African Anarchism : The History of A Movement

Chapter 4 : The Development of Socialism in Africa

We touched briefly on the atypical development of classes in a few societies in pre-colonial Africa. However, after European contact, class formation accelerated. The European powers that invaded and colonized Africa in the late 19th century were fully industrialized capitalist countries that saw in Africa a captive market as well as a source for raw materials for their industries. This was the fundamental reason for colonialism.

The colonizers produced a capitalist economy with some similarities to the economies of their own countries.[60] In Europe, the owners of capital had expropriated the land and other means of production from peasants and artisans, turning them into wage workers. From their labor, the capitalists extracted a surplus which they accumulated and invested in more land, factories, and labor in order to extract more surplus. In this way they expanded wealth and reproduced capitalist social relations at the same time.[61]

As we saw previously, the pre-colonial African mode of production was anything but a capitalist mode of production. To serve their own interests, the European colonizers superimposed capitalism on Africa. This entailed the transformation of African societies from relatively self-sufficient communal agricultural units into units dependent on the larger economies being created.[62] A new division of labor was being forced on Africans leading to new material relationships in the larger society. In the colonies, the horticultural basis of the African mode of production was progressively undermined as villages were forced to grow cash crops for export or provide cheap labor for European plants and mines. This created new classes — new material relationships — within the colonies. In her study of colonial Guinea, for example, R.E. Galli identifies several colonial classes :

1. A new administrative class of Europeans

2. A European class of large landowners

3. A European class of large merchants (the trading firms)

4. A European managerial class

This group formed the bourgeois class, the owners of capital — that is, the owners of the land and means of production. This class was aided by what Galli calls the petit bourgeoisie[63] :

1. Mid-level managers in the state apparatus, on plantations, and in trading and mining companies

2. Colonial professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.)

3. Some indigenous small shopkeepers and traders

How were African societies incorporated into the colonial capitalist system ? First, the nobility and chiefs were co-opted into acting as administrators for the colonists. Galli sees them as an agrarian class, not a capitalist class, because they did not exploit villagers in a capitalist manner. They exploited them, rather, because of their traditional authority over land and labor.[64] They delivered taxes and labor to the colonialists, squeezing the peasantry as much as they could, but not directly expropriating land. (A corollary of this could be cited in Nigeria with regard to aristocratic rulers — the Emiros of northern Nigeria, and the traditional Obas in the southwest.) The nobility and chiefs were the tools used to execute the colonial powers’ indirect rule over their African colonies.

There was also a small group of educated Africans whom the French called assimiles, mainly sons of chiefs and other notables sent to European cities for an education.[65] They were absorbed as lower-level officials in government and as professionals, and aided the colonial capitalist class in administering and maintaining the social order. A good example of this type is the character Obi Okonba in Chinua Achebe’s novel, No Longer at Ease.

As mines and factories opened in some African colonies, a small working class came into being. The great mass of the people were, though, still peasants, now producing for urban markets. Lastly, there was what Galli has classified as the “lumpen proletariat,” that group of Africans who had become alienated from the land and had gone to the cities in a vain search for work. Without an education, they became beggars, prostitutes, petty traders, and layabouts.

By the early 20th century, much of Africa had come under colonial domination. Several societies on the continent had metamorphosed from their precolonial state into societies with discernible, antagonistic classes. As in all class societies, the dominant European imperial class, in alliance with its local agents, engaged in brutal, wholesale exploitation of local labor. Local labor was exploited to produce raw materials for European industries and to generate enough surplus to run the colonies. The relationship of the dominant and subordinate classes in the colonies typified what has been termed “the colonial situation.” This phrase aptly captures the sociopolitical, economic and psychological state of affairs in a colonized society.

In analyzing the growth and development of African anarchism, we shall focus on the currents that acted as a countervailing force against the entrenched capitalist mode of production, both under colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The Trade Union Movement and the Liberation Struggle in Africa

Trade unions in Africa did not begin as pure, ideological revolutionary organizations. Rather, they emerged during the colonial period in direct response to the colonial situation. They represented, in the main, a revolt against an imposed, inferior sociopolitical and economic status.

