A group of striking textile workers demand an extra R5 per day at the Consolidated Textile Mill in February 1973. 
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

A collaboration with the Chris Hani Institute

Long after the decolonisation wave swept across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, two large countries – Brazil and South Africa – remained in the grip of wretched political systems. The military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985) and the apartheid regime in South Africa (1948–1994) faced significant challenges from a range of political and social forces. Although many of these struggles are etched into public memory, the role of workers’ resistance is little known outside of unions, as if workers’ struggles were marginal to the story of democratisation.

On the contrary, in both countries, the struggles of workers were central in bringing down odious regimes. In South Africa, the 1973 strikes in the industrial port city of Durban began the process of building a militant trade union movement that would, by the second half of the 1980s, have the apartheid regime reeling from its blows. In Brazil, the 1978–1981 strikes in three industrial cities in greater São Paulo – Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul – are often said to have marked the beginning of the end of the military dictatorship. The strikes were led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then president of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union and the current president of Brazil.

Striking Frame Group workers meet for a report back on negotiations with management in Bolton Hall in 1973.
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

Workers led the way against entrenched forms of domination that not only exploited them, but also oppressed the people as a whole, and the democracies to come were first incubated on the shop floor. This dossier is a contribution to recovering that part of South Africa’s history.

The 1973 Durban strikes were part of a wider political ferment in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a generative site of political experimentation and innovation. Black workers had a long history of organisation and mobilisation in Durban and its surrounding areas. African dockworkers first struck in 1874, and in 1906 many workers, including those labouring in white homes, walked off their jobs to join the rural rebellion against a new poll tax. Led by Bhambatha kaMancinza, the rebellion took the form of guerrilla attacks launched from the sanctuary of the Nkandla forest near Eshowe, a small town to the north of Durban. In 1913, Indian workers on sugar cane plantations, most of them indentured, organised a massive strike. Dockworkers in Durban went on strike again in 1920, and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, which was formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919, became a major force in the city in the late 1920s.¹ Zulu Phungula, a charismatic worker leader, led another period of confrontation on the Durban docks from the late 1930s.

In 1930, Johannes Nkosi, a dockworker organiser and powerful presence in the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), which was known to workers as abantu ababomvu (‘the red people’), was murdered by the police after he led a public burning of pass books, the documents that the apartheid government required Africans to carry in order to access cities. Between 1949 and 1959, workers on the Durban docks organised another five strikes.

On 12 August 1946, there was a new moment of rupture as African mine workers in and around Johannesburg struck, demanding higher wages. They continued the strike for a week in the face of police terror, which killed nine workers and wounded another 1,248. Although the strike was crushed, it had an enduring impact on struggles for freedom and provoked a shift towards more direct confrontation with the state. The communist-led African Mine Workers’ Union, which had organised the strike, gave birth to the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), formed in Johannesburg in 1955.

Sactu was aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) and sought to connect labour organising to the struggle for national liberation. The federation played a leading role in the wave of national strikes, which picked up frequency and militancy in the late 1950s. This was also the case in Durban, which, largely as a result of its dockworkers’ tenacity, became a key node of militant trade unionism.

The attempt to exclude Africans from any autonomous presence in urban life was central to the logic of apartheid. Cities were seen as sites of white modernity in which Africans could only be present as strictly subordinated and segregated workers. Pass laws were the key mechanism in the system of oppression that increasingly sought to confine African family life to ethnically delineated rural ‘homelands’ governed in the name of ‘tradition’.

In 1960, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a breakaway faction from the ANC, resolved to directly challenge the state on pass laws. On the morning of 21 March 1960, around 20,000 people gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a township in today’s Gauteng Province. Tension grew as fighter jets swooped low over the protestors. Barricades were rushed, and the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, murdering 69 people. As Frantz Fanon wrote, the Sharpeville massacre ‘shook [global] public opinion’.²On 8 April, the state banned the ANC and the PAC.

Despite its open affiliation with the ANC, Sactu was not banned. It initiated a few strikes the following year, most significantly in Durban, where nurses at King George V Hospital and workers at the Lion Match Company went on strike. But in December 1962, the apartheid government banned 45 officials in Sactu and its affiliate unions, excluding them  from public life, and the federation was forced underground. Black trade unionism had largely been smashed.

For more than a decade, white power was at ease. The economy grew unevenly but rapidly, and the state appeared impregnable. An authoritarian regime, on and off the shop floor, as well as rising employment and workers’ increased purchasing power, resulted in relative acquiescence. But in 1969, a sudden economic downturn produced retrenchments and an erosion in real wages that put Black workers and their families under growing strain.

White supervisors undertake Black labourers’ work in a market in January 1973. 
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

New Ideas on Campus

At the same time, new forms of dissent emerged among staff and students on the University of Natal’s Durban campus. Initially this flourishing of political creativity centred around two charismatic men, Steve Biko and Richard Turner, both of whom used their charisma to enable collective deliberation rather than to act as gurus to passive followers.

Biko, who was from King William’s Town (now eQonce) in the Eastern Cape, was educated at Mariannhill Monastery’s St. Francis College outside Pinetown, an industrial area on the western edge of Durban. In 1966, at the age of 22, he returned to Durban to study medicine at the University of Natal’s segregated Black medical school.

Turner was from Cape Town and had completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ideas were also important to Biko. He was interested in a range of other thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Karl Marx, and in recent political experiments in China and Tanzania, as well as Yugoslavia, which he had visited in the 1960s.

Turner proposed a democratic, participatory vision for society rooted in a humanistic Marxism with, he wrote, a specific commitment to ‘popular participation, based on workers’ control’.³Biko, also a radical humanist, drew on thinkers such as Stokely Carmichael, James Cone, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Kwame Nkrumah.⁴He was a sharp critic of the racial paternalism of white liberalism and insisted, against the thinking of some white intellectuals on the left, that discussions of class should not eviscerate the question of race.

Turner, Biko, and their comrades were thinking from Durban amid global political upheaval. The political energies generated by the Black Power movement in the Americas (from the United States to Trinidad) were in the air, as were the primarily youth-driven 1968 uprisings that rocked cities from Mexico City and Dakar to Lahore and Rio de Janeiro. Anti-colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria were a key influence in the Paris uprising, where there was an alliance between workers and students. As the scholar Kristin Ross writes, this enabled ‘unforeseen alliances and synchronicities between social sectors and between very diverse people working together to conduct their affairs collectively’.⁵

In the same year, Biko led the formation of the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), a Black student group. Headquartered in Durban, it incubated ideas that came to define the Black Consciousness Movement. Barney Pityana, a leading figure in Saso, recalled ‘long hours of interaction and debate among friends’ during which Biko ‘listened and challenged ideas as they emerged, concretised them, and brought them back for further development’.⁶

Biko is well known for sparking engagement with ideas of Black Power, Caribbean radicalism, and African nationalism. However, he is less well known for introducing Paulo Freire’s ideas to South Africa, ideas that were widely taken up by radical academics and students in Durban, including Turner when he arrived in the city in 1970.⁷

David Hemson (second from the left), Harriet Bolton (far right), and textile workers Joyce Gumede (second from the right) and Desmond Matabela (far left);attend a strike meeting in Bolton Hall.
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

A Return to Labour Militancy

In 1969, dockworkers in Durban went on strike and were met with swift repression at gunpoint. Around 2,000 dockers were dismissed and forced onto trains that took them back to rural areas. In 1971, they threatened another strike. In neighbouring South West Africa (now Namibia), which was ruled by South Africa at the time, a general strike was organised in December of the same year, and strikes continued until April 1972. It was clear that the period of labour quiescence was coming to an end.

A confluence of factors battered the apartheid economy in the early 1970s, including a drop in international oil production, higher oil prices, and the US Federal Reserve Bank delinking the US dollar from the gold standard. The vast majority of African households were living in poverty, and an increase in rail fares compounded the situation.

On 23 February 1971, more than 24,000 workers walked out of clothing factories in and around Durban, and many participated in a mass meeting held at the Curries Fountain sports ground, a storied site in the history of popular organisation. Employers, unable to resort to disciplinary action due to the scale of the walk out, quickly agreed to the workers’ demand for a 20 per cent wage increase.

After the strike in the clothing factories, two students in Turner’s orbit, Halton Cheadle and David Davis, along with David Hemson, a young academic and committed militant, sought to connect with the growing labour militancy. The group was approached by Harriet Bolton, who had helped organise the Curries Fountain meeting and was part of the Garment Workers’ Industrial Union (GWIU), an Indian union. Her attempts to include African workers in unions had been rebuffed by the white leaders of the Trade Union Council of South Africa (Tucsa). In 1974, Bolton would lead the GWIU’s departure from the council. She approached Turner for help and, working closely with Hemson, they decided to offer union jobs to radical students. The students engaged workers and unions in various ways, including undertaking research related to wages and producing Isisebenzi (‘The Worker’), a newspaper that published interviews with workers, as well as more wide-ranging articles derived from the practice of careful listening.

Dockworkers struck again in 1972. Contrary to the idea that renewed labour militancy in the early 1970s was entirely ‘spontaneous’, Hemson has noted that various letters and pamphlets that appeared before and during the strike ‘provided concrete evidence of an underground network which did not declare itself even when open trade unionism started among dockworkers’.⁸

When dockworkers went on strike again in 1972, they were not only defying their white bosses: the strike was also a challenge to traditional authority, which, in a standard technique of colonial domination, was integrated into the domination of labour along with broader African life. In 1972, J.B. Buthelezi, the uncle of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the reactionary Zulu nationalist organisation Inkatha, found his authority contested by dockworkers. One demanded to know ‘Who is this man, who elected him to represent us?’.⁹Cheadle, who was at the meeting, recalled that when Buthelezi ‘got up to speak for the workers, they all shouted him down. It was absolute chaos’. Morris Ndlovu, a dockworker, affirmed: ‘It was at that meeting where we realised our power because we were talking for ourselves’.¹⁰

The situation came to a head in early 1973. On 9 January, African workers in factories across the city went on strike to demand pay increases, in many cases by two to three fold. They woke at 3 am and made their way to a nearby football stadium, chanting, as they moved through rush hour traffic, ‘Ufil’ umuntu, ufile usadikiza, wamthint’ esweni, esweni usadikiza’ (‘A person is dead, but their spirit still lives; if you poke the iris of their eye, they still come alive’). Hemson recently recalled that day in moving prose:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea-processing plant.

The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers and the gatherings of locked-out workers did the individual have an expression of confidence.¹¹

The moment had the feel of a general strike and opened the way for the ructions to come. Writing in early 1974, Sam Mhlongo, a medical doctor who had been imprisoned on Robben Island as a teenager, observed that ‘this strike, although settled, had a detonating effect’.¹²

The bosses blamed ‘agitators’ and ‘intimidation’ and threatened severe punishment against ‘ringleaders’. They refused to negotiate with the workers, called the riot police, and insisted that the workers elect a committee of representatives. Following a long history of dockers’ struggles in Durban, the workers refused. The Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu, arrived and appealed to the crowd to return to work, promising to negotiate on their behalf. He also cynically sought to divert vertical conflict between African workers and white bosses onto a more horizontal plane by dividing Indian and African workers.¹³

By the end of the month, workers in around 100 factories and other workplaces went on strike, including more than 6,000 workers at the notoriously exploitative Frame Group, at the time one of the largest textile companies in the world. In the words of one worker, ‘Although I make blankets for Mr. Philip Frame, I can’t afford blankets for my own children’.¹⁴The police beat and detained some of the strikers, but despite the repression, strikes cascaded up and down the coast and as far inland as Pietermaritzburg, affecting the docks, mills, manufacturing, and transport industries. Many Indian workers joined the strikes, and the consistent demands from the bosses to elect representative committees were refused.

On 5 February, 3,000 municipal workers, African and Indian, walked off the job; by 7 February, this number rose to 16,000. Municipal work was classified as an essential service, and so the strike was considered illegal. Rubbish was not collected, graves were not dug, and food was left to rot as the municipal market and abattoir shut.

Workers began to march through the city under observation from police on the streets and helicopters in the air. The presence of rebellious workers on the streets became a symbolically insurgent presence in the apartheid city. At the end of March, estimates of the number of workers that had gone on strike ranged from 65,000 to 100,000 across more than 150 factories and workplaces.

Unions were formed at a rapid clip in the chemical, garment, metal, and textile industries. As workers began to unionise, there was a terrible incident at Prilla Mills in Pietermaritzburg, where the brutal labour regime was rooted in systemic sexual abuse as well as child labour (which was highly unusual in urban South Africa). Princess Osman, the leading organiser at the mills, was attacked on her way home and her face disfigured with acid.¹⁵

Coronation Brick workers march along North Coast Road in Durban, led by a worker waving a red flag. 
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

Educating the Educators

The strikes began with an affirmation of humanism, a politics that exceeded the demand for wage increases. There were also public hints of a connection to the national liberation struggle, with workers singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (‘God Bless Africa’), a Christian hymn that had become an anthem for the nation being forged in struggle. As Hemson observed, ‘The workers started to talk about [the African National] Congress. If you went to their homes at night, they would dig up the floorboards and bring out old ANC pamphlets’.¹⁶

Edward Webster, who arrived in Durban in February 1973 to take up an academic post, recalled that the working class ‘was not some collective tabula rasa waiting for white intellectuals to tell them what to think. They had their own history and political traditions… [including] the national political tradition [which] had deep roots in Durban and its surrounding areas’.¹⁷However, some university-trained intellectuals were unable to understand that workers had entered into open contestation with their own political histories and ideas. This tendency, which remains common today, is exemplified by the reaction of an influential radical white academic to a survey of workers. When the survey results showed that Moses Mabhida, a trade unionist and communist who had gone into exile a week after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, was one of their most respected leaders, the academic declared that no such person existed and that the survey must have been fabricated.¹⁸

Connections to the national liberation movement were not only at the level of ideas; there were also personal connections. For example, Harold Nxasana, a former Sactu militant and political prisoner who was active in the labour milieu in the early 1970s, was employed in one of the organisations set up by university radicals to service the labour movement.

Hemson has noted that Turner and Biko, and many of their followers, did not grasp the enduring power of the national liberation struggle and its close ties to the ANC. However, in the years since, several scholars have come to recognise that this tradition maintained a strong presence among workers. As a result, workers’ commitment to the ANC tradition in the 1970s is now much better understood.

