In 1972, Lionel Cliffe floated the idea of a radical Marxist journal on Africa, and in collaboration with other Marxist Africanists, produced the first issue in October 1974. Four decades later, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) publishes this special issue in tribute to Lionel, following his death in October 2013. Most of the articles were first presented as papers at a Colloquium that took place in October 2014, organised by Lionel’s colleagues and friends at the Universities of the Western Cape and of Cape Town and supported by this journal, along with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the University of Leeds. The Colloquium’s title of Land, liberation and democracy in Africa’ reflected the three main areas of Lionel’s lifetime work.
In making their presentations, many of the contributors reflected on their own collaborative relationships with Lionel, and on their debts to his encouragement and assistance in their own work. This issue is therefore a tribute both to Lionel’s life and work, which reflects the personal and political influences he had on the authors’ own approaches to analysing African realities and also the respect which the authors had for not only his work, but the man himself. Not all the papers presented could be included in this issue, but it is hoped that we can publish them, together with the papers that are included, in a Festschrift book in the near future. All the authors included in this issue have been associated with Lionel as colleagues and friends or students, or all three, and the geographic coverage of the contributions, as for the Colloquium, broadly matches that of Lionel’s own work.
This issue begins with a revised version of my keynote address to the symposium. My own association with Lionel goes back to Tanzania in the late 1960s, as a research student and later as a colleague at the University of Dar es Salaam. Back in the UK we worked together as two of the founder editors of this journal, as collaborators in editing ROAPE issues, and in other work on land and rural development in which he involved me, usually when he had taken on more than he could cope with. Others of his collaborators and friends will recognise this story! The keynote tries to cover both Lionel’s life and his various contributions in the areas of land tenure and rural development, the politics of the liberation movements and the issues surrounding democratic political practice. It notes especially the formative effect on his thinking of his decade in Tanzania during the early, exciting years of independence and Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa version of socialist development and rural cooperation.
This thinking, and especially the importance of understanding rural class formation and its relationship to politics, carried through to work, especially on land, in Zambia, Zimbabwe, the Horn, and, in the later years, South Africa. The importance to Lionel of doing the fieldwork necessary to discover what was happening on the ground grew out of his experience in observing attempts at rural transformation and how Nyerere’s ideas of agricultural cooperation were more likely to be successful if built on existing practices at the grassroots rather than imposed by government and party edict from above. Following the keynote is a short and complementary tribute to Lionel by a former editor, Mike Powell. Powell sees Lionel as an exemplar of the ‘politically engaged intellectual worker’ whose participation in academic enquiry was concerned with how it would contribute to socio-economic progress, and thus determined his methodological approach to research. As he writes, his experience of seeing Lionel in action and interacting with him was not the same as mine, but his recollections of Lionel in meetings and of conversations with others about him, and tributes paid to him, remind us of his focus on doing research that would lead to an empathetic understanding of the people and communities in question, and which would inform policies that would improve their welfare.
Lionel’s focus on land and rural development is reflected in the majority of the articles in this issue. His Tanzanian experience straddled two separate periods in that country’s immediate post-independence history. In the first, Tanzania followed a path reliant on foreign aid and investment to generate growth and development, and discovered that this path did not lead to rapid growth, but to embedded poverty and inequalities between and within urban and rural societies. The second period followed Nyerere’s Ujamaa strategy, starting with the Arusha Declaration in 1967. This saw both the successes, especially of the formation of ujamaa villages from below, and the germs of failure in the adoption of a forced villagisation strategy, the latter trying to exchange rapid results for a careful analysis of the situation on the ground.
Even when such radical attempts to transform property relations failed, victims to the various ways in which imperialism manipulates local actors to maintain control over global political and economic forces, some of those radical initiatives live on in different ways. As Elisa Greco shows in her contribution, where ujamaa vijijini, or villigisation, was a voluntary action at the grass roots, the varying degrees of enthusiasm and vigour with which they were embraced and pursued at the time have left a legacy of solidarity and resistance. Nyerere sought to transform Tanzania by building a collectivist base in the countryside, to bring scattered producers together not only to facilitate the better delivery of education, health and other public services, but also to increase agricultural productivity and therefore the well-being of both rural and urban populations. The move from voluntary to coercive methods to effect this policy was ultimately its undoing. What Greco’s account underlines is that people’s experience of ujamaa has inspired future challenges to the new regimes of land grabbing for corporate agriculture.
