Extractive capitalism and hard and soft power in the age of Black Lives Matter

As we go to publication, Omicron appears to be on the wane but there is no guarantee that it is the last of the Covid variants. Indeed, medical opinion seems to be accepting that Covid-19 in whatever variant may become endemic and be treated like influenza, with vaccinations as the means of keeping it under control. This was not the first reaction to Omicron, however, which was for the rich global North to reward South Africa, which had first identified the new variant and alerted the rest of the world to it, ironically by stopping South Africans entering their countries. While it has been hypothesised by medical scientists that the high number of South Africans with autoimmune disorders and illnesses, most notably HIV/AIDS, may have allowed more variants of Covid-19 to develop there so rapidly, it became clear that the Omicron variant had developed independently elsewhere. The irony of barring entry to travellers from South Africa was compounded by the global North’s ‘vaccine apartheid’ denying the South the power to protect their own populations. While the expectation in the global North may be that it can live with the virus, even though some countries, notably China and New Zealand, have successfully followed a zero-Covid strategy, the global South, lacking the same level of health care, with autoimmune diseases and a shortage of vaccines, cannot expect to be able to live with the virus without negative consequences leading to further impoverishment. The winner in all of this is of course Big Pharma. Oxfam International (2021) reports that corporates such as Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have received US$8 billion from public funds while at the same time refusing to share their knowledge with countries of the global South that have neither the technological nor manufacturing capacity to produce the vaccine themselves. Meanwhile, it is reported that during the pandemic, from March 2020 to November 2021, the 10 richest men in the world have doubled their wealth (Oxfam International 2022), while Africa's five richest men have seen their aggregate wealth grow by 38.5% over the same period (Africa Report 2021).

The rest of this section of the editorial covers some recent developments which we see connecting the withdrawal of US and UK troops, following the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, to the French withdrawal in Mali. We discuss the outbreaks of civil and military conflict across Africa focusing on Ethiopia, Sudan and Mali, noting in the last case how the intended withdrawal of French troops mirrors the withdrawal of US and UK forces from Afghanistan in the sense of the imperial powers placing greater emphasis on ‘soft’ power. In particular, we focus on the soft power of foreign aid and how that has to some degree replaced the military involvement in Afghanistan and is intended to do so in Mali. We go on to discuss the particular case of the Commonwealth and its role in the spread of soft power and combating poverty – seen as a key cause of conflict. We place the connected issues of aid and imperialism in the context of the movement for decolonisation and the age of Black Lives Matter, raise the question of the role of the member countries of the global South in pressuring the North for action to bring about a reduction in global inequality, and conclude with a brief reflection on the role of ROAPE in this context.

As we noted in the last issue, Africa is expected to have the slowest recovery from the Covid-induced recession of all the world’s regions. This is not helped by the outbreaks of armed conflict that have appeared over the last two years. The civil war in Ethiopia between the federal government and Tigray has not been resolved and at the time of writing Tigray is blaming the federal government for a shortage of food and medicines in the state. As Hibist Kassa pointed out in her contribution on our website (Kassa 2021), an explanation of what is happening in the country requires a historical approach, not least recognising the imperial history of Ethiopia itself, so that stories that see the conflict as one between the centre and a region oversimplify explanations for it. While her account may be disputed, she does raise issues of class and the state which are central to this journal’s concerns. We welcome contributions to the journal which address the complexity of Ethiopia’s recent period of rapid development and offer an explanation which deals with the consequences of the process of accumulation and class formation during the last two decades.

Sudan is another country that has experienced major political upheavals over the last three years. The overthrow of the al-Bashir dictatorship was a great victory for the growing opposition movement. The coup followed the mounting discontent of the Sudanese people with their material conditions as the government failed to manage the loss of the oilfields to the newly created South Sudan. However, it was a military coup that eventually and after much bloodshed bowed to the popular movement, the Forces of the Declaration of Freedom and Change (FFC), by agreeing the formation of a military-civilian administration which would be responsible for the transition to democracy within 39 months. Two years later, the military mounted another coup, detained the prime minister and brought the FFC back to the streets. The chant of the regular popular demonstrations that Muzan Alneel (2021) makes the focus of her article written before the coup and shared on Roape.net – ‘It hasn’t fallen yet: the rule is military still’ – was prescient. As she documents, the military were always in control and had backing from the Emirati and Saudi governments, which later, together with the US, other global North governments and the African Union, pushed for the power-sharing arrangement that operated before the second coup in September 2021. The prime minister was released from detention and restored to his position in October 2021 only to resign at the beginning of 2022, unable to work with the military and against a backdrop of continuing popular demonstrations and killings by the security forces. As Alneel points out, the transitional government’s neoliberal policies were no different from those of al-Bashir’s regime and did not satisfy the popular demand for economic justice for the majority of Sudanese. We would welcome contributions to this journal which offer an analysis of state and class in Sudan and the basis for the continuing power of the military.

