Neo-liberalism has had a devastating impact on higher education in Africa, writes Issa Shivji in our lead editorial this week. "The public intellectual, whose vocation is to comment, protest, caricaturize, satirize, analyse, and publicize the life around him or her is rapidly becoming history, which history, by the way, has no historian to record," states Shivji as he charts the history of East African discourse and the impact of neo-liberalism on intellectual life.

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The purpose of this short intervention is to review the state of interaction between our universities in East Africa so far as intellectual debate is concerned. If in the process I refer somewhat passionately to the debates of the 60s and 70s, it is not out of nostalgia but to draw inspiration. And we need this inspiration given the state of intellectual inertia and marketisation of academia that has set in with the invasion of neo-liberal agenda in our universities.

The Nationalist Period

Sketches of the political context

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the immediate post-independence period was one of great expectations and equally great political turmoil. The anti-colonial struggles that picked up after World War II came to fruition in Africa in the sixties. Ghana got its independence in 1957 and Nkrumah picked up the flag of Pan-Africanism in his great passion for African Unity. Born in the midst of cold war, signs of any autonomous nationalism by independent states attracted the wrath of super-powers. Western intervention in the running and changing of regimes in Africa was rampant. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the open military intervention of the US left an indelible impression on the East African leaders and made them very vulnerable. Radical nationalism had a very hard time keeping afloat.

The Zanzibar revolution of 1964 and the subsequent army mutinies in all the three East African countries threatened to derail nationalism in this part of the world. The extent of the influence and intervention of the former colonial power, Britain, in these events can only be appreciated now when we have the opportunity to peruse diplomatic papers of the sixties and seventies recently opened in the Public Records Office. Relatively more independent nationalists like Nyerere found it extremely difficult to keep the former colonial power at bay. Embarrassing though it may have been, Nyerere had to call in British troops to quell his riotous soldiers. But the nationalist in him could not countenance British troops on the Tanganyikan soil. He had the Nigerian troops look after the defense of the country while the new Tanzanian army was being trained.

In what he called an “undiplomatically frank” letter to Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister of Britain, Nyerere narrated his fears and entreated the Prime Minister to understand his position.

“These are only a few of the reasons why we cannot be expected to be so confident of American non-interference in our affairs as British feel in relation to her own country. For the whole of this past year we have been subjected to pressures from the United States – and from Britain too before the change of Government – in relation to events in this country, particularly in relation to the post-revolutionary period in Zanzibar.

And finally, I am sure you will realise that there has been a reaction against the complacency with which we viewed our security questions before the mutiny of January this year. It may be that in consequence we see dangers where none exist, but if so this is a fault on the right side under the circumstances. Africa is going through an extremely difficult period of transition, and coup d’etats are not things in which any African Government can afford to take a merely academic interest.” (Letter from Nyerere to Wilson, 27/11/64)

Kenyatta had thrown in his lot with the West while Obote was struggling with his kingdoms. Nyerere continued agonizing over where he stood. His anti-colonial nationalism began to draw him to take non-alignment more and more seriously. The liberation wars in southern Africa, which were inevitably, and for obvious reasons, supported by the Soviet bloc and, which found a home and consistent support in Nyerere, no doubt, also had a radical influence on Mwalimu.

There were other events on the continent which also played a role in the political thought and discourse in this region. Nkrumah had moved radically to the left. His Pan-Africanism went hand in hand with anti-imperialism. Unlike Nyerere’s anti-colonialism, which was politically and diplomatically much more astute, but lacked a profound understanding and appreciation of imperialism, Nkrumah’s anti-imperialism was thoroughly rooted in political economy. His ‘Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism’ (1965) published in October 1965, elicited an immediate protest from the US Government which promptly cancelled a $35 million aid to Ghana. Four months later Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup (Blum: 1986:223). The CIA had been planning the coup with Ghanaian military officers for a year (Blum 2001:141).

Five months later, one of the architects of the coup Colonel A. A. Afrifa wrote a book on the coup (Afrifa 1966) which could have been easily penned by a CIA scribe. In the book, the author vilifies Nkrumah’s Pan-African dreams and support for national liberation in the Congo and elsewhere and demonstrates his unreserved flunkeyism towards the West.

“At the attainment of independence, the British handed over to us a decent system of Government in which everyone had a say. …. Organization of African unity or no Organization of African unity, I will claim my citizenship of Ghana and of the Commonwealth in any part of the world. I have been trained in the United Kingdom as a soldier, and I am ever prepared to fight alongside my friends in the United Kingdom in the same way as Canadians and Australians will do.” (quoted in the introduction, Afrifa 1966:11)

Reading Afrifa’s book may send a chill down our patriotic spines. But I should say only some spines! In this age of globalization, not very dissimilar things are being said by our own leaders. One East African president is credited with having castigated his own people as ignorant, envious and lazy for not understanding the demands of globalization while another has dramatically disowned his own radical past as he embraces the imperialist US.

The East African Academic Discourse

Nyerere’s radical nationalism eventually led him to ‘socialism and self-reliance’ while at the same time he continued to nurture a pretty consistent aversion to both the, then, super-powers. Only a few months before the Arusha Declaration, the University students had demonstrated against the introduction of compulsory national service and mandatory contributions from their salary. One of the placards read; ‘Colonialism was better’. Nyerere could not stomach it. He dismissed the students, some three hundred of them, and used the occasion to lambaste the accumulative tendencies of his own coterie of leaders. He slashed their salaries by twenty per cent. That became a precursor to the leadership code of the Arusha Declaration.

‘Every TANU and Government leader must be either a peasant or a worker, and should in no way be associated with the practices of capitalism or feudalism. No TANU or Government leader should hold shares in any company … or hold directorships in any privately owned enterprise … or receive two or more salaries … or own houses which he rents to others.’ (Nyerere 1968:249), thundered the Arusha Declaration. University students thus became the historical harbinger of the Leadership Code, if not the Arusha Declaration, albeit unintentionally.

