We have observed, with growing concern, a recurring friction in our ranks between those who approach socialist politics through the lens of Pan-Africanism (a camp we belong to) and those who approach it through what we call – for reasons we shall explain in the next section – a “Supermarxist” framework.1

This tension has manifested, repeatedly, in squabbles, in group purges, in call-outs, in the conflation of legitimate Pan-Africanist analysis with sensationalism on one end and a strict, colour-blind internationalist analysis as a psyop on the other. As we have said before, and we shall repeat here again, this is the result of wrong applications of theory that, left unaddressed, will continue to reproduce exactly this kind of rupture within our movement.

Addressing it seriously, then, requires that we first identify its roots. This pamphlet is the product of that undertaking. The argument itself is organised as follows. First, we identify the strand of thinking in question and explain why we borrow the label “Supermarxist” to describe it. Second, we locate the principal error that generates everything else: the misidentification of concrete material conditions. Third, we characterise the observable tendencies this error produces. Fourth, we enumerate the specific charges this tendency levels against Pan-Africanism and refute each one dialectically. Lastly, we close by appealing that we not only apply material analysis to concrete material conditions but also ourselves, in the form of self-analysis.

Who is a Supermarxist?

“Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”
English: “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist”
— Karl Marx, reportedly to Paul Lafargue2

The term “Supermarxist” is one we have borrowed from Opoku Agyeman, who used it as a critical label for those African Marxist scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam (the so-called Dar es Salaam School of African Marxologists) whom he accused of placing rigid, orthodox Marxism above the concrete concerns of Pan-African liberation. His contention then was that these scholars had subordinated the specific material realities of colonised and neo-colonised African peoples to a universal class struggle framework derived from 19th-century European capitalism and had done so with a dogmatic certainty that brooked no modification.3

It is 2026, not 1978, yet Marxism — properly applied to African conditions today — remains just as indispensable. It is precisely because we take Marxism seriously that we do not use the term “Supermarxism” lightly. What it names is, in effect, pseudo-Marxism: the mechanical, copy-paste application of a framework as though it were a closed set of eternal laws, rather than a method of analysis demanding fresh application to each concrete condition.

The contemporary Supermarxist tendency we address is, more specifically, Trotskyist-Internationalist in character. It holds that:

• The primary contradiction in any social formation is always and everywhere class.

• Race is a superstructure — a distraction from the real motor of history.

• The correct organisational form is the international workers’ party oriented to the formal proletariat and the theory of permanent revolution;

• Pan-Africanism is a form of bourgeois nationalism that obscures class divisions and serves the interests of the African petty bourgeoisie;

• Anti-imperialist governments and movements that do not conform to this form are suspects to be opposed or at best withheld solidarity from.

These positions, taken together, constitute not just an intellectual posture but a political programme. And it is the political consequences of such a programme, its correctness, or lack thereof, when measured against the concrete conditions of Africa today, that we shall contest in the next sections.

What is the Supermarxist error?

“The concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living soul of Marxism.”
— V.I. Lenin

Now that we have more context on who a Supermarxist is, let us identify their common mistake. Every charge, every tendency, every practical error we shall address flows from a single basis: the misidentification, or even outright dismissal, of the concrete material conditions of Africans.

Comrades who, by instinct or methodology, fall into this camp tend to defend their position by invoking the scientific character of Marxism as a shield: “Marxism is scientific — therefore, you cannot apply it wrongly. To accuse us of dogmatism is itself unscientific.” They have often used this specific analogy: “You cannot apply Einstein’s theory of general relativity incorrectly, because it is scientific.”

Such an analogy, on closer examination, in fact, proves our point rather than theirs.

Einstein’s theory is valid precisely because it maps onto the actual constants and conditions of this universe. The speed of light is constant not because Einstein assumed it but because reality imposed it on Einstein through patient, often painstaking empirical observation.4 That grounding in material reality is what makes the theory scientific. Remove that grounding and apply the equations while assuming a different speed of light, and you get results that are precise, rigorous, and even internally coherent but completely wrong.

Theory + Correct Empirical Conditions → Valid Conclusions

The scientific method is such that if you get the empirical conditions wrong, the conclusions are wrong even if the theory is perfect. Such is not a failure of the theory but a failure of application. And it is a failure that is entirely possible, common, and dangerous.

