Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (London: Verso, 2023), 160 pp., $19.95
Red Africa begins with a dilemma its author, Kevin Ochieng Okoth, confronted when, in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement erupted in South Africa. While the movement clearly aimed at diversifying the curriculum of the university to reflect the makeup of the student body, at institutional racism which continued despite the fall of Apart- heid in 1991, and at the exorbitant fees that put higher education out of reach of most Black South Africans, Okoth noticed something odd: “some activists embraced the language of ‘Afro-pessimism” which claimed there were irreconcilable differences between Black people and non-Black people of colour” (vii). This so obviously contradicted the position taken by Steven Biko, a hero of the movement, and a key figure in the anti-apartheid struggle, that Okoth felt impelled to make further inquiries. Exploring what he dubs “Afro-pessimism 2.0” (AP 2.0), Okoth realized there was “an impasse in anti-imperialist politics: the separation between decolonization, or Black radicalism, and Marxism” (xii). This led him to revisit the historical record and the political thought of figures such as Eduardo Mondlane, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral and André Blouin, focusing on vital currents that no serious scholar can overlook. But what gives Okoth’s effort special relevance today is that this historical background is mobilized to battle a cluster of notions which have gained currency in recent decades and which aim to erase that history and to ensure such revolutionary leadership never again emerge.
Recalling the “spirit of Bandung” and the 1955 conference which gave that spirit birth, Okoth reminds us of the wave of decolonization that swept what we now call the Global South after World War II. More to the point, Okoth emphasizes the revolutionary socialist or communist leadership of many of the struggles for national liberation that characterize the period. Situated in this international context, Okoth recounts key events in numerous parts of Africa, particularly but not exclusively, those countries which experienced revolutions led by Marxist parties and organizations: Ghana, South Africa, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique prominent among them. Indeed, it is remarkable how much historical data Okoth condenses in a short book.
Afro-pessimism, Okoth points out, was originally a concept pro- moted by capitalist mouthpieces such as the Economist to indicate the hopeless state of post-colonial Africa. The concept justified the re- imposition of colonial rule albeit in the guise of the IMF, World Bank and other institutions which would provide the necessary “training” for Africans to eventually “be ready” to govern themselves. This overtly racist and imperialist dogma mutated into AP2.0 promulgated by none other than certain Black intellectuals as, supposedly, an expla- natory methodology which, ironically, echoed the same racist assump- tions, i.e., that there was something inherent in “blackness” that was both “pre-modern” and incomprehensible by what were ostensibly “eurocentric” categories such as history, political economy or even national liberation. Furthermore, AP2.0 always insisted that Marxism and Blackness were incompatible and that the failures of the revolu- tions of the Sixties, whether in the metropole (especially the US) or in Africa, were to be blamed on the adoption of Marxism-Leninism as guiding principles.
Okoth dissects the relationship between AP2.0 and neoliberalism, why “The triumph of neoliberalism also signalled the end of a fruitful period of Black internationalism” (pg.6). Just as neoliberalism claimed to challenge the state (Reagan: “the government that governs least governs best.”) and better protect the individual (Thatcher: “there is no such thing as society”) by making the market the highest authority, certain intellectuals erected phantasms like Decolonial Studies which substituted terms (e.g., “coloniality” for “colonialism”) to obscure their real agenda. Just as neoliberalism was developed to intensify exploitation and reinvigorate imperialist rule after the earth-shaking revolutions of the postwar era, Decolonial Studies and a variety of other “novel” nostrums were developed to cloak old-fashioned reac- tion in radical garb. Indeed, the neoliberal university was not only the incubator of such ideological constructs but the employer and status-giver of those needed to propagate them.
Each chapter of Red Africa takes on another element or dimension of the phenomenon, each time referring both backward and forward in historical and theoretical terms. “From Black Studies to Afro-Pessi- mism: the Making of an Anti-Politics”, looks back at the Black Liber- ation Struggle in the US, its concrete relationship with the simultaneously erupting struggles in parts of Africa, and details the process by which Imperial order was restored. The question is then posed: how can what claims to be “oppositional” or “radical” lead any- where if it has no strategy other than Black faces in high places? Recent events amply demonstrate how vague ideas-slogans really-become fashionable, leading to celebrity for their proponents but disillusion- ment for those they claim to represent. Twenty million people took the streets protesting the murder of George Floyd but far from leading to a revolution or even substantive reform, massive protest was immediately-and routinely-turned into a futile gesture only capable of putting one murderous cop in jail and garnering a US$100 million dollar donation from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones.
In “Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery” Okoth subjects a widely accepted construct to critical examination. The views pro- pounded by Cedric Robinson, for example, are shown to be flawed con- ceptually and inaccurate in fact. For one thing, the term “racial capitalism” was coined by two South African Marxists to describe what made apartheid an indispensable component of South Africa’s version of capitalism. The term’s original purpose was to combat a line promoted by the International Labor Organization: “that a conflict existed between the objective of economic growth and the policy of apartheid, and that the former would eventually undermine and abolish the latter. According to the ILO there was no need for anti- racist struggle-capital itself would do the necessary work” (pg.44).
