Lead article
June 2000

The challenge of Africa in crisis

by Lou Turner

Today Africa faces crises-military, political, economic, and human-more daunting than any since the imperialist carving up of the continent began in 1884, the year following the death of Karl Marx. Though Marx didn't live to see the new stage of capitalist globalization that would come to be called "imperialism," nor its human wastage of sub-Saharan Africa, nothing is more concrete today for understanding the depth of Africa's crisis than his scathing critique of the rapaciousness of capitalist accumulation, and the philosophy of human liberation he developed as a pathway from under it.

Whether we take such so-called "natural" disasters as the devastating famine in the Sahel in which an estimated 24,000 people die daily, or the epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS crisis in which two-thirds of the 34 million people in the world living with the infection are dying in sub-Saharan Africa, or the two cyclones that wracked Mozambique with the heaviest flooding of the Limpopo and Save rivers in living memory, there is nothing "natural" about Africa's crises.

On the contrary, a man-made array of crises stretches from the Ethiopia-Eritrea "border war" in the Horn of Africa west to the Foday Sankoh/RUF (Revolutionary [sic] United Front), Charles Taylor-sponsored war of atrocities and diamonds in Sierra Leone, southward to Jonas Savimbi/UNITA's counter-revolutionary war of attrition in Angola, northeast to "Africa's world war" in Congo-Kinshasa, and finally southeast to Robert Mugabe's opportunistic nurturing of Zimbabwe's neocolonial contradictions over land and the legacy of white settler colonialism.

SOUTH AFRICA: CLASS STRUGGLE, THE PARTY, AND MARX

Neither the political-military crises nor the so-called natural ones which reveal the violent contradictions now tearing Black Africa asunder constitute all there is to Africa's contradictory reality. Instead, our point of departure must be the contradictory process by which the creativity of the African masses also develops in such ongoing class struggles as the one unfolding in Africa's most industrially developed country-South Africa.

The African National Congress (ANC) came to power at the head of a tripartite alliance with the South African Communist Party, and the massive 2 million member COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions). Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's first post-Mandela president, has pressed ahead with his government's Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) program while retrenching deeper into neoliberalism through privatization of public assets like utilities and government agencies, and boosting further the country's huge 32% unemployment rate.

In addition to this government-sponsored unemployment, the working class also faces the deadly impact of HIV/AIDS: as much as 20% of the country's skilled workforce will be infected with the retrovirus over the next decade. Yet President Mbeki heads the most scandalous state response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. With the highest HIV rate of any country in the world, and a projected 3.5 million person mortality rate over the next decade, Mbeki's government has drastically cut funding to fight HIV/AIDS, including the state's refusal to pay for the use of the anti-AIDS inhibitor drug AZT by pregnant women to prevent the spread of the infection to their babies because of his "personal" view that the drug is too toxic. All of this flows from the widely discredited view Mbeki holds that the HIV infection does not cause AIDS!

However, the reason the South African working class's May 10 general strike which saw over 4 million workers stay away from their jobs must be our point of departure is not only because it's easy to forget that revolution in permanence (and not Mbeki's and the national bourgeoisie's rhetoric of a capitalist "African renaissance") remains the ongoing impulse of the African masses in the midst of seemingly endless crises. It is also because most of the contradictions we see across the continent as a result of the unfinished nature of the African revolutions are found in this most technologically developed land in Africa.

Take so seemingly different hot spots as the Ethiopia-Eritrea war and the "land war" in Zimbabwe. It is certainly true that these stem from the historical contradictions of the legacy of imperialist colonialism. Nevertheless the immediate forms that they take are organized around the specific class impulses of the ruling party elites, namely, the fear that their failure to deal with their internal economic and political crises will result in the African masses voting out or severely weakening their ruling party power through even such limited means as national elections.

Whether it's Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party, or the ruling EPRDF in Ethiopia, fear of even a modest decrease in their monolithic state power impels them onto the cynical path of fomenting armed conflicts to divert the masses' attention from their governmental incompetence and corruption.

Exactly 40 years ago Frantz Fanon warned precisely of this phenomenon. "In reality," Fanon wrote in his field notes published posthumously in TOWARD THE AFRICAN REVOLUTION, "the colonized states that reached independence by the political path seem to have no other concern than to find themselves a real battlefield with wounds and destruction. It is clear, however, that this psychological explanation, which appeals to a hypothetical need for release of pent-up aggressiveness, does not satisfy us. We must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world (not for nothing did the French bourgeoisie of 1789 put Europe to fire and sword)."

