Memories on African liberation (1956 - 1975)

INTRODUCTION

The need for oral history, as exemplified in personal narratives of the actual actors in the history of Africa in particular, is obvious in view of the scarcity of authentic sources for that history. The same is true for social and cultural histories of societies in periods of social transformation. These personal narratives fill the many gaps that are sure to occur if we rely solely on official documents that may be biased by the interests and policies of the people in power.

My own experience in Egyptian politics - and probably in others - shows that official history is often subjected to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of the facts to suit the changing moods of the main actors in power, or those who follow them. Thus, the multiplicity of narratives may be a source of control rather than a cause for confusion.

The relations between Egypt and the rest of Africa, before or after the 23 July revolution in 1952, are a model for the importance of oral history of those relations, whether in the fields of political and economic development or in the common struggle against foreign domination. The radical change of policy of the Anwar Sadat regime in 1971 immediately after the death of President Gamal Abdul Nasser resulted in an obvious lack of adequate documentation of the Nasser regime and hence the need for the contributions of oral history.

My present contribution in this area is a modest addition that needs to be complimented by contributions from other actors in this field, either from Egypt or from the Arab North of Africa. Indeed I have had the chance to record the memories of Mr. Mohammad Fayek, the assistant of President Nasser for African Affairs (2002). I also had a long interview with the late Kwame Nkrumah in Conakry in 1970 after he was ousted from power, and with former President Ben Bella (Algeria) in Bamako. Add to this my direct personal relations with a number of the leaders of African liberation movements that are exposed in this paper, or were referred to in previous contributions of mine.

The scope of this paper will not allow a detailed expose of all the events that took place after the end of World War II that led to the involvement of the Nasser regime in the process of national liberation. I believe this was prompted more by the course of events rather than by any prior belief of that nationalist leader as expressed in his booklet ‘Philosophy of the Revolution’ published in 1955, where he mentioned three spheres of interest of Egypt’s foreign policy.

After the end of World War II, the nationalist fervor in Egypt was very high. At the same time imperialist projects in the Middle East tried to create imperialist military bases and include our countries in anti-Soviet blocs. Confronting the popular attempt to gain full independence from Britain, we were confronted with the occupying British troops in the Suez Canal zone, and the attempts to lure Egypt into membership of the Bagdad Pact and then the Cento Pact. We also had to face imperialist bases in Tripoli in Libya and Canio Station in Ethiopia, apart from direct colonial rule in Africa. At the same time, Sudan was nominally under joint Anglo-Egyptian rule, while it was in fact a simple British colony.

The new ‘revolutionary’ regime allowed forms of resistance against British troops, while negotiating for the evacuation of those troops from both Egypt and the Sudan. However, it was careful to keep away from all imperialist military pacts in the region and not to become implicated in the Cold War, taking into consideration that Israel was one of the forward bases of imperialism in the Arab region.

Therefore, to write the national history of Egypt after World War II we should consider the ‘free officers’ led by Nasser in 1952 as part of a nationalist movement, and not as founders of the independence movement.

JOINING UP

One may consider the effects of this atmosphere on a young man born in 1935 and later joining the university in Cairo with a background of Wafdist and Moslem Brotherhood influences, beginning his studies in philosophy and sociology in a leftist atmosphere. Amid the wide nationalist propaganda of the free officers, he started frequenting the African Association in 1956, where he met young African students of Islamic studies, many of whom had rallied to the popular defense of Egypt against the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression that year. That aggression was to punish Egypt for its Nationalist spirit, its insistence on getting rid of all occupation troops, its breaking of the monopoly of the West for arms supply, and its nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company.

In his long sessions of dialogue in 2002, Fayek told me of Nasser’s instructions during the Sudan negotiations with Britain in 1953 to deploy much effort against the British and American influence and to gain the support of Sudan’s neighbours in Ethiopia and East Africa. At the time the Egyptian Broadcasting System started its dedicated transmissions in Tigrean (for Ethiopia and Eritrea), and in Swahili (for East Africa). By the 1960s these transmissions were extended to cover 30 African languages.

The central pole of attraction for those youth was the late Mohammad Abdel Aziz Ishak, the well known intellectual. They also met Mohammad Fayek, who was keen to keep in touch with African youth, mostly Azhar students, with a few from Cairo University. For me, this experience of getting acquainted with these youth, who were full of enthusiasm to go back to their respective countries to help in their liberation and development efforts, was very instructive. Needless to point out that their activities were much influenced by the fervor of the Nasserist media.

I have always pointed out that Nasser’s mention in his booklet ‘Philosophy of the Revolution’ of the three spheres of interest in Egyptian politics (Arab, African and Islamic, in this order) did not indicate the real priority given to our relations with Africa. Indeed, in 1955 Nasser was exploring the Asian experience when he met in Bandung with the leaders of China, India and Indonesia (as well as Ethiopian and Ghanaian representatives).

Until that time his interest in Africa was mainly concerned with securing the situation of the newly independent Sudan, and hence he saw fit to support the independence efforts of the Nile basin countries: Kenya, Uganda, Eritrea and Congo. The regime had created the Tahrir publishing house to publish its own newspapers: Al Gomhouria daily and the weekly Al Tahrir Liberation. In the latter, we read about American military bases, and the Kenyan ‘Mau Mau’ revolution under Jomo Kenyatta. Between 1956 and 1958 there were many African and Asian developments that were followed by the Syrians asking for unity with Egypt and thus shifting our priority once more to the Arab sphere.

Thus the interaction with the Nile countries and the rest of Africa came before this talk about the three circles of interest. It seems to me that this latter theory was the brain child of some petty bourgeois intellectuals who were obsessed with the role of Egypt and its influence.

It was a period of rich experiences for Egypt and for a youthful student of Cairo University, who witnessed, among his newly acquired African friends (many of whom undertook military training with the Egyptian National Guard) the defeat of the imperialist aggression of 1956. Soon after came the first Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (held in December of 1957 and January 1958) where scores of young delegates from African and Asian Countries thronged through the premises of the Cairo University’s halls.

Together with my African friends, I accompanied many of those delegates and thus improved my previous superfluous information about their countries. Such contacts prompted my increased interest in the African Association, and acceptance to contribute some modest articles to the new periodical ‘African Renaissance’ about African journalism as well as African music and sculpture. This periodical (1957) was the best known about Africa at the time, and an issue in English soon followed to make it more accessible to a wider audience. At the time I was also a researcher of the Egyptian Folklore Institute.

The period 1956 - 1960 was rich in nationalist fervor, both in Egypt and Africa where the struggle for independence was the first priority. Contacts with the Socialist powers (the Soviet Union and China) were needed in the struggle against Colonialism in its various manifestations. Thus the Youth Festival in Tashkent saw many participants from African countries, but many of them were among the students in Cairo because of the obstacles put up by the colonial powers against travel to the Soviet Union. So it was decided to hold the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Conference in Cairo, and it was attended by hundreds of young delegates, although many of them also came from countries of voluntary exile.

Some of these extended their stay in Cairo, while many more left permanent representatives to establish offices in Cairo, their best opening to the outer world. The rule was for the leader to hold a personal meeting with Nasser before leaving the country, and he would obtain Nasser’s instructions for founding that new office, and allotting time on the broadcasting system. Some other members of the office would be posted at the secretariat of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). Thus Zamalek was crowded with many Africans. It became a refuge for revolutionaries and a venue for many students in Egypt and sometimes some nationalist leaders such as Fathi Radwan, Helmi Murad and friends of our delegate assassinated in Somalia, Kamal Ed Dine Salah.

INVOLVEMENT

Among the leaders received by Nasser in 1957/58 was Sheikh Ali Mohsen Al Berwani, the leader of the Zanzibar National Party (ZNP), who pointed out to Nasser his dilemma as a nationalist leader, but was accused by the Africans as being an Arabist. Nasser rallied to his support by allotting a special guest house named ‘The East Africa House’ to accommodate some 40 students from all East African countries (including Zanzibar). I was appointed as supervisor of this group in 1958 after graduating from university. My background with the African Association must have been taken into account for this appointment. I spent two years in this job (1958 - 1960) and this was very useful to my later work.

The declarations of self rule or independence came one after the other from the African French colonies, while the Algerians kept up their armed struggle against France with full Egyptian support.

Opposition to French and British colonialism flared up by the end of 1958, such that within a few months we saw Felix Mome, the leader of the Union du Peuple du Cameroun (UPC), visit the African Association, followed immediately by Mosazi, the leader of the Ugandan National Congress (UNC), who left the brilliant John Kaley to manage their office in Cairo. Then came Oginga Odinga to start the office of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), followed by Oliver Tambo to open the office of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa.

At the same time or a little earlier came Wold Ab Wold Mariam, who directed the Tigrean broadcasting programme, followed by Adam Mohammad Adam and Sheikh Ibrahim Soltan, the leaders of the Eritrean liberation front before they fired their first shot. They had come to present their demand for self determination status for Eritrea to the United Nations. As for Haj Mohammad Hussein, who belonged to the Ogadin (part of Ethiopia populated by ethnic Somalis), he led the Somalian Liga that called for grouping all Somalis in a Greater Somalia. He solicited Egypt’s support for his cause in view of the assassination of Kamal Ed dine Salah, Egypt’s representative in the Somali Council of Trustees. We also received Harbi and his comrades in Djibouti, Joshua Nkomo and his comrades in Southern Rhodesia, and Kenneth Kaunda and his comrades of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) from Northern Rhodesia.

As a young man, I was really overworked by my duties in the East Africa House and the African Association. The sources of information about Africa were very scarce in Egypt at the time, and Fayek, in his reminiscences, told me his only source of information about Africa in the fifties was John Gunther’s book ‘Inside Africa’ together with a few booklets in Arabic. Thus I was happy when he instructed me to translate certain articles in some African newspapers he had managed to subscribe to. I was also happy to lay hands on Lord Healy’s book ‘Survey of Africa’ (1958) that was later updated in Colin Legum’s treaties in the 1960’s. Afterwards the information authority translated books by Kenyatta and Nkrumah and others. And the Sudanese Studies Research Institute was transformed to become the African Research Institute.

We had the feeling that Israel was trying hard to circumscribe Egypt’s role in the Nile Basin and we countered this by deep solidarity with all liberation movements in the region. The close alliance between Israel and the racist regime in South Africa was a clear warning to Egypt of the similarity between the settler colonisation systems in both Palestine and Southern Africa. This was a lesson for me about the various systems of colonisation.

At the time I was getting involved with the leftist trend in Egypt, and I knew from our friends in the African Association that most African liberation movements were also leftist. Thus it was an unpleasant surprise when George Padmore visited Egypt as an advisor to President Nkrumah. This author of Pan-Africanism, whose anti-communist trends were very pronounced, did not fit in the guise of advisor to Nkrumah, who championed the liberation movement and the unity of all African people. Indeed, Padmore met with little welcome among the delegations in Egypt, especially as the Soviets and the Chinese had established friendly relations of cooperation with all these movements, and had their representatives in the secretariat of AAPSO in Cairo. I overcame my ambiguous feeling only after coming into close contact with David DuBois and his mother Shirley DuBois, who explained the leftist content of the Nkrumah concept. They had come to Egypt after the great Pan Africanist William DuBois had passed away in Accra in 1963, and we read together the poem where that great man had celebrated the ‘Triumph of the Nile Pharaoh (Nasser) over the British Lion’ in 1956. We also reviewed William DuBois’s concept of African unity and his influence on Nkrumah, who considered him the father and teacher of all African nationalists. Strange to note that few African intellectuals give much attention nowadays to this internationalist Marxist thinker. I also noted how George Padmore tried to eradicate the influence of DuBois on Nkrumah, and even tried to sow discord between Nkrumah and Nasser over the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference (AAPSO) by holding the All African People’s Conference in Accra only one year after the AAPSO conference in Cairo (1958).

I was surprised when the delegates returning from Accra told me of the non violence policy announced in that conference which Frantz Fanon had opposed. I decided to study the effect of Fanon’s teachings in Africa and whether the presence of Asian citizens had spread Gandhi’s policies of non-violence. Indeed, we were concerned in Egypt that some of Nkrumah’s advisors may have led him to believe that Nasser was competing with his policy of African unity in favour of Arab leadership. Such ideas were manifested by Padmore’s concept of Black Zionism (when talking about the return of American Blacks to Africa), and Kogo Botsio, Nkrumah’s advisor, disapproving of the so-called Arab influence. Indeed, we always suspected in that atmosphere that any anti-Arab policies in Africa were the outcome of Israeli instigation.

Yet we were all pleasantly surprised when Nkrumah asked Nasser to help him marry an Egyptian lady. As Fayek told me, this was done in a very friendly manner, and disproved all rumours about competition for influence between the two men. Indeed, we jokingly called this marriage a marriage of Pan-Africanism with Pan-Arabism. Later, Mrs DuBois chose, in 1966, to stay in Cairo after the coup against Nkrumah, and I found her a nice flat overlooking the Nile that Dr. DuBois had been fond of during his stay in Cairo in 1958. She was so happy with that flat and treated me as a close member of the family. Her son, David DuBois, lived in that flat until his death some five years ago when he bequeathed it to an Egyptian friend.

During the Nasser era, the political culture of liberation did not have a monopoly as some may believe, but conservative cultures also flourished because of the depth of religious feeling among the people. The big changes Nasser applied to the scope of study by introducing secular and scientific curricula did not alter significantly this situation, but on the contrary increased its role in the higher education system. Thus the number of African students seeking education at Al Azhar University in the mid-1960s exceeded 20,000. The non Moslem African countries complained that their students could not easily follow studies in other branches of higher education, and Nasser decided to remedy this shortcoming by founding new institutes of higher education where tuition was carried out in English and in French.

Bureaucracy too was an obstacle for any insertion of the representatives of liberation movements into Egyptian society, despite their acceptance by some responsible people. Indeed, the efforts of our Bureau of African Affairs were decisive in this direction, and it did not suffer from the internal political strife within other offices such as those concerned with Arab or Sudanese affairs. The different members of the Free Officers Movement sometimes competed for influence in such a way as to adversely affect the various spheres of activity. African Affairs sometimes suffered when we had to solve problems in cooperation with the myriad of centres of influence such as the centres in charge of foreign students (in Azhar or elsewhere), or the secretariat of AAPSO, or the Federation of Labour, or the Nasr Company for Export and Import, or the Higher Islamic Council, or Parliament, or the Socialist Union, or the deputies to the president. The young and responsible man that I was, I would sometimes feel dizzy trying to unravel such entangled connections. Even the African Affairs Bureau sometimes suffered from internal differences of opinion that needed a presidential decision.

The above is some sort of auto criticism of a period rich in movement where the objectives were always greater than the movement itself. This criticism was directed at the Egyptian system, but it also applies to many of the participants of the African movements themselves. Indeed, few of them were ambitious enough to study Egyptian society, or even raise their own political consciousness to make known their society in revolution against colonialism. Only a few, were those with whom I managed to make rich intellectual dialogue. However, my personal and human relations were very fruitful with many of those leaders as my home was always a welcoming venue, and my wife and children were familiar with many of those friends. It seems to me that this lack of political culture among many of those cadres of the liberation movements may explain many of the setbacks that befell some of the countries liberated through the struggle and led by well-established movements. In many cases internal ethnic or communal strife wasted much of the gains of independence and hampered development efforts. Such reflections may need a detailed study well outside the scope of these memories, and may explain the preponderance of the military action over the political during the liberation struggle.

We could assess the effectiveness of the particular liberation movement by the activity of its office in Cairo and the effectiveness of its representation. Thus Dr. Moumie, the president of the UPC of Cameroun headed in person their office in Cairo, and he was a well-known opponent of the French colonial policies, such that his assassination was obviously imputed to the French Secret Service. John Kaley was the deputy president of the Uganda Congress Party, and Rubin Kamanga was elected as deputy president of the Zambia Independence Party while resident in Cairo. Similarly Alfred Nzo was elected secretary general of the ANC of South Africa while resident in Cairo, and later was appointed minister of foreign affairs in Mandela’s first administration after apartheid.

These close political - and personal - relations with such well-accredited leaders of their countries were a cause for pride to all of us in the African Affairs Bureau, and to me in particular. All these leaders occupied modest offices beside my own modest office at the African Association, but they were all a model of activity and vitality. The financial help given to such powerful parties in their respective countries was generally modest. (I remember that all that was given to a liberation leader to carry out a country wide election campaign before independence in 1964 was equal to 25,000 dollars).

The concept of national liberation at that moment immediately after independence still needs some deep thought. Indeed, I never attended any real debate during those two decades (1955 - 1975) about the real content of Fanonism, Guevarism, Nasserism or Nkrumaism. We were all the time taken up by the day to day events and the progress of this insurgency or revolt in this colony or the other, but we never had the leisure to debate the theoretical or social content in a methodical fashion. We might discuss the actions of the different leaders and the rivalries or cooperation that affected their action, or we might invoke the memories of Fanon or Guevara as nationalist leaders to be emulated. We never debated their political or social thought in order to follow their example or otherwise.

Thus the armed struggle as the sole means for political liberation, and the rivalries that sometimes led to fratricidal strife in pursuit of supremacy after independence was the salient facet of the picture. However, there were exceptions where some leaders had enough social and class consciousness, as in the case of South Africa, and the thinking of Amilcar Cabral and a few other leaders. Indeed, it is hard to expect that the concepts of the necessary social transformations not developed during the period of national unity during the liberation struggle, can be seriously addressed during the less exacting situations after independence. I recall that when I met the late Nkrumah in Conakry in 1970 after his ousting, he exposed in length his views about such matters in retrospect and had written a book entitled ‘The Class Struggle in Africa’. He gave me a copy of that valuable book exposing the state of the classes and the role of intellectuals in Africa, and even the conditions for successful guerilla warfare in Africa and the social background for such success.

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