Africa and the crisis of socialism: postsocialism and the Left

This special issue concentrates on the years when international socialism sank into crisis, which were primarily the 1980s and 1990s. The works in this issue highlight and interrogate the reactions, conversions, trajectories and memories of groups and individuals who had experienced some form of socialist rule in Africa, espoused socialist or communist ideas, or studied in European socialist countries. Alongside achievements in establishing democratic rule and giving civil society a stronger voice, this ambiguous era of economic liberalization and structural adjustment also brought about the dismantlement of the developmental postcolonial state, its privatization, disorder and religious radicalism, and the extinction of hard-gained social goods (Mkandawire and Olukoshi 1995; Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999; Mbembe 2001; Young 2004; Ferguson 2006). On the international plane, this period witnessed growing disillusionment with socialist experiments, the promising lustre of East Asian economic achievements, China’s gradual turn to capitalism, and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

We are, however, aware that the crisis had set in much earlier than this in some of the most ambitious socialist countries. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser had reached socioeconomic impasses and faced the resulting consequences already in the second half of the 1960s. Nevertheless, the socialist option still held currency well into the early 1980s for both Jerry Rawlings in Ghana and the Egyptian leftists (Ismael and El-Sa’id 1990; Nugent 2009–10). Between 1983 and 1987, Thomas Sankara led one of the most idealistic socialist revolutions in Burkina Faso. Around the same time, however, Mozambique began to reverse its socialist policy, whereas the advent of perestroika in the Soviet Union deprived the Ethiopian Marxist junta of indispensable resources, leading to, or at least accelerating, its demise (Clapham 1992; Pitcher 2003).

On the northern coast of the continent, the most long-lasting party-state socialist regime, which perceived itself as the guardian of a national revolution, faced economic collapse, the subsequent social unrest, and a crisis of political legitimacy. In October of 1988, hundreds of thousands of Algerians took to the streets to denounce the ruling Front de Libération Nationale as responsible for their country’s ills and to appeal for free elections (McDougal 2017, 284–289). This major popular uprising has been conveniently neglected by mainstream scholarship, which considers – albeit for plenty of good reasons – the collapse of “actually existing socialism” between 1989 and 1991 as the stepping stone of political change worldwide. In several respects, however, the “Algerian October” was a dress rehearsal for what was soon to occur in the Eastern bloc and beyond.

These developments form both the African and the international background against which the contributors to this special issue raise a number of common questions. These questions concern the reactions of African actors, the pathways of transition to the new era, and the legacies of the old one. Here, we inquire into how political activists, social groups, those educated in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, intellectuals and writers experienced these developments, reacted to the crisis of socialism and eventually reinvented themselves over time. Of particular interest is the investigation into conversions from socialism to new futures or utopias, the latter of which included the prioritization of human rights, freedom of religion, a liberal or social democracy and, more broadly, developments within the field of culture.

The collection of articles deliberately includes a range of very different case studies. On the one hand, there are the self-fashioned socialist and dictatorial regimes of Sékou Touré in Guinea-Conakry as well as Ethiopia since the fall of the Marxist junta; on the other hand, we see country cases like Senegal and Nigeria, in which Marxist organizations stood in opposition to pro-Western regimes, and leftist intellectuals and activists fell victim to repression. Thus, this special issue explores the impact of leftism on the making of contemporary African political cultures and the development of civil society in light of precisely this broad range of contextual conditions that we have outlined above. Continuities, path dependencies and incremental political change, each of which is related to a socialist experience, come under investigation here, and recollections and postmemories constitute an integral part of this inquiry.

Scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds – including the historians Adam Mayer and Constantin Katsakioris, the sociologists Pascal Bianchini and David Ratner, the social anthropologist Tanja Müller, the political scientist Alexander Stroh, and the literary scholar Elara Bertho – represent multiple perspectives on these topics. Bertho analyzes the reactions of Guinean writers who lived in the country when Sékou Touré passed away in 1984. Katsakioris and Müller examine the activity of returned students, who had attended schools in the Soviet Union and East Germany, as well as the legacies of their experiences and training in the Eastern bloc. Bianchini retraces the trajectories of Senegalese leftist movements and activists from May 1968 to the 2000s, while Mayer looks at how Nigerian Marxist thinkers reacted to the crisis of socialism during the 1980s and 1990s. Stroh retraces the political developments in Burkina Faso from the revolution of Thomas Sankara to the Balai Citoyen in 2013 and beyond, highlighting the legacies of Sankarism in the party system. Finally, Ratner explores the memories of the Ethiopian post-revolutionary generation, who had hardly experienced the violent revolutionary period, but who still related to it in their own ways.

