At the time of writing this editorial, there was the spectre of the global economy grinding to a halt as a consequence of the impact and response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Although ‘Africa was the last region of the world to be sucked into the pandemic and thus far appears to be the least affected’ (Aye 2020), years of structural adjustments, followed by heavy doses of neoliberalism, had not only sapped the energy of the African masses but had also impoverished its people. After a slow start in China, the virus spread rapidly to other regions; and, largely because of poor health facilities and the growing indebtedness, it was felt that some African countries might be overwhelmed by the virus, which led to calls for the immediate suspension of the debts owed by African countries (Okonjo-Iweala et al. 2020). According to ROAPE contributing editor Baba Aye (2020), by mid April 2020 the total number of recorded Covid-19 cases in Africa was over 10,000, with over 500 deaths. Initially, the infection seemed prevalent among the rich, who are internationally mobile and have the ability, to undergo testing for the virus and to self-isolate.
The initial response of most African leaders to the pandemic was typified by that of Tanzania’s president, John Magufuli, who saw Covid-19 as a problem from a distant land, and considered that Africa would be saved from its worst excesses. By the end of April, the incidence of the virus had worsened in the country and in Africa in general (though not in comparison to some other parts of the world): as the number of dead rose, the time for early containment of the virus was lost (Taylor 2020). Instead, the virus moved throughout the continent. It soon became clear that Africa’s weak health infrastructure could not cope with the demands, as the mortality rate continued to rise. There was a further call for immediate debt relief for African countries ‘in order to create the fiscal space governments need to respond to the pandemic’ (Okonjo-Iweala et al. 2020). Most African governments on their own do not have the resources to fight the virus, since health facilities in the form of hospitals and clinics are not available to the majority. Africa has been greatly weakened by the corruption among the governing classes and by the International Monetary Fund's structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and subsequent neoliberal strategies. Furthermore, the USA’s decision to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization because of Washington’s disagreements with China has not helped the prevailing air of pessimism and frustration surrounding the outbreak.
According to Coulibaly, Gandhi, and Senbet, African governments were responding to Covid-19 with determination by declaring states of emergency, forced quarantines, restricting travel and public gatherings; and private-sector firms, civil society groups and grassroots movements were joining the fight in many different ways (Coulibaly, Ghandhi, and Senbet 2020). In general, the reactions of African leaders have been mixed. For example, some states like Senegal and Ghana were quick to respond to the pandemic: by closing their borders and initiating ‘a comprehensive plan of contact tracing’ (Hirsch 2020). It is reported that a few months into the outbreak, Senegal was to develop testing kits at a cost of $1 a patient, which in 10 minutes can ‘detect both current or previous infection’. On the other side of the continent, President Andry Rajoelina of the Malagasy Republic announced that his country’s scientists had discovered a cure for the Covid-19 virus based on indigenous plants, which has been ordered by several African states (Ibid.).
There has not been a common strategy on the part of African leaders in their quest to defeat the virus. Not surprisingly, the burden has fallen on the workers and the poor, who will have to bail out African corrupt elites once again, as noted by Baba Aye (2020): ‘The unholy trinity of SAPs – privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation – exacerbated the ill effects of the deteriorating social and economic determinants of health.’ According to Okonjo-Iweala et al. (2020), it has been estimated that for the first time this century the figure of people living in poverty will rise by about 50 million. Furthermore, it is suggested that all the progress in reducing poverty since the launch of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015 has been lost, the burden being carried by the urban and rural poor. Many African countries have now joined the rest of the world by imposing severe restrictions on the movement of citizens as checkpoints are set up in order to impose the various lockdowns. However, African countries cannot afford a furlough system to aid employers and compensate workers. Law enforcement officers are often merciless in their dealings with the poor, particularly those who dare to question or challenge the decisions of the merchants of the misery and impoverishment. The arrival of Covid-19 in Africa has also coincided with the arrival of swarms of locusts in East Africa, triggered by cyclones from the Yemeni sand dunes providing fertile breeding grounds for these voracious creatures, which pose a threat to the livelihood of millions of people in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, creating additional shocks and vulnerability for the people of East and Central Africa.
