Introduction
Participation in activities to support African liberation movements and against university investments in the apartheid regime in the late 1970s led me to the ‘early Lionel Cliffe’1 in Tanzania. This also involved studying some of the intense theoretical and political polemics in that period over African liberation and revolutionary alternatives coming especially from East Africa that included scholars such as Babu, Mafeje, Mamdani, Nabudere, Rodney, Shivji, as well as Cliffe. They either taught or studied at University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), and were drawn into this intellectual capital of East Africa and the debates about changes in Tanzania under Nyerere’s African socialism around the time of the 1967 Arusha Declaration (TANU 1967). One influential example in the 1970s was what was known as ‘the great debate’,2 which people in many countries followed in trying to better understand the global political dynamics of that period and post-independence struggles in particular.
Reading these writers, and talking to some of them, gives a sense of just how stimulating the scene of intellectual ferment was at UDSM at the time, both ‘overturning’ the old conceptions of education and together with that grappling with the way forward and what vision and ideology were required to change African societies and states. Writers from that period debated how African countries still in the clutches of former colonial powers could build an independent path to development, and how could they sever from them, which, after all, was what national liberation aimed to do. This discussion reflected the emerging influence and different interpretations and evaluations of Marxism, Marxism–Leninism and of Maoism and what China’s new democratic revolution and socialist road represented, as well as its applicability to Africa.
This was the environment which Lionel Cliffe contributed to creating, in the young and then still conservative UDSM of the late 1960s. I was invited to participate in the 2011 Nyerere Intellectual Festival held there organised by the Chair of Pan African Studies, Issa Shivji. It coincided with the university’s 50th anniversary, and brought together a significant number of people to debate the theme of pan-Africanism.
A certain nostalgia for the 1970s was in the air at the festival, which had the positive aspect of remembering the invigorating days of national liberation, the dreams and struggle for revolution and questioning the obstacles to understanding why liberation ultimately was unfinished, and needed to go much further than independence. A remembering of times when the terms of debate, the terms of what seemed possible, were quite different than today’s, when young people around the world were inspired and convinced that the ‘future was actually up for grabs’ and when the old colonial order was crumbling, partly because of the struggles in Africa, Latin America and Asia (including the defeat of the US in Vietnam).
At the same time, in 2011 the big UDSM hall was packed with probably 60% students and youth, under the age of 25 for the most part, posing all kinds of questions about ‘how do we do it today?’ The generational divide was a friendly but constant reference point. Sometimes this was put in such a way as to sharpen debate, even if it did not really get to the heart of the matter of why national liberation movements fell short of their objectives: ‘Did the past leaders fail?’ or ‘Is the new generation too “duped” by neo-liberalism,’ in a self-interested way, to continue the struggle and take responsibility for transforming what had not been? Is pan-Africanism a solution? Not the ‘old nationalist kind’, some said. A mock debate raised issues such as, ‘Was the struggle against the system national or regional, continental or international? What about the oppressed in other parts of the world?’ Some people challenged the idea of ‘new pan-Africanism’, asking whether it too was not a form of nationalism and whether adding a label to it like anti-imperialist was sufficient to acknowledge its limitations in the context of a worldwide system dominated by global capital. A serious challenge came from a Kenyan woman in the audience: ‘Can we really break away from the imperialist system today and if so, how?’ And others asked, ‘What does the land question have to do with all this?’
There cannot be a rerun of the 1970s or of the attempts in that form and with that vision of radical social change. But much can be learned from those experiences and the high-level debates of which they were part. While the need to put ‘finishing’ liberation and social emancipation on the political agenda throughout Africa (and elsewhere) is broadly felt, lack of clarity about what this really means as well as the difficulty of doing so deters many who are eager for radical change. So much has developed in terms of the penetration of the global capitalist system into individual countries – shaping and continuing to distort economies in the South and imposing forms of political rule by mostly compliant states. A body of rich studies has helped us understand how the accumulation process works in post-colonial Africa, its relationship to land tenure and agriculture systems, the felt impact and concrete effects of globalisation, and how the obstacles to getting rid of capitalism have changed, or not. And yet so much is still the same, particularly the evident social need for and aspirations to get out from under all that and set society onto a different trajectory.
Redistributing land – for what purpose and in whose interests?
