The task is to recapture progressive thought and policies from post-independence Africa for our times.

In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah described the paradox of neocolonialism in Africa, in which “the soil continue[s] to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.” He captured what continues to be an essential feature of Africa’s political economy.

Enforced through neoliberalism in the contemporary period, many African states remain dependent on exporting primary commodities to enrich the global North, with their domestic policy constrained by unequal aid, trade, and investment regimes, and what is now, after almost four decades of structural adjustment, an almost permanent state of austerity.

Despite its manifest failures, neoliberalism continues to dominate policy making on the continent, bolstered by an ideological onslaught and a conditionality regime that has stifled any space to imagine and pursue alternatives.

African governments in the immediate post-independence period challenged the neocolonial exploitation of the continent. Whatever their ideological inclinations, governments saw the key task of their time as securing their political and economic agency by breaking out of their subordinate place in the global economic order and imagining a new one. In contrast with the contemporary externalisation of policymaking, they responded creatively to the material interests of the majority of ordinary peoples.

The state sponsored and/or established industries; provided universal education to foster skills necessary for transforming the economy; built social infrastructure to ease reproductive labor; delinked from colonial currencies; made resources available for domestic producers and women through developmentalist central bank policies; worked to diversify revenue sources; and built regional solidarity.

The post-independence project was undermined and derailed by the active efforts of North governments including their former colonisers. They disrupted African governments through assassination attempts and coups, and opportunistically seized on the 1980s commodity crash that devastated African economies, compelling them to accept World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) loans conditional on liberalization, austerity, and privatization. Four decades later, the ideological dominance of neoliberalism is profound.

Spaces of progressive thought and learning have been fragmented, knowledge production has been monopolised by the free market logic, and tendentious misreadings of the post-independence period as ideological, statist, and inefficient abound, facilitating a sense best summed up by the Thatcherite pronouncement that “there is no alternative.”

Recasting post-independence policies

Three widespread misreadings of the post-independence period were wielded to push structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and continue to underpin the neoliberal hegemony in Africa.

Firstly, the WB/IMF and North governments cast post-independence leaders as excessively ideological in order to discredit the entire experience. In reality, however, while there was an ideological ferment, the range of policies adopted by African governments to assert economic sovereignty were similar across the ideological spectrum.

Capitalist oriented Kenya, socialist humanist Zambia, scientific socialist Ghana, Negritudist Senegal, and Houphouet-Boigny’s Côte d’Ivoire (then the Ivory Coast) constructed a central role for the state in post-colonial social and economic transformation, often driven by the collective ethos of meeting society’s needs in the absence of any significant local private capitalist class and the levels of investment necessary for transformation.

This often translated to the creation of state-owned enterprises and heavy investment in human capital; interventionist fiscal and monetary policies; and a uniform (if ultimately inconsistent) commitment to import substitution industrialisation. The false homogenisation of the post-independence development project as a failure of ideology has allowed neoliberalism to be positioned as an ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ remedy to this period rather than an ideology itself, liable to contestation.

Secondly, the strong role of the state in post-independence development policy has been blamed for Africa’s development problems and used to justify the installation of the market as the solution, laying the basis for large-scale privatisation and deregulation. In reality, however, all post-independence economies were largely market-oriented with key sectors dominated by foreign capital, serving as a continuation of colonial patterns.

Post-independence governments did, however, set out to regulate foreign capital through, for example, nationalising strategic industries and capital controls. Ultimately, the failure to curtail the dominance of foreign capital, continued dependence on primary commodity export, and the vagaries of the global economic system worked to undermine the post-independence development project. This reality has been obscured to scapegoat state intervention, justifying the further encroachment of foreign capital and continued integration into an unequal global economic order. Thandika Mkandawire and Charles Soludo outlined the hypocrisy of this narrative, noting that the post-independence project was not outside the dominant policy orientation globally.

Post-depression, Europe was being reconstructed through massive state-driven intervention, and the Marshall Plan led by the United States was far from a market driven exercise. As Ha-Joon Chang has noted, the delegitimisation of the state as a development actor in Africa denied the continent the very policy instruments used by the North to develop.