While seemingly far removed from immediate preoccupations in Africa, the Taliban’s recapture of the Afghan state in the wake of US and allied withdrawal has had its impact on parts of Africa. African security contractors and a range of civilian personnel have had to be evacuated (Pijoos 2021). Uganda has emerged as a US proxy and a possible transit destination for Afghans fleeing their homeland (Pijoos 2021). Dozens of schoolgirls have been temporarily resettled in Rwanda (BBC 2021a). Furthermore, the events raised the spectre of inspiration potentially being provided to Islamist/jihadist insurgents across Africa, notably in countries where international ‘protection’ forces are being similarly scaled down or are withdrawing, and where insurgents have reportedly welcomed Taliban resurgence (Byaruhanga 2021; Ford 2021).

Mali’s military rulers and wide sections of its population have therefore questioned Franco-American commitment to the continued protection of their country from Islamist and other insurgents, citing France’s announced intention to scale down the long-running Operation Barkhane by 50% (Seldin 2021; Venter 2020). Thus, despite a long-term plan for a mostly regional multi-national Takuba Task Force with French and American military/technical advisers to replace French troops (Ford 2021), Malian government officials appear to be weaponising widespread popular dissatisfaction with perceived state inability to reduce insecurity, even with French military support. They are threatening to contract Russian mercenaries to compensate for French troop withdrawals (Rono 2021; Seldin 2021). High-powered military and diplomatic exchanges reportedly under way between representatives of American and European governments and their Malian counterparts aim to reassure the latter of the former’s ongoing commitment to effective counter-terrorism protection measures (Venter 2020), with the added advantage of containing perceived Russian military and security ‘expansionism’ in Mali, the wider Sahel region and elsewhere in Africa (Ford 2021). As we write, there are reports of popular demonstrations against the French presence in Mali and the sanctions imposed on the country by ECOWAS, supported by France and the US and threatened by the EU, because of the apparently popular military coup which overthrew the government of the late president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and because of the delay in returning the country to democracy.

Countries like France, the UK and the USA pride themselves on their ability to wield military (‘hard’) power on the global stage in the pursuit of their imperial ambitions (Balls 2021). The belief that the use of ‘soft’ power can achieve these ambitions more effectively is increasingly prominent. British Conservative MP David Davis (2021), for example, sees the wielding of soft power as ‘economical, transformative and serv[ing] the mutual interest’, and is precisely ‘where Britain has, in recent history, excelled’. Indeed, we are reminded that not only is the UK one of a small number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries that met the 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) UN target for aid spending, but that this international aid has targeted a range of socio-economic and other sectors, including health, education, infrastructure, governance, civil society and humanitarian intervention across some 150 countries (Kommenda and Kirk 2021). The impacts and implications of the reduction of the UK’s aid commitment to 0.5% of GNI would undoubtedly vary within and between aid recipient regions and countries and it is widely assumed that they would fall disproportionately on aid targeting humanitarian needs, girls’ equality and climate change (Wintour 2021b). Apparently, predicted humanitarian and wider development impacts are considered so potentially retrograde that a selection of major philanthro-capitalist donors, including some who have seen their wealth grow during the Covid pandemic, have volunteered to make up much if not all of the expected shortfall (Vinter 2021).

