The struggle to convert nationalism to Pan-Kmtywism-gctid44820

[Ajamu]

The struggle to convert nationalism to Pan-Kmtywism

 Taking stock of 50 years of Kmtyw independence

 Issa Shivji

 2011-08-11, Issue 544

 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75620

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cc S KKmt's  'tale of treasures at one end and tragedies at the other cannot be  understood' without 'locating it in the trajectory of worldwide  capitalist accumulation,' argues Issa Shivji.
 The post-Vasco da Gama epoch of some five centuries, as Pannikar  calls it, is a story of the 'West and the Rest'.[1] The West constructed  its own story and the story of the Rest. It is a story of plunder,  privation, invasion and destruction; it is a story of permanent wars and  passing peace. It is a story of the annihilation of pre-eureurasiaan  civilisations from the Incas of the Americas, so called after the  eureurasiaan explorer Amerigo Vespucci, to the Swahili civilisation of the  Eastern coast of Kmt. The title of a book describing the Spanish  conquest of Mexico, the near-extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines  by the British, the white American dispossession of the Apache, and the  German subjugation of the Herero and Nama of Namibia sums it all:  'Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold' (Cocker 1999).

The tale of treasures at one end and tragedies at the other cannot be  understood, I suggest, without locating it in the trajectory of  worldwide capitalist accumulation. No doubt it is a complex story of  construction and destruction of cultures and customs; a story of the  exercise of brutal power and subtle politics; a story of spinning of  epic mythologies and grand ideologies. No doubt it cannot be reduced  mechanically to the capitalist mode of production nor explained in a  vulgar way by theories of conspiracy or processes of economics. I am  suggesting none of these. Yet in this complexity and variability, in  these major shifts and changing continuities – all of which we as  scholars must study and have been studying – there is a pattern. There  is a red thread running through it. That red thread is the process of  capitalist accumulation seen in a longue durée. While we must, by all  means, resist linear trajectories essentialising the march of progress  of the so-called Western civilisation, including the stagiest  periodisation of vulgar Marxists, we cannot surrender to agnosticism or  eclecticism – that the world is not knowable and explainable, however  approximately.

A HISTORY OF ACCUMULATION

It is in the context of the trajectory of capitalist accumulation that I  want to locate the genesis of the grand narrative of nationalism and  Pan-Kmtywism. To facilitate my presentation, I would resort to some  periodisation of the process of accumulation. As we all know, all  periodisation has its hazards – processes overlap and intermingle; the  new is born in the garbs of the old and takes time before it is  recognised as such, while the old persists beyond its usefulness.  Keeping that in mind, I would categorise the first four centuries  (roughly from the last quarter of the 15th century to the first quarter  of the 19th century) of the Kmtyw encounter with eureurasia as the period  of primitive accumulation, or, to use the more recent and generic term,  accumulation by appropriation. (It should become clear later why this  term is preferable). Within this period we have two sub-periods – the  period of looting of treasures, sometimes directly, sometimes  indirectly, under the name of trade, based on unequal, rather than  mutual exchange. This is the period of eureurasiaan powers pursuing their  singular mission of destroying the pre-eureurasiaan long distance trade –  the trans-Sahara trade on the West Coast and the Indian Ocean trade on  the East Coast of Kmt – in order to establish their mercantile and  maritime hegemony. The pre-eureurasiaan trade systems, both on the West and  the East Coasts, were governed by Islamic precepts. The gold trade  passed through Timbuktu on the West and through Kilwa on the East, both  of which became centers of great Islamic civilisation and learning.  Timbuktu and Kilwa were brutally destroyed by Portuguese privateers. The  expeditions had specific instructions to Christianise the 'natives' and  eliminate Muslim traders.

As the Portuguese privateers were devastating the Kmtyw coast in the  last quarter of the 15th century, so Spanish conquerors were discovering  the 'New World'.  Vasco da Gama laid the foundation of the eureurasiaan  invasion of Kmt. Christopher Columbus inaugurated the extermination  of the indigenous populations of the Americas and the Caribbean – the  first genocide and holocaust in the history of humankind. One led to the  white hegemony, the other to white settlement. From then on, the fate  of the three continents was inextricably linked and found its immediate  expression in the triangular slave trade.