The enduring tendency to overlook rich political traditions among the oppressed underscores that ‘it is essential to educate the educator himself’, as Karl Marx wrote in Theses on Feuerbach.¹⁹Hemson has made an important observation in this regard:

In truth, the ‘teachers’ had much to learn about the militancy of women workers; existing networks in the workplace and society; the underlying loyalty to the ANC when there was the opportunity to safely express this; the spirit of the Mountain (of rural armed resistance against chieftainship in Pondoland); the militancy of many migrant workers; how to struggle for reforms without becoming reformist; how to exercise leadership without tutelage; and what approaches to adopt to maintain workers’ control over leadership in the union.²⁰

Vusi Shezi, who went on to become an organiser with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and whose frustration with management’s treatment of him and his co-workers led him to join the 1973 strikes, also spoke to broader anti-colonial motivations behind the strikes, recalling an event where his anti-colonial perspective got him in trouble with the bosses, who in turn reassigned him to more demanding work:

I was working the night shift. … I was saying to myself, ‘I am wasting my time and I am not studying. If I was using this time to study… but I don’t have books’. … Then I started writing on the big trolley… taking a piece of chalk, what I know about the arrival of the whites starting in 1652 and how South Africa was colonized. … Unfortunately, I forgot to wipe it off. Then the next morning, it was seen by senior management. They see this trolley with a very good map of Africa, and some background on colonialism, with a bit of an attack on the apartheid government and complaints about black leaders that were jailed.²¹

But, of course, enduring commitments to the national struggle did not overshadow that fact wages were a critically important issue in the 1973 strikes. Speaking in the heat of the strikes, one worker declared, ‘The child that does not cry dies… we should cry for ourselves for working hungry’.²²Another remarked, ‘Our bosses go in Mercedes cars, yet their workers do not even have overalls for work’.²³Other workers reported that they had to use loan sharks to get through the month. The bosses, the white media in Durban, and the Afrikaner nationalists who held state power largely abandoned their simultaneously paranoid and comforting fantasies about ‘agitators’, ‘communist plots’, and ‘overseas influence’ and settled on the idea that the strikes were strictly about wages rather than a wider political project.

Reports on the strikes from the Institute for Industrial Education founded by Turner and others in May 1973 and in the Black Review, a publication initiated by Biko in the same year as a project of Black Community Programmes, also looked at the strikes in solely economic terms, as a question of wages.²⁴The historian Julian Brown has argued that this understanding likely resulted in the state not resorting to the kind of intense violence and large-scale repression it had previously used against mass mobilisation. This insight generates another: it may have been tactically useful for the workers to avoid directly political issues in their public speech while sustaining a more political understanding in private speech.

Brown also notes that white elites frequently saw the strike in ethnic terms, as an outcome of a particular Zulu history and culture. But of course, as he observes, the strikes included Indian and African workers, and Africans of various ethnicities, including Pondo and Shangaan workers. Moreover, the interpretation of the strikes through a masculinist understanding of Zulu culture could hardly account for the many women who came to the fore, including Indian women in some factories.

Hemson has reminded contemporary audiences that Turner made a fundamental political mistake in aligning with the reactionary ethnically constituted organisation Inkatha, which, he argues, Turner misunderstood as an at least potentially progressive movement of the rural poor. In contrast, he notes that Biko was very clear on the collaborationist character of Inkatha. In the 1980s, it would violently attack the labour movement, and, in 1989, murder one its great woman leaders, the Numsa shop steward Jabu Ndlovu.

Some academic work has, explicitly or implicitly, ascribed the deliberative collective practices and formal democratic commitments that emerged from the Durban strikes and characterised the union movement for decades to come to the involvement of mostly white intellectuals inspired by the New Left in Western Europe and North America. This eviscerates a well-known history of collective practices of deliberative consensus-seeking rooted in rural life that has long shaped myriad struggles by workers and others. This history is well described in the work of T. Dunbar Moodie and Vivienne Ndatshe on migrant workers in the Johannesburg gold mines.²⁵It was highlighted by Nelson Mandela in his statement from the dock in 1962 when he argued that the ‘seeds of revolutionary democracy’ lay in the councils, known as Pitso, Imbizo, or Kgotla, through which rural communities, following pre-colonial practices, governed themselves.²⁶Describing the practices in these councils as ‘democracy in its purest form’, Mandela explained that, there, everyone could speak, and ‘meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached’.²⁷

This collective and carefully deliberative search for consensus remains a constitutive force in the contemporary movement of the urban poor Abahlali baseMjondolo (meaning ‘residents of the shacks’), which emerged in Durban in 2005 and today has more than a 100,000 members. The same is true of the African humanism manifest in the moment of rupture on factory floors in Durban in 1973, as powerfully expressed by Emma Mashinini, a leading trade unionist in the 1980s: ‘I am human. I exist. I am a complete person’.²⁸The oppressed do not enter the political terrain without pre-existing ethical and political commitments, practices, and memories.

The democratic character of the labour movement that emerged from the Durban Moment is best understood as a productive encounter, what Fanon called ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’ between university-trained intellectuals and working-class militancy. ²⁹

Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu addresses Coronation Brick workers in Durban North, January 1973. 
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

After the Durban Moment

In March 1973, Biko and Turner were both banned, the former exiled to his hometown in the Ciskei Bantustan and the latter to his home in a white working-class Durban suburb. Hemson, who had helped found dock, furniture, and metalworker unions in the first three months of 1973, was banned the following year.

On 25 September 1974, Saso organised a rally at Curries Fountain in solidarity with the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo), whose struggle for independence in Mozambique was nearing its conclusion. The event was banned the day before it was scheduled, but 5,000 people turned up and the atmosphere of defiance was electric. The police disrupted the rally, and nine Saso activists were arrested, tried, and jailed. The arrests brought the period of political innovation that scholar Tony Morphet famously called the ‘Durban Moment’ to an end. ³⁰In September 1977 Biko was murdered by police, and Turner was assassinated in January of the following year.

After the successes of the 1973 strikes, workers became increasingly conscious of their position as the industrial proletariat driving the industrial economy. They were more aware of their power and the fact that employers could not easily dismiss large swathes of the semi-skilled workforce. In addition, more women began to emerge as union leaders: in 1975, Emma Mashinini founded the South African Commercial, Catering, and Allied Workers’ Union (Saccawu) in Johannesburg, and Jabu Ndlovu would become a powerful leader in the Metal and Allied Workers’ Union (Mawu) and then Numsa in the 1980s.

In June 1976, a series of protests led by Black school children against both apartheid education and the wider system of oppression was met with murderous repression. The Soweto uprising, as it came to be known, shifted the primary locus of resistance to Johannesburg and ignited a national turn to open revolt. In 1979, Black trade unions were legalised, and many of those that emerged after the Durban Moment came together through the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in Hammanskraal, north of Johannesburg.

Fosatu was committed to workers’ control of unions and on the shop floor, as well as the empowerment and education shop stewards. There was a clear sense that the democracy being developed in the labour movement would, in time, become the nucleus for the democratisation of society. This was expressed in the slogan ‘Building tomorrow today’.³¹Like the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union before it, Fosatu undertook impressive cultural work including organising theatre, poetry, and choir projects. Again there were productive connections between grassroots militants and university-trained intellectuals. Ari Sitas, an academic in Durban, played an important role in the explosion of cultural work and innovation in unions. Alfred Temba Qabula, a migrant worker from emaMpondweni who had participated in the 1959 peasant uprising known as the Pondo Rebellion as a teenager and joined Mawu while working at the Durban Dunlop factory in the early 1980s, became known among unions and the broader progressive movement as a renowned poet.

A famous speech, discussed and drafted by many and delivered in 1982 by the Fosatu Secretary-General Joe Foster, made a strong argument for the organisational autonomy of labour from the national liberation movement: ‘Workers must strive to build their own powerful and effective organisation, even while they are part of the wider popular struggle. This organisation is necessary… to ensure that the popular movement is not hijacked by elements who will, in the end, have no option but to turn against their worker supporters’.³²

Although Fosatu was a powerful force, it was unable to unite all the unions in one federation. The first moment of unity in action across the progressive labour movement took place when the radical doctor and trade unionist Neil Aggett, an organiser for the African Food and Canning Workers’ Union, was murdered in police detention in 1982. In response, unions across the country went on strike, opening new possibilities to forge the wider unity that was to come.

The historian Jabulani Sithole writes that Sactu began to encourage its ‘underground operatives to infiltrate them [unions] with the aim of undermining them from within if they were regarded as reactionary, or in order to take them over if they were deemed progressive’.³³Between 1981–1985, Sactu underground operatives Samuel Bhekuyise Kikine, Thobile Mhlahlo, Sydney Mufamadi, Samson Ndou, Themba Nxumalo, Matthew Oliphant, and others participated in building unity among a range of unions.

The high levels of organisation first built on the shop floor began to move into wider society. On 20 August 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was launched in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. Hundreds of organisations became affiliated with the UDF, including unions; youth, women’s, and student organisations; religious groups; and professional associations. In a famous speech from 1987, UDF leader Murphy Morobe affirmed its commitment to radical democracy in clear terms: ‘we are talking about direct as opposed to indirect political representation, mass participation’.³⁴Many commentators who were in or close to the UDF argued that its formally organised democratic practices were drawn from trade union experiences.

However, the relationship between the UDF and the union movement was not uncomplicated. There was a significant degree of distrust between the unions aligned with the UDF and the Fosatu unions that remained independent from it. This escalated a simmering debate between two factions of the radical intelligentsia, who described each other (but not themselves) as either ‘workerists’ or ‘populists’. The workerists wanted the union movement to remain independent of the ANC so that it could sustain the autonomy of organised working-class power from the multi-class national liberation movement. The populists saw white supremacy as the primary problem confronting Black people across class and wanted to marshal maximum unity in the struggle for national liberation.

The workerists dominated Fosatu until 1985, when a new and much bigger federation – the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) – was formed and launched in Durban at Curries Fountain following a process of unity summits and meetings that had begun in 1981. The balance of power had shifted to the populists. Fosatu dissolved into Cosatu, which explicitly allied itself with the UDF, and later, the ANC.

But, notably, the expression of the national tradition associated with the ANC and now expressed in Cosatu had, in important respects, been shaped by the Durban Moment, including ideas of worker control and Black Consciousness. Jay Naidoo, the first general secretary of the new federation, recalls first being radicalised at a stirring public meeting led by Biko in an Indian neighbourhood in Durban.³⁵Cosatu rapidly became extraordinarily powerful in workplaces and wider society and, along with the UDF, made significant and decisive contributions to the collapse of the apartheid regime.

In 1990, the apartheid state began to concede that a shift to some form of democracy, limited of course to liberal democracy, was inevitable. The Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani has argued that ‘The most important force for this change was not the armed struggle, nor exile politics, nor the international boycott movement’, but rather the political work of ‘student activists of all colours and by migrant and township labour’.³⁶

The democratic popular politics with their roots in the Durban strikes were not entirely forgotten as apartheid gave way to a new order. As Mashinini insisted, ‘When we elect leaders to be public representatives, we do not mean that they have divine rights to rule us. They are servants of the people and must accept that we have a right to criticise them. That’s what we learnt from the trenches of the labour struggle that dealt a death blow to apartheid’.³⁷

However, the socialist hopes of the unions gave way to deep disappointments resulting from the accommodation between capital, white power, and national elites. As Qabula, the most compelling voice among the worker poets, lamented, ‘Slovo and Hani saw red everywhere… But Tutu and the Bishops… saw rainbows’.³⁸In 2002, he died in poverty, like so many others who were on the frontlines of struggle. He left these haunting lines:

we are the movable ladders
that take people up towards the skies,
left out in the open for the rain
left with the memories of teargas, panting for breath.³⁹

The Durban strikes, and the workers’ struggles that built a powerful trade union movement in their wake, were not given their rightful place in official memory. Today, they are seldom remembered outside of union circles.

The sometimes bitterly personal and sectarian battles that have been waged in academic journals over which political forces – workerists, populists, Black Consciousness activists, white intellectuals, or operatives in the ANC underground – should be credited for both the wider Durban Moment and for building the post-strikes union movement have not helped matters. On the contrary, this contestation has often taken the form of an intra-elite battle.

The workers who built democratic forms of counter-power from within a deeply oppressive society, eventually bringing down that system, are seldom given full acknowledgement and respect. Their history still awaits an adequate telling.

A section of the crowd of striking Coronation Brick workers in Durban North, January 1973. 
Credit: David Hemson Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries.

Notes

Bibliography

The art in this dossier is based on still frames from the music video ‘IMF’ by Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 (Knitting Factory Records) featuring Dead Prez’s M1, directed by Jerome Bernard and produced by Duck Factory.

Seun Kuti is a member of the band Egypt 80 and the youngest son of the late Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer and political figure Fela Kuti, whose popular album Zombies, released in 1976, heavily criticised the military dictatorship that was in power at the time and inspired resistance among the Nigerian people. Nearly forty years after the release of his father’s album, Seun’s music video ‘IMF’ harks back to the continued assault against the sovereignty of the African people, featuring rows of growing zombie-like International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials chasing an African man and, finally, turning him into a money-obsessed, disfigured monster identical to themselves.

Before the pandemic was announced by the World Health Organisation in March 2020, the poorer nations of the world already struggled with seriously high – and unpayable – levels of debt. Between 2011 and 2019, the World Bank reported, ‘public debt in a sample of 65 developing countries increased by 18 percent of GDP on average – and by much more in several cases. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, debt increased by 27 percent of GDP on average’.¹

The debt crisis did not take place because of government spending on long-term infrastructure projects, which could eventually pay for themselves by increasing growth rates and allow these countries to exit from a permanent debt crisis. Rather, these governments borrowed money upon borrowed money to pay off older debts to wealthy bondholders as well as to pay for their current bills (such as to maintain education, health, and basic civic services). ‘Among the thirty-three sub-Saharan countries in our sample’, the World Bank noted, ‘current spending outstripped capital investment by a ratio of nearly three to one’.² When the pandemic struck, countries that had adopted the World Bank-International Monetary Fund policy to grow their way out of the debt crisis floundered. Growth rates shrank, which meant that debt volumes ballooned, and so these governments decided to borrow more and adopt deeper austerity policies, which dramatically increased the debt burden on their populations.

Registering, in their own way, what is universally acknowledged as an intractable debt crisis in the poorer nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that a serious banking crisis is likely to emerge (while ignoring the factors driving this scenario). ‘Our updated global bank stress test shows that, in a severely adverse scenario, up to 29 percent of emerging market banks would breach capital requirements’, the IMF wrote in October 2022.³ This means that the context of high debt, high inflation, and low growth rates (with lowered employment expectations) could lead to the collapse of a third of the banks in the poorer nations.

Neither the IMF nor the World Bank nor indeed any of the international financial institutions (IFIs) have any credible pathway out of this crisis. Indeed, the IMF report surrenders to reality as it tells central banks across the globe to ‘avoid a de-anchoring of inflation expectations’ and to ensure that ‘the tightening of financial conditions needs to be calibrated carefully, to aim at avoiding disorderly market conditions that could put financial stability unduly at risk’.⁴ The focus here is to keep ‘the market’ happy, while there is remarkably no care for the downward spiral of living conditions for the vast majority of the people on the planet. In its October 2022 Fiscal Monitor Report, subtitled Helping People Bounce Back, the IMF noted that while governments’ top priorities must be ‘to ensure everyone has access to affordable food and to protect low-income households from rising inflation’, they must not attempt ‘to limit price increases through price controls, subsidies, or tax cuts’, which would ‘be costly to the budget and ultimately ineffective’.⁵

In January 2023, the IMF’s World Economic Outlook predicted a slightly better, albeit ‘subpar’, growth forecast but warned of continued worries of debt distress in the poorer nations, writing that ‘The combination of high debt levels from the pandemic, lower growth, and higher borrowing costs exacerbates the vulnerability of these economies, especially those with significant near-term dollar financing needs’.⁶ The antidote to debt distress, according to the IMF, is ‘fiscal consolidation and growth-enhancing supply-side reforms’, namely more of the same old austerity-debt trap. If the governments of the poorer nations are told not to use these basic tools (which are used routinely in the richer nations), their only choice – as far as the IMF is concerned – is to borrow in order to provide even low levels of relief to the very poorest people in their countries. Effectively, the IMF has surrendered to the prevailing reality and offers the poorer nations no viable exit from a permanent debt crisis.

