“Comrade, wherever we are,
the struggle continues.”

Selected Works of
Walter Rodney

Masses in Action

Published in New World Quarterly, 1966

Over the past decade, Guyana has been stirred into a state of constant self-examination. The results, however, have been meagre and disappointing, largely because the discussion has been confined to the period after 1953, and to the personalities, failures and recriminations of that era.¹ There is a tacit assumption that only in 1953 did mass involvement in Guyanese political affairs begin, national political leaders arise, and racial suspicion and strife find expression. Guyanese history began a long time ago. Even the beginning of this century is an arbitrary and not entirely satisfactory point at which to take up the story of the Guyanese masses; but it does allow some scope for at least an interim examination of the Guyanese past in terms which are relevant to the working class.

By the end of the nineteenth century the net result of nearly three centuries of varied activity by external forces on the Guyana mainland was the creation of a small society limited to the coastlands, to the production of sugar and to all that went with sugar in terms of class stratification and foreign exploitation. Today, the fundamentals of the situation remain unaltered, with sugar accounting for more than 40% of the revenues. Yet the old colonial system had its critics, the most serious of all possible critics - the working masses. It is the contention here that both the marginal modification of an entirely sugar-bound society and the hostility evoked by that society are to be traced to the years after 1900, and in particular to the period of the first World War.

Bauxite

In the economic sphere the principal supplement to sugar in Guyana today is bauxite. At the outbreak of the war a number of mining concessions were issued when geological evidence indicated that extensive deposits of bauxite were likely to be encountered in Guyana. The largest concession was held by the Demerara Bauxite Company, which was registered locally in 1916, backed by American and Canadian financial interests. The Demerara Bauxite Company built the town of Mackenzie before the end of the war; and early in November 1919 there was a Chronicle report that the Company had just exported 1,500 tons of bauxite - its fourth shipment.²

All Guyanese welcomed the discovery of bauxite, but there was a revealing debate about the role of American capital, when it was ascertained that the Northern Alumina Company of Toronto of which the Demerara Bauxite Company was a subsidiary, was merely a facade for U.S. capitalists. Primarily, the question was posed in terms of British imperial interests versus those of the U.S.A.; and in fact the British government suspended the granting of mineral concessions in Guyana during the latter stages of the war, with the hope that British capital would give a better account of itself after the struggle in Europe had ended. But there was also the underlying assumption in the Guyanese press that local interests could well have been jeopardised by U.S. capital, and local entrepreneurs demanded the opportunity to be allowed to raise capital and take the initiative in the bauxite industry. As it turned out, the North American financiers and industrialists had the field to themselves. The Demerara Bauxite Company quickly joined forces with and took partial control of Sprostons, the most important engineering and shipping firm in Guyana at that time; and together they came to dominate the Demerara river and a significant section of the economy.

Growth of U.S. Imperialism in Latin America

Stimulated by wartime conditions, trade between Guyana and the U.S.A. was on the increase, and imports from the U.S.A. were rapidly outstripping imports from Britain. Guyana was but a small part of a process of development taking place in the whole Latin American and Caribbean area. In Jamaica, the U.S.A. had gone further towards capturing the local market than in any other British West Indian territory; while in Surinam it was also U.S. capital which had started the bauxite industry. This new U.S. offensive was a further stage in the decline of European influence in the Southern Americas, a process which started with the Haitian revolution.

The nineteenth century had already shown that European decline meant replacement by U.S. domination. This situation was being seriously discussed in the Caribbean and Latin America at the end of the first World War. The Argosy gave prominence to a discourse by an Argentine intellectual on the dangers that were imminent because of U.S. imperialism. All the British West Indian islands were particularly concerned that the British were planning to relinquish their Caribbean possessions to the U.S.A. The answer to this new threat, they felt, was a Federation, though curiously enough, this too was envisaged in broad hemispheric terms to include Canada. Subsequently, the hopes of Federation were dashed, while the fears that the British would relinquish their possessions to the U.S.A. were fully justified in every respect except that of international law.

Simultaneously with bauxite, the more glamorous attraction of diamonds was presented. By 1922 the diamond industry was flourishing, accounted in value for one quarter of the exports of Guyana. Since gold had been discovered in 1882, with rubber and balata providing further incentives, and with bauxite and diamonds in the offing, it is not surprising that the 'bush' acquired a new meaning for Guyanese and the habit of looking inland was probably enhanced by the partial breakdown of the traditional relations with Europe, which the war effected. During the war people keenly debated the feasibility of such schemes as a road to link up with the main Pan-American highway, and a railway deep into the hinterland, while an economic survey of the Rupununi was proposed.

The parallel with Guyana of 1966 is striking. The interior can be seen to represent in the consciousness of the Guyanese an escape from the insular and colonial relations of the narrow coastal strip and, incidentally, it is clear that the masses are taking the initiative in the matter. This consciousness, for obvious geographical reasons, is absent from the islands of the Caribbean, but it is not unique so far as the mainland territories are concerned. A modern historian sees the most characteristic element of Latin American history as being its "El Dorado Spirit";³ and that spirit was perfectly exemplified by the Guyanese 'Pork-Knocker', as well as being shared by those who remained behind.

Precious little emerged out of the hope that the interior offered Guyana a brighter future. All that came of the scheme of communication with the hinterland was the Rupununi cattle tract, which was opened in 1917. The gold rush of the 1880's had declined considerably in the early years of this century. Mushroom companies had collapsed as yields proved unremunerative, and the diamond industry was to follow a similar pattern. Both minerals continued to produce regular revenue, but the scale of operations was small. At a glance, it seems that Guyanese had over-estimated their resources, but it was those who believed that the country had only minor alluvial deposits of gold and diamonds, but no supplies at great depth, who were living in a world of fancy. The woeful ignorance and apathy of the colonial regime militated against the rational utilisation of Guyana's resources.

Indentured Immigration

The conception of change which the Guyanese workers entertained during the war was by no means restricted to the exploration of the interior. On a number of vital fronts they were prepared to wage a struggle against the forces of oppression. One of their most crucial battles was for an end to indentured immigration, and subsequently for the prevention of exploitation of the same ilk.

There were veiled indications in the Guyanese press that when McNeil and Chiman Lal, the two commissioners from India, visited Guyana in 1916 to investigate the indenture system, they were carefully guided to their sources of information; and there were strong assertions on the part of the Indian and Negro workers that they had struggled uncompromisingly against the system of indenture. The commissioners' report was not decisively condemnatory, but in any event, the 18th April 1917 saw the arrival of the last ship bringing indentured immigrants from India. By the time that the last indentured contracts were served, all sectors of the society became nominally free.

Indenture, unlike slavery, was constantly producing free citizens in large numbers, some of whom were repatriated at the expiry of their contract. Indeed the rate of repatriation was quite high. In the twenty years between 1891 and 1911 a total of 36,016 Indian immigrants returned home, compared with 65,764 who arrived during the same period. Many of the Indians who remained in Guyana, like the freed Negroes, moved away from the sugar estates and attempted to set themselves up as an independent peasantry. In 1890, 30% of the East Indians earned their living outside of the sugar estates; while by 1911 less than half of those labourers brought to Guyana in the interest of the sugar industry were still to be found on the sugar estates. The population of Guyana in December 1917 was 314,000, out of whom 137,000 were Indians, and only 62,000 of them were on the sugar estates.

Rice

Rice provided the basis for the East Indian withdrawal from the sugar plantations. Some African slaves and their descendants had planted rice in Guyana and elsewhere, but it was not a crop which was widespread in West Africa, in contrast to India, whence the indentured immigrants brought techniques of irrigated rice farming. As early as 1905 Guyanese rice imports began to drop, and shortly afterwards the local rice industry was not only taking care of the domestic consumption but was also exporting. Under wartime conditions, the rice industry was able to set its sights clearly on exports, because it was easy to capture the West Indian market which was starved of food imports. In Guyana itself there were food shortages, making it necessary for an embargo to be placed on the export of rice in 1917. However, in March 1919, permits were once more issued for the export of rice to the West Indian islands, so that the rice industry emerged from the crucible of the war as Guyana's second agricultural activity.

Naturally enough the East Indian peasants wanted land. The planter and government attitude towards the settlement of indentured immigrants on small holdings was not initially favourable, but both in Trinidad and Guyana they were prepared to grant small amounts of land if this would keep labour from returning to India. Besides, the land had to be properly drained and irrigated for rice farming, and the crop needed to be financed and marketed. All these problems have only been successfully tackled in the last few years, so that for decades the rice farmers waged a constant struggle against drought and flood, and against the voraciousness of the Georgetown merchants who advanced credits and then bought the paddy or rice at ridiculously low prices. Yet, for all this, the East Indian peasant, like the ex-slaves who had managed to set up free villages in Guyana, had to some extent escaped the toils of the plantation system, and it is probably significant that, according to Chandra Jayawardena, "the Indians of the rice-growing villages consider the Indian plantation labourers to be disorderly and immoral".⁴ Throughout the Caribbean the heritage of sugar is one of degradation.

Indian "Middle Class"

While the mass of the East Indian population were either labouring on the sugar estates or in the rice fields, there were also small numbers of merchants and professional men of the race already prominent by 1917, precisely because indenture had long been producing free citizens. Clearly such individuals had already acquired interests quite different from the East Indian workers and peasants. It was an East Indian landowner and rice miller, Gayadeen, who was a principal opponent to the scheme of setting up a cooperative rice mill, when this was proposed late in 1918. His intention was that the peasants should be entirely dependent on him, and he issued a thinly-veiled threat to increase the rent of the ground and the houses of the East Indian peasants over whom he held the whip hand. Veeraswamy, a Georgetown lawyer, was accused of hypocritical posturing when he called upon the East Indian workers of Guyana to fight for king and country, while allowing himself to be persuaded that he was too valuable an asset to Guyana to risk enlistment. However, it was the small East Indian section of the "middle class" to whom the indentured and ex-indentured immigrants looked for guidance and leadership, and in turn the lawyers and merchants sought to articulate the interests of the East Indian community as a whole.⁵ For instance, when there was a serious disagreement on a sugar estate, the labourers would trek to Georgetown and seek the assistance of prominent individuals like Luckhoo and Veeraswamy.

Racial Consciousness

It appears that by the 1890's the East Indians had begun to consolidate some sort of community life. By 1917 there were forty-six mosques and forty-three temples, while only two temples had been seen by a royal commission in 1870.⁶ The end of indenture, though not as decisive as the end of slavery, produced a new wave of communal feeling among the East Indians of Guyana, one of the products of which was the British Guiana East Indian Association. The idea was put into practice on the initiative of Mr. Mudhoo Lall Bhose, and the other signatories of the first circular calling for the formation of the Association were J. Viapree, Rampersaud Sawh, E. Kawall, J.D. Rohee, M. Ishmael, A.S. Ruhoman and Peter Ruhoman. On the 13th February, 1919 the Association came into being with Mr. J. Luckhoo as the first President.⁷ The aims and objects of the British Guiana East Indian Association were the social, intellectual, and moral improvement of its members by means of debates, lectures, writing of essays, and the provision of library and recreational facilities. After some disagreement, it was decided that the Association should also indulge in political activities. The Association also published Indian Opinion as its official organ, championing the cause of the East Indians in Guyana. In addition there was a keen interest in the affairs of the Indian sub-continent. The editorial of an early issue of Indian Opinion published in May 1919 dealt with the recent disturbances in India and the affairs of the Indian National Congress.

There was a simultaneous resurgence of Negro racial consciousness. It was also linked to the end of indenture, since discussions of the role and status of the East Indians in Guyana inevitably involved comparisons with the Negroes. But even more decisive was the impact of the American Negro struggle.

The government twice attempted to pass legislation (in 1918 and 1919) against the importation of American Negro literature, which was widely read among the Guyanese Negro masses. The end of the war saw the attempts of the Pan-African movement to lobby the Peace Conference in France. Meetings were held in various places, notably in the Town Halls of Georgetown and New Amsterdam, to discuss the question of sending a delegate to the Peace Conference. Letters to the press, lectures and sermons on the problems of the Negro were all common, drawing frequently on examples from the U.S.

By 1923, the Negro masses had formed organisations such as the Georgetown branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Marcus Garvey's), the African Communities League and the Negro Progress Convention. The relatively small Portuguese community also sought to organise itself around the Portuguese Benevolent Society. There was much talk among them of their "Portuguese patrimony", of the need to preserve the Portuguese language in Guyana, and of the desirability of a Portuguese political party.

The Class Struggle

Co-existing with the emphasis on racial identity was a powerful upsurge of class consciousness. The Rev. M.A. Cossou, speaking at McKenzie in February, 1919, remarked that "if, as President Wilson has said, the world must be safe for democracy, the relations between capital and labour must be of the best". Three months later, the preamble to a resolution of workers in Georgetown proceeded as follows: "That this meeting of the working classes in the City of Georgetown and delegates from various associations of the working classes in the electorate of the counties of Demerara, Essequibo, Berbice and the Town of New Amsterdam, expresses .... etc." These were typical expressions of the awareness of the fundamental class contradictions in the society.

Rising Prices

During the war, prices had rocketed. A commission appointed to prepare a report on the salaries of civil servants found that on the average the cost of living had increased 150% by 1918. What improvement would the end of the war bring? This was the principal question posed by Guyanese as the conflict in Europe neared an end. In December, 1918, shortly after the Armistice of the previous November, Rev. R.T. Frank, a great champion of the workers, warned them not to expect too much. In particular, he was gloomy but realistic in his assessment that the cost of living would not fall. He urged the formation of labour unions, and it was precisely the high prices of goods during and after the war which forced the workers to organise themselves.

Dockers' Agitation

As early as 1905, H.N. Critchlow, then eighteen years old and a dock labourer, conceived with some other waterfront workers the idea of going on strike for higher wages. It was put into practice that very year, precipitating widespread rioting which was answered by the guns of the police. When another attempt at strike action was made the following year, Critchlow, as the spokesman of the dock workers, was brought before the City Magistrate on a charge of "preventing a labourer named Abraham Richie from earning an honest living". The charge was dropped but so was the scheme for striking. It was not until 1916 that a new move was made. The hours of work exiting for workers on the waterfront at that time were 6.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., with an interval of one hour for breakfast. The dockers determined that the hours should be reduced and that the wages of 64 cents per day should be increased to 84 cents. With the help of J. Sydney McArthur, a Georgetown barrister, and Nelson Cannon, a member of the Court of Policy, they prepared a petition to the government. When this failed, militant strike action gained the workers their demands.

The first success of the waterfront workers in 1916 was an empty one, since prices continued to spiral, and in September, 1918, they returned to the attack. Led once more by Critchlow, they demanded increases for both casual and full-time workers, a different system of payment and a reduction of hours. The dockers bargained astutely, drawing up a detailed cost of living index showing the increases in the prices of foodstuffs and other essentials. Working a full six-day week of sixty-nine hours, regular employees could earn a maximum of only four dollars and eighty cents per week, which was manifestly inadequate when placed against the cost of living index. The Chamber of Commerce, which handled the negotiations for Bookers and other Water Street firms, claimed that they were not responsible for the rise in the prices of basic foodstuffs, and they were at first prepared to grant no more than one shilling per week increase. The dockers were adamant, and won their point. In a final letter conceding victory to the workers, the Chamber of Commerce added ominously -- "the Council hopes that this will place a period on recurring demands".

The length of the dockers' working day then stood at nine hours. The "Eight-Hour Day" became the next rallying cry of these workers, and claims for this were pressed on the Chamber of Commerce early in December, 1918. The Chamber had already hinted that they intended to call a halt to any further improvements in the lot of the dockers; and they now expressed "extreme regret and surprise that the labourers, within six weeks of a generous and liberal concession of all the terms demanded in their petition dated 16th September, 1918, should again approach the Chamber for further concessions". The merchants claimed that since the beginning of the war the scale of payment had risen by nearly 100%, and, to knock off one hour from the nine-hour day would mean in effect another increase of 10%. The Chamber's continued rejection of the dockers' claim for the eight-hour day was categorical, leaving no room for bargaining. Thus, in January, 1919, militant strike action was decided upon, leading directly to the formation of the British Guiana Labour Union.

The British Guiana Labour Union

The B.G.L.U. celebrates its anniversary on the 11th January, but the organisation which was in existence on the 11th January, 1919, seems to have been no more than a "Porters Union", an unofficial entity called into being by the waterfront strike. It was on April 6th that a meeting was held at the Unique Friendly Society in Regent Street at which Critchlow proposed a resolution for the establishment of a labour union, and this was carried. Two representatives of Bookers were also invited, and from them came the suggestion for the formation of an Industrial Council for settling disputes between the dockers and the Water Street employers. The three-man Council met shortly afterwards, and recommended the eight-hour day and certain wage increases.

Out of the agitation of the dockers arose an organisation which transcended their own struggle. As one correspondent to the Argosy pointed out, the tense post-war labour situation in the world at large which was regularly treated in the Guyanese press could not help but influence the Guyanese proletariat. It was a testimony to the revolutionary mood of labour throughout the land that requests started pouring in for membership of the B.G.L.U. from various parts of the country.

In April a meeting was held at Victoria (East Coast Demerara) which decided in favour of a labour union branch for the area. The following month the workers of Bagotville (West Coast Demerara) followed suit; and these were typical examples of the movement which led to the rapid establishment of a countrywide workers organisation. All sectors of labour were involved, including tradesmen. The first President, M. Hosanah, was a tailor; and there were even jibes that residents of the Alms House or Old People's Home were allowed to join the Union. This came about because the Union was also a Friendly and Burial Society, thus grafting itself on to one of the oldest forms of social organisation which the masses of Guyana had experienced.

The B.G.L.U. had a wide base of direct industrial action. The latter portion of 1919 and most of 1920 witnessed a succession of disputes and strikes, involving, among others, the Railways, the Electric Company, the Sawmills, Sugar Estates, the Argosy and the docks. The pressure of this agitation, carried on by manual workers, was sufficient to gain advantages even for the Water Street clerks, though it was not surprising that these white-collar workers never showed real loyalty to the workers' movement.

The first annual general meeting in 1920 was something of a fiasco, and the Union nearly disintegrated. Membership fell from a peak of 13,000 to a few hundred, but the Union continued to function as a pressure group. By 1923, the delegates to the general conference could look back on a few years of solid achievement. One Union campaign had led to the passage early in 1922 of a Rent Restriction Bill. There was a rumour in January 1923 that the Rent Act was about to be repealed, and the workers prepared to resume the fight if necessary. This was one of several ways in which the workers indicated that they would use the union to undertake tasks other than wage negotiations.

One resolution of the 1923 conference aimed at the establishment of a voluntary organisation to provide advice which would prevent the masses from indulging in petty litigation in cases which could be settled out of court. Another principal concern was with unemployment, against which a petition was organised. Perhaps the most ambitious of the moves taken by the B.G.L.U. was its attempt to convene the first ever West Indian Conference in 1920. Unfortunately, only the Trinidad Working Men's Association was able to send delegates - the remaining territories expressing willingness but inability to attend. The chance to develop a common West Indian perspective for the labour movement was therefore lost, though workers' struggles in Trinidad were closely watched in Guyana.

Rural Revolution

It is necessary to stress that the awakening among the Guyanese masses was countrywide, and not simply confined to the activities of the urban workers in Georgetown. The B.G.L.U. took an interest in plantation labourers also, though its activities on the plantations were severely limited by the managers' opposition to their labourers joining the Union. East Indian labourers for the most part continued to use Crosby8* and the Immigration Department to voice their problems, asking prominent Indian lawyers to intercede on their behalf. This was by no means a passive arrangement. Both the Crosby and the Indian lawyers had to meet huge deputations who arrived in Georgetown from the particular plantation or area, where the grievances were felt.

Often the whole plantation staff left en masse as happened in 1917 and again in 1924 with labour from Ruimveldt. On the latter occasion there was an encouraging unity between rural and urban effort. 4,000 Indians and Negroes started to march on Georgetown with flags, sticks and their tools – some to meet Critchlow at the B.G.L.U. office and others to the Immigration Department to complain about irregular wages.

Apart from the formation of the Labour Union, the initiative on the issues concerning the well-being of the masses came from the rural peasantry. The Chairman of the Victoria Institute remarked in April 1919 that "Georgetown looks to the East Coast to decide its political matters", and the facts did bear out this situation. The weapons which the rural proletariat and peasantry fashioned for their struggle included credit banks and agricultural societies, while the Village Councils and the Village Chairmen's Conferences were forums for the expression of the will of the rural masses and their determination to confront the planter class. In February 1919, the Attorney General accused A.A. Thorne, a workers' representative in the Combined Court, of wanting to see a set of Bolsheviks in some village led by the Village Chairman. In reply the Chairman of the West Bank Agricultural Society noted that "the Attorney General has brought in the ominous Russian term ... The question was one of capital and labour. Labour was represented by the Farmers' Conference and the Village Chairman's Conference. --"

Cane Farming

One of the most significant trends during the war era was the development of a system of cane growing on a peasant farming basis. In 1897 a Royal Commission had recommended grants-in-aid to cane farmers. Very little was done by the government to implement the report, but farmers and sugar planters worked out private arrangements on some estates. The farmers faced considerable difficulties, such as the transportation of their cane to the factories and its unloading, but they organised themselves to overcome these problems and to win higher rewards from the sugar estates which purchased their product. In March 1919 the Cane Farming Movement proposed legislation to regularise the relationship between the small cane farmer and the estate which bought and milled his cane. They pointed to Trinidad where there was a small amount of legislation passed on the subject in 1902, though what the Guyanese farmers would have preferred was an extensive code such as that which was in existence in Queensland, Australia.

Co-operative Credit Banks

Alongside the Cane Farming there sprung up the Co-operative Credit Bank movement, since loans over the period from sowing to crop time were essential. In fact, credit facilities played an ever greater role in the young rice industry. A number of Co-operative Credit Banks were established early in the century, but they became really important as the cane farming movement intensified, as the rice industry grew, and when the popularly influenced Local Government Board took over the scheme in 1916. At the end of 1915, only three banks were registered; by the end of 1916 they had increased to 18; and by 1918 there were 26 Co-operative Credit Banks in existence. The numbers of shareholders increased from 220 in 115 to 5,815 in 1918; and in the same period the working capital had risen from 611 dollars to 28,020 dollars.

The operations of the Ann's Grove-Clonbrook Co-operative Credit Bank can be taken as a typical example. During the year 1918 it issued loans to 156 shareholders amount to 2,508 dollars. These extended over periods of from one to twelve months and involved sums of from five to twenty dollars. Clients were chiefly paddy growers, along with provision and cane farmers, hucksters, coconut-oil makers and small businesses. Their efforts were obviously small, since there were narrow limits to what could be wrung from the colonial regime.

The Reaction of the Plantocracy

Every one of the tendencies so far pinpointed represented a direct or potential threat to the old colonial system. The opening up of the interior, the end of Indian indenture, the rise of cane farming and the organisation of the proletariat were all seen by the plantocracy as undermining the structure of the sugar society.

In the 1890's, when the gold fields were opened, the sugar planters found great difficulty in maintaining a steady supply of labour at the wages they offered and this was the situation which gave rise to the Royal Commission in 1896. But the recommendation of the Royal Commission that Crown Lands should be opened up to peasants was anathema to the planters. According to J. Eleasar, a Georgetown solicitor, "the Crown Lands were locked up and kept from the people's reach for many, many years because it was thought by the planters that anything done to settle the people on the land would tend to take away labour from the sugar estates". That was common knowledge among the masses. By the end of the war the planters were more anxious than ever, because bauxite, balata, rice, gold, diamonds, cane-farming and irrigation schemes offered alternative employment to Guyanese workers formerly bound to the sugar estates. The planters therefore embarked on a counter-revolutionary offensive.

After the 1896 Commission, the proprietors of Vryheid's Lust (Berbice river) encouraged the cultivation of canes on their estates by farmers, the lands being given free of rent. This practice was adopted by a number of other estates. In December 1918, the cane farmers were suddenly told that they would have to pay nine and twelve dollars per acre. No notice was given, neither was there any increase offered to the farmers for their canes. La Bonne Mere was the only estate which did not pursue this reactionary policy. In vain did the farmers propose alternative schemes for the continuation of the cultivation of estate lands. What the planters wanted was an excuse to introduce legislation for further immigration, the only method which they knew to maintain the hierarchal plantation system. They took land out of production which the cane farmers were eager to work; and within a short period, in Berbice alone, the estates of Adelphi, Canefield, Bath, La Retraite, Highbury, Goldstone Hall and Everton were closed, ostensibly because of shortage of labour, when in fact there were many people willing to work, if only the starvation wages were increased.

The Colonisation Scheme

Early in 1919, the Chairman of the Planters' Association approached the Attorney General claiming that there had been a reduction of 6,000 acres in the cane industry, and that there was a prospect of greater reduction if planters did not get new supplies of labour. Out of this request was born the Colonisation Bill, which aimed at introducing into Guyana another influx of cheap labour, preferably from India.

The planters introduced the measure at a time when wartime Defence of the Colony Regulations were still in force. Thorne complained that "it was manifestly unfair that when the labourers who were interested in the matter were told they were not to deal with the matter as a result of the times in which they lived, that on the other hand the capitalists could meet together and formulate a scheme". However, the workers refused to be gagged. They recognized the Colonisation Scheme for what it was - an attempt to undercut local labour and keep them in a position of subjection. They campaigned vigorously against the proposal when it came before the Combined Court, and warned the elected representatives that they should express popular opposition to the bill. A Chronicle editorial countered by saying that "the elective members would be very foolish to be terrorised by agitators, who warn them not to vote for these proposals at the peril of their seats". It hinted darkly that such action would supply the strongest arguments for the creation of Crown Colony Government. Such threats did not stop the workers all over the country from making their position plain. Every one of the Anti-Colonisation meetings held all over the country was a success, while the Pro-Colonisation faction found that their meetings were invariably fiascos.

Although the Combined Court did send a mission to England and India, nothing came of the Colonisation Scheme. Nevertheless, it was the most important issue of public debate in Guyana at the end of the first World War, and it showed decisively how keenly the masses were assessing their colonial situation and how determined they were to put an end to it. In the mood they were in, nothing escaped the vigilance of the masses. When the government introduced legislation to ban the import of Negro American literature, the workers fought this on two occasions; when a reactionary Jury Bill was brought forward, the workers again fought bitterly, though without success; and on yet another occasion, popular opposition nipped in the bud a proposal of the Governor's that a Vagrancy Law should be passed to coerce labourers to work on public works at ridiculous wages.

The Constitution

A reminder of the type of political system existing in Guyana is necessary at this juncture. In 1891, the Court of Policy, which was until then a purely nominated body, was reformed to allow the election of fourteen members along with the eight members nominated by the Governor, who together sat in the Combined Court. There were also two elected Financial Representatives, though the power over finance was constantly in dispute, because it introduced a clash with the executive authority of the Governor. In any event, it took some time before the governing body reflected the change in the Constitution, the nature of that change being to give some representation to the coloured and Portuguese "middle class".

Given the very narrow and restricted franchise, it is obvious that the new representatives in the Combined Court after 1891 were not elected by the workers, and did not represent the workers. But some benefits were derived by having in the centre of local political power a group of individuals who were opposed to the planter class and to many aspects of the old colonial system. For instance, as Raymond Smith noted, it is probably significant that the rice industry started at a time when the sugar industry was depressed, and when the new "middle class" were coming into power after the Constitutional reforms of 1891. Besides, the "middle class" themselves were not satisfied. They clamoured for more control over the affairs of the country, especially in the financial sphere; and as so often happens, they encouraged the workers to shout along with them to make as great a noise as possible.

1916 appears to have been a decisive year. A Recall Movement was launched against the then Governor, Egerton, who had become unpopular with the Georgetown merchants because he interfered with their unwholesome speculation in rice exports. However, the "middle class" played to a public gallery which had its own reason for abhorring the colonial system and its representative, the Governor. The workers, too, began to take up the cry for a more democratic Constitution and for a political programme for their own betterment. As one correspondent of the Chronicle wrote in October 1918, "It is a common thought among the poorer peoples of this colony that places under British rule do not make rapid progress ... Until the policy of the country gets into the hands of the people through their representatives, it is bound to make slow progress".

By the end of the war, the electorate was faced with a 'Progressive Party', which was not an organisational unit, but an alliance of politicians, which had emerged out of the Recall Movement with the intention of capturing all fourteen of the seats which were to be filled by election. Again they identified themselves with the masses, and this itself was to provide grounds for disillusionment when they were successfully elected.

Political Influence of the Masses

The influence which the workers wielded under the limited franchise of the pre-Adult Suffrage era is usually under-estimated. The physical unrest of the masses was a factor which had always to be taken into account. During the first three decades of this century, disturbances and riots erupted with great frequency. They were called "Bread riots"; and one could not ask for more blatant examples of people asking for bread and being given bullets. The breathless haste with which the colonial regime read the Riot Act was a testimony to their deep-rooted fear of mass action which they had inherited from the sugar planters and slave owners.

Quite apart from the threat of violence, the workers made an impact through public meetings. Georgetown workers met under the auspices of the B.G.L.U. to discuss the relative merits of Percy Wight and P.N. Cannon, concluding that the latter was an enemy of the working class; workers in New Amsterdam met and demanded that Eustace Woolford should return to the constituency and give an account of his stewardship in the Combined Court, and especially to explain his ambivalence on the Colonisation Bill which the workers had denounced; while peasant farmers of the East Coast Demerara met at Victoria Village, condemned the government in power, and agreed to form a 'Political Association', embracing members from Anne's Grove and Bachelor's Adventure. All this was in the period after the Recall Movement and the formation of the 'Progressive Party', and it may appear futile because the workers had no vote.

Yet the popular clamour had its effect on those who held the vote and those who appeared as representatives of the people. By 1923, for example, Cannon had lost the Georgetown mayoralty, and while he himself retained a seat in the Combined Court the candidates whom he supported were all unsuccessful. Proof of the impact of popular agitation against the Colonisation Bill came when the government itself decided to hold a number of public meetings to win support for the measure. The workers simply invaded those meetings, held in 1919, and passed resolutions of their own calling for improvements in sanitation, drainage and irrigation and wages before they would consent to a further influx of immigrant.

The Suspension of the Constitution in 1928

Everyone felt that the Constitution of 1891 had outlived its usefulness. The "middle class" wanted more power, especially over the finances and the executive; while the planter class, having already ceded some of their authority to the "middle class', and seeing the spectre of mass power if more liberal reforms were granted, were willing to let the British crown take direct responsibility for the colony of British Guiana. Dissatisfaction with constitutional forms was in fact general in the British West Indies after the war, and resulted in the appointment of a royal commission, which visited the area and reported in 1922. The Wood Commission, as it was called, rejected the demands of the Guyanese planter class to take a step backward, but neither did it allow the presence of elected members on the Executive as the "Progressive Party" requested. No important changes were made, so the elections of 1926 were held under the Constitution of 1891.

A.R. Webber, one of Guyana's few historians, and an individual who was himself personally involved in the politics of the period, wrote that the elections of October 1926 were "fought with unexampled ferocity", and that "the declaration at the polls showed a sweeping victory for the Popular Party; and a complete and devastating rout of their opponents, who were well possessed of this world's goods".⁹ But practically every seat was judicially challenged, and eventually five members of the Court of Policy were unseated on legal technicalities. No doubt the Colonial Office was being informed of these developments, as well as receiving advice from the planter group to put an end to the Constitution which gave power to the upstart "middle class" and encouraged the workers to dabble in politics.

As mentioned before, as early as 1919, there were dark hints that if the elected members allowed themselves to be influenced by popular agitators this would "supply the strongest arguments for the creation of a Crown Colony government". Again in 1925, this idea was publicly voiced by the Governor of British Guiana when he returned to England; and in 1927 it was decided to put it into practice.

No one quite knew what was the purpose of the Commissioners who visited Guyana in 1927 - at least not until the following year when it became clear that they had been seeking excuses to suspend the Constitution. At any rate, the Constitution of 1891 was so radically changed that the effect was to remove all power from the elected representatives. It is clear that even the small measure of representation under the Constitution of 1891 was seen by the colonial regime as a threat. Thus in 1928, not for the first time nor for the last, a constitutional coup d'etat was effected to break local resistance to the British imperial system.

Race and Class

In so far as reflection on the period under discussion is understandably influenced by the present conjuncture of circumstances in Guyana, it is obvious that the question of the inter-relation between race and class consciousness is of the utmost importance. In the decade after 1955 these two factors proved antagonistic, and consequently the anti-colonialist struggle of the Guyanese masses received a serious set-back. However in 1900-1928 the situation was entirely different. Then, it was the awareness among both Indians and Negroes of the peculiar disadvantages under which their own race laboured which precipitated an attack on the colonial society.

Racial consciousness was mobilised when a group felt it laboured under special disadvantages. Indian Opinion launched an attack on the government for keeping the East Indian masses in a state of illiteracy. It pointed out that of 20,000 children of East Indian parentage of school-going age, only 6,000 were attending school. This was branded as "a neglect not only inexcusable, but culpable". On an issue such as this communal anger was jointly directed against the colonial regime, because the Negro masses were at that very moment waging a struggle to lay the foundations of a more democratic educational system, rejecting the "Payment by Results" and other limitations which were in vogue since the Elementary Education Ordinance of 1876. Incidentally, the struggle of the teachers not only on their own behalf, but for a system of education which would benefit their pupils and the country, is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent in the annals of the history of the Guyanese working class.

Apart from the demands for more education, there was also some consideration given to the curricula, and one of the suggestions of the East Indian community was that Indian languages should be taught. One striking feature of the debate on the issue by the Teachers' Association was the position taken by R. French, who argued that unless they took steps to teach the Indian languages, the latter would disappear, as the African languages of the slaves had disappeared, and the community would be the poorer. This, and many other views on related topics, indicated that the racial groups in Guyana were seriously addressing themselves to an examination of where they stood, of what they possessed of value, and of what changes were desirable. At every juncture, they were unmasking the colonial society as the enemy.

When in 1917 the East Indians succeeded in having marriage ceremonies by Moulvis and Pandits recognised, they had gained a victory over the white-christian-capitalist conception of the society,¹⁰ and it was against this that the Negro masses too were directing their fire. They joined in the refrain of the Negroes of the U.S.A. that blacks had fought side by side with whites during the war, and now they should be given new opportunities. It is extremely significant that the colonial administration saw the associations such as the Negro Progress Convention not as racist groups but as class formations. The literature from the U.S.A. was anathema because it was being widely read by "the poorer classes of society"; and it was suggested that the local branch of Garvey's movement should be banned because it was 'Bolshevik'.

The Rev. Frank wrote in January 1919 of the Negro masses of Guyana: "the possibilities wrapped up in them and the powers within them are immense". This applied equally to the East Indian masses; but for the release of the energies of all concerned, there was necessarily a process of self-realisation, which was taking place in a framework of racial groupings rather than in the context of 'nation'. That process of communal self-realisation did not inevitably bring the races into conflict, nor retard the formation of organisations along class lines, nor weaken the struggle against colonialism.

What occurred in the period after 1955 was that communal awareness was for various reasons turned inwards to exacerbate racial contradictions among the Guyanese workers and peasants. I say 'exacerbate' because racial conflict in Guyana was an inevitable concomitant of the fact that indentured labour (East Indian, Chinese and Portuguese) was conceived specifically to break the back of Negro opposition to the planter class. Throughout the decades after Indian immigration began in 1838, there were differences over wages between racial groups on the sugar estates, brought about by the deliberate policy of the planters of playing one groups off against another. No doubt, racial conflict fed racialism, and vice versa; and indeed, there are a host of other such interconnections that one could make. What is certain is that simple and definitive explanations must give way to a more sober analysis of the complexities of the development of the Guyanese mass movement - of the relationship between racial consciousness and racial prejudice, between economic competition and racial conflict, between communal identification and class objectives.

African History in Service of The Black Liberation

Speech at the 1968 Congress of Black Writers

Initially, I had written a short supplementary paper to that which was to be presented by Mr. Richard Moore. Therefore, the order having been inverted, it places me in a rather tricky position. I had intended to continue on the basis of certain things that he would have said. However, very briefly, my position is this: Moore would have spoken on African civilizations, according to the program. I myself had intended and, in fact, I will consider certain aspects of African history that would not normally fall under the rubric of civilization. And, in the process, I would have liked to question the very concept of civilization. I entitled my paper “African History in the Service of the Black Revolution,” and the first contradiction, the first dilemma that one faces in attempting to utilize African history as one of the weapons in our struggle is a realization that, in a very real sense, we, as black people, are placed in [the] invidious position of having to justify our existence by antecedents, having to prove our humanity by what went before. Now, this is very invidious. Humanity is not a thing one proves. One asserts [it] perhaps, or one accepts [it]. One doesn’t really set out to prove it. But, unfortunately, the historical circumstances in which black people have evolved in recent centuries have implanted in the minds of black brothers and sisters a certain historical conception and, in order to destroy that historical conception, one has to engage in this type of game of saying, “This is what the white man said but no, it isn’t really so, we have a past,” and that sort of thing.

Now, if we are forced into that position, it seems to me that there are two rules that we can observe to make the exercise more meaningful. The first rule is that I, as a black historian, am speaking to fellow blacks. That means that, as far as the white audience is concerned, here and in the world at large, they are perfectly entitled to listen but I am not engaged in the game that they set up by which they say to me, “You prove, black, that you’re a man. Prove it to me by showing that you have civilization,” and that sort of thing. I’m not engaged in that job as far as white people are concerned. I am engaged [with], I must address myself solely to, black brothers. To the extent that they have been involved and destroyed in a process, we are seeking to re-create. And, furthermore, as I said, it’s “in the service of black revolution.” Those whites, those few whites who may join the black revolution, will certainly do so for reasons that are far more profound than their knowledge or acquaintance with African history. So that’s another reason why we don’t need to address ourselves to them.

The second rule is that African history must be seen as very intimately linked to the contemporary struggle of black people. One must not set up any false distinctions between reflection and action. We are just another facet of the ongoing revolution. This is not theory. It is a fact that black people everywhere, in Africa and in the Western world, are already on the march. Nobody who wants to be relevant to that situation can afford to withdraw and decide that he is engaging in what is essentially an intellectual exercise. The African historian, to me, is essentially involved in a process of mobilization, just like any other individual within the society who says, “I’m for Black Power. I’m going to talk about the way the blacks live down in the South,” etcetera. That’s a facet of mobilization. The African historian is also involved in that mobilization.

Now, having said that, I would like to illustrate the ways in which, in fact—if there’s to be any proving of our humanity—it will have to be done with three examples. The first is Cuba. Cuba has proven very concretely that the way of asserting that humanity is by revolutionary struggle. And when I say it has proven that, it has proven it to the black people in Cuba. Now, this is a question with which even black brothers outside of Cuba are not very familiar, and so I’ll, just for a minute, indicate what the position was and is for the black people of Cuba.

They started, like everybody else in the West, as slaves. They existed as slaves longer than any other group, except the Brazilians, well into the 1880s. And subsequent to slavery, they became involved, very rapidly, in the new imperialist relationship with the United States, and this hardened the existing prejudice of Spanish slave and Spanish colonial society. There is a very useful book recently published by Esteban Montego, a Cuban slave who was a runaway and who reflects on his life in this period and gives some insights into the type of pressures that faced the black man in Cuba after slavery. With the intensification [of economic and political activity] by the United States [in Cuba and] the importation of Florida-type qualities, a black man in Cuba was just dirt. I mean it was the South; it was apartheid. If you (the black man) were seen in a certain part of Havana after a certain hour you were liable to be shot, guilty of being black, you see. The black situation in Cuba was as bad as any other sector that we can point to. But within the process of revolutionary struggle, first as slaves— because they were the first revolutionaries; we black people were the first revolutionaries, the first guerrilla fighters in this part of the world, this hemisphere—and then as freed men, the black people struggled in Cuba. They struggled, of course, alongside white people who had a vested interest in struggle—white people who wanted to break the imperialist bonds. Not white liberals who are enjoying the luxuries of capitalism and give us some platitudes about behaving in the right way and so on; white people involved in struggle. It’s a completely different conception of white from the metropolitan white who, whatever category he falls into, is objectively involved in our oppression and our suppression. Every white person in this room is objectively involved in the oppression of black people so long as they live in a metropolitan centre because the metropolitan centre is dominating colonial black people. It is as simple as that.

Anyway, in Cuba that’s not a position. Whites fought against the system, and in that process, the black people could be genuinely emancipated. Now, in Cuba today, barriers to entering certain buildings, certain eating houses, and that sort of thing have completely disappeared. Juan Almeida, one of the members of the Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party, is a black man who was involved in the struggle from the time of the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro. And the position of the black people is such, not only socially and politically emancipated, but moving in a direction of reasserting their culture (the Afro-Cuban culture), of getting official encouragement to assert that culture. And we find in Cuba today more genuine interest in the African Revolution, more interest in the African plastic arts and in African drama than there exists in Jamaica, which is a place 95 percent black, because the black people of Jamaica are still involved [in,] and are dominated under, imperialist relations. So that is Cuba and that is Jamaica.

And it means that for the African historian in Cuba, he can go ahead and research and talk about African history in a new social context. But for anybody in Jamaica, he can’t seriously talk about history divorced from revolutionary struggle. He isn’t serious if he’s doing that. You can’t say that “African history will proceed as normal. We’ll just teach it in the curriculum and that will be fine. Let imperialism proceed.” In any event, the system doesn’t even want you to do a simple thing like teaching African history. The prime minister of Jamaica, a black man (you know he looks black anyway), was approached with a request to let African history and an African language, Swahili, be taught in the schools, and he said, “No, we can’t have any of that.” He gave some reason—a curious reason—something about there being so many different races in Jamaica. Very curious. I mean, 95 percent of the people are black but he can’t teach an African language. They teach Latin, French, Spanish, and everything else. A lot of different reasons don’t seem to come into that. But it shows that the colonial structure is itself aware of the fact you can’t separate a new conception of self, which should spring from historical investigation with a new actuality, from the revolutionary process to change the situation that presently exists. For the Jamaican, the system makes it impossible for him to come to this new awareness of himself because it doesn’t want him to be involved in a revolutionary process.

For any historian who seeks to reconstruct the African past, to reconstruct the past of black peoples in this continent, in such a context he cannot say that the revolution will wait until people are re-educated and that re-education reaches an advanced stage, because he isn’t even allowed to engage in that process of re-education. Consequently, the revolution is with us already. The history will have to be subsidiary to that, it will have to come during and after the revolutionary process. In other words, the Jamaican freedom fighter will have to be a man [who] will, perhaps in his spare time, read some African history. Che Guevara said the guerrilla should always carry something worthwhile in his knapsack. So, the guerrilla fighter, the freedom fighter in Jamaica, would read some African history, but he isn’t waiting on that to move. He has to move because the only way that he can establish a relationship with his own past is, in fact, by breaking the present bonds that restrict and constrain us.

In the United States (and this will presumably apply in Canada also) the situation is rather different. In the United States the national bourgeoisie is powerful, the most powerful national bourgeois group in the world, and, undoubtedly, it will be the most powerful national bourgeois group in the history of the world because there won’t be any more powerful group after the US, you know. That sort of thing is coming to an end. Anyway, this national bourgeoisie, they have the confidence that comes from their wealth. The Jamaican petty bourgeoisie is a comprador class, the neo-colonialist class. They don’t have any confidence because they don’t have any capital. They know they exist on handouts from the metropolitan system, so they are very shaky and very uncertain of themselves. And they will even stop you from, as I said, studying African history. But the US bourgeoisie is employing a different tactic. But the brothers and sisters, and here I am addressing myself particularly to the brothers who have come up from the United States, will have to be aware of the gambit that is in fact already being utilized with respect to African history and culture. And that is this: The national bourgeoisie in the United States appears to be giving a concession. They are saying, “Okay, fine, you go ahead and study African history and African culture,” and they will give you so much African history and culture [that] you just have time for nothing else. The object is to divorce the process of thought and reflection on our past from the process of changing the present, so that you feel that you’ve gained something, but you end up in some remarkable contradiction. What you will find is this (in fact it’s happening already): Rockefeller—who is making most of his money out of South African gold, out of the Rand, out of exploiting and participating in apartheid, the most vicious racial system in the world—that guy is going to finance a chair in African history. That’s the type of contradiction. If a black progressive thinks he’s doing something by going into African history, using up a Rockefeller grant, all he is doing is forgetting both the domestic and external implications of American capitalism and, in fact, supporting that system because the guys don’t mind if you go into a library or museum and lock yourself up all day. That’s wonderful; keep you off the street, keep you out of the struggle. We have to avoid that type of myth, that cultural revival, per se, is going to carry us a long way. I don’t want to seem to be critical of the development of interest in African history and culture. Quite obviously not, that’s what I myself am involved in. What I am trying to suggest is that sometimes, while involved in a process, we ourselves have to be very careful to delimit how far that process should go. Let’s all wear Afros, let’s put on African clothes. Fine. But that doesn’t mean we are not going to struggle. The system still has to be broken before we can express ourselves in any fundamental way.

I had to make that type of introduction before I could go on to talk about African history as such. And when I go on to talk about that I will return to my initial submission that I would like, in fact, to question these categories of civilization. We start off with a conception of civilization and it can be proven, it can be demonstrated rather, that African history can provide us with examples of civilization in the terms the Europeans have expressed. In other words, we can go to Egypt; we can go to Kush, that’s in the Sudan; we can go to the western Sudan, to Ghana, Mali, Songhai; we can take the central Sudan, Bornu, and Kanem; the Hausa states; Mossi, coming further south; we can go across to the eastern part of the continent and find the early Bachwesi empires and the later developments of Bunyoro, Baganda; we can go further south into Central Africa, the Luba-Lunda Kingdoms; we can take the development in southern Bantu in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Shona sections in the centre and over in the far east, that’s the Zulu rising. We can build up a picture that conforms to a European conception. In other words, we can play the game of proving to white society that “you were wrong when you said we had no history, that we had no civilization. Look [at] what we produced.”

But I’m only going to deal with one aspect of that, and that’s Egypt. Everybody knows about Egypt. I don’t have to delineate the Egyptian civilization. If you want to read about Egypt, you have to go and check some books on the Middle East or you have to go and find some guy who calls himself an Egyptologist. You never find any assessment of Egyptian culture, any serious assessment, within the African continent. Not never. Of late it is changing. But the traditional approach, the years of study of Egypt, have taken place in a context of [the] Middle East, Mesopotamia, background to European culture, that sort of thing. Africa just doesn’t come in. Very curious. To begin with, we have a simple geographical description. European refers initially to either what is actually within Europe or what proceeded from Europe as a geographical entity. American the same, Chinese the same. But curiously, Egypt is well entrenched in Africa, but it never appears in any assessment of African civilization. In other words, what I am trying to say, why I am taking this single point, is to show the ways in which the issue can be evaded. White society can either say you have had no history or, where they see an element of civilization in their terms, they can say that was not yours, either by saying it outright or ignoring it.

In the case of Egypt, a second argument is advanced: the question of colour. If you press the first argument I made, then a white [person] will say, “Well, you know, the people in Egypt were white so that really it has nothing to do with Africa, which is a place for black people.” In that sense, one will have to go back and try to determine what was the racial composition of dynastic Egypt. And, as far as we can tell, the Egyptians represented themselves as red- or copper-coloured, as distinct from lighter-skinned white peoples living outside of Egypt and as distinct from darker-skinned black peoples living outside of Egypt also, to the south. Their own conception of themselves was certainly not white. Furthermore, the whole history of Egypt is one of southward expansion and of contacts, sometimes not very pleasant contacts, in the form of slave raids with the south. So it is clear the whole Egyptian population must have been infused with a large quantity of black blood, if we want to take it in racial terms.

We can go further than that. For the whole of the eighth century BCE, the Egyptian dynasty was actually in the hands of the Nubians, in the hands of the Empire of Kush. In other words, for that period, black men were ruling the society. I found no evidence that the society itself was racially conscious. I’m only making this distinction in terms of race because we are attempting to break down certain myths. And the myth is quite simple. In other words, if we look at Egyptian society, we see that it certainly was not white, we can take the medial position that it was brown and that it had very large elements of black, including a whole black dynasty. This is just to illustrate the ways in which, even within the terminology that Europeans have established, one can indicate that African history exists, that African civilizations exist, that the black man can look back on this and gain the necessary revolutionary inspiration. But I want to move on from there because I don’t feel that we should accept these categories that have been established by European writers. These categories are established simply by looking at European society as it has existed, extracting out the elements that they consider to be meaningful in that society, and then judging the rest of the world with these standards, as though these are universal criteria. It is what I call “cultural egocentrism.” These fellows have no concept of judging any culture by attempting to get out of their own. They base themselves solidly in their own limited perspectives and then judge everybody else by that.

In Africa, even apart from the state systems I have merely enumerated and that, presumably, Richard Moore will talk about in more detail, one could find a whole variety of people, millions of people, living outside of the normal political state. And in European terms, they were not civilized, because to be civilized you had to be living in this large political conglomeration, you had to be writing, preferably (this is one of the criteria which is normally adduced for civilization), and you had to be engaged in a political and administrative process that is rather similar to that, let’s say, of the modern United States. In other words, the greatest expression of human progress is in terms of the size of the state, in terms of the size of the armies that the fellows can send against each other to kill each other out and the like. I mean it really is amazing because, even within white society, those people who question the society—and there have been many in the post-war epoch who question the very basis of the society—would wonder if, on sheer size and population and so on, the United States is the most civilized country in the world, if we use those criteria.

We know that it is the most barbarous because of the way in which it has exercised its power, because of the way in which it has stifled its own population. And that is not only the black population but the white population. We have to challenge those criteria, and when I look back at African states, at African society in the broadest sense, I would, in fact, like to throw out the word civilization. I think it is a very arbitrary word, I don’t think it gets us very far. I mean, we use it as a prop so that we can advance our thoughts and at a certain stage it will abolish itself, as it were.

I abolish it on a whole variety of grounds. I mean, one could add, for instance, that we as black people—and this is a question that came up yesterday in an embryonic form when C. L. R. James was speaking—must define the world from our own position. So I want to talk about civilization and I’m a black man and I’ve been subjected to slavery. And I can’t look around and say European society was civilized. I can’t say this. I can’t participate in what the French call la mission civilisatrice when this is what colonialism was for them. “If that is civilization,” was it brother LeRoi who said it? “then give me back the jungle.” That is a definition we as black people cannot accept at all. And once we throw aside that definition, we have to start working with other things. We have to forget the sort of formal approach and start trying to determine what is meaningful in social relations and what were the features of African social relations that were most meaningful. And that’s what I’ll talk about for a little while.

I think that, just as we can say, in the small societies, before the European arrived in Africa, certain states and certain political developments were in existence, similarly, we can emphasize the culture-history; we can try to determine, in the period before the fifteenth century, what were the lines along which African culture-history was developing. And here we must understand that Africans, for the most part, were living in small societies, some of them so-called stateless societies—just a family, an extended family; no superstructure of the state, no huge territorial delimitations. But, whatever the situation in which they lived, whether it was an isolated family unit, whether it was a clan arrangement, or whether it was a state, it seems to me that certain principles can be extracted [as] the dynamic principles of African culture. And this is what represents the civilization—having eroded the erroneous concept surrounding it—of Africa in that particular period. I’ll try to select just a few [of] the most outstanding (in my estimation) of these principles.

One of them is hospitality, the way people related to each other in terms of hospitality. Another one is the way in which the people of a certain age in this society were treated. Another is the whole question of law in African society, the way that the law was administered, the whole ethos behind the law. I think I would like to take those three points and start to have a look at them now.

I start with hospitality. In the African systems, Europeans who arrived in the fifteenth century or Europeans who arrived subsequently within an indigenous context saw the Africans living by themselves. It’s amazing the regularity with which they stressed the nature of African hospitality, the extent of African hospitality. This was not just, as it were, an individual response of Africans. It was rooted in the nature of their social organization. The extended family, for instance, was in itself an agency of social relief. It was in itself an agency that would deny the existence of the extremes of poverty and abandonment in African society, which we find in modern capitalist society. Because, as an extended family, it meant that the responsibility was theirs. All members of the family share a responsibility for others. This is the nucleus of the whole concept of hospitality.

One can go further and take the principle of the family when it is projected into the clan arrangement. A clan, in a rough sense, is a whole collection of families. It’s a set of people who share a common ancestor [and] common totems, [as] sometimes the term is used. Now, within that clan there are numerous people who don’t know each other. They just know they belong to clan A. They’ve never seen each other. Their relationship in terms of physical and genetic proximity is very vague. They acknowledge an ancestorwho is very remote, on the borders between history and legend. But, nevertheless, a clan brother is a brother and he’s treated as a brother whenever the occasion arises. In other words, I belong to clan A and I come from 300 miles away and I meet another clan brother; he has certain responsibilities toward me—to house, feed, clothe me. The system provides for that hospitality.

We can go further. Take the structure of authority, whether it be the chief, or a king, or a ruling group. They too have certain very clearly defined responsibilities with respect to the action of giving, the key being hospitality. So much so that I came across a very interesting incident of a small chief in a Sierra Leone system who they were about to elect into a king and the guy says, “Well, sorry, I’m not going to take that job. I just don’t have the funds to carry out the type of hospitality which is normally expected from a ruler.” That’s his job—to keep an open house. Guys just turn up there and, as I said before, a brother is a brother, a sister is a sister.

Now, I don’t know how it will appear to you, but when I started off and I looked at this, to me, this is a more profound aspect of relationship than how big the state was and how many armies were jumping across to kill each other. This was an aspect of interpersonal relationship. This was a quality of life that doesn’t exist in our society. It couldn’t exist in capitalism, which is based on profit motive. This is not to say that there aren’t individuals within the capitalist system who are hospitable. All over the world one finds hospitable individuals. Here I’m talking about a hospitable society, not the odd individual. The whole society is geared toward a reciprocal relationship with those around. And this, to me, is very, very striking, and it seems to me that, as a principle for human organization, it is one of the facets about African cultural development to which greater attention should be paid.

Let me talk about the old men: age. Again, we’ll start with capitalist society. The old people in the capitalist society have no value. Capitalism wants labour. You’ve finished working, well that’s tough. In more recent times, you get a pension, but the system doesn’t have any further value for you. In West Indian society, in the period of the slave trade, the planters used to make a concrete economic calculation. They had this discussion going. The discussion went along these lines: “Shall we let these blacks work for us for a long time and get old and try to get the maximum period of work out of them? Or shall we work them to death in a limited period of time and get new blacks?” And most of the planters, in fact, felt that it was more advantageous to avoid the problems of having old people in the society. What’s an old black going to do? He can’t produce. He can’t work the eighteen hours a day the plantation system required. So it’s better not to have old black people in the society. And capitalist society all over, not just on the question of race, adopts this attitude to elderly people.

African society is fundamentally different. Throughout Africa, the principle of gerontocracy prevails. The elder, by virtue of his age, is vested with certain authority and certain power. This is basic because, for them, wisdom is a reflection of an experience and, by that very fact, all things being equal, the older the man in the society, the more his experience in the problems within that society, the more his reflection on them, and, therefore, the greater his wisdom. There is more to it than that: it means that the older man has had an opportunity within that society to acquire [a] certain formal education, because African society had its aspects of formal education. There was a period of intensive education when a man or a woman, or should I say a boy or a girl, was about to be initiated into the society, to become a man or a woman. That was always a period of intensive education. And, subsequently, as individuals moved from age group to age group, or from one level in a secret society to another, or from one age sect to another—all these being institutions that related people on the basis of age—he was also privy to additional knowledge, so that he was going through a process of learning. When he reached a certain stage, he was supposed be an historian, lawyer, guardian of the constitution, and the president of the state. He was supposed to be a tutor to the young king when he came up, to the king’s sons that is, or nephews, depending on the system, and, in effect, these elders were given responsibility. They were free, of course, because of the hospitality, from the task of winning a living, and the system asked them to be alert.

This is the difference. I’ve seen a lot of old people—in England in particular it struck me. It is not as bad in the West Indies. Our black people still manage to survive, even in old age. But I looked at English society and it has completely destroyed a certain sector of the society. These women who reach a certain age, they can’t relate to anything else. They perhaps go to a little bingo party and then after a while they can’t even totter out to that. And then you just herd them into old people’s homes. They have no function. They do nothing, so they rapidly degenerate and become cabbages, because your mind, if you don’t keep it going, is going to degenerate. And this is our society that we live in now. African society catered for a completely different conception. The man is always growing, the man is always learning, until he dies. And that is why field researchers have found that when you go into an African society, you can go and find any old man. Find him, he might be sixty, he might be seventy, and with perspicacity he will point out to you elements of the culture and recall episodes of history going back more than a hundred years—in other words, more than his lifetime. He has been trained by the society to function in that way. Now this, to me, is tremendous. A society that takes you from birth and carries you all the way so that life has meaning to the end. Well, you judge that for yourself.

I want to talk now about the attitude of the law in African society. This is my third episode, my third area of illustration. The law in African society was, of course, customary law, rather than recorded law. In recent times, that customary law has become the subject of serious scholarship, and numerous treatises have been presented on African law. The principles are very complex. To begin with, we must understand the framework in which it functions, a framework, as I see it, of social order, social stability. So that immediately limits the areas in which the law is going to operate. Let me illustrate. And this, again, is using European evidence. All the things I am saying I can quote ad extentum from European sources. It is a useful technique. The man says, “No, that’s not so.” Then you say, “Well, this man said so, it wasn’t me, you know. White people went and saw this.” This is European evidence. They go to African society and they’re amazed at the type of social security that existed there in the fifteenth century. All this stuff I’m talking about is cultural history, the period before the European arrival. Some of it carries over, but I’m talking about traditional African society.

All of the travelers into the western Sudan, time and time again, they reiterated, “This is tremendous. How can we travel such huge distances from one end of the Empire of Mali to another and we don’t find any robbers, we don’t find any vagrants? If we lose something, when we turn up at the court of the king, we find that thing has been transmitted there to be given to us.” It was amazing to them because they were operating from the background of brigandage in Europe, highway robbery. I mean our society—well, capitalist society—is a robber society, so this explains the whole thing. [In] the whole development of capitalism—piracy, brigandage on highways, etcetera—the security for goods and persons is a very late development in European and capitalist society, and it has come about through the establishment of massive mechanisms for keeping people in their places; in other words, a police force and army. But in African society this wasn’t so. It wasn’t the police who were all around to see that goods and persons were secure. It was the social constraints. People just didn’t do that. Mungo Park went to the Gambia.7 He saw a little group called the Djolas. He said these are a bunch of savages. Yet, he himself had to concede. He says, “I left my goods there for months unattended and when I went back, there wasn’t a pin removed.” And this is a generalized type of remark that is made about African traditional society; a socially induced security. Everybody moves around and the like. Now, that’s the norm. This doesn’t mean that there is no crime whatsoever. I’m just suggesting the area that, in that society, was exemplary in its freedom, especially in comparison with Europe.

Now, insofar as there was crime, it had to be dealt with by the law. And the principle of the law was not to deal retribution to an offender, which has largely been the principle of European law until recent times, [wherein] the whole penal system is still being questioned. But, fundamentally, it hasn’t changed. The law is to deal retribution, the law is a means of controlling certain individuals. And this is, of course, particularly relevant to us as black people in white society. But, that apart, what was happening in African society was that an offender was asked to make restitution, either to the individual whom he offended, or to the state if his offence was against the state, [or] against the society as a whole. It was a question of restitution rather than retribution being meted out to him. It meant that if he stole, the object was to replace what he stole, not to put him in jail. I have never, ever read of a jail in traditional African society. I have never read of stocks and fetters and chains before the slave trade. This was the African traditional society that didn’t jail people. It said to them, “You replace what you have taken.”

Again, the contrast with Europe is clear on all these points, and what I am developing, therefore, is the idea that there are principles of human activity that we need to look at, which are quite distinct from the so-called principles of civilization, and that when we look at that, we begin to see how tremendously meaningful African life was.

Now, we as black brothers, we look around—in the West in particular, and even in Africa this happens because Africans too have been subjected to the processes of white cultural imperialism—and you want to engage in the exercise that I mentioned at first, that is, trying to destroy the myths the whites have prepared. Even though this places you in a defensive position you have to do it for your own benefit and for the benefit of your brothers and sisters. And you look at the western Sudan, and that is great. You see in the fifth century— and, no doubt, brother Richard Moore, [who] is here now, will talk at length about that—states that are developed in a period comparable to the European Dark Ages and Middle Ages. I shan’t go into that, as I said. But there is a trick in that, when you are finished saying we have states, we have civilizations like the European, the guys are then going to say, “Well, what happened afterwards? We developed, we produced the modern state.” And that leaves you in a rather bemused position if your initial premise was that human development can only be expressed in its highest form in that type of structure Europeans call a state and within the terms that they consider civilized.

At some stage you have to supplement your awareness of the great achievements, of the striking achievements of African society. I know this from personal experience. I go to a black and you can see anguish in him. He says to you, “I want to know something about the great achievements [of] Africans. Tell me something striking.” So, you start to tell him about Lalibella and about rock churches shorn out of sheer rock in Egypt. You tell him about the pilgrimages of Mansa Musa to Egypt. A hundred years after, people in Egypt were still recalling it. He carried so much gold that, years afterwards, the Egyptian economy was still disjointed. You tell him about the sculpture of Benin and Ife and suggest to him that these things are the marvel of the modern European world. But then you go further. I would go further. I’m suggesting to the black brothers and sisters that we need to go further than that in illustrating these principles that I indicated earlier. For an actual political purpose related to the revolution, we have to indicate that this cultural basis existed quite independent of states because, if not, there are certain types of contradictions into which we fall.

Here, I have in mind the way in which the white world normally plays up certain aspects of African contemporary development as relapses into barbarism. You say that what’s happening in Nigeria, what happened in Congo, this is a sort of atavism—the blacks have gone back to the primeval savagery once the restraining hand of white civilization has been removed. And to counter that type of nonsense one doesn’t only have to point to the development of so-called civilization. One also has to show these aspects of everyday life that were meaningful long before the Europeans arrived, and if we were to pursue the process, we could see how, in fact, these things were distorted during the era of contact with Europe; how they were distorted, particularly in West Africa, during the era of the slave trade.

My final reflections, before I give over to this brother, concern some other questions that brothers, in my part of the world anyway, have been asking. They say, “Well, if you recall African history and you recapture African culture, to what extent is it possible to practice this today? Is it just a question of doing this as a sort of catharsis to throw out what the Europeans said or is there a possibility of using these principles in constructive contemporary action?” For Africa, the answer is clearly yes. In African society, any serious attempt to revolutionize the society will have to take serious cognizance of these principles. And the best example is the work being done in Tanzania today and the type of analysis being carried out by that remarkable man, Julius Nyerere. Take a document like “Socialism and Rural Development,” which is something blacks should all read. He is attempting to select the elements of culture in Tanzania, the process of cultural history before the Europeans arrived, and as it was affected by European arrival, and then from that, to try to come to terms with the modern situation. You can extrapolate, you can see the process. It’s not just going back and taking out, harum-scarum. It has to be dialectical, you have to see what still exists in the contemporary situation that comes from the traditional roots. And, in that sense, the analysis of culture-history is extremely relevant to the present revolution.

Now, I wouldn’t go that far for the New World. I would not be able to say what the shape of this society is going to be. It’s a very tremendous question, but one that I don’t really need to ask. White people always keep asking, “After Black Power, what?” This is not really for all of us to determine. That’s another epoch. It’s like Marx writing about the class struggle and he says, “After all that is finished, the history of humanity will begin.” Well, I see it that same way. When we have achieved what we want to achieve, the history of humanity will begin. Humanity will work out its history. We are concerned now with the blacks. The blacks have to get something done and I don’t think, really, that we can use African history in the Western world in the sense that Nyerere used it. I think we can only use it in the first sense, as a sort of catharsis toward action. We probably could do more with our own history, the history of black people in the New World, as a basis for working out what is a revolutionary strategy in the New World and what will be revolutionary in the new situation. But that is another matter.

For me then, African history, as carried out by the black brothers and sisters, will have to be a process of coming to grips with all aspects of African history and with trying to determine what the categories are into which we should fit things, as distinct from saying, let us start and try to determine whether we can reconstruct African history along the same terms in which European history has been reconstructed. Because that analysis, where you utilize only the European criteria, is itself the same process of bastardization; the guy oppresses you and then he selects your terms of reference [for you]. Even when you’re fighting him you use his terms of reference. But what I am trying to suggest here is that we have to break out from those terms of reference. Thank you.

The Groundings With
My Brothers

Statement of the
Jamaican Situation

Chapter 1 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

In 1938, exactly one hundred years after the supposed Emancipation of the Black Man in Jamaica, the masses once again were driven into action to achieve some form of genuine liberation under the new conditions of oppression. The beneficiaries of that struggle were a narrow, middle-class sector whose composition was primarily brown, augmented by significant elements of white and other groups, such as Syrians, Jews and Chinese. Of late, that local ruling elite has incorporated a number of blacks in positions of prominence. However, irrespective of its racial or colour composition, this power-group is merely acting as representatives of metropolitan-imperialist interests. Historically white and racist-oriented, these interests continue to stop attempts at creative social expression on the part of the black oppressed masses.

It was only natural that imperialism and its local lackeys should have intensified the oppression of our black brothers. But, paradoxical as it may appear, they have been forced to create as a psychological prop to their system of domination the myth of a harmonious, multiracial national society – ‘Out of Many, One People’, as the National Motto pretends. In this way they are hoping that the black masses will never organise independently in their own interests. Today that system of domination and its justificatory myth are faced with serious challenges and reverses. For a new phase is beginning in the epochal march forward of the Black Humanity of Jamaica.

The break-up of the myth of a harmonious, multiracial society has been rapid and has assumed numerous forms. Firstly, the regime has been forced into carrying out a crude manipulation of the symbols of national black pride. Marcus Garvey and Paul Bogle were enshrined as ‘National Heroes’, when the methods and achievements of these Black Liberators point the way ever more clearly towards Black Resistance today. Their example violently contradicts the hypocritical claim of the state regime to be representative in any way of the Black Masses.

The most profound dilemma of all faced by a regime of alien class elements is that posed by the existence of the numerically powerful Rastafari Brethren, who have completely and inexorably broken with Jamaican society and its values, and who have chosen a faith and a culture based on Ethiopian Orthodoxy. At no time was this dilemma better demonstrated than when the local political bosses were forced into accepting a visit by His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, and then literally had to stand back while the population thrust forward enthusiastically to pay homage to the Ethiopian Monarch.

More recently, and at a time when the Black Liberation struggle taking place against white racist American society is fiercest, these same political bandits felt sufficiently threatened by the power of the example of struggle to carry through the banning of Brothers Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and James Forman. Even more damning has been their prohibition of the liberation literature of Carmichael, Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammad, at a time when the world is celebrating International Human Rights Year piously sponsored by the Jamaican Government.

The local lackeys of imperialism have long had to admit the existence of tremendous social injustice – the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ as they put it – but they asked the nation to live with the illusion that things were bound to improve. Now the ‘have nots’, who are the mass of the black people, know that things have been getting worse. The unemployed, numbering some 30 per cent of the potential work force, are understandably desperate and the whole repressive machinery of the State has been brought to bear on them.

The administration of the law has become more vicious and partisan. The number of charges imposed on black people for the possession of ganja (marijuana) are astronomical, and the government has decreed that the minimum sentence on conviction must be eighteen months. A charge of ‘suspicion’ has now been entered into the law books, and to be black and poor is to invite this charge in much the same way as the vagrancy laws operated in the period immediately after Emancipation. The quality of justice dispensed by the legal system still depends on skin colour.

Since ‘Independence’, the Black police force of Jamaica have demonstrated that they can be as savage in their approach to black brothers as the white police of New York, for ultimately they serve the same masters. The Prime Minister has not concealed his determination that the police should be used to maintain the present system of social oppression, and he has given them full authority to utilise whatever brutal methods they think necessary to carry out this mandate. Shortly after taking office last year, Prime Minister Shearer told the police, ‘I make no bones about it gentlemen. I want all Jamaica to get the message that the police force under this Government is not reciting Beatitudes to anybody.’ He later added that the police, whenever confronted with ‘criminals’, should not stop to find out what distance was between themselves and the criminals before ‘setting them alight’. In eight months between August 1967 and April 1968, there were at least thirty-one people who were set alight by police guns, sixteen of them dying on the spot. Other incidents of police brutality are too numerous to mention. Yet one of the most significant strikes in recent times was that carried out by the Jamaica police force, demanding higher wages. That strike was not so much a part of the movement of the black working class, but a part of the breakdown of the system of oppression, for the local political lackeys have shown their incompetence in every direction.

The stagnation in the rural areas has reached a stage of crisis. Marginal sugar estates continue to go out of production, leaving hundreds of workers jobless, and prospects for the banana industry are just as bleak. Apart from their inability to raise the living standards of the black masses, they have failed to make provision for increased water consumption and for drought, they have failed to modernise telephone communications, and they have failed to make allowance for the increased need for electrical power. Consequently, in recent months, the ramshackle nature of the neo-colonial structure has been cruelly exposed, and it was the very middle class who have benefitted from ‘1938’ who recently complained most bitterly when they suffered simultaneously from water rationing, extensive electricity power cuts, a limping telephone service, and no police protection for their property.

What matters above all else on the contemporary Jamaican scene is the action of the black masses in their various capacities. Their activities are in part responsible for the atmosphere of decay which surrounds the present administration, and at the same time they provide an indication of the shape of things to come. The racial question is out in the open, in spite of all the efforts to maintain the taboos surrounding it. The Rastafari brethren have been joined on this question by large numbers of other black people – many of them influenced by the struggle and example of black brothers in the USA – while culturally, there is a deepening interest in things African. Of the greatest significance are the effects at self-expression among black people – pamphlets, newssheets, and the like. These independent efforts are essential because of the complete control which imperialism and its local puppets maintain over the various established news media.

Meanwhile, the two reactionary trade unions, which are the most important social bases of the two reactionary political parties, are also facing the challenge of the workers. Not only has there been a wave of strikes without the complicity of the unions, but there is emerging an independent worker movement concerned with the unity of workers in their place of work or within a given industry. The large unemployed sector lacks organisational forms, but there is a widespread reappraisal taking place among unemployed black youths, who have recognised the farcical nature of the present two-party operation, and the self-defeating role which they themselves played so recently in 1967, when they gunned each other down on the orders of the political bandits of the two parties. Whether or not black youths have participated in violence on behalf of the oppressors, they have all suffered from police brutality, and they have seen recently the middle-class members of the ‘gun clubs’ coming forward to volunteer their services in suppressing the people while the police were on strike. Throughout the country, black youths are becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interests. For those who have eyes to see, there is already evidence of the beginnings of resistance to the violence of our oppressors.

Black Power,
A Basic Understanding

Chapter 2 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people. I’m putting it to my black brothers and sisters that the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us. I could have chosen to talk about people of the same island, or the same religion, or the same class – but instead I have chosen skin colour as essentially the most binding factor in our world. In so doing, I am not saying that is the way things ought to be. I am simply recognising the real world – that is the way things are. Under different circumstances, it would have been nice to be colour-blind, to choose my friends solely because their social interests coincided with mine – but no conscious black man can allow himself such luxuries in the contemporary world.

Let me emphasise that the situation is not of our making. To begin with, the white world defines who is white and who is black. In the USA, if one is not white, then one is black; in Britain, if one is not white then one is coloured; in South Africa, one can be white, coloured or black depending upon how white people classify you. There was a South African boxer who was white all his life, until the other whites decided that he was really coloured. Even the fact of whether you are black or not is to be decided by white people – by white power. If a Jamaican black man tried to get a room from a landlady in London who said, ‘No coloureds’, it would not impress her if he said he was West Indian, quite apart from the fact that she would already have closed the door in his black face. When a Pakistani goes to the Midlands, he is as coloured as a Nigerian. The Indonesian is the same as a Surinamer in Holland; the Chinese and New Guineans have as little chance of becoming residents and citizens in Australia as do you and I. The definition which is most widely used the world over is that once you are not obviously white, then you are black and are excluded from power – power is kept pure milky white.

The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites – the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas. A further subdivision can be made with reference to all people of African descent, whose position is clearly more acute than that of most nonwhite groups. It must be noted that once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman – these things pale into insignificance. Actually I’ve found out that a lot of whites literally cannot tell one black from another. Partly this may be due to the fact that they do not personally know many black people, but it reflects a psychological tendency to deny our individuality by refusing to consider us as individual human beings.

Having said a few things about black and white, I will try to point out the power relations between them. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the capitalist division of the world was complete. It was a division which made capitalists dominant over workers and white people dominant over black. At that point, everywhere in the world white people held power in all its aspects – political, economic, military and even cultural. In Europe, the whites held power – this goes without saying. In the Americas the whites had committed mass murder as far as many ‘Red Indian’ tribes were concerned, and they herded the rest into reservations like animals or forced them into the disadvantageous positions, geographically and economically, in Central and South America. In Australia and New Zealand, a similar thing had occurred on a much-smaller scale. In Africa, European power reigned supreme, except in a few isolated spots like Ethiopia; and where whites were actually settled, the Africans were reduced to the status of second-class citizens in their own countries. All this was following upon a historical experience of 400 years of slavery, which had transferred millions of Africans to work and die in the New World. In Asia, Europe’s power was felt everywhere, except in Japan and areas controlled by Japan. The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples – whether or not they are minority or majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.

Since 1911, white power has been slowly reduced. The Russian Revolution put an end to Russian imperialism in the Far East, and the Chinese Revolution, by 1949, had emancipated the world’s largest single ethnic group from the white power complex. The rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America (with minor exceptions such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba) have remained within the white power network to this day. We live in the section of the world under white domination – the imperialist world. The Russians are white and have power, but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples. The white power which is our enemy is that which is exercised over black peoples, irrespective of which group is in the majority and irrespective of whether the particular country belonged originally to whites or blacks.

We need to look very carefully at the nature of the relationships between colour and power in the imperialist world. There are two basic sections in the imperialist world – one that is dominated and one that is dominant. Every country in the dominant metropolitan area has a large majority of whites – USA, Britain, France, etc. Every country in the dominated colonial areas has an overwhelming majority of nonwhites, as in most of Asia, Africa and the West Indies. Power, therefore, resides in the white countries and is exercised over blacks. There is the mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence (e.g., Malaya, Jamaica, Kenya), but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has no power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area.

When Britain announced recently that it was withdrawing troops from East of Suez, the American secretary of state remarked that something would have to be done to fill the ‘power vacuum’. This involved Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Malaysia. The white world, in their own way, were saying that all these blacks amounted to nothing, for power was white and when white power is withdrawn a vacuum is created, which could only be filled by another white power.

By being made into colonials, black people lost the power which we previously had of governing our own affairs, and the aim of the white imperialist world is to see that we never regain this power. The Congo provides an example of this situation. There was a large and well-developed Congolese empire before the white man reached Africa. The large Congolese empire of the fifteenth century was torn apart by Portuguese slave traders, and what remained of the Congo came to be regarded as one of the darkest spots in dark Africa. After regaining political independence the Congolese people settled down to their lives, but white power intervened, set up the black stooge Tshombe, and murdered both Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese people. Since then, paid white mercenaries have harassed the Congo. Late last year, 130 of these hired white killers were chased out of the Congo and cornered in the neighbouring African state of Burundi. The white world intervened and they have all been set free. These are men who for months were murdering, raping, pillaging, disrupting economic production, and making a mockery of black life and black society. Yet white power said not a hair on their heads was to be touched. They did not even have to stand trial or reveal their names. Conscious blacks cannot possibly fail to realise that in our own homelands we have no power, abroad we are discriminated against, and everywhere the black masses suffer from poverty. You can put together in your own mind a picture of the whole world, with the white imperialist beast crouched over miserable blacks. And don’t forget to label us poor. There is nothing with which poverty coincides so absolutely as the colour black – small or large population, hot or cold climates, rich or poor in natural resources – poverty cuts across all of these factors in order to find black people.

That association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony, i.e., it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer.

The Spaniards went to Central and South America and robbed thousands of tons of silver and gold from Indians. The whole of Europe developed on the basis of that wealth, while millions of Indian lives were lost and the societies and cultures of Central and South America were seriously dislocated. Europeans used their guns in Asia to force Asians to trade at huge profits to Europe, and in India the British grew fat while at the same time destroying Indian irrigation. Africa and Africans suffered from the greatest crimes at the hands of Europeans through the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies and the Americas. In all those centuries of exploitation, Europeans have climbed higher on our backs and pushed us down into the dirt. White power has, therefore, used black people to make whites stronger and richer and to make blacks relatively, and sometimes absolutely, weaker and poorer.

‘Black Power’ as a movement has been most clearly defined in the USA. Slavery in the US helped create the capital for the development of the US as the foremost capitalist power, and the blacks have subsequently been the most exploited sector of labour. Many blacks live in that supposedly great society at a level of existence comparable to blacks in the poorest section of the colonial world. The blacks in the US have no power. They have achieved prominence in a number of ways – they can sing, they can run, they can box, play baseball, etc., but they have no power. Even in the fields where they excel, they are straws in the hands of whites. The entertainment world, the record-manufacturing business, sport as a commercial enterprise are all controlled by whites – blacks simply perform. They have no power in the areas where they are overwhelming majorities, such as the city slums and certain parts of the southern United States, for the local governments and law-enforcement agencies are all white controlled. This was not always so. For one brief period after the Civil War in the 1860s, blacks in the USA held power. In that period (from 1865 to 1875) slavery had just ended, and the blacks were entitled to the vote as free citizens. Being in the majority in several parts of the southern United States, they elected a majority of their own black representatives and helped to rebuild the South, introducing advanced ideas such as education for all (blacks as well as whites, rich and poor). The blacks did not rule the United States, but they were able to put forward their own viewpoints and to impose their will over the white, racist minority in several states. This is a concrete historical example of Black Power in the United States, but the whites changed all that, and they have seen to it that such progress was never again achieved by blacks. With massive white immigration, the blacks became a smaller minority within the United States as a whole, and even in the South, so that a feeling of hopelessness grew up.

The present Black Power movement in the United States is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites. It recognises the absence of Black Power, but is confident of the potential of Black Power on this globe. Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of black consciousness. ‘A race without power and authority is a race without respect,’ wrote Garvey. He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made blacks aware of their strength when united. The USA was his main field of operation, after he had been chased out of Jamaica by the sort of people who today pretend to have made him a hero. All of the black leaders who have advanced the cause in the USA since Garvey’s time have recognised the international nature of the struggle against white power. Malcolm X, our martyred brother, became the greatest threat to white power in the USA because he began to seek a broader basis for his efforts in Africa and Asia, and he was probably the first individual who was prepared to bring the race question in the US up before the UN as an issue of international importance. SNCC, the important Black Power organisation, developed along the same lines; and at about the same time that the slogan Black Power came into existence a few years ago, SNCC was setting up a foreign affairs department, headed by James Foreman, who afterwards travelled widely in Africa. Stokely Carmichael has held serious discussions in Vietnam, Cuba and the progressive African countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea. These are all steps to tap the vast potential of power among the hundreds of millions of oppressed black peoples.

Meanwhile, one significant change had occurred since Garvey. The emphasis within the US is that black people there have a stake in that land, which they have watered with their sweat, tears, and blood, and black leadership is aware of the necessity and the desirability of fighting white power simultaneously at home and abroad. Certain issues are not yet clear about the final shape of society in America. Some form of coexistence with whites is the desired goal of virtually all black leaders, but it must be a society which blacks have a hand in shaping, and blacks should have power commensurate with their numbers and contribution to US development. To get that, they have to fight.

Black Power as a slogan is new, but it is really an ideology and a movement of historical depth. The one feature that is new about it as it is currently exercised in the US is the advocacy of violence. Previously, black people prayed, we were on our best behaviour, we asked the whites ‘please’, we smiled so that our white teeth illuminated our black faces. Now it is time to show our teeth in a snarl rather than a smile. The death of Martin Luther King gave several hypocritical persons the opportunity to make stupid remarks about the virtues of non-violence. Some of the statements made in the Jamaica press and on the radio and TV were made by individuals who probably think that the Jamaican black man is completely daft. We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.

White Americans would certainly argue the moral and practical necessity of their participation in the First and, particularly, the Second World War. What is curious is that thousands of black people fought and died in these wars entirely in the interest of the white man. Colonialism is the opposite of freedom and democracy, and yet black colonials fought for this against the Fascism of Hitler – it was purely in the interests of the white ‘Mother Countries’. Slaves fought for American Independence and for the North in the American Civil War. Black oppressed Americans went in thousands to fight for justice in the world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam. We have fought heroically in the white men’s cause. It is time to fight in our own.

Violence in the American situation is inescapable. White society is violent, white American society is particularly violent, and white American society is especially violent towards blacks.

Slavery was founded and maintained by violence, and in the one hundred years since the ‘emancipation’ of slaves in the US, the society has continued to do black people violence by denying them any power or influence (except for the occasional individual). Their interests are therefore ignored, so that thousands of black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medicine; while hundreds of thousands are destroyed emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination. This is the worst sort of violence, and it is accompanied by many acts of individual violence against blacks carried out by white citizens, police and sheriffs. Most incidents of rioting in recent years arose spontaneously out of self-defence and out of anger against brutality. When black Americans react to meet force with force, this should surprise nobody, because even the most harmless animal will finally turn in desperation against its hunters. It is useful to know that this is the conclusion arrived at not only by Black Power leaders, but also by the official committee of the US Senate which was appointed to investigate the racial situation.

Apart from local violent protest (riots), US society faces the possibility of large-scale racial war. The book Black Power, written by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (and now banned by ‘white power’ Jamaican government), stresses that its aim was to present an opportunity to work out the racial question without resort to force, but that if that opportunity was missed the society was moving towards destructive racial war. In such a war, black people would undoubtedly suffer because of their minority position, but as an organised group they could wreck untold damage on the whites. The white racists and warmongers cannot drop their bombs on black people within the USA, and whatever damage is done to property means damage to white property. We have nothing to lose, for they are the capitalists. Black people could not hope to, nor do they want to, dominate the whites, but large sections of the black youth realise that they cannot shrink from fighting to demonstrate the hard way that a 10 per cent minority of 22 million cannot be treated as though they did not exist. Already the limited violence of the past few years has caused more notice to be taken of the legitimate social, economic, political and cultural demands of black people than has been the case for the previous one hundred years. The goal is still a long way off, for it is not only in a crisis that the blacks must be considered. When decisions are taken in the normal day-to-day life of the USA, the interests of the blacks must be taken into account out of respect for their power – power that can be used destructively if it is not allowed to express itself constructively. This is what Black Power means in the particular conditions of the USA.

Black Power – Its Relevance to the West Indies

Chapter 3 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

About a fortnight ago, I had the opportunity of speaking on Black Power to an audience on this campus.11* At that time, the consciousness among students as far as the racial question is concerned had been heightened by several incidents on the world scene – notably, the hangings in Rhodesia and the murder of Dr Martin Luther King. Indeed, it has been heightened to such an extent that some individuals have started to organise a Black Power movement. My presence here attests to my full sympathy with their objectives.

The topic on this occasion is no longer just ‘Black Power’, but ‘Black Power and You’. Black Power can be seen as a movement and an ideology springing from the reality of oppression of black peoples by whites within the imperialist world as a whole. Now, we need to be specific in defining the West Indian scene and our own particular roles in the society. You and I have to decide whether we want to think black or to remain as a dirty version of white. (I shall indicate the full significance of this later.)

Recently there was a public statement in Scope where Black Power was referred to as ‘Black supremacy’. This may have been a genuine error or a deliberate falsification. Black Power is a call to black peoples to throw off white domination and resume the handling of their own destinies. It means that blacks would enjoy power commensurate with their numbers in the world and in particular localities. Whenever an oppressed black man shouts for equality, he is called a racist. This was said of Marcus Garvey in his day. Imagine that! We are so inferior that if we demand equality of opportunity and power, that is outrageously racist! Black people who speak up for their rights must beware of this device of false accusations. It is intended to place you on the defensive and if possible embarrass you into silence. How can we be both oppressed and embarrassed? Is it that our major concern is not to hurt the feelings of the oppressor? Black people must now take the offensive – if it is anyone who should suffer embarrassment, it is the whites. Did black people roast six million Jews? Who exterminated millions of indigenous inhabitants in the Americas and Australia? Who enslaved countless millions of Africans? The white capitalist cannibal has always fed on the world’s black peoples. White capitalist imperialist society is profoundly and unmistakably racist.

The West Indies have always been a part of white capitalist society. We have been the most oppressed section because we were a slave society and the legacy of slavery still rests heavily upon the West Indian black man. I will briefly point to five highlights of our social development: (1) the development of racialism under slavery; (2) emancipation; (3) Indian indentured labour; (4) the year 1865 in Jamaica; (5) the year 1938 in the West Indies.

Slavery. As C. L. R. James, Eric Williams and other WI scholars have pointed out, slavery in the West Indies started as an economic phenomenon rather than a racial one. But it rapidly became racist as all white labour was withdrawn from the fields, leaving black to be identified with slave labour and white to be linked with property and domination. Out of this situation where blacks had an inferior status in practice, there grew social and scientific theories relating to the supposed inherent inferiority of the black man, who was considered as having been created to bring water and hew wood for the white man. This theory then served to rationalise white exploitation of blacks all over Africa and Asia. The West Indies and the American South share the dubious distinction of being the breeding ground for world racialism. Naturally, our own society provided the highest expressions of racialism. Even the blacks became convinced of their own inferiority, though fortunately we are capable of the most intense expressions when we recognise that we have been duped by the white men. Black Power recognises both the reality of black oppression and self-negation as well as the potential for revolt.

Emancipation. By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain had got most of what it wanted from black labour in the West Indies. Slavery and the slave trade had made Britain strong and now stood in the way of new developments, so it was time to abandon those systems. The slave trade and slavery were thus ended; but Britain had to consider how to squeeze what little remained in the territories and how to maintain the local whites in power. They therefore decided to give the planters £20 million compensation and to guarantee their black labour supplies for the next six years through a system called apprenticeship. In that period, white society consolidated its position to ensure that slave relations should persist in our society. The Rastafari brethren have always insisted that the black people were promised £20 million at emancipation. In reality, by any normal standards of justice, we black people should have got the £20 million compensation money. We were the ones who had been abused and wronged, hunted in Africa and brutalised on the plantations. In Europe, when serfdom was abolished, the serfs usually inherited the land as compensation and by right. In the West Indies, the exploiters were compensated because they could no longer exploit us in the same way as before. White property was of greater value than black humanity. It still is – white property is of greater value than black humanity in the British West Indies today, especially here in Jamaica.

Indian Indentured Labour. Britain and the white West Indians had to maintain the plantation system in order to keep white supreme. When Africans started leaving the plantations to set up as independent peasants, they threatened the plantation structure, and therefore Indians were imported under the indenture arrangements. That was possible because white power controlled most of the world and could move nonwhite peoples around as they wished. It was from British-controlled India that the indentured labour was obtained. It was the impact of British commercial, military and political policies that was destroying the life and culture of nineteenth-century India and forcing people to flee to other parts of the world to earn bread. Look where Indians fled – to the West Indies! The West Indies is a place black people want to leave, not to come to. One must therefore appreciate the pressure of white power on India which gave rise to migration to the West Indies. Indians were brought here solely in the interest of white society – at the expense of Africans already in the West Indies and often against their own best interests, for Indians perceived indentured labour to be a form of slavery, and it was eventually terminated through the pressure of Indian opinion in the homeland. The West Indies has made a unique contribution to the history of suffering in the world, and Indians have provided part of that contribution since indentures were first introduced. This is another aspect of the historical situation which is still with us.

1865. In that year Britain found a way of perpetuating white power in the West Indies after ruthlessly crushing the revolt of our black brothers led by Paul Bogle. The British government took away the constitution of Jamaica and placed the island under the complete control of the Colonial Office, a manoeuvre that was racially motivated. The Jamaican legislature was then largely in the hands of the local whites, with a mulatto minority, but if the gradual changes continued the mulattoes would have taken control – and the blacks were next in line. Consequently, the British government put a stop to the process of the gradual takeover of political power by blacks. When we look at the British Empire in the nineteenth century, we see a clear difference between white colonies and black colonies. In the white

colonies like Canada and Australia, the British were giving white people their freedom and self-rule. In the black colonies of the West Indies, Africa and Asia, the British were busy taking away the political freedom of the inhabitants. Actually, on the constitutional level, Britain had already displayed its racialism in the West Indies in the early nineteenth century when it refused to give mulattoes the power of government in Trinidad, although they were the majority of free citizens. In 1865 in Jamaica it was not the first nor the last time on which Britain made it clear that its white ‘kith and kin’ would be supported to hold dominion over blacks.