The Arusha Declaration heralded an unprecedented intellectual activity on the Campus of the University College at Dar es Salaam. But this activity was not only a Tanzanian one. It involved East Africans. It will be remembered that this was the time of the University of East Africa. Makerere sent out doctors, Nairobi engineers and architects and Dar es Salaam, lawyers. My own class of 1967-70 boasted almost half non-Tanzanians among whom were the leading lights of, what later became, Museveni’s guerrilla force and first cabinet.

Student leaders, Faculty members and administrators, came from the three East African countries. The subject-matter of study was East African. In the Law Faculty, for example, we studied and taught the laws of all the three East African countries. The first interdisciplinary course introduced in the Faculty of Law in the wake of the Arusha Declaration, and with the intention of breaking down compartmentalization of knowledge, was called ‘Social and Economic Problems of East Africa.’ Later on, the Faculty of Arts and Social Science introduced a similar course called ‘East African Society and Environment’ known by its acronym EASE.

Student struggles, protests, debates and intellectual discourse in and outside the classroom was East African. In their Second Memorandum, the Vigilance Committee which spearheaded and led the student protest against a new curriculum clearly used the East African vantage point:

“As it was stated in our first memorandum, the real issue at stake is a fundamental one concerning the ownership of this University College: whether the College will ultimately belong to the people of Tanzania and East Africa or to imperialism.” (Quoted in Shivji 1993:40)

East African students were also very prominent in the militant student organisation like the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Its chair was a gentleman called Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Among its members and activists were many East Africans who later on became prominent in various fields of life in the countries concerned. East Africans prominently participated in what we used to call then ideological struggles or debates.
Prominent East Africans, including academics, were invited to exchange views with the students and the Faculty of the University College. No East African, or African, event passed without there being a discussion and a “surgical” analysis of whether it was in the interest of the people or the petty bourgeoisie and/or imperialism.

Although this was a period of intense debates and radical discourse on the Dar Campus it had its reverberation on the other two Campuses as well. When Obote declared his ‘Move to the Left’, among the first places outside Uganda that his intellectual supporters visited was the Dar Campus. I remember Professor Yash Tandon fervently defending Obote’s ‘Move to the Left’ before a very cynical, but well-grounded and articulate, USARF militants. The then chairman of USARF, Museveni, sardonically snubbed Tandon arguing that the ‘Move to the Left’ was not a traffic question!

I frequently joke that in the Left we had a neat division of labour between the three East African countries. Dar excelled in ideologising but it only ideologised. As Mao said of Trostky: He, Trostsky, took a correct stand but he only stood. Nairobi organised, took to the streets and philosophized later, while Kampala took to the ‘bush’, gun in hand and power in head.

No doubt, the prominent discourse was radical. Although garbed in the language of Marxism, I think, it was grounded much more in ‘radical nationalism’ than ‘Marxism-Leninism’. The mainstream academic discourse too was nationalist, albeit inconsistent and wavering, but the point is that there was a discourse, a debate, a critical examination of our history and politics, culture and economy, past and present. It was a vibrant intellectual community with a home-grown debate, concerned about not only seeking the truth – the traditional vocation of a university – but also asking, ‘truth for what and in whose interest’. Interestingly, with the benefit of hindsight I might even venture to say that although at the time the gap between the mainstream nationalism and radical nationalism appeared wide and unbridgeable in the then young militant minds, they had a common point of departure and, perhaps, even a common vision.

The nationalist mainstream too contributed in a “strange” way to the East African discourse, whether it was in the form of nationalist histories narrated by Temu and Kimambo or anti-colonial art embedded in the poems of Okot p’Bitek or the early novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Ebrahim Hussein’s plays. I say, in a strange way, because at the time we saw mainstream nationalists as essentially reactionary yet we engaged with them and that is precisely the basis of a critical discourse. With relish, we cited p’Bitek’s anti-European poems and his biting caricature of the Europeanized African elites. Listen to this which first appeared in 1967 in the ‘Transition’ coming out of Kampala and was later reproduced in the volume ‘Socialism in Tanzania’ edited by Lionel Cliffe and John Saul:

“The students in our University are not revolutionary. They are committed and conservative. They have vested interests. They look forward to graduation, the circumcision ceremony before joining the “big car” tribesmen. Our university and schools are nests in which black exploiters are hatched and bred, at the expense of the tax payers, or perhaps heartpayers.

And when they have fallen into things
They eat the meat from the chest of bulls
And their wives grow larger buttocks
And their skins shine with health,
They throw themselves into soft beds
But the hip bones of the voters
Grow painful sleeping on the same earth
They slept before Uhuru.” (Saul and Cliffe 1973, vol.2:293)

No doubt there is some truth about what Okot p’Bitek is saying about the students then, but today, it is the whole truth about our neo-liberalized universities; yet we do not have p’Biteks to agonize over it.

There was another, more formal, interaction and academic input into the East African discourse. Under the aegis of the Inter-University Council (IUC), there used to be an annual East African Social Science Conference whose venue rotated between the three Campuses. These conferences were great events. Faculty were accommodated in student dormitories. Research papers and field reports were presented. Current events were discussed. Some of the conferences became big occasions provoking intense dialogue. I remember that when my ‘Silent Class Struggles’ was ‘published’ in the then USARF’s journal, ‘Cheche’, (September 1970) it was presented at a subsequent Conference by a comrade since I was away in London doing my LL.M. I am told there was very interesting discussion.

On another occasion, I think it was in mid-seventies, there was a very heated debate on Angola. This must have been sometime in mid-70s, just about the time that the tradition somehow fizzled out, like many other East African forums.

Two things happened in 1971, which directly or indirectly, were responsible for heralding the disintegration of the East African discourse, at least its formal organizational forms. One was the overthrow of Obote and the other was the dissolution of the East African University. While playing a delicate political game, Nyerere, unlike his friend Obote, managed to avoid Nkrumah’s fate. After his palace coups in which he got rid of his kings, Obote took the road to the Left. But his move to the left in a highly differentiated Ugandan society not only attracted opposition within but also the imperial wrath without. In a coup by Iddi Amin Dada, backed by the Israelis and the British, Obote was overthrown in 1971 heralding in a new phase in the disintegration of whatever was left of East Africanness in the region. The Amin coup drove out many Ugandan intellectuals to various countries abroad. A good number ended up in Dar es Salaam where they became part of the academic and intellectual discourse.

