Southern Africa: The Liberation Struggle Continues

Fifty years on from the beginnings of liberation in Africa, John Saul finds there is still much work to be done, especially in southern Africa where the final triumph over colonial and racial domination occurred. In each of the the five sites of the overt struggle against domination – Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – there are clear signs of recolonization. This time by capital. What we have seen is the virtual recolonization of southern Africa by capital. This is something new. It is not easy to disaggregate this "capital" into national capitals and see it as being the instrument of various nationally-based imperialisms and their several colonialisms. Now, it is an "Empire of Capital" that is currently recolonizing Africa. Of course, this has been complicated by the still independent role that national states play in the imperial equation. Moreover, it is the case that such a "recolonization" has been accomplished with the overt connivance of indigenous leaders/elites – those who have inherited power with the demise of "white rule" but who, in doing so, have manifested much greater commitment to the interests of their own privileged class-in-creation, as opposed to those of the mass of their own people. In short, it is not a happy world for the vast mass of ordinary southern African citizens – despite the freedom that they had seemed once to have won. Some facts for South Africa may provide an indication of such a reality, one that has also scarred each of the five countries of the region that once became key sites of overt liberation struggle: Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Indeed, the several country case-studies that comprise the body of this edition of AfricaFiles' Ezine will, cumulatively, give a very clear sense of this reality. In Zimbabwe, in the brutal thrall of Mugabe and ZANU-PF has witnessed an even greater deterioration of national circumstances. ZANU-PF stewardship of the economy has been an unmitigated disaster, while its politics, through years of overt and enormously costly dictatorial practices, have produced a situation that is proving enormously difficult both to displace and to move beyond. In South Africa, the economic gap between black and white has indeed narrowed statistically – framed by the fact that some blacks have indeed got very much richer (from their own upward mobility as junior partners to recolonization and from the fresh spoils of victory that this has offered them). Yet the gap between rich and poor is actually wider than ever it was – and it is growing. A long-time and firmly loyal ANC cadre (Ben Turok) has himself published a book entitled The Evolution of ANC Economic Policy. In the book, Turok acknowledges both the contribution of ANC policies to growing inequality in South Africa, while reaching "the irresistible conclusion that the ANC government has lost a great deal of its earlier focus on the fundamental transformation of the inherited social system". Source: AfricaFiles