1938. Slavery ended in various islands of the West Indies between 1834 and 1838. Exactly one hundred years later (between 1934–38) the black people in the West Indies revolted against the hypocritical freedom of the society. The British were very surprised – they had long forgotten all about the blacks in the British West Indies, and they sent a royal commission to find out what it was all about. The report of the conditions was so shocking that the British government did not release it until after the war, because they wanted black colonials to fight the white man’s battles. By the time the war ended, it was clear in the West Indies and throughout Asia and Africa that some concessions would have to be made to black peoples. In general, the problem as seen by white imperialists was to give enough power to certain groups in colonial society to keep the whole society from exploding and to maintain the essentials of the imperialist structure. In the British West Indies, they had to take into account the question of military strategy because we lie under the belly of the world’s imperialist giant, the USA. Besides, there was the new and vital mineral bauxite, which had to be protected. The British solution was to pull out wherever possible and leave the imperial government in the hands of the USA, while the local government was given to a white, brown and black petty bourgeoisie who were culturally the creations of white capitalist society and who therefore support the white imperialist system because they gain personally and because they have been brainwashed into aiding the oppression of black people.

Black Power in the West Indies means three closely related things: (1) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (2) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (3) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks.

I shall anticipate certain questions on who are the blacks in the West Indies, since they are in fact questions which have been posed to me elsewhere. I maintain that it is the white world which has defined who are blacks – if you are not white, then you are black. However, it is obvious that the West Indian situation is complicated by factors such as the variety of racial types and racial mixtures, and by the process of class formation. We have, therefore, to note not simply what the white world says but also how individuals perceive each other. Nevertheless, we can talk of the mass of the West Indian population as being black – either African or Indian. There seem to have been some doubts on the last point and some fear that Black Power is aimed against the Indian. This would be a flagrant denial of both the historical experience of the West Indies and the reality of the contemporary scene.

When the Indian was brought to the West Indies, he met the same racial contempt which whites applied to Africans. The Indian, too, was reduced to a single stereotype – the coolie or labourer. He too was a hewer of wood and a bringer of water. I spoke earlier of the revolt of the blacks in the West Indies in 1938. That revolt involved Africans in Jamaica, Africans and Indians in Trinidad and Guyana. The uprisings in Guyana were actually led by Indian sugar workers. Today, some Indians (like some Africans) have joined the white power structure in terms of economic activity and culture; but the underlying reality is that poverty resides among Africans and Indians in the West Indies and that power is denied them. Black Power in the West Indies, therefore, refers primarily to people who are recognisably African or Indian.

The Chinese, on the other hand, are a former labouring group who have now become bastions of white West Indian social structure. The Chinese of the People’s Republic of China have long broken with and are fighting against white imperialism, but our Chinese have nothing to do with that movement. They are to be identified with Chiang Kai-shek and not Chairman Mao Tse-tung. They are to be put in the same bracket as the lackeys of capitalism and imperialism who are to be found in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Whatever the circumstances in which the Chinese came to the West Indies, they soon became (as a group) members of the exploiting class. They will have either to relinquish or be deprived of that function before they can be reintegrated into a West Indian society where the black man walks in dignity.

The same applies to the mulattoes, another group about whom I have been questioned. The West Indian brown man is characterised by ambiguity and ambivalence. He has in the past identified with the black masses when it suited his interests, and at the present time some browns are in the forefront of the movement towards black consciousness; but the vast majority have fallen to the bribes of white imperialism, often outdoing the whites in their hatred and oppression of blacks. Garvey wrote of the Jamaican mulattoes: ‘I was openly hated and persecuted by some of these coloured men of the island who did not want to be classified as Negroes but as white.’ Naturally, conscious West Indian blacks like Garvey have in turn expressed their dislike for the browns, but there is nothing in the West Indian experience which suggests that browns are unacceptable when they choose to identify with blacks. The post-1938 developments in fact showed exactly the opposite. It seems to me, therefore, that it is not for the Black Power movement to determine the position of the browns, reds and so-called West Indian whites; the movement can only keep the door open and leave it to those groups to make their choice.

Black Power is not racially intolerant. It is the hope of the black man that he should have power over his own destinies. This is not incompatible with a multiracial society where each individual counts equally. Because the moment that power is equitably distributed among several ethnic groups, the very relevance of making the distinction between groups will be lost. What we must object to is the current image of a multiracial society living in harmony – that is a myth designed to justify the exploitation suffered by the blackest of our population, at the hands of the lighter-skinned groups. Let us look at the figures for the racial composition of the Jamaican population. Of every one hundred Jamaicans,

76.8 per cent are visibly African;

0.8 per cent European;

1.1 per cent Indian;

0.6 per cent Chinese;

91 per cent have African blood;

0.1 per cent Syrian;

14.6 per cent Afro-European;

5.4 per cent other mixtures.

This is a black society where Africans preponderate. Apart from the mulatto mixture, all other groups are numerically insignificant, and yet the society seeks to give them equal weight and indeed more weight than the Africans. If we went to Britain we could easily find nonwhite groups in the above proportions – Africans and West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis, Turks, Arabs and other Easterners – but Britain is not called a multiracial society. When we go to Britain we don’t expect to take over all of the British real estate business, all their cinemas and most of their commerce, as the European, Chinese and Syrian have done here. All we ask for there is some work and shelter, and we can’t even get that. Black Power must proclaim that Jamaica is a black society – we should fly Garvey’s Black Star banner, and we will treat all other groups in the society on that understanding – they can have the basic right of all individuals but no privileges to exploit Africans as has been the pattern during slavery and ever since.

The present government knows that Jamaica is a black man’s country. That is why Garvey has been made a national hero, for they are trying to deceive black people into thinking that the government is with them. The government of Jamaica recognises black power – it is afraid of the potential wrath of Jamaica’s black and largely African population. It is that same fear which forced them to declare mourning when black men were murdered in Rhodesia, and when Martin Luther King was murdered in the USA. But the black people don’t need to be told that Garvey is a national hero – they know that. Nor do they need to be told to mourn when blacks are murdered by white power, because they mourn every day right here in Jamaica where white power keeps them ignorant, unemployed, ill-clothed and ill-fed. They will stop mourning when things change – and that means a revolution, for the first essential is to break the chains which bind us to white imperialists, and that is a very revolutionary step. Cuba is the only country in the West Indies and in this hemisphere which has broken with White Power. That is why Stokely Carmichael can visit Cuba, but he can’t visit Trinidad or Jamaica. That is why Stokely can call Fidel ‘one of the blackest men in the Americas’, and that is why our leaders in contrast qualify as ‘white’.

Here I’m not just playing with words – I’m extending the definition of Black Power by indicating the nature of its opposite, ‘white power’, and I’m providing a practical illustration of what Black Power means in one particular West Indian community where it had already occurred. White power is the power of whites over blacks without any participation of the blacks. White power rules the imperialist world as a whole. In Cuba the blacks and mulattoes numbered 1,585,073 out of a population of 5,829,029 in 1953 – i.e., about one-quarter of the population. Like Jamaica’s black people today, they were the poorest and most depressed people on the island. Lighter-skinned Cubans held local power, while real power was in the hands of the US imperialists. Black Cubans fought alongside white Cuban workers and peasants because they were all oppressed. Major Juan Almeida, one of the outstanding leaders of Cuba today, was one of the original guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, and he is black. Black Cubans today enjoy political, economic and social rights and opportunities of exactly the same kind as white Cubans. They too bear arms in the Cuban Militia as an expression of their basic rights. In other words, White power in Cuba is ended. The majority of the white population naturally predominates numerically in most spheres of activity, but they do not hold dominion over blacks without regard to the latter’s interests. The blacks have achieved power commensurate with their own numbers by their heroic self-efforts during the days of slavery, in fighting against the Spanish and in fighting against imperialism. Having achieved their rights, they can in fact afford to forget the category ‘black’ and think simply as Cuban citizens, as Socialist equals and as men. In Jamaica, where blacks are far greater in numbers and have no whites alongside them as oppressed workers and peasants, it will be the black people who alone can bear the brunt of revolutionary fighting.

Trotsky once wrote that revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us here at the university going to join the bacchanal?

Let us have a look at our present position. Most of us who have studied at the UWI are discernibly black, and yet we are undeniably part of the white imperialist system. A few are actively pro-imperialist. They have no confidence in anything that is not white – they talk nonsense about black people being lazy – the same nonsense which was said about the Jamaican black man after emancipation, although he went to Panama and performed the giant task of building the Panama Canal – the same nonsense which is said about WI unemployed today, and yet they proceed to England to run the whole transport system. Most of us do not go to quite the same extremes in denigrating ourselves and our black brothers, but we say nothing against the system, and that means that we are acquiescing in the exploitation of our brethren. One of the ways that the situation has persisted, especially in recent times, is that it has given a few individuals like you and I a vision of personal progress measured in terms of front lawn and of the latest model of a huge American car. This has recruited us into their ranks and deprived the black masses of articulate leadership. That is why at the outset I stressed that our choice was to remain as part of the white system or to break with it. There is no other alternative.

Black Power in the WI must aim at transforming the Black intelligentsia into the servants of the black masses. Black Power, within the university and without, must aim at overcoming white cultural imperialism. Whites have dominated us both physically and mentally. This fact is brought out in virtually any serious sociological study of the region – the brainwashing process has been so stupendous that it has convinced so many black men of their inferiority. I will simply draw a few illustrations to remind you of this fact which blacks like us at Mona prefer to forget.

The adult black in our West Indian society is fully conditioned to thinking white, because that is the training we are given from childhood. The little black girl plays with a white doll, identifying with it as she combs its flaxen hair. Asked to sketch the figure of a man or woman, the black schoolboy instinctively produces a white man or a white woman. This is not surprising, since until recently the illustrations in our textbooks were all figures of Europeans. The few changes which have taken place have barely scratched the surface of the problem. West Indians of every colour still aspire to European standards of dress and beauty. The language which is used by black people in describing ourselves shows how we despise our African appearance. ‘Good hair’ means European hair, ‘good nose’ means a straight nose, ‘good complexion’ means a light complexion. Everybody recognises how incongruous and ridiculous such terms are, but we continue to use them and to express our support of the assumption that white Europeans have the monopoly of beauty, and that black is the incarnation of ugliness. That is why Black Power advocates find it necessary to assert that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL.

The most profound revelation of the sickness of our society on the question of race is our respect for all the white symbols of the Christian religion. God the Father is white, God the Son is white, and presumably God the Holy Ghost is white also. The disciples and saints are white, all the Cherubim, Seraphim and angels are white – except Lucifer, of course, who was black, being the embodiment of evil. When one calls upon black people to reject these things, this is not an attack on the teachings of Christ or the ideals of Christianity. What we have to ask is ‘Why should Christianity come to us all wrapped up in white?’ The white race constitutes about 20 per cent of the world’s population, and yet nonwhite peoples are supposed to accept that all who inhabit the heavens are white. There are 650 million Chinese, so why shouldn’t God and most of the angels be Chinese? The truth is that there is absolutely no reason why different racial groups should not provide themselves with their own religious symbols. A picture of Christ could be red, white or black, depending upon the people who are involved. When Africans adopt the European concept that purity and goodness must be painted white and all that is evil and damned is to be painted black, then we are flagrantly self-insulting.

Through the manipulation of this media of education and communication, white people have produced black people who administer the system and perpetuate the white values – ‘white-hearted black men’, as they are called by conscious elements. This is as true of the Indians as it is true of the Africans in our West Indian society. Indeed, the basic explanation of the tragedy of African/Indian confrontation in Guyana and Trinidad is the fact that both groups are held captive by the European way of seeing things. When an African abuses an Indian, he repeats all that the white men said about Indian indentured ‘coolies’; and in turn the Indian has borrowed from the whites the stereotype of the ‘lazy nigger’ to apply to the African beside him. It is as though no black man can see another black man except by looking through a white person. It is time we started seeing through our own eyes. The road to Black Power here in the West Indies and everywhere else must begin with a revaluation of ourselves as blacks and with a redefinition of the world from our own standpoint.

African History and Culture

Chapter 4 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

I

Every human society has a history and a form of culture, and this includes Africa. Africans in the West have been deliberately kept ignorant of African achievements by the white men for centuries. The purpose of their policy was to build up a picture of a barbarous Africa, so that we Africans who had been removed from our homes and made into slaves would be afraid to admit even to ourselves that we were Africans. In the West Indies, names like ‘Bungo’ and ‘Quashie’, which refer to Africans, are names which most black people hate, and our knowledge of Africa is got from reading Tarzan comic books.

We are the only group in the world who deny ourselves, preferring to be known as ‘Negroes’ rather than Africans. In order to know ourselves we must learn about African history and culture. This is one of the most important steps towards creating unity among Africans at home and abroad.

Africa is the home of mankind. The human being came into existence on the African continent nearly 2 million years ago; and human society and culture reached great heights in Africa before the white men arrived. We must learn something about the following African kingdoms and empires.

(a) On the River Nile, there was Egypt and Meroe (Sudan). These kingdoms flourished on earth before the birth of Christ, and Egypt in particular is recognised as having contributed greatly to the modern world. Its huge pyramids and sculptures are still considered as wonders, and mankind has never re-discovered some of the technical skills which the Egyptians possessed, such as the art of preserving the dead body. Europeans have long refused to accept the simple geographical fact that ancient Egypt (like modern Egypt) was an African country, and even though some of its culture came from Asia, its achievements must go to the credit of Africa.

Meroe produced a culture very similar to Egypt, and also ruled over Egypt for a long period. The Egyptians were Africans of a light complexion, while the people of Meroe were dark skinned.

(b) In ancient Ethiopia, there was the kingdom of Axum, forerunner to the Ethiopian kingdom. The written language of Axum was called ‘Ge’ez’, and it is still used within the Ethiopian church today. Axum, along with other parts of ancient Ethiopia, is famous for its architecture, especially its tall and finely carved stone pillars and its churches carved out of solid rock.

(c) In West Africa, some of the most powerful political states in Africa began to develop some 1,500 years ago, and their period of greatness lasted for more than 1,200 years. These kingdoms bore the names of Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Kanem; and they all arose near the great Niger River. They were noted for their agricultural production, their learning and their commerce, especially in gold. These states also encouraged the religion of Islam (while Ethiopia, of course, was the centre of Christianity).

II

Apart from the states of Egypt, Meroe, Axum, Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Kanem, which have already been mentioned, there were many others in different parts of Africa which achieved greatness before the arrival of the white man and before we were snatched away as slaves. On the West African coast, the states of Benin and Oyo were famous; in Central Africa we can take as examples Kongo and Monomotapa (Zimbabwe); and in East Africa two of the oldest kingdoms were those of Bunyoro and Buganda. All of these are strange names because we have never been taught anything about them. If we want to call ourselves conscious Africans, then we must know the map of Africa, we must remember the names of these great African states, and we must find out as much as possible about them.

However, the majority of Africans lived in small societies, and these must also be seriously studied. Sometimes, it is felt that only in large political states can one find civilisation and culture, but this is wrong, and in the great political states of Europe and America today, many human values have been destroyed; while even the smallest African village was a place for the development and the protection of the individual.

Certain things were outstanding in the African way of life, whether in a small or large society. These distinctive things in the African way of life amount to African culture. Among the principles of African culture the following are to be noted: hospitality, respect (especially to elders), importance of the woman (especially in cases of inheritance), humane treatment of lawbreakers, spiritual reflection, common use of the land, constant employment of music (especially drums) and bright colours. Some of these principles are found in many different human societies, but very few are encouraged in the present white capitalist world. Even in Africa itself, European slave trading and colonisation have destroyed many aspects of African culture. But culture is not a dead thing, nor does it always remain the same. It belongs to living people and is therefore always developing. If we, the blacks in the West, accept ourselves as African, we can make a contribution to the development of African culture, helping to free it from European imperialism.

What we need is confidence in ourselves, so that as blacks and Africans we can be conscious, united, independent and creative. A knowledge of African achievements in art, education, religion, politics, agriculture and the mining of metals can help us gain the necessary confidence which has been removed by slavery and colonialism.

Marcus Garvey always preached the value of African history and culture. He wrote that ‘for many years white propagandists have been printing tons of literature to impress scattered Ethiopia, especially that portion within their civilisation, with the idea that Africa is a despised place, inhabited by savages and cannibals, where no civilised human being should go’. After dismissing that propaganda as completely false, Garvey continued: ‘The power and the sway we once held passed away, but now in the twentieth century we are about to see a return of it in the rebuilding of Africa; yes, a new civilisation, a new culture, shall spring up from among our people.’

III

On the physical side, man is an animal, but is different from other animals in several important ways. The three most outstanding physical qualities are the following:

(a) Man walks upright.

(b) Human hands are adapted to making and handling tools.

(c) Man’s comparatively bigger brain allows for higher thought, and man is referred to as Homo sapiens, which means ‘thinking man’.

Homo sapiens first came into existence on the African continent. This fact has been established by archaeologists (people who study the material evidence of past society, usually by digging into the ground), by paleontologists (people who study the ancient climate and structure of the earth), and by other scientists who can find out the age of bones and rocks that existed millions of years ago. What these scholars say is that nearly 2 million years ago, man evolved in Africa, long before he came into existence elsewhere. Numerous remains of early human types have been found in eastern Africa, and a place in Tanzania called Olduvai Gorge is especially famous.

Man in Africa (like man everywhere else) adjusted to his physical surroundings to produce human society and culture. The first form of society came about when individuals got together to hunt in groups.

Probably the most important development in human history was the invention of agriculture. Strange as this may seem today, there was a time when the idea of growing crops and rearing animals did not occur to man. When the idea came about, hundreds of years were spent in collecting wild grasses and roots, which were brought into the service of man. Wild animals such as the cow and the horse were also tamed and used by man. It was in the Middle East that agriculture started about 10,000 years before the birth of Christ, because that region was well supplied by nature with grasses such as wheat and barley. Agriculture spread rapidly into Africa by way of Egypt. In the grasslands of Ethiopia and West Africa, certain new grain species were first brought into human use from the wild variety. Those grains form the millet family. Africa was also the home of certain varieties of rice, yam, beans, fruit, etc. Agriculture meant food to support a growing population, and people settled down to build a stable society.

All over the world, the greatest challenge to man was his environment or physical surroundings. Man in Africa learnt to overcome the problems of his own environment. Advanced methods of agriculture developed in Africa many hundreds of years before Europeans went to that continent. Irrigation, terracing and crop rotation were all practised.

The other basic aspect of material culture is concerned with the working of metals and the making of metal tools. Here again, metalworking spread into Africa from the Middle East, becoming widespread long before the European arrival, and in some cases the metal technology was highly developed. Africans in the Congo were famous for mining copper and those in the Sudan famous for their iron. Apart from tools and weapons, metals were used for ornament, and here gold played its part. What all of the above really mean is that ancient Africa was in the mainstream of human history.

IV

Apart from the material aspect of culture, man has always produced things of the spirit. In fact, the development of religion, literature and art is associated with higher forms of culture and civilisation. In all of these fields Africa can be proud of her achievements. Take, for example, the art of Africa. European books on the early development of man always praise the paintings and engravings made by man long ago in France, Germany, etc. There are similar paintings all over Africa, placed on huge rocks and showing the great variety of animals which are found on the African continent and which were hunted by Africans. The paintings and engravings, like man himself, appeared at a much-earlier date in Africa than in Europe. As man progressed, he moved from simple rock paintings to sculpture. African sculpture in wood, copper, bronze and iron is recognised by the whole world both for the remarkable skill with which the sculptured objects are produced and for their expression of beauty, dignity and other human spiritual qualities.

Black Africans have developed in the same way as all mankind and have made their own contributions to humanity, because we are simply a part of a single species – Homo sapiens, or ‘thinking man’, as mentioned before. Skin colour by itself is insignificant. Some black Africans have given birth to white albino children (known in Jamaica as ‘dunduss’), but these children are really no different from their parents. In man’s physical makeup, one of the most fundamental things is the type of blood; and blood groups do not conform to skin colour. In other words, an African is physically closer to a European with the same blood group than he is to another African of a different blood type.

Colour has become important because the white men found it convenient to use racialism to exploit the black peoples of the world. As Africans, we will use the question of race to unify ourselves and to escape from the oppression at the hands of white men and their black lackeys. So long as there are people who deny our humanity as blacks, then for so long must we proclaim and assert our humanity as blacks. That is why our historical and cultural heritage is so important, and that is why we must proceed to live our culture because culture is a way of life. We must recover what was taken away from us, and we must adapt in order to survive and keep on growing as a section of humanity.

Here it is very important to notice the question of technology. Europeans accuse black people of not inventing the wheel. They claim that our culture never included the construction of machines which work on the principle of the wheel – e.g., mills and wheeled transport. This is partly true, but all that can be said is that we never borrowed the principle of the wheel, for it was invented in China and borrowed by Europeans. Where our history and culture lack certain things, there is nothing wrong in borrowing. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Haile Selassie, was the first African to realise the importance of the European invention of aircraft and sought aeroplanes, not to be like Europeans, but to protect Ethiopian culture by strengthening it with something new. AFRICANS (ESPECIALLY YOUTHS) MUST LEARN NEW SKILLS.

V

The Nile Civilisations. The Nile is one of the great rivers of Africa and of the world. One branch, the Blue Nile, starts in Ethiopia, while the White Nile starts in Uganda. They come together in the Sudan and then flow through Egypt to the sea. Few sights are more spectacular than the Murchison Falls on the White Nile and the Tisisat Falls on the Blue Nile; but the Nile is famous not just because of its length and great beauty, but because it is the cradle of ancient civilisations.

The history of Egypt of the pharaohs is well known, and it should not be difficult to obtain a good book (with photographs). White people are quick to deny that ancient Egyptians were Africans, by which they mean that Egyptians were not black. The ancient Egyptians usually portrayed themselves as ‘red’, and their empire included black subjects from further up the Nile. Red intermarried with black, and for many years a line of black kings ruled Egypt. There is no evidence to show that racial discrimination was part of their culture. Yet, according to the white men’s way of seeing things, the red and the black populations of Egypt would have been classed as ‘coloured’ or ‘Negro’. Christ was a member of the Essene group of Jews from Egypt. Were he alive today, he would suffer from racial discrimination.

One of the Nile kingdoms which is much less known than Egypt is that of Kush (sometimes called Meroe, which was the capital city for a long time). Kush was situated in the northern Sudan, whose population were black Africans. It was at one time a province of Egypt, but it achieved its independence and built up a society that was scarcely inferior to that of Egypt. In fact, 800 years before the birth of Christ, Kush was powerful enough to invade Egypt and take over the throne of the pharaohs. Their rule in Egypt came to an end more than a hundred years later, when Hittite armies invaded from Syria, armed with superior weapons.

The people of Kush were famous for their manufacture of fine pottery, beads, jewels and ornaments; and they were an important source of gold in the ancient world. The first capital city, Napata, and the second, Meroe, were international trading centres, in touch with Africans in every direction, especially Egypt to the north and Ethiopia to the southeast. Beyond the shores of Africa, they were in touch with Syria, Persia, Rome, Greece and India.

Women played an important part in the political structure of Kush, and this is something found in most parts of black Africa. There were many great queens of Kush, and it is felt that Candace, mentioned in the Bible as queen of Ethiopia, may really have been a queen of Kush.

Kush was not as magnificent as Egypt in the building of pyramids and temples, but in one respect Kush surpassed even the glories of Egypt, and that was in the manufacture of iron. Up to today the hills of ‘slag’ or waste material from iron smelting are still to be seen near Meroe in the Sudan. Meroe was an industrial centre in the heart of Africa, helping to spread the techniques of iron smelting and ironworking to other peoples of the continent.

The names of KUSH AND MEROE ARE PART OF OUR HISTORICAL HERITAGE AS AFRICANS.

VI

The early history of Ethiopia (part 1). The area of Ethiopia is 395,000 square miles, which is about ninety times the size of Jamaica. One-third of the area is high land, and it is in highland Ethiopia that most of the early historical developments took place. This highland was a natural defence against invasion and also a barrier to easy communications with the rest of Africa. In fact, within Ethiopia itself, steep valleys divide the mountains and make it difficult to get from one place to another. The Abai or Blue Nile separates the northern highlands of Amhara and Gojjam from those of Shoa to the south.

The isolated hilltops, or ambas, as they are called, were often used as mountain fortresses or as monasteries, such as those of Debra Libanos and Debra Tabor.

Ethiopia is a land of diversity. Many different factors came together to form the Ethiopian empire and culture. There are several different peoples, with different languages, different ways of making a living and different religions. Among the principal groups we find the Amhara, Asau and Galla. The Amhara speak a language which is called ‘Semitic’ (related to the Jewish language), while other peoples speak languages related to Arabic, or to other African languages such as the Nilotic.

On the fertile highlands, the fanners grew the varieties of millet contributed by Ethiopia to Africa and the world. On the grasslands we find ‘pastoralists’ – individuals who specialise in the rearing of cattle – and from early times fishing was of importance in the lakes and rivers. Naturally, modern Ethiopia has many other kinds of workers and skills which were not present from the earliest days.

Many people are surprised by the diversity of religion which still exists in Ethiopia today. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is supreme within the state, but there are large numbers of Muslims and animists (Africans following the old religion of their forefathers), and there are even a number of Jews. All of these people, in spite of different languages, religions, etc., are subjects of the same government, which is today under HIM Emperor Haile Selassie I.

Ethiopians can differ in skin colour from light brown to jet black, but none of them are really different from the black Africans outside Ethiopia. White propaganda likes to suggest that the achievements of Ethiopia are not the achievements of Africa. Marcus Garvey knew about this lying propaganda and made it look ridiculous. He wrote as follows:

Professor George A. Kersnor, after describing the genius of the Ethiopians and their high culture during the period of 750 B.C. to A.D. 350 in middle Africa, declared the Ethiopians were not African Negroes. He described them as dark coloured races showing a mixture of black blood. Imagine a dark coloured man in middle Africa being anything else but a Negro. Some white men, whether they be professors or not, certainly have a wide range of imagination.

Ancient Ethiopia before the coming of Christianity. In the Ethiopian highlands in ancient times, the main group of people were the Agau. Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, many people from the Yemen and Arabia crossed the Red Sea into Ethiopia. These were known as Sabeans, and they brought the language of Ge’ez which is still used in the Ethiopian church.

The Sabeans were interested in trade, and they set up a number of trading ports and towns on the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea and in the nearby mountains. By far the most important of these towns was Axum in the highlands of Tigrea, and Axum was the foundation upon which the Christian empire was later built. Axum (and its Red Sea port of Adulis) were centres of international trade, exporting perfumes, incense, ivory and gold to Egypt, Persia, Syria, India and throughout the Greek and later the Roman Empire. As such Axum was also a centre of culture, and one of its early kings, Zoscales, spoke and wrote Greek perfectly.

Above all, Axum and similar centres created the first elements of a special Ethiopian culture. The Sabeans became Ethiopians. The relations between the newcomers and the previous inhabitants produced the Amharic language and produced a special form of architecture not found anywhere else outside of Ethiopia. A strong kingdom grew up which spread from Tigrea further into Ethiopia and also across the Red Sea into Yemen and Arabia. Less powerful rulers had to pay tribute to the king of Axum, so that even before the coming of Christianity the king of Ethiopia was a ‘king of kings’.

VII

The Development of the Ethiopian Church and Amharic Culture. Just before the coming of Christianity to the empire of Axum there were three different forms of religion: (i) animist (traditional) beliefs and reverence for ancestors; (ii) belief in the gods of Arabia, such as Mahrem, the god of war; and (iii) the Jewish faith.

Conversion began in the province of Tigre, which was the centre of the ancient empire of Axum. The Christian nature of the Ethiopian kingdom is traced back to the union of Solomon and Sheba and is recorded in the Kebra Nagast, or ‘the Glory of Kings’.

Many Europeans consider the Kebra Nagast and the account of the union of Solomon and Sheba as nothing but a fable with no truth whatsoever. They claim that Sheba was in Arabia and not in Ethiopia, and that Christianity entered Ethiopia for the first time 330 years after the birth of Christ. There are Greek documents which say that about the year AD 330, Azana, the king of Axum, was converted to Christianity by Frumentius, a Syrian bishop sent by the patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt.

On the question of the relations of Solomon with Sheba, it must be remembered that Ethiopia ruled large parts of Arabia, so that even if Sheba was in Arabia, the ‘queen of Sheba’ would still have been one of the titles of the queen of Ethiopia. Furthermore, even if it is impossible to prove the matter historically one way or another, the Kebra Nagast still remains a vital cultural document, which correctly emphasises the ancient nature of the link between Ethiopia and the Hebrew world before the birth of Christ. This document is a symbol of Amharic culture, for that culture developed out of the relations between Africa and the Near East.

The presence of the Falashas, or ‘black Jews’, in Ethiopia is a very important fact. Some authorities consider them to be one of the ten ‘lost tribes’ of Israel, and they were among the earliest inhabitants of Ethiopia. This is proved by the fact that their beliefs and system of worship go back to the pattern set by Moses, and they had no knowledge of the more recent developments in the Jewish faith such as the Talmud (the Bible of the modern Jews).

Ethiopia was a major centre in the ‘biblical world’ – along with Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. It is clear that Christianity must have begun to spread in Ethiopia from the earliest days of Christ’s teachings. What probably happened is that there was a struggle until Christianity gradually became the official religion, and Ethiopia became part of the structure of the international church.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has certain special features:

(a) It is a church based on the people and their way of life. Even when converting ‘animists’ to Christianity, it respected their previous culture and adopted part of it. For example, while the Western church always tries to suppress African music and any popular music, the Ethiopian church worshipped and celebrated to the sound of drums and other instruments of the people.

Similarly, while the common people of Europe were spoken to by priests in the unknown tongue of Latin, the people of Ethiopia used their own languages (Ge’ez and Amharic) to express themselves inside and outside of the church.

(b) Some of the ancient Hebrew practices of the Ethiopian Falashas were also respected, such as the ban against the eating of pork.

(c) The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has preserved many of the features of the early Christian church, and many of the books in their worship are considered to be ‘apocryphal’ by the Western church. According to the Western church of Europe, the books of Enoch, Jubilees and Ecclesiasticus are not authentic, but these biblical books which the Ethiopians have today were translated into Ge’ez long before the Western world was familiar with Christian writings.

(d) The Ethiopian Church has a strong tradition of monasticism. Individuals withdrew from the daily life of society to become monks or hermits in isolated places on the ambas, or mountaintops. This was due to the influence of the Eastern church, for as part of a world religion, the Ethiopian Orthodox faith had international connections. Ethiopian tradition explains that Frumentius, or Abba Salama, was important because he was the first man with authority to ordain priests in Ethiopia under the patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt. Up until 1948, the abuna, or archbishop of Ethiopia, was consecrated by the patriarch of Alexandria.

The Ethiopian church has survived for centuries in spite of many dangers. The first threat came from the ‘animist’ Agau peoples. In the tenth century, the Agau, under their Queen Ester, defeated the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. For 133 years the Solomonic line was deposed by a royal dynasty called the Zagwe. However, some of these Zagwe rulers were zealous Christians and kept the Christian empire alive. The most famous Zagwe was called Lalibala. He ruled at the end of the twelfth century and built eleven of the remarkable rock churches of Ethiopia. (They were carved out of solid rock.)

When the Solomonic dynasty returned in AD 1270, they had to fight against the Jews (Falashas) and the Muslims. The important thing to notice is that when the Jews and Muslims were overcome militarily, they still had a place in the social, political and economic life of Ethiopia.

VIII

The Western Sudan. Today, the name ‘Sudan’ is given to the independent African nation which has borders with Egypt and Ethiopia. In earlier times, the whole of Africa south of the Sahara Desert was called in Arabic ‘Bilad es Sudan’, which means ‘land of the blacks’, and the term ‘Western Sudan’ referred to an area which today includes the independent states of Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Niger, Upper Volta and Chad, along with the northern part of Nigeria. This is an area of the greatest importance in the development of African history and culture.

The Western Sudan was an area of grassland and woodland, which had great advantages over the desert country to the north and over the thick forests to the south. It was possible to make rapid progress in agriculture, and this region of Africa produced several new grains suitable for human consumption – three of the most widely used being sorghum, pennisetum and a species of rice which grows in flooded fields.

The Western Sudan was also quick to borrow and master the technical skills of mining and refining iron, after these skills became known in Egypt, Meroe and North Africa. Using iron tools, the inhabitants of the region produced a supply of food which allowed the population to expand.

Apart from food crops they also brought into use a certain variety of cotton. Skilled workers were engaged in the manufacture of iron, cloth and pottery, and through the exchange of goods over long distances there arose the need for professional traders. The society had therefore become specialised in its economic operation.

The fact that people could move about easily in the open countryside meant that there were constant contacts between the different sections of the Western Sudan. For instance, this was one of the few areas of Africa where it was possible to use horses in large numbers. It means that there was a reasonable degree of unity where things such as language and religion were concerned. It means, too, that there were numerous little things (such as the way people dressed, the way they cooked their meals and the way they greeted each other) which were all done in the same way. There was, therefore, a common culture or way of life in the Western Sudan – a culture that was part of the broader African pattern, but which had certain special features, as we have seen in the case of the Amharic Ethiopian culture.

One of the distinguishing features of the Western Sudan was the fact that it kept producing large kingdoms and political empires. From the earliest centuries of the Christian era right up to the arrival of European colonialists in the last century, the Western Sudan has not lacked complex political states covering huge areas of territory.

It is necessary to conclude the discussion on the Western Sudan, and on the empire of Mali in particular.

Its founder was Sundiata Keita, a political and military genius. Modibo Keita, the first head of state of the republic of Mali, is a descendant of Sundiata Keita. Obviously, this is a source of pride and confidence for the inhabitants of that part of Africa, but we too can share those feelings.

Another famous name in the history of Mali was Mansa Kankan Musa, who was noted both for his military skill and his devotion to Islam. He made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, carrying one hundred camel loads of gold, most of which was spent in Egypt and caused dislocation of the Egyptian economy. Mansa Kankan Musa became a legend not only in his own country but also in Egypt, Italy and Arabia, for after his pilgrimage all world maps clearly and accurately included the country of Mali.

That sort of journey had great economic and cultural consequences. It was followed by the exchange of diplomatic missions, and by the arrival in Mali of architects, craftsmen and Muslim teachers. Most foreign visitors went to the city of Timbuctu. In the English language Timbuctu ‘is often used in the sense of the most backward place on earth’. Yet, as long ago as the fourteenth century, when Europe was emerging from its own ‘Dark Ages’, Timbuctu was the largest city in West Africa and one of the most famous in the world as a centre of gold trade and as a city of learning. There were numerous schools at all levels, using the Arabic language; and the Sankore mosque was the home of a University producing theologians, lawyers, linguists and geographers. A visitor to Timbuctu about 450 years ago wrote as follows: ‘In Timbuctu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary. More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business.’ In a city which was renowned for its trade in gold, there was more profit to be made from books than from any other line of business! In other words, learning was valued more highly than gold!

IX

The West African Coast. On the coast the conditions did not permit the growth of huge empires, for the thick forests limited agriculture, population and movement. Nevertheless, there were places where even the serious disadvantages imposed by nature had been partly overcome. Populations had grown large and settled enough to allow big political states to come into existence. The two most important areas of development were the western section of Nigeria and the mouth of the River Congo.

As in the Western Sudan, the small states of Western Nigeria and lower Congo had grown until they controlled other small states on the basis of family relationships.

The Yoruba. In Western Nigeria there was a single culture and language which is called Yoruba. The Yoruba were established at Ile-Ife by about the twelfth century A.D., and shortly afterwards they set up another centre at Oyo. In fact Oyo became more important politically, militarily and economically, but Ile-Ife remained the spiritual and constitutional head of Yorubaland. Yoruba traditions spread eastwards to the Edo of Benin at the mouth of the River Niger and westwards into what is now Dahomey, where the kingdoms of Allada, Whydah and Dahomey were established in the sixth century.

The Yoruba and the Edo of Benin had a very stable political system and a well organised economy, but they were famous above all for their sculpture. They produced sculptures in wood, ivory, terracotta (a red clay) and in metals such as iron, bronze and brass. Today, the finely fashioned heads and wall-plaques of Ife and Benin are the wonder of the museum world. When the first examples were discovered by Europeans in the nineteenth century, they argued that the work was not done by Africans. Perhaps the Greeks or Carthaginians had visited Nigeria a long time ago, they said – or perhaps the sculptures were done by early Portuguese travellers. But slowly the undeniable truth dawned on everyone, and the art treasures of the Yoruba and Edo had to be accepted as examples of African culture.

Africans everywhere (including Haiti and other parts of the West) have shown their tremendous talents in the ‘plastic’ arts – those which have to do with carving and moulding. The art of Ife and Benin is typical of all Africa in many respects. The really different feature is that it was done in metals, which survive over centuries, while the wood sculpture of other parts of Africa has been the victim of termites, rot, breakages, etc. We know that before the birth of Christ there was a civilisation in Central Nigeria which made terracotta figures similar to those which Ife and Benin were to make in metals from the twelfthth century onwards. There is little doubt that a developed society flourished in that region throughout the centuries after the birth of Christ.

At Nok, the Africans mined and smelted tin. They imported copper from Takedda, a place in the Sahara; and with the copper and tin, they were able to make bronze. They lacked zinc which is required to manufacture brass, but they imported brass all the way from the Middle East, which shows how far the Yoruba were able to extend their trade and culture contacts. Probably, this is why some Yoruba still insist that their ancestors came from the Middle East.

The Yoruba manufactured iron, copper, glass beads, cloth and other everyday items such as pottery. The skilled craftsmen were grouped together in guilds, which is exactly the way that skilled workers were organising themselves in Europe at that time. The guilds in western Nigeria were under the control of the rulers of Ife, Oyo and Benin, but they served the interests not just of the royal family but also of the powerful religious societies. Even though these cultures were neither Christian nor Muslim, they were religious.

African History In The Service of Black Revolution

Chapter 5 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

One of the major dilemmas inherent in the attempt by black people to break through the cultural aspects of white imperialism is that posed by the use of historical knowledge as a weapon in our struggle. We are virtually forced into the invidious position of proving our humanity by citing historical antecedents; and yet the evidence is too often submitted to the white racists for sanction. The white man has already implanted numerous historical myths in the minds of black peoples; and those have to be uprooted, since they can act as a drag on revolutionary action in the present epoch. Under these circumstances, it is necessary to direct our historical activity in the light of two basic principles. Firstly, the effort must be directed solely towards freeing and mobilising black minds. There must be no performances to impress whites, for those whites who find themselves beside us in the firing line will be there for reasons far more profound than their exposure to African history. Secondly, the acquired knowledge of African history must be seen as directly relevant but secondary to the concrete tactics and strategy which are necessary for our liberation. There must be no false distinctions between reflection and action, because the conquest of power is our immediate goal, and the African population at home and abroad is already in combat on a number of fronts.

If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means. The Cuban revolution has already demonstrated in this hemisphere the role and achievement of black people as participants in a people’s war against imperialism. They were a despised minority in the period of US hegemony, but the dignity which they have achieved in the process of the Cuban revolution is itself eliminating the initial necessity to draw distinction along the lines of race and colour. Interest in the African revolution, in African plastic arts and drama and in the history of Africans in the New World, is cultivated in Cuba today at a level that is far above that of neo-colonialist Jamaica, which is 95 per cent black. In Jamaica, a recent proposal to teach African history and an African language in the schools was turned down by the ‘black’ prime minister. The conclusion is clear – Jamaican freedom fighters will read some African history in the course of preparing for an engaging in hostilities; but the struggle will not wait until the re-education of the mass of the black people reaches an advanced stage.

In response to the demand for more black culture and history, the national bourgeoisie of the USA has adopted a technique different from that of their neo-colonialist puppets in the West Indies. Having that security which comes from the possession of capital, they feel confident in making certain concessions to black culture in their educational institutions and media of public communications. As always, they concede the lesser demand to maintain the total structure of white capitalist domination, hoping to siphon off young blacks into a preoccupation with African history and culture divorced from the raw reality of the American system as it operates on both the domestic and international front. That gambit must not work. Imagine the juicy contradictions – Rockefeller finances chair on African history from the profits of exploiting South African blacks and upholding apartheid! Black revolutionaries study African culture alongside of researchers into germ warfare against the Vietnamese people!

We blacks in the Americas have missed the opportunity when a more leisurely appraisal of our past might have been possible. It is nearly half a century since Garvey remarked that ‘the white world has always tried to rob and discredit us of our history’, and in that period far too few blacks made the effort to enrich themselves and brothers by acquiring a knowledge of African history. In 1929, Norman E. Cameron, a black man from Guyana, wrote the first volume of The Evolution of the Negro, in which he sought to revive the pride and confidence of Africans in the New World by pointing to the achievements of African states in the period prior to the European advent; and the work of Richard Moore has been similar in content and purpose. Now the work of self-revaluation in terms of our African past is taking place within a milieu of social upheaval, and the mechanics of upheaval have first priority on the energy of black people.

African civilisations. Only after the above preliminary remarks is it possible to engage in discussion on African history as such. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that emphasis on the highlights of ancient African civilisations should be complemented by an examination of African culture and history in the same pre-European period. Scholars interested in African history have exhibited a preoccupation with the highly developed political state, which has led to the casual treatment of the smaller states or the so-called ‘stateless societies’, where there is no politico-economic entity wider than the family. This means that the present written history of the continent does not touch on the lives of millions of Africans who lived outside of states such as Egypt, Kush, Ethiopia, Ghana, Benin, etc. Even within those kingdoms the historical accounts often concentrate narrowly on the behaviour of elite groups and dynasties; we need to portray the elements of African everyday life and to comprehend the culture of all Africans, irrespective of whether they were resident in the empire of Mali or in an Ibo village. In reconstructing African civilisations, the concern is to indicate that African social life had meaning and value, and that the African past is one with which the black man in the Americas can identify with pride. With the same criteria in mind, it is worth noting the following aspects of African social behaviour: hospitality, the role and treatment of the aged, law and public order, and social tolerance.

Numerous reports attest to the hospitality of African communities. Within any village or chiefdom, the codes of hospitality and a spirit of charity prevented the extremes of poverty and abandonment which one finds in richer and supposedly more mature societies. The African extended family was in itself an agency for mutual aid and welfare; and the family connections led to the clan, where a similar pattern unfolds. The common ancestor shared by all clan members is a very vague figure on the borders between history and legend, many generations distant, but a clan brother is a brother. He was welcomed, housed and fed if he turned up at the compound of another clan member whom he had never seen before. The greater the status of the individual, the greater his obligation to have an open house for all, although he did get something in return, for the reciprocal exchange of gifts was a common practice.

Africans approached their earliest European acquaintances in the same hospitable and charitable manner that was normal in dealings among themselves. They called the white men ‘honoured guests’, they gave them protection and love, they plied them with gifts; and it took Africans some time to realise that Europeans worshipped strange gods called Money and Profit. African society did not prove immune to those gods, but, right up to the present, one finds comments on the warmth of African hospitality, emerging from the whole social conscience and not just from unusually well-disposed members of the community.

Because of the extended-family system and the universal hospitality, the aged were fortunately free of the problems of sustenance. They played self-fulfilling and socially satisfying roles within their communities. While old age was a liability in a New World plantation and throughout the capitalist world, in Africa advanced age brought honour, increased respect and authority. The gerontocratic bias of African society meant that a great deal of power and authority was based on seniority in age. An elder was learned and wise because he had had maximum exposure to life in that society, as well as to all of the formal education which was available. As a young man he had spent several months in the ‘bush school’, where he had received instructions prior to initiation; later he had graduated from successive age-groups or through several levels of a fraternity, where secret knowledge was revealed at each stage; and finally an elder would himself be a teacher. In a state system, elders tutored the prospective ruler and advised the ruling king; while in ‘stateless societies’, they were the sole repositories of historical, spiritual and legal knowledge. In both sets of situations they had to be informed and alert because of their responsibilities.

In the great empires of the Western Sudan, Berber and Arab visitors from North Africa never failed to be impressed by the security afforded to goods and persons, even when movement over long distances was involved. The movement of traders along the ‘paths’ in Akan country was equally safe, and these conditions existed in much more humble African societies. The Senegalese Djola, long resident in lineage groups in the Casamance region, were described by Mungo Park as ‘barbarous’, but he found that he could leave his personal possessions among the Djola for months on end without suffering any losses. This public order was maintained not by an extensive police force, but by the constraint of the community as a whole. Of course, crime did exist in the society, and it was dealt with by a complex code of customary laws, which in recent years have become the subject of scientific enquiry and scholarly treatises. The basic principle of justice was restitution – the object of the legal judgement being to help the wronged party rather than inflict punishment on the offender. It is significant that one hears of nothing resembling a jail within indigenous African society, nor is there any evidence of stocks, fetters and the like. European visitors to West Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were struck by the mildness and humane nature of the laws. Capital punishment, for example, was rare, being completely absent from some societies.

The attitude of the law suggests an attempt to put into practice the concept of tolerance towards human frailty. Tolerance operated in a number of spheres, religion being the most important. Yoruba religion, through Voodoo and Shango, has had a strong impact on the life of Africans in the Caribbean. One scholar who has delved deeply into Yoruba religion has this to say:

I admire Yoruba paganism first and foremost for its tolerance. It is a religion which provides satisfaction for many different kinds of human temperament. Everyone can worship the divine forces in his own fashion, and there is no rivalry or prejudice between different cults. But there is more than religious tolerance, there is human tolerance. Here the cripples, albinos and other deformed persons have a special god to look after them. They occupy a special position at his shrine, and thus, people who elsewhere are laughed at, are here needed and respected.

African traditional religions are by nature non-imperialistic. Unlike the universal revealed religions, they do not set out to show others light, so that there is no possibility of domination in this sphere. African systems of dynamic belief allowed Islam to exist peacefully for centuries, they allowed the first Christians to enter without demur, and above all the various African religions never waged the religious wars which were so much a part of the history of Europe. Even Christianity in Africa, as represented by the Ethiopian Coptic Church, took on a different and more tolerant aspect. Western Christians mocked the Ethiopian Coptic faith, largely because they despised its syncretisms and its coming to terms with the divergent elements of culture within Ethiopia.

It is to be stressed that while some of the above considerations apply to African society today, they are to be cited in a much-earlier historical context. They were noted by Europeans in the fifteenth century and were obviously in operation long before then. In other words, while the citizens of Songhai, Ife, Kongo and Monomotapa were creating the conditions for living in large territorial states, other Africans were not steeped in darkness.

That, after all, is the great myth which we are still struggling to discard from the minds of our own brothers and sisters here in the Americas. Their fear is that the Africa which they left is one of primordial savagery; they visualise apelike blacks swinging from tree to tree and hear the licking of cannibal chops. To dispel this myth it is invariably necessary to begin by pointing out that Africa, too, had great buildings and great states similar to those which emerged in the history of those countries where our white oppressors and denigrators reside. Both to complement and to transcend that type of instruction, we have also to base ourselves solidly within the culture of Africa.

It is possible to compare the Western Sudan between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries with Europe in the Dark and Middle Ages, and the comparison is advantageous to Africa on many points. But from there it is possible to fall into the trap of believing that the political state is the only meaningful form of social development and to feel bemused as a black man because Europe pursued that form to the full in succeeding centuries, while Africa did not. Quite apart from the fact that stagnation in the ‘Third World’ was causally related to advance in Western Europe, the argument about civilisations leads into a cul-de-sac when we do not reject European cultural egocentricity. In this instance, the whites have merely selected a facet of their own culture which is outstanding – namely, the ability to bring together millions in a single political unit – and they have then used this as a universal yardstick for measuring the inherent worth of cultures and races. (The classic example of this cultural egocentricity is the statement that ‘the black man never invented the wheel’.)

What is most fundamental is an attempt to evaluate the African contribution to the solution of the problems posed by man’s existence in society; and hence the stress placed in this paper on matters pertaining to social relations: codes of hospitality, processes of the law, public order and social and religious tolerance. In each of those areas of human social activity, African norms and practices were given a high value by Europeans themselves. They often reflected that the hospitality they saw in an African village was lacking in their communities; that the security of goods and persons in Africa stood in marked contrast to brigandage and depredations in Europe; and that the restraint of African law with respect to capital punishment was to be set off against the fact that dozens of offences were still punishable by death in Western Europe up to the sixteenth century. On the other hand, African norms were frustrating to capitalists. For instance the whites resented the polite formulae of African greetings since they were lengthy and could delay business for a whole day. One European denounced African hospitality in the following terms:

The law of hospitality is obstructive of industry. If there is provision in the country, a man who wants it has only to find out who has got any, and he must have his share. If he enters any man’s house during his repast, and gives him the usual salutation, the man must invite him to partake. Thus, whatever abundance a man may get by assiduity, will be shared by the lazy; and thus they seldom calculate for more than necessaries. But the laws of hospitality are not restrained to diet. A common man cannot quietly enjoy a spare shirt or a pair of trousers. Those who are too lazy to plant or hunt are also too lazy to trade.

The above is a beautiful set piece of the moral terminology of capitalist accumulation – the ‘assiduous’ and the ‘industrious’ who will inherit the earth, while those who do not share grace are the ones who were ‘lazy’. It pointedly illustrates the difference between the African and European cultures. A lot is known about the dialectical development of European society, but very little about that of Africa prior to and immediately after it was drawn into trade relations with Europe and the Americas. However, the few studies which exist suggest that the two continents were fundamentally different in ethos and were not moving in the same direction. Even within the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, the explosiveness of class contradictions was lacking, as Diop stresses in his Nations Negres et Culture. In the states of Ashanti and Dahomey, whose growth was contemporaneous with European mercantilism, there was no concept of the ‘market’ in the sense of supply and demand, and the social redistribution of goods made accumulation impossible. The most pronounced line of growth was not economic but cultural. There were a few nuclei representing distinctive ways of organising life, and these were spreading – the Mande, Akan, Yoruba and Hausa being among the best known from West Africa. European commerce (and the slave trade in particular) deflected the course of their historical advance.

The difference between African and European historical formation made the white men ‘superior’ in the operative sense, for they were able to establish hegemony, due to the technology and class dynamic of capitalism. The consequences for Africa were disastrous. Economies were disjointed and oriented externally; anarchy, injustice in the realm of the law, internal slavery and exploitation replaced public security, the human operation of the law and the solidarity of the family. But, apart from the measurable negative effects, one must also consider that a fantastic amount of physical and social energy went into the defensive task of sheer survival. We did survive not only in Africa, but on this side of the Atlantic – the greatest miracle of all time! And every day black people in the Americas perform the miracle anew.

Needless to say, we do more than just survive. Anguished New World blacks, in the search for dignity, usually ask for elements of unquestioned grandeur in their African past. These can be perceived in the Ife/Benin sculptures, the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, the carved rock churches of Lalibela, and in a great deal more. But, after all that, we would still lack the understanding that ordinary African life had meaning and value. That is one of the weakest aspects of our perception of the African past; and it is that chink which allows the white propaganda machine to suggest that contemporary distortions in African society represent pure atavism. Congolese and Nigerian problems, in particular, have been successfully projected among black people as the breaking out of the ancestral savagery of tribalism, once the restraining hand of white civilisation was removed. Of course, in reality these tragic contemporary situations are consequences of neo-colonial forces impinging on African colonial society, just as colonialism in its mercantilist and imperialist phases had earlier deformed traditional Africa.

The foregoing remarks should be sufficient to substantiate the proposition that an overall view of ancient African civilisations and ancient African cultures is required to expunge the myths about the African past, which linger in the minds of black people everywhere. This is the main revolutionary function of African history in our hemisphere. Some individuals envisage that this knowledge is a stepping-stone to the active regeneration of an African way of life, but this is far-fetched, except in the case of the African continent itself. For instance, President Nyerere, in his policy document Socialism and Rural Development, defined a new Socialist agrarian formation, the Ujamaa village, after reflecting on the nature of African traditional society and the direction in which it was already being transformed within the colonial era and the first years of independence. That exercise by the leadership of the people of Tanzania was regional rather than broadly ‘African’, and it was as much an exploration of the present as a recovery of the past. Applied to New World blacks, this means in effect that the history nearest to revolutionary action will be the history of Africans in their new American environments.

The Groundings With
My Brothers

Chapter 6 of The Groundings With My Brothers, 1969

The government of Jamaica, which is Garvey’s homeland, has seen it fit to ban me, a Guyanese, a black man, and an African. But this is not very surprising, because though the composition of that government – of its prime minister, the head of state and several leading personalities – though that composition happens to be predominantly black, as the brothers at home say, they are all white hearted.

These men serve the interests of a foreign, white capitalist system, and at home they uphold a social structure which ensures that the black man resides at the bottom of the social ladder. He is economically oppressed, and culturally he has no opportunity to express himself. That is the situation from which we move.

There has recently, just tonight in fact, come to my attention a statement which is entitled ‘Text of Statement’ by the Honourable H. L. Shearer, prime minister of Jamaica, made in the House of Representatives on 17 October, regarding the exclusion of Dr Walter Rodney. I, up till now, have not got reasons for the ban imposed on me, and probably I shall make some reference to this document as I go along.

But first, let me indicate this, that the government of Jamaica, in so far as it has attempted to stifle the aspirations of the masses and in so far as it believed that my removal from the scene is going to aid in stifling the masses, is making a serious mistake. This act in itself will not delay their day of judgement. Indeed, these fellows know this, they know the present state of affairs cannot go on forever; and this is what creates the atmosphere of fear, this is what allows them to take such stupid and panic-stricken measures.

First and foremost for the benefit of some West Indians who still refuse to appreciate that our society is racist, I would like to give a slight historical analysis of the problem. West Indian society is a veritable laboratory of racialism. We virtually invented racialism. Because it was in the slave system on the slave plantation that the fantastic gap between master and slave was translated into a feeling on the part of the white slave master that he had inherently to be superior to that black man who was slaving out in the fields. It was the white plantation owner who produced a number of pseudoscientific and theological theories attesting to the inferiority of the black man. Ours was the society in which modern racialism was engendered, and it has developed and intensified since then, assuming certain subtle but nevertheless vicious forms based on colour, and based on a hierarchy which presupposes that black is the lowest natural colour of things, and that white is at the top. That is the society from which we come, and the particular society has added a new dimension to the bag of tricks which racialists have. That dimension is to try to confuse the people.

It goes like this. They claim that in our society we cannot talk about black and white, because we have these gradations of shades. We have many peoples, we are told. Ninety-five per cent of the Jamaican population is clearly black, the other 5 per cent is divided into these shades, and we are told we have many peoples. It is a harmonious multiracial society, we are told. It is an integrated society, we are told. It reminds me of Ted Jones’s poem ‘Integrated Nigger’. It is a myth of the ruling class, and it is a subtle myth, an important myth because it does in fact have a certain appeal. It talks about multiracial and harmonious living, which nobody on a theoretical level would oppose. This is what we are struggling for.

The lie is that harmony exists, and the black people show it up to be a lie, sometimes quite spectacularly. This month, October, is Paul Bogle’s month, that great black Jamaican patriot who marched and as he marched he said, ‘Remember your colour and cleave to the black.’ Marcus Garvey was also in the same category. Garvey’s appeal was to all black men, whether they were in Jamaica or outside. And even when there were not great leaders present, the mass of the people have constantly been acting against this system. In our epoch the Rastafari have represented the leading force of this expression of black consciousness. They have rejected this philistine white West Indian society. They have sought their cultural and spiritual roots in Ethiopia and Africa. So that whether there is a big flare-up or not, there is always the constant activity of the black people who perceive that the system has nothing in it for them, except suppression and oppression.

Now the government is terribly afraid of the question of colour. This is something I’ve learned from living in Jamaica for a period of time. They would much rather you talk about Communism, so that they could tell country people, ‘He is a Communist, he wants to take your goats and chickens,’ and do those Jamaican peasants want you to take their goats? No man! And they are very right, too, so what government men are afraid of is the question of colour. They are afraid of that tremendous historical experience of the degradation of the black man being brought to the fore. They do not want anybody to challenge their myth about ‘Out of many, one people’ and a harmonious multiracial society, and they show it in various ways. They will ban people from coming to the country like James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael. They will ban the literature of Malcolm X, Elijah Mohammad, Stokely Carmichael. The black Jamaican government, in case you do not know it, have banned all publications by Stokely Carmichael, publications by Elijah Mohammad, all publications by Malcolm X. I hope Stokely does not go and write a book on cookery or some such thing. It would be banned in Jamaica.

In my own case, to give you a small example, I went to the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. I pre-recorded a programme on Black Power and the white power system said that they are not using that programme, when they saw what came out of it. A small example but a token of things to come, no doubt. Because the system does not want you to open the issues, they do not want anybody to articulate those grievances which the masses are talking about all the time.

Now, what is my position? What is the position of all of us because we fall in the category of the black West Indian intellectual, a privilege in our society? What do we do with that privilege? The traditional pattern is that we join the establishment; the black educated man in the West Indies is as much a part of the system of oppression as the bank managers and the plantation overseers.

The system will give you a nice house, a front lawn, a car, a reasonable bank balance. They will say, ‘Sell your black soul.’ That is the condition upon which you exist as a so-called intellectual in the society. How do we break out of this Babylonian captivity? I suggest three ways. I suggest first that the intellectual, the academic, within his own discipline, has to attack those distortions which white imperialism, white cultural imperialism, have produced in all branches of scholarship. In fact what I was attempting to do in the Congress of Black Writers earlier was to talk about that sort of thing and its relationship to African history. Of course, the white press of Canada did not see fit to talk about those points. I think I saw it only in the McGill Daily. They were more concerned with nice little juicy bits about violence. We will give them some titbits as we go along.

My second point is that the black intellectual has to move beyond his own discipline to challenge the social myth, which exists in the society as a whole. In other words, this myth about the multiracial society. This is the sort of thing which we have a duty to perform to the black people from whom we came.

Thirdly, the black intellectual, the black academic, must attach himself to the activity of the black masses. I shall not deal with point one on this occasion. I shall concentrate on points two and three. I shall try to exemplify my own role in the period while I was there in Jamaica.

I begin by stating, first and foremost, that the struggle was there long before I went and will continue long after I have left. I am simply trying to analyse that particular conjunction of forces as I saw them when I attempted to get in touch with the black people, to perform these two functions: attacking the myth, the various myths rather, and getting in touch, working with the people. On the first level, as far as Black Power was concerned, the response of the population was automatic because this is what they are doing, this is what they are talking about. They can tell you and I about Black Power, but I’ll indicate this later on. You can learn from them what Black Power really means. You do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they add something to what you are saying.

So the mass response was there, and the government response was also clearly there. They, in their panic, were quick to come out against this new spectre, Black Power. For my own part, I was prepared to make these statements in public, and around me there gathered a nucleus, and a movement was born calling itself the Black Power movement. Unfortunately I have not brought the aims along with me, but you will find them highly respectable even in the terms of the system. We went outside the university and we talked to black brothers and black sisters, and this the society, this the system could not tolerate. Even more, let us talk about the activities. I lectured at the university, outside of the classroom that is. I had public lectures, I talked about Black Power, and then I left there, I went from the campus. I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting-down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the brothers say. We have to ‘ground together’. There was all this furore about whites being present in the black writers’ congress, which most whites did not understand. They do not understand that our historical experience has been speaking to white people, whether it be begging white people, justifying ourselves against white people or even vilifying white people. Our whole context has been, ‘That is the man to talk to.’

Now, the new understanding is that black brothers must talk to each other. That is a very simple understanding which any reasonable person outside of a particular ‘in-group’ would understand. That is why we talk about our ‘family discussions’. Now, when I went out, as I said, I would go to the radio if they wanted me, I would speak on television if they allowed me. I spoke at the Extra Mural Centre. Now, these are all highly respectable, and I would go further down into West Kingston, and I would speak wherever there was a possibility of our getting together. It might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully. (Those of you who come from Jamaica know those gully corners.) They are dark, dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them. I have spoken in what people call ‘dungle’, rubbish dumps, for that is where people live in Jamaica. People live in rubbish dumps. That is where the government puts people to live. Indeed, the government does not even want them to live in rubbish dumps. I do not know where they want them to go, because they bulldoze them off the rubbish dumps and send them God knows where. I have sat on a little oil drum, rusty and in the midst of garbage, and some black brothers and I have grounded together. Now, obviously, this, first of all, must have puzzled the Jamaican government. I must be mad, surely; a man we are giving a job, we are giving status, what is he doing with these guys? Shearer calls them all manner of names there in this paper, you know: ‘criminals and hooligans’. What is he doing with them? So they are puzzled and then obviously after that suspicious; he must be up to something, as the paper will try to imply. But we spoke, we spoke about a lot of things, and it was just the talking that was important, the meeting of black people. I was trying to contribute something. I was trying to contribute my experience in travelling, in reading, my analysis; and I was also gaining, as I will indicate.

Now, for the government of Jamaica and this statement: I cannot go into it. I have a lot of ambiguous reactions to it. At one level I want to tear it apart, but there are reasons why I do not want to tear it apart. The first is that all the charges made here are either irrelevant, frivolous or vague, and I cannot put forward any defence against such. You know, it is like that trick question: a man comes up and asks you, have you stopped beating your wife? He makes the assumption that you are beating your wife and asks you, have you stopped. So it is that sort of nonsense; they throw out a little thing and then get you to grab the bait; and there is another reason why I would not defend myself against this. People like this man here, the so-called, the Dishonourable H. L. Shearer, prime minister of Jamaica, this traitor to the black race, has no moral authority to lay accusations against me. What I will give instead is not a defence; it is an explanation. It is an attempt to make an analysis of what was going on, in the hope that this has some meaning for other people who are either within the struggle today or would like to join the struggle. For the educated black man, as I said, the principles are clear. There are three possibilities open to him, and it seems to me that if he does not follow every single one of those three, and perhaps some more that he can think of, he is not fulfilling any function as far as our people are concerned, except the function of oppressing them. Let me refer to another statement which I made which the white press found very irritating – that all white people are enemies until proved otherwise, and this applies to black intellectuals, all of us are enemies to the people until we prove otherwise. It is not just a question of student riots.

The students have demonstrated, which is good. They came out; they heard a university lecturer was banned; they got no reason, which is the normal procedure of the Jamaican government (it does not give reasons for things). They came out, they started to walk along the roads, the police started to teargas them, they started to beat them with batons and night sticks and something flared up, relatively small, but it is a great advance I tell you. There is no more bourgeois campus in the world than the University of the West Indies. Yes, I was there; in my time this would not have happened: they might have demonstrated about bad food in the halls, or in solidarity with South Africans, you know, on quite harmless issues as far as the Jamaican government was concerned. However, they moved, and that in itself is a good thing, but there was more to it than that. The black brothers in Kingston, Jamaica, moved against the government of Jamaica. That is the point that must come home. Let us stop calling it ‘student riots’. What has happened in Jamaica is that the black people of the city of Kingston have seized upon this opportunity to begin their indictment against the government of Jamaica.

Now, let us see what happened. As far as I can gather, fifty buses were overturned and burnt. Fourteen major fires were started in different parts of the city; certain known enemies of the people were spat upon, dragged out of their cars and beaten; shop windows were wrecked. I gather that downtown Kingston looks as if Hurricane Flora has just passed through. Now let us get this abundantly clear – this did not happen as an isolated incident; that is part of a whole social malaise, that is revolutionary activity. It has only marginal significance as far as my ban is concerned. The significance is that the brothers see that I am a spokesman for their cause, and the Jamaica government is so brazen as to stop me from returning. That is the incident that triggered it off, but beneath that, there is a whole range of short-term and long-term considerations which we must take into mind. Take for instance the fact that those fifty buses were burned; that is not just coincidental for those who know Jamaican society. The JOS, which is the private company running transport in Kingston, is one of the most notorious companies in Jamaica. There is a strike there every other day. It is notorious from the point of view of its relationships with the workers, and just recently it decided to hike the fares as far as the people were concerned. Now, imagine the poor people of Jamaica standing in the hot sun, waiting on the bus, having to pay increased fares and while they are struggling to find the 4d, for that is what the fares have gone up to, here is a whole set of guys flashing by in some cars longer than you can see out here in Montreal. You have to go to Jamaica to see long cars, you know. That little middle class there, they love to show off. The bigger the car, the better. A little petty city and they fill it up with American cars, and they jump around, and they feel so pleased with themselves. And the black man is there, and he has not got 4 Jamaican dollars for a bus fare. So when those fifty buses were burnt, it was that type of issue that was involved. The brothers who were in that struggle, unemployed, they have no housing, they have no education, they have no prospects in the society, save to go to what the brothers call ‘Must Pen’ – May Pen Burial Cemetery. They call it ‘Must Pen’; you must go there.

That is what has been going on in the society. So if we have to take a stand, we have to take a stand perhaps on the first issue, say the immoral, shameless conduct of the Jamaica government in issuing this ban. But it is not the first and presumably will not be the last such action on their part. We also have to take a stand of solidarity behind those black brothers. We also have to recognise that three more martyrs have been added to the long list of black martyrs in Jamaica in recent days. We will have to find out their names. We will have to sing their praises.

This is not an issue which is isolated. In fact, as I speak here, I would like to feel perhaps that what I am saying in one form or another will reach the brothers, and therefore it is a message both to you and to them. And above all, I would like to indicate my own gratification for that experience which I shared with them. Because I learnt. I got knowledge from them, real knowledge. You have to speak to Jamaican Rasta, and you have to listen to him, listen very carefully, and then you will hear him tell you about the Word. And when you listen to him, and you can go back and read Muntu, an academic text, and read about Nomo, an African concept for Word, and you say, goodness, the Rastas know this, they knew this before Janheinz Jahn. You have to listen to them, and you hear them talk about cosmic power and it rings a bell, I say, but I have read this somewhere, this is Africa. You have to listen to their drums to get the message of the cosmic power.

And when you get that, know you get humility, because look who you are learning from. The system says they have nothing, they are the illiterates, they are the dark people of Jamaica. Our conception of the whole world is that white is good and black is bad, so when you are talking about the man is dark, you mean he is stupid. He has a dark mind. So that is what the system says. But you learn humility after you get into contact with these brothers. And it is really great I am giving here now a personal reaction. I find my colleagues, my so-called peers, white people, black bourgeoisie, all frustrate me and I get annoyed. I find it difficult to conduct a discussion. I am more likely than not to tell them a few bad words after a while. And by and large, I do not think it is good for the personality, probably makes you contemptuous, haughty and so on, that you have seen and they have not seen. But with the black brothers you learn humility because they are teaching you. And you get confidence, too; you get a confidence that comes from an awareness that our people are beautiful. Beauty is in the very existence of black people.

Now we have gone through a historical experience through which, by all accounts, we should have been wiped out. We have been subjected to genocidal practices. Millions raped from the West African continent, a system of slavery in the West Indies which was designed to kill people. The documents are there. White slave masters used to conduct a discussion. They said, look, we have some blacks, what to do with them? Is it better to let him grow old and work for us for an extended period of time, or should we let him work for a specified period of time, work him so hard and let him die, and buy a fresh slave? And the consensus of opinion was this; take a prime African black, work him to death in five years, and you make a profit. So the system aimed at killing us out!

Now, not only have we survived as a people, but the black brothers in Kingston, Jamaica, in particular, these are brothers who, up to now, are every day performing a miracle. It is a miracle how those fellows live. They live and they are physically fit, they have a vitality of mind, they have a tremendous sense of humour, they have depth. How do they do that in the midst of the existing conditions? And they create; they are always saying things. You know that some of the best painters and writers are coming out of the Rastafari environment. The black people in the West Indies have produced all the culture that we have, whether it be steel band or folk music. Black bourgeoisie and white people in the West Indies have produced nothing! Black people who have suffered all these years create. That is amazing.

So these are things you learn when you are in contact with our people. And, therefore, it seems to me that there is something that we have to give. I tried to outline some of the things which I tried to give.

The Imperialist Partition
of Africa

Published in Monthly Review, April 1970

Lenin very rarely mentioned Africa in his writings on colonialism, but inferences about Africa can be drawn from Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and other works. Most bourgeois writers on the partition of Africa make snide remarks on the Leninist explanation of imperialism. Because they have already established a near monopoly of what is written on the subject, it is necessary to frame this analysis as a refutation of common misconceptions. Furthermore - as is so often the case with the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – many hostile criticisms are based on sheer ignorance of the texts. Thus the reader must bear with frequent quotations.

Lenin is generally said to have professed an "economic" theory of imperialism. This gives rise to the criticism that his theory was one-sided, because Europeans carved up Africa for several reasons-economic, political, social-humanitarian, psychological, etc. Of course Marxism does not concern itself solely with some so-called "economic" aspect of society. It is a world-view which perceives the presence of multiple variants within the complexity of human society, and seeks to unravel their relationship with reference to the material conditions of existence. Lenin did not have to spell out this elementary Marxist position in everything he wrote. His essay on imperialism dealt with the question of the expansion of the capitalist economy. The non-economic dimensions were known to exist, and were regarded as secondary. Lenin made two passing references on this point:

(l) The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits. And they divide it in proportion to "capital," in proportion to "strength," because there cannot be any other system of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development In order to understand what takes place, it is necessary to know what questions are settled by this change of forces. The question as to whether these changes are "purely" economic or non-economic (e.g., military) is a secondary one, which does not in the least affect the fundamental view of the latest epoch of capitalism.

(2) The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest.

We do need to be informed as to how changes in the politico-military balance of power and European national aspirations for domination stimulated the striving for colonies in Africa. Such factors were not outside Lenin's field of awareness, and exploiting them at length does not in the slightest invalidate his thesis. For example, such facts as that the French are hung up on "prestige," or that changes take place in the so-called balance of power have to be related to the political economy of Europe. They did not arise out of thin air. They were products of the development of monopoly capitalism within the boundaries of several European nation states. The elaboration of this argument would carry us deeper into the European past, which is outside the scope of this brief analysis. The more pertinent question is: How far and in what ways did monopoly capital impinge on Africa during the period of the notorious scramble?

A great deal of trouble has been taken to show that little capital was invested in Africa prior to the first worldwide capitalist war. Western Europe invested far more in Eastern Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia than it did in Africa. This is a contradiction of Lenin only for those who have not read Lenin. Lenin's examples of investment by monopolies outside of the capitalist epicenters are situated in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. He cited Russia, Rumania, Turkey, and Argentina most forcefully as countries on the receiving end of investment and exploitation.

Only Britain, with a large number of old and new colonies, was exporting a significant proportion of its capital to its political colonies in the early part of this century. France was investing mainly in Russia, and Germany divided its interests between Eastern Europe and the Americas.

Lenin quoted the geographer Supan to the effect that the characteristic feature of the late nineteenth century was the division of Africa and Polynesia. He then added that "Mr. Supan's conclusion must be carried further, and we must say that the characteristic feature of this period is the final partition of the globe, not in the sense that a new partition is impossible; on the contrary, new partitions are possible and inevitable, but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet." Lenin's emphasis on "completed" is significant, because it places the scramble for Africa within the context of a single process emanating from Europe and spreading across the whole world. Its intensity was not the same at all points. Huge amounts of capital were not initially invested in Africa, but Africa could not escape the inexorable process of expansion, domination, and partition which had its roots in monopoly capital.

Lenin took pains to show that the division of the world among capitalist monopolies and the nation-states in which they were encrusted was not a policy option which could just as well have been replaced by more enlightened thinking. He emphasized the internal logic which made international partitioning inseparable from the nature of monopoly capital in that epoch. Africa was the great unknown continent. Europeans dreamed of its great potential. Certain remarks of Lenin are particularly apt in this regard:

Finance capital is not only interested in the already known sources of raw materials, ... because present-day technical development is extremely rapid.... Hence the inevitable striving of finance capital to extend its economic territory and even its territory in general. In the same way that the trusts capitalize their property by estimating it at two or three times its value, taking into account its "potential" (and not present) returns, and the further results of monopoly, so finance capital strives to seize the largest possible amount of land of all kinds and in any place it can, and by any means, counting on the possibilities of finding raw materials there and fearing to be left behind in the insensate struggle for the last available scraps of undivided territory.

It took a considerable time before imperialist powers made efforts to invest large amounts of capital in Africa as a whole. In the case of France, significant capital investment in Africa is a post-Second World War phenomenon. Lenin had noted that the possibility of exporting capital to backward countries was created by those countries having been drawn previously into international capitalist intercourse, thereby creating elementary conditions (such as the start of railway and port construction) for further and more intensified involvement. The necessary infrastructure was emerging in Eastern Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia; but this occurred scarcely anywhere in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lenin, like Marx before him, recognized the tremendous contribution made by Africa to the accumulation of capital during the epoch of the slave trade. The fact that he did not deal with Africa at any length in the context of imperialism was not an oversight, for in that epoch Africa was marginal to the development of capitalism.

An understanding of this has frequently been obscured by a tendency to caricature Lenin's theory of imperialism to mean the division of the world into political colonies. Since Africa was the classic example of political partition, it would then follow that Africa was the continent in which monopoly was principally interested. Lenin spoke first and foremost about the "struggle for economic territory." Imperialist nations sometimes found it possible and necessary to transform their economic territories into political colonies, so as to reinforce exploitation and protect their capitalists front foreign competition. As Lenin put it: "Colonial possession alone gives complete guarantee of success to the monopolies against all the risks of struggle with competitors, including the risk that the latter will defend themselves by means of a law establishing a state monopoly." Nevertheless, monopoly capital often settled for spheres of economic interest which retained varying degrees of political independence.

Monopoly capital had a small representation on the African continent relative to its presence in Asia and America, but it appeared in sufficient force to precipitate the ruthless scramble for Africa. it must be borne in mind that such capital as was invested in Africa was concentrated in two key areas: South Africa and Egypt, with the Congo, the Maghreb, and Nigeria as other decisive points. Looking at East Africa, one bourgeois historian (Koebner) remarked that "the Imperial British East African Company was certainly not a galaxy of big capitalist interests." This was meant as a neat aside which would put down the Leninist interpretation, and it is actually factually accurate though woefully out of focus. Lenin's position did not imply that every part of Africa was bulging with surplus capital brought in by big European monopolies. It is not necessary, for example, to seek a specific reason why Europeans wanted the region that is now the Central African Republic. It is enough to know that monopoly capital was interested in a few parts of the continent where potential was to some extent verified. In squabbling for those areas, Europeans also saw fit to apportion among themselves the great unknown expanses – especially since nobody wanted to miss a share, not even Spain or Italy.

The main elements of the epoch of Cecil Rhodes in Southern Africa are too well known to require attention here. All the ingredients about which Lenin spoke were clearly present. There were Rhodes and De Beers representing monopoly capital; there were gold and diamonds and the possibility of extensive railroad development; there was Anglo-German competition; and there was the spectacle of both the Boers and the Africans being subjected to and incorporated into the far-flung empire of capital. The Egyptian scene is equally well-known, the Suez canal being symbolic of the great ambitions of European finance capital. Disraeli was nothing but a front man for the Rothschilds, who later utilized their political influence to bring about the conquest of Egypt. Besides, British capitalists interested in India had good reason for wanting to oust the French and colonize Egypt and the Sudan.

In Egypt, Britain and France invested capital directly in the Canal and indirectly in other sectors through loans. The French were very keen on loan capital, as Lenin observed, when he said that "French imperialism might be termed usury imperialism." This was well exemplified in the Maghreb. French occupation of Tunisia was achieved through a policy of financial loans at extravagant rates to an equally extravagant Bey of Tunis, who still existed in the feudal atmosphere of the Crusades, and who proved easy prey for the manipulations of European financiers. Britain and Italy were also in on the deal, but France shut them out by an armed attack on Tunis in 1881-expressively termed a Coup de Bourse. The Sultan of Morocco was caught in the same bag when in 1904 he negotiated a loan of 62.5 million francs from French banks, pledging 60 percent of the nation's customs revenue as security.

Algeria was an exception, though not a very important one from an analytic viewpoint. Its coastlands had fallen prey to French greed since 1830, and so the beginning of its colonization was not part of the general imperialist expansion. However, from the 1880s interest in Algeria was stimulated by France's new offensive in Africa, and the Maghreb in particular. When Lenin referred to Portugal as a British colony, he indicated that this was true long before the heyday of imperialism, but that it had assumed new significance in the epoch of partition. His remarks in that context are quite appropriate to the Algerian-French relationship. "Relations of this kind," said Lenin, "have always existed between big and little states. But during the period of capitalist imperialism they become a general system, they form part of the process of 'dividing the world'; they become a link in the chain of operations of world finance capital." In Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, military force was applied in the interests of finance as well as to keep the Mediterranean plains free for European settlers. This question of finding room for Europe's "surplus population" was one to which Lenin gave prominence, taking his cue from the pronouncements of imperialists like Cecil Rhodes. In practice, it was not an important theme in the imperialist take-over of the African continent, the Maghreb being one of the few areas where it was applicable.

South of the Sahara and north of the Transvaal lies the vast mass of black Africa, which was so blithely cut up by the robber statesmen who sat together in Berlin in 1884. Setting apart Egypt and South Africa as "exceptional" capital-receiving countries in nineteenth-century Africa cleared the way for mystifying the partition of the rest of the continent by talking about explorers and missionaries bringing civilization to the natives. Yet, in some ways it can be said that nowhere is the universality of the Leninist formulation better vindicated than in these lands where capitalism had previously unleashed slave trading from the East and West Coasts. "Under the old capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature," said Lenin. "Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become the typical feature." A glance at the evidence would show that this changeover was sharply effected in tropical Africa. During the epoch of the slave trade, Europeans carried goods to Africa and exchanged them for human beings, who were thus transformed into saleable commodities. When Europe became interested in the raw materials of the continent, capital was sent to transform Africans into workers and peasants producing for the capitalist market.

The Congo has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first as well as one of the last African countries in which slaving took place. By the nineteenth century someone living in the Congo basin could be seized and sent westward to the Atlantic or eastward to the Indian Ocean. Imperialist Europe had to stamp out the slave trade where it still survived; the new necessity was for African labour to be harnessed by European capital so as to export raw materials like rubber and cotton. Enter Livingstone, Stanley, and King Leopold. backed by the Belgian franc and white missionaries who preached the redeeming value of work which produced what capitalism required.

It is a mere illusion to present the Congo as the property of one man (King Leopold) and to discuss its colonisation in terms of personal fancy. it was because several nations were bent on exploiting the Congo that it was left under the nominal administration of the ruler of a small state. Britain was itself interested only in a guarantee of trade and not in sovereignty over the country. Britain first tried for a treaty with Portugal which would have given the Congo to the Portuguese, while allowing British merchants to enjoy extensive privileges. Later Britain fell in line with France and Germany in support of Leopold's creation of a "Congo Free State"-free in the sense that there should be no restrictions on trade and investment by capitalists of all countries. There was a great humanitarian outcry against the atrocities committed by Europeans in the Congo under Lcopold's regime, but the international commission which studied the situation was more interested in the fact that Leopold had violated the agreements on free trade. In 1906, as Leopold's personal rule drew to an end, he felt obliged to offer four huge concessions to British, French, and American capitalists. That was the point at which Union Minière and Forminière came into being, and the Congo took the first step toward becoming the cockpit of international monopoly capital.

The Congo was atypical. Elsewhere in Africa, the principal European capitalist nations seized economic territory and ran up their own flags to prove the point. Sometimes, the flagpoles seem to have been stuck in the ground without rhyme or reason. Why little Gambia inside Senegal's belly? Why German Togo and French Dahomey closeted between the British colonies of Gold Coast and Nigeria? The only explanation (and one highlighted by Lenin) is the European search for raw materials-particularly for edible oils and fats which were obtainable in West Africa from the oil palm and the peanut. It was in order to maintain investments which encouraged the growing of peanuts that British capitalists clung to Gambia; while Togo and Dahomey were "protectorates" established by Germany and France to protect their interests in palm oil.

The German involvement in the palm-oil trade and its acquisition of Togo constitute a small episode which illumines one of Lenin's principal arguments concerning the way that Germany was fast outstripping Britain and France in the phase of monopoly capital. Germany had a major interest in the West African oil palm because its expanding industries and railways had need for more lubricants, its proletariat offered a large market for cheap cooking oils, its advanced mixed-farming sector utilized palm-kernel cake as stock feed, its steamships had established direct lines with West (and East) Africa, and Hamburg was the only place in Europe with the machinery for crushing palm kernels. The consequence of all this was that Germany received a much larger share of the "economic territory" of West Africa than is apparent, by encroaching into territory politically controlled by Britain and France. By 1885, German firms (backed by the Disconto Bank) had secured over half of the palm kernel exports of the British protectorate of Lagos, and one third of the palm oil. More than three quarters of the palm kernels exported from British West Africa went to Germany up to 1914. Besides, the acquisition of the small colony of Togo (and the other German colonies) was a notable achievement in that German economic power had to overcome the long historical headstart established by Britain and France, whose presence in West Africa dated from the period of the slave trade.

Not all companies engaged in palm-oil trade were monopoly concerns. On the contrary, the commerce got underway in the early nineteenth century with a large number of small entrepreneurs who were known as "palm-oil ruffians" and whose activities constituted a phase of violent free enterprise. But by the time of the partition, the Niger riser had a single giant firm, the Royal Niger Chartered Company, which was the first colonial government of Northern Nigeria. just as Rhodes's more notorious British South African Company was entrusted with the destiny of South Africa's peoples. The way the RNCC subsumed and consumed competitors by mergers, cut prices, and other means fits neatly into the classic pattern analyzed by Lenin. Its charter (granted in 1886) ended in 1897, but it continued as the Niger Company until 1911 when it was taken under the wing of Lever Brothers. A large part of Nigerian production was therefore destined to fall under the control of the African capitalist octopus, the United Africa Company, which in turn was a subsidiary of (Anglo-Dutch) Unilever.

Lenin had spoken of monopoly in the sense of the dominance of one or two firms within a particular branch of industry in a given capitalist economy. In the economic partition and repartition of Africa, new dimensions of monopoly appeared. Firstly, some European firms established dominance over colonial trade-a much more diffuse category than, say, the steel, oil, or chemical industries which were the objects of Lenin's attention. Thus the UAC appeared in all British colonies and in the Congo, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Chad, and the Carnations, handling whatever raw materials happened to be staple in those territories. Secondly, the UAC in most cases extended- its tentacles over all facets of a given colonial economy-from shipping to the distribution of razor blades in its own retail shops. Similarly, French colonial monopolies such as CFAO, SCOA, and Madagascar Import-Export were actively engaged in concessionaire agricultural activity as well as handling mast of the imports and exports. No monopoly, however great, could have such complete control over a metropolitan capitalist economy.

It must be reiterated that Lenin had little to say that was explicitly concerned with Africa. From that it follows that while his insights provide an immediate point of departure for an analysis of the imperialist partition of Africa, one should not expect to find all the answers in his writings. For that matter, Lenin did not pose a very significant question: Why did imperialism appear in Africa in the form of political partition? This omission is one reason why bourgeois writers have got away with blurring the distinction between imperialism and the political partition of Africa. The two things are not interchangeable. Imperialism derived from the expansion of the capitalist economy, while partition was determined by (a) the nature of African social formations, (b) the element of racism within the capitalist superstructure, and (c) the opposition of Africans to European incursion.

In some cases, imperialism was prepared to allow countries their political independence (as in Latin America and the Balkans), while in others European intervention in tax collection and the setting up of spheres of commercial interest (as in China), gravely impaired political independence but did not abolish it altogether. In Latin America and Eastern Europe, there were social classes which were playing a role within capitalist production long before the imperialist epoch. These countries were easily incorporated by imperialism, provided that nothing was done to openly deprive them of the attributes of national ;sovereignty, for they had a bourgeoisie which had participated in national revolutions. In nineteenth-century China, there existed a bureaucratic feudal class and the beginnings of a national bourgeoisie, both of which could he used as instruments of foreign capital. The bureaucratic feudalists in particular were rapidly transformed into compradors serving imperialism. Most of Africa in this period was pre-feudal in its social relations, and Europeans therefore found it necessary to introduce their own personnel and to set up their own governments.

However, there were a few Africans with the necessary social experience who could have functioned independently within the colonial framework. In Senegal, Sierra Leone. Ghana. and Nigeria, an African educated elite was in the process of formation ever since the end of the eighteenth century, and was quite prominent by the time colonial government was instituted. The coming of colonialism involved the deliberate destruction of this black elite because of the racism spawned in the earlier phase of capitalist expansion when genocide in Latin America and the enslavement of Africans had to be given pseudo-scientific and obscurantist philosophical justification.

South Africa was another laboratory in which the white racist virus was cultivated; and while capitalism subordinated the quasi-feudal economy of the Boers. it was found useful to further entrench racism as a prop to the brutal exploitation of the labour of the black peoples of Southern Africa. As a part of the capitalist superstructure, racism was so powerful that Europeans could scarcely bear the thought of politically independent Ethiopia and Liberia on the African continent, despite the fact that both of those states had become enmeshed in the international capitalist system.

Africa had no revolutionary nationalist traditions which would have clashed with colonialist ambitions. Nevertheless, there was widespread resistance to the imposition of colonial rule, because people spontaneously defended their way of life against aliens. In one instance-that of Ethiopia-European force was inadequate, and the Ethiopians trounced the Italians at Dogali in 1887 and more decisively at Adowa in 1896, thus guaranteeing their political independence. On the other hand, Britain suffered some setbacks in Egypt and the Sudan, and used those as stepping stones to political power. It is quite true that British statesmen did not envisage political rule over Egypt when British capital was first invested in the Suez Canal. The embryonic Egyptian nationalist movement under Colonel Urabi and the Sudanese victory over Generals Hicks and Gordon were undoubtedly events which forced Britain to exercise political domination over Egypt and the Sudan. From the events in Egypt some bourgeois writers have drawn the mindless conclusion that it was the Egyptian nationalist revolt rather than finance capital which explains the presence of British imperialism in that part of Africa. Clearly, the nationalist manifestation was a response to British imperialism, which (with its French counterpart) had already taken possession of Egypt as an economic territory. For Lenin, the division of economic territory was the central factor, and the correctness of that position is powerfully evident today in Africa when imperialism has almost completely changed its form of political partition, the better to pursue the substance of economic exploitation.

Some Implications on the Question of Disengagement from Imperialism

Discussing Issa Shivji’s Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle, 1970

In Part One, Shivji discusses 'the Neo-Colonial Mode of Production', about which no comment shall be offered here except to say that the basic premise can scarcely be disputed. He is saying that poverty and underdevelopment are caused by the drainage of wealth in the direction of the developed capitalist nations, and that political independence in any given colony does not halt the process of exploitation – which is essentially economic. That position is not new, and Tanzania has in effect given it full support in the Arusha Declaration, which outlined certain steps to be taken to block the outflow of wealth through foreign capitalist exploitation. The Department of Development Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam has graphically illustrated the role of the Arusha Declaration in the economic sphere in the Diagram (shown on pages 63-64). Shivji's invaluable contribution is his frank assessment of the extent to which the re-structuring of the economy has really been taking place as envisaged by TANU and as represented in that diagram.

The key notion is that of disengagement. The Editors of Cheche state in their Preface to the original edition of Shivji's paper that

by disengagement, it is not meant total isolation, but reduction of economic dependency, elimination of surplus outflow, utilization of this surplus for construction of nationally integrated economies, equitable cooperation with friendly socialist countries and mobilization of the masses for rapid development and defence.

Nationalization is one method of initiating this disengagement. But it has been shown by studies elsewhere that the benefits of nationalization are not as self-evidence and automatic as they are sometimes thought to be. Shivji provides convincing and disturbing evidence of the way in which the policy of nationalization of foreign enterprises in Tanzania has been deprived of much of its sting.

To attempt to cut the tentacles of imperialism finds a contradiction in joint ventures with subsidiaries that can ultimately be traced to the giant multi-national corporations like Anglo-American Corporation, Metal Box Company, Imperial Tobacco Company, Nestles, etc. The attempt to cut down on net outflow finds a contradiction in the expensive management contracts. The attempt to change the pattern of investment finds a contradiction in the rise of what Shivji calls the economic and political bureaucracy, who continue to direct surplus unduly in the direction of non-essential consumer goods and services. One could also partially explain some shortcomings as unavoidable necessities owing to the relatively weak bargaining position. But no amount of wishful thinking or pious statements can cover over the major problems which Shivji has exposed. They have to be recognised as problems before solutions can be devised.