ZIMBABWE AND MOZAMBIQUE: THE LAND, THE ECONOMY, AND THE PARTY

In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's ZANU-PF faced the most serious vote of confidence in the 20 years of its single party rule when it lost the constitutional referendum in February. Corruption and its incompetent handling of the economy have made the party more unpopular than ever, as well as Mugabe's intervention in the conflict in Congo-Kinshasa. Until the war veterans' land seizures, the Western-favored MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) stood to make serious inroads into ZANU-PF state power in the May, now rescheduled June, national elections.

Which is why it is crucial to recognize that while the Zimbabwean masses have every legitimate claim to the rich white-owned farm lands that were brutally expropriated from them under colonialism and that have been occupied since March, Mugabe's opportunistic support for the land seizures (after his government fumbled a chance three years ago to confiscate 1,000 white-owned farms under eminent domain) is really aimed at silencing his AFRICAN political opposition who were poised to unseat his party. The MDC could win 50-70 seats in the 150-seat parliament in the upcoming national elections.

The occupation of 1,000 of Zimbabwe's 6,500 commercial farms by disenfranchised veterans of the country's liberation war reveals just how important Zimbabwe's $32 billion a year agricultural industry is to the country's most powerful political interests. Principal among them are the white farmers organized under the Commercial Farmers' Union, Mugabe's ZANU-PF government, and the farm laborers' union affiliated with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions whose general secretary, Morgan Tsvangirai also heads the opposition MDC.

The agreement of white farmers to allow the African squatters represented by the ZANU-PF-affiliated War Veterans Association to remain on the land permits ZANU-PF to establish political bases on the farms to counter the broad organizational support the MDC enjoys among farm laborers.

The current political crisis in Zimbabwe is unmistakably a class struggle. It is no less so in neighboring Mozambique though submerged by torrential floods. Once the poorest country in the world, Mozambique over the last several years has had the fastest growing economy in the world with a 11% growth rate.

Though it's true that the floods may have washed it all away, disclosing just how difficult it is sustain economic development in poor Third World countries, it is no less true that it is because IMF/World Bank and Anglo/American investment and debt relief have divided the country north and south. Most aid and investment is concentrated around the capital Maputo in the south, the region of the flooding, while neglecting the center and north of the country.

Mozambique, moreover, is evidence of a new ecological danger created by capitalist globalization. Disastrous climatological changes, ranging from drought and famine to floods, further exacerbate the uneven development fostered by international finance institutions.

Zimbabwe's land crisis and Mozambique's "natural disaster" have repercussions for the rest of the continent. South Africa's land commission has nearly 64,000 land claims before it, of which only 4,000 have been addressed. The Pan Africanist Congress has warned that unless the process of redistributing vast, wealthy farmlands is speeded up, land seizures will commence in South Africa.

AFRICA'S RENDEZVOUS WITH MARX?

Capitalist development of African agricultural lands has not succeeded in lifting the African masses out of the most wretched poverty, despite the small but growing stratum of Black commercial farm owners who have enriched themselves as much at the expense of poor farm laborers as white farmowners have. Nonetheless it is true that Africa's traditional peasant farming, much of it done by women, is among the most productive sectors of the agricultural economy, despite government and foreign subsidies going to big commercial farms.

According to Mwesiga Baregu, research coordinator of the Harare-based Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies, "The land question in southern African...arises from the forceful and often brutal evictions of indigenous people from fertile lands by colonial settlers. The fundamental goal of the liberation struggles, therefore, was to redress this historical wrong.

"But the liberation wars in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa were largely terminated by peaceful settlements which were essentially a counter-strategy to armed victories.... Thus suing for peace or 'constructive engagement' in southern Africa was meant to establish a controlled regional transition and, if that was not possible, at least a negotiated one. A 'revolutionary transition' had to be avoided at all costs.... The nearly century-old struggle for justice in South Africa (understood as repossession of stolen land) was 'transformed' into a crusade for peace and democracy. Form took the place of essence and content."

There was however a historical moment during this second wave of the African revolutions in which revolutionary intellectuals resisted foisting theoretical responsibility for the making the revolution onto the shoulders of the African masses, and took Fanon's advice to once again turn to Marx. One such African Marxist, S. Mshonga, in addressing the land question in Namibia, also had to wrestle with the contradictory legacy of post-Marx Marxism, beginning with Engels.

On the one hand, Mshonga quotes Engels as an uncritical advocate of the classical customary communal land tenure system, based the extended family system, as the pathway to creating a modern socialist society. According to Engels, "It is not only possible but inescapable that the countries which have managed to make a start on capitalist production and where tribal institutions or relics of them are still intact, will be able to use these relics of communal ownership and the corresponding popular customs as powerful means of considerably shortening their advance to socialist society...."

On the other hand, however, Mshonga takes a second critical look at the contradictions within the land question in the theoretical context in which Marx posed it in the last years of his life, as European imperialism was poised to makes its mad scramble for Africa.