Some left-leaning critics of the experiences of land redistribution and reform in Africa separate the struggle for land from these overriding questions of unfinished liberation while others are seriously sceptical about whether redistributing land is necessary and/or desirable. However, the land question is actually a central part of thinking a different future, not just for the countryside, but for society as a whole.
Most of my scholarship has been focused on the conflicts over land in Africa, particularly southern Africa, and in the course of this, the nature of the state, the national question and liberation, broadly defined, come up constantly. What type of democracy is needed, to serve whom and for what ends? During field research on land demand and land conflict in South Africa, I frequently saw how people’s hopes to gain access to land (as well as water and all that goes with land), and ideas of what they could do with it, were shaped to a great extent by their perception of possibilities of any broader changes in society occurring in their potential interests (Andrew 2005). They don’t always express it that way, but some do, and eloquently.
In other words, one can hold up a mirror to the contradictory rural areas of Africa and if looking carefully and critically one may get some kind of reflection of the inequalities, social relations, power imbalances and huge obstacles, quantitatively and qualitatively, facing the rural poor in society as it is structured today: who is and is not allowed to eat, to produce what and how much; who can choose to use meagre revenues to try to resettle elsewhere or to stay through another planting season, or to split their families between town and country, buy nice telephones and Nikes, or larger gravestones for their loved ones and so on. And in many places it is not an exaggeration to say – who lives and who dies, such as in poorer countries like Mali and Burkina Faso. But a mirror and a reflection will not show deeper aspirations buried by how society is organised, much less offer a solution, or suggest a path to finish unfinished liberation.
Thus, while analysing social differentiation, and the dynamics of political economy at various levels, is a crucial contribution to our collective knowledge, it is not in itself sufficient to reveal what is in the interests of the ordinary people. Our ability as engaged researchers to help identify and defend the interests of those not represented or even invisible in national and international discussions requires conveying in our work to the best of our understanding that capitalism cannot and will not represent the interests of the poorest section of the people, which in rural Africa tend to be connected to land in some way.
Our analysis needs to go further and envision something entirely different than the suffocating choices the capitalist system offers the poor today. In other words, there is a need to project a revolutionary struggle for land and for agricultural production, in which the rural poor themselves become a critical section of the people mobilised to do something radically different, as part of ripping up and revolutionising the political, economic and social fabric of society as a whole. This is quite different from the prevailing view and experience in the world.
To return to those who challenge the importance of land redistribution in today’s world, whether or not one looks at rural social transformation, in no matter which African country, from the starting point of liberation and agrarian revolution has a lot to do with how one answers whether restructuring land ownership and access is necessary and desirable or not. If our horizons are limited to ‘pushing the boundaries’ of liberal democracy and the clemency of the existing state, we will be disappointed every time, and worse, will deceive those we are engaged with in changing society. The view that ‘history has moved on, just get over it’ (dispossession, injustice, immense inequalities) comforts this type of myopia.
Many rural people do make it out of, or are pushed out of, the countryside, sometimes obtaining a job but often not. Mostly the rural poor are not absorbed into the formal economy once they are driven off the land and this is an increasing and mostly destructive feature of globalisation throughout the South. However, this push and migration off the land gives the misleading appearance of a mass of urban dwellers who are completely severed from the land and from small-scale production. Although it varies in extent in different countries, large numbers of the ‘semi-proletariat’ and ‘unanchored’ rural poor remain attached to land in various ways (Andrew 2005; Moyo 2001).
As engaged scholars, our goal cannot be to perfect a system of democracy in Africa that serves and corresponds to subjugation by imperialism and foreign domination. Formal democracy alone has not been able to and cannot do away with the undemocratic land system in the interests of the poor nor transform the way the production of food and goods is carried out. Besides understanding and exposing these limitations, our goal should be to go further – to do better – to examine alternatives to the existing system, connected to a different type of state and future, in which the social and economic basis is built for overcoming rather than sharpening inequalities and which is not subordinated to world capitalist relations. All this was an important part of the Dar es Salaam debates in the 1970s.