In view of its scope and chronological focus, the present special issue can be seen as taking the torch from the literature on African socialisms. In recent years, this historical literature has witnessed spectacular growth and renewal. To begin with, the works by Bahru Zewde (2014) and Jeffrey James Byrne (2016) on the Ethiopian and Algerian revolutions, respectively, both based on a wealth of sources, have detailed the political and ideological struggles and their immediate effects in terms of establishing socialist regimes and, in Algeria’s case, supporting other anti-imperialist movements. Kwame Nkrumah’s attempt to modernize Ghana on socialist lines – from the early visions to the increasing shortcomings and growing disillusionment – has been critically revisited by historians who have shed light on Nkrumah’s key projects and policies along with their rather adverse effects (Ahlman 2017; Lambert 2019). Priya Lal’s study on Tanzanian socialism (2015) also stands out for its comprehensive approach and the commitment to retrieving the diverse aspirations, views, experiences and memories of those who lived through ujamaa.

Other studies bring non-socialist countries and non-state actors into the picture. This is the case for Klaas van Walraven’s seminal contribution on the Marxist-inspired Sawaba nationalist movement in Niger (2013), and for Françoise Blum’s studies of the leftist Pan-African student movement in France (2016, 2017). Another distinct strand within this body of literature has concentrated on Africa’s relations with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and China. These relations encompass ideological, political and military ties (Gleijeses 2002; Westad 2005; Alexander and McGregor 2017; Lee 2017) as well as development projects (Monson 2009) and educational exchange (De Saint Martin and Yengo 2017; Burton 2019; Katsakioris 2020). The forthcoming volume Socialismes africains, socialismes en Afrique, edited by a group of French historians (Blum, Kiriakou and Mourre 2021), brings all of these perspectives to the conversation.

Contributions to the present special issue build on and engage with the literature focusing on the period in which socialism extensively informed the political, economic and intellectual agendas across Africa. At the same time, they push the inquiry one step forward into the years of crisis and engage with the literature on postsocialism, transitions, democratization, sociology of reconversions and memory in the tradition of two important preceding publications. The first is the seminal special issue “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms,” edited by Anne Pitcher and Kelly Askew and published in Africa in 2006. Surveying former socialist countries, such as Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania, and drawing comparisons with postsocialisms in Eastern Europe, this path-breaking publication explored the ways in which the socialist past shaped the postsocialist era and raised a number of questions about the politics of forgetting, the contested memories and the continuities that we also pursue here. The second major source of inspiration we wish to acknowledge is the special issue edited by Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf under the title “What’s Left of the Left?” which appeared in 2010 in the South Atlantic Quarterly and which deals exclusively with Sudan. In particular, it addresses the complexities of the Sudanese Communist Party, including its leadership, its struggles over social and national questions, and its legacy in contemporary Sudanese political and intellectual life, to which this very publication testifies (Abusharaf 2010).

This dual inspiration conditioned our approaches and brought a productive tension to the surface at the same time. In essence, this tension appears when one looks at the crises and legacies of socialism in two groups of countries. On the one hand, countries including Mozambique and Algeria represent an actual materialization of socialist rule supported by a powerful discourse of legitimization. On the other hand, a number of countries, from Sudan to Nigeria to Senegal, mitigated the influences of communism and leftism for the most part due to an outlawed opposition. Certainly, the sociopolitical realities have been more complex than what this schematic distinction may imply. For this reason, scholars are right to pay attention to the specificity of each national experience and to consider the historicity, the social and political conditions, and the horizon of expectations within which the socialist past has been played out. There is little doubt, for example, that the legacies of socialism have been very different in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, each of which experienced socialism in very different ways. The point, however, remains that this group of socialist regimes tends to attract more scholarly and public attention than the role of the Left in political and social developments in countries that did not experience a socialist government. This special issue combines insights into both groups.

The emphasis on socialist regimes fostered theoretical and methodological approaches highlighting parallels with postsocialist Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet countries. There is no doubt that this perspective contributed important insights. However, other strands of the history of African socialisms, particularly those in the context of non-socialist countries, have been overshadowed as a result of this emphasis. Consequentially, the input of leftism in the democratic movement and culture remained understudied, with a few notable exceptions, such as the comparative account of authoritarian legacies on party competition provided by Rachel Riedl (2014) that includes but does not focus on the socialist pasts. The established perspective is, therefore, uneven and incomplete. The leftist intelligentsia of Nigeria, which fought so many battles for democracy, freedom of speech, justice and civil rights for years before the collapse of the Eastern bloc, deserves more attention, and so does the input of the left-of-government Senegalese Left in the country’s democratic culture. Similarly, the contributions of the Left to the struggle for democracy, civil rights and human rights under regimes that opposed socialist politics, such as Morocco and Tunisia, tend to be neglected.