This dossier has been drafted with the knowledge that the permanent debt crisis besieging the poorer nations has not resulted from short-term market failures or from business cycles that will rebound, and that it is not fully a consequence of governments’ mismanagement of finances or deep-rooted corruption. Rather, our assessment of the debt crisis draws from an important speech given by Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) at the Organisation for African Unity in July 1987. ‘Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who colonised us’, Sankara explained. ‘Debt is neocolonialism’, with the fiscal and monetary policies of many of the African states taken over by the ‘technical assassins’ of the IFIs. ‘Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa aimed at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules’, he continued, with the IFIs setting policy by using the debt as an instrument to demand ‘structural adjustment’ of domestic finance ministries and central banks.⁷

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s former prime minister and then chair of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission), came to the Organisation for African Unity meeting in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) in 1987 to say that the entire debt of the poorer nations could not be repaid and should be forgiven. Sankara acknowledged the importance of the Brundtland Commission’s assessment and then said:

Debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure. Those who led us to indebtedness gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No, Mr. President, they played, they lost. That’s the rule of the game, and life goes on. We cannot repay because we don’t have any means to do so. We cannot pay because we are not responsible for this debt.⁸

One alternative to the debt crisis is a debt strike, which is what Cuba’s Fidel Castro began to raise in his speech at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in New Delhi in 1983 and which was on the agenda for the Continental Dialogue on the Foreign Debt in Havana in August 1985. It is within this dynamic that Sankara spoke of the need for an ‘Addis Ababa united front against debt’.

The context for such a ‘united front against debt’ has returned, but the political will for it now is as low as it was then. However, the world is very different today than it was in the 1980s. Other alternatives have since presented themselves, such as those available through regional integration and through alternatives to the Western-backed IFIs (for example, financing from China and other large developing countries).⁹

This dossier opens with an introduction to the world of the IFIs – mainly the IMF – and their role in exacerbating the poverty brought on by colonialism and transforming it into a permanent debt crisis, and then moves into a deeper assessment of the contradictions of sovereign debt on the African continent. The final section carries a statement on the IMF-induced debt crisis by the Collective on African Political Economy and offers alternatives to IFI-led funding to manage the turbulence of debt.

The Fundamentalism of the IMF and the Permanent Debt Crisis

In 1919, John Maynard Keynes of the United Kingdom’s Treasury Department published a book that became a sensation. In the book, entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes observed that the Great War had ‘so shaken the system as to endanger the life of Europe itself’.¹⁰ The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, did not grasp the underlying problems that had led to the war and only cemented the victory of some countries against others. The treaty left structural problems intact, such as the ‘disordered finances’, in Keynes’ words, of many countries (not only Germany, which faced an enormous and unpayable reparations bill). The Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Sterling Crisis of 1931, and the Banking Panics of 1931–1933 revealed the underlying vulnerabilities of capitalism, with the ‘disordered finances’ being the spur towards the potential general collapse of the system. In 1936, Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, a manual to save capitalism by a theoretical plea for governments to use state resources to recycle profits and balance an unbalanceable system. Keynes, who dabbled in eugenics theory, did not extend his views on state intervention to protect the system in the British colonies and prevent the decline of their population’s living standards.

When the United States invited its allies to Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) in July 1944 to discuss how to manage the structural crises that contributed to the Second World War, Keynes – who was one of the main figures at this meeting – said that it would be ‘the most monstrous monkey house assembled for many years’, suggesting that ‘twenty one countries [that] have been invited’ – presenting a list of primarily colonised countries, from Guatemala and Liberia to Iraq and the Philippines – ‘clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground’.¹¹ Instead, Keynes preferred that the two founder states of the Bretton Woods Conference, the United Kingdom and the United States, ‘settle the charter and the main details of the new body without being subjected to the delays and confused counsels of an international conference’, as he explained a few years earlier.¹² In fact, Keynes (on behalf of the United Kingdom) and Harry Dexter White (on behalf of the United States) arrived at the meeting with two plans already drafted, which they put on the table and upon which the final Articles of Agreement for the International Monetary Fund as well as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (or the World Bank) were built. The other participants were largely onlookers.

Despite the limited input of most of the world, which was still under colonial rule, the purpose of the IMF as laid out in the Articles of Agreement was straightforward, none of it built to extend the power of the British imperial system. The main thrust of the articles was to assist the ‘expansion and balanced growth of international trade’ and to ‘contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy’.¹³ To establish these ‘primary objectives’, the IMF was tasked with preventing any short-term problems from becoming long-term crises, such as by maintaining exchange rate stability and facilitating loans to prevent balance-of-payments spirals ‘without resorting to measures destructive to national or international prosperity’. When the former colonial countries won their freedom, most of them became members of the IMF based on the Articles of Agreement, and in 1961, the IMF created its Africa Department. Until the Third World Debt Crisis that began to spiral with Mexico’s default in 1982, the IMF had primarily operated by providing short-term financing in a relatively modest fashion through the Compensatory Financing Facility (1963) and the Buffer Stock Financing Facility (1969).¹⁴

In the aftermath of Mexico’s default, the IMF conducted what its managing director, Michel Camdessus, called the ‘silent revolution’.¹⁵Against its manifest purpose, the IMF began to respond to requests for short-term bridge financing by demanding that countries radically change their domestic economic policies as a condition for approval. Through their new programmes, the Structural Adjustment Facility (1986), and then the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1987), the IMF put a singular recipe on the table: privatise the economy, including the state sector; commodify areas of human life that had up to that point been in the public domain; terminate any government deficit financing; and dissolve any barriers on foreign capital investment and trade (such as subsidies and tariffs). The IMF had experimented with these measures in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru in the 1950s with limited success before turning them into the basis for their policy not towards all countries, but specifically to be used against states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which struggled with an international economic system shaped by colonialism and capitalism. These were the countries that had championed the formation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 to advance their own proposals to exit the neocolonial world order, proposals that were passed by the UN General Assembly in 1974 as the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The new IMF policy emerged in contest against the possibility of an NIEO, since rather than allow for a better deal for raw material prices or for tariff-subsidy arrangements, it demanded the withdrawal of all these anti-colonial schemes. Even Raghuram Rajan, the IMF’s own chief economist from 2003 to 2007, wrote in his book Fault Lines (2010) that the IMF’s policies appeared as a ‘new form of financial colonialism’.¹⁶

The IMF’s ‘silent revolution’ intensified the crisis faced by the poorer nations, driving them into a spiral of indebtedness and poverty. The general formula for this spiral is as follows:

1. Countries go into short-term balance-of-payments debt because of their lack of capital – much of it stolen during the colonial period – and their reliance upon borrowing to conduct (often expensive) capital improvements in their countries (some of which are in the raw material extraction sector, thereby operating as a subsidy for foreign mining companies).
2. The IMF arrives and informs the finance ministries that government spending for education, healthcare, and other social development projects must be cut in order to prioritise payments to wealthy bondholders (in the London Club) and to governments – mostly the old colonial states – (in the Paris Club) who have lent them money.
3. To pay the debt servicing on these loans, the poorer nations cut their government spending, thereby impoverishing their people further, and export more of their cheapened raw materials (rather than more profitable finished products). When countries start to export more and more primary commodities, this produces a price war that leads to a steep decline in the revenues gained from the volume of exports.
4. With weakened revenues from imports, the poorer nations must continue to cut their social spending, ramp up their sales of raw materials and public assets, and borrow more money from external private and governmental sources… just to pay off the interest on their ballooning debt.
5. The imperative of ‘exchange rate stability’ prevents governments in the poorer nations from exercising any effective monetary policy – including implementing capital controls – while their fiscal policy is already eviscerated by balanced budget demands from the IMF, social spending cuts, and pressure from wealthy bondholders to ‘reform’ (i.e., surrender) their tax policy.

In 2016, senior members of the IMF’s research department published an article called ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’, which argued that the ‘adverse feedback loop’ set in motion by austerity, followed by increased inequality and then yet more austerity, had to be broken by a less rigid, less fundamentalist approach to ‘liberalisation’ and neoliberalism.¹⁷ There was even a suggestion of ‘greater acceptance of [capital] controls to deal with the volatility of capital flows’. While there was a decline in the conditions that the IMF required to receive their loans over the course of the decade before this paper was published, there is no evidence of any qualitative change in IMF policy.¹⁸

Guinea, for instance – a country that has at least a third of the world’s bauxite – entered the IMF rollercoaster in 2011 and immediately became trapped in the debt-austerity cycle.¹⁹ In 2014, the Guinean government of Alpha Condé wrote to the IMF that the ‘tight fiscal and monetary policy’ had led to a ‘reduction in spending, including on domestic investment’, which made it impossible for Guinea ‘to respect the indicative targets for spending in priority sectors’.²⁰ In other words, Guinea borrowed to try and exit a crisis, but the borrowing itself led to cuts in social spending and deepened its crisis. In 2019–2020, the country experienced a cycle of protests sparked both by Condé’s attempt to change the constitution as well as the worsened economic situation. A UNICEF report found that, in 2019, twenty-five very poor countries spent more on debt servicing than on education, health, and social protection combined. Sixteen of those countries are on the African continent.²¹

In the early months of the pandemic in 2020, the IMF offered to open up new windows for borrowing that they said would come without conditionalities.²² The G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative and other such offers to pause debt payments suggested that the poorer nations would receive assistance to prevent total economic collapse and to gain access to vaccines. However, Oxfam found that thirteen of the fifteen IMF loan programmes during the second year of the pandemic (2021) required ‘new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk’.²³ The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index reveals that fourteen out of the sixteen countries in West Africa planned to cut their budgets by a total of $26.8 billion in 2021 to contain haemorrhaging national debt crises and that these policies have been encouraged by the IMF’s COVID-19 loans.²⁴

The evidence is clear: the IMF not only engineers austerity-driven debt crises, but its policies are designed to ensure and manage a permanent debt crisis, not to erase debt.

Africa’s Sovereign Debt Crisis

In 2009, the Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo published the instant bestseller Dead Aid.²⁵ Moyo’s main argument in the book was that there was little to show for the hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid that had been given to the African continent since 1970. Rather than spurring development, she said, aid had financed grand-scale corruption and civil wars, which in turn thwarted economic growth on the continent. Moyo’s case against aid was not a new one. Her book’s arguments were inspired by the Hungarian-born British conservative economist Peter Bauer, in whose memory Moyo dedicated her book. Bauer made a career singling out foreign aid – not colonialism or neocolonialism – as the chief architect of Africa’s underdevelopment.²⁶

What was new about Dead Aid was Moyo’s prescription. In a chapter titled ‘A Capital Solution’, Moyo called for the substitution of aid with private market debt. That is, she called on Western countries to significantly reduce their aid to Africa and at the same time called on African governments to make up for the shortfall by borrowing from private creditors and bondholders such as hedge funds, banks, and so on. For Moyo, this was an elegant solution to the problem of corruption, which had historically bedevilled the foreign aid industrial complex. Money sourced from private debt markets was unlikely to fuel corruption in Africa because, Moyo argued, private creditors were sophisticated enough to not invest in countries likely to engage in corruption. After all, corruption acted as a drag on economic growth, which in turn threatened the prospects of debt repayment. On the other hand, to access much-needed private credit, African governments would need to demonstrate to private creditors that they were committed to fighting corruption and to investing the proceeds in growth-enhancing activities. Moyo’s policy solution was, therefore, a supposed win-win for all concerned.

Moyo’s ‘capital solution’ provided the intellectual cover for the financialisation of capital flows to Africa through the issuance of so-called Eurobonds (i.e., the issuance of bonds in US dollars and Euros), whose meteoric rise would engulf the continent in a new debt crisis by 2020. Ghana’s first issuance of a Eurobond in 2007 was a turning point for the continent. The country’s debut bond of $750 million was issued to much fanfare and was highly sought after by financial investors in New York and London.²⁷ In a quest to satisfy investors’ appetites, Ghana followed up by issuing two additional Eurobonds totalling $2 billion in 2013 and 2014. Other countries in Africa soon followed suit.²⁸ In 2011, Zambia obtained its first sovereign credit rating (a credit score of sorts) from the ratings agency Fitch. Shortly thereafter, the country issued two Eurobonds in quick succession in 2012 and 2014, a scenario that increased Zambia’s external debt by an incredible 300% in three years.²⁹Kenya likewise jumped on the bandwagon, issuing three Eurobonds between 2014 and 2019 that totalled around $5.5 billion.³⁰

Eurobond issuance on the continent grew at an incredible pace in the second decade of the twenty-first century: by 2020, twenty-one African countries had issued Eurobonds (several, in many cases). According to the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics handbook, the stock of Eurobond debt for sub-Saharan Africa grew from about $32 billon in 2010 to $135 billon in 2020, a 322% rate of increase.³¹In other words, the stock of Eurobond debt had more than tripled in just ten years.

The rate of increase in the stock of Eurobond debt between 2010 and 2020 far outstripped other sources of foreign currency debt in Africa. For example, multilateral debt from the World Bank, IMF, African Development Bank, and other institutions increased by about 144% over the same period, a rate that is less than half that of the increase in Eurobond debt. Similarly, bilateral debt from governments in countries such as China, France, the US, and the UK to governments in Africa also increased at a rate of 145%, which was also less than half the rate of increase in Eurobond debt.³²

This last point on bilateral debt is worth highlighting given the argument on ‘debt trap diplomacy’ that has become commonplace with respect to debt from China. The argument alleges that China is using debt to trap Africa in a perpetual cycle of indebtedness and servitude. However, the facts present a different picture. Though World Bank’s International Debt Statistics handbook does not provide a country-by-country breakdown of bilateral debt to Africa that would allow us to isolate the Chinese component, it shows that by 2020 Africa’s total external debt owed to bilateral creditors (i.e., countries) stood at $115 billion, compared Eurobond debt of $135 billion. Further, the figure for bilateral debt provided by the World Bank is for all bilateral creditors, implying that Eurobond debt outstripped all debt from bilateral creditors, which includes China. A careful analysis from Debt Justice shows that African debt to China was $83 billion in 2020, a number smaller than the $135 billon owed to private bondholders.³³ Figures on Chinese loans and Africa’s debt produced by researchers working at the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University in the United States are often cited in support of the debt trap diplomacy argument (despite their own researchers having published articles debunking the Chinese debt trap narrative).³⁴However, they are not very useful in this particular case because, according to CARI itself, its database ‘does not track [debt] disbursements and repayments’.³⁵In other words, CARI only reports on newspaper announcements of loan contraction but does not track to see if the contracted loan left China and, if it did, if the recipient government in Africa subsequently paid it off or paid off portions of it. Therefore, CARI figures can be misrepresented in ways that vastly exaggerate the true stock of Chinese debt to Africa.