Some Ugandans became members of the Faculty while others found jobs in the city. All of them were invariably involved, openly at the University, or more privately in town, in study groups, contributing to the ongoing discourse. But otherwise, each of the three East African countries went its own way, politically, economically and intellectually. The University of East Africa which had incorporated the three Campuses of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Makerere became separate universities. Although the three national universities did not have formal links, it is interesting that they informally knew and took interest in each other’s debates and discourses during much of the ‘70s and eighties.

For instance, Dar es Salaam was very aware of the ‘agrarian debate’ among Kenyans carried in the ‘Review of African Political Economy’ (originally abbreviated to RAPE and later changed to ROAPE) published in England. Its editors were the former lecturers from the North who had participated in East Africa. To an extent, therefore, ROAPE illustrates the spill over of the East African discourse. Interestingly, there were other spillovers. For example, those who had taught law in Dar played a prominent role in directing the Department of Law at the newly established University of Warwick in England where law was taught from an interdisciplinary approach or ‘law in context’. Courses like Law in Development carried on the tradition established at Dar.

Just as the Ugandan exiles physically participated in Dar debates and organised from there to liberate their country from the clutches of Iddi Amin, Kenyan militants drew inspiration from Dar. Although numbers began to dwindle, a significant number of Kenyan students managed to find their way to the Hill. But they faced increasing obstacles. For example, the then Attorney General, Mr. Njonjo, who put on airs of an English gentleman, would not accept Dar law graduates unless they had done another year in the Kenya Law School, presumably to debrief them of Dar es Salaam ‘school’.

Formal links between the three campuses suffered even more. Although we continued to visit each other’s Campuses as external examiners, this was not conducive to developing a coherent discourse. But even separately, as we approached the eighties, intellectual and academic climate on the three campuses began to decline as the socio-political context entered the period of Structural Adjustment Programmes and increasingly aggressive imperial policies orchestrated through the IFIs.

To the academic doldrums of neo-liberalism, we now turn.

The Neo-liberal Intervention

Neo-liberalism made its entry into our countries through various Structural SAPs of the early eighties. These programmes were nothing more than the further integration of our economies and resources into the world market circuits (liberalisation of trade); the withdrawal of budget allocations from social services to repay loans (cost-sharing and balancing of the budget); the deliverance of natural resources to multinational capital, but, more important, to take away the sovereign decision-making right of the African nations. Cost-sharing and user fees destroyed whatever little “welfare” state was established in the wake of independence.

Universities came under severe attack. The World Bank suggested that Africa had no need for universities, Universities were ‘white elephants’ which devoured more than what they produced (Zeleza & Olukoshi eds. 2004, 2). The content of what the Universities taught was not suitable for the market. It would be cheaper to train our kids in Northern universities. Our politicians and university administrators slavishly bought into these. We embarked on the so-called transformations of our universities from sites of generating knowledge to kiosks for selling “education wares”. Our courses these days are modularized and semesterized. In effect it simply means cutting up courses into bits and pieces, regardless of whether it makes pedagogical sense, to enable fee-paying students to collect necessary units to pass. It is not good business to fail students; that would draw out university business from the market. What our colleague, Professor Chachage, said in an external examiner’s report sums up the tragedy of the commodification and marketisation of higher education.

“The number of unit courses, as it is clear from many of the papers I went through, is a result of the way semesterization has been undertaken, whereby whole years courses from the previously three-term system have been simply broken into two separate courses to satisfy the requirement of the process. This has been done without any regard to the coherence of the programmes, and how the process of building blocks of knowledge through thorough exploration of themes is affected. The end result is what is important for a student is to simply collect enough units to get a diploma or a degree. In this regard, what has been created is a situation whereby a student looks for an easy way to obtain a degree and not knowledge.”

The debates and intellectual discourse which is the life-line of any vibrant university community has virtually disappeared. There is no time as time is a commodity subject to ‘opportunity cost’. In a competition between consultancy and panel discussion, the rational economic choice is of course consultancy, particularly when panel discussions and intellectual debates have virtually no value and are actively discouraged by our new-university mandarins. A couple of years, ago one of our lecturers received a letter of reprimand for organizing a panel discussion on the Afghanistan war during “office hours”! (For that can only be the appropriate word these days for teaching time).

The public intellectual, whose vocation is to comment, protest, caricaturize, satirize, analyse, and publicize the life around him or her is rapidly becoming history, which history, by the way, has no historian to record. (The historian is busy taking American tourists on a tour of the Bagamoyo slave market.)

I am of course exaggerating, but I am exaggerating the truth. Many of us, who may nod our heads in the Senate and laugh at silly jokes cracked by the university mandarins, agonize in corridors and in private. The committed intellectual in us refuses to go away, if not in all, at least in some. And I believe, or want to believe, that those few constitute a critical mass which we need to nurture and revitalize consciously, deliberately, and patiently.

Dying craftsmen broke the machines in protest. That cannot be expected of petty bourgeois intellectuals. We cannot perhaps stop the commercialization of our universities, but we can at least think of university co-operatives. We must be able to revive our craft in new conditions. We cannot and need not repeat the discourses of the nationalist decades but we need to reinvent an Eastern African discourse, maybe, this time around, rooted in genuine Pan-Africanism. We have to engage and take issue with the Pan-Africanism of the States, the NEPAD-ist one rooted in globalization ad domination, and pose an alternative Pan-Africanism of the People, rooted in anti-imperialism and liberation. In other words, the nationalism of the twenty-first century is Pan-Africanism rooted in anti-imperialism (for the development of some of these ideas see Shivji 2005) . This is not a proposal. It is only an illustration of reconstructing an Easter African, not only East African, discourse. By Eastern African, I mean the inclusion of Rwanda, Burundi, DRC besides Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Needless to say no discourse is uncontentious. The essence of any serious discourse is precisely contention of ideas. Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism are very contentious issues depending on the social stand-point one takes. I am not taking a position. I am only arguing for a discourse in which we can, and should take positions. Our major social responsibility is to discourse and expose the ills of society, to hold up the mirror, so to speak.

