The extraversion of protest: conditions, history and use of the ‘international’ in Africa

Abstract

The growing number of international causes and an intensification in the establishment of transnational networks in Africa are expanding a chain of interdependency which links an ever-larger and more diverse set of actors from North and South. It therefore seems relevant to revisit the debates of the 1990s concerning the dependency of ‘African civil society’ with regard to the North, through the concept of ‘extraversion’ within the political spaces of sub-Saharan Africa. First, it is argued that the conditions and effects of this internationalisation of protest actors are contradictory. Access to the international sphere is subject to two forms of competition: social and political. While universally determined by socially selective skills, such access also provides a vehicle for social ascension. Meanwhile, in the specifically African context, it is the object of intense political battles, representing as such both a ‘refuge’ and a resource, as well as a new source of coercion. Secondly, it is suggested that the specific modalities of relationships between actors from North and South tend to reproduce existing inequalities, with the effect that northern models of protest (in terms of both themes and tools) ultimately win out in African spaces. Finally, similarities in modalities of implementation, in vocabulary, in the skills demanded by internationalised mobilisations, and in the political and economic reforms introduced by external actors, lead to the hypothesis that these transnational mobilisations contribute to a reforming authoritarianism, that is to say to the implementation of reforms which depoliticise social and political issues and reproduce the established order. By repositioning mobilisations with access to the international sphere within the history of African political spaces, the concept of extraversion thus allows consideration of their impact as agent of both emancipation and domination.

Keywords:

• mobilisation
• Cameroon
• internationalisation
• extraversion
• collective action

Notes

This article was translated for ROAPE from the original French text by Margaret Sumner. Email: [email protected]

The slave trade offered some elites a privileged opportunity to capture the external resources they needed to guarantee their internal power (Thornton 1998).

See for example the action brought by former Mau Mau fighters, victims of torture, against the British state; or the affair of the ‘ill-gotten gains’ denouncing the assets of the presidents of Gabon, Congo and Equatorial Guinea, especially in France.

Even if such recognition might encompass certain contradictions; for example, a young Kenyan human rights activist, claiming links with the Mau Mau movement and using its revolutionary arguments, receiving the Reebok Human Rights Award, a prize awarded by the American multinational.

Anti-colonial mobilisations which expressed demands for political emancipation in vernacular language, relying sometimes on international law (notably the case with some of the discourses of the Union des populations du Cameroun in the 1950s), are not discussed here.

An insider's view of the programme was gained during the first semester of 2006 through participation in some Programme concerté pluri-acteurs (PCPA) activities in Cameroon. Informal conversations have since been held with some of its officials, Cameroonian and French.

Interviews on 21 December 2005 and 25 January 2006 with the leader of each of these union centrales, Yaoundé.

To a Cameroonian, it was obvious that the principles of partnership had been flouted: ‘a (French) trade unionist used an unfortunate turn of phrase in this regard: “We did it for your own good.” We replied as follows: “Without us is against us.” … We're extremely sensitive to issues of equality in relationships’ (Interview with one of the Cameroonian PCPA officials, Yaoundé, 27 February 2006).

Available at http://www.pasoc-cameroun.org/index.php?file=Page&name=Comite_de_pilotage [Accessed 8 July 2010].

This observation does not call into question the work of the Observatory which, in particular, produced a report on the riots of February 2008 and their suppression (Observatoire national des droits de l'homme [ONDHC] 2009).