This goes to show that the current sovereign debt crisis currently engulfing the African continent is largely the creation of private creditors via the Eurobond craze that possessed and took hold of the continent in the second decade of the twenty-first century, helped along by the intellectual justifications of Dambisa Moyo and others. Eurobonds did not fix the problem of corruption that was said to be endemic with foreign aid, as Moyo argued they would. For example, hundreds of millions of dollars of Kenya’s first Eurobond issuance are said to have gone ‘missing’. In Zambia, questions have been raised about where the Eurobond money went.³⁶ In Mozambique, loans and bonds were illegally withdrawn and misused by state-owned enterprises (known as the Tuna Bond Scandal). As these cases illustrate, Western private bankers and creditors have facilitated this type of theft.³⁷

Finally, analysing the sources of debt in Africa casts doubts on current multilateral initiatives aimed at resolving Africa’s sovereign debt crisis. One example is the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), launched by the G20 in May 2020, soon after the COVID-19 pandemic began to send shockwaves across the globe, to encourage bilateral and multilateral creditors to suspend interest payments on debt owed by poorer nations, including those in Africa, for a year. The DSSI was hardly successful, as many creditors – with the exception of a few, such as China – refused to suspend interest payments.³⁸ In addition, many analysts remarked that the DSSI was not fit for purpose, since it only applied to official debt (multilateral and bilateral), while the sovereign debt crisis was largely fuelled by a private bond crisis as shown above.

As the DSSI expired in June 2021 and the sovereign debt crisis got worse, the G20 launched the Common Framework for Debt Treatments, which would become the guiding mechanism for debt restructuring after the initial years of the pandemic.³⁹ Unfortunately, it is bedevilled by many of the same problems that afflicted the DSSI. First, the Common Framework only has mechanisms for resolving official credit. But, as the above analysis shows, a substantial portion (and by far the largest single source) of Africa’s sovereign debt is owed to private bondholders and creditors. Their absence largely confines debt restructuring discussions to the theoretical sphere, with little practical value. Second, the Common Framework lays the ground for an official creditor committee, which in the case of Zambia is co-chaired by France and China. France is seen to represent the old Paris Club of creditor countries, which together make up a sizeable portion of the official credit given to Zambia. China is a co-chair given its emergence as an important source of credit to Africa, and Zambia in particular. However, the structure and governance of Zambia’s creditor committee with the two co-chairs has opened the country to geopolitical manoeuvrings and, in the process, largely paralysed the prospects for genuine debt restructuring anytime soon.

A Permanent Solution to the Debt Crisis

The fifty-four sovereign African states are vastly different from each other, with distinct languages, histories, social and economic challenges, and possibilities. However, they are united by a political project that has been institutionalised through the African Union and its legal and organisational frameworks and by a neocolonial sovereign debt crisis.

This final section of the dossier is divided into two parts. The first is a statement made by the Collective on African Political Economy, which lies at the root of the analysis presented in this dossier. The second elaborates on the finance section of A Plan to Save the Planet, a document drafted by twenty-six research institutes from around the world.⁴⁰ These alternatives are provisional and require far more theoretical and practical elaboration, which is precisely the task of the Collective on African Political Economy.

The IMF Is Never the Answer: A Statement from the Collective on African Political Economy

Many countries across the Global South, particularly those in Africa, are currently in the throes of fiscal crises – largely the result of a perfect storm of global events. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global economic recession, which in turn impacted national economies. The ongoing war in Ukraine has disrupted vital global supply chains for food, fertilisers, and energy, thereby increasing many countries’ import bills and straining their budgets. The fiscal crisis is fundamentally a result of an unsustainable build-up of sovereign debt in the last decade, fuelled by cheap credit from Western economies and encouraged by international financial institutions, including the IMF. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine made what was already a tenuous situation worse.

Many poor countries are turning to the IMF as a credible source for finance in the present moment, largely egged on by claims that the IMF has reformed from its bad old ways and no longer demands crashing austerity as a conditionality.⁴¹ Back in 2016, IMF economists published a mea culpa in which they (sort of) confessed the sins of the past and promised that they had turned over a new leaf.⁴²The evidence, however, suggests anything but a reformed IMF. A study from the International Labour Organisation that carefully tracked IMF conditionality in 2020, when many countries were grappling with health and financial burdens related to the COVID-19 pandemic, found that in most of the 148 countries examined, the IMF still required austerity as a condition for granting assistance.⁴³

The government of Zambia, the first country to default on its debt as a result of the pandemic, recently concluded a financing deal with the IMF with the signature condition of ‘a large, front-loaded, and sustained fiscal consolidation’, as the IMF put it –
in other words, austerity in black and white.⁴⁴ The IMF wants the Zambian government to reduce its expenditure by billions of dollars over the next three years, which will be most acutely felt by the poor majority.⁴⁵ The government of Sri Lanka, a country whose debt-fuelled boom came to a spectacular halt earlier this year, is also seeking IMF assistance, with early indications showing that the conditions attached to the deal will be as indefensible as the Zambian deal.⁴⁶The Ghanaian government too is desperately seeking another IMF deal, this after the last one was celebrated as the deal that would ‘restore the lustre to a rising star in Africa’.⁴⁷

All this goes to show that the IMF cannot be the answer to the poorer nations’ economic challenges. Alongside its sister institutions, the IMF has provided ‘assistance’ to poor countries ever since its establishment in 1944, and yet many of these countries have remained poor in spite of this. The reason is that IMF assistance has never confronted the structural factors that have continued to consign many countries to the ranks of the poor. As diagnosed many years ago by scholars such as Walter Rodney and Andre Gunder Frank, development in the North is sustained by underdevelopment in the South.⁴⁸ Seen this way, the IMF, as the archetypical Northern institution, is duty bound to maintain and entrench this status quo. How else does one explain the IMF’s solution to Zambia’s financial woes, for example? The IMF prescription ignores the fact that the country’s foreign-owned copper mines continue to generate billions for their overseas shareholders yet pay so little in taxes in a country where the estimated annual income taxes for one mining project alone could have amounted to nearly half the 2020 national water supply and sanitary budget.⁴⁹

A new kind of institutional apparatus that fosters cooperation, rather than competition, is required for Africa’s economic liberation and that of the Third World more generally. This would mean, for example, establishing currency arrangements that bypass the US dollar, which is a strong lever of IMF conditionality and a weapon of US foreign policy. These kinds of long overdue proposals are already underway in parts of the world, such as in Latin America, where Brazil’s President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) and Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández have proposed the establishment of a regional currency, the sur, that could be used to settle cross-border claims and store reserves.⁵⁰ The hard work of figuring out the technical details related to the implementation of such regional currencies must begin in earnest.⁵¹ Africa, for example, needs a continental bank that is wholly owned by the people and will serve as a genuine tool to bolster sovereign industrial policies. The highly influential African Development Bank, with its significant Western shareholding, is not fit for purpose.⁵²

Furthermore, there is an urgent need to restore and reinvigorate the capacity and autonomy of the African state to deliver on its development agenda. State capacity and state autonomy depend on the ability to adequately mobilise tax revenues, an area in which the African state has continued to underperform. The tax-to-GDP ratio, a measure of resource mobilisation, has remained incredibly low in Africa largely as a result of illicit financial flows that continue to spirit away billions of dollars from the continent every year.⁵³ As a consequence, the adequate delivery of the kind of social services that underpin people’s dignity (social security, health, education, etc.) continue to be hamstrung.⁵⁴ Further, the low tax-take in the poorer nations forces many governments to seek the easy way out by borrowing on the international capital markets, setting into motion dangerous debt dynamics that ultimately lead governments back into the unloving arms of the IMF. Notably, IMF conditionality rarely confronts the fact that state capacity and autonomy have been eroded in Africa largely as a result of the tax dodging practices of transnational corporations.

Just as problematic is the leading role that the IMF and its allied institutions have taken in the fight to save the planet from climate change. The IMF’s answer to climate change, which is influential given its inordinate role in the world, points to the private capitalist sector as the solution to the planet’s problems.⁵⁵ All this is ironic given that the private capitalist sector’s insatiable appetite for profits at all costs has been responsible for the climate crisis.

The Third World must re-imagine a path out of our current crisis that doesn’t depend on the IMF, its allied institutions, and Western capital. The last seventy years or so have demonstrated that a reliance on these institutions only serves to trap the Third World in a perpetual state of underdevelopment. We need an emancipatory set of institutions and frameworks that will lead to the total independence of the Third World.

This is a task that the Collective on African Political Economy (CAPE) has decided to take on in a serious way. CAPE is a new grouping of Africans from different walks of life that are committed to the economic, and thus total, emancipation of the African continent and the Third World more broadly. CAPE hopes to recapture the emancipatory scholarship and politics of a previous generation of intellectuals that emerged from the post-independence movement in the 1960s and reformulate it to respond to the needs of today’s world. The lessons of that generation and the institutional infrastructure that it built have been forgotten largely as a result of IMF and World Bank-inspired structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that began in the 1980s. The SAPs are responsible for widespread destruction, including the evisceration of progressive scholarly communities in Africa and much of the Third World. It is precisely such communities that CAPE hopes to bring to life to rebuild a present, and future, that centres the needs and aspirations of the majority.

Âurea Mouzinho
Peter Magati
Crystal Simeoni
Hibist Kassa
Brian Kamanzi
Ndongo Samba Sylla
Grieve Chelwa
Ihsaan Bassier

Constructing Financial Alternatives for a Sovereign Africa and Third World

Over the course of the past two decades, the stranglehold of Western-based bondholders and Western-controlled IFIs has weakened as other countries – mainly China – have emerged as the largest trading partners with African states and as the largest lenders to these states. Importantly, China’s public and private debt forgiveness during the pandemic has put pressure on IFIs to rethink the harshness of their debt repayment-austerity governance model.

The opening provided by Chinese funding is not an opportunity merely to borrow more: it is an opportunity for African states to construct genuine, and sovereign, development projects in this climate. These projects must seize multiple opportunities to raise funds, and the fragility of IMF power must also be utilised to advance fiscal and monetary policies that are built on an agenda committed to solving the problems of the African people, not facilitating the demands of wealthy bondholders and the Western states that back them. A number of mechanisms are on the table to avoid the IMF-driven debt-austerity trap. Some of them, expanding upon A Plan to Save the Planet, are listed below.

Invalidate historical debts and rescue stolen assets:

• Renegotiate all odious external debts of the poorer nations. An ‘odious debt’ is a debt incurred by a country without the assent of its people, such as during the phase of a military dictatorship.⁵⁶
• Seize assets held in illicit tax havens, which as of 2010 total at least $32 trillion.⁵⁷

Build progressive tax codes:

• Build the capacity of tax departments in each country, including digital tax infrastructure.
• Implement taxes on wealth and inheritance.
• Implement higher rates of taxation on income, such as capital gains, that is made through financial speculation by all non-bank corporate entities.
• Discourage the profit-shifting activities of multinational corporations and adopt a unitary approach to tax the share of global profits generated by subsidiaries of multinational corporations.

Reform domestic banking infrastructure:

• Democratise the banking system by expanding the role and size of public banking and by implementing more regulations of and transparency for private banking.
• Enforce ceilings as a percentage of liabilities on speculative banking activity by commercial banks.
• Regulate the interest rates that banks charge for specific goods, such as housing loans.
• Implement tight regulations for pension funds so that the savings of the people are not used recklessly for financial speculation and encourage the creation of public sector pension funds.

Build alternative funding sources to the IMF’s debt-austerity traps:

• Set capital controls to prevent both foreign and domestic capital flight, policies that even the IMF argues are important.⁵⁸ As highlighted earlier, capital flight is not only deleterious for local financial markets: it also robs the continent of the resources needed to drive an autonomous developmental agenda. With capital controls, governments will be able to devise effective monetary policies in an environment that would not be buffeted by shocks and unexpected fragilities. Capital controls must be implemented alongside a robust wealth tax collection system, pro-labour distribution policies, and the prevention of dollarisation.
• Attract investment from institutions that do not enforce structural adjustment conditions, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the BRICS’s New Development Bank. The absence of SAPs-like conditions on these emerging and alternative sources of capital explains their growing popularity in the South and Africa in particular.
• Take advantage of local currency central bank swap arrangements (such as those offered by the People’s Bank of China).
• Adopt ceilings on the interest rates that commercial and multilateral lenders charge developing countries.

Enhance regionalism:

• Encourage the creation of regional trade and reconciliation mechanisms.

Notes

Some of AFRICOM’s known permanent and semi-permanent military bases on the African continent, 2019.

How do you visualise the footprint of Empire?

The images in this dossier map some of AFRICOM’s military bases on the African continent – both ‘enduring’ and ‘non-enduring’, as they are officially called. The satellite photos were gathered by data artist Josh Begley, who led a mapping project to answer the question: ‘how do you measure a military footprint?’

For this dossier, the images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites were physically projected onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today. Meanwhile, the pins and thread connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes.

We refuse simple survival. We want to ease the pressures, to free our countryside from medieval stagnation or regression. We want to democratise our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future. We want to change the administration and reconstruct it with a different kind of civil servant. We want to get our army involved with the people in productive work and remind it constantly that, without patriotic training, a soldier is only a criminal with power. That is our political programme.

Thomas Sankara (President, Burkina Faso) at the United Nations, 4 October 1984.

On 30 May 2016, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) held its 601^st meeting. Though the agenda was broad, members of the PSC came to the meeting concerned about a range of conflicts: the collapse of the Libyan state and the impact that this had across the Sahel, the ongoing struggles in the Lake Chad region with the persistence of Boko Haram, and the wars that marked the Great Lakes region (with the loss of sovereignty by the Democratic Republic of the Congo on its eastern flank). The ‘primary responsibility for ensuring effective conflict prevention’, the PSC noted, ‘lies with the Member States’, namely the fifty-five countries on the African continent from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

The PSC needed no lessons from anyone on its own limitations, which were two-fold:

1. Internal fragmentation. Only months before the May meeting, the PSC had authorised the deployment of 5,000 troops from the African Prevention and Protection Mission to Burundi. This was partly due to the enduring causes of the long-standing conflict in the Great Lakes, which included the Burundian Civil War (1993-2005) as well as the political crisis occasioned by President Pierre Nkurunziza’s suffocation of the political system, which led to public protests and state repression in 2015. President Nkurunziza pushed an agenda amongst African heads of governments to block the PSC’s decision. The AU decided that the situation in Burundi had calmed down, despite the fact that the United Nations found evidence of crimes against humanity. This was one example of the fragmentation of the African leadership, which prevented the PSC from moving an agenda.
2. External pressures. In February-March 2011, the PSC met to draw up a full-fledged roadmap to dial back the conflict in Libya. A PSC mission gathered at Nouakchott, Mauritania to travel to Tripoli, Libya and open negotiations based on paragraph 7 of the PSC communique. This paragraph – which was known as the ‘roadmap’ – contained an elegant four-point pathway, including the cessation of hostilities, delivery of humanitarian assistance through cooperation, protection of foreign nationals, and adoption and implementation of political reforms to eliminate the causes of the crisis. Both the government of Libya and the opposition initially rejected the roadmap, but the avenues for dialogue remained open, which is why a PSC mission was ready to go to Tripoli. The day before the PSC mission could leave, France and the United States began to bomb Libya. This bombing took place under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and UN Security Council resolution 1973 (voted on by three African countries: Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa). The ‘humanitarian intervention’ quickly exceeded the UN mandate of protecting citizens, moving towards regime change using immense violence that resulted in civilian casualties. The disregard shown by the North Atlantic states for the African Union and the PSC has gone by virtually unremarked.