For those African countries where outlawed communist parties and leftist movements played a major role, the usual references to postsocialism and postcommunism in the former Eastern bloc are less relevant. Instead, it appears more fruitful to draw parallels with the trajectories of the Left under the authoritarian military-based regimes in Southern Europe. Eventually, the historical role assumed by the Sudanese Communist Party or by the Left in Nigeria, as analyzed in Adam Mayer’s article, seems to have a lot in common with the role of the leftist intelligentsia, including the students’ and workers’ movements that stood at the forefront of the struggle against dictatorship and for democracy, social justice and civil rights in Greece, Portugal and Spain (Maravall 1978; Radcliff 2011; Accornero 2013; Kornetis 2013; Cavallaro and Kornetis 2019). Furthermore, for the students who experienced authoritarianism in Latin America and Southern Europe, May 1968 and the leftist movements of the 1960s and 1970s gave expression to their struggles for freedom of speech, civil rights and democracy. These causes brought them closer to student movements in the Global South. The trajectories of the Senegalese Left after May 1968, as analyzed in the chapter by Pascal Bianchini, reinforce the relevance of this historical conjunction.

Lastly, we recall the perhaps most common conversion. The creative intelligentsia, which fought for human rights, embraced liberal values, and endorsed democratic causes across the world, more often than not had sat at the desks of the communist or leftist movement. As Constantin Katsakioris notes in his article, this is precisely the trajectory of Ousmane Sembène, the communist activist and Soviet-educated father of African cinema. This does not imply that one should refrain from considering the impact and legacies of socialism in postsocialist countries in order to think in terms of the Left placing the emphasis only on non-socialist countries and non-state actors. Rather, pursuing both lines of inquiry allows for the uncovering of the dynamics of socialism across Africa while at the same time averting the reading of African socialisms against the European experience (Müller 2019).

Even if many of these dynamics have been reversed, they are nonetheless of huge historical significance. Tyler Dickovick (2008), who studied the process of democratization in postsocialist Ghana, Mali, and Benin, made a powerful case for how Marxist-inspired regimes set these countries on an unintended path toward democratization. In practice, as Dickovick argues, rulers who embraced Marxism systematically opposed ethnic politics, used the rhetoric of the New Man and leftist patriotism, and sought to mould the citizenry along functional non-ethnic lines. The unanticipated effect of these socialist-inspired policies was to support the successful transition to democracy when the Eastern bloc fell apart and socialism itself was discredited.

Georgi Derluguian’s (2012) insightful analysis of the conversion of FRELIMO (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique) from Leninism and Third World leftism to the realities of the neoliberal world that emerged since the crisis of socialism is equally thought-provoking. How did war-ridden and economically ruined Mozambique manage to navigate the domestic and international challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, only later to become a diligent student of good governance? According to Derluguian, the answer lies in the capacity of FRELIMO’s leftist intelligentsia to manipulate international ideological and material resources, use these resources to weaken the ethnic-based opposition, and, over time, build relatively effective political and bureaucratic mechanisms. This capacity built on the social capital the leftist intelligentsia had accumulated since the 1960s, marking the starting point of a powerful historical sequence.

In the postsocialist era, Mozambican ruling elites opted to silence the socialist past, and Ethiopians moved to cross it out. Still, the past survives in the memories of Ethiopians and East German-educated Mozambicans, as David Ratner and Tanja Müller demonstrate in this collection. In South African contemporary cultural production, the leftist politics and ideas that flourished during the national liberation struggle are being rediscovered (Robbe 2018), while in Angola, the 1977 Marxist revolt of Nito Alves appears to haunt the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) regime even today (Saul 2014). As noted above and analyzed in the contribution by Alexander Stroh, Sankara’s image inspired the recent popular movement that associated democratic rule with both progress and social justice. Likewise, in Tanzania, the socialist president Julius Nyerere constitutes an icon of morality and nation-building. Even though his ujamaa experiment has lost appeal, opposition parties and social movements still refer to his socialist policies, for example, when they advocate the provision of educational and health services for Tanzanian citizens (Fouéré 2014). Evoking these facts is not an exercise of nostalgia. What matters most in retracing the legacies and afterlives of socialism in various African contexts is to understand the most common directions, as well as the more specific ones, in which the past and the politics that it still inspires are used.

Education is another important field in which the legacies and impacts of socialisms deserve to be traced and assessed. Influential Marxist thinkers from Abdou Moumouni (1964) to Ali Mazrui (1978) have argued for the centrality of education in the development of postcolonial Africa. Socialist countries from Nasser’s Egypt to Nyerere’s Tanzania undertook tremendous efforts to expand education. Cooperation with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Cuba was often instrumental in these efforts. Without counting trainees in military, political or short-term vocational programs, the number of African students who attended regular programs at universities or technical schools in the Eastern bloc and Yugoslavia most likely reached more than 100,000. Most of them returned to their home countries, where they often served at educational institutions and sustained the efforts to expand education. Numerous Eastern bloc-educated African scholars and professionals espoused Marxist ideas and remained faithful to socialism. The exhaustion of and retreat from socialist projects triggered or accelerated the dynamics of various conversions which still must be delineated. This special issue investigates parts of these dynamics, complementing the growing literature on the training and experiences of African students in the Eastern bloc.