The transformation of policy in Tanzania from the ujamaa of Nyerere to the competitive capitalist liberalism model of the international financial institutions (IFIs) has been extremely damaging to the country’s development, and that of the rest of the African continent. Andrew Coulson, long connected with Lionel both in Tanzania and the UK, documents what this has meant for the cotton sector in Tanzania, both in the case of production of the crop itself and the manufacture of textiles from it. Coulson’s account highlights the negative effects of market liberalisation on the quality and output of cotton, and of the institutional changes from primary cooperatives controlled by farmers to commercial parastatals controlled by the state. Textile manufacturing was seen as one of the building blocks of industrialisation, but misdirected policy resulted in a high-cost industry unable to export competitively and which simultaneously saddled the population with unaffordable textiles. Coulson’s detailed case study is an example of the approach that Lionel advocated – first, find out what is happening on the ground, and then construct appropriate policies which listen to the producers and their concerns.
Kenya took a very different road with a land reform first crafted by the British colonial regime. Brian Van Arkadie, who worked in Tanzania and who knew Lionel from his days at Makerere, was an active participant in the post-independence period as a British civil servant, sitting in the meetings between the UK and Kenyan governments negotiating British aid and later heading a commission on land settlement. For Van Arkadie, although this redistribution was intended to address landlessness and poverty, in the hands of the Kenyatta regime it became more about establishing a strong African ruling class and cementing political power in the hands of that class. The extent to which this may stir up unrest and resistance through opposition from those left out – beyond the negative impact that is generally believed to have been had on inter-ethnic relations in the old White Highlands – remains to be seen.
The theme of policy failure is continued by Ray Bush, a graduate student and long-time colleague of Lionel, in his analysis of rural Near East and North Africa (NENA). Bush is able to draw on Lionel’s method of analysis of rural social formations in their specific context, to inform his own discussion of power and politics in NENA. Bush emphasises the importance of locating agriculture and farming in the wider political economy, in regional, national and international contexts of IFI-led economic ‘reform’; conflict and war; and climate change. He highlights the role of small family farms – still the backbone of agriculture in a large part of the world in spite of the onward march of the corporates. He asks whether there are policies which can ‘uncover ways in which the challenges for small family farmers can be met without merely conceding to the interests of the owners of larger units of capital’, not least by listening to the farmers themselves – an important lesson Bush derives from Lionel’s own work elsewhere in Africa. He concludes by mapping a research agenda that can deliver policies which will support family farming, an agenda which approaches the position and needs of this farming holistically, across all their agricultural and non-agricultural activities, and in their relationship to corporate farming, markets and the state.
One of the mechanisms through which corporate agriculture annexes family farming is contracting with farmers to supply crops to supplement production from the large estates and plantations. Lloyd Sachikonye, a graduate student of Lionel, reviews his own earlier research on contract farming in the context of its expansion, following Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reforms. He draws out the similarities and differences, most notably the success of tobacco growers, compared with the problems between growers and companies in the cotton sector which have reduced output. As Sachikonye points out, the land reforms have had the unexpected consequence of the rapid growth of contract farming with its attendant ‘accumulation from below’ by growers with larger areas of the redistributed land. The issue of rural class formation, a constant theme in Cliffe’s work, and its implications for political change is indeed one high up on the research agenda in this case.
The land reforms in Zimbabwe had other effects too. Grasian Mkodzongi, a participant in the Cape Colloquium, traces the reforms’ consequences for rural governance. The Fast Track Land Reform programme not only involved war veterans leading land occupations, as was well documented, but also often involved collaboration with customary authorities, or chiefs. This collaboration has placed those chiefs in strong positions and led them to contest with the state issues of ownership and control of land. The issue of chiefly rights to land becomes crucial when it comes to exploiting any mineral wealth underground. Then there is not only contestation between the state and chiefs, but among the chiefs themselves about who has sole authority. Chiefs who ensure that the people in their localities get the benefits of mineral exploitation rather than see these go to local and national politicians, gain greater popularity and legitimacy even though they are unelected, than do the elected representatives of the people affected. In this analysis, chiefs play a different role than under colonial rule, this time defending their subjects against the state, rather than ruling their subjects on behalf of the state. The re-emergence of chiefs as important political players was a development which I can remember puzzled Lionel, who would have appreciated the specific explanations to be found in Mkodzongi’s empirically grounded analysis.