The emergence of African labor unions was a further manifestation of the incorporation of the capitalist mode of production into African economies. This incorporation, as we saw earlier, led to the balkanization of African societies into nations and classes. As the exploitation of the colonies continued under European colonialism, the colonized peoples came to gradually realize that the situation was an impediment to their own freedom. The emergence of labor unions was a manifestation of basic class consciousness among the workers, as well as a response to colonial rule.

The growth and development of trade unions in Africa during the colonial period reflected varying conditions in different societies. In the ordinary colonies, such as Ghana and Nigeria, the unions were less revolutionary than in European-settled colonies such as Algeria, Kenya and South Africa, where strong racial undercurrents brought the contradictions of the colonial situation into sharp focus. We shall next examine in some detail the trade union movements in Nigeria and in South Africa, as representatives of the trade unions in these two colonial situations.

The Nigerian Labor Union Movement

Nigerian workers made their first attempt to assert their rights in 1897, when workers in the Public Works Department protested for three days in August against arbitrary changes in working hours. In defiance of Governor McCallum’s threats of dismissal, the workers refused to withdraw their demands, and in the end they obtained some measure of relief through a compromise solution.

The trend toward labor agitation increased in the early 1900s as a result of the worsening nature of colonial government policies. Since there were more workers than the existing industries could employ, employers instituted oppressive employment contracts in which workers were treated like slaves. As Ananaba points out in his book, The Trade Union Movement in Nigeria, these contracts laid great emphasis on the obligation to work, while they laid no emphasis at all on the rights of the worker.[66]

At the same time, there was a growing consciousness of racial barriers to economic advancement, and of the great disparities between European and African earnings, even for the same jobs.[67] In the words of Gutkind and Cohen, “the colonial-racial nexus further erode[d] class awareness by stressing the common identity of all Africans in their subordination to and exploitation by an alien hierarchy.”[68]

Moreover, the 1929 global depression further aggravated the condition of workers under colonialism, as colonial governments took the opportunity created by economic desperation to impose direct taxation on workers and to convert permanent jobs to day-labor jobs, among other things.[69] That same year, the famous Aba Women’s Riot took place, in which women from the southeastern Nigerian town of Aba and surrounding provinces demonstrated against a new tax on their own property. It is instructive that this particular riot, in which many women were killed, was organized and executed by women.[70]

Radicalization of workers in Nigeria continued in the late 1930s, partly due to a growing spirit of working class consciousness and partly, according to Asoba, as a result of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s new brand of combative journalism, which brought to public attention the various forms of colonial exploitation. Azikiwe inspired Nigerians’ confidence in their ability to bring colonial rule to an end through activist political and working class agitation.[71] Other manifestations of radical working class consciousness were the observance of May Day celebrations and the establishment of a Workers’ Week.[72]

Another factor in the burgeoning of radical trade unionism in Nigeria was the Railway Workers Union, which was the first radical union to organize strike actions. The union’s radicalism can be attributed to the “towering and fearless personality of Michael Imoudu.”[73] He led Nigerian workers to great victories, the most outstanding of which was the 1945 general strike ; there the “solidarity of the labour rank and file”[74] was first truly seen in the Nigerian labor movement. Subsequent strikes arising from the nature of the colonial system strengthened the labor movement challenge to the economic and political status quo.

In 1949, for instance, the tragic Iva Valley coal miners strike took place at Enugu, Nigeria. It resulted in the massacre of dozens of striking miners by the colonial police force ; but during the strike the miners managed to sabotage the coal mining process. Such strikes greatly raised the class consciousness of the workers and seeded thoughts of socialism in their minds, opening their eyes to the nature of not only capitalism, but of the government and its laws as well.[75]

The trade union movement in the colonial period also served as a countervailing influence against foreign investors, who dominated strategic parts of the national economy. In Nigeria these investors included domineering transnational corporations like the Lever Brothers, United African Company, and the United Trading Company, all of which maintained a firm grip on the export and import trade. The unions fought collectively against foreign monopoly capital and agitated for the socialization of important industries in the country, with a view to installing a socialist government where the identity of the working class would not be forgotten.[76]

Although the labor movement in Nigeria contributed quite significantly to ending British colonial rule, post-independence Nigeria reflected the same basic sociopolitical and economic structures that existed under colonial rule. In post-colonial Nigeria, workers have had to contend with essentially the same capitalist system, typified by antagonism between capital and labor. Today, the working people of Nigeria are suffering heavily under the burden of unemployment, factory closures, inadequate housing, transport, health care and educational facilities, social insecurity, and lack of personal freedom.