National liberation, land and rural transformation
Nations that have suffered under the weight of the global system must break the grip of foreign capital over the lifelines of the economy, and land is at the heart of this, exactly because of the destruction, artificial borders and seizing of whole territories through colonialism and imperialism. This is the national (liberation) question in Africa simplified – and why it is closely bound up with the unresolved land question, as well as overcoming the deep scars from the centuries-long slave trade to which much of the continent was subjected. In settler colonies like South Africa, breaking free from the white minority’s colonial and racially configured monopoly of land is an essential part of this national question. It is linked, but not identical, to removing the stranglehold of the external imperial powers.
The domination and subjugation of Africa has been an uneven process which has to be carefully analysed. All African countries have in common the system of global capital feeding upon them, draining their resources and much of the productive labour of their people, all of which may lead to ‘development’ but in very disarticulated ways. The rural poor usually bear the brunt yet are supposed to be grateful for this type of development, whether an infrastructural project like a big dam wipes out their lands and villages or huge tracts of pastoral territory are devoted to privatised wildlife production and leisure hunting grounds. South Africa sits in a very different position in this chain of domination than Mali or Burkina Faso, for example. South African companies, as part of multinationals that do the same in South Africa, drain profits from gold mines exploiting low-paid labour in Burkina Faso.
South African Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Nkwinti said at the 2014 national land tenure summit: ‘Land doesn’t grow, the population grows. We must find ways of sharing this land in an equitable manner’ (Matshediso 2014). Part of the African National Congress (ANC) populist narrative is to encourage thinking that land is separate from the social system guarding its ownership, access and use. Superficially, it acknowledges different interests, but in effect obscures them, partly in order to redirect people’s struggles into conventional, if not official, ANC channels.
This is consistent with the reality that the existing state in South Africa has not and will not take even the first step of beginning to dismantle colonial land ownership, as occurred in Zimbabwe, let alone recognising and enforcing genuine democratic rights to land for more than a few. It is rooted in the limitations of the ANC’s concept historically of power-sharing and hoping to implement a form of social democracy based on capitalist growth. This has been compounded, as we know, by the international conjuncture: the collapse of the former socialist Soviet Union, multiple forms of pressure, support and organised ‘assistance’ by the West, occurring at the end of the period of struggles for national liberation and independence. These struggles had (mostly) already been swept into states compromising with the ‘post-colonial’ version of the external domination so many people had given their lives to free their countries from. The ANC, like Mugabe, accommodated long before they got to power. It was not just a ‘right turn’ in 1994 or 1980 (Andrew 2005). However, to be fair, and perhaps Cliffe would have disagreed with this, Mugabe opposed the Marxists in his ranks who considered the hard-fought war part of an agrarian revolution, and he promoted instead an avowedly nationalist programme. This led the way to his presidency, a negotiated compromise at Lancaster House on the basis of ties with and dependency on the West in the context of formal independence.
Fast-track land reform after 2001 in Zimbabwe did change racially based settler colonial landholding and more fully placed the state in control of productive resources. Can this by itself be said to be in the people’s interests? The degree to which thoroughgoing transformation was on the agenda is still heatedly debated, as is the nature of the state leading land redistribution, which initially had a significant aspect of originating from a social movement demanding land. Moyo (2001) analysed the range of class interests that the land invasions represented in the early 2000s. Yet the movement quickly became something else, even if fast track’s ‘redistributive’ aspect went further than it did within a set of different constraints in the 1980s. Rather than simply dismissing Zimbabwe's land reform as an authoritarian exercise or evaluating it in purely productivist terms, what are the dynamics and what can we learn?
State-sponsored fast-track reform, even though it angered the West and others, was conceived only as policy from above to reinforce aspirant bourgeois strata in and around the state and not as part of mobilising the population for changing society as a whole. Within that, its heavily agrarian base played a central role – but once again, that reform was only able to travel a certain distance and was far from a revolution. The disappointment has been palpable among those who sought and expected much more (Interviews Mashonaland Central and West, November 2005, November 2007). The ‘liberatory’ aspect has certainly been overstated by some of its ardent defenders and unambiguously so by Mugabe. Despite his party’s increased anti-imperialist posturing after fast-track land reform, nationalism in this scenario once again shows it does not and cannot stand up to imperialism – and is neither able to ‘finish national liberation’ nor committed to that and to thoroughgoing social transformation.