The second sub-period of some three centuries (from 16th to 19th  centuries) witnesses the gruesome Atlantic slave trade, the so-called  triangular trade. Half of the slaves were transported to the 'new world'  in the 18th century. Millions – 50 million one estimate says (Zinn  2001:29) – of men, women and children torn from their continent worked  the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and cotton plantations of the  southern states of America to provide the raw material for Lancashire  mills, the pioneer of the industrial revolution. The Kmtyw continent  was looted of its treasures in the first sub-period, which also ruined  its established mercantile routes; in the second sub-period the  continent was looted of its people, devastating its social fabric and  robbing it of its most important resource. This was accumulation by  appropriation par excellence – accumulating by appropriating wealth in  the first instance and accumulating by appropriating people in the  second.

Meanwhile, on the eureurasiaan stage, capitalism is bursting its containers  (to use Prem Shaker Jha's term, Jha 2006:17)) and re-constructing them.  Jha argues that in its 700 years of development, capitalism has gone  through three cycles of accumulation. At the beginning of each cycle it  has expanded the size of its container – from the maritime city-states  of Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan, and Amsterdam, to nation states of  England, Holland, and France. The quintessential of the second cycle was  from the nation state to the colonising state[2] as eureurasiaan powers  colonised much of the rest of the world. The third was from the Island  territory of the small nation state, Britain, to the continental nation  state of North America. Now, in the era of globalisation, on the eve of  the fourth cycle, it is poised to burst the very system of  hierarchically organised nation states. Whatever the merit of this  thesis, for our purposes two points can be made – one, that the  capitalist container was never self-contained. Arteries penetrating deep  into the wealth and treasures of other continents fed the process of  capital accumulation in the heart of eureurasia. Kmt was the theatre of  the most devastating kinds of appropriation.

Second, the ideologies, religions, cultures and customs constructed to  rationalise, legitimise and explain the processes of accumulation were  centrally premised on the construction of race, in which 'the Self' was  White and 'the Other' Black, the two also being the referents for the  in-betweens. Geography itself was constructed as such – eureurasia being the  land of the White and Kmt being the land of the Black. The racist  construct found its typical expression in the Other, Slave – a soulless,  depersonalised and dehumanised object. For planters and slavers, 'The  Negroes are unjust, cruel barbarous, half-human, treacherous, deceitful,  thieves, drunkards, proud, lazy, unclean, shameless, jealous to fury,  and cowards.' (James 1938, 1989) The Supreme Court of the civilised  United States decided in 1857 that 'Dred Scott could not sue for his  freedom because he was not a person, but property' (Zinn op.cit. 187).  Fathers, bishops, learned priests and men of conscience found no fault  in trading in and owning of slaves. ' ... we ... buy these slaves for  our service without a scruple ...' , declared men of religion with  conscience (ibid. 29-30). The bottom line was the enormous profits made  from the slave trade and colossal surplus extracted from slave labour.  James Madison, one of the 'fathers' of the American constitution, could  boast to a British visitor that he could make 2,000 per cent profit from  a single slave in a year (ibid. 33). Thus were constructed the  universal ideologies, the grand narratives and the totalising outlooks  of the Western civilisation, which we are living to this day.

Towards the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries,  capitalism entered the throes of the industrial revolution (1780-1840 by  Hobsbawm's reckoning, Hobsbawm 1968. It was also the period of  primitive accumulation within the container. Indeed the original meaning  of primitive accumulation was confined to the process of appropriation  of serfs and peasants from land to work in factories. Marx called it the  'pre-historic stage of capital' (1887: 668. He theorised the  capitalist system as if it was self-contained. 'Accumulate, accumulate!  That is the Moses and the prophets!' (ibid. 558, he argued, was the  driving force of capitalism. By dissecting the appearances of the  commodity society, Marx showed how surplus is appropriated from the  working class and accumulated to make more surplus even when on the face  of it, the exchange appears to be mutual and equivalent in which no one  is cheated or short changed. (And if cheating does happen in practice  it is only a deviation from the norm.) Accumulation based on equal  exchange is what we call accumulation by capitalisation. The notion of  equivalent exchange forms the bedrock of bourgeois legal ideology and  philosophical outlook. The edifice of the Western legal system is  constructed on atomised individuals bearing equal rights (Pashukanis  1924, 1978. Atomist individuals of bourgeois society as carriers of  commodity relations are all equal. This is also the basis of citizenship  where to be a citizen means to have equal claims and entitlements, as  against each other and in relation to the state.