One must also commend Shivji for not inventing classes where they do not exist - a tendency of mechanistic Marxists. His class struggle is on the international plane. That means that the European, North American and Japanese capitalists stand on one side and the workers and peasants of Africa are on the other. The weapons in this battle are ideological and they are 'structural' in the sense that the workers, peasants and progressive petty-bourgeoisie have to devise a variety of new structures which will replace the old – the national corporations to replace private firms, worker self-management to replace elitist managerial separation from the working class, Ujamaa villages to replace individualist and potentially capitalist farming, self-reliant schools to replace colonial institutions designed to alienate students from their peasant parents. In contrast to South-East Asia and Portuguese Africa, we do not hear the staccato sound of machine-gun fire, and therein lies the justification for speaking about the Silent Class Struggle.

Nevertheless, Shivji's generalisations are sometimes rather loose. He holds that 'the fundamental contradictions in Tanzanian society are to be found in the content and nature of the relationship of Tanzania's economy with international capital.' It would be more accurate to say that the content and nature of the relationship of Tanzania's economy with international capital both in the past and at present has given rise to the most decisive contradictions within Tanzanian society. That refinement is not a mere ideological nicety. It is absolutely necessary so that one proceeds to discern which are the decisive contradictions internally, and how their resolution would in turn break the stranglehold of external capital. Because it is clear that the slow rate of disengagement of the Tanzanian economy from the imperialist world economy is partly due to internal blockages of a politico-ideological nature – apart from whatever manipulations the imperialists are up to.

The Tanzanian reader should ask, 'What are the reflections of the international class struggle on the local scene?' Shivji comes close to home when he begins to discuss the 'petty bourgeoisie'; though unfortunately, this crucial question is dealt with only in the last few pages and the analysis is far from adequate.

Many people find the term 'petty-bourgeoisie' to be pejorative and abusive because of its association with the bourgeoisie - the exploiters of the world. But a case can be made for its continued use as a non-abusive analytical term, describing a local social stratum that lives in a privileged manner in a colonial or post-colonial society. Amilcar Cabral has spent a great deal of time in analyzing strata and sub-strata in Guinean Society, with the functional aim of advancing a national Revolution by any means possible. The success of the Guinean revolution on the battle front and at the level of political and social organization is a potent reason for paying close attention to Cabral's views on this subject. He considers the petty bourgeoisie not as a decadent stereotype but as a stratum with various possibilities, and he includes himself. Cabral was concerned with evaluating the 'nationalist capacity' of the petty bourgeoisie as well as their 'revolutionary capacity' for the post-independence phase. He speaks about a 'revolutionary petty bourgeoisie', meaning that section which has joined the Liberation Struggle and is already carrying it forward in the direction of Socialist reconstruction in the liberated zones. In other words, the African petty bourgeoisie stratum includes Shivji, the other T.Y.L. comrades at the University and most of the national leadership in Tanzania - irrespective of political convictions. Sections of the petty bourgeoisie have broken with their mentors, and individuals within the group have at various times wholly or partially opposed the external and local capitalists.

Shivji puts forward two situations where the petty bourgeoisie allies itself with what he calls 'revolutionary forces'. The first is in the struggle for national independence and the second is 'where the political power has been won by a socialist revolution, thereby cutting all links with the international bourgeoisie'. The first situation was found in the national independence movement in Tanzania: a significant section of the petty bourgeoisie together with the workers and peasants from whom they sprang constituted a revolutionary force represented by TANU. The second situation, however, definitely does not apply to Tanzania. We cannot expect a Socialist Revolution to cut the links between the petty bourgeoisie and international capitalism all in one go. The Socialist Revolution here must to some extent be preceded by the cutting of the links; while viewed from another angle the very cutting of the links over a long period of time constitutes a facet of the Revolution.

Shivji is undoubtedly aware of the fact that for the Socialist Revolution a smaller proportion of the petty bourgeoisie are initially prepared to join the workers and peasants than was the case with the national revolution for political independence. One must take this rift inside the petty bourgeoisie as the point of departure for political action. It is not a question of revolutionary forces against the petty bourgeoisie but of a struggle within that social stratum which is called the petty bourgeoisie and which includes the economic and political bureaucracy, whose actions are most relevant to the question of disengagement from the imperialist economy.

It is very crucial to try and understand why the bureaucracy is so slow in disengaging, why it continues to rely on advisers from the very capitalist firms (not just countries), and why it has not given absolute priority to consumer necessities and capital projects. There are undoubtedly a few elements who are ideologically hostile to Socialism and who are still the direct spokesmen of external interests. There are many more who are indifferent and intellectually lazy, and since they are not committed firmly to change, they two are unwitting allies of anti-Tanzania forces. The silent class struggle involves exposing the difference between revolutionary and non-revolutionary ideas. It involves scrutinizing the overall implications of the policies pursued by the economic bureaucracy at every stage. Because these ideas and policies are associated with individuals, it means drawing the line between those who are prepared to come over to the side of the labouring masses and those who are interested in preserving the personal privileges incompatible with Socialism. In that respect, Shivji's paper is itself a contribution to the Silent Class Struggle.

In the final analysis, it is the peasants who have to disengage from imperialism, so that the value of their labour would be used for providing themselves with goods and services. However, the ideological confrontation is neither directly between the peasants and the imperialists nor within the peasantry itself. The battle of ideas is within the petty bourgeois stratum. Because colonialism cut the peasantry off from access to the positive aspects of bourgeois knowledge such as science, and it never allowed the peasant to gain a comprehensive view of the imperialist system of production with its epicentres in New York, London and Zurich.12* However the educated African was allowed insights into those matters - mainly so that he could function in the intermediary zones between the peasant producer and the capitalist. The role of the progressive African intellectual is to go beyond the bounds which capitalism imposed and to penetrate the very essence of the system. Shivji presents a chart vividly showing the international ramifications of the local companies entering into partnership with the N.D.C. This is not secret information but it requires initiative to seek it out; and the international bourgeoisie is not pleased when we view this type of information and discern its implications. Elements within the local bureaucracy are not pleased either. It is up to them to decide whether they want to retort with rationalizations or whether they want to join in an honest search for the way out of our predicament of underdevelopment and dependence.

From the viewpoint of a progressive, the ideological struggle takes the form not only of resolutely contending against erroneous ideas at large in the society, but also that of constantly and critically examining one's own position. That is why this review of Shivji's paper is a necessity, so that collectively a progressive tendency can establish itself, complete with its own critical apparatus for self-correction. Capitalism is dying. Before 1917 capitalist power encircled the whole globe. Today it has been pushed out of huge areas of the world and it is receding. When a mode of production is dying, its ideological superstructure is also destined for extinction, so that the characteristic modes of bourgeois thought are on the wane. But this disappearance cannot take place without intense intellectual battle. That is very much part of The Silent Class Struggle in Tanzania.

No revolutionary doubts that the eventual outcome of the Silent Class Struggle in Tanzania and Africa will be victory for the workers and peasants; and it follows that the victory of ideas will be won by progressive tendencies allied to workers and peasants. It is the timing of the victory which is at issue, and one of the most crucial factors affecting that is the extent to which sections of the petty bourgeoisie attach themselves to and actually transform themselves into workers. Petty bourgeois intellectuals must have the humility and integrity to admit that in a certain sense they are no less self-appointed spokesmen of the masses than the others who are selling Africa down the drain. The Revolution requires that the millions who have been gagged throughout history should speak and choose. It is the responsibility of the revolutionaries to find ways and means of indicating to peasants and workers the relevance of Socialist ideology and perceptions to the latter's day to day lives. Only then can the working classes choose between the different lines that emanate from the petty bourgeoisie taken as a whole. There is also the heavy responsibility of learning from those directly engaged in production, both in terms of factual data and patterns of discipline. Undoubtedly, Shivji would agree with all this (given these premises upon which his paper rests) but his emphasis on the refractory nature of the petty bourgeoisie obscures the fact that contradictions are helping to detach more and more individuals of petty bourgeois background from the imperialist camp, and, as they blend into the working classes, the situation is created not only for disengagement from imperialism but also for the ultimate objective of constructing a socialist society.

The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment

Social Sciences Conference of East African Universities, 1970

Tomas Szentes, in his survey of Interpretations of Economic Development, observed that, in contrast to bourgeois theories, Marxist writing ‘explains the phenomenon of economic underdevelopment, the perspectives of eliminating it and the concrete questions on further development, always in relation to history, within the framework of historical interrelations, by concentrating on the main driving forces of social and economic development, and by analyzing phenomena and their causes as dialectical interdependencies’. He then goes on to draw attention to the fact that ‘it is particularly and naturally the national theoreticians of the underdeveloped countries themselves, who stress the international aspects of economic underdevelopment, and the latter’s relations with colonialism, even if without any sign of Marxist mentality.’ It is no accident that the Tanzanian, Justinian Rweyemamu, puts forward the view that the poverty of ‘developing’ countries is to be largely traced to the historical relationships of the metropolitan countries and the former colonial countries. The West Indian, Norman Givan, in a study of ‘Multinational Corporations and Dependent Underdevelopment in Mineral Export Economies’, also urges that the origins of institutional dependence must be sought in the historical evolution of the economies for centuries before. Both are products of and spokesmen for colonized portions of the globe, reacting against the metropolitan bias of standard bourgeois approaches to the problem of development.

Unfortunately, historical dimensions to the analysis of the African economy are lacking, because enquiry into the African past, as conducted by historians, has seldom concerned itself with seeking explanations for the present international division of labour and all that goes with it. My examination here does not pretend to be exhaustive, but hopefully it will shed some light on the coming into being of the structural features associated with development and underdevelopment, as instanced in the economies of Western Europe and Africa. Because the economic history of Europe is better known, more emphasis will be placed on African underdevelopment; and for similar reasons, the colonial period will be neglected relative to the centuries commonly referred to as ‘pre-colonial’.

The first significant thing about the internationalization of trade in the late fifteenth century was that Europeans took the initiative and went to other parts of the world. No Chinese junks reached Europe, and if any African canoes reached the Americas (as is sometimes maintained) they did not establish two-way links. This meant that what was called international trade was nothing but the extension overseas of European interests. Insofar as there was a strategy to international trade and the production that supported it, that strategy was firmly in European hands, and specifically in the hands of the maritime nations from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. They owned and directed the great majority of the world’s ocean-going vessels, and they controlled the financing of trade between four continents. Africans had little clue as to the tri-continental linkages between Africa, Europe and the Americas; nor did the inhabitants of the Moluccas have any notion of the European markets into which their species were directed by European ships. Europe had a monopoly of economic intelligence of the international exchange system seen as a whole, for Western Europe was the only sector capable of viewing the system as a whole.

Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannon to gain control of all the world’s waterways. For instance, force was necessary in the case of the Sino-Japanese trade and with regards to the Arabs in East Africa. Once European hegemony was achieved, it gave them the power to allocate roles to every other part of the world, so that the various inputs intermingled with the benefits of Western Europe. Even the whites in the Americas were for three centuries on the periphery of a system whose centre of power was in Western Europe. Initially, the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had the most far-flung interests. When the Iberians were still in command of a major sector of world trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, they engaged in buying cotton clothes in India to exchange for slaves in Africa to mine gold in America. Part of the gold in the Americas would then be used to purchase spices and silks from the Far East. The concept of metropole and colony did not require European settlement. In Africa (and Asia) it was sufficient that local economies were in some way drawn into the web of international commerce.

It is interesting to note that what is called ‘international law’ also reflected the early division of the trading world into metropoles and dependencies. The law recognized by different states as governing the high seas was understandably European and not Indonesian or African. On the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean, the African more likely than not was an object rather than subject or master of the law. Slavers in a Dutch slave ship were legally protected against piracy, because they were Dutch property. The law of the metropoles became the law of international relations. This is yet another reflection of the commercial hegemony established by Europe at the onset of the epoch of international trade.

Africa had little say in the determination of the import and export content of its commerce with Europeans. Europe’s exports were an extension of domestic production of and demand for a wide range of articles, such as Dutch linen, Spanish iron, English pewter, Portuguese wines, French brandy, Venetian glass beads, German muskets, and so forth. Europeans were also able to unload on the African continent goods which had become unsalable in Europe. Thus, items like old sheets, cast-off uniforms, technologically outdated firearms, and a whole range of pacotille found guaranteed markets in Africa. Africans slowly became aware of the possibility of demanding and obtaining better imported goods, and pressure was exerted on the captains of ships, but the interplay between African buyer and European supplier was extremely circumscribed. Europeans were most concerned about regional variants like the demand for copper in Eastern Nigeria and iron on the Upper Guinea Coast. They also took into account shifting tastes within any given region; but the overall range of trade goods which left Hamburg, Copenhagen and Liverpool was determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production and consumption within Europe itself.

The effectiveness of Europe’s power to make decisions within the international trading system was best seen in the way that it selected what Africa would export. A complete list of African export commodities since the fifteenth century would include things such as civet perfume, ambergris, indigo, monkeys and feathers: but, of course, those were mere curiosities. The economically significant commodities were very few and were chosen by Europeans in accordance with European needs.

The ships of the Portuguese discoverers gave the search for gold the highest priority; partly on the basis of well-known information that West African gold reached Europe across the Sahara, and partly on the basis of speculation. The Portuguese were successful in abstaining gold in parts of West Africa and in eastern Central Africa; and it was the ‘Gold Coast’ which attracted the greatest attention from Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The number of forts built there was testimony to this, and the nations involved included the Scandinavians and the German principality of Brandenburg, as well as other colonial stalwarts such as the British, Dutch and Portuguese. However, since gold was limited to very small areas of Africa as far as Europeans were aware, the principal export was human beings.

Only in a very few places at given times was there the export of another commodity of equal or greater importance. For instance, in Senegal there was gum, in Sierra Leone camwood, and in Mozambique ivory.

Why Europeans were anxious to acquire gold would appear to require no explanation, but, apart from the universal fascination with the yellow metal, one must take into account that it was a direct response to a pressing need in Europe: namely, the need for gold coins within the growing capitalist money economy. Camwood was also called into existence as a West African export because of the expanding capitalism in Europe. It was mainly utilized for its yield of red dye, and it ceased to be of value in the nineteenth century when European technological advance created substitutes. Ivory from Africa passed into European industry (as distinct from artwork) during and after the sixteenth century, once the lathe had made precision-cutting possible. Its export to Europe continued well into the colonial period, until plastic substitutes undermined important sectors such as billiard and bowling ball manufacture. It is in the light of its own needs and technology that Europe has always made the decisions concerning what Africa should export and concerning the beginning and decline of each export commodity. The most crucial of these decisions for ‘pre-colonial’ African trade was Europe’s allocation to Africa of the role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the world.

It is a valid question to ask why Africans accepted the terms of what they should export, and particularly with regard to the sale of human beings. One suggestion which was at one time widely accepted and unchallenged was that African society already had slaves which were simply handed over to European buyers. The institution of slavery has co-existed with and formed part of communal, feudal and capitalist societies; but its widest incidence occurred when communalism was extensively broken down, which was not the case in Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The most likely explanation is that captives were made in war, and it is reasonable to assume that such fresh captives (as distinct from those who had earned a place in their captors’ society and family structure) would have been considered readily expendable to European buyers.

One has also to take into account the offer of European commodities as a pole of attraction. Paradoxically enough, the influence of European goods can scarcely be attributed to their quality. On the contrary, things such as cheap European fabrics were inferior to African products and this was recognized by buyers. However, they were brought to Africa in large quantities, so availability was the crucial factor. No doubt, the novelty of European commodities also led to their being accepted in exchange for gold or human beings. Estaban Montejo, an African who ran away from a Cuban slave plantation in the nineteenth century, recalled that his people were wooed into slavery by the colour red. Diverting as his recollection may appear, it should not be dismissed lightly. He wrote as follows:

It was the scarlet which did for the Africans; both the kings and the rest surrendered without a struggle. When the kings saw that whites – I think the Portuguese were the first – were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs, and the blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran down to the ships like sheep and there they were captured. The Negro has always liked scarlet. It was the fault of this colour that they put them in chains and sent them to America.

In the Congo, the slave trade did not get under way without grave doubts and opposition from Africans who had established contact with the Europeans. The king of the state of Kongo clearly defied the nature of his expectations from Europe. He asked for masons, priests, clerks, physicians, and the like; but instead he was overwhelmed by slave ships sent by his Catholic brothers in Portugal, and a vicious trade was opened up by exploiting contradictions within the loosely structured Kongo kingdom. It might be objected that the Kongo king who took this stand against slavery had been converted to Christianity and was speaking as a Catholic. But there was little in Catholicism either in Portugal or among the missionaries in Kongo which would have raised any sanguine hopes that the Christian religion was in any way a barrier to the enslavement of Africans. With the date of the Kongo episode being at the beginning of the sixteenth century it can legitimately be interpreted as rare surviving evidence of an important aspect of the initial confrontation between Europeans and Africans at the onset of the internationalization of trade and the onset of the Atlantic slave trade in particular. An African ruler had conceived of possibilities of mutually beneficial interchange between his people and a European state, but the latter imposed an export specialization in human cargo.

Once Africa and Europe became interlocked on the latter’s terms, it was beyond the capacity of any given African state or society to change the status quo, because Europeans reacted by force and other means to maintain their position. This was exemplified in Angola, where the Portuguese employed an unusual number of their own troops and tried to wrest political power from Africans – with a resolution that was not customary in the epoch before colonial rule. The Angolan state of Matamba on the river Kwango was founded around 1630 as a direct reaction against the Portuguese. With Queen Nzinga at its head, Matamba tried to coordinate resistance against the Portuguese in Angola, especially in the 1640s when the Dutch offensive against the Portuguese provided a European ally. Portugal gained the upper hand in 1648, but Matamba remained hostile, and participation in the slave trade was largely in abeyance as far as that state was concerned for a quarter of a century. But, slaving having become a major activity of the region, Matamba could not forever stand aside. So long as it opposed trade with the Portuguese, it was an object of hostility from neighbouring African states which had a modus vivendi with Europeans and slave trading. When Queen Nzinga resumed business with the Portuguese in 1656, it was undoubtedly a major victory for the latter. Her change of name to Dona Ana de Sousa was a very nominal concession to Christianity, but it symbolized a major decision-making role of the Portuguese within the Angolan economy.

A smaller but more specific example of African resistance to continued European imposition of trade in slaves comes from the Baga people in what is now the Republic of Guinea. The Baga lived in mini-states, and in circa 1720 one of their leaders attempted to secure an alliance to stop the slave traffic. He was apparently defeated by local European resident traders, mulattoes and other slave-trading Africans. It is not difficult to understand why Europeans would have taken immediate steps to see that Tomba and his Baga followers did not opt out of the role allocated to them by Europe. A parallel which presents itself is the manner in which Europeans got together to wage the ‘Opium War’ against China in order to ensure that the Chinese would continue to import the addictive drug that was so profitable for Western capital.

Of course, it is only as a last resort that the capitalist metropoles need to use armed force to ensure the pursuit of favourable policies in the periphery. Normally, economic weapons are sufficient. Within the same context of opposition to the slave trade, Dahomey found itself being brought to terms by being deprived of European imports – some of which had become necessities by the time that Dahomey had its altercation with European slave traders in the 1970s. The episode is worth careful scrutiny because the conventional interpretations portray Dahomey as nothing but a bloody slave-trading state, and make absolutely no mention of the determined opposition to the trade that was carried out by Dahomey’s greatest king, Agadja Trudo.

The fundamental pillar of the Dahomean conception of the state was that all Dahomeans were inalienable. The king required of his subjects complete obedience, and they asked in turn for unqualified protection. Adadja Trudo appreciated that European demand for slaves and the pursuit of slaving in and around Dahomey was incompatible with Dahomey’s development. Between 1724 and 1726, he looted and burnt European forts and slave barracoons; and he reduced the trade from the ‘Slave Coast’ to a mere trickle, by blocking the paths leading to sources of supply in the interior. European slave dealers were very bitter, and they tried to sponsor some African collaborators against Agadja Trudo. They failed to unseat him or crush the Dahomean state, but in turn Agadja failed to persuade them to develop new lines of economic activity, such as local plantation agriculture; and, being anxious to acquire firearms and cowries through the Europeans, he had to acquiesce in the resumption of slave trading in 1730.

In 1730, Dahomean slaving was placed under royal control and was far more restricted than previously. Yet, the failure of this determined effort illustrated that a single African state at the time could not emancipate itself from European hegemony. The small size of the polities and the numerous political divisions made it so much easier for Europe to make the decisions about Africa’s role in world production and trade.

Because the nature of African exports was determined from outside the continent, questions such as the level of output and prices were also decided outside Africa. Time and time again, trade in slaves responded to various external stimuli. At first, the labour was needed in Iberia and in the Atlantic islands such as Sāo Tomé, Cape Verde and the Canaries; then came this period when the Greater Antilles and the Spanish American mainland needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be met. The records show direct correlations between levels of exports from Africa and European demand for slave labour in this or that part of the American plantation economy. When the Dutch took Pernambuco in 1634, the directors of the Dutch West India Company immediately informed their agents on the ‘Gold Coast’ that they were to take the necessary steps to pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta – thereby creating the infamous ‘Slave Coast’. When the British islands of the Caribbean took to growing sugarcane, the Gambia was one of the first places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be instanced right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces Eastern Africa also, since European markets in the Indian Ocean islands became important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since American demand caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope.

Even medium and short-run fluctuations in the volume of African trade were usually reflections of European conditions. The incessant European wars of the mercantilist epoch were particularly decisive in this respect. There was a drastic fall in French shipping to Africa during the Seven Years War (1748– 55); while both British and French shipping was absent from regular trade during the American War of Independence and the years of Anglo-French struggle that followed. The African ‘producer’ of a commodity such as captives was quite helpless in the face of these European practices. During the American War of Independence, Futa Djallon and the neighbouring countries in Sierra Leone became full of captives, who had of necessity to be incorporated into a local system of production because they were kept hanging around for a long time with no ships in sight.

It might seem to be labouring the obvious to emphasize that a fundamental characteristic of centuries of Afro-European trade was that its dimensions were determined outside of Africa. But, it is equally obvious that local conditions were bound in some ways to affect output, price and the European choice of particular parts of the continent at particular times. Thus, the local conditions around (say) the Bight of Biafra or Lake Nyasar would certainly have influenced the rate of extraction of captives at any given time. The emphasis on the overall global determinants is necessary in order to situate the mechanics of trade within Africa and their proper international perspective, and in so doing one can immediately perceive the striking similarity between the early commerce and the subsequent colonial and neo-colonial trades.

The kind of benefits which Europe derived from its control of world commerce are well known, although it is curious that the recognition of Africa’s major contribution to European development is usually made in works devoted specifically to that subject; while European scholars of Europe often treat the European economy as if it were entirely autonomous. European economists of the nineteenth century certainly had no illusions about the interconnections between their national economies and the world at large. J.S. Mill went so far as to assert that as far as England was concerned, ‘the trade of the West Indies is hardly to be considered as external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’

Marx can be cited in the same context, not as heretic or as the ultimate authority, but merely because of the frankness of his comments. It was Marx who wrote that ‘the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal populations … the turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black skins signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.’

Central and South American gold and silver played a crucial role in meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist money economy, while African gold was also significant in this respect. African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the ‘guinea’.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for the most part of the nineteenth, the exploitation of Africa and African labour continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shopping, insurance, the association of capital, capitalist agriculture and the capital goods industry. Sometimes, the efforts were modest and localized. Thus, the St Malo fishing industry was stimulated by the opening up of markets in the French slave plantations; while the Portuguese fishing industry also gained new buoyancy. Then there were more spectacular developments like the growth of seaport towns connected with Atlantic trade – notably Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Bordeaux and Seville. Behind those ports there often emerged the manufacturing centres that gave rise to the notion of the ‘industrial revolution’. As Mantoux put it, ‘the growth of Lancashire, of all English countries the one most deserving to be called the cradle of the factory system, depended first of all on the development of Liverpool and her trade.’

The connections between capitalism and slavery as far as England is concerned are adequately documented by Eric Williams. A similar picture would emerge from any detailed study of French capitalism and slavery, given the fact that during the eighteenth century the West Indies accounted for 20 per cent of France’s external trade – much more than the whole of Africa in the present century. Of course, benefits were not always directly proportional to the amount of involvement of a given European state in the Atlantic trade – for instance, the enormous profits of the Portuguese economy went into the hands of the more developed Western European capitalist nations who supplied Portugal with capital, ships and trade goods. Germany was included in this category, along with England, the Dutch Provinces and France.

Commerce deriving from Africa helped a great deal to strengthen transnational links within the Western European economy, bearing in mind that American produce was the consequence of African labour. Brazilian dyewoods, for example, were re-exported from Portugal into the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Baltic, and passed into the continental cloth industry of the seventeenth century. Sugar from the Caribbean was re-exported from England and France to other parts of Europe to such an extent that Hamburg was the biggest sugar-refining centre in Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century. Germany supplied manufacturers to Scandinavia, Holland, England, France and Portugal, for resale in Africa. England, France and Holland (in spite of competing mercantilist systems) found it necessary to exchange various classes of goods to better deal with Africans for gold, slaves and ivory. The financiers and merchants of Genoa were the powers behind the markets of Lisbon and Seville; while Dutch bankers played a similar role with respect to Scandinavia and England.

Western Europe, after all, was more than just an arbitrary geographical connotation. It was that part of Europe in which by the fifteenth century embryo capitalist relations already posed a challenge to feudalism, marking a further departure from the natural, self-sufficient autarchic economies of previous modes of production. When the Western European nations moved overseas, it was the product of an internal dynamic, which was not navigated or even deflected by new trades with Africa, Asia and the Americas. Enclosures continued in the English countryside, and agriculture in Western Europe generally continued its slow rate of evolution, serving to support a larger population and to provide a more effective basis for the wool and linen industries in particular. The rate of transformation in technology and in the socio-economic organization of industry was more rapid. African trade hindered none of these things. On the contrary, it speeded up several aspects, including the integration of Western Europe – as noted above. That is why the African connection contributed not merely to economic growth (which relates only to quantitative dimensions) but also to real development in a structural sense. Conversely, it can be demonstrated that the contacts with Europe had no organic relationship to what Africa was doing previously nor did they permit the reemergence of any rational continental or regional ties within Africa itself. Trade within Europe meant historical disruption and disintegration, and those things proved crucial to Africa’s underdevelopment.

Africa’s external trade was very limited up to the fifteenth century. Apart from northern Africa (the Horn included), it was only East Africa that had foreign trade relations. The Portuguese sought with some success to replace the Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and to the rest of Asia. It was the Portuguese who came to carry most of the ivory which was marketed in India; while Indian clothes and beads were sold in East and West Africa by the Portuguese and the Dutch. The same applied to cowry shells from the East Indies. A new trade route between Africa and the Americas was an extension neither of the indigenous American economy nor of the African economy. Its total rationale lay in Europe. In effect, therefore, Europe took the first steps towards transforming Africa, Asia and America into economic satellites. It was at the very outset of international trade that there was established that radical pattern with Europe at the centre and very few independent connections between the non-European territories.

Inside Africa itself, the period of trade which preceded the establishment of colonial rule was also determined by the state of affairs where there were ties between colony and metropole but none between colony and colony. It will shortly be illustrated that trade with Europe arrested the development of numerous small African economies. Lack of economic integration in Africa is mainly a result of that fact, because social formations in given geographical areas were not permitted to extend their production and economic boundaries so as to generate trade with each other comparable in importance to that between each area and Europe. There is no doubt that the potential for independent economic development was present in a large number of localities, based on local resources and skills. As those local economies multiplied and grew closer together, they were bound to create regional and continental markets as in Europe and parts of Asia that had gone further along the same evolutionary path. In addition to blocking the possibilities of continued evolution, European trade also set in motion a process of active disintegration. Certain inter-territorial links established on the continent were broken down because of European trade. Several examples arose on the West African coast down to Angola, because in those parts European trade was most voluminous, and the surviving written record is also more extensive.

When the Portuguese arrived in the region of modern Ghana in the 1470s, they had few commodities to offer local inhabitants in exchange for the coveted gold. However, they were able to trans-ship from Dahomey supplies of cotton cloths, beads and female slaves which were saleable on the ‘Gold Coast’. The indications are that the Portuguese were responding to a given demand in the ‘Gold Coast’, so that a previous trade must have been in existence between the two regions. The Akan were gold producers, and the people of Benin were specialist craftsmen who had a surplus of cloth and beads which they manufactured themselves. As an expansionist state, Dahomey also had access to prisoners of war; while the Akan seemed concerned with building their own population and labour force, so they acquired female captives from Dahomey and rapidly integrated them as wives. When the Portuguese intervened in this exchange, it was subordinated to the overall interests of European trade. As soon as Portugal and other European nations had sufficient goods so as not to be dependent on the re-export of certain commodities from Dahomey, then all that remained were the links between the ‘Gold Coast’ and Europe on the one hand, and between Dahomey and Europe on the other. That represented the destruction of whatever potential existed for creating a regional market with its own internal logic.

Probably, Dahomey products reached the ‘Gold Coast’ by percolating through what is now Benin and Togo, using as far as possible the creeks behind the coast. Therefore, it would have been more convenient when Europeans established a direct link across the open sea. The superiority of Europeans at sea was of the greatest strategic value, along with their organizational ability. This was illustrated in several places, beginning with the Upper Guinea Coast and the Cape Verde islands, where Portuguese settlers broke into the pattern of local trade ever since the 1460s. They intervened in the transfers of raw cotton and indigo dye from one African community to another, and the Cape Verdean settlers went a step further in establishing a flourishing cotton-growing and cotton-manufacturing industry. They used labour and techniques from the mainland and exported the finished product along the length of the coast down to El Mina.

The Portuguese also took over the trade in local cowries in Kongo, the trade in salt along the Angolan coast, and the trade in high-quality palm cloth between Loango and southern Angola. In some instances, they achieved dominance not just because of their ships and commercial skills but also by the use of force – providing they were operating on the littoral and could bring their cannon into play. The disruption of transactions between the ‘Gold Coast’ and the ‘Ivory Coast’ followed that pattern. A strong coastal canoe trade existed between these two regions, with people of Cape Lahou sailing past Cape Three Points to sell their cloth as far east as Accra. The Portuguese set up a fort at Axim near Cape Three Points, to service gold trade with the hinterland; and one of its incidental functions was to restrict the east–west coastal African trade. They prohibited Axim residents from going to Cape Lahou, and they stopped canoes from the ‘Ivory Coast’ from travelling east beyond Axim. The purpose was obviously to make both areas discrete economic entities exclusively tied to Europe.

The Portuguese were not successful in destroying this African commerce, and the Dutch inherited the problem when they took over Axim in 1673. The servants of the Dutch West India company which was operating on the Gold Coast hovered between two alternatives. If possible, they wanted a complete cessation of the African trade; and when that was not achieved, they tried to force the people of the ‘Ivory Coast’ to buy a certain amount of Dutch goods in addition to the local products they received on the ‘Gold Coast’. The Dutch stipulated that each Axim canoeman going to Cape Lahou should carry Dutch goods worth at least four ounces of gold. In effect, that converted a purely inter-African exchange into a European/African trade.

What was doubly detrimental to African attempts to integrate their own economies was the fact that when Europeans became middlemen in local trade networks, they did so mainly to facilitate the extraction of captives, and thereby subordinated the whole economy to the slave trade. In Upper Guinea, the Portuguese and their mulatto descendants in the Cape Verde islands and on the coast engaged in a large variety of trade permutations – involving cotton, dyes, kola nuts and European products. The purpose of it all was to fill the holds of slave-ships calling at Gambia, Cacheu, Bissau, the Bay of Sierra Leone, and so on. In Congo/Angola, the same picture emerges. The salt, nzimbu shells and palm cloth that came into Portuguese hands made up for their shortage of trade goods and served to purchase captives on different parts of the coast and deep in the interior. This element of subordination and dependence is crucial to an understanding of African under-development today, and its roots lie far back in the era of international trade. It is also worth noting that there is a type of pseudo-integration which is compatible with dependence. In contemporary times, it takes the form of Free Trade areas in the ‘Third World’, which are made to order for the penetration of multinational corporations; while from the fifteenth century onwards this pseudo-integration took the form of the interlocking of African economics over long distances from the coast, so as to allow the passage of human captives and ivory from a given point inland to a given port on the Atlantic or Indian ocean.

The West African gold trade was not destroyed but it became directly dependent on European buyers, by being diverted from the northward routes across the Sahara. Within the savannah belt of the ‘Western Sudan’, the trans-Saharan gold trade had nourished one of the most highly developed political zones in all Africa from the fifth century onwards. But it was more convenient for Europe to obtain its gold on the West Coast than through North African intermediaries, and one is left to speculate on what might have occurred in the ‘Western Sudan’ if there had been a steady increase in the gold trade over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, there is something to be said in favour of African trade with Europe in this particular commodity: gold production involves mining and an ordered system of distribution within Africa. Akan country and parts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique sustained flourishing socio-political systems up to the nineteenth century, largely because of gold production. It was the trade in slaves that completely undermined the situation in West, East and Central Africa, for the procurement of captives was based on warfare, banditry and social distortions.

A considerable body of writing is now coming into existence on the topic of the consequence of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa; and much of it purports to show that earlier views of the completely negative impact of the trade are ill-founded. Indeed, some individuals are preoccupying themselves with highlighting the many beneficial effects of the slave trade on Africa. The white-washing trend is another facet of the distortions produced when capitalism tries to provide itself with moral justification. Apologists rely on such flimsy arguments as ‘Africans benefited by getting European goods’ and ‘new food crops were introduced’ – as though Europe had to be enslaved before it got to enjoy the potato from the Native American Indian. This genre of scholarship stresses the fact that certain African kingdoms grew stronger during the centuries of slaving, and it assumes that the connection was a positive one. The truth is that some areas continued to develop and they did so in spite of slave trading; although all who participated were warped to a greater or lesser extent, and all were reduced to a state of dependence.

Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences for Africa, but the overall picture of destructiveness is clear, and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the recruitment of captives in Africa (as distinct from their sale at coastal ports).

One of the uncertainties concerns the basic question of how many Africans were exported. This has long been an object of speculation, with estimates ranging from a few millions to 100 million. A study by Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, has suggested the figure of about ten million Africans landed alive in the Americas, the Atlantic islands and Europe. That figure may well be low, in spite of the author’s assertions to the contrary, because so many of the import figures in the Americas were given out by individuals who were deliberately minimizing numbers in order to defraud revenue collection, and the volume of ‘contraband’ arrivals is difficult to measure. However, if this low figure was accepted as a basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those attempting to make light of the experience. As Curtin was aware, ‘the cost of the slave trade in human life was many times the number of slaves landed in the Americas. For every slave landed alive, other people died in warfare, along the bush pats leading to the coast, awaiting shipment, or in the crowded and insanitary conditions of the middle passage.’

On any base figure of Africans who landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make an increment to cover mortality in trans-shipment, which averaged in the vicinity of 15 to 20 per cent. There were also other deaths between time of capture and time of embarkation. Most important of all, given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives, it is necessary to estimate the number of people killed or maimed in order to appreciate the extent of the millions who were taken alive. The resultant figure (a considerable multiple of 10 million) would represent the number from the population and labour force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans in the Americas. It is a loss that would have to be evaluated in the light of age and sex selection and other features. Slave traders preferred their victims between fifteen and thirty-five years of age, with a ratio of two men to one woman. They often accepted younger children but rarely any older person. They shipped the most healthy wherever possible, and even took pains to choose those who had had smallpox and were thereby immunized.

Absence of data about the size of Africa’s population in the fifteenth century makes it impossible to carry out any scientific assessment of the results of the population outflow. But, nothing suggests that there was any increase in the continent’s population over the centuries of slaving, although that was the trend in other parts of the world. Lack of increase or even slight increases would have represented a ‘deficit’ in terms of a population projection, since fewer babies were born that would otherwise have been the case if millions of childbearing age had not been eliminated. Finally, on this particular topic, it is essential to recognize that the Atlantic slave trade on the Indian Ocean has been called ‘The East African slave trade’ and ‘the Arab slave trade’ for so long that it obscures the extent to which it was the European slave trade. When the slave trade from East Africa was at its height in the late eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, the destination of captives was the plantation societies of Mauritius, Reunion and Seychelles as well as the New World, via the Cape of Good Hope. Besides, Africans labouring as slaves from Zanzibar to Persia in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were all ultimately serving the European capitalist system which had become all pervasive. The Sultan of Zanzibar did not eat from cloves himself.

An emphasis on population loss as such is highly relevant to the question of socio-economic development. In recent times, since imperial agencies have decided on a Malthusian line for the ‘Third World’, it is being forgotten that population growth played a major role in European development in providing labour, markets and the pressures which led to further advance. The Japanese population growth had similar positive effects; while in other parts of Asia which remained pre-capitalist, the size of the population led to a much more intensive exploration of the land than has ever been the case in what is still a sparsely peopled African continent. Even in the absence of statistics, it seems that West Africa was always a more densely populated section of the continent than either Central or East Africa; and it was there that the brunt of the slaving fell, warping the development of some of the most advanced areas in all Africa, such as Yorubaland, Igboland and Akan country.

African economic activities were affected both directly by population loss and indirectly by other features of slave trading – notably the violence and insecurity that it engendered. Before the eighteenth century, the Portuguese and Dutch actually discouraged slaving on the ‘Gold Coast’, for they recognized that it would be incompatible with the gold trade. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, gold had been discovered in Brazil, and the importance of gold supplies from Africa was lessened. Within the total Atlantic pattern, African slaves became more important than gold, and Brazilian gold was offered for African captives at Whydah and Accra. At that point, slaving began undermining the ‘Gold Coast’ economy, and made large inroads into the gold trade. Slave-raiding and kidnapping made it unsafe to mine and to travel; and in any event the resort to warfare for captives proved more profitable than gold mining. One contemporary European observer noted that ‘as one fortunate marauding makes a native rich in a day, they therefore exert themselves rather in war, robbery and plunder than in their old business of digging and collecting gold.’

What was so clearly evidenced in the above example must have been true for all other branches of economic activity, and especially for agriculture. Occasionally in certain localities, food production was stimulated to provide supplies for slave ships, but the overall consequence of slaving on agricultural activities in Western and Central Africa were negative. Europeans on the scene did not commit to that effort, and where such comments are not available the inference is nonetheless inescapable. Labour was drawn off from agriculture and for those remaining, conditions were unsettled. Dahomey, which in the sixteenth century was renowned for exporting food to parts of what is now Togo, was suffering through famines in the nineteenth century. An enlightening parallel is the way migrant labour and cash crops affected the food economy of colonial Africa and made famine endemic in some districts.

Just as the slave trade and overseas trade in general had multiplier effects on European development, so it had multiplier effects on African underdevelopment. Where there was integration across national boundaries in Europe, there was disintegration in Africa. The creation of growing points in the European economy and the establishment of backward and forward linkages were all out of the question in Africa, because foreign trade was not a logical extension of internal production and exchange. On the contrary, a great deal of time and energy went into activities like slaving and elephant hunting, which were not designed to permit an expansion of Africa’s ability to produce foodstuffs and other essentials of human consumption.

Special attention needs to be paid to ivory exports, because they are more important than the sport of captives as far as most East African societies were concerned and because it is necessary to determine the extent to which the ivory trade had consequences comparable to the slave trade. There was definitely a qualitative difference between the two. The ivory trade led to professionalization just like the slave trade, but bands of elephant hunters (found for example among the Cokwo, Baganda, Nyamwezi and Bambara) were positive additions to the social structure while bands of professional raiders and man-stealers were threats to established society. Andrew Roberts’s study of the evidence relating to Nyamwezi ivory trade has shown that this long-distance trade sparked off other beneficial developments, such as increased trading goods, food and salt. There were other African exports such as gum, rubber, camwood and wax which also had certain beneficial effects on socio-economic patterns when they were traded, showing clearly that slaving was in a category by itself. Many of the other commodities were accommodated within the colonial trade of the late nineteenth century, indicating that their export was comparable with the exploitation of African labour within Africa – an objective with which slave trading obviously came into sharp conflict.

On the other hand, ivory was an asset that was rapidly exhausted in any given region, and the struggle to secure new supplies sometimes brought violence almost indistinguishable from that produced by slaving. Besides, the most decisive limitation of the ivory trade was the fact that it was not an outgrowth of local product, and it caused restructuring dependent upon an overseas market. The Nyamwezi were trading articles of African manufacture among Africans long before the export of trade opened up. In a sense, regional trade provided the ‘capital’ for the long-distance ivory trade, but from then on any expansion of local manufacturing was incidental to, rather than the goal of, local economies caught up in the international trading network, and the expansion was very limited. This kind of conceptualization is completely lacking in reconstructions of African history. In a sizable volume of essays devoted to ‘trade in Central and Eastern Africa before 1900’, there is nowhere expressed any awareness that the professionalization of trade per se is no great thing, and that it meant not development but the subordination of local economies in the case of Africa’s relations with Europe. Andrew Roberts ends his study of Nyamwezi trade as follows:

It would seem, then, that we are obliged yet again to conclude that only rule by representatives of superior technology could provide the conditions for sustained advance from the subsistence economy. This was, indeed, partly due to the very manner in which the region had become already linked to, and in a sense dependent on, the economies of the industrialized world.

The writer of those lines should be given credit for at least a hesitant acknowledgement of the notion of ‘dependence’, which is so central to an understanding of underdevelopment. For the rest, the statement is timid and confusing.

Why is it that representatives of superior technology were required to carry Africans out of the subsistence economy, and they were not necessary to perform similar functions for Europeans and most Asians? It was precisely the external links which precluded the possibility of independent self-sustaining advice, and that was true of the Nyamwezi ivory trade as it was of the Kazembe trade in captives. Besides, at all times one must keep in mind the dialectical opposite of the trade in Africa: namely, production in Europe or in the Americas under European control. The few socially desirable by-products of elephant hunting within Africa were chickenfeed in comparison with the profits, technology and skills associated with the product in Europe. The ivory marts of Minping Lane were the centres where real profits on ivory trade were made. The tusks then augmented in value when they were turned into billiard balls and piano keys in London, and when they went to Sheffield to be transformed into knife handles and to Dieppe and Geislingen to be made into hundreds of different artifacts by marine processes. Europe was strengthened by these and numerous other foreign-fed industries to carry Africa out of their own developing capitalist economy in the most disadvantaged situation possible.

European technology was not as superior to that in other parts of the world in the fifteenth century as is often assumed. Their supremacy in that aspect at the present time is itself more a consequence than the cause of their hegemony over the rest of the world. In the fifteenth century, Europe merely had the edge over humanity elsewhere in the scientific understanding of the universe, the making of tools and the rational organization of work. One of the major shortcomings of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a shortage of commodities for exchange, as has already been illustrated. They were forced to make use of Asian and (to a lesser extent) African consumer goods, which were often of superior quality. Yet, as is also implicit in earlier sections of this analysis, European superiority in certain sectors proved decisive. African and Polynesian canoes were of high standard, but the relevant sphere of operations was the ocean, where European ships could take command. West Africans had developed metal-casting to a fine artistic perfection in many parts of Nigeria, but when it came to the meeting with Europe, beautiful bronzes were far less relevant than the crudest of cannon. African wooden utensils were sometimes works of great sensitivity, but Europe produced pots and pans that had many functional advantages. Literacy, numeracy, organizational experience and the capacity to produce on an ever-expanding scale (even under the domestic system) were also very meaningful advantages on the European side of the scale.

Once Africa was drawn into the orbit of Western Europe, the latter’s technological development was speeded up, as already noted in the case of several other aspects of their economy. For example, the evolution of European shipbuilding from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was a logical consequence of their monopoly of sea commerce after the fifteenth century. During the same period, the North Africans were bottled up in the Mediterranean, and although it was from there that Europe borrowed a great deal of nautical instrumentation, the North Africans made no further worthwhile advances. Where the initial European advantage was not sufficient to assume supremacy, they deliberately undermined other people’s efforts. The Indian navy, for instance, suffered from the rigid enforcement of the English Navigation Laws. Yet, the expenses involved in building new and better European ships were met by the profits of overseas trade such as with India and Africa. The Dutch were pioneers in improving upon the caravels which took the Spanish and Portuguese out across the Atlantic, and the succession of Dutch trading companies operating in Asia, Africa and America were the ones responsible for experimentation. By the eighteenth century, the British were using Dutch know-how as a basis for surpassing the Dutch themselves, and the Atlantic was their laboratory. It used to be said that the slave trade was a training ground for British seamen. It is probably more significant to note that the Atlantic trade was the stimulator of consistent advances in naval technology.

We know a fair amount about the evolution of science in Europe prior to overseas expansion, and it is possible to evaluate the catalytic contribution of the non-European world in the epoch of mercantilism. The technological revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe sprung from the interplay of numerous variables rooted entirely in the European experience, but they all have to be placed in the context of capitalist development; and it is no mere coincidence that the crucial engineering inventions of the late eighteenth century followed after the profits from external trade had been internalized by Western European capitalism. We know far less about the evolution of African technology, but commerce with Europe could have had no positive effect in this sphere.

In the first place, craft skills would have suffered from the plague of slaving in the areas directly affected. Much has been made of the destructive aspect of the Ngoni incursion northwards into East Africa. In the Lake Nyasa/Lake Tanganyika corridor, warfare and raiding virtually obliterated cloth and hoe-making. Slave recruitment was warfare and pillage on a grand scale, and must have had analogous effects for the vast areas concerned. Of greater importance, however, were the indirect consequences of trade as such, including the impact of imports and the European subversion of local trade.

The relationship of African technology to cloth manufacture is worthy of note, given the strategic role that textiles have played in economic development in Western Europe, Japan and the US. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the demand for cloth in Africa was constantly expanding. All areas experienced a shift from car nudity through animal skins and bark cloth to cotton. Indian and European textiles helped meet this expanding demand, while areas like Senegambia, Ivory Coast, Benin, Yorubaland and Loango were exporters to other parts of Africa (through European intermediaries for the most part). But the volume of European production was so constantly increasing, along with the skill, so that Dutch and English manufacturers in the eighteenth century copied fashionable Indian and African patterns. Since they had established a stranglehold on local distribution, the products they brought had to be accepted even though they were inferior to the originals. By the late nineteenth century, European textiles were being imported in sufficient quantities to swamp local production and to make regions such as Senegambia into exporters of raw cotton and importers of finished cotton cloths. Wherever remnants of the industry survived, production was in the same technological mould of earlier centuries, because the narrow looms were never permitted to respond to the kind of demand which would have forced a breakthrough.

With regard to textiles as well as iron, European imports were presumably viewed by Africans as supplementary to their own production of those items so long as there was a sufficient market. One would expect that if the foreign commodity became a threat to local manufacture, the affected African would make a stand. An example to this effect was the salt industry of Sierra Leone, which was protected by local African edict excluding salt as an import in the eighteenth century. The reasoning was sound, because in the early nineteenth century, British ships sailing to Nigeria carried cheap salt – to the detriment of local production.

Yet the industry and skills which actually existed and were destroyed were probably of less consequence than the loss of the development opportunity. This cannot be calculated, but it must not be ignored.

The editors of the aforementioned volume on East and Central African trade illustrate the disruption of industry and skills in Congo/Angola through the intervention of the Portuguese and their mulatto and black servants (pombeiros) in African commerce. They recognize that the demands of the Atlantic trade ‘ended by subverting the whole commercial structure with its attendant local industries’ but in the same breath they contend that ‘the opening of the overseas market does not seem to have altered in any radical way the role which commerce played in the economy of the area’. Here again, the basic weakness is a failure to distinguish between an independent economy in evolution and one that is being transformed into a satellite. In the former, commercial activity is entirely the consequence of the level of the development of the productive forces, whereas in the latter it is mainly a reflection of external needs. For slaving regions like Congo/Angola in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it means that the role of commercial activity was no longer simply the distribution of local products, nor was it the export of those products, nor was it the export compatible with the old. That is what cut off the possibility of evolution along previous lines, even though the worst effects were deferred for a considerable period until Europe itself was powerful enough to take complete control through such means as the sending of commodities to replace those that had formerly been locally made.

Any trade in Africa which was an extension of European production was largely irrelevant to the technological advance within Africa. When Britain was the world’s leading economic power, it used to be referred to as a nation of shopkeepers. Most of the goods in their ships were produced by themselves. Africans from Senegal to the Cunene and from the Limpopo to the Tana busied themselves selling godos that they had not produced. They were agents for distributing European imports and for organizing the export of a few staples which were not in demand within the continent. The Afro-Portuguese middlemen of Upper Guinea, the Akan market women, the Aro traders of the Bight of Biafra, the pombeiros of Angola, the Yao traders of Mozambique, the Swahili and Nyamwezi of East Africa were not performing a function which is essentially the same as that being carried out today by members of the disproportionality large service sector. Their contribution to technological development was nil because they were on the fringes of production.

Commerce with Europe was not propitious to independent technological invention on the African side, nor did it create any consistent demand for the import of European technology, except for firearms. Europeans responded to that with the cheapest of muskets. What they deliberately ignored were the exceptional African requests that Europe should place certain skills and techniques at the disposal of Africa. This was an element in the Kongo situation, already alluded to. When Agadja Trudo sought to stop the slave trade, he also made an appeal to European craftsmen, and he sent an ambassador to London for that purpose. One European who stayed at the court of Dahomey in the late 1720s told his countrymen that ‘if any tailor, carpenter, smith or any other sort of white man that is free be willing to come here, he will find very good encouragement.’

At about the same time that Agadja Trudo was seeking new skills from Europe, the Asantehene, Opuku Ware (1720–50), was also thinking along those lines. He asked Europeans to set up factories and distilleries in Ashtai country and got no response. Those requests were coming from the areas of Africa that were sufficiently developed to have been able to incorporate new production techniques without any great dysfunctions. This was also true of Ethiopia. A Portuguese embassy reached the Ethiopian court in 1520. Having examined Portuguese swords, muskets, clothes, books and other objects, the Emperor Lebna Dengel felt the need to introduce European technical knowledge into Ethiopia. Correspondence exists between Emperor and European dignitaries such as Diego de Albuquerque (Portuguese Viceroy in India), Kings Manuel I and John III of Portugal, and Pope Leo X, in which requests were made for European assistance to Ethiopian industry. Until late in the nineteenth century, Ethiopian petitions to that effect were being repeated with scant success.

One of the most profound facets of the cultural arrogance of European colonialists in Africa was their boastfulness about technological accomplishments and their contemptuous attitude towards what they considered as African non-achievements in that sphere. ‘They (Africans) had no plough, no wheel, and no means of transportation except human head porterage and dugout canoes on rivers and lakes. These people had built nothing, nothing of any kind in material more durable than mud, poles, and hatch!’ The above words of a British colonial governor are relatively mild specimens of the technological superiority syndrome. Such statements sprung from and strengthened the racist assumption that African people were incapable of the discovery and application of scientific laws. Yet, the evidence suggests that it was the connection between Europe and Africa which aided the technological maturation of the former, while inducing a period of technological marking time and even regression in Africa. Furthermore, the issue of inventiveness is subordinate to the diffusion of techniques. Europeans did not invent the wheel – it spread from China. Both because of the structure of international trade and because of the conscious decisions of European states, Africa was robbed of the opportunity to benefit from the scientific heritage of man.

In the centuries before colonial rule, Europe’s scientific and technical capacity increased by progressions, while Africa appeared to have been almost static. What was a slight edge when the Portuguese rounded Cape Bojador in 1444 was a huge gap by the time that European robber statesmen sat down at Berlin 440 years later.

The growing technological gap between Western Europe and Africa was consistent with the trend of capitalism to polarize wealth and power on the one hand, and poverty and dependence on the other. In a present imperialist epoch, super-profits from the dependencies have to some extent improved the standards of living of the metropolitan workers but in the earlier period internal exploitation strengthened external exploitation, and vice versa. At the national level within Western Europe, the unevenness of development had already been noted. This was sharply in evidence by the nineteenth century, with areas such as Portugal, Spain and Ireland playing colonial roles with respect to Britain, France and Germany. Inside of national economies, the polarization also expressed itself in the elimination of small producers and the rise of monopolies. The monopolies, therefore, were at the pinnacle of a system that knew nothing but profit-making and domination as its guiding principles. The monopolies set the tone for international political economy in the late nineteenth century. They intervened directly in Central and Eastern Europe through massive investments; and on a slightly smaller scale Western European monopolies sought financial and economic opportunities in Asia and Latin America. They were joined in this imperialist partition of the world by North American capital – the US having been transformed from an outpost of Europe into one of the command centres of capitalism.

Africa by then was somewhat in the doldrums as far as Europe was concerned. Its great period accumulating primary capital for European development was over. Nevertheless, Europe still had a place for Africa within the new imperialist scheme of things. A few areas of the continent became crucial for European investment: namely, Algeria, Egypt, South Africa and Congo. Elsewhere, smaller European entrepreneurs were permitted to operate, although ultimately they too were tied to the big banking and industrial concerns which controlled the Western European economy, and they were under the umbrella of nation states that bargained consciously and unconsciously as agents of monopoly capital. Thus, the clash of Anglo-French financial interests in Egypt and the potential for investment in Congo were keys which opened the doors to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ – that is, to the transformation of the continent into political colonies to protect economic spheres.

Apart from the Suez Canal and the South African and Congolese mines, the investment in the African continent in the late nineteenth century and subsequently was primarily to facilitate the production of agricultural staples to be utilized by the new industries of Europe. The expansion of soap-making, the rise of a wider market for cooking fats, and the need for lubricants in railway and engineering works led to the exploitation of the palm oil resources of West Africa; while the German machine industry could produce plants for crushing palm-kernels to provide stock-feed for capitalist agriculture. The extension of demand for cooking oils and fats also affected groundnuts – the opportunity being exploited by the financiers and industrialists of Marseilles. The Lancashire cotton industry, after its long partnership with the American slave South, was in the late nineteenth century anxious to promote the growing of cotton in Egypt and the Sudan and in East and West Africa. The invention of the pneumatic tube, the arrival of the motorcar, and the increase in the rubber-wheeled transport of all sorts taxed the rubber-producing capacities of the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Brazil and Africa. Such examples could be multiplied. They all demonstrate that Europe’s needs by the late nineteenth century were themselves a product of the immense quickening of economic life over the previous four centuries, and one of the factors in that quickening was the unequal association with Africa.

Equally significant is the fact that Europe derived the power to exploit Africa in new ways. Trade in slaves, ivory and gold was conducted from the coasts. There, European ships could dominate the scene, and, when necessary, forts could be built. Before the nineteenth century, Europe was incapable of penetrating the African continent, because the balance of force at their disposal was inadequate. But the same technological changes which created the need to penetrate Africa, also created the power to conquer Africa. The firearms of the imperialist epoch marked a qualitative leap forward. Breech-loading rifles and machine guns were a far cry from the smooth-bore muzzle loaders and flintlocks of the previous era. It is no wonder that Europeans had no hesitation in selling Africans antediluvian models of firearms. Hillaire Belloc spoke on behalf of his fellow Europeans when he said that ‘what matters is that we have the Maxim [machine gun] and they have not.’

Curiously, Europeans often derived the moral justification for imperialism and colonialism from features of the international trade as conducted up to the eve of colonial rule in Africa. The British were the major exponents of the view that the desire to colonize was largely based on their good intentions in wanting to put up a stop to the slave trade. True enough, they were by then as opposed to the slave trade as they were once in favour of it. Technological changes had dialectically transformed the seventeenth century necessity for slaves into the nineteenth century necessity to clear the remnants of slaving from Africa so as to organize the local exploitation of land and labour. Leopold in the Congo also used the anti-slavery pretext to introduce into Congo itself forced labour and ‘slavery-like practices’; while at a deeper level all Europeans had derived notions of racial and cultural superiority between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries so that even the Portuguese presumed that they were historically destined to ‘civilize the natives’.

Africans fought alien political rule and had to be subdued by superior force. But a sizable minority did not insist that their trade connections with Europe should remain unbroken, for that was a measure of the extent to which they were already dependent on Europe. The most dramatic illustration of that dependence was the tenacity with which some Africans fought the termination of slave trading. For most European capitalist states, the enslavement of Africans had served its purpose by the middle of the nineteenth century, but for those Africans who dealt in captives the abrupt termination of the trade at any given point was a crisis of the greatest magnitude. In many areas, major social changes had taken place to gear the region to the service of the slave-trade – one of the most significant being the rise of ‘domestic slavery’ and various forms of class and caste subjugation. African rulers and traders who found their social existence threatened by the earliest legal edicts such as Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 found ways of making contact with Europeans who still wanted salves. Where other commodities were suggested, tremendous effort went into organizing those alternatives: ivory, rubber, palm oil, groundnuts, cotton, and so on.

The transition to forms of production that used African labour inside Africa resulted in the rise of economic and social institutions that ensured the partition of a large number of Africans in the money economy, and also ensured that the value created would be siphoned off to capitalist Europe. That gave rise to the particular forms of structural dependence which we know today – visibly seen in the bank branches, the import/export agencies, the manufacturing subsidiaries, the mining companies, the pattern of road and railway networks, and so on. Needless to say, it is the intensive study of the colonial period which will answer most of the questions about underdevelopment as we know it today, but the extent to which the situation was being set up for centuries before is often underestimated. Anthropologists were the worst offenders in this regard, with their ahistorical prediction for describing everything that they found in colonial Africa as ‘traditional’. But historians are also guilty of making a distinction between colonial and ‘pre-colonial’ Africa, in such a way as to cloud the fact that there was continuity from one phase to the other.

The notion that the first four centuries of Afro-European trade represent the roots of African underdevelopment is doubly attractive because there was an actual carry-over of some of the mechanisms that connect the two spheres of metropole and dependency. At the metropolitan end, there were the insurance companies and the shipping companies; while in Africa itself there had arisen certain social formations that were immediately available to operate within the colonial enclave economies from the 1880s onwards. Those are the African traders already mentioned as the forerunners of the modern service sector. Some were highly placed within African society; many were new men of previously low status; while many others were literally products of foreign trades, being the children of Europeans and Arabs. The mulatto element was very pronounced in Western Africa, and it continued to be prominent in the early colonial period and for much later. In what was called the French Sudan, to take one specific example, all economic activity spread inland from the four communes on the Senegalese coast, inhabited by blacks and mulattoes having long connections with Atlantic trade. So long as it is not based on settlement, a colonial system requires compradors. Throughout most of Africa, those compradors at the start of the colonial period were already performing that function in the dependent trade economy.

Besides, the Africans conducting trade on behalf of Europeans were inevitably influenced by European thought and values. The quest for European education did not begin in colonial Africa. It started when coastal rulers and traders recognized the need to penetrate more deeply into the way of life of the white men who came from across the sea. The mulatto sons of white traders and the sons of African rulers were the ones who went furthest along this line. At one level, it was strictly functional. The Sierra Leone chief in the eighteenth century explained that he wished ‘to learn book to be rogue as good as white man’. At another level, it meant imbibing those values which led to further African subjugation. The Rev. Thomas Thompson was the first European educator on the ‘Gold Coast’, and he wrote in 1772 a pamphlet entitled The African Trade for Negro Slaves Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion. The returned Africans who played such a crucial role in Sierra Leone and throughout West Africa in the period of the establishment of colonial rule were also in varying degrees products of Western culture and education – strikingly embodying potentialities of both enlightenment and mental confusion springing from deculturalization. Unfortunately, the latter trend was no more operative, and with the coming of colonial rule they became conscious and naive agents of foreign domination. The cultural nexus, therefore, provides further reason for seeking the roots of African underdevelopment and dependence in the early centuries of Afro-European trade.

Labour as a Conceptual Framework for Pan-African Studies

Speech at the Institute of the Black World, 1970

At the most fundamental level, the pan-African historian has to be engaged in the study of either the African continent or the African peoples abroad. It is not at all necessary that he has to be concerned with the links between the two. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways in which the connection can be and has been approached. The two most outstanding would seem to be (a) the choice of a subject that in itself spans Africa and Africans in the New World, such as the slave trade and the pan-African movement; and (b) the search for the African roots of particular New World cultural phenomena, notably religion and music. The proposed use of ‘Labour’ as a conceptual framework for pan-African studies is in addition to and not a replacement of the already established modes of approach.

The ways in which people organize their labour and the tools with which they work provide an entree to the study of all history from the time that early man was capable of fashioning a crude pebble tool in Eastern Africa. Furthermore, labour is the basis for other global approaches to human history which present their analysis in terms of class and other social formations. This universality has certain advantages, since African history must be evaluated not as a discrete and isolated entity, but as a part of human development. Useful conceptual approaches should therefore facilitate comparisons with other areas of the world. The contention here is that there have been certain peculiarities in the way that Africans have worked or have been forced to work, and those labour patterns over the past few centuries have largely determined the relations between Africans and non-Africans. It is within the present stage of world development that one finds the initial justification for supposing that the labour concept can be of major utility in pan-African history, because no overview of the world today can fail to deal with the contrasts between the rich and the poor nations – between what are essentially the white and non-white peoples of our planet – and underpinning those contrasts are differences in the type of labour performed and the technology of work. What appears in popular jargon as ‘the difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots”’ is virtually identical with what economists term ‘the international division of labour’.

Just as bourgeois intellectuals take the relationship between capital and labour as a ‘given’ and almost as a ‘natural’ factor, so they tend to treat the international division of labour in a static fashion, depriving it of its broad historical dimensions. As a result, it is argued that the international trade network (which is so disadvantageous to the underdeveloped countries) is based on different comparative cost advantages in production. It is said that the differences are attributable to different resource endowments, and that world trade enhances the specialization of production in all participating countries. This argument incorporates certain obvious absurdities. Which continent is richer than Africa in natural resources? And yet Africa is the least specialized, except in lines of production that require the least skill, are least remunerative and most vulnerable within the international capitalist system. African peoples everywhere, both within the continent and abroad fall within the category of the poor, the underdeveloped and the under-specialized. The explanation for this must be seen in historical perspective, and it involves a close look at the way Africans have worked prior and subsequent to involvement within Europe and the Americas.

There have indeed been a great deal of scattered studies on African labour, which are illuminating even though they are not necessarily informed by an awareness that similar tendencies were operating wherever Africans worked, and that they were slowly building into an international pattern. What follows below is a mere sketch of the possibilities that might be opened up by looking at the vista of the pan-African past with the labour concept consciously and consistently being utilized as the framework for enquiry. Five broad divisions suggest themselves by way of periodization:

1) Africa before the white man

2) Africans under white slave owners abroad

3) Africa in the epoch of the internationalization of trade (fifteenth to mid-nineteenth century)

4) Africans in post-slavery America

5) The foreign exploitation of African labour within the continent (late nineteenth century to the present).

1. Africa before the White Man

The number of issues to be considered in this category are numerous. Many are brought together within the debate about ‘feudalism’ in Africa which was once keenly conducted among historians of Africa, and has now virtually petered out as far as English-speaking scholars are concerned. However, within Francophone circles, there is still a stimulating discussion about whether there was a distinctive African mode of production. These issues involve comparisons not only with Europe but also with Asia. Since it was Europe which subsequently came into contact with Africa, it is well to understand the features in African and European society that determined their respective roles of subordination and domination. Naturally, the nature of African work reflected the environment and social interests, and African skills were developed in directions different from those of Europe. For example, West Africa in the fifteenth century boasted skills in brass casting and plastic arts, advanced techniques in canoe-building and river travel, and notions of agriculture relevant to tropical forests, savannahs and swamps. Europe, on the other hand, had superiority to some extent in arms technology and to an overwhelming extent in shipbuilding, navigation, administration and accounting.

Crudely speaking, it could be said that by the fifteenth century, European labour and technology was more advanced than its African counterpart and hence the European capacity to exploit Africa through trade. But there is scope for a more comprehensive analysis which would pinpoint the precise areas of social dissimilarities vis-à-vis Africa and Europe. It was over a period of time that the dissimilarities transformed themselves into advantages and disadvantages. For instance, Africa lacked a technological dynamic leading towards mass production. When mass production became the norm in Europe and a decisive factor in world trade, then African handicraft skill turned out to be a disadvantage. This did not come into effect until the nineteenth century, when Europe came to define what was developed and what was not, with their own technology and way of life held up as the standard of excellence, for ‘those who can define are the masters’ and vice versa. In order to start the reconstruction of pan-Africanism with a clean slate, it would be helpful to understand in what direction African labour had been developing at the time that we were our own masters.

2. Africans under White Slave-owners Abroad

An interesting sidelight of the slave trade which has never been brought into view is the extent to which many agricultural, mining and craft skills were transported to the New World. The early slave trade to the Spanish in the New World sought labour to engage in mining and cattle raising in the Greater Antilles and on the Spanish Main. Several of the peoples of the Senegambia who were victims of this phase of the slave trade were experienced as pastoralists and familiar with open-pit mining of gold and iron ore. Crops such as cotton, indigo and rice were produced in the American colonies and the Caribbean by Africans who were already growing those same crops in their own societies. It could hardly be a mere coincidence that rice production was successfully launched in the Brazilian state of Maranhão in the mid-eighteenth century just at the moment when African labour was being brought in from the traditional rice-farming sector of Upper Guinea.

Nevertheless, as has been argued by several scholars, the slave regime was hostile to the formation of new or sophisticated skills within the Western tradition. Slave labour was meant to be the cheapest possible, and it consequently had to be unskilled – carrying out the simplest tasks with the crudest of tools. Otherwise, there would have been specialization and division of labour far beyond the managerial capacity of the overseers and whips. Slavery never evolved beyond backward agriculture, so industrialization was out of the question. Meanwhile, in Europe the bourgeoisie were forced constantly to renovate their means of production, which meant enhancing the skills of their own white workers. The slave sojourn in the Americas, in the Indian Ocean and in Europe by Africans gave the first clear indication of the development of a broad gap in labour performance and technology between the white and the black races.

3. Africa in the Epoch of the Internationalization of Trade

Beginning with the Congo, Europeans showed themselves unwilling to accede to African requests for the importation of new techniques from Europe, although the Congolese requested masons, doctors, apothecaries and teachers. This refusal was repeated when Dahomey and Asante made similar requests in the eighteenth century. Europe was consciously blocking the spread of technology which is a central feature in the emergence of a more scientific mode of production, both in Europe and later in Japan. Africans received cheap consumer goods, while Europe secured gold for expanding its monetary economy and labour to create value and open up a whole brave new world in the Americas.

The impact of the slave trade on the African labouring population is obviously a topic that would of necessity be examined if one is interested in how African labour has fared historically. The only comment offered here is by way of rejection of a recent trend in studies assessing the slave trade. The approach begins by suggestion (with justification) that figures of slaves exported have been greatly exaggerated in the past. There follows the conclusion that the slave trade was therefore far less significant within African history than it was previously made out to have been. The conclusion is a non sequitur, since the impact must be measured for specific places at particular times. At the end of the seventeenth century, the ports of what is now Dahomey were loading 30,000 victims per year, and this was sustained for decades. The hinterland of the Bight of Biafra had its turn at the end of the eighteenth century; while a heavy flow came from Lake Nyasa in the decades before 1850. These are three of many instances, and to find a point of comparison in European history it would be necessary to look at what transpired during the Thirty Years War in Germany, and during the two World Wars in Europe. Besides, in Europe such wars contributed to the development of a particular type of society; so that after all the casualties and all the disruption, opportunities were provided for building bigger things by combining capital, science and skilled labour in ever more daring ways. What did the slave trade build in Africa? Nothing but a bridge leading to the next phase of exploitation where the present international division of labour came into its own.

4. Africans in Post-slavery America

Africans in the New World fared little better after slavery in terms of making their labour more scientific and appropriating more benefits to themselves. In the West Indies and the United States, many ex-slaves were frustrated in their attempts to set up an independent peasantry, and instead they became rural proletariat or quasi-serfs under the name of sharecroppers. There was diversification of black labour into trades and petty commerce, but nothing which could upset the basic pattern of American society where capital came either from whites at home or abroad and where the dominant technology was in the hands of the whites. For the vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that black labour within industrial America has virtually the same relation to whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to Europe and white America.

Since emancipation, the necessity of obtaining modern scientific labour skills was always appreciated, at different levels of perception, by sectors of the black population in the Americas. There was an awareness that real equality with whites would follow only after the acquisition of a technique that was equal to that of the oppressors, and this explains the tremendous drive towards education within the first generation of legally free black people. Of course, since whites retained political power, there were a thousand ways in which they could thwart the achievement of that objective, and those who broke through the education cordon simply made a contribution to established white technology. The few exceptions to this rule were individuals who sought to aid black political liberation and to build up a tradition of independent black activity on both sides of the Atlantic.

5. The Foreign Exploitation of African Labour within the Continent

Having tired of exploiting African labour abroad in the chattel form, the international capitalist system with Western Europe at its epicentre transferred its interest to African labour on the continent, setting up the political apparatus of colonialism at the same time that European scholars (including non-Marxists) attest to the tremendous role played by capital in imperialist expansion. In industrial society, the concept of capital automatically calls to mind that of labour; but it is worth noting that on the African continent in the colonialist era, labour was held back by the colonialists using several means in addition to the provision of fixed capital and wages. The colonial period is the best documented in African history both from the viewpoint of written records and the accessibility of orally preserved records. Studies to date on forced labour, labour migrations, peasant cash-crop production, the proletarianization of labour in South Africa, and so forth, have tremendous scope to be expanded to cover the whole continent. Those areas of history are so close to the present that their significance in influencing conditions in Africa as they are today is virtually self-evident. Within the field of contemporary history, it becomes even more vital to forge a mature social science approach which attempts to grapple with political economy in its historical perspective. Analytically, the labour factory has the advantage of being valid for several academic disciplines, and it can therefore be pivotal in arriving at an overview of the ‘state of the nation’ in Africa and in particular parts of the continent.

Conclusion

By re-emphasizing that the above is a mere outline of possibilities, certain criticisms concerning omissions can be avoided. However, there is one particular limitation that is perhaps inherent in the approach: namely that it tends to treat African history using external and largely European frames of reference. For instance, ‘Africa before the white man’ might suggest that the coming of the whites at a particular point in time marked an entirely new phase in the continent’s history. Needless to say, areas of Africa have continued with their own dynamic virtually up to the present and one has to be careful in distinguishing where the European presence was merely one factor among many and where it was the sole or dominant factor. Besides that, there is the danger attendant upon any interpretation based on isolating one variable – the conclusions could be lopsided if a great deal of attention is not paid to the interrelations between that variable and the numerous others which are always involved in any historical reconstruction.

Occasionally, some historians deny that the writing of history is an exercise in contemporary politics. Yet many among those would subscribe to the now-hackneyed adage that ‘every generation rewrites its own history according to its own lights’, which is another way of saying that the base of operation is always the contemporary socio-political scene. In any event, pan-African historians have largely taken it upon themselves to make it explicitly clear that history and the writing of history must be used as a means of liberation of our people. This does not necessarily mean that the historian qua historian is in the front line of the struggle, or that he has ready solutions, but at least he should be called upon to investigate areas relevant to an understanding of the present predicament of black peoples around the world. Looking at our labour history should provide some further insights into the differentiation in labour skills and technology which is now so characteristic of black/white relations, and it has the added advantage of underscoring the sameness of historical experience of a people scattered in different parts of the world.

George Jackson:
Black Revolutionary

Published in Maji Maji, 1971

To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in America’s toughest jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was Black, and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that Blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George Jackson was political prisoner and a Black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.

Once it is made known that George Jackson was a Black revolutionary in the white man’s jails, at least one point is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this prison, Black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin prison authorities who are responsible to America’s chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jackson’s life and death.

When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was 29 years of age and had spent the last 15 [edited: 11] years behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen. He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic working class.

Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jackson’s survival for so many years in vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal achievements, and in addition they offer an interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the Black masses in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.

Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labour. For the African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he laboured to produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the slogan the right to work. Masses of Black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.

The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The 30-odd million Black people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.

Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February 27th this year, Black and Brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilisation of the nonwhite prisoners was resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side of the Nazis, Afro, and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the side of the Blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.

The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry, essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.

Secondly, it is solidifying the Black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois Blacks also feel threatened by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings from the street forces of the Black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.

Thirdly, the courage of Black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jackson’s murder by placing a few bombs in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the Black prisoners and the Black Panther Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed. The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the established capitalist press has come out with exposes of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of Black prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.

Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of Black prisoners and Blacks in America as a whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.

For more than a decade now, peoples liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression. George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.

International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three – many Vietnams. It has long been recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labour in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the Black struggle is internationally significant because it unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other Blacks now behind prison bars in the U.S.A.

The British Colonialist School of African Historiography and the Question of African Independence

Seminar delivered in 1971

Views on African independence can be divided into three major categories, as follows:

The colonial rulers, out of goodwill, granted independence, for which Africans had previously been given the necessary training.

The African people, through mass nationalist parties, wrested political independence from the colonizers through struggle.

With malice and deep strategy, the colonial powers themselves promoted the handover of the trappings of sovereignty, so that African independence meant false decolonization.

In terms of intrinsic merit, the second and third categories above are of much greater importance than the first, because they reveal more about the historic processes which they set out to explain and they contribute more to an understanding of ‘the present as history’. One embarks on a critique of the colonial-goodwill training school mainly because the view is widespread and still in the ascendant in certain quarters. Besides, chronologically speaking, it was the earliest view; and the others cannot be fully comprehended without contemplating their relationship to the colonialist position.

Two principal protagonists have been selected here to represent British colonial writing on this subject: namely, Sir Alan Burns and Lady Margery Perham. In the opening sentence of his book, Colonial Civil Servant, Sir Alan Burns announced, ‘I was practically born into the Colonial Civil Service. My grandfather and my father were both members of that Service.’ As a former governor of Gold Coast and Nigeria, and as a high-ranking official in the Colonial Office itself, Sir Alan Burns is an unimpeachable spokesman for British colonialism.

Lady Margery Perham is well known as a friend of the Colonial Office. She was for many years the most active ‘Africanist’ at Oxford, offering courses to Colonial Office civil servants, as well as training the present generation of colonist-minded fellows at Oxford who write on African history.

Independence and nationalism came to Africa as European imports, so they tell us. African peoples previously lacked all common elements of nationalism, except common territory; and the requisite ingredients were provided by the presence of the colonizing powers. According to Margery Perham, African nations now owe to Europe the form of their existence as nation states. In effect, the argument suggests that both formal and informal education given by the British brought to Africa the ideas of freedom and democracy and the conception of the nation state. Margery Perham notes that schools in British colonies taught ‘the assertion of liberties from Magna Carta to the Reform Act of 1832 and beyond’.

Nationalism is a sense of common identity that arises as human groups seek to resolve the basic contradiction between man and nature. It is a definition of the in-group, as against all competitors in the struggle for scarce resources. Nation states grew up in Europe, Asia and Africa. What was Ethiopia other than a nation state? And what about Egypt long before colonial rule? Several African states destroyed by colonialism were as large as and often larger than the succeeding territories arbitrarily defined by Europeans. Even if, for the sake of argument, one were to deny that states like those of the Zulu, the Baganda, the Asante and the Mandinga under Samori Touré were not nations, it would be impossible to deny that they were ‘nationalities’ at an advanced stage of evolution towards nationhood per se. They were at least comparable to Ireland and Ukraine in the nineteenth century; and they had more people sharing a common culture than many microstates in Europe, Africa and Latin America at the present time.

What European colonialism provided was a new context for nationalism in Africa, after having destroyed the old. The boundaries drawn at Berlin became in most instances the borders of the new African nations of our time, because reaction against colonial administrations dictated the form of African nationalism. There is a vast difference between form and substance.

Another extravagant assertion of the colonial-goodwill-training school is that Africans were taught ‘freedom’, or (more modestly) ‘the democratic freedoms’. Sir Alan Burns states categorically that ‘the Sudan, under Anglo-Egyptian condominium, owes everything – including independence – to British tutelage.’ Do the concepts of freedom and independence really involve tuition and learning? It has aptly been pointed out that throughout history, there is no evidence of any individuals or groups being against the idea of freedom, though there are countless numbers who have been against the freedom of others. Claiming freedom on behalf of the people of Tanganyika at the United Nations in 1956, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere spoke of freedom in terms of ‘a natural call, a call of the spirit, ringing in the hearts of all men, and of all times, educated or uneducated, to rebel against foreign domination’. He was then making a reference to the great Haji Maji wars by the people of southern Tanganyika against the Germans; and the thesis can be amply illustrated by the wide-ranging African resistance to the imposition of colonial rule in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.

With respect to ‘democratic freedom’, one can say that the issue is much narrower than that of relaxing to ‘freedom’. Liberal or bourgeois democratic freedoms are a specific set of civil rights which emerged at a particular period in the history of capitalist Europe. Leaving aside the question of how far those rights were implemented in practice in Europe itself, it is certainly true that African leaders articulated African demands for freedom in the terminology of bourgeois democracy. Here again, what is at issue is the form of the demands. And, even at that superficial level, one must be careful to notice the sleight of hand by which the dialectical opposite of a particular position is presented as conscious policy. The British taught those who emerged as nationalist leaders with the purpose of facilitating exploitation, not so that they would advance the cause of African freedom. British colonialism in Africa produced Nkrumah, Kaunda and even Banda (of anti-federation fame) in spite of and not because of British colonialist intentions.

At one point in her analysis of African and Indian nationalism, Margery Perham comments on the ideas of nationalist leaders as follows: ‘Like other weapons turned against the West, they have been purloined from the West. And the ideal of democratic freedom and an almost indefinable sense of moral obligation towards the weak, have been learned very largely from Britain herself.’

That statement is redolent with bourgeois and colonialist assumptions, confusion and deceit. In the first place, the bourgeois notion of private property is extended to political and moral standards and the ideal of democracy. They have been taken out of patents for those aspects of the universal striving of man, and the Africans have come by them only through theft – that is, ‘purloined’. But, in the very next breath, the Lady says that the ideas were ‘learned’, thereby reintroducing the duality of teaching/learning and the implication that it was a conscious handing over on Britain’s part.

Indirect rule is a topic much favoured by British colonialist historians.

Sir Alan Burns calls indirect rule ‘local government’ and claims that ‘indirect rule is an excellent school in which the difficult art of self-government can be learned’. Whatever indirect rule was, it was not training in self-government, because power and responsibility was always in the hands of the colonizers. Indeed, it marked the termination of the exercise of political power by the African people or by strata of the African population on behalf of others. In its northern Nigerian form and other variations, indirect rule was a tool of convenience for governing Africa cheaply and with the minimum of effort. It is quite incredible that it should be interpreted as one of Britain’s gifts of backward Africa, and as offering the training that would lead to independence.

It might appear more plausible to suggest that the legislatures which were set up in the colonies offered training for independence. Legislative councils allowed for a few nominated Africans, and later on for a few elected African representatives. Undoubtedly, the few learned about Westminster procedure and about when bills went into committee, when they had their second reading, and so on. But, that is hardly enough grounds for concluding that the legislative councils were the ‘educational prototype of centralized parliamentary government’, to use the words of Margery Perham. Up until the time that internal self-government was constitutionally made possible, all other legislative experiments wore variations on the theme of metropolitan domination via the governor of the colony. The basic question is whether Africans were participating in the exercise of power and responsibility, to which the answer is ‘no’.

All colonial constitutions stressed the ‘reserve’, ‘paramount’ or ‘overriding’ powers of the governor, thus guaranteeing that African members would be frustrated, in the few instances where honest and courageous African nationalists were permitted to enter.

In its extreme form, the colonial-goodwill-training thesis amounts to the assertion that colonialism from the outset was consciously liquidating itself. Sir Alan Burns implies this by observing that in the very process of colonizing Africa, Britain was ‘bringing under its protection backward peoples and leading them towards civilisation’. With reference to Nigeria, he wrote that ‘we are in Nigeria merely as trustees for the people, and it is our business to train them as rapidly as possible for self-government.’

A writer who claims that British education in the colonies was education for freedom and that indirect rule was practice in the art of self-government, should also maintain that Britain was planning decolonization virtually from the word ‘go’. In that regard, Burns maintains consistency, at the price of holding the laughable view that the British conquered only so as to plan decolonization. Margery Perham is more cautious and less consistent. When it comes to timing the moment when imperial Britain decided on the policy on self-government as a possibility, she moves much closer to the end of the colonial period.

If admittance of Africans to the legislative councils was part of the preparation for self-government and independence, then the timing of Britain’s goodwill-training programme should at least date from the 1920s. However, Perham concedes that colonial administration hardly got under way properly until the 1930s, and it was not until after the Second World War that Britain began to timetable independence. ‘The war had subtly changed Britain’s attitude, though the authorities hardly knew it until faced with the decision’, she writes. So now we know that there was a change post-1944, that there could not therefore have been a previous policy to contemplate independence, and that even after 1944 this change does not become effective until the colonial authorities were faced by ‘the decision’: namely, what to do with the great African and Asian humanity which said ‘enough’ to colonial overlordship.

In parts of her work, Perham unreservedly admits that ‘anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism represents the latest phase in the reaction of the rest of the world against the long domination of the West.’ She concedes the basic desire for freedom on the part of all peoples, and actually uses the term ‘regaining of independence’ with reference to the movement for African sovereignty in the late fifties. A reading of several texts from this British colonial historiographical school shows the same ambivalence and inconsistency. On the one hand, there are the vague and far-reaching claims to British uniqueness in preparing Africans for independence or self-government from a very early date. On the other hand, when more specific statements are made, they never mention a date earlier than the post-war epoch as the point when conscious policy came into being; and (on a lower key) they admit that the initiative for change came from the colonized peoples.

Sir Arthur Creech-Jones, as secretary of state for the colonies in 1948, put forward the first public policy statement to the effect that the central purpose of British colonial policy was to guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth. That statement is often cited by the British colonialist school of historiography under discussion, and Perham places considerable emphasis on the role of the Labour Party in that respect. With the experience of India, Ceylon and Burma behind them, British policymakers had apparently anticipated the goal of eventual African self-government within the Commonwealth and the rapid and full constitutional independence which actually came to Africa. It is the contention here that the nature and degree of independence and the timing of that eventually as conceived by some British policymakers in 1948 were all significantly different from what did occur in the years to follow.

The most dramatic testimony that Africans rather than the British were the ones who set the main patterns of constitutional change in the 1960s is provided by the remarks of colonial officials right up to the eve of those changes – remarks showing blissful unawareness that the end of colonialism was in sight. Burns addressed a seminar of colonial officials at Oxford in 1947, in the capacity of governor of the Gold Coast. He began as follows:

I have been asked to speak to you this morning on the future of the Colonial Service as I think it must develop if it is to meet the growing demands that will be made on it during the next twenty or thirty years … There have even been suggestions that our Empire is coming to an end, that our colonies are now anxious and ready to stand by themselves, and there will shortly be no more need for a Colonial Civil Service. I don’t believe it.

Virtually all the statements that Britain was actively contemplating granting African self-government from the latter part of the 1940s are made with hindsight by the writer faced with the reality of independent Ghana and other comparable changes. For instance, Sir Charles Jeffries explained in 1960 that ‘the writing was on the wall’ in the Gold Coast in 1947, but he confessed that he did not see it, and he justified his own lack of perception as being part of a general phenomenon. He notes that Martin Wight, an ‘expert’ on colonial constitutions, had written in 1947 that the Gold Coast Constitution of 1946 would last for decades! So, while Wight, Jeffries, Burns and Creech-Jones were contemplating self-government perhaps at the end of this century, the people of the Gold Coast came out on the streets in 1948 and upset those plans. The same picture can be obtained for other colonial territories which later played very dynamic roles in the independence struggle. Sir Hugh Foot said of Nigeria: ‘In 1945 many people thought that the most Nigeria could hope for was a continuation of paternal administration, a few decades of marking time, at most a slow and steady development of the policy of indirect rule.’

With hardly any exceptions, the British colonial historians would join Perham in acknowledging that the nationalist movements developed with ‘unexpected speed and power’. This is explained away by the colonial-goodwill training school as something that did not contradict the substance of British plans but was ‘merely a matter of timing’. However, that is a very frail rationalization, because the rate of change was so drastically affected by the efforts of the colonized that in effect the guide was being led. It would be naive and anti-historical to overlook the role of the colonizers in the last years of colonialism.

Governors like Arden-Clarke, Renison, Turnbull and Hugh Foot presided over the dissolution of the British Empire with unquestioned skill; but it is certainly questionable whether they led or guided towards independence, as distinct from compromising with a reality that had outrun expectations.

A great deal usually hinges on the example of the rise of Ghana out of this Gold Coast colony. It is there that one can pinpoint the earliest plans and reactions of British colonialism faced with African nationalism. Events in Ghana up to 1957 cannot be measured in exactly the same way as events leading to the independence of Lesotho in 1966 or even to that of Uganda in 1962 or Sierra Leone in 1961, because the later stages of the process gave the colonizers much more time to readjust and resume the initiative. The detailed history of the Gold Coast from 1947 to 1957 is one of British back-peddling on the specific issue of constitutional independence. It was rioting by working elements that led to the Coussey Commission; ‘Self-Government Now’ meant a great deal more than eventual self-government; and the leap from self-government to independence was also, from the British viewpoint, a major concession. The sequence of events is incompatible with the notion that the process reflected the central purpose of British colonial policy.

British colonialist historians consistently propose the most disinterested of motives as lying behind British colonialism in Africa. In their interpretations of British decolonization, they merely assert the factor of goodwill, and never contemplate the possibility of self-interest. Thus, Margery Perham writes:

Nowhere, except in the regions of white settlement, did Britain even attempt to refuse the demand once her government was convinced of its strength. The problem was essentially one of timing. With her stands of efficiency and her sense of obligation to minority groups, British governments wanted to see the transfer of power carried out by gradual and orderly stages.

A reconsideration of the supposedly philanthropic reasons for colonizing Africa would automatically weaken the credibility of this line of argument, and whatever little remains would disappear in the face of British manoeuvers during that period when Africans were pushing for independence. Why were so many African nationalism leaders jailed? What about the attempts to interfere with the character of the regimes that would rule the independent African states? Without going into the details, one can cite Zanzibar as a blatant example of the way in which the British tried to manipulate the granting of independence so as to frustrate the will of the African majority and leave local power in the hands of a trusted Arab elite. British colonialists withdrew only when faced with a challenge, they beat a strategic retreat in the light of their own interests, seeking to preserve as much as was possible. That was entirely natural, and is to be expected in any such political situation. It needs to be argued only because certain high priests have suggested otherwise.

British colonialist writers on the period of decolonization in Africa invariably refer to the notions of ‘mandate’, ‘trusteeship’, ‘welfare’ and ‘development’ as being integral to the purpose of colonial rule. Some of the actors in the colonizing drama had made such claims from the outset – notably, Livingston, in his emphasis on Christianity and commerce, and Lord Lugard, in his thesis on Dual Mandate. However, it was not until after the last war that policy statements consistently included the welfare of Africans as one of the motivations of colonial rule, coinciding with the establishment of Colonial Development and Welfare (C.D. & W.). Sir Alan Burns adds this concern of the British for African economic independence to the list of other noble motives. In 1957, he asserted that:

The avowed British Policy is today, as it has been for many decades, to lead all dependent territories up to self-government, and in the meantime to teach the peoples of the countries concerned the difficult art of governing themselves, and to improve the economic condition of each territory so that it may be able to face the future unaided.

The C.D. & W. fund is generally projected by writers of this school as Britain’s contribution to the socio-economic welfare of the colonies and to their economic self-sufficiency. But C.D. & W. loans were not intended to make the colonies more independent, nor did they accidentally achieve that end. The loans were meant to develop certain social services and infrastructure in the colonies, so as to maximize their potential within the imperial context. The French were doing the same with their fund, and so both operations were following the line of thought advanced most cogently by the colonial minister, Albert Sarrault, in 1914 – the policy of mise en valeur or economic maximization of the potentiality of the colonies in the interests of the metropoles. Britain and France made no bones about the fact that the colonies were required to bail the metropoles out of the desperate post-war economic situation. To a considerable extent, the colonies did serve that purpose. Discerning Africans saw the whole C.D. & W. scheme as a fraud, having nothing to do with African development and a great deal to do with the welfare of Europe; but, in any event, none of its British planners ever asserted more than the aim to develop both the colonies and British in terms of their continued association. Economic development for political independence was never raised as an issue.