Afghanistan is one of the five largest country recipients of UK overseas aid and the British government has reportedly recently doubled that aid in the wake of the Taliban resurgence (Wintour 2021b; McNulty 2021). Furthermore, British diplomats have been in contact with Taliban officials to discuss the humanitarian crisis, the prevention of terrorism, a safe passage for those wanting to leave the country, women’s and girls’ rights and the treatment of minorities (BBC 2021b). Clearly, this is an attempt at regaining the political initiative which was so disastrously and publicly ceded during the ‘hard power’ debacle of Western military evacuation, but this time via a ‘soft power’ intervention of a kind likely to meet with broad approval among coalition partners like the EU and US, countries already engaged in ‘operational engagement’, involving humanitarian and other assistance, in exchange for Taliban ‘moderation’ and the opportunity to counter growing local Russian and Chinese influence (Foy and Chazan 2021).

The Commonwealth, with its 54 mostly former British colonies/territories in its role as a ‘symbol of post-imperial cooperation’ (Wintour 2021a), represents a further manifestation of so-called soft power at work, ‘an ordinary, bureaucratic multilateral institution, focused on incremental change through diplomacy and information sharing, just like many others’ (Fitch 2018). The Commonwealth functions largely as rights-based advocacy organisation with a declared commitment to improving the lives and livelihoods of its citizens, while maintaining an important sideline in providing development policy advice and technical assistance informed by ‘principles of consensus and common action, mutual respect, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and responsiveness’ (The Commonwealth 2013, 4). Commonwealth Africa was the largest regional beneficiary of British aid in 2019. Baroness Scotland, the current secretary-general, is of the opinion that ‘[i]n this frankly rather troubling and troubled world, we’ve never needed the Commonwealth more’ (Fitch 2018), while for Kamalesh Sharma, her immediate predecessor, not only had the Commonwealth been instrumental in ‘imparting its values of good governance, democracy and development around the world’, but it was also the ‘club of the 21st Century’ (Massiah 2012). In this ‘club’ the seeming absence of a dominant role for Britain, the former colonial power and a major funder, in everyday Commonwealth deliberations has also been seen by some as evidence of the organisation functioning as a space for the pursuit of racial equality and even anti-colonial activity (Fitch 2018).

Indeed, decolonisation, black lives and the Commonwealth capture this dynamic well (Ransome 2021). Black lives, after all, make up the majority of the organisation’s 2.4 billion people, or about a third of the global population, with Africa accounting for about 35% of country membership, significantly more than any other world region. A similar proportion of countries in Africa are also members of the Commonwealth. Drayton has perceptively noted how ‘we remain, in Britain and in the Commonwealth, in an in-between space, in which forms of inclusive political doctrines and vision are entangled with highly unequal societies and an unequal international order’.¹ In other words, the actual benefits of Commonwealth membership as measured in improved ‘democracy, good government, human rights and economic development’ (BBC 2017), whose shared pursuit is one of the association’s raisons d’être, remain persistently unevenly distributed.

This of course goes to the very heart of the Commonwealth as institution, practice, representation and as a set of complex and evolving lived realities. Despite the manifest diversity characterising Commonwealth countries, the association’s charter identifies a capacity to coalesce around shared values, principles and inheritance, including concern for the vulnerable, as a particular strength. But such strength surely derives from entwined histories which themselves are heavily implicated in the creation and maintenance of the ‘highly unequal societies and an unequal international order’ (The Round Table 2021). And this in spite of the Commonwealth’s 1971 Singapore Declaration calling for the elimination of global disparities (Hirsch 2018). The Commonwealth’s policies to deal with inequality and its causes are driven by an overarching neoliberal globalising logic, whose enduring domination continues to be facilitated by a combination of imposed and negotiated norms associated with good governance, economic efficiency, poverty reduction and foreign aid. As Hirsch puts it,

In Britain’s case, the Commonwealth has served very nicely to advocate its particular shopping list: liberalised, extractor-friendly regimes, low corporate tax rates, and a creative system of tax havens predominantly located in – you guessed it – other Commonwealth countries. (Hirsch 2018)

Decolonisation and ROAPE

The Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements are provoking a re-examination, re-interpretation and redissemination of global history and are thus at the very heart of decolonisation and decolonial struggles, impulses and initiatives. In his recent book aimed at rectifying the ‘miscasting’ of Africa’s role in, and contribution to, the emergence of a modern world economy, Howard French, recalling Walter Rodney’s (1972) classic, writes that

[t]his will involve rewriting school lessons about history just as much as it will require the reinvention of university curricula. It will challenge journalists to rethink the way we describe and explain the world we all inhabit. It will require all of us to re-examine what we know or think we know about how the present-day world was built, and to begin incorporating this new understanding into our everyday discussions. (French 2021)