Sankara’s radical reform in Burkina Faso
What about other experiments in radical agrarian reform in the interim, such as that launched in Burkina Faso through a military coup by the militant young officer Thomas Sankara in 1983? ‘The singularity of our revolution is coming at a time when the revolutionary movement in the world is losing ground every day,’ Sankara said in his October 1983 Political Orientation Speech. He was referring both to liberation movements in the Third World as well as the broader deceptions over the latter decades of the USSR (and the contradictory path of Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union) as well as the reversal of socialist China after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, all of which he drew different elements from for his programme. Sankara has again become a reference point for some African youth in various countries looking for a radical alternative, including some of those who poured into the streets of Ouagadougou as a prelude to the military ousting of his former ally-turned-rival and 27-year successor, Blaise Compaoré, in October 2014.
Rearrangements of neo-colonial states through military coups have been common in West Africa to say the least (five in Upper Volta/Burkina Faso alone between its independence in 1966 and Sankara’s group taking power in 1983), but rarely do new presidents proclaim such a frontal opposition to the existing order.
Sankara came to power with the support of some of the dissatisfied urban middle classes, who were a small sliver of the population, the trade unions and a dissident section of the army. His radical resolve to fight against control over Burkina Faso’s resources and development by the pernicious ‘neo-colonial state and army’, as he called them, both ‘foreign and national’, earned him the ire not just of the West, but of those he targeted within the upper classes in Burkina’s cities and within the military itself, where many locate his assassination in 1987.3
The Comité national de la révolution (CNR) that Sankara led implemented a wide range of important and progressive reforms from literacy to vaccination to tree-planting campaigns, attacking top civil servants’ privileges, outlawing genital mutilation of young girls and generally placing great emphasis on freeing women from multiple forms of servitude and their social status as ‘minors’, particularly harsh and tenacious in the 90% rural areas.
Sankara referred to Burkina as an extremely poor and backward agrarian country based on a feudal form of social organisation and whose development had been strangled by French neo-colonialism. Every revolutionary attempt has complex dynamics, yet it appears that Sankara’s revolutionary-sounding call in 1983 to build an independent national economy in many ways ultimately became an appeal for an improvement in the terms of the dependency relationship with the imperialists and the aid they dispensed. He skilfully exposed the consequences of their domination and distortion of Burkina’s economy and undoubtedly would have liked to go further than the material constraints and limited social base in the army and society made possible, but was unable to create a different dynamic that could challenge those constraints and limits. His four very short years of carrying out well-intentioned reforms within these constraints show among other things both the necessity and the difficulty of severing from foreign capital, especially in a poor country whose radical turn France was not in a mood to abide, and where Sankara’s process of taking power through a military coup had not created either the revolutionary understanding or organisation among the people to stand up to outside powers, notably France, and to see changing society as part of that.
One of the primary resources that the country contributed to French neo-colonial accumulation was exporting over half of its labour power to work in the richer neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire, on cocoa and coffee plantations, existing in a detrimental symbiotic relationship with the large impoverished peasant subsistence economy in Burkina Faso. It is difficult to imagine a real transformation of Burkina without reversing this dynamic and integrating and mobilising the ‘exported’ workforce.
Based on the French policy of monocultures in its West African colonies – peanuts for Senegal, and cotton for Mali and the former Upper Volta – small Burkinabe farmers continued after independence to produce for capitalist export markets via French multinationals; in the early 1980s cotton was essentially the only Voltaic sector (processing mills) to see any real capital investment. Yet while strongly anti-imperialist in sentiment and language, the CNR’s programme was limited by an inability to envision and elaborate the steps required to achieve real independence from imperialism and self-reliance that Sankara mentioned frequently.
For example, in reviewing the state’s orientation towards agriculture and land reform, French geographer B. Tallet rightly questions CNR policies of pursuing development projects in the already more developed cotton-producing areas of the southwest, projects which, in continuity with colonial and post-colonial dependency, tended to increase rather than reduce regional disparities that were only partly based on land quality. He emphasises that this was not just a problem of maintaining unequal administrative structures in different regions, but of renewing World Bank projects in areas where the population was denser and investment was higher, so results would be likely more ‘positive’ in terms of monetary value (Tallet 1989, 41–42).
