African Guerrillas Research Articles

Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975 by Natalia Telepneva

<i>Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975</i> by Natalia Telepneva

Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974 by George Roberts

A bomb inside a parcel bearing stamps from Moscow tragically ended Eduardo Mondlane’s life in 1969. He was forty-nine. After being educated in Portugal and the United States, and teaching at Syracuse University, he was living with his American wife and their children in a suburb of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. Mozambique was still a colony of Portugal, and Mondlane, immensely likable, tall, imposing, and with a formidable presence, was the leader of Frente de Liberação de Mozambique (frelimo), a Soviet-backed liberation movement that had training bases in Tanzania and guerillas in the field against the decaying Portuguese dictatorship.The Soviet stamps were false flags. The Tanzanian police have never made arrests, but they determined that the bomb was constructed in Dar es Salaam (two others were found) and inserted into Mondlane’s mailbag by a frelimo worker. Apartheid South Africa, China, the Soviet Union, and Portugal might each have had reasons for assassinating Mondlane. So would more radical rivals within frelimo. Portugal was an obvious suspect, but eliminating Mondlane would have paved the way for a more strident antagonist to assume control of frelimo (which is exactly what occurred). Or private Mozambican business interests close to dictator Salazar may have arranged the detonation. Tanzanian officials who disliked Mondlane were also implicated.The mystery remains. But Mondlane’s death greatly transformed his own country’s liberation trajectory and, arguably, led to a civil war within independent Mozambique and the descent into corruption that now consumes the nation. Mondlane’s removal also preceded similar kinds of suspicious losses in other Tanzanian-based liberation movements, especially within the Zimbabwe African National Union (zanu), as well as atrocities amid the training camps of all of the southern African guerrilla contingents.The examination of Mondlane’s demise is this book’s most significant contribution to the workings of anti-colonial machinations in one of its main African hubs. But the book has much more of value to modern African history and politics.Supporting the liberation of Africa was the guiding star of Tanzania’s “front-line” policy under its Afro-socialist founding president, the amiable and charismatic Julius Nyerere. frelimo was but one of Nyerere (and Tanzania’s) many anti-colonial causes. Tanzania had won its independence from Britain in 1961 without much of a struggle. Thereafter it served as the safe haven and operational base for the South African African National Congress (anc), zanu, Namibia’s South-West African People’s Organization (swapo), and frelimo, among other less successful nationalist groups.Nyerere’s backing and the support of his sometimes-divided government was critical to the maturing and ultimate success of the armed struggles in all of these eventually independent countries—even distant Namibia. Nyerere shepherded zanu particularly, even when Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, his close collaborator, preferred the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu), a rival Zimbabwean movement.Roberts’ well-researched book is about the interplay of the various liberationists and ruling party Tanzanians from its own independence to the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. There are important discussions of Tanzania’s transforming itself into the “spearhead of Third World revolution.” Tanzania, writes Roberts, “routinely adopted the most radical stances toward questions of anticolonial liberation on the international stage” (10). Indeed, as the author explains in several places, and fully explores in a very salient chapter on the Arusha Declaration of 1972, “Revolution beyond its [own] borders went hand in hand with revolution within them …” (10). Ujamaa (family community togetherness, in the sense of brotherhood) and rural transformation rather than heavy industrialization became the emphasized pathways to an envisaged prosperity and development that never matured. Millions of peasants were relocated, nomads gathered in clusters, and plantations nationalized. Media freedom was also eliminated; a very important chapter details how the press was curtailed, and then made subservient to the new nation.The state became more and more authoritarian, as this book demonstrates. Indeed, Roberts says that Nyerere’s promotion of anticolonial liberation was closely connected to its accelerating authoritarianism (15). As well, Roberts shows how authoritarianism had its internal critics, and how the early indigenous local founding political elites were replaced by more pliant “second generation” leaders—how Oscar Kambona and Paul Bomani, to give two examples, were superseded as the state drifted away from its early democratic roots.Because Roberts chose to focus on Dar es Salaam rather than Tanzania, this book is less a political history of Tanzania than it is a series of loosely related—but stimulating and intelligently crafted—essays on how Tanzania altered internally (from idealism to cynical statism) while simultaneously (and at some substantial cost to itself) helping to free southern Africa from white domination.