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* Issa Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

References

Afrifa, A. A., 1966, The Ghana Coup, 24th February 1966, London: Frank Cass.
Blum, William, 1986, The CIA: a forgotten story, Lonodn: Zed Books.
Blum, William, 2001, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s only Superpower, London; Zed Books.
Nkrumah, K. 1965, Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism, London: Heinemann.
Nyerere, J. K. 1968, Freedom and Socialism, London: OUP.
Saul, J. & Lionel Cliffe eds. 1973, Socialism in Tanzania, vol. 2, Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
Shivji, I. G.1993, Intellectuals at the Hill, Dar es salaam: DUP.
Shivji, I. G., 2005, ‘The Rise, the Fall and the Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa’, in Felicia Arudo Yieke ed. East Africa: In Search of National and Regional Renewal, Dakar: CODESRIA
Zeleza, P. T. & Adebayo Olukoshi eds. 2004, African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, vol 1, Dakar: CODESRIA.

Tony Blair urges his people to show the same compassion to the African victims of, what he calls, ‘man-made disaster’, that they have shown to Asian victims of natural disaster.

The small question though is: which man has been responsible for Africa’s man-made disaster? We shall not go too far back into history. Let’s just look at the last two decades and only two major wars – economic and military – which have devastated the continent.

The continent is the most war-torn region in the world. In the last decade, there were 12 wars taking place in 10 countries on the continent. Eleven were supported by the US through arms sales or military training. Many of these wars were offshoots of the Cold War years. According to one estimate, during the Cold War years (1950-1989) US sent some US$1.5 billion in arms and training to Africa. And this trend has not stopped in the post-Cold War period. Africa has yet to reap the so-called peace dividend.

From 1991-1995, 50 of Africa’s 53 countries received military assistance from the US. US arms sales and military training to Africa totaled more than $227 million. And US’s junior partner, UK, follows suit. British arms sales to Africa rocketed from ?52 million in 1998 to ?125 million in 2000 and topped ?200 million in 2001 after the deals with Tanzania to sell ?28 million military air defence and ?100 million to sell Hawk jets to South Africa. Under Tony Blair’s new labour government, military sales to Africa increased from 1.6 per cent of all sales to the Third World to 19 per cent.

Gordon Brown’s compassionate offer to pay 10 per cent of Tanzania’s debt to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank amounting to some $40 million over the next ten years sits rather awkwardly with $40 million that was spent a couple of years ago to get the radar from a British company with Blair’s support. At the time one British MP, Tony Worthington, commented in the House of Commons: ‘The idea of going to Dar es Salaam to negotiate debt reduction and then agreeing to something that adds $40 million to that debt does not sound like prudence, does it?’ Well, in the imperial mindset, it does.

Arms trade is “good” business. It is “good” economics and “good” politics. It creates jobs, increases profits and ensures a safe continent for Western multinationals to continue siphoning off resources and expatriating super-profits which keep the capitalist engine running. And as a bonus, the military-industrial complex of the West keeps reproducing the dependency syndrome in Africa, caricatured in the African child with a begging bowl.

The aid-dependency syndrome in Africa, which is deployed variously – for domination, for compassion, for humiliation, for intimidation – is an important plank in the relationship between the West and Africa. While we are pilloried with ‘aid-fatigue’ in response to our begging bowl, Western rulers get very angry when some countries (very few indeed and none in Africa) try to extricate themselves from the world wide aid net.

It is revealing that when India refused to accept any aid from the West for tsunami victims, the Western world was outraged. Journalists ridiculed and questioned India’s motives – ambitions of a regional super-power, seeking a seat in the Security Council, acting big brother to neighbouring countries. These are the same people who hardly ever question the motives of Western aid. No, Western aid is out of altruism and human compassion.

Mwalimu (Julius Nyerere) was hated by the West more for preaching self-reliance rather than socialism. If he survived the wrath of the CIAs of this world (unlike Nkrumah) it was perhaps because we never practiced self-reliance and Mwalimu never wrote a book, ‘Self-reliance, the First Stage of Liberation’, the way Nkrumah did, ‘Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism’.

Anyway, so much for the military war. What about the economic war?

For the last two decades beginning with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s, Africa has been involved in implementing neo-liberal policies handed down by the West through their so-called multilateral institutions. SAPs have devastated the continent. Since 1980 African debt has increased 500%. 313 million Africans lived in absolute poverty in 2001 compared to 200 million in 1994.

Life expectancy has dropped by 15%; literacy rates have fallen. More than 140 million young Africans are illiterate. In ten years, between 1986 and 1996, education spending per capita in Africa has fallen by 0.7% a year. Primary and secondary school enrollment has gone down as parents cannot afford cost-sharing imposed on them. University students have rioted as they find themselves without employment and therefore unable to repay loans. In Tanzania, non-payment of educational loans has been criminalized!

Mr. Blair need not ask which men are behind Africa’s man-made disaster? But can Africa’s men and women swallow the rhetoric of compassion and forget the reality of exploitation?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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In his speech to a seminar of political leaders held in Zanzibar on 19th February this year, President Mkapa made a very fundamental point which needs to be deeply thought over and widely debated. In his view, the whole Tanzanian society and people need a muafaka or national consensus. He expressed his apprehension that the political and economic reforms that have taken place over the last twenty years have loosened national ties, unity and brotherhood/sisterhood (udugu) in our society and country. 'I earnestly urge,' he said, 'that the market or free economy, together with political freedoms and freedom of the press should not be the beginning of the weakening of our unity, national solidarity, or should not dilute our nationalism, union and udugu.' (translation from the original Kiswahili mine).

He continued: 'The market economy will result in some of us becoming richer than others. Political freedom has brought many parties and their many honourable leaders. But this should not be a reason for some to feel better than others. We, Tanzanians, should remain ndugu.' He went on to say that it is our udugu which makes us equal human beings, with equal dignity, equal rights and equal basic needs. 'Our udugu,' he emphasised, 'is not ideological; rather it is embedded in our African culture.'