The contributors to this special issue attempt to shed light on these questions from different angles. Elara Bertho captures the reactions of Guinean writers and cultural officials to Sékou Touré’s death in their unpublished poetry and prose of the time. Relief and happiness largely prevailed, whereas some sources also testify to the authors’ bewilderment. While one author from Conakry made a parody of the dictator’s socialist slogans, another appeared to still be committed to the socialist and Pan-African project that had inspired the struggle for independence and the early years under Touré’s leadership despite his very critical general judgment of the late president. In any case, as Bertho argues, the two sorts of reactions shared a perception of historical rupture which, in terms of temporal regimes, appeared to be the turning point from futurism to presentism.

Tanja Müller and Constantin Katsakioris examine the trajectories, views and recollections of returned students. Having followed the Mozambican graduates of the Stassfurt School of Friendship in East Germany for several years, Müller demonstrates that they preserved their belief in socialist values while also hanging on to a notion of citizenship largely influenced by their socialist education. As Müller argues, these are both concrete and important legacies of their formative years in East Germany and not simple manifestations of nostalgia. Katsakioris’s article corroborates Müller’s findings. Instead of returning disillusioned with actually existing socialism, many graduates remained faithful to socialist ideals and friends of the Soviet Union. To some extent, however, the graduates’ involvement in Soviet–African cultural societies after they returned reflected the anxiety that this group, looked down upon by Western-educated Africans, felt in defending their qualifications and social capital.

Pascal Bianchini and Adam Mayer investigate the contribution of the Left in the political life and social movements of Senegal and Nigeria, respectively, two countries whose rulers never embraced the ideology of the Eastern bloc. Nevertheless, in both countries, the Left was not only a proponent of radical politics, but also the primary force defending the autonomy of the trade unions and the student movement, voicing a critical discourse vis-à-vis the ruling class, and keeping a repertoire of opposition politics with a democratic potential alive under difficult circumstances. Bianchini details how over time, and thanks to the liberalization of the regime, representatives of the Senegalese Left strengthened civil society. Mayer retraces a similar process in Nigeria, where most Marxist intellectuals pursued the Marxist critique after 1989, through which they also espoused a defence of human rights, socialist feminism and democratization.

Likewise, Alexander Stroh studies the role of Sankarism in the long democratic transition of Burkina Faso, which culminated in the 2014 revolution. At the same time, he tries to explain the poor performance of Sankarist parties in the post-revolution elections. This apparent contradiction can be resolved, Stroh argues, if one considers democratic development as an incremental process. In this process, Sankara’s rule between 1983 and 1987 ushered in a critical juncture. Over time, however, Sankarism underwent significant evolution, with its most successful strand being the one that embraced social democracy. Finally, David Ratner explores the memories of the post-revolutionary generation in Ethiopia to find a “mix of criticism and nostalgia” and many other specific sophisticated assessments. In this case, the denunciation of violence by the interviewees did not preclude their sympathy for the idealism and selfless struggle of the youth. While they all rejected ethnic politics, Ratner’s interviewees were also aware of the social causes of the revolution. It is perhaps this understanding that determined their interest in Marxism.

The contributors to this special issue use a wide range of sources, from archival documents to literature and interviews. They also bring their own methods and approaches, including, but not limited to, oral history, participant observation and historical institutionalism. This diversity enriches and reinforces the overall project, as all seven contributors share similar interests and address a common, well-defined set of questions. This common denominator constitutes the basis for our interdisciplinary endeavor. When these conditions are met, interdisciplinarity is always exciting, and the editors are deeply grateful to the contributing authors.

Acknowledgements

The editors are deeply grateful to Nadine Siegert, Christopher J. Lee, Salah Hassan and Achim von Oppen, and to the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies for encouraging and supporting this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Constantin Katsakioris

Constantin Katsakioris is a Visiting Professor of African History at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He received his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2015 and is currently completing his first monograph on the training of students from Africa and the Middle East in the Soviet Union. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Global History, the Journal of Modern European History, the Cahiers d’Études africaines and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Alexander Stroh

Alexander Stroh is a junior professor of political science and a founding member of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests include electoral competition, political parties and the role of the judiciary in sub-Saharan Africa, with a general bias in favor of West Africa and, more specifically, Burkina Faso. This country is included in comparative and single-case works which have been published in journals such as Comparative Politics, Democratization, the International Political Science Review and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.