Undoubtedly, no nationalist movements in Africa so far as advanced to constitution and juridical independence entirely through armed struggle – not even Algeria. Apart from Algeria and perhaps Kenya, it cannot be said that violence was the dominant element within any one colony. Yet, in spite of all that, it is misleading to characterize the independence movements as non-violent. The emphasis on non-violence overlooks the fact that the concept of violence in any operational sense includes also the threat of violence and the example of violence; and, within the colonialist camp, additional confusion is deliberately generated to obscure the fact that colonialism was violence in a form hardly less distilled than slavery.

Colonialism was violently imposed on Africa, and it was violently maintained. Land-grabbing was violence, forced labour was violence, tax collection was violence. Certain juridical fictions emanating from the colonizing power placed only the briefest of lion-clothes to cover the nakedness of violent colonial oppression. If the colonized exposed the legal fictions of ‘law and order’, then there was the Riot Act and the colonial police. If the local forces were inadequate, then a troop-carrying gunboat was forthcoming. In spite of all that, there was a pattern of violence in the colonies, stemming from worker and peasant actions such as strikes and boycotts. There were enough of those in the inter-war years and in the post-war epoch to make the colonialist extremely apprehensive.

Nationalists and anti-colonialists inside and outside the African continent naturally draw attention to the evidence of that African resistance against European exploitation which took the form of strikes and violent demonstrations. However, colonialist historians, and especially those with administrative backgrounds, were well aware of the same phenomena. Burns dedicated a chapter in his Colonial Civil Servant to ‘Wars and Riots’. He noted the seriousness of the Egba Rebellion in western Nigeria in 1918 and of the Aba women’s riots in eastern Nigeria in 1929. He admitted that the ‘Gold Coast has a bad reputation for wars and civil disturbances, some of which were against the alien government’. He was acting-governor of Nigeria in 1942 when the trade unions mobilized against the government; and he went on the air to broadcast a typical governor’s appeal for ‘reasonableness’ and ‘loyalty’ while promising that he must do his ‘duty’ if anyone dared to go on strike. The increasing intensity of such strikes and confrontations after the war must have necessarily entered into British calculations as to how long unadulterated colonialism could last.

The winning of constitutional independence in any given African territory has to be correlated with winning of independence everywhere else on the continent and in Asia, so as to determine to what extent the so-called peaceful handover of power was really peaceful and was due to the goodness of the colonizers, and to what extent it was an option forced on them by examples of violence in particular colonies and by the threat of violence implicit in any nationalist movement which had shaped the people into a single resolute force. It is, for example, palpably obvious that the French learned from defeats in Vietnam that they should quit the whole of Indochina ‘peacefully’, rather than perish at other Dien Bien-Phus. The French repeated their high-handed actions in Africa and found that the national war of liberation threatened to reduce the French 100-franc note to a piece of worthless paper, and had already bequeathed the National Assembly in Paris with a succession of jack-in-the-box premiers. There was clearly a connection with the unsuccessful French wars of repression in Algeria and the hate with which they tried to establish acceptable African governments in West Africa.

As for the British, Malaya haunted them in Asia and the example of Kenya gave them diarrhoea in Africa. True, they did suppress the Mau Mau land and freedom army, but at what cost! Imperialism is not imperialism if it costs more to suppress the exploited than the imperialists receive in surplus. The British knew that it was wise to proceed with African independence rather than court more Mau Mau. Even in far-off British Guiana, the popular movement of the 1950s could exert some leverage on the British by threatening them with Mau Mau.

India is often given as the classic example of non-violent transfer of power from the imperial power to the indigenous nationalist forces. But it should be remembered that India had a powerful current of mutinous soldiers and other political traditions opposed to the non-violence of Gandhi. The British retreated as much from the threat of millions of Indians lying peacefully on the roads and railways as from the possibility that they might get up and strike back, given the example of those nationalists who were attacking British life and property before and during the Second World War. Some insight into that situation and its relevance to Africa is provided by W.R. Crocker in his book Self-Government for the Colonies, written in 1949.

Crocker was a colonial official in Africa, and shared many of the general assumptions of his professional group. Yet, his emphasis is quite different from Burns’s, under whom Crocker worked for some time. His book was an attempt to explain to his countrymen the force of nationalism as he saw it in the colonies. The question that he posed was ‘suppress or appease?’, and he followed that up by asking whether suppression by the British stood any chance of success. His own answer was that:

The lesson from India is that nationalist agitation can be carried to such a length as to result in a breakdown of government, or what is so near to a breakdown that law and order and essential social measures can no longer be properly executed.

Crocker also made reference to the cost and difficulty of putting down the early armed African movements for independence in Algeria in the 1920s and in Madagascar in 1946, as well as the people’s war in Indochina. Besides, the international situation had changed, and he warned that Western Europe lacked the power and will to suppress. Therefore, it was essential to ‘appease’, and he explained:

By appease I mean that the existence and the reality of the nationalist movement must be taken very seriously and that efforts must be bent to controlling it, guiding it, and competing with it, up until the moment when power can be transferred with a reasonable prospect of inflicting no undue sufferings upon the docile majority, or up until the moment when the retain of power is no longer practicable.

Apart from the gratuitous solicitude for the welfare of the ‘docile’ colonized, the above statement really gets down to the nitty-gritty. Crocker goes into a few more details where he warns that to oppose the agitators is to make them more popular, and that to hold back too long in granting African demands for independence would be dangerous. In one sense, Crocker was a liberal among reactionaries; while in another sense, he was no more progressive – save that his line was a frank exposure of what the colonialists were doing, while others were trying to say that the hyena was only a goat. For what Margery Perham tries to hide under the rubric of ‘transfer of power’ is what he exposes in his definition of ‘appease’. He showed an awareness that constitutional independence in India and Burma had not weakened the ties between those territories and Britain. The problem was how and when to step down, so as to secure the best of the situation. As he explains it:

The conundrum of when to the transfer authority, and how to in any given territory, will require the highest political qualities … But English history is in many ways a history of political genius … If the British are true to their genius, the British colonial problem can be solved.

The limitations of this British colonialist school of historians are manifold. Most of them flow logically from the bourgeois worldview. There is no piece of this writing which is free of references to the Soviet Union and Communism. Explicitly and implicitly, there is the recognition that their interpretation of what happened in Africa is part of the struggle to determine whether capitalism or socialism shall triumph. Indeed, an interesting side-alley into which many of these writers divert is a discussion of the ‘colonial’ and ‘nationality’ question of the Soviet Union, with a view to demonstrating that Russian exploitation of non-Russians existed inside the Soviet Union, and with a view to warning Africans about the Soviet wolf.

Needless to say, the British colonialist school has a metropolitan and racial bias. It comes out most clearly in their references to pre-colonial Africa, but it is also present in their analysis of decolonization in a patronizing form. This is implicit in many statements already quoted in this discussion and is generally well enough known that the issue need not be flogged in this context.

In highlighting the dominant features of this type of scholarship, attention should be drawn to the fact that it springs from the British political ruling elite, who are bourgeois but more than just bourgeois. Throughout British history, there has been a unique interpretation of classes and class values at the level of the political elite. The English bourgeois partly pushed aside but partly absorbed the feudal nobility, whose deportment and norms were adopted. Writers who fall into the colonial-goodwill-training school were nearly all colonial civil servants at one time or another and were very much part of the political ruling class. One of the distinguishing marks of this scholarship is the use of the royal ‘we’ – clearly referring not even to the British people as a whole but to the policymakers. They scarcely bother to mention the economic exploitation of the colonies, which metropolitan rule was intended to protect; and one suspects that they were often ignorant of or indifferent to the economic reality of colonialism. Be that as it may, this school of interpretation is concerned above all to justify itself as a good ruling class – both in a practical and moral sense.

In the final analysis, the value of the work under discussion is virtually nil. Because of its narrow focus on constitutional decolonization, it completely fails to mention other forms of integration between the colonies and the metropole in the economic sphere. Because of its concentration on British activity, it tells us nothing about African participation and the African role. There are a few hints that they perceived the class fissures within the nationalist movements; and, whatever their class perspective, it would have been valuable to get the views of the British rulers on this matter. However, such issues are simply defined out of the picture.

On the specific issue of constitutional decolonization projected as British activity, the colonial-goodwill-training school tells us nothing about the pull and shove of the critical years when the question of African Independence was indeed a political game. British colonialist writers cannot say anything meaningful about the process because they have conspired beforehand to affirm that it was nothing but sweet reasonableness on the part of Britain. With that sort of approach the result is a ‘scholarship’ devoid of even the saving grace of ‘facts’ unearthed by bourgeois empiricism. It reveals nothing. At every turn, there is a bland expression about trusteeship, mandate, guidance, partnership, transfer – like soothing music for the milch-cows.

As indicated from the outset, the obligation to deal critically with the school of British colonialist historians is imposed by the wide vogue which it enjoys. It is probably still the majority position among European scholars in the metropole, and there is a significant neo-colonialist school whose work involves a revamping and refurbishing of the old interpretations, after jettisoning a few of the more objectionable and unsaleable points. Besides, a historical view is not the property of historians. It is the expression of class, national, racial and other presuppositions, and it returns to strengthen the said presuppositions. The vast majority of Englishmen will never give a thought to African history, but, whenever they react to an issue involving Africa or Africans, their judgement is shot through by the colonialist historical interpretation.

Supposedly in the new spirit of independence, African research historians have taken to compiling texts for schools, sometimes in collaboration with whites who are very much tied to the old colonial structures. Thus, Joseph Anane of Nigeria got together with Godfrey Brown to edit West Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and they handed over a chapter on ‘Colonial Rule in West Africa’ to W.E.F. Ward, a former educational officer on the staff of the British Colonial Office. Understandably, Ward spoke on behalf of his own country and class, and restarted the colonial-goodwill-training myth:

When I joined the British Colonial Service in 1924 the fashionable slogan was ‘trusteeship’: I was told that West Africa was not yet ready for self-government, but that it would be one day. Meanwhile Britain was in the position of a trustee, and I must look on my work as directed to helping Africa to take the government into its own hands … We were expected to work ourselves out of a job, though it cannot be claimed that all of us realised it, or that all of those who did not realise it approved of the idea.

The last sentence is a characteristic piece of double talk; while the ‘we’ simply means that the oppressor continues to write history for the oppressed.

In East Africa, the volume by Gideon Wese and Derek Wilson, East Africa Through a Thousand Years, is in some ways a counterpart of the Anane and Brown volume – Wese being a Kenyan and Wilson an English history master at a white settler-oriented Nairobi school. This time, however, it is just not inviting a particular British colonialist, but the advancement of a coherent colonialist view of decolonization, made more dangerous because it will infiltrate under the name of an African historian.

East Africa Through a Thousand Years completely accepts the frame of reference of British colonialist historians, whereby constitutional matters were the focus of the decolonization process. It presents to African school certificate pupils the notion that ‘the path to independence’ in Tanganyika began in 1945, when two African members were admitted to the legislative council. Wese and Wilson credit Burns and Perham when they assert that:

The major concern of the British government was that each new state should be ready for independence, i.e. that it should be a stable government, acceptable to its people, under wise and capable leadership.

Must another generation of African youth be asked to write and believe in such European fairy tales?

Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism

Published in African Review, 1972

This article attempts to identify Tanzanian Ujamaa with Scientific Socialism in certain ideological essentials. It is an exercise in theory, bearing in mind that historically the theory of socialism preceded the establishment of socialism as a system in any part of the globe. Scientific Socialism (or Marxism, if you like) is an explicit world-view which contemplates every conceivable phenomenon from protein to literature, in terms of a methodology applicable to nature and society. Therefore, the comparison with Tanzanian Ujamaa is not completely analogous, since the latter is neither explicit nor all-embracing. However, the same kind of reservation could probably be expressed for any ideological variant other than Scientific Socialism. One must, in most cases, seek ideology in human actions, combined to greater or lesser extent with statements of principle or policy. The Tanzanian political process has produced over the last decade several noteworthy declarations of principle and sufficient actions which give meaning to the said declarations. The work 'Ujamaa' has already been popularized in two contexts: firstly, as referring to the extended family of African communalism; secondly, with reference to the creation of agricultural collectives known as Ujamaa villages. The relation between the two is that the Ujamaa villages seek to recapture the principles of joint production, egalitarian distribution and the universal obligation to work which were found within African communalism. In the present discussion the world 'Ujamaa' incorporates both of these meanings, and includes also the implications of several policy documents and public plans. 

A necessary piece of ground-clearing must be performed by advancing the negative proposition that Tanzanian Ujamaa is not 'African Socialism'. Such a disclaimer may appear curious and even presumptuous in view of the fact that in 1962 Mwalimu Nyerere referred to Ujamaa as 'the basis of African Socialism'. But, there are several reasons for keeping the two concepts widely apart. When 'African Socialism' was in vogue early in the 1960s, it comprised a variety of interpretations raging from a wish to see a socialist society in Africa to a desire to maintain the status quo of neo-colonialism. Since then the term has come to be identified with its most consistent and least revolutionary ideologue, Leopold Senghor, and with the late Tom Mboya. As such, 'African Socialism' is generally taken to mean a set of relations which leave capitalism and imperialism unchallenged. It is therefore essential to disassociate the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist stance in Tanzania from a caption that has been pre-empted by non-revolutionary African leaders. Furthermore, when Ujamaa was presented as an option shortly after the independence of Tanganyika, it was (knowingly) defined as an abstract set of values without reference to the social forms necessary for their realization.¹³ Much has now been done in the way of policy decisions to indicate and build the relevant social structures, thereby further differentiating Ujamaa from its erstwhile counterparts of 'African Socialism' in so far as the latter never advanced from the ideal to the real. Above all, one must take note of the progressive evolution of Tanzanian theory and practice over the period of nearly a decade, as a positive response to national, African and international developments.¹⁴

Conversely, to associate Ujamaa with the category 'Scientific Socialism' seems to be flying in the face of assertions to the contrary by Tanzanian policy makers. Scientific Socialism is held to be synonymous with Marxism, Communism, and the like, which have been held at arm's length by Tanzanians who propound Ujamaa. The contradiction is more apparent than real. In part, it disappears when one take into account the above-mentioned factor of significant politico-ideological advance from Arusha to Mwongozo. In addition, and more decisively, the difference is largely based on a caricature of Scientific Socialism (Marxism), which proposes that socialism must come through proletarian revolution within an already developed capitalist state. Such a definition would automatically exclude Tanzanian Ujamaa, which looks toward the socialist organisation of peasants and seeks to revive and perpetuate the collective principle of production and the equalitarian nature of distribution which characterised communalism. As carried out both by some self-professed Marxists and by bourgeois analysts, the transformation of Marxism into a barren, dogmatic, mechanistic and uni-dimensional theory has understandably led many creative individuals to reject what purports to be Scientific Socialism. To re-open the issue, one must go back to first principles and rescue the essence of Scientific Socialism.

Socialism emerged as an ideology within the capitalist society. All of its exponents saw the viciousness of capitalism and agreed on the need for replacing the prevailing production for private profit with a system which met the needs of all. However, they were not agreed on either the precise content of socialist society or the means by which it was to be instituted. It is in these areas that the necessity arose for distinguishing between unrealistic socialist hopes and a more rigorous analysis which could claim to meet the canons of scientific method and which by its correctness guaranteed meaningful action for the realisation of socialism. For Marx, 'Scientific Socialism' is quite simply socialism that is scientific. 

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier and other pioneer socialists of the early 19th century were dubbed 'utopian' by Marx and Engels for a variety of reasons, notably because they failed to appreciate that human social development proceeded through certain stages and because their model socialist societies did not take cognisance of the reality of class struggle.¹⁵ On the other hand, the rubric 'Scientific Socialism' still attaches to the mode of perception which predicts the emergence of socialism as a produce of the dialectic movement of all previous history and as a consequence of the triumph of the working class. Utopian socialism or at least utopian elements in socialist thought have persisted and re-appeared from time to time. 'African Socialism' is utopian in its refusal to come to grips with the class relations in which Africans are enmeshed and in its romanticised ignorance of the stages of African historical development. It is the contention of the author, that in contrast, Tanzanian Ujamaa is correct in its perception of the principal motion of its own society. 

The assertion that 'there are no classes in Africa' is often used to justify capitalist investment in the continent and in recent times it has come under criticism from progressive African thinkers.¹⁶ Firstly, it must be noted that the international character of capitalist production in the era of imperialism has placed the propertied class in the metropoles while the greater portion of their working force resides in the colonial or semi-colonial areas. Secondly, the colonial sectors show varying degrees of stratification and class formation as a consequence of their integration in the international capitalist economy. Both of these features are recognized in the Tanzanian policy documents which elaborate on the theory of Ujamaa: TANU's Arusha Declaration and Mwalimu Nyerere's Socialism and Rural Development being the most relevant.

The Arusha Declaration had little to say about the development of socialism in the countryside beyond expressing the opinion that concern for the peasant farmer must be a priority. However, this document set the stage for the policy of constructing Ujamaa villages by expropriating the foreign capitalist class who until then were owners of the major means of production within Tanzania. It stated unequivocally that the major means of production are under the control and ownership of the peasants and the workers themselves through their Government and their Cooperatives. Nationalisation and the acquisition of part ownership of several companies were steps in the direction of severing the links between the local working classes and the international bourgeoisie. The Arusha Declaration also stated that socialism was incompatible with the presence of capitalist elements, in contrast with 'African Socialism' which has as one of its major tenets the advocacy of co-existence of private and public ownership.

Utopian socialists promoted models in which capitalists cooperated with their workers in the new society. They sometimes assigned a major initiatory role to the bankers. Senghor's proposal was to socialise agriculture, to establish public utilities as a mixed sector and to leave banks, commerce and industry to capitalist enterprise.¹⁷ The sum total of these arrangements would be 'African Socialism'. In so far as contemporary theory and practice of Ujamaa in Tanzania does allow for private enterprise, this is well understood to be transitional, an entirely different concept from that of the permanent co-existence of capitalist and supposedly socialist relations within the same society, and one that has been implemented in every socialist revolution from 1917 onwards.

Both feudalists and capitalists are cited by the Arusha Declaration as enemies of socialism. The former had their place in the scheme of things in Africa before the coming of the Europeans, while the latter came into being as part of the process by which metropolitan capitalist society was remodelling colonial society (wittingly and unwittingly) along lines of stratification and exploitation. The Indian businessmen in East Africa were the closest representation of a locally resident bourgeoisie, and it is no accident that they were the most affected by the measures of expropriation behind the nationalisation of foreign-owned property, i.e. by the Acquisition of Buildings Act, 1971. Thus, both ideological statements and government policy pinpointed that within Tanzania there were capitalists and feudalists standing in opposition to the workers and peasants. The Arusha Declaration does, in the same breath, make a rather unsatisfactory distinction between urban and rural Tanzania as representing exploiters and exploited, respectively.¹⁸ It is in Socialism and Rural Development that stratification in the countryside is also acknowledged and a realistic assessment is made of African communal society, as it was and as it is becoming.

Having extolled the virtues of 'traditional' African living in Africa, Socialism and Rural Development proceeds to identify both its inadequacies and the fact that communalism as a way of life and a value system has been constantly eroded under the pressure of African involvement in capitalism. Because of cash-crop farming in particular 'the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds, have often been abandoned'. In place of the old Ujamaa patterns, there was a growing gap between those who owned and hired labour and the landless who offered their labour for hire in order to survive. In this context, Mwalimu Nyerere predicted that, unchecked, such a development raised the spectre of most of the peasantry becoming a 'rural proletariat' working for the minority landed class.¹⁹ This observation attests to the fact that the theory underlying the modern version of Tanzanian Ujamaa identifies contradictory forces within the nation as well as the direction for change that must result from the interplay of such forces. Marx and Engels attacked 'Proudhonism' because, among other things, Proudhon saw socialism as being based on independent petty producers of the artisan class.²⁰ But changes in technology by the mid-19th century had convincingly demonstrated that the artisans were doomed to extinction by machine production and the universalization of capitalist relations. Of course, the peasant is also a petty producer and has actually been eliminated in large parts of Western Europe. The question as to whether there is a possibility of using peasant production as the basis for a socialist state has been raised in many debates, and its resolution depends upon the local and international political economy of the time. Before tackling this issue in the specific context of Tanzania, it is enlightening to pursue briefly the debate on 'Peasant Socialism' as it was conducted in the rather similar context of late 19th century Russia.

Like contemporary Tanzania, 19th century Russia was an exploited semi-colonial sector of the international imperialist economy. Unlike Tanzania, Russia had experienced fully matured feudal relations and was becoming capitalist and industrialized from its own internal dynamic, quite apart from the intrusion of Western European capitalism. Nevertheless, there had persisted under feudalism and embryo capitalism certain communal forms of organisation among the peasantry - namely, the obshchina or mir (village communes) and artel (artisans' cooperatives). Russians of a socialist or anti-capitalist bias contemplated a socialist society that was qualitatively different from that envisaged by their counterparts in industrialized Western Europe. They argued that Russia could avoid the maturing of capitalist relations within its national boundaries and move directly to a brand of socialism where the dominant social class was not the industrial proletariat but rural peasants, living a life that was not far removed from the communalism that preceded enserfment and capitalism.²¹ Obviously, there is a great deal in Tanzanian Ujamaa that is analogous to the pre-occupations of the Russians in question, who are known to posterity as Populists.

In the 1870s and early 1880s, late in their veteran careers, Marx and Engels were asked to comment on the possibility of Russia avoiding capitalism. In a letter to K. Kablukova, a Populist, Engels viewed favourably the opportunity presented in Russia 'to be able to appeal to the people's thousand year old natural urge to associate, before this urge is wholly extinguished' (emphasis supplied). Marx expressed the opinion that the rural community was the mainspring of Russia's social regeneration, but that in order that it might function as such, one would first have to eliminate the deleterious influences which then assailed it from every quarter.²² The vital condition for the successful building of socialism in Russia on the old communal base was speed to forestall further inroads on surviving collectiveness. In addition, it was essential that revolution in Russia be preceded by or immediately followed by the outbreak of a workers' Revolution in an industrialized part of Europe. This point is made in the introduction to the first Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto published in 1877 and again at some length in Engels' statement On Social Relations in Russia (1882). Some years later, Engels reaffirmed the contention as follows:

I would say that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless - that higher form was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model. That higher form being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequences of the capitalist form of production and of the social dualistic antagonisms created by it, it could not be developed directly out of the agrarian commune, unless in imitation of an example already in existence somewhere else.²³

As seen in the above, Marx and Engels dealt with the stages of human social development in a much more flexible manner than they are usually given credit for. They are of course insisting that the movement from communalism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism is a movement from lower to higher forms, with implications for the volume and efficiency of production and the satisfying of human needs. But they are not implying a single mechanical line of historical progression, and they actually deny this in the course of the discussion. In a comradely letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881, Marx explained that his description of the historical inevitability of the foundation of the capitalist system was expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.²⁴ Four years earlier, he had made the same point with rather greater asperity in reply to a detractor, Mikhailovsky, who insisted on misreading Marx. Firstly, Marx reminded his readers that the chapter on primitive accumulation in Das Kapital does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. He then proceeded to show that the given historical sketch of Western Europe might be applicable to Russia if Russia continued to move in the same capitalist direction as Western European countries; for in that case Russia could not succeed without first transforming a sizeable number of peasants into proletarians. However, Marx vigorously disavowed any intention of using his model of Western Europe to provide a historical-philosophical theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself.²⁵

Although Marx completely disowned the proposition that a people must move to socialism via capitalism, it is understandable that bourgeois academics ignore this and interpret Marx to mean exactly what he said he did not mean.²⁶ But even self-styled Marxists have also made it appear that Scientific Socialism can be arrived at only on the basis of an advanced proletariat within a given country and hence only after capitalism has held in sway that country for a lengthy epoch, in precisely the same manner as Western Europe. 

As far as Russia was concerned, the discussion by populists and Marxists about avoiding capitalism turned out to be one about a non-realisable hypothesis. Marx and Engels feared that the process of stratification in the countryside would continue unchecked. Information reaching them from the late 1870s suggested that Russian communal forms were becoming shells which only hid the new exploitative relations of capitalist society. Towards the end of his life, Engels regretfully concluded that the obshchina should be treated as a dream of the past. A fine chance had been missed, but reality had to be faced, for capitalism was being built in Russia on the labour of landless peasantry turned proletariat.²⁷ A few years later, when Lenin made his in-depth analysis of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, he convincingly demonstrated that the capitalist process was far too advanced to think in terms of by-passing that stage. In other words, the creation of a rural proletariat and of landlord farmers which Socialism and Rural Development was interested in avoiding in Tanzania had already occurred in Russia by the turn of the present century among the peasants themselves - in addition to the continued existence of feudal and bourgeois landowners.²⁸

Even after it became clear that internal and external factors were hastening the final decomposition of Russian communal forms, some theorists still clung to the idea that Russia could build socialism on the model of an old commune. Only at this point were they eschewed by Scientific Socialists as propagating Populist Utopianism. For instance, in 1890, Engels declared that the Populist, Danielson, was beyond hope, in spite of prolonged ideological exchange and correspondence to clarify the conditions under which Russian communalism could be revived.²⁹ For purposes of an analogy with Tanzania and Africa, what is crucial is that the founders of Scientific Socialism seriously and enthusiastically contemplated a variant of socialism very much akin to Ujamaa, and they indicated the conditions under which it might be realised. The most important requirements were, firstly, that the 'traditional' forms should exist in real life and have some social vitality, and, secondly, that international conditions should be favourable owing to a socialist breakthrough in some part of the world. For Africa, the fulfilment or nonfulfilment of these conditions needs to be examined.

An effort has already been made to underscore the idea that for Marx different paths to socialism did exist, precisely because of varied experience of movement from one social phase to another. It is of some value to the history of philosophy to keep the record straight on this issue; although one is primarily concerned not with establishing Marx's correctness but rather with confirming the truth of the observation that the movement of different peoples through history has had significant variations. This could be illustrated within Europe with regard to the contrast between Eastern and Western Europe. As far as Asia is concerned the social stage parallel to that of feudalism in Europe bore sufficient peculiarities to the categorised separately as 'the Asian Mode of Production'.³⁰ Most relevant to the African continent is the debate on a possible 'African Mode of Production'.³¹

With the exception of parts of the Middle East and Egypt, neither Asia nor Africa had slavery as a distinct social system, and African societies had very little servitude outside of the context of capture for export. From African communalism, the evolution was in a feudal or quasi-feudal direction, and communal forms persisted even in the most stratified societies. Ruling elites in empires as large as those of the western Sahara still maintained their authority through the heads of communities rather than through contractual relations with individual peasants.

It is in the pre-European era that Senghor seeks his model of pristine 'Socialism' in Africa. But, to begin with, communalism was not socialism. Collective production was narrowly restricted on an ethnic, clan and geographical basis, and the egalitarian principle of distribution was limited by the low level of production so that societies came nowhere close to fulfilling the needs of all their citizens – hence Marx's description of this stage as 'Primitive Communism'.³² Socialism is inconceivable prior to the emancipation of man from such elementary forces as drought, flood and disease. Besides, in determining whether African communalism has any relevance in the present time, one must identify it as still persisting, i.e. the thousand year old urge to associate must not have bee extinguished. In many part of Africa, communal forms lost their primacy centuries ago with the emergence of feudal and quasi-feudal forms of exploiting labour, including household servitude. Large parts of Africa were integrated within the capitalist economy since the fifteenth century because of the European quest for slave labour. Finally, there was the period of colonial rule which introduced capitalist exploitation of labour in every part of the continent. It certainly is not enough for Senghor to sound a warning of possible class formation in the present period, when it is obvious that Senegal has already passed through a lengthy and intense historical experience incompatible with the maintenance of communal forms or the practice of egalitarianism.

Admittedly, in 'Ujamaa – the Basis of African Socialism' Mwalimu Nyerere sounded a note rather similar to that of the standard version of 'African Socialism', when he asserted that 'We, in Africa, have no more need of being "converted" to socialism than we have to being "taught" democracy.' However, taking the continent as a whole, Tanzania is exceptional in that even at the end of the colonial period the communal forms were still recognizable. This is a consequence of its people having been relatively little involved in the capitalist money economy of mining, settler plantations and cash-crop production. The low degree of internal stratification at the time of constitutional independence was reflected in national cohesion and the solidarity of a single mass party. Between 1961 and 1967 there was increasing differentiation, so that 'Socialism and Rural Development' dealt with the core of the problem by determining that socialism could only be built in Tanzania by halting stratification and the creation of a rural proletariat. This was the first of the conditions which Marx and Engels laid down when discussing how socialism might have been built on the basis of the Russian commune.

The possibility of regenerating traditional communalism also depends upon factors outside of the national political economy. This model for Ujamaa is as much in the present as in the past. If certain socialist values can be recovered from communalism, then equally there is the possibility of importing (and modifying) values and concrete attributes of socialism in any part of the globe. When Mwalimu Nyerere referred to the weakness of traditional African communalism, he mentioned technological inadequacy.³³ This factor should be given greater emphasis because it was technological inadequacy which meant scarcity and led to stratification and the internal evolution of classes in parts of Africa before contact with Europe. It was also technological weakness that led to loss of independence when Africa was confronted by European societies. Movement to a higher stage means massive strengthening of productive and defence capacity. But, with true political independence, any African society can resume its interrupted socio-economic and technological development at a higher level by utilising the fund of scientific knowledge now available to mankind. Some of this knowledge is already in the hands of the first socialist states, and even if it is still the property of capitalists, it can be expropriated.

In effect, the skipping of stages involved in the jump from communalism to socialism is only possible in a given society because elsewhere the intervening stages have existed or are still existing and because, as Engels postulated, modern industrial socialism has broken the stranglehold which capitalism previously maintained on the world at large. The first condition opens up the technological possibility of building socialism whilst the second provides a model and profoundly influences the international political situation. Amilcar Cabral put his finger on these points and explains lucidly that 'the possibility of such a jump in the historical process arises mainly, in the economic field, from the power of the means available to man at the time for dominating nature, and, in the political field, from the new event which has radically changed the face of the world and the development of history, the creation of socialist states'.³⁴

Potekhin, the well-known Soviet specialist on Africa, a few years ago expressed his agreement with those versions of 'African Socialism' which aimed essentially at building socialism in Africa and using African paths to socialism. In his opinion, colonized Africa could move directly and uniquely to socialism largely because of the Soviet Union. The latter was available as a source of help and a power transforming the global political balance in such a way as to restrain the large capitalist nations in their exploitation and oppression of small would-be socialist states.³⁵ The unstinted aid supposedly available from the Soviet Union would be regarded as illusory by most progressive Africans who are learning that self-reliance is definitely a superior alternative to any 'Big Brother'. However, it is true that the socialist sector of the world (divisions notwithstanding) offers a set of models, a set of alternative partners for trade and a more accessible source of technical aid. Tanzanian external political and economic relations have already gone a long way towards maximising the advantage created by the existence of socialism in various parts of the world. It is one of the key ways of seizing what Marx considered a golden opportunity for moving to socialism on the basis of communalism and without having to experience the full development of classes characteristic of capitalism. It can further be argued that a colony or semi-colony within the imperialist framework can never develop to full capitalist maturity. Africa has experienced almost as many years of capitalist development as Europe, but in our case the unfolding of capitalism has meant historical arrest and backwardness. The accompanying stratification never approximated to the dynamic of capitalism in the metropoles. Thus, one could never expect capitalism to perform in Africa the historically progressive role it played in Western Europe. This is yet another fact of a more refined theory concerning the states of human social advance. Such a theory must cease assuming that development is self-contained for any given group or society, and this line of reasoning also reinforces the conclusion that for Africa a different path to socialism is not only possible but is unavoidable.³⁶ An ideology such as Ujamaa is scientific in so far as logically and scientifically it charts this new path.

The fact that the path of Ujamaa in broad outline is so reminiscent of one perceived by Marx is a salutary co-incidence in so far as this particular discussion is concerned. Since so much of Marx's time was spent applying his scientific method to a critique of capitalism in Western Europe, any debate outside that geographical area cannot be tied merely to what Marx said, as though Scientific Socialism were entirely comprised within the pages of Marx's writings. 'Marxism' when considered as synonymous with Scientific Socialism means the application of scientific method (of which Marx was a founder) to the study of any given situation. This is a task of such complexity that Marx and Engels often issued warnings that the chances of incorrect conclusions were high.³⁷ However, the argument that Ujamaa is consistent with Scientific Socialism is made easier to substantiate because of Marx's conclusions with regard to an obviously analogous situation. The Marxist who considers the stress on 'traditional' African communalism as theoretically incompatible with a Scientific Socialist approach must bear the onus of proving that Marx's brief application of his own theory was unscientific in the Russian case. At the same time the non-Marxist seeking to isolate Ujamaa from what he imagines to be Scientific Socialism must at least be brought up short in light of evidence that Marx himself explicitly countenanced the possibility of a development towards socialism that integrated peasant collectives from the communal epoch.

After Marx's time, new (Scientific) Socialist ideas have been elaborated out of revolutionary experience. Their accuracy and relevance have been tested by nothing less than the experience of building socialism in economically backward countries in the teeth of imperialist opposition. Ujamaa has not yet been fully tested in this sense and there are a wide range of 'social engineering' problems which have still to be tackled in the creation of new structures, new values and ultimately a new socialist man. If agriculture in Africa were already somehow mystically socialist, then there would not have arise all the travail of physical transposition and social re-adjustment which is actually going on in Tanzania. Resettlement and collectivisation proves how many aspects of the prevailing system were at odds with modern socialism: notably, the isolated production units, low level technology, stratification and narrow vertical divisions. 'African Socialists' formulated 'socialist agriculture' as an existing reality rather than a goal to be achieved by rescuing communal elements; so it follows that they had no socialist programme. Under Senghor, nothing has been done to relieve the exploitation of peasants producing cash crops and to remove rural exploitation; while in Kenya the only practical change in the agricultural sector as envisaged by Tom Mboya was the introduction of advanced agricultural machinery for the individual capitalist farmer.³⁸ Even the more progressive African political and ideological leadership long neglected the countryside, and opted for a one-sided industrialization strategy. Tanzanian Ujamaa is a unique contribution to the African socialist revolution and to socialist theory as a whole because of its solid connections with the observable data in the Tanzanian countryside. This is the characteristic which causes 'Leninism' or 'Maoism' to be considered as having enriched the Scientific Socialism of which Marx and Engels were the founders.

Undoubtedly, a much greater gap emerges when one compares implementation of Tanzanian Ujamaa with the implementation of Scientific Socialism in the particular countries where this has been attempted. Here is where the disavowal of Scientific Socialism makes a real difference because it encourages an attitude of mind which masks contradictions and even throws overboard theory as such behind the guise of being 'practical'. It can be argued that measures taken to implement socialism in Tanzania run the risk of being defeated for lack of a rigorous theory which comprehends the antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions of the world scene. The issue of nationalisation is a case in point.³⁹ However, this does not mean that Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism are on two divergent paths. One should distinguish between an awareness of the fundamental movement of society and history, on the one hand, and adjustments to that movement in terms of struggle and construction, on the other hand. The latter is always very problematical but the first is more fundamental requiring an understanding of which classes are on the ascendant and which social systems are moribund. Tanzanian Ujamaa can claim to be correctly focussed in this regard. This being so, there is no insuperable barrier to the development of scientific strategies and tactics.

The above argument may be considered further in relation to the rural sector. It cannot be said that the construction of Ujamaa villages has followed a scientific line of identifying points of weakness and strength as advocated by Engels and Lenin and as practiced by Mao Tse-Tung and Kim Il Sung. But the theory and policy of Ujamaa has logically determined that the key role in Socialist construction has to be played by the Tanzanian peasants. This is in accord with the present stage of the development of productive forces within Tanzania and with the present international conjuncture, and such an insight gives Ujamaa its chances of success and ample scope for evolution which it would have lacked if the theory had backed the wrong class or the disintegrating capitalist social system. The actual building of Ujamaa villages is a task requiring definite expertise. From a sociological viewpoint, practical implementation must take into account both the varying socio-economic formations found in Tanzania as well as the phenomenon of stratification.⁴⁰ Any sociologist might deal with some of the problems of collectivisation but ultimately it is only a Scientific Socialist approach that can guarantee success. By way of illustration one could turn to Vietnam, where bourgeois social scientists lent their skills to the government of the U.S.A. in the creation of 'strategic hamlets.'⁴¹ Their technical expertise ran counter to the movement of the society and the hamlets were dashed aside by the conscious and organised peasants of Vietnam. At the same time, collectivised agriculture in the liberated parts of the country has been moving forward steadily.

One searching test of the scientific nature of any version of socialism is its reflection of the interests of the most exploited and oppressed classes. Marx regarded Utopians as having advanced towards a more defensible position to the extent that individuals like Owen and Fourier grasped the fact that socialism was the ideology of the working class and that it must therefore uncompromisingly serve this class.⁴² Significantly too, the later Social Democratic deviation from scientific and revolutionary socialism reflected bourgeoisification of intellectuals and worker leaders in the epoch of imperialism. By way of rounding out a working understanding of Scientific Socialism, it should be made clear that socialist theory must voice the interests of the most exploited of the producers - this being perfectly possible alongside the phenomenon of class desertion by individuals from propertied or privileged strata, and alongside the assumption of leadership roles by these individuals. In Africa (as in Europe, Asia and the Americas) it is from within the ranks of an educated elite that leadership is drawn for movements claiming to be socialist. But there is a vast difference in the fundamental class loyalties of those espousing 'African Socialism' as compared to Tanzanian advocates of Ujamaa; a difference between a parodied mischievous use of the term 'socialism' and the de facto elaboration of the theory to which a Marxist could readily subscribe in terms of its potential for realising a socialist society along scientific lines. 

Fanon called for the self-liquidation of the African petty bourgeoisie and their regeneration as a revolutionary intelligentsia, but of course this is far from being the case within the continent as a whole. 'African Socialism' is the inflection which the African petty-bourgeoisie have given to bourgeois ideology in an attempt to camouflage from the masses the deepening capitalist exploitation of the neo-colonial era. In sharp contrast, Tanzanian Ujamaa has begun to make the decisive break with capitalism. The evidence lies in the Arusha Declaration, in the Mwongozo, in the Tanzam railway, in the nationalisation of certain buildings and in virtually every act of Tanzanian foreign policy. Tanzania Ujamaa, limited as it is in actual achievement can substantiate the claim to be the ideology of the majority of Tanzanian producers in the countryside and the towns.

In the final analysis, simple honesty is a vital ingredient in Scientific Socialism - honesty in the cause of man, the workers, and dedication to his emancipation. Subjective as this may initially appear, it is very much part of the scientifically determinable process of social change, because consciousness is a principle factor in this process. This is precisely why Marxist theory is not mechanistic. Wherever it makes a projection into the future, the calculation includes human will and consciousness as a variable, because knowledge, self-awareness and organised activity by the exploited are all tied together. Tanzanian Ujamaa has broken with the crude manipulative dishonesty of 'African Socialism'. For instance, Tanzanian political leadership does ask for the 'traditional' communal virtue of hard work, but not in a context where local exploitation and class formation is allowed to proceed unchecked and is indeed promoted by the very theorists of 'socialism'. Therefore, Ujamaa can appeal to and deepen the consciousness of peasants and workers which imparts greater momentum to the people's struggle to build socialism.

From the viewpoint of social theory, it is not satisfactory that writings propounded Ujamaa never indicate awareness of the universality of communal forms. Examples broadly similar to African communal organisation can be drawn not only from Russia before enserfment, but from every part of Europe and Australasia at one time or another. One of the first tasks of the scientist is to place things in the same category. Reluctance to do so in this case is probably due to the hankering after uniqueness among progressive Africans - something which occasionally leads into blind alleys, but which on the whole is essential for the liberation of the colonized.

The insistence on an African identity is a worthwhile corrective not only to bourgeois cultural imperialism but also to dogmatic expositions by self-styled Marxists or Scientific Socialists. Identification with the particularity of experience in Africa is as essential as appreciating the universality of scientific method. When the doctrine of Ujamaa postulates an African path to socialism it affirms the validity of Scientific Socialism, in spite of the lack of any declaration to this effect by Tanzanian leadership and in spite of deliberate efforts to distort both Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism so as to present them as fundamentally contradictory.

Serious political considerations make it necessary to undertake this kind of abstract enquiry from the viewpoint of one committed to the African Revolution. When the task of evaluating African social thought and practice is left to bourgeois theoreticians, they find it convenient to place all ideological strands into one amorphous mystifying whole, which includes utterances by Tubman as well as Nkrumah, by Mboya as well as Sekou Toure, by Senghor as well as Nyerere. Indeed, some go so far as to assert that 'in substance Nyerere and the Senegalese are closer than he is to Sekou Toure or Nkrumah'.⁴³ At the same time, progressive European friends often display a penchant for armchair Marxist perfection, so that for them Nyerere and Senghor are indeed in the same bag, because the former has not come forward to declare for Marxism.⁴⁴ The superficial and confused nature of such a conclusion is a consequence of the authors not being involved in making revolution, for whoever is involved in the actuality of revolutionary transformation will not fail to perceive the differences between form and substance. The substance of Ujamaa is its stand against capitalism, against imperialism, against racism and against exploitation of all kinds; and (to put it affirmatively) its stand for the emancipation of the working population of Africa and for the remodelling of the society along lines of socialist equality and socialist democracy.

Curiously enough, progressive Europeans are the ones who display the hegemonic tendencies characteristic of the imperialist metropoles, in so far as they have no time for insights that seem in any way to depart from models originating in Western Europe. The former imperialist masters, knowing the force of African nationalism which ousted them from the politico-constitutional sphere, do not ignore the search for an African identity, but rather take care to foster its most negative aspects; namely, the alienation from revolutionary features of European thought. To remedy both defects, theory for the African Revolution must spring from those who have had the historical experience of and socialization under slavery, colonialism, de-culturalization, racism and super-exploitation which has been the peculiar lot of Africans. Within that context, it will then rapidly become clear who is supporting an anti-people line, such as 'African Socialism', and who is advocating genuine liberation as envisaged by Tanzanian Ujamaa.

A more rigorous assessment of current ideologies in Africa is also a political necessity on account of the possible dialogue between Scientific Socialists and Nationalists. The former are a mere handful, and in most African countries today can scarcely hope to co-operate with the existing regimes. To do so would be to repudiate socialist principles, as well as to risk senseless liquidation at the hands of the 'African Socialists', 'Arab Socialists' and other denominations who are more concerned with fighting religious wars against 'Communism' than with emancipating the African people. But, the contention here is that Tanzanian Ujamaa offers a radically different framework for political action on the part of the self-conscious Marxist. Whatever verbal affinities Ujamaa has with anti-Marxist doctrines it has placed the common struggle against capitalism and imperialism on a much higher plane. Scientific Socialism has been attacked time and time again. Whenever the attack is based on overt or covert hostility to the working masses, it has been accompanied by a policy of alliance with the bourgeoisie against the most resolute workers elements. The history of Fabianism, Social Democracy and the like illustrates this clearly, and helps further to distinguish Tanzanian Ujamaa as being compatible with the precepts of Scientific Socialism and with the construction of a genuine socialist society.

Presumably, it could be documented that Tanzanian Ujamaa as it now stands is the product of a series of 'pragmatic' adjustments to difficult situations, comprising things such as the crisis of school leavers, the coup in Uganda and the problem of foreign exchange.⁴⁵ However, the inference of most of the foregoing arguments is that the response has been suggestive of a commitment to the masses. If this were not so, why then have other African regimes reacted differently to the same stimuli and pressures as have manifested in Tanzania? The progressive strengthening of a revolutionary stand in Tanzania (to which attention was drawn at the outset) is a factor of the greatest significance. It suggests movement on the road to socialism, both in practical terms and as an aspect of ideological development. Of course, there is a major difference between historical tendency and accomplished fact, but consciousness and political behaviour form part of the bridge between the two. This is not to be overlooked by anyone attempting the rigorous task of applying scientific method to social reality with the view of aiding the birth of African and International Socialism. Theory that is non-Marxist must be evaluated in terms of whether or not it is substantively anti-worker or anti-scientific. Invariably, socialist revolutions have their roots not only in Scientific Socialism as a body of thought but also in the formulas independently and correctly arrived at by precursors who did not use Scientific Socialism as their point of departure.⁴⁶

African nationalists are certainly involved in the African revolution in the two types of front represented in Mozambique and Tanzania respectively: namely, the fighting front and that of 'peaceful' transformation. Leaders of these two related struggles will at some point have to come to terms with a consistent theory for 'appreciating' their situation and taking action. Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba - i.e., every successful socialist revolution has borne out the truth of Engels' observation that Scientific Socialism is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics. The mobilization of the producers, the defence of revolutionary gains and the advance of the struggle against modern monopoly capitalism are not tasks that can be accomplished by good intentions alone. Masses of people have to enter into an epistemology and a methodology different from those to which they have been accustomed. In China, they call it 'Mao Tse-Tung thought' - a blend of specific insights and pre-existing theory. There is nothing inherently improbable in Tanzanian Ujamaa continuing to advance to reach that position. But, in the light of the claim that certain intellectuals have become so enamoured of Tanzania as to relinquish their critical function, let it be clear that this is no paean of praise. It is an assessment of a possibility that can be realised only though an ideological and political struggle to transcend the alienation from that part of the heritage of man which is called 'Scientific Socialism'.

The Meaning of African Liberation Day

Speech delivered in San Francisco, 1972

I was born in a place that used to be called British Guyana. I happened to have been educated in Jamaica, to have lived among Black people in England and on the Continent. I have met brothers and sisters who say that their mother-tongue is, quote-un-quote, “French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese,” as well as English which we speak. And because of this, we have a problem of identification: we do not know who we are! And that is why this gathering is of great symbolic importance, because it is an act of identification.

We are saying that we identify with the African people of the African continent. We are saying that we are an African people. And when we make this identification, we have no illusions about the fact that this is a very revolutionary initiative; it is a rejection of every other form of identification which the white society has asked us to accept.

Let me draw your attention to something which white universities and white libraries practice; and this is a university community; numerous universities lie around this land (Bay Area): go into their libraries and check the Library of Congress cards under Europe or European, you will find all entries listed concerning the Continent of Europe; you will also find entries listed about Europeans in East Africa; Europeans in Asia and Australia.

Look under the Chinese, you will find entries listed not only for Mainland China, but for Chinese in Malaysia, and for Chinese North America, but look under Africa and Africans — the only entry under Africans relates to the Continent itself — there are not entries under Africans overseas — there is no such category. Africans who have been raped from the Continent mysteriously disappear and become “Negroes”!

“We are saying that we are an African people.”

So when we reject the very term “negro,” it is not playing with words; negro is a conception — when we reject the term negro it is a rejection of a whole historical interpretation because (get it very clear) negro is a thing! a negro is not a person!

Historically, when we were taken as slaves, we were dehumanized, we were converted from people into things! In the literature of slavery, a slave is referred to, an African is referred to as apiece. The Portuguese will say, “We have thousands of pieces, hundreds of pieces” — those are Africans to whom they referred.

We were brought to this section of the world and we were auctioned; and auction is something reserved for antique furniture. We were brought to this section of the world and in Washington and in Virginia and in Maryland (my God, in Maryland a cracker was shot the other day); in places like that, we were bred as slaves, they were slave breeding grounds. Now breeding of that sort is reserved for stud animals, so the negro was a thing — at best and animate object in the category of cattle, horses and sheep. So when we break with that and say we are an African people, that is a revolutionary identification.

“Negro is a thing! A negro is not a person!”

I do not say to understand who we are is the be all and end all — on the contrary, it is merely a very short step forward in the struggle, because freedom is a long road — freedom is the road which the Vietnamese people travel on the Ho Chi Minh trail; each man and woman carrying 60 pounds weight. Freedom is the long road which the Brothers from Angola, in which the Movement of the Popular Liberation of Angola, that is the road which they take week after week, crossing Eastern Angola, indeed, crossing Zambia, crossing the plains, crossing the flooded rivers, crossing the swamps, to engage with the enemy — that is the road of freedom.

Freedom is the road which carried in Guinea (Bissau), along the creeks and the rivers, the Brothers take the canoes to engage the enemy. Therefore, I am not saying that the identification is all — it is a process of struggle — and when we support Africa today, let no one have the impression that we are supporting a passive people. Because the news media has either been silent or deliberately mis-informative as is their want. They have not told you the level which the struggle has reached in Southern Africa. They have not told you the amount of territory which has been liberated from the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea (Bissau), and Mozambique.

“Let no one have the impression that we are supporting a passive people.”

They have not told you that in 1970 there was a massive campaign by the Portuguese, a campaign to end all campaigns in Mozambique. It was designed to eliminate the liberated zones. It had a massive array of armaments, 50,000 troops, American advisers; they went to the United States and had one of their generals trained on the assumption that the United States are the world experts on counter-guerilla warfare. But even if I had to fight the counter-guerilla war, I would be reluctant to ask the advice of the Americans, because they are only experts in losing! It turned out that they lost that struggle — the people of the Mozambique today have a greater liberated area, have produced an intensification, not only of their military program, but of their socio-economic and political program.

The same applies in Angola, the same in Guinea (Bissau). And, furthermore, when we look at Southern Africa, although it is true that there are certain areas when the armed struggle, the highest level of struggle, has not yet been reached, we must not, for a movement deprecate the energies, the courage, and the activities of our Brothers and Sisters in that part of the world.

Let me say a brief word about South Africa. The people of South Africa are not cheap as some would have you believe. The people of South Africa have a long history of struggle, longer than in many other parts of the African continent. In the period after the first World War, there was in South Africa the strongest Black trade union on the Continent and in most parts of the world. The trade union known as the I.C.U., led by an African giant, Clement Sdale, was one of the greatest trade unions of its time. It failed! Why did it fail? Let me tell you a secret, it failed because it was betrayed by the white working class of South Africa.

“In the period after the first World War, there was in South Africa the strongest Black trade union on the Continent.”

Nevertheless, the struggle continues in South Africa. What happens in Southwest Africa (Namibia)? Few people know of Namibia. Namibia is the diamond mine of the world, that is where the Oppenheimers, the Goldfingers, the later Englehart, that is where the Rockefellers draft gem diamonds and industrial diamonds out of the ground by the tons every year.

And in Namibia, the people have had to face the brutality of the Germans in the last part of the 19th century and in the present century. Germany learned to practice fascism in Africa before it practiced it in Germany. It was against the heroic people of Namibia that the Germans unleashed a policy of genocide. Nevertheless, enough of the people, and this is a constant wonder — that we have managed to survive — to survive and to multiply — which amazed them (white people).

The people of Namibia last year staged a tremendous strike against the mining companies — out of the blue — no one expected it — the people of Namibia said to the mining companies, the white race’s international monopoly capitalist — they said, “We are still here! We are still here! And we will strike when the hour comes.” And this is true throughout Southern Africa.

In Zimbabwe, the whites thought they had a good thing going; they have banned Z.A.N.U., they banned Z.A.P.U. They have some in prison, the rest are exiled. They brought in the South African police and military. They have the support of the British government, they have the support of international monopoly capital, and they said, “We are going to stage a mock referendum which will draw the wool over the eyes of the world because we have intimidated the African sufficiently that we will get them to accept our domination by means of a referendum,” and then they attempted to count this referendum, they sent the British commission, and what happened? The people of Zimbabwe came out unarmed, unarmed mind you, to face the guns and they said, “no! no!” in a very loud voice; it was heard everywhere, it was unmistakable that they would not accept white minority rule in Zimbabwe.

“The people of Zimbabwe came out unarmed to face the guns and they said, ‘no! no!”’

And when you talk about struggle, furthermore, again it is to be remembered that there are governments in Africa today, who are putting their integrity, putting their existence out on the limb in order to support the struggle in South Africa. Governments like Tanzania, Zambia, Guinea, Algeria, and even the U.A.R., although it is fighting a war against the Zionists, they all have the time and resources to devote to the struggle of African unity and African liberation.

These are things to bear in mind when we say we are giving our support, because the world is full of many people who are claiming their rights but doing nothing else about it. We will support those who are claiming their rights and backing it up with what is necessary to demand and grasp one’s rights.

There is another illusion which must be squashed, and that is that when we support Africa, we are supporting a foreign entity, we are escaping from the struggle here, but the support of Africa is merely an extension from the struggle here.

The struggle is universal because the system of oppression is universal.

The struggle is international — and black unity must be international because we are the world’s most authentic international people. We live on every continent, through no choice of our own. But when the enemy has created a system of production and a system of exploitation which rests upon our physical presence in the Americas, in Europe, and in Africa, we will use that dispersed presence to mount a tremendous international campaign to liquidate the struggle that has reduced us to the position which we are in now.

“There are governments in Africa today who are putting their existence out on the limb in order to support the struggle in South Africa.”

Let me move toward a conclusion, Brothers and Sister, a conclusion which asks you to bear in mind what this gathering symbolizes. It symbolizes a “no” to Nixon, a “no” to the murderous policies in Vietnam, a “no” to the United States companies which are investing and exploiting on the African continent; a “no” to N.A.T.O. which provides Portugal with the wherewithal to bomb and blast our African Brother who are struggling for their rights in their own land. That must be an explicit “no”! It is also a “yes” — it is an affirmation, we are saying yes to the line which was developed by people like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon.

We are saying “yes” to the struggle in Africa today which is led by such giants as Ahmed Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere … And we are saying “yes” to people like the Soledad Brothers and the martyrs of Attica.

This time is a symbolic act of coming together. This is also a time for self analysis and self-criticism and rededication. So we will go from here with a new strength. We will reconsider the nature of the domestic struggle and its relation to the international struggle, moving toward the realization that the system must fall — it all must fall! Have no illusions about it, the system that was created within this country as it extends throughout the world is so immoral, so vicious that there is no compromise, there is no remedying — except to banish it!

So, we will move out, to contemplate in our various ways how to arrive at its destruction. As we move out, bear in mind a slogan which the Brothers in Southern Africa use. They say, “Victory or Death! Victory is Certain.” Victory or death because they are placing their lives on the line — the highest form of struggle! But they are saying “Victory is Certain” because we are the future, we are the repositories of the truth, we are the most exploited and the most oppressed _ and must, of necessity, by the repository of freedom. So let us join and reiterate that slogan of Southern Africa, “Victory or Death — Victory is Certain!”

(Crowd repeats: “Victory or Death — Victory is Certain!”).

Power!

Education in Colonial Africa

CAAS Colloquium on Africa, 1972

The separation of knowledge has been entrenched within the structures of bourgeois universities in such a way that scholars in the humanities and social sciences can only pay lip-service to the concept of multidisciplinary approaches. It would appear that education as a subject or department is particularly alienated and cut off from other disciplines. Certainly, on the development issue, the little that is written hardly ever integrates the aspect of education. At the same time, educationists who write about ‘educational development’ are unwilling or unable to relate this to the movement of the society as a whole. The inclusion of the topic in this series of seminars attests to its fundamental importance to the political, economic and cultural changes taking place in Africa over the past eight or nine decades.

A ‘balance sheet’ approach to the colonial period in Africa invariably fastens on to the building of schools as a decisive element in favour of colonial benevolence. No attempt is made to explain how this benefited or developed Africa and the Africans, but the argument carries great force because of the universalized assumption that Western education per se is good. Africans came to believe it and the vast majority still do believe it. After all, someone with a school education on the continent is distinctly better off than someone who has not gone to the kind of school set up by Europeans. It is also obvious that the leadership of the political parties that strove for independence was drawn mainly from the educated elite. In this sense, European education of the colonized may appear to have been a crucial factor in political development. Yet, there is perhaps no subject on which conscious Africans can be so roused as that of colonial education. The path to political awareness in Africa more often than not leads to a denunciation of missionaries, colonial schools, Shakespeare and cultural imperialism. When prodded, any African educated under the colonial system can point to numerous incongruities from individual experience of the curricula, teachers and procedures of the schools he or she attended. Indeed, within the same individuals there is often the ambivalence of pride in scholastic achievement on the one hand and self-flagellation on the other, because they had acquiesced to the racist colonialist educational programme.

Education in Africa was not approached systematically by the colonial powers until the 1920s.⁴⁷ By that time, colonial administrations had been set up throughout the continent and a range of economic activities were placed in motion with the aim of providing surplus for the metropoles.

A small fraction of that surplus was redeployed to ensure that Africans would fill certain jobs in the lowest echelons of the economic and administrative sectors. Primary schooling was all that was essential for these positions as messengers, clerks, police constables, and so forth; but it was also necessary to train African teachers and a handful of Africans who were sufficiently initiated into the European way of life to pass the experience on to their brothers and to act within church, state and private firms as middlemen between the European hierarchy and the African masses. Hence, the growth of a modicum of secondary schooling, teacher training and eventually the rare experience of university education.

Functionally, colonial education was developing the ‘modern’ sector in Africa – mining, cash-crop agriculture and trade with Europe. In effect, that meant the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of the African economy. It must not be forgotten that Africa had its own Indigenous system of education to the European impact.⁴⁸ This system did not simply disappear, but it suffered the same contraction and diminution of vitality as did the ‘traditional’ economy. The disappearance of craft skill is nothing else but the disappearance of the education that had previously caused those skills to flourish. Indigenous African education lost its leading role in the society just as the traditional economy was displaced by the money economy. Those who entered the money economy saw European education as the element which might lead to upward mobility. Thus, the son of an agriculturalist was no longer apprenticed to him on the land but was sent off (wherever possible) to a school which would fit him for a part in the money economy – preferably in the administrative services where prestige was highest.

Education, even at the most revolutionary periods, highlights continuity in those aspects of the society which are cherished by the masses or by the dominant class. Education at its best seeks to bring out the potential of individuals to serve their own society and master their own environment. Colonial education interrupted the patterns of education which performed these functions and substituted instead learning associated with the advancement of an alien society and which usually had little to do with increasing African mastery of their own environment. Curriculum development in Africa over the past decade has everywhere had to face up to the problem of irrelevance in the colonial school system. The examples which cropped up throughout the school day were alien and irrelevant to the African child. Rather than building upon what existed, colonial schooling destroyed what existed, which made it easier in the long run to subscribe to the great lie that no education was previously available. One is concerned here with an African’s basic awareness of his environment. Before the European or in a context of freedom from European education, a cattle-keeping people observed their animals with such attention that European languages have no words to describe the seventy or eighty varieties of cattle that, say, a Zulu or a Fulani felt it necessary to distinguish.⁴⁹ In a similar vein, it was noted that African children in the forests would normally know the names of dozens of trees at an early age and would confound the European visitor who could not tell one leaf from another.⁵⁰ The point here is that a European-educated African was just such a stranger and ignoramus in his own land.⁵¹ It is this break in the continuity of the historical movement in Africa that I am consistently referring to as ‘underdevelopment’ in an active sense, and it embraces economic, political and cultural fields.

Presumably, if African education had been replaced by something of greater value to the African people, it would still have been possible to claim that Africa benefited and developed. Indeed, it could be argued that they had jumped to a higher stage which would have been long in coming if the process of uninterrupted evolution had gone on. However, the new education was severely lacking in many ways. To begin with, it was education for a tiny minority, replacing a system of education for all that had previously existed. The quantitative limitations of colonial education need to be stressed both as a corrective to the colonialist claim that they brought education to Africa and as a means of understanding that the present situation in Africa is profoundly influenced by the fact that the school system inherited from colonialism cannot possibly cater to the majority of the population.⁵² Masses of figures could be brought to show how few were the Africans who were allowed schooling by the colonial powers. A large proportion of the few were primary school dropouts while an insignificant minority made it to secondary school. After all, it has to be noted that Africa today still has appalling figures of illiteracy and inadequate schooling in spite of the fact that the independent governments have often done more in ten years than the colonists did in seventy-five. That is what a truly African education policy will not merely have to extend the colonial school system, but it will also have to break with the basic rationale that has guided it so far: of training a minority to aid in the work of administration.

Producing Africans to aid in the task of colonial administration was of course not simply a matter of functional skills but also of ideology. Always learning is presented within a given ideological framework. Europeans could not do otherwise but instruct Africans within the bourgeois framework which was brought from Europe. However, winning over Africans was not left to chance. Policymakers for colonial education deliberately and carefully worked out the kinds of programmes designed to create the ‘loyal’ African servant. The French referred to them as ‘cadres’ and emphasized that they should not merely serve as clerks, translators and the like but as active agents of French cultural imperialism among the African masses.⁵³ Occasionally, a far-seeing colonialist thought in terms of training Africans who would continue to run the continent in the interests of Europe after Europeans had relinquished direct political control. But for the most part the educated elite was viewed as being permanently available for aiding their white masters, since scarcely any colonialist contemplated the end of European rule in Africa within this century.

One extremely interesting example of the way the colonial powers saw education as buttressing colonial rule ideologically and practically lies in the treatment of African rulers and their sons. African rulers had been deprived of power in the process of imposing European rule, but they still retained varying degrees of authority in the eyes of their own people; and all colonial powers used what they called ‘chiefs’ as agents within their administrative systems. To the French, this was so important that they made it mandatory for chiefs to send their sons to school, in order that this stratum within African society should develop the same perspectives as educated Africans from different backgrounds. The French were being perfectly logical in expecting that all who aided them in the work of administering African territory on behalf of France should have an ideological perspective determined by the French themselves. The English, too, at some points felt the education of their ‘indirect rule’ chiefs to be a priority; and schools for African rulers were opened at Bo in Sierra Leone and Tabora in Tanganyika. Although the experiment of special schools was not carried very far, it did translate that the sons of the ‘traditional’ rulers allied to the British did rise to the top of the educational ladder. In the Gold Coast colony and Nigeria, clashes between the educated elite and the ‘illiterate’ chiefs used to be common in the 1930s, but they disappeared in the post-war epoch as education and other factors cemented the privileged into a class whose interests were more readily reconcilable with those of the colonialists than they were with the interests of the African masses.⁵⁴

When the German and English ruling classes of the nineteenth century decided to give more education to their workers, they did so out of the realization that they were enhancing the value of labour. Similarly, European policy-makers for African colonies perceived that education was one aspect of the maximization of the continent’s resources – the policy of the mise en valeur as French colonial minister, Albert Sarrault, put it. Inevitably in such a case the oppressor tries to re-create the oppressed in the image which is most suitable for persisting with the relationship of domination and subordination. In the case of Africans, the education system was doubly dangerous because it also fostered white racism and destroyed the African sense of identity to the point of self-hate. The kind of studies done on the impact of white education on the blacks of the US and the sort of conclusions taught by Fanon of the ‘white masks’ of the black West Indians are all highly relevant to the educational situation of colonial Africa. The system produced individuals like the Senegalese Blaise Diange, who vigorously proclaimed that he was the most ‘French’ and would always be French. Those who were most qualified were understandably the most alienated. The highly trained black lawyers of West Africa performed the role of black Englishmen so fastidiously as to outdo the models they were imitating. The picture they present is both droll and tragic. Colonial education in this respect was a tragi-comedy.

Some colonists recognized how distorted and destructive were the images produced by colonial education in Africa. One high-ranking French official was distressed to hear that black Africans were made to recite that ‘the Gauls, our ancestors, had blue eyes’.⁵⁵ Others expressed dissatisfaction with educational standards in the more conventional sense, because the colonial education given to Africans was hopelessly inferior by the criteria of contemporary Europe, and it became relatively more backward as the colonial period advanced. The widening gap between the African and European sectors of the world imperialist economy was matched by a widening gap between the standards and achievements of the European-type education available in both sectors.

While teaching methods were evolving in Europe, those in Africa remained fixed in a Victorian mould. While some freedom was being created in the atmosphere of a European classroom, the authoritarianism of colonialism reinforced the authoritarianism of backward scholasticism. Racism added to this mess, so that even the African head teacher ran the risk of being publicly disciplined within his school by some twitter of a white school inspector. Europeans were quite aware that they were giving Africans an inferior education by European standards, quite apart from the contradictions that sprung from offering a European-oriented schooling to African children. Wherever there were white settlers, their children went to schools whose curricula and standards were more or less equivalent to the best metropolitan schools of the time, so as to allow such white children to return and fit into their home society when they so decided. This discrimination was most marked where settler societies had come into existence, notably in Algeria, Kenya, South Africa and the Rhodesias.⁵⁶ But everywhere on the continent the education offered to Africans was quantitatively and qualitatively as inferior as it could be and still remains consistent with the European objective of training Africans who would be effective auxiliaries in the work of colonization.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the backwardness of colonial education in Africa was its adherence to a so-called literary model producing ‘white collar’ types at its highest points. This model persisted in spite of the reorientation towards science which was taking place in the metropoles themselves. But of course, once one understands that Africa had a fixed role to provide unskilled labour for the international capitalist system, it is not surprising that scientific and technical education was never a marked feature of colonial education. Such a development would have contradicted the very purposes of colonial rule. Only in a place like the Congo did industrial activity force education into a technological channel so as to provide semi-skilled labour. The same potential existed throughout Southern Africa, but it was denied by the avowedly racist policies designed to keep Africans from rising into the skilled and semi-skilled employment grades of the mining economy.

Africans as well as Europeans made requests for reform and radicalization of the colonial educational system. There were demands for more school places for girls, for more technical colleges and for curricula that were generally more relevant to the ecology and to the African people. None of these demands could get very far, because the parameters of the educational system were set by the phenomenon of colonialism as such. Capitalism in Europe had hardly done much to liberate the woman and in a colonial context it actually undermined the position of the African woman. To recommend more education for girls was to fail to take account of the fact that the constricted money economy had no employment opportunities for women. A demand for more technical colleges was usually met by the answer that there was not enough finance in the coffers of the colonial administration. Of course, there was a vast difference in the amount of surplus expatriated to Europe and the amount of money raised by taxing Africans to meet the daily expenses of subordinating the said Africans. Colonialists were naturally loath to forgo any of the surplus unless it went into the infrastructure for future profits and for maintaining the system as it was. Technical education was ruled out because it actually ran counter to the international division of labour that was part of colonialism. And the same was true of high-level agricultural education. It must not be imagined that Africa’s role was agricultural and Europe’s industrial, scientific agriculture was also monopolized by Europe. Therefore, the superficially attractive idea of agricultural education for Africans was put into effect by colonialists in a degenerate racist form, which had as its rationale the training of Africans to take their ‘national’ place as manual workers on the land.

A complete catalogue of the evils of the colonial educational process in Africa would be long indeed. It was no less decisive than the economic factor in bringing about the under-development of Africa. Indeed, in examining the concept of dependency as a crucial aspect of underdevelopment, one cannot fail to realize the major contribution of the educational system in producing the individuals with all the syndromes of psychological dependence and with the Iifestyles that derive from serving as European puppets in Africa. Yet, it is equally vital to understand the contradictions that were set in train because of the colonial school system. Those contradictions arose in spite of the intentions of the colonial masters, and they have already served in undermining the foreign domination of Africa.

Education elicited a very positive response from large numbers of Africans. A great deal of force in one form or another was employed in getting the money economy in motion; and education was one of the very few positive inducements that motivated people both to join the money economy and to increase their participation in ways such as extended acreage of cash crops. Colonized Africans not only pressured the colonial governments to build more schools, but they themselves made tremendous efforts, including thirty-mile walks to the school, local financing of schools and teachers, and community programmes for educating students in Africa and even abroad.

To some extent, these efforts aided the colonial enterprise. More Africans were thereby having access to European-type education without the colonialist having to release as much of their profits as they might otherwise have had to do. However, the African drive for more education defeated the purposes of the colonialists in a number of ways. The principal consequence is that particularly in British colonies there were more Africans with primary education than the colonialists really required for their own tasks. The colonial regimes were unable to provide such individuals either with secondary schooling or with the jobs that fitted the expectations created by the years of schooling. It is clear that in many colonies the crisis of the primary school leavers was a serious factor lending dynamism to the African independence movement.⁵⁷

The African search for ‘modern’ education also had a marked mobilizational and organizational effect. The act of getting together to finance a school was a political act. The sponsorship of a scholarship scheme tied to palm oiI or to cotton cultivation was also a political response on the part of the oppressed. The form of welfare organizations which catered to educational objectives during the 1930s and 1940s was later subsumed by the mass political parties. As Africans broke beyond the bounds of colonial educational opportunities, individuals as well as collective opposition to colonial rule was engendered. At the individual level, it has been noted how significant were the roles played in independence struggles by West Africans educated in the United States. Those individuals were part of the process of seeking out Western education wherever it could be found. Coming from places like Nigeria, their normal outlets for limited higher education was in Britain; but they sought new frontiers in the United States when they found no openings in Britain.⁵⁸ Africans who never received higher education or any education at all were part of the movement to change certain vicious racist trends of the colonial educational system in which they placed hope for their children. In French West Africa, the major issue over which there was popular protest was the French attempt to create ‘Bush Schools’ that were supposedly more relevant to African needs but were fundamentally aimed at creating an inferior educational environment for ‘the natives’. The struggle against these schools was a victorious one, and it formed part of the national independence struggles in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa in the post-war era. The same is true of the African movement against agricultural education in British East and Central Africa.

The powerful African independent Church movement had a somewhat less powerful counterpart in the independent schools that sprung up on African initiative. In Kenya, they had a Christian background; in North Africa, they had a Muslim background; while elsewhere, as in the Sudan, no particular religious preference was expressed. In all these situations, however, the independent spirit went far beyond the classrooms, and the colonial powers were themselves quick to see the generally ‘subversive’ implications of Africans controlling their education in this way. In any event, contradictions arose within what the colonists would have considered as the most advanced institutions espousing European value systems. With very few exceptions, the leaders of African independence movements were products of an educational programme that was aimed at keeping them as colonial subjects. The opposition to the colonial intellectual formation took place at two levels. A few individuals actually rejected the entire value system of capitalism, individualism, racism and exploitation. These were the few who uncompromisingly continued to strike out against imperialism after gaining the tokens of constitutional independence. The second level of protest was generated by the contradiction between the value system and the personal aspirations of educated Africans. They had been taught about freedom, liberty and a career open to the talents, and instead found that colonial rule offered the educated elite none of these things. Taken together with all the other contractions of colonial society, the antagonism between the colonizers and the African educated elite was a notable contribution to the emergence of national political parties, and to the gaining of constitutional independence as a step on Africa’s march towards reconquering the political power lost through the imposition of Europe’s colonial rule.

Everywhere on the African continent, education originating with the colonialists was meant to ensure mental and physical enslavement. To a large extent it did carry out this function. But every aspect of Africa’s subjugation also contained the seeds of revolution since capitalism in its colonial guise could not satisfy even the minimal aspirations of the African people. The more cash crop farming there was the more likely it became that there would be peasant revolts. The larger the wage-earning sector, the more likely it was that there would be the revolt of organized labour. Dissatisfaction with education and with the opportunities for education was at the forefront of colonial grievances and it helped to weld together the vast majority of the population to address themselves to the principal contradiction between themselves as the colonized and the Europeans as colonizers. No other facet of the African experience so clearly illustrates the dialectic of oppression and resistance. Historical underdevelopment is a key aspect of the story, while the rebirth of freedom is the other.

The African Revolution

Talk at the University of Michigan, 1972

The African continent today has less turmoil, less violence and a slower rate of social transformation than Asia or Latin America; and these are the elements normally associated with Revolution. Yet those who speak of the "African Revolution" know that African people are more aware and more determined than ever before. It is this consciousness, added to internal contradictions and external forces, which gives the African situation its revolutionary character.

For nearly forty years, C.L.R. James has been interested in the development of political consciousness among African people and in their strivings toward grasping control over their own lives. As an analyst of processes in Africa, James qualifies to be called an "academic" or "intellectual"; and as a participant in the struggle for African advance, he becomes a "revolutionary intellectual." It will be found that anyone confining himself to the supposedly pure academic understanding of Africa will in fact fall short of the objective, because of lack of commitment and failure to relate theory to practice. The value of James's contribution to the African Revolution and to an appreciation of it stems precisely from the blend of committed scholarship and activism.

Quantitatively, what James has written on Africa does not amount to a great deal, and it is certainly a tiny proportion of his numerous writings on a variety of subjects. Similarly, one could say that only a small part of his time was devoted to activity directly concerning the African continent. It is the quality and significance of his writing and political action that really matters. During the 1930's, when the "Western Democracies" were conspiring to make Ethiopia into an Italian colony, James directed from England an ad hoc committee of "International Friends of Ethiopia." This later emerged as the "International African Service Bureau," having James as editor of its journal, International African Opinion.⁵⁹ The main platform of this journal was colonial liberation; and it was against this background that James wrote A History of Negro Revolt in 1938.⁶⁰ It bears the marks of those years when even Black militants inside and outside Africa accepted the language of the European oppressor - "Negro," "natives," "tribes," etc. Beyond that, however, the book is a mine of ideas advancing far ahead of its time.

James began his section on "Revolts in Africa" by citing what historians have come to call (rather disparagingly) the Sierra Leone Hut Tax War of 1898. As James explained, it was a reaction by indigenous Sierra Leone peoples against the imposition of European colonial rule, symbolized by the enactment of legislation taxing dwelling places. It was a war of national resistance and liberation, involving the majority of the ethnic groups in Sierra Leone in unified struggle. Many years elapsed before any researcher seriously undertook investigation of this episode.⁶¹ The reason for the disinterest is that African resistance to European colonization was not supposed to have existed as far as colonialist scholars were concerned. As late as 1957, Sir Alan Burns was expressing the orthodox view when he wrote that Africans welcomed the coming of the British. As he put it, "there was, for the most part, little fighting against the local people. In certain cases, slave dealers, pirates and tyrannical rulers were fought and defeated, but the inhabitants of these territories as a whole stood aside during the fighting and willingly accepted British rule." Burns was a colonial governor and wrote on behalf of the British ruling class. The mere mention of a different position in 1938 was an act of defiance and singled out C.L.R. James as a front-runner in the field of African studies devoted to African liberation.

Having cited the Sierra Leone war of resistance in 1898, James proceeded to mention a series of African social movements taking place in the inter-war years, and commonly designated as the African Independent Church movement. James unerringly identified three of the most important of these - centered around John Chilembwe (Malawi), Simon Kambangu (Congo) and Harry Thuku (Kenya). Once more, it was many years before these protests were to gain the recognition they deserved. John Chilembwe is today an African hero known far beyond the boundaries of what was in his day the British colony of Nyasaland, and his service to his people evoked one of the fullest biographies written on an African leader.⁶² Harry Thuku has also been in the forefront of subsequent historical writings on Kenya, and will undoubtedly continue to attract attention. And it is now accepted that forty years of the immediate pre-independence history of the Congo cannot be understood without reference to the popular forces and aspirations articulated by Simon Kambangu.

Not only were African Independent Churches neglected as an area of enquiry for many years, but when they were first studied or assessed by Europeans, there was a tendency to portray them as being exclusively related to religion or superstition. By Christian missionaries, they were often presented as the work of the devil, while other social researchers came up with such mystifying terms as "millenarian," "messianic" and "atavistic." James's treatment was very brief, but he captured the essence of these anti-colonial African mass movements in a few lines. He recognized them as revolts against oppression and as part of the socio-political protest engendered by the presence of the Europeans and the system of colonialism. He distinguished between form and content, noting that the language of religion in which the protests were couched should not obscure the fact that they sprung from such things as forced labour, land alienation, and colonial taxation. It was because the leadership had formal schooling from missionaries that they expressed themselves primarily in religious terms. As James put it, "Such education as the African is given is nearly always religious, so that the leader often translated the insurrection into religious terms. ... To every African [independent church organization] is an instinctive step towards independence and away from the perpetual control of Europeans." (pages 53, 55)

A third segment of James's treatment of African revolt was provided in his analysis of workers' organizations and their militancy. He cited the Sierra Leone railway strikes of 1919 and 1926, the Gambian sailors' strike of 1929, the spontaneous uprising of Nigerian women at Aba in 1929, and the powerful Black trade union activity of the A.C.U. in South Africa. In each instance, he pinpointed phenomena of the greatest relevance to the creation of Africa as it is today, and he was doing so a comfortable twenty years before writings on these subjects generally acknowledged these facts. For that matter, even today the tremendous awakening of the small urbanized African element in the 1920's is recorded only in texts which take the minority Marxist position on African history or as a backdrop to the specialist volumes on the African trade union movement.⁶³

In describing the fortunes of a mass organization, James is at his best - partly because of the immediacy that he brings to commentary and more so because of his grasp of the dialectics of organization. In 1938, he had obviously had enough experience of political organization at both first- and second-hand to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the I.C.U. under Clements Kadalie. James's account is a real tribute to the fighting spirit of the Africans of South Africa who today bear the burden of apartheid. In a most economical manner, he probed the quality of the leadership, examined the relationship of leadership to the mass from which it sprang, reflected on the international context of the strikes and other protests by the African workers of South Africa at that time, and quietly indicated that within a racist situation the category of "class" must be seriously re-examined. A great deal has been said on the South African labour movement, and much more remains to be written.⁶⁴ But the following lines by James constitute a judgment that will probably remain unshaken. He observed as follows:

The real parallel to this movement is the mass uprising in San Domingo. There is the same instinctive capacity for organization, the same throwing up of gifted leaders from among the masses. ... After 1926 the movement began to decline. It could not maintain itself for long at that pitch without great and concrete successes. It was bound to stabilise itself at a less intense level. Kadalie lacked the education and the knowledge to organise it on a stable basis - the hardest of tasks for a man of his origin. There was misappropriation of the funds. He saw the necessity for international affiliation. But though the constitution of the organisation condemned capitalism, he could not affiliate to the Third International. The white South African workers refused his offer of unity, for these, petty bourgeois in outlook owing to their high wages and the social degradation of the Negro, are among the bitterest enemies of the native workers. (pages 70, 71)

European scholarship on Africa in the 1960's was ostensibly more liberal and more concerned with the history of Africans rather than the activity of Europeans in Africa. Yet standard general works carried scarcely a hint of the tremendous armed struggle waged by Africans in the late 19th century before falling to the European enemy.⁶⁵ It is only very recently that this topic has begun to receive the attention it deserves from African and European historians dealing with the continent in that period. (It is interesting to note that individuals like James and Padmore never receive credit or acknowledgement from later writers.) The same applies to the subject of African independent churches and to the self-mobilization by the small wage earner class in colonial Africa. How come that C.L.R. James was so prescient as to perceive the significance of all these "African revolts" when writing in 1938? And what is the meaning of such manifestations as far as the contemporary African Revolution is concerned?

Most schoolboys would have heard the axiom that each generation rewrites its own history. It does so not merely by giving different answers to the same questions but by posing entirely different questions based on the stage of development which the particular society has reached. Certain scholars will be among the first to raise the new and meaningful issue because of their sensitivity and connection with the most dynamic group in the society. Thus, when African peoples were mounting a struggle for political independence and as they continued that struggle through military means in Southern Africa and politico-economic means elsewhere, they automatically because interested in recalling previous resistance. Initially, only a scholar committed to or at least sympathetic to the present African emancipation drive would find it possible to seek out and unearth the evidence of earlier struggles. C.L.R. James was a participant in some of the earliest pressure groups in the metropoles urging African freedom from colonial rule in the 1930's. That is why he was capable of writing A History of Negro Revolt in 1938.

A people's consciousness is heightened by knowledge of the dignity and determination of their foreparents. Indeed, the African world-view regarding ancestors as an integral part of the living community makes it so much easier to identify a given generation with the struggles of an earlier generation. The perception, therefore, is in terms of self - what struggles were we waging in 1885, in 1904, in 1921, and so on? It is also a learning experience in which African people often painfully find out the mistakes of (say) king Lobengula of South Africa or the Maji Maji warriors of Tanzania. To give historical depth to the process of resistance is itself functional within the African Revolution today. James knew this. His major effort to project a past revolt was The Black Jacobins, that remarkable study of the momentous victory of the enslaved African population of San Domingo against the Thermidorean reaction in France, and against the expansion of British capital. A History of Negro Revolt fulfilled the same purpose; and one of its most significant features was its emphasis on the continuity of resistance.

Modern nationalist African historians have recently come to the realization that the "nationalism" of the 1950's and 1960's had its roots deep in the African past, and that the political parties which won independence in so many territories were only the end product of a continuous process of resistance which took diverse forms: notably, armed struggle, independent churches, welfare associations, peasant crop hold-ups and strikes by wage earners. This has been fiercely resisted by a small number of white scholars, basically because they wish to hold to the position that nationalism was a product of colonialism and virtually a gift to the African people from Europe in the period after the last war.⁶⁶ This is not the time and place to refute such a view, and perhaps there is no context in which there is much value in so doing. However, it is worth pointing out that a perception of links and continuity between popular resistance over a long period of time is not something unique to an African nationalist historian. This is the approach adopted by Vietnamese scholars, by progressive Philippine scholars, and by Cuban scholars.

James's awareness of the continuity of African resistance throughout the colonial era can be illustrated by the following lines: "By the end of the nineteenth century, less than one-tenth of Africa remained in the hands of Africans themselves. This rapid change could not fail to produce a series of revolts, which have never ceased." (emphasis mine) (pages 40, 41) His awareness that this struggle evolved over time and changed form can be observed in these sentences: "in the years before the war [of 1914] the tribes simply threw themselves at the government troops and suffered the inevitable defeat. Such risings could not go on. They were too obviously suicidal. In 1915, however, we have a new type - a rising led not by a tribal chief but by a Negro who has had some education." (page 53) Then, moving to the end of the decade of the 1920's, James commented on urban workers' resistance in Congo Brazzaville: "This movement had definite Communist tendencies. What the authorities fear most is a combination of the workers in the towns and the peasants in the interior. Such a movement, however, has not yet taken place .... Yet railways are linking the various portions of the territory, and ... since the war each succeeding revolt has been more fierce, more concentrated than the last." (page 62) And, finally, the brief survey was brought up to the year 1938 with reference to the cocoa hold-up that had just taken place in the British colony of the Gold Coast. James felt that "an extraordinary determination and unity linked the population", but he had no romantic illusions that victory was at hand. His assessment at that point was that, "Militant as was this movement, yet, as in most of the older colonies, there was not that militancy which thinks in terms of throwing out the British. ... There is no national revolutionary movement." (page 84)

In the years immediately after James wrote the above lines, the tempo of events in Africa quickened, and the various strands of revolt were drawn together. There developed both the combination of urban and rural elements which the colonial authorities feared and the determination to throw the colonialists out rather than merely seek concessions. In England, James remained part of the small group of Black men who constantly agitated on the African independence issue, expressing their confidence that at the end of the last world war the peoples of the continent would not brook much further delay in the quest for independence. The demand for African independence was voiced most insistently at the famous Manchester Conference in 1945, having in attendance both DuBois and Padmore as well as two future African heads of state in the persons of Kenyatta and Nkrumah. James himself reflects that at the time it was felt that their statements about African freedom could only have come from "lunatics or inebriates." It is true that the colonial powers and Britain in particular spoke vaguely of self-government for Africa, but no schedule was set up and the tenor of their pronouncements suggested a delay of some forty or fifty years at least. In 1947, on the eve of Nkrumah's return to the Gold Coast colony, British experts were saying that the 1946 Gold Coast constitution would last for several decades, and exhortations were being made to strengthen the British colonial administration to meet the growing demands that were to be made on it.⁶⁷ The difference between these two perspectives is that between a people-centred approach on the one hand and a blend of racism and paternalism on the other. The Pan-Africanists were expressing confidence in the African people and they were proved right. (Even so, James frequently admitted being surprised by the speed of change in Africa. Other African leaders have made statements to this effect, showing that when the potential of a people is realized in action it literally goes beyond all expectations.)

It is difficult and perhaps unnecessary to try and single out James's role within the Pan-African movement, since it was essentially a collective venture.⁶⁸ What is well-known is that Africans in the diaspora for many years were the driving forces of Pan-Africanism, and it is important to examine the significance of this for the African Revolution. Garvey was an exception in regarding himself as "an African overseas." DuBois remained American until very late in his life, and James has always consciously identified as a West Indian. He offers the explanation that the West Indian (both French and British) has been steeped in the culture of Europe, has in many instances mastered that culture so thoroughly as to lecture the "mother countries" on it and tear it down from within. Hence Cesaire, Fanon, Padmore, etc. James certainly prided himself on mastery of everything in European culture from Greek tragedy to the Hegelian dialectic. But once in England, he moved instinctively to a Pan-African platform. This is highly intriguing. Today, it is usual for the Pan-Africanist in the New World to be into a heavy culture thing. This is condemned by certain philistines (white and black) as being romantic racism, since African culture is supposedly alien to the Americas. What the critics fail to realize is that there are fundamental political realities which draw the conscious Black man in the New World towards the African continent. These realities operate equally whether the individual has arrived at a stage of heightened consciousness via cultural nationalism or through a more conventional approach to the struggle against exploitation and oppression.

Some attempts have been made to explain why articulate and politicized West Indians like James, Padmore, and Garvey found that their field of expression had to be within North America, Europe and Africa rather than in their island homes. The answer is to be found partly in their home environment and the socio-political inadequacies there.⁶⁹ However, the continuing validity of the Pan-African perspective throughout the years of James's career derives from the incontrovertibly international character of white racism, and the situation of African peoples as integral parts of the international political economy.

After the end of formal enslavement in the Americas, there were a few whites who would have welcomed the massive re-transfer to Africans to their homelands. But of course our labour was still needed by the capitalist systems of West Europe and North America, so that possibility was never part of the rational calculation of white society. The alternative was to try and placate the former slaves by promises of advance within American and Caribbean society. We were told to forget slavery, forget Africa and forget that we were Africans. The stumbling block to accepting this is that the unique exploitation and oppression of the Black population could only be explained in terms of our colour and origins. As young men in Trinidad, James and Padmore read Garvey and DuBois. As young West Indians they were concerned primarily with West Indian politics, but the factor of blackness could not be escaped since it was so pervasive. Similarly, within the United States, Black people were impelled to read about Africa not because of any a priori judgments that they were "African" but because of the necessity to survive and challenge white mythology within the U.S.A. itself. James drew attention to this process, saying that "The American blacks - faced with this view of the past of Africa, a view that has been used not only to justify slavery but also to maintain segregation and oppression - found themselves driven to make the most serious studies of the past of Africa."⁷⁰

Once the African continent was brought under colonial rule by the end of the last century, the racist factor was also evident there as a justification of exploitation and oppression. Racism had become part of the superstructure of the white capitalist world. The drive towards white domination shaped policy as an end in itself - sometimes at variance even with the profit motive which is the propellant of capitalism. It became highly probable that any Black man fighting against white oppression in his particular locality would sooner or later realize that all Africans "at home and abroad" were caught up in the same predicament. Pan-Africanism is not simply a unity of colour, it is also a unity of common condition and one that retains its validity because the dominant group in the international political economy continue to define things in racist terms for their own convenience. For their own convenience, admittedly, but then they are also playing with revolution. James has more than once commented on this double-edged weapon of racism. He wrote recently that "centuries of Western domination and indoctrination ... create in the minds of the great majority of Africans and people of African descent everywhere a resentment that is never entirely absent. It may remain dormant for long periods, but it can be depended upon in a particular population at a particular time to create and cement a formidable unity and determination. Imperialism created this feeling; it has paid and will pay dearly for it."⁷¹

Identity is both affirmation and negation. It recognizes in the same instant the insider and the outsider. Black becomes relevant to an African at that point when he came into the contradiction with white men. The continuing sharpness of that contradiction is due to white domination, and the Black or African identity has become a weapon for emancipation. At the level of organization, it is a common enough principle that unity and the enlargement of scale must be brought to bear against the enemy. It is logical enough, too, that one must maximize strong points, so the freeing of the African continent itself became the first priority of for politically active West Indians who knew the limitations of their own societies and knew that the weakness of Africa contributed to indignity and low status abroad. Europeans enslaved Africans and colonized Africa. They could never have imagined that some of the slaves would be instrumental in the freeing of the colonies, but the outcome was an unavoidable consequence of the kind of international political economy that emerged under European guidance from the 15th century onward.

The African Revolution so far has already demonstrated convincingly that what has been used as a badge of servility can be turned into a bond of unity and a liberation tool. James's career is a small illustration of this. It is also an illustration that the given African identification is not sufficient as far as carrying out the African Revolution is concerned. The Revolution is by and of the mass of the workers, peasants and such leadership as emerges from the mass struggle. This perception of classes forming within African society and his attachment to the Marxist world-view placed James in a position shared by several Black intellectuals over the course of this century. It required a reconciliation between the African and the World Revolution, as it were, and a plotting of the coordinates of race and class. The manner in which these were resolved by James is instructive.