Finally, the myth of weak and inefficient institutions in the post-independence period underpinned efforts to dismantle the state and its role in the economy and social provisioning. This misrepresents what was a uniquely consistent policy period on the continent, in which there was stable tariff policy and taxation, and public development plans and budgets. Mkandawire and Soludo suggest neoliberal actors like the WB/IMF simply failed to understand the multiple roles of institutions in the post-independence period: rural post offices were also savings banks and meeting places for the community, the Cocoa Marketing Board in Ghana also raised money to fund education.

As such, when they were dismantled and replaced with standardised, monotasked institutions during structural adjustment, it ripped the social fabric that was integral to the post-independence agenda. For example, after the state-run Cocoa Marketing Board was dismantled, universities were forced to raise funds privately, and those donors over time reshaped and de-politicized the curriculum. The resulting sense of dislocation, alienation, and commodification has undermined the deep efforts of post-independence governments to foster socio-economic inclusion.

The post-independence period had a range of limitations, critically related to the failure to adequately address gender imbalances, enable independent workers and peasants movements, or build strong decentralised systems of local governance. However, when compared to the neoliberal era, there was inspiring clarity around the goal of structural transformation and a wealth of policy efforts aimed at transforming the neocolonial patterns that still grip the continent. The questions post-independence governments asked, to which the policies were formulated as answers, were all but ignored by neoliberalism. It is, therefore, of value for Africans to go beyond the persistent narratives that serve to bolster neoliberalism, and reassert Africa’s experiences in this period as an anchor for development alternatives.

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This article introduces the series “Reclaiming Africa’s Early Post-Independence History” from Post-Colonialisms Today (PCT), a research and advocacy project of activist-intellectuals on the continent recapturing progressive thought and policies from early post-independence Africa to address contemporary development challenges. Sign up for PCT updates here.

This post is from a new partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

Africa entered the global COVID-19 discussion in typical fashion—shrouded in a discourse of lament and crisis. In April 2020, while New York City held on securely to the title of “COVID-epicenter” (after Italy relinquished the title), scholarship and opinion pieces proliferated, predicting that Africa’s demise was on the horizon. A public health expert writing for The World Economic Forum (WEF) warned that Africa had a “time bomb to diffuse.”

As wealthy countries grappled with their own inundated health systems, more Africans would die because the West could not afford to help. In May, Yale School of Medicine forecasted that by the end of June, 16.3 million Africans could contract the virus—a 135% increase in the number of cases from April to May and 39% increase from May to June. Lack of health infrastructure, high user fees, large refugee populations, high rates of comorbidity indicators, poor governance, corruption, and lack of sanitation were just some of the factors informing the anticipated COVID-related death toll in Africa.

Studies like these were plentiful in the early months of the pandemic. The reality, however, strayed far from the science and expert opinions. By August, the number of COVID cases on the continent remained low in both absolute and proportional terms. This time, the experts began to postulate why Africans were not dying as they had predicted. In the aftermaths of these errant conjectures, headlines like “Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of Coronavirus outbreaks in Africa” dotted the media landscape. Again, public health experts returned to what they had previously adumbrated as exposing the continent to high cases of COVID-19—poverty, population density, demographic structures, co-morbidity factors. Some even suggested that the numbers were a result of low testing, which has since been disproven. What the predictions hadn’t taken into account was how quick to act most African countries would be.

Ghana was one of the first countries to close all of its land and sea borders. For nations that had been impacted by Ebola, there was still infrastructure in place to respond to COVID, thus minimizing spread. Senegal and Rwanda also had noteworthy responses characterized by innovative solutions to treatment and contact tracing. The African Union coordinated with other regional partners to establish the African Medical Supplies Platform—a virtual marketplace where governments and health officials can directly purchase essential medical supplies.

What these failed predictions depict is how the global public health industry is complicit in the reproduction of what Malinda Smith calls “the African tragedy”—the uncritical epistemic industry that has long produced knowledge of African development as a monolithic and primordial tragedy. This intellectual space is generally inhabited by development economists giving credence only to internal factors like  “good” governance and economic institutions.

The African tragedy is maintained through a valence of objective and quantifiable science that obscures racists and un-reflexive discourses about the continent. Global health, just like development economists, begin their inquiries and predictions for the dissemination of COVID-19 in Africa with a set of assumptions that rely on an undifferentiated continent with no possible positive attributes to contain the spread of the virus. We saw evidence of this when two French doctors expressed how vaccine trials should take place in Africa because there are “no masks, no treatments, no ICUs” and “they are highly exposed and they don’t protect themselves.”