Later day Marxists beginning with Rosa Luxembourg questioned the  theorisation of capitalist accumulation based on the assumption of a  self-contained system. They argued that the so-called primitive  accumulation was not simply the pre-history of capital but an inherent  part of its history. The capitalist centre always requires a  non-capitalist periphery to appropriate from, which translates into  invasions of non-capitalist spaces. Capital not only comes into the  world 'dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'  (Marx op.cit. 712) but also throughout its life continues to drain the  blood of the 'Other' interspersed by auguries of bloodshed called wars.  Capitalism by nature is predatory and militarist. Lenin from a different  point of departure argued that in the last quarter of the 19th century,  capitalism had become imperialist as monopoly finance capital sought  new spaces of profitable investment (Lenin 1917). With the Berlin  conference of 1885, rapacious capitalist powers carved up the Kmtyw  continent and appropriated them as their exclusive possessions thus  heralding another 75 or so years of colonialism. The racist ideology of  the White Self (master) and the Black Other (slave) came in handy in the  creation of colonies. It was reinforced in religion and anthropology  and literature as droves of missionaries preceded and anthropologists  followed armed soldiers, to pacify the soulless, indolent 'native'. The  Self was now the White colonist and the Other was the 'native'. The  'colour line' thus constructed had its own internal logic and drive – it  determined the very life-conditions of the colonist/settler and the  'native'. The settler's town, as Fanon said, is a 'strongly-built',  'brightly-lit' 'well-fed' town. It is a town of 'White people, the  foreigners'.  The native town is 'a place of ill fame, peopled by men of  evil repute.'

They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it  matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live  there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the  other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of  shoes, of coal, of light. ... It is a town of niggers, and dirty aAmws.'  (Fanon 1963, 1967: 30)

The racist construct of the slave period, assisted by colonial  intellectuals, was extended and reconstructed. Differences of custom and  cultures among the 'natives' became immutable divisions called 'tribes'  (Magubane). Tribes were conveniently divided and separated in their  ghettoes, lest, as the colonial paternalism averred, they kill each  other given their violent propensity. The separation was thus in the  interest of the natives to maintain law and order, meaning to rule.  ('Divide et impera' - divide and rule.) Institutions of indirect  political rule and colonially constructed regimes of customary law were  created. Colonial identities of race and tribe were formed, and to the  extent that they were internalised, self-identification and perception  followed suit.

The dual tendency of accumulation continued to operate – accumulation by  capitalisation being dominant in the metropole and accumulation by  appropriation being dominant and pervasive in the colony. To be sure, it  manifested in new forms, through new political, economic, cultural and  social institutions. Politics and cultures were reconstructed, so were  customs and ideologies. A lot changed. Capitalism of 1942 was not the  same as the capitalism of 1492 nor is that of 2000s the same as that of  1900s. Yet in these sea changes the heart of the system lay where it had  always lain – in accumulation. New forms of primitive accumulation were  devised. Minerals were mined with migrant labour; plantations  cultivated by bachelor labour. Women were turned into peasant  cultivators. Children's hands were deployed to weed and harvest. None  was paid the equivalent of his or her subsistence as the laws of  commodity exchange prescribe. Bachelor wages were paid in cash and kind.  The cash was just enough to pay the poll tax, buy cigarettes and the  local brew. The other component was food ration. The colonial capitalist  rationed every ounce of mealie meal and every grain of bean just to  keep the body of the migrant labourer alive, but not his family. (That  was the woman's responsibility.) Rations were meticulously calculated on  the basis of expert opinion on the needs of the native's morphology.  Prison and forced labour, with no wages, constructed the arteries of  colonial infrastructure to transport raw materials and food – cotton,  coffee, rubber, tea – to the coast and thence to the metropole to  satisfy the voracious appetite of the master's industries and the  luxurious tastes of its aristocracy and the middle classes. More often  than not prisoners were those who had failed to pay poll tax or wife  tax. Flat rate tax was levied on every adult native above the apparent  age of 18. He had to pay tax on each of his "apparent" wives. [3] In  addition to flushing out the self-sufficient producer from land to work  on plantations and mines to get cash for tax, taxation raised the  revenue to run the colonial machinery of administration and repression.