Given the emphasis on udugu, a little digression on the political origin of the term 'ndugu' in Tanzania is appropriate. It was first used by trade unionists to express class (social) solidarity. Later, in particular after the adoption of the policy of socialism and self-reliance, the term became prominent in the party and political vocabulary. It expressed nationalism and the policy of ujamaa. In both cases, therefore, 'ndugu' was explicitly an expression of ideology. Be that as it may, let us return to the core question raised by the President.

In my view, there are three points in the President's submission which, with respect, are indisputable. One, that over the last two decades the national consensus in our society has begun to disintegrate pausing a veritable threat to national unity and social solidarity. Two, that the adoption of neo-liberal policies and orientations has begun to polarize our society. The emergence of the filthy rich and pathetically poor in our country is undeniable. Three, that there is a need to reconstruct national consensus and concord.

The central question is: what would be the basis of the new national consensus? To being to answer, let us examine our recent history.

The struggle for independence was a mass movement. The consensus of the large majority was based on the nationalist ideology, or the right of self-determination. Immediately after independence the nationalist consensus began to show cracks with the rise of the wabenzi, whose ambition was simply to step into the shoes of the colonial masters. The University students demonstrated against National Service in October 1966 accusing the politicians of drawing fat salaries while they were being asked to make sacrifices. Responding angrily, Mwalimu thundered:

'You are right when you talk about salaries. Our salaries are too high. … Do you know what my salary is? Five thousand damned shillings a month. Five thousand damned shillings in a poor country. The poor man who gets two hundred shillings a month – do you know how long it's going to take him to earn my damned salary? Twenty-five years! … The damned salaries! These are the salaries which build this kind of attitude in the educated people, all of them. Me and you. We belong to a class of exploiters. I belong to your class. … You are right, salaries are too high. Everybody in this country is demanding a pound of flesh. Everbody except the poor peasant. How can he demand it? He doesn't know the language. … What kind of country are we building?'

Three months later came the Arusha Declaration which declared that we wanted to build a socialist society, a society where every one is a worker or a peasant, where no one exploits another, where a genuine leader does not live off the sweat of another man. The building of a socialist and self-reliant society was the new national consensus. It mobilized the masses and inspired the youth.

The ujamaa consensus lasted almost a decade before the economic crisis of the late seventies and early eighties undermined it. Both the nationalist and the ujamaa consensus were ideologically based. Both were national visions to build a society based on equality. The socialist vision specifically addressed the cracks in the nationalist ideology which began to appear in the post-independence period with the rise of the self-enriching wabenzi.

Twenty years of neo-liberal policies have not generated any new national vision which can mobilize and inspire. The national consensus has been undermined by the market economy as ethnic, racial, religious, class and gender fault-lines have resurfaced. The rhetoric of political pluralism and economic liberalism cannot cover the deepening divide between the haves and have-nots, between the walalahoi, walalahai and walalaheri, that is, the poor, the middle and the rich.

Under the circumstances, what would be the basis for a new consensus? That is what we need to debate. While it may not be possible to say what it should be based on, we can certainly say what it cannot be based on. National consensus, by definition, cannot be built on some metaphysical values of cultural brotherhood when the underlying material reality is characterised by extreme class and social divisions.

We are fast slipping down the road of what the nineteenth century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli called 'two nations', the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor 'between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.'

Nor can national consensus be constructed on the basis of imported or imposed metapolitical values of political pluralism and hedonistic individualism.

With President Mkapa, we need first to admit that the old consensus has broken down and with Mwalimu, as in 1966, we need to ask: What kind of country are we building? Do we want to build a country of Two Nations?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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The Argument

We have become so used to the rhetoric of the “global village” that talking about African nationalism sounds anachronistic and outdated. But that is exactly what I wish to address. In this paper, I will explore the “National Question” in Africa and its erstwhile expression, nationalism, in three sections. First, I will discuss the rise of post-Second World War nationalism and its true essence, if you like. Then, I will address the debunking of nationalism in the post-cold war period under the apparent hegemony of neo-liberalism and so-called globalisation. Finally, still holding high the Gramscian adage, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” I anticipate the insurrection of a second nationalism.

Post-War Nationalism
The Essence of Nationalism

Introducing his book Freedom and After, Tom Mboya remembers what he calls the “proudest day of my life.” That was December 6, 1958, the opening day of the All Africa Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana. Earlier in the same year, there had been a conference of independent African states, of which only eight existed at the time. “These two conferences,” says Mboya, “marked the rediscovery of Africa by Africans.”

"This rediscovery of Africa by Africans was ‘in complete contrast to the discovery of Africa by Europeans in the nineteenth century.’ The Conference of Independent African States had marked the birth of the African personality, and the delegates had all agreed on the need for Africa to rise and be heard at all the councils of the world affairs. "

The conference was attended by some five hundred delegates from political parties, trade unions, and organisations involved in the great awakening that was African nationalism. Patrice Lumumba and Roberto Holden were there, so was Dr. Kamuzu Banda. The nationalist upsurge in the post-war period in Africa was a great moment for a people that had been denied humanity by centuries of slavery and colonialism. Ideologies centered on Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Personality” or Leopold Senghor’s “Negritude” or Kenneth Kaunda’s “Humanism” or even Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa expressed one central theme, nationalism.

The quintessence of nationalism was, and is, anti-imperialism. It was a demand and struggle against, rather than for, something. It was an expression of a struggle against denial – denial of humanity, denial of respect and dignity, denial of the Africanness of the African. It was the struggle for the “re-Africanisation of minds” or to “rebecome Africans,” as Amilcar Cabral put it. Archie Mafeje sums up the period well:

"It was the historical experience of racial humiliation, economic exploitation, political oppression, and cultural domination under European and American slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that gave rise to theories of ‘African personality’ and ‘Negritude.’ At the centre of these theories was the question of the liberation of the Black man – his identity or the meaning of ‘being-Black-in-the-world.’ It was a philosophical or moral justification for action, for a rebellion which gave rise to African nationalism and to independence. The latter was the greatest political achievement by Africans. It was an unprecedented collective fulfillment."