Outrage ensued from these comments, with the head of the World Health Organization calling it a “hangover from colonial mentality.” Yet, how different are these comments from the underlying reasons that informed early predictions that Africa would be ravaged by COVID? When some African countries far exceeded expectations, headlines foreshadowed that the worst was yet to come. The New York Times recently proposed that the “extra time” that had been bought by the slow spread of the virus was not enough to bolster weak health care systems, which would soon bring about the originally anticipated number of cases for the continent.

More recently the rise in cases and COVID-related deaths in Africa has been tied to the highly transmissible South African variant of the virus. Here, again, public health officials did not anticipate that the primary factor leading to increased COVID-19 cases in Africa would be a more contagious version of the virus, once again shifting our attention from dilapidated health infrastructure to public health questions that transcend expected disaster. The disaggregated country-level data shows that most African countries continue to control the spread of the virus and mortality rates—still faring better than many wealthier nations.

An appeal to the African tragedy is never about the fundamental causes of poverty, lack of infrastructure, or corruption. These factors cannot be addressed by more aid and development interventions. Solutions to these public health problems demand a fundamental restructuring of the economic and political order.

We see steps in this direction with respect to the People’s Vaccine Alliance—a coalition of governments and actors from the Global South demanding that the publicly-funded COVID-19 vaccine be considered a public good. These demands come as wealthier countries comprising only 14% of the global population have purchased 53% of the more promising COVID-19 vaccine. Countries in the Global South have taken to the WTO to demand that the WTO suspend TRIPS (the trade related aspects of intellectual property rights) to ensure that all countries have access to the requisite health resources for controlling the virus.

V.Y. Mudimbe expresses how the othering of Africa is an inexorable feature in the invention of Africa. It sustains the West’s ability to imagine itself as intellectually and morally superior. These delusions of grandeur are maintained through enterprises like global public health that discursively reinforce conditions suggesting the need for Africa to remain financially and epistemically dependent on Western countries.

The forecasting of COVID-related deaths was accompanied by a call for the world to “save Africa.” Brain drain, land seizures for natural resource extraction, covetous intellectual property rights, and histories of medical racism, have all contributed to the conditions that would have led public health experts to predict that COVID would ravage the continent.

Many West African countries are still rebounding from the effects that the World Bank and IMF-backed Bamako Initiative wrought on their health care systems. To make these issues salient, however, is to share accountability for the African tragedy with the international community.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

A class analysis of Kenyan society is a complex matter and not the object here, but a few issues need clarifying before I give the reasons why I believe the Kenyan middle class must support the struggle to implement the 2010 constitution and why it is in their interest to do so.

In Kiswahili we have the word tabaka which also means social classes. Foreign ruling classes that rule the world have been called mabeberu, makabaila, mabwenyenye, wanyonyaji, wavuna jasho. Nationally we have our own walala hai (those who sleep alive), walala heri (those who sleep okay) and walala hoi (those who sleep tired and hungry). Walala hai are also known as wavuna jasho (exploiters). Walala hai are agents of foreign interests. Walala heri have strata or layers: the upper middle class, the middle middle class, and lower middle class. While the first layer seeks to join the walala hai, the middle middle class is for the most part generally comfortable with its class position. But the lower middle class is always conscious of the possibility of falling back into the ranks of the walala hoi, the working classes.

Philosophers have blamed this situation on the opportunism of the middle classes in matters of transformation and revolution. Indeed, it has been argued that the middle classes never participate in transformative and revolutionary movements until victories have been secured. That’s when they celebrate loudly in bars making it clear to all that they were always part of the social reforms. Playing it comfortable and playing it safe.

One of my friends, Professor Luis Franceschi, has this metaphor about the middle classes and their role in revolutions:

“A revolution begins like a matchstick which burns from the head and transforms itself (the wood) into ashes. A matchstick is not lit by the wood, or by its rear end, but by its head; the head is the igniter. Well, the head of a revolution is not the masses, it’s the middle class. Those are the igniters. Those are the ones educated enough to be uncomfortable, and comfortable enough to have something to lose. By igniting, they risk it all, they go all the way and in doing so they turn old habits into ashes and pull along the masses.”

The masses are also educators of the middle classes and the educated. Transformative and revolutionary leaders do also come from self-educated working class people and from the foot soldiers of social reforms and revolutions. Revolutionaries also come from self-educated prisoners. Malcolm X is a striking example of this latter breed.