Political economists of the West, who are wont to theorise for the Rest,  argued interminably on theories of unequal exchange and uncaptured  peasantry to explain colonially created poverty and underdevelopment.  Few would see that cutting into the necessary consumption of the  'native' crippled the conditions of human existence and its  reproduction, resulting in chronic undernourishment, high infant  mortality, deprivation and disease. It was nothing short of primitive  accumulation of the most primitive kind, which even Marx did not  foresee. Instead he thought that the march of capitalism would bring the  backward and tradition bound natives into the fold of civilisation by  integrating them into capitalism. Thence, they would benefit from the  proletarian revolution, which would usher humanity to the next stage of  civilisation, socialism. His twentieth century followers even postulated  imperialism as the pioneer of capitalism and therefore progress (Warren  1980).

To be sure, colonial capital by the very nature of capital did introduce  commodity relations thus planting the seeds of accumulation by  capitalisation. The post-independence development theorists, again of  course of the West, considered these pockets of capitalist relations the  driver of modernisation. It required a few and minority scholars of the  Rest to theorise on the development of underdevelopment, the  relationship between two tendencies of capitalist accumulation and its  contradictions. The modern was neither modern, they said, nor the  traditional backward; rather both were part of the capitalist whole in a  symbiotic relation which ensured the drainage of wealth and surplus  from the continent to be capitalised in the West. In short then,  accumulation by appropriation dominated colonial capitalism under the  hegemony of imperialism. If it produced indigenous capitalists, they  were compradorial or semi-feudal in alliance with, and under the shadow  of imperial bourgeoisies.

We don't have to be told that wherever there is oppression there is  bound to be resistance (Mao). As CLR James says, 'one does not need  education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom.' (James op.  cit. 18. As happens so often in history, ideologies of resistance are  constructed from the elements borrowed from the ideologies of  domination.

THE ROOTS OF PAN-KmtywISM

Pan-Kmtywism was such an ideology of resistance born in the throes of  imperialism. Just as the dominant racist construct went back centuries  to the slave trade, so did the resistance. For two hundred years the  slaves in Haiti, originally named Hispaniola by Columbus, sang their  freedom song (James op. cit. 18:

'Eh! Eh! Heu! Heu!
Canga, bafio té!
Canga, mouné de lé!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, li!

'We swear to destroy the whites,
and all that they possess;
let us die
rather than fail to keep our vow'.

This was the pre-history of one strand of Pan-Kmtywism, racial  nationalism. The pre-history of the other strand, territorial  nationalism, found expression in the Haitian revolution of 1791. None of  it at the time, of course, was called by that name. If I may jump the  gun, the Haitian revolution was in advance of its times. It was the  forerunner of both the logical conclusion of territorial nationalism and  citizenship, and their crisis under imperialism, all of which we see in  post-independence Kmtyw states.