In the aftermath of the NATO war on Libya, the Sahel region experienced a number of conflicts, many of them driven by the emergence of forms of militancy, piracy, and smuggling. Using the pretext of these conflicts, and inflamed by NATO’s war, France and the United States intervened militarily across the Sahel. In 2014, France set up the G-5 Sahel, a military arrangement that included Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, and expanded or opened new military bases in Gao, Mali; N’Djamena, Chad; Niamey, Niger; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The United States, for its part, built an enormous drone base in Agadez, Niger, from which it conducts drone strikes and aerial surveillance across the Sahel and the Sahara Desert. This is one of the many US bases on the African continent. The United States has twenty-nine known military facilities in fifteen countries on the continent, while France has bases in ten countries. No other country from outside the continent has as many military bases in Africa.

The number of foreign military bases on the African continent alarmed the PSC, which raised this as an important issue in its May 2016 meeting:

Council noted with deep concern the existence of foreign military bases and establishment of new ones in some African countries, coupled with the inability of the Member States concerned to effectively monitor the movement of weapons to and from these foreign military bases. In this regard, Council stressed the need for Member States to be always circumspect whenever they enter into agreements that would lead to the establishment of foreign military bases in their countries.

Since 2016, little advance has been made on the PSC statement. It is telling that the PSC did not name the countries that have the most bases on the continent, a question of quantity that has an impact of the quality of suppression of African sovereignty. Had the PSC named the United States and France as the main countries that have military bases in Africa, it would have had to acknowledge the particular reasons why the US and France continue to require a military presence for their ends.

It is important to acknowledge that these developments are neither the norm for Africa’s modern history nor are they inevitable. In 1965, Ghana’s former President Kwame Nkrumah published an important book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, which reflected on the phenomenon of military bases. These had been commonplace during the time of high colonialism, with bases across the continent from the British base at Salisbury in former Rhodesia (present-day Harare, Zimbabwe) to the French base at Mers El Kébir in Algeria. Both the British and the United States militaries had bases in Libya, from the Wheelus Air Base to the military posts in Tobruk and El Adem. In return for the land and the right to barrack troops at these places, the UK and the US provided Libya with ‘aid’, which Nkrumah rightly said was a payment for the loss of sovereignty. Here is Nkrumah’s assessment of these bases in Africa:

A world power, having decided on principles of global strategy that it is necessary to have a military base in this or that nominally independent country, must ensure that the country where the base is situated is friendly. Here is another reason for balkanisation. If the base can be situated in a country which is so constituted economically that it cannot survive without substantial ‘aid’ from the military power which owns the base, then, so it is argued, the security of the base can be assured. Like so many of the other assumptions on which neo-colonialism is based, this one is false. The presence of foreign bases arouses popular hostility to the neo-colonial arrangements which permit them more quickly and more surely than does anything else, and throughout Africa these bases are disappearing. Libya may be quoted as an example of how this policy has failed.

In 1964, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser called for the removal of these bases, and in 1970 – after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy – the bases were removed. Five years before this, Nkrumah correctly judged the mood of the Libyan people. This mood, from 1965, runs through to the present. Since it was set up in 2007, the US government’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) has not been able to find a home on the African continent; the headquarters of AFRICOM is in Stuttgart, Germany. The African people continue to pressure their governments not to give in to US demands to shift the AFRICOM headquarters from Europe to Africa.

Neo-colonialism, Nkrumah noted, seeks to fragment Africa, weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity and sovereignty, and thereby insert its power to subordinate the aspirations of the continent for pan-African consolidation. Neither the Organisation of African Unity (1963-2002) nor the African Union (2002 onwards) have been able to realise the two most important principles of pan-Africanism: political unity and territorial sovereignty. The enduring presence of foreign military bases not only symbolises the lack of unity and sovereignty; it also equally enforces the fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments.

Arba Minch, Ethiopia
6.040864 | 37.588118
Source: Google Maps

The Surrender of Our Sovereignty

In 2018, the US Department of Defense proposed that the US and Ghana agree to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a $20 million deal that would allow the US military to expand its presence in Ghana. In March, widespread unhappiness of this agreement swept large sections of the population into the streets; opposition parties, who worried about the possibility that the US would build a military base in the country, raised their objections in parliament. By April, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said that his government had ‘not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America’. The US Embassy in Accra repeated this statement, saying that the ‘United States has not requested, nor does it plan to establish a military base or bases in Ghana’. The SOFA agreement was signed in May 2018.

It does not require a close reading of the agreement’s text to know that there is in fact the possibility that the US could build a base in the country. Article 5, for instance, states,

Ghana hereby provides unimpeded access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas to United States forces, United States contractors, and others as mutually agreed. Such Agreed facilities and areas, or portions thereof, provided by Ghana shall be designated as either for exclusive use by United States forces or to be jointly used by United States forces and Ghana. Ghana shall also provide access to and use of a runway that meets the requirements of United States forces.

Through this article, the US is permitted to create its own military facilities in Ghana. By any definition, this means that it can set up a base. The surrender of Ghana’s sovereignty also comes to light where the SOFA agreement states (Article 6) that the US would ‘be afforded priority in access to and use of Agreed facilities and areas’ and that said use and access by others ‘may be authorised with the express consent of both Ghana and United States forces’.

Furthermore, Article 3 says that US troops ‘may possess and carry arms in Ghana while on Official duty’ and that the US troops shall be accorded ‘the privileges, exemptions, and immunities equivalent to those accorded to the administrative and technical staff of a diplomatic mission’. In other words, the US troops can be armed and, if they are accused of a crime, they will not be tried in Ghana’s courts.

In March 2018, Ghana’s minister of defence, Dominic Nitiwul, was challenged on a radio station by Kwesi Pratt of the Socialist Forum Ghana (SFG). Nitiwul said that there was nothing peculiar about this agreement, since other African countries – like Senegal – had signed such agreements. Ghana, said Nitiwul, had signed similar agreements with the US in 1998 and 2007, but these were done in secret because there was no tax waiver. Pratt warned that Ghana would be ‘surrendering sovereignty’ in entering this agreement. The general sentiment in the country was opposed to the base, which is why both the Ghanaian government and the US denied that a base would be built.

Pratt was right. The US presence at Kotoka International Airport in Accra became the heart of the US military’s West Africa Logistics Network. By 2018, weekly flights from Ramstein Air Base in Germany landed in Accra with supplies (including arms and ammunition) for the at least 1,800 US Special Forces troops spread out across West Africa. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said in 2019 that this weekly flight was ‘basically a bus route’. At the Kotoka airport, the US maintains a Cooperative Security Location. This is a base in all but the name.

Nzara, South Sudan 4.634998 | 28.26727
Source: Google Maps

The US Footprint

The African continent does not have an unusually large number of foreign military bases. These can be found across the world, from the US bases in Japan to the British bases in Australia. No country has a greater military footprint around the world than the United States. According to the US National Defense Business Operations Plan (2018-2022), the US military manages a ‘global portfolio that consists of more than 568,000 assets (buildings and structures), located at nearly 4,800 sites worldwide’.

In 2019, AFRICOM produced a list of some of its known military bases on the African continent, distinguished between those with an ‘enduring footprint’ (a permanent base) and those with a ‘non-enduring footprint’ or ‘lily pads’ (a semi-permanent base):

The list does not contain the bases where the US uses ‘host nation facilities’, such as in Singo, Uganda and in Theis, Senegal.

The large presence of the US Armed Forces on the African continent is not a surprise. The US has the largest military force on the planet, both in terms of the vast number of resources that the US puts into its military and the reach of the military via its base structure as well as its naval and aerial capacity. No other military force in the world matches that of the United States, which spends more on its military budget than the next eleven countries combined. China, which follows the US in military spending, disburses only a third of what the US spends per year.

The footprint of the US military on the African continent is not only quantitatively larger than that of any other non-African country’s bases on the continent, but the sheer scale of the military’s presence and activities gives it a qualitatively different character; this character includes the capacity of the United States to defend its interests on the continent and to attempt to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources and markets. There are two tasks that the US military fulfils on the continent:

1.  Gendarme functions. The US military operates not only to provide an advantage to the United States and its ruling elites, but it functions – along with the armies of the other NATO nations, including France – as the guarantor of Western corporate interests and the principles of capitalism. Nkrumah came to the same conclusion in 1965, stating that ‘Africa’s raw materials are an important consideration in the military build-up of the NATO countries… Their industries, especially the strategic and nuclear factories, depend largely upon the primary materials that come from the less developed countries’. Reports from the US military routinely sketch out the responsibility of its range of armed forces to ensure a steady stream of raw materials for corporations – especially energy – and to maintain unimpeded movement of goods through shipping channels. Such reports include National Energy Policy (May 2001) from the National Energy Policy Development Group, led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States (September 2018) from the Interagency Task Force in Fulfilment of Executive Order 13806. In this sense, the US military – alongside its NATO partners – operates as the gendarme not for the world community, but for the beneficiaries of capitalism. Alongside the US is France, whose military presence in Niger is closely linked to the imperatives of the French energy sector, which requires the uranium mined in Arlit (Niger). One in three French light bulbs are powered by the uranium from this town in Niger, which is garrisoned by French troops.

2.  The New Cold War. As Chinese private and public commercial interests have increased on the African continent, and as Chinese firms have consistently outbid Western firms, US pressure to contain China on the continent has increased. The US government’s New Africa Strategy (2019) characterised the situation in competitive terms: ‘Great power competitors, namely China and Russia, are rapidly expanding their financial and political influence across Africa. They are deliberately and aggressively targeting their investments in the region to gain a competitive advantage over the United States’. The European Union followed with a report called Towards a Comprehensive Strategy with Africa (2020), which – while it did not directly mention China – worried about ‘competition for natural resources’.

These two points – the gendarme function and the New Cold War – require further elaboration.

Agadez, Niger 16.950278 | 8.013889
Source: Google Maps

Resource Exploitation

Africa is the world’s second-largest landmass with the second-largest continental population (1.34 billion people in 2020) – more than the population of North America and Europe combined (1.1 billion people). Asia is the largest continent with the largest population (4.64 billion people).

Africa’s subsoil holds a range of important natural resources: 98% of the world’s chromium, 90% of its cobalt, 90% of its platinum, 70% of its coltan, 70% of its tantalite, 64% of its manganese, 50% of its gold, and 33% of its uranium, as well as a significant share of the world’s reserves of other minerals such as bauxite, diamonds, tantalum, tungsten, and tin. The continent holds 30% of all mineral reserves, 12% of known oil reserves, 8% of known natural gas, and 65% of the world’s arable land. The UN Environmental Programme estimates that Africa’s natural capital accounts for between 30% and 50% of the total wealth of African countries. In 2012, the UN estimated that natural resources accounted for 77% of total exports and 42% of total government revenue.

African states’ reliance upon the export of raw materials of various kinds – due to the power of multinational corporations and the lack of sufficient industrialisation in a range of African countries – has put them in a position of dependency on foreign capital. This condition of dependency was structured by the policies of the colonial rulers, who maintained economic activity in Africa based on the extraction and growth of raw materials which were then sold through colonial concessions to the countries of their rulers. This dependency was inherited by generations of post-colonial elites, who derived rents from it and did nothing to alter the structure. African states, therefore, rely upon external revenues from the export of raw materials, on aid programmes from Western governments, and on institutional aid.

Such dependency creates undue avenues for manipulations by these foreign governments who have a permanent interest in Africa. Ruling governments use the endowed natural resources to secure aid from foreign partners without paying particular attention to the aid requirements and conditions. These aid terms leech African countries of necessary revenues. For instance, the UN Economic Commission for Africa reports that over the past fifty years, illicit financial flows have resulted in the loss of at least $1 trillion, ‘a sum nearly equivalent to all the official development assistance the continent received during the same period’. These are precious funds that could be used to diversify African economies, build missing infrastructure, and enhance social wages on the continent. Economic dependency narrows the options for African governments, which become more and more subordinate to foreign interests and powers. Amongst governments who are economically subordinated, the political will to resist military intervention – from establishing new foreign bases to allowing foreign militaries to operate in a myriad of other ways – is negligible.

Several pan-African platforms have emerged over the past decade to rectify this dependency, including the African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (1989), the Africa Mining Vision (2008), the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainable Development in Africa (2012), the Arusha Declaration on Africa’s Post Rio+20 Strategy for Sustainable Development (2012), the African Development Forum’s communique at the eighth summit (2014), and then culminating in the African Union’s adoption of the First Ten-Year Implementation Plan (2014-2023), outlined in the third document of Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want (2015). Each of these documents – with different levels of emphasis – points to the need to break the reliance on raw material exports, better manage the contracts signed with multinational companies, and use the resources earned from exports to improve the conditions of social life as encapsulated in the UN agreements on Sustainable Development Goals.

The failure to properly harness resources and drive a people-centred development programme produces the social context for both political and military conflicts, including insurgencies that are often refracted along ethnic and religious lines, and for the expansion of migration around the continent and towards Europe. These two results of the deeper economic crisis of African states – conflict and migration – produce the surface-level excuse for countries like the United States and France to establish military bases on the continent.

• Conflict. The US government has established regular military relations – including lily pad bases – in São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea. On the one hand, explanations for the US presence there do not shy away from directly saying that this is about the movement of Nigerian and Gulf of Guinea oil to the US; Nigeria, a member of Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the eleventh largest oil producer in the world. On the other hand, the US government says that it has a military presence in the Gulf of Guinea to stem the growth of Islamic militancy, particularly ISIS and al-Qaeda, even though government officials agree that these groups do not have a threatening presence there.

 In Central Africa, AFRICOM has been engaged for over a decade in training the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), particularly in Camp Base, a military base just outside of Kisangani. According to a communiqué by AFRICOM in 2010, the military training would be ‘part of a long-term, multi-lateral US-DRC partnership to promote security sector reform in the country, [which] will assist the DRC government in its ongoing efforts to transform the Armed Forces of the DRC’. These relations between the DRC and AFRICOM have since deepened.

