African Liberation Research Articles

Icon(oclastic): John S Saul reflects on Southern African liberation struggles

ABSTRACTJohn Shannon Saul has described himself as a ‘revolutionary traveller’. Over the past five decades (and counting!) he has been involved in profound social, political and economic change in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. These decades saw active building of the left in Canada as well, with Saul working as an activist in the Southern African solidarity movement, challenging Canadian government and corporate collusion with white dictatorship and, later, their participation in the ‘recolonisation’ of that region. An author (more than 20 volumes and a vast number of academic and popular articles), an editor (This Magazine; Southern Africa Report), and an activist, Saul remains committed to anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist work in Canada, Africa and elsewhere. In this article he reflects on his career working on liberation movements and revolutionary struggles, while at the same time looking forward to new challenges and opportunities.

Christian warfare in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. The Salvation Army and African Liberation, 1891–1991. By Norman H. Murdoch (foreword N. M. Bhebe ) Pp. xxxi + 218 incl. 22 ills. Eugene, Or: Pickwick, 2015. $28 (paper). 978 1 62564 681 1

Christian warfare in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. The Salvation Army and African Liberation, 1891–1991. By Norman H. Murdoch (foreword N. M. Bhebe ) Pp. xxxi + 218 incl. 22 ills. Eugene, O<scp>r</scp>: Pickwick, 2015. $28 (paper). 978 1 62564 681 1

Rethinking sin and evil through the life of a child sex slave

This article rethinks (original) sin and evil through the life of a child called Engela who has been ‘sold’ into sex slavery. Focus is placed on the high value with which children should be regarded, especially children who have been sold as sex slaves. During this argument the emphasis is placed on ecclesiastical evolutionary perspectives on creation as well as relevantand contemporary understandings of sin and evil, and related to this, the devil and hell. Towards the end of the article theological consideration is given to fatherlessness, because Engela’s father was often absent in her life. According to literature, Jesus in all probability grew up without a father too. It seems as if Joseph played a minimal role in his life and education, whilst Jesus’ own experience of rejection laid the foundation for his compassion with the socially rejected, particularly children. Fatherlessness from a black African liberation perspective is also contextualised and applied.

China’s growing security relationship with Africa: for whose benefit?

China’s security relationship with Africa has evolved significantly since the 1960s and early 1970s when China was a modest provider of military assistance and training for African liberation and revolutionary groups. China has become an increasingly important supplier of conventional and light weapons to African governments and stepped up the volume of its military exchange visits. It is a major troop contributor to United Nations peacekeeping operations in Africa, a member of the international anti-piracy force in the Gulf of Aden, and is taking steps to protect its growing physical presence and interests in Africa.

Reconstructing South African Identity through Global Summitry

This article will evaluate South Africa’s pursuit of global summitry as an expression of its own evolving national identity. Since its inception, South Africa’s multiculturalism has produced fragmentation and reconstitution of identity-based sovereignty. We argue that the contradictions which have featured in the historical processes of South African identity formation and reformation, whether from its position as a colonial bastion of white power or that of a beacon of African liberation, are both motivated by, and manifested through, its foreign policy activism in global summitry. This process lends meaning to contested domestic politics and helps shape regional and global affinities, affirming South Africa’s legitimacy as a representative of the African continent. Engaging in global summitry provides South Africa an opportunity to present a coherent purpose to audiences at home and abroad on key issues that emerge out of the country’s divided diversity.

Decolonisation and its discontents: Thoughts on the postcolonial African moral self

Decades after the end of colonialism, Africa seems well positioned to evaluate the successes or failures of Africa as a continent of liberated people. Nearly all analyses of African liberation movements have rightly highlighted the glories of decolonisation; very few have stressed its pitfalls. This article examines the negative moral consequences of certain philosophical assumptions of the African decolonisation process. Of particular interest in this inquiry is the frame of mind of African actors of decolonisation who eventually became the political and intellectual leaders of their countries. How might we conceive of the African moral subject within the contexts both of decolonisation and as a member of the global community in the twenty-first century? What, if anything, can Africa learn from the missteps of the decolonisation process?