The promotion of aid and other forms of soft power can be understood within the context of an ahistorical pro-market orthodoxy, central to which are processes of accumulation on a global scale, assisted by foreign aid. This neoliberal globalisation is potentially a threat to democratic coherence as it promotes individualism, weakens community bonds, undermines class solidarity and facilitates authoritarianism (Bromley 2019). But while many of the issues that this raises around the structure and functioning of the aid-industrial complex are familiar (Dichter 2016; Kharas 2007), the AfricanFeminism collective challenges us to re-examine and reframe these in a manner which reflects realities and sensibilities of the age of Black Lives Matter (Efange 2020). Attempts at decolonisation of this kind are overdue and, as they suggest, already under way, but they caution against the very ‘real risk that the current Black Lives Matters protest will morph into cosmetic and performative changes within the international development sector’ (Ibid.).

The reduction in the British aid commitment is opposed by a coalition of interests, both narrowly political and more broadly politicised, on the grounds of the harm to the world’s poor and to Britain’s capacity to continue to deploy ‘soft power’. Central to such soft power is both the deployment of international aid and, on a narrower level, the existence and functioning of partnership and cooperation institutions like the Commonwealth through which components of international aid move. In Africa, the cuts are reportedly ‘already having deadly consequences. Clinics are closing, schools are being abandoned, economies are stalling. Ethiopia is slipping into famine’ (Davis 2021). But, as Aisha Dodwell has pointed out,

What’s missing from recent debates surrounding aid are open and honest conversations about the deep-rooted causes which are embedded in the unjust structures of the global economic order that trap billions in poverty. We still have a global economy that continues to be rigged in favour of wealthy nations and corporations. (Dodwell 2021)

To this we might add, how and to what extent are the countries of the Commonwealth’s global South addressing such questions and with what outcomes? How far can we expect that section of the Commonwealth to challenge more overtly the structures and processes which continue to shore up the gross inequality of the global order? And how can we, as activists, continue to provide the tools – intellectual, political and otherwise – as part of wider and ongoing processes of decolonisation? ROAPE has never been only, or primarily, an academic journal. Set up in solidarity with the oppressed in Africa and its diaspora, it has always functioned as a space for anti-colonial/anti-racist and alternative voices of a wide range of kinds, with a non-negotiable commitment to decolonisation, both before and since Black Lives Matter. In particular, as ROAPE’s reach has seen it extend (often well) beyond the pages of a journal, through an increasing range of interventions informed by our strong commitment to academic/intellectual and activist solidarity, to a variety of online sources/outlets, there has been much to necessitate ongoing, critical and often heated reflection on our collective purpose. The practical and ethical challenges posed by writing-as-activism and publishing-in-solidarity, as much for us as for our authors and readership, have always been central in our deliberations, but have assumed even greater significance in the context of decolonisation and Black Lives Matter. How do we continue to provide a transformative and revolutionary space for the lived experiences of Africa’s colonised, exploited, racialised, patronised and silenced to include, significantly, what Ochonu (2021) perceptively describes as their ‘viewpoints and feelings’? This of course goes to the very heart of projects for/of decolonising knowledge production and dissemination, one that crucially emerged early in ROAPE’s existence. The issue remains, as the Sierra Leonean historian Ibrahim Abdullah has observed in what must surely be of wider relevance:

It is never acceptable to have non-nationals write your history, nor is it acceptable to have them define the kinds of questions a nation should ask or confront in trying to make sense of its individual and collective identity … in the global arena. (Abdullah 2021)

We assume that Abdullah sees history written by non-nationals as complementary to but not a substitute for one written by nationals. ROAPE will strive to ensure that African nationals take up an increasing amount of the space it has created for anti-imperialism and decolonisation struggles, while at the same time welcoming the complementary work of non-nationals writing in solidarity with those fighting these struggles.