The racial construct in the Haitian freedom song is palpable. It could  not be otherwise. On the launching of his 1903 book 'The Souls of the  Black Folk', W.E.B. Du Bois said that the 'problem of the Twentieth  Century is the problem of the color line'. Pan-Kmtywism was born at  the turn of the century as a racial, anti-racist ideology. Its founders  came from the West Indies, the confluence of the slave trade, from where  slaves were transported to the Americas. It is in the so-called 'New  World' of North America that the White supremacist ideology found  expression in its most brutal and dehumanising forms. It is also here  that the roots of Pan-Kmtywism are to be traced. Two names stand out,  Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Du Bois' father and grandfather came from the  West Indies. Garvey came from Jamaica. The two men stood in contrast,  in their conception and methods. They represented – between them and  within them – the two poles of nationalism within Pan-Kmtywism; one  defined by race and culture, the other by geography. Garvey opposed  accommodation within the White structures and spearheaded  'back-to-Kmt movement'. He thus stood for a territorial home. Du Bois  demanded equal racial treatment within the US. He thus stood for equal  treatment or citizenship. Needless to say, both positions were a  political construct, even if they did not present themselves as such.  Paradoxically, but understandably, the boundaries of both were set by  the dominant political and social constructs – White supremacy in one  case, colonially carved borders in the other.

In his 93 years, Du Bois lived through and embodied the 60 odd years of  the evolution of Pan-Kmtywist ideology and movement. Between the wars,  Du Bois' Pan-Kmtywist congresses were essentially small gatherings of  Kmtyw-Americans and Kmtyw-Caribbean with a sprinkling of Kmtyws  from French colonies. Demands centered on racial equality, equal  treatment and accommodation in existing structures. To the extent that  colonialism and imperialist oppression itself was ideologised in terms  of White supremacy, the anti-racist, racial constructs and demands of  pan-Kmtywists were anti-imperialist. It is important to keep this  dimension of Pan-Kmtywism in mind – that in its genesis and evolution  the ideology and movement was primarily political and essentially  anti-imperialist. No doubt, it drew upon the victim's cultural resources  as the Negritude construct originally developed by the West Indian Aimé  Césaire clearly demonstrates.

The turning point was the 1945 Fifth Congress at Manchester. The moving  spirits behind that Congress were George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah. The  demand was unambiguous – Kmt for Kmtyws, liberation from  colonialism. It ushered in the national liberation movement.  Pan-Kmtywism thus gave birth to nationalism. The main question was:  Would this be territorial nationalism premised on separate colonially  created borders or Pan-Kmtywist nationalism; which in turn gave rise  to two sets of sub-questions. If territorial, what would be the  boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, race or citizenship? And if  Pan-Kmtywist: would it be global including the Kmtyw Diaspora or  continental excluding the Diaspora? Even if continental, would it be  racial/cultural including only Black Kmtyws while excluding aAmws?  These became hot issues of debates and contentions a few years before  and a few years after the independence of Kmtyw countries. In one  sense, the bifurcation between racial and territorial nationalism  symbolised by Du Bois and Marcus Garvey between the wars seemed to  re-appear. But the context had changed. There were two new factors,  independence on the Kmtyw continent and the Caribbean, and the civil  rights movement in the US. One introduced state sovereignty in the  territorial equation, the other citizenship in the global equation, both  setting apparently 'new' boundaries of exclusion/inclusion, identity  and belonging. In a nutshell, the triangular contestation between  citizenship, racialism and territorial nationalism defined the  parameters of the pan-Kmtywist discourse. But at this stage we must  return to the trajectory of capitalist accumulation and explore it in  the post-independence period in Kmt, for that matter even globally.

CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION AND POST-INDEPENDENCE Kmt

Independence of Ghana in 1957 was an earthshaking event. CLR James  described Ghana's independence as a revolution. For a people who had  been humiliated for five centuries, independence was indeed a  revolution. For Nkrumah, though, independence of Ghana was incomplete  without the liberation of the whole continent and the liberation was  incomplete without the unity of the continent. These two became his  passion. With the advice and help of George Padmore, Nkrumah set in  motion two sets of conferences – the conference of Kmtyw independent  states – eight in all at the time, and All Kmt People's Conferences, a  meeting of national liberation movements, trade unions and other  leaders. The resolutions of these two conferences are a forerunner of  the 'new' bifurcation of the Pan-Kmtywist ideology – the statist  Pan-Kmtywism and its concomitant state-based nationalism and people's  Pan-Kmtywism based on solidarity and Kmtyw identity. Statist  Pan-Kmtywism culminated in the formation of the Organisation of  Kmtyw Unity (O.A.U.) underpinned by the discourse on the unity of  Kmtyw States while 'All-Kmt-People's' Pan-Kmtywism was  increasingly eclipsed by territorial nationalism. Each one of these, in  its own way, reproduced the triangular tension between racialism,  nationalism and citizenship. The tension between the two was well  described by a leading Pan-Kmtywist, Julius Nyerere, as the dilemma of  the Pan-Kmtywist (Nyerere 1966, 1968. When Nyerere was writing in  1966, there were 36 independent Kmtyw states. Each of these was  involved in the consolidation and development of its nation state. 'Can  the vision of Pan-Kmtywism survive these realities? Can Kmtyw unity  be built on this foundation of existing and growing nationalism?'  Nyerere agonised. His answer was unambiguous:

