Group items tagged

Yeros reflected upon our contemporary moment. We have witnessed, he argued, a shift from the more rural-based social movements of the early 21st century to the more urban-based social movements of the last eight years or so. This turn is suggested in the sweeping protests in many African urban centers around rising food and fuel costs (2007 and 2008), the “Arab Spring” (2010 and 2011) and the “African Awakenings” (2010, 2011, 2012), the “Occupy Movement” against economic inequality (2011 and 2012), the “15-M Movement” in Spain (2011), anti-austerity movements in Greece (2011), and related socio-economic-political movements in which the occupation of an urban square or an urban center has been a powerful organizing mechanism.

Despite facing considerable constraints and obstacles (including state violence and intimidation of protestors and state appropriations of movements, as demonstrated by Olympio Barbanti's discussion of resistance in the Amazon), the scale of current rural resistance is considerable—enough so to challenge Yeros’ perhaps preemptive declaration that we have witnessed a shift towards urban-centered struggle. At least, this shift is in no way totalizing.

At the School, our discussions of agrarian resistance included struggles that are organized, non-organized, widespread, small-scale, non-movements, grassroots, feminist/womanist, Marxist, populist, and ecological—including struggles that incorporate and/or are incorporated by NGOs and struggles opposed to NGO involvement.

The Gulabi Gang (a.k.a. the “pink brigade”) is made up of 400,000 women protestors united against caste discrimination, domestic abuse, and corruption. Similarly, the 10-year long Aaroh campaign includes 42,000 women and 15,000 men members who demand legal land ownership. The slogan, Kelkar explained, urges recognition of women farmers: “We work 70 percent of the land, we want 70 percent of it!”

Despite endemic hunger in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and across the Sahel, Joseph Chiombola explained, the land targeted for mechanization and plantation development is most often “breadbasket land.” As our activist and practitioner colleagues—among them Joseph Chiombola, Massay, Sophie Ogutu, Adwoa Sakyi, and Ngoni Chikowe—reminded us, “peace space is shrinking.” 

My work along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline demonstrates some of the structural challenges to rural resistance projects that contribute to this shrinking of space for peace. Connected by an oil pipeline, disparate communities in Cameroon struggle to unite, often without knowledge of the pipeline’s ecological and social destructions in neighboring towns. Moreover, neoliberal capitalists operate through obscure processes, involving dozens of agents, agencies, and institutions. This plethora of subcontracting agencies and consortiums means that people often do not know which corporate, financial, or state agency to address with their grievances. 

Our collective endeavor was to bring into practice a Southern Scholarship from and in the South. At the same time, we recognized the need to reach out farther into the South for future Schools, to encourage even broader Southern participation, including from activists and scholars in Colombia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Carlos Mielitz introduced the new Higher Education Cooperation Plan of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which seeks to support the maintenance of South-South connections for meaningful knowledge exchanges on topics related to rural wellbeing and hunger (Mielitz is himself a representative of FAO). This session was powerful for bringing representatives of a hugely influential and powerful institution, the FAO, into a room of activists-academics who have devoted much of their adult lives to confronting the challenges of capitalism’s exploitation of the countryside. Our discussion emphasized the need to be critical as we seek meaningful platforms and relationships of exchange.

Several participants delivered presentations nearly exclusively citing Northern academics, demonstrating the globalized dominance of Northern scholarship even in an intentionally Southern intellectual and academic space. Attention was brought to these epistemological gaps during the Q&As.

We agreed to circulate a resource list of critical Southern scholarships—making connections between our project and others, including the Why Is My Curriculum so White? campaign.

This diversity allowed us to retain an emphasis on the co-creation of relevant academic theory at the same time that many of our conversations and presentations emphasized the practical applications of these theories in the societies and cultures around us. We had a number of knowledge-sharing and informational sessions on concrete, contemporary activism within various agrarian organizations, including NCOM (Ghana’s National Coalition on Mining), International Union of Food (IUF – an organization that unites food, farm, and hotel workers), the World March of Women, and La Via Campesina (an International Peasant Movement).

Tetteh Hormeku, the Head of Programmes at the Third World Network-Africa, presented a documentary film, “National Coalition on Mining (NCOM): Fighting for Equity in Ghana’s Mining Sector.” NCOM is the only mining collective in Ghana. It arose in response to community exploitation and environmental degradation by Newmont Mines and AngloGold Ashanti. Farmers in the film explain that mining companies “took advantage of our knowledge-gap to mistreat us.” After advocacy and community education initiatives from NCOM, “we [the farmers] know a farmer’s consent is very important.”

Watching the film and listening to the perspectives of Ghanaian farmers, I recalled a scene from an American Discovery Chanel reality TV series tellingly titled, “Jungle Gold.” During one episode, a Ghanaian farmer (whose land has been appropriated by two American brothers who have recently come to Ghana to mine its gold) walks boldly into the mining site, demanding sufficient payment for the loss of his land. A Ghanaian guard (hired by the American brothers) pushes the farmer into the mining site’s water pit. Meanwhile, the American brothers dismiss the farmer as greedy, claiming that they have already paid him for the land.   In these scenes, the farmer’s dispossession is reduced to cheap entertainment. His humiliation is complete. Thinking back to this TV episode emphasized the importance of venues like the Summer School to celebrate agrarian struggle and peasant life even as we acknowledge the considerable capitalist forces and actors repressing, co-opting, and subsequently humiliating rural people.

