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AFRICA’S CONTRIBUTION TO EUROPEAN CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT According to Rodney, Europeans went through several phases of desire in Africa: first it was gold, through ivory and camwood to human cargo (slavery). He sketches the slow conquest and penetration due to shipping superiority and the slow breakup of African kingdoms and states in the 16th-17th century leading to the Portuguese slave trade and decision-making role for Europeans in Africa. While dissecting the slave trade he drew parallels between the rise of the European seaport towns of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes, Seville and the Atlantic slave trade. In a passage that vividly explains the impact of Europe on Africa and its subsequent underdevelopment Rodney asserted that: ‘the European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production’. Rodney pursues the notion that colonisation gave Europe a technological edge and addresses the exploitation of African minerals important for making steel alloys, manganese and chrome, including columbite – critical for aircraft engines. Significantly, in the course of this orbit of exploitation there was incessant African resistance. But European firearms, after reaching a certain phase of effectiveness, as in the use of the Maxim (machine gun) against the Maji Maji and the Zulus and others, in concert with the use of Africans in colonial armies tipped the military balance in favour of Europe and subjugated a continent.

Rodney also attacks the notion, which unfortunately still persists, that there is some universal nexus or equal relationship between ‘hard work’ and great wealth, a myth peddled in the West today. In his tome Rodney swats away this ‘common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through hard work can became a capitalist’.

The FN has moved away from the fringes of the political party system to take up a place nearer to the centre. It has subsumed its appeal to racism, Holocaust denial and nativism under a cloak of anti-immigration policies coupled with a broad populist appeal against the demands of the European Union for austerity.

The FN has moved away from the fringes of the political party system to take up a place nearer to the centre. It has subsumed its appeal to racism, Holocaust denial and nativism under a cloak of anti-immigration policies coupled with a broad populist appeal against the demands of the European Union for austerity.

In recent weeks the French and international press have been full of stories about the resurgence of the Front National Party (‘FN’) in France led by Marine Le Pen.

Dismantling of the Apartheid in the 1990s was one of the great events of the turbulent 20th century, even though the manner of its dismantling was deeply marred by the fact that the critical negotiations which made it possible came in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, in a significant coincidence, those negotiations on the issue of South African settler colonialism ran parallel to those other negotiations, on the Israeli settler colonialism, which led to the Oslo Accords.

That’s just about right: “using them.” The ANC was a conservative force when Mandela first joined and even after the radical turn that Mandela and his close associates introduced into its politics, it remained a small party based primarily in the frustrated black middle class. Origins of the alliance with the communists were purely pragmatic. As Charles Longford was to write after Mandela’s death: As an insignificant political force, removed from the black working classes and the poor, ANC stood little chance of generating any meaningful political pressure that might affect change. They needed the black majority. That is why they turned to the South African Communist Party.

Only in the American scheme of things is it possible to bestow upon someone the highest honours that the US can give to anyone but also keep the same person on the list of “terrorists”—just in case!

It is a much bigger question than say “Could he have negotiated a better deal at independence?" The answer to the latter question I believe is, yes, he could have. On reflection, I am convinced that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) need not have settled for so little after 100 years of a titanic, heroic struggle of the people since 1912, the year the ANC was born. To be honest, the 1994 deal produced a little mouse out of a mountain of a struggle! And it is this little neo-colonial mouse that is roaring today while the mountain is levelled down. The people were depoliticized immediately following the 1994 agreement, a process I witnessed firsthand.

For a short spell, Ruth First was a tutor in a course I taught at Dar. Joe Slovo (her husband) was leading the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC and was soon to become the General Secretary of the SACP. We had discussions and differences over a number of issues – including, the nature and character of corporate capital in South Africa (see further below) , and the role of the armed struggle. During the 1990-94 independence negotiations Slovo broke a stalemate in talks with his idea of the "sunset clause" and for a coalition government for five years following a democratic election.

Coming now to the bigger question: “Could Mandela have used his moral authority to usher a socialist revolution in South Africa?” Here I believe that whilst he could not have ushered a socialist revolution, the ANC could have achieved much more for the people than what they have in the last 18 years.

Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?

Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?

Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?

In the U.S. itself with the advent of Cold War ideology and political repression under McCarthyism, perspectives and political organizing around Africa became a highly contentious arena of struggle. The Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) during the early 1950s came under fierce attack by the U.S. government and were driven out of existence.

Later during the 1960s when the various national liberation movements and independent African states embarked upon the armed struggle as a necessity to fight the U.S. and NATO backed colonial and settler-colonial states in Africa, Pan-Africanist and socialist strategist Kwame Nkrumah identified U.S. imperialism as the major force in the movement for genuine territorial sovereignty on the continent. The U.S., although paying lip service to supporting the anti-colonial movements, sought to stifle and manipulate the national liberation movements for the benefit of Wall Street and the Pentagon.