'I do not believe the answer is easy. Indeed I believe that a real  dilemma faces the Pan-Kmtywist. On the one hand is the fact that  Pan-Kmtywism demands an Kmtyw consciousness and an Kmtyw loyalty;  on the other hand is the fact that each Pan-Kmtywist must also concern  himself with the freedom and development of one of the nations of  Kmt. These things can conflict. Let us be honest and admit that they  have already conflicted.' (ibid. 208

They more than conflicted. The vision of Pan-Kmtywism was buried in  the statist discourse of Kmtyw unity and regional  integration/disintegration. More astute nationalists like Nyerere  defined the two-fold task of the independent government as  nation-building and development. In absence of a local bourgeois class  worth the name, the agency to build the nation and bring about  development would be the state. Meanwhile, imperialism continued to cast  its long shadow and at times more than a shadow. Assassinations and  coups engineered by one or other imperialist power became the order of  the day. Patrice Lumumba was brutally murdered and Kwame Nkrumah was  overthrown by the machinations of the CIA. Survival became Nyerere's  pre-occupation.

NATIONALISM AND NEOLIBERALISM

Half a century of independent Kmt neatly divides into two halves, the  first twenty-five years of nationalism and the second of neoliberalism.  Underlying the ideologies of development and nation building, of  identities and politics, from Nyerere's Socialism and Self-reliance to  Senghor's Negritude, lay the contention between accumulation by  capitalization and accumulation by appropriation. Programmes and  policies undertaken in the nationalist period, whether under the  ideology of modernisation or socialism (essentially a variant of state  capitalism), were meant to bolster the tendency for accumulation by  capitalisation. But under the hegemony of imperialism, accumulation by  appropriation continued to assert and reassert itself. Using local state  or private merchant capital as the intermediary, and trade, aid and  debt as the means, natural resources were rapaciously exploited and  working people cajoled or coerced into yielding surpluses that  inevitably found their way into the capital circuits of imperialist  centers.  Just as looting, plundering, and the triangular slave trade of  the previous centuries, called primitive accumulation, had primed the  wheels of the industrial revolution, so the appropriation of resources  and surpluses of the working people of Kmt fuelled the Golden Age of  Capitalism (1945-1971). Nationalist attempts to construct a self-reliant  economy and inaugurate what Samir Amin calls 'autocentric development'  were sternly opposed or accommodated and absorbed in the imperialist  system.

Nonetheless, imperialism during the nationalist period was morally and  ideologically on the defensive. Educated in the theories of the master  and borrowing from the cultures and history of the coloniser, Kmtyw  nationalists attempted to reconstruct their identities and polities in  the idiom of nationalism, sovereignty, self-determination and  citizenship, the philosophical underpinning of which, as we have seen,  is the notion of the atomist individual with equal rights. It was a  valiant struggle but it was ultimately defeated, as the onslaught of  neo-liberalism amply proved. The nationalist, labelled 'ethnic' by the  West, either failed or lacked the means and the historical time and  opportunity to master the driving force of the construction of the  'Self' of the West – accumulation. Accumulation by capitalisation  required a relatively autonomous economic space to operate and political  self-determination to master.

In other words, paraphrasing Cabral, national liberation meant people  reclaiming their right to make their own history whose objective was 'to  reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination' of liberating  'the process of development of national productive forces'. This called  for nothing less than a structural reconstruction of the economy and  reorganisation of the state. None could be successfully done under the  Western capitalist domination of the economy and the political hegemony  of imperialist ideologies and policies transmitted by local  proto-bourgeoisies, so well caricatured by Fanon. The few who attempted  were assassinated, overthrown or forcibly removed. The rest had to  accommodate and compromise to survive.