This is not hypothetical or hyperbole; it happens, demonstrably, even within natural science. Newtonian mechanics applied to Mercury’s orbit gave wrong predictions, not because Newton was wrong about the domain, but because the empirical baseline was incomplete. And before Lister finally convinced the medical establishment of the need for antiseptic practice, there was Ignaz Semmelweis – the Hungarian doctor who discovered and demonstrated the relationship between unwashed hands and childbirth mortality and was denounced and institutionally destroyed by colleagues who were absolutely certain that their scientific training meant their conclusions could not be wrong.

The certitude of mastery, divorced from concrete observation, has always been the most dangerous form of error. Marx himself understood this. The correct identification of material conditions was not, for him, preliminary to the analysis — it was the analysis. He identified real constants of capitalism as he observed it: surplus value extraction, class contradiction, capital accumulation, and so on. But he derived these from specific empirical conditions — those of industrial England and Europe more broadly: a European proletariat, pre-financialised capital, societies without racial-colonial structuring.

He did not begin with theory and apply it to reality; he began with the reality of European capitalism and built theory from it. By the time he wrote Capital, he had spent years in the British Museum studying actual factory records, actual wage data, actual production statistics of nineteenth-century England. His theory is scientific because it emerged from such concrete material investigation.

Marx said as much clearly: when Russian comrades asked him whether his analysis of primitive accumulation applied universally to all societies, he replied, in his 1881 correspondence with Vera Zasulich, that his analysis was limited to Western Europe and could not be mechanically transplanted elsewhere.5 A man who wrote that cannot honestly be invoked to justify applying his English analysis to 21st-century Nigeria.

Walter Rodney, throughout his works (Decolonial Marxism, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Groundings With My Brothers, etc.), demonstrated with meticulous empirical rigour what Marx’s method actually produces when applied to African conditions: an analysis in which race and colonial extraction are not superstructural appendages but the very mechanisms of capital accumulation.

Rodney was not abandoning Marxism — he was doing what Marx had done, beginning with the concrete conditions of the society he was analysing and building theory from them. Amílcar Cabral made the same methodological point in practice. In Towards African Revolution and elsewhere, Cabral insisted on what he called a “return to the source” – a rigorous, empirical investigation of the specific social formations, class structures, and productive relations of each African society – as the precondition for any correct political line. His concept of the petty bourgeoisie “committing class suicide” and his account of the role of culture in a people’s struggle for liberation were not theoretical oversights. They were concrete responses to the concrete finding that Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau lacked an industrial proletariat large enough to serve as the classical revolutionary subject.

Do comrades see what we are saying? Is the suggestion, then, that Cabral’s return to culture — a people’s own identity and historical memory mobilised in their struggle against imperialism — was somehow non-Marxist? That Rodney, in centring race and colonial plunder, had strayed from Marxist analysis? If so, then it is the Supermarxist, not Rodney or Cabral, who has parted ways with Marx’s own method, which began always with the concrete and built theory from it. The Supermarxist inverts this entirely; they begin with theory and subordinate African reality to it. That is not science. It is dogma.

They may respond, “But the fundamental laws of capitalism — exploitation, surplus value, class struggle — are universal and timeless; we are applying those, not the specific 19th-century instance.” Fine. Then account for South Africa under apartheid, whose legacy persists today: a Black and a white mineworker, both formally proletarian, both owning nothing but their labour, neither with land nor capital. Reduce class to bare exploitation, to ownership versus non-ownership of the means of production, and the two men occupy the same position. Concrete material reality tells us otherwise. The white man supervises; the Black man is confined to unskilled work, however talented he is. The Black man is paid a fraction of the wages paid to the white man. The white man goes home; the Black man goes to a shack. One man’s floor was the other’s ceiling, in the same mine, on the same shift. Peter Abrahams’s Xuma witnessed this floor and ceiling, their naked dialectics, in Mine Boy. His experience is proof enough for us: that the underground, for him, regardless of competence, was his permanent station. Which analysis is scientific — the one that abstracts away this form of exploitation with a colour line running straight through it, or the one that accounts for it?6

A universal law that cannot explain a central feature of African material reality is not being applied scientifically. It is being applied selectively, which is the definition of dogmatism.