The postponement of these internal crises has apparently run its course. Imperialist war no long delays the impact of the inherent failures of capitalism related to its incapacity to provide housing, jobs, medical services, education and municipal services to the majority of its people. Nonetheless, in its destructive character, imperialism continues on the path of endless war and pursuit of ever-rising rates of profit.

Liberia Rising 2030, a national vision whose aim is to make Liberia a middle-income country by the year 2030. This vision, projected to replace the Lift Liberia Poverty Reduction Strategy, has as its core macro-economic policy reforms, as well as lofty goals aimed at strengthening social cohesion, democratic consolidation, and governance reform.

One of the problems with state-building as a post-conflict reconstruction agenda is its myopic focus on building state institutions, with the core assumption that no positive institutional practices existed before the ‘post-conflict moment’—a fallacy of terra nullius as articulated by Cliffe and Manning (Cliffe and Manning, 2008: 165).

In this analysis, the post-conflict state represents a ‘blank slate,’ a tabula rasa to be foisted upon by donors who function as social engineers, in which policy makers conflate the ‘state idea’ (our imaginations of what the state should be) with the ‘empirical state’ (how the state actually functions in practice) (Abrams, 1988).

NEPAD will be highlighted and endorsed at the G-8 meeting in Alberta, Canada, in June 2002, at the July launch of the African Union in Pretoria, and at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development–with a proposed global “New Deal” modeled on NEPAD–in late August. At such events, protesters who support the cause of global environmental, social, and economic justice will be told, in effect, “Don’t worry, you can go home, because Thabo Mbeki is taking care of globalization’s shortcomings.”

Mbeki’s approach is consistent with what has been termed compradorism. Mbeki and his main allies have already succumbed to the class (not necessarily personalistic) limitations of post-Independence African nationalism, namely acting in close collaboration with hostile transnational corporate and multilateral forces whose interests stand directly opposed to Mbeki’s South African and African constituencies.

In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial country identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.

Thabo Mbeki is seen as Africa's most legitimate, self-confident and fundamentally pro-Western leader. If anyone can shake down the World Bank in Washington for debt cancellation, or the WTO in Geneva for trade concessions, it's the primary architect of the miracle transition in recently-liberated South Africa.

From the late 1990s, Mbeki embarked upon an "African Renaissance" branding exercise with poignant poetics. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennial Africa Recovery Programme (with the acronym "Map"), whose powerpoint skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki's meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal. The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists. It was immediately endorsed during a special South African visit by World Bank president James Wolfensohn "at an undisclosed location," due presumably to fears of the disruptive civil-society protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF czar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.

What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said: ‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.

Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders.

The land, then the main means of production, belonged to the whole tribe, and there was no individual ownership whatsoever. There were no classes, no rich or poor, and no exploitation of man by man. All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government. Recognition of this general principle found expression in the constitution of the Council, variously called Imbizo, or Pitso, or Kgotla, which governs the affairs of the tribe. The council was so completely democratic that all members of the tribe could participate in its deliberations. Chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, all took part and endeavoured to influence its decisions. It was so weighty and influential a body that no step of any importance could ever be taken by the tribe without reference to it… In such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want and insecurity shall be no more. is is the inspiration which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political struggle.

The role of the leader is to interpret the arguments and viewpoints put forward in debate in such a way as to make that consensus possible, drawing from expressions of difference a "tribal wisdom" which reaffirms their essential unity. The model requires that the leader who takes this role should be accepted, but not necessarily elected. What is crucial is that the question of leadership be settled beforehand, and kept separate from the question of how the popular will is to be interpreted.

In capitalism, wage-labor is the principal means of access to the means of production, and profits depend on not paying more for it than the capitalist can help.

To suggest that rising global wealth and global poverty are interrelated, and that the former is premised upon the latter, is not something that most players in international development want to do because it would reveal the sordid foundation of their vision of development.

UN Millennium Project director Jeffrey Sachs defends sweated labour across the global South, saying the “sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty” (1).

One of neoliberalism’s founding fathers, Friedrich Hayek, wrote: “I have not been able to find a single person even in much-maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under [deposed former president] Allende” (3).

White South African mining magnates, billionaires and businessmen were meanwhile meeting the exiled leaders of the ANC, such as Mbeki, in European capitals, to offer deals and hammer out the economic structure of post-apartheid South Africa; a favourite meeting place was a majestic mansion, Mells Park House, near Bath, in England.

The white ruling elite had prepared for such outcomes with great deliberation. It had methodically nurtured a new black entrepreneurial and professional class through loans, subsidies, etc., whose interests predictably came into conflict with those of the black working classes and the poor who were the mass base of the anti-apartheid struggle in all its aspects. Like any typical national bourgeoisie in post-colonial Africa and Asia, members of this newly confected class aspired to little more than becoming intermediaries between global capital and the national market.