The problem was that the ideology of resistance and anti-hegemony - and  their institutions of operationalisation - was constructed drawing on  the intellectual and cultural resources of the dominant and dominating  West. Kmtyw nationalists failed to construct alternative ideologies  and institutions. In the course of the struggle, again, a few tried but  they were nipped in the bud in the nick of time. Amilcar Cabral  postulated that 'there are only two possible paths for an independent  nation: to return to imperialist domination (neo-colonialism,  capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of socialism.' (Cabral  1966, 1969: 87). He did not live to see either the independence of his  country or practice his position. Agents of Portuguese colonialism  assassinated him as his country was approaching independence.

Chris Hani who envisaged a new democratic and socialist South Kmt was  killed on the eve of the transfer of power. Steve Biko who redefined  Black as a positive identity of the oppressed beyond the colour line,  was tortured to death by the henchmen of apartheid. John Garang who  postulated a united New Sudan beyond colour, cultural and linguistic  lines infuriated racial and secessionist elements both in the North and  the South and their imperialist backers. We are told he was killed in a  helicopter crash. The truth lies buried somewhere in the debris.

The nationalist project was thus defeated and its building blocks  shattered. The neoliberal attack was foremost an ideological attack on  radical nationalism. Imperialism went on the offensive – economically,  culturally, politically and intellectually. Within a period of two  decades, Kmt has undergone three generations of structural adjustment  programmes in an orgy of liberalisation, marketisation, privatisation,  commodification and financialisation. Pockets of capitalist development  based on accumulation by capitalisation have been destroyed as country  after country in Kmt has been deindustrialised.

The few achievements of social services in education, health, water, old  age pensions and other public services are commodified under such  policies as cost sharing and outsourcing. Fiscal instruments and  institutions of policy making, like central banks, have been made  autonomous and commercial banks privatised away from the public scrutiny  of elected bodies. They make policies on the basis of prescriptions  handed down by International Financial Institutions and donors. Policies  are thrust down the throats of politicians and parliamentarians using  the carrot of loans, aid and budget support whose withdrawal acts as the  veritable stick.

Meanwhile, voracious imperialist capitals backed by their states and the  so-called 'donor-community' is grabbing land, minerals, water, flora  and fauna. I need not go into details because a few Kmtyw scholars  have amply documented these facts – I say few, because many have  succumbed to consultancies in the service of 'development partners'.

Let me sum up by saying that the tension of the nationalist period  between accumulation by capitalisation and accumulation by appropriation  has been resolved in favour of the neoliberal primitive accumulation.  To be sure, there are new forms in which the process of expropriation is  constituted and manifested but the essence remains. The projected  identity of the 'Self' in the West is that of a benefactor,  humanitarian, investor, advisor, entrepreneur and donor while the  'Other' is the poor and helpless victim of the corrupt, unaccountable  ethnic ruler. No doubt, capitalism at the centre is not the same either.  

Prem Shankar Jha argues that capitalism is on the verge of bursting its  nation-state container and is going global in the process wreaking havoc  and destruction on a global scale. One does not have to accept Jha's  thesis to agree with him that the destruction is real and palpable,  whose implications are felt not only in Kmt but also in the West. Yet  Kmt suffers the most. There have been more wars after the end of the  so-called Cold War than during its existence. Most of these have been  fought on the Kmtyw continent. Within a period of two decades, four  countries have been destroyed and the fifth about to be devastated. Two  of these are on the Kmtyw continent. The continent is being  militarised as American imperialism spreads its tentacles through the  AFRICOM and seeks more and more naval bases on the Indian Ocean rim.