Portuguese Fascism’s Genocidal Strategy in Mozambique: the Zambezi River South Bank in the Early-Mid 1970s

An exceptional combination of circumstances would make the Wiriyamu massacre of December 1972 the most documented operation of the total war waged against the populations by Portuguese fascism along the southern bank of the Zambezi river from the early 1970s. The representation of Wiriyamu by present-day Portuguese intelligentsia oscillates between the acknowledgement of an “episodic” case and a sort of relativistic denial. Both representations explicitly deny the carnage as a moment of a vaster genocidal strategy meant to prevent African guerrillas from crossing the critical border of the Zambezi river, which would signify a direct threat to the main bastions of apartheid. Since African troops constituted more then one half of the Portuguese army’s total enrolment, denial positions are based on the rhetorical assumption that the imperial war was a sort of “civil war”. This mystification is directly linked to the fact that the mass-killings in the Wiriyamu area were carried out mainly by African commando units. In this essay a parallel is made with the 1920s’ colonial literary accounts of the genocidal processes which took place in Mozambique in the 1910s. Like in the 1920s, the argument of today’s Portuguese elites is that savagery is the work of savages and the Portuguese, with their scant resources, had to rely on what was available. A general contextual view is presented, particularly attentive to the developments of the last months of Portuguese rule around Inhaminga, where regular mass-killings were carried out mainly by Portuguese soldiers and settlers. This essay aims to contribute to the understanding of their moral distress, but at the same time their determination, as a community self-represented by ideas of “race” and nation, to “exterminate all the brutes”. Moreover, it seeks to promote the discussion on the connection between present-day denial rhetoric and racist or culturalist hierarchical representations.

When Death is Not an Option? Empirical Evidence from Ijaw Armed Group Fighters in the Niger Delta of Nigeria

Studies have shown that the ultimate consideration intrastate armed group and/or rebel fighters have is the risk of losing their lives in the course of the conflict they execute. Irrespective of how weak or unprepared their enemies seem to be, they do not gloss over this possibility. To this end, they invest a lot of time, energy and resources in ensuring adequate and effective recruitment, training, and armament to ascertain minimal casualty, at least. But, could there be a case where death is not an option for consideration for armed group fighters? This paper casts its searchlight on the armed group fighters in the Niger Delta who invoke the powers of Egbesu, the deity or god of war and justice as they take up arms against the security apparatuses of the Nigerian state and the multinational oil companies. Theoretically, it draws insights from literature on earlier insurgencies and uprisings in Africa, especially the “magic” African guerrillas. Empirically, the paper relies on data collected through narrative and semi-structured interviews with the fighters during field works in the Niger Delta region. From these data which are coded on MAXQDA software and analyzed by Qualitative Content Analysis method, there is strong evidence that the Ijaw armed group fighters do not consider the possibility of death as a viable option. Egbesu is found worthy of protecting the fighters as long as they abide by its principles and the war is within their understanding of justice. This is a bourgeoning insight in understanding motivations for armed resistance in Africa, the paper argues.

Healthcare and warfare. Medical space, mission and apartheid in twentieth century northern Namibia.

In the year 1966, the first government hospital, Oshakati hospital, was inaugurated in northern South-West Africa. It was constructed by the apartheid regime of South Africa which was occupying the territory. Prior to this inauguration, Finnish missionaries had, for 65 years, provided healthcare to the indigenous people in a number of healthcare facilities of which Onandjokwe hospital was the most important. This article discusses these two agents’ ideological standpoints. The same year, the war between the South-West African guerrillas and the South African state started, and continued up to 1988. The two hospitals became involved in the war; Oshakati hospital as a part of the South African war machinery, and Onandjokwe hospital as a ‘terrorist hospital’ in the eyes of the South Africans. The missionary Onandjokwe hospital was linked to the Lutheran church in South-West Africa, which became one of the main critics of the apartheid system early in the liberation war. Warfare and healthcare became intertwined with apartheid policies and aggression, materialised by healthcare provision based on strategic rationales rather than the people’s healthcare needs. When the Namibian state took over a ruined healthcare system in 1990, the two hospitals were hubs in a healthcare landscape shaped by missionary ambitions, war and apartheid logic.

&lt;em&gt;African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks&lt;/em&gt;, Mats Utas, ed.

