Leo Zeilig

Student resistance and the democratic transition: student politics in Senegal 1999–2005

University students participated in the democratic transition in Senegal that, throughout the 1990s, saw student activists across the continent advocate for political change. This paper examines the role students played in the election of the new government in Senegal in 2000 and the years that followed. Many student activists in Senegal argued that they were responsible for the changement politique, that saw the first defeat of the ruling Socialist Party since independence in 1960 and the victory of Abdoulaye Wade – ‘papa sopi’ (‘the father of change’). The paper considers the relationship of students to the new governments. It argues that students in Senegal, and across the continent, have played a vital role in political transformations, though not in circumstances chosen by them.

The Student-Intelligentsia in sub-Saharan Africa: Structural Adjustment, Activism and Transformation

University students acquired a politically privileged status in much of sub-Saharan Africa; this was connected to the role the student-intelligentsia played in the struggles for independence. After independence, student activism became an important feature of the new states. However, higher education on the continent came under sustained attack in the 1980s and 1990s, with the policies of the IMF and World Bank reversing the generous funding national universities had received. This cast student activists into a world transformed by political and economic forces, contested in waves of popular protest. While students in many cases maintained their status as politically privileged actors, they now did so in countries where there had been a convergence of popular classes. This article charts some of these developments, and argues that the student-intelligentsia has played a diverse and contradictory role in the recent political and economic upheavals on the continent.

Burkina Faso: from Thomas Sankara to popular resistance

SUMMARY Arguably the résistance populaire across Burkina Faso in September 2015 against the coup led by members of the old regime was as significant as the uprising that toppled Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. This Briefing attempts to unpick the significance and extent of the popular resistance.

Não vamos esquecer (We will not forget)

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Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa: ROAPE/Third World Network-Africa Connections workshop, held in Accra, Ghana, 13–14 November 2017

This introduction to the Accra workshop on ‘Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa’, held on 13–14 November 2017, explains the rationale behind the initiative to have three Africa-based ROAPE meetings, why they are important and how they relate to historic socio-economic transformations, the most significant of which remains the great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose centenary month coincided with the Accra workshop. Industrial transformation has been pivotal to such large-scale change. As Ghana’s experience underlines, when industrial change has failed or faltered, societies and polities have paid a steep price, certainly in terms of overall development that transforms the lives of all their peoples and, it seems, in terms of sovereign or autonomous economic development and freedom from foreign domination of their economies. That the workshop also coincided with Ghana’s 60th anniversary of independence made the reflections in Accra doubly important, focused as they were on strategies of industrialisation and Africa’s non-dependent development broadly defined. It was also the appropriate starting point for the trilogy of meetings: the upcoming meetings in Dar es Salaam in April and Johannesburg September 2018 will explore alternative development strategies and the politics and character of resistance and change respectively. ROAPE has historically convened large formal conferences. These included, to name a few, ‘The transition to socialism’, Leeds, 1982; ‘The world recession and food crisis’, Keele, 1984; ‘State, mining and development’, Leeds, 2007. In 2016, however, the journal’s Editorial Working Group (EWG) decided to adapt this approach and to help convene and establish a series of dialogues of enquiry and interrogation of issues over a longer time frame with activist and other non-academic actors in Africa. Our website initiative of www.roape.net has certainly increased accessibility and range of material from Africa with a modest view of trying to be more engaged in Africa. The series of three workshops is intended both to build on this initiative generated by the new website and to extend and deepen ROAPE’s grounding in Africa.

The state: the executive committee of global capitalism?

The articles in this issue are in one way or the other concerned with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the state in Africa. ROAPE no. 5, published in 1976, focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it (Cliffe, Cohen, and Lawrence 1976). The state itself was variously labelled by the contributors to that issue as ‘relatively autonomous’, ‘overdeveloped’, ‘unsteady’ or in the case of Amin’s Uganda, ‘unhinged’. In the global North, the state was not regarded as Marx and Engels’s executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but rather as relatively independent of class forces, acting as a referee between capital and labour and ensuring some degree of fair distribution of income and effective provision of health, social welfare and education services. This view fitted well with the idea of a capitalism declining under the weight of its own contradictions and socialism being on the agenda for the near future. In Africa, as in most of the global South, the state, was seen as the necessary principal actor in mobilising resources for investment for development. However, over the period in which neoliberalism became the dominant ideology buttressing capital’s political fightback against labour’s increasing share of value and the ensuing falling rate of profit, especially from manufacturing, the order of the day has been to force the state to retreat. Financial liberalisation, the privatisation of state assets, the subcontracting of public functions to private enterprises, curbs on public expenditure, and laws curtailing the rights of trades unions were the building blocks of a process that saw capital recapture a greater share of value. These policies were not only pursued by governments but also became the key parts of the policy instructions to countries of the global South seeking help from the international financial institutions, along with other ‘liberalisation’ measures concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and trade. Yet these recommendations flew in the face of the history of the very successful East Asian economies, especially South Korea, examples of a ‘developmental state’ in which investment was directed by a technocratic elite to specific productive activities as part of a manufacturing industrial and rural development growth strategy involving parallel state investment in education, skills and social welfare. The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ through which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and subcontracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become. Today, the neoliberal project is under attack as never before, especially in the global South as its failure to achieve real structural change becomes increasingly evident. Even in the global