My friend Luis, whom I have quoted, has in mind organic intellectuals who are essential auxiliaries of transformative and revolutionary movements. Indeed, this is a special category of public intellectuals; not all public intellectuals are organic intellectuals.

Linda Katiba

The 2010 constitution is founded on a number of major pillars. The vision and objectives of the constitution are progressive. In particular, the values and principles laid out in Article 10 — patriotism, national unity, sharing and devolution of power, the rule of law, democracy, participation of the people, human dignity, equity, social justice, inclusiveness, equality, human rights, non-discrimination, protection of the marginalised, good governance, integrity, transparency and accountability and sustainable development — signal a future that is different from our colonial and post-colonial past.

In the preamble to our constitution, we acknowledge the supremacy of the Almighty God of all creation and our right to freely practice our various faiths, with Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and other religious figureheads as our role models. Ours is one of the most progressive bills of rights that protects the whole gamut of our civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. The constitution decrees strong and independent institutions to act as strong checks and balances and guarantee good governance and democracy for all. The powers of the presidency are democratised and decentralised, monitored, checked, and balanced, so that never again shall we entertain the old refrain “KANU iko wapi? Juu kabisa! Na Moi? Juu! Juu! Juu kabisa!” that characterised the old doctrine of divine kingship where the president played God and owned God.

The constitution decrees accountability and transparency in security and financial matters and there are provisions for how we incur our national debt. We are compelled by the constitution to organise politics around ideologies and issues and not divisions of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, region, generation, clan, occupation, and xenophobia.

Without a doubt, the constitution recognises the sovereignty of the Kenyan people as supreme and their participation in societal matters is decreed. If implemented, Chapter 6 on leadership and integrity will give us a social, economic, religious, spiritual, and political leadership that leads us to our vision of a better society.

The constitution has a vision of the equitable distribution of land and national resources. In mitigating the land issue — at the heart of our social, economic, cultural, spiritual, and political problems — the constitution gives us the hope that access to land will be possible to ensure the right to food for all.

Collectively these pillars guarantee stability, peace, prosperity, egalitarianism, justice, freedom, ecological safety, non-militarism, democracy, alternative leadership, electoral justice and an end to civil strife. They lay a very solid basis for mitigating the weaknesses of the constitution. Our national resources will be held in trust for us and we will stop subsidising the state by supporting others through charity or social justice philanthropy because the state and the political leadership have stolen, wasted, or mortgaged these resources.

Chattering Class No More

In particular, the middle classes will be relieved of a tremendous financial burden when public goods that include education, health (the right to the highest attainable standard of health including reproductive healthcare), a clean and healthy environment, food (freedom from hunger, and access to adequate food of an acceptable quality), water (clean and safe and in adequate quantities), and social security, are progressively realised. The ultimate vision of the constitution is to de-commodify and de-privatise these public goods. There will never be a progressive realisation of these public goods if resources continue to be wasted and stolen and if we cannot pay off our sovereign debt.

For those who want to contest for political power, if the constitution is implemented, electoral justice will be assured and campaigns will not be run on the basis of how much money a candidate has. Political parties will be institutions that are not owned by ethnic barons and their cartels, national and foreign. Contesting for political power is important for an alternative political leadership to emerge that can be entrusted with the implementation of the constitution.

The constitution gives all Kenyans rights. It ends the politics of revenge and vindictiveness and protects Kenyans who, although in league with foreign interests, are robbed by them. It is important to state this because we know of Kenyans who own properties abroad who have been denied visas by the governments of those countries. We also know that in some cases, assets of Kenyans have been frozen abroad without due process. The state must protect the rights of such Kenyans. Taking the current position that they deserve such treatment is to subvert their rights under the constitution.

The Kenyan middle classes cannot anymore claim to sit on the fence when political matters come up for discussion and when seeking solutions to political problems. Indeed, there are no political fences to sit on in Kenya. We are either for the current unacceptable and unsustainable status quo or we are the vanguard of transformative and fundamental changes in our society.

Foremost among these changes is the development of an alternative leadership in all our social, economic, cultural, spiritual, and political spheres. Such leadership will be at the forefront of our struggles for freedom from exploitation, oppression, and domination by both national and foreign interests. The alternative to this transformation and change is enslavement, poverty, hunger, instability, and denial of our basic rights and freedoms, including the promise of fulfilling our democracy.