Kevin Ochieng Okoth argues for a reassessment of the aspirations symbolised by the Third World movement unleashed at the Bandung Conference to discuss peace and the role of the Third World during the Cold War, economic development and decolonization, which took place in Indonesia in 1955, writes John Green
This is an important book for anyone interested in the development of African societies in the post-colonial era. The author is arguing for a reassessment of the aspirations symbolised by the Third World movement unleashed at the Bandung Conference to discuss peace and the role of the Third World during the Cold War, economic development and decolonization, which took place in Indonesia in 1955. The national liberation movements that emerged in Africa in the wake of that Bandung conference became engaged in a “de-westernisation” or “Africanisation” of the struggle. Okoth points out that most of the leaders of those national liberation movements that emerged during the 20th century were Marxist or Marxist-inspired.
In this slim volume, he shows how the early aspirations for a third way and the development of an African version of socialism were sabotaged by Western imperialism in cahoots with corrupt national elites. Since then, there has been a full-flight retreat from those ideas, and Africa today is to a large extent still the playground of globalised capitalism, accompanied by extreme exploitation of the populations and the countries’ raw materials, there is still widespread poverty and, almost continuous armed conflict. Western imperialism was able to co-opt indigenous ruling elites, who allowed them to continue exploiting and dominating their former colonies. Okoth argues forcefully that Marxism, which inspired so many of the early anti-colonialist freedom fighters, still has a vital role to play in African politics and is not, as a number of intellectuals have argued, solely a Eurocentric philosophy of little use to Africa.
Unfortunately, Okoth sometimes writes in a language aimed more at fellow academics, than a wider audience, unfamiliar with much of the jargon and abstruse references he uses. This is a great pity, because what he has to say is very relevant and deserves to reach well beyond academic circles.
His book is a response to what he calls the “Afro-pessimists”, those who consider Africa’s problems and the apparent inability of any black nation to govern itself in a stable and democratic manner as endemic, rather than a condition that can be changed radically and for the better.
In seven short chapters, he sets out to evaluate the main ideas and ideological conflicts concerning African development, from Afro-pessimism, through the Negritude movement, the black struggles and black studies campaigns in the USA, to neo-colonialism. He grapples with the ideas of the Senegalese leader, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, Luis Cabral among others who have contributed so much to the development of African self-awareness and towards an independent African ideology. He also brings to our attention the contribution made by the almost completely unknown Andrée Blouin. She first worked for Sékou Touré in Guinea, helping to mobilise women in support of the liberation struggle there. During the 1950s and 60s she threw herself into the fight for a free Africa on a wider scale, mobilising the Democratic Republic of Congo’s women against colonialism and would become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, DR Congo’s first prime minister. She had a vibrant exchange of ideas with other revolutionaries like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, yet her story is hardly known.
Okoth makes the distinction between colonialism – a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation and its people rests on the power of another nation, whereas coloniality refers to the underlying patters of power that have survived beyond the official end of colonial domination.
He polemises with those academics who reject Marxism and nationalism as having little to offer Africans today and are only mirroring those Western intellectuals who try to separate Marxism as a philosophy from Marxism as a guide to struggle. Okoth responds that among those early leaders of the national liberation struggles national liberation was rarely seen as an end in itself but rather as a moment on the road to a wholesale liberation of the African continent. He agrees, however, that the nation state concept was a ‘poisoned gift of national liberation’ imposed by the former colonial and imperialist powers, but one cannot chastise the liberation movements for struggling to take control of it, he argues. Freedom, as articulated by the national liberation movements, was based on the right to self-determination – a political question concerning the democratic rights of oppressed nations.
He includes a chapter on the history of black struggles in the USA and the divisive debates waged between those who saw that struggle as part of a wider global struggle against capitalism and exploitation and those who saw it in purely racial terms, as a black struggle only.
He quotes Marx’s Capital to show that Marx did not, as some have argued, ignore racial aspects of capitalist exploitation and that he did make a distinction between slave labour and wage labour. He also notes that there is a tradition in Marxist thought that has taken seriously the role race has played in the development of capitalism.
He quotes also from Marx’s letter to Pavel Vasilyevich, which shows that Marx clearly recognised the fundamental difference between “indirect slavery” i.e. wage slavery, and the condition of enslaved black people. “For Marx,” Okoth writes, “the very possibility of a proletarian revolution relied on the abolition of slavery.” There is indeed a tradition of Marxist thought that that has always taken seriously the role played by “racial capitalism” in the development of Western industrial capitalism. Slavery and the exploitation of black slaves played a vital role in the primary accumulation of the capital needed to invest in and promote industrial development, particularly in Britain and the USA during the 18th and 19th. centuries.
Okoth concludes by reminding his readers that there are “alternative paths to emancipation, and that these remain as radical and transformative as ever. It is up to us,” he adds, “to build a communism for our times from the ruins of Red Africa.”
Red Africa – Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics by Kevin Ochieng Okoth is published by Verso
John Green is a former trade union official, a journalist and former documentary film-maker, which in the 1970s involved clandestine filming assignments in South Africa in the 1970s aimed at helping bring the abhorrent practices of the apartheid regime to world attention. He is the author of numerous books, including Ken Sprague, People’s Artist, A Revolutionary Life: Biography of Friedrich Engels and Britain’s Communists: The Untold Story.
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation.
This article was first published in Liberation Journal. Read the journal here
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