At the time of writing, according to official data (and the variations that this implies), the countries with the highest incidence of the virus are the USA and Brazil. Following these, India, the Russian Federation and others have overtaken the UK, Italy and Spain, as the virus has been transmitted through further populations. Despite the absence of adequate medical facilities and significant numbers of trained personnel in Africa, the disease has affected a relatively small number of people in comparison with other regions of the world, though the figures for African countries continue to rise. In both the USA and Britain, the relative impact of the disease has been highest among ethnic minorities – African Americans and Latinos in the US, Black and ethnic minorities in Britain (BAME). A number of ‘sociological explanations’ have been suggested, including cultural, religious and organisational practices – many of these explanations ‘pathologising’ a BAME cultural trope instead of focusing on the socio-economic basis of ethnic minority alienation. Mainstream analysts in both Britain and the US have turned their back on issues relating to the role that neoliberalism, austerity and racism have played in decimating these communities by pushing their members to the edge of starvation and rendering them as les damnés de la terre, of the developed world, as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in both the US and Britain has clearly demonstrated.
In the USA, the situation is exacerbated by gun-toting racist police officers who do not hesitate to stand on the neck of African Americans, or shoot at unarmed civilians, and an insouciant president who seems to wallow in unnecessary conflicts with states and individuals. The killing on 25 May of George Floyd, an African American man, by a Minneapolis police officer, while three other officers stood by – in contravention of their operational manual, which requires officers to intervene in cases where excessive force is being used by another officer – has put the problem of racism in both the US and Britain back on the political agenda. There have been demonstrations throughout the USA including in Washington DC, the capital, where it was reported that the president was kept in the White House bunker for his own safety. For two weeks following Floyd’s assassination there were daily protests and demonstrations largely by young white and Black people who demanded changes in police regulations and for the officers involved to be severely punished. The crowd demanded changes to the law and an end to racism in their country.
In Britain too, thousands of predominantly young people marched every day for a week calling for an end to racism. The climax of the British demonstration was at the old slave port of Bristol, where ‘Black Lives Matter,’ a Black-led multiracial and international protest movement brought down the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader. The statue was thrown into the same harbour from which Colston commenced his nefarious journeys, ploughing through the Atlantic to collect African children, women and men for the long journey through the perilous middle passage where the lives of millions ended as they were thrown overboard for falling ill or challenging their slave masters over unjust treatment.
The leaders of the young people who demonstrated outside the White House were chanting ‘Show me what democracy looks like?’ and they replied, ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ ROAPE extends solidarity to all the brave young people who came out to condemn institutional racism wherever it raised its ugly head in America, Britain or in any other part of the world where one race is held as superior and another inferior, which breeds the type of police brutality that has led to the death of George Floyd and many others. Our solidarity is also extended to the young men and women for having the courage to stand up for their democratic rights and to condemn the brutal killing of a human being by an agent of the American state, and to show that Black Lives Matter indeed.
The voice of African activists – ROAPE webinar
ROAPE’s recent webinar provided a platform for African activists and researchers to discuss the likely impact of the global recession on the continent, the role of international financial institutions and the cost to workers; in short, ‘the new normal in Africa’, in their own countries, and how the people are paying the price for Covid-19. Most of the participants described how they saw the fragility of the state in the current epoch not just in the state’s inability to provide homes, health facilities and employment for the people, but in its aloofness from the people and their needs. Some speakers asserted that it was not clear who was the target for the state – the virus, or the workers and peasants that the state is expected to serve. As one discussant put it: ‘it is not clear whom the state is fighting: Covid-19 or the poor, as the state via the oppressive apparatus continues to brutalise and terrorise those living in informal settlements.’
A Nigerian delegate spoke about the constant struggle for food and survival in Africa’s largest democracy, as well as the intensification of repression of the poor during the lockdown. A delegate from Zimbabwe discussed the government of the ruling party ZANU–PF’s use of the anti-virus campaign as a cover for wider repression, as activists are winning the case for a radical change of direction. As another activist argued, both politics and the economy are likely to change in the crisis. Many delegates underlined the impact of capitalism on the environment through deforestation and capital flight from the continent, and highlighted the plight of the toiling masses in Africa. Delegates emphasised the crisis of homelessness and the transformation to a securitised state: an absence of personal security in many African countries, absence of basic necessities like water, and of security against terror, hunger, poverty and homelessness; they emphasised that the masses are seen as a problem to the ruling classes. There was demand for an end to the politics that favours the elite to one that puts the people at the centre of all societal activities.