Attaching agricultural modernisation techniques to production for export, whether a non-food crop like cotton, or beef that is not part of Burkinabe diet, is a different programme, especially when applied to relatively more developed regions, while others starved. Only a minority of the peasantry had access to animal traction at that time, so small farmers needed inordinate labour power that was in short supply, partly because of the enormous migration to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. The CNR supported modernisation to alleviate the arduous existence of the peasantry and the field labour shortages, as well as in anticipation of generating greater surplus (Ibid., 48). But the question is, as for any revolutionary initiative, land reform and modernisation on what basis, for whom and with what type of agricultural production?
In trying to reshape what is by definition, and was recognised as, disarticulated development through the dominant hand of the international market, both external aid and investment in fact made it impossible to achieve food self-sufficiency. A revolutionary course would need to establish access to adequate food in all areas of the country, especially disadvantaged ones, as a clear priority of agricultural production. While growing food crops might not generate as much monetary value, meeting basic food needs could make a decisive difference for the huge numbers who go to other countries to work. Food self-sufficiency would create a different and more solid basis for carrying out further-reaching aspects of land and agrarian transformation and reducing some of the customary, ethnic and other barriers within pre-capitalist social organisation.
Very quickly, in one year, the CNR ordinance on agrarian and land reorganisation announced the creation of a ‘national land domain’ which made the land ‘the exclusive property of the state’. Ostensibly the state aimed to use this land reform to bring poor peasants, at that time 90% of the countryside, into the revolution, to move them towards more modern methods to enable them to improve their situation, and to assign land to those who needed it (Textes 1984). Restructured land tenure targeted the privileges of traditional authorities who allocated land and managed tenure (rights of use) through ‘land chiefs’ (chefs de terre, tengsoramba) and lineage (Hilgers 2005, 68, 76). The mainly youth force of the Committees to Defend the Revolution (CDRs), organised throughout the country to carry out the CNR’s programme, essentially replaced them as the new authorities, attributing rural land parcels. The CDRs were apparently ill-equipped to handle disputes that arose (Ibid., 80), as peasants neither fully participated in the process, nor were roused to confront or challenge it. Various chefs de terre managed to hold onto their authority simply by joining the village-level CDR leadership or declaring themselves to be the local CDR (Schwartz 1996, 160–164). Sankara also described the unevenness, although optimistically, and distinguished between parasitical ‘feudal notables’ and some of the village chiefs, whom he said just wanted recognition from their ethnic group4 and could be a positive force for social change (Maïga 1983).
One bold measure that Sankara undertook was to abolish the hated colonial head tax, which had continued after independence and represented a heavy burden on the rural poor. In addition to aiming to change the state’s relationship to the countryside, the CNR also saw it as a way to purposefully undermine the chiefly authorities’ material position and social influence (Hilgers 2005) as part of ‘democratising the social relations in the countryside’ (Sankara 1983). In appearance the state was showing that it would not take a slice of peasants’ eventual surplus, apparently provoking higher food prices for urban areas since this policy too was linked to expectations of greater investment, as Tallet explains (1989, 48).
Another equally important aspect which requires more reflection, and which the literature discusses less, is the strong grip of feudalistic and patriarchal ideas and their relation to land practices and pre-capitalist agrarian systems. This problem also emerged with respect to changing taxation. Local authorities were accustomed to taking a share of taxes in money or in kind, which in the not so distant past was combined with peasants paying tribute of animals or even surrendering daughters to tribal chiefs. And without waging a more general land-based agrarian revolution, the ‘ground’ for these authorities remained unturned. In other words, peasant farmers felt compelled to find other ways to continue to pay tribute in case the Ouagadougou, and town-centred, revolution did not succeed in radically reorganising agricultural production and transforming these social relations in the countryside in the peasants’ interests, thus enabling them to ‘let go’ of, and help do away with, customary authority over the land and the system of debts and obligations that went with it.