American humanitarianism and the end of Portugal’s African empire: Institutional and governmental interests in assisting Angolan refugees in Congo, 1961–74

Abstract Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal’s colonial empire in Africa disintegrated. As African liberation movements in Angola waged a protracted war for independence, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Congo. This article examines humanitarian assistance in Africa during decolonization to challenge the myth that humanitarian assistance has ever been impartial, neutral or independent. It compares the ways in which one organization, the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), and the US government assisted Angolan refugees in Congo. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between humanitarian aid and political positioning in a Cold War context? This article argues that the particular interests of humanitarian organizations and states determined the types of aid both provided. Cold War tensions prompted the US government to provide educational assistance as part of its humanitarian response to Angolan refugees in Congo, but the same crisis forced a nascent organization such as ACOA to open dialogue among its members in order to define its position on the relationship between African liberation politics and humanitarian intervention.

Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of RaceTeklaAgbala Ali Johnson. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012.

Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012.In Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race, author Tekla Ali Johnson examines the critical role of Ernest Chambers's work in the city of Omaha, the state of Nebraska, and within the US. Johnson uses careful detail to illustrate Chambers's deep commitment to his constituents, portraying his work as human rights advocate, state senator for nearly forty years, and Black Nationalist ideologue as all intertwined for human liberation. The strength of the book lies in Johnson's ability to provide the reader with broad view of Chambers's political acumen by establishing context that overlaps his early life and collegiate experiences, where his political antennae were raised and developed, to the sociopolitical living conditions of Blacks in Omaha and throughout the United States. Chambers served as the only African American state senator in the Nebraskan Unicameral throughout his career. Johnson's presentation provides critical insights into how local and national civil rights and Black struggles, connected with the African liberation movement, galvanized Chambers's own political identity. According to Johnson, Chambers's overall philosophy centered on a belief in humanism where all people were treated humanely, and he openly expressed his discontent for the injustices all around him (36).Johnson divides the book into seven chapters where two main themes emerge: Chambers as Defender of the Downtrodden and Chambers as Free Radical. These themes, borrowed from chapter title and title of the work, are mutually inclusive for Chambers's work. In the first four chapters, the author provides framework for better understanding the political challenges that Blacks faced in Omaha by detailing Chambers's education as radical (Chapter One), his connections to the community (Chapters Two and Three), and his learning resulting from his early experiences in the legislature (Chapter Four). Each of these chapters sets the stage for the reader to better comprehend his work as Free Radical. The descriptor of Chambers's political activism as radical is first situated within his unwillingness to align himself with either major political party. This non-affiliation was important in how he attempted to navigate both the local Omaha and the Nebraskan political terrain. Thus, Chambers was free to represent his constituents from power basis that came directly from the people without the connections to major political party-for both their benefits and constraints. This political freedom also allowed creative and unfettered space to imagine leadership and representation without restriction. Flis connections to the community included his staunch advocacy of their basic human rights; he served as Co-Chair of the Police Community Relations Board in North Omaha and was highly engaged as parent advocate in the local schools. To help the reader hear Chambers's own voice, Johnson includes plethora of statements from his essays which were crafted for local and national media, remarks from occasional appearances on the news, snippets from range of memos, and quotes from his varied speaking engagements. …

A Luta Continua: radical filmmaking, Pan-African liberation and communal empowerment

While the anti-apartheid movement has emerged as the premier illustration of transnational solidarity activism, little attention has been paid to the earlier success of the Portuguese African liberation movements. During the 1970s, parties like Mozambique’s FRELIMO established global alliance networks that helped sell their revolutions to ambivalent western societies. In the African American community, the construction of these transnational linkages was aided tremendously by radical filmmaking in the form of American Robert Van Lierop’s A Luta Continua. This transnational collaboration created a film that captured the universal and practical elements of FRELIMO ideology in a way that became a model for local organising, particularly in the African American community. Activists concerned about solidarity with southern Africa, communal control of resources and racial equality all used Van Lierop’s interpretation of FRELIMO’s socialism in A Luta Continua to construct grassroots movements that would spread nationally in the 1970s and lay the groundwork for more familiar anti-apartheid activism in the next decade.

“The Consummate Material Girl?”