In this issue

The contributions to this issue begin with three articles concerned with different aspects of resource extraction, the key driver of both colonial and post-colonial economic development and still the dominant sector of many African economies. Camille Reyniers begins with a resource, the forest, where nature is able to sequester and store more carbon than it releases. It is not for nothing that tropical forests, especially the Amazon, have been dubbed ‘the lungs of the Earth’. While a collectivist approach to the question of how to discourage deforestation and encourage new tree planting would involve regulation of land use by a conservation-orientated state, in today’s dominant neoliberal world policies are designed to achieve such regulation by market mechanisms and, in the absence of a market, by creating one. In the case of tropical forest resources, a value is put on the forest’s ability to store carbon, which creates credits for reducing deforestation, credits which can be traded across borders. As Reyniers notes, this neoliberal approach entails giving financial value to the forests, privatising them and so turning them into tradable commodities. At the same time the political objective of neoliberalising nature limits the role of the state.

Reyniers examines projects and institutions implementing the UN’s programme of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She notes that rather than establishing the pure market beloved of neoclassical economists, what results is a ‘hybrid’ model in which public funds from multilateral organisations and from the state are used to construct the illusion of a market while at the same time preserving some semblance of a state in control of allocating funds to the private operators. Given the limited capability and authority of the DRC state, this model gives substantial power to the private operators, backed by the multilateral organisations, including the World Bank. This is yet another example of the way the private sector has colonised the state under the neoliberal dispensation. As Reyniers argues, the alternative to these quasi-market policies is a major reform of land use, which surely has to be the prerogative of the state; but whose interest that state protects and promotes will always determine who benefits.

Neoliberalism promotes inward global corporate investment in resource exploitation through capital markets. In response to the failure of this strategy to generate the inward investment required for rapid development through structural change, governments turned to resource nationalism, attempting to gain some control over resources and the ways in which their exploitation could be shifted towards integration with growing domestic economic activities. The second article in this issue addresses the question of beneficiaries from state intervention by examining, in the Tanzanian case, the degree to which resource nationalism has given communities participation in the use of resources. In the second article of the issue, Japhace Poncian asks whether resource nationalism has changed the practice of community participation in resource governance.

Acknowledging the problems of defining communities, Poncian uses the term for ‘a group of people directly affected by the mining activities and who organise themselves in a united front, to confront the state’ (in this issue, 531). This can include various sub-groups: ‘artisanal and small-scale miners, local residents engaging in farming and fishing, and local political elites riding on popular dissatisfaction with resource extraction to push for protests’ (Ibid.). Poncian’s three case studies cover the conflict between a large gold mine and the local community during the neoliberal period, the protests against the construction of a gas transmission pipeline and the policies towards artisanal and small-scale miners, the latter two in the period of resource nationalism. Poncian finds that under neoliberalism, community protests against the gold mine owned by Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation were severely suppressed by the state, as might be expected in the neoliberal playbook in which the state protects the interests of foreign investors. In the case of the pipeline the government excluded the local communities where the natural gas was discovered and piped the gas to the already favoured Dar es Salaam, thus excluding the local economy from benefiting from the development spin-offs. In the case of the artisanal and small-scale miners, it became clear that the main interest of the resource nationalist government was not to involve local communities and their miners in resource governance but to tax the miners, ensuring that the state captured value from mining activities, rather than using those financial resources to improve the lives of the miners.

The next two articles in this issue illuminate the dysfunctionality of the Nigerian state featured in two Briefings in the last issue. They also provide further evidence of the increasing wealth and power of what Adam Mayer in a blog on Roape.net referred to as its ‘parasitical oligarchy’ (Mayer 2020). The first examines the case of the allocation of oil blocks in Nigeria, and further illustrates the relationship between state and capital discussed in our first two articles in this issue. Victor Iwuoha uses a patron–client framework to argue that the clients, the Nigerian firms that were allocated oil blocks, had a lot more power than predicted by the literature, which largely puts the patron in control of such relationships. He argues that the programme of indigenisation has not contributed to national economic development, as the rents from the oil production are appropriated by the Nigerian owners who then return the favours of being granted the oil blocks by financing the politicians who have made this possible. In the process, Iwuoha argues, the state is being deprived of taxation revenues while the indigenous oil owners have some control, through kickbacks or other forms of corruption, over the amount of the revenues they need in order to preserve power over the state.