Time and again, James found his white Marxist comrades reneging on their internationalism when it came to the cause of the Black man - be it Ethiopia, the West Indies or the U.S.A. The only course of action compatible with the welfare of African peoples was to break with such compromised crypto-racist whites, as Padmore did, as Sekou Toure did, as Aime Cesaire did. Africans on the continent do not find this course of action hard to follow. There is already a built-in suspicion of "foreign" ideologies which can be carried to irrational lengths but which at least serves as a barrier to accepting white ideological hegemony of any sort. The progressive African who is conscious of what the Christian missionaries did is unlikely to be taken in by Marxist missionaries.

A less obvious lesson which can be drawn from James's double commitment to Marxism and the African Revolution is that certain brands of Marxism have no applicability whatever to our situation, having in fact been exposed as bankrupt in Europe itself. While Stalinism dominated the European scene during the late 1920's through to the 1940's, James was attracted to the minority Trotskyite position, which at least questioned some of the monstrosities carried out in the Soviet Union under the banner of Socialism. Later, James broke with the Trotskyite mainstream on the grounds that they too were too wedded to the Soviet State to perceive how completely the Revolution had been betrayed. Without entering into the substance of this argument, it can still be affirmed that the African Revolution cannot afford to draw on Marxist theory in its dogmatic Stalinist or even Trotskyist form. But, conversely, it should be equally clear that Africans can benefit from mankind's ideological heritage just as we can build on the universal technological heritage. James brings out the applicability of Marxist methodology in his analysis of some important features of contemporary Africa: notably in his evaluation of the Ghana experience and in his approach to the transformation taking place in Tanzania.

What happened in Ghana is central to an understanding of modern African politics. Many liberals paid lip-service to Ghanaian independence while trying to suggest that it was a gift from Britain and was complete in itself. Such individuals were out of tune with Nkrumah's efforts to achieve genuine all-round liberation for the Ghanaian people; and his overthrow was a welcome opportunity for them to spout anti-African sentiments. In turn, James was prompted to reply in a number of public forums, restating positions he had arrived at sometime before the coup. His first concern was to vindicate the popular and revolutionary nature of the events that transpired in the Gold Coast colony between 1947 and 1957. During this period, the role played by Nkrumah was that of an authentic spokesman of the people, challenging the leadership of the petty-bourgeois educated elite of lawyers and doctors. However, James was equally emphatic that subsequently (i.e. after 1957) the revolution in Ghana and Africa as a whole was subverted by those forces. In my opinion, this change needs to be reaffirmed, not only vis a vis the reactionaries and liberals who always disliked Nkrumah, but also with regard to the ultra-leftists who suddenly decided after the Ghana coup that Nkrumah had never been leading a revolutionary movement at all, but rather a party of the petty bourgeoisie.⁷²

In the many analyses which he has made of the popular movement in the Gold Coast and Ghana, James seldom if never uses any overt Marxist categorization, or makes any citations of the spokesmen of scientific socialism. Indeed, his favourite comparison is with the French Revolution, and he is quite happy to use Michelet and Lefebvre as the sources of his quotations. But his methodology remains that of historical dialectics; and he was in effect showing the compatibility between the latter and an Africa nationalist or Pan-Africanist stance.

It is relevant under the present circumstances to explore the limitations rather than the achievements of Nkrumah's regime, since it is the former which have salutary lessons to offer on the nature of Revolution and counter-revolution in Africa. James traces the deterioration of the Ghanaian revolution at some length in his study Nkrumah Then and Now, pointing to political errors and problems such as the following:

Nkrumah's dismissal of the Chief Justice for a politically unpopular decision; the growth of a bureaucracy; the total alienation of the middle classes; the encouragement of a coterie of sycophants; failure to involve the masses politically; and personal degeneration of Nkrumah as he became overwhelmed by forces hostile to his original intentions. Not surprisingly, the strongest part of James's argument dealt with the question of the state and the political party. A correct appreciation of these issues remains one of the highest priorities to be met by the leadership of Africa today.

Among a number of well-meaning people, neo-colonialism is considered as incorporating political freedom unmatched by economic independence. Nkrumah himself fostered this distinction. However, at a much more fundamental level, it should be noted that neo-colonialism is incompatible with political independence, and that the flag-raising ceremonies effected no change on the colonial state. James suggested that, "The first problem was a state, a government. To begin with, he had no independent African government. Like all these new African rulers, he had inherited a colonial government organised for purposes quite different from his own." The African head of state found himself "in charge of a British imperialist colonial government which was constructed for British imperial purposes and not for purposes of governing an African population." ("Reflections on Pan Africanism.") This remarkable insight (which James develops at some length in his "epilogue" to A History of Pan-African Revolt) is beginning to gain wider acceptance.

In 1971, such sentiments were officially expressed by the governing party of Tanzania, in a document that declared unequivocally that the people had yet to take political power into their hands throughout the continent.⁷³

In 1966, while writing on Nkrumah to a West Indian public, James made the following comment:

It took Nkrumah six years to win independence by 1957. He could have gone on to independence in 1951. He preferred to wait. But one day he told me he didn't know whether he was right to wait, or if he should have gone forward in 1951 as George Padmore and Dorothy Padmore were urging him to do. I did not know what to think at the time but today I am of the opinion that he should have done straight ahead. That six-year delay was one cause of the deterioration of his party and his government. A revolution cannot mark time for six years.

More prominence should be given to this idea than James himself gave it. (See another mention in "Reflections on Pan-Africanism.") It was a fundamental aspect of the derailing of the people's aspiration in Ghana and elsewhere on the continent. The struggle for independence was a revolutionary one emanating from the masses of the people and embracing almost all strata of the population. Colonial governments retreated before the force of popular political organizations, but at the same time they manoeuvred and counter-attacked sometimes openly and more often insidiously. A period of "Self-Government" such as that in Ghana between 1951 and 1957 was one of co-optation and defusing. It was in that period that the colonialists ensured the perpetuation of the colonial state and of the international imperialist economy.

Within a colonial or neo-colonial state structure the locus of power lies outside the national boundaries, having only a local representation in the form of an administration or through the persons of a small class created by and dependent on capitalism as a system. To break with this, the African revolution must transfer power to the people. In Ghana, this did not happen. The party decayed, the bureaucracy flourished in state and party, and the regime became more authoritarian behind its facade of one-party democracy. James's judgment of Nkrumah on this score is a judgment of the African Revolution.

Nkrumah studied, thought and knew a lot. But one thing he never mastered: that democracy is not a matter of the rights of the opposition, but in some way or other must involve the population. Africa will find that road or continue to crash from precipice to precipice.

After the fall of Nkrumah and the subsequent demise of Modibo Keita, one could well ask "Where is the African Revolution?" -- especially given the fact in the first place that constitutional independence brought nothing but puppet regimes in so many territories. James, as a revolutionary protagonist for nearly half a century, is not unduly perturbed by the apparent weight of the counter-revolution. Insofar as the African leadership is not responsible to the majority of the people, it only means that the African Revolution will be aimed as much against them as against the longstanding alien forces of capitalism and imperialism. James cites Fanon with full approval in this context, paraphrasing him as follows:

In the nationalist revolution of the twentieth century, the people must be against not only the imperialists. Some of the people's leaders who come forward to lead the revolution have nowhere to lead the people, and revolution must be as fiercely against them as against the imperialists. Some of the writers, having learned all they could from Western civilisation, will join the revolution, but bring nothing positive and corrupt the revolutionary movement. The intellectuals must learn that they must dig deep among the mass of the population to find the elements of a truly national culture. (Emphasis mine, taken from "DuBois to Fanon.")

It is the last of the above statements which holds the key to James's present fascination with the Tanzanian situation. James's praise for Tanzania is unstinted:

The impact that the policies of Tanzania have made upon Africa and upon the rest of the world has already established the African state of Tanzania as one of the foremost political phenomena of the twentieth century. Tanzania is the highest peak reached so far by revolting blacks. (page 117, A History of Pan-African Revolt).

What has Tanzania done to receive such unqualified praise, in James's opinion? The government nationalized foreign property, which was good. It began to restructure the educational system in an entirely new way, which was an even better idea. It was planning the future on the basis of socialist rural communities, drawing upon the heritage of the people, since Ujamaa or family living was part of that heritage. This, in James's estimation, was the most revolutionary aspect of the political thought of Tanzania.

Reading between the lines, one can see that James has enriched his own long fruitful career of learning and teaching by turning to the pages of Fanon and more so Mwalimu Nyerere. Fanon exposed the limits of Western culture and its counter-productive aspects as far as a Black revolutionary leader was concerned. Nyerere and the Tanzanian developments undoubtedly rekindled James's interest in African civilization and African culture. The fact that Ujamaa seeks its roots in the African past and in African society must have reinforced James's long-held conviction that Revolution must be of the people. Tanzanian Ujamaa was of the people and about the people.

Because the majority of the Tanzanian population lives in the countryside, it means that any goals for the well-being of the country must relate primarily to the rural areas. A most obvious conclusion, one might say, but it only became obvious after Nyerere had said it often enough. Nkrumah had not discerned this. Economic development under his rule was urban-directed and oriented towards industry, which was viewed as a panacea. In evaluating Nkrumah's economic policies, James did not perceive the weakness. He merely observed that Nkrumah was trying to do too much. It was more than that - it was an incorrect strategy for socio-economic development, because it ignored the majority of the population and was encouraging further ties of dependence with the outside world rather than self-reliance, as is Tanzania's goal.

When looking at the appalling economic plight of Africa and the Third World, James at one point tended to place reliance on an external solution: namely in "the regenerative assistance of the accumulated wealth and technical knowledge of the advanced countries." For once James seems to be defeatist when he assesses that "the regimes in Asia and Africa, with their present resources, have no possibility whatever of overcoming constant economic crisis and political and social decay." Undoubtedly, a Revolution within the metropolitan centres would be of inordinate importance to the African Revolution, but it is no pre-condition. It may even be argued that the world revolution must continue to move from the "periphery" to the "centre" as far as the imperialist world is concerned. In any event, the trend pointed by Tanzanian Ujamaa is for self-reliance, internally integrated growth, and a self-sustaining economy which can in itself constitute exit from the economic crisis and socio-political decay attendant on neo-colonialism. There can be no guarantee of success of this particular line, but there can never be a guarantee in these matters. James himself is fond of telling political activists to do what they feel has to be done - and let the rest take care of itself. In terms of economic policy, therefore, he has taken his cue from the Tanzanian revolution.

Some Marxists are sceptical of what is going on in Tanzania. They cannot separate Ujamaa from the "African Socialism" of the African petty bourgeoisie. A few of these are Africans on the continent or in the Americas - a fact worth noting in the present context. More significantly, there are numerous Africans as enthusiastic about Ujamaa as James is, but who refuse to accept that insights can be gained from Marxism which are applicable to the African situation and would strengthen our ideological position. James has always been applying Marxism to the concrete conditions of Black society, irrespective of whether or not he announces this. Occasionally, he makes it explicit. He did so with regard to the Tanzanian Revolution, and it is worth ending with the illustration to that effect.

Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the Russian Revolution, James isolated the two matters on which Lenin placed absolute priority in his last years. The first was the break-up of the old state machinery and the second was educational work among the peasants. Marxism-Leninism was not Nyerere's point of reference, but he decided upon these same two priorities for Tanzania after the experience gained from several years in office as head of state. James holds up this relevant parallel between the Russian and Tanzanian situations as an example to those Africans who misguidedly and maliciously represent Marxism as "something that Marx had to say about the advanced countries." Equally of course one could conclude that Marxists formalism is not indispensable in the task of discerning the movement of society and building the new structures that express the interests of the mass of the people.⁷⁴ It is significant that a question as seemingly abstract as that of the value of Marxism to the African Revolution has recently been revived among African students on the continent and activists in the Black movement in America. It is a recognition of the fact that, as oppressed people, we cannot afford to overlook any weapon which could contribute to our liberation. One of the many facets of the career of Mzee C.L.R. James is precisely the awareness that African freedom will not be won without building on the positive elements in the history of Man. This is a propitious moment for restating that proposition, because it can be placed in the now firmly established context that the portion of that history most relevant to us is the history of Man in Africa and of Africans in world affairs.

Problems of Third-World Development

Published as a New Beginnings Pamphlet, 1972

On reflecting on the problem of Third World development, I recall an incident many months ago when the Republic of Guinea was invaded by the Portuguese. As soon as the Chinese heard about the invasion, the Xinhua News Agency put out a report denouncing American imperialism. America’s name had not as yet been called by Guineans, but the Chinese from objective analysis decided that if the Portuguese were invading Guinea, it had something to do with American imperialism. And in like vein, I would suggest that if we are talking about the problems of development in the Third World, the major problem is the United States of America, because it crowns the whole structure of world imperialism. I will leave this as an assertion, because to go into a justification would consume time. However, I would like to illustrate in some ways the connections between imperialism and underdevelopment.

In the United Nations, a certain euphemism is in use. They speak about the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ market economies. These two collectively constitute the imperialist world: the developed market economy being the United States, the Western European countries and Japan; and the curious category of the developing market economy includes the rest of what we commonly refer to as the Third World, the economies of which are hooked into the metropolitan structures of North America, Western Europe and Japan. Some of the mechanisms for exploiting the so-called developing countries have been known for a long time. For instance, unequal trade has been a common subject of discussion, and in recent times it has received more careful analysis, so that we know rather more than we used to about exactly how the captains of trade contributed to the exploitation of the underdeveloped world. This is not a position that is merely adopted by Marxists or radical nationalists; it is a position which is commonly asserted even by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

A second well-known mechanism of exploitation within the structure of imperialism is the transfer of profits from under-developed areas towards the metropoles. My only comment on this is to note that what is called ‘profits’ is in fact ‘capital’. For too long most of us, including people who would call themselves leftists, have created an idiom of ‘capital export’ from the colonies and semi-colonies; and the very idiom obscures part of the reality, indeed, perhaps the whole reality. I am of the opinion that we cannot refer to the export of capital from the metropoles to the underdeveloped sector of the world except in a limited sense. Historically, the movement of capital has always been on balance from the external or peripheral sectors of the imperialist economy to its epicentres. This began with the trade in slaves, while later it took the form of grossly unequal trade between Europe and the rest of the world. The most that can be said about European capital export is that Europe has been the centre for the redistribution and reallocation of capital that is produced throughout the world. Capital produced in, say, the Caribbean or in North America in the epoch of slavery, was shifted to Europe, and – at a later date – was redistributed from Western Europe to Eastern Europe; or capital that was obtained by forcing the Chinese to smoke opium was redistributed into the Indian sector of the British imperialist economy; and so on and so forth. But, strictly speaking, there never has been any export of capital from the developed areas in the sense of capital being engendered and originating in the metropolitan sectors for export overseas. So, my point about profit is that when we look at its mechanism closely, we find that it is always a means of transferring to the metropolitan economy capital produced out of the material and human resources of the Third World.

Unequal trade and capital flows away from the underdeveloped countries are two of the principal mechanisms of imperialism. There are others that are proving to be significant in their own ways, which tend to be left out of the literature, and which are very operative when we come to think in terms of changing the status quo. One of these, for instance, is the blockage of technology. This takes a number of forms: it could mean actual technological retardation or arrest in the underdeveloped countries; or it could mean simply the blockage of the movement of technology from the metropolitan to the colonial economy. The best examples of the actual destruction and retardation of technology would come from Asia – notably China and India – and to a lesser extent from Africa. Examples of the failure to allow the transfer of whatever technology has developed in Europe itself to the Third World can be taken at random. Particularly in the more recent epoch, we have had in Africa striking instances of the refusal of the metropolitan capitalist/imperialist countries to allow the transfer of technology in certain critical areas which would pose a threat to their own exploitation and domination. In Africa today, one of the biggest and best-known projects is that of the Tanzania–Zambian railway. The whole history of this railway is one in which metropolitan countries set out to interfere with the movement of this particular aspect of technology to a part of the Third World, and they failed because in this instance the People’s Republic of China was available as an alternative source. The corollary to the blockage of skills and technology is that of the international division of labor under imperialism has always ensured the development of world technology within certain specific sectors, namely the metropolis, and more recently in particular parts of the metropoles, allowing the United States to assume hegemony in most fields. This is an important phenomenon when we come to examine the contemporary evolution of imperialism, because the changes in technology which were possible in the last decade have made it possible for the imperialist countries to begin to adopt radically new strategies in terms of international division of labour and in terms of the kinds of political controls which they exercise over the Third World.

Yet another general feature to which attention should be drawn is the way in which imperialism has restructured the world economy so that within the Third World there is no cohesion with respect to production and exchange. As one moves from colony or semi-colony to another colony or semi-colony, one finds the breaking of the ties which formerly integrated one with the other – that is to say, the breaking of the trade ties which integrated the productive resources. One finds within each colony also the same disjunction, the same disaggregation of the consistent parts of a colonized economy. Instead, the linkages are with the metropolitan economy, and are determined exclusively by the latter in its own interest – an interest which proves incompatible with the independence and any real development of the Third World.

Moving on from the essentially economic concerns, I wish to highlight the political facet of imperialism. A number of writers on Latin America and to a lesser extent on Africa have paid considerable attention to the creation in the Third World of certain strata, or certain classes, which reflect the interest of the metropoles and which allow the requisite kinds of penetration and exploitation. This political control takes a number of forms: there is the classical colonial form, there is the utilization of white settlers, and most important in the recent period, there has emerged in Africa and Asia an indigenous strata who conduct locally the activity required to support the international economy. These are people who – in Fanon’s words – perform the function of transmission lines for international monopoly capital.

The foregoing represents a very brief portrayal of the mechanisms of imperialism. I am not attempting to go into any serious theoretical justification of why imperialism is the big problem of Third World development, because – hopefully – we understand that. So perhaps we could proceed to look rather more closely at the movement of contemporary Third World history, in order to better appreciate the problems and possible antidote to underdevelopment. In the last decade, we have been in a sense in a counter-revolutionary epoch, in spite of many of the festivities that have taken place celebrating the so-called independence in various parts of Africa and Asia, and in spite of certain foci of liberation. We can say that a general movement of history in the Third World has been counter to any direction that one may term independence. This I will illustrate using a number of criteria. First of all, one can apply the Western bourgeois measurements of growth rates, although these are very limited and skewed. One finds that the growth of the Third World economy has failed to keep up with those norms which have been established by groups such as the Pearson Commission. Most Third World countries do not get that ratio of growth in bourgeois economic terms which is supposed to represent their march forward. Very, very few have achieved the percentages – 6 or 8 per cent growth rate – which are set by the bourgeois economists as prerequisites for development. Second, and more important, is the fact that those criteria, where they are satisfied, do not lead to anything that the people of the country would call development. Hence the rise of the term ‘growth without development’, which has already become current in the writings on West Africa.

It has been seen that by using the criteria of GNP (gross national product) and per capita income, one finds a certain amount of growth undoubtedly taking place, but when this is examined in any serious detail, it is proved to be entirely misleading. As long as the local economy is part of the imperialist world economy, there is still the export of surplus – that is, the actual export of capital – and the redistribution of wealth within these so-called developing Third World countries is such that the vast majority of the people can and do experience an actual lowering of their living standards while the GNP and per capita income are supposedly rising. A few economists looking at the problems of economic development are beginning to apply the simplest of yardsticks by returning to factors such as housing, food and clothing – the principal elements of man’s existence and the things that human beings have been striving for from the very onset of their attempts to deal with the material environment. In Jamaica, for example, it has been found that the units of housing for the vast majority of the people have been decreasing; more people are suffering from protein deficiency than was true of an earlier period; and more people are going about without shoes or without proper clothing than has been true earlier. All this in spite of significant increases in GDP (gross domestic product). In Africa one can readily cite Ivory Coast and Kenya in this respect, for such growth as shown by the statistical indices in these parts of Africa is not matched by any increases in the wellbeing of the mass of the population.

The most animus factor undermining attempts to achieve independence and development in the Third World has been the rise of new forms of exploitation and domination within the global capitalist economy. One of them is tourism. It has a nasty history in the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, but in more recent times it is becoming very extensive. By 1969, tourism was one of the biggest economic factors in Tanzania of all places. Someone observed that, just as in Latin America there used to be ‘Banana Republics’, so international imperialism was threatening to transform Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into the ‘Wildlife Republics’. Every effort was made to attract tourists to look at the animals, and the animals assumed priorities higher than human beings. Incidentally, it is not at all true that it is the indigenous people who are responsible for such diminution in the wildlife population as has occurred in recent years, because groups like the Maasai have always coexisted with the lions and wild game. And in recent times, the problem of game conservation is of far lesser magnitude than that of human development and that of the survival and creativity of peoples of the region. Certainly, tourism in all its aspects is proving to be one of the new areas of expansion of the imperialism economy. It is a new way of confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies, being seen in its most arrant and vicious forms in the Caribbean territories. Several islands in the Caribbean have been transformed into backwaters of the world economy; they are no longer central to the development of the world economy, because they have lost the priority that they had a long time ago when Sugar was king. It is a relatively simple task to transform them into cesspools, which is what the tourism economy is all about.

A more significant aspect of the new trend of domination is that which economists are calling the ‘branch-plant economy’. It made its impact felt first in Latin America and then in Asia, and it is slowly beginning to touch on the African continent. This is a very subtle development, the negative effects of which remain unperceived for some time, because many people have been preoccupied with looking at the old forms of the international division of labor, whereby the underdeveloped countries were allocated roles connected either with agriculture or with the production of raw materials in the extractive mineral industry. It was felt by leaders like Nkrumah when he came to power in Ghana that the answer was to create industry in Africa. The dichotomy was simply industry versus agriculture or processing versus the export of unprocessed goods. Now imperialism has been able to circumvent the criticism that it reduces the Third World merely to primary production. The international bourgeoisie and their agents have been able to start ‘industrialization’ of a sort within Third World countries. Looking at the development plans of every African nation, one finds that a beer factory will usually figure number one or number two on the list.

Building a beer factory is considered as the first step towards industrialization. Quite apart from the fact that I don’t know of beer as having developed any nation, one has to realize the fallacy on which the claims are based. The underlying notion is that industrialization per se is the answer to underdevelopment. Therefore, the logic of that argument is that if the country ceases to import beer and instead develops an import substitute by making the beer locally, then a step has been made in the direction of development. This resort to import substitution has characterized a lot of the development plans of the Third World outside of the really progressive areas, and what in fact it means is that the capitalist structures in the metropoles have reached the stage where the export of consumer goods is no longer really critical, but the export of certain capital in goods is much more crucial. The capital goods sector has experienced tremendous growth in the period of colonial exploitation and the period of semi-colonial exploitation, and there is now an objective necessity for the metropoles to export these capital goods; namely the plants that manufacture the beer, cigarettes or even textiles. Of course, the metropole seeks to incorporate their productive enterprises within the total structure of monopoly capital, which takes the form of the multinational corporation. The multinational corporation perceives the advantage of extending its operations into various other parts of the globe. Today it is not considered opportune merely to produce in the United States and Germany and to sell abroad. More markets can be explored by actually setting up the ‘branch plants’ in Brazil, in Singapore, in Ivory Coast, and so forth.

The movement of contemporary Third World political development throughout Africa and throughout Asia also shows tremendous deterioration. Latin America is exceptional only because it had its formal independence ever since the early nineteenth century, and Latin America has gone through the kinds of trauma which Africa and parts of Asia are only now beginning to experience. The dictators and the coups in Latin America were the butt of jokes even in the colonial world. In the West Indies, we used to say that if there was no coup in Latin America on a particular day, it would be announced on the radio as an item of significance – ‘no coup anywhere in Latin America today’. In Latin America, countries have perhaps settled down to a pattern of more stable dictatorships, but they certainly have not in most places begun to tackle the problem of political stability in terms of the development of their own people. In any event, what I have to say relates more to Asia and Africa, and I will pick my examples mainly from Africa and from the Caribbean. In these instances, constitutional independence took place during the last decade. Subsequently, we have witnessed the realization of political dependency and economic dependency in much sharper forms, and of course the two cannot be separated. It is an allusion to put forward the notion of political independence without economic independence because politics is about making choices, and it seems to be incredible that someone should say, ‘We have no control over our economy but we can make political choices.’

What happened after constitutional independence was of course the rise of new forms of political manipulation on the part of imperialism. Deterioration of this independence has been taking place because of a number of factors. First, under the control of imperialism, Third World countries have a sort of political vacuum nationally that arises from the fact that power does not reside locally. The national government of the petty bourgeoisie has little control over production and is endowed with a very feeble political base. They of course have police and military forces which are intended to serve as means of coercion of the population, but nothing else. An appreciation of these facts is fundamental to an understanding of the trends towards militarism, because if a political regime is so bankrupt that it is entirely dependent upon the military, if it has to resort to authoritarianism, then who is more authoritarian than the army? So, the army frequently decides to take over the role of governing, rather than merely being the police force of the civilians in power. We also find that the petty bourgeoisie in the Third World countries are not as capable as the bourgeoisie in the metropoles when it comes to playing a certain kind of political game. They are not capable of granting to their own population participation in bourgeois democracy, because the colonial situation is antithetical to any form of democracy – even to bourgeois democracy. The American bourgeoisie – to use this example – is powerful enough to realize that it can afford certain forms of bourgeois democracy, unless the stage is reached where the system is so eroded that they must take to fascist alternatives. But, normally, the bourgeoisie will of necessity engage the large middle-class sector and a large segment of the working population in parliamentarianism, free speech, and the like. In the Third World, this is seldom possible. The petty bourgeoisie who reside in Accra and in Kingston and in Singapore cannot afford to have any formal exercise of democracy. They do not have the power. They do not have the economic base. They are entirely dependent on two things: first, their external support; and second, whatever local police forces they can muster. Increasingly, the political situation in these Third World countries becomes more openly authoritarian. A striking example has been the regime of Forbes Burham in Guyana. He began some years ago by trying to convince some folk that he was about nationalism and even about socialism. To a large extent, he succeeded in the mystification, but after just a few years, the mask has been removed, and it is now apparent that Guyana has the makings of a kind of Haitian situation, given the trend towards the creation of a Ton-Ton Macoute, aiming at political intimidation and assassinations. This and other indications in most of Africa and Asia suggest that neo-colonialism is not merely a state but – like all historical forms – it has its own motion, and both politically and economically the motion is in a negative direction.

I would like to try and explore some of the difficulties facing politically progressive groups within Third World territories – groups who analyse the situation and problems of development and who ask themselves the classic question, ‘What is to be done?’ How do they function, or how have they been functioning, and what kinds of projections can be made for the near and distant future? Using the crude distinction between the political and economic facets of the problem, I will suggest that the real issue at the moment – and for the foreseeable future – is not an economic issue but a political one.

It has already been affirmed that the fundamental nature of the development problem in the Third World is the relationship with the metropolitan economies and the nature of dependency, lack of internal integration, absence of technology, and so on, which are all essentially or primarily economic phenomena. Nevertheless, we should distinguish between what may be fundamental – which I think is economic – and what has a priority. The latter refers to the question of timing and that is where politics takes precedence. It will be necessary to look briefly at some of the economic problems, but the emphasis here will be on the political ones.

Progressives residing within Third World countries virtually without exception now pose the problem of economic development in terms of ‘disengagement’. How do you break with the dominant imperialist system? This question marks a change from a lot of the preoccupations of a decade or five years ago, because it has become clear to a minority at any rate that some kinds of proposed solutions are not solutions at all, but rather an intensification of the problem. That is to say, solutions by way of aid, by way of further foreign entanglements, by way of so-called local capitalist development are not really solutions. An awareness of their insidious nature springs from a correct historical appraisal of the form of involvement between, on the one hand, Africa, Asia and Latin America, and, on the other hand, the European and North American economies plus Japan. Historically, this involvement has been the determinant of the Third World countries; and therefore, it becomes odd to suggest that further involvement, that an intensification of the involvement, would provide a solution. The solution lies in disengaging and disentangling from the historical bonds. In other words, if the answer is not in further engagement, if it is not in aid, if it is not in increasing one’s traditional exports, if it is not merely in import substitution, then it must lie in terms of rebuilding one’s economy so that it becomes a logical integrated whole. It must lie in terms of creating linkages between Third World economies, starting from a continental base within Latin America and within Africa. It must lie in rebuilding or regenerating, or starting afresh if necessary, the technological development of the Third World which has been arrested or which has been side-stepped in one way or another. These are undoubtedly tremendous tasks. Certain kinds of solutions are already being indicated but the main thing is to identify the direction in which one has to investigate. As long as so many poor economists have been looking at aid theories and at forms of playing around with devaluing or revaluing currencies or other techniques which all have as their basis a preoccupation with sustaining links with the imperialist economy, then for so long we have not been looking at the real problems and we have not been turning up any valid solutions.

However, before any progressive within the Third World can get down to working out the economic minutiae, they have to deal with the political problems. Indeed, the tendency on the part of progressive groups within these Third World countries to evade the issue of getting at the political preconditions to economic development is itself a problem of underdevelopment. In my own days as an undergraduate at the University of the West Indies, several of us did sit down and try to work out a schema concerning what the new political economy would look like. There was no dearth of talk about what society should look like. Many socialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been dealing with that issue for a long time, but it is only a very tiny minority who have been concerned with trying to analyse the movement of history as it is subsequently to determine what action was needed to obtain political leverage. In other words, the question of power was being avoided, and without that one is only talking about blueprints which is essentially an occupation for idle bourgeois philosophers.

With respect to tackling the problem of power, there is required more detailed social analysis than merely saying that we have, on the one hand, the enemy who are the metropolitan capitalist, and, on the other hand, the exploited Third World. We have to make a closer analysis of the types of society which have been created within the Third World, to enquire as to what are the potential openings for a struggle to change the situation. Nationalist movements almost by definition tended to obscure and paper over the kinds of internal contradictions that existed in their societies, and when they achieved constitutional independence it very often came as a shock to realize that the internal contradictions were playing a much more crucial and determining role than had previously been allocated to them. Only a small number of progressives in the Third World are exempted from this stricture. The majority failed to make a clear analysis of the society which would allow them to locate within their own society the forces of change and the forces of reaction. The probable reason is that the social strata existing in Third World countries manifest a variety of forms that were not necessarily encountered in the metropoles. So the Third World intellectuals who may have taken a progressive orientation forming from a Marxist framework still found themselves unable to understand their own society, to the extent that they failed to distinguish between the tools that they acquired from abroad and the conclusions that they were introducing from abroad. This is a very common misconception. Having adopted Marxism or Scientific Socialism as a framework of analysis, one may or may not apply it creatively to one’s own environment. Besides, Third World intellectuals are very fascinated by models, models that were historically applicable to societies outside of their own. The principal model was Russia at one time, while later it became China. There are very few who have had the courage – because it does take a lot of courage and a lot of energy – to deal with their own situations and to come up with the relevant answers.

One of the Third World social groups readily identified as having its own peculiarities is the petty bourgeoisie. There is a national bourgeoisie in India and Brazil, and in parts of Latin America; but it is not a general phenomenon within the Third World. By and large, the personnel who control the reins of power undoubtedly adhere to the norms and values of the bourgeoisie in the metropoles. But they do not control any capital formations. At best, they own two or three houses, and they own one Mercedes-Benz plus a Volkswagen, and so forth. But these are not capitalists. We must formulate a position that allows us to see the dependency of this class, its roots in the international bourgeoisie and the peculiarities which develop from that. I myself prefer to portray them as a stratum within the international capitalist class, a stratum serving that international capitalist class; and in each situation one has to examine their particular characteristics, including their behaviour patterns. In Africa and the West Indies, the petty bourgeoisie display characteristics such as self-hate, because they are usually black men who have a certain white orientation. They have what is correctly identified as imitativeness and lack of creativity, which were not characteristic of the European bourgeoisie in its heyday. The European bourgeoisie was an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. In the Caribbean or in Africa the only entrepreneurship that the petty bourgeoisie are capable of is buying a truck or investing in real estate. They have neither the capital nor the kind of aggressiveness which is required to engage in capital enterprise. The point at issue is that progressives within Third World countries have to confront the problems of development almost exclusively in relationship to local particularisms. What are the forces existing in the society and how does one begin to organize to confront the recognized enemy? How does one begin to reach the masses, who are essentially peasant masses, with a very small minority of workers in the traditional (industrial) sense of the word? I would like to reflect briefly on these questions with regard to one part of East Africa, one where I am fortunate to possess first-hand or very reliable second-hand information: Uganda.

Uganda is an intriguing case. In Uganda, under Milton Obote, progressive groups were in existence and had to make a decision on how to participate in actualizing Uganda’s development. Looking at their national society, they saw a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly evident in the Third World: namely, a government that could not easily be classified as being either fish or fowl – a government that was making certain rhetorical statements about socialism, about ‘moving to the left’ – a government that within the context of African liberation was anti-apartheid, anti-Smith regime, anti-imperialist in its rhetoric – and therefore a government that one could not place in the same anti-communist and pro-Western bracket as that of Malawi’s Hastings Banda or that led by Felix Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast. And yet at the same time when these Ugandan progressives looked at Ugandan society they knew that it was no different from the society in Ivory Coast or very little different from the society of Malawi. There was the same continuation of the exploitation of the peasantry in the Ugandan countryside and the same rapid increase in wealth – in terms of consumer goods and land – of a small elite. It was an elite that to some extent had a base in the ‘traditional’, quasi-feudal structures, along with a new elite of intellectuals, the government officials, the new party officials, and so on. In effect, Ugandan militants recognized that neo-colonialism was running rampant within Ugandan society. Any ambivalence on their part derided from the ambiguity caused by Obote’s preempting of certain socialist terminology, thus making it difficult for socialists to come out and completely denounce him. So, the socialists in Uganda began to work out a strategy for their particular situation.

It was a strategy for immediate political action and it was tantamount to a strategy of development. They recognized that first they needed to establish an organization of their own. This is a real problem in Third World countries, especially where the government is playing games. How does one establish an organization of one’s own? It appears that there were groups in Uganda who were concentrating on resolving that problem. At the same time, they had to decide that they must participate to a certain extent within the politics of Uganda and within the politics of the ruling party, Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Some of these individuals were in fact prepared to run in the elections scheduled by Obote – he had scheduled a very fancy election where a single candidate was to appear in about four constituencies simultaneously. The election never materialized because of the coup. But some of these individuals were prepared to participate in those elections. Eventually of course, the coup interrupted this, and Ugandan progressives were then faced with the situation where a government that was more clearly rightist, a government that was more clearly neo-colonialist, had come to power.

Some Ugandan militants had predicted the military coup – a testimony to their insights into their own society – and yet their response to the new clique was far from uncompromising. Several among them produced rationalizations which permitted them to associate with a regime that was more blatantly opposed to the interests of the ‘common man’ in Uganda than was the case under Obote. Kobode, who was appointed foreign minister, was previously one of the shining lights of the Uganda Left, and apparently still retains pretensions to socialism. Only a tiny fragment denounced the coup and began to take steps which qualify to be called revolutionary, and which kept in sight the objective of people’s power. Why did this ineptness, disintegration and collaboration arise on the part of groups who claimed to perceive the essential lines of solution to their own development problems? It does suggest a lack of serious analytical framework, although many of those involved claim to be Marxist. Besides that, however, lack of self-confidence and a degree of opportunism also enter the picture. The new situation posed by the Idi Amin takeover would have required the boldness to break completely with the state machinery and to operate entirely outside of the boundaries of petty bourgeois politics. Instead, several of the progressives came up with the lame alternative of ‘working within the system’, and fobbed off many revolutionary Ugandan youth by saying that Amin was amenable to the advice from the ‘Leftists’.

The paradox of progressives seeking to give advice to reactionary governments is not new. There is a long history of this in Latin America, because Latin America has had many progressive economists and other social scientists who spent a lot of time advising the curious governments that arise in that part of the world. The paradox reveals that from the viewpoint of groups grappling with the problem of development in the Third World, the roots of the problem are political, being inextricably linked with the question of political power.

The Ugandans would seem to have accepted this under Obote and then to have reneged on their responsibility in this regard subsequent to the coup. Nevertheless, one does not have to be pessimistic about the outcome. What is happening in Uganda and other arenas is that contradictions keep multiplying day by day. The creation of a militaristic or police state itself polarizes the forces and causes people to react against the regime, if only for the sake of survival. If, on the other hand, the regime is flirting with anti-imperialist and socialist ideas without any commitment, then it requires only a few years before the rhetoric is exhausted and the period of reckoning begins. Inevitably, behind the facade of pseudo-progressive assertions, corruption increases and police brutality also. I am not at all pessimistic about the long-term prospects for liberation and development in the Third World. The propping up of regimes by imperialism is a short-term solution. Objective conditions in the Third World are worsening, as I suggested earlier. The living conditions of the vast majority of people are deteriorating. That is what will maintain the initiative towards change and propel the Third World out of the counter-revolutionary phase which arose after formal independence. Besides there is the factor of racism which is all pervasive throughout the Third World, which is particularly strong where black people live in Africa and the Caribbean. It is a unifying factor. Imperialism has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a double-edged blade, and the very unity that is engendered among black people – the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and oppression – is being turned around as a weapon to be used against imperialism.

To conclude, perhaps the most important reason for confidence and for revolutionary optimism – with respect to both the political problem which is immediate and the long-term economic problem – is that the peoples of the Third World have not been dehumanized, in spite of everything: in spite of slavery, in spite of colonialism. The historical record will show that it is the peoples of the metropoles who have gone through the most dehumanization. That’s the way it is. Slavery has dehumanized slave masters more than it has dehumanized slaves. Colonialism has dehumanized the colonialist more than it has dehumanized the colonial people. The working class in the metropoles is more confused, more alienated and less in control of their own destiny than the peasants in the African countryside and the workers on plantations in the Third World countries. The latter do not have any crumbs or fruits that have been thrown at them to increase their confusion. Nor have they been living within a society which assails them on all sides with a variety of myths that cloud exploitation under the banner of God and country, and so on. Ultimately, it seems to me that freedom will come from those who are the most oppressed. Slaves rather than slave masters are the repositories of freedom; liberation will come from those who are not yet liberated, and human dignity will be reasserted by those who are not yet dehumanized.

Q&A

Question: Would you consider the more important problems of imperialism to be the ones created by neo-colonialism or those belonging to the old capitalist experience of imperialism?

Answer: The old imperialism is falling apart, one has to be more sensitive about the new changes. There are very powerful existing areas of old imperialism as in South Africa, but there the issues are clearly defined. Whatever the strength of the white minority regimes and of Portuguese colonialism backed by NATO and by foreign monopoly capital, the stage is set and armed struggles are already unleashed in those areas. I think it is easier to mobilize politically where colonialism is open and blatant in the old-fashioned form.

The new colonialism is sometimes so difficult to decipher that one might think that one is doing something progressive when in fact one is really being co-opted by the system. Take nationalization as an example. There was a time, back in the early fifties, when people who nationalized were automatically regarded as progressive nationalists and socialists, and imperialism moved against them to squash them immediately. But now nationalization has become a technique that can just as well be used by the enemy, as by progressive Africans, Asians or Latin Americans. Nationalizing a plant within the context of the international division of labour and the international allocation of resources could well mean that production is no more independent than if it had remained in the hands of foreign enterprises. A joint venture in which the government takes over 51 per cent of the shares may superficially suggest control, while in practice the 51 per cent comprises the problems of labour management and their 49 per cent comprises the profits. There are all kinds of new techniques that are being devised by international capital. After all, mosquitos today are able to cope with the DDT insecticide. Similarly, imperialism has a certain flexibility, and I think the new forms and adjustments are maybe more difficult to combat because they are subtle, and there is a time lag before it can be appreciated that imperialism can also turn retreat into success.

Question: Could you analyse the Tanzanian situation?

Answer: Tanzania is one of the few instances where I think that a nationalist government, which inherited power at independence, does provide a framework within which a struggle can be conducted. Both things have to be recognized: first, that this nationalist government does provide a legitimate framework for onward development; and second, that a struggle is nevertheless necessary. One then has to determine what exactly is the struggle? Who is struggling against whom? What is the alignment of forces? There is a very useful analysis by a young Tanzanian which is entitled Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle. It is a silent class struggle because it does not take the form of armed struggle. Instead, it takes the form of a great deal of manoeuvring within the structure between on the one hand the bureaucracy and the reactionary elements of the petty bourgeoisie, and on the other hand a much smaller group committed to socialism, who are attempting very slowly and with a great deal of difficulty to try and establish some links with the vast majority of the people. Meanwhile, the workers themselves have to find ways and means of confronting the petty bourgeoisie. Within this structure, within the idiom of socialism, a struggle is going on all the time. Many individuals who are justifiably happy about what is going on in Tanzania sometimes romanticize the situation, because they do not know how difficult the struggle is and they do not realize that it is a struggle that has produced not only gains for the working people but also many setbacks from day to day.

Question: What role is being played by the nationalized sector and by the trade unions in Tanzania?

Answer: Nationalization is a step in a forward direction. The next issue becomes the method of running these enterprises. Nationalized industry is a fairly small sector, because Tanzania is not an industrialized country, but what goes on within it is significant in ideological and political terms, apart from the economic implications. A bureaucracy has been developing. This is not unique; it happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in China, it happened in Cuba. The bureaucracy has emerged as a social formation crucial to socialist development – or lack thereof – even where the property base of an exploiting class has been liquidated. So that is a very real problem in the nationalized sector. How does one deal with it?

In Tanzania, there has been talk about workers’ control in the factories. It has never reached the point of workers’ control in practice, but there has been over the past year a very healthy self-assertion by the workers. This has not taken place through the trade union, which is virtually defunct. Workers in their own factories have been reasserting themselves in Tanzania, particularly since the Tami Guidelines, which Tanzanians refer to as the Mwongozo. There has been a spate of worker manifestations which have taken these guidelines as their credo, because the guidelines say that the country has to create new styles of work, new kinds of relationships between the party, the government, the officials and the bureaucrats, and the workers and peasants; and this is getting at the root of the problem of the rise of a new bureaucracy and its relationship politically and socially to the rest of the population. Workers in their factories, using Mwongozo as a sort of article of faith, have been attacking the bureaucracy, have been attacking the managers and the officials who have been placed over them. Strikes and work stoppages therefore often mirror, in a small way, the ongoing struggle between the people who are directly at the production line and those who are supposedly making policy in the society. That is one facet of this silent class struggle.

Education in Africa and Contemporary Tanzania.

From Education and Black Struggle – Notes from the Colonized World, 1972

I. Education in Africa

In discussing education in Africa, we should first contrast the independent educational system as it existed before the arrival of Europeans with the colonial education system established after 1885, which is the conventional date for the beginning of African colonization. The differences between the two are critical to any real evaluation of contemporary education in Africa.

Communal and universal vs particular and elitist societies

Education in independent pre-colonial Africa was universal. Everyone received either a formal or informal education designed to give him or her a role within the society. Mothers passed on values to their children and the elders acted as models of behaviour for the youth. That was informal education. It went on all the time and could not be stopped.

Formal education in independent Africa occurred throughout teaching one’s skills to apprentices. For example, if a man were a hunter, a miner or a cloth-maker, he would educate his children or other family members or other persons in the society, in order to preserve his particular craft. In addition to vocational skills, social values were specifically transmitted to the young at puberty during the rites of initiation. Many societies also had formal training schools for those preparing for the equivalent of the priesthood. So this, very briefly, was the African educational system. It provided education for everybody. It had a role for everybody.⁷⁵

Colonial education, or European education in colonial Africa, stood in contrast to the above. It was doled out to a minority. Colonial education was elitist, because it was based upon elitist philosophical and ideological assumptions derived from European class society, as distinct from African society which was communal and relatively unstratified. In a stratified sociological system, education serves the interest of the dominant class, caste, race or geographical unit, irrespective of pretensions to the country. Such an education is for the few, whether they be the actual children of the ruling class, or children of the exploited and oppressed classes who are co-opted into the services of that system.

When the European education system was transported to Africa, it became even more limited and elitist, because the purpose of the colonizers within Africa was to select only a very small number of Africans to aid in the work of colonization. The point was made very clearly by the colonizers: ‘Why do we want to educate the blacks? Because we are running the country, but we cannot do it all on our own. We need some African messengers and translators. We need African clerks in the railways, the civil service and the trading companies. We need teachers to train those messengers and clerks.’ That is why it became necessary for the colonialists to establish some form of school education in Africa.

The African vs the European personality

Another set of distinctions exist between indigenous African education and colonial education. African education was designed to develop what I call the ‘African personality’, a term which has been used by Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and a number of other prominent African spokesmen. It often carries vague mystical overtones, but what I have in mind is simply that a society, both consciously and unconsciously, develops individuals to sustain its mores and values. In unfettered African society, Africans were part of the extended family. They developed a consciousness of their relationship to their kin, their land and their ancestors. All these factors made up the ‘African personality’.

Any educational system, so long as it is independent, develops people for purposes which the society internally and independently chooses for itself, notwithstanding the fact that a particular sector may be more influential than another in exercising that choice.⁷⁶ In the colonial system, it was not the people themselves, not the colonized, who set the terms and goals of their education. The colonizer did so. When he educated a few Africans, he did so not to develop them within their African context, as Africans, but rather to alienate them from their society from which they came. His purpose was to create or recreate them in his own image, to mutilate and transform the very sense of their African identity.

A dramatic illustration of this is found in French West Africa, where African school children were told to recite, ‘The Gauls, our ancestors, had blue eyes.’ When a French school child says this, it is a means of identifying himself with his past, and this is normal in any educational system. But when a colonized Senegalese or Dahomean is told that the Gauls, his ancestors, had blue eyes, and he knows he has black eyes and a black skin, he experiences a tremendous sense of alienation.⁷⁷ His sense of who he is, his sense of being an African, is in danger of collapsing. He becomes instead a black European, which was, in fact, the purpose of French as well as British, Belgian and Portuguese colonial education. It was designed to alienate the few who received it from the mass of the people as a whole, not to reinforce the connection between those educated in the formal system and the rest of the population.

Interdependence vs individualism

A third set of contrasts is related to the communal nature of African education which stressed the interdependence of individuals within the society. Work and social effort had to be collective if they were to be meaningful. This collective emphasis sprang from the structure of the society, which was non-stratified or relatively undifferentiated. Suth class contradictions that did exist were, by and large, non-antagonistic class contradictions, except in a few areas where feudal or quasi-feudal social forms had come into being.

An antagonistic contradiction penetrates to the basic means of production. When the existence of members of one class depends upon exploiting members of another class, race or nation, then their interests are antagonistic. In African societies, there were non-antagonistic contradictions based on the division of labour. Such, for instance, was the opposition between pastoralists and cultivators, between whom there was at the same time a considerable degree of interdependence. Also, there was a division of labour in which some individuals became priests, while others wielded political authority. When the division of the social product is relatively egalitarian, a major contradiction does not arise between the priest and ruler, on the one hand, and the rest of the subjects on the other.⁷⁸

In the African situation, it was possible to teach that labour is a collective activity, since this was in accordance with social reality. Colonial education, deriving from bourgeois values, portrayed labour and even social existence to be competitive. Not only was this idea extolled within the classroom, but in the arena of real life such progress as was possible within colonial society was granted to Africans because of their personal achievements, thus further separating the individual from the mass of his fellows.

The colonial educational system was competitive in the metropoles, but it was more so in Africa, because only a tiny handful – far less than in Europe or North America – became, as it were, the chosen few. A tiny handful went to school, and it was made clear to them that: ‘Here it is! Here is your avenue to progress. You have to compete with others to get there. And once you make it within the system, you will establish yourself as a superior individual, not as some small part of a collective.’ Ideological values were buttressed by material changes which further differentiated African society.

For example, where land used to be the property of the whole community, it became commercialized. Under colonialism, land was bought and sold in Africa, a concept almost unknown previously. Once it was bought and sold, a few individuals got the land. And others had to do without. They became sellers of labour to those who owned land. The individualist approach struck at the roots of the land tenure tradition, and the educational system reinforced that individualism as well derived its rationale from it.

Orientation to, or away from, the ‘life environment’

A final set of contrasts suggests that the original African education was carrying forward what may be called the principle of praxis – the unity of theory and practice. One was learning about life. The individual was instructed about the life of the community in order to fulfil his own role within the community and simultaneously understand and complement the roles of others. African education was specifically oriented towards the practice of day-to-day life. It must be reiterated that educational systems are both formal and informal. We should not hold to the idea that education takes place only if there is a classroom – and only if people remain outside of the process of production for months or years. That is the narrow Western conception of education that evolved out of feudalistic and capitalist times. But Africans were educated differently.

Consider, as an example, the African pastoralists. When Masai youth, aged five or six, deal with cattle, they are at school. By the time they reach the age of ten they can distinguish dozens of species of cattle – their shape, the color of their skins, their particular markings, the shape of their horns, and so on. The Masai can even identify the species of ticks that come and rest on their cattle. They have gone to school with their cattle because it is essential for their survival and the survival of their community that they should know about cattle, for that is how the community makes its living. Therefore, whether they get that education by formal or informal means, it is at all points linked to the question of practice, of doing, as distinct from a purely abstract appreciation.

Colonial education in Africa was hostile to the principle of praxis, partly because of unconscious and ill-considered European premises about education. Consider a subject as basic as geography. A European schoolteacher in a tropical schoolroom in Africa or in the West Indies would teach about spring, summer, autumn and winter, which relatively few Africans or West Indians would ever have seen.

Brought from Europe, the educators too often taught the same things they would have taught in Europe. But more than that, they insisted that education in Africa be essentially ‘white-collar’ education. They promoted what they considered to be the values of Christianity, and values connected with doing certain types of low-level bureaucratic work. It was a non-specific, non-technical education, unrelated to the actual physical environment of Africa.

In Europe, a scientific and technological bias had been imparted to education in the late nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth century, because such a bias was necessary to the development of capitalist society in Europe. However, because Africa had been allocated the role of primary producer within the imperialist international division of labour, it was not only unnecessary, but undesirable and antithetical to the interests of capitalism that African education should take a scientific and technological direction. The colonizers did not want Africans to do anything more than supply labour in its cheapest and crudest forms. When, for example, rural Africans in South Africa did manage to get skilled or semi-skilled jobs, the whole racist society galvanized itself to hold back African development, because an African was considered even more of a threat if he had an education and a skill. He was then either not given a job or given it at a wage as much as ten times less than that which a European received.

The African schoolchild who did receive a colonial education very often was removed physically to a primary or secondary boarding school. Many Africans who experienced this kind of education found that they could no longer relate to their own home communities, or that they had tremendous difficulty in doing so.⁷⁹

The church too was responsible for outdated forms of African education. By the nineteenth century, churches in Europe had ceased to play the hegemonistic role in education which they had played in previous centuries. Europeans had come to an awareness that the church should be separated from the state and from civil education, because the metaphysical approach of Christianity was hostile to the full elaboration of European knowledge, especially in science. For the most part, Europeans very calmly separated the church from their school system.

But, at the same time that the Europeans were separating the church from their educational system, they were bringing the church into Africa. They found it useful, one presumes, to create irrelevant and mystifying approaches to knowledge, because all they wanted the African to learn was the fear of God. The missionaries said this very clearly: ‘We want to teach them the fear of God.’

II. Education in Tanzania

Qualitative gains

Against the background of colonial and pre-colonial education in Africa, it may be helpful to take the narrower example of Tanzania today to pinpoint some of the things that Tanzania has achieved, and some of the things that it has tried to achieve, in the educational sphere.

The legacy of colonial rule was an extremely high rate of illiteracy throughout the continent. The number of children going to school very seldom went above one out of ten, and in some cases it was less than that.⁸⁰ In the United States one talks about high school dropouts and college dropouts, but in Africa one talks about primary-school dropouts. Fifty per cent of the children in Africa had to contend with an enormous quantitative problem in the area of education. Heretofore, colonial education had only been made available to a very small percentage of the African population. But the government planners of the new African educational systems were charged with providing a formal school education for everybody. They had to start thinking in terms of universalizing education, pushed by the demand of the working classes.

In my opinion most African countries which attained independence with a few secondary schools and with almost non-existent facilities for technical and university education, have done more in ten years of independence than the colonialist did in seventy-five years of colonial rule, as far as expanding the physical educational facilities are concerned. I have many reservations about some independent African governments, but it is simply an indication of how shabby the colonial regimes were, that in seventy-five years they did not manage to give to Africans, quantitatively, even the primary education which governments in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and elsewhere are giving to their people today. Very seldom does the new education arrive, however, at anything near universal school education. Not even in Tanzania.

The Tanzanian government projected the year 1980 as the date when it hoped to arrive at universal primary education. This wait is justified by policymakers in terms of a lack of finances. Education is a huge financial investment which does not bring immediate returns. It is a long-term investment. Many governments spend 25 per cent, perhaps thirty per cent of their budget on education, and of course this is not as productive an investment as a farm or a factory, which will conceivably show returns in one to five years.

In spite of this, many young Tanzanians have not been very happy about the idea of accepting incomplete primary education for a number of years. Their imagination has been caught by the kind of experiment which went on in Cuba and which provided the Cuban people with universal literacy. While coming nowhere close to the Cuban ‘Year of Education’ strategy, Tanzania has stepped up its adult education programme. President Julius Nyere argued that because so many of the present adult population had been denied the opportunity of education during the colonial period, adult literacy campaigns should become a matter of the highest priority, and Tanzania has had one of the more successful adult education programmes in Africa. Altogether, it cannot be denied that ten years of independence has shown a tremendous development, in purely quantitative terms, in the number of children going to school, and in the number of people in the society who received a formal education of the same schoolroom type as had been established under colonial rule. That is the first achievement.⁸¹

The elimination of racism

Another early achievement in post-colonial Tanzania was the elimination of the racist structure of colonial education, which reflected the racism of the colonial and capitalist world. There were white settlers in Tanzania, although their Kenyan counterparts were more numerous and more notorious. These white settlers received, by far, the largest proportion of the educational budget. Arabs and Asians received the next largest slice, and finally, the majority, the people of the land, the Africans themselves, received the scrapings. This racist school structure was promptly attacked and destroyed.

Teacher training

The idea of teacher training had to be seriously reconsidered, because part of the process of African alienation resulted from the physical presence of white teachers in African schools who, whether or not they consciously subscribed to all the goals of colonial rule, reflected the biases and individualism of the metropoles and the racism inherent throughout the capitalist world.

Since Tanzania had been one of the more ‘backward’ colonies, few Africans were trained to be teachers at the time of independence. Its leaders wanted to expand their school system, but the teachers who were already entrenched there were primarily white expatriates and Asians who did not always opt for national status. The university opened its first college of arts, social sciences and natural sciences in 1965, and it was used virtually as a teacher-training institution. A programme was devised by which an undergraduate could emerge at the end of his studies as a teacher in two subjects. Normally within the British system, one earns a Bachelor’s degree before proceeding to study for a year, or two years, to acquire teaching certification considered appropriate for secondary school teachers. Tanzania had to break with that practice and integrate teacher training within the undergraduate programme. About 80 per cent of all the early graduates went straight from the university into the secondary schools to meet the priority of ‘Tanzanization’.

A small example of the consequences of ‘Tanzanization’ can be seen in the return to traditional dance (ngoma) within the school system at both primary and secondary levels. Music and dance have always been dominant African art forms, and they were relevant to culture in ways that were far more fundamental than mere recreation. Not only has ngomo been revived in the schools but the traditional forms have been given a new content, a new thrust. The words the students sing and the scenes they act out in ngoma might today be related to Ujamaa, the collective, for example. Or they may even be concerned with the question of defence against the Portuguese. So there is a merger of new political content with old African form.

The National Service programme

Beyond the quantitative changes and the more obvious transformations of the school structure, one confronts much more complicated questions. Tanzania has had to struggle to retrieve its education from a colonial to a distinctly African path. At the same time, these African values had to be set in the forward-looking context of socialist reconstruction. A key problem is that colonialism (like any other social system) has means of self-perpetuation. ‘Africanization’ per se could not break the continuity of colonial education, given that African teachers had been taught by Europeans within a European value framework. In effect, the African teacher was often a ‘programmed’ European: making Fanon’s phrase ‘Black Skins, White Masks’ even more apt than it initially appears, since the mask in indigenous African practice symbolized a complete change of identity on the part of the wearer. Higher institutions of learning in Africa were particularly prone to emphasize colonial continuity, often under the guise of maintaining ‘international standards’. Any African teacher who had access to higher education, either before or after independence, was likely to be as elitist as the European who had preceded him; alienated from his African roots, and as individualist as though he had been socialized in Britain or the US.

The National Service was perceived as a device to induce change of a practical and normative kind in Tanzania. It was instituted as a means of bringing a number of youth into more active participation in the life of their community. One of its principal aspects was the provision of the rudiments of military training for self-defence. Colonialism disarmed the African people, except for those who served the master in the colonial army. One of the first things which the National Service did was to revive the normal practice whereby the youth are entrusted with the physical defence of the society. At the same time, the National Service revived the principle that education should provide real skills, practical skills, as distinct from ‘while-collar’ education. So, the National Service offered agricultural and craft skills regarded as relevant to the question of economic development. Its first recruits were youth with primary and lower secondary education.

The National Service also rested on the premise that young people should be educated to serve rather than to command peasants and workers. University graduates represented the pinnacle of the old elitism. They had to learn to reintegrate themselves with the rest of the population. Therefore, in 1966, the National Service Act was extended to cover secondary and university students previously exempt from its provisions. Tanzanian university students completing their training that year were required to enter National Service. Like everybody else, they were to live in a National Service camp for six months and were to be trained by instructors who often had only primary school education. At the camp, servicemen received an allowance. For a subsequent eighteen months they were to make a contribution of 60 per cent of their salary to the national budget. University students promptly demonstrated to signify their non-acceptance of these terms. This was confrontation of the people versus the elite; and being an elite without power, university students were disciplined to perform National Service in order to complete their education. Now secondary school graduates proceed immediately to National Service camps for some months before joining the university.

The National Service programme succeeded to a limited extent. After setting out on the difficult task of re-fashioning people’s values, it has, not surprisingly, ended up with a degree of formalism. In other words, students will go to the National Service and they will do what they are told. But they will not necessarily accept the idea that they are there to serve the people and merge with the community of producers. No one in Tanzania would be so naive as to say that the National Service works perfectly, or to suggest that months of work on nation-building projects will create a new sense of identity for servicemen. One of the excruciating problems is that the National Service is shot through with hierarchization and commandism, which is antithetical to its own goal of maximum participation along socialist and democratic lines. While given a highly political task to perform, its direction at various levels is manifestly ‘apolitical’, which means in effect petty bourgeois. A political education wing was incorporated in the National Service at an early date, but it appears to have been swamped rather than to have expanded in a manner that would allow the institution to be considered a cadre-forming one. For the moment, the most positive thing that can be said about the National Service is that structures have been set up and that meaningful goals have been defined which go far beyond the structures and goals of the colonial educational system.⁸²

A national language

Tanzania has been fortunate in being one of the few African countries with an authentic national language. There are dozens of linguistic units in Tanzania, but, with few exceptions, everybody can communicate in Swahili. Most observers have commented on this phenomenon as evidence of Tanzania’s national and territorial integrity. In addition, the existence of Swahili as a lingua franca has implications with regard to transcending both stratification and external orientation. English, which was the teaching medium in the colonial secondary schools, was one of the mechanisms of alienation. The continued use of English and French in post-colonial Africa helps keep the African petty bourgeois attached to their masters. With the introduction of Swahili as a language of national education, those who entered the secondary schools were offered the opportunity of defining their visions of the world in a language which grew out of their own environment. There also emerged the possibility of using an idiom which could bind together the peasantry and the upper classes, in contrast to the European language, the use of which previously divided them.

English is still the language of instruction at the university and in the higher reaches of the secondary schools because it takes time to make the transition to Swahili. Textbooks have to be developed and new concepts have to be incorporated into the language. Some foot-dragging in the practical implementation of the national language policy is evident. It is probably due, in part, to the lack of self-confidence of most of the petty bourgeoisie and their wish to continue the English language identification with the metropolis. However, debate in local circles has produced a consensus that Swahili can – and must – take precedence at all levels of communication – including the university.

Education for self-reliance

In the wake of the famous Arusha Declaration of 1967, Mwalimu⁸³ Nyerere made public a major policy document on education, entitled Education for Self-Reliance. It should be borne in mind that the subtitle of the Arusha Declaration was ‘TANU’s Policy of Socialism and Self-Reliance’.⁸⁴ The emphasis on self-reliance thereafter became the principal theoretical premise for educational reconstruction. Education for Self-Reliance starts with an awareness that the colonized were educated to be dependent upon the colonizers: an education for dependence. In contrast, the goal for Tanzanians in the conceptualized socialist, self-reliant Tanzania was that they should be dependent on their own efforts, their own skills, their own creativity. Education under colonialism was mainly supported by the state or church. That is to say, Africans paid taxes and generated surplus out of which the colonial administration or the church allocated funds for education. Those who went through the formal educational systems were removed from production and kept as specifically privileged persons for the duration of their secondary education. Patterns such as these were challenged in Education for Self-Reliance.

The colonial education system was a pyramid, starting off with a narrow base of primary education, becoming extremely narrow at the secondary level and tapering off sharply at the point of higher education. Education for Self-Reliance insisted that a national educational system could not have as its goal the well-being of a few at the top. A change of priorities was required so that the edifice could be built around the well-being of the majority. Under the colonial system, primary school was not an end in itself, for it meant nothing to emerge after six years of primary school. The primary school graduate was considered by the colonialist a potentially better labourer or cultivator. But the African who was to help in administration needed to proceed further. Given the ‘white-collar’ orientation of colonial society, Africans also accepted that the purpose of education could only be achieved by climbing the pyramid.

The new approach in Tanzania was based on the contention that it is absurd to spend millions of shillings on an educational system whose end product is a handful of trained people – especially since the only thing they can do is administer the country rather than spearhead production. If only a handful still continued to reach the top of the educational pyramid in independent Tanzania, that would constitute a secondary achievement. The major focus was to be on primary education, because only in this sphere could the policymakers conceive of giving everybody an education in the near future. All primary school graduates had to be fitted for service in the society, rather than as misfits with no meaningful jobs – as happened in colonial Africa and as happens in neo-colonial Africa.

The goal of a self-reliant education led to a re-evaluation of the age at which children should start school. Generally, the starting age is six years, and at twelve the child is finished with primary schooling. The logic behind the TANU decision to start school at a later age was that a primary school graduate of twelve years or less is neither physically nor mentally equipped to assume the role of producer in the society. Consequently, in 1963, the starting age was pushed upwards to seven years and the school leaving age to fourteen years. Interestingly enough, in pre-colonial African society, a child became an adult at the time of puberty; the initiatory ‘rites of passage’ meant that a girl became a woman, and a boy, a man. The European conception of a teenager – someone who is unproductive for four or five years – was totally unheard of.

The policy of education for self-reliance placed a lot of emphasis on agricultural work, because the vast majority of people in the country earn their living from subsistence. The colonial educational approach was designed to downgrade and degrade manual work, particularly as it related to agriculture. That is why the educated African elite despised (and still despises) the peasants. When the colonialist did introduce agricultural education, as happened in several areas, it did not allow for improvisation or innovation. It was agricultural instruction of the crudest form, based on the premise that hoeing the land through the expenditure of sheer physical energy was the natural lot of Africans. Education for self-reliance, on the other hand, asserts the dignity of African labour, and aims at strengthening the connections between theory and practice, so that schoolchildren can be involved creatively with their environment. Labour in the field was not to be a punishment, as it was in the colonial era, but an exercise in the scientific utilization of natural resources.

In this framework, school farms have become very important to the development of the Education for Self-Reliance movement in Tanzania. The farm is useful in that it can provide revenue for the school. But that, I think, is a secondary purpose. Much more relevant are the attitudes connected with agricultural labour, the possibilities of innovation, and the experience of study and work. Within a self-reliant educational environment, the whole school community of teachers and students act as a democratic entity. The student and their teacher are supposed to set priorities – determining what is to be planted and what is not, how it is to be done, how it is to be marketed, and to what use funds will be put. The school, like an Ujamaa community, is to be an exercise in self-government, whereas colonialism was the negation of that self-government.

Some observers have belittled the significance of self-reliant education by pointing out that this idea and many others are not at all new, having been mooted and experimented upon during the colonial period.⁸⁵ What they fail to recognize is the limiting and distinguishing factor of the colonial political economy and the fact that the same policies can assume radically different meanings within a new social order. It would have been unrealistic to the point of infantilism to expect even the most honest of colonial agricultural-educational programmes to convince Africans of the merits of agriculture, when the colonial value structure, deriving from the mode of production, pointed to the success of those who abandoned direct participation in agriculture and engaged instead in more ‘civilized’ pursuits. These observers fail to address themselves to fundamental issues, such as who wields power and in whose interests. The policy of education for self-reliance opens up revolutionary possibilities because it is the decision of people in their own interests. To suggest that the colonialists had the same vision of African well-being is an exercise in apologetics – and not a subtle one at that.

Other commentators have lined up for or against Education for Self-Reliance in terms of their assessment of its class content and significance for socialism. Thus, the pan-Africanist Marxist, Mzee C.L.R. James⁸⁶ waves ecstatically about the document. He affirms that ‘the simplicity with which Dr. Nyere states what his government proposes to do disguises the fact that not in Plato or in Aristotle, Rousseau or Karl Marx will you find such radical, such revolutionary departures from the established educational order.’⁸⁷ Mzee C.L.R. James is as much influenced by what is within the document as by the creation of Ujamaa socialism, which he regards as a revolutionary response to the objective conditions of Tanzania and Africa. On the other hand, a negative assessment has been offered by an American educationist, Philip Foster, which is filled with bourgeois assumptions. He expresses a firm commitment to class society in Africa, on the grounds that there are ‘conflict objectives of equality and efficiency’. He is convinced that future progress in Tanzania and Africa must mean further class stratification. His real quarrel with Education for Self-Reliance is that not only does it hark back to traditional African communalism, but it also points forward to a new socialism, starting with the countryside.⁸⁸

Of course, five years after the promulgation of the policy, the more rewarding activity is not to contemplate it as theory, but rather to focus on its implementation to date. The Brazilian educationist, Paulo Freiere, when asked to comment on education for self-reliance in Tanzania replied that it looked liberating on paper, but that the answer would only be found in praxis, because ‘the question is not is it but do it.’⁸⁹ Studies on the practical meaning of self-reliance programmes in Tanzanian schools are in their infancy, but even a casual awareness of the Tanzanian contemporary scene suggests that education for self-reliance has not been working according to plan – far from it. Inevitably, with such a complex manner, people grasp the formal and superficial aspects first. Many schoolteachers think that education for self-reliance means having a farm. They decide to have a farm, and ‘self-reliance’ is placed on a timetable just like physics, mathematics or history. At a given time, the students go out, they work and they come back in, but no serious attempts are made to integrate the different aspects of the curriculum so that it points in a given direction. Teachers may seldom make any attempts to involve students in determining what constitutes self-reliant activity in their respective regions. They still use the authoritarian, bureaucratic approach, although they might boast of self-reliance in their schools. In this connection, their class allegiances and ideological outlook are factors of great importance.

Education and liberation

Ultimately, the success of the schoolroom revolution is itself dependent on the development of structures and patterns within the society as a whole. Tanzanian education is trying to create new norms, but at the same time the total society must be moving in a given direction. These two things are mutually supportive. In Tanzania, serious attempts have been made to create new structures and establish new norms in many aspects of the political economy. They all have a bearing on the attempted revolution in education. During the early 1960s, students scoffed when they were told to limit their aspirations for the future and regard themselves as servants of the people. They asked, ‘How can these politicians, driving in their Mercedes-Benzes, accumulating real estate, joining capitalist companies, tell us to be socialist?’ When university students demonstrated against the National Service in 1966, one of the things they said was that if they were to have a 60 per cent cut in their salaries for the time spent in National Service, then something should be done about the cabinet ministers, principal secretaries and other top civil servants. Although President Nyerere disciplined them and sent them home for a year, it is significant that this student revolt sparked the Arusha Declaration. Nyerere agreed that the political leadership should discipline itself. He cut his salary by 20 per cent, and other cabinet ministers followed suit. For those who did not initiate this sacrifice voluntarily, a law was passed reducing the salaries of top civil servants. Much of the Arusha Declaration was in fact devoted to outlining a code of behaviour for the top echelons of the society – outside of the private business sector. That leadership code was something of a self-denying ordinance, which has since been used as a yardstick to measure observance or non-observance of socialist ethics in the lifestyles of the nation’s politico-bureaucratic leadership.

The TANU leadership code achieved some correlation with values in the educational system. One cannot have a constant contradiction between practice in the political and educational arenas. Children will follow certain models, and the most important models actualized within the society cannot be flagrantly out of step with those idealized in the classroom. Similarly, as far as agriculture is concerned, a lot of small-scale capitalist ventures were encouraged in Tanzania in the early 1960s; but, in the most recent period, collective Ujamaa agriculture has been given the greater sanction. It makes sense to have notions of Ujamaa given structural form in an agricultural community at the same time that they are being extolled in school. Furthermore, when children leave the school where they have been taught the value of communal and collective efforts, they have before them the possibility of joining an Ujamaa village and thereby becoming a permanent part of the movement for the construction of socialism, as shaped and conditioned by their history and environment. How far this possibility is realized and how effective the Ujamaa villages are themselves, are of course questions which immediately arise and demand an answer.

The transformation of the colonial education system in Tanzania and Africa as a whole is part of a much broader front of combat against imperialism and neo-colonialism, internally and externally. Although it is a critically important aspect, educational transformation alone will never lead to the total liberation of society. Indeed, it is dialectically impossible for profound change to take place in the old educational system within antecedent and concomitant transformations of all aspects of the political economy. The prognosis for change in Tanzania and African education processes is therefore the same as the evaluation of the prospects of socialist revolution and total liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism. In the long run, this evaluation must be based on the multifold contradictions of imperialism, which are tearing it apart and which have transformed it into a moribund part of the world order. In the short run, the dynamic of change within Africa is determined mainly by the configuration of emergent class society and by the rate at which the mass of direct producers acquire the consciousness of and capacity to act in their own interests – with the support of intellectuals drawn from all strata. For these reasons, our discussion of education must rest suspended, since an examination of the above short- and long-run trends is beyond the modest scope of this analysis.

A Brief Tribute to
Amilcar Cabral

Published in Ufahamu, 1973

In Amilcar Cabral, Africa had a giant who bridged the gap between theory and practice, and hence represented the embodiment of revolutionary praxis. Cabral was a theoretician of the highest calibre – but only because he was involved in changing the ugly realities of colonized African society. He supervised a People’s War of Liberation with great distinction – but only because of the soundness of his scientific worldview and his capacity to apply it penetratingly to the social relations of Guinea-Bissau.

The few pages which Cabral devoted to an analysis of the African societies of Guinea-Bissau are of extraordinary perceptiveness and authenticity. This is understandable, since the accuracy of the interpretation was literally a matter of life and death. The massive task of political mobilization that the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde – PAIGC) so strikingly achieved was based on a correct appreciation of such niceties as the relations between youth and elders among the Balanta people; or ties between a quasi-feudal Fula lord and his aliens, or the role of the itinerant Manding trader within the colonial economy. Based on this political mobilization, the military conflict has in turn been decidedly resolved in favour of the PAIGC in most parts of Guinea-Bissau.

It is the element of commitment which sets Cabral apart from the common run of intellectuals who boast of being ‘neutral’ and ‘un-biased’, thereby passively accepting the perpetuation of the colonial status quo. At the same time, Cabral’s work as a revolutionary African intellectual also contrasts sharply with the purpose of the early European anthropologists who openly oriented their study towards the maintenance of colonial rule, by writing ‘intelligence reports’ for the occupying power. Cabral was serving as an intelligence officer of the army of liberation, when he unravelled the intricacies of segmentary lineage groups and the stratified social formations which exist in Guinea-Bissau. The fact that the Portuguese colonial regime has virtually fallen apart in contrast to the surging growth in the area of liberated Guinea is the ultimate proof of the reactionary nature of the colonial relationship and the progressive character of the intellectual work carried out by Cabral and his colleagues.

Paradoxical as it may seem, Cabral (leader of a nationalist movement) was constantly playing down the importance of mere nationalism. He did so through perceiving the difference between a political outlook limited to nationalism and one which encompassed a revolutionary transformation of the people’s lives along Socialist lines. It is this revolutionary transformation that was the supreme objective in Cabral’s eyes. This he stressed on the innumerable occasions when he stood before the villagers of Guinea-Bissau. He put it to them that:

Independence is not just a simple matter of expelling the Portuguese, of having a flag and a national anthem. The people must be secure in the knowledge that no one is going to steal their labour, that the wealth of the country is not going into somebody else’s pocket. Even today the Guinean people stand naked and are still afraid of the river, the rain and the forest. We tell the Guinean people that by their work the river will be tamed, and the rain will be put to good use.

Here was the straightforward language meant to fortify against further manifestations of neo-colonialism, the growth of a national bourgeoisie, and the perpetuation of ignorance and fear among the masses.

Cabral saw that the nationalist struggle chronologically preceded the Socialist revolution, but that it was imperative to prepare for the subsequent Socialist revolution from the onset of the national phase. Armed struggle was the unavoidable path to the liberation of Guinea. Yet, politics has remained in command throughout. The PAIGC has constantly involved itself in the cadre formation, mass mobilization and the creation of democratic Socialist structures and attitudes. All of these programmes benefited from the long-term vision of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the PAIGC since its inception in September 1956.

For those of us who aspire towards a deeper appreciation of historical dialectics, Cabral’s analyses are models for study; one doubts whether even the sceptic can remain unimpressed by the strength and flexibility of his arguments concerning the role of respective strata and classes within the Guinean revolution. Cabral broke away from a rigid categorization of this or that class as ‘reactionary’ or ‘revolutionary’. Instead, he was concerned with the dual revolutionary/reactionary potential of most of the elements involved in the nationalist struggle. He examined the specifics of Guinean society and pinpointed the methods by which revolutionary potential could be realized under the guidance of the PAIGC.

Franz Fanon, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for popularizing the notion of the revolutionary nature of the African peasantry. Speaking at the Franz Fanon Centre in Milan, Cabral found it necessary to caution that while the peasantry had the greatest objective interest in the struggle, the peasantry was not a revolutionary force – rather it constituted the principal physical force available to the armed struggle.

The contradiction between himself and Fanon is more apparent than real. What Cabral is warning against is the facile conclusion drawn by some that the peasants will be spontaneously revolutionary. Bitter experience has shown that this is not true even for the industrial working class, in spite of the highly socialized nature of industrial production. Cabral was in effect renewing the battle against the concept of revolutionary spontaneity and restating the case for painstaking mobilization by the most conscious elements. Then, and only then, would the peasantry become a revolutionary force.

Great political leaders derive their stature from their relationship to a given social class, usually when that class is on the ascendant. In this instance, Cabral’s greatness is tied into the forward movement of the labouring population of the Guinea-Bissau, Africa and the Third World. Not only is he a product and spokesman for that movement, but he has been an active agent in moulding the force of change in an anti-imperialist direction. Indeed, one can say that Amilcar Cabral still remains an active agent working against imperialism, both through the legacy of his thought and in the structures he left behind. It would be idle and dangerous to deny that the enemy still has the capacity to sow divisions and cause confusion within the Guinean liberation movement. Cabral’s own assassination is testimony to this effect. But at a certain point, a movement becomes irreversible, and all the efforts of the enemy smack of desperation and insanity, as we have seen in the last days before the Vietnamese people achieved their historic victory over US imperialism. Victory in Guinea Bissau, for the popular forces, in Angola and in Mozambique, is the only justification that Cabral would require, and on all fronts that victory is in the making.

Marxism and African Liberation

Speech at Queen’s College, 1975

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak on the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular time, one is being asked to involve oneself in an historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the black population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year, and from my own observations, it is being waged in a large number of places across this country.

Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position. Thus it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our discussion.

It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are being debated in this country today, just as they're being debated in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America and in many parts of the metropolitan world in Western Europe and in Japan. Because the widespread nature of the debate and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not just drop from the sky. There is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to engage others in a meaningless debate.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis in capitalism and imperialism today; and as the crisis deepens, people find it more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought which rationalise the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions, and quite clearly, Marxism, Scientific Socialism poses itself as one of the most obvious of the available options.

The question is not new to Africa or to the black people as a whole - that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have raised before the question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians. Its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have long debated the relevance of Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the 19th century? If so, was it still relevant to the 20th century? One can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of society or to the society's law or culture as a whole.

These are all issues that have been debated before and we should have some sense of history when we approach this question today, because with that sense of history we can ask, why is it that the question of the relevance of Marxism to society always crops up? And, in a very brief answer, I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is first of all, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality.

At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.

More than that, the second condition is that people ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. One starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism and which we will call a bourgeois framework of perception. And because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to raise the question about the relevance of Marxism.

After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the other foot!

But initially, it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance, the logic, and so on, of Marxist thought. And therefore, in a sense, unfortunately, when we ask that question we are also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework, of bourgeois thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy and uncertainty - what is 'the relevance of Marxism?

It is particularly true in our part of the world, that is, the English-speaking part of the world, because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism, a hostility that manifests itself in a peculiar way. It manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought.

In the English tradition,, which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa, it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. it is fashionable to glory in one's ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says - but why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.

So one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.

It is rather difficult to seriously address the question of the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought, because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis, and from the outside as it were, it is extremely difficult.

Indeed, I would say it is pointless, strictly from the outside, without ever having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask what is its relevance. It is almost an unanswerable question; and I think in all modesty, that for those of us who came from a certain background (and we all come from that background), one of the first things we have to do is establish a basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and as we become familiar with them we can then be in a better position to evaluate Marxism's relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.

I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant or, let me put it another way, whether the variants of time and place make a difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense we would almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated, Western Europe. We don't have the time to deal with that in detail. But we can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an applicability to Western Europe, or had in the 19th century, to what extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its validity extend across time?

These are the two variables, time and place; and those can be translated to mean historical circumstances, time - and culture which means the place, and what social and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us, to make it more precise, black people, no doubt well-meaning black people, ask the question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the culture of Western Europe in the 19th century is, today, in the third quarter of the 20th century, still valid for another part of the world, namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or black people in this country; whether it is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation which I wish to present for discussion.

The Methodology of Marxism

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought, Scientific Socialist thought, would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions which people should grasp.

The first is to look at Marxism, as, a methodology, because a methodology would, virtually by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place.

And essentially, to engage in a rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time I would suggest that, one of the real bases of Marxist thought is that it starts from a. perspective of man's relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words; and rooted itself in the material conditions and in the social relations in society.

This is the difference with which I will start. A methodology which begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations which arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man's consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanised through its interaction with man's labour; and man's labour produces a constant stream of technology which in turn creates other social changes.

So this is the crux of the Scientific Socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man's relationship in the process of production on the assumption, which I think is a valid assumption, that production is not merely the, basis of man's existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness.

It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself from the rest of the primate's and the rest of life.

What does Marxism pose itself against? It poses itself against a number of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx's, own evolution, it is well known that he started by looking first at Hegel, a very plausible and perceptive analyst of the 19th century who was guilty, in Marx's own estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the material' world as virtually deriving from those ideas.

In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn't go into. Hegel. I would go further than Hegel. for a classic exposition of the idealist world view. I take it from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God". That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every other thing from there: the Word was God!

But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people's activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop social relations out of production, and that we shouldn't be mystified with words. Oh, naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force and one that even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.

Now, Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places and at different times; but he concentrated his attention on Western Europe. If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels, you will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about feudalism, but by and large, they concentrated on capitalism. They hardly even talk about socialism.

Marx's great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of the world? The vast majority of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I referred to pre-capitalist society, especially feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally Marx mentions the Asiatic mode of production. Occasionally he came across to look at the data concerning the United States. So he had something of a geographical span and a long time 'span.

But it was so minimal in comparison with the bulk of his work that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx's method and his conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing - that Marxism is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe, but is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century and cannot transcend those boundaries, when clearly Marx was doing the job he had to do. He was looking at his own society, he was doing it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution.

I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and place. It is implicit in Marx and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian development, using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx himself. After Marx's death you will get the evolution or the development of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognising that the methodology can be applied, must be applied to different times to different places.

Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of his principal contributions. The first major thesis of the young Lenin was the Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia which was evolving differently, and apply them to his own society. This he did.

He had at the same time to consider the time dimension that in the 19th century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism, and by the latter 19th century this had given way to monopoly capitalism. It has given way to imperialism. So Lenin had to deal with that method by applying it to a new dimension in time. So he wrote about capitalism in its imperialist stage.

So those are the two variants operating: the ideology; the methodology of it (we'll stick to the methodology for the time being) being applied to different societies at different. times. Having made the point for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a. number of people: Mao tse Tung applying it to Chinese society which was a different society from Russian society. Understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society, relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound way than any previous writer because that was the nature of Chinese society and he had addressed himself to that.

And finally for our purposes, the most _important example, the example of Amilcar Cabral because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of his essays, the one titled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays; began by making clear that the best he could do -was to return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying: "I am going to look for classes", for example. He said. "if I say this I will be denying that my people have any history because I do not perceive classes for a long period in the genesis of my own people":

Then he referred back to Marx's and Engels' classic statement that "the history of all existing, societies is the history of class struggle", to which Engels had appended a note saying that by "all history", we mean "all previously recorded history". It so happens that the history of the people of Guinea-Bissau hasn't been recorded and Cabral says, "I want to record that history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the, concept which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that society".

Marx uses the method and he discerned the evolution of classes and of the phenomenon of classes itself as being a major determinant, the major determinant in Western European history at a particular point in time. Cabral says we will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved. So without much of a fanfare he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African society.

If, and when, in the history of Guinea-Bissau, the aspect of class appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to look at Guinean people in the process of production, at the various modes of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we ask the question today about the relevance of Marxism to black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion.

They seem not to- take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilised, internalised, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European.

That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and to the defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from. a backward, quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent, industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American, continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society.

It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon; and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon, which was already universalised itself, is somehow inapplicable to some black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of black people reject this ideological position.

When we investigate and try to centralise or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions about the present. What kind of society, do we live in today? What kind of societies do black people live in today in different parts of the world? And while, of course, we as black people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa have our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that we are all in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of production.

The society about, which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth, dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism which was the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts of the world. It created slave society in the Americas.

Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production which derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of peripheries, colonies and semi-colonies.

So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of Marxism.

Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand and, to hopefully adopt and adapt a critique of that capitalist system because that is essentially what Marx's writing is about. He was critiquing that capitalist system. He did [so] more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is the world dominated by capitalism then we must understand the

12centre of that system, the motor within that system, the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

My second consideration after methodology, (and I had originally suggested that there were two basic things, and one was the methodology), is to look at Marxism as a revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology.

In class societies, all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies derive from and support some particular class. So for all practical purposes we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist system.

Now, I would suggest, historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the set of ideas we call Scientific Socialism arose within capitalist society to speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the oppressed, of the culturally alienated; and we must understand that of the two major sets of ideas before us, idealism and materialism, bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy, that each of the two is representative of a particular class.

I don't have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation of socialism, but briefly, in the 19th century it was in the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas. Out of the diverse and unsystematised socialist ideas, Marx was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory - Scientific Socialism. -It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society.

Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production.

A Scientific Socialist position is and remains revolutionary, because it aims, consciously aims, at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.

From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen, who have attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion, as though one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalent, without looking at the class base and without looking at whether an ideology is supportive of the status quo or not.

Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and Scientific Socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in, the sky, they do Not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive from a different class interest and their aim is to overthrow that system of production.

Africa and Scientific Socialism

There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World people, have virtually a vested interest in Scientific Socialism, because it offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilised for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.

What I will attempt to deal with as best I can, are certain questions arising from individuals who might say yes to most of what I've said and then will ask the question, "Is there no other alternative? Is there no other ideological system which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but is anticapitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of African people wherever they are?"

These questions are worth looking into because there are black people asking these questions and we have to try and resolve them. My own formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African or black people who have attempted to devise systems which they-consider to be non-capitalist and non-socialist, systems they consider valid alternatives to. Scientific Socialism for the emancipation, of. African people.

In this regard, we have a number of pan-Africanists, a number of African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life, and made a distinction between Scientific Socialism and pan-Africanism. He said this is the road we will follow: pan-Africanism. We do not want to go that road which is capitalist, we do not want to go the socialist road, we will derive for ourselves something that is pan-African.

In a sense, Nkrumah followed up on this; and although at one, time he called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism, at the same time. So he was trying to straddle two worlds simultaneously - the world which says in the beginning was matter and the world which says in .the beginning there was the word.

And inevitably he fell between these two. It's impossible to straddle these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must grant the honesty of many, people who have attempted to do this impossible task and follow them to find out why they failed.

They failed because their conception of what was a variant different from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought.

And this was the problem, that bourgeois thought, and indeed socialist thought, when we get down to it, can have a variety of developments or roads and aspects or paths. With bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature, and because of the way in which it prompts eccentrics, you can have any road, because, after all, when you are not going any place you can choose any road!

So it was possible for these individuals to make what. I consider to be a genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought and yet find, in the final analysis, that they had merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves had suggested that they were confronting at the outset.

There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of the examples actually, are Africans who I think were blatantly dishonest from the beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters, who are tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don't think they're out to develop socialism. I don't think they're out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interest of the African people. But, nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of socialism.

And therefore I shan't in fact go on to African socialism. What I'll do is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a number of years during the fifties and, right up to when he was overthrown - that would cover at least ten years - in which he was searching for an ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he talked about pan-Africanism; he went to Consciencism and then Nkrumahism, and, there was everything other than a straight understanding of socialism.

What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What were the practical consequences of this attempt to dissociate himself from an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class contradictions in Ghana, that these class contradictions were fundamental.

For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy which took some socialist premises but which he refused to pursue to their logical conclusion - that one either had a capitalist system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the product of people's labour, or one had an, alternative system which was completely different and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing these two to create anything that was new and viable.

A most significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and before, he died he wrote a small text, Class Struggle in Africa. it is not the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it is there Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the misleading consequences of an ideology which espoused an African cause,. but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand,; an historical necessity to separate itself from Scientific Socialism. It indicated quite clearly the disastrous consequences of that position.

Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it was a terrible mistake. Yes, there are classes in Africa. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interest of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interest of international monopoly capital; and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African continent and a struggle against imperialism.

And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, at bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have, to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognises and challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It is a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, an African nationalist who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that somehow, he must dissociate himself in one way or another from Scientific Socialism because it originated outside of the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications.

This is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact, to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of bourgeois thought.

People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating to electricity but they say: "Marx and Engels, that's European!" Was Edison a racist? But they ask the question, "Was Marx a racist?" They genuinely believe, that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, they are obscuring the totality of social development.. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain, historical law and hence scientific law of society which can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators.

Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to end, that any ideology, when applied, must be applied with sensitivity. It must be applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given society.

Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or, let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven, and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting.

It was the task, of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to scrutinise it and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

I have already cited Cabral in another context and he reappears in this context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau. Looking at the potential of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people's history, but appears as a living force within, one's history.

And this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which is to take it as a finished product rather than ongoing social product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at Marxist theory, at its relevance to race, looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we come up with a very important paradox. And it is this: that the nationalist, in the strict sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of giving the people of Africa or the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy.

The petty bourgeois cannot fulfil these historical tasks. For national liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two.

Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development, for consciencization, as they say in, Latin America; and the nationalist struggle was won because it came under the rubric of Scientific Socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, "There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed. But there has certainly been no revolution which has succeeded without a revolutionary theory".

Class Contradictions in Tanzania

Lecture at North-Western University, 1975

My topic is specifically "Class Contradictions in Tanzania." Ten or fifteen years ago that type of topic would not have attracted very much attention except perhaps some raised eyebrows, because it might well have been considered as self-evidently absurd. Samir Amin, who is today one of the leading Marxist theoreticians on the African continent, wrote an article some 12 or 13 years ago entitled 'Class Struggle in Africa,' and it was anonymous. Very significant! At that time it was not even safe for someone to write an article on class struggle in Africa. Those were the days when Leopold Senghor and others were parading their theses which gathered or attracted world wide attention - theses to the effect that there were no classes in Africa. Today consider that changes have taken place both on the level of popular perception as well as in the academic sphere concerning the question of class and its relevance to an understanding of the analysis of Africa at the present and in the recent past, and indeed, using the broader scientific framework, in the more distant past.