This paper examines one facet of the media persona of high profile South African liberation struggle figure, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: how English-language media represented her conspicuous consumption during a monumental decade in the country's history, the 1990s. In the framework of theories of post-coloniality and intersectionality, the paper analyses the discourses in a corpus of thematically coherent media texts featuring Winnie's lifestyle and consumption practices. Media narratives of Winnie's taste for “diamonds,” “champagne,” “mansions,” and “expensive clothes” are deconstructed as ideologically loaded and influenced by racialized and gendered power struggles. The extent to which Winnie is presented as having “sold out” on the liberation struggle and having “bought in” to neoliberal values is theorized in the context of the politics of wealth and poverty in a newly liberated society.

Chiefly Power in a Frontline State: Kgosi Linchwe II, the Bakgatla and Botswana in the South African Liberation Struggle, 1948–1994

Kgosi Linchwe II of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela – a cross-border chieftainship in Botswana and South Africa – was at the centre of a network of trans-frontier links that played an important role in the liberation struggle in South Africa. In the context of the reluctant inaction of Botswana's national government, as a state surrounded by states under South African influence and economically dependent upon them, this case demonstrates a hitherto hidden aspect of the activities of the liberation movements in the region. The case of Linchwe II demonstrates the ways in which the authority, influence and connections that underpinned his chiefly power made it possible to assist the liberation movements in ways that the state government was unable to do because of concerns for national security. This study reveals a hidden history of involvement in the struggle that has been obscured by the historiographical focus on the international politics of Botswana, using a deep, micro-historical focus on a region that was highly involved in, connected with and affected by the South African liberation struggle.

Archive and method in Queer African Studies

abstractThis writing considers the relationship between archive-production and archive-use and method in Queer African Studies. It turns to three sites. First, it examines an early document from Kenya's archives to examine what official archives can see and know, and how they might be used. Second, it draws attention to the often-overlooked archive of 1960s African liberation narratives that address and enflesh the figure of the homosexual within decolonising imaginations. It does so to question the privileging of the 1990s as the most crucial period in generating homo-themed discourses in Africa. Finally, in a ‘litany of complaints’, it suggests possible ways in which Queer African Studies might position itself alongside other fields of study, even as it generates its own archives and methods attentive to African histories and, more crucially, to the lives and bodies it seeks to make more possible.

AFRICAN LIBERALISM IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE? HASSUNA D’GHIES AND LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISM IN NORTH AFRICA, 1822–1835

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the “good society” based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D’Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly “African” liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D’Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D’Ghies's turn toward an “imperial liberalism” underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

The Empty Noose

Although graphic lynching photographs have become a popular topic of academic study, today’s lynching iconography does not rely on spectacle. This essay explores how the shift to figurative representations of lynching affected anti-racist strategies. In particular, it examines how one organization and two authors of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement era—the Black Panther Party, playwright Ed Bullins, and novelist John Edgar Wideman—responded to this change. The Black Panthers and Bullins employed empty and cartoon noose imagery to retaliate against White power. They put the noose into the hands of a Black mob and made it into a tool of revenge. However, this strategy backfired, replacing one vision of mob violence with another, glossing over the costs of revolutionary violence, and allowing White culture to deny the racist meaning of the empty noose. John Edgar Wideman’s 1973 novel The Lynchers illustrates this, demonstrating that the empty noose image, even reclaimed for anti-racist purposes, has not been useful for African American liberation. Early anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett were right in their insistence on gruesome spectacle in the fight against lynching, and their strategy remains necessary even in the 21st century, long after the era of frequent lynchings.

"Not until Zimbabwe Is Free Can We Stop to Think about It": The Zimbabwe African National Union and Radical Women's Health Activists in the United States, 1979

This article contributes to the fledgling literature on solidarity with individual African liberation struggles other than the South African antiapartheid movement by focusing on one of several connections made by the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) with radicals in the United States. In 1979, a time of global revolutionary optimism, discussions were held about building solidarity between ZANU and the Federation of Women's Health Centers, a radical wing of the women's health movement. The proposed links held the promise of developing new understandings of gendered embodiment and anticolonial struggle and perhaps even of novel, radical practices of social emancipation in soon-to-be-liberated Zimbabwe and in the United States. But cultural differences, historical ignorance, insensitivities, and conflicting understandings of gendered and political propriety scuttled the efforts, providing early intimations of race and gender fault lines in the two movements that were to become increasingly apparent in the coming decades.