Early African nationalism should not be confused with the traditional discourse on the expression and development of nations in the womb of capitalism in nineteenth century Europe. Rather, it was an expression of a people that was an antidote to White supremacist rule. In a sense, it is correct to say that nationalism was the process, a process of struggle, in the formation of nations. In that sense, perhaps, nationalism preceded nations. Militant nationalists grasped this to some extent although they did not express it as consistently nor did they wholly appreciate the defining characteristic of nationalism, that is, anti-imperialism. In explaining the objectives of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) to the UN Trusteeship Council in 1955, Nyerere said:

"Another objective of the Union is to build up a national consciousness among the African peoples in Tanganyika. It has been said – and this is quite right – that Tanganyika is tribal, and we realise that we need to break up this tribal consciousness among the people and to build up a national consciousness. That is one of our main objectives towards self-government."

This formulation is no doubt problematic. It lends itself to the reactionary side of bourgeois nationalism, or what later came to be called “nation-building theories.” Let us look at another formulation; this time, from a leading member of a national liberation movement and an avowed Marxist – Marcelino dos Santos, then a leading member of FRELIMO. In an interview with Joe Slovo of the South African Communist Party, Dos Santos analyses the tension between tribe and nation:

"The main conditions for [the] successful rejection [of tribalism] are present. On the general point of whether we have already moulded a nation in the true sense of the word, I want to say that a nation is based on concrete realities. And the most important reality in the present stage in Mocambique is the fight against Portuguese colonialism…It is our common fight against our common oppressor, which plays an outstanding role in creating a national bond between all the diverse groups and cultures…Of course, a nation is a product of history and its formation goes through different phases. In this sense, the work for the final achievement of nationhood will continue even after independence, although the fundamental elements of nationhood are already in existence and in the process of being further developed in Mocambique. "

Dos Santos’ conception of nation formation does not differ fundamentally from Nyerere’s presentation of “nation-building,” although their points of departure appear different. Dos Santos, like Slovo, takes as his starting point the Marxist theory of nation (this, presumably, is “the true sense of the word”), which, in its Stalinist version, emphasises the European conception of a nation – common territory, language, culture, and economy. If these ingredients are not present, or not present to a sufficient degree, you have a tribe at worst or a nation in the process of being formed at best. Implied in the European conception of nation also is the idea of voluntarism, that is, forming or building a nation from the top. Perhaps the point to underline in Dos Santos’ exposition is that the anti-colonial struggle is an important ingredient of nationalism. The problem with Dos Santos- and Nyerere-type formulations is that the nationalist petty bourgeoisie, when it rose to power, wavered on anti-imperialism and ended up with top-down statist notions of “nation-building.”

I find Amilcar Cabral’s propositions more fruitful. They contain a germ of great potential in understanding the historicity and specificity of the National Question in Africa. Cabral suggests that post-war African nationalism was a struggle not only to reclaim history but also to assert the right of the African people to make history: “The foundation of national liberation lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history.”

Cabral also makes the point that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent.” These are profound insights. First, nationalism is constituted by the struggle of the people against imperialism, thus anti-imperialism defines African nationalism. Second, nationalism, as an expression of struggle, continues so long as imperialism exists. Third, the National Question in Africa, whose expression is nationalism, remains unresolved as long as there is imperialist domination.

Archie Mafeje builds on these insights, observing that “all the struggles in Africa and most of the Third World centre on the National Question.” He perceives nationalism as the common denominator underlying the different interpretations and connotations of the National Question. Furthermore, he says, nationalism is always a reaction against something. In African history, nationalism has been a reaction to imperialist domination. As proto-nationalism, the reaction was against the colonial phase of imperialism, or political domination by aliens. Since independence, meta-nationalism has been coping with the changing modalities of imperialist domination.

The dominant discourse on the National Question has run along different lines, however. In both the political right and left, the central debate has been over whether Africa has nations and nationalities or tribes and ethnic groups. In the Eurocentric worldview, nations represent a higher level in the evolution of social and political formations than tribes. Fed on Stalin’s rather schematic formula, and therefore unable to find nations within the territorial units called African countries, even radical Marxists, like Slovo, have found it difficult to theorise adequately about the National Question. In the hands of rightwing pundits, it has been worse. The so-called lack of nations has been used to debunk and delegitimise African nationalist movements and their achievements. With the current hegemony of neo-liberalism and the imperialist comeback, the spokespersons of imperialism have been quick to condemn nationalism as nothing more than an expression of ethnicity and tribalism.

Note this typical sample from an editorial in US News and World Report:

"In the Third World, there had been grand ideas of new states and social contracts among the communities, post-colonial dreams of what men and women could do on their own. There were exalted notions of Indian nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and the like. Ethnicity hid, draped in the colours of modern nationalism, hoping to keep the ancestors – and the troubles – at bay. But the delusions would not last. What was India? The India of its secular founders – or the ‘Hindu Raj’ of the militant fundamentalists? What exactly did the compact communities of Iraq – the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shia – have in common? The masks have fallen, the tribes have stepped to the fore."

This type of denigration strikes at the heart of nationalism, that is, at anti-imperialism. Be that as it may, let us look more closely at the various aspects and expressions of nationalism.

* This is an extract from a paper 'The Rise, The Fall and The Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa' by Issa G. Shivji, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam Tanzania. The paper is from Keynote Address to the CODESRIA East African Regional Conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, October 29-31, 2003. To read the full paper, please click on the URL below.

Human rights are often presented as claims or entitlements. It is also said that rights belong to individuals. Both these ideas arise from a philosophical perspective, which assumes that human beings exist as isolated individuals who make claims or possess entitlements in isolation.

An exactly opposite philosophical perspective tells us that human beings are social beings, not individual beings. Society is a web of relations - social, economic, cultural and political - which have been constructed historically as different interests in society interact, clash and contradict and give birth to new sets of relations. Social struggles, therefore, are the base from which social relations develop. […]

The modern human rights debate - or discourse - is constructed on the philosophical foundation of the human being as an individual, and not as a social being. This lies at the centre of many of the controversies in human rights discourse. […]

The values and principles that underlie the human rights discourse have been constructed historically in the course of social struggles. Therefore, human rights is a contentious discourse in which different, and often contradictory, perspectives representing different interests in national and international society, seek dominance or hegemony.