Sankara was very conscious of the unbearable effect of oppressive patriarchal tradition and practices, particularly regarding rural women, that the Burkinabe ‘people’s democratic revolution’ needed to change and which he exposed regularly and articulately. Based partly on existing organisations and partly on the new political emphasis on women’s liberation, Mossi women’s groups set positive examples of organising local primary health care facilities, building mills to relieve the arduous tasks of pounding millet day and night, concrete grain storage ‘banks’ and dams (with assistance from non-governmental organisations) to provide water they normally walked long distances to fetch. Girls began to attend school in larger numbers and for the first time women were issued identity cards, previously reserved for men. The national policies also had the advantage of stimulating heated debates over numerous CNR decrees against polygamy, excision, prostitution, arranged marriages and dowries, while bringing to the surface the differences between rural and urban women’s conditions as well as disagreements over how to approach changing backward and/or ‘culturally’ oppressive traditions woven into peasants’ lives and challenging men’s opposition to the liberatory winds blowing during this period.5
Among important projects such as building schools and primary health care clinics, digging wells and environmental measures to fight against deforestation and desertification (Dumont and Paquet 1984), the CDRs established Village Groups, which peasants joined on a voluntary basis. Within a short time, however, CDRs set up peasant cooperatives, which met with some degree of resistance at that early stage of the reforms. This was less likely a problem of forms of organisation than one of how the classic contradiction between ‘more peasant autonomy and more collectivisation’ was handled, as Tallet stressed (1989, 48). Land was assigned explicitly to women only in a small number of cases owing to the rapid emphasis on state ownership (Morena de Souza 2005, 16). The initial step of distributing land individually, including to each woman, rather than by household, can be an important one in uprooting feudal-traditional land allocation, and the customs, tributes and male domination that go with it, and is not separate from the overall social changes that are necessary.
Nationalising land linked to this model of agrarian reform from above therefore seems not to have sufficiently politically aroused the poor, and rural women in particular who perform much of agriculture, to carry out land reform in their own interests and to strike at the backwardness, patriarchy and highly unequal division of labour in the household while beginning to transform the social relations underpinning them.
The difficulty of doing away with slavery is another case in point. While Sankara banned it in 1983, he could not curtail, much less end, slavery without an all-round revolutionary approach to changing society that would mean people fighting from below to eradicate the material and ideological conditions for it. Instead, for many of the rural poor, it was one form of temporary feudal debt payment: selling children as forced migrant labour in the neighbouring countries or in the Burkinabe cotton fields, or as domestic workers to oil-rich Gabon and Nigeria, perhaps hoping to be able to buy them back one day. It is likely that those constrained to sell their children were unaware of the treacherous tentacles of the world economy, sucking out Burkina’s agricultural labour power while the country remained desperately poor, exacerbated by the odious regional child slave economy.6
These examples show only a few of the obstacles within the CNR’s approach, and also those posed by the larger external opponents of national liberation during even this short attempt to radically reform the ensemble of broader relations of domination in which the country was entrapped. It was not long tolerated in Paris or Abidjan, and was abruptly ended through the same unchanged state apparatus and army that briefly enabled Sankara and the CNR to rule.
An independent national economy
One thing Africa does possess is tremendous labour power, including in the rural areas, yet it is critical whether this force is unleashed as the basis for a socially different, independent national economy, or simply corralled (or a fraction of it) into competing for low-paid jobs on large-scale farms operated as part of state-owned enterprises, richer individual landowners and multinational agribusinesses, while other sections are left largely untapped in impoverished and underdeveloped countrysides (Andrew forthcoming).
Rethinking agriculture does not have to be a hindrance to urban struggles, as it is sometimes projected, but could rather be connected to a different vision of society as a whole. Redistributive land reform has an important role to play in this as part of any rural transformation programme and as part of radically transforming all of society. Proceeding in this way would involve dismantling the colonial or neo-colonial land tenure regime, depending on the particularities of the country and its history, that is a barrier to even considering a different kind of agriculture or ‘a different countryside’ and to destroying old social relations. As argued above in the Burkina case, one immediate objective would be to organise food production as a cornerstone of building a national economy independent from the world market – based on first meeting food needs of the population and attending to basic problems like housing, health and sanitation.
An important part of this process would be breaking down patriarchal property relations and beginning to change traditionalist thinking and inequalities between the sexes and within the family and society. In some countries this would involve individual land titling, the positive feature of which assumes importance in the context of developing economic independence and lays a solid basis for voluntary forms of cooperatives and collective ownership in order to move towards deeper transformation.