Atoms, apartheid, and the agency: South Africa's relations with the IAEA, 1957–1995

A founder member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), South Africa embarked on an ambitious nuclear weapons programme contrary to the IAEA Statute. Against the background of the Cold War, South Africa's threat perception included, amongst others, threats posed by the Soviet Union, which was a nuclear-armed state and a supporter of the banned South African liberation movements. Moreover, the South African government's apartheid policies resulted in the country's increased international isolation, which also affected its relations with the IAEA. A major global campaign to isolate the apartheid government in South Africa spilt over to the IAEA, resulting in several punitive actions against South Africa. Tracing the South African case through several phases, this article illustrates the intimate links between state identity, state ideology, nationalism, status, and threat perception. The South African case illustrates the need for sustained scholarship on all the dimensions of the Cold War.

Social Change for Social Betterment: African Americans in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, PA

This study, undergirded by social change theory, resulted in an acknowledgement of the names of individuals and organizations and a deeper understanding of the roles and positions they assumed as social change agents in Philadelphia during the Progressive Era as they struggled to fight for social rights, human rights, and social and humanitarian service delivery for freed slaves and Blacks in Philadelphia. African American liberation and social change is rooted in social conflict, and while many may consider that it is the one of the most prevailing and long-lasting conflicts that exists in American society—the struggle between African Americans and Caucasian Americans—it is a conflict that, at this point in American history, had not yet reached a resolution. Blacks in Philadelphia and throughout America were forced to rely on their personal abilities, strength, and resiliency to move through the process of fighting for social change.

The Ruth First Papers Project: digitising the Ruth First archive

Soon after Ruth First was murdered in 1982 an appeal went out for funds to create a Trust in Ruth's name. In the 1980s the Trust found a home for Ruth's papers and documents at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS) in London under Shula Marks' directorship. The hope was that the archive would be part of a centre that would study southern African liberation, continuing work that had been brutally cut short by Ruth's murder in Maputo. In 2012 the ICwS launched the Ruth First Papers Project, which aims to digitise the archive of Ruth's papers. A dedicated website was established where the first selection of documents has been made available for anyone (anywhere) to consult. In this brief introduction, Rockel and Mahon – researchers on the project – describe the process of selecting documents for digitisation and the experience of encountering Ruth in the archives.

The African Diaspora in continental African struggles for freedom: Implications on the criticism of African Renaissance literature

If African Renaissance literature is critiqued against the backdrop of historical narratives of global African commitment to collective African self-reclamation, it will be possible to entrench the strategic values that will expedite the fruition of an African Renaissance. In light of this realization, this article discusses the contributions of the African Diaspora towards continental African liberation from European colonial domination, with a view to theorizing the implications of this history on the criticism of African Renaissance literature. Focusing on Diasporan African agency in organizing Pan-African congresses, conferences and conventions between 1900-1950, this article argues that part of the critical consciousness on the basis of which African Renaissance literature should be discussed can be extracted from Diasporan African contributions towards continental African liberation.

Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women's Entanglement in South Africa's Liberation Struggle

The end of apartheid has opened up new research possibilities into the history of the African National Congress (ANC). Yet the scholarship on the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), remains largely restricted to questions of strategic, political and military effectiveness. The transnational character of the anti-apartheid struggle is mostly absent from nationalist historiographies, while little is known about the daily lives of those who made up the ranks of MK, their interactions with host communities, and the implications of having a large, predominantly male army – with their feelings, longings and frustrations – stationed outside South Africa's borders for three decades. Morogoro, a small upcountry town in Tanzania, was one of the key sites where relations between South African exiles and Tanzanians were forged. In the early years of exile, relationships between ANC/MK cadres and Tanzanian women were not officially sanctioned by the movement, but from the late 1970s they were increasingly formalised through marriage. In this way, the lives of many Tanzanian women became entangled with the South African liberation struggle. Relationships and marriages between South African exiles and Tanzanian women were not only a significant aspect of everyday life in exile, but also key components of an ANC familyhood, linked in turn to expressions of masculinity in MK and to the making of a national community and imaginary. This article seeks to illustrate the complex implications and present repercussions of these marriages and relationships by tracing the lives of seven Tanzanian women, which reveal a multiplicity of personal and emotional entanglements that are obscured by a narrow focus on military and strategic objectives.