Even at the very outset when the debate was raised in the early '60s, it was not true that there were no classes in African society. What was probably true is that the main manifestations of class contradiction within Africa then was still in the form of the extension of the class contradictions of the dominant capitalist metropolitan society. So that for all practical purposes, it was the capitalist class of Europe or Euro-America which was the exploiting class of the African continent and any intermediaries between them were relatively unimportant, and did not manifest real political presence. Consequently, when Marxists attempted to look at the interval evolution of class problems, they were seen to be or held to be not just alien but irrelevant concepts into the discussions of African society. Today, as I said, it has become sufficiently generalized that one does not need to be defensive about adopting this particular posture. For Tanzania, it is striking because Tanzania is probably one of the territories where class formation is least developed on the African continent, and yet it would excite no controversy at first sight to raise the questions of class contradictions in Tanzania. This indicates how well entrenched the position has become on the African continent today.

The Concept of Class

I will begin by trying to explain the concept of class formation before I look at class contradictions because I think that the classes in Africa are embryonic, they are still very much in process of formation. Perhaps one could say that no class is ever completed. In any society classes are continually undergoing change. But certainly there are periods when it is more difficult to utilize the tool of class because the individual's social groups that comprise the class are themselves moving toward an awareness of themselves, and do not necessarily have the organizational apparatus to express themselves as a class. By way of comparison, one may think of the 18th century in France. In writing about that period Marx had to make the point that the bourgeoisie was not in existence at the time of the French Revolution however much it may be called the bourgeois revolution. Elements which went into the making of the bourgeoisie were certainly present in 18th century France, and over the period of the late 18th century and early 19th century that class matured into the form which it came to take in the middle of the 19th century. The same applies to Africa. But here one must be careful; one must be able to understand that strands and strata are coming together to produce what could definitely be called classes.

The Process of Class Formation

While this process clearly began in the colonial period, for Tanzania my argument will be that class formation post-1960 has been as important if not more important than class formation before 1960 or before 1961, if you want to take the exact date of independence. It is a very recent phenomenon and it has been accelerated by the process of national independence. The low profile of classes in Tanzania before independence accounts, to my mind, for a number of the unique features of political and social development in that country. One of these features is political unity.

Political unity can only be explained in part at any rate as a function of the non-emergence of strong sectors of the petty bourgeoisie in pre-independence colonial Tanzania. By looking at the historical experience of a number of other places, say Ghana, the earliest and still in many ways the best studied of the African states moving toward nationhood, we find that in that country there had been a considerable proliferation of embryonic petty bourgeois elements of different types. Some had their matrix in the old traditional society: they had been chiefs, or sons of chiefs or they had been incorporated into the structure of the British so called native-authority rule; they had developed a base in the land and of course, in primary cash crop production of cocoa; they had professional classes that date back to the late 19th century in West Africa; they had a certain number of indigenous traders including the very important market women, and so on; they had fractions of a petty bourgeoisie in Ghana. I think that the development of these factions was such that the British were able to manipulate elements and create intraclass contradictions long before the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, had really matured. Already at this very embryonic stage, it was struggling within itself, and again that is not historically new. Sectors of classes, mercantile as opposed to industrial sectors, or of the capitalist class have always had their internal contradictions. And those contradictions became politically important because of the deliberate policies of colonial powers. Britain, in this case, tried to withdraw from Ghana, as from Nigeria, as from the Sudan and Uganda in such a way that the state machinery was left in the hands of different elements of the petty bourgeoisie.

In Tanzania, because the class or the stratum (perhaps we should say it was still a stratum, or several strata at that time) was not well developed, the attempt to play one section off against another was not very successful. Attempts to get what we may call conservative African nationalists to organize a political party to oppose TANU had far less success than similar attempts in Ghana to oppose the CPP. The low profile had this first consequence that it conduced towards national unity; and even after independence, again taking as a point of reference what has occurred in a number of other territories, notably Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, we find that the petty bourgeoisie politicizes ethnic differences in its search for state hegemony. Ethnic differences exist; of course they exist on the African continent. They are not necessarily political differences, however. They don't necessarily cause people to kill each other. They become so-called "tribalism" when they are politicized in a particular framework. And in post-independence Africa they have been politicized largely by sections of the so-called African elite. (I am referring to them as the African petty bourgeoisie, in the search for bases for their own maintenance in power).

In Tanzania again we see that this is rather unique. Occasionally one hears in internal discussions in Tanzania some reference to so called ethnic or tribal loyalties, but it has never reared its head within the state as a determinant of the direction of political change. Clearly this is not a function of the absence of ethnic groups, because Tanzania has as many or more ethnic groups as other areas. Nor is it the function of dominant ethnic groups, because if we broke Tanzania down, we could pick out two or three very dominant ethnic groups. The pattern in Tanzania is not all that dissimilar from, say, the pattern in what is now Zaire, where ethnic politics have become important. So the lack of politicization is mainly, in my opinion, not due to ethnic differences but due to the rather weak development of the petty bourgeoisie as a class. They didn't have the chance to get involved in jockeying amongst each other, utilizing their own ethnic bases for that purpose.

A third point, and perhaps the most important point concerning the process of class formation in Tanzania, is that the weakness of the petty bourgeoisie allowed the specific development which we see in Tanzania, which is the development towards what is called Ujamaa, or socialism or Tanzanian socialism, however you care to translate it. It seems to me we must try to explain historically why it is that this particular African country made that option. It's not merely a choice, a political choice, which any African state could have made. I think we should look for the conditions which made it possible for Tanzania in 1967 to declare so-called socialism, to announced the Arusha Declaration. In the search for the explanation, again as a prominent reason, I would suggest the weakness of the particular class who stood initially to lose from such a declaration.

In other parts of Africa where the petty bourgeoisie or some of its elements were already sufficiently entrenched, it would have been difficult to envisage an Arusha Declaration being made, and these elements simply retreating to their shells and offering no opposition.

I was fortunate to have been in Tanzania at that particular time; in seeing members of the leadership of TANU then, in 1967, one got a distinct impression of the discomfort on their part. Many elements, people that you could look up as individuals - ministers, members of the hierarchy and the civil service, were applauding the Arusha Declaration very painfully. Once could see that it did not exactly fall in line with their conception of where the country should have been going. And one must therefore say that in a certain sense they were coerced, or at least constrained, to move in that direction. And one could see the constraint: the constraint was a class struggle, it was between themselves and the mass of the people. The mass of the people, workers and peasantry, came out in such tremendous force behind the document that I don't think that the small fragile petty bourgeoisie could ever have had the confidence, or that anyone in that class could get up and say, 'We stand opposed to this option.' It would almost have been equivalent to committing suicide. They had no power base to confront the mass of the population at that time. Consequently we will see of course that they retreated and devised a number of stratagems to avoid a head-on confrontation, but a refusal of that position was just not possible, given the balance of class forces in 1967.

The same thing occurred in 1971 when TANU produced another important document, the TANU Guidelines or Mwongozo, as it is called. In many ways this is an even harder hitting document than the Arusha Declaration. One could perceive that in a sense the wording of the document, the elaboration of the document, was due to only a small number of individuals within the hierarchy of the party who took a particular position. But the others were not prepared to come out openly against it, again for the same reasons. It was too obvious that the vast majority of Tanzanian people stood in that framework, and that anyone who wanted to oppose it had to do so surreptitiously. Opposition had to be done in devious underhanded ways and not by coming forward and saying 'We are against the policy of socialism and self-reliance,' or 'we are against the policy of worker control,' or 'we are against an anti-imperialist line.' Except for a small handful, everyone felt constrained to at least mouth the slogans. There was a tiny handful who, after the Arusha Declaration, said 'Well, it's time for us to cut and run; we prefer property to socialist jargon and we will leave.' But quite a number decided that the best strategy was to say what they felt needed to be said, and then to try to vitiate it, try to trivialize and denude the concepts of their real meaning.

Of course, I'm talking about a relative situation - Tanzania relative to the rest of Africa, not relative to the rest of the world. To the rest of the world it is very obvious that class formation in Africa has not produced the same sharp differentiation it has historically in other parts of the world. But relative even to rest of Africa, in a significant number of African territories there has arisen a small landed class, a landed petty bourgeoisie, a kulak class to use the familiar Russian term. In Tanzania, analysts who have been looking around the countryside have also discerned what they call an emergent kulak class, but I think very often they are straining at the evidence. One kulak doesn't make a kulak class. What one could discern in Tanzania is that when you take the size of the country and the development of cash crop farming in certain isolated pockets of the country, you could go into a given community and you could find one or two kulaks, but it cannot be said that they began to operate in a way comparable to say, Ghana, or the Ivory Coast, or Western Nigeria or Senegal. There wasn't because quantitatively and qualitatively it was a different phenomenon. There was no real kulak class in Tanzania, no landed class comparable to either Uganda or Kenya in the East African countries. Of course, there were no industrialists; very few African countries had industrialists. But there were in a number of African countries a few African capitalists, timber traders or people having timber concessions, merchants of course, other than industrialists - the merchant class in West Africa or Central Africa, for example. But in Tanzania, as in the rest of East Africa, the presence of the Asians as the comprador class, as the merchant bourgeoisie, has meant that very few African[s] entered that pattern of trade, or acquired wealth through trade. And there were even very few professionals, less than in West Africa, and certainly less than in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Kenya had less for different reasons, partly because of the white settler economy which had allowed very few African professionals.

What we find, therefore, is that the petty bourgeoisie in Tanzania was small. And not only was it small, but it also had a second important characteristic: it was limited to certain sectors of production or sectors of social activity, particularly the civil service, and as an extension of that, the other coercive apparatus - the police and the army. This is where African petty bourgeoisie found itself. I think this is as important to understanding the subsequent evolution as is the fact that it was a small petty bourgeoisie. It was small but its character was also circumscribed and limited to particular sectors. It was not mercantile. It was not involved professionally to any great degree. It did not have land. It was concentrated in effect in the area of the state, either the civil service or the policy-army apparatus. I believe that this established a certain determination, a certain predilection, for state or status solutions to their particular problems - a predilection that was not present, say in either Uganda or in Kenya, to use the East African neighbouring territories as ways of comparing and contrasting the Tanzanian development. In Kenya there is still a definite commitment to the landed bourgeoisie or the landed petty bourgeoisie, and the same applies to Uganda. In Tanzania, the emergent elites never had any real commitment to the land in the form of private ownership. Therefore, in a real sense, it wasn't too surprising that they began to pursue policies which immediately returned the land or confirmed that the ownership of the land should be in the hands of the population. Had there already been a substantial development of anything approaching latifundia, then it would not have been an option that could so simply have been put into effect, but because of the lack of development of a private landed class, it seems to me there was no barrier towards a development in this direction.

The Structure of the Working Class

Let us take a brief look at the working class before going back to look at the petty bourgeoisie who are really going to be the focus of the analysis. In Tanzania (as in so many of the African countries) the working class was small. It was a transient working class with a high proportion of migrant labour although there has been a fair degree of stabilization of migrant labour in the post-war years. But certainly the working class remained essentially rural, the larger proportion being on the sites of plantations, largely unskilled either in the same rural occupation or in other spheres such as the docks where they remained unorganized. The Tanzanian working class never achieved a significant measure of independent organization. And it is independent organization which ultimately makes a class. The workers of Tanzania engaged briefly in the struggle for their own organization in the early 1960['s] (or I should say really in the late 1950's and the early 1960's - that is the period just crossing the barrier between colonialism and independence). The trade unions which evolved by 1961-1962 were still continuing the same trajectory as they had in the anti-colonial struggle, i.e. a trajectory designed to ensure that workers were represented and that workers built an independent organ of expression. But by 1964 this was completely halted by an attempted army mutiny in which some of the trade union leaders were involved. The government acted to virtually put an end to independent trade union organization - independent meaning independent of the state, independent of the leading party. This was in contrast to, say Kenya where there is a lesser degree of trade union independence in any real organizational sense. 

As a consequence, the working class subsequently has also been competing for power through the dominant party, TANU, and through the state. If the workers had retained an independent trade union organization, it is conceivable that we would have seen them as the instrument of their own struggle. But that organization post 1964 was incorporated into the governmental party machinery. Consequently, to whatever extent there is worker power in Tanzania, it is expressed through the party, TANU, or through the state which is, in some sense, the instrument of the ruling party. And therefore we have both the petty bourgeoisie and the workers concentrating their energies on the same social organization, on the same mechanism - the political party and the state becomes the arena in which the contradictions between the workers and the petty bourgeoisie still resolve themselves. That is what I would like to look at. How does the state serve? In whose hands does it rest? What derives from state policy?

The Workers, The Petty Bourgeoisie and the State

The Arusha Declaration is a starting point of modern Tanzania development. This was a response to internal crisis, a response to the stagnation of the neo-colonial economy in Tanzania, and it really marked the failure of the hopes of the petty bourgeoisie that international capital would have entered their situation to strengthen the class in [a] particular kind of way. The petty bourgeoisie had assumed that after independence, if they took the attitude of welcoming foreign capital and welcoming foreign aid, international foreign capital would be forthcoming. This was really the assumption. They imagined that there was some process of growth within the neo-colonial picture, within the post-colonial imperialist framework, which would allow them to develop as a class. But this was not in fact forthcoming. Any study of the period for Tanzania and for a number of other African countries shows very clearly the unfulfilled hopes of foreign investment and aid. Unfulfilled in many senses, particularly because (in many instances) it just did not come. Even when it came, it did not necessarily come when and where the government expected it to come. And when it was available, it was available with a number of other complications, political and economic, which the government of Tanzania found hard to accept. Therefore, by the mid-60s, the Tanzanian economy was definitely stagnant in the face of declining world prices for major products (like sisal and cotton). The option it seems to me was taken by the petty bourgeoisie under pressure from the working masses in the sense that the stagnation and decline of real standards were bound to raise their own current from the working people. That pressure had to be responded to and the response was in the form of the Arusha Declaration. This declaration was positive in the sense that it went along with popular aspirations and popular hopes that the producers would be able to control the product of their own labour and to control the shaping of the society to cut down the alienations which stem from the primary alienation of the product of a man's labour. Now that was positive 'Yes,' but at the same time the petty bourgeoisie were able to work out the strategy in which they would use this new intervention as a means of entrenching their control over the state.

Whatever the objective of the exercise of transformation, one thing was certain: the petty bourgeoisie intended to maintain their hegemony over the state apparatus. Indeed after 1967 they used the new policies as a means of reproducing themselves as a class. In a way this was almost axiomatic; since they were essentially a bureaucratic formation, they moment that they nationalized and began to engage in some forms of control over economic production, the bourgeoisie expanded itself, or extended itself into those sectors of economic operations. They built huge complexes like the National Development Corporation (NDC), the State Trading Corporation (STC), which became known in Tanzania as, in effect, extensions of the state, extensions of the old civil service. The people who benefited most from this were the young petty bourgeoisie.

In Kenya there was a different line because the Kenyans always had one advantage from their class perspective: Kenya was and still is a subimperialist centre in East Africa. It is the point of entry for foreign capital into the whole of the East African community, not just into Kenya alone. Consequently, the opportunities for pickings, if you like, were always higher in Kenya. The presence of the multinational corporations, partially determined by the presence of settlers in the colonial period, meant that Kenyans could actually think in terms of becoming directors of various multinational corporations. For Tanzanians, it was not feasible on ideological grounds. Besides there were very practical reasons that the petty bourgeoisie could not hope for very much in this direction. Tanzania was not that type of economy. The rate of expansion of multinational capital in Tanzania before 1967 was relatively small. Consequently it was through the state intervention that they could increase the possibilities of holding jobs equivalent to directorship. They wouldn't be directors of a foreign company; they would be directors of branches of the NDC or STC or they would be managers of particular plants. In effect they were extending themselves as a class.

At the same time the African petty bourgeoisie in Tanzania, as in the rest of East Africa, had an old opponent: the Asian commercial comprador element. This group had been foisted on the African people in many respects. In my opinion (and I think that the record indicates this), they had been deliberately promoted by the British government as a layer between foreign capital and Africans. They were allowed access to credit; most of them based their operations of [on] the 90-day credit system. They were in effect sponsored by the banks and the large import-export houses - the same banks which refused to give credit to Africans. The British government and the colonial states had sanctioned this by issuing credit restriction ordinances which made it impossible for Africans to advance as middlemen. So the experience of the so-called Asians, that is those from the Indian subcontinent, was linked with or part of British policies in East Africa. As so often happens, the comprador or the middleman often attracts the ire of different indigenous classes much more so than the metropolitan ruling class. In Tanzania and in Uganda also, there were what were called Asian riots or anti-Asian riots in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. For some people they may be classified as racial riots, but they were not racial riots, they were manifestations of class struggle, since you find the same kind of thing in Jamaica where you would find anti-Chinese riots simply because the Chinese happen to be the middlemen in that particular context. The ordinary peasants in the countryside, the working people in the sisal [e]states and in the towns found that their immediate enemy was the so-called duka walla, the Indian who controlled the duka, or the shop, because that Indian bought their product, he cheated them in weighing their product, he cheated them in reselling to them what he imported from abroad. Although this was petty in relationship to the fundamental exploitation of the market which was being established in Mining Lane in London, the peasant had to react to his immediate enemy[,] the worker had to react to his immediate enemy. And so there has been a considerable anti-Indian sentiment which is class-based. The African petty bourgeoisie too, as he began to move forward and to have certain aspirations for advancement felt that the Indian was the first obstacle. He couldn't see Barclay's Bank as the immediate enemy, because that was too distant, too powerful, and in his own horizons he didn't really aspire to become a competitor to Barclay's Bank, but he could aspire to become a competitor to an Asian merchant or an Asian professional or an Asian civil servant. So for the petty bourgeoisie too, the Asians were very often the immediate enemy. In the post-Arusha Declaration period in Tanzania, the Asians as a comprador class have begun to disintegrate. This is true in East Africa as a whole.

In Uganda the people are of course aware of the dramatic turn of events after Amin came to power. People may be less aware of what's going on in Kenya, but in Kenya there's also been a constant pressure and harassment of the Asian petty bourgeoisie by a would-be African commercial petty bourgeoisie. In Tanzania it did not take the same form. It did not take the form of individual Africans seeking to take over Asian shops. What has happened is that the state has encroached upon areas in which the Asian petty bourgeoisie were dominant, and since the African petty bourgeoisie controls that state it means the expansion of the bureaucratic class or the bureaucratic sector of the petty bourgeoisie as against the commercial petty bourgeoisie. The State Trading Corporation, for instance, took over a large number of the functions initially carried out by a host of private importers among whom Asians were predominant. Buying and selling abroad was initially taken over. Then slowly the STC has also attempted to establish itself with certain retail outlets. It has also meant that questions as to what is to be purchased, in what quantities, at what prices, and how it is to be sold - all these questions are now being determined by the state, by the African bureaucratic bourgeoisie, and not by the Indian merchant class, except in so far as they can react defensively and try to break out by certain stratagems which they do indeed adopt. But by and large initiative in these regards has passed into the hands of the African petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucratic African petty bourgeoisie.

The impact of the Arusha Declaration and the move towards social and towards state controls over production and distribution has been to sharpen that contradiction between the commercial petty bourgeoisie which was a particular ethnic grouping and the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie. It has been resolved in their favour in the sense that the Asians, for the most part, seem to have decided that there is no further stake in East Africa; their main concern has been to try to liquidate their capital, to try to get it out of the country, which they have done in an infinite variety of ways. In Tanzania it is extremely difficult to get foreign exchange, to get money out of the country. Usually what happens, however, is that whenever there is a new edict concerning exchange control, it has come at least a year if not two years after the Asians have been using that loophole. Therefore the amounts of money already sent to London and to Canada and to this country [the U.S.] are quite fantastic. At the same time, the Asians do interact by attempting to form liaisons with members of the African petty bourgeoisie, utilizing the straight-forward cash nexus just to bribe them into an acceptance of the Asian position. So they are a declining class, but they can at the same time exercise an influence based on the fact that they do have some liquid funds and this is used to increase the amount of bribery and corruption that is present in the system.

Nevertheless, I would say that one could conclude at this point - even before the Asians are completely finished as a class - that there is no longer any future for them in the old roles which they had in East Africa and Tanzania. In Tanzania this has been done through the instrumentality of the state, in Uganda through the instrumentality of the army and other private African entrepreneurs, and in Kenya though the instrumentality of private entrepreneurs. Most important to the people of Tanzania have been those contradictions manifested between the petty bourgeoisie and what I will call the producer class - the peasantry of the countryside, excluding the very few kulak owners. There is also a contradiction between the petty bourgeoisie and the workers of the towns and the countryside. This contradiction, which is a much sharper contradiction, a much more antagonistic contradiction than the earlier one between the commercial element and the bureau element, manifests itself at all levels in a variety of ways. I will cite only some of what seem to me to be critical examples.

Ideology and Class Contradictions

In the education sphere, for instance, and having taught in the country I hope I am sensitive to what went on in that area, I would say that the class struggle was reflected in ideological terms and conducted in very sharp ideological terms in Tanzania, more so than in any other African countries with which I am familiar, with the possible exception of Ethiopia. There it was conducted in a rather different way, primarily by Ethiopian students as a part of a whole underground. In Tanzania it was conducted out in the open inside the education institutions, particularly within the university, a young university which had been established like so many of the Third World universities as just another factory being put into the Third World by the metropolitan countries. It was established in 1961 as a typical institution of bourgeois learning and functioned in that way, in terms of its curricula, its staffing, its programmes, its structure, and everything else in the mid-1960s when it was formed. But because of the move towards socialism, even at the level of rhetoric, since much of it wasn't put into practice the move towards socialism itself had behind it the power of producing classes in Tanzania, and this could not be kept out of the development of the University of Dar es Salaam. Therefore one found there a tremendous conflict taking place between bourgeois knowledge and scientific analysis which derived from looking at the actual practice of the producer classes in Tanzania and in the world at large at this particular point in time. Some of the questions were of theory; they had to address themselves to the whole plethora of bourgeois knowledge and understand its methodology, its perceptions, to understand the struggle between idealism and materialism. I presume it would not be necessary for me to go into that kind of detail. Those of us who took part in this in one way or another related to the students and related to the population outside of the university, so that it was, I think, a genuine reflection of changes taking place in the society as a whole. There were, of course, broad debates about the organization of the university, about how one organizes academic disciplines, and so on. But there were also a number of debates which were very pertinent to the immediate policy c[ho]ices of the Tanzanian government. The question of development, for example, was not evolved as an academic debate per se. It evolved from a perception of real choices in the policy sphere: what was to be done at the particular point in time in specific areas of economic, political, and social development. It arose out of the formation of the solutions to the so-called problem of underdevelopment. People began to question the kinds of theoretical framework and paradigms which bolstered particular kinds of solutions. If the solutions proved to be false in practice, their theoretical justifications were exposed to much more critical analysis, and ultimately to an onslaught in that institution, at any rate, from which they have not recovered. So the debate was at all times linked or at most times linked to the ongoing struggle within Tanzania.

From time to time students themselves would take the initiative. This was extremely useful because the students were not only students of the university but they were at the same time members of the TANU Youth League. Therefore it was ensured that this was a struggle that was at all times relevant to the immediate needs as many young Tanzanians saw those needs of their country.

That is one level. Within the university and within all other educational institutions, such as the secondary schools, the same kind of struggle went on to try to clarify theory and to recognize that the ideas which existed in that society were not simply free-floating ideas. They had historical roots. They had social class origins and one had to pin down these social origins if some progress were to be made in clarifying the said ideas.

Economic Policy and Class Contradictions

More immediate, and more critical, from a political viewpoint, were the contradictions taking place at the level of economic policy which were also partly tied up in some ways with the contradictions in the educational system. But major debates were also taking place on specific aspects of policy, say for instance, tourism. There was a whole year at least in which the question of whether Tanzania should promote tourism or not was an issue of national importance that people were battling back and forth on this option. In some ways you may look at it and imagine": "Ok, tourism, are you for it or are you against it?" This is a free decision. We express a position, we analyze the situation, we subject the data to some scrutiny and we come up with a position for or against. But it is not as simple as that. When one looks carefully at the way in which the debate was conducted, who stood for the tourism option, who opposed it, one sees there were class roots, very clear class roots in taking up a position for tourism or against it. Fanon, in his usual manner, remarked quite a long time ago in 1960-61, that tourism is a very important vehicle: a way in which the petty bourgeoisie organizes relaxation for the metropolitan bourgeoisie and uses that opportunity also to reinforce their class ties. It was very clear in Tanzania that, in spite of the protestations for socialism, this tremendous need to push tourism and to rationalize what after all, in purely economic terms, is one of the most meaningless so called industries, was linked with the necessity - this felt need on the part of the Tanzanian bourgeoisie to keep in touch with their metropolitan masters. In effect it wasn't particularly different from what was going on in Kenya. Kenya just did it openly. Kenya did their tourism in the name of capitalism. Tanzania was trying to do their tourism in the name of socialism. In fact it is already in shambles, but the need was to rationalize this position, which was a class position and the petty bourgeoisie conceptualized development along certain lines. They had a vision of what needed to be consumed, of what needed to be built, of the kinds of societies that derive from bourgeois metropolitan society. The hotels, the airports, the transit facilities, these were things which fitted the class perspective of the Tanzania petty bourgeoisie.

On the other side were members of the same class, naturally enough, engaged in a debate which required articulation in certain ways. Essentially this involved young Tanzanians who were of the same social class origins, but who were responding to different class loyalties and who were expressing different class loyalties. They were saying that our workers and our peasants are not concerned with those who want to come and watch the lions and gazelle and to watch the Masai and so on, and call themselves tourists: that this will not do anything for the mass of our population. On the contrary it will inhibit a development of serious economic options which could lead to real integrated development. It will introduce and reinforce cultural backwardness and cultural penetration and place our people continually in the position of servitors of Euro-America. This was an argument that was lost in the first instance by the anti-tourism elements. It was won by those who wanted to promote international tourism, but in the year that followed tourism has been proved to be simply economically unprofitable quite apart from everything else. It was pointed out that deploying such a large proportion of finances into this sector was bound to be disastrous and it has already proved to be that way. A huge modern automated airport was built between Kilimanjaro and Arusha where the game reserves are located only 10 minutes flight from Nairobi. This was completely unjustifiable in any terms, but it was claimed that with an airport more visitors would come to watch the animals. When the visitors did not come to watch the animals and this huge airport lay empty, the same petty bourgeoisie began to suggest that possibly they might do some market gardening around this airport. They might therefore freight fresh vegetables out and make some profit. The order of priority was not just due to lack of vision but due to a particular straight jacketing in which this class found itself. So they thought first of tourism and only subsequently when the tourism was in shambles did they begin to think about production; even then, of course, the production will have to be tied to the existing infrastructure which is a meaningless infrastructure because it is pointless to engage in production simply for export to Europe. But that is another question.

The same clash of views I think came out, not always as clearly as the tourism debate, with regards to questions concerning irrigation, choice of crops, and the general conduct of agricultural policy. The tourism debate was very sharply focused and people took sides. It may not be clear with regard to other aspects of economic policy such as cash crops, general crop selection, and whether or not the country should engage in irrigation, and other questions. But looking at it even at least with hindsight, one can perceive that there was a tendency on the part of the petty bourgeoisie to treat agriculture mainly as an intensification of that which had gone before. There was no conception of a break. To take sisal or cotton as examples, when the prices declined the tendency was to imagine that one could grow more. Certainly for cotton and sisal certain areas had to be abandoned, because they were not profitable. There was no new conceptualization of breaking with the international division of labour in which they as a class had emerged. Consequently, we find today significant sectors of Africa are suffering from famine. In suffering from this famine, each one, depending upon their religious affiliations, will appeal to Allah or God or the ancestors of whoever it is, or the rain gods, who are supposedly responsible for there being no rain. So it becomes a mixture of natural phenomena and the solution is a metaphysical or religious intervention. Of course, famine is neither natural nor metaphysical. It is a social phenomenon. Drought and famine are not just 'natural.' I don't know in what sense one can just describe them as 'natural,' when the society has the capacity technically and organizationally to plan firstly, to eliminate or at least reduce the incidence of drought and famine and, secondly, to reduce the consequences of drought and famine. So we see that these societies had continued their colonial policies of failing to deal with the critical question of food first, and being preoccupied with what they call "foreign exchange," they have been growing coffee, and cotton, and sisal and what have you.

That must be put as part of the historical explanation of why the famine and drought are so widespread throughout Africa at the present time. It is a reflection of the incapacity of neo-colonial societies to even feed themselves or to protect their populations from the vicissitudes that lie outside the immediate control of each individual, but do not lie outside the control of the society as a whole, if that society is geared towards resolving the problem. So these I would say are aspects of bourgeois thought, of petty bourgeois policy, and the fact that they were pursued when there were at least some individuals in the society arguing to the contrary is an indication that they were pursued in spite of the contradictions or by way of contradictions. They were not simply steam-rollered; it was not that the whole society was blissfully unaware of other alternatives. Alternatives were discussed and the petty bourgeoisie chose their own road which in most cases have lead to disaster.

To conclude briefly on the point about the Tanzania economic policy, there still is an ongoing debate about factors such as economic advisors, about the questions of economic agreements, so called "managerial agreements" by which nationalized or partially nationalized companies are placed in the hands of foreign management consultants. That debate about consultants and experts and advisors still goes on. In part it was attacked from a nationalist perspective. Some Tanzanians said, 'well, we need to nationalize or Africanize, so we can't have all these sensitive positions.' But nationalization has not been enough. In fact the nationalists themselves, the petty bourgeois nationalists stopped short at a particular point, because of a lack of confidence in themselves. To understand the petty bourgeoisie again go back to Fanon, look at the pitfalls of the national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth. He captured that very well: the lack of confidence in a class that is an outgrowth of another historical experience that never controlled anything in its own right. It didn't control production. It didn't control property. It is derived from the colonial system.It has[n't] the confidence to challenge that system fundamentally. It is culturally dependent as well as economically and politically dependent. Consequently, they find it very difficult to break with this conception of foreign advisors, foreign management, etc., having no confidence to break, therefore they rationalize it by saying, 'Well, McKinsey isn't really advising us how to be socialists. McKinsey is merely giving us the technological expertise. We will account for the political inputs.' The capitalist firm comes in and goes through all our records and the Harvard advisory team and all those various paraphernalia of bourgeois individuals still trample around in and out of Dar es Salaam and the countryside. This is rationalized by saying, "We are taking from them a technical expertise and this is all. We will account for the political inputs." One of the most fundamental bourgeois fallacies is that you can separate technology from ideology, that you can separate the mechanics of a process from the fundamental direction in which you are going, from the class content of the kinds of advice which you get about organizational structures, and so on.

Production of Class Contradictions

For Tanzania, outside the economic sphere, the most decisive contradictions - the ones on which the real earthy manifestations of the class struggle are based - have come directly out of production, either in the countryside or in the towns. In the countryside, there have been contradictions arising out of policy of Ujamaa and its implementation: in the towns these are seen in the clash between bureaucratic management and the workers at the point of production. The policy of ujamaa itself has a great deal to commend it. It is not merely a form of social organization and of economic production. It is meant to be a social whole, a cultural whole. It is meant to be an environment in which the rural producers resume control over their own lives by participating in running their day-to-day lives, and making choices about fundamental things in their day-to-day lives. It intended to put a halt, as Nyerere made clear, to the incipient or more than incipient penetration of the money economy and the class formation in the countryside. It was intended to put a halt to the rise of any kulak elements, and to the accompanying rise of a landless proletariat. What has in effect occurred is that only a very few of the functions of this operation have been successfully concluded. In large measure there have been concluded a certain regroupment of forces, particularly in areas of the country that had been sparsely settled or where the pattern of spatial distribution of population and economic activity was such as to warrant a grouping of forces. This regrouping took place, for instance, in central Tanzania where there is a low density of population, and in western Tanzania where the homesteads were also scattered. This is useful because it allows people to come together and one can provide them or the government can provide them with medical services, schools, and a number of other things. It means that a government proclaiming itself to be socialist has had to carry out an historical task which in other societies had been carried out in a previous epoch. Capitalism, and feudalism for that matter, had helped in the grouping of populations and certainly capitalism very ruthlessly enclosed land and brought farms together. It also concentrated populations in urban centres.

In Tanzania, this programme of grouping rural populations had had some serious setbacks in recent years. Evidence of this came late in 1973 and 1974 when the programme for creating Ujamaa villages seemed to have bogged down. It had not reached the quantitative dimensions that had previously been planned, because a number of areas apparently had not moved into the villages as they were expected to. On some examination it does not appear as though there were serious political inputs into getting these individuals [to] move. To ask people to move, to ask them to make a new life, to participate in a whole new form of production would obviously require a considerable politicization. This was the premise upon which regrouping was based in China - mutual-aid teams though the brigades right up to the communes. It was a political process first and foremost, but to the bureaucrats they could only reduce it to a bureaucratic process, not one of entering in and with the mass of the population to effect transformation, but one in which they see it as a question of logistics and figures and maps with little pins stuck in to show where the Ujamaa villages are and what is growing where. They can conceptualize a problem which says, 'we need to move X number of people from this point to another and we need so many lorries, so you get the lorries, you go to the area, you get the police to come with you, and you break up people's villages, and tell them it will be much better you for. Possibly it will work out; possibly those people will decide it is better for them.['] But the world has had a great deal of practice of certain individuals telling other individuals what is good for them and telling them they will kill them for their own good if necessary. We see the end product of that in South East Asia today. Certainly from a socialist perspective, it is always dangerous that bureaucratization should parade in the name of socialism. It happened of course under Stalin and it did put a certain blight upon socialism for quite a long time. Therefore one does look with some concern at this same manifestation.

The high incidence of bureaucratic activity, of bureaucratic decision making within the context of the Ujamaa villages created a real contradiction because those peasants are fully aware of what is going on. Inside the villages once they are formed, there is a struggle over controlling the day-to-day policy. The peasants don't give up. They are quite tenacious. They have a way of bringing their perspectives to bear on the problems also. So it is not one-sided, but because the petty bourgeoisie are more in control of the state apparatus, it becomes rather difficult for the peasantry to win significant victories at this time.

And finally there are the workers themselves, a small class, judged in comparison with Europe, an insignificant class. A very tiny percentage of the total producing force can be regarded in any way as a proletariat. But, as it so often happens in this type of economy, the proletariat is strategically situated. It is situated in the capital town and other urban areas and in sensitive sectors of production and therefore what it says and does simply cannot be ignored. It strikes me that the contradictions between workers and the bureaucrats have really come out in a very sharp form as the working class itself has advanced in its own clarity, partially as a result of the same policies which have been pursued by the government. You see the ambivalence of policies: the elements within the petty bourgeoisie have allowed for the elaboration of a certain theory of certain ideas within the Tanzanian environment, which have further strengthened the Tanzanian working class. And the Tanzanian working class makes demands on the system in very enlightened terms. Not merely demands concerning increased wages (those have been made and they are necessary to defend living standards of the population), but going beyond that, workers have in the last several years in Tanzania been making a number of very advanced demands concerning their role in the productive process and in the control of the produce process. 

Once the factories were nationalized, once an institution fell under the NDC and was either government-owned or partially government-owned, the petty bourgeoisie imagined that was the end of the process. It was now a Tanzanian enterprise and, as a Tanzanian enterprise run by Tanzanian managers, it was enough for the workers to fall in line and behave more or less as they had behaved previously. But this did not turn out to be the case. Workers began to raise questions that the nationalization of those industries meant that they had to be run by Tanzanians in a new kinds of way consonant with the interests, the self images, etc., of the Tanzanian working people. One of the consequences of this was that the party agreed to issue the party guidelines of Mwongozo which in effect addressed itself to the whole problem of bureaucratic management. It was saying, 'Well, bureaucrats cannot behave in the same fashion as the colonialists or the imperialists used to have,' or they said that the nationalization implies a whole new way of organizing production and change, a qualitative change in the relationship between the workers and the management during the period immediately following the proclamation of Mwongozo in 1971. But an interesting thing which occurred after the acceptance of the guidelines was that the petty bourgeoisie themselves recognized that this was too dangerous a weapon. The workers used to move around with a very small version of the guidelines, a document printed up into a very tiny booklet, which could be stuffed into a top pocket or any pocket. Workers had a habit of moving around with the Mwongozo and taking it out - as we understand the Chinese take out their little red book - and opening it to the appropriate page, and confronting bureaucrats and saying, "Well, look, according to paragraph 14 so, and so; this is what it says and now what you are saying there and doing is quite different from what is going on here. And then they would move on to paragraph 15 and so on and so forth, and this was becoming very dangerous. Workers were presuming to educate the educated. In other words, it was threatening to become a revolution.

Interestingly enough when this class contradiction manifested itself, the petty bourgeoisie began to withdraw from the issue of Mwongozo. They began to say, 'Well, each one in his own institution would come up with an exception why Mwongozo didn't apply there.' The doctors started to say, 'Well, look at this hospital. We are the doctors. After us come nurses and cleaners and so on. I mean this hospital has to be run by doctors. We have the expertise. You can't have Mwongozo and self-management and things like that in a hospital. People will die.' What they need to do is, of course, to go and look at the Chinese experience, to look at a book such as that by Joshua Horn, Away with All Pests, and they will understand that in a truly democratic society the hospitals are run by all, including the patients themselves. But they felt they were making a valid case for exceptions. The youngsters in schools began to flash Mwongozo and argue against the missionary type education, the pattern of hierarchy and the authoritarianism which still prevailed in a large number of boarding schools in Tanzania, and of course the headmasters and the schoolteachers said, 'Well, you are too young to know about Mwongozo. Mwongozo was written for adults, not for children. As children you are under our care.' They therefore seized all copies of Mwongozo which might be circulating among the student population.

Then in the banking institutions the bankers and the chief bankers would say, "This is a lot of money we have here. We can't be joking with this financial question. These workers don't understand accounts. They don't understand questions like: "What is the current rate of the Tanzanian shilling as compared with dollars and things like these. How can we have Mwongozo operating in our institution?" So in a variety of ways one saw the petty bourgeoisie retracting from the position into which they had been forced initially on the question of the Mwongozo, one found the workers advancing by raising the level of their demands, so that they constantly talked issues on principles. They constantly talked about incorrect behaviour in the factories. They talked about favouritism, firing in accordance with the kinds of ethnic loyalties of the manager. They exposed any ways of victimizing or exploiting the women in the factories, sexually or otherwise. Things of this sort began to increase considerably in 1971 and 1972 reaching a high point when in one factory, a rubber factory, the workers decided to lock out the management and run the factory themselves for a certain period of time (not a very long period of time; actually until the police came). The workers ran the factory because of the things that had been raised against the workers when they went on strike was that they were striking now that Tanzania has national property and therefore any strike was against the national interest, and not the interest of capital as used to be the case before the factories were nationalized. So the workers in that factory were answering that argument. They were saying, 'We are not going on strike. We are not putting an end to production in the country. We will increase production when we are running the factory.' So they were posing a more fundamental question: the question of who controls production; who is the boss in so-called socialist society. But for the time being, of course, the petty bourgeoisie is still essentially in control of the state and it could not allow the working class to exercise this type of initiative, so those workers had to be rounded up and scattered.

Conclusion

Many times when I speak about Tanzania, I find that I fall into the difficulty of trying to justify it against reactionaries and to clarify the realities against those who are romanticizing such realities. Each one is a different kind of operation. There are enemies of Tanzania who do not like the socialist content, so for them whatever is going on wherever it fails, that is so much the better. Against such an assault one has to be careful to be critical of the reality, and the transition, but to be critical of it from the viewpoint of its failure to live up to certain types of expectations, and the fact that the contradictions have not yet resulted in the positive benefits for the working masses. And then on the other hand when one is talking with the romanticizers, people who essentially have a sympathy with what is going on in Tanzania, but have not penetrated in day-to-day reality, then it is necessary to understand or to point out that social contradictions do not cease because a government issued a document.

The Arusha Declaration is very nice. Another document is issued which says that socialism is for self-realization or education for self-reliance and Mwongozo. All these are very positive, certainly better than neighbouring territories like Kenya and Uganda which either have no document or have some policy statements that are really absurd. But that is not an answer to the reality or a substitute for the reality. The position was a position in part won by progressive elements and by the pressure of the workers and the peasants, but it can only be worked out in practice depending upon the balance of class forces. And at the present time the petty bourgeoisie, although small in number, is in control of the state. It is reproducing itself. It still retains certain kinds of links with the international monopoly capitalist world.

It would be difficult at this time to make a prognosis about the immediate resolution of the said contradictions -- whether progressive tendencies or more reactionary tendencies will win out. I have a certain confidence, perhaps, a confidence tinged with hope, that the trend will in fact lead, even in the short run, towards the resolution of these contradictions in favour of the progressive elements among the working peoples. Clearly, I can not be quite certain. But that is not as important as the long run trends. Over the long run, there is no doubt about it: I think that the masses of the population are being brought into a politics of participation and that they have in these last five years entered into struggles in a way that is much more meaningful than for most other neo-colonial African territories. Therefore whatever happens in the short run, one can see the towns, serving their best interests in terms of the access to power, because these historical changes will not take place of themselves.

History is, of course, made by people. Marx and his followers clearly understood this. There is a tendency on the part of bourgeois detractors to suggest that somehow a Marxist formulation is talking about things and about abstractions, and reification, whereas in fact we are talking about people in society, and certainly history is made by people depending upon their particular level of consciousness. In this sense the contradictions are sharpening the consciousness of the most exploited and oppressed classes, heightening their consciousness and this must be in the long run a very positive fact.

Marxism as a Third World Ideology

Lecture at the University of Ontario, 1975

This is an appropriate time at which to participate in a further discussion on the question of Marxism, because the amount of interest and the amount of practical attention which has been given to that ideology has increased enormously.

In the process of this increase there has also been, inevitably, a tendency towards factionalism – a tendency towards wanting to adopt, logically enough, a position which the adherents of Marxism or Scientific Socialism consider to be the most theoretical and ultimately practical interpretation of what Marxism is. For my own part, I will at the outset, for the sake of convenience, avoid entering into any discussion which will adjudicate between rival claimants to the title of Marxism. It is not for me at this moment – I do not think it will advance our analysis in the time allocated if we were to launch into trying to determine who is actually Marxist–Leninist between so-called Stalinists and so-called Trotskyites, between one side or the other in the Sino-Soviet dispute, between the old Left and the new Left. That is to say, as a matter of convenience, I will avoid the complications inherent in those very often polemical distinctions. However, more than that, I believe that on principle one can argue that there is a common understanding – or a body of common theoretical understanding – among all of those who are avowedly Marxist, and that there is an area which is smaller, but nevertheless significant, of common practice – common anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist practice – among these rival groups. And this is part of my justification for avoiding that contention. Besides, at a later point in the analysis, I will go on to suggest that, on principle, the introduction of Marxist factionalism into Third World political discussions in an a priori fashion is usually destructive, and at best is pointless.

So let us attempt – however difficult that may appear to some people who are engaged in Marxist discussion – to take Marxism as though it were homogeneous or as though we do not have a multitude of contenders for the title of Marxism as it were, and focus our attention on the Third World. The Third World, that part of the globe which has been engaged in capitalist relations for centuries, but which has been engaged in capitalist relations in its own peculiar way, qualitatively different from the way in which the metropolitan countries of North America and Europe have been engaged in the capitalist system of relationships. And because of the qualitatively different manner in which the Third World has participated in the international capitalist economy, there are peculiar factors that are described as backwardness or underdevelopment, or what have you. This is a portion of the world without capitalists – without significant indigenous capitalists, without a significant indigenous proletariat, very often having pre-capitalist social formations still existing in various stages of disintegration.

Our enquiry really amounts to trying to determine the relevance of Marxism to that part of the world; and more particularly, understanding the relevance of a Marxist interpretation to strategies designed to transform or speed up the transformation of these parts of the world which are lightly, very often lightly, termed the Third World. So, in trying to answer the question ‘How is Marxism relevant to the Third World?’ my insistence is that we understand that Africa, Asia and Latin America, when referred to as the Third World, do not constitute a socio-economic system which is distinct from the capitalist centres of the world. If we make that distinction, I believe we will fall into all kinds of traps when we attempt to apply the analysis of Marxism or any other kind of ideology to the Third World. We must see the countries of Africa, most of Asia outside of China, Korea and Vietnam, and virtually all of Latin America outside of Cuba, as still functioning as integral parts of the capitalist world. It is merely that they complement the capitalist centres. And this, after all, is not the thesis that need necessarily be exemplified at great length today in 1975; because, a large number of non-Marxian scholars have also come to accept this complementarity – this dialectical relationship between what is often called the centre and the periphery or the metropolitan heartlands and the colonial or semi-colonial or neo-colonial areas of the world. Looking at this question over several decades, we find that different answers have predominated at different times.

The earliest answers – answers suggested by the colonial powers themselves – were quite simple. They said to Third World peoples: Marxism–Leninism or Scientific Socialism or Communism has absolutely no relevance to your needs and interests. Indeed, this ideology would be completely inimical to your needs and interests. The colonial powers, their spokesmen and ideologies simply said, in effect, that Marxism was not good for the natives; that this was not a vision of the world which should be incorporated into the way in which colonial peoples saw themselves, saw their societies, and saw the world outside. And this was consistent with their position of power. Colonialism sought to ensure that colonized peoples should not wage effective nationalist struggles. They were opposed in the early years, even to the expression of nationalism. So, it follows that they were all the more bitter, all the more concerned to oppose that brand of nationalism which was enlivened by Marxist thought which went beyond saying that we are determined to have independence, but that we are also determined to build a new society which is completely different from the capitalist society we have inherited.

And it is generally true that while colonialists were hostile towards Marxists inside of their own countries, they were doubly hostile to Marxism and to Marxists who might appear in India, in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Quite obviously, it has not been an easy history for Marxist thought inside of the Western countries – in Britain, France, in North America. Up until today, Western Marxists are discriminated against in institutions such as these. But the bourgeois metropolitan system has certain capacity to accommodate. It sometimes, in fact, goes out of its way to incorporate some individuals who are outside of the so-called mainstream, and it will therefore give and take within the limits of its own maintenance and it will allow some Marxist thought to exist. But the Third World practice for many years, and I think it still remains true, is to resolutely oppose, on the part of the same powers, the development of Marxist thought. It seems to me, then, that the bourgeoisie themselves recognize their vulnerability in the Third World; they recognize that Marxist thought has a double potency, if you like, in the Third World countries.

This attempt on the part of imperialism and the colonial powers to keep Marxism out of the Third World understanding, was not entirely successful. There have always been instances of African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean Marxists operating in their own societies, operating at an international level – sometimes quite successfully. But, by and large, we must accept that throughout the colonial period – extending right through the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s – Marxism was an insignificant ideology, lacking both the individuals to articulate Marxist ideas in journals, and the political parties to represent the Marxist–Leninist position.

The colonialists were relatively successful in maintaining the exclusion of Marxist thought. More importantly, they created a generation of Third World scholars who were immersed in bourgeois theory and who peddled all of the understandings which they gained from bourgeois theory. And this usually meant, for instance, that they were automatically anti-Marxist; without even thinking about it, they were anti-Marxist. They had an idealist vision of the world and they assumed that what they had was a universalistic vision. They saw the capitalist system and they thought that the capitalist system always was, is and always will be. They saw the human being functioning within the constraints of capitalist society, and they said ‘there is man’; and they began to talk about human nature and the like, and they did not and cannot perceive that they are speaking about human nature only in a particular social system.

All of these understandings were encrusted in the Third World vision of itself. And that applies irrespective of whether we were trained in these institutions abroad, or whether we were trained in the surrogate institutions such as the University of the West Indies or the University of Ghana or Makerere. Because, one can be brought into line with the bourgeois worldview either by being brought to the metropole itself, or alternatively the bourgeois institutions can be transferred to the metropole to do the job locally, as a sort of forerunner of the international branch plant economy of the multinational corporations.

However, that was an era that I think is disappearing; it is not past. One has to see the trends; one has to see that, today, it is not a simple argument between bourgeois ideology and Marxist ideology. That simple dichotomy between good and bad – the forces of evil and the forces of Christianity, and so on; that kind of argument is no longer very acceptable. A number of factors have intervened. For one thing, when it used to be told to a Ghanian or to a Jamaican that Communism is evil and Marxism–Leninism has no value, it was part of a package in which the bourgeoisie asserted that Marxism–Leninism cannot work. You see, quite apart from the moral, philosophical or ideological arguments, there was this appeal to the so-called practical. It said: Even if we grant the theoretical validity of this system we can prove to you that it is not efficient, that it does not work; that capitalism is efficient and that socialism does not give people food; that there is starvation in Russia and no clothes; and that the Chinese are eating grass. You see, those were years ago in the early period of the development of the revolutionary systems in the world.

But as the Russian Revolution passed those initial years of extreme economic difficulty – the difficulties which they had inherited from Czarist regime, and as the Chinese Revolution grew from strength to strength – again transcending the period of absolute impoverishment of the masses that was characteristic of feudalism and imperialism in China, it was and is no longer possible to seriously propose to any Third World country that socialism does not work – that it is not a practical system, as it were. So the argument must shift; it must in some way come to terms with the ideological dimensions. I believe the argument has shifted and I would like to focus on that shift because it is the contemporary dimension of the discussion of Marxism in the Third World.

This new discussion – the new shift – means that in the first place, Marxism is not posed directly against bourgeois ideology. There is an attempt to avoid this direct confrontation. Marxism in the Third World – I’ve seen this in Africa, it’s happening in the Caribbean, it happens in Asia – is counterposed against some other version or vision of the world. Africans or West Indians will be told: ‘We understand that Marxism has some validity, but we do not think that Marxism is relevant for us. We have to look for our own solutions’ – which is one of the more important ways of countering the Marxist world-view. And as you can see, it obviously has a greater initial plausibility than the old distinction between Marxism and bourgeois ideology – between socialism and capitalism.

A second variant on the same theme that is often interconnected, is that one can be told that there is some strength in Marxism and in socialism on the one hand, and there is some strength in capitalism and capitalist theory on the other hand; and that one of our tasks is to borrow intelligently from the two systems. So, here again, you find that Marxism is not posited as something that one runs away from absolutely as an ogre that is painted in certain colours that are very frightening. It is approached rather obliquely, and one is told to choose some elements from either of the two systems.

I believe that these are both sleights of hand and are ideological devices intended to weaken the development of a scientific understanding of the world; and I shall try to indicate where I feel the logical weakness lies in both approaches.

A Peculiar View of the Third World

Let us first examine the approach which suggests that what we need in the Third World is something peculiar. If one is in Ghana, one will think about Ghanaian culture. In Africa, as a whole, there is a need for African socialism, it would be said. In India, in Sri Lanka: let us look for something that relates to our own culture. These are powerful arguments because they address real emotions; they address the colonial in his conception of himself. The colonial, after all, had been challenged as a being; his very identity had been challenged. He had been exposed to cultural imperialism, in addition to the political and economic exploitation. And, therefore, it rings a certain bell and elicits sympathy when one says we must avoid all foreign domination of thought, and we must ensure that that which we create is ours, that we cannot reject capitalism or bourgeois theory and take in its place socialism or Marxist theory, because that is a new form of imposition. And I think that there are a few Africans, a few Asians, who would put forward this kind of argument very ably, and I myself have tried to put it forward without any caricature whatsoever. I think that this is the argument as it would be put forward at its best; and I still feel that, at its best, it is false. For several reasons.

First of all, when these individuals are speaking, they are automatically making the assumption that Scientific Socialist ideology or Marxism–Leninism is limited in time and space – culturally limited. That is the assumption to the argument; because on that assumption one can say Marxism was generated within Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Therefore, if it has any relevance – putting aside that question – its relevance is circumscribed by those factors. It may be relevant to the Europeans, it may have been relevant in the nineteenth century, or perhaps it is still relevant to Europeans in this century; but it is not relevant to us. That is to say an African, a Third World person, is speaking: it is not relevant to us because it is theirs; it is an alien, cultural thing. Later on, we might have to discuss the extent to which Marxism, like any ideology, must of necessity incorporate elements of the culture which produces and fosters and propagates it. But, in this position, the fundamental ideological assumption is a bourgeois assumption.

It’s a metaphysical assumption which makes a separation between the application of scientific principles to the society as distinct from the application of scientific principles to the real world – to the natural world. Because the very individuals who would so cogently, and convincingly perhaps, make this kind of argument are individuals who have no qualms about standing before you and using this microphone. They have no qualms of standing before you and using the electricity, the harnessing of the electric energy; and, of course, they may be speaking in an African or Asian or Caribbean country. But they do not make a fanciful argument which suggests that things which originate in the natural world – the harnessing of principles of understanding the motion of the natural world – should be rejected a priori in the Third World because they were initially discovered in the First World or Second or whatever kind of ranking you are applying. And, without recognizing it, they are subscribing to a certain dichotomy which is their bourgeois philosophical worldview – that dichotomy which is perfectly prepared to discover (to seek out at any rate and then discover) the principles of motion in the natural world. The capitalists do that because it aids in production; it is an integral part of the capitalist system that they should maximize production; that they should maximize the efficiency of technology. So they will not mystify (certainly they will not consciously and deliberately mystify) the pursuit of scientific knowledge with regard to the real world.

But then by the same token, the bourgeois class – the capitalist class – has an interest in specifically mystifying the application of scientific principles to society; because the same application of scientific principles to society would suggest that we must understand the changes – the transitions by which capitalism itself came into being, and by which the particular class in power will be removed from power. It would be a study in their own liquidation, if you like, and one perhaps could not reasonably expect the bourgeoisie to promote the study of their own liquidation.

And so, we find that there is always that contradiction in bourgeois thought between the application of scientific principles to society and to the natural world – which is a very artificial distinction. And those who, as I said earlier, are making the argument about cultural validity and cultural uniqueness and peculiarity, are clearly falling victim to this distinction. The moment that we can break beyond that understanding, we can see even further the limitations of a position that tries to see Marxism as culturally distinct and as having no relevance to the Third World.

One of these limitations is that it is necessary first to misunderstand deliberately, to misread Marx in order to conduct their own polemics. They will say, for instance: Marx does not deal with the kinds of society which we have, Marx and Engels were writing about European society which had classes and we don’t have the same classes; we don’t have any proletarian workers. And they may be right. In some countries of Africa there is hardly any proletariat to speak of. Countries of Latin America and Asia perhaps have larger numbers; but, in any event, they are right in saying that the particular class configuration or even the absence of classes in a Third World country does not conform to the model of analysis that Marx might have organized for Western Europe, and which, of course, is relevant to North America.

In so doing, however, they overlook that which Marx himself had said, because Marx hadn’t claimed that he was organizing a philosophical worldview and that he had created categories for Western Europe which were applicable in and of themselves to the Third World – applicable without any new intellectual or analytical effort. Indeed, Marx had to chastise those individuals (some of them calling themselves Marxists) who would like to have applied his understanding of Western Europe in a very uncritical way to the development of Eastern Europe; and he had to warn them that Marxism was not a general historical philosophical understanding of the whole world at all times, in every place. He made it very clear that that which he and Engels had been dealing with was a systematic and detailed formulation of the development of capitalism within Western Europe; and that they had attempted to describe and understand the specific features of capitalism specific to Western Europe. So that the universality which both he and Engels claimed, was not the universality that applied to Western Europe. The ‘universality’ is the universality of contradiction; the universality which can be determined by utilizing the historical materialist method with relationship to any given society. So that when those individuals say that Marxism claims that all societies must pass through the same processes, and that the important thing is the presence of the given working class in a particular way, and that therefore we must of necessity bypass this because our society is unlike that which Marx describes – I think those individuals have fundamentally failed to come to grips with what he was saying. And I don’t think it is merely accidental; I think that there is an element of distortion which is deliberate. And that in itself is a serious reflection on their arguments, because, if you have to engage in deliberate distortion of the opposition’s arguments before you can come to terms with the argument, it suggests that you yourself are coming from a very weak position.

Besides, yet another limitation of the attempt to force Marxism into these narrow boundaries of time and place arises out of the fact that these individuals fail to recognize and accept Marxism as a growing ideology. That is to say, just like with any body of science, it is not static; it takes in new ideas, it has new discoveries, it responds to the variations as scientific enquiry continues. That is why one can speak about Marxism–Leninism. The very fact that we couple Lenin’s name to Marx’s name in a very fundamental way, is a reflection of Lenin’s contribution at a different time – his ability to say: Yes, we are looking at capitalism, but we are not looking at the same capitalism which Marx had looked at in the earlier part of the nineteenth century; instead, we are looking at capitalism in its imperialist epoch, and this is a qualitatively different thing. So, in that process, Lenin contributed to the growth of Marxist ideology.

Moreover, the same applies to the contributions by Mao; and the same would apply to the contributions by Che Guevara, or to the contributions by Amilcar Cabral. Contributions which recognize that Marxism is itself a growing body of scientific knowledge, that one has an ontology, one has an epistemology, and that from there one must move towards dealing with the particularities that occur in any given place at any given time. And this would certainly move Marxism far beyond these mundane, restricted limits which have been forced upon it by some theoreticians.

In the practical day-to-day struggles of the Third World, irrespective of whether people accept some of these arguments – and you may think that they are esoteric and that the day-to-day struggle does necessarily take account of these arguments – Marxism continues to grow as a Third World ideology in spite of the attempts to present it as something alien to the Third World. And it continues to grow as an independent ideology seeking clear alternatives to capitalism, in spite of the attempts to divert this process by focusing on a compromise between capitalism and socialism.

That compromise is something I shan’t discuss at any length because, again, the moment that one takes the care to understand Marxist ideology, it becomes immediately obvious that one cannot have a foot in both camps; it is not possible to talk about the coexistence indefinitely of a socialist and capitalist system. There may be, at a certain point of transition, the incorporation of elements which are capitalist in a socialist system or vice versa. But if that is so, then we will have to examine the tendency; we will have to examine which of the contradictory features is manifesting itself ultimately to become the dominant system. But it isn’t possible for someone such as Leopold Senghor to say: In Senegal we will have a little bit of capitalism, and a little bit of socialism, and then a little bit of Senegalism; but this is in effect what he says. He says: We’re going to have three sectors of our economy. We will have the foreigners owning something, then we will have a section that is publicly owned, and then we will have some joint ownership; and this is put forward as a socialist alternative or an alternative to Marxism; and very consciously Senegal puts this forward as an alternative to Marxism.

Yet one of the many fallacies in this position is that Senegal began as a capitalist country. It is located within the international imperialist order. The Senegalese people were not making any choice about whether they wanted to be either capitalist or socialist; they were in fact capitalist. The only choice they can make is whether they want to continue to be located within the capitalist system or whether they want to escape from it. So it is a false duality to imagine that they are outside of either system, and that they are choosing from both to create a third alternative. And any steps which fail to remove it from the capitalist system are steps which, in effect, support the capitalist system.

The Rise of Marxism in the Third World

Quite apart from examining it at the level of the theoretical implications, one is struck by the sizeable increase in Marxism – or, to put it more effectively, the increase in the adherence to Marxism, the increase in the discussion of Marxism, the increase in the awareness of Marxism, in the Third World. All of these strategies pursued by Africans and Latin Americans and Asians – to stem the tide of Marxism – haven’t really been effective. Because, while it may be difficult for anyone to say, for instance, that in Asia, in 1965, there were ten thousand Marxists and now there are twenty thousand (that sort of exact quantitative description we know may not be possible), I am certain that there would be no observers or analysts of the scene who would deny the increase in Marxism, and in adherence to Marxism. And this increase can be measured in a number of indirect ways.

It can be measured, for instance, by seeing the number of scholars who are using the formal tools of Marxist analysis – anthropologists and economists, political scientists, historians from Africa, Asia and Latin America – who, five or ten years ago would never have been found on the scene are today not in a majority, but they are conspicuous in each field. Very often conspicuous by their excellence, because they are engaging in hard original work which challenges bourgeois assumptions and manages to assert itself on the basis of its own internal logic and consistency. So that a glance at the journals – from the point of view of those of us in the academic community – will indicate to you the growing number of Marxists who are practising in every discipline in Third World countries. And this is not because they were encouraged; one can be very sure of that. This is itself a dialectical development, a development over and against the trend of their formulation, because they were formed mentally in bourgeois philosophy, as I said earlier.

A second measure is to look outside of the universities or beyond the level of university academics, at the number of student groups, the number of worker groups or independent intellectual groups that are avowedly Marxist. Not just that – one may say that they are using some Marxist terminology or that they are disguising their Marxist content. Nowadays, in the Third World, there are a large number of groups which come forward and say: We are Marxists. Now again I’m trying to avoid, for the moment, the discussion as to whether they come forward and say they are Maoists or they come forward and say they are something else, but they come forward and say that they are Marxist; that much is certain. And that is a very important change that is part of our contemporary scene; because, in most parts of the Third World, it is still hazardous to identify oneself as a Marxist. And therefore, the fact that it is happening more and more is an indication of a tremendous growth, and a willingness and a capacity to challenge the domination of bourgeois thought.

Alongside these groups – very often as part of the activity of the groups – we have the proliferation of journals which carry Marxist slogans, which carry Marxist analysis. These are things that can be discovered through a random sample, just looking through the Third World, especially if one has the opportunity to see the literature that comes out at what we call the grassroots level. Literature that is not necessarily put in the same glossy format as Time or Fortune magazines, but literature that comes through the hard sweat and labour of people turning a Gestetner, very often by hand, not even electrically, and producing things that may not be the most attractive to look at, but which carry out the task of Marxist reconsideration of society.

Marxism is growing in the Third World, and I don’t think that this is merely because of some theoretical subtlety on the part of the Marxists themselves – if indeed this has any part to play. Rather, it appears to me to derive from the practical experience of the Third World over the last decade and a half – the practical experience gained since countries in Africa and Asia in particular achieved their so-called independence, their nominal constitutional independence. Ever since independence, these countries have had certain experiences; they have set out for instance to develop themselves, whatever that means to anybody else. But they very often had a conscious vision of developing, of advancing, and in so doing, or in attempting to do so, they utilize the well-known bourgeois theoretical assumptions about how one develops, they utilize bourgeois advisors to set up their four- and five-year development plans; they utilize bourgeois international experts to tell them how to take off. And the result is there for everyone to see. It is a failure of bourgeois thought to deliver the goods, if you like.

That is one of the most important considerations in explaining why the alternative philosophical view is gaining ground; because when the bourgeois theorists had before them the new field of independent African countries, then it could be said that they must be given a chance to prove whether they are right or wrong about capitalism being a road of development for everyone. But after ten or fifteen years, in some cases – in Asian countries much longer than that – it is no longer possible to say that bourgeois theory has any possibilities of growth for the Third World countries. Even the liberals, even neo-classical economists themselves, are turning towards Marxist-inspired visions and understandings of what is dependency and what is underdevelopment, and what are the ways out of these states of dependency and underdevelopment, so it is the practice which accounts, in no small measure, for the advance of Marxism in the Third World.

Class Struggle in the Third World

There is also the recognition that the Third World cannot stand outside of the rest of international society. It certainly cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the capitalist world, nor for that matter, can it isolate itself from those parts of the world which have made socialist revolutions. This recognition came very clearly, or most clearly, and it came at the earlier period in South East Asia – a tremendous development of the Vietnamese struggle.

It came also in Latin America, because the Latin Americans had been independent for a long time and, after this political independence, they have had a long experience of neo-colonialism. An experience which forced them to recognize that there was no way in which they could understand the movement of Latin American society without understanding the interpenetration of foreign – mainly American – capital, monopoly capital into the Latin American environment. So that they began to build into their understanding of their society an understanding of the larger society. And if they had to understand the larger society, they automatically had to go back to understanding capitalism and to seeing why it was or why it is that capitalism enslaves not only its working class but indeed more so, the working class and the dispossessed peoples of the Third World.

One of the interesting choices which has been made by most Third World political spokesmen – choices at the ideological level – is a choice based on their unwillingness to recognize that class can be relevant in their own context. There was some factual basis for that unwillingness. Many Third World countries began their period of political independence with the internal class struggle at a very low level, because the internal classes had been subordinated to external capital, and the operation of internal class struggle had been subordinated to the operation of the nationalist struggle of all classes against the external monopoly capitalists. But, as the years advanced since independence, in each Third World country, the evidence began to grow of the decisive role of internal class struggles – of the growth of indigenous classes playing decisive roles in the motion of the internal societies. And this has also been a potent factor in forcing Third World peoples to come to grips with an analysis which has room for understanding the world in terms of class struggle.

An example which is always very clear and very illustrative, is the example of Ghana and the development of the thought of Kwame Nkrumah. Nkhruma had always had some Marxist overtones before he got into power and when he got into power. There was a time when he used to describe himself as a Marxist and a Christian; there was a time when he used to describe himself as a Consciencist; he spoke of himself as a pan-Africanist. He attempted to incorporate some Marxist insights, but not as a total methodology, not as something that underlay his whole political philosophy and his political practice, largely because he insisted that there were no classes in Ghana. And then he was overthrown and he went to Guinea and he was given aid by his friend Sekou Toure; and in his last days he produced a considerable body of writing. And in this writing he proclaimed: I used to say that there were no classes; but when I was overthrown by the Ghanaian petty bourgeois class, I discovered that there were classes. If you read Nkrumah’s Class Struggles in Africa, that is basically what he is saying. He very clearly, in his own way, delimits the classes in Africa and accepts that the petty bourgeoisie functions as a class in its own right, with interests hostile to the African working class and peasantry; and he is therefore able to reformulate his vision of Ghana and of Africa, or he did so before he died.

Nkhruma, of course, was one of the foremost nationalists; he stood on the vanguard of nationalist struggle. But that block to his full understanding came because he could not or would not – I think it is a combination of the two – perceive the development of classes inside of Ghana.

Today, the obvious growth of indigenous classes throughout Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the rest of the Third World is a clear pointer to the need to grasp a strategy which recognizes, or which is based upon a recognition of the existence of class struggle as a motive force in history; and here again Marxism comes in for additional attention on the part of Third World scholars. Of course, to say that Marxism is relevant does not necessarily say that the body of Marxist thought which exists is adequate to an understanding of the Third World predicament.

These are two different questions, in different order of logic; and I think they have been confused by a number of people. Marxism as an operative methodology in political philosophy, as the ideology which sprang from the working class in Europe, has developed its own. We can measure physically the body of literature which has been produced by Marxists; and that literature has been preoccupied with Western Europe, with North America and with the developed countries, because most of the Marxists came from those countries. And even Third World Marxists in the early days, were concerned with metropolitan society.

So, there is a body of Marxist literature which is inadequate to the needs of the Third World because it just does not deal, for the most part, with the problems of the Third World. So that when one says that Marxism is relevant to the Third World, it means that the Marxist scholar – whether he be Third World, of Third World origin or not – who attempts to deal with Marxism in the Third World must be operating at the most advanced and creative level. He is not merely transferring known truths from another part of the world to the African or Asian situations; he has to engage in the very difficult task of building from the bottom, an actual body of Marxist enquiry and Marxist analysis of the societies in question. And this is where one has to emphasize – and to emphasize and to emphasize once again – that Marxism can only be of value if whatever it takes to be the universal is applied to the particular; and it is in the very particularity of the exercise that one will demonstrate that the universal is actually universal and that it is applicable.

In the United States for instance, there has been – and no doubt there has been a spillover of the same discussion in Canada – very lengthy, sometimes very violent discussion among black brothers and sisters about the relevance of Marxism. It basically comes from the understanding of whether this Marxism has any validity to black people in their special predicament as an ethnic group. And the arguments against its applicability are rather similar to the arguments which an African or a West Indian might use – the sort of arguments I have outlined above. In other words, those who are opposed would say that: Marxism is about class, and our problem is a racial or ethnic problem. Marxism originated with the same Western society which dominates us and we must reject all forms of white cultural domination, Marxism included.

However, there continues to be the growth of a serious interest in Marxism on the part of Afro-Americans – the black population in the United States. And their task, quite clearly, consists in bringing the tools of Marxism to bear upon the specific history of the United States. In that specific history, a number of contradictions arose; and if the contradiction between races happens to be a fundamental contradiction, then that is the contradiction which will attract their attention. They will have to come up with the formulations which deal with the specifics of their own social situation. Failure to do so does in fact strengthen the arguments of those who try to suggest that Marxism is irrelevant. Because, if you proceed into a situation, whether it be an analysis of Afro-America or an analysis of Pakistan, and you do not attempt to develop with respect to those specific situations, but rather merely to transfer a body of knowledge in a fixed static form from another part of the world, then you will be accused of being irrelevant. You will be accused of cultural hegemony; you will be accused of trying to force the indigenous interpretation into your own external imperialist-oriented model.

The Burden of Third World Marxists

That is why I think that the responsibility which Third World Marxists carry is an extremely heavy responsibility. In Western Europe, in North America, it is possible to plug into an existing body of thought. Any discussion about Marxism in these parts can immediately find some source of established Marxist orthodoxy, they can find the unorthodoxies; they can in fact adjudicate between all kinds of rival versions to Marxism, in its application to their own society. It doesn’t mean that the Western Marxist does not function to revitalize and to review the Marxist vision of his own society, but he has something to review. The Third World scholar is more often than not starting from the very beginning, having nothing to review, having nothing else but sometimes inadequate empirical data – empirical data which has to be collated and picked up from bourgeois sources. And because they have to be lifted out of a bourgeois context, you often find yourself in a very difficult position; because it is not entirely impossible to separate the data from the conceptualizations which might have lain behind the enquiries, and which therefore influenced the particular type of data which was collected. So, the Third World Marxists will find themselves starting from scratch. But it is a task that has to be carried out because, to do otherwise, is precisely to fall into the hands of those who want a sort of cultural exceptionalism, who will say that Marxism is not for us because it is inimical or antithetical to our own culture and our own history.

The record so far is very clear that capitalism has been on the retreat; that Marxism–Leninism started out undoubtedly as something within Europe and is today of course embraced by 800 million Chinese – which itself always makes me wonder why it is that people still say that Marxism is a white ideology. One would have thought if the ideology is to be coloured by the colour of the majority of its adherents, then Marxism is to be called a yellow ideology. And if it is a yellow ideology or is capable of being yellow, and if it is capable of being brown in the case of some Asian countries, of being black in the case of Cabral’s Guinea or of Mozambique under Frelimo, then immediately one sees that there are very many breaches that are made in this wall which was being built, or which certain people attempt to build around Marxism to keep it from the world’s least developed peoples.

My own contribution is merely to bring this to the attention of Third World scholars – for the most part, Third World students; because in an institution such as this, one will of course come into contact with Marxist ideology. But inevitably, Marxist ideology will be the submerged ideology; the dominant ideology is going to be the ideology of the ruling class. As I had cause to tell my students many years ago at the University of Dar es Salaam, when someone asked how they should know which is a bourgeois ideology, which textbook they should take up, which one will have a bourgeois view and which will have the capitalist view, I told them that they could go into the library and close their eyes and stick out their hand and the chances are they would have got a bourgeois book. So that they could proceed on that assumption; they don’t have to select, just close your eyes, feel around, grab any number of books, and you’re dealing with a bourgeois worldview.

Now, at the same time, there are possibilities; there are possibilities which perhaps, when we live in the metropoles, we do not appreciate them until we go back to the Third World countries from which we came. The possibilities lie in the contradictions of this society and the fact that Marxist thought, irrespective of all these things, is in fact present; and that literature is available, and that facilities for enquiry are available. And one could urge therefore that, even within the realms of institutions that are designed to carry out a particular ideological function, it is possible to conduct a sort of guerrilla intellectual war by which one will have access not to that which was designed specifically for one, but access which hinges upon the dialectical transition beyond that which was intended for one.

There are many things which I believe the Third World scholar can grasp, in spite of the quite conscious attempt on the part of all of our institutions – including those in the Third World – to reformulate us and to continue to programme us as bourgeois thinkers.

Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America

Presented at the Sixth Pan-African Conference, 1975

Political conferences of the oppressed invariably attract a variety of responses - varying from cynical conviction that they are an utter waste of time to naïve optimism that they will change the face of the world. In actuality, popular struggle continues from day to day at many different and more profound levels; and its intensity at any given time primarily determines the relevance and utility of the conference as a technique of co-ordination. The Sixth Pan-African Congress scheduled for Dar es Salaam in June, 1974 consciously aims at being heir to a tradition of conferences which grew out of the response of Africans to their oppression in the first half of this century. Therefore, its rationale must be sought though a careful determination of the co-ordinates of the contemporary endeavours of the African people everywhere.

Since the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945, the political geography of Africa has been transformed by the rise of some forty constitutionally independent political units presided over by Africans. This is to state the obvious. Yet, following in the wake of the great pageant of the regaining of political independence, there has come the recognition on the part of many that the struggle of the African people has intensified rather than abated, and that it is being expressed not merely as a contradiction between African producers and European capitalists but also as a conflict between the majority of the black masses and a small African possessing class. This, admittedly, is to state the contentious; but the Sixth Pan-African Congress will surely have to walk the tightrope of this point of contention.

Any 'Pan' concept is an exercise in self-definition by a people, aimed at establishing a broader redefinition of themselves than that which had so far been permitted by those in power. Invariably, however, the exercise is undertaken by a specific social group or class which speaks on behalf of the population as a whole. This is always the case with respect to national movements. Consequently, certain questions must be placed on the agenda: notably, the following:

Which class leads the national movement?

How capable is this class of carrying out the historical tasks of national liberation?

Which are the silent classes on whose behalf 'national' claims are being articulated?

The significance of the above questions emerges clearly in the classic case of Pan-Slavic nationalism. The Pan-Slavic ideology of the late nineteenth century and the turn of this century offered the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe a unified vision of themselves, aiming to transcend the fragmentation which was a consequence of the powerful waves of imperial expansion which has [had] struck the shores of the Adriatic and the Black Sea. The Slav intelligentsia who advocated Pan-Slavism were spokesmen of emergent bourgeois forces in the clash against feudalism, and their position also reflected some sympathy for the oppressed peasantry since it was in the interests of capitalism that serfdom be removed. But their hopes were frustrated because they failed to unseat indigenous and external feudal oppressors, including their Slav 'Brothers' who formed the ruling class in Tsarist Russia. Subsequently, the local Balkan bourgeoisie were unable or unwilling to confront capitalist/imperialist partition; and the region gave rise to the term 'Balkanization', as the supreme expression of failure to carry out the task of national liberation and unification. It was left to the Balkan masses under working class leadership albeit under conditions of war to tackle effectively the problem of nationalism and of broader eastern European unity in the period after the second world war. Significantly enough, they did so within the context of socialist reconstruction, a task which was beyond groups benefiting from capitalist exploitation.

Pan-Africanism in the post-independence era is internationalist in so far as it seeks the unity of peoples living in a large number of juridically independent states. But it is simultaneously a brand of nationalism; and one must therefore penetrate its nationalist form to appreciate its class content. This exercise is made easier by the fact the nationalist movements in Africa which led to the regaining of independence in more than three dozen states constitute a phenomenon which has already received considerable attention. These movements were essentially political fronts or class alliance in which the grievances of all social groups were expressed as 'national' grievances against the colonizers. However, while the workers and peasants formed the over-whelming numerical majority, the leadership was almost exclusively petty bourgeois. Understandably, this leadership placed to the fore those 'national' aims which contributed most directly to the promotion of their own class interests; but they voiced sentiments which were historically progressive, partly because of their own confrontation with the colonialists and partly because of pressure from the masses. Pan-Africanism was one of these progressive sentiments, which served as a platform for that sector of the African or black petty bourgeois leadership which was most uncompromising in its struggle against colonialism at any given time during the colonial period.

Virtually all leaders of African independence movements paid at least lip service to the idea that regional freedom was only a step towards the freedom and unity of the whole continent; and the most advanced nationalists were usually the most explicit on the issue of Pan-African solidarity. Nkrumah and Kenyatta were both at Manchester; while Nyerere, Kaunda and Mboya were the driving forces behind the Pan-African Movement for East and Central Africa (PAMECA). Within the Francophone sphere, several leaders took Pan-Africanist positions in one form or another. The radical Union des Populations de Cameroun refused to accept colonial boundaries in Africa; Senghor espoused a culturally oriented doctrine of black internationalism, comparable to Pan-Africanism; and even Houphouet-Boigny was initially associated with a political party which was Pan-Africanist in thrust: namely, the Rassemblement Democratique Africaine, which addressed itself to the whole of French West Africa. Pan-African solidarity also manifested itself with regard to the war of independence in Algeria, an episode of which united not merely North Africa but also helped force alliances between progressive nationalists on both sides of the Sahara. Similarly, the rise of national liberation movements dedicated to achieving freedom by any means necessary served to underscore the reality of Pan-Africanism. All African leaders had to concede that freedom in Southern Africa was vital to guarantee the freedom of any given part of Africa, and the test of practice showed that commitment was greatest in the case of the most forward-looking of the petty bourgeois regimes - Ghana (under Nkrumah), Egypt (under Nasser), Tanzania, Zambia and Guinea.

It would be unhistorical to deny the progressive character of the African petty bourgeoisie at a particular moment in time. Owing to the low level of development of the productive forces in colonized Africa, it fell to the lot of the small privileged educated group to give expression to a mass of grievances against racial discrimination, low wages, low prices for cash crops, colonial bureaucratic commandism, and the indignity of alien rule as such. But the petty bourgeoisie were reformers and not revolutionaries. Their class limitations were stamped upon the character of the independence which they negotiated with the colonial masters.⁹⁰ In the very process of demanding constitutional independence, they reneged on the cardinal principle of Pan-Africanism: namely, the unity and indivisibility of the African continent.

The first Pan-Africanists to engage in the political mobilization of the African masses on African soil had a continental outlook. The African National Congress which was formed in the Union of South Africa in 1912, aimed at being 'African' and not merely 'South African' and it was renamed in 1923 to emphasize this fact. Significantly, organizations of the same name extended into what is now Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. It is also significant that dynamic African spokesmen of the 1930s like Nnamdi Azikiwe and Wallace Johnson were African rather than Nigerian or Sierra Leonean. But the lawyers and place-seekers who eventually took the independence movement in hand were incapable of transcending the territorial boundaries of the colonial administrations. Imperialism defined the context in which constitutional power was to be handed over, so as to guard against the transfer of economic power or genuine political power. The African petty bourgeoisie accepted this, with only a small amount of dissent and disquiet being manifested by the progressive elements such as Nkrumah, Nyerere and Sekou Toure.⁹¹ Areas of West and Central Africa which experienced French colonial rule witnessed the shameless dismantling of those colonial politics which had a large territorial base. Whereas the French had maintained unity for exploitation, the African petty bourgeoisie lacked the capacity to demand both unity and freedom. So they accepted the Balkanization which led to fragments called Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and so on. Since independence, little or no progress has been registered with respect to reversing this Balkanization.

It is a striking historical fact that the bourgeoisie proper have been the spearheads of national unity in which capitalism was first engendered. They sought political unity to guarantee the integration of production and distribution, giving rise to what were then relatively large nation states in Britain, France and Germany as compared to the numerous feudal fiefs which previously existed. The North American continent provides the most formidable example of the identification of bourgeois interests with federal unity and with the building of an infrastructure which rolled across a whole continent without regard to the cost in blood especially since the blood spilt was principally African and Native American (Indian).

The petty bourgeoisie of Asia, Africa and Latin America are a different breed. They cannot be described as 'entrepreneurs', 'pioneers', 'captains of industry', 'robber barons' or in any of the other swashbuckling terms coined to glorify the primary accumulation of capital. Franz Fanon flays them unmercifully but truthfully when he points to the shoddy, imitative, lack-lustre character of the African petty bourgeoisie. Their role in the international capitalist system has always been that of compradors. Their capital outlay might often be greater than that of a factory owner during the industrial revolution in England during the early nineteenth century, but in the present era of monopoly capitalism it suffices mainly for chicken-farms. In any event, most of the African petty bourgeoisie is not directly involved in economic enterprises - their real sphere being the professions, the administration and the military/police hierarchy. They lack both the vision and the objective base to essay the leap towards continental unity.

A close scrutiny further reveals that the failure of the African ruling class to effect meaningful unity is not merely due to weakness. Recalling once more the dismantling process which took place in Francophone Africa at the time of negotiated independence, it can be seen that the pusillanimity of the African petty bourgeoisie in the face of the deliberate creation of non-viable dependent mini-states by France attests not merely to the strength of the colonizers but also to fear on the part of the presumptive African rulers that larger territorial units might have negated their narrow class welfare. Throughout the continent, none of the successful independence movements denied the basic validity of the boundaries created a few decades ago by imperialism. To have done so would have been to issue a challenge so profound as to rule out the preservation of the petty bourgeois interests in a compromise 'independence' worked out in conjunction with international capital.

If the weakness of the present petty bourgeois leadership of Africa were the only problem, then they could be dismissed as passive bystanders, who cannot make operational the potential of Pan-Africanism as an ideology of liberation. However, they maintain themselves as a class by fomenting internal divisions and by dependence on external capitalist powers. These policies are antithetical to Pan-Africanism. The record since independence confirms that the interests of the African petty bourgeoisie are as irreconcilable with genuine Pan-Africanism as Pan-Africanism is irreconcilable with the interests of international capitalism.

Most African mini-states are engaged in consolidating their territorial frontiers, in preserving the social relations prevailing inside these frontiers, and in protecting imperialism in the form of the monopolies and their respective states. The capitalist super-powers, directly and indirectly, individually and collectively, guarantee the existence of the African petty bourgeoisie as a ruling class and use them to penetrate and manipulate African society. This has been done so crudely and openly that one does not have to be especially informed or especially aware in order to perceive what has been going down. Ex-ambassadors of the U.S. have a way of reminiscing on how they cynically manoeuvred the Reds and Blacks; local representatives of American, British and French security forces are so entrenched that they dispense with all cover; and the African petty bourgeoisie itself is so gauche that it rushes openly to the defence of an international monopoly such as LONRHO, when even the metropolitan political rulers are too embarrassed to do so.⁹²

All the activities of international capital aim at perpetuating the division of the continent which they initiated at the time of the Partition. The petty bourgeoisie is also showing that it seeks to maintain division of the African masses, since the anti-colonial alliance with all other classes has gained its objective of formal independence. The only alliance which the African ruling class now vigorously defends is that with imperialism against the African people. Most decidedly, this power structure does not want to allow the masses either the consciousness or the reality of unity.

Pan-Africanism has been so flouted by the present African regimes that the concept of 'Africa' is dead for all practical purposes such as travel and employment. The 'Africanisation' that was aimed against the European colonial administrator soon gave way to restrictive employment and immigration practices by Ivory Coast, Ghana (under Busia), Zaire, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and others - aimed against Dahomeans, Nigerians, Burundi nationals, Malawians, Kenyans and all Africans who were guilty of believing that Africa was for the Africans. Of course, it was said that unemployment among citizens of any given country forced the government to take extreme steps. This is a pitiable excuse, which tries to hide the fact that unemployment is the responsibility of the neo-colonial regimes, which can no nothing better than preside over dependent economies with little growth and no development.⁹³ In many respects, one African has been further shut off from another during the present neo-colonial phase than was the case during raw colonialism. Even within the context of the existing African nation states, the African ruling class has seldom sought to build anything other than tribal power bases, which means that they seek division and not unity at all levels of political activity, be it national, continental, or international.

The dominant mode of thinking in Africa today is inherited from the colonial masters and is given currency by the state apparatus. Not surprisingly, therefore, the very concept of class is ignored or mystified. The petty bourgeoisie get very upset at being called "petty bourgeois", and strenuously deny that there are any class differences between themselves on the one hand and the workers and peasants on the other. It is not surprising that Socialism has been enemy number one for so many African states. African leaders fight the bogey of Communist threat rather than the reality of capitalist/imperialist oppression. Even the more progressive of this ruling class harbour and protect local reactionaries while neutralizing or eliminating Marxist and other left-wing elements. In ten, twelve or fifteen years of constitutional independence, the various parts of Africa have scored no victories in ending exploitation and inequality. On the contrary, social differences have increased rapidly and the same applies to the amount of surplus extracted by foreign monopoly capital. In the spheres of production and technology, the so-called "development decade" of the sixties offers the spectacle of decreasing agricultural production, a declining share of world trade, and the proliferation of dependency structures because of the further penetration of multi-national corporations. All of these matters are highly relevant to a discussion of Pan-Africanism.

The transformation of the African environment, the transformation of social and productive relations, the break with imperialism, and the forging of African political and economic unity are all dialectically interrelated. This complex of historical tasks can be carried out only under the banner of Socialism and through the leadership of the working classes. The African petty bourgeoisie as a ruling class use their state power against Socialist ideology, against the material interests of the working class, and against the political unity of the African masses.

Of course, the rhetoric of the African ruling class is something else. Only a Banda has the temerity to openly abuse the concept of African unity, and only a few others would openly espouse capitalism and imperialism as decent, and just. Otherwise, the petty bourgeoisie prefers the technique of paying lip-service to progressive ideas, seeking the defeat of these ideas through a process of trivialization and vulgarization. Both Socialism and Pan-Africanism are of the utmost importance with respect to this technique. In once sense, the unwillingness of the petty bourgeoisie to manifest overt hostility to Socialism and Pan-Africanism is a testimony to the development of mass consciousness and to the level of confrontation between progressive and reactionary forces on the world stage. But it is also very insidious in so far as pseudo-revolutionary positions tend to pre-empt genuinely revolutionary positions. For instance, the existing African regimes have helped create the illusion that the OAU represents the concretization of Pan-African unity. The OAU is the principal instrument which legitimizes the forty-odd mini-states visited upon us by colonialism.

It is a tribute to the momentum of Pan-Africanism that the OAU had to be formed. The idea of Pan-African political unity had take deep roots, and it had to be given expression if only in the form of a consultative international assembly. This indicates a higher level of continental political co-ordination than was to be found in Latin America during the period when the old colonial regimes there were being demolished. It is also true that no imperialist power is a voting member of the organization, in the way that the United States of America is entrenched within the Organization of American States. Nevertheless, the O.A.U. does far more to frustrate than to realize the concept of African Unity. The degree of its penetration by imperialist powers has been evidenced on numerous occasions, the most striking being those which have arisen around the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white minority in Zimbabwe, around the issue of 'Dialogue' with the white racist South African regime, and over the persistence of the French in selling arms to the Republic of South Africa.

At best, the OAU regulates a few internal conflicts between the petty bourgeoisie from different parts of the continent. Beyond this, it is committed to maintain the separation of African peoples implicit in the present territorial boundaries, so as to buttress the exploitative social systems which prevail on the continent in this neo-colonial epoch.

When Lumumba was waging his heroic battle against imperialism in the Congo, it seemed for a brief while that there would be an alignment of progressive versus reactionary African forces. The masses of Africa were only too anxious to join their Congolese brothers in the fight against white and black mercenaries. Indeed, the lines were drawn so clearly that international revolutionary solidarity was forthcoming from many parts of the world. However, the continent suffered a setback in the Congo. Affairs in the Congo were 'normalized' to the point of changing the country's name to Zaire. Meanwhile, one of the most important principles accepted by African governments in the wake of the defeat of the Congolese was that no popular dissident movement in an independent African country can be supported by any group or government in another independent African country. In constitutional terms, this is expressed in the fine-sounding phrase "non-interference in the internal affairs of a member state". In practical terms, this is how the most reactionary elements of the petty bourgeoisie tie the hands of the masses of Africa.

One of the cardinal principles of Pan-Africanism is that the people of one part of Africa are responsible for the freedom of their brothers in other parts of African; and, indeed, black people everywhere were to accept the same responsibility. The OAU denies this, apart from areas still under formal colonial rule. By so doing, they are implying that the objective conditions which impelled the Africans masses to fight the colonialists have since been transformed, which is a blatant falsehood. Any exploitative, oppressive and autocratic African state is cordoned off against fellow African intervention or criticism, even when the most elementary civil and human rights are trampled upon. Meanwhile, the more progressive states are not really protected against intrigues and various forms of aggression arranged by imperialism though the agency of the adjacent neo-colonial African states; and, in any event, Socialism cannot be built in any one African country, so that the few initiatives towards Socialist transformation on the continent are bound to be stifled by the continued division of Africa into artificial states.