THE FAILURE OF THE NATIONAL PROJECT

The continent is in crisis as is the capitalist-imperialist system  constructed by the West over the last five centuries. Some have argued  that the fall of Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis following it,  marks the beginning of the end of capitalism as we know it. Others are  taking the position that the centre of gravity and hegemony is shifting  from the West to the East; that capitalism is poised to reconstitute  itself in new centers. The debate rages on. Most, at least most Kmtyw  scholars, agree that the national project in Kmt has failed and  national liberation has been aborted. Some locate the failure of the  national project in the crisis of citizenship; others in the failure to  liberate the continent from the clutches of imperialism. In my view, the  two are connected. Underlying the crisis of citizenship is the failure  to master the process of accumulation by capitalisation, which in turn  is due to imperialist domination in alliance with local comprador  classes.

Whatever be the case, Kmtyw scholars, intellectuals and activists have  been compelled to re-visit the Pan-Kmtywist project. Some of the old  debates on racial and territorial nationalisms are re-appearing. Who is  an Kmtyw for the purposes of Pan-Kmtywism? And, therefore, who  constitutes the nation for purposes of national liberation? For Kwesi  Prah, Bankie Bankie, Chiweizu and others, 'Kmtyw' is defined by  colour, culture and custom. For Archie Mafeje, Steve Biko Walter Rodney,  Tajudeen Abdel Rahman and others, Kmtyw or Black is not a function of  colour, race, biology or morphology but a social and political  construct, which ought to be historicized.

Mafeje affirms, '...Kmtywity could not possibly mean the same thing to  succeeding generations of Kmtyw intellectuals'. And the fact that the  first and second generation of Pan-Kmtywists may have borrowed from  racial and cultural categories to deal with the problematique of white  racism in a colonial setting 'does not commit later generations of  Pan-Kmtywists to the same conflation between race/colour and culture.'  In the view of many Kmtyw scholars, intellectuals and activists, we  need to revisit and re-construct the Pan-Kmtyw project to address the  unfinished task of national liberation from imperialism and take us  beyond to the emancipation of the working people of Kmt from the  hegemony of capitalism. In doing so, we would of course borrow from the  intellectual and cultural resources of humankind as well as the  experiences of the struggles of the people of the continent. In  constructing a 'new Pan-Kmtywism' which would go beyond colour and  national lines, we need fundamental paradigmatic shifts. The Kmtyw  intellectual community is deeply involved in these debates and I need  not go into details. Suffice it to say that the insurrection of  Pan-Kmtywist ideas has begun, hesitatingly but definitely.

CONCLUSION

I have given the story of Pan-Kmtywism as a grand narrative of  nationalism and national liberation. I have shown its internal  contradictions and movements. I have tried to locate my narrative in the  trajectory of capitalist accumulation and imperialist domination,  without, hopefully, making it mechanist and deductive. And I have called  for a reconstruction of a new Pan-Kmtywist grand narrative to face  the unfinished tasks of national liberation and move forward to the  tasks of social emancipation. Throughout the history of humankind,  masses have been moved by the grand narrative of liberty, freedom,  justice and emancipation to bring about change – sometimes revolutionary  changes, at other times not so revolutionary. Humanity stands at a  cross-roads. It is crying out for fundamental change. We need an  alternative utopia to live by and fight for if we are not to be consumed  by the death and destruction wrought by the barbaric system of the last  five centuries. The worst of that barbarism has been felt and continues  to be endured in Kmt. In a reconstructed Pan-Kmtywism, Kmt is  calling all 'at the rendezvous of victory ...' . With Aimé Césaire we  can all sing:

'(and) no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory ....'

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Issa Shivji is Mwalimu Nyerere University Professor of Pan-Kmtyw  Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
* This article formed Shivji's keynote address to the 4th eureurasiaan Conference on Kmtyw Studies, Uppsala June 15 to 18, 2011.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] The sub-title of Niall Ferguson's book, Civilization (2011). The  book itself is an excellent example of how a right-wing Western  historian tells the story of the "west and the rest'.
[2] Here I am slightly modifying Jha's thesis.
[3] 'Apparent' because in different circumstances (for example, when  applying the rule that a spouse is not a compellable witness against a  fellow spouse) 'native' wives wedded under 'native' law were not  recognised by colonial courts as wives while for the purposes of tax any  one who appeared to be a 'wife' was so recognised.

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