Marx's insight into the duality in the traditional Russian commune, the MIR, led Mshonga to critically consider the duality in Africa's communal land forms: "In this regard Marx noted that 'either the propriety trend will prevail over the collective one or the latter will prevail over the former. Everything depends on the historical environment within which it finds itself.'"

Africa once again finds itself at a crossroads. It is now self-evident to the African masses what four decades of traveling down a road that has postponed its rendezvous with MARX'S Marxism has meant.

FROM SIERRA LEONE TO THE HORN OF AFRICA-WARS, DIAMONDS, AND GLOBALIZATION

In Sierra Leone and the Horn of Africa, the question is no different though it would seem that terrorist and annexationist wars have made sheer human survival instead of revolutionary transformation the most immediate task at hand.

The collapse of the UN-brokered, July 1999, Lome Peace Accords to end Sierra Leone's 8-year civil war, the intervention of British military forces, the appeasement diplomacy of President Clinton's special envoy to Sierra Leone, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the latest capture of the Pol Potist Foday Sankoh, May 18-all point to the reality that the terrorist RUF remains in control of Sierra Leone's lucrative Kono and Tongo diamond fields.

The RUF's control of the diamonds fields, no less than its unspeakable atrocities against the Sierra Leonean masses, have won Sankoh leverage and appeasement from the UN and the U.S. who, against protests from human rights and democracy movement groups, sponsored his power-sharing position in the government.

As in Bosnia and Kosova, U.S. imperialism leads the way in appeasing genocide. In Africa it's on a more monstrous scale: Sankoh's RUF specializes in mass dismemberment of men, women, and children as young as four months old, rape camps, and the recruiting of children by forcing them to massacre their own families.

Meanwhile, Liberian President Charles Taylor, who helped found the rogue RUF during his own war of atrocities in Liberia and who was himself given legitimacy through the diplomatic fig-leaf of Jesse Jackson, has kept a steady flow of arms going to the RUF in exchange for diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leone by the RUF.

The RUF and UNITA in Angola, as well as various forces in the civil war in Congo-Kinshasa, especially the Kabila government, exploit their country's diamond wealth to finance their war aims while their masses subsist in grinding poverty. United Nations sanctions against UNITA's diamond smuggling operations-the largest in the world-were curtailed by fears that UNITA might dump the diamonds on the world market to raise cash, thereby driving down diamond prices. Which is why in Angola and Sierra Leone transnational corporations like DeBeers and Anglo-American are deeply but secretly involved in the conflicts. Just as Taylor has done in Sierra Leone, so has Mugabe come to Kabila's defense in Congo-Kinshasa by defending its diamond rich Kasai province.

Finally, the Ethiopia-Eritrea war has returned Ethiopia to the annexationist road it had unsuccessfully traveled down for three decades, first under the monarch Haile Selassie and then under the Stalinist Mengistu. After several months of cease fire in the border war instigated by Eritrea's occupation of the desolate Badame region, Ethiopia resumed its two-year old war with Eritrea on May 12. As we go to press, Ethiopia has penetrated deep inside Eritrea, quickly taking control of a third of the country, and declared victory.

Having supported the EPRDF to oust Mengistu's Derg government in 1991, Eritrea achieved its own self-determination not long after. On the anniversary of its independence, it finds itself at war with its former ally. In two years, tens of thousands have died on both sides, and more than a million Eritreans have been displaced by Ethiopia's latest offensive. While Ethiopia has spent millions on this ill-considered war, famine threatens millions of Ethiopians and Eritreans.

And all of this occurs in a "new world order" in which capitalist globalization has inaugurated the recolonization of Africa. African underdevelopment is at one and the same time the condition for such mass human tragedies as famine, war, and disease, as well as for Western "humanitarian" aid to further enrich big Western agricultural, military and pharmaceutical interests. Food aid is part of the U.S.'s diplomatic arsenal, whether in the form of sanctions which devastate vast impoverished masses of people, or in the form of famine relief. Globalization has sunk the old colonial and neocolonial relations to entirely new, more degenerate depths.

As we have seen, however, the poor Africans are not only suffering but fighting back. That's because Africa has known ever since the ill-fated, UN-designated "Africa Year" of 1960 that the logic of capitalist accumulation assures that there will never be enough capital available to develop even one impoverished country in Black Africa.

Which is why Raya Dunayevskaya concluded her chapter in PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION on "The African Revolutions and the World Economy" that "It is not possible to comprehend the African reality apart from the compelling objective forces of world production, the pull of the world market, AND the underlying philosophy of the masses which Marx called 'the quest for universality.'" Working that out a quarter century later is what Africa's myriad crises challenges us to do.