A large discovery of oil (estimated to be 1.7 billion barrels) was made at the border of Congo and Uganda in the Lake Albert region in 2007. It is no surprise, therefore, to see that this region became heavily militarised. This is particularly evident in the town of Beni, North Kivu. Beni is the epicentre of scores of gruesome murders often attributed to the Ugandan rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has operated in the Congo since the early 1990s. On 27 January 2021, a delegation of AFRICOM officers arrived in the DRC to discuss with the Congolese military the need for ‘cooperation and engagements, security and stability efforts, and working together to further professionalise the DRC military and strengthen ties’.

On 10 March 2021, the US State Department designated the ADF as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’ and ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’, although local organisations and the UN Group of Experts on the DRC say that there is no evidence to link the ADF to ISIS. The US State Department adopted this stance based on a claim made by the Bridgeway Foundation, the charity arm of the Texas-based investment firm Bridgeway Capital Management. This designation allows for an increased US military presence in the Congo. The main area for this presence will be adjacent to the oil reserves. The US military will also continue to provide stability for the African strongmen, who have come to rely on US support for their longevity.

• Migration.IMF-driven austerity programmes and the failure of African states to manage resource sales in a way that provides decent lives for the population have resulted in large-scale migration across the continent. A quarter of the close to 41.3 million migrants displaced due to violence and conflict have attempted to migrate to Europe, while the rest have moved around within the continent. The migrants who wish to go to Europe travel across the Sahara Desert to Libya, broken by the NATO war, and then cross the Mediterranean Sea. The journey is dangerous, but when the UN surveyed those who made it across the sands and the waters, more than 90% of the migrants that they would do it again.

European attempts to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea have been futile. Foreign militaries have been used in the Sahel to limit migration and keep migrants as far as possible from the European border. That is partly why France assembled the G5 Sahel Initiative and why the US built the large drone base in Agadez, which provides important aerial surveillance of migration in the region. What the countries of Europe have done is to export their borders far from their own territory and to make sure that the harsh interdiction of refugees and migrants is done outside the coverage of their own media. This is a kind of arms-length outsourcing of the refugee crisis: the West gets to drive its terrible anti-migrant policies at the same time as it gets to appear innocent while its subsidiaries do its dirty work. Europe has moved its southern border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert, now dotted with military bases from Mauritania to Chad.

The surface arguments of conflict prevention and migration management are commonplace. But, once in a while, deeper motivations are clarified by some US officials. As Commodore John Nowell, who runs the Africa Partnership Station of AFRICOM, said in 2008, ‘We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t in [US] interests’. By ‘here’, Commodore Nowell meant the African continent.

The New Cold War

In the US government’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the authors wrote that, ‘Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential of any nation to militarily compete with the US and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US advantages’. In fact, China’s military capacity is largely defensive, since China has built up its military abilities in order to defend its coastline and its territory. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has emphasised that his country is committed to multilateralism: ‘China never seeks global hegemony’, he said on 24 April 2021. What the US planners more precisely indicate is that they would not like to see Chinese commercial and political power challenge the overall hegemony of the United States. As Commodore Nowell put it, US interests are the reason for the country’s presence in the region; any threat to those interests must be undermined by any means necessary.

Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti 11.544409 | 43.14707
Source: Google Maps

In 2013, the Chinese government inaugurated the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Prior to the formalisation of the BRI, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was set up in 2000 between Beijing and, initially, forty-four African countries (fifty-three out of fifty-five countries on the continent have since established relations with China under the Forum). Since 2013, China has invested in almost all African countries, all of which – except for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) – have broken ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China.

Over the years, China has signed several Memorandums of Understanding with the African Union, including one in 2015 within the framework of Agenda 2063 to support building infrastructure. China has invested large amounts of money in key infrastructure such as the Mali-Guinea rail project and the Sudan-Senegal railway line; in energy infrastructure, such as a 2600MW Mambilla hydropower project in Nigeria and the 400MW Bui Dam in Ghana; and in telecommunications, such as telecom equipment for Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Sudan. In December 2020, construction began on the new China-funded $80 million Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters south of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. There are now about 600 completed BRI projects globally.

Chinese aid – unlike IMF aid, Western commercial investment, and overseas development assistance – does not come with the vice of debilitating conditionalities. Evidence for more favourable terms comes in the various agreements signed by China, but more than that, it comes from China’s theory of patient capital, which has until now been adopted within the boundaries of China but has slowly – through Chinese state banks – emerged as a major investor outside its territory. China is now the second-largest investing country in the world, with the China Export-Import Bank and China Development Bank being major investors. The loans that these state agencies provide are long-term investments and are not on short repayment schedules. China fully understands that its loans are given to release infrastructure bottlenecks and to therefore support social development. Borrower countries are given flexibility as benefits are forecast to come in the long-term. For example, 30% of the investment in Central Asia and 80% of the investment in Pakistan will not be recovered.

Rather than develop its own humane commercial and development aid policy that would benefit the African people, the United States has opened up a ‘new cold war’ against China on the African continent. The development of AFRICOM in 2007 alongside the escalation of US and allied foreign military bases in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere are part of this New Cold War. Fundamentally, the New Cold War has been structured by a (mis)information war, which consists of two main elements:

China’s new ‘colonialism’. Stunningly, the old colonial powers, which continue a neo-colonial policy towards Africa – as illustrated by Nkrumah and evident in the base structure – now turn their gaze on China and accuse it of being a colonial power. The main rhetoric used in this (mis)information war is that China allegedly uses its financial resources to ensnare countries in a debt trap, which forces these countries to hand over their resources at low prices. The term ‘debt trap diplomacy’ is used against China, and yet it was not China that enforced structural adjustment loans that drew most African countries into a cataclysmic debt trap that has only deepened during the pandemic. It was not China, but the IMF, which carried forward a policy framework driven by the US Treasury Department. While the US China of ‘refusing to renegotiate terms [of loans], and then taking control of the infrastructure itself’, the reality is that Chinese lenders have cancelled, deferred, and restructured terms of existing loans (before and during the pandemic) and have never seized sovereign assets from any country. Two senior US professors published an article in The Atlantic in February 2021 with the telling title ‘The Chinese “Debt Trap” is a Myth’. The charge of colonialism against China is made by countries that have a well-documented history of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa.

China’s military capacity. The old colonial powers accuse China of building up its military presence in Africa. Reviving a false and dated trope, AFRICOM commander General Townsend recently made unsubstantiated claims that China seeks to build a naval base on the coast of West Africa. In fact, China’s military presence is negligible compared to the Western military footprint. In 2008, China joined the anti-piracy manoeuvres in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden; these operations were based on UN Security Council resolution 1816 (2008), which asked member states of the UN to provide the transitional government in Somalia with ‘all necessary means to repress acts of piracy and armed robbery’. A decade into these operations, China its first overseas military base in Djibouti. The purpose of this base was twofold, first to provide logistical support for escort vessels for Chinese tankers in the Gulf of Aden, and second to support the multinational anti-piracy campaigns. At the same time, in the highly militarised region of the Horn of Africa, the Chinese government financed the construction of the Ethiopian-Djiboutian electric railway under a $4 billion project, while the China Export-Import Bank provided funding for more than $300 million on a water pipeline to bring potable drinking water from Ethiopia to Djibouti. China’s approach to peace is qualitatively different from Western foreign military activities that focus on gendarme functions and armament, choosing instead to focus on infrastructure-led economic development and poverty alleviation.

The African Union

In 2016, the African Union (AU) raised the issue of foreign military bases on the African continent. The discussion has not been deepened since then. The African Union’s dependence on external funding and resources for its operations, including peacekeeping, has limited its freedom to take independent, strategic, and tactical decisions in its operations. For peacekeeping, for instance, African states raise only 2% of the cost of the AU’s peace and security operations, while foreign funders – such as the European Union – provide 98% of the funds. This has constrained the ability of the Peace and Security Council to drive its own agenda and is why the AU has not been able to effectively continue the discussion around the foreign military bases.

On 15 October 2003, Nile Gardiner and James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation in the US published a white paper called US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution. They argued that the US government should create a US Africa Command that would intervene in Africa ‘when vital [US] national interests are threatened’ in the same tradition as was done in Latin America and the Caribbean with the establishment of the US Southern Command in 1963. This became a reality in 2007. Two African countries, Botswana and Liberia, indicated that they would be pleased to house the headquarters of AFRICOM. At that time, South Africa voiced opposition to AFRICOM’s move to the continent. Through AU intervention, both Botswana and Liberia backed off.

The mood to prevent AFRICOM’s headquarters from being based on the continent remains amongst the African people. However, this has not stopped US and some African heads of state. In a meeting with the US Secretary of State Blinken on 27 April 2021, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari asked the US to relocate AFRICOM Headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany to the African continent in order to help fight insurgencies. Growing pressure from Islamic and other dissidents and increased instability in Nigeria may have been a contributing factor to President Buhari’s appeal, though he fell short of suggesting Nigeria as host for AFRICOM. Nigeria’s position is a major shift from its initial stand which, a decade ago, was against the presence of AFRICOM in Africa. Nonetheless, US military bases proliferated after that date. The AU referred to the danger of this proliferation in 2016 but, even at that time, all that the AU could muster were the tepid words: ‘concern’ and ‘circumspect’. Despite these words, AFRICOM insinuated itself into the AU with an attaché to the PSC and staff in the AU Conflict Prevention and Early Warning Division, as well as the Peace Support Operations Division. With the entry of AFRICOM into the AU in the name of ‘interoperability’ to link US military forces with AU peacekeepers, the US has begun to shape the AU’s security framework more directly.

In his book on neo-colonialism in Africa, Nkrumah wrote:

The danger to world peace springs not from the action of those who seek to end neo-colonialism but from the inaction of those who allow it to continue. … If world war is not to occur it must be prevented by positive action. This positive action is within the power of the peoples of those areas of the world which now suffer under neo-colonialism but it is only within their power if they act at once, with resolution and in unity.

These words from 1965 ring true today.

Camp Simba, Kenya -2.171847 | 40.897016
Source: Google Maps

References:

Two young girls return to their homes after drawing water from a stream that the farm dwelling community shares with wild animals, 29 July 2020.
Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele

Introduction

 Growing up on a farm in Nyarha, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, I experienced the best childhood.[1] There are several reasons for this. The first was the innocence of childhood, just being a little girl running freely and playing with oonopopi (‘dolls’), iraysisi (‘racing’), undize (‘hide and seek’), upuca (‘the stones game’), and ugqaphsi (‘jumping rope’). The sense of community, freedom, and interdependence in communal living was another joy. My parents could send me to a neighbouring homestead without any fear for my safety. My mother would often send me to the neighbour’s house to ask for igaqa le beef stock (‘a cube of beef stock’) to season our food if she didn’t have any, or intwana ye swekile (‘some sugar’) if she ran out.

The only time when I felt the absence of that freedom and the sense of belonging begin to dwindle was at the sight of the white farm owner. Instantly, I became overwhelmed by a great fear. The fear was both a learned and taught behaviour; we were taught that it was a form of respect. While taking instructions from the farmer, my grandfather would be deferential, bowing his head to avoid eye contact. When my father heard the sound of the farmer’s motorcycle approaching, he would quickly hide his beer.

The relationship I have described between the farm owner and farmworkers and dwellers is part of the social fabric of the farm. Farms are not just units of production; they ‘are structured by paternalist discourses – practices that weave power relations into the very fabric of social identity and daily life’.[2] As a form of control and display of his power, the white farm owner needed to get the sense that you feared him. Appearing fearless was viewed as a sign of disrespect, especially if it meant that you were ready to question anything that the farm owner said or did.

As a child, I found it peculiar when my father used to tell me that all of the vast farmland around eNyarha belonged to white people. None of the Black people had any land. As an adult, I was enraged to learn that five generations of my family had worked for the same family, but we had no claim to that land whatsoever. I questioned why my family’s decades of labour bore fruit only for the wealthy white landowners and their descendants. I could not reconcile the story of five generations of hard labour with the life we were living: a life of poverty.

The labour relations on South African farms continue to maintain race, gender, and class inequalities as a central character of work and life. Large-scale commercial farmers, like all other capitalists, maintain cycles of servitude which result in the generational poverty of their workers and engage in exploitative labour practices such as coercing employees into long hours of manual labour and paying them slave wages. As workers spend most of their time working, they rarely have the time, physical strength, or mental energy to practice other methods of subsistence, undertake recreational activities, or travel away from the farm. Both the land and the workers themselves are sites of exploitation. Farmworkers are paid poorly: as of 2022, their salaries range from R2000 – R6000 (about $136 – $408) per month. Their paltry wages are not enough to sustain them, forcing them into a life of minimal subsistence, and they often complain that they can’t afford to purchase food or pay for their children’s education.

Many farmworkers and intellectuals alike have pointed to the unpaid, undervalued, and often invisible labour of reproducing and sustaining life, such as the birthing and rearing of children, maintaining the household, caring for the sick, cooking, cleaning, and so on, also known as reproductive labour. This labour is at the base of our economic system, as it reproduces not only our existence as a species and society but also provides workers for the capitalist class. In the words of Susan Ferguson:

… our understanding of capitalism is incomplete if we treat it simply as an economic system involving workers and owners and fail to examine the ways in which the wider social reproduction of the system – that is, the daily and generational reproductive labour that occurs in households, in schools, in hospitals, in prisons and so on – sustains the drive for accumulation.[3]

In the context of farms, workers’ meagre incomes hinder social reproduction for their families. Under this system, in which farmworkers are tied to the land yet retain no ownership over it for several generations, their employment encompasses all aspects of their world: to work the land, to live on the land, to nurture and sustain the land, to raise children on the land, to bury family and loved ones on the land, to have a connection with the land, to love the land, and to call the land home, but never to own the land.

Bab’Kubheka, a 71-year-old retired farmworker and farm dweller in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, explains how his parents’ social class has impacted his life and the lives of his siblings. He says:

We were crippled by the system. Our fathers were labour tenants who had no money to send us to school.[4] They were also told how many cows they could keep and where to keep them. They did not get any renumeration, hence they are known as labour tenants … we could not be educated at the tertiary level because our parents had no money. We lived on the food they used to grow. We did not sell anything. They woke up to go and work for white people without any remuneration. Today we have a problem that our people – Black people – still do not have land.[5]

Bab’Kubheka’s account exemplifies Walter Rodney’s assertion that ‘To mark time or even to move slowly while others leap ahead is virtually equivalent to going backward’.[6] Poverty transfers and reproduces across generations.[7]

In addition to farm work, women like Nozibonelo Mavis Dayi are largely responsible for the social reproduction of the family in the form of unpaid care work in the household, 21 March 2021.
Credit: New Frame / Bonile Bam

About This Dossier

Departing from the assumptions that have shaped the way that the land question is framed as an elite nationalist project in South Africa, this dossier focuses on farmworkers as key contributors to the land debate. It makes two main arguments. The first is that one of the main reasons for the enduring generational poverty of Black farmworkers is the exploitation of their labour. The farm, like many other capitalist endeavours, relies on the devaluation of the labour of Black people. Landowners treat Black people’s labour as cheap and maintain a kind of serfdom in which landless workers are tied to the owner’s land and compelled to be loyal. Threats of job loss and evictions are a few ways that farm owners extract loyalty, which has serious implications for the farmworkers: to question anything is to risk everything.