Thabo Mbeki—once a member of the central committee of the SACP, trained in economics in England and in guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union, an eminent leader of the ANC who criss-crossed continents during the 1970s and 1980s to connect the exiled political leadership with the externally based military units, Vice-President under Mandela and President of South Africa after him—could, in the fullness of time, gleefully say, “Just call me a Thatcherite.” Self-enrichment is at the heart of varieties of Thatcherism. Or, as Deng Xiaoping famously said: “It is glorious to be rich.”

All of this became painfully obvious in August last year when militarized police forces violently cracked down on a wildcat miners’ strike in the platinum town of Marikana. In the ensuing bloodbath, the most serious bout of state violence since the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the end of apartheid in 1994, 34 workers were killed after being peppered with machine gun fire at close range.

The story of South Africa over the last 20 years must qualify as one of the most authentic political tragedies of our era. Once upon a time, not very long ago, the country was held up as an example to the world. In 1994, when the apartheid regime finally came to an end and South Africans overwhelmingly elected Mandela as their first democratic President, the world looked to South Africa with a mix of hope and expectation.

In this brave new world, Mandela was a former revolutionary turned philosopher-king; an elder of the global village who came to represent not only the suffering and aspirations of black Africans, but also the hopes and desires of Western progressives. Mandela mingled with world leaders, the European royalty and multi-billionaires; he hung out with popstars and sports legends, but he also maintained a close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Khaddafi. Father Madiba, in a way, was above politics. Or was he?

Without Barre’s iron fist, the clan-based political rivalries which had been artificially repressed for two decades bloomed and a country swimming in foreign arms and local animosity was plunged into a vicious civil war.

Where international peacekeepers and foreign soldiers had cut and run, the UIC, working with the local population, struggled to extract peace and order from chaos.

By 2007, a weak Somali transitional government called for international military action to help destroy the Islamic courts. Ethiopian forces – bolstered by the United States’ blessing and with the support of some its arms – entered the fray to destroy an organisation supposedly linked to al-Qaeda. However, this same organisation had won the respect of many Somalis by rescuing parts of the country from chaos and random violence. Although Ethiopia’s military action in Somalia decimated the UIC, it also forever de-legitimised the Transitional Federal Government.

Behind the scenes is the reliance on the military and mobilisation of base sentiments of ethnic and regional forces by each power camp. While the Yar’Adua camp is mobilising the military bureaucrats (who fear for their careers in a new arrangement) to ensure the thin thread tying Yar’Adua to power, the Jonathan emerging bloc is relying on intelligence forces and old military forces to sustain itself, as seen in the removal of Yar’Adua’s National Security Adviser.

the US and European capitalist governments’ concern for democracy in Nigeria is underlined by the economic interests of their big capitalist sharks. This explains the ambiguity in their statements, trying to boost support for Jonathan and at the same time giving room for Yar’Adua’s comeback.

the NLC’s statement after its last NEC meeting stated the reason behind its lukewarm attitude toward the country’s political crises. It maintained that some anti-democratic forces want to use mass labour action to hijack power through the military. Does the NLC mean that its actions are a recipe for an anti-democratic takeover of power? Is this not a viable excuse for any repressive government that may emerge from this current muddy struggle for power to suspend labour movement and civil society activities? More importantly, how can a mass action of workers and other oppressed people, maintaining opposition to military rule and demanding a sovereign national conference, lead to the emergence of military rule? The NLC’s position only reflects its previously failed policy of political neutrality and collaboration with anti-poor governments, a version of policy of lesser evil-ism.

The outstanding documentary Darwin's Nightmare examines how global growth functions in Mwanza, Tanzania, an abjectly impoverished city on Lake Victoria whose inhabitants are afflicted with AIDS, environmental ruination, and hunger amidst the profitable exportation of local fish to the affluent Western European market. Capitalism is, after all, not designed to feed people but to make money.

Sobukwe was arrested in Soweto, Johannesburg, in 1960 and subsequently imprisoned for organising and leading the March 21, 1960 anti-pass march. It was a peaceful protest against an indentification card that was mandatory for Africans under the apartheid regime. The march culminated in the settler-colonial regime massacre of people at Sharpeville and Langa townships of present-day Gauteng and Western Cape respectively. While wee may probably never be able to hear Sobukwe’s voice again because the settler-colonial regime ensured he remains silent beyond his grave by banning him and destroying the audio material containing his voice, his ideas remain. We wish we could hear him talk.

there had to be an African democratic government

there had to be rapid extension of industrial development to help, among other things, alleviate pressure on the land as well as ensure full development of the human personality in a socialist context.