The winner of ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize, awarded annually for the best article published by an African author in a publication year, is Dr James Musonda. His 2023 article, ‘He Who Laughs Last Laughs the Loudest: The 2021 Donchi-Kubeba (Don’t Tell) Elections in Zambia’, was published in ROAPE Volume 50, Issue 175. In their commendation, the journal’s Ruth First Prize Committee noted:
This is a provocative, thought-provoking and radical analysis of the 2021 election in Zambia when the ruling party was unexpectedly overthrown. With its foundation in extensive first-hand research, participant observation and activist immersion, Musonda’s account is a worthy example of Ruth First’s methodology in Mozambique in the 1970s as well as of her commitment to class analysis relevant to a particular time and place.
Compared to the usual explanatory framing of African elections in uncritical terms of clientelism and ethnic arithmetic, Musonda here undertakes a study showing how the ‘politics of the belly’ (Bayart 1993) can be subverted. His account takes on the way the Zambian political class held on to power through its ruling party via bribery, violence and oppression and through its linkage with the copper mining companies which dominate Zambia’s economy. Copper, once nationalised, is now privatised and trade union activity has declined. Elections offer an opportunity for sheer numbers to confront state and capitalist power – an opportunity usually forcibly suppressed. However, the gross failures of the Zambian government and its economic impoverishment of the population have sparked bitterness and a growing awareness that there might be ways to resist. There is a nuanced account of class relations here – never simply ‘elite/mass’ oversimplifications, but distinctions made and evidenced between the diversity of organised workers and auxiliary informal workers, bureaucratic and security state functionaries, and between voters of different backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, economic standing and so on.
Most notably, Musonda evidences their dynamic interactions as they move towards a class alliance for more open confrontation with state power. Evidence of an explicit ideology of protest and rejection and a growing awareness of potential agency emerges. Through underground mobilising led by the trade unions, the corrosive impact of bribery was undermined with the subversive notion of taking the money, but voting for the opposition. Even if this plays out as sabotage rather than outright revolution, it worked, and the ruling party fell. Musonda has provided a powerful analysis of resistance to class oppression which deserves to be more widely debated, both in terms of the capacity of the weakened trade union sector in Africa to mobilise radical opposition and whether or not such underground forms of organising are to be seen as progressive.
In terms of countering reactionary academic fashions and emphasising agency in a framework of political economy, this piece impressively backs ROAPE’s remit and activism.
James Musonda is a former trade unionist, born and bred on the Zambian Copperbelt, where he also worked as a nurse at Mopani Copper Mines. He holds a PhD in Politics and Social Sciences from the University of Liège. His PhD thesis draws on his ethnography in two underground mines where he worked as a helper and in two mining communities on the Zambian Copperbelt. He dealt with the question of what it means to have a job and be a worker under the neoliberal dispensation, tracking subjectivities through the workers’ everyday lives.
Musonda is currently the senior researcher in just energy transition at the Institute for Economic Justice in South Africa, where he is principal investigator of a project focused on labour and energy transitions in South Africa, Ghana and Kenya, funded by the Ottawa-based International Development Research Centre. He is the winner of the 2021 Terence Ranger Prize of the Journal of Southern African Studies for the best article by a first-time author in that journal for his article ‘Modernity on Credit: The Experience of Underground Miners on the Zambian Copperbelt’.
Musonda’s (2023) prize-winning article can be read on the ScienceOpen ROAPE open-access website at https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.1080/03056244.2023.2190452.