The question posed at the outset of this analysis in relation to the class content of nationalism suggested that one identifies the leading class, assesses its revolutionary capacity and evaluates the manner in which the subordinate classes are handled. Our conclusions at this point are that the African petty bourgeois leadership since independence has been an obstacle to the further development of the African revolution. A final illustration to this effect is the way in which the very vanguard of the Pan-Africanist movement (as it emerged from the Fifth Congress) lost its direction and wallowed in bourgeois theory and practice. Like other African leaders, they too propagated the false antithesis between Pan-Africanism and Communism - an intellectual activity spearheaded by no less a person than George Padmore. Understandably, his practical politics suffered a corresponding decline; and in spite of once having stood in the ranks of the international working class movement, Padmore found himself intervening in Guyana in the mid-1950s on the side of that section of the local leadership which was supported by the British and American governments, by local and foreign capitalists and by the CIA-infiltrated trade union, the AFL-CIO.⁹⁴ At the same time, Nkrumah was engaging in ideological mystification under new facades such as 'consciencism', while doing little to break the control of the international bourgeoisie or the Ghanaian petty bourgeoisie over the state. He had already eliminated the genuine working class leadership from the CPP during the first years of power, and it was only after his overthrow by a reactionary petty bourgeois coup d'etat that Nkrumah became convinced that there was a class struggle in Africa and that the national and Pan-African movements required leadership loyal to its mass base of workers and peasants.⁹⁵

Obfuscation of the notion of class in post-independence Africa has made Pan-Africanism a toothless slogan as far as imperialism is concerned, and it has actually been adopted by African chauvinists and reactionaries, marking a distinct departure from the earlier years of this century when the proponents of Pan-Africanism stood on the left flank of their respective national movements on both sides of the Atlantic. The recapture of the revolutionary initiative should clearly be one of the foremost tasks of the Sixth Pan-African Congress.

Although New World black representation predominated at all Pan-African Congresses and Conferences in the past, the agendas were usually devoted almost exclusively to the affairs of the African continent. It can be assumed that the Sixth Pan-African Congress will not be substantially different, but the creation of independent Caribbean nation states does introduce a new dimension with regard to the participation of this part of the black world. Having sketched the main outlines of the petty bourgeois position in Africa, it is unnecessary to elaborate on the Caribbean scene, because of the numerous and basic similarities. It is to be noted, however, that that which appears as a tragedy against the vast backcloth of Africa re-appears as comedy in the Caribbean. Early this year, the people of the then colony of Grenada took to the streets to express in uncompromising terms their opposition to the exploitative and oppressive system of Anglo-American colonialism, which is manned locally by a certain petty bourgeois clique. At the same time, the British government carried on regardless in its plans to grant independence to the said petty bourgeois clique, expressing reservations only on the point of whether or not it was safe to send a member of the Royal Family to preside over the independence ceremony. As it was, militant striking workers deprived the independence celebrations of telephone services, port services and electricity, but the petty bourgeoisie regime managed to add some fireworks to mark the auspicious occasion. What term other than 'comedy' can describe such a situation?

The ruling class in each given British Caribbean territory usually takes pains to create a 'national' identity, which amounts to little more than glorifying the fact that some Africans were sent to slave plantations in Jamaica or Trinidad rather than Barbados or Antigua, as the case may be. On the basis of this 'nationalism', the petty bourgeoisie can continue the former British colonial policy of preventing trade unionists and progressives from moving freely amongst the people of the Caribbean. Another antic which is common on the part of the West Indian regimes is that they operate against (unarmed) national liberation movements inside the Caribbean while fully proclaiming support of African liberation movements in Southern Africa. This latter posture, along with other pro-African rhetoric, was forced on several West Indian leaders because of popular sympathy for the African cause at the mass level. The posturing and rhetoric are extremely useful on jaunts to Africa in their quest for class alliances with the African petty bourgeoisie itself.

Yet, the realities of state power have predetermined that when the Sixth Pan-African Congress meets in Dar-es-Salaam in June 1974 it will be attended mainly by spokesmen of African and Caribbean states which in so many ways represent the negation of Pan-Africanism. One immediate consequence of the rise of constitutionally independent African and West Indian states is that for the first time such a gathering will be held on African soil and will be sponsored, directed and attended mainly by black governments rather than by black intellectuals as such or by small black protest organizations, as was the case up to the Fifth Congress in Manchester. Already it is clear that states will be represented as states and that the OAU will play some role.

When a few individuals began to contemplate this Congress some years ago, it was felt that it should be a coming together of black political movements, as distinct from governments. One school of thought envisaged that it would be a select conference of the most progressive elements in the black world. To a large extent, this was the significance of the All African People's Conference held in Accra in 1958. However, plans for a similar meeting in the 1970s would be hopelessly idealist. The African radicals of 1958 are by and large the incumbents in office today. The radicals of today lead at best an uncomfortable existence within African states, while some languish in prison or in exile. The present petty bourgeois regimes would look with disfavour at any organized programme which purported to be Pan-African without their sanction and participation.

None of the progressive African regimes, which are already isolated and exposed to internal and external reaction, would dare to host a Congress which brought together only those who aggressively urge a unity of the African working masses and the building of a Socialist society. Such a Congress would have to be held in a metropolitan centre, and would thus condemn itself to serve primarily as a forum for alienated intellectuals.

In the light of the above considerations, any African committed to freedom, Socialism and development would need to look long and hard at the political implications of participation in the Sixth Pan-African Congress. The purists might be tempted to eschew any association whatsoever; but revolutionary praxis demands that one should contend against class enemies in theory and in practice, by seizing every opportunity to utilize all of the contradictions within imperialism as a global system - in this instance, contradictions born of economic exploitation and racist oppression.

Without falling into the trap of imagining that the present states of Africa and the Caribbean will liberate the African masses from the tyranny of man and nature, it still remains an open political question as to how far they can be pressured to take steps which lessen the immediate impact of imperialist exploitation and which perhaps grant respite to the producers and progressive forces. Southern Africa provides excellent illustrations to this effect. Our brothers in the South are striking blows which include attacks on enemy bases in Angola, the destruction of rail links in Mozambique, the disruption of production through strikes in Namibia and South Africa, and the intensification of politico-military offensives in Zimbabwe. The leadership even in the most reactionary African states have found it difficult to avoid responding in some positive manner to these activities; just as liberal organizations and governments of the capitalist world are now finding it prudent to join Socialists and radicals in giving international support to African liberation movements. It would be naïve to abstain from participation in forums where the above processes are taking place, because a committed presence is essential both to accelerate as well as to control contributions which could otherwise cease to be merely opportunist and become actively counter-revolutionary.

Turning to the economic policy of African regimes, one also perceives that the dilemma of increasing underdevelopment places the petty bourgeoisie on the defensive. Whether within the OAU or in a wider Non-Aligned context, they can be propelled to consider new marketing arrangements, new forms of African and Third World cooperation and some devices to moderately restrain foreign exploitation. The agreement between oil producers has been the most striking in recent times. African governments have been understandably ambivalent in their attitude towards the manoeuvres of North African oil states and other producers in the middle East, but the fact that so many members of the OAU broke diplomatic relations with Israel was no insignificant achievement in the face of Zionist imperialist propaganda and penetration in Africa. Clearly, the system of neo-colonialism is not closed to elementary progressive steps by the present leadership. Strictly speaking, such steps derive from the perceived class interests of the petty bourgeoisie. For this reason, it is crucial that within a Pan-African forum a principled and analytical position should be advanced for the adoption of increasingly revolutionary strategies for African economic and political liberation. The petty bourgeoisie must either be pushed forward or further exposed.

As stated at the outset, popular struggle is carried on in many ways and at many different levels. The struggle to participate is the opening round of the series of inter-connected battles likely to emerge out of the proposed Sixth Pan-African Congress.

Queries have been raised with the Temporary Secretariat of the Congress concerning fears that anti-government organizations in the Caribbean would be excluded from participation, owning to the involvement of at least two (English-speaking) Caribbean governments in financing and in offering venues for preparatory meetings. In a open letter to the Secretary of the Temporary Secretariat, Owusu Saudaki drew attention to the following points:

1) The involvement of Heads of State, who use their relationship to the Sixth Pan-African Congress as a sign of being progressive while in fact they pursue domestic and foreign policies which maintain the neo-colonial status quo within their own countries.

2) The possibility that because of financial problems and other problems the only people representing Caribbean countries will be official government delegations and not those people who represent community, workers and other progressive groups in those areas.  

It is useful to quote at some length from the reply by the Secretary, Courtland Cox. He note that, "the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), which is host for the Sixth Pan-African Congress, strongly recommended that all African and Caribbean heads of state, without exception, be invited to the Congress .... This formal procedure should not be construed as a blanket endorsement by the Congress of domestic and foreign policies of all heads of state, nor should it be taken that the Congress will be dominated by the policies of any one, or groups of these heads of state .... The truth is that those who advocate the most militant steps for African liberation ... frequently don't even have money to get together to talk .... President Nyerere used the occasion of an interview with the Congress earlier this year to ask how can the colonially-created existing black states be used by our people to gain liberation? These states are there. Their policies, institutions and services have some considerable impact on the lives of millions of Africans .... Our criteria for delegations to the Sixth Pan-African Congress may be stated generally as: (1) Africans with demonstrated commitment to progressive political principles, (2) Africans with capabilities (or access to these) necessary to meet our people's basic needs, especially those with technical skills, and (3) Africans with mass political bases; as embodied in political organizations and institutions with recognized community constituencies .... No delegates, whether from the Caribbean or anywhere else, will be prevented from participating in the Congress due to lack of funds. This is one of the special charges of the International Secretariat and the International Steering Committee".⁹⁶

In spite of the above re-assurances, it will undoubtedly require vigilance, mobilization and perhaps confrontation within the Caribbean on the part of Left movements to confirm their right to attend - albeit alongside of representatives of governments and pro-government organizations. The apparent restriction of delegations to the English-speaking Caribbean is another negative feature. The seemingly superficial difference of language has always sharply divided the international black movement into an Anglophone sector and a Latin culture zone. French-speaking (and Spanish-speaking) blacks joined their brothers in French-ruled Africa in elaborating the initially anti-colonialist and anti-racist doctrine of Negritude. But, like Pan-Africanism, Negritude in the hands of petty bourgeois black states became a sterile formulation of black chauvinism, incapable of challenging capitalism and imperialism. Negritude in Senegal buttresses neo-colonialism, while in Haiti it is used to gloss over an even more desperate situation of exploitation and suppression of the black masses.

It is important to break through the language barrier and it is crucial to recognize the existence of opposed tendencies within the international black world. The Congress organizers must be asked to take steps to reach the known nationalist and Socialist opponents of French colonial rule in places like Martinique and French Guiana; and they cannot be allowed to side-step the existence of a large black population in Cuba who have already accumulated rich experience in the liquidation of racism though Socialist transformation. But of course these are not tasks to be left solely to the Secretariat and the host country of Tanzania. Any Pan-Africanists committed to Socialist revolution will first strive to ensure that the Congress and the future of Pan-Africanism are not left to the tender mercies of the black petty bourgeoisie.

It is still not clear which governments will or will not participate in the proposed Sixth Pan-African Congress. No release from the Temporary Secretariat has borne on this point, although information did become public via the Tanzanian press suggesting that the invitations were all-embracing and that a proposal to exclude Banda was defeated. The more conservative African governments may well view the whole idea with scepticism if not hostility. For them the OAU is quite enough for the realization of Pan-Africanism.

Eloquent testimony to the doubts on the part of segments of the petty bourgeoisie was provided by an editorial comment in Kenya's Sunday Nation of March 17, 1974. It suggested that many people would query the very calling of another Pan-African Congress on the grounds that "most of the aims of the Pan-African movement were achieved after the 1945 Manchester meeting". Besides, the proposed Sixth Pan-African Congress has certain areas of focus such as health, agriculture, technological research, liberation support and political cooperation; and according to the commentary in question, it might be better to leave the governments and the OAU to organize such programmes. Even granting the need for another Congress, the Sunday Nation (representative of local and foreign capitalist interests in Kenya) finds that "the whole political tenor of the (proposed) congress is leftist, and the choice of Dar-es-Salaam as the venue for the meeting is no accident". The commentary is in no doubt that the most critical question is that of whom to invite; and it reacts strongly and specifically to the mere whisper that Cuba might be invited, asking rhetorically, "how can the government of Cuba be invited as a participating government?" One must certainly thank this right-wing African journal for corroborating an analysis made from a different perspective. The one point on which class enemies can agree is that there is a battle to be fought.

Given the balance of class forces in the African continent today at the level of state power, it must be assumed that, apart from the Liberation movements, the majority of African delegates will seek to retain Pan-Africanism within its present parameters of inter-state co-operation, based on the persistence of the territorial units and of petty bourgeoisie control. However, a progressive presence of one dimension or another would at least ensure that certain issues would be open to debate. The issues most likely to evoke contention can particularly be foreseen by scrutinizing the official document referred to as "the Call", both in terms of what it says and (perhaps more indicative) what it does not say.⁹⁷

The Call accords high priority to the question of liberation in the still colonized parts of Africa. This is as it should be, not merely because one wants the South to be 'independent' like the rest of Africa, but more so because the nature of the confrontation in South Africa offers the real possibility of African freedom there being qualitatively different from that which was obtained by the constitutional road. Since southern Africa is the cockpit of international monopoly capital, and since Portugal and the white minority regimes are all clearly supported by NATO and multinational corporations, the struggle for national liberation is a rather clearer learning experience than the nationalist episode of the 1950s. People are fighting and dying for more than the trappings of independence. In each theatre of operations, both the leadership and the mass are maturing, so that members of the petty bourgeois stratum which exists there as everywhere else have either failed to last the tough course or they have been transformed in the process. There will be no doubt be more instances of opportunism and defections, and there will no doubt be a much longer period of the practice of tribalist mobilization in certain quarters; but the prospects of greater ideological clarity, or increasing politicization and of a stronger attachment to equalitarian and democratic structures arise directly out of the concrete situation, being pre-conditions for the success of the armed struggle.

At the very least, the Congress would be expected to record the firmest statement of support for the Liberation movements, taking as a point of departure the accord reached recently by the OAU at Accra which has been the most resolute statement by African leaders to date. Documentary support for the Liberation Movements is by no means a decisive factor in their existence or success, but when a conference has to pronounce on this matter, then those statements must be sharp enough to constitute political and diplomatic weapons for the use in the rear of those fighting on the front liens. Because the Lusaka Manifesto (1970) was a mild document which could be interpreted as having some reservations about armed struggle, it was seized upon in this sense by many reactionaries, and it was still being quoted as an official position of progressive African leaders long after they had unequivocally declared their backing for the armed struggle of the Mogadishu Declaration (1971).

However, generally speaking, no delegate at any conference today has to make the case for the Liberation Movements. For one thing, they are already making the most effective case for themselves though sacrifice and achievements; and for another thing, the real danger in the support of the movement on the African continent itself is that rhetoric may take the place of practical assistance. The record to date exposes the gap between resolution and practice on the part of OAU members as far as monetary support to the OAU Liberation Committee is concerned. Recently, the rhetoric has become seemingly more fiery and reveals a tendency to obfuscate issues concerning the interpretation of the struggle. Take, for instance, the demagogic appeal that African governments should send armies to the combat zone. Such a suggestion is completely out of touch with the concept of people's war and out of sympathy with the process though which a people prepare themselves for self-liberation. One African Generalissimo has just called for the scrapping of people's guerrilla activities in Southern Africa, and proposes instead to lead his own (mercenary) army to conquer the white regimes!

Even the slightly more palatable call for individual volunteers casts doubts on the capacity of Africans in the South to effect their own liberation. Significantly enough, these statements do not originate with any of the Liberation Movements. None of the Liberation Movements has called for anything other than material, diplomatic and moral support. They have the fighters - that is not a problem. A serious problem does arise when offers of assistance to the struggle are used to camouflage attempts to penetrate and control on the part of imperialism and its lackeys. When "Our Man in Kinshasa" appears in the role of supervisor, umpire and builder of the Angolan people's movement, it hardly requires a great deal of political acumen to sense the pricking of one's thumbs.98*

The Congress must be asked to adopt the position that Liberation Movements should at all times be allowed to speak for themselves. The demand should be that, both inside and outside Africa, Liberation Movements should have unshakeable credentials, instead of being excluded when their interests are being discussed or instead of having to fight anew on each occasion to determine whether they should have the status of observers or second-class participants. It is for the movements to indicate their own priorities and necessities at the Congress, and in response other delegates would contemplate the practical support which can be mobilized. It should also be made clear that the most positive support is the advancement of popular anti-imperialist power everywhere on the continent and in the Pan-African world.

Vying with liberation in importance in the estimation of the authors of The Call is the question of science and technology. The Call asserts rightly that "If we do not control the means of survival and protection in the context of the twentieth century we will continue to be colonized." (Emphasis in the original). Consequently, it proposes the establishment of a Pan-African Centre of Science and Technology geared towards such priorities as the development of a viable self-supporting agricultural system in Africa.

On the issue to technology, one is again faced with the fact that superficially universal agreement can be obtained. No one would deny the necessity for mobilizing maximum resources in science and technology to fight the war against ignorance, disease and poverty. No one can remain indifferent to the chronic malnutrition or to the acute suffering brought on by widespread drought and famine. The danger is that a discussion of technology tends to become 'technocratic' in the worst sense of the word. Drought and famine, for instance, are not merely 'natural phenomena' arising out of the failure of precipitation from on high. The incapacity to prevent or deal with drought and famine and the fantastic hardship which ensues are all related to the socio-economic structures of neo-colonial Africa and to the way that our economies are located within the international imperialist system. It requires certain political decisions to change these structures and the system. Whether or not Africa will make scientific progress, whether or not the technology will be relevant and adequate, whether or not the mass of the people will benefit from scientific/technological innovations are all questions which can be resolved only within specific socio-economic contexts and questions which are therefore ultimately political and ideological.⁹⁹

It is precisely in the politico-ideological sphere that The Call is most deficient. It confines itself to the broad distinction between colonized blacks and European colonizers. It say nothing about the existence of capitalist and Socialist systems or of struggle within the capitalist/imperialist world. It comes out against the fact that Africans allow finance capital to dominate and direct their economic and social life; but this leaves room for the national bourgeois interpretation that this domination can be remedied while still remaining within the capitalist fold. Indeed, most African governments are at the moment scrambling to become more deeply involved in the European Common Market. With regard to indigenous exploitation, the authors of The Call are prepared to "stand with those who are avowed and open enemies of the elite who wish to lead a life of privilege among our people" -- which is fine, but hardly sufficiently analytical and explicit.

In defence of the bland nature of The Call, the organizers of the Congress would no doubt argue that it is not their function to pre-empt discussion, but that their role is to bring together a wide spectrum of views held by concerned Africans and black people everywhere. (In line with Cox to Saudaki as cited above.) But the tenor of this discussion so far has been to illustrate that neutrality and unity of nationalism is illusory and that in practice particular classes or strata capture nationalist movements and chart their ideological and political direction. Pan-Africanism today has to recognize such situations, if it is to be a brand of revolutionary nationalism and if it is to be a progressive internationalist force. 

Coincidentally, a "Conference of Asians" is scheduled to be held in Tokyo next June at about the same time as the Sixth Pan-African Congress. Their Preparatory Committee has also circulated a preliminary call which suggests that "We have been left behind and they are ahead of us". However, in this instance, 'we' and 'they' are not simplistically Asian and European, respectively. On the contrary, the Asian Preparatory Committee explains as follows: "'We' are the people, the masses of the people. 'They' are those who have power and money. 'They' create their own network of power and money to exploit and suppress us, the people. 'We' the people, are left behind; 'we' are divided and ruled."¹⁰⁰

The inference to be drawn from the above Asian analogy is that the goal of African people's unity is by no means inconsistent with a policy a drawing a line of steel against African enemies of the people and with seeking the closest working relations with non-African peoples, to the extent that the latter are engaged in the fight against exploitation. It should not be imagined that previous Congresses were occasions for all-black camaraderie. Oftentimes, the Left and the Right were represented, and a line had to be hammered out through struggle, as was the case when DuBois and Blaise Diagne confronted each other. For that matter, the reactionary trend was occasionally successful; notably, when the French colonialists managed to promote their own spokesman, Blaise Diagne.

Whatever may emerge from the Sixth Pan-African Congress, it is necessary that some participants should be identified with a platform which recognizes the following elements:

1) That the principal enemies of the African people are the capitalist class in the U.S.A., Western Europe and Japan.

2) That African liberation and unity will be realized only through struggle against the African allies of international capital.

3) That African freedom and development requires disengagement from international monopoly capital.

4) That exploitation of Africans can be terminated only through the construction of a Socialist society, and technology must be related to this goal.

5) That contemporary African state boundaries must be removed to make way for genuine politico-economic unity of the continent.

6) That the Liberation Movements of Southern Africa are revolutionary and anti-imperialist and must therefore be defended against petty bourgeois state hegemony.

7) That the unity of Africa requires the unity of progressive groups, organizations and institutions rather than merely being the preserve of states.

8) That Pan-Africanism must be an internationalist, anti-imperialist and Socialist weapon.

Walter Rodney¹⁰¹

Dar-es-Salaam

April 1974

The Angolan Question

Speech at Howard University, 1976

I would like to come to the situation in the United States and to look at the types of responses, and to look at what I consider to be some fairly horrendous mistakes which were made by certain forces in this country, the United States, in their approach to the Angolan question.

Again, I will dismiss at least one element. We can dismiss those who are attempting to hire black mercenaries for the FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola) and UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). When this individual (Roy Innis, who took over the Congress of Racial Equality in 1968) purports to be organizing black mercenaries to go and fight in Africa, and then we know that mercenaries cost, whether they are black or white – and we know that this particular black functionary cannot afford to pay anybody – we know that these black mercenaries would have been paid by imperialism, to go and fight in Angola.

However, I think we can dismiss that as an aberrant phenomenon – as the expression of a particularly reactionary and unresponsive force within the black American political environment. So, we should really concentrate attention on those elements that are serious. With serious people, one engages in serious debate. And I think there were a large number of serious people throughout the Afro-American community who supported UNITA when they should have been lending uncompromising support to the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) at that particular historical juncture.

It was immediately obvious that there was a startling coincidence – a startling convergence – between the positions of certain individuals who call themselves progressive, revolutionaries, and who in fact regarded themselves as the essence of revolution – yet their positions converged with that of US imperialism. And this amazing historical convergence needs to be understood.

I assume that there are elements within the audience who took that position, and I’m not going to engage in any abuse of those elements. I am simply going to say I believe the position was historically completely incorrect. I will indicate how I believe that error took place.

The first thing is UNITA gained a certain popularity in this country in the very late sixties and the early seventies, particularly in the period of the rise of the African liberation movement, and the like. I was following the process, so I know that they were becoming more exposed and more popular in this country. And that they used certain, very opportunist political tactics and techniques. They simply appealed to the growing black consciousness by saying, ‘Inside of Angola we stand for the elevation of the black man to a position of dignity and rule, and the MPLA stands for the elevation of whites and mulattoes over the indigenous African people.’ That was the standard line in the late sixties and early seventies.

And they would then say, ‘Look at the MPLA. It has so-and-so, who is in its executive, who is a white, who is a Portuguese. It has so many mulattoes who are on the Central Committee, it has so-and-so who is married to a white woman, President Neto, and so on and so forth.’

And in the context of the US, I think that those are very telling points. In the context of the black struggle in this country, when brothers and sisters were going through that terrible period of self-identification, trying to extract themselves out of the dominant white culture, I think that those points made a great deal of impact. Particularly because the MPLA was not really seeking to influence the Afro-American population. Or much of the American population.

So that is one reason why the UNITA gained in popularity. And when we examine that very carefully, we must of course admit that to declare blackness is a very easy thing to do. I mean the same character who was mobilizing black mercenaries was also in the forefront of declaring his blackness – and he would call himself Garveyite, and so on and so forth.

To declare for blackness is one of the easier things to do. Once one recognizes the opportunities inherent in that situation.

But surely we need to go further than that. We need to examine, first, whether the reality in Angola was the reality as portrayed by UNITA. We need to go further and ask whether the historical experience of Angola could be so easily assimilated into the historical experience of black people in the US that Afro-Americans should run to make a judgement on Angola on the basis of some knowledge they had that so-and-so was married to a white. Or that so-and-so was a mulatto.

Because the central understanding that we must reach is that any situation must be examined on its own historical merits. What is called ‘race’ in the US is not the same thing as what might be called race in Angola. In fact, in this country, those who are all called black, or used to be called Negro – if they went to Angola, they would be distinguished, many, as mulattoes. If we want to understand Angola and the complex of the relationships between social strata and race, and so forth, we must then understand Angola. We cannot sit in Washington or in Detroit and imagine that what we are seeing around the block is Angolan society.

And this seems to me to be one of the mistakes which the brothers made when they tried to transform a very simplistic understanding of black–white relationships in the judgement of whether they would support the MPLA or support UNITA.

One is reminded here of some of the things which Fanon wrote in regard to Africa, when he was talking about the pitfalls of national consciousness. He was talking about the pitfalls of African national consciousness. Now we can apply that to the pitfalls of black national consciousness. Which is to say that national consciousness is clearly a liberating force, but at a certain point it can provide blinkers. It can turn into blinkers and constitute a barrier for further understanding of the real world.

The second and more widespread factor, and one that ultimately proved to be most decisive for many black progressives, was the notion that UNITA was a Maoist movement. And these left forces who opposed the MPLA were moving from the starting point of supporting Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong thought.

In their own words, they have a vision and an analysis of contemporary society wherein they identify as the principal contradiction between the two superpowers. They argue further that the more dangerous force is Soviet socialist imperialism, because it’s more covert, it’s more subtle, and because it ultimately can be more powerful, since capitalist imperialism is on the wane. And therefore, in a situation in which the Soviets are involved, one has to take a stand on the opposite side.

Now, what is my disagreement with that position? I shall not go into all my disagreements, because I do not want any sort of global confrontation. I am not in favour of trying to resolve all the problems of the world at the same time, in a single stroke. So that I’m not going to attempt to deal with that postulation about the principal contradiction and its implication.

What we are going to ask is how does that relate to Angola with its specific characteristics. If someone holds that belief as a sincere revolutionary tenet, when that person approaches Angola, how is it that such a belief ends by placing such forces on the side of those who have for 500 years oppressed the African people?

What explanation does such a person give to the Angolans who have been engaged since 1960 in armed struggle against the Portuguese, against NATO, who at the end of that struggle found they were faced with the South Africans and with an escalation of US support to the so-called liberation movement which had been harassing the genuine freedom fighters for many years?

So that from a dialectical perspective and a scientific perspective we struggle and work to discover the correct line. It is only from a theological perspective that one knows the correct line because of revealed truth. And it seems to me that the limitations of that position were very clearly revealed in the Angolan situation. I have not seen a single analysis from forces claiming that they had the ‘correct’ line, which meant opposing the Soviets – not a single analysis of what was going on inside of Angola. It was purely external. And I do not believe we can proceed on that basis.

Transition

Published 1978

The term ‘transition’ has already appeared in scholarly works dealing with contemporary countries in the process of development. It has been attributed precise – although sometimes conflicting – meanings within this growing body of scholarship, concerning both the concept of collateral ideas such as the transfer of technology, the economics of transition, the dynamics of cultural change and the state’s own role in development. Each one of these facets would obviously demand the keenest of attention and their examination can take place effectively only through comparative study of different objective situations. The present analysis sets itself a more modest task: namely to explore the parameters of the concept of transition as it might plausibly appear from a general perspective. Transition and development are already part of a popular vocabulary. One needs to bridge the gap between academic specializations and the wider informed community, which is committed to seeking both the understanding and the positive action inherent in the notion of transition in this era and in this part of the world.

Neither the rate of change nor the duration of change are immediately established with the use of the word transition. Mankind was in transition over hundreds of millennia while using stone tools. The neolithic portion of the Stone Age itself lasted for several thousands of years; but it is possible to affirm that the beginning of agriculture in that period constitutes the most important ‘revolution’ in the history of human society. To speak of transition from one mode of production to another allows for somewhat greater precision: yet one is still confronted with timescales of several centuries which mark the passages from antiquity to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism. In the history of Guyana, the end of chattel slavery in 1838 provides an opportunity to treat the first post-emancipation decade as an experience with free labour; and yet it was not until 1921 that direct legal coercion of labour gave way to more conventional relations between wage labour and capital. One can therefore argue that the transition from slave labour to free labour in Guyana lasted from 1838 to 1921. (The last indentured labourers arrived from India in 1917; all indentures expired in 1921.)

In each of the contexts above, the term transition is legitimately employed, and yet there is the disconcerting possibility that approached in this way all history may be characterized as transition from one stage to another. To avoid tautology and trivialization, it is clearly essential to assign a narrow timespan to the concept as it relates to contemporary social change. Further, limiting the duration of transformation implies an accelerated rate of change.

Whatever the context, the state of transition can only be established by inference. It is a link between two historical epochs, and it incorporates elements of both the old and the new. By definition, the state of transition lacks unique, classical or sharply outlined features. All of this is being conceded in the present analysis, without prejudice to the premise that it is meaningful to utilize the term with regard to modem developing societies (each of which possesses its own specificity) only if transition is a brief interlocking rather than an amorphous and protracted phase. Transition, then, constitutes a transitory phase between two epochs.

The moment of transition is determined by contradictions in the preceding era. The presumption is that the contradictions have reached a point of maturity and their resolution necessarily implies a qualitatively different situation. It is for this reason that transition is a brief period of intensified activity when new social forms triumph over the old in a context of sharp struggle. Transition is analogous to the older Marxist philosophical term ‘leap,’ as the point at which evolution and quantitative change gives face to revolution and qualitative change. Thereafter, the evolutionary rate of change once again applies. Contemporary transition implies a leap or (better still) a series of leaps, in material production, social relations and consciousness all taking place within a circumscribed period of time and acting in a self-reinforcing manner.

It is the contention here that Marxism provides the single consistent worldview for a resolution of the problems of transition. Long-term and relentless social forces have made transitional monopolies the characteristic and dominant form of capitalism. Transnational capital (which is of course imperialist) has socialized the means of production far beyond the point identified by Lenin in the early part of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, transitional capital has concentrated the control of surplus into fewer and fewer (private) hands, and it has set up an international division of labour that is inherently unstable and crisis-ridden. Meanwhile, proletarian and peasant alliances have affected socialist revolutions in several countries. However incomplete and distorted these socialist revolutions may be, the countries concerned have made the leap from theory to practice as far as socialism is concerned, and they are enmeshed in a set of social contradictions different from those prevailing in the capitalist/imperialist world. Within the underdeveloped sections of the capitalist world, certain social forces operate in a manner that sustains capitalist/ imperialist production relations, while others favour the resumption of material production at a higher level under the aegis of the working class guided by socialist ideology. The latter option provides the setting for that moment of historical change that will usher in a new society. In this connection, transition in the contemporary Third World should be unambiguously identified as ‘the transition to socialism’.

In practice, the transition to socialism has always been attempted under inherited conditions of material and social backwardness and powerful external constraints. Socialist revolutions have been initiated with poor technology, they have been conducted where the proletariat has barely crystallized, they have carried the load of transforming pre-capitalist social formations, and they have been faced with the alliance between local propertied classes and the bourgeoisie of the epicentres of imperialism. This was true of the Soviet Union and China; it holds true in greater measure for Cuba, Vietnam, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Mozambique and any other ex-colony where internal contradictions place socialism on the agenda, both as the ultimate goal and as the means of transformation.

The anti-colonial movement as a whole (most of which was non-socialist) must be given credit for reopening the discussion on development and transition – a discussion which first appeared in explicit fashion with the emergence of the Soviet Union after the First World War. Interestingly enough, the heightened consciousness of change in the post-colonial world gave rise to an African journal with the name Transition, which was once extremely popular among the intelligentsia on that continent. The reoccurrence of the title in Guyana is more than just coincidence. It attests to similarity of objective and subjective conditions, for the rapid dissolution of aspects of the old order of colonialism forces consideration of the possibilities of qualitatively changed societies. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the debate on social transformation has been extended to virtually every part of the globe, but it has not necessarily been made more penetrating. On the contrary, transition and development have been given the vaguest of definitions, and the urgency of revolution has been muted until indistinguishable from the timelessness of evolution. In part, these tendencies have to do with lack of clarity in defining the stage of advanced imperialism that has come to prevail; while above all they stem from bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interpretations of the historical stages which lie ahead.

All classes and strata within the anti-colonial nationalist movements identified alien domination as a negative feature within the world society which was in the process of dissolution. Nationalist class alliances have virtually demolished the old political superstructure of global imperialism. Beyond this point, there can be no unanimity at the national level. The presence of conflicting classes in Third World countries means that there can be no agreement on identifying capitalism and imperialism as the sustaining elements of the Old World Order. Vested interests therefore inevitably deny that transition and development necessitate the demise of capitalism and imperialism. It is the contention here that exploitative classes propose pseudo-solutions to the problems of development. There is no real problematic of transition outside the framework of the transition to socialism. A working-class solution offers a revolutionized society; all other proposals modify or extend to greater or lesser degree the system of production and reproduction based on the commoditization of labour power and the alienation of surplus labour.

The post-colonial world is too differentiated to be reduced to any single neo-colonial stereotype. Nevertheless, at one end of the spectrum, there is the classic neo-colonialism of states which have barely altered their politico-military dependence on the former colonizing powers and which have strengthened their ties with international capitalism on the conventional basis of private ownership of the means of production. In such instances – for example Malaysia, Zaire, Trinidad and Tobago – the departure of the colonial administrations has been followed by rapid reconstitution of the local bourgeois and petty bourgeois into transnational capitalist production. Technology transfers, moderate shifts in the international division of labour and the increasing hegemony of the US and Japan are some of the novel features of the classical neo-colonial tendency; but of course the result is the intensification of something which is centuries old: namely, capitalist accumulation on a global scale. For the rest of this analysis, attention will be focused only on those conditions and strategies which at least offer the appearance that they mark the beginning of a new social era.

In several Third World countries, the idea of a ‘mixed economy’ has been presented in a very attractive format. A private sector, a state-owned sector and a sector of joint ventures would ensure the best of both worlds and would itself constitute a new entity defined as socialism of a special type – see the works of Leopold Senghor, for instance. The fact that these ideas have been most ardently propounded by the ruling class in countries such as Senegal and Singapore is far from reassuring, given that these two states function integrally and comfortably within the imperialist framework. Whether the political leadership of Senegal or Singapore had any intention of building socialism is highly debatable; but, conscious intention apart, the transition to socialism could not have been affected by a few piddling measures of government participation in an economy that remained firmly located within the international capitalist system. The ‘mixed economy’ is at best a logical fallacy when it is not a deliberate smokescreen for bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interests. Transition must necessarily have mixed features of capitalist relics and embryonic socialism, but the latter would exist in a position of dominance. Transformation would therefore involve the inexorable displacement of the last legacies of capitalism.

A number of Third World countries have declared themselves adherents or discoverers of one species of socialism or another. Where there is a verbal commitment to the transition to socialism, it requires greater scrupulousness to see whether what is proposed is indeed transition. Tanzania’s Ujamaa socialism is one of the more revealing experiences. The socialist Arusha Declaration was announced some twelve years ago, in 1967; the implementation has been carried out by a government which commands respect in the Third World, and a significant body of literature has accumulated on Ujamaa socialism. One of the most recent and carefully documented studies of the Ujamaa village collectives in Tanzania casts serious doubt on whether the process of socialist transition has yet been initiated within the countryside. The principal reasons for this adverse judgement are as follows:

the low level of production and productivity of the agricultural co-operatives (that is, Ujamaa farms);

the stagnation and regression of the co-operative sector in attracting labour;

the failure of the co-ops to provide a basis for improved agricultural technology; and

the bureaucratization rather than democratization of decision-making in the villages.

The researchers Mapolu and Philipson located the fundamental problem not within the villages themselves but in the political framework, which is not firmly based on those classes with the greatest objective interest in transformation: that is, the peasantry and working class. The questions of productive forces, social organization, ideology, state and class were all touched upon in an attempt to explain why socialist development/transition had failed to get under way in the Tanzanian instance. The premises of the assessment were made explicit:

Since the development of the productive forces specifically includes the development of the general abilities of the producers themselves, co-operation should enable progressive ideas to take root more firmly in all aspects of peasant life; and through co-operative self-management and decision-making, give the direct producers more control over the state apparatus at the local level, thus enhancing their participation in running the economy at a national level.

Co-operation … takes on its class characteristics from the general strategy of development in which it is inserted, which is in turn an expression of the interests of the ruling class (or alliance of classes) in each particular social formation.

The low level of production and the rate of progress in rural Tanzania cannot be explained outside an analysis of the existing social structure and of the manner in which the economy is linked to the international capitalist economy. Hence the fact that this particular policy has not proved to be a substantial basis upon which improvement in rural production could be generated arises from the failure of the policy to address itself to the fundamental problems of social structure and economic integration. In essence, therefore, the issue is really political: to be able to sufficiently mobilise and organise the masses in a manner which would extricate the economy from its domination and exploitation by international capitalism, requires a class base and an ideological perspective which hardly a single African government can be credited with at present.

The cogent formulation above allows us to advance the understanding of transition, with particular reference to its political facets. The necessity for social change in the Third World arises out of a conjuncture of contradictions in the system of capitalist/imperialist production. But the appreciation of this necessity and its historical implementation requires the political organization of those social classes with an objective interest in the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a society freed from the exploitation of labour. The leap from evolution within capitalism to evolution within socialism is no mere spontaneous process. It involves changing levels of consciousness, building working-class organization and self-discipline, and above all the revolutionizing of the state and hence the character of all subsequent social and political intervention.

The struggle for national independence often nurtured euphoric hopes that in the post-independence period national development would virtually take care of itself. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things else will be added thereunto’ was a famous dictum of Kwame Nkrumah’s. It presupposed that the contradictions which undermined colonialism, and which therefore forced imperialism to alter its political form, would also force an alteration of its social, cultural and economic substance. However, imperialism has proved itself far more powerful and resilient in the periphery than had been suggested in interpretations of ‘moribund capitalism’. The local petty bourgeois, comprador classes became more and more marginalized after independence. Such a context was hardly propitious for initiating transition; and the Third World states aimed at modifying the international division of labour so as to promote the indigenous bourgeoisie. An examination of the development plans of the great majority of independent African and Caribbean states discloses almost identical provisions for nurturing domestic private capital; and the growth of indigenous capital has been registered in all Third World countries, alongside of the pauperization of workers, peasants and lumpenproletariat. The emergence of the indigenous bourgeoisie may create tensions with respect to the established multinational capitalists; yet the new class in the periphery contributes to the reproduction of capital and of capitalist social relations on a global scale. The coming into being of such a class has been welcomed by institutions such as the World Bank, and one has grave difficulties in identifying the strategy of indigenous capitalist growth with any variant of socialism whatsoever.

Non-Marxian versions of socialism often deny the existence of classes or at any rate deny the central dynamic imparted to society by antagonistic class contradictions. Even seemingly anti-imperialist leadership – as in Ghana and Tanzania – has espoused this position. Meanwhile, the reality has been that the petty bourgeoisie has consolidated itself as a class. A programme of development which denies the independent existence of the working class and the peasantry is unable to mobilize these classes in their own interests or to make them the leading classes within the state. Conversely, the same denial of class formation enables the petty bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie to take state control – first surreptitiously and then brazenly – on the abscess of their greater sense of organization during the nationalist phase of anti-colonial struggle.

The options which the petty bourgeoisie and allied strata may pursue in relation to international capital vary from joint ventures to the nationalization of foreign and domestic capital. Obviously, there is a difference between the uninhibited private enterprise in Trinidad or Morocco and the attempted state ownership in Guyana and Algeria. However, it is quite remarkable how the instances of state intervention have failed to produce any substantial improvements in living patterns as far as the mass of direct producers are concerned. Even more remarkable is the tendency towards instant reversal of such progressive objectives as might have been secured by the nationalist mass base at an earlier period. A progressive foreign policy, for instance, has been known to change into its opposite virtually overnight. Transition is movement in a given direction – it is not a shuttle service. Yet, ownership of the means of production has been transferred from private hands to the state and then back again to private hands – in Indonesia, in Egypt, in Ghana. One could say that, objectively, the period of state ownership merely served to guarantee that some section of the indigenous population would be better prepared to undertake the role of small and medium-sized private capitalists in the era of the multinational giants.

There is one particularly troubling question in evaluating those ‘progressive’ countries that differ in some respects from the classic neo-colonial states. Have they begun to chart a new course which is anti-imperialist and non-capitalist or is it that they represent socio-political formations which capitalism can accommodate and welcome? Advanced sectors of French capitalism are quite reconciled to the Algerian ‘experiment’; the World Bank finds it useful to associate with the Tanzanian petty bourgeoisie; North American mining capital has given the stamp of approval to the Guinean regime; and with respect to Guyana, the American state ignores the application of its own recently designed ‘human rights’ criteria. The implication is that imperialism has not yet been stretched to the limit of its potential. It will accommodate states that have taken steps against foreign private property in response to internal and external forces, provided the new juridical property relations affect neither the long-term contribution of the country to global capitalist accumulation and provided the state continues to guarantee class differentiation. The crucial variable is the composition of the state. Any given Third World country is at least arguably transitional when the classes and strata which were pre-eminent in the colonial period begin to lose their control over the means of production and the state. To put it another way, the movement towards socialism demands a prior constitution of the working class into the state so that the state would increasingly reflect the role of the working class in production.

States with different class bases may concur with respect to some policies of national development. Changes in the international economy, for instance, are being advocated by all Third World nations. The accumulating petty bourgeoisie concurs with realists among the leading bourgeois spokesmen, who admit that the old international order cannot survive with the same form and content; hence the calls for a new international economic order and for the initiating of a so-called North/South dialogue. In effect, the strains of imperialism in its present stage demand partial change if there is to be a new lease of life. Marxists and working-class intellectuals have long called for revamping the international economic order. They can claim to have been more resolute and consistent in working for such changes, and have realistically pressed for the best of the short-term arrangements even within the strictures set up by agreements such as the Lomé Convention. However, working-class objectives are more far reaching than those adjustments that give breathing space to accumulating classes on the periphery of capitalism. After all, it is from the perspective of alienated labour in the Third World that the operations of the old international order are most intolerable. It is only a working-class state that will revolutionize social reproduction within its own boundaries and simultaneously contribute to the final dismantling of global imperialism.

By implication, the leap towards socialism is inseparable from the conscious intentions of working-class leadership made manifest through the state. All historical leaps have not been consciously directed. On the contrary, passages from one mode of production to another previous to socialism have been the result of forces that were improperly understood even by the main classes in the drama. The bourgeois class could hardly have been said to have directed the early formation of capitalist society. Socialism is unique because of the highly developed consciousness of the two combatant classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Social relations in Third World countries today cannot be changed independently of men’s will. Conscious decisions have to be taken to change the forces of production (including the size, skill and composition of the working class), the relations of production and the mediation of those relations by the state. Of course, ‘conscious intentions’ mean much more than mere statements or ideological declamations. Verbal adherence to Marxism in Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, Somalia and Ethiopia has accompanied social developments indistinguishable from those in states where there has been an explicit rejection of the theory of class contradictions: that is to say, Marxist intellectuals have been silenced, workers’ representatives have been eliminated and the working class as a whole excluded from democratic participation in social reconstruction. For transition to have validity, it must include the widespread promotion of socialist education without caricature, and it must rest firmly on workers’ democracy.

The contradictions within the imperialist system and between imperialism and socialism provide the objective basis for the passage to socialism in dependent capitalist countries. This has to be reiterated and then qualified by the equally important variable of action by class-conscious elements. Transition therefore equates with guided transformation; it means social policy directed by the working class in its own interest. Broad and challenging possibilities are opened up by the notion of workers’ democracy, which has relevance both at the point of production and within the several levels and branches of the state. It should also be clear that such transition would allocate meaningful roles to strata which are closely or potentially allied to the working class: above all, the peasantry as well as independent craftsmen, shopkeepers, the lower salariat, students, technocrats and other intellectuals. The scope of the present discourse does not permit elaboration of the complex interrelated problems that have to be resolved once the process of transition is under way. In the final analysis, comprehensive answers will be forthcoming through social practice and attempted transformation.

People’s Power, No Dictator!

Published by the Working People’s Alliance, 1979

1. On the Nature of a Dictatorship in General

A dictator is defined as one who elevates himself above all other citizens, and often makes claims to be closer to God than mere mortals. Emperors, kings and nobles of the feudal period easily became dictators because they could justify despotic acts on the grounds that royal power and authority were of sacred origin. In more modern versions of dictatorship, the absolute ruler has to fabricate an elaborate cult of the personality to prove that he is more intelligent, more potent and generally superior to any other human being. Idi Amin fancied himself not only a physical giant but also as a intellectual giant. Besides, he boasted of a direct line to Allah. Eric Gairy, our Caribbean ex-dictator, dabbled in obeah and convinced himself that he was better than the world's leading scientists and would personally solve the problem of unidentified flying objects. This is the stuff of which dictators are made.

By definition, the dictator is responsible to no one, no organisation, to no social institution. One the contrary, he creates the impression that he holds in the palm of his hand the existence of every person and every organisation. The dictator is paramount. He gives out land, scholarships etc, not because they belong to the people, but because he considers that he is doing the rest of mankind a great favour. That is why human and civil rights disappear under a dictatorship. At best, an individual is expected to be eternally grateful to the dictator. After all, that which the dictator giveth he also taketh away.

A dictator is representative of some class other than the majority of the exploited workers and peasants. Class domination itself is sometimes called "dictatorship", but of course all members of the class which controls the given economy normally expect to share in the political power. A dictator prevents this from happening. Even within his own class there is no scope for freedom of expression. The dictator obeys no rules other than those of his own making; and consequently there is a tendency for rules to be abandoned altogether. The rule of law is replaced by arbitrary conduct and orders from above.

Dictators surround themselves with mediocrities and lackeys -that is to say, by men and women with little competence and integrity who maintain their positions though cunning, opportunism and boot-licking in relationship to the dictator. In relationship to the people, these stooges of the dictator become tyrants, who imitate as best as they can, the intolerant and despotic behaviour of the big boss.

In political life, men and women make decisions about their own welfare. Politics has to do with making choices and implementing decisions. The realm of politics therefore constitutes one of the highest aspects of a people's culture. Through one-man rule, the dictatorship reduces politics to the art of manipulation. There is nothing big or small which lies outside of his personal intervention. Nor does he remember to draw the distinction between public policy and private interest. That is why the dictator and his cohorts continually confuse the national treasury with their private bank accounts. That is why a dictatorial regime so often bases decisions on petty spite and vendetta -amounting to what we in Guyana would call "grudge" politics.

On the surface, the dictatorship might appear to be efficient; but the opposite is usually the case. The fact that a dictator is ruthless, does not necessarily make him efficient. A dictatorial system destroys initiative. It does not allow the genius of the people to flourish and it frustrates even that class from which the dictator emerged. Dictators always pretend to be strong men, but in practice, the effort to control everyone and everything is too much. The historical record shows that several dictators were more than a little bit mad before they seized power, and many of them certainly went crazy after some years of despotic rule.

2. On the Nature of the Burnham Dictatorship in Particular

As soon as we have stated the tendencies of dictatorship in general, we have already begun to lay bare the characteristics of the Burnham dictatorship. But of course we must go further and identify all of its peculiarities. The first peculiarity is that the Burnham dictatorship has masked and camouflaged itself. It would prefer that its vices be hidden from the public. Why is this?

Men in the past have boasted of being dictators. Some have even pretended to be benevolent autocrats, ruling in the interests of those over whom they exercised absolute control. Recently, Somoza of Nicaragua went down fighting as a unrepentant dictator. But nowadays, hardly any rulers admit that they are dictators. The demand for freedom has become universal, and repression feels the need to camouflage itself. Thus the Pinochet regime in Chile rigged a referendum to tell the world that the Chilean people voted for a dictatorship! Idi Amin claimed to have had the support of the Ugandan masses whom he was butchering! The world has come to shun racist regimes, military dictatorships and all dictatorial governments. This climate of international opinion offers the first explanation as to why the Burnham dictatorship prefers to remain disguised.

The Burnham dictatorship presents itself as its own opposite -that is to say, it presents itself as a democracy. This pattern has been determined by the manner in which Burnham achieved political power. Some dictators seize power by violence, as frequently happened in Latin America. Some inherit from a previous strong-man, as in the case of "Baby Doc" Duvalier who succeeded "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti. Occasionally, a dictator can arrive on the scene as part of an electoral process before taking the steps of brazenly undermining the self-same electoral system. This was the case with Hitler who subverted German bourgeois democracy in the 1930's. Burnham has taken a similar road to power - subverting the democratic system of which he was part in 1953.

We cannot say that Guyana today has reached the same stage as Germany under Hitler's rule, because that would be to lose a sense of proportion. Burnham as a dictator is petty because ours is a nation of less than a million people. Hitler had a mad wish to rule the world. For this reason, he is generally described as a megalomaniac. Hitler's megalomania was backed by the powerful German economy and the might of the German army. Burnham's megalomania is closer to comedy and farce. It takes the form of wearing a General's uniform and hoping that the army will conquer his own people. In the long run, however, every dictator is like any other dictator. Burnham certainly has the capacity to make life miserable for the entire population of our small nation.

Like all classic dictatorships, that which exists in Guyana has fostered the cult of the personality. The minority PNC regime has used all manner of tricks and gimmicks to make the "Comrade Leader" appear to be a demi-god. Some of the gimmicks were inherited from our past of colonial oppression. Thus on the exercise books of school children, the face of the reigning English Monarch was simply replaced by that of the Prime Minister, even though there is a President as Constitutional Head of State in Guyana.

Other practices which promote the cult of the personality have been adopted in flagrant violation of our culture. It is on record that one Hindu Pandit insulted his co-religionists and Guyanese as a whole by stating that Burnham is a re-incarnation of Lord Krishna. All Guyanese can attest to the many manoeuvres of the PNC regime to glorify and deify the man Forbes Burnham. We have been afflicted with his face, his name, his voice everywhere. This obscene and vulgar behaviour eventually had a damaging effect on our entire artistic production, including the strangling of our calypso tradition so the calypso crown could be won by whoever shouted the loudest praise to the dictator. When Burnham could not pretend that he was the greatest, he sought to attach himself shamelessly to the shirt-tales of those who had proved their greatness in one field or another -ranging from Fidel Castro to Mohamed Ali. Most West Indians were totally disgusted by the ridiculous practice of Burnham laying personal claim to Clive Lloyd and the West Indian cricket team.

For a small nation, Guyana has produced a discouragingly large number of lackeys and stooges who hide in the shadow of the "Comrade Leader". Guyanese constantly complain of "square pegs in round holes". The square pegs are the misfits and soup drinkers who flourish because each one is prepared to be his master's voice. This is a double tragedy in this situation. First there is the tragedy (with some mixture of comedy) of the incompetent, the mediocre and the corrupt making a mess of things. Secondly, there is the tragedy in which men and women of ability and integrity have been dismissed or they have run away or they have been reduced to silence. This part of the tragedy involves honest police officers who must condone corruption, doctors who must heal without drugs, managers who are not allowed to manage and workers who are not permitted to produce and are then forced to consume a diet of lies and deceit. And all of this, incidentally, is carried on in the name of Socialism.

The smallness of our society also draws attention to the highly personalised nature of the dictatorship. The dictator and his cronies make it their business to hire and fire. They interfere with major management decisions and they intervene in the most trivial affairs. The ruling clique can be vindictive with appointments at the supposedly independent University of Guyana as they can be vindictive with regard to businessmen applying for licenses for imports controlled by the Government. The dictator can personally intervene to stop a soldier from going on leave, to prevent a junior clerk from getting a promotion, to victimise a casual workers for failing to "toe the line". Decisions as to who to prosecute in the courts should normally be made by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Many of these decisions are made by the dictator himself in Guyana and are influenced not by the well-being of the state but by personal spite. It is said that the "Comrade Leader" boasts of his long memory and marks down persons for victimisation even if he has to wait for fifteen years before he can vent his wrath on them.

When Guyana achieved independence in 1966, the PNC was a minority Government which had come to power through dubious means. Ten years later, it had become a dictatorship in which the state control over the economy was the main weapon used to keep people in line. Burnham and his cronies consider themselves powerful and clever men when they successfully threaten and intimidate a mother by bringing threats against her children.

The Italian writer, Machiavelli, is famous for his analysis of politics as the art of manipulating power. Machiavelli's best-known book, "The Prince" was written some 450 years ago as advice to a ruler with absolute power. We have it on the authority of the late Jessie Burnham that her "Brother Forbes"was a firm disciple of Machiavelli. In his own words, Burnham has described politics as the "science of deals". He likes to wheel and deal and to treat persons as through each can be bought and sold. Burnham encourages around himself individuals who are weak or corrupt because he then exercises vicious control over them. According to Burnham's thinking, the ends justify the means, and the only means which matter are those which have to do with achieving and holding on to power. Any means are acceptable if they allow him to keep control over the state machinery. This is the ultimate in cynicism and fully reveals the Machiavellian strategy which has guided Burnham in his pursuit of absolute power in Guyana.

On the international scene, Burnham could never be a powerful force. But he has proved crafty and cunning in achieving his ends within Guyana. An old woman at Bourda shouted at a recent political meeting that "Burnham mek Satan cry!" This remarkable piece of wit from the Georgetown streets was in response to the deviousness of a man who has worked out a long-term plan for dividing and ruling the Guyanese people - all of whom he holds in deep contempt. Again we should refer to the pamphlet by Jessie Burnham, entitled Beware My Brother Forbes, in which she describes his racist attitude to Indians, his absolute selfishness and his limitless ambition to hold others in domination. Jessie Burnham also provided evidence as to the stealthy manner in which Forbes Burnham went about his objectives.

The Burnham dictatorship crept up upon Guyanese people like a thief in the night. His violations of human rights were frequent, but they were sufficiently gradual that many persons did not realize what was going on until it was too late. Take, for example, the end of freedom of the press. This was not achieved by any single action or by any single law. First, one national daily newspaper was nationalised and the second followed later. The two were then merged. One radio station was taken over by the government while the second was kept under manners. Eventually the two became government-owned and came under one management. Meanwhile, the opposition press was being restricted even at the level of one-page duplicated sheets. The nationalised press and radio are of course maintained by revenue produced by all Guyanese; but step by step they became the personal tools of the dictator and his clique. Press and radio journalists lost all independence and professional dignity. Today, the Chronicle newspaper is proud to announce itself as the 'Sister' of the New Nation publication which is the official organ of the PNC party.

Many Guyanese of good will are wondering whether there was a point at which they should have taken a stand to defend the freedom of the press. The best time to fight for a freedom is when it exists and is first threatened. But few Guyanese were prepared to [come] forward in the early years of the Burnham dictatorship because they were simply hoping for the best. Burnham recognised this attitude as a weakness of our people and he made the most of it. Today, there is no press freedom to defend; this is only a freedom destroyed which has to be rebuilt.

The fate of the Army and Police can serve as other examples of the trickery which built the Burnham dictatorship. According to the Guyana Constitution, each soldier or policeman takes an oath of loyalty to this country symbolised by the Head of State. Each soldier or policeman is expected to be loyal to the commands of an elected government representing the people. Little by little since independence, loyalty to the country became loyalty to the PNC and then personal loyalty to Burnham. The uniformed forces helped the PNC to beat down the majority opposition in 1973 and then by July 1978 they were helping Burnham to steal the rights of 90% of the population -including the rights of many former supporters of the PNC. One wonders whether the soldiers and police realized when they stopped being loyal to the country and started being the watch-dogs of a dictator?

In the old days, the "Three Card" con game was very popular in Georgetown - especially in Lombard and Water Streets. The "Three Card" deals used to announce "the more you watch the less you see", as they cunningly flicked their cards from side to side. Forbes Burnham is our national champion "Three Card" con artist.

There is another side to the gradual way in which the Burnham dictatorship was established. Guyanese were dealt blow after blow without being knocked out. But we certainly became dazed and stupefied. Our national poet, Martin Carter, was one of the first to comment publicly on this process. He mentioned how the senses of Guyanese were being dulled. Martin Carter called this the "paralysis of the spirit". Many decent Guyanese were tricked into doing dirty things, believing that these acts would contribute to their own welfare. Instead, each dirty deal simply confirmed the power of the dictator and allowed him to turn around and insult even former supporters. As we would say in Creole, people get use and then they get 'buse.

Burnham is well-known for his flowery language. Unfortunately some of our people fell victim to the sound of words without examining the meaning. 'Paramountcy' is one of Burnham's fancy words. He announced the doctrine of PNC paramountcy or domination over Parliament, the Courts, the Press and everything else. In fact, 'Paramountcy' was the official statement that a minority party which was growing smaller and smaller intended to maintain dictatorial rule over the majority. At the same time, Burnham made it clear that he was 'paramount' over the PNC. The PNC party constitution gives Burnham so-called reserve powers which are greater than the reserve powers of the old colonial governors over the legislature. The PNC Constitution states as follows: "If the leader ........ is of the opinion that a situation of emergency has arisen in the Party, he shall have power ........ to take all action necessary to correct such a situation; and for this purpose he may assume and exercise any and all the powers of the Biennial Delegates' Congress, The General Council, the Central Executive Committee, any other Committee, Group, Arm, Organ or any other Officer of Official of the Party."

Burnham the dictator is paramount over the paramount party!

3. On the Rights of the People

When Guyana gained its independence it inherited what is called the bourgeois democratic system of Britain. Socially and economically, the population remained divided into different classes; while politically everyone had a right to help elect a Parliament which had one or more parties. The Constitution of independent Guyana was the product of class struggle waged partly in Europe and partly inside Guyana itself.

It was the people's struggle inside Guyana which contributed most to political freedom in our country. The efforts of slaves and indentured bondsmen made the question of liberation both a national and international issue. Given our background of slavery, the question of freedom can never be ignored in Guyana and the Caribbean.

Today, we take for granted the freedom of worship. But it was not a freedom readily granted by our oppressors. When a few non-conformist ministers of religion first suggested that slaves should have access to Christianity, they were resisted by the slave masters. Those slaves who wished to practice the Christian religion ran terrible risks in order to insist on their right to worship as they chose -just as thousands of slaves had earlier fought to continue holding their African beliefs. Under indentureship, the situation was not very different. It was usually after the end of their five year bond that our Indian foreparents were able to turn to the temple, the mosque or the church as the case might be.

One of the most bitter struggles in the history of Guyana has been the struggle to establish the right to work. That is to say, the right to be offered employment which would provide a decent living. The right to work means the right to eat and the right to live. After slavery, the free population was willing to work. But they demanded fair conditions; and planters brought in indentured labourers to undercut the demand for better wages and conditions. The indentured labourers themselves soon grew aware of the situation. They too demanded better conditions and the result was that they were refused employment while fresh indentured labourers were brought in. The right to employment in crop time, the right to employment out of crop season, the right to employment in the public sector, all of these were at least partially won by the end of the colonial period.

Alongside the right to work was the right to housing. Acquiring a house depends on what one earns and is therefore linked to the right to work. Plantation labourers were housed in logies from slavery days. When labourers became free, the planters told them they could enjoy the privilege of staying in the plantation logies if they worked on the estates without protest. Right up until recent times, estates have ejected tenants who exercised their right to strike.

That is why our people have always preferred houses in a village instead of houses on estates. On the sugar estates, in the villages and in the towns, workers have organised to demand decent housing and to demand housing with no strings attached. Housing is not a favour which the dictator has granted to the people. The right to housing is an internationally recognised and fundamental human right. It is one for which the Guyanese people have struggled in the countryside and in the towns.

In the colonial days of British Guiana, rural workers and farmers made the magnificent contribution of establishing free villages -like Buxton on the East Coast, Demerara, Queenstown in Essequibo and Fyrish/Gibraltar in East Berbice. The village residents fought the planters and the colonists in order to practice democracy at the local government level.

The urban working class led the way in establishing trade unions and in exercising the right to strike. Stevedores were amongst the most abused and exploited workers in the colonial system. Yet it was the stevedores and other dockworkers who sacrificed to make trade unions possible.

Our middle classes identified themselves with popular campaigns against dictatorial governors, against corruption in the public service, against planters manipulating elections, and against the misuse of the authority of the courts. All classes in the colony of British Guiana fought to promote freedom of expression in public places and in the press. The end result of all this was the election of governments of their choice. Popular struggle in Guyana won concessions which were partial and temporary. Clearly, there could never be full justice under colonialism, capitalism and imperialism because of deep-rooted class inequalities. The hope of the majority was that elected governments and national independence would revolutionise the economy and society so that justice would prevail.

Most Guyanese live on the coastlands. These coastlands were once desolate swamps flooded by the sea and the savannah waters. The dams and the canals, the roads and the houses, the fields and the factories, the schools and the churches, the words and the gestures -all these represent our common heritage. Our foreparents planted their strength, their seed, and their intelligence in a country which is now ours. Neither the land nor the rights of the people are gifts of the Burnham dictatorship. On the contrary, that dictatorship has placed the nation in reverse gear. It is destroying the economy and it stealing the rights of the people.

4. Expose the Burnham Dictatorship

We have said before that the Burnham dictatorship would prefer to hide under the disguise of being a democracy. Elections have not been abolished; instead they have been rigged in such a way as to become a complete mockery of the most fundamental of rights -the right to self-determination and free choice of one's government. The rigged elections of 1968 and 1973 and the amazing referendum fraud of July, 1978 all indicate that Guyanese people have not chosen the PNC clique. The regime holds power by armed force. Guyanese are finding from their own experience that the dictatorship hates to be reminded that it is a dictatorship. To expose the dictatorship, the first step is to denounce the government as illegal and illegitimate.

Dictators have a way of building statues in their own image. When a dictator is overthrown, the population seizes the chance to destroy or remove the various things which were meant to glorify him. But it is equally important that some of the symbols of the dictator's power should be destroyed before his fall. Psychologically, the domination of the dictator has to be rejected. The population must learn to despise the falsehoods which surround the man; they must refuse to accept that he has any halo of greatness around him. They must remove any confusion in their own minds and see the dictator clearly for what he is - a villain and a monster, the principal enemy of the people.

Certain verbal attacks have been made on the dictator. Dayclean, the organ of the Working People's Alliance, first called him "Big Jim" so that people should not forget Jim Jones and the 914 dead of Jonestown. Burnham has blood on his hands from that horrible atrocity. We call him the "Crime Minister" to let the people remember the corruption, electoral frauds and the recent murder of Father Darke.

In Latin America, the dictators are known as 'gorillas' -as distinct from the freedom fighters who are 'guerrillas'. We want it known that Guyana too has its 'gorilla', and that he is appropriately named 'King Kong'. The strength of which Burnham boasts is the strength of the ape, and besides he is a make-believe character - straight from Hollywood.

Our language must express not only ridicule but anger and disgust. The dictatorship has reduced us all to such a level that the situation can be described only in terms befitting fifth, pollution and excrement. Even our deep-rooted sense of modesty in Guyana cannot stand in the way of rough words to describe the nation's shame. That is why the WPA repeats the legend of King Midas who was said to have been able to touch anything and turn it into gold. That was called the "Midas Touch". Now Guyana has seen the "Burnham Touch" – anything he touches turns to shit!

Many beautiful ideas have suffered from the Burnham Touch – socialism, cooperatives, free education, nationalisation, solidarity with Afro-Americans, support for freedom fighters. Burnham tries to intervene personally in everything - from road building to the administration of sports. He has touched a great deal in Guyana. Many formerly descent Guyanese are walking around doing dirty things or compromising with the evil of dictatorship. They have been touched.

Of course, exposure of the dictatorship requires far more than mere words. The entire population must be committed to action. Each action in the popular interest is bound to reveal the dictatorship in its true colours.

Mass public meetings sponsored by the WPA have recently been used by Guyanese to show their opposition to the PNC clique. The apparatus of the police state was brought down on the heads of peaceful citizens attending these meetings. From time to time, the police denied permission for the use of loud-speaking equipment in defiance of the Constitution. Peaceful pickets and gatherings without loudspeakers have been broken up with tear gas and baton charges. In this way the dictatorship feels that it is gaining a physical victory but the people are moving forward in their understanding. No one can now pretend that our rulers protect the freedom of assembly.

As criticism of the regime grew in all quarters, the dictatorship came into the open on the question of press freedom. They tightened the noose around the PPP's Mirror newspaper, strangling it through denial of newsprint. The Government has intensified its search for duplicating machines and typewriters. Duplicating equipment was seized from a political group (the WPVP) and also from a trade union (NAACIE). No one can now pretend that our rulers believe in freedom of the press.

Determined working class efforts have once again exposed the Burnham dictatorship on the question of the right to strike. When the sugar workers went on strike for a memorable 135 days in 1977/1978, the government called it a political strike. Now every strike is called a political one -which means that the strike undermines the power of the dictatorship. Workers have to learn not to fear when their strike action is called 'political'. If the power of the people undermines the power of the dictator, then let our strikes be political! The real issue is not whether a strike is called industrial or political: it is whether that strike is in the interests of the workers concerned and of the working people as a whole.

The recent bauxite strike is a high point in the history of the Guyanese working class. For six weeks, bauxite workers stood firm to force management to implement their collective labour agreement. The Guyanese dictatorship has consistently attacked the living standards of the working class. It is not surprising that the bauxite strike attracted the support of workers everywhere in Guyana. Positive leadership from the four progressive trade unions gave bauxite workers nationwide backing, especially within the sugar industry. Sugar workers and clerks who came out in solidarity also seized the opportunity to advance their own just demands, such as the demand that the government respect a 14 dollars a day minimum wage. The entire nation got a feel of what united working class action could mean.

Following the strike, the dictatorship has unleashed victimisation. This is further evidence of their determination to eliminate the right to strike and the right to work. Yet, the dismissal of the strikers itself is the next major point around which workers will rally. As is the fashion with apes, King Kong beats his chest and threatened to slaughter indiscriminately, but united labour actions can always call his bluff.

United strike action teaches us how the dictator can be exposed and how he can be deposed. The regime panicked at the thought of anything looking like a general strike. Burnham knows that no amount of violence or military force can replace the labour power of workers. He has tried cutting cane with the Militia, the National Service and so on, and this was a dismal failure. He did not even waste time trying to introduce scabs into the bauxite industry because he knows that there is no way that would have been accepted. The dictator requires the population to produce so as to sustain himself and the clique of parasites who dominate Guyana. That is why mass withdrawal of labour is the ultimate weapon representing the power of the people.

The Burnham dictatorship needs the cooperation of workers to buy guns to keep down the very workers! This is the fantastic contradiction which points the way towards a policy of non-cooperation and civil disobedience.

Non-cooperation means simply that citizens will refuse to cooperate in their own oppression and in the oppression of others. It may be hidden or open, individual or collective. The instances are increasing of individual Guyanese resisting or ignoring the notorious "instructions" given by the dictator. Each publicised example of personal resistance helps lift the spirits of the entire population. Other individuals are going about their personal rebellion in a quiet manner. However, non-cooperation will be most effective where it is based on collective or group action.

In India, Mahatma Gandhi organised millions in his campaign of non-cooperation and civil disobedience against the British colonialists. One of Gandhi's campaigns brought about the boycott of cloth imported from Britain. In the U.S.A., the modern Civil Rights struggle started with a famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954. Thousands of black people refused to use the bus until the bus company ended racial discrimination. Here in Guyana, several persons and organisations have called for a boycott of the lying and vicious publication called the Chronicle, which uses the people's money to abuse the people. Such a boycott would represent an example of non-cooperation. It has to be agreed on and implemented as a collective action.

Civil disobedience is also a matter which is best approached by large numbers acting at the same time. It means a readiness to disobey the government (otherwise known as the civil power). In Guyana, the civil power is itself disobeying the laws and the Constitution -for example, in relation to the freedom of assembly, the conduct of local and national elections, the right to picket or to march, and the rights which citizens have when arrested.

The WPA has made a public commitment to challenge the illegal and arbitrary behaviour of government forces such as the police. It relation to public meetings, this challenge has thoroughly exposed the nature of the Burnham dictatorship; and it has done so because masses of people have got the message and have turned out in numbers.

The regime had two choices. One was to allow us to exercise our democratic rights and let the majority show its true feelings of opposition to the dictatorship. The other choice was to drive the people off the streets by force. But the second choice backfired because it showed people both at home and abroad how much Guyana had become a police state.

Civil disobedience goes beyond the point where the civil power breaks its own laws. One can suggest disobedience of the law because of the fundamental fact that the government is illegal. Citizens have a right to be guided not by the unjust laws or an unjust state but by what Gandhi called "the higher law of justice". There are some laws such as traffic regulations which are relatively free of political interference; but citizens will decide when laws offer safety and which ones can be broken as a part of a rebellion against the dictatorship.

Civil disobedience has always been met by threats, by beatings, by imprisonment and ultimately by loss of life. This process has already begun in Guyana. The lessons from other countries show that a determined people cannot be turned back. Certainly, blows and imprisonment are bringing out the steel in the Guyanese people and the dictatorship will be taught whose steel is sharper. The murder of Father Darke failed to intimidate; instead more decent men and women rallied to protest the appalling state of the nation in Guyana.

Few individuals want to willingly invite their own death. Yet many will be found who are prepared to fight fearlessly for their rights even if their lives are threatened. The human spirit has a remarkable capacity to rise above oppression; and only the fools who now misrule Guyana can imagine that our population alone lacks such capacity. During the famous 1763 slave rebellion in Berbice, there were numerous examples of the undying courage of our foreparents. The Dutch slave-masters captured Accabre, one of the leaders of the rebellion, and he simply laughed scornfully when they tormented him. Soon after, Accabre and eight other freedom fighters were put to death by roasting over a slow fire. Even their enemies were impressed by the fact that Accabre's men were firm to the end and did not flinch.

The violence of the dictatorial state is always lurking ready to be unleashed when the people make their challenge. There will be more jobs lost, more bones broken and more lives sacrificed. Failure to see this would be to under-estimate the difficulties. Precisely, because of the violence the population will develop its own tactics of self-defence. Attacks by PNC thugs and by thugs in uniforms (calling themselves police) have so far gone down without resistance. That phase is at an end. Self-defence is an inalienable human right, and the tactics of confronting the regime will change to ensure that persons defend their right to life and limb.

Nether the WPA nor any other organisation needs to produce a master plan for national struggle against the dictator. We can rely on the initiative and good judgement of our people, provided there is a spirit of resistance. Martin Carter's Poems of Resistance were written against colonial domination. They are still relevant today. It is no accident that he was among the first to call for renewed resistance, this time against the Burnham dictatorship. Artists have a special responsibility at this time of crisis, the task of defending creativity against the onslaughts of a regime which behaves like the Philistines of old in trampling everything of human value. The people of Latin America have found that pens and guitars and paint brushes all become effective weapons against the gorillas. Language, song and drum are also weapons within the Guyanese situation. Cultivate the spirit of resistance! Cultivate the Accabre spirit! King Kong must go!

5. Raise up a Clear Alternative: National Unity and People's Power

In the midst of national crisis, Guyanese have made some gain. The most dramatic achievement has been the consolidation of racial unity. Africans and Indians are standing side by side in a way that has not been true since 1953. Indeed, we now have a degree of racial unity greater than at any previous time in our history. The WPA has consistently argued that political unity across racial lines was most desirable and possible. The truth of that position is now obvious.

The firmest unity is unity in struggle. Guyanese are no longer divided in their struggle for bread and justice. Indian sugar workers and African bauxite workers are making common cause. African lawyers and Indian lawyers both see the need for unity to restore the rule of law. Our racial minorities are joining the new national movement without fear of domination.

The dictatorship is spreading the wild propaganda to hold back the movement of inter-racial solidarity. The PNC clique is putting out that the WPA is an Afro-Guyanese group splitting black people so that Indians will be the next rulers! There is no need to answer such backwardness, except to ask that you look around and "see with the eyes of the people". What is more vicious is that the regime is using or creating incidents of racial violence on the East Coast Demerara. When the PNC sends thugs into Indian communities we are not told anything about this. When an African is killed by Indians, this is meat for the racists on "Action Line" and is taken up at length on the radio by no less a criminal than the "Rabbi". The PNC clique are even bold enough to talk about 1962 when they were in the forefront of racial violence. But we will "hear with the ears of the people".

Before the dictatorship can be overthrown, we must solve the difficult problem of creating national unity in the face of class differences. So long as there are classes, there must be some degree of class conflict. Nevertheless, it is necessary to build a broad unity across existing class lines; and there are several factors which favour such a development in Guyana today.

The highest expression of modern capitalism is found in the multi-national companies. The power of the modern capitalist is tremendous because it is on such a scale that it dominates entire nations and sustains imperialist exploitations. Guyana is fortunate that multi-national companies such as Bookers and Alcan no longer control our economy. Nationalisation was called for by all sectors of progressive opinion in Guyana. Nationalisation of sugar and bauxite must be recognised as positive, although the nationalised industries have suffered from the Burnham Touch. The private capital which exists in Guyana can play a nationalist and patriotic role because it does not automatically represent imperialist exploitation.

Guyanese manufacturers and businessmen in general can participate in a movement of national unity because there is great need for an expansion of production and for an increase in productivity. Above all, there is great need for an extension of the productive forces -which means more technology, more investment, and a larger body of workers who are guaranteed employment and advancement. Through debate, discussion, and mutual respect for agreements, the National Movement can offer conditions mutually acceptable to the group of local businessmen and to the broad masses of workers.

In Guyana and the West Indies, an important social role is played by the middle class. The term 'middle class' or 'petty bourgeoisie' is generally used to refer to professionals, small businessmen, big farmers, and civil servants from the middle ranks and above. The Guyanese middle class is in deep crisis.

The decline in Guyana's living standards has hit the middle class very hard - because they least expected it and are unaccustomed to it. Normally the middle class thinks in terms of security and comfort. There is very little of these things left. It's a headache to run a car, it's a burden to pay a mortgage, and it is impossible to acquire articles of consumption because of scarcity and extravagant cost. So the middle class has come to feel some of the material deprivations which many workers had long known about -and the learning process has been painful.

Besides, the middle class has lost its sense of professional pride. There is little or no job satisfaction to be gained at any level in government service and even outside of the government. Many have been beaten down into silence; but there are individuals who travel and who know the world. They therefore know that internationally the Guyanese government is totally discredited and that Guyanese have to bear the shame heaped on them by the dictator. Many members of the middle class are therefore entering the political movement. Many are willing to be mobilised, others will commit resources and a few are prepared to take serious risks as part of the movement.

The middle class understands that it can never monopolise a Guyanese government. From 1953, that has never been possible. Thinking members of the middle class are therefore in agreement that the solution is a government of National Unity. This would be a government which they cannot dominate but one in which their interests will be adequately represented and in which their views will be given honest and careful consideration.

The WPA stands within the ranks of workers and peasants. There is no hesitation in so doing; there are no ifs and buts about our commitments to building a society in which working people enjoy the fruits of their own labour. A united working class is the base on which national unity is to be built. It is the working class (including housewives and the unemployed) who suffer most under the corrupt dictatorship. It is the working-class which has sacrificed most in the struggle for bread and justice. A working-class interpretation must win over the progressive element of other classes and strata. It will have to be made clear that the Burnham dictatorship came forth from a particular economic system - a system based in inequality and exploitation. It will also have to be made clear that working people require fundamental chances in the political structure to permanently guarantee rights which they temporarily won in the face of colonialism. The Guyanese working people who are in the immense majority, will expect to have their labour power reflected in the power of the state.

The WPA has called for a Government of National Reconstruction and National Unity. Inevitably, the working people must play a leading role in such a government. Yet, it is proof of the maturity of our workers that they fully understand the need for patriotic compromise with other classes and social strata. Workers know from the most bitter of experiences how hopeless the economic situation has become. Small farmers know from heart-breaking experience that it is impossible to cultivate and survive. So the vast majority of our people will surely rally around a programme which restores the economy through the participation of all. They will rally round a programme which restores democratic rights.

One can sum up on the national question by saying that all classes in Guyana have an objective interest in unity. That is to say, each class has suffered in one way or another from arbitrary rule, insecurity and lack of the opportunity to do an honest job. Collectively, we are faced with the threat of disintegration and the loss of commitment to Guyana as a nation state. This is tragically seen through the large numbers lining up at the embassies and passport offices and in the large numbers who have but one ambition in life - to leave Guyana.

This is the time of calling on our resolves of patriotism. The road to recovery of national purpose lies though the restoration of democracy. All parties and all interest groups must somehow be represented and be seen to be represented in a Government of National Reconstruction and National Unity.

Burnham Must Go! Yes, but that is only one side of the coin. There must be an alternative to replace the dictator. Let that alternative be a Government of National Unity. A clear alternative is a powerful political force. It gives our people something to mobilise around. It gives the outside world something to think about as the force of the future in dealing with Guyana. In the last days of the Burnham dictatorship, a Government of National Unity must be declared. It will unite races and classes; it will attract civilians and uniformed personnel; it will itself contribute to speeding up the end of the reign of King Kong. 

People's Power! No Dictator! 

All Power To The People!

Slavery and Underdevelopment

From Roots and Branches: current Directions in Slave Studies, 1979

In evaluating the two connected concepts of slavery and underdevelopment, the principal emphasis must necessarily be on underdevelopment. Slavery – as institution, as epoch, as mode of production – acquires its significance in this formulation from an awareness of the implications of inequality and dependence in the modern world. Failure to grasp the multiple manifestations of underdevelopment as a contemporary phenomenon inevitably leads to an obscuring of the historical issues. Multinational corporations, management contracts, blockages of technology transfers and the rise of new dependent class structures in the so-called Third World provide the logical starting point for historical enquiry. No doubt it is for this reason that within the field of African studies the most effective analyses of the development process have been authored by economists, cultural anthropologists and political scientists, while historians remained locked within time capsules. It is against the background of the considerable advance in theoretical and scientific work on underdevelopment that one might resume in a new way the already long-established debate on the role of slavery.

The notion of underdevelopment has emerged out of a series of debates. There have been varying empirical observations from territory to territory and varying emphases on the constituents of underdevelopment.¹⁰² Yet, all approaches to underdevelopment as a historical process have discerned the presence of given tendencies towards inequality, backwardness and dependence. These tendencies are operative at most times, although they might ultimately be transcended. It is, for instance, observable that inequality and dependence are self-reinforcing; but a decisive and obvious exception is provided by the transition from a peripheral role in colonial North America to the hegemonic position of the US within the capitalist/imperialist world. Today, the discussion continues – focusing on potentialities in Brazil, in India, and in other ‘semi-industrialized’ or ‘intermediary’ economies. In terms of modern monopoly capital, it is preferable to identify the forms of surplus realization and accumulation without prejudice to the possibility that ‘underdevelopment’ can give way to ‘dependent development’ in certain sectors of the periphery. These modifications in the approach to underdevelopment hardly apply to the period of slavery, since it predates monopoly capitalism. As a premise of this chapter, underdevelopment will be held to be an integral part of the development of capitalism on a world scale.¹⁰³ This is not necessarily self-evident, but the arguments to this effect have been made at such length elsewhere that they have to be taken as a given in this context.

The expanded reproduction of capital and the creation of a world-system involved the realization of surplus and its extraction from all regions within the ambit of capital. This meant not merely the extension of economic activity from one continent to another but also the juxtaposition of several different social formations and modes of production, articulated in such a way as to secure the dominance of capitalist relations as well as the transfer of value to the capitalist class in the core areas.¹⁰⁴ The search for greater precision in determining when capitalism became the dominant mode in Europe is beyond the present exercise and so too is an estimation of the impact of New World slavery on the emergence of capitalism in Europe. However, these questions do have relevance to the distinction between ‘commercial capital’ and ‘industrial capital’ and to that between commodity production by wage labour and commodity production by means other than wage labour. These latter issues are directly pertinent to the role of slavery in the history of underdevelopment in Africa and the Americas.

The slavery which existed in the Americas between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries coexisted with other modes of production in Europe, Africa and America. These were articulated to constitute a system with a capacity for further physical expansion and one which achieved inter alia the following:

1) the accumulation of capital;

2) new forms of combining and organizing capital;

3) qualitative leaps in the production of technology;

4) the development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and

5) a strengthening of the state and other basic social institutions.

Any exploration of the links between slavery and underdevelopment should seek to assess the contribution of slavery to the lop-sidedness of the above points. More than that, one needs to be more confident that the contribution by slavery was essential and unique at decisive junctures.

No scholars have expressed doubt as to the enormous significance of European overseas expansion and of Atlantic trade in particular. The stumbling blocks are to be found beyond these innocuous phrases when attempting to assign weight to slavery and the slave trade.

Africa still receives short shrift in conventional texts on the subject of Atlantic trade.¹⁰⁵ Yet, whenever the subject has been explored, it emerges that Africa was historically indispensable to the leading class forces in Europe. The feudal landed classes who participated in overseas expansion would have been unable to renew themselves (in the form of quasi-feudal plantations and land grants) and the nascent capitalist class needed the New World to redress the social balance in the Old. They did so by integrating the Americas into a network of financial and market relations dominated by themselves in the metropolitan centres. Africa also helped to extend the market for cheap European manufactures and to strengthen the techniques of guaranteeing capital and credit; but, of course, Africa’s key role was as supplier of labour for which there were no alternatives at the time.

Africa was structurally marginal to the emergent world system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In strict terms, one could not in fact say that African societies had become integrated into the world economy. Wallerstein argues persuasively as follows:

But why Africans as the new slaves? Because Europe needed a source of labor from a reasonably well-populated region that was accessible and relatively near the region of usage. But it had to be from a region which was outside its world-economy so that Europe could feel unconcerned about the economic consequences for the breeding region of wide-scale removal of manpower as slaves.¹⁰⁶

Only rarely did Africa supply values and labour directly to Europe; and for the most part its linkages were via the American continent. In the apt terms of Samir Amin, Africa functioned as a periphery of the American periphery.¹⁰⁷ As a periphery of a periphery, Africa was raided rather than cultivated. The politico-commercial nexus was rather fragile. European forts changed hands among the different nation states and sometimes fell under the sway of the local African rulers. The more vulnerable slave barracoons were in effect tolerated by African authorities; while both the European and African trading factors on the coast had to be allocated considerable amounts of commercial credit on mere trust. But the paradox of structural marginality and immense historical significance also applied with regard to the impact of the slave trade on Africa itself. Large parts of the continent supplied labour at a cost to itself which must be measured in terms of production and physical and social reproduction.

Unfortunately, there has been no appreciable accumulation of new data to clarify the question of the slave trade within African societies. Available statistical information was compiled and tabulated as a ‘Slave Trade Census’ by Philip Curtin. This was hailed in some quarters as indicating that prior estimates were grossly exaggerated and that consequently one must scale down considerably conceptions of the destructive effect of slaving on African society. The Curtin figures were of course oriented towards the Americas; and he indicated that they could not be held to be definitive for Africa.¹⁰⁸ Give or take their own imperfections, figures for Africans landed alive in the Americas or even embarked on slave ships offered no more than a framework in which further extrapolations are required to approximate numbers lost to African societies and to relate quantity to quality. This would have called for further regional and general studies to examine the mechanisms of slave procurement and the indirect consequences in the demographic, social, economic and political spheres. One is still left with the necessity to speculate, partly because of the insufficiency of studies and partly because certain data may well be irrecoverable.

Surmising or theorizing about the relationship of slaving to African development may be done plausibly by inferring from general principles or perversely by hiding behind the supposed lack of proof. Thus, Inikori contends that a much higher population loss must be inferred from projections having to do with the removal of Africans in their reproductive prime. He contends further that the diseconomies in the utilization of a basic factor of production (labour) meant that even a neo-classical theoretical approach should logically deduce that the slave trade applied a brake on African growth and development.¹⁰⁹ John Fage, on the other hand, emphasizes that there is no evidence to suggest that the operations of slaving caused marked devastation and loss of life; while with respect to the labour factor, he hypothesizes that

it is even conceivable that it may have been more profitable for some parts of this area [of West Africa] to have exported the equivalent of its natural growth of population rather than to have kept it at home.¹¹⁰

No indication is provided by Fage as to the relationship between labour and development or that between population densities and the social and natural environment.

I have argued elsewhere at some length with respect to the underdeveloping tendencies of the slave trade in Upper Guinea and in Africa as a whole.¹¹¹ Slavery in the Americas was of course ultimately responsible for whatever consequences flowed from the Atlantic slave trade in Africa; but what needs to be recognized is that slave exportation from Africa was not a system of production comparable to slavery in the New World or anywhere else in prior epochs. For Africa, the critical activity centred around the mechanisms for the reduction of human beings into captives and chattel. These mechanisms reduced or destroyed production, as has graphically been illustrated by the effects of slave procurement on the gold mining industry of the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century.¹¹² One frequently encounters African sayings that people, subjects or hands make for strength. With relatively low population densities and little labour-saving technology, it followed that labour rather than land was the scarce factor of reduction – to use the neo-classical formulation. In Marxist terms, the removal of human beings constituted the removal of the most important of the productive forces.

Sections of the current scholarly literature continue to affirm that what took place in Africa was ‘trade’ and that this trade ipso facto contained developmental potential.¹¹³ John Fage argues that ‘in the first place, the European slave traders were traders, who bought their slaves from coastal African merchants’.¹¹⁴ More recently, A.G. Hopkins has elaborated on this theme.¹¹⁵ By insisting that the exchange of human beings for commodities on the coast comprised trade, the analysis directs attention away from the mode of acquiring captives.¹¹⁶

It also saves the way for the assumption that trade always benefits both parties – that is to say, the concept of comparative advantage is accepted without question. Yet, all recent work on development on a world scale (of varying ideological perspectives) confirms that ‘unequal trade’ is entrenched as between developed and underdeveloped countries; and hence the near-universal appeal for a New International Economic Order. With regard to slavery, trade and market theories which have no power to explain the present are invoked to explain the past.

The search for comparative advantage deriving to Africa from the trade in slaves gives rise to arguments which are both trivial and contrived. For instance, Hopkins places great store on the African production of food for provisioning slave ships, as though the quantum would have been greater or the process more dynamic than in the case of food production to feed the same Africans for the duration of their lives in Africa. Under colonial rule, the underdeveloping tendencies persisted for as long as African production was designed primarily for an external market, while the withdrawal of manpower as migrant labour has been abundantly illustrated as serving to enhance backwardness and dependence in which labour is recruited.¹¹⁷ One of the principal differences between slave trading and colonialism is that the latter introduced the hegemony of capital within African societies. Slavery began the destruction of the coherence of African social formations without offering any alternatives. Colonialism actively pursued the destruction while counterposing a new coherence of capitalist structures in which eleven social formations and modes were reconstituted to confirm capitalist market relations and ultimately wage relations. Slavery began the incorporation of Africa into the periphery of the world-system without any notable intrusion of capitalist forms inside Africa itself.

The terms ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ are only rough approximations as descriptions of parts of the world economy at any given time. It is acknowledged that there were always gradations of centrality and importance, so that the American periphery of the slavery era falls into a category different from that of the African periphery. In the Americas, slavery undoubtedly constituted one of the modes of appropriation integral to the capitalist system; and for this reason, the discussion of slavery and underdevelopment should concentrate on the American sector. The exercise can usefully be prefaced by an indication of the essential and recurring features of (capitalist) underdevelopment expressed as laws of motion of the societies concerned. Clive Thomas offers invaluable insights when he identifies underdevelopment and dependence as basically involving:

the lack of an organic link between domestic resources and domestic demand; and

the divergence between domestic demand and the needs of the broad majority of the population.¹¹⁸

At this point I will focus on the example of Guyana with the intention of providing some specificity within the context of the broader study of trans-Atlantic slavery. The available literature on West Indian slave plantations has usually found little difficulty in fitting Guyana into the main generalizations covering the region. In Guyana, as elsewhere, sugar seemed inevitably to go hand in hand with slavery. For all practical purposes, the strip of coastland which circumscribed the slave plantations of Guyana in the eighteenth century was another small island where the master–slave relationship was almost exclusive. Production in Guyana was subject to the same colonial and market constraints as were characteristic of the West Indian islands.

Yet, Guyana did have its peculiarities. It was not a small island in which continuous sugar growing had exhausted the cultivable soils before or soon after slavery ended; nor was it debt-ridden and burdened by multiple mortgages by the turn of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the soils were not easily exhaustible and there was no question about the economic viability of the slave-based sugar industry on the eve of emancipation. The relatively large plantation units were well capitalized and, with the aid of compensation payments, the industry survived the first major market crisis of the equalization of UK sugar duties in 1846. Above all, Guyana had a substantial hinterland which set it off from the West Indian islands. There is every reason to investigate why a large continental area remained a colonial enclave during and after slavery.