A ‘lack of professionalisation of state bureaucracy and due process, and the erosion of public agency resource mobilisation and accountability processes’ (569) pervades the state. There is, as we see in the previous articles in this issue a limit to the exertion of state power, as the political class is effectively bought by the owners of the indigenous enterprises. What appears to complicate matters is that the indigenous businesses need foreign partners with the experience of oil exploration and production in order to exploit the blocks they are granted. This version of resource nationalism is in effect a class issue in which a growing domestic capitalist class of oil block owners requires collaboration with foreign capital to increase its hold over the state. While the winners are clearly both domestic and foreign capital, the losers are the majority of Nigerians who suffer from the inadequate services that a state, deprived of revenues from its principal resource, provides.

The state–capital relationship in its crudest form increasingly appears as cronyism, both in African countries and in many other parts of the world. In the fourth article in this issue, Okorie Albert, Ifeanyichukwu Abada and Raymond Adibe examine the case of the power sector reforms in Nigeria and their connection to party funding, in this case of the governing Peoples Democratic Party. The authors argue that there was a relationship between party funding and the award of contracts in the privatisation of Nigeria’s power sector and that such cronyism has not improved the poor performance of the power supply that privatisation was meant to address. Crony capitalism entails the use of state power to advance the interests of particular businesses through crony connections which allow political influence to be bought by the funding of the governing party or other parties that could form the government in the future.

The authors find considerable evidence to show that party financiers made sure their party candidate got elected and that deals were able to be made with state and federal governments which advantaged those who funded the governing party. The authors also document the corruption and fraud associated with the privatisation of the power sector including such elements as contracts with fictitious enterprises and kickbacks to government officials. The award of contracts to cronies was to put a large part of the power sector in the hands of people with no experience of running a power supply. As a result, the privatised companies needed government support to keep going, the total opposite of the neoliberal credo that the private sector is superior to the public because of its participation in the discipline of the free market. Meanwhile, the financial rewards to the politicians, government officials and their business associates found their way into their ostentatious lifestyles or to tax havens around the world where they could hide their ill-gotten gains. Little goes into domestic investment, as the authors observe: instead there exists a powerful rentier capitalist class that fails to develop the productive forces to at least the partial benefit of Nigerian workers and peasants.

Class is at the heart of the fifth article, in which Joshua McDermott argues that informal workers are a part of the working class and not ‘a non-class, comprised of entrepreneurs, subsistence farmers and the unemployed, and thus exterior to, and transcendent of, capitalist class relations’ (610). Based on research in Sierra Leone and analysis of International Labour Organization data, McDermott argues that informal workers are directly or indirectly involved in global value production and the process of capital accumulation. He describes what he terms the three dominant views of informal workers: neoliberal, heterodox and left-liberal. The first saw the informal sector being gradually integrated into the formal sector as capitalism developed. When this failed to materialise, an active policy of promoting ‘entrepreneurship’, often through microfinance, became dominant neoliberal policy with the realisation that the formal sector did not generate the quantity of jobs needed to absorb the informal workers. The second heterodox view sees informal activities as separated from capitalist production relations characterising African countries in particular as largely small farmer/peasant subsistence economies isolated from the dynamics of global capitalism. Possibilities for self-organisation into alternative relations of production are also part of this heterodox perspective. The third ‘left-liberal’ position, according to McDermott, is critical of neoliberal policies but still sees informal workers as excluded from the benefits that formal workers have under capitalism. This left-liberal approach calls for better organisation of informal workers so that they can get the benefits accruing to formal workers while maintaining the informality of their work.

McDermott is critical of all these views as he argues that they fail to understand the ways in which capitalism, far from excluding informal workers, has integrated them into the global system. He argues that

a class-based understanding of informal workers offers the most explanatory power as to why informality persists, how it functions to enrich the few at the expense of the world’s poorest workers, and how we can end the deprivation and inequality associated with it. (McDermott, 615)

McDermott’s account of his ethnographic research in Sierra Leone leads him to conclude that petty traders and informal workers play a key role in the reproduction of low-paid formal-sector workers in the extractive industries, in the reproduction of the reserve army that keeps those wages low and as a consumer market for formally and informally traded goods. McDermott emphasises the key role African economies have played in the development of global capitalism which has produced a unique social formation that is nonetheless one which makes the continent’s informal workers an integral part of global capitalism.