Reviewed by: African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks ed. by Mats Utas Mohamed Haji Ingiriis Utas, Mats, ed. 2012. African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks. London: Zed Books. 255 pp. £28.89. In African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, Mats Utas has edited an excellent volume made up of contributions from prominent anthropologists and political scientists. The contributors present both country and thematic case studies, augmented by empirical research emanating from fieldwork studies, mostly done in western Africa. The volume is an excellent contribution to the scholarship of African conflicts and an excellent sequel to Christopher Clapham’s African Guerrillas (1998). In the introduction, Utas stresses that, in Africa, war “does not imply the collapse of everything; [but] a venturing into total anarchy. Alternative forms of control and management establish themselves when formal governance is diminished” (p. 2). Probably, there is no place in a general African context that such illuminating assertions are truer than in Somalia, except that writing about western Africa, Utas does not have Somalia in mind, although there has not been a functioning government for more than three decades in Somalia, and the politics of patronage in post-conflict trajectories exist there. Part one consists of four chapters of country case studies in West Africa, which discuss conflict-ridden nations in the subregion; a fifth chapter is on Uganda, an eastern African country that has suffered a similar plight. Part two consists of well-researched empirical studies in five excellent chapters, for which, as in part one, most of the contributors did ethnographic research during brutal armed conflicts in the 1990s and early 2000s. The researchers, in their encounters with local people, succeeded in establishing invisible camaraderie with warlords and their militias, whom they do not seem to criticize in any way, probably reflecting the obviously unholy alliance or relationship; nonetheless, several contributors appear congenial to the warlords and other nonstate actors in the conflicts. Thematically, this collection reiterates the fact that when the state shrivels, the ensuing vacuum paves the way for big men—a loose, nonstate, heterogeneous group, competing for the spoils of the conflict. Such groups spring up at the margins of state institutions. A big man is referred to as a modern-day postconflict sultan, credited with “the ability to command, to instate mass action, where authority is not structurally ascribed and socio-historically motivated [by being] based on the Big Man’s ability to create a following and to large extent dependent on his informal abilities to assist people” (p. 6). In Guinea-Bissau, the big men are known as homigarandi; in Somalia, afarjeeble, slang for ‘wealthy warlords’. In the foregoing context, what emerges is the term bigmanity, which depends upon time and space, but its originator is unknown. In several instances, the notion of bigmanity does not emanate from the local citizenry; at times, the collection touches on a big man like Gus Kouwenhoven, a well-known Dutch national, who operated in war-torn Liberia and is now allegedly serving a prison sentence in the Netherlands. [End Page 92] Alleged examples of similar big men include a French oil manager who was in Mogadishu in the early 1990s and Giancarlo Marocchino, an Italian who lived in the capital for the better part of the 1990s, when he reportedly operated in the Somali clan wars. In 1993, he was reported to have been briefly arrested and detained by United Nations troops in Somalia. As readers learn from African Conflicts and Informal Power, if not for alleged war traders like Kouwenhove and Marocchino, African conflicts might have been less destructive, and the pursuit of spoils and resources in such wars would have been minimal. The contributors acknowledge how war transforms societies, yet the way that it metamorphoses does not illustrate dependence upon the society caught in the warfare. Therefore, several contributors are wary of postconflict conditions as they observe that breaking the war structures, consolidating communal peace, and rebuilding state institutions would, to say the least, take many years, and that a relapse is more or less probable. Also, the observations by Ilmari Käihkö, in his contributing essay, demonstrate that there is...

African Guerrillas: Raging against the machine, edited by Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunn

African Guerrillas: Raging against the machine, edited by Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunn

“Heading for the Gun”: Skills and Sophistication in an African Guerrilla War

For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in wars of their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. In Kenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: they were taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with their guns. More recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effective substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men in Sierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes, because they were too poor to obtain guns. When the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said to be the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk. Rhodesia's bush war, Zimbabweans' liberation struggle, suggests something else, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, most especially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideas about Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.