Looking at it that way, it is possible to imagine mobilising people to establish a new framework in which they are socially productive and are actively and consciously helping to overturn the old and to progressively build the basis for self-reliance. Mafeje stresses the importance of this, noting that African countries are ‘easily balkanized’, falling prey to what he calls ‘colonial capitalism’. This is not, he says, ‘a lack of resistance or will or militancy’, but ‘the inability of African leaders to cut the umbilical cord from their former colonial masters’ and the ‘lack of a viable alternative’ (Mafeje 2002, 5). Others have argued variously for national or regional resistance to outside powers by establishing trade and production within a geographical area, another theme debated in Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s.
This is not meant to present a complete tableau by any means, but rather to contrast potential horizons with examples that illustrate the severe limits of democratising land access, use and redistribution within the framework of globalised capitalism. On the one hand, this system totally distorts peasant economies still bearing feudal-like ‘traditions’ in places like Mali (where conditions similar to slavery still exist in parts of the north) without any really significant benefits of being incorporated into global circuits of production and distribution. Both features fuel separatist movements and make communities more vulnerable to political Islamist forces expanding in the region. On the other hand, in more developed African economies, including South Africa with its relatively high degree of industrialisation, much of what passes for ‘free’ waged, or partially waged, agricultural labour on the capitalist farms is still marked by various not fully capitalist features from the past: oppressive social practices and degrading treatment supporting a particular form of exploitation, webs of debt and the methods of using women’s labour and reproduction. These features are even more flagrant in labour tenancy areas (Andrew 2005, Andrew forthcoming).
Liberal democracy as a form of political rule: ‘we have political freedom, where’s the land and the economic justice?’
This question is a common way in which the disconnection is expressed between the form of political rule in a given country, liberal democracy as the case in point, and the lack of democratisation and transformation of all other arenas of society, including the property system and the distribution of land. The relationship to global capital, as touched on in the examples above, is a crucial starting point for going beyond just explaining the limits of the basic right to vote, whether in Senegal, whose system of governance is widely touted as a democratic model, or in the context of arch-rivalry and extreme election violence in Kenya. Cliffe stated in unambiguous terms, referring mainly to Zimbabwe and Kenya, that ‘it would be incorrect and delusional to imply any necessary link between “power-sharing” and democracy’ (2009, 92). This has been proven to be the case over and over.
The limits of liberal democracy have been widely discussed and researched and there are new exposures every day. Many African countries are still fighting for basic formal equality before the law, which liberal democracy not only promises but is supposed to bring about, depending, that is, on which part of this highly unequal world you live in.
There are a couple of points to underline here. First, relatively more democratic constitutions like South Africa’s guarantee equality before the law, while the people face stark inequalities throughout society. That state can only partially implement this formal equality and corresponding political rights, as is true in many countries. The contradictory nature of liberal democracy is that it is the form of political rule that corresponds to the ostensibly equal exchange of commodities within the capitalist system. However, the social inequalities are not an anomaly of that system but rather a foundation of it, in which the labour power of the people, if they can sell it, is reduced to a saleable and exploitable product.
It is not just a matter of ‘uneven development’ within and among countries dominated by global capital in one or another form as discussed above; or that time and patience are required to see if the state, whether in a more liberal or more social democratic mode and framework, irons out the wrinkles, as is frequently claimed. On the contrary, one of the particular features of liberal democracy as a form of rule is that it masks and rationalises these socio-economic inequalities and that applies to the US and the UK as much as it does to Africa.
Second, and similarly, property relations underpin the same social order; they stand in the way of social transformation. So property rights and access (or lack of access) to land are a particular expression of the barriers the commodity system erects, which formal democracy does not erode or gradually dismantle, but instead protects and usually entrenches. Research in relationship to land tenure security and reform for farm workers and labour tenants in the context of South African land reform as a whole leads me to conclude that after 20 years of the relatively more developed liberal democracy in South Africa, provisions for formal equality are very unlikely to implement rights that seriously challenge the private property system as it currently is organised (Andrew forthcoming).