Just as dominant and dominating interests may employ the ideology of human rights to justify and rationalise their dominance, so also the forces that seek to resist dominance may deploy human rights to mobilise their resistance. Human rights, as we know them today, were born in a period of contention. They were born in the context of the Cold War between the socialist and the capitalist system on the one hand, and in the context of the wars of national liberation from imperial/colonial domination, on the other. This context has had a major impact on the debates within, and about, human rights. […]

Human Rights as Contentious Discourse

The most celebrated document in the history of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), was adopted in 1948 when the world had just emerged from one of the most devastating wars. There were only 56 member states of the United Nations with only three from Africa, including apartheid South Africa, which adopted the UDHR.

But the world was a long way from recognising the universal human being. More than two-thirds of the world's peoples were colonised and referred to as natives. They were not thought to be human enough to have human rights! President Roosevelt's four freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship 'god' in your own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear (no wars between states) – which are supposed to have provided the building blocks of the UDHR did not include the freedom most central to the colonised peoples: 'freedom from colonial oppression' or the right to national self-determination. […]

The human rights ideology was incubated in the crucible of the Cold War (1945-90) and reflected the political, ideological and military disagreements and struggles underlying it. While the Cold War was cold in Europe, it was very hot in the Third World, Africa included. There was not a single year from 1945 to 1990 when there was not conflict somewhere in the world. […]

During much of the Cold War and to this day, the USA presented, and continues to present, itself as the champion of freedom, democracy and individual rights, despite the fact that it was at the same time trampling on the basic rights of Third World peoples - their rights to life and self-determination - as it propelled and fuelled wars and supported dictators. […]

The double-standards in human rights discourse, and the unequal power relations which underlie it, is not fully appreciated if human rights are presented as apolitical, asocial and ahistorical values inherent in us all because we are human beings. The setting of human rights standards through international conventions and declarations is itself a very contentious political process which demonstrates the gross inequalities of the world capitalist and imperial system. […]

Thus the way human rights are prioritised and categorised is itself open to debate, demonstrating the ideological nature of human rights discourse. Like all ideological discourses, half-truths and untruths are presented as absolute truths and whole truths. We should be wary therefore of a perspective on human rights which does not treat human rights in the context of history and social struggles.

Wherever there is oppression and injustice, there is bound to be resistance and struggle. In this process, the oppressors justify and rationalise their oppression in ideologies of domination, just as the oppressed mobilise and articulate their resistance in the ideologies of struggle and resistance.

In the present era, as globalisation is touted as the universal human good, we are also witnessing unprecedented inequalities, injustices, oppression, and levels of poverty and deprivation, which make mockery of our basic humanity, let alone human rights. […]

What Africa pays in debt-servicing and through loss of terms of trade every year would be more than enough to provide decent health, education and safe drinking water to every man, woman and child on the continent. Meanwhile, for the last 10 to 15 years, Africa has been subjected to unprecedented dictation from the international financial organisations and the so-called donor community. The neo-liberal policies adopted as a result have plunged the continent deeper into poverty with little prospect of improvement as its resources are pillaged by multinational corporations and its politics increasingly entrapped in the game of musical chairs for the minuscule urban elites. […]

Human Rights as Resistance

- The rights of peoples to self-determination

As we saw, the UDHR did not include the right of nations and peoples to self-determination although the declaration was born in the midst of a world in which more than two-thirds of the human race lived under colonial or semi-colonial conditions. […]

In the context of the rising national liberation movements and new forms of imperial domination, a number of liberation movements, trade unions and activist intellectuals meeting in Algiers in 1976 adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, known as the Algiers Declaration. ( ). The Algiers Declaration is a fine example of the reconceptualisation of the rights ideology by civil society to legitimise the struggle of peoples. The Algiers Declaration does not pretend to set any standards nor freeze these standards as enforceable rights of individuals to stabilise the status quo, but rather it consciously sums up people's struggles so as to legitimise them.

By further rethinking the right to self-determination and giving the term 'people' a contextual meaning, this right also has the potential to capture the current struggle of the African people for democracy from below and genuine participation in governance.

The right to self-determination, it can be argued, includes the right of the people to be consulted on all matters that affect their lives. Just as an individual has a right to be heard before any adverse action is taken against him/her, so the people have a right to be consulted before decisions are made affecting them. […]

The right to self-determination has been a major weapon used by various NGOs to argue and articulate the case against the ruinous economic policies the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed on African and other developing countries. In February 2002, a number of NGOs campaigning against Third World debts convened a People's Tribunal in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to hear evidence and adjudicate upon the legality and legitimacy of the debts. The 'verdict' ( ) deploys with great effect the language of human rights generally, and particularly the language of the right to self-determination, in order to show that Third World debts are illegitimate and that the people of the South are fully justified in resisting payment of these debts.

- Right to Life

The right to life is considered a basic right. As a matter of fact, the right of peoples to self-determination and right to life together may be justifiably called the mother of all rights.

In the mainstream interpretations, the right to life is given a narrow meaning of the right to existence. Various campaigns against capital punishment and torture have been anchored in this right. But Third World jurists and human rights activists, faced with extreme poverty and inhuman existence in their societies, have imaginatively expanded the meaning of the right to life to include the right to livelihood, right to shelter, right to land and right to food. […]

In this way, the language of rights is deployed to articulate the most pressing concerns of the large majority of people while at the same time providing the language of resistance against, and changing of, the existing conditions. It is important, therefore, that activist NGOs and other human rights advocates are conscious of the different perspectives on human rights, so that they know what to promote, in whose interest and in which direction.

* See for the Algiers Declaration and the verdict of the People's Tribunal on Debt.

*Would you like to respond to this editorial? Send your views to [email protected] and we will publish them in our Letters and Comments section next week.

The 60s and 70s were the age of liberation and revolution in Africa. It was the age of the late Abdulrahman Babu, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and many others. For us in Dar es Salaam and many other areas of the world, it was a time of intellectual ferment, and insurrection of ideas.