The role of women in agriculture was an issue whose importance to understanding rural society Lionel recognised from early on in his work, especially in areas of male out-migration where women’s role in the ‘traditional’ division of labour altered, with important implications for political change and alliances. Marjorie Mbilinyi, a colleague and friend of Lionel’s from his period at the University of Dar es Salaam, and long-time feminist academic-activist in Tanzania, looks at the history of agrarian struggles from ‘a transformative feminist’ perspective. This framework, Mbilinyi explains, ‘combines gender and class, and questions of race and national sovereignty in its analysis of production and reproduction as significant components of feminist political economy’. She notes how rural women producers have come to be represented by corporate agriculture as backward, and how they have simultaneously been at the forefront of local resistance to globalisation forces which grab their land. Echoing Lionel’s early work on Zambia, she shows how women under colonial rule had to take on more of the burden of subsistence production while men migrated or engaged in the production of marketed crops. Women were at the forefront of cooperative developments during the Ujamaa era, and they continued to be active in the resistance to the effects on rural communities of liberalisation, a legacy of the Ujamaa period which Greco emphasises in her article.
Lionel liked to make comparisons between countries’ experiences to draw out lessons for policy that might be learned by others travelling the same road. Indeed one of his last pieces of work was to make a comparison between the power-sharing experiences of Kenya and Zimbabwe (Cliffe 2011). Nancy Andrew, whose association with Lionel began when he was her doctoral external examiner, provides some comparative perspective on the transformation of rural property relations across Burkina Faso, South Africa and Zimbabwe, teasing out the lessons that can be learned for radical approaches to land reform, or in the case of South Africa, the absence of them. Andrew stresses the importance of land and the need to transform distribution and productive potential, but also illuminates the obstacles to doing this within the context of corporate capitalism and property relations. This is a context in which even apparent redistributive land reform can serve a purpose for a political system that is far from democratic, being based on capitalist property relations with no real commitment to greater social equality. In emphasising the importance of rural transformation to effect real liberation and democracy, her article provides a link to the two other themes of this issue in the articles that follow.
The first wave of liberation from colonial rule was in large part the result of negotiation sometimes following violent conflict, as in Kenya. The second wave culminating in the liberation of South Africa from apartheid involved varying degrees of armed struggle modelled on the successful guerrilla movements of Asia and Latin America. The liberation of the Portuguese colonies was partly a consequence of successful armed resistance, which contributed to the military-led Portuguese revolution against its dictatorship and the support for liberation from the new regime. As with liberation struggles elsewhere in Africa, resistance to the white regime in Rhodesia was complicated by the existence of competing liberation movements with different external backers. John Saul, a colleague of Lionel’s at the University of Dar es Salaam, and lifelong friend, here examines a fascinating moment in the history of Zimbabwe’s liberation narrated in a recent book by the late Wilfred Mhanda (aka Dzino Machingura), which illustrates not only the drag on liberation that these rivalries among the movements generated, but also the degree to which external players – and in this case liberated Mozambique – influenced outcomes. The strong possibility that existed in the then Rhodesia for a movement to emerge, modelled on Frelimo, was compromised by Mozambique’s regional realpolitik, and allowed Robert Mugabe to emerge as the eventual leader of liberation, an outcome not initially favoured by Samora Machel. Saul has particular insight into this story, having been closely associated with Frelimo’s struggle both as observer and solidarity activist in its cause, and having been close to the Frelimo leadership both during liberation and after.
Lionel’s connection to Zimbabwe began with his detention in Zambia in 1976 when he was teaching at the University of Zambia and was accused of being one of the foreign lecturers behind the student opposition to the government’s interference in the rivalry between the three Angolan liberation movements, with their different big power backers. During his time in Zambian gaols, Cliffe met some of the Zimbabweans also detained by the Zambian government on the grounds of involvement in the murder of Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) leader Herbert Chitepo. This moment is referenced both by Saul and by David Moore in the final article in this issue, and both articles complement each other. Moore takes up Lionel’s notion of ‘generations’ in discussing and explaining political developments and rivalries within the Zimbabwe liberation movement, and ZANU in particular. Moore examines these generations and their place in Zimbabwe’s history, throwing light on how this idea might help to understand the rise of Mugabe and the demise of many of his rivals. He then ventures into a discussion of the British and US views of the main protagonists in ZANU, from Mugabe himself to the subject of Saul’s article Wilfred Mhanda/Dzino Machingura. Both of these contributions offer fascinating insights, which illuminate not only national and regional politics, but also the way the rival world powers of the Cold War era affected outcomes in Africa, and in particular how the US and UK attempted to fashion the policies and political orientation of African governments themselves, as in various ways they still do.
This issue is a tribute to Lionel Cliffe, the person, the ‘politically engaged intellectual worker’, the academic activist, and the teacher. It is a tribute to his approach to understanding African political economy in ways that can help to develop policies, especially those which improve the lot of the poor and dispossessed. This journal was conceived by Lionel to do that and aspires to continue to do so, which will be a fitting tribute to his memory.