Robinson, however, applied the term generally, claiming it described capitalism, as such. Okoth pays close attention to Robinson’s argument and grants it some validity, in particular, the usefulness of Robinson having shown that “white supremacy masks itself as an economic rationale, which in turn organises racial hierarchy with racia- lized plantation labor at its core” (pg.45). But Okoth goes further to inquire why such argumentation is directed at Marx. He writes, “There exists a tradition of Marxist thought which has taken seriously the role that the racial played in structuring the modern world, and which acknowledges how central both the transatlantic slave trade and racism were to the development of capitalism … this tradition complicates the separation between the exploitation of the worker and the social death of the black/Slave that is the heart of AP2.0’s account of Blackness.” (pg.43).
Furthermore, he exposes Robinson’s misreading (or non-reading) of Marx as a characteristic of critics who, in the end, dismiss Marx altogether, refusing serious engagement with either the text or the praxis of Marx and Engels. Such misreading inevitably leads to a rejec- tion not only of Marx’s method but that of revolutionaries, especially in Africa, inspired by Marx’s thought and example. It is, moreover, diffi- cult to escape the implication that what the term “racial capitalism” has come to mean is the flip-side of what it was originally designed to combat, i.e., that if you eliminate racism capitalism would be just dandy. Which, not surprisingly, is the position currently in vogue in the “liberal” West.
Problems of historical fact arise when considering that the slave trade did not begin or end with the Atlantic slave trade. The Arab slave trade, beginning in the eighth century, and extending south from Mesopotamia to eastern, southern and western Africa, was well established by the time the Portuguese first entered the picture. Fur- thermore, after the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere (Brazil 1888), slavery continued in Africa itself well into the 20th century, Mauritania being the last country in the world to abolish slavery in 1981 (it continued there, de facto, into the 21st century). Okoth cites the example of Nigeria where the practice continued until the 1950s. The stigma attached to the Osus (outcasts) of Igboland is felt to this day and is not based on any discernible “racial” characteristics.
Other problems arise when one considers the differences between Imperial powers. No doubt racialization played a pivotal role in every case. But they were not therefore identical. Furthermore, each was affected differently by revolutions in both the colonies and the metro- pole. Nevertheless, as Okoth explains, the concepts of race and racial capitalism, of slavery and its “afterlives”, often betray a US-centric bias. The US is taken as the exemplary case and all others more or less follow the same pattern. Little attention is paid, for example, to whether the imperial power involved was Catholic or Protestant, what the demographic makeup was (black, white, indigenous ratios, etc.) much less how resistance to and the abolition of slavery was mani- fest in each instance.
Another dimension of this problem is the relative inattention paid to the works of Guyanese Marxist, Walter Rodney and others like him who originate in the Caribbean or Latin America. It appears that some scholars in the US are unwilling or unable to critically evaluate their own preconceptions.
Okoth further contrasts the views of African and Caribbean revo- lutionaries with those of their counterparts in the US showing how the aims of national liberation and socialism differed significantly from the demand for Civil Rights and recognition within the structures of the US Constitution. While leaders such as Mondlane, Cabral, Rodney and Blouin articulated a revolutionary socialism in solidarity with Vietnam, Cuba, China and other Third World struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the US focused mainly on securing the rights denied African Americans in the US. Though the struggle in the US took a revolutionary turn in the late Sixties and early seventies, drawing inspiration from the national liberation struggles in the Third World, and though the struggle in the US provided powerful encour- agement exemplified, for example, by the famous statement Mao made concerning the significance of the Black struggle in the US, dis- tortions nonetheless arose that have obscured the role played by other actors. More specifically, those who were leading revolutionary struggles in former colonies which necessarily differed from those waged inside the imperial US.
Other examples Okoth explores include the Negritude movement, the role of Franz Fanon and, as he calls it, “Neo-Colonialism, or, the Emptiness of Bearing One’s Flag." He points out how the contradic- tions in each case were not only international in character, involving multiple peoples, countries and contending Cold War power blocs, but were conditioned to a greater extent than is often acknowledged by the struggle for socialism as a world-wide movement. It is no acci- dent that the title of Franz Fanon’s most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, is also the first line of the “Internationale.” While there was powerful impetus to reject Europe’s claims of “natural” superiority, to proudly declare the richness and profundity of African thought, art and social practices, this was not a call to return to a mythical past or to replace Europeans with native exploiters, but rather to eman- cipate humanity and build a world free of exploitation altogether.
Red Africa concludes by pointing forward. “Our political horizons have changed since the end of the Bandung era, leaving us with no option but to place their politics into ‘a new problem-space’. The dream of national liberation as envisioned by anti-colonial Marxists might indeed have faded, but the utopias they envisioned have not yet been exhausted” (pg.127). Okoth refers to exiled Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who coined the term “decolonizing the mind”, and remains to this day a committed revolutionary and Marxist. Ngugi, incidentally, wrote a powerful novel, The Wizard of the Crow (2006), giving literary expression to many of the themes taken up by
Red Africa. This is only one reminder of the vitality and promise that can result from reclaiming revolutionary black politics.
© 2024 Mat Callahan
Musician and Author
Bern, Switzerland
info@matcallahan.com