Guyana had large areas of living space which were not occupied by slave plantations. In these thinly populated areas, the prior communal modes of the Amerindians persisted – albeit deformed under the pressure of European conquest and colonization. Slave plantations were established on the littoral from which the indigenous Amerindian population had been cleared. But the frontier was static and there was no expansion of capitalist relations or transplanted peoples into the hinterland. Among the characteristics of Guyanese underdevelopment one notes the incomplete inventory and exploitation of hinterland resources and the limited nature of new settlements. These features were marked during the heyday of slavery and are to be attributed to the political economy of slavery.

Slavery required secure conditions for the reproduction of slave labour after that labour had been introduced. The problem of runaways varied in acuteness depending mainly on the environment. The forested areas of Guyana offered conditions no less favourable to runaways than did Suriname and Brazil. In the period of Dutch ascendancy, intermingling between Amerindians and Africans produced the mixed ‘Boviander’ communities which were highly rebellious and constituted poles of attraction for runaways. This was the experience of the seventeenth century when small slave plantations were established on the middle and upper reaches of the Guyanese rivers. After the Dutch resolved upon coastal agriculture in the mid-eighteenth century, the Guyanese economy turned away from the hinterland. Even the necessary activity of slaves ‘aback’, such as cutting palm leaves for thatch, was considered dangerous since it facilitated escape.¹¹⁹ The enslavement of distant Amerindian ethnicities and the importation of Africans on a large scale were compatible with the maintenance of friendly relations between European slave owners and the neighbouring Amerindian communities. Indeed, the latter were then prevailed upon to undertake certain police functions in apprehending and returning escaped slaves. The choice of the coastlands for the development of slave plantations was premised upon ecological factors; but, having been made, this choice was reinforced by the demand of the slave system for security – to the prejudice of interior development.

Slavery arrived full-blown on the Guyanese coast, attracting both Dutch and English capital and settlers already in the Caribbean. There was no question of replacing independent small producers by slaves and the rise of such cultivators was inconceivable once the slave plantation held sway. The plantation system continually sought to exercise monopoly over land and labour, a feature which was perceptible only after slavery ended. Although Guyanese history is badly under-researched, it has recently been served by two scholarly texts which address themselves to the plantations after slavery. Both confirm the perverse role of the plantation owners in seeking to hold on to all cultivable land and in providing disincentives to any alternative economic ventures which would reduce planter dominance over the labour market.¹²⁰ Even a casual examination of the slavery era shows that these tendencies were most pronounced and that it was the slave-based plantation which was the principal stumbling block to hinterland development and to the balanced development of the economy.

The dependent slave economy failed to utilize resources which were readily at hand within the domestic environment, while relying on the import of goods which could have derived from these same resources. The buildings of the coast were made from wood, but for the most part that wood was not cut from the forests of Guyana. The same could be said for the furniture within the houses. It was not until the 1850s that the export of greenheart was established and several more decades passed before there was a local timber industry seeking to fulfill local demands. As late as 1902, the administration was unable to answer a query from the Colonial Office as to the existence of particular woods. On that occasion, the governor observed: ‘It is clearly unsatisfactory that we should be without complete and suitable specimens of all the woods of this Colony.’¹²¹

The spectacle of importing North American white pine into a forested colony was startling enough; but the policy towards the gold industry is more striking still. In spite of the El Dorado legend and the tremendous stimulus provided by the search for gold in the Americas, the gold industry in Guyana was pursued with a remarkable lack of vigour. African slaves and Bovianders had mined gold under the direction of the Dutch in the mid-eighteenth century. After the move to the coastal plantations, Dutch planters were apparently so fearful of any competition to their plantation labour supplies that they closed gold mining operations completely. Nothing was revived until exploration resumed in 1864; and in the 1880s Guyanese were still rediscovering that the territory had alluvial gold. At that point, the planter class was reluctant to release public funds to advance the gold industry. Their command over public policy and the public treasury was unchallenged during the epoch of slavery, and this ensured that slavery had profound effects in vitiating the links between production and resource base in the Guyanese situation.

Underdevelopment is a form of development – dependent and asymmetrical, but development nonetheless within the socio-historical context of the capitalist world system. The slave plantations of Guyana transformed the coastlands from thinly inhabited marshland to productive plantation zones. This was a development of resources hitherto under-developed by the sparse settlements of communally organized Amerindians who were farming, fishing and hunting. While contributing to the burgeoning growth of the capitalist cores, slave plantations imposed constraints on extending capitalist relations within Guyana itself. Discussion on the precise relationship of slavery to capitalism has advanced beyond the polarization of slavery as either capitalist or non-capitalist. It is self-evident that slavery stood in the way of the commoditization of labour and yet the internal hierarchical structure of the slave plantation was significantly influenced by capitalist forms in Europe. At all times, slavery remained independent on the markets, financial infrastructure and technology of the world capitalist centres.

Hindess and Hirst seek to abstract the essence of slavery in the Americas as follows:

It is a mode of production subordinated to the capitalist mode of production within the international division of labour and the world market created by capitalism. The conditions of reproduction of the Slave Mode of Production under these circumstances depend upon the capitalist system; upon world demand for the commodities it produces, competing regions and methods of production, alternative sources of investment, etc.¹²²

Paula Beiguelman simply and effectively defines modern (New World) slavery as ‘capitalist slavery’;¹²³ while Clive Thomas emphasizes another crucial dimension when he designates it as a ‘colonial slave mode of production’, given the fact that colonialism became ‘the mediatory structure through which the influences of emerging capitalism in Europe were transmitted’.¹²⁴ There is a wide area of agreement that slavery was an essential component of peripheral capitalism and that as such it could not develop enough internal momentum to ensure that its surpluses were used for the development of capitalism in a territory such as Guyana.

For sugar, there was only one market, which lay more often than not in a single metropolitan centre. The nature of surplus realization imposed a relentless dependency on the planter class vis-à-vis the metropoles. Dependency is a colonial characteristic; but it must be noted that slavery in the colonies was bound to be heavily dependent because the slave economy stood no chance of creating an internal market. The tied market was also the source of capital and credit. Commercial and financial institutions were never autonomous within Guyana. Technology, too, was externally derived and there was little room for innovation or even adaptation of the type which could be termed developmental. Improvements to factory technology were very slow in coming to Guyana, while field husbandry remained wedded to the utilization of heavy inputs of cheap labour. In his unique study of Cuban sugar technology, Manuel Moreno Fraginals makes it clear that the major force in inducing growth in eighteenth-century Cuba was more manpower and slavery – in contrast to metropolitan capitalism – which lacked the dynamic to constantly revolutionize production methods.¹²⁵

These remarks are also applicable to Guyana. There was a proliferation of artisan skills on the Guyanese slave plantations and there were slaves who mastered the boiling of the sugar; but, of course, they were not exposed to scientific principles or experimentation. Besides, sugar technology was industry-specific and confirmed the mono-cultural dimension of the economy. The slave planters pursued policies which made it impossible for other branches of economic activity to be established and they were able to create barriers to the free entry of capital into agriculture, industry and distribution.

The legal essence of slavery – ownership and legal coercion – and its political expression in a narrow planter-controlled state both contributed to holding back development in Guyana. The local state institutions under planter management were weak in their relation to the external world but they were powerful instruments in the hands of the masters for use against the slaves. The plantocracy was given free rein in its domestic policies. Without a domestic market and forms of petty commodity production, intermediary strata were extremely weak and closely tied to the planter class. Obviously, slavery stood in the way of the emergence of a wage-earning proletariat, but in addition it also inhibited the growth of other classes and strata associated with the maturation of capitalism in the metropoles.

Initially, reference was made to the necessity to premise the evaluation of slavery on contemporary underdevelopment. It is, however, just as important to pursue the historical enquiry into the post-slavery decades of the nineteenth century, where continuity and change gave meaning to previous trends.

For nearly 100 years, sugar planters bitterly resisted the creation of a free labour market as implied by emancipation. They succeeded (with metropolitan backing) in importing indentured labour from various sources and in having that labour force heavily subsidized from state revenues. Briefly in 1848 and then systematically from 1846, the planters organized large-scale state-aided immigration from India. Until the last indentureship terminated in 1921, planters maintained a strategic section of the labour force on fixed wages and contracts outside the labour market. Their efforts were directed against the emergence of a proletariat which could make industrial and social demands on the owners of capital. Inevitably, the free section of the labour force found its initiatives frustrated by the immense control which planters wielded over indentured workers and hence the ease with which those workers were deployed to break the unity of working-class struggle. Interestingly enough, planter resistance against the commoditization of labour was spearheaded in the late nineteenth century by plantation companies which were an integral part of the new monopoly forms of the imperialist era.

The post-slavery plantations also showed a determination to retain a monopoly over land and to keep agricultural land in particular from coming onto the market. The conditions of tenure of the ‘frontlands’ of the coastal strip were such that each estate had an automatic option on the ‘backlands’ of potential polder husbandry. Until these options were taken up, the land belonged to the Crown, as did the forests and savannahs of the interior. Planters moved quickly to raise the price at which Crown land could be sold to a prohibitive level and to restrict the terms under which it could be leased. These measures blocked non-plantation capitalist development of the land and they militated severely against the emergence of a peasantry.

Nevertheless, it is equally important to recognize that the planter monopoly over land and labour was breached in the nineteenth century and that growth and development registered in the post-slavery epoch were due precisely to the small ways in which that monopoly had been successfully challenged. Ex-slaves immediately assumed the role of a modern proletariat in presenting their own terms for wages and conditions of work. They did not make a great deal of headway in the face of state-aided indentured immigration, but their wage level was usually slightly higher than that of indentured bondsmen whose rate of one shilling per day remained unchanged from 1838 to 1921. African exslaves moved into a variety of occupations in the villages and towns and to some extent in the hinterland also. Their first objective was not to escape from estate employment, but they at least supplemented estate earnings by functioning part-time as artisans and in petty commodity self-employment of one sort or another. Ex-indentured Indians, Chinese and Madeirans took similar routes. One infers from all this the extraordinary importance of legal coercion in the slavery epoch. Recent research has firmly concluded that it was the plantation structure that was the key element in underdevelopment in Guyana.¹²⁶ This should be modified, and the emphasis shifted to the slave mode of production – colonial and capitalist – with which the plantation was first associated. The plantation remained a factor inducing backwardness mainly to the extent that legal extra-economic extraction of surplus did continue after slavery; but the new situation lacked the comprehensiveness of slavery and was slowly undermined by wage labour.

Former slaves and ex-indentured workers were able to express their own demands for goods and services. Their demand created an internal market for land and houses as well as for food, clothing and other consumer items. The immediate post-slavery activities of Africans in Guyana have long been a subject of scholarly attention, but misapprehensions still prevail. In general, the first postemancipation decade is presented as the era in which ex-slaves fled the plantations and set themselves up as peasants in the villages.¹²⁷ This simplifies and virtually inverts a reality in which Africans were still primarily sugar workers but had withdrawn their residence from estate housing and were making strident demands to support their conception of a tolerable standard of living – demands which included higher wages, education and access to cultivable land for those who wished to become full-time or part-time agricultural producers for local consumption. Distribution and other service sectors expanded because of these post-slavery trends, and intermediary classes began to make their presence felt.

However slow hinterland development may have been in the nineteenth century, it was only possible because of the energy released by emancipation. As wage earners and as petty entrepreneurs, former plantation workers were responsible for the growth of the timber and mining industries. When the middle strata acquired a small economic base outside the direct control of the plantation, they also started to challenge the political hegemony which restricted their further growth. A new Constitution in 1891 was the consequence of protracted ‘populist’ agitation on the part of all strata outside the planter class. Legislators were thereafter elected on a slightly widened franchise, and they were persuaded to remove some of the stumbling blocks towards the acquisition of Crown land, towards the establishment of a peasant-based rice industry and towards the development of a gold and diamond mining industry. Once more, the role of the state serves to emphasize the historical significance of the political exclusiveness which necessarily went along with slavery in Guyana and wherever slavery was not merely one institution but the basis of peripheral capitalism in any given territory.

Because New World slavery was a colonial phenomenon, it is sometimes difficult to separate the specific consequences of slavery from those which accrued from colonialism. The evidence on Guyana seems to support the conclusion that underdeveloping tendencies can uniquely be identified with slavery. First, when they relate to the central fact that labour was not a commodity and to the absence of efforts to achieve this – in contrast to primitive accumulation when indigenous pre-capitalist societies were colonized in Africa and Asia. And second, when the tendencies stem from the monopoly over land and labour in the hands of slave owners, who placed restraints on the development of other forms of private property. This again falls short of being a common feature of colonialism per se. The colonial state – in the history of capitalism – guaranteed slavery or migrant labour or peasant production, depending upon the mode of labour appropriation which evolved. But the colonial slave state was more monolithic than others because there were no competing class interests which had to be reconciled at the level of the state and because uncompromising authoritarianism was necessary to reproduce the relationship between master and slave.

The Struggle Goes On

Speech delivered in Georgetown, 1979

Brothers and sisters!

Many persons are coming forward and are bringing evidence and information about what is going on. They tell about their own particular experiences — as housewives, as taxi drivers and so on. They all come and give information with the necessary details, so that we can get a total picture of what the social, economic and political life is like in this country today.

And there is not a group without some fundamental grievance. What we would like to do in the Working People's Alliance is to share with you some analysis of the facts before us. We will concentrate on information as the basis of our analysis of where we are, and more important still, of where we are going. It is essential to carry out such a sober analysis. The idea being not simply to rally our supporters, but to convince all Guyanese, because we respect their intelligence. When you put sensible things before the Guyanese population, they will respond; and that is our task today.

I want to begin my reference to events by asking you to think about some of the more recent statements which have emerged from the ruling government since the murder of Father Darke — for that murder was an important political event in the event history of this country. Father Darke fell as the first martyr of the present stage of the Guyanese revolution. We must understand the significance of his murder. The W.P.A. has already publicly accused the P.N.C., as a party and as the government of this country, of complicity in that murder. And we have said that in any decent and civilised country, investigations would have proceeded to find out who were the real authors and instigators of the murder of Father Darke. (Someone shouts, "Rabbi!".) More than just the Rabbi. We must not be confused into thinking that the Rabbi is an independent entity! The Rabbi is not independent. The Rabbi himself is a stooge of other forces. We must identify his masters — his paymasters. We must not be afraid to say openly that the People's National Congress has been officially involved in thuggery. Eventually it had to lead to murder as it did on July the fourteenth. And what has occurred since convinces us that the government, having got itself in that murder, is now concentrating on the cover-up.

First they came out with ridiculous stories about 'scuffling' that went on; then they refused to tell the Guyanese and the international public that Father Darke was killed while doing his duty as a journalist.

They never published any photographs of July 14 in the Chronicle. That was not because the Chronicle photographer was not there. He was right there on the scene. He had the time and the opportunity to photograph us when we were brought on a ridiculous charge of arson, but they would not publish any photographs of the violence. Photographs do exist. If you go to 'Freedom House' in Robb Street, you will see the display of these photographs. The brother says the photographs should be carried to court. I agree, that's a logical statement. In a normal, civilised, healthy country, it would have gone to the courts. Instead, The Minister of Labour, Health and Housing, a Minister who actually had the temerity to turn up at the funeral of Father Darke, has now gone on record as fabricating yet another dimension to the lie — coming up with remarkable interpretation that the murder of Father Darke was another Catholic priest whose name he cannot pronounce.

The Chronicle of Lies

In one sense, we can dismiss this as nonsensical. In another sense, however, it is a reminder of to all of us how much contempt the government of this country has heaped upon the people of this country.

You have to be absolutely contemptuous of the people whom you are addressing to tell them such foolishness and expect them to believe. It is a total insult to anyone's intelligence to be given such an interpretation when most Guyanese today and certainly those of us who live in Georgetown, have by now gotten a clear picture of what happened on that day. But the ruling class is continually trying to tell us that whatever they say is the truth — no matter what you see, no matter what you experience. Even if you saw it with your own eyes and they print the opposite in the Chronicle, you are supposed to say to yourself, "I must have been dreaming when I thought I saw it that way." They continually insult our intelligence and our capacity to make independent decisions.

The Chronicle, of course as you realise, has sunk to a new low. Part of their recent propaganda has to do with the Bauxite strike, and it is not the first time that they have concocted propaganda about the bauxite strike. I believe that they work on the assumption that because Linden is separated from Georgetown, or Kwakwani is separated from Georgetown, they can tell us here in Georgetown and tell the people in Corentyne and Essequibo anything about Linden, and people will believe. But they publish so many contradictions in their own newspapers that even the most uninformed reader must come to the conclusion that they are reading a tissue of lies. A few days ago the Editorial comment on page one of the Chronicle proved itself a most remarkable document. I read it four or five times and still find it difficult to understand. In an editorial which dealt with the question of truth — they said they were searching for truth — they themselves wanted to know where to find it. One day we hear the strike is crumbling and the next day we hear the strike is firm. One day we hear how everybody turned out to work. Next day we understand it is only one man. And then they ask the question in the end, "Where is the truth amidst all of these confusing statements?"

The thing about that editorial is that the contradictory statements to which they refer are all published in their own newspaper. They were not taking these statements elsewhere — they were using the information from the Chronicle to write an editorial saying that "We ain't know wha is truth, because every day we does print a different story." And yet, spectators continue to buy it, and to read it, while the P.N.C. expect us to believe anything that they present to us. It is ultimately, as I said, apart from comedy, an insult to the Guyanese people, and we have to say that we will put an end to those in power who have such a low estimation of our abilities. Not only are they insulting us. but in the real sense, it seems as if they have taken leave of all sanity.

With Burnham, Lunacy Prevails

The W.P.A. has asked people to comment on this before, and I want to put it forward very seriously because when you accuse people of acting as if they were mad or acting as madmen or madwomen you're making a serious accusation. It should not be put forward lightly as though it were a mere joke, because in normal circumstances, the mentally ill person is just like any one else who is physically ill and we should be sympathetic. But when the ruling class is characterized by elements of insanity, it is another matter altogether, because those who are insane must be given proper medical treatment. They must be removed from normal processes of work while that treatment is going on. So we don't expect our rulers to be plagued by insanity, and yet it is difficult sometimes to find any explanation of their conduct which can be given in normal terms of an individual or individuals who are sane. Time and again you come up against the only possible conclusion — that we are ruled by people who have departed from their insanity in the literal sense of the word, because you have become insane when you have lost touch with reality. If you move down the road shadowboxing, someone might imagine you are a boxer practising. 'So you alright — you practising.' But if you do this every day and people realize that you are not really shadowboxing, 'you genuinely believe you fightin' somebody else, then they say you mad.' Because you have departed from reality; you've lost touch with reality. They seem to think that they are all-powerful.

Whoever accumulated power to themselves in such a way that they want to make every single decision in the state a personal decision, is being taken over by insanity, and it is not surprising, because no one man or handful of men even in their own interests should conduct the affairs of state as their personal business. So that when some sister 'have to get wuk as a washer-woman, he gat to intervene to decide whether or not she gon' get dat wuk.' And when so-and-so got to get a promotion or a scholarship, 'all a' dis thing gat to be done by certain telephones." Now when you reduce yourself to government by telephones, it means you've got to jump everytime the telephone rings. So they're very jumpy. More than that, they can't sleep because when you dedicate yourself to oppressing others, you cannot sleep. You have to spend all night planning how you will oppress the next day and then you've got to spend all the next day oppressing. You have no sleep day or night. So that is why this ruling class is being plagued now by symptoms of lunacy — losing touch with reality — they haven't a clue what is going on. They're living in a world of their own and they're trying to reduce the rest of us to the same condition of losing touch with reality.

What is it when the news media continually comes out to tell you that you did not see what you saw. They tell you that they saw what you didn't see — this is a way of making you lose touch with reality.

Brother and Sisters, I am aware of the preferred mode of transportation of King Kong. Nevertheless, we have to proceed with what is going on down there and we want to show that the ruling class has clearly lost touch with reality in a way that is absolutely frightening. Think about the story of the palace that they were about to build. In the midst of the most desperate economic crisis that has ever hit this nation, (let us forget for a moment who brought on the crisis, we know they brought it on, but forget that for a moment), any sane government would not think about building a palace. But you see King Kong had decided he wanted to build a palace to his ego, and a monument to his own stupidity — so that he could sit inside and be a monument inside a monument.

One of the brothers in the audience, when we were at Grove yesterday, suggested to us that what was required was to extend the zoo to take in the Residence and then we would have one of the most prized exhibits of any zoo in the world. People would come from all over the world and pay to see King Kong.

The Burnham Touch

When one is searching for words to describe what is going on, it is very difficult to find the appropriate terms. Personally as the days go by, I find it difficult to describe the reality around us. Although I would modestly say that my vocabulary is not limited, I find my choice of words limited to those which describe excrement, words which have to do with the faeces and defecation. One has to come down to speak of it in a way that reflects and captures the reality of the time and the mood of the people. The other evening, speaking at another site, I had to draw the analogy, to say what if there ever was such a thing called the Midas touch, which was the touch that made everything turn into gold, then we will have a new creation in this society — the Burnham touch where everything he touches turns to shit. One has to put it in these brutal terms because the situation in which we are is a brutal situation. One has to put it in even these crude terms because they have reduced us in such a way that even those terms do not fully capture reality. Whatever they touch, even if they touch a policeman in uniform — that is the Burnham touch. And that is why we speak to our brothers in uniform and we have to greet them roughly, not because we do not understand they are brothers and sisters in uniform, but because we have to point out to them the way in which they have been touched, and that they're covered with filth because of this regime. They continually have to go out and do all manner of dirty work.

Now I will give you a typical example: In recent searchings in the country, one of the persons who has just been searched in Linden is Brother Yearwood, better known as Brother Jomo. Now Jomo is an individual who, during the referendum, personally walked the whole distance from Linden to Georgetown as a mark of his own moral and political protest. Brother Jomo was in the crowd on Saturday July 14, when he was attacked by the Rabbi's men and very seriously injured his arm so that he lost control of certain fingers. It will take considerable time, if ever, for him to recover full control of those fingers — he was seriously wounded. And the moment he was let out of the hospital, his attackers were, of course, rushed through the traffic court at five o'clock in the afternoon to be released back into the street on merely nominal fines. So far as the law was concerned, as far as the particular magistrate NORMA JACKSON or JACKMAN or whatever her name is was concerned, they were free to go back on the streets. Another one who was touched. Let me complete the story about brother Jomo. Jomo went back to Linden after his attackers had been freed to go on the road, and the police turned up to search his house for arms and ammunition. I suppose the next thing that they will do is to arrest him and say, "We are charging you with unlawfully throwing yourself on a bayonet and causing the bayonet to get blood." That is the only thing left for them to do. Then the victim becomes a double and triple victim.

Black Skin, Fascist Mask

This is the society in which we live and we are not talking about 'long-time story'. We're talking about what's going on right now. And we have to expose this ruthlessly. One of the things that the regime does not like is to be exposed and uncovered. They have lived for these many years by putting on certain masks, by trying to fool the outside world — and even some Guyanese who live right here, with the mask of democratic government because they have a joke institution called a Parliament. In this mask they have something called a free press, free judiciary etc., but we know that when we lost the right to choose our own government in free elections, we lost all other rights. It is just a matter of time — they take when they want to take, they give when they want to give — until that time when the people intervene. Unmask them and show them that the power belongs to the people!

If you notice in the media, whether it be Action Line, or the New Nation, or the Chronicle, one of the things they're very hurt about is the so-called attacks on their leader. How come their leader can be attacked? King Kong is supposed to be beyond criticism. They have seriously promoted him as the ultimate in wisdom, all-knowing, all powerful, next to God — a man whose face adorns the exercise books of our children, and who is probably responsible for their high failure rate in the schools. Do not believe it was a mere accident that it was necessary to promote the cult of the personality around him, to make it appear as though all intelligence in Guyana was concentrated in one man and no intelligence was outside. All virtue, all political acumen, all commitment was concentrated in one man. It even reached the stage, (and you will check this out for yourself, you will check it out in terms of your experience and your memory of what has been going on) when it was popular in P.N.C. circles when something went wrong for the person to say, "Well, maybe you're right, it did go wrong, but the Comrade Leader didn't know anything about it." You have to put the Comrade Leader above all wrong doing, although in another context he himself has said that nothing goes on that he doesn't know about. But whenever something went wrong, it is claimed he didn't know about it. It is a way of isolating him from the people, putting him way above the people, and therefore it is equally important that in the context of our present struggle we unmask that attempt to wrap this individual up, romanticize him and present him to the Guyanese people as the 'ultimate.'

On the contrary, we will judge him on the basis of his performance, and on that basis we can we can say that he has been the initiator of a period of a total lack of democracy in this society; that he has supervised over bringing the society to the lowest ebb it has ever been in its history; that he has reduced Guyanese to a position where he can only say "we shame" wherever we go, "we shame". We have said this before, and one could always ask Guyanese as individuals to check this amongst themselves. They can check with their relatives abroad because we are a people who travel the world, and there is hardly anyone in touch without some relative or a friend in Canada, the United States, etc.

Write them and ask them how you felt as Guyanese at the time of the Jonestown tragedy. Many of them actually went around denying that they were Guyanese. Somebody would come up to you and say, 'tell us something about Jonestown. I know you're from Guyana", and the person would explain, "no, you get it wrong, is Ghana, you get it wrong".

Burnham's Shame Is On Our Backs!

Nobody want to own up to being Guyanese abroad. You had better not go to Trinidad or Surinam or any place and let it be known that you come from Guyana because the police will pick you up, all kinds of things will happen to you because you are Guyanese. In other words, although it is the shame of the ruling class, they have brought that shame upon us.

All Guyanese will have to bear that burden and therefore it is time that we make sure we throw that burden off our backs. And we have the capacity. It is only the ruling clique who imagine in their fantasy, in their lunacy and lack of touch with reality, that the people do not have the capacity.

The maximum leader finds or found in the past that the things he had to do was to surround himself with mediocrity, surround himself with persons of no stature; surround himself with persons unknown to the people, with persons who had compromised loyalty to the supreme leader. All of those tendencies we have to arrest, and before the time runs out on us we will have to try and work out some steps for the programme by which we will effect the removal of the P.N.C.; the removal of the illegal clique, or what is left of the P.N.C., because it is hardly a political party anymore.

Many a rank and file member of that party has quit its ranks, many who years ago honestly felt that they could work with that P.N.C. have now given up in disgust. And when you check it out, you find those former members of the P.N.C. or the Y.S.M. — they too know the Burnham touch because he put it on them. They realize with even greater confidence, with even greater certainty that the task at hand is the removal of that clique because they have firsthand experience of working in those frustrating conditions. And it is precisely at this point in time we have to mobilize all forces, not only those who were opponents yesterday, but those of our brothers and sisters who today can realize that they must join our ranks — and we will make way for them. We will welcome any Guyanese who recognizes what is going on and who is prepared to make progress on a different path. That is why our programme as a party involves actively the people of Guyana. Ideologically as Brother Roopnarine was explaining in all circumstances we will pursue a principled line for the building of genuine socialism.

The W.P.A. And Our Struggle

Let us make it clear that we are not asking persons to enter because of support for our ideology. We are asking for an active effort of the people people for national reconstruction and national unity on the basis of common sense, patriotism, decency and honesty. We are committed to building a Guyana for the future of the Guyanese children. We are prepared to enter into a dialogue with groups such as businessmen, the various professionals like lawyers and doctors, engineers and architects and so on. We are challenging them to take a stand now against what is going on at the political level. We are challenging them to recognize that the workers in the society, in all sectors have a common cause, to realize that they have to participate in a future government if they want to be able to claim that they are patriotic Guyanese who are prepared to contribute to the well-being of the nation.

These groups may well ask you what is our programme for them. Where do businessmen and professionals fit into our programme? And we can answer that question as best we can from our printed programme and our exchange with them verbally. There is more than that; it is not simply that we should promise any given group that after the revolution they will get certain rewards. We want to say to these groups, "participate in the process of change, participate in what is now the true Guyanese revolution, and by virtue of participating, you will not have to ask anybody what is the policy, because you will help in the making of that policy." That is why we are challenging everyone to get involved now because it is only by being involved now in the process of change at this very beginning that the individual goes around and says "We also have power, we're also involved in the process of power, we also can make decisions in our society of the national level, of the local level, within our communities, and so on."

The W.P.A. has been very careful, as those who know over the years will testify, to warn against demagogues. We have been careful to warn you against people who come to you and say, "we are the new deliverers, we are the new messiahs and the new prophets." this is because it is the old set who stressed precisely that, and delivered to you — to what? That which we know about. They delivered you into the Burnham touch. As a consequence, we are not simply saying that we will come forward and take hold of the reins. of power as they are, because we are not interestedin those trifles. We are saying that in the interests of Guyanese as a whole we have to build a new political system in the long run — one that offers stability, security and justice for all Guyanese; and if we are to do that and if we are to solve the immediate pressing problems of the economy, we have to have the participation of all, all sorts and types so that we can pool our collective wisdom and our collective intelligence. It is only a fool who believes that he or she alone has the wisdom to make decisions particularly in a situation as desperate as ours. One would have thought that anyone in this situation would be only too happy to get aid from somebody else, to hear other people participate in making the decisions in the present crisis. So we challenge the businessmen, we challenge the professionals to come forward and identify themselves with the idea of a government of national reconstruction and national unity.

On Being A Professional

I want to say some words in particular about the professionals who are a group who normally have a lot of respect in Guyanese society. And to be professional, really means that once you have chosen that field of work and you have certain standards which you would like to maintain as a professional, whether you be a future professional or whether is be what we traditionally call a 'trade'. As a professional, you try to follow professional standards. You try to follow standards that are correct and laid down. Even if you are an undertaker, you have professional standards. You don't just throw the body into the earth, because that would be against your professional standards which dictate that when you bury people you do so with a certain standard. So professionalism is an important element of social life because if people do not uphold proper professional standards, the entire society tends to collapse. What we find in Guyana today is that the conditions which prevail make it impossible for professionals to conduct their professional life was they would like. You are not allowed to do the job you want to do. Many persons are frustrated not just by the economic conditions but by lack of job satisfaction — a lack of an opportunity to develop a talent, to show their creativity, to advance in their chosen field of work and activity.

We just have to look around and we realize this at once. We talk about the media — which means in Guyana the newspaper and the radio. Now the persons who work there are journalists, and in the past we have had a tradition of fighting journalism in Guyana. More than one hundred years ago, there were independent fighting journalists in this country and we do have a tradition of fighting journalism. We had, even in the colonial days, journalists who fought to make journalism a genuine profession. Even the former editor of the Chronicle who resigned recently, in the old days, before he got the touch, would have been known as a journalist of repute. That is the tragedy of Guyanese life, the man went around touching so many people on their head and their shoulders that that was the end for them after he touched them. What we have to realise is that a profession such as journalism is a profession which in other parts of the world commands maximum respect. In the United States today, I am assured that the most popular course for enrollment in the universities is journalism because students have come to associate journalism with a capacity to speak and write. These journalists saw the exposure of those who planned the Vietnam War; they saw the exposure of Nixon — all that was done by journalists. And nowadays, in the U.S.A. and Canada and Britain, when a minister of government receives a 'phone call that such and such a journalist wants to see him,' they immediately get straight; they get under 'heavy manners' because when a journalist is talking to you, you have to be serious. But what have they reduced journalists to in this country? They're not even scribes because they cannot write down what is happening, so they're not even notetakers.

In the old days, the journalists used to move around with their notepads and write down notes, but now it is not even worthwhile writing down notes. The brothers will not be published if it is serious material — certainly not in the form in which the journalist intended. They cannon investigate independently. They cannot ascertain what facts are there. They cannot cross-question a Minister to hear what is the truth and what is not. They had the biggest news story in the history of journalism — JONESTOWN — bigger than any other single news story — and not a single Guyanese journalist could get into the act. Do we understand the extent to which they have been deprofessionalized? A professional journalist is living ina country which has the biggest news story in the profession on the history of journalism — not just in this country but in the world, and he never wrote a line about it because the nature of the system under which he lives has reduced him to such a low level! It is an abomination to the spirit, really. Wherever you turn (I'm just using one example) one can multiply this a thousand times. The Government of Guyana has reduced us to the lowest possible level, whether as workers, housewives, or professionals.

The People Make A Revolution!

There is no way out under the present system. So we have got to make up our minds what we are deciding now within the Working People's Alliance. It is not simply that the government 'do bad' and they must do better, it is not simply that they must do part good and part bad and they must remedy it. It is not that they must reform. It is not that they must hold another election and rig it all up. We 'finish' we all of that. THEY MUST GO! THE P.N.C. MUST GO! And they must go by any means necessary.

They have been accusing us of fermenting violence. They have even had the temerity to say that we are working up hit-lists — assassination lists in which the names of the Prime Minister and Hammy Green and so on appear. Someone who heard that was speaking to me the other day and said, "Well if all you really intend to to assassinate dem fellas, ah tell you something — you gat to join the queue." The guy was asserting his right. He was saying that people were standing up in line before us and that many Guyanese were standing in line. Their 'hit-list' then is ridiculous on many grounds and the people understand it to be ridiculous. We have said that we are not for assassination because politically and ideologically, an assassination is of no value to us. We do not want to replace one individual with another individual of the same type, whether it be for better or worse. I remember when the King Kong was ill, reportedly seriously ill. And many Guyanese, including Christian Guyanese, were praying for the best. And even in those days, we in the W.P.A. used to say that that would not solve any problems. We would not want to concentrate our analysis into thinking that if one man went, then the whole system would be cleaned up. What we wanted was to make the whole system go, and we repeat that now.

And we say further that we do not want those who have been responsible for crimes against Guyanese people assassinated; so if any of you brothers and sisters were thinking along these lines, we ask you to hold your hand because WE WANT THEM ALIVE! The time has come when they will have to face the Guyanese people and be brought into account for the many years they thought they were beyond any kind of control on the part of the people.

And there is another reason why assassination is not within our political textbook. And that is because assassination is the act of one man — any one man can assassinate a leader. But only the people can make a revolution! And the day has to come when the real revolution will begin — the revolution in the economy, the revolution in the society, the revolution to bring us back to a level where we can hold our heads up high. And it is that day that we need the participation of the people. As for the assassination — we are not worried about that. That is something that they are inventing because they have plans for assassination; because they have not only the Rabbi's squad as their death squad, but they have the assassins that they have been training at Low Creek. They have been training them to be snipers, training them to come amongst people with silent weapons while they guard the kingdom of the real assassins. These have been produced by the P.N.C. government — produced by the clique in power, because it is necessary for them to find some excuse in order for them to carry out their orders and their plans.

Violence: The Guyanese Struggle

They are now trying to distort the fact through their media. Let me tell you what the fascists did in Germany. They created the conditions, set up the situation, and then afterwards removed the 'undesirables'. So we want the people to understand that very clearly. It is not that we are afraid of the concept of violence because ultimately we would not let them bully us into thinking that violence is not the necessary political step under certain circumstances. If we felt that way we would not be able to understand what is going on in South Africa; we would not be able to understand what is going on in Zimbabwe. We would not be able to understand the reasons for the happenings in Grenada or Nicaragua.

In the Long run the people must free themselves by any means necessary and they will receive recruits from the people at the point at which violence is the only alternative; then violence becomes the supreme political weapon. And note that, the very famous Mahatma Gandhi, famous for his peacefulness, famous for peace and nonviolence, is a man who once explained the difference between nonviolence and cowardice. He said that nonviolence has its applications. But he once wrote, "I do believe that where there is a choice between violence and cowardice, I would advise violence." That is Mahatma Gandhi, a peace loving man.

So what I am trying to drive at is a certain understanding, not for the present but merely for the future. We are attempting to try and create at this stage, political change without violence. In fact, if the Guyanese people cannot see this possibility we are likely to arrive at political change with violence. This is not because I say so or the W.P.A. said so or anybody else said so. It is because that is the very nature of society and it is in the nature of man. Man pushed to this level will degenerate into a violent society, so we don't have to push violence. The violence underlines the society because we are ruled by a violent and illegal government and if they are not removed now there will be violence.

They have been guilty of the real violence. The very nature of this illegal regime is defined by violence — note the $70 million that they spend on the armed forces. That is the violence that we have to overcome. And if it is not removed at the present time by the combined will of the people, then unfortunately probably our children will be saddled with this oppression of the spirit. WE must show some responsibility even if it requires taking to arms to remove certain oppressive regimes. So right now we have our task — finding the way to unleash the energy of the people and removing the clique in power before they bring violence to bear on the vast majority of the population.

We would like to list several ways in which this process must proceed. Brother Roopnarine spoke about your physical presence at these gatherings. The W.P.A. considers this extremely important and it is obvious that the P.N.C. clique also thinks that this is important. People are already winning victories. Imagine, we have brought the P.N.C. back to the streets to hold public meetings. That is a victory in itself. Of course, the meetings will collapse and they will go back into their seats and will try other techniques that are much more fearful and repressive. But initially we can show them that we have come to the streets.

We have to let the police force know and we have to let the Police Commissioner know that we will insist on our rights under the constitution and our rights as human beings to meet and discuss at the highest level. We are not going to allow ourselves to be threatened, abused and kept off the streets. If they have to deal with only a handful of the Working People's Alliance, then they know that they can bring down a mass of police. But when they have to deal with the Guyanese people in thousands; when they have to deal with persons of all ages, both sexes, both major races, various occupations, professions and the like, they know it would not be possible to unleash the forces of repression because the very police and armed forces are drawn from amongst people.

They will not, therefore, in the circumstances of massive popular uprising, massive shows of our indignation and frustration against the government in power bring out real everyday policemen. They will bring out their thugs and dress them in uniform. But it is the right of the Guyanese people to assemble peacefully and this is a peaceful assembly. The only time the peace is broken is when they introduce their thug element and we must also drive those thug elements from off the streets. They will not come back once the people are resolved. They will not dare to come into this kind of gathering! So we have to make it clear that we will count ourselves here, we will draw strength from each other. We will look over our shoulders. We will see Africans and Indians standing side by side and we will know that this regime will not trick us back into another 1962.

On the Need to Organise The Working Class Into A Fighting Force

Then we have to go further, we are going to work out programmes in which we refuse to co-operate with the elements in power because people have it within their rights to find various ways of refusing to cooperate because the state requires your cooperation in order to survive. Just a while ago someone put to us a proposal which in fact is not a new proposal. He said when they close down the Mirror by refusing to offer newsprint, when they practise various forms of discrimination which do not allow freedom of expression and freedom in the press, one of the things that people can do is boycott their press. Boycott their newspaper. Now that this is the kind of suggestion coming from within the people themselves and if we sit down as we should to work out these proposals, we can find ways and means to stop this illegal government — to remove them. What we have to understand then is the need to develop programmes of our non cooperation. The W.P.A. has said on previous occasions, that individuals should set out to isolate the agents of the regime. Now this government has spent a great deal of money setting up what they call security forces. Apart from the uniformed security forces, they have all kinds of messengers and pimps who go around spying on other persons. They have all kinds of wire-tapping, mail-opening, and so on in this society. Quite apart from those who follow us around, we know that there are others reduced to that kind of job of professional Peeping Toms in order to report on other persons. This must surely be one of the most undignified ways in which you can ever live.

One day we caught one of them up at Linden and when we accosted him we said, "My friend, when you go home tonight and you have children and they ask you, "Daddy what were you doing all day?" You've got to say, "Well children, I was out spying on the W.P.A.."" That is the level to which one is reduced. You have to tell your children that you are a spy, and that this is your work — to go around spying on other people.

We believe that those who are paid and those who are not, are carrying out this activity of spying, harassing, telling tales, etc. on others. They should be isolated within the community and when you know them you must point them out. You must be able to say, "Look, one she is going there." or "Look, she there she is another one!" We must make sure that these people are brought out into the light of day and let us see whether they will operate when they know that the Guyanese people look down on such type of behavior.

We also say, and we know that the regime is very anxious about this point, that in the final analysis, the working people have one commodity which is all-powerful, and that is their own labour power. This is the ability to work or the ability to say "we will no longer work under these conditions." It is interesting to find that now is the time when the working class is under the greatest pressure. They therefore have to consider the strike weapon as a weapon in their own interest and which can help to perfect their living standards. The government is today terrified at the thought that workers should go on strike and they are raising all manner of bogies, bogies and jumbies to threaten people when they consider the possibilities of strikes. Every strike that has taken place under the P.N.C. has been called a political strike. It is nothing new to them to call a bauxite strike a political strike. What persons have to realise is whatever they call it, it does not matter, the working people have the moral right to withdraw their labour to alter the conditions under which they live. More than that, they have the right to say if we live under such oppressive conditions that even asking for increments from this present set of managers and political rulers is forbidden, then strike is not enough. If they say in order to get the increments we have to move the present rulers, then they have to make sure that the strike has teeth, they have to make sure that when they act to withdraw they do not bend until they get the results of their strike. They do not bend until they can see that the conditions are being altered in a way guarantees them that they as workers would share in the fruits of their labour and if it means that the program must go, and our interpretation is that it does mean that the government must go, then they must go.

It is critical that at this juncture that the Guyanese working people realize the need to seriously, soberly but effectively utilize their rights to strike. Earlier their tribute was made to the bauxite workers and we must repeat it. Kwakwani has been on strike for the longest while. They led the strike. Now the Linden workers are also on strike. We know that that means. We know that is the single largest industrial working class section in this country. we know that it represents a group which racially and politically was misled, confused and conned by the regime many years ago and what these workers are telling the rest of Guyana is that their eyes are completely opened and that they understand their own interest. Even the leadership of the Guyana Mine Workers' Union which was put there by the party has abandoned the party because even it has to realize, that when it comes to the interest of the workers, the P.N.C. has deceived us all, and the time has come to tell them that there is no line to be drawn between industrial and political action that will stop workers from going on strike on the basis of their own self interest.

So we have to salute the Linden workers and the Kwakwani workers. That is why we have asked for that contribution, and persons are still going around collecting and at the end we will announce what the Guyanese people assembled here have contributed at a W.P.A. meeting. Though we are a new political party, we will not use one cent of that money four our own purposes; we will hand it over to the bauxite workers.

There are many people who believe that a revolution is about blood. It is true that at times in a revolution blood flows. Very often innocent blood, very often the blood of the best amongst us. But one must be prepared to take a stand against evil and injustice in the society. We will have to realise that the time is now to make precisely that stand. For too long our nature has been overcome by fear; a justified fear. It is true that there is a fear of losing jobs; the fear of not getting promotion; the fear that your children might be victimised and so on. But there must be a point at which people realize, that even that fear has to be overcome. It has to be overcome by a new resolution because in the long run it is not simply that you and I are fighting in individual battles. Far more important is the sense in which we can fight in a collective battle. They can't fire everybody, they can't victimise everybody; on the contrary, they have given us the vast majority whom they have treated with contempt, whom they have insulted everyday for 14 or 15 years. When we act together, we will make this little paltry gang of petty dictators go on their way. And we will bring them to task. Because it is obvious that in the end they depend upon the power of the people.

The people put them in power, they now spit upon the people. The people put them into power in the sense that the P.N.C. used the electoral machinery to rig it. They got some support internally; they got some support outside from the C.I.A. Once they got that they parked the dictatorship in a one-way road; they took a one-way ticket to dictatorship, day by day reducing the rights we had. The supporters who helped put them into power back in the '60s, had no power by the time we reached the '70s — even the P.N.C. rank and file.

Our Youth & Our Liberation Struggle

The note on which I will end is the question of our youth. The tragedy of Guyanese youth, and it is areal tragedy, is that they have been shut out from politics. Even during the period of the Vietnam War, it was only the P.Y.O., the youth arm of the P.P.P. that used to make propaganda on that issue. Our youth could not even understand what was going on in as fundamental struggle as Vietnam. In the early days, it was the P.N.C. that shut them off from that. Our youth have been kept politically uneducated. This is as the time when in the world at large, young people are setting forth new political directions in every nation.

In South Africa for example, you have heard of the Soweto uprising. Do you believe that those were adults alone in Soweto? School children, 14, 15, and 16 years old made the Soweto revolution. And I remember certain incidents of that Soweto struggle. When the young people of Soweto were meeting, many of their elders came and said, "We do not want to rock the boat; the White man is too strong. Apartheid is too strong. Apartheid is too powerful. Take it easy." That is what the older people were telling the youngsters. And one person from Soweto, a young man who has now left and is now in Europe explained to me that there was a meeting in which they had to actually throw out their own parents — their own elders were thrown out of the meeting for standing in the way.

Now that was a serious development. When the elders have to be cursed by the younger people in a sense. And that is the real threat in this country today. That in the next generation some young people will ask the older people, "Daddy" or "Mummy", as the case might be, "Where were you when all that was going down?" And if you don't have an answer it's no better than a young slave asking an older slave why he or she never rebelled.

So we want our young people to understand that all over the world people are taking political steps. Out of that same Soweto uprising I saw a girl from that same Soweto uprising, a young woman fourteen years of age. She went to fight for Soweto with nothing in her hands except for a handful of stones to throw against the government with all its guns and tanks. She had one leg shot off. When she was introduced by a reporter and she was speaking to him she said, "Yes, my leg has been shot off. But I went there to fight for dignity and for rights and for justice when I had two legs. Now I will go there and I will hop about on one leg and I will continue to fight," That’s a fourteen year old sister.

I believe that all young people too would have that capacity. I believe that they're now beginning to be re-politicised, in other words, they're coming back to thinking out things for themselves because so long we were hiding from thinking. Hiding because we have certain fears that somebody else might get in or we might rock the boat and so on. But there is no boat left to rock. Just a sinking ship.

So we have to recognize today the importance of the elder persons who know of the 1960's, and those who know of 1953 too who will realise that we are at a new political awakening. And the younger persons will participate for the first time in trying to build a society of their own choice; a society where they will speak to themselves, because right now look around at the leadership of the P.N.C. They were not put there by any young person, they were not even put there by any person. Youngsters do not know them and they don't know the youngsters.

And they don't care, they insist that they are secure while our young people, in the very best years of their lives, when they have much physical and mental energy, are wasted. We can all allow your youth to build. When did we ever build? Our youth are under the most severe pressure. They are being kept in a state of ignorance and darkness. And we have to pay for that at the present moment of the struggle here in Guyana.

Brothers and sisters, we are coming to the end of our allotted time and and we are going to close the programme soon. There are a couple of announcements. But what we are saying to you, we say totally. The regime considers us a mob when we come together in big numbers. They call us a mob. We say, come together to draw strength from the traditions of resistance which have come down from the tradition of slavery and indentureship and anti-colonialism to the present time. And there is no force that has stopped it in any other part of the world. And there is no reason to imagine that this handful, because they control the military power, can hold the entire Guyanese people to ransom. But the change will come, and what it will emphasize is people's power. That will continually be our emphasis.

All power to the people!

Sign of the Times

Walter Rodney’s last speech. Georgetown, 1980

Brothers and Sisters, Hail! Hail! you have heard Brother Rupert Roopnaraine, you have seen him and you know that he is in fine form. We want to let you know that Brother Omawale is also here with us, and he is also in fine form. As the brother in the street would say, I man Ire, I man dread, which simply means that whatever pressures may be coming down we are determined to resist. Our will to struggle has not in any way been lessened; on the contrary, today we feel stronger than ever, we feel more confident than ever, not simply in our own ability and capacity, because that would be incorrect. We feel more confident because of the demonstrated ability and capacity of the people as a whole.

The People's Will to Struggle

There are many ways, some of them big and some of them small, in which our people continue to demonstrate their ability. I will give but two small examples. The first is to let you know that whatever happens our people manage to maintain their sense of humour as a barge, as a weapon, against the oppressor. And I can assure you that there is very little that the oppressor can do when you use your very humour and wit as a weapon against them. A simple example, you may have heard that a number of brothers and this sister in New Amsterdam were arrested and charged with putting up a poster. Well, the fact of the matter is simply this: that the individuals concerned were engaged in an activity and apparently when they looked at a certain structure, which was a public convenience recently built, someone decided that this public convenience should be immediately renamed Burnham's Palace. The enemy cannot cope with that.

I can to give you another kind of example, a much more serious example[.] It relates to our Brother Edward Dublin, because many of you in Georgetown would not know that brother, who was executed by a section of the police carrying out the orders of this regime, for political reasons. Now normally when a brother falls in the struggle, there are some political movements which try to suggest that he was a saint, that he was a perfect human being, that he was always an angel from the time of his birth. We have thought to suggest nothing of the kind. What we do know is that Brother Edward Dublin was what you would call a 'street force'[,] a brother who had been kicked out of the work force at Linden. And when you get kicked out of the work force the only force you can join is the street force. So the brother was on the street force, and what was important while he was hustling a living was that he managed to acquire a certain political awareness, decided that is [it] wasn't worth the while getting into petty crime and getting into conflict with the police. He decided that he would never again lend his services to be bought off as a mercenary and a thug by the regime. And because this brother took that stand, he became a threat to the PNC (Peoples National Congress) and the ruling class and their representatives in the Wismar/McKenzie area, and he was executed. What I am trying to say is simply this: The revolution is made by ordinary people, not by angels, made by people from all walks of life, and more particularly by the working class who are in the majority. And it is a sign of the times, a sign of the power of revolutionary transformation, when a street force member is developed into a fighting cadre in a political movement.

In many ways, Brother Rupert Roopnaraine, Brother Omawale and myself owe to you, the Guyanese people, a word of thanks. The Working People's Alliance as an organisation, all the members, owe to you a word of thanks for the immense solidarity and support which is developing, which continues to develop in this period. But while offering this word of thanks, we also want to make it clear that the solidarity which we have seen is itself an indication that people are struggling for their own rights. These are times, many times, when a people decide to identify with a cause, not simply because they feel the individual, the group or the cause requires support, but because they calculate, correctly, that that is the method by which they would advance their own interest at a particular point in time. This is not new in the history of this country. I was reflecting myself, through a certain familiarity with some aspects of our own history in this country, and I recalled the names of two Guyanese: they may not be known to you but I will leave their names in your memory after tonight.

One of them was named John Rohlehr, and for those of you who know this country that is the name that tends to be associated with Berbice -so he came from Berbice. He was a Black Guyanese, and in the late 1880's John Rohlehr returned to this country as a qualified medical practitioner, the first Black Guyanese to demand to be employed by the colonial medical service. As you would expect, he was discriminated against, and initially the colonial medical service said no, they would not employ Dr. John Rohlehr. The mass of the people of this country, from one end to another, carried out a tremendous campaign on his behalf until, ultimately, special enabling legislation had to be passed to allow him to practice. But what was important is that when they struggled for and behind John Rohlehr, they were also struggling for their own right. And it is a good thing that subsequently he also participated in the movement for the provision of dispensaries and hospitals for the mass of poor people in this country.

And I want to recall in the same breath the name of a Guyanese to the name of Louis DeSouza; you needn't know where he came from to recognise that he was a Guyanese of Portuguese origin, one of the first Portuguese to take some active part in the public life of this country. Louis DeSouza was a barrister, a fearless barrister, who went into the colonial courts and challenged corruption; and because he challenged corruption from the top down, beginning with the Chief Justice, he was brought up on a charge of contempt of court and he was jailed. And when DeSouza was jailed, and even when his trial was going on, the mass of the people of Georgetown invaded the courtroom. They had a hard time holding back the ordinary people because they could get over the hurdle that he was Portuguese, this didn't bother them even though there were many Portuguese businessmen whom they might consider as exploiters. Nevertheless, the ordinary people of this country rallied behind Louis DeSouza; he was one of the most popular men in this country because when he challenged the corruption of the Chief Justice and the courts he was really striking a blow which they themselves wished to strike. And by the same token, today, when we speak of human rights and the violation of rights of particular individuals, we are really expressing the question of the basic right of the majority of the people.

The New Constitution And The Self Proclaimed Monarch

The Working People's Alliance has prepared a certain display, a certain visual display, which is an attempt to make clear the connection between one's constitutional rights and [the] fact of whether one eats or does not eat, or the factor indeed of whether one drinks or does not drink milk. And this poster which we have is a reference to Shahabadeen's Constitution, which we sometimes call Shahab's Constitution, better known as the Paramount Constitution. But what our brothers and sisters did was to prepare a poster which shows you a new trade mark: Shahab's Ideal Evaporated Constitution. And this constitution is a special constitution in which human rights are subtracted. Now you see the point of the poster is to let you understand that no milk and no constitution are not two separate things. You can't walk down the road grumbling about no milk and forget the fact that we do not have a free constitution; the two things are part and parcel of the same. That is the message!

Brother Roopnaraine spoke about the way in which the rulers in this country have a capacity to impose the worse hardship on people and then turn around and make it appear as through they are doing you a tremendous favour; so that when they ban milk they ask you to clap your hands and cheer that they have achieved the world's first Guyana banned milk way. This is the kind of absurdities to which they reduce us. On another occasion I had cause to refer to the same phenomenon in very crude language; I did so deliberately and I have to repeat it because the situation warrants the crudity. I said that what the rulers do is to shit and piss on us, and they tell us we must call it perfume.

I want to speak a while about the constitution which you have not seen; Brother Eusi Kwayana mentioned that fact. Now that in itself is one of the most important facts that you must consider. What is a constitution, apart from being a piece of paper? It is a document which supposedly represents the fundamental law of the country; everything else which is in the statute bodies and the law books depend upon the constitution. That is the basis of our entire legal life.

Of course the constitution has some confusing language, suggesting that they are responsible to parliament. But how can the assistant to the president be responsible to anybody but the President? If you are his assistant you are responsible to him, that is the nature of our constitution. And how does a man come to wield these tremendous powers? Supposing we were to say, the constitution argues that if he was to win a majority, a large majority of popular support, he should enjoy these powers. But that is not so. First of all King Kong himself will never face the electorate. The constitution simply says that the present Prime Minister, on the day appointed for the new constitution to come into effect, shall assume office as President as though he was elected thereto, as though he were elected. So the reign shall begin automatically. For some future president it is said that his party should win an election on the List Proportional System. And if his party wins, then his party can automatically make him president. But there is no provision for this very powerful, this immensely powerful individual, to be chosen directly by the Guyanese people. Now there are two questions we have to consider; the first is that it is clearly a trick to put the particular individual into power. But the second question, which is equally important, is that no individual, whoever, should have that kind of power and should be put into office in such a trivial way. No individual should have absolute power in any State; and it really is a situation of absolute power which the constitution is seeking to give the so-called Executive President.

I will give a final illustration of that power by letting you know how the people can get rid of this President, or how they can try to get rid of the reign of the President. There is a very complicated procedure by which those in power in the parliament wish to try and remove the President because they think he has committed some gross criminal act or something of the sort, they have to go through a number of stages to see if they can remove him. First of all, a notice has to be given to the Speaker, signed by no less than one-half of all the elected members of the assembly, alleging that the President has committed a violation of the constitution. And then, after a number of other steps, this motion is put to the National Assembly, but the National Assembly cannot debate it immediately. They will go ahead to appoint the Chancellor – I have to go over this rather quickly – but ultimately the Chancellor will appoint a tribunal who will consider whether the allegations are justified. And if this tribunal, which will be headed by some mythical independent Chancellor of the Judiciary – just like the Jonestown Inquiry was headed by a mythically independent Chancellor of the Judiciary who subsequently said he did not want to hear anything about Jonestown – we will have a tribunal which will decide whether it is justified that this President should be removed. And if the tribunal, by chance, should say that he should be removed they can go back to the Assembly and the Assembly can vote, by a three quarters majority, that the President should be removed. Now if all of this happens, the President will have to resign within three days, unless, and this is it, he must resign in three days unless before that time he himself dissolves the parliament.

Now, in any nation in the world the process of making a constitution is one of the most fundamental political processes. You have to engage in debate, you have to engage in discussion, you have to present the facts, you have to bring in all manner of groups to ensure that it is clearly a public discussion. Yet we can go ahead in this country, the rulers are threatening to impose a constitution on us and the vast majority of the Guyanese people have not even set eyes on this document. Now do you imagine they have things in there that they want you to see? That constitution is filled with a lot of perfume. It talks about the powers of the President. You know this constitution is mainly about a president; a man is going to become something called an Executive President. It is supposed to be a Republican Constitution. But in the New Nation, which is the organ of the People's National Congress (it is not a paper that is dedicated to bringing down the government), in the New Nation, in referring to the President under the new constitution they spoke about the reign of the President. In case you didn't get the point, the word reign is only associated with a monarchy, only a King reigns, a President is supposed to have a term of office. But a King reigns and the New Nation spoke about the reign of the King. That could only be one king they were speaking about – the well known Kong.

Accountability of the President Under the New Constitution

I want to let you know, by reading, some of the provisions which King Kong has in his perfumed constitution. One of the things that he guarantees is what is called immunity. This is what the constitution says: "The holder of the office of President shall not be personally answerable to any courts for the performance of the functions of his office, or for any act done in the performance of those functions. And no proceedings, whether criminal or civil, shall be instituted against him in his personal capacity in respect thereto, either during his term of office or thereafter." Now that, in fact, is not as outrageous as it sounds, because it is qualified by saying, first that he shall not be prosecuted for acts done in his official capacity; and one can always argue that if he legally carried out certain duties then he should not be prosecuted. But then we go on to find that they speak about his personal functions, and they say as follows: "Whilst any person holds or performs the function of the office of president, no criminal proceedings shall be instituted or continued against him in respect of anything done, or omitted to be done by him, in his private capacity. And no criminal proceedings shall be instituted or continued in respect of which relief is claimed against him for anything done or omitted to be done in his private capacity." This is the King speaking. If we were to go through that document and read it provision by provision, concentrating attention on the functions of the one who will reign, we will see, for example, that he has tremendous power of appointment. He appoints the Prime Minister, he appoints people called Vice-Ministers, he appoints Vice-Presidents and then Cabinet Ministers, he even appoints the leaders of the opposition. He appoints all of the legal hierarchy, and of course once he has appointed these individuals, the constitution actually describes them as his assistants (the Cabinet Ministers) because their function is to assist the president who will sit in the cabinet with them and over them.

Charges of Treason

You need to try and get hold of this document, you have to struggle to try and understand the kind of language it has; but it is promising you slavery, and therefore you have to try and understand so that you will be in a better position to resist that slavery. I do not want to go on very long on the constitution, because of course as always our time is limited. I want to take notice of an issue which is of major importance at the present time, and has already been referred to by most of the speakers, and that is the so-called treason charges which have been laid against certain Guyanese in the last day or two. We in the Working People's Alliance wish to draw your attention to the fact that the treason charges represent a new level in the attack against the Guyanese people. It is what you call an escalation of the attack against the Guyanese people. The attack has already been going on. The attack has taken many forms, one of which I will draw to your attention and that is the numerous searches which have taken place in the country of persons' private houses. Those people who live their own quiet lives may not realise that dozens upon dozens of persons in this community are being searched everyday, without a police warrant. The police simply have to turn up and say they are acting under the National Security Act, and they can search your premises at any time, day or night, without a warrant.

There is a special section of the police force - the death squad -which is primarily responsible for these searches and harassments. They have searched dozens upon dozens of people, some of them have been leading members of our party, some have not been. We have been searched personally, our families have been searched, rank and file members have been searched, their friends have been searched. There has been a literal frenzy of searching in this country, and in many ways it demonstrates that in spite of the so-called power of the King, there is a tremendous fear in the camp of the enemy. Because you have to be inspired by fear to be searching under every rock and blade of grass looking for some opposition. Clearly you believe that there is opposition under every blade of grass, under every rock, so you are searching. In this country we have the fantastic record of the Prime Minister's personal physician having been searched. This is what is known as paranoid behaviour. That means he has a preoccupation, his mind is benefit [beset] with the idea that someone is going to do for him. Why else should he be preoccupied with such searches. Now in spite of the fact that they have searched for arms and ammunition, they have generally found no arms and no ammunition. They have therefore concentrated on picking up Day Clean, and therefore, by their own definition, they have acclaimed Day Clean as a weapon in the struggle. Whenever they see our literature they pick it up under the National Security Act governing arms and ammunition; so they are performing a service in telling you what to look for. More than that, with searching through papers, it is clear that the new strategy is to try and find out who are members of our party, who are members of groups politically opposed to the government; and in the process they are proceeding to identify any political opponent as someone who is committing treason. What is their objective in so doing? Their hope is to intimidate, their hope is to threaten. Their hope is to frighten persons by tell them, if you oppose this government, we will lock you up, we will beat you up[,] we will torture you, and ultimately we will hang you. That is the threat.

But many men and many women have faced that threat in this country and in the history of world society, and it has never been able to beat the spirit of mankind, it has never been able to beat back humanity. And I do not believe that it is remotely possible in this country that the enemies of the people can extinguish and put out the humanity which resides in us. On the contrary, we have to recognise that the treason charges, because are they are a new acceleration of violence against the people, must be met by a new determination to fight.

We want to remind you of the last time, to the depth of my knowledge, that there was a treason trial in this country, that was when a certain Reverend John Smith, in the latter days of slavery, in the 1820's was charged for treason and he was executed in this country. Why did they charge John Smith? He was a missionary; he went to preach to the slaves. Now he did not tell the slaves to revolt, that is quite incorrect. Many of the missionaries were telling the slaves to be peaceful, but in a certain sense the missionaries were revolutionary because they were preaching to the slaves and telling them that they were men and that they had souls. And if you were a slave, and you were a man and you had a soul, then in their own framework you couldn't be an animal, you couldn't be a thing. So that was revolutionary for that time. By speaking of freedom in the midst of slavery, John Smith was charged for treason, and you can draw the parallel. To speak of freedom in these days, the enemies of the people of Guyana are threatening to charge us with treason. But as Brother Clive (Thomas) has already said, it will not be enough to charge seven persons; they will have to charge the entire Guyanese population. If they say it is treason to plot to overthrow the King, then we are all treasonable. You see, treason is an offence that was born in the period of feudal laws, when kings were defending their power, and treason really meant treason against the person of the king. You see how the ruling class in this country come back time and time again to the notion that they are royalty. They call themselves the Kabaka, a feudal, backward word. They talk about their reign, now they talk about treason. But we understand where they are going, what they do not understand is where we are going.

There are times when treason becomes a matter of concern. In modern times, during warfare, it is permissible to ensure that citizens of a country at war do not betray their own country, and in that context it is correct to speak about treason. But while we are in peace-times, where is the treason? What is our army fighting against? Remember when we had a military levy, they said it was because we had border problems we needed to strengthen the army to protect our borders. But now you know that the army is permanently stationed in the coastland, to be brought to bear against the struggle of the sugar workers, to be brought to exercise right here at Bourda and around the city, against the people. Where is the war? The only war is war on the part of the vast majority of the working people and their allies against a handful of exploiters and would be exploiters. And there is no room for treason in that war; we will be loyal to our own roots, we will be loyal to our own interests, and as I said, we will then all have to be deemed to have committed treason. More than that, and this is the final point, I wonder how on earth the government is so sensitive, so backward and stupid, that they do not understand the simplest thing. In the modern world when you speak of treason, the first country that comes to mind is South Africa; it is the only country in recent times that has conducted treason trials. The government of Guyana has put itself into the select company of the government of apartheid South Africa. This is the level of their doltishness, that they do not understand that the term treason is associating them with the most reprehensible regime in the world, the apartheid regime of South Africa. As of now Guyana and South Africa can walk hand in hand and tell the world that they are brutalising citizens to bring them up on the so-called charge of treason against the State.

You see, when you raise the charge of treason in the international community, the first question that people ask is not whether individuals were planning to overthrow the government or not; they don't ask that question. The first question they ask is what kind of government is it that will possibly cause persons to want to think of violently overthrowing it? That is the first question they ask. They ask how did that government come into power; they ask what kind of constitution they have; who respects the constitution. Does the government respect the constitution; do the citizens have rights; can the government be removed from power constitutionally? Those are the kinds of questions they ask. Now if we were to put ourselves in the position of the rulers of this country, I think we would be very ashamed to open up a hornet's nest and forget about ‘62 and ‘63 and ‘73 and ‘78; we shouldn't want people to be reminded of that, or the world; so we shouldn't want them to ask how we got to power. We shouldn't want them to ask how the people can remove us, because they themselves have already said that they will not be moved. There is no constitutional and legal way according to them, and they will never be moved. And they raise the question of treason; imagine, they raise the question of people training in arms, they say what six or seven persons are now being charged for is some conspiracy to train and carry out training. When we know that dozens and dozens, PNC thugs, House of Israel thugs, have been training illegally at Lou Creek all week.

When we know that weapons are circulating illegally, quite apart from the armed forces, these weapons are placed in the hands of political thugs. A government which does that is not a government which can afford to present itself to public scrutiny. But when they have dared to bring some brothers up on a charge of treason, they have brought themselves into international scrutiny, and the Working People's Alliance pledges that it will move to ensure that in every possible way and every international forum, this issue of treason trial in this country will receive the maximum exposure. (Applause) We do not have to have our members involved necessarily, we are certain whatever issues are raised around that treason trial we will have to be fundamentally sure about the rights and freedoms and aspirations of the Guyanese people. Whether the individuals conspired or did not conspire is another issue. I do not know whether they conspired to overthrow Chroudrimootoo on the West Coast. I do not know what it is supposed to be about, but what we know is that when the government has to move in that way they are not just speaking to people on the West Coast, they are speaking to people in Essequibo and in Wismar and on the East Bank and in the Black Bush Polder. And they are telling these people two things at the same time, they are saying if you rebel we are going to lock you up and beat you and torture you, and we are going to hang you. That is the threat. But you know they are say[ing] something else which they weren't intending to say; they are saying to the people of Blackbush: "Look, yuh know all you are not the only people opposed to us, they got some more on the West Coast". They are so concerned[,] so pissed off, that they are entering into conspiracy. And they the Blackbush people go say: "But boy is not we alone in this thing". You understand, the government is spreading the message by their very doltishness. They are spreading the word that rebellion and resistance is now spreading through the length and breadth of this country.

They dare to speak about arms; they who supervised Jonestown dare to speak about who possess arms. We say we must combine a number of things. We have to combine the struggle against the unjust constitution - we have to combine the struggle to defend the standard of living; we have to combine the struggle for whatever elements of freedom and the press and the judiciary and so on might barely remain in this community. All of these things have to be combined into a single struggle. The enemy depends upon dividing us to lessen the power of the people. So as long as we understand that we can move forward. Never mind the brother who lies there [reference to someone in the crowd], he lies there and he is not in power. Let us concern ourselves with those who are behaving in that way and who are in power over us; he is in an unfortunate position.

The Struggle Must Continue

We want to make clear that we have to continue in whatever way possible, the struggle for certain rights. We are here tonight and in a sense it is a vindication, an affirmation of our right to have a public consultation. And yet you have to bear in mind that it is a right that you cannot afford to step back from. You have to continue to press for the right, because do not forget that in the past there were times when the meetings would have been disallowed; there were times when the times of the meetings have been changed. In other words, the government has really been trying to say that we do not have a right to meet here, we only have a privilege which the King can give us at the abundance of his power and mercy. And we have to continue to insist that it is ours by right. There is another reason why they give it. They give it, at times, to test the climate. If, for example, there were ten of us present here, the regime would be tremendously pleased. If we had a crowd that equalled their crowd they would be tremendously pleased; ten of us here would be just what they would like. The brother seems to have got that point, even he. Now on the other hand, when you turn out in your numbers the regime must recognize that they are after all facing the wrath of the people as a whole; and we have to remind them of that in many different ways.

So we say tonight in conclusion, bearing in mind the resolution which has already been passed, that we must understand that we are still locked in struggle, and we are reaffirming our commitment to struggle, and we are saying we are ready to proceed, we are moving forward, we are not intimidated, we recognize the pressures but we are far from bending under those pressures.

Peoples Power!!

PEOPLES POWER

NO DICTATOR!!!

Notes

[←1]

For an exception to this pattern, see New World Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1.

[←2]

This article is largely based on the newspaper reports for the period, as contained in the Chronicle and the Argosy.

[←3]

Pendle: A History of Latin America.

[←4]

Chandra Jayawardena: Conflict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plantation (London 1963) p. 12.

[←5]

R.T. Smith: British Guiana suggests that this was because the East Indian "middle class" was not accepted by the already established coloured and Portuguese "middle class".

[←6]

R.T. Smith: British Guiana.

[←7]

Peter Ruhomon: Centennary History of the East Indians of British Guiana (Georgetown 1938) – He gives the credit for founding the Association to his brother, Joseph Ruhomon, who started an East Indian Association in Berbice in 1916. However, this Association was virtually defunct in 1919, when the Georgetown effort was made.

[←8]

* MY FOOTNOTE: James Crosby, who died in 1880, had been such a powerful 'Protector of Immigrants', and for so long a time (some three decades), that colonial government offices concerned with Indian indentured workers had come to be known by his name.

[←9]

A.R. Webber: Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana (Georgetown 1931).

[←10]

I have been unable to ascertain the exact terms of the concession, but the matter was by no means satisfactorily dealt with, and further measures had to be taken in more recent times.

[←11]

* Editor’s Note: This was delivered at the University of the West Indies (UWI)

[←12]

* “Events have shown that the only social sector capable of being aware of the reality of imperialist domination is the petty bourgeoisie”. Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea.

[←13]

J.K. Nyerere, 'Ujamaa - the Basis of African Socialism' (1962), in Freedom and Unity, p. 162. The opening sentences make this point – “Socialism, like democracy, is an attitude of mind .... The purpose of this paper is to examine that attitude. It is not intended to define the institutions which may be required to embody it in modern society.”

[←14]

Significantly, Tanzanians or foreign observers who have been left behind by the trend towards heightened socialist understanding seldom pay attention to more recent pronouncements of Mwalimu Nyerere, but consider 'Ujamaa - the Basis of African Socialism' as a final blueprint.

[←15]

F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1962).

[←16]

See, e.g., Samir Amin, The Class Struggle in Africa (1964) African Research Group (Reprint 1970) and Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, (Panaf Publications, 1970).

[←17]

Leopold Senghor, Nationhood and the African Road to Socialism (1960), see English translation, 1962, p. 78. The most relevant passage reads as follows: 'Our plan will include three sectors: a socialised sector - agriculture; a mixed sector - public utilities and companies with mixed economy; and a free sector. The latter - banks, commerce, industry - will itself be oriented towards the objects of the Plan and, to a certain extent, controlled... The mixed sector will preferably comprise transport and energy - within the limits of our possibilities, of course. As for agriculture, we are fortunate that it has traditionally been socialistic, because of the communal nature of Negro African Society.['] Glimpses of an interesting critique of this position by the Ugandan, John Kakonge, are to be found in B. Onuoha, Elements of African Socialism, (1964), pp. 89-92. At that time, Kakonge espoused Marxist ideas.

[←18]

The Arusha Declaration and TANU's Policy on Socialism and Self-Reliance, TANU, (1967), p. 13.

[←19]

J.K. Nyerere, 'Socialism and Rural Development' (1967), in Freedom and Socialism, especially pp. 342-344.

[←20]

The one available text which juxtaposes Marx and Proudhon is unfortunately rather unenlightening. It is J. Hampton Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism, (1964). See pp. 110-101 for Proudhon's view of the petty producer.

[←21]

See Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution: a History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, English translation, 1960. See especially the chapter on N.G. Chernyshevsky.

[←22]

Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence(Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow). (Translation of Russian edition of 1953), Engels to Kablukova, August 1880 and Marx to Zasulich, March 1881.

[←23]

Op. cit., Engels to Danielson, October 1893.

[←24]

Op. cit., Marx to Zasulich, March 1881.

[←25]

Op. cit., Marx to the editorial board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877.

[←26]

I.A. Potekhin cites an instance to the effect, which arose out of a discussion of 'African Socialism'. See William Friedland and Carl G. Rosberg (eds), African Socialism, (1964). In all fairness to Leopold Senghor, it should be noted that his hostility to Scientific Socialism is seldom ill-informed, and he shows his awareness of points of clarification such as those raised in the letters cited under notes 12 and 13.

[←27]

Selected Correspondence, Engels to Danielson, March 1892.

[←28]

V.I. Lenin, Collected Works(Foreign Languages Publishing House and Progress Publisher Moscow), Vol. 3, (1963). The Development of Capitalism in Russia was written in 1905 as an elaboration of one of Lenin's first analyses of political economy, entitled 'New Economic Development in Peasant Life'. For this, see Vol. 1.

[←29]

Selected Correspondence, Engels to Plekhanov, (February 1895).

[←30]

Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations (ed. E. Hobsbawm) and Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes, Sur le 'Mode de Production Asiatique', (Editions Sociales, Paris, 1969).

[←31]

C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, 'Recherches sur un Mode de Production Afriquain', La Pensee (April 1968) and I. Varga, 'African Mode of Production: a Research Hypothesis', Universities of East Africa Social Science Conference, (Dar es Salaam, December 1970).

[←32]

The term is best avoided, owing to the perjorative implications attached to the word 'primitive' by anthropologists of the colonial period.

[←33]

J.K. Nyerere, 'Socialism and Rural Development', loc. cit., p. 339.

[←34]

A. Cabral, 'The Weapon of Theory' (1966) in Revolution in Guinea, p. 79.

[←35]

I. Potekhin, 'On African Socialism: A Soviet View', in Friedland and Rosberg, op. cit.

[←36]

For an overview of Africa's part in the international capitalist system, see the author's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, (1972.) It should be noted that if capitalism is seen as a total system it would not even be necessary to advance an argument concerning skipping of stages.

[←37]

Selected Works, Vol. 2 and Selected Correspondence, Engels to C. Schmidt and J. Bloch, 1890. These are two of the clear instances.

[←38]

Tom Mboya, 'African Socialism' in Friedland and Rosberg, op. cit.

[←39]

See Issa G. Shivji, 'Tanzania the Silent Class Struggle', (1970).

[←40]

The variety of socio-economic formations is stressed in 'Socialism and Rural Development'.

[←41]

For a brazen piece of imperialist 'academic' writing along these lines, see W.A. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam, (1966), Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Public Policy.

[←42]

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, (Moscow, 1962), p. 591.

[←43]

Challenor Morse, 'The Economics of African Socialism', in Friedland and Rosberg.

[←44]

In 1971, Swedish comrades reprinted 'The Silent Class Struggle' by Issa Shivji, along with comments by Saul, Rodney and Szentes. In an appended paragraph, it is stated provocatively that 'the ideology of African Socialism - be it developed by Tom Mboya, Leopold Sedar Senghor or Julius Nyerere - denies the existence of classes in African societies'. See Zenit Reprint 6, Stockholm.

[←45]

It could be said that the formulation of 'Education for Self-Reliance' had roots in the inadequacy of the colonial education system, with particular reference to the bottleneck at the secondary school level. The coup in Uganda sparked off the Mwongozo, while most recently the problem of foreign exchange led to restrictions on the importation of private cars, which politically is a curb on conspicuous consumption by the petty bourgeoisie.

[←46]

With reference to the Russian situation, both Marx and Lenin had the highest regard for Chernyshevky. In Cuba, Jose Marti falls into the same category, while Fidel Castro himself is a living example of transition from honest committed bourgeois idealism to Scientific Socialism.

[←47]

The mid-1920s saw the work of the Phelps–Stokes Commission as well as other enquiries by the British and French which gave direction to what was until then an ad hoc missionary effort with marginal state participation.

[←48]

For one of the best discussions on the Indigenous African educational systems, see A. Moumouni, Education in Africa (André Deutsch, 1968).

[←49]

The perception was based on colours, patterns and shape of horns. See, for example, A.T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (Longmans, Green & Co, 1929) pp. 573, 574. And for a broader and more modern survey of the same theme, see W. Allan, The African Husbandman (Oliver & Boyd, 1967).

[←50]

See, for example, A. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (Oxford University Press, 1939) for a comment to this effect on the Bemba.

[←51]

Dr Kofi Busia relates how his secondary schooling at Mfantsipim in Cape Coast made him a stranger when he returned home to Asante after a few years. See K.A. Busia, Purposeful Education for Africa (Mouton, 1964).

[←52]

This point is excellently brought out in J.K. Nyere, Education for Self-Reliance (Tanzania Government Printer, 1967).

[←53]

See J.B. Bolibaugh, ‘French Educational Strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa’, (PhD dissertation, Stanford.) Therefore, the combined function of the educational policy was to secure both service and loyalty. This was specifically stated in a colonial administrative ordinance of 1899 for Madagascar; which read as follows: ‘To make the young Malagasy faithful and obedient subjects of France, and to offer an education the character of which would be industrial, agricultural, and commercial so as to insure that settlers and various public services of the colony can meet their personnel requirements.’ Quoted in H. Kitchen (ed.), The Educated African: A Country-by-Country Survey of Educational Development in Africa, compiled by Ruth Sloan Associates, (Praeger, 1962), p. 252.

[←54]

See, for example, F. Bourret, Ghana, The Road to Independence, 1919–1957 (Stanford University Press, 1960).

[←55]

Bolibaugh, ‘French Educational Strategies’.

[←56]

One study that documents the blatantly inferior education in settler areas is L. James, Racialism and Education: Aspects of Development in former British Central Africa (Brown & Kroger, 1965).

[←57]

This is discussed in Ghana’s case by D. Austin, The Politics of Ghana, 1946–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1964).

[←58]

See, for example, J.S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (University of California Press, 1958).

[←59]

John Gaffar La Guerre, "Cyril Lionel Robert James, 1901-- An Annotated Bibliography" (Mimeograph, University of the West Indies, 1970).

[←60]

This has since been republished as C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Drum and Spear Press, 1961). (All page references in the text are taken from this second edition.)

[←61]

A major monograph has still to make its appearance on this subject. However, see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (1964) and Robert Rotberg and Ali Mazrui (eds.), Black Protest (1970).

[←62]

George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African (1958).

[←63]

An example of the first category is Jack Woddis, Africa, the Roots of Revolution. In the second category, see Ioan Davies, African Trade Unions (1966).

[←64]

One of the more revealing volumes is that by Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope (second edition, 1964).

[←65]

This applies for instance to R. Oliver and J.D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, which is still widely in use.

[←66]

This view was first strongly advocated by colonial historians such as Lady Margery Perham, and is now being pursued by a younger generation of neo-colonial European scholars.

[←67]

See, e.g. Sir Charles Jeffries, Transfer of Power: Problems of the Passage to Self-Government (1960).

[←68]

James himself is tireless in giving credit to the others who were involved, such as DuBois, Padmore, Wallace Johnson and Makonnen. See, e.g., his discourse, "From DuBois to Fanon" (1970).

[←69]

A number of explanations have been offered for this phenomenon. One of the recent reviews is one by Locksley Emundson, "Caribbean National-Building and the Internationalization of Race: Issues and Perspectives," in Wendell Bell and Walter Freeman (eds.), Ethnicity and Nation-Building (Sage Publishers, 1972).

[←70]

C.L.R. James, "Colonialism and National Liberation in Africa: The Gold Coast Revolution" in Norman Miller and Roderick Aya, National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World (The Free Press, 1971), page 106.

[←71]

Ibid. page 129.

[←72]

See, e.g. Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer, Ghana, the End of an Illusion – a book with many insights but one marred by oversimplification of the class situation in Ghana.

[←73]

The T.A.N.U. Guidelines(T.A.N.U., Dar es Salaam, 1971).

[←74]

For an expanded discussion along these lines, see Walter Rodney, "Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism," in African Review, Volume 1, No. 4 (1972).

[←75]

Under the rubric of ‘African Education’, writers almost invariably refer to Western education in colonial Africa, and ignore the African antecedents. An outstanding exception is the work of Abdou Moumini, Education in Africa (André Deutsch, 1968).

[←76]

‘Secret societies’ and other similar confraternities in pre-colonial Africa quite consciously established goals for the society as a whole and provided instruction to that end. The Ekine dancing society of Kalabari in the Niger Delta is a case in point. Its role was to integrate newcomers into Kalabari by stimulating them to master the local (Ijo) language, customs and worldview. Consequently, although Kalabari was heterogeneous in its ethnic composition, its population had a common cultural identity. See E.J. Algoa, ‘The Niger Delta States and their Neighbours, 1600–1800’ in J.F.A Ajayi and M. Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa: Volume One (Colombia University Press, 1972) and J.F.A. Ajayi and R. Horton, ‘From Fishing Village to City-State: A Social History of New Calabar’, in M. Douglas and P.M. Kaberry (eds.), Man in Africa (Barnes & Noble, 1969).

[←77]

J.B. Bolibaugh, French Educational Strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa, (University Microfilms, 1968), p. 125. Bolibaugh’s study is one of the best expositions of colonial educational policy, especially since the French were prone to explain their objectives more fully than the British.

[←78]

This passing reference to the nature of pre-colonial African societies is not intended to convey the impression of a static situation. Non-antagonistic contradictions could and did transform themselves into antagonistic ones. However, the transition took place slowly, and made itself manifest only in a few places.

[←79]

See, for example, K.A. Busia, Purposeful Education in Africa (Humanities Press, 1964), p. 7: ‘At the end of my first year at school … I went home for the Christmas vacation. I had not been home for four years, and on that visit, I became painfully aware of my isolation. I understood our community far less than boys of my own age who had never been to school.’

[←80]

A great deal of quantitative data is to be found in H. Kitchen (ed.), The Educated African (Praeger, 1962).

[←81]

In December 1971, when Tanzania celebrated ten years of independence, it was their proud boast that they had achieved far more in those years than the British and German colonists had before. Several former officials of the British colonial regime were invited to test the validity of this claim. With specific reference to schooling, some data are available in J. Cameron and W.A. Dodd, Society, Schools and Progress in Tanzania (Pergamon, 1970).

[←82]

A few letters, both critical and supportive of the institution, have appeared in the national press. No formal study of the National Service has been published.

[←83]

Mwalimu means ‘master teacher’.

[←84]

TANU are the initials for the political party headed by President Julius Nyerere – the Tanzanian African National Union.

[←85]

Cameron and Dodd are among those who are confused and confusing on this point. See also A.R. Thompson, ‘Ideas Underlying British Colonial Education in Tanganyika’, in I. Reanick (ed.), Tanzania: Revolution by Education (Humanities Press, 1970).

[←86]

Mzee is a title of respect.

[←87]

C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Drum and Spear Press, 1969), p. 133.

[←88]

P. Foster, ‘Education for Self-Reliance: A Critical Evaluation’, in Richard Jolly (ed.), Education in Africa: Research and Action (International Publication Services, 1970).

[←89]

A transcript of Paulo Freire’s discussions in Dar es Salaam in 1971 is held by the Institute of Adult Education of the University of Dar es Salaam. The same is in progress with respect to his 1972 visit. This quotation is also cited in a review of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed by M.J. Mbilinyi, in The African Review, April 1972.

[←90]

Strictly speaking, the African petty bourgeoisie during this early stage of the independence struggle constituted a stratum or fraction within the international bourgeoisie. One of the most interesting features of post-independence politics is the manner in which the petty bourgeoisie has increased its dimensions, its economic base and its autonomy by use of the state machinery.

[←91]

Some of the evidence attesting to this point can be listed as follows: a) Sekou Toure attempted to move immediately into political units broader than Guinea - comprising at various times Senegal, Mali and Ghana. b) Nkrumah secured the insertion of Pan-Africanist clauses in the Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1960, which was framed "in the confident expectation of an early surrender of sovereignty to a union of African states and territories". c) Nyerere was prepared to postpone the independence of Tanganyika and subordinate this objective to that of an independent East African Federation, "rather than take the risk of perpetuating the balkanization of East Africa" -- See Freedom and Unity (1966), p. 90.

[←92]

The allusions are firstly to William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks (London 1967) and secondly to several international news highlights of 1973/74. Specifically on the Lonrho issue, what is worth noting is that the embarrassment was caused to British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, because of the revelations of the blatant way in which Lonrho directors flouted profit controls at a time when the Conservative government was trying to convince the working class to accept wage freezes.

[←93]

See, e.g. Samir Amin, Neo-Colonialism in West Africa (Penguin, 1973).

[←94]

For a discussion on this point, see Philip Reno, The Ordeal of British Guiana (Monthly Review, 1964).

[←95]

See Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (Panaf, 1970) and Revolutionary Path (Panaf, 1973).

[←96]

Owusu Saudaki to Courtland Cox, 16. Oct. 1973 and Courtland Cox to Owusu Saudaki, 18 Oct. 1973.

[←97]

The Call was originally issued by the Temporary Secretariat in Washington and is now available from P.O. Box 9351 Dar-es-Salaam.

[←98]

* Macbeth: "By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes"

[←99]

Black progressives are becoming increasingly aware of the political and ideological dimensions of the question of utilizing technology for human well-being. See, e.g. S.E. Anderson, "Science, Technology and Black Liberation", The Black Scholar, March 1974.

[←100]

Information on the "Congress of Asians" can be obtained from: Dai San Kikaku; 4th floor, Omotemachi Building; 4-8-19, Akasaka; Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan.

[←101]

The author has been associated with the Congress preparations in the capacity of 'sponsor' - a vaguely-defined term which includes persons of many differing political persuasions.

[←102]

Useful bibliographies are to be found in the following: F. Bonilla and R. Girlng (eds.), Structures of Dependency (Stanford University, 1973); N. Girvan (ed.), ‘Dependence in the Old World and the New’, Social and Economic Studies, Special issue, 1973; P. Gutkind and I. Wallerstein, The Political Economy of Contemporary Africa (Sage Publications, 1976).

[←103]

S. Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, 2 vols., (Monthly Review Press, 1974), see, pp. 19, 29 – ‘The underdeveloped economy is a piece of a single machine, the capitalist world economy. It occupies a particular place in this worldwide system, and fulfills definite functions in it … The theory of underdevelopment and development can only be the theory of the accumulation of capital on a world scale.’

[←104]

I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Academic Press, 1974), see especially pp. 86, 87.

[←105]

See, for example, R. Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Cornell University Press, 1973).

[←106]

Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, p. 89.

[←107]

S. Amin, ‘Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa – Origins and Contemporary Forms’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 10(4), 1972.

[←108]

P. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Wisconsin University Press, 1969), p. 271.

[←109]

J. Inikori, Working Paper on the Slave Trade, UNESCO seminar, Haiti, 1978.

[←110]

J. Fage, A History of West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 84–9.

[←111]

W. Rodney, West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade (East African Publishing House, 1967); A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1540-1900 (Clarendon Press, 1970); How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle L’Ouverture Publications Tanzania Publishing House, 1972).

[←112]

W. Rodney, ‘Gold Coast’, Transactions of the Ghana Historical Society, 10, 1969.

[←113]

This academic position is well represented. See, for example, D. Neumark, Foreign Trade and Economic Development in Africa: A Historical Perspective (1964) and A.M. Kamarck, The Economics of African Development (1967).

[←114]

J. Fage, History of West Africa, p. 89 (emphasis in original).

[←115]

A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (Longmans, 1973).

[←116]

Marx devoted some attention to this point when he wrote: ‘The slave market maintains its supply of the commodity labour power by war, piracy, etc., and this rapine is not prompted by the process of circulation, but by the actual appropriation of the labour-power of others by direct physical compulsion.’ See Capital, Vol. II (Progress Publishers, 1956) p. 483.

[←117]

For a recent contribution, see J. Kombo Moyana, ‘The Political Economy of the Migrant Labour System’, African Development, 1(1), 1976.

[←118]

C. Thomas, Dependence and Transformation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism, (Monthly Review Press, 1974), p. 59.

[←119]

On the problem of runaways in Guyana, see A. Thompson, Some Problems Concerning Slave Desertion in Guyana, c. 1750–1814 (Cave Hill, 1976).

[←120]

A.H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves, The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (Yale University Press, 1972); and J.R. Mandle, The Plantation Economy: Population and Economic Change in Guyana, 1838–1960 (Temple University Press, 1973).

[←121]

Public Record Office, CO111, Governor’s Despatch, 12 August 1902.

[←122]

B. Hindess and P. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (Routledge & Kagan Paul, 1975), p. 161.

[←123]

P. Beiguelman, ‘The Destruction of Modern Slavery: A Theorectical Issue’, Review, 2(1), 1978.

[←124]

C. Thomas, From Foreign Plantations to State Farming: A Study of Change in the Dominant Crop of a Backward Agrarian System (International Labour Organisation, 1979).

[←125]

M.N. Fraginals, The Sugarmill: The Socio-economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba (Monthly Review Press, 1976), see especially p. 18.

[←126]

See Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves; and Mandle, The Plantation Economy.

[←127]

The basic work in this school of interpretation is R. Farley, ‘The Rise of the Peasantry in British Guiana’, Social and Economic Studies, 2, 1954; and his ‘Aspects of Economic History of British Guiana, 1781–1852’, PhD, University of London, 1956.