Articles in this issue
In the first article, Jean Copans highlights what he describes as the ‘virtual disappearance of Marxist theorisation throughout French social sciences during the past quarter of a century’ and the way that references to the concept of social class have become uncommon. By contrast, since the early 2000s the sociology of French society has reinstated the concept of class in reaction to the economic crisis found in the reshaping of production, though not necessarily dealing with the means of production and class struggle. Copans reminds readers that as late as the inter-war years, French social science could only make sporadic use of class in analysing colonial African societies. In his view, it should come as no surprise that ‘the Marxist tradition symbolised by ROAPE has never enjoyed a particular strong presence in French-language African Studies.’ He points out that it was not until the Second World War that social classes appeared in urban studies and political mobilisation. By contrast, communist, Marxist and militant leaders strived to organise and mobilise nationalists for independence. Copans draws attention to the fact that it was in social anthropology that Marxism took root in the late 1960s, however, these imaginary edifices were destroyed by the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s; for him, the 1990s witnessed the dissolution of the African state and its subjection by anglophone political scientists. In his view, this is accompanied by various new forms of work and exploitation and dispossession.
The next article, written by Paul Stewart, Andries Bezuidenhout and Christine Bischoff, deals with an important issue for workers in South Africa, namely occupational health and safety. The mining industry in that country is notorious for its violent history, with a regime of institutionalised violence in mining production that only ended in the mid 1960s. As the authors explain, this has been a major concern for workers in the country, in particular those who have worked under the system of subcontracting, illegal mining and cases of inter-union rivalry. The authors point out that for almost 60 years this ‘industrial army’ was housed in single-sex compounds, with no real wage increases, due to the functioning of the colonial apartheid system, whereby basic rights, including the right to strike, were denied. It was not until after the formation of the National Union of Miners (NUM), with its slogan ‘organise or die’, that there was sufficient pressure to mobilise for the improvement of occupational health and safety and for the promulgation of the Mine Health and Safety Act of 1996. The article is based on an analysis of surveys of trade union members in the mining industry from the late 1990s and subsequent years. It was not until the 1980s onwards that the NUM ‘was able to appreciably limit physical assaults as the union established representation for workers for the first time since 1946’. Nonetheless, workers’ safety continued to be a big issue in the industry. The article first searches for a worker-oriented perspective of the politics of health and safety in the mining industry of South Africa, and then deals with how the growth of subcontracting and the emergence of illicit mining have transformed the health and safety culture in South Africa.
This article is one of two in this volume addressing the thorny issue of precarious work, which is the scourge of working people. This can assume the form of utilisation of non-unionised labour, or subcontracted labour, with the main intention of bypassing unionised workers, through placing contracts out only to anti-union employers who are ipso facto ready to undermine the wages of the unionised worker. Indeed, as Stewart et al. observe that South African mine operation is replete with such workers, and, as the authors also observe:
Whether construed as non-standard employment … or as subcontracted labour or as falling under the scourge of precarious work … , over the past two decades a high proportion of mineworkers in post-apartheid South Africa have been employed through intermediaries … . (Stewart, Bezuidenhout and Bischoff, in this issue, p. 32)
The article goes on to draw attention to the growing number of subcontractors emerging in various South African mining operations and their numbers continue to increase, as job security disappears for an ever-increasing number of South Africans. Not only is job security lower, but wages are also lower and workers are subjected to more dangerous jobs. In conclusion, the authors highlight the manner and extent to which employers tend to exploit linguistic and ethnic differences among the workforce, specifically to undermine worker solidarity.
Lawrence Ntuli’s article is the second paper in this volume that looks at the experiences of precarious workers in South Africa. Ntuli compares the tactics and strategies of precarious workers who fought through the unions for better conditions at work, and those who engage in industrial struggle away from the union. He points out that both sets of workers utilised different forms of organisation, yet they used almost identical tactics and strategy. One important common strand that runs through both unions was the belief that better wages and conditions can only be delivered by the union. Data for the article came from field studies (which received a contribution from our ROAPE small grants fund which later became the Lionel Cliffe Memorial Research Scholarship), not from library or desk research. Ntuli draws attention to the fact that unions tend to be poor at organising precarious workers, largely because they prioritise the needs of what Ntuli calls ‘insiders’ and neglect the needs of the ‘outsiders’. Furthermore, he compares the strike actions of two groups of precarious workers who were employed by two municipalities in South Africa, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality (EMM) and the City of Johannesburg (COJ). After a number of years operating as precarious workers, both groups were desirous of ending the practice. Both Ekhurhuleni and the City of Johannesburg are located in Gauteng Province of South Africa and share a common history; both are governed by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as well as being members of the South African Local Government Association. Both municipalities were committed to precarisation of work. In 2001, however, COJ created a waste removal entity called Pikitup, which was an independent municipal entity owned by COJ, but registered as a private company, and operating as a private company. EMM, meanwhile, outsourced a portion of waste removal to various contractors; one of the private contractors was LLM Training and Development, which won a three-year contract that enabled it to employ 92 workers. The employers of precarious workers did not comply with the law. After the Pikitup and LLM workers realised that the unionised workers who did the same jobs as them enjoyed better pay and conditions, they became eager to join the union. For Ntuli, both sets of workers soon realised that the road out of unbearable working conditions was to join a union and fight back. As such they decided to join the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU), the largest union in South Africa, with strong ties to the ruling ANC and strongly opposed to privatisation. According to Ntuli, workers in both municipalities felt that within SAMWU, ‘they were likely to be listened to and to gain a powerful and collective voice’, yet the different size and composition of worker organising in EMM and COJ led to uneven results.