On filling voids

In January this year, Donald Trump reportedly described various South American, Caribbean and (apparently all) African countries as ‘shitholes’ (or, according to some, ‘shithouses’) during a meeting on immigration with senators in the White House (Gambino 2018) – eliciting widespread, often ‘forceful’, protest, including from individual African countries, the African Union (AU) and United Nations (Gerits 2018; Smith and Rawlinson 2018). Why indeed should (or does) America welcome immigrants who were, according to the president, presumably manifestly ill-prepared, by virtue of their origins, to contribute meaningfully to the task of Making America Great Again? Whether or not this represents, as the AU claimed, racism, xenophobia, prejudice and bigotry (Finnegan 2018), or indeed whether Trump already ‘had form’ in this area, as Wolffe (2018) forcefully argues, is academic. But an equally significant indicator of Trump-era US–Africa relations was provided by the fact that, after a whole year, the administration had still not outlined a clear Africa policy nor filled vacant senior diplomatic postings in both the US State Department and embassies on the continent (Schneidman and Temin 2018). For us at the Review of African Political Economy, however, the significance of this particular episode of POTUS Reigns lies elsewhere – in its affirmation of the need for ROAPE to continue to provide ‘radical analyses of trends, issues and social processes’ in Africa, both in the pages of the journal and, increasingly, across diverse spaces of mobilisation and sites of resistance, including social media (see roape.net). This last is of more than passing significance. Twitter is, after all, Trump’s favoured means of communication, the one he resorted to with his denials and obfuscation when news of his alleged remarks broke. Indeed, even as it trended on Twitter, the comment was also being widely ridiculed, debated and contested in the blogosphere (Nair 2018) and online news sites, forcing Trump to send placatory letters to African leaders restating US commitment to their continent (Wadhams 2018) as the row threatened to overshadow Rex Tillerson’s planned first official visit to Africa as US Secretary of State (Schemm 2018). Asked by the African press in Addis Ababa for his reaction to the president’s remarks during the visit two months later, Tillerson declined to comment, as did his host Moussa Faki, AU Commission Chairperson, who declared the matter closed, with both men opting rather to highlight ‘areas of cooperation’ which had proved ‘useful to both parties’; instead, lingering disagreement over China’s current and future role in Africa provided the rare discordant note to these public proceedings (Wadhams 2018). On the eve of his departure for Africa, and in the process of identifying priorities of US Africa policy, as well as for his five-country visit, Tillerson had contrasted ‘the U.S. approach of “incentivizing good governance”’ with China’s, ‘which encourages dependency, using opaque contracts, predatory loan practices and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut their sovereignty’ (Ching 2018). However, his attempt to return to the subject in Addis Ababa by advising African countries ‘to carefully consider the terms of [Chinese] investments’, apparently elicited the response from Faki that, not only are Africans ‘mature enough to engage in partnerships of their own volition’, but that ‘[t]here is no monopoly, we have multifaceted, multifarious relations with [different] parts of the world’ (Wadhams 2018).

From ‘whiteman in rags’ to revolutionary nationalist: Patrice Lumumba 1925–1960 1

Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925–1961) is perhaps the most famous leader of African independence. After his murder in 1961, he became an icon of anti‐imperialist struggle. His picture was brandished on demonstrations across the world, together with those other faces of the 1960s, Che Guevara and Mao Tse‐Tung. The subject of this article is the life of Patrice Lumumba before he came to power in 1960. Lumumba was born in Kasai province in the centre of the Belgian Congo. After a few years of intermittent schooling, he left for the regional capital Stanleyville, where he became a post office clerk. Soon Lumumba became a prominent member of the évolue, those Africans hand‐chosen by the Belgians to run the colonial state. As the pace of political change quickened in the 1950s, he became an unruly subject and underwent a fascinating transformation – from praising the Belgian’s civilising mission in the Congo to radical nationalism. Most academic work is based on the last dramatic year in Lumumba’s life. Based on original interviews and sources largely unknown to an English‐reading audience, this article argues for the importance of understanding Lumumba’s entire life to make sense of his rapid political evolution and the trajectory of political change in the Congo.