Zimbabwe as a former white settler colony is an example of the diversity of land tenure arrangements in Africa, with an agricultural sector dominated by white commercial farmers and creating a black working class of farm labourers. The fast-track land reforms (see ROAPE 165) involving the expropriation of white commercial farms raised the question of compensation to the farmers for their loss. In the final article of this issue, Philani Moyo questions the arrangements entered into by the Zimbabwean government in the 2020 compensation agreement with white commercial farmers. This agreement principally compensated farmers for the improvements made to the farms before expropriation but not for the land itself. Farmers who were Zimbabwean nationals or nationals of countries that have agreements or treaties protecting investments were to be compensated for the value of the land as well as the improvements. This ‘Global Compensation Deal’ of US$3.5 billion involving a heavily indebted government is financed by a 30-year bond funded by various international public and private sources. This, as the author notes, is clearly part of Zimbabwe’s attempt to regain international respectability and encourage inward investment as the government moves to a neoliberal strategy at a time when – as we have seen with resource nationalism – other countries have started to move in the opposite direction.

Moyo criticises the compensation arrangements from several viewpoints. First, he queries its legality as it has not been subject to an act of parliament. Second, he argues that Zimbabwe will not be able to raise the billions of dollars required to fund it because of the parlous state of the economy and the country’s already substantial indebtedness. Third, he suggests that it will come under strong political opposition from those who believe that the white owners who are being compensated themselves expropriated the land from the black Zimbabweans who were farming it. There are also elements of the deal that Moyo argues reverse parts of the fast-track redistribution. Fourth, he notes that an unlikely alliance of the war veterans and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is opposing the deal because they see it as part of a strategy to restore friendly ties with the global North. Moyo concludes that the deal contradicts the main point of the liberation struggle, which was to get back the land that was appropriated by the white settlers under colonial rule, and instead, through its affirmation of respect for property rights established under colonial rule, signals the regime's ‘geopolitical and geostrategic interests’ (632) and openness to the demands of global capitalism.

The contribution to our Debate section in this issue takes up the issue of the appropriation of land by white settlers in the context of a discussion about transitional justice, exemplified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Matthew Evans argues for a transformative justice enacted through non-reformist reforms that push the boundaries of what is possible towards a more revolutionary outcome. He argues that transitional justice is not enough to deal with such structural injustices as the racial inequalities of land distribution in southern Africa. There is a need to go beyond what Evans calls the ‘liberal and legalistic’ (646) character of transitional justice in which the focus is on ‘interpersonal violence and civil and political rights’ (648). This means addressing ‘structural violence and socioeconomic rights violations’ (Ibid.) such as the forced removals and alienation of land under apartheid, thus helping to strengthen a process of land reparations and the re-righting of the structural injustices suffered by the black population. A transformative justice that addresses these issues with ‘non-reformist reforms’ (646) might open up cracks in the system that then lead to a more revolutionary transitional justice that involves ‘large-scale redistribution of wealth, the democratic control of the economy, and people’s courts that pursue both direct perpetrators and indirect beneficiaries of the previous regime, including bystanders’ (Franzki and Olarte 2014, cited by Evans (648).

We return to Zimbabwe in an extended book review of three books by Zimbabwean authors on the period after the onset of economic crisis in 2000 covering the labour movement, a health epidemic and the urban housing crisis. Kristina Pikovskaia notes that the common features of the books are not only that they deal with social injustices suffered during this period but that they see the way forward coming from the mobilisation of Zimbabweans from below, however difficult the political system makes that. This review article is followed by three reviews of important books. The first, by Filip Reyntjens, is on one of the horrific outcomes of civil war: the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the subject of Omar McDoom’s study. The second, by Mike Chipere, is of Serena Natile’s critical study of digital financial inclusion in Kenya and how digital finance is paraded as a means of raising levels of women’s inclusion in economic activity while effectively producing the opposite outcome. In the third review, Njuki Githethwa examines Jacob Mwathi Mati’s historical and contemporary account of political protest in Kenya, noting its limited coverage to largely elite and constitutional movements and its neglect of the many grassroots organisations and movements that have engaged in political protest over the colonial and post-colonial periods. As recent events have demonstrated across the continent, grassroots protests in the face of unpopular governments and worsening living conditions for a majority of the populations have the power to destabilise seemingly impregnable regimes. More protests across the continent are likely to be the main story of 2022.

Notes

1 Richard Drayton made the lead presentation at The Round Table series of the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs entitled ‘Decolonisation and black lives: the case of the UK and the Commonwealth’ on 10 June 2021 (The Round Table 2021).