African awakenings: the courage to invent the future
A version of this paper was first published in Pambazuka News and forms the basis of the introductory chapter to a forthcoming book from Pambazuka Press African Awakening: the emerging revolutions edited by Sokari Ekine and Firoze Manji
We are living today in what is probably one of the most inspiring times in our recent history, reminiscent of the period of the rise of the anti-colonial revolutions that followed the Second World War. Our continent is pregnant with hope, but equally it carries hope’s twin, despair. This duality, which has remained a characteristic of our post-colonial inheritance, was perhaps best illustrated in the events of 1994: on the one hand we witnessed the rise of the popular movement that brought about the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa; and on the other, we saw the massacre of nearly a million people in Rwanda in a period of a few months. Both hope and despair coexist in all our countries. But because of the depth of the current crisis of capitalism, that duality will become ever more polarised in the coming period.
African awakenings
We are all familiar with the extraordinary events that took place in Tunisia and Egypt leading to the downfall of Ben Ali and Mubarak, and followed by popular uprisings in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere in what is known today as the Middle East. Corporate media has christened these the ‘Arab Spring’. However, this in not an adequate descriptor as it ignores the widespread expressions of discontent across the continent. Throughout 2011 we have witnessed significant uprisings in a large number of African countries – and we should not forget that Tunisia and Egypt are African countries. Indeed, where does Africa begin and where does it end? Did the building of the Suez Canal amputate Africa from its intertwined history with the peoples to the east? Is Africa merely a geography? Or should it more correctly be seen as a history, a history that precedes the colonial conquest by millennia.
The uprisings of 2011 have not been confined to the Arab-speaking world. There have also been protests, strikes and other actions in Western Sahara, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Gabon, Sudan, Mauritania, Morocco, Madagascar, Mozambique, Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Djibouti, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, Botswana, Namibia, Uganda, Kenya, Swaziland, South Africa, and Uganda. Many of these uprisings have been brutally suppressed.
Some of the uprisings have perhaps not (yet) been on the scale that we have witnessed in North Africa, and each has its own etiologies. But despite the specificities of each, together they can legitimately be considered as the cumulative response to a common experience shared over the last thirty years. Indeed, they have much in common with events we have witnessed this year in Wisconsin (USA), Spain, Greece and, indeed, in Italy (where 95% of the population delivered a resounding defeat of the government in a referendum that sought to privatize water, to extend impunity to politicians, and to attempt to expand the use of nuclear power).
The shifting political and social climate in Africa is not limited to the overt, large-scale uprisings. There is growing evidence in a number of countries of social movements re-emerging during the last 10 years, providing a framework through which the disenfranchised have begun to re-assert their dignity, proclaiming – even if only implicitly – their aspiration to determine their own destinies, their own right to self-determination. The emergence and activities of movements such as Bunge La Mwananchi, Bunge Sisters and the Unga Revolution in Kenya, Abahlali base Mjondolo, the Anti Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement in South Africa, the anti-water privatization movement, the growing militancy of the LBGTI movements, the formation of alliances of peasant and farmer organisations, the growing demands from organised labour –- all these are manifestations of an underlying mood of discontent and disenchantment with the social and political order. Even in South Africa, that so-called democratic success story, “South African police have conservatively measured an annual average [since 2005] of more than 8000 ‘Gatherings Act’ incidents by an angry urban populace which remains unintimidated by the superficially populist government of Jacob Zuma” (Bond, 2010).
Today, the gathering momentum of these movements for change defines the social and political scene on the continent. We are witnessing not so much an ‘Arab Spring’ as an African Awakening.
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