Secondly, this dossier argues that those who work the land deserve to be its primary beneficiaries, but, instead, they have been excluded from the profits and stability of owning land for generations. They have also largely been made invisible in labour statistics and excluded from the land debate and in national discussions on land redistribution policy. Understanding their perspectives is important for advancing a land reform programme that benefits those who work the land, which is why this dossier centres their contributions to the land debate, and why Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research conducted interviews with farmworkers from the South African provinces of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Cape, and Western Cape for this dossier.

The land question in South Africa has several dimensions, including the role of white-owned farms, traditional authority in the former Bantustans, and the urban land question. This dossier is devoted the former.

Women farmworkers face additional inequities in land distribution and working conditions. Former labourers Freeda Mkhabela, Lucia Foster, and Gugu Ngubane (from left to right) are among the activists struggling against landlessness as well as poor pay and working conditions, and for better treatment of farmworkers, 26 May 2021.
Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

Our History Has Become Our Present

 ‘Time does not pass or progress; it accumulates, even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the immense labour it takes to surrender what-has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects’.[8]

– Ian Baucom

 Writing about the plight of farmworkers in South Africa in 1990, historian Wendy Davies showed how one can track land distribution along racial lines as well as the devaluation of the labour of Black people through history. Davies detailed how Black pastoralist and farming communities were dispossessed of land by sequential waves of white settlers from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. White settlers gained ‘ownership’ of new territory by winning frontier wars against Black chieftainships and kingdoms. Through a process of drawing up bogus treaties and deeds of sale, they ensured that the terms were vastly in their favour. Although there was significant resistance to their advance, the white settlers’ use of violence enabled the success of their occupations.[9]

British and Dutch (‘Boer’) settlers in South Africa required labour for their farms, plantations, and mines on the land that they had appropriated from Black South Africans.[10] In Davies’ words, White farmers emphasised that ‘only if blacks toiled for the white man could their presence be tolerated’.[11] The British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes displayed this view in his 1894 speech to the Cape House Parliament, pronouncing that ‘it must be brought home to them [Blacks] that in the future, nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour, in physical work, in manual labour’.[12] This process was carried out by coercing Black people to work for white farmers by taking their land away from them, by destroying their livelihoods, and by introducing taxation in order to drive them into the labour economy.[13]

Davies explains that, ‘when white farmers had gained control of virtually all the land, Black farmers began to enter into sharecropping or tenancy arrangements with their white “owners”’.[14] Sharecropping meant that those who worked the land shared a portion (typically 50 per cent) of their crop with the ‘owner’ in return for land access.[15] Farms were and still are home to labour tenants, another group that provides free labour to farm owners in return for land access, typically by working for free for six months of the year. There are also Black farm dwellers who reside with their families on farmland that they own, some of whom are employed in farm work on a part-time or full-time basis.[16]

This process of accumulation by dispossession has had an enormous impact on social and class formations across the African continent. As Issa G. Shivji explains, ‘the disparity we see between workers and owners, between rural and urban areas and between colonised and metropolitan countries is the result of a process of unequal exchange that goes back several centuries’. [17]

Elderly and retired farm dwellers and farmworkers carry memories of their ancestors through oral histories. Nomabhaso Skenjana points to the site where her family’s graves had been located from the 1880s until they were destroyed during apartheid, when the farm was seized by white people, 4 August 2021.
Credit: New Frame / Bonile Bam

Land Distribution by Race and Gender

The agricultural sector in South Africa is a key driver of economic growth; in the final quarter of 2020, the agricultural GDP grew by 13.1 per cent, and, in the same calendar year, the country’s agricultural exports were worth R151.7 billion ($10.2 billion).[18] However, one of the problems with the current distribution of land in South Africa is that farmworkers and farm dwellers are excluded from the wealth produced by agricultural exploits. In 2017, the total land used in commercial agriculture accounted for 37.9 per cent of the total land area of South Africa.[19] As seen in table 1, most agricultural land is still privately owned by white male farmers, though white people make up less than 10 per cent of the population. Meanwhile, individual men own 72 per cent of the total farms and agricultural holdings with individual owners, compared to women, who own only 13 per cent.[20] However, these statistics only record landowners and not those who work land, who are made invisible, thereby erasing the reality on the ground that there are two players in agricultural production: the farm owner and the farmworker.

Table 1: Individual farm and agricultural

It is worth noting that the gender inequities on South African farms are in line with continental and global trends. Zakithi Sibandze of the Swaziland Rural Women’s Assembly describes how, in order to have access to land, women in rural Swaziland must either be married to a man or have a son or brother in whose name the land must be registered. Similarly, in Kenya, as Perpetua Wambui Karanja writes, ‘Women’s economic well-being has continued to depend largely on their rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance, and their rights to land ownership as an instrument of social and economic transformation has increasingly been neglected’.[22]

In the Northern and Western Cape of South Africa, many women are seasonal workers employed in vineyards and orchards during the harvest, generally for six months at a time. This causes both job and food insecurity for many of the women farmworkers and, consequently, for their entire families. MamNywabe, a farmworker from Nyarha, in the Eastern Cape, explains how gender inequality exists even when women are permanently employed: ‘At my workplace, we get treated differently as women because, even if something concerns us, it only gets discussed and concluded by the men but when it comes to us, we know nothing about it’.[23] At the household level, women are also largely responsible for facilitating the social reproduction of the family in the form of unpaid care work in addition to farm work. The men, meanwhile, are more often employed on a long-term or permanent basis and secure better paying jobs as foremen, supervisors, and bakkie (‘pick-up truck’) drivers.

Given this reality, when discussing the agrarian question in South Africa, it is essential to address the gender inequities in land ownership and the career progression for women farmworkers, as well as the invisible work that women undertake in their households.

The graves of Black people are proof of the labour of generations of their families on South African farms. This is the site of the ancestral graveyard of the Phyllis family on which Yvonne’s father Jacob and his family worked, 6 June 2021.
Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

Umhlaba wookhokho Bethu! The Land of Our Ancestors!

 ‘Nature did not produce property-less labourers on the one side and owners of property on the other’.[24]

– Issa G. Shivji

 Farmworkers relate to the land with a sense of belonging and cultural heritage, often referring to it as umhlaba wookhokho bethu (‘the land of our ancestors’). This phrase has multiple meanings in the context of farming communities. Not only do they think of the land of their ancestors through a historical lens; they also conceive of it as an unresolved question of injustice, understanding it to be deeply rooted in history and in generations of exploitation by white farm owners – a history that continues to the present day. Farmworkers see the land as being stolen from their forefathers through the process of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism. In their articulation, this not only led to the loss of land and livestock, but also a disruption of pre-colonial African conceptions of land relations and land use. The understanding of the land as a commons – that it can be held communally – was largely destroyed.

As we know, primitive accumulation was a crucial component of colonial rule in Africa. Farmworkers are critical of the white minority’s illegitimate acquisition of land and argue that it is the root of racial inequality. In countries that experienced the tragedy of settler colonialism, Shivji explains how massive amounts of land were alienated and how these countries experienced initial processes of land grabbing.[25] He refers to this as ‘primitive accumulation par excellence’, the original process by which the conditions of capitalist accumulation were created.[26] This process also produced a ‘surplus population’ of landless people who held neither formal nor customary rights, leading to the proletarianisation of a large sector of the population. This created a set of people who had nothing to use for subsistence and reproduction except for their own energy and muscle power.

Over time, agricultural land ownership has become even more racialised. The acquisition of land is a costly process that is more easily afforded by white people who have the generational wealth and resources to purchase land. The wealth that farmers gain from the land in turn allows them to acquire more land and make further investments on their existing property. Farmworkers, by comparison, have no share in this prosperity. They create wealth for the white farm owners while remaining impoverished, and their children inherit their parents’ poverty. This is how the wealth gap becomes more entrenched, as expressed by the fact that the richest 1 per cent of South Africans hold roughly 40.8 per cent of the country’s total wealth while the bottom 90 per cent hold a 20.1 per cent share.[27]

Emerging from the historical processes of radicalised dispossession, land ownership and enrichment from it have enormous implications for power relations in which farm owners continue to have far more rights than the workers over whom they exercise control. As Carmen Louw of the feminist initiative Women on Farms Project explains, ‘The farms in the Western Cape stem from colonial times. The people working on the farms today are descendants of the slaves that started these farms and, therefore, they have a right to land redistribution’.[28] It is clear that farmworkers do not view their historical dispossession as separate from the current land and labour struggles.[29]

On the most basic level, farmworkers are concerned about securing their own housing and shelter to make better lives for themselves, their families, and future generations. Oom Boetman, a farmworker who specialises in agricultural fencing in Colesberg, in the Northern Cape, explains: ‘Ons soek beter bly plek, dan sal ons ook beter lewe’ (‘We want better housing so that we too may live better lives’).[30] Similarly, Tanie Leana, a farm dweller in the same province who has six children and one grandson, wishes that the government would develop their community. ‘Ons soek net huise’ (‘We just want houses’), her daughter says.[31]

Keeping livestock, ukulima (‘crop farming’), and ukufuya (‘animal husbandry’) are sources of survival for farmworkers like Ephraim Muggibelo Simelane, 30 July 2020.
Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele

Generational Labour

‘We will never address the dignity of farmworkers if we don’t get the land.

The land question is non-negotiable!’

– Trevor Christians, secretary-general of the Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural, and Allied Workers’ Union (CSAAWU)

Though the Freedom Charter promises that ‘the land shall be shared among those who work it’, and section 25 (5) of the Constitution of South Africa promises equitable access to land, these promises have yet to be fulfilled. Several generations of landless farmworker families have used their labour in service of the productivity and maintenance of farms across the country. In the process, they have contributed immensely to the generational wealth of farm owners. Farmworkers tie this process to the labour struggles of their forefathers; long-term generational labour on farms should be considered a sufficient reason not only to justify farmworkers’ tenure, but also to claim land ownership.

Farmworkers Baw’uSukwini and Baw’uMkwayi both touch on this point. A fifth-generation farmworker, Baw’uSukwini, talks about the case of his family on a livestock farm in Nyarha, in the Eastern Cape:

I think that my dad is the fourth generation on that farm … My dad was over 80 years old when he died. My dad never went to school; he was born [on the farm and] … he grew up there and worked there. He reached old age and died there. All eight of us siblings … grew up on that farm and we worked on that farm … farmworkers are the ones who have worked that land until their hair turns grey. Why is it that the government doesn’t buy a farm? After buying the farm, they could go around the farms looking for people who are living on the [white-owned] farms. The government could indicate that a farm has been bought for them to live on so that they wouldn’t have to go to the township.[32]

Baw’uMkwayi, a retired farmworker on another livestock farm in Nyarha, in the Eastern Cape, shares her story:

 all of them [my family] worked on the farm … I also worked there for 20 years … [and] my wife also worked on that farm … for 20 years in the kitchen at the farm owner’s compound. When we left, she too got nothing; she left empty handed.[33]

 Most farmworkers have no formal employment contracts or benefits. As Baw’uMkwayi and Baw’uSukwini describe, it is common for workers to end up with no pension or way to support themselves in old age, making them reliant on younger generations. In this way, the cycle of labour is perpetuated as younger people work on farms to support dependents of various ages.

Ryno Filander, president of the CSAAWU, a farmworker’s union in the Western Cape, shared that he, his father, and his mother all work on the same wine farm in Langeberg. He explores two parallels on the farm: the multi-generational wealth and power of farm owners and the multi-generational poverty and powerlessness of farmworkers. ‘If you have land, you have power’, he says. The other problem, Ryno explains, is the ‘dop system’.[34] With the dop system, employers pay their employees with cheap wine, or dop. Though the dop system was outlawed in South Africa in the 1960s, in the late 1990s researchers estimated that anywhere from 2 per cent to 20 per cent of wages in the Western Cape were still being issued in alcohol.[35] Alcoholism remains one of the major challenges facing public health across South Africa – particularly in the Western Cape.

Members of the Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural, and Allied Workers’ Union (CSAAWU) protest in Cape Town against poor working and living conditions on farms, 21 September 2019.
Credit: New Frame / Barry Christianson

Grave Matters 

Farms have also become places of great spiritual significance for farmworkers whose ancestors were buried on that land. For farmworkers, their ancestors’ graves are in many instances proof of the intimacy between work and life on the farms. The concepts of home and belonging are also influenced by the ancestral connection between the living kunye nezinyanya (‘and ancestors’). This is one of the main reasons why families live on farms for years despite exploitation and abuse. As MaNkomo, a farmworker we spoke to in Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal, explained, ‘We don’t want to leave these farms because our parents and grandparents are buried here’.[36]

The loss of the ‘intangible’ – the vital spiritual connection between the living and the dead – is a significant consideration if we are to ensure restorative reparation and justice for farmworkers. Dineo Skosana’s work examines protests against the relocation of 1,000 African graves from Tweefontein Farm in Ogies, Mpumalanga to a new site, leading living descendants to report feeling ‘spiritually vulnerable and disconnected from their ancestors’.[37] By examining this phenomenon, Skosana highlights the failures of post-apartheid objectives to remedy past injustices. She argues that inadequacies in the legal system have created the conditions for market-friendly laws, such as the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (2002), to override the protection of heritage enshrined in The National Heritage Resource Act (1999), resulting in new forms of exclusion.[38]

Currently, land governance does not take cultural or historical aspects into consideration and continues to reproduce pain and trauma for the landless. This contributes to the dismal failure of the land reform programme that is currently being implemented by the state. Farmworkers see ancestral graves as both proof of labour and a political claim – that scores of people buried on farms were once labour tenants and exploited workers who ensured the farm’s flourishing. These graves are a testimony to the lives of those who bore the brunt of racial capitalism. Bhut’Ben, a second-generation farmworker in Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal spoke to this point more broadly: ‘Umphakathi wa-la awukho esimeni esi-right ngokwe nkululeko, kuthiwa sisenkululekweni. Cha as’kabi khona thina. Sisagqilazekile’ (‘The community here has not experienced freedom. We are said to have freedom but no, we have not yet achieved it here. We are still in slavery’).[39]

Addressing Food Insecurity

A report produced by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations shows that food insecurity is already a global crisis, meaning that people do not have, ‘at all times, … physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’.[40] This report estimates that, in 2020, anywhere from 720 to 811 million people across the globe faced hunger while one in three (2.37 billion) lacked adequate food access.[41]

Despite the fact that farmworkers in South Africa – and around the world – provide food for society, they are one of the groups most vulnerable to food insecurity.[42] What we eat, drink, and wear is all thanks to farmworkers. Though their skills and expertise are crucial to the economy, their labour continues to be devalued. Seasonal farmworkers (usually women) who are often employed for only half the year regularly face the challenge of job insecurity given that they do not have access to their own land to produce food year-round. Climate change has also rendered farming an increasingly precarious field, mainly for frontline and low-income communities around the world.