But things have changed. Today, many academics have metamorphosed from intellectual researchers of yesterday to policy consultants of today. The truth of course is that we are neither consulted nor recommend policy. Policy is set elsewhere by those who hold the purse string while, we the local counter-parts, as we are called, mount stage shows organising national workshops of stake-holders;. No one pretends that consultancies generate knowledge, much less that the consultant is an organic intellectual. We all know, and admit it in private, that we are neither organic to anything nor intellectuals. We are simply paid juniors, euphemistically called counterparts, of Western consultants paid by the West, leaving us little time to care about the rest. In this game of euphemisms, Western paymasters are called development partners; consultancy, whose only source of scientific data is rapid rural appraisals and other consultancy reports, is called development work, which development work is dutifully executed by a Western team leader called development practitioner.

It is this amazing double-speak of imperial consultants and propagandists which has been at the heart of decimating the body of intellectual thought that provided the theoretical foundation and ideological inspiration for the age of liberation and revolution. The double-speak is aimed at three targets.

One, at rehabilitating imperialism morally by demonising Third World nationalism and delegitimising Third World states (particularly Africa) as no more than a coterie of ethnic groups out to loot poor, ignorant populations who need to be saved from their own rulers by the humanitarian interventions of the international community. Humanitarian interventions to save the Third World people from themselves, then is presented as the motif of numerous military and economic interventions by the international community from Serbia to Somalia. These interventions are not only begged for by our political leaders themselves but also justified by our intellectuals. In the post-cold war period we do not have any clashes of idea or ideological struggles but the clash of civilisations, as Samuel Huntington, the intellectual think-tank of the US state department, proclaims. The clash is supposedly between the Western civilisation and Islamic and Confucian civilisations, between the Good and Evil, between the Values of the Free World, and the prejudices of the Rest, between People and non-people.

Of course, the clash of civilisations had to be invented. How else would one justify the expanding military machine of imperialism while at the same time proclaim end of ideology after the Cold War?

The second big onslaught has been to make the ideology of human rights, and its related offshoots such as rule of law, good governance, poverty alleviation etc. Again human rights is of course not presented as an ideology but an immortal, all time truth. Its unquestioning pervasiveness and acceptance among our own intellectuals is remarkable. When I wrote my The Concept of Human Rights in Africa arguing that it was an ideology of domination and that we needed to re-conceptualise it and turn it on its head to make it an ideology of resistance, it was simply ignored and brushed aside as demagogic.

In our part of the world, human rights ideology, in short, has been pretty effective in displacing grand social theories and vision of human emancipation. Human rights discourse has succeeded in marginalising concrete analysis of our society. Human rights ideology is the ideology of the status quo, not change. Documentation of human rights abuses, although important in its own right, by itself does not help us to understand the social and political relations in our society. Given the absence of political economy context and theoretical framework, much of our writings on human rights, rule of law, constitution, etc., uncritically reiterate or assume neo-liberal precepts. Human rights is not a theoretical tool of understanding social political relations. At best it can only be a means of exposing a form of oppression and, therefore, perhaps an ideology of resistance. If not carefully handled, it cannot even serve that purpose.

The third target of imperial ideological onslaught has been the organisational expression of people’s struggles. Traditional and historically well-tested forms of organisation like parties, trade unions and mass movements are placed on the same footing as non-governmental organisations. As a matter of fact, it is the various human rights NGOs which occupy the centre stage because they are best funded by the donor community and whose importance is blown out of all proportion to their real capacity for change.

The very concept of NGO has drained the people of the organisational expression of their struggle. NGOs are supposed to be non-political, non-partisan and non-membership, formed by activists, usually from outside the social group that they are advocating for, without any constituency, accountable only to themselves and the funder. Their function, as they see it themselves, is awareness raising and advocacy in which people themselves are passive, ignorant subjects or victims, incapable of struggling for their rights. Under the demagogic precept of action not words, even well intentioned individuals in NGOs willy-nilly end up supporting the status quo because they have no theoretical tools or ideological stand to guide them. In the world of NGOs, theory and ideology are swear words. They are despised. In other words, we are told to act, not to think.

In the 60s and 70s, the radical intellectual did not make a distinction between political and civil, between nongovernmental and governmental but rather preached and practised the dictum that Politics is the concentrated form of economics and that the state is the table of contents of civil society and class struggles.

Today, the world is presented as a global village which is being inexorably villagised by the forces of globalisation. It consists of the international community and others. The composition of the international community is flexible but rogue-states are definitely not part of it. No one, we are told, has control over the processes of globalisation because it is controlled by the invisible hand of the market, which incidentally, is a very competent distributor of resources. We, in the Third World do not have much of a choice in this globalised world. The globalisation experts tell us, and our political leaders repeat it parrot-like, that globalisation offers opportunities and challenges. To be able to make use of these opportunities, among other things, we need to behave ourselves; enforce the civilisation values of freedom, individualism, good governance, and human rights. We must of course put in place an enabling environment to attract development funds by making available at no cost our state sovereignty, land, labour, minerals, water and air and space to investors. For this we need appropriate sectoral policies and the international community would always consider our applications for funds to hire consultants to draft such policies for us.

We all know that there is no community of interest in the international community; that globalisation is just another name for imperialism; that the global village embodies in it global pillage; that all cards are staked on one side in stake-holders workshops; that good governance is another name for legitimising economically despotic system, for governance is not a question of morality but a contest of power. Yet, it is amazing how this farce is re-enacted and the most we can allow ourselves is to make a few sarcastic remarks, which is good entertainment, while business continues as usual.

It needs hardly to be said that we are in the trough of the world revolution but I do not believe all is lost. The forces of progress may have been defeated but certainly not destroyed. Wherever there is oppression, there is bound to be resistance. There is a silver lining and we are already witnessing it: Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa are dress rehearsals. As Abdulrahman Babu would have said, Comrades. Do not fritter away this opening. Use it.

Edited extract of a keynote address at the International Conference to celebrate the life of Adulrahman Mohamed Babu, Dar es Salaam, September 2001

* Issa Shivji, Professor of Law, University of Dar es Salaam