Neither Bandits nor Madmen: Modern African Insurgents

African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine. Edited by Morten Boas, Kevin C. Dunn Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007. 275 pp., $58.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-58826-495-4), $23.50 paper (ISBN: 1-58826-471-8). One of the notable characteristics of the African political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the persistence of political violence perpetrated by armed insurgencies. Because guerrilla movements have such a far reaching impact, not only on politics and the peace and security of the continent but also on the pace of economic development and social stability, it is critical for scholars and practitioners alike to accurately understand the motives, sources, and nature of African guerrilla movements. In their provocative edited volume, African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine , Morten Boas and Kevin Dunn provide a reconceptualization of guerrilla movements. Specifically, they and their contributors challenge the facile assumption that African movements can be understood in terms of “single-factor” explanations that regard contemporary insurgents as “devoid of any kind of political agenda” or “greed-based approaches [that] present them as bandits” (p. 1). As the contributors show, not only are these explanations empirically suspect, they also leave policymakers with few options for dealing with guerilla movements—short of brute force. Politically motivated insurgents can be negotiated with; bandits cannot. At its core, African Guerrillas mounts a fundamental critique of the “insular, positivist-dominated field of US political science” (p. 4). Boas and Dunn advocate a “holistic, historically grounded approach” to understanding the complexities of African guerrilla movements, which “are best understood as rational responses to the composition of African states and their polities” (p. 4). Current guerrilla movements, they write, “seem more like manifestations of rage against the ‘machinery’ of dysfunctional states, their equally fragmented and corrupted institutions and the uneven impact of a globalized modernity” (p. 5). Importantly, the contributors to African Guerrillas employ this contextually grounded approach throughout the volume. After framing the …

African guerrillas: raging against the machine

Introduction - the Editors. African Guerrilla Politics: Raging Against the Machine? - K.C. Dunn. Marginalized Youth - M. Boas. Whither the Separatist Motive? - P. Englebert. Liberia: The LURDs of the New Church - W.S. Reno. Cote d'Ivoire: Negotiating Identity and Citizenship - R. Banegas and R. Marshall-Fratani. The Democratic Republic of Congo: Militarized Politics in a Failed State - D.M. Tull. Uganda: The Lord's Resistance Army - K.C. Dunn. Sudan: The Janjawiid and Government Militias - O.H. Rolandsen. Senegal: The Resilience of Weakness in Casamance - V. Foucher. Angola: How to Lose a Guerrilla War - A. Malaquias. African Guerrillas Revisited - C. Clapham.

The Wretched of the Empire: Politics, Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–80

This article examines the vital importance of political ideology in formulating effective counterinsurgency, by examining the case of Rhodesia between 1965 and 1980. During this period, the Rhodesian Front (RF) Government of Ian Smith adopted a radical right-wing ‘world-struggle ideology’ to justify settler resistance to African decolonisation. The RF's ideology, based on settler-status anxiety, upheld a conspiratorial interpretation of modern politics that emphasised virulent forms of Anglophobia, anti-communism, anti-internationalism and anti-liberalism. The Smith Government portrayed African nationalism not as an indigenous political phenomenon, but as an external instrument of world communism and Western appeasement. After 1972, when Rhodesia faced a protracted insurgency, many of the principles of RF ideology were applied to counterinsurgency warfare with disastrous results. Because the Rhodesian Government viewed African guerrilla warfare as unrelated to domestic politics, Rhodesian counterinsurgency lacked a realistic political dimension. The dictates of settler ideology blinded the Rhodesian Government to the vital need to win ‘hearts and minds’ by applying timely principles of political pacification and reform to its counterinsurgency effort. Instead a Rhodesian counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force was pursued. Such a campaign proved counter-productive accelerating strategic deterioration and leading ultimately to the political victory of the African guerrilla cause in 1980.

African Guerrillas edited by CHRISTOPHER CLAPHAM Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. 208. £40.00, £12.99 (pbk).

<b>African Guerrillas</b> edited by C<scp>HRISTOPHER</scp> C<scp>LAPHAM</scp> Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. 208. £40.00, £12.99 (pbk).

The international politics of African guerrilla movements

Abstract Although the causes of insurgency in Africa are largely domestic, it has important implications for international politics. Most insurgent movements, and not only liberation insurgencies directed against white minority rule, have been able to gain at least tacit support from neighbouring states. The nature of the relationship between the movement and the state from whose territory it operates, along with the organisational strength of the movement itself, are the most important determinants of its external relations. The key external resources which insurgents require are arms, food, money, publicity, and diplomatic recognition. These may be obtained in a variety of ways, but relationships with non‐governmental organisations are often particularly significant.