The most dangerous version of this is not the crude, uneducated misapplication. It is the misapplication by the most studied, most theoretically sophisticated comrade — because the deeper the mastery of theory, the more convincing its misapplication sounds (especially to them) and the more consequential its effect. The usual certitude of the Supermarxist goes: I have the right formula, demonstrably so; therefore, my analysis must be correct. But the most studied comrade in the room is not automatically the most correct one.

Correct analysis requires two things equally: the soundness of the theoretical framework and an accurate reading of the concrete material conditions. Get the material conditions wrong, and no degree of precision in Marxist theory will save the analysis from being false.

Following Rodney’s and Cabral’s example, then, let us be even more precise about exactly where the Supermarxist misreads the African material condition — in three specific and consequential ways. First, they apply the framework of industrial capitalism to a continent whose insertion into capitalism was never industrial in the classical sense.

Africa was not incorporated into global capitalism as an industrialising partner; it was incorporated as a continent of total extraction — of enslaved labour, of raw materials, of land. The capitalism that came to Africa was racial capitalism from the outset7: a system in which race was not an ideological varnish on an underlying economic logic, but the very mechanism through which that logic operated. Land dispossession was organised by race. Labour coercion was organised by race. Political exclusion was organised by race. So to analyse capitalism in Africa since first contact, specifically its offshoots in the form of extractivism and imperialism, without accounting for how race constitutes it is misguided.

Second, they apply the classical proletariat-bourgeoisie framework to class formations that do not fit it. The African comprador class is not a classical national bourgeoisie; it did not develop organically from merchant capital to industrial capital. It emerged largely as an administrative and intermediary layer within the colonial and neocolonial state apparatus, its wealth flowing not from the exploitation of domestic productive labour and resources in general but from rent, commissions, contracts, licensing fees, and resource concessions — the various forms of surplus that accrue to a middleman in a relationship of structural dependency it did not create and cannot seriously control. Given this, it has no objective interest in developing national productive forces. This transforms the analysis of internal class struggle entirely.

Third, the overwhelming majority of the African labouring population does not fit the orthodox proletarian schema. Peasants, smallholder farmers, informal urban workers, petty traders, market women, artisans — these are the actual proletarians of Africa, and their relationship to capital is mediated, indirect, and structurally different from that of the classical factory worker. The urban poor of Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Kinshasa are not Marx’s classical proletariat; they are people expelled from the land by primitive accumulation and structural adjustment, surviving through informal trade, subsistence, and occasional wage labour. Orienting African socialist politics exclusively toward the formal trade union movement and the small industrial working class — which in many African countries constitutes a relatively privileged stratum compared to the peasantry and informal poor in general — is an unsound classification of the revolutionary subject itself.

These are examples of dogmatism. And it is precisely the representative tendencies which are offshoots of this error, what comrade Mao called “book worship”, that we shall now turn to characterising in their observable forms.

What are the Supermarxist tendencies?

“Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head.”
— Amílcar Cabral

1: Class Reductionism

On the racial question, the Supermarxist’s first move is hardly that of genuine engagement. It is evasion. When confronted with a concrete observation — say, a comment on the persistence of global anti-Black racism or on the predatory character of European expansion both before and after capitalism took root in that society — the Supermarxist does not engage the claim on its merits. He reaches instead for a counter-example that explains it away without addressing it: “This is just the bourgeoisie dividing the working class.” “The Japanese did atrocious things too – the Rape of Nanking, their own imperialism – were they Europeans when they conquered their fellow Asians?” And imperialism’s favourite cousins: the Benin, Zulu, Oyo, Bakongo empires were expansionist too. “African societies practised slavery. Spare me the Kum Ba Yah about Ubuntu and Omoluwabi, please” — as if these invalidate the observation or experience in the first place.

Let us reference a particularly telling conversation we were privy to recently. A comrade — by his own admission a Pan-Africanist socialist — observed that European culture carries a supremacist character that predates capitalism and is not guaranteed to dissolve even with the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat in that society, should this were to happen. For this, he was denounced, accused of Black supremacism, of being a closet Hitler.

Such is the Supermