Contents
Introduction
1. State and class in pre-colonial West Africa
2. Tribalism, colonialism and capitalism
3. Religion, racism and class
4. Sharia in Nigeria: a class analysis
5. The poverty of education in Ghana
6. South Africa in the twentieth century
Introduction
The slower development of socialist ideas in Africa is arguably due mainly to the distorted and stunted development of the means of production as a result of the relations of production that the capitalist system imposed on the continent (in the form of the Atlantic slave trade and colonisation). In class society, surplus value is extracted from the class of producers by the non-producing class. In many parts of the world, the class mode of production is purely capitalist in nature with working class interests standing diametrically opposed to those of the capitalists. However, Africa still manifests significant characteristics of a feudal mode of production.
Here, in Africa, industries and factories are concentrated in the urban areas where the class struggle is carried out between the proletariat and the capitalists. But global capitalism sees Africa as a source of raw materials and a ready market for the finished products of the West. Comparatively few industries and factories have been established in Africa. As a result, factory workers constitute only a small fraction of the total workforce, thus limiting the size of the proletariat.
On the other hand, in the rural areas where the majority of the population are found, the dominant labour process is still, to a degree, feudalistic. Except in a few cases (in the former settler colonies, for instance) where one can find some form of capitalist farming, subsistence agriculture (including animal rearing) is the main occupation of the people. Individual farmers own their means of labour – hoes, machetes, and such other simple traditional implements and each family works on a small plot of land. But they also work for the chiefs from time to time or, if not, they give a portion of their harvests to them or to landowners. This is the form that the direct extortion of surplus value assumes at the local level.
As the dominant worldview in any given society has been the view of its ruling elite, there is little wonder that in rural Africa conservative traditional beliefs (in the power of the gods, the fetish priests, the chiefs, etc) still hold sway. In the same vein, whilst some (the relatively better paid workers) in urban areas are slaves to the delusion of “making it”, most think that they have been “divinely” destined to live in misery and must patiently wait for the day of deliverance and reward in the afterlife.
This unique production process has led to the creation of a rather disproportionate and disparate working class, inclusive of street hawkers, petty shop-keepers, prostitutes, casual workers in urban areas, seasonal agricultural labourers in the rural areas and a large reservoir of the unemployed and ‘underemployed’.
But in spite of this bastardised state of the exploited classes, considerable inroads could still have been made in the development of their political consciousness. When Marx wrote, on the emancipation of the working class, that “the head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat’, he meant that the working class, as the most wretched of the classes, has to play a revolutionary role in the struggle. But this can only be done if the philosophy of emancipation (a revolutionary class consciousness) is thoroughly grasped.
Of particular importance when considering the level of class consciousness in Africa is the misrepresentation of socialism by the continent’s early “advocates of socialism”. The supposed revolutionary ideas of socialism were first propagated in Africa by individuals influenced in the main by the then USSR. But, as the Soviet system was only another version of capitalism, namely state capitalism, a distorted idea of “socialism” was spread. This “Marxism-Leninism”, as it was popularly known, had nothing to do with the self-emancipation of the working class that Marx taught. Instead, this Soviet distortion taught that state power could only be captured on behalf of the workers – as they were incapable of the feat – by a small conspiratorial group of professional revolutionaries who alone were capable of understanding socialist ideology. To date, this is still the prevalent view of socialism here in Africa and this has led, and continues to lead, to the sidelining of the immediate task of raising the consciousness of the people (making more genuine socialists). Instead these “socialists” organise themselves into political parties like the mainstream ones and vie with them for political control of their respective countries. Others go underground as subversive, shadowy groups without any meaningful links with the people they claim to represent. With the collapse of the USSR and its satellites in Eastern Europe, many of these pseudo-socialists simply vanished into thin air, leaving their followers in confusion.
Moreover, in Africa, the capitalists, afraid of the liberating potential of an enlightened people, have deliberately limited access to a decent education. Apart from a good education being a commodity available only to a privileged elite, the course content of education in general has been so designed as to produce school leavers whose academic worth and capability is deplorably second-rate. Closely linked to this is the contribution of the media. The radio, TV and newspapers are actively complementing the efforts of the (mis)education system. The media is replete with trivialities and non-issues. Even for the few who are privileged enough to have access to education, they read nothing but misinformation and distortions that are intended to hold back intellectual development on general and political awareness in particular. Added to the above is the very disturbing problem of material insecurity. Most people in Africa spend all their time looking for the next meal. Even or a majority of the literate, the decision to buy, for instance, a newspaper is at the risk of foregoing a meal. People are so hungry, so tormented by war and instability, and so exhausted by the struggle to survive that seeking knowledge is out of the question. Such a situation of ignorance and extreme poverty has become a convenient breeding ground for religion, which feeds on despair and, as can be imagined, most people, having lost all hope, turn to the myriad religious groups that abound for “comfort”. These groups are, needless to say, generously sponsored by Western capitalists precisely because they are aware of the power of religion to blunt the revolutionary potential of the dispossessed, and of religion’s ability to grease the machinery of exploitation.
It is such issues that this pamphlet discusses. The pages that follow present illuminating instances of the distortion of the class struggle in African society. They explain the use of religion, the educational system, and the state to perpetuate the status quo. The ultimate aim of this pamphlet can be summed up as being to help the emergence in Africa, as elsewhere, of socialist parties which, in the words of the 8th clause of the Declaration of Principles of the World Socialist Movement, will enter “the field of political action, determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist” and rally the working class “to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give way to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom”.
This pamphlet is made up of articles on Africa, mainly written by socialists from that part of the world (as is the above introduction), that originally appeared in The Socialist Standard.
The Editors, African Socialist February 2005
Revised and reprinted 2015
1. State and class in pre-colonial West Africa
Was the state instituted for mutual protection or did it arise when society became divided into classes?
Long before Marx and Engels, political thinkers and philosophers, had written extensively on the concept of the state, in the 1640s, Thomas Hobbes had argued that the state was essentially a contract between the individual and the government. The alternative, called by Hobbes ‘the state of nature’, was a thoroughly unpleasant life—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Thus, according to Hobbes, the state emerged to improve mankind’s lot. However, Engels, summing up his historical analysis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the State was a product of class society: “It is an admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.” As if to echo Engels, Marx pointed out that the state could not have arisen, let alone maintained itself, had it been possible to reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.
Marx revealed that a definite level of development of labour productivity is essential before there is real opportunity for humans to exploit other humans. If people produce only the minimum of products required to maintain their physical existence and reproduction, any systematic appropriation of someone else’s labour is out of the question. The opportunity to appropriate someone else’s labour appears only when the productive forces have developed to the level at which the quantity of goods produced somewhat exceeds the minimum required to maintain the direct producers’ lives. The question then arises: Did Africa’s labour productivity reach a level that provided the opportunity for humans to exploit their fellow human beings? The answer is both no and yes. The appropriate answer to this question would enable us to determine the origin of the state in pre-colonial Africa.
But it would be absurd to think of only the level of productive forces without the relations of production. Productive forces cannot be developed in a vacuum. People produce them jointly—in groups rather than on their own. People’s relationship to the means of production determine their position and place in the production and the mode of distribution of the products. Where one group of people makes its living by appropriating the labour of the other, then society is divided into the exploiter and exploited. The need to maintain this vampiric relationship of production leads to the rise of an apparatus of coercion and conditioning to systematically brainwash the exploited into accepting their exploitation as a normal condition of life or to crush their resistance.
Before private ownership
If this analysis of state and class is anything to go by then one cannot authentically talk of the state among some of the communities in Ghana before the 14th century. The predominant principle of social relations was that of the family and kinship associated with communalism. Among the Gur social groups in the Upper East Region of Ghana, for example, every member of the society had their position defined in terms of their relationship with their mother’s or father’s family. Leadership was based on religious ties to the Tindana, or custodian of the land, who ran the affairs of the people with a committee of elders chosen from all the families and clans of the territory. This committee administered land, the major means of production, not as its personal property, but as the property of all the people in Gurum-Tinga (Gur land) who had the right to till it. Hunting, fishing and grazing grounds for animals were organised in a similar manner. No-one starved whilst others stuffed themselves with food and threw the excess away or sold it for profit. The basic economic law was that of providing the members of society with the necessary means of subsistence through communal ownership of the means of production. The absence of private property in the means of production, of the division into classes and the exploitation of man by man excluded the need for a state. Production was essentially of use values; and there was no alienation of the producer from his means of production.
The fundamental flaw in the social organisation of the Gur, however, was that the position of the Tindana was supposedly sanctioned by the gods, and therefore permanent. This notion also applied to the elders of families and clans who served in the committee of elders. Only death could loosen their grip on authority. This meant that people occupying positions of trust could use their positions for personal gain, taking a significant share of communal property and becoming rich; indeed vestiges of private ownership of property began to rear its ugly head in the Gur community around the 16th century. However this development did not reach its fullest maturity before the violent intrusion of British colonial rule. To a very large extent, this explained why the British colonial government had to create chiefs in Gur land and use them as instruments of its policy of exploitation and dehumanisation.
It is also important to note that once African societies began to expand by internal evolution, and the instruments of labour were perfected, people obtained more means of subsistence than was essential for their survival. The restricted nature of communal property and the egalitarian distribution of products of labour that characterised people such as the Gur acted as a drag on the further development of the productive forces. The need for joint labour disappeared with the appearance of sickles, iron-tipped hoes, spears and arrows. What this meant was that the possibility of individual labour also emerged. But individual labour brought about private ownership, private ownership brought about inequality between the people; and rich and poor people emerged. In the Mali empire, for example, the dominant mode of production was feudalism even though the communal and slave modes of production had not completely died out. By the end of the 15th century there were both chattel and domestic slaves in Mali comparable to the feudal serfs in Europe. In Senegal, Portuguese traders also found that there were elements in the population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency.
A cursory look at the socio-economic and political scene in Africa before colonisation does not reveal one dominant mode of production. Also it is not easy to compartmentalise the socio-economic formations and arrange them in a sequence as some writers do, because the social and economic terrain reveals considerable unevenness in development. There were social formations representing hunting bands, communalism and feudalism, while other formations represented a mixture of these. It was upon these that colonialism was superimposed.
2. Tribalism, colonialism and capitalism
Within the context of neo-colonial statehood, tribalism is a colonial derivative based on matriarchal or patriarchal relations, forged in the distant past and used by an ethnic group as a defensive and an offensive weapon against other groups. The position of some of those who see tribalism as the main cause of Africa’s present social and economic predicament follows a familiar pattern of thinking. The colonialists, according to them, tried to make a nation-state out of a hotch-potch of antagonistic and uncivilised African peoples, but failed in their pious mission. The various tribes had age-long hatred for one another and as soon as the colonial power went the natives descended into barbarism, maiming and killing each other.
Nationalists in Africa see the matter differently, painting idyllic pictures of the African past and blaming all the tribal conflicts that have erupted after independence solely on colonialism. This viewpoint is as historically incorrect as it is undialectical. Facts abound on how the internal evolution of some African communities, before colonialism and mercantile capitalism, had provided groups of people the opportunity to appropriate the labour of others, accumulate economic surplus and consequently subjugate other communities. This is a scenario that must have generated a certain level of tribal animosity and discrimination based on economic exploitation and wealth, even if this was on a minor scale compared with the situation in colonial times and the post-independence era. It was these differences that were deliberately and carefully nurtured by the colonialists, and later exploited by the neo-colonial bourgeoisie after independence to keep the people manacled to the capitalist system.
In colonial times
Colonialism, whether it was of the British, Belgian, French or German variety, was not meant to be a benign enterprise. The motive behind its establishment was one: the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of economic surplus. Consequently, the driving force behind it, capitalism, did not spare the exploitation of labour in both the metropolis and other lands even if it meant spilling blood to fulfil this sordid agenda.
This mercenary impulse had implied increased production, technological expansion, the growth of the external and domestic market and ultimately the annexation and political control of other territories. Tribal groups which stood in the way were, in colonial parlance, pacified. But if, as suggested in some quarters, the colonial enterprise had meant to pacify and carve out viable nation-states capable of competing with metropolitan capitalism, the monopolistic tendency and vampire essence of the profit system would have been still-born. Far from creating problems for itself, its policy towards the people of the colonies was guided by the trinitarian doctrine—atomisation, exploitation and domination. This unfolded in its pattern of social and economic investment in what came to be known as Ghana and before that as the Gold Coast.
British colonial policy encouraged investments in only those areas of the colony which were endowed with mineral and forest resources. This pattern of investment engendered considerable regional variations in terms of the provision of roads, railway lines and social services. Thus the Southern Sector which, by virtue of its location, abounded in timber, gold and fertile soil benefited far more in terms of infrastructural development than the Northern territories which did not have any known mineral resources. But even in the Southern part of the colony there was discrimination in the provision of amenities on the basis of the contribution to the exportable surplus. The pattern of investment that characterised British economic policy was not born out of any preference for the Asante over the Dagarti, but based on cold capitalist reasoning. After all, some minimum maintenance of workers’ health and education was a reasonable investment since it ensured the maximisation of the extraction of surplus from the worker; and the greedy capitalists by their calculations knew this too well.
How did this promote tribalism? By annexing the Gold Coast and putting the people in a subordinate status, the British colonial power froze any further evolution and consolidation of a national identity. For example, it destroyed the principal catalyst for achieving the unity of fragmented loyalties. Not only did colonialism deprive states like Benin, Oyo and Asante of all their principal vassals and tributary states, but it followed up the process of fragmentation by smashing the basis of the hegemonic power of these states thus giving full rein to all manner of divisive tendencies.
While pretending to be carrying out a mission of uniting the incorrigibly warring tribes, British colonial policy consciously and systematically separated the various people, creating conflict and ill-will among them. The colonial government sometimes saw the value of stimulating tribal jealousies so as to keep the colonised from dealing with their principal opposition—the colonial and the emergent African bourgeoisie, who together, were milking the people.
By categorising the various linguistic subgroups in the Gold Coast—Frafra, Dagarti, Ninkarsi Kusaasi, Dagomba, Akyim, Asante and Fanti—as tribes the colonial regime began to nurture parochial and exclusivist consciousness among people who previously had regarded themselves as one. All official documents in colonial times, for example, required information on the place of origin and ethnic background of the individual. Names were thus suffixed with one’s tribal background and area of origin. Feeling regarded as a member of an ethnic group by others and that they would behave towards you accordingly, individuals began to feel the need to identify more closely with their “kith and kin” and to promote its interest relative to others.
Racist colonial ideology ignored the fact that the people of the Gold Coast shared a common heritage of colonial oppression and colonially-induced capitalist exploitation with its concomitant ills: poverty, ignorance, disease and malnutrition. As a result, its philosophy of determining the inferiority or superiority of a people, in terms of the extent to which they had culturally imbibed all that the colonial establishment represented, came to dominate the worldview of some Africans.
Colonial ideology and culture operated on the basis of a hierarchy of cultures in which that of the metropolitan bourgeoisie was supposed to be supreme. The culture of the country of origin of the metropolitan bourgeoisie therefore became the standard by which a people’s level of primitiveness or barbarism was determined. The more your thinking, values and mannerisms were close to the colonialists’, the more human you were; and by implication the further your behaviour and outlook were from the masters’, the less human you were. This explained why the rich and educated elite who were products of the colonial educational system did not answer questions in their African dialect but in English. They talked about the opera which they had never seen except from a distance, referred to winter and Buckingham Palace and, above all, adopted a critical attitude towards other Africans who they derogatively referred to as “bush people”.
But the idea of trying to approximate to the coloniser was not only to be found in the relations between the African and the European coloniser. Sometimes Africans tried to approximate their status to other Africans if they thought those individuals enjoyed a higher status. African ethnic groups, which had a high number of educated and rich people within them as a result of their long contact with the coloniser, tended to feel superior to others. Even if they were poor and illiterate they identified psychologically with those in their tribal group who were rich and educated. It did not matter to the poor Asante, Frafra or Ewe person if all of them were victims of crude exploitation by colonialism and the African bourgeoisie. In their minds, the identification with the tribal big boss and the fact that they came from the same ethnic background was enough, even if it did not ensure the enjoyment of a spoon of marmalade from the master’s table. This exclusivist and warped thinking explains why a poor Asante, for example, could feel deeply offended if he was mistaken for a Busanga or any other tribe. This not only lead to more barriers between the ethnic groups but effectively undermined their capacity to confront capitalist exploitation. The inter-ethnic struggle for superiority or at least to avoid the stigma of inferiority dissipated the energies of the people.
Tribalism today
The African bourgeoisie, which assumed the mantle of power after colonial rule, also did not fail to realise the usefulness of tribalism in the struggle against the African masses. Like racial violence in Europe, tribalism was a means to an end: deflecting the anger of the masses from the neo-colonial bourgeoisie and directing it at other members of the working class. In another sense it was the most convenient cover for the capitalist robbers who stole economic surplus from the working class and poor peasants. The attitude of the African bourgeoisie towards the colonial state that it inherited, therefore, was not that of dismantling and radically transforming the exploitative relations of production. It was guided by the desire to inherit the colonial state-machine and seek accommodation with international capital in the extraction of economic surplus from the working people. Consequently, post-independence politics in Africa has witnessed the arousal and manipulation of tribal passions and petty differences among ethnic groups, for the same sordid reasons that the bourgeoisie in Europe sometimes find it convenient to use racism.
The predatory character of capitalism, coupled with the hollowness and hypocrisy of the African bourgeoisie, created fertile conditions for the festering of this cancerous disposition. Slogans, values and the moral high ground, postured by the bourgeoisie as events unfolded long after independence, have been blatantly self-serving. As for their masters abroad, the state machinery has now become an important instrument in their quest for capital accumulation at the expense of the masses, whom they claim in political party campaigns to be liberating from poverty, disease, etc. However, given the peculiar historical and economic circumstances in which it has had to evolve, it is not an exact carbon copy of its masters abroad.
The African bourgeoisie is more desirous of imbibing the lifestyles and privileges of its overlords in Europe and America than showing the creative and strong interest in production that marked the genesis of the bourgeoisie in Europe. Its extravagance and neo-colonial conditions have been at the core of the steep declines of production levels in recent times, leading to shocking levels of destitution and poverty. But it is precisely these conditions of want that the bourgeoisie has shamelessly manipulated to scuttle the unity of the dispossessed in the towns using tribalism as a tool.
Cruel economic conditions have forced many residents in poverty-stricken suburbs to seek help and protection by means of a network of social obligations, transferring some of their traditional feudal loyalties and institutions to the urban environment. Most ethnic groups in Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi-Takordi have installed chiefs to whom they pay allegiance and seek protection. Tribal associations have also been formed to advance the cause of particular ethnic groups and used as sources of benefit: help in finding a job, accommodation, money and credit. People also stick together to make common cause against other tribal groups in the struggle for economic survival in the dog-eat-dog environment that has been created by capitalism.
It is these tribal associations that provide arenas for the various factions of the bourgeoisie to launch offensives and counter-offensives against each other in their struggle for political and economic power. Events in the run-up to 2000 presidential election in Ghana provide ample testimony of this, as many of such groups with the backing of the bourgeoisie have sprung up, all seeking to advance the interest of the bourgeoisie in the various ethnic groups. They have organised and whipped up the sentiments of the lower strata of their tribespeople against rivals belonging to different ethnic groups. They have created the impression that it is only when one of your tribesmen is at the helm of affairs that you can have a fair share of national development and individual personal advancement. Consequently, where a presidential or vice-presidential candidate comes from has become extremely important.
But as it has always been the case after every election, those factions that win the election will easily forget about the ethnic support base they so subtly manipulated to propel themselves to power. They will shun the company of their poor tribespeople who supported them and will fraternise closely with their allies in other ethnic groups. The rancour and bitterness that characterised their relations will soon be forgotten, except on political party platforms. They will play tennis, billiards and golf together and discuss lucrative business contracts in posh hotels. As for their indigent brethren, who had worked tirelessly to put them in power, they will have to start thinking seriously about how to pay school fees, feed the family, and get good accommodation.
The festering of tribalist, nationalist and racist sentiment are nurtured and sustained by the capitalist system of production which produces only for profits and not for needs. The abolition of the profit system and its replacement with socialism based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for production and distribution would put an end to discrimination and bigotry. But this cannot happen unless people understand and see the need for this kind of change. More than ever before, the formation of socialist parties in Africa to take up the task of spreading the socialist message has become urgent.
3. Religion, racism and class
The absurd claim of racism is that people’s behavioural, physical and cultural traits conform to a certain fixed and immutable pattern; and this determines the superiority or otherwise of a group in relation to others. This is an outlook that has been used to justify some of the most unspeakable and horrendous crimes against humanity, sometimes leading to killings of genocidal proportions.
In Eduardo Galegno’s Open Vein of Latin America, he recounts that before foreign conquerors set foot on the soil of the land, the Indians totalled no less than 70 million. But a century-and-a-half later, they had been reduced to 3.5 million; and in 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than two million that had once lived between Lima and Paita. Yet Archbishop Linan by Cisneros exposed how some of the church elders had perfected lies into a fine art. He said: “The truth is that they are hiding out, to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”
Racism, however, is flawed on a number of counts, not just for its barbarism and irrationality. Its fundamental arguments are basically weak. Where are those people who conform to racial purity, let’s say in terms of colour? You will meet a lot of dark-skinned people in Africa, but you will no doubt also come across light-skinned types in southern Africa and eastern Nigeria. How can one also argue that the Yanamani Indians or the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are less intelligent than people in Norway or Japan. The two groups live in different material conditions, and these varied environments impose on them tasks and solutions that respond to their peculiar circumstances. In spite of the gaping loopholes in racists’ theories, racism has been used together with religion to justify the enslavement of other people.
Islam, Christianity and Hinduism
The Arabs and their Muslim counterparts, according to Dais Brion, were the first people to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa. They were also the first people to view blacks as suited by nature for the lowest and the most degrading form of bondage. Rotter’s pioneering work and the research of Benard Lewis reveals that for medieval Arabs the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation and the devil. Arab scholars, most of the time, also invoked the biblical curse of Canaan to explain why the sons of Ham had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for the sins of their ancestors.
By the 10th century, some Muslim writers asserted that Ham begot all blacks and people with crinkly hair and that “Noah put a curse on Ham according to which the hair of his descendants would not extend over their ears, and they would be enslaved wherever they were encountered”. Lewis also quotes a 13th century Islamic historian from Iran who concluded that the Zanj (blacks) differed from animals only because their two hands are lifted above the ground and that many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.
In the 17th century, Father Gregorio Garcia detected “Semitic blood” in the Indians, because like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done to them”. When Bartolome de Las Casas upset the Spanish court with his fiery denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council had replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Another justification for holding other people as slaves was found in Leviticus 25:44 which said, “Both thy bonds-men, and thy bonds-maid, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen that are round you; of them shall ye buy bonds-men and bonds-maids.” But the most popular text on the matter is found in Genesis 9:25 which says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” Some slave-owners went beyond the bible arguing that it might be wrong to enslave Christians, but that the Negro was not a human being and therefore could not become a Christian. One pious lady said, when asked if her Negro maid was to be baptised, “you might as well baptise my black bitch.” While Bishop Berkeley put the same idea into philosophical language when he said, “Negroes were creatures of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to other sacraments.”
Similarly, racist sentiments are expressed in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures of ancient India. Indra, the God of the Aryans, is described as “blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the blackskins, which Indra hates”. The account further reports how Indra “slew the flat-nosed barbarians, the dark people called Anasahs. Finally, after Indra conquers the land of the Anasahs for his worshippers, he commands that the Anasahs are to be flayed of [their] black skin.”
The first distinctive feature to be noted in religion and racism is their appeal to a two-category system which presupposes a basic division of mankind into an “in” group and an “out” group. In addition, this fundamental division is supported, initiated and sanctioned by God himself. God has a special concern for the “in” group, and it receives his sustaining aid and grace. By contrast he is indifferent or hostile to the “out” group. In the final analysis God does not value all men equally, consequently he treats them differently. And this difference is not accidental but central to his will and purpose. The two-category system is correlated with an imbalance of suffering in which the “out” group suffers more than the rest of the people. In the account of the Rig Veda, for example, we know that God has less affection for the Anasahs because they suffer more than the Aryans. It is also evident from holy books like the bible and the Rig Veda that God’s favour or disfavour is correlated with the racial or ethnic identity of the group in question. God’s wrath and hostility are sometimes even directed at the physical features of a particular ethnic or racial community.
In the bible, Yahweh often sides with the Israelites in the murderous campaigns to grab land from the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines and Amalekites in the same way that he was used to justify colonialism. Similarly, in African traditional religion, the God of a particular ethnic group assists it to overcome its enemies and brings prosperity to the “in” group. It stands to reason that whilst there is no rock-solid evidence to support the claim that God created man, there is enough justification in the materialist assertion that God is an invention of man. This is grimly illustrated by the fact that while Saddam Hussein was calling on God to help the Iraqis in the Gulf War, George Bush was doing the same thing. No God caused the death of the young men who were slaughtered; but the misguided beliefs and the greed of the ruling class.
Production and production relations
Consequently, the “out” and “in” scheme of analysis has nothing to do with God. It is a manifestation of the concrete and material world of humans reflected in their consciousness in the process of the production and distribution of wealth. Ultimately, production and production relations determine the ideas individuals have about themselves as a group, and about society at large in matters of morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. And it is only when we have identified and understood the material assets and constraints of a society, how it produces goods to meet its material needs, how the goods are distributed, and what type of social organisation sprouts from the organisation of production that we would have come a long way to understanding the culture and religious views of that society.
If the production relations make it possible for a minority to appropriate the end-product of the labour of the majority, then the views of the minority become the dominant ones in society, whilst the opinion of the majority are suppressed. The ownership of the means of production is thus important in understanding people’s perception of social phenomena – religion, philosophy, art etc. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control over economic surplus. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual community and church organisations to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.
As children in a predominantly Catholic community, we used to be told that God was surrounded by a host of angels with archangels. God was the boss and each angel and archangel had a specific assignment to perform in heaven. This was a world-view that sought to give blessing to the master-servant relationship that existed in the feudal era and class society in general.
Some quotations in the bible are also anti-worker if applied in today’s circumstances. Take for instance the saying, “But I say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” I suppose that when the Accountant General’s Office slashed as much as a 100,000 cedis from my salary in March, I should have responded: “Please my Lordship why are you so generous with me? Take 100,000 cedis more.” This would have been submissiveness stretched to its idiotic limits, and an invitation to exploitation and despotism. It could mean an acceptance of wage slavery, a system that is inimical to working people’s interests.
The New Testament also advises us to despise and deprecate worldly things in lieu of heavenly rewards. What would this mean for those who have already made material gains here on Earth? If people like Bill Gates are also God-fearing they would have a double reward; one on Earth and the other in heaven, whilst the God-fearing poor will have only one. As for the poor who are not God-fearing, the extent of their loss and damnation is inestimable. The end result of these teachings, if employed in a class society, makes the working people docile and facilitates their exploitation by the owning class.
Convenient smokescreen
But this is not all. It also calls forth the other forms of alienation which are not strictly economic, but are organically linked to it. It is important to note that racism and religion tend to elevate the culture and other virtues of the dominant class; and denigrate that of the oppressed. But the class character of this domination especially becomes difficult to unmask if the oppressor class has a different racial background from the oppressed, as was the case during the heady days of apartheid and colonialism. Skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics subsume the class dimension of the problem, and exploitation is seen through the binoculars of race. One therefore develops a superiority or inferiority complex, depending on one’s physical traits; and the fundamental issue, which is class exploitation, is lost. Given these circumstances racism becomes a convenient smokescreen with which the ruling class masks its exploitation of labour. Eventually the attention of the working class is diverted from the real causes of its predicament; and a section of it becomes a pliant tool of the ruling class in its attempt to entrench the capitalist system.
The effect on that section of the working class which does not share similar physical characteristics with the owning class is to deny itself as different from the dominant class. It identifies and shares the convictions, doctrines and other attitudes of the dominant class which oppresses it. Guilt and an inferiority complex promoted by the dominant class and imbibed by the oppressed become the result of this process. Consequently the attempt to escape this inferiority by denying and condemning oneself becomes a lifelong struggle.
Let’s consider this for one moment. It is important to note that for many Christians, the traditional African religious individual is superstitious and worships idols and several gods; there is only one God, though he has a son begotten by the Holy Spirit. This god is white, his angels are white; and when the saved finally go to heaven, they will wear white robes of purity. But the devil is black; his angels are black; sin itself is black and when the sinful finally go to hell, they will be burnt to black coal. It is surprising that the African converts sing in pleading terror: “Wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow?” And is it any wonder that some Africans buy skin-bleaching creams to lighten their dark skins? Is it also surprising that so-called educated and enlightened women often buy red, blonde or brunette wigs to hide their black hair or spend hours on end in hair saloons trying to make their hair curly and long?
Christianity even denies the African the right to their name. A name is a simple symbol of identity. But the African convert would normally be required to discard his African name and give himself such good Christian names as Smith, Verwoerd, Robert, James, Julius, Ironmonger, Winterbotham, Elizabeth, Summer, Winter and sometimes Autumn. This business of getting new names has its roots in slave property relations, where the person of the slave was the property of the owner to be disposed of and used as the master deemed fit. So slaves were branded with the master’s name.
The same story is true in art, dance, music, drama etc, but the ultimate objective in class society is one—to control the productive forces and appropriate economic surplus irrespective of the exploiter’s race or tribe. Economic control however is much more difficult to attain without political control. Political control is therefore established through proxy governments. Even then the vampire system finds that economic and political control are incomplete without cultural and hence ideological control. So the system employs religion and bogus theories like racism to ensure the mental castration of the worker, be he European, Asian or African.
4. Sharia in Nigeria: a class analysis
When Bill Clinton visited Nigeria in 2000, he snubbed the predominantly Muslim north by dropping from his original itinerary a visit there where Sharia Law was in the process of being revived. But the Muslim leaders of the North, already apprehensive about Clinton’s visit, had organized a massive protest demonstration, which took place on the very day the US President stepped on to Nigerian soil on 25 August 2000. Clinton visited Nigeria for purely economic reasons. If, therefore, he and the advocates of Sharia harboured a mutual distrust, then one may not be wrong to suggest that behind the Sharia façade lingers an economic motive. To understand this possibility better a brief history of Northern Nigeria is necessary.
Fulani theocracy
Islam was introduced into the area now occupied by Niger, Chad and Northern Nigeria by Arab traders from North Africa and, by the 11th century, many of the rulers there, who were mostly Hausa, had been converted to Islam though, their subjects still mostly adhered to their Africa traditional religions. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that a Fulani Muslim scholar decided to launch a jihad on the people, accusing them of being “pagans” or, in the case of the rulers, of not practicing Islam in the true sense of the word.
He succeeded in overthrowing the Hausa leaders and placed his tribesmen as leaders of the Hausa city-states. With Sokoto in present day North-Nigeria as headquarters, the Fulani Empire spread its tentacles southwards and by the close of the 19th century had touched Yorubaland down south. Having established themselves as the new rulers in the region, the top brass of the Muslim Fulani naturally controlled commerce, trade routes, agriculture and thus became not only the political leaders but more importantly they held economic power. As commerce and industry flourished, these sultans, emirs and sardaunas set up courts where they tried cases according to the Sharia.
Many writers refer to the action of Dan Fodio and his generals as more of a Fulani revolt against the Hausa rulers than an Islamic Jihad. Whatever the case, the ordinary Fulani, like the ordinary Hausa, still lived in poverty while the new ruling classes enjoyed the same privileges the old Hausa lords had.
Enter Britain
The political and economic dominance of the new Muslim Fulani was, however, interrupted by the coming on to the scene of the British colonialists. The mid-nineteenth century saw the gradual annexation of city-states, not only in the south but also in the north. Several Muslim states had been taken over by the British, partly through the signing of treaties and partly by force. Though the then governor of Nigeria, Lord Lugard, ran the country through the “indirect rule” system, the powers of the Fulani oligarchy were considerably eroded. The taxes and rent they hitherto monopolised were now to be passed on to the colonial administration in Lagos. Their authority also shrank as clerks and other administrative officials were appointed by the governor to assist in running the states. All important decisions were made by the British governor, leaving the sultans and emirs with the less rewarding duty of implementing them. They thus lost considerable authority over their subjects.
With the attainment of independence in 1960 and an increased influx of western lifestyles, ideas and secularism, the importance of these Muslim Leaders further plummeted. A new category of privileged groups emerged, in the form of top civil servants, lawyers and businessman. Some of them even attained, through their economic power, a higher social status than the traditional rulers. Thus, having lost almost all the authority and power vested in them by the Jihad, the Muslim Fulani rulers were getting frustrated at the new disadvantaged economic sidelines they were being relegated to.
Why ‘new’ sharia?
It must be made clear that sharia did exist in Northern Nigeria for a very long time in the “cadi” or “alkali” courts. However, they only handled cases relating to family matters like divorce, inheritance, adoption, etc. The current one has attracted a lot of attention because it seeks to go further to include flogging, stoning, amputation, beheading, etc. So the question now is: who is behind it and why. All reports coming from the ten states involved in the confusion claim that it is the Muslim masses who are clamouring for sharia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The decision-making process in place in Nigeria, and in fact all over the world today, effectively excludes the masses. All decisions are taken by the few in high positions. Every legislative body is peopled with the rich or their representatives who enact laws meant to control the poor.
In the case of sharia in Northern Nigeria, it is heavyweights like Alhaji Shehu Shageri (former president of the federal republic of Nigeria), Alhaji Ahmed Sani Yarima (governor of Zamfara state) Alhaji Ebrahim al Zakzaky (leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) who make decisions and then call on the people to support them. In fact, when last year President Olusegun Obasanjo called a meeting of the Council of State to discuss sharia, Shagari not only refused to attend but also said the Council had no right to take any decision on sharia.. Alhaji Ahmed Sani Yarima, for his part, said Zamfara would not comply with the Council of State’s decision that sharia be suspended. These examples show clearly that the masses do not make any decisions.
This Islamic revival sweeping across Northern Nigeria, in the form of sharia, is in reality the determined efforts of the Muslim Fulani overlords to regain their damagingly eroded power and authority and consequently their sources of wealth, coupled with the desire of the Muslim Hausa elite and businessmen to further their economic interests. This unholy alliance of the fendal Fulani and nouveau-rich Haus came to be known as the Muslim Hausa Fulani. Their imposition of the sharia on the people signifies the ongoing class war of the ruling class which, as is always the case, pits the unsuspecting masses against each other. It is, therefore, not surprising that in Zamfara state (the first to go sharia) whereas the two cinema palaces in Gusau (the capital) are closed down, the wealthy few are allowed to keep their satellite dishes and VCRs. Also, since the start of the sharia nonsense in those Northern states, only the poor have fallen victim to the penal code and the various clashes. The originators and their families remain safe whilst the poor masses are used as cannon fodder in a matter that they (the masses) have nothing to gain from—nay, in a matter that is very detrimental to them.
It is not by accident, therefore, that whereas the ordinary Muslims and Christians and Northerners and Easterners and Westerners are busy killing and maiming each other their Muslim, Christian, northern, eastern and western wealthy leaders are hidden away in cosy mansions, jointly forming and owning political parties for the ordinary Muslim Christians northerners, easterners and westerns to vote for come election day. This is real class war.
Another economic dimension which adds some weight to the desire to implement sharia relates to the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Gulf region. These countries have set up numerous organizations that generously disburse funds to Muslim groups and states all over the poor world. So in order to have access to these cheap “petro-dollars” the leadership of the Northern Nigerian states only need to express their total commitment to Islam and Islamization and the hard cash will start to flow in to further enrich those leaders. It is in this light that one can understand the marathon trip undertaken by governor Ahmed Sani Yarima of Zamfara state to Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Sudan and Saudi Arabia at the peak of the international outcry, in 2001, over the poor Saffiatu Husein who is to be stoned to death for adultery, though the man who impregnated her is set free. It is also known that Ibrahim al Zakzaky, the leader of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood, and a notorious trouble-shooter, is heavily funded by Iran.
Fighting sharia
A lot of noise has been made about the excesses of sharia but little has been put forth worthy of a solution to the anomaly. Nigeria is broadly divided into Hausa Fulani north, the Ibo east, and the Yoruba west. The privileged classes in all these three areas always come up with issues that keep the masses distracted from the exploitation visited upon them by the same privileged classes who consider themselves leaders of their people. In the North today it is Sharia, in the West it is Ooduwa People’s Congress (OPC) which is demanding full control of the resources of “their land”, and in the East there are the various secessionist movements. The whole aim of fomenting troubles is for the leaders to carve out spheres of economic influence for themselves among their various ethnic groups.
All these sectional and divisionist activities can never solve the real problems of the people—poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, insecurity, war, etc. In fact the leaders who instigate the masses to go sharia or to secede, and most of those who are seen to be taking issue with the excesses thereof, are merely seeking to enhance their economic interests. Religion, secessionist movements, nationalism and many so-called human right activists are generally tools used by the ruling classes to perpetrate the status quo. All those involved in the promotion of such ideas are birds of the same feather. They hypocritically shout about freedom of conscience and self-determination, unity of mankind, justice,etc. Such double-standards expose not only their bankruptcy and insincerity but also the reactionary role of religion, secession and nationalism.
The only solution to those issues is to uproot the real cause of the problems—the overthrow of the unjust economic system in operation in today’s world. It is this system which makes it possible for the masses to be kept in a state of ignorance, allowing a few individuals to take advantage of this same ignorance. This injustice becomes possible since under the present economic arrangement it is a few who control the world’s wealth, whilst the majority own nothing and so remain at the mercy of these few rich individuals. And that explains why religious patronage is a common phenomenon in Northern Nigeria, where the wealthy “alhajis” “own” mosques and the poor in the neighbourhood, who go there to pray and recognize the “owner” as bossman, get petty favours and so can easily be manipulated.
5. The poverty of education in Ghana
There is a close affinity in Ghana between post-independence politics and the pre-independence era when the political and intellectual African elite were mobilising support from the African masses to overthrow the colonial establishment. Both have been full of promises and rosy dreams of what the future ought to be like.
Elections in Ghana these days, for example, remind one of the politics of agitation by the Nkrumahs, J. B. Danquahs and the Houphuet-Boignys in the colonial days. Equality, freedom and freedom from poverty and oppression are sonorously proclaimed these days too; and every available propaganda tool is used by parties to discredit other political parties in the bid to win the support of the voting public. But the results of these bitter campaigns have always ended the same way. As soon as any political party assumes the mantle of office, the ideas that it used to politicise the masses to propel it to power becomes a fetter on the purpose of the leadership of the party. The demands for equality and freedom from poverty, and the vitriolic criticisms launched against the oppressive economic policies of previous governments, are inevitably forgotten and equally inevitably people come to direct them at the party that has taken over the reins of power. The difficulty of the political leadership is that it wants to inherit the privileged positions of previous governments that it has unseated either in an election or a coup d’état, without implementing the progressive and radical sounding ideas which had helped it to come into power. It knows too well that its interest as the representative of the ruling class and international capital are diametrically opposed to the interest of the majority. And it cannot fundamentally transform the existing relations of production in the interest of the masses, without limiting its own access to economic surplus. The interests of the Ghanaian ruling class since independence is just the same as those of the old colonial regime; and it works with the forces of neo-colonialism and international capital to negate the consciousness of the masses, using its unlimited access to the economic surplus to attain this objective.
Ruling class and ruling ideas
The national bourgeoisie and international capital have succeeded in foisting their ideas on the majority of the people largely because of their control over material production. Marx and Engels’ claim that “the class which has the material means of production at its disposal has control at the same time over the mental means of production, so that generally speaking those who lack the mental means of production are subject to it” seems to describe the Ghanaian situation aptly. In no other field have the techniques of mental control been employed with such efficiency as in the educational system. Apart from being inaccessible to a majority of Ghanaians it seeks to create the myth that the current neo-colonial and capitalist direction of development are sacrosanct and inviolable. The school curriculum, especially in the social sciences, is replete with all kinds of bogus assertions seeking to justify the unjustifiable. The educational system has thus evolved essentially into a positive instrument serving neo-colonialism and the ruling class in Ghana; whilst at the same time making it difficult for the propertyless classes to understand the true nature and causes of their wretched conditions.
This is evident in the economics syllabus in educational institutions and the thinking of prominent intellectuals on the subject. They all reflect the ideas of bourgeois academicians in America and Britain. Consequently, the ideas they propagate manifest the interest of capital. Books written by Harvey, Adam Smith, Caincross and Hansen are not only important textbooks for students but reference books for teachers. The ability to regurgitate the ideas in these books in examinations qualifies one to be a graduate of economics and enhances the chances of an individual to aspire to lucrative jobs. These books are devoid of class analysis in their presentation of current economic problems, ignore imperialistic influences as factors in the underdevelopment of a country, and propagate the myth that without foreign investment economic growth and development would be hampered. The exploitative aspects of foreign and Ghanaian enterprises are either completely ignored or little discussed. The worship and devotion to free enterprise is therefore total. The impression that private investment of capital is essential for economic growth relegates labour to a secondary position in industry and prepares the minds of the people to accept the dominance of capital over labour in the process both of production and distribution. It also seeks to imprint in the minds of the recipients of education the idea that the profit motive is both essential and intrinsic to increased productivity; and the belief that free-for-all competition at the market place is the only way to realise the overall interest of society.
The alternative to the free market policy is normally presented as the state ownership of the means of production. What is not discussed or is not known is that the state ownership of the means of production, prescribed and fixed in law, does not preclude the exploitation of labour by capital. Capitalism is not only characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes. That is the superficial aspect of it. The essential aspect is the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage labour and accumulate surplus value thus obtained as capital. The immediate post-independent West African economic situation would suffice to illustrate this point. Workers sold their labour power to various state enterprises; and the products of their labour were sold in the market place with a view to profit. The difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produced was used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged classes. Under the guise of socialism, the state was employed by the ruling classes to appropriate economic surpluses from the masses. State ownership sought to hide the monstrosity of capitalist exploitation by confusing socialism with state property and presenting it to the producers of wealth as the best.
With the failure of the economic recovery programme staring them in the face, the ruling class has become louder in their call for “indigenisation” in recent times. Suddenly, the ghost of economic nationalism is being resurrected after it had been banished from economic planning. Conspicuously absent are those aspects and activities of enterprises that have made their operations inimical to the interest of a majority of Ghanaians, irrespective of their origin.
The ethos, symbols, values, lifestyles, relations of production and modes of operations are not of primary concern to the new converts of indigenisation. What matters is the encouragement of Ghanaian manufacturers to produce more to capture the local market from “foreigners”. But such factors as mentioned constitute strong inbuilt pressures on local entrepreneurs to cave in to the wishes of foreign capital. Instead of enterprises becoming more and more national in the use of local resources and in satisfying the needs of the vast majority of Ghanaians, it is in fact the Ghanaian entrepreneurs who are going to become less and less national. The ultimate beneficiaries will be the privileged class whose share of the surplus in the exploitation of Ghanaian labour would increase. Indigenisation would, therefore, essentially become a weapon of the haves in the country to realise their dreams of increasing their wealth which was somewhat crushed during the heydays of liberalisation.
Ethnic chauvinism
In sociology and anthropology one encounters the bogus assertion that Ghana has ethnic and not class relations. This argument is nurtured by bourgeois politicians and their mentors in sociology departments who want power based on communal hegemony. Normally the place occupied by individuals in a historically determined system of social production is not made the basis of analysis. While it is not denied that ethnic consciousness exists in Ghana, the phenomenon has to be recognised as part of the ideological rationalisation that reinforces and in turn reflects the existing relations of production. Classes in Ghana may be embryonic but they exist. Thus while ambitious petty bourgeois politicians preach and fan the deadly parochialism of ethnic chauvinism, they actively form alliances with petty bourgeois elements in the various other ethnic groups to consolidate their repressive domination of the masses. Ethnocentrism, as presented by bourgeois sociology, is essentially a weapon of the dominating classes to dissipate the energies of the working class, divide them, and strangle potentially progressive organisations.
Another fraudulent intellectual claim obviously calculated to instil false consciousness in the recipients of education is that Ghana’s present underdevelopment is a direct inheritance from the pre-colonial times. The history departments and historians of repute in universities have made no attempt to prove or disprove this assertion. They just reproduce it for students to swallow and regurgitate during examinations. The impression this propaganda pap seeks to create is implicit: that pre-colonial conditions continue to be reproduced. But three questions immediately come to mind when issues of this nature are discussed. Is this claim correct? If it is correct why is it that these conditions have persisted in spite of years of colonialism and neo-colonialism? What forces are reproducing them and why?
It should be understood that societies are not static and Ghanaian societies were not an exception to this law of development. They also went through the processes of change that characterised societies elsewhere. These changes were to be found in the revolutionary transformation of the social structures, relations of production and techniques of production of social groups. What impacted negatively on these processes of change were two things—the slave trade and the subsequent integration of Ghanaian societies into the world capitalist system in a subordinate position. One cannot deny the infrastructural changes that contact with Europe brought in its wake; but the subsequent material benefits benefited the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the sham bourgeoisie in the colonial country. It condemned the majority to perpetual poverty.
Some contemporary African writings used as literature books in universities and secondary schools in Ghana also do not adequately address the phenomenon of exploitation. Mongo Betis’s Poor Christ of Bomba; Rene Maran’s Batouala; Oyono’s The House Boy; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; and Camera Laye’s African Child tend to emphasise the superstructural aspects of colonialism. The imposition of colonialism through brute military force and the subsequent destruction of African socio-cultural and political institutions are given prominence in these writings. What is not normally clearly established, or is often ignored, is the link between the superstructural aspects of colonial rule and its economic base—production relations. The colonial production relations were the foundation upon which the political, juridical, ethical and religious aspects of colonialism were founded. But in these works the cultural and political aspects of colonialism are artificially severed from the production relations which provided it with its life-force and dynamism.
However, available evidence proves that the real reason for colonialism was to ensure the haemorrhage of capital from the fringes of the capitalist system to its core. The cultural and political domination which were made very much part of the colonial system were therefore a means to an end.
6. South Africa in the twentieth century
I. The making of a black working class
Our welfare”, declared Lord Alfred Milner in June 1903, “depends upon increasing the quantity of our white population, but not at the expense of its quality. We do not want a white proletariat in this country.” It was therefore of utmost importance that the country be developed and he stressed “…the urgency of that development which alone can make this a white man’s country …requires a large amount of rough labour. And that labour cannot to any extent, be white, if only because. . .white labour is much too dear.”
In these few words Lord Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa, set the stage for the development and expansion of capitalism in that country in the 20th Century. It is no exaggeration to say that the history of that country over the past one hundred years has been dominated and shaped by one thing above all others – the supply and control of that “large amount of rough labour.”
Having beaten the Boers in the South African War and ended their near-feudal pre-capitalist state, headed by Kruger (a man who was said to believe that the earth was flat), the British ruling class had reasserted its Imperial rights and had made South Africa safe for mining capitalism. By destroying the political power of the largely agricultural Boers, which was hindering full development of the gold mining industry, the way was now open to embark on a massive piece of social engineering. Milner had the opportunity to entrench white supremacy and set trends, and guide processes, that would effect the development of capitalism there for over seventy years. His ultimate objective being: “a self-governing white community, supported by well treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to the Zambezi.”
The period extending from the end of the South African War in 1902 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was crucial to the development of segregation which was later transmuted by the Afrikaner state into Apartheid. Three premises underlay the policy of segregation:
1) Territorial separation of the races; 2) a controlled flow of cheap African labour into areas allocated to white Afrikaners and 3) white political and racial supremacy guaranteed by the exclusion of black Africans from political power.
This policy was purported to serve the best interests of all. According to Lionel Curtis, one of Milner’s protégées, it would allow for “the white and black races to develop on their own natural lines [aiming at] the separation of the two races into different areas.” White supremacy was justified by the ideas of social Darwinists—the fear of sex across the “race” line “weakening the race”. It claimed to have a concern for the “child like” African which was patronising in the extreme.
The reconstruction programme was almost immediately faced with a problem—black Africans did not want to co-operate. The majority of them lived as peasant agricultural producers and displayed a distinct preference for subsistence agriculture to wage labour. The discovery of gold and diamonds of the latter part of the 19th Century had drawn some of them into the mines of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand as migrant labour on short term contracts. Such work provided many with the opportunity for earning enough money to enable them to buy a gun (as a means of self defence against attacks by white colonialists on their property) and to accumulate sufficient money to pay the bride price which would enable them to marry and thereby gain access to land of their own.
Having their own means of subsistence in agriculture, the peasantry were an extremely attractive source of labour power for the mining capitalists. Peasant labour-power could be bought at wage rates considerably less than those needed to support and reproduce land-less wage labour-power. This was because part of the cost of reproducing the peasant (now wage-labourer’s) ability to work could be borne by the pre-capitalist sector of the South African economy. Having access to other means of support, the migrant workers could be paid “bachelor” wages. In effect the mine owners were buying labour-power at below free market prices.
What was required was a means by which the peasantry’s access to their own means of subsistence could be limited. It should be sufficient to subsidise mine and agricultural wage labour but not sufficient to enable the potential work force full independence from the money economy. This would guarantee a constant supply of cheap labour power. Just such a means was provided by the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. Under its provisions, Africans were no longer allowed to buy or rent land, or to squat on land in exchange for a share of the crop. In other words, Africans in rural areas designated as “white” were reduced to tenants and wage labourers—a situation in which, according to the President of the Chamber of Mines, “the surplus of young men, instead of squatting on the land in idleness [could] earn their living by working for a wage”.
Black peasants, now prevented from squatting, were allocated 22 million acres of land as reserves in which migrant workers could attempt to provide for themselves and their families in between working in the increasingly capitalistic agricultural and industrial economy. This allocation represented some seven per cent of the land area which was later increased to 11.7 per cent, although it was estimated at the time that even this amount was inadequate.
Coupled with the reduction or elimination of the peasants ability to provide for themselves went their spatial segregation into areas reserved for their use—segregation by law rather than custom or preference. That this was an overtly racially based move is illustrated by the fact that Afrikaner squatters rendered land-less by an agrarian crisis of bankruptcies, the decreasing size of farms, and the drive to capital accumulation in the agricultural sector, were abandoned to the rigours of the urban labour market—driven by economic compulsion rather than racial legislation. White urbanisation continued throughout the 1920s at a rate of more than 12,000 per year, creating the problem of the “poor whites” in both town and countryside. In 1929, there were, out of a white population of 1.8 million, 300,000 classed “very poor” and mainly Afrikaner speaking.
Why was it that segregation, and later apartheid, took the vicious form it did in South Africa? After all, Britain and the other European colonisers had settled in other areas of the world with racially mixed populations and which did not produce anything like the same results. Historians disagree as to the precise reasons, seeing the legacy of slavery, which entrenched the idea of their being a link between race, status and class, as one root.
It has also been suggested that the “Shepstone system”, developed in Natal, by which a relatively weak settler society “bought off” the danger of “swamping” by a numerically stronger native population by allocating undeveloped land as their “location” in which the native population could produce their own means of subsistence. In these locations, the colonial administration levied a “hut tax” which covered the administration costs of the system and provided a surplus for the colony. This system is thought to have been influential in the development of a South African “Native Policy” in the 1920s. The segregation of Africans in locations of their own was also a “solution” resorted to in response to an outbreak of bubonic plague which the white inhabitants of racially integrated Cape Town associated with black Africans.
Driven by the economic compulsion of profit making the mine owners (the dominant sector of the non-agricultural sector of the economy) adopted what was for them a perfectly rational solution – a “cheap labour system” for the employment of migrant workers.
The gold deposits on the Rand (the largest in the world) are of relatively low grade. In addition, the grade of ore milled declined from a ten year annual average of 11.748 dwts per ton between 1890 and 1899 to 6.752 dwts per ton in 1910, to 6.263 dwts per ton in 1914. As a result they could only be developed profitably by massive capital investment and cheap labour. The cost of mine supplies and freight charges were out of the control of the mine owners and the only cost that they might control was the price of labour power i.e. the low wages paid to migrant African workers. The cost of reproducing that labour power was, as we have seen, shared in part by the pre-capitalist economic formation of the Reserves. Labour costs were further reduced by accommodating African workers in racially segregated compounds. This enabled the employers to keep down feeding and shelter costs and circumvent the “board wages” system which had had the effect of raising labour costs in the Kimberley diamond mines when miners lived in boarding houses outside the mines.
A second cost-cutting strategy developed in this period, and later made statutory in the mining industry in South Africa in 1911, was the industrial colour bar. This entailed the restriction of African workers to the least skilled work, higher paid more skilled and supervisory jobs being reserved for whites. Merle Lipton has pointed out that some sections of employers opposed the imposition job bars as they tended to distort the jobs market in which they wished to operate a recruitment policy “based on competence not on colour”. Nevertheless job colour bars were introduced partly due to political pressure from white workers fearful of the threat of having their wages under cut by non-unionised migrant labour.
In the 1950s, the colour bar was extended to the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy. As a result, black Africans in the process of being made into a working class were racially segregated both “horizontally” by restrictions on where they lived and “vertically” by how far they could progress (or rather not progress) up the skills and wages ladder.
The other major economic activity heavily reliant on African labour was agriculture and an alliance between agriculture and mining was required to avoid the “bidding up” of wage costs through competition for African labour. This was partially achieved by the establishment of a Native Recruiting Corporation which was responsible for all black African recruitment. In order to prevent black workers simply moving on to a better paid job. the Industrial Pass Law system, introduced in 1895, was extended. Under its provisions the movement of Africans were restricted to specific areas and the movement away from them was made a criminal offence. These laws had been largely drafted by and in the interests of the mining capitalists and allowed the mine-owners successfully to reduce migrant workers’ wages by thirty per-cent. It was this system of passes that was later to be used to control the movement of black workers fleeing the chronic unemployment and degradation of the reserves.
II. Capitalist development and the end of apartheid
As the South African economy advanced in the post-World War I period, so did the entrenchment of the racial segregation recommended by the Lagden Commission of 1905. Segregation, originally justified as a means of defending and protecting “tribal” Africans, was adopted as a national political programme for entrenching white supremacy
In a period of rapid and unprecedented economic expansion, the employing class in South Africa were confronted with a dilemma. The labour demands of an expanding economy for increasing amounts of labour could only be met by Africans moving to, and settling in, urban areas. This development ran counter to the wishes of those with political power and wedded to the segregation of the races and white domination.
Earlier legislation such as the Mines and Works Act (1911) and the Natives’ Land Act (1913) were joined on the statute book by legislation intended to provide flexible and sophisticated means of controlling the movement of black workers into urban areas. Segregation by custom and preference became increasingly segregation by legally defined racial groups (as in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923). In a period of black urbanisation, when the number of Africans living in towns rose from 336,800 in 1904 to 1,146,600 in 1936, segregation became the “consensus ideology.”
Almost all shades of capitalist opinion were united in the belief in the need to maintain an adequate supply of cheap black labour-power. Black Africans were to be allowed into urban areas and to remain as “temporary sojourners” only so long as they fitted in with their employers’ profit making interests. State legislation was a response to the problems brought about by rapid industrialisation in a society in which sectional class interests had come together to demand a policy formed along racial lines. The interests of capital in obtaining cheap labour was given legitimacy and political backing by white workers fearful of the competition from black workers who, in the absence of legal trade unions, were being paid considerably less than their white counterparts.
Capitalism, in the early stages of its development in South Africa, was based on mining and clearly benefited from cheap labour based on segregation and where the potential for class solidarity was undermined and very considerably weakened by the poison of racism. The case for it doing so at a later (secondary) stage where the interests of manufacturing and commerce had come to be the dominant ones in the economy—the case for a “colour bar” in employment—became much weaker.
Under the impetus of war, the South African economy boomed. Between 1938-39 and 1945-46, manufacturing output increased by 60 percent, that of coal by 50 percent, and the size of the garment industry doubled. The Gross National Income rose in value from £395.6m in 1939, to £666.8m in 1946, and to £850.5m in 1948. Among those producing this expansion were black workers from the reserves and, although the proportion of urban dwellers who were black was lower than the proportion of urban dwellers who were white, their absolute number was much higher. In the period 1936 to 1946, the percentage increase in South Africa’s “racial” groups living in towns were: Whites from 65 percent to 76 percent, Asians from 66 percent to 70 percent, Coloured from 44 percent to 62 percent, and African from 17 percent to 24 percent.
To meet the increasing demand for labour in wartime, the Federated Chambers of Industry advocated the relaxation of the influx control and pass laws in the areas allocated to whites. Suggestions were made that African trade unions be recognised as a more effective means of obtaining smoother industrial relations. The Transvaal Chambers of Commerce argued that “whatever progress has been made in the efficiency of our labour in this country…has been the greater where management has a unified and organised body of worker to deal with.” Clearly capitalist development was making different demands and priorities on the state.
Manufacturing industry had overtaken mining as an employer of labour and had different labour demands to those of agriculture and mining. Most important of these was the need for a more highly skilled and stable workforce. To minimise the cost of reproducing the workforce it suited manufacturing capital to have workers as close to their places of work as possible, i.e. in the towns. However, economic realities, which were working towards a diminution of segregation on racial lines, ran into the political realities of a general election victory for the Herenigde Nationalist Party [HNP] in 1948.
Based on an alliance between the Transvaal farmers and the Afrikaner section of the white working class and petty bourgeoisie, the HNP had, in forging that alliance, advocated rigidly segregationist policies. Historically Afrikaner agricultural interests, because they competed for black labour power with employers in the mining sector, had given the appearance of pursuing “anti capitalist” policies. This coupled with white disillusionment with trade-unionism and a lack of socialist understanding made the NP appear an attractive alternative for working class Afrikaners.
The Broderbond of Afrikaner business interests had instigated the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs [SABRA] to undertake “the scientific study of the country’s racial problem”. Committed to white economic and political supremacy, SABRA developed its concept of apartheid as ‘total segregation’ in order to counter the growing economic strength of black Africans. The NP, however, represented interests which often conflicted and as a result it pursued contradictory policies. There were differing attitudes to, and proposed solutions for, the “Native Question” and there was no common approach to the problem of African urbanisation. There was no single “Grand Plan” for apartheid in 1948. The Afrikaner political elite could not agree over the substance of apartheid and it was a topic of dispute as to how far and by how much economic prosperity should and need depend on black labour.
The final outcome of the debate over the making of apartheid involved internal party struggles, struggles within the state bureaucracy, and between the state and the conflicting interests of capitalism. Differences over a possible “middle course” versus an “ideal” apartheid were apparent from the start. Prime Minister Malan admitted in 1950 that complete territorial segregation was “impractical” because “our whole economic structure is to a large extent based on native labour.”
The South African Agricultural Union’s conception of apartheid did not envisage either the expansion of the reserves or the development of agriculture in them so as to absorb the urban black Africans, which some apartheid fanatics envisaged. They regarded that policy as totally impossible. “You will completely dislocate the country’s economy if you do that.” Similarly the Afrikaanse Handelsinstitut, an organisation dedicated specifically to the cause of Afrikaner business, thought that it was necessary to be “practical” and that South Africa could have both racial integration and the continuance of white political and economic supremacy. For them, “It must be acknowledged that the non-white worker already constitutes an integral part of our economic structure, that he is so enmeshed in the sphere of our economic life [and that] total segregation is pure wishful thinking.”
Paradoxically, the increasing amount of racial segregation that was a feature of the twenty or so years immediately following 1948 occurred at precisely the time of spectacular economic expansion of capital in South Africa. In the 1960s GDP rose at average annual rates of 9.3 percent. Between 1962 and 1970 the contribution made by manufacturing and construction to the gross domestic profit rose from 24.1 percent to 28.2 percent while the proportion contributed by mining and agriculture declined.
Attempts at urban influx control were thwarted—not least by black workers, unable to support themselves in the economically and ecologically collapsing reserves, who flocked to town illegally. Pass law convictions increased dramatically from just over 164,000 in 1952 to some 384,000 in 1962, representing 3 million offences in ten years. It is clear that the imposition of pass laws, forced removals of urban squatters, and increasing racial segregation all occurred at this time not as a policy deliberately sought by capitalist interests but in direct contradiction to the most profitable extraction and distribution of surplus value. It was argued that business would have been even more profitable, and capitalist interests better served, had the enforcement of apartheid been abandoned. The policy had outlived its purpose and the enormous cost of its administration coupled with the deleterious effect on industrial and manufacturing efficiency was an unwarranted drain on capitalist profits. But the system was a Frankenstein monster lurching on with a life of its own, with apparently no political consensus capable of terminating its existence.
As it was, the state machinery itself, by allowing flexible interpretations of policies such as urban labour preference, mitigated the worst effects of government policy and pass law prosecutions declined from 700,000 in 1970 to 206,000 in 1982.
Changing material conditions were making apartheid increasingly irrelevant to the needs of capital. There still remained the problem of how, and by whom, it was to be dismantled.
III. South African capitalism under new management
Having achieved the freedom to organise on both the economic and political fronts it is a tragedy that the working class in South Africa are repeating the political errors committed by their fellow workers elsewhere in the world. Instead of trusting in their own abilities and organising for the establishment of socialism they continue in their support of capitalism and in the hope that it can be made to work less harshly against their class interests.
The victory of the African Nationalist Congress and its allies COSATU and the South African Communist Party has not resulted in the implementation of the promises made in the ANC Freedom Charter. Drafted in 1955, the Charter made a number of extravagant promises among which were “that South Africa shall belong to all who live in it, black and white…” and “rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no one shall go hungry.”
Whilst sympathising with the plight of our fellow workers in South Africa suffering the obscene discrimination of apartheid, it was our duty as socialists to point out that the result of ANC rule would be continued poverty and exploitation for the majority of the population of South Africa. Abandoned promises and principles are par for the course among capitalist politicians. As we have long pointed out, workers who place their faith in leaders inevitably face disappointment. After years of struggle and sacrifice workers in that country eventually gained the franchise but, as elsewhere, have wasted it in support of the system that exploits them. A change in the racial makeup of those in control of political power makes virtually no difference to the economic situation of workers. For them there are the same old problems in the new South Africa as before of finding and keeping a job and trying to live on the wages that go with it.
Shortly after his release as a political prisoner in June 1990, Nelson Mandela promised that poverty and misery would be tackled by the new democratic state “as a matter of urgency”. He talked of “rapid and visible progress being made to improve the quality of life of all the people.” After ten years of ANC government, income differentials in South Africa remain the second widest in the world. Fully half of South African households are classified as poor, earning less than R355 per adult per month [about £28 or US$52]. This poverty is not confined to any one race group but is concentrated among blacks – 61 percent of Africans and 38 percent of Coloureds are poor, according to Julian May of the University of Kwazulu, Natal. He also points out that the poorest 40 percent of households account for only 11 percent of total income while the richest 10 percent of households, making up only 7 percent of the population, accrue 40 per cent of total income.
Many in the international business community wished the ANC every success following their victory at the polls and looked forward to doing business along the lines agreed while they were in exile. Mandela was quick to reassure them that the ANC were:
“sensitive to the fact that as investors in post-apartheid South Africa you will need to be confident about the security of your investments, an adequate and equitable return on your capital and a general capital climate of peace and stability”.
Clearly the plan was to ensure the smooth generation of profits for the exploiters. In the words of Dr C. L. Stals, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, “investors, both domestic and international…are demanding visible evidence of sound macro-economic policies…and some assurance of reasonable returns”. In his August 1995 address to the shareholders he highlighted the challenge facing the country, not in the elimination of poverty but in the “creating of an investor-friendly environment that will enable the economy to break through the current limits of a growth potential that…is too low.”
There was convincing evidence, Stals went on, of a new vitality in the economy “instigated mainly by the successful political reforms” of the ANC. He recognised that the government had succeeded in reducing the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP from 8.5 percent in 1992/93 to 6.8 percent in 1993/94 and that they aimed to reduce it still further to a projected 5.8 per cent. (In fact it later reduced it to less than 2 percent). The Minister of Finance must, he said, be supported in these efforts – a reduction in the slice of profits represented by government expenditure would mean a larger amount available for investment in the private sector. The suggestion that this would create more jobs has failed to materialise as new investment was made in more efficient labour processes.
Accumulated net capital outflow in the period 1985 to 1993 of R50 billion turned into a net capital inflow of R18.6 billion in the twelve-month period up to June 1995 – capital that was needed to supplement scarce savings in the domestic economy. International confidence in the profit potential of investing in South Africa paid off. Dividend payments on non-resident investments increased from R5.7 billion in 1998 to R18 billion in 2000. Nominal wage growth per worker in that year in contrast was the lowest recorded in the past three decades reflecting a decline in workers bargaining power in the face of an increasing level of unemployment.
The capitalist class has broadly welcomed the ANC government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (GEAR). Focussing on price and financial stability, and a reduction in government expenditure as a proportion of GDP, it reflects the current capitalist economic orthodoxy and was intended to attract investment and boost economic growth. It has been partly responsible for a modest growth in the economy. But it has been a growth without jobs. The projected increase of 378,000 jobs to be created in 1996-97 turned into a loss of 103,000 as investment concentrated in capital intensive sectors while other areas of the economy contracted in the face of foreign competition. Meanwhile unemployment rates stubbornly remain at around forty percent. Edward Osborn, an economic consultant and a columnist for Reuters, summed up the prospect for South Africa as one of “continuing jobless manufacturing growth during which the hopes of GEAR will not materialise as far as employment is concerned…Certainly manufacturing is not going to be a soft provider of jobs in the future.”
Whatever the hopes of working class voters for the ANC project, the reality has always been that its reforms would be constrained by capitalist economic circumstances and priorities. Inevitably the cold analysis of the political realists in the ANC has triumphed over the hot-headed and utopian hopes of state intervention as a solution to working class problems.