One of the main critiques presented to argue against the redistribution of land is the dangerous myth that it will negatively affect food security. This myth not only disregards the fact that billions of people around the world already experience food insecurity, but also relies on large-scale production and manufacturing under capitalism as the only path forward. Rather than centring a concern to guarantee food security for all, capitalist paranoia fixates on its fear that redistributing land will disrupt profit revenues generated by large-scale farming and food production. While some farmworkers, mainly the elderly, are asking for the recognition of peasant landholdings, where small landholders survive from and produce on the land, ukulima (‘crop farming’) and ukufuya (‘animal husbandry’) are not limited to familial subsistence.[43] Generally, farmworkers are critical of the myth that white farmers are the only ones capable of farming with superior technology and are the only efficient producers, while Black farmers only farm for subsistence and contribute minimally to the economy.[44]

A genuine concern for food security would take into account other means of producing food, such as growing crops ukusiphilisa (‘for our livelihoods’). Along these lines, the idea of food sovereignty was developed in the 1990s to advocate for ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through sustainable methods and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’.[45] Prioritising food sovereignty is an alternative way of organising our food system that gives those who work the land a say in how the agricultural industry is organised and what its productive priorities should be.

However, food sovereignty and ukusiphilisa – alongside farmworkers’ relations to land – are disregarded by the capitalist solution to food production. Farmworkers’ land aspirations are greater than producing food for themselves and their families; they see themselves as farmers in their own right, as workers of the land, as producers of food, and as farmers of livestock, and they strongly believe in their ability to contribute substantially to domestic and continental markets. An effective land redistribution programme must support their ambition.

Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana, a settlement supported by the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020.
Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

Conclusion

 Land reform in South Africa has failed miserably at addressing the injustices of colonialism and apartheid. Post-apartheid governments have adopted a market-oriented approach to land redistribution by prioritising the willing-seller, willing-buyer model, which has only deepened inequality. The beneficiaries of land are still elites and large agricultural corporations who can access bank loans. Land reform as it stands has not led to restorative justice, nor has it solved the problem of land hunger amongst the masses or among the Black farmworkers who have built up the wealth of farm owners for generations.

Land redistribution is an urgent need to remedy ‘historical wrongs’ and address existing social and economic inequities in order to secure an egalitarian future for all.[46] Today in South Africa, farmworkers live under the most dehumanising conditions. In all of the country’s nine provinces, they regularly face eviction despite the existence of laws such as the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997, which is intended to prevent displacement. In cases where farm dwellers resist eviction, landowners have been known to cut off basic services like water and electricity in an effort to push them off the farms. Labour and living conditions on farms are appalling, and the people who live and work there have limited access to education and healthcare services, keeping them trapped in poverty.

Descendants of the forgotten workers from centuries past call for reparation. A land redistribution discussion which deliberately ignores African modes of being and relationality to land upholds the colonial project and portends dehumanising exclusion. Any land redistribution programme which ignores these claims is insufficient.

The following demands from farmworkers and farm dwellers are key components of an effective land reform programme:

1. The government of South Africa must consult farmworkers and farm dwellers to incorporate their contributions into the development of a land reform programme which addresses their land needs.
2. Labour tenants’ claims to land ownership should be given priority in order to avoid land reform that solely enriches Black elites.
3. The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development should facilitate the process of white farm owners apportioning some of their farmland to lifetime employees and descendants of families who have worked on farms for several generations.
4. The government must purchase farms for farmworkers and assist them with capital for start-up costs, farming equipment, and agricultural skills.
5. Land reform in South Africa must take into account the social factors that contribute to food insecurity and acknowledge the opportunities to rectify it through land redistribution.
6. The process of land reform must address the marginalisation of women workers in the agricultural industry and the lack of land ownership by women farmers to ensure gender parity in both spheres.

Loo ngumhlaba wookhokho bethu! This is the land of our ancestors! Land to those who work it; it is high time that those who work the land get to own the land.

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Bab’Kubheka. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, 23 October 2021.

Bhut’Ben. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal, 24 October 2021.

Bhattacharya, Tithi. ‘Mapping Social Reproduction Theory’. Verso Books Blog, 15 February 2018. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3555-mapping-social-reproduction-theory.

Baucom, Ian. ‘Specters of the Atlantic’. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 61–82.

Baw’uMkwayi. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 5 June 2021.

Baw’uSukwini. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 5 June 2021.

Carmen Louw. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Stellenbosch, Western Cape 14 March 2022.

Credit Suisse Research Institute. Global Wealth Report 2021. June 2021. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html.

Cross, Catherine and Michelle Friedman. ‘Women and Tenure: Marginality and the Left-hand Power’. In Women, Land, and Authority: Perspectives from South Africa, edited by Shamim Meer, 17–34. Cape Town: David Philip, 1997.

Davies, Wendy. We Cry for Our Land: Farm Workers in South Africa. Oxford: Oxfam, 1990.

Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, Republic of South Africa. Land Audit Report, Version 2: Private Land Ownership by Race, Gender, and Nationality. Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, November 2017.

Devereux, Stephen, Ruth Hall, and Colette Solomon. ‘The Farm Workers Who Produce Our Food Are the Most Vulnerable to Hunger’. Mail & Guardian, 8 October 2019. https://mg.co.za/article/2019-10-08-00-the-farm-workers-who-produce-our-food-are-the-most-vulnerable-to-hunger/.

Du Toit, Andries. ‘Farm Workers and the “Agrarian Question”’. Review of African Political Economy 21, no. 61 (1994): 375–388.

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, World Food Programme, and World Health Organisation. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021: Transforming Food Systems for Food Security, Improved Nutrition, and Affordable Healthy Diets for All. Rome: FAO, 2021.

Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. ‘Food Security’. Policy Brief, no. 2 (2006): 1–4.

Hornby, Donna and Stha Yeni. ‘Farm Dwellers in Kwa-Zulu Natal South Africa and the Politics of Home’. Conference Paper no. 74 presented at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative Conference, 2018.

Karanja, Perpetua W. ‘Women’s Land Ownership Rights in Kenya’. Third World Legal Studies 10, article 6 (1991): 109–135.

Leana, Tanie. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Colesberg, Northern Cape, 6 February 2022.

London, Leslie. ‘The “Dop” System, Alcohol Abuse, and Social Control Amongst Farm Workers in South Africa: A Public Health Challenge’. Social Science & Medicine 48, no. 10 (1999): 1407–1414.

Mafeje, Archibald B. The Agrarian Question, Access to Land, and Peasant Responses in sub-Saharan Africa. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2003.

MamNteshi. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, 23 October 2021.

MaNkomo. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal, 24 October 2021.

MamNywabe. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 6 June 2021.

Mkhize, Naledi N. ‘Private Game Farms and the Tenure Security of Workers and Dwellers in Cradock – Implications for Tenure Reform in South Africa’. PhD diss., University of Cape, 2012.

Moore, Melissa. ‘SA’s Agriculture Sector – A Key Driver of Economic Growth’. Future Growth, 31 May 2021. https://www.futuregrowth.co.za/insights/sa-s-agriculture-sector-a-key-driver-of-economic-growth/.

Moyo, Sam. ‘The Politics of Land Distribution and Race Relations in Southern Africa’. Identities, Conflict, and Cohesion Programme Paper no. 10, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2004.

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Ngcukaitobi, Tembeka. ‘Part Two: Land Matters and Historical Distortions’. Interview by Yvonne Phyllis. New Frame, 7 July 2021. https://www.newframe.com/part-two-land-matters-and-historical-distortions/.

Ngcukaitobi, Tembeka. ‘Rethinking the Past and Future of Land Reform’. New Frame, 19 November 2019. https://www.newframe.com/rethinking-the-past-and-future-of-land-reform/.

Oom Boetman. Interview by Yvonne Phyllis. Colesburg, Northern Cape, 6 February 2022.

Ossome, Lyn and Sirisha C. Naidu. ‘Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5, no. 1 (2016): 50–76.

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Ossome, Lyn, and Sirisha C. Naidu. ‘The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour’. In Labour Questions in the Global South, edited by Praveen Jha, Walter Chambati, and Lyn Ossome, 63–86. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

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Ryno Filander. Interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis. Bellville, Western Cape, 26 July 2021.

Shivji, Issa G. Accumulation in an African Periphery: A Theoretical Framework. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2009.

Shivji, Issa G. ‘Commodification of the Commons in the Transition to Neo-Liberalism: The Case of Tanzania’. Online lecture in The Political Economy of Land Governance in Africa seminars, Network of Excellence for Land Governance in Africa, 9 September 2021.

Shivji, Issa G. ‘Let a Hundred Socialist Flowers Bloom: A Conversation with Issa Shivji’. Interview by Freedom Mazwi. Review of African Political Economy, 11 November 2021. https://roape.net/2021/11/11/let-a-hundred-socialist-flowers-bloom-a-conversation-with-issa-shivji/.

Shivji, Issa G. ‘Sam Moyo and Samir Amin on the Peasant Question’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8, no. 1–2 (2019): 287–302.

Shivji, Issa G. ‘Trajectories of Accumulation: How Neoliberal Primitive Accumulation is Planting the Seeds of Suicide’. New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, no. 68 (2018): 36–38.

Skosana, Dineo. ‘Grave Matters: The Contentious Politics of Gravesite Removals in Contemporary South Africa – The Case of Tweefontein, Ogies’. PhD diss., University of Witwatersrand, 2019.

Skosana, Dineo. ‘Mining Activities Continue to Dispossess Black Families in South Africa’. Bizcommunity, 12 November 2019. https://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/608/197777.html.

Statistics South Africa. ‘Stats SA Releases Census of Commercial Agriculture 2017 Report’. Stats SA, 24 March 2020. http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=13144.
 
 

Endnotes

[1] This dossier is written in the first person by the author, Yvonne Phyllis, a descendant of farmworkers. The use of the first person has been retained to reflect the intimate nature of politics surrounding the issue of land in South Africa.

[2] Andries du Toit, ‘Farm Workers and the “Agrarian Question”’, Review of African Political Economy, no. 61 (1994): 375.

[3] Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Mapping Social Reproduction Theory’, Verso Books Blog, 15 February 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3555-mapping-social-reproduction-theory.

[4] Bab’Kubheka speaks in plural when referring to fathers, forefathers, or ancestors because he understands his family’s struggles to be part of the class struggle of all Black farmworkers, farm dwellers, and labour tenants. This way of speaking is common in many African cultures.

[5] Bab’Kubheka, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, 23 October 2021.

[6] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso Books, 2018), 271.

[7] For more on this topic, see Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, ‘Part Two: Land Matters and Historical Distortions’, interviewed by Yvonne Phyllis, New Frame, 7 July 2021.

[8] Ian Baucom, ‘Specters of the Atlantic’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 61–82.

[9] Wendy Davis, We Cry for Our Land: Farm Workers in South Africa (London: Oxfam, 1990), 1.

[10] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[11] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[12] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[13] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[14] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[15] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[16] Davies, We Cry for Our Land, 1.

[17] Issa G. Shivji, ‘Trajectories of Accumulation: How Neoliberal Primitive Accumulation is Planting the Seeds of Suicide’, New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy, no. 68 (2018): 36.

[18] Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global Wealth Report 2021.

[19] Statistics South Africa, ‘Stats SA Releases Census of Commercial Agriculture 2017 Report,’ Stats SA, 24 March 2020, http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=13144.

[20] Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, Republic of South Africa, Land Audit Report, Version 2: Private Land Ownership by Race, Gender, and Nationality, Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, November 2017.

[21] In the 1950s, the apartheid government divided South Africans into four racial groups: white, native (or Black), Indian, and Coloured (mixed-race people).

These racial and cultural descriptors are no longer legislated as they were during the apartheid years but are still in common use today. For more on race and ethnicity in South Africa, see South African History Online, ‘Race and Ethnicity in South Africa’, 27 August 2019, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/race-and-ethnicity-south-africa.

[22] Perpetua Wambui Karanja, ‘Women’s Land Ownership Rights in Kenya’, Third World Legal Studies 10, article 6 (1991): 109.

[23] MamNywabe, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 6 June 2021.

[24] Issa G. Shivji, Accumulation in an African Periphery: A Theoretical Framework (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2009), 26.

[25] Issa G. Shivji, ‘Commodification of the Commons in the Transition to Neo-Liberalism: The Case of Tanzania’, (Online lecture in The Political Economy of Land Governance in Africa seminars, Network of Excellence for Land Governance in Africa, 9 September 2021).

[26] Shivji, ‘Commodification of the Commons in the Transition to Neo-Liberalism’, 2021.

[27] Credit Suisse Research Institute, Global Wealth Report 2021.

[28] Carmen Louw, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, 14 March 2022.

[29] Moyo, ‘The politics of land distribution’, 2.

[30] Oom Boetman, interview by Yvonne Phyllis, Colesberg, Northern Cape, 6 February 2022.

[31] Tanie Leana, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Colesberg, Northern Cape, 6 February 2022.

[32] Baw’uSukwini, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 5 June 2021.

[33] Baw’uMkwayi, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Nyarha, Eastern Cape, 5 June 2021.

[34] Ryno Filander, interview by Yvonne Phyllis, Bellville, Western Cape, 26 July 2021.

[35] Leslie London, ‘The “Dop” System, Alcohol Abuse and Social Control Amongst Farmworkers in South Africa: A Public Health Challenge’, Social Science & Medicine 48, no. 10 (1999): 1407–1414.

[36] MaNkomo, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal, 24 October 2021.

[37] Dineo Skosana, ‘Mining Activities Continue to Dispossess Black Families in South Africa’, Bizcommunity, 12 November 2019, https://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/608/197777.html.

[38] Dineo Skosana, ‘Grave Matters: The Contentious Politics of Gravesite Removals in Contemporary South Africa – The Case of Tweefontein, Ogies’, (PhD diss., University of Witwatersrand, 2019).

[39] Bhut’Ben, interview and translation by Yvonne Phyllis, Mooi River, KwaZulu-Natal, 24 October 2021.

[40] FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, World Food Programme and World Health Organisation, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021, 2021.

[41] FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021, 2021.

[42] Stephen Devereux, Ruth Hall, and Colette Solomon, ‘The Farm Workers Who Produce Our Food Are the Most Vulnerable to Hunger’, Mail & Guardian, 8 October 2019, https://mg.co.za/article/2019-10-08-00-the-farm-workers-who-produce-our-food-are-the-most-vulnerable-to-hunger/.

[43] Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), ‘Let a Hundred Socialist Flowers Bloom: A Conversation with Issa Shivji’, ROAPE, 11 November 2021, https://roape.net/2021/11/11/let-a-hundred-socialist-flowers-bloom-a-conversation-with-issa-shivji/.

[44] Moyo, ‘The Politics of Land Distribution’, 2.

[45] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ‘A World Without Hunger: The Fortieth Newsletter (2021)’, October 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/40-a-world-without-hunger/.

[46] Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, ‘Rethinking the Past and Future of Land Reform’, New Frame, 19 November 2019, https://www.newframe.com/rethinking-the-past-and-future-of-land-reform/.