In the next article, Fadzai Chipato, Libin Wang, Ting Zuo and George T. Mudimu analyse aspects of youth struggles for land in post-land-reform Zimbabwe. Land has been a major source of conflict in Zimbabwe both in the colonial and post-colonial eras. The appropriation of most of the fertile land under colonialism played a major role in fuelling anger by the African rural masses, which led to the war of national liberation and independence. After liberation, there were struggles for land and demands that had not been met. Groups like the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association mobilised to occupy land from the privileged white farmers. In the gerontocratic society that was Zimbabwe, the land released went to the veterans and senior party functionaries, and the voiceless youth remained landless. This article focuses on the struggle of youth from the grassroots to have a share in the distribution of land. To achieve this goal, the article focuses on the political economic structure in which youth, state and agrarian capital articulate, while focusing on the direction of the struggle for land. The article includes three case studies: 1) where data is collected for the first study through in-depth interviews with landless youth, government officials and the ruling ZANU–PF; 2) a case study at district level, through interviews with youth that participated in the campaign for land; 3) data obtained via nationwide interviews through secondary sources.
Chipato and her co-authors show how
youth’s quest for land has been reduced to a party, not a national, issue: in the process this has led to the alienation of youth who do not belong to the party and also dampens the prospects for progressive youth to access land, due to the fact that they will always be forced to view accessing land as a party favour rather than a constitutional right that they claim. (Chipato, Wang, Zuo and Mudimu, in this issue, p. 70)
The final article by Jacobo Grajales, entitled ‘From war to wealth? Land policies and the peace economy in Côte d’Ivoire’, examines the interaction between post-conflict development policies, people’s expectations and fears unleashed by the ending of the war and the necessity and capacity of local actors to establish external alliances. In particular, it deals with an accord struck with autochthonous landholders, migrants and the state by the country’s first ruler, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who remained in office from independence in 1960 until his death in 1993. However, the economic downturn of the 1980s brought an abrupt end to the agreement, which was at the heart of one of the fastest growing regions in the country, where it is said that foreign and domestic investments had helped to put an end to political turmoil. The palm oil extraction mill operated by Dekel Oil, which was an Israeli-owned enterprise, was a major export earner. In spite of the reputation of Côte d’Ivoire as a haven for foreign investors, the country went through a nine-year civil war which was triggered by an attempted coup in 2002, leading to the country being essentially divided into two halves: rebel-controlled north and government-controlled south. The violence came to an end in 2011 with the appointment of Alassane Ouattara as president of the country, and former president Laurent Gbagbo was sent to The Hague International Criminal Court, where he was charged with crimes against humanity. The author interviewed a wide range of individuals (95 in all) during the course of a three-month intensive research trip in the country. Informants included peasant producers, Ivorian state officials at the local and national levels, members of the NGO community, and international development professionals in Abidjan and Paris.
Grajales draws attention to the economic insecurity that has engulfed Ivorian society when he points out that ‘Legal security is not an issue solely for urban dwellers investing in the countryside, also referred to as “Sunday farmers”, or planteurs du dimanche.’ He points out that ‘It is also instrumental in attracting and securing foreign investment.’ He highlights the reinforcement of the social structures of agrarian capitalism and the intense competition for land involving village chiefs, who act as ‘wardens of land’, and subjects who need land for subsistence. For him, many of these village authorities who are acting as wardens of the land are powerful property holders. He warns that if the trend is not checked, ‘the result is the transformation of chieftaincies into economic brokers’, as is the case in other states in Africa. He points out that these deals can involve not just individual property owners, but also village authorities, in particular village chiefs. He points out that village chiefs who are already property holders are often being transformed into economic brokers, as lease agreements are signed directly by village chiefs as if they were owners of the land.