Liberal democracy works to obscure the reality that property relations underpin the social order. This kind of democracy also nourishes illusions about the limits and possibilities of change. It portrays to all social strata, not just the aspiring middle classes, the idea that we are just individuals interacting with each other and determining our own future based on our own individual life choices and motivations – a freedom that the state purports to guarantee and protect. However, in the wealthy formal democracies like the US, if you are a black individual walking the streets with even a hint of attitude, don’t try to test those democratic limits, even if your hands are in the air when the police arrive! This type of rule also provides a certain amount of freedom for intellectuals, government thinkers, policy makers and others to try to improve and expand the parameters of what is possible under formal democracy, however unequal and ultimately limited, because they believe they can help to align the right set of circumstances (or, less generously, are paid to make people think that).
The other side of the coin is also common, that ‘well that’s just capitalism, what do you expect?’ This is not helpful either, because if left at that level it feeds apathy towards any kind of struggles (either against glaring abuses or for critical if partial changes) and, most of all, discourages expanding people’s involvement and responsibility that is so indispensable. Of course it is absolutely necessary that people fight against inequality and for basic rights even if they don’t fundamentally challenge the political order. Sometimes they can win things, such as concessions or the retractions of regressive new laws. (And the system can also reverse those at a later time.) Most importantly, such political engagement can help to build the consciousness, understanding of how the system functions and unity among different sections of the people for a broader and more consequential struggle.
We have a responsibility as scholars to demystify the idealisation of liberal democracy and not just object to its limitations, to challenge ourselves and those with whom we work. That is not a programme for liberation, but it is not separate from it either.
What kind of research do we need?
State land reforms ‘from above’ have been going on for decades throughout the world and it is important to draw lessons and incorporate conclusions from these into our work, especially the essential one that by themselves such land reforms cannot lead to something radically different that would ultimately change people’s lives qualitatively, much less challenge capitalist relations, as is sometimes argued. While maybe we know it is true, should we not be among those who aim to bring everyone in on this, to encourage thinking and active engagement beyond these limited parameters – ‘out of the box’?
Many rural people one meets in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Kenya want much more and something far different than the formal freedom to vote, but they are not sure how to go about it – they are just sure their own government won’t lead them there! And in South Africa, it is difficult not to notice that their horizons become narrowed by the failure of land redistribution and the ways that struggle over these essential questions of livelihood and future has been channelled into improving laws that are largely inapplicable, or is suppressed altogether. Social critique too is often restricted to the failings of formal democracy rather than challenging its barriers to transforming society.
The struggle for land can open a pathway, beyond just partially fulfilling a democratic need and demand for land, towards developing a different society and a new kind of political rule that dismantles structures of inequality and the old ownership system from the past and breaks down and leads people to transform old practices, gender and nationality discrimination, superiority of urban over rural, and other prejudicial ways of thinking.
Going back to the Tanzania and Eritrea period of Lionel Cliffe’s life, there is much to learn from the experience of the national liberation movements which were not able to carry through those agendas. We need to study this period to understand the reasons for this and to synthesise those insights with the many valuable theoretical and empirical contributions of engaged scholars since then, whether on the nature of the state, social class, skewed development and ‘under’-development, our collective critique of capitalism, its pernicious influence on intellectuals and youth, or whether on ‘traditional’ institutions, gender relations, informal economies and migration.
Reality continues to change. And radical alternative visions and solutions are still needed. We must continue to provide lively critiques of the system; these are crucial but not enough, as many conferences tend to note in their closing sessions. A particular area of focus is that of patriarchy and land, which is very under-researched or treated as a separate subject and often falls off conference agendas altogether. Clearly there are countless questions to probe regarding land relations, use and rural livelihoods, land and green grabbing and their relationship to globalisation, financialisation and agriculture, as well as all the vital aspects of the environmental crisis and how it plays out in today’s broader political economy.
We also need more research that clearly analyses the social relations and production systems in different countries: how uneven development works, the different forms and ways in which capitalism incorporates elements of other modes of production in order to stabilise external domination, further ethnographic work of cultural and religious practices, not divorced from political economy, but as an enrichment of it. We need further critical study of the political institutions, especially the state, the expressions and means of resistance, the ways in which political consciousness is shaped as well as thinking and analysis that build on the early national liberation period and other experiences of trying to revolutionise society. In doing this research, we must dare to rethink the ‘whole thing’, beyond the socially acceptable goal of decolonisation – a different future altogether. What would it look like? What will it require? And, to take slight liberties with Cliffe’s words quoted in one tribute to him (Lawrence and Szeftel 2014, 291), it means being ‘serious about the world’.