A prominent feature of the post-independence Nigerian labor movement, that distinguishes it from the pre-independence movement, is the clear absence of a revolutionary perspective. Since independence, the unions have exhibited a tendency to act in league with the ruling elite in the running of the state, while mouthing revolutionary jargon.

In 1987, under the military dictatorship of general Ibrahim Babangida, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) participated in a wide-ranging debate on the political future of Nigeria. The workers published a “Workers’ Manifesto” titled, “Towards a Viable and Genuinely Democratic Future : [the] Nigerian Working Class Position,” containing 28 points relating to political, economic, social and cultural issues.”[77] According to the then-NLC president, the document reflected the political aspirations of the Nigerian working class, namely, that “only a socialist option can ensure a viable and stable political and economic arrangement in Nigeria.”[78]

The NLC manifesto spoke of raising the political consciousness of the working class, and it called for full working class involvement in political life. The document’s position on the future economy is that the working class should plan and control the production and distribution processes. According to the manifesto :

From taking control of the economy through so-called investments to overinvoicing, we have seen clearly the collaboration of the multinationals and their local agents in ruining our economy, perpetrating fraud and corruption and influencing technocrats and administrators in the performance of government business. What Nigeria requires today under the leadership of the working class is to take our destiny into our own hands through the appropriate political action — socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange.[79]

Unfortunately, there has always been a sharp divergence between theory and practice in the leadership of the Nigerian working class movement. In reality, the leadership of the trade union movement has always shared a class interest with the ruling elite. This has its origin in the pre-independence era, when the leadership of the working class came to regard the nationalist struggle and the cause of the labor movement as indissolubly linked, and thus allied itself with nationalist political parties. Crowther has gone so far as to regard one of the nationalist parties, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, as more or less a “confederation of trade unions.”[80]

In post-independence Nigeria, the romance between the leadership of the trade unions and political parties has blossomed even more. In Nigeria’s ill-fated Third Republic, for instance, there were spirited attempts by the labor movement to form a political party under the aegis of the Nigerian Labour Congress to compete against other political parties. When that failed, the leader of the NLC, Paschal Bafyau, along with his supporters, pitched his tent with the Social Democratic Party and contested the party’s presidential primaries, which he lost.

As the struggle against military dictatorship gained momentum in Nigeria, there have been some successes. Labor leaders such as Frank Kokori, General Secretary of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers, and Milton Dabibi, General Secretary of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association (both unions representing workers in the petroleum industry, the country’s mainstay), displayed admirable courage in 1994 when they successfully led their unions in strikes which for two months closed oil facilities across the country. When the military government reacted by deploying soldiers to break the strikes, the workers resorted to sabotage. So effective were the strike actions that the country was virtually paralyzed while they lasted. In Lagos, the bustling commercial capital city of Nigeria, streets and major highways were nearly deserted, public transportation grounded, and offices and work places shut down. As reported in The Lagos Guardian Newspaper, the Lagos State Military Administrator, Col. Oyinlola, had to walk to the opening of a seminar, having been unable to find gas for his official car.[81]

One interesting and instructive aspect of these strikes was their decidedly political aim — “to bring an end to military dictatorship.” In its 72-hour ultimatum to the federal government, the Lagos branch of the NLC demanded the following :

1. that the federal government should immediately and unconditionally release all political and labor activists detained nationwide ;

2. that all closed media outlets be reopened immediately ; and

3. that the government should immediately enter into meaningful dialogue with workers and all disaffected groups, minorities and disaffected ethnic nationalities.[82]

As the crisis deepened, the NLC in Lagos concluded that “it will be a great disservice to workers in Lagos State if [the] Labour Congress would fold its arms and allow the workers to continue to suffer...”[83] Consequently, it directed all Lagos State “workers in banks and insurance firms, factories, and industries, local government councils, public corporations, federal and state civil service, and so on, to embark on a sit-at-home strike as from July 12, 1994 until otherwise directed by the State Council.”[84] The anarchosyndicalist Awareness League took an active part in the strikes and demonstrations, convinced that the departure of the military government would allow greater opportunity to carry on the struggle for a libertarian society. Never since the civil war of the 1960s had the Nigerian state come so close to disintegrating. But the military junta of General Sani Abacha responded by issuing a barrage of decrees proscribing labor unions, arresting activists and labor leaders en masse, and sacking opposition media outlets.