Briefings and debates
In the briefings in this issue, Mohammad Amir Anwar and Mark Graham analyse digital labour, more specifically the role African workers are playing in the global information economy, including developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems. They argue that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, and on that basis outline possible contours of a new global division of labour for digital work and suggest actions to make it a more progressive system. Murtala Muhammad, Ramatu Buba, Muhammad Danial Azman and Abubakar Ahmed take into focus China’s involvement in the trans-Saharan textile trade and industry in Nigeria, specifically in the historic textile city of Kano. They analyse the significant smuggling of Chinese textile products through the Sahara into the Kano market during the period 2000 to 2015, and show that China’s activity has displaced local manufacturers in Kano. Michael I. Ugwueze, Christian C. Ezeibe Icon and Jonah I. Onuoha examine the political economy of automobile development in Nigeria, specifically the major developments in the industry since 1960. They argue that inconsistent implementation of automobile policies has reinforced the capacity of non-indigenous automobile manufacturers to dominate the sector, and conclude that consistent policy implementation that promotes the interests of indigenous manufacturers is relevant for increased local production and job creation in the sector. Youssoufou Hamadou Daouda analyses the political economy of Boko Haram, particularly the poverty and living conditions in southeastern Niger (Lake Chad Basin). The briefing shows how the conflict dismantles the local economy, jeopardises living conditions and heightens tensions between local communities and public authorities, and more generally destroys the dynamism of the Lake Chad Basin economy based on cross-border trade in agricultural and fisheries products. Due to the conflict, many people are now living in camps, where precarious living conditions and poverty become daily challenges, and where tensions between refugees, host populations and local authorities are recurrent.
In the first of three debate pieces, Franklin Obeng-Odoom explores the scholarship concerning persisting inequality (and resulting uncertainty and social costs) in Africa. He argues that the contending orthodox, heterodox and political economy explanations are not satisfactory, and that instead stratification economics, centred on property and institutions, offers a more compelling elucidation of why stratification and inequality persist on the continent. In the second debate, Morten Ougaard examines Samir Amin's contribution to historical materialism, and argues that Amin's contributions to historical materialism were original theoretical innovations that represented a clear break with Eurocentrism in this tradition. They include the concept of tributary social formations and a global perspective on the development of human society. He concludes that Amin's interventions deserve more attention and appreciation than they have received. In the first of a two-part Debate contribution, John Saul reflects on the ‘hero’ in the history of the Mozambican liberation struggle and, in particular, the impact on the course of liberation of the assassination of Frelimo’s first president, Eduardo Mondlane. The question of the importance of individual leaders to socialist revolutionary projects and what might have happened if they had lived is one for serious debate in this journal and which we hope will be stimulated by Saul's essay.
On Roape.net
Even before the current crisis, we were beginning to feel the impact of the climate emergency across our work. We posted an interesting interview with John Molyneux (2020) on climate change, capitalism, and an important initiative, the Global Ecosocialist Network, which brings together activists and researchers from across the global North and South. And in a blogpost soon after, introducing an important book series, Vishwas Satgar (2020) argued that we must confront carbon capitalism which is at the heart of the acceleration of the climate crisis that also foments exclusionary nationalisms. Satgar argued that there must be a return to Marx – something we would agree with in this journal.
We have continued to post articles in our debates section, on Rwanda (Ansoms 2020), Walter Rodney (Seddon 2020) and Critical Agrarian Studies (Engels 2020). We have also received a number of excellent pieces from a workshop in Tunis at the beginning of the year which brought together scholars, activists, organisations and artists who work for the liberation of Asia and Africa (Tunis Workshop Organisers 2020). We have posted on Ethiopia (Markakis 2020), debt, and Lumumba’s murder – and the impact for Zambian nationalists (Marmon 2020). In addition to these were Harris Dousemetzis’ (2020) blogpost on the life and politics of Dimitri Tsafendas, and a fascinating hidden history of Omar Blondin Diop’s murder in Dakar in the 1970s, by the researcher Florian Bobin (2020).
As the Covid-19 pandemic began to hit the continent, we posted reports from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Burkina Faso (Roape.net 2020), with researchers and activists explaining what is happening in these countries. On two occasions in March, Femi Aborisade, Heike Becker, Didier Kiendrebeogo, Gacheke Gachihi, Lena Anyuolo and Tafadzwa Choto looked at how the crisis is taking shape – how governments are using the virus as a cover for wider repression, and the broader context of capitalism, climate change and popular struggle. In addition, we have posted an excellent interview with Ian Angus (2020), who touched on climate change and Covid-19. He discussed the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene and Covid-19 in the global South. Angus argued that new viruses, bacteria and parasites spread from wildlife to humans because capital is bulldozing primary forests, replacing them with profitable monocultures. Ecosocialists must patiently explain that permanent solutions will not be possible so long as capital rules the earth. ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig and Hannah Cross (2020) also provided an overview of Covid-19 within a radical political economy perspective.