At the same time that we observe the range of successes achieved by NCOM, we hear echoes in this statement of a subtle NGO-ization of resistance. Some participants in the School have argued that NGOs too often play a strategic role in perpetuating neoliberal capitalism by capturing resistance and directing it at negotiations (at “dialogue”) for survival within capitalism, rather than struggle for emancipation from—or transformation of—the system (see Issa Shivji’s powerful article, “The Silences in NGO Discourse”).

We maintained a steady focus on the historical and material actors and forces that produce and sustain global capitalism (imperialism), the differentiation of struggle (including an awareness of the social, gendered, economic, political, “ethnic,” and caste inequalities within rural societies), the intersection of oppressions, and material hardships produced within agrarian places and bodies.   Many of our conversations emphasized the need to place gender at the center of the “land question” in the South. This placement moves beyond “add gender and stir” approaches more popular in the neoliberal corporate academy, governmental policy, and established developmental organizations.

Shivji summarized central themes from Tsikata and Marjorie Mbiliny’s plenary as (1) the need, as posited by Tsikata, to embed “the gender question” within the radical political economy and (2) the need, following Mbiliny, to emphasize the “bigger picture” of global capitalist hegemony and patriarchal relations. The latter, I think, is an emphasis on the interrelationship between capitalist hegemony with patriarchal relations.

Confronting global capitalism requires serious and sustained conversations about South-South political and economic relations. Bon Monjane’s examination of Brazilian capitalist investments in Mozambique demonstrated the risks of idealizing South-South relations. “South-south cooperation is camouflaged to advance investment and financing,” he explained, in the case of ProSavana, a Brazilian agribusiness investor. ProSavana’s promotional slogan, “Africans are thirsty for Brazil,” seeks to dispossess farmers in the Nacala corridor of Mozambique. The ProSavana project will transform the corridor into an export zone of industrial soybean plantation in what has been referred to as Africa’s “biggest land grab.”

Shivji’s assertion that women “subsidize capital” through her super-exploitation by capital (as a laborer/producer) and her exploitation within the household (as unpaid laborer/reproducer) is helpful in conceptualizing women’s integration within neoliberal capitalism, particularly rural women (whose household/reproductive labor is often greater than women in urban areas).

In the Blue Skies out-grower production structure in Ghana, women make up 60 percent of the employees, yet, Joseph Yaro explained, women’s positions are the least secure and the poorest remunerated. In such rural out-growing production schemes, women have become “permanent casuals” in a context of labor overabundance. While hegemonic developmental paradigms espouse “employment creation” as a goal in poverty reduction needs, we must advance a nuanced reconceptualization of what this “employment creation” looks like, as social differentiation, casualization, and insecure conditions generate “winners” and “losers” in out-grower value chains.

In a context of an aggressive promotion of agro-business and policies of gender mainstreaming (which are often in diametrical opposition to women’s wellbeing), Gaynor Parodza warned, “Policy-makers treat women as homogenous and this risks harming and excluding the most vulnerable or those with the most fragile rights.”

Our Q&A discussion emphasized the lived realities of gendered land tenure, including a need to recognize that women live in legal pluralities, often navigating both statutory and customary laws. Statutory and customary are not somehow discrete, separate systems: In Ghana, for example, a person is given the land from the chief but still must get the title from the state.

Following the Summer School, Chambi Chachage and Deborah Bryceson offered rejoinders to Shivji’s notes (see Chachage’s response and Bryceson’s response) although neither attended the School. While I support projects to spread the knowledge shared and co-created during the School as widely as possible and I am passionate about critical exchanges of ideas to advance our projects, I am troubled by a wider tendency in academia to over-problematize minutiae in ways that are counter-productive for movement making.

Alongside the geographical diversity of participants, the School brought together scholars, activists, practitioners, policy-makers, and farmers. Among the activists present was Sophie Dowllar from the World March of Women in Kenya, who was arrested with five of her colleagues in March 2000 for organizing a week of cultural celebration and activities in the Ogiek community in rural Kenya (read an interview with Sophie here). David Calleb Otieno joined the group from Kenyan Peasant’s League (KPL), an organization that is fostering important solidarity links with social justice activists and political refugees across the region.

Taken holistically in the context of the Agrarian South Summer School—a place that we are struggling to protect and sustain, where we come together to address devastating poverties that trigger thousands of annual farmer suicides in India and that disproportionally disadvantage the elderly, women, and children—we must work to ensure that our provocations advance political momentums and struggles against neoliberal capitalism (imperialism)’s violence against entire ecosystems. 

Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes—and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize—under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9–10, 2002) presidential election.

Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.

One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.

In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.

Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.

To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.

around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.

Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.

The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.

At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.

what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.