One thing remains clear : despite courageous attempts by the labor movement to revolutionize Nigeria, its efforts were limited in both scope and content. A primary reason is that, being centralized and hierarchical in structure, the unions function as authoritarian, bureaucratic organizations. Their leaders often see their positions as opportunities to feather their own political and economic nests. The NLC desires to see a more humane Nigerian society, but the ideological inspiration that informs the actions of the congress does not contemplate a completely different kind of society, built by the workers organizing in the workplace and in the community. Usually Nigerian labor leaders do not aspire beyond involvement with the powers that be in the running of the economy and the state. Consequently, the activities of the movement are not based on a clear conception of class reality and class struggle. In their world view of a better and freer society, most labor leaders fail to direct their activities against the double yoke of capital and state. This pattern has been typical in the former “normal” colonies, as contrasted with European-settled colonies such as South Africa.

The South African Labor Movement

South Africa stands out as one of the countries in Africa in which labor has played a decisive role in the struggle for significant socio-political change. The struggle of the South African working class dates back to the formative years of South Africa — 1910 to 1922 — when labor engaged in bloody battles with the capitalist class. Gary Jewell’s documentation of the conflicts between employers and workers is most instructive. According to Jewell, in the space of a decade the orgy of violence had resulted in a call by the workers for “a red or syndicalist workers’ Republic.”[85] Although these early workers’ revolts were carried out predominantly by white workers, over time some of the strikes began to be initiated by blacks. In 1920, for example, a strike of the Port Elizabeth municipal black workers, organized by Samuel Masabala of the Cape Provincial Native Congress, resulted in the police shooting deaths of 19 workers.[86] This led to a strike in the Rand in which over 40,000 black miners demanded improved career prospects in jobs reserved for whites.[87]

By 1921, Percy Fisher, Secretary of the South African Mine Workers Union, had initiated the formation of a Miner’s Council of Action, which developed into a Red International of Labour Unions, with a revolutionary mission. Jewell identifies the four basic factions that constituted the union as follows :

1. the Communist Party, Bolshevik with DeLeonist elements favoring an industrial union government ;

2. Afrikaner Mynwerkersbond, consisting of poor white Afrikaners calling for an Afrikaner Union to destroy the British capitalists and establish a republic ;

3. Labour Party moderates, led by Archie Crawford ; and

4. the old IWW syndicalist network.[88]

Jewell notes that “the presence of independent IWW syndicalists is demonstrated by the government charge that the strike attempted to set up a ‘Red or Syndicalist Workers’ Republic.’”[89] Jewell’s account of the events leading to the declaration of a Red Workers Republic is informative. According to him, the strike action was carried out by workers in different industries, including the South African Industrial Federation’s coal miners, later joined by gold miners, engineers, and power workers.

In the face-off between the workers and the rulers, the Smuts government tried hard to break the workers’ solidarity, but with little success. When it became clear that the workers remained uncompromising in their demands, Smuts threw the government’s military support behind the mine bosses and declared martial law, urging them to reopen the mines.[90] As discussions continued to break down, the Miners Council of Action “seized the initiative and forced the South African Industrial Federation to proclaim a general strike.”[91] The declaration of a Red Workers Republic followed the proclamation of a general strike. The Smuts government responded by sending detachments of the army and air force to attack the striking workers. The building housing the strikers’ headquarters in Benoni was strafed on the 14th of March, and at least 153 people died in the attack.[92]

It has been argued that because this strike was conducted primarily by white workers with relatively little support from blacks, there was an absence of class solidarity. However, Jewell quotes James Duke’s view that the strike and the declaration of a Red Workers Republic was “a major breakthrough in race relations and class struggle, virtually an Afrikaner civil war with black support for the Afrikaner.”[93]

The imposition of apartheid in 1948, however, entrenched in South Africa a class war that largely followed racial lines. With the ascendance of apartheid, class identification and class struggle in South Africa became predicated on the color of a worker’s skin. This had started two years previously in 1946 when a strike by 60,000 black workers received no support from the all-white Miners’ Union, and was quickly crushed by the mine owners and the Smuts government.[94]

By 1956, the Nationalist government had broken up the South African Trades and Labour Council along racial lines — the South African Confederation of Labour was made up of whites, and the Trade Union Council of South Africa was made up of nonwhites (coloreds and Asians).[95] Although apartheid greatly emasculated the workers’ movement and polarized workers along racial lines, massive black strikes continued into the 1970s, often aimed at winning pay increases for workers.

But the real impetus for the burgeoning of radical black labor unions under apartheid was the Labour Relations Act of 1981, which gave the unions a measure of recognition and allowed them to operate legally.[96] In 1975, the Progressive Party had declared South Africa the second most strike-ridden country in Africa (after Morocco).[97] But in 1976, Vorster Botha, then prime minister of South Africa, had boasted to German investors that “South Africa was free of strike[s].”[98] But strikes resulted in the loss of 243,000 working days during the first three months of 1988, and a walkout by two to three million workers on June 6th through 8th of that same year was the biggest in South Africa’s history.[99] While wages and working conditions were the major causes of the strikes, an aggravating factor was capital’s pressure on the regime to reduce the number of jobs in the public sector, restrict wage increases to three percent, and to privatize the economy as a way to solve the country’s economic crisis.[100]

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a syndicalist-oriented organization, was launched on November 30, 1985 during the state of emergency of July 1985 — March 1986.[101] The National Union of Mine Workers (NUM) was the largest of COSATU’s affiliates.[102] We may well say that the glory days of working class struggle in South Africa were brought back to life with the birth of COSATU. In 1986, the labor movement in South Africa, under the leadership of COSATU and with the support of students and community organizations, observed the 100th May Day with a walkout/strike. At the time, it was the largest such action to ever take place in South Africa ; over 1,500,000 million workers took part in the call for the day to be declared a public holiday.[103]

Another display of workers’ solidarity occurred on October 1, 1986, the day of mourning for the 177 miners who were victims of the Kincross mining disaster. The work stoppage was organized by the National Union of Mine Workers, and 325,000 miners took part.[104]

As a countervailing force against foreign monopoly capital, the unions supported disinvestment from South Africa. The economic sanctions and disinvestment campaigns spearheaded by the unions, and later adopted by many Western governments, contributed in no small measure to the final capitulation of apartheid.

The struggle of the South African working class that preceded the collapse of apartheid showed that many workers were prepared to lose their jobs in the course of the struggle. T.B. Fulani notes that when a black worker in South Africa went on strike, the worker risked not only losing his job, but also losing his home in the city, and being forced into a Bantustan [an economically depressed “homeland” similar to a U.S. Indian reservation — ed.].[105] In spite of a sharp increase in the cost of living, taxation, growing unemployment, and increased repression of trade unionists, the number of strikes in South Africa continued to rise in the years preceding the collapse of the apartheid regime. Fulani summarizes the range of social, economic and political demands of South African labor unions : since 1979 workers have demanded the right to form trade unions of their choice ; they rejected all government-created institutions such as community councils and the president’s council ; they fought against the introduction of a new income tax for blacks in 1984 ; they demanded the withdrawal of government troops from black townships. They fought against low wages and the victimization of workers ; and they organized a boycott of white-owned shops and factories.[106]

Although the working class movement in South Africa can boast of a long history of struggle, this struggle has not fundamentally changed society. In the fight against the apartheid regime, the South African unions were taken over by middle class politicians of the African National Congress (ANC), who lack clear revolutionary political goals. The outcome of this takeover compromised the ideal of a completely different kind of society. The leadership of the unions became an integral part of the reformist struggle of the ANC for majority rule in South Africa. It’s no accident that many leaders of COSATU have received plum jobs in the post-apartheid ANC government of Nelson Mandela.

The ANC government does not represent much that is fundamentally new to the working class in South Africa. This is clear to both the ruling elite and to South African workers. The same old capitalist mode of production, based on the exploitation of labor by capital, continues to exist in South Africa. The working class task still remains the revolutionary transformation of society, that is, the achievement of a truly new society based on liberty and socioeconomic equality.

* * *

Socialism or communism as an ideological model is not entirely new to Africa ; it first gained ground in South Africa with the formation of the Communist Party in 1921. The South African Communists, who broke away from the Labour Party in 1915 to form the International Socialist League (ISL), had as one of their objectives the pursuit of proletarian internationalism.[107] An editorial in the fourth issue of The International, the weekly paper of the ISL, stated on October 1, 1915 that “an internationalism that does not concede the fullest rights which the native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham... If the League deals resolutely in consonance with socialist principles with the native question, it will succeed in shaking South African capitalism to its foundation...”[108] Thus the International Socialist League made efforts to identify with the workers and with the plight of the down-trodden black population. It made contact with all existing black organizations, such as the African National Congress, and founded the Industrial Workers of Africa trade union.[109]

In 1921, under the auspices of the Third International, the Marxist-DeLeonist ISL accepted Lenin’s 21 demands and formed the Communist Party of South Africa. Its leaders were S.P. Bunting, former Labour Party Chairman W.H. Andrews, and direct-action mine workers Ernie Shaw and Percy Fisher. Though it adopted the organizational form of a Bolshevik party, the South African C.P. remained strongly influenced by IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) revolutionary syndicalist views, and by DeLeonist industrial union concepts.[110]

But through the years the South African Communist Party underwent a marked transformation, both in its relationship to the state and in its conception of the struggle for a better society. It abandoned its initial revolutionary program, and in alliance with other nationalist groups conceived and began to work for a two-step approach to liberation, to wit, a bourgeois democratic revolution, followed by a socialist revolution. The party was more concerned with the issue of state power than class power, and paid scant attention to bringing an end to power and privilege in South African society.

The major liberation movements in South Africa — the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party — both adopted a document known as the Freedom Charter as a framework for a liberated South Africa. The Freedom Charter, however, while it proposed to restrict the operations of monopoly capitalism, did not envisage the abolition of the capitalist system. As Sisa Majola states, the Freedom Charter “envisage[d] the development of small-scale capitalist enterprises as a result of the elimination of the various colour barriers.”[111] Accordingly, the Charter envisioned a South Africa where all people “shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.” Majola further observes that even the demand contained in the Charter, that “restriction of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land redivided among those who work it, to banish famine and hunger,” did not necessarily propose the socialization of land ownership and control.” From all of this we can conclude that the initial ideals which the South African Communist Party embraced were short lived ; they were compromised by its alliance with nationalist groups for the purpose of acquiring political power.

The “Revolution” in Guinea

The so-called revolution in Guinea deserves comment in that the party that led the “revolution” — the Democratic Party of Guinea (DPG) — was a mass party with a revolutionary ideology based on worker and peasant interests.

The organization of workers in Guinea was led by Sekou Toure, a descendant of a famous anti-French colonialism resistance leader in the 19th century. Under Toure’s guidance, trade unions merged their protest against French rule with that of various ethnic and regional associations, creating the PDG. In its early years, the PDG maintained strong links with the French syndicalist union, the CGT.

The objective of the PDG’s founders was to create a mass party, and they achieved this at least for the duration of the independence struggle. The PDG achieved its mass mobilization by appealing to workers on bread and butter issues — salaries, benefits, etc. — and then to peasants on the basis of needs such as roads and schools, and also on the basis of their resentment toward their chiefs and nobility who had sold them out to the French. They particularly appealed to women and to youth, both groups extremely exploited by the elders and chiefs.

Guinea’s chiefs were more or less tax administrators for the French, bleeding their own people dry. They also provided forced labor for mines and plantations. They had become discredited among their people, and the PDG exploited this. By 1956, the party had united the country and swept the elections of that year. This caused the French governor to issue a statement that recognized that the chieftaincy “was gravely compromised... and it was no longer admissible that we maintain against wind and storm chiefs who no longer represent anything.” Following the election, the PDG set up village committees, some of which made up lists of grievances against their chiefs and exacted reparations from them. This frightened many chiefs, who then fled to the capital, Conakry.

In 1957-58, the PDG stripped the chiefs of power and established popularly elected local governments, from the village up. They also began to tax French companies, broke up trading monopolies, and reformed government. When in 1958 the people of Guinea voted for independence, the French fled en masse, and in revenge took with them whatever they could carry, even the telephones from the walls. Only 20 French administrators out of an estimated 41,000 remained. The stage was then set for peasant and worker interests to influence the government and the development of Guinea. But, as in South Africa, this was short lived. The new “revolutionary” politicians soon prostituted the ideals of the liberation struggle, as is inevitable whenever “revolutionary” politicians occupy positions of power and privilege.

The Awareness League : an African Anarchist Movement

The Awareness League began as an informal study group at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the mid 1980s. The group continued to function essentially as a leftist coalition composed of marxists, trotskyites, human rights activists, and leftists and radicals of various persuasions. Until 1989, the group consisted mostly of student activists, journalists, and university graduates. The different tendencies within the body generated intense debates and self-criticism.

This type of group was not without precedent, though. At Ibadan University, a similar left coalition, The Axe, had existed since about 1983. Its members published for a while a periodic newsletter known also as The Axe, and later The Socialist Register. This group barely survived the crisis that engulfed the left, notably the authoritarian left, in the second half of the 1980s.

The debates that went on within the Awareness League at the end of the 1980s brought to the fore the need to transcend the body’s organizational structure — namely, its informality and its seeming absence of a clear ideological direction. This turmoil coincided with the political convulsions in Eastern Europe and the growing unpopularity of marxist socialism around the world.

The eventual collapse of Communism was foreshadowed in a lengthy analysis in The Torch newspaper, a monthly publication of the Revolutionary Socialist League in the U.S.A. The former trotskyites at The Torch ran a long and thorough repudiation of marxism-leninism and the state socialist systems it had given rise to. Authored by Ron Taber, and titled “A Look at Leninism,” the series attempted to show that Soviet-style state socialism was doomed.

Members of the Awareness League study group followed this critique with close interest. Its brutal perceptiveness left most members of the Awareness League in no doubt about the way forward for the League. In response to the series published in The Torch, the League wrote, “we are a body of young, unemployed university graduates, students, and artisans, interested in, and committed to, the teachings and principles of socialism. We hold revolutionary socialism as our manifesto... We are particularly impressed by the publication, ‘A Look at Leninism,’ which we consider an important self-critical effort, which no true marxist or revolutionary can afford to wish away.”

Subsequent events led to the transformation of the group into an anarchist organization, though it still retained its old name. By February 1, 1990, the Awareness League formally shed its former image as a leftist coalition. The group’s charter, approved in 1991, pronounced the League as a:social libertarian organization inspired by and committed to the ideals, principles, objectives, goals, ends and purposes of revolutionary socialism and anarchosyndicalism, characterized as the antithesis of statism as well as the manifestations and institutions thereof.

With capitalism enmeshed in interminable crisis and its institutions — social, economic, political and cultural — increasingly succumbing to fatigue across the globe, the imperative for sustained struggle against the forces of capitalism has never been greater. It is instructive to note that the crisis of capitalism has been most intensive and pronounced in the underdeveloped third world countries. This is not surprising, to say the least : capitalism’s chain was bound to break at its weakest links.

The Awareness League upholds the principles and dictates of internationalism, convinced that national boundaries and territoriality are but artificial creations. The League stands for and is committed to peace and rejects war, militarism, fascism, and racism as well as the acquisition and development of technologies that promote war, militarism, and, in turn, undermine peace and peaceful coexistence among nations.

The League advocates violence only as a form of resistance to the violence and violent methods and tactics of the ruling class, its agencies and collaborators or as a form of liberation struggle. To this end, the Awareness League, as an anarchosyndicalist and revolutionary socialist front, proclaims all over the world and insists that no form of collaboration can exist between the ruling classes — the exploiter — and their victims, the masses.

The League has since grown into a 1000-member movement with members in all 15 southern Nigerian states, as well as the states of Kaduna, Adamawa and Plateau in the north. In 1996 the League was admitted as the Nigerian section of the International Workers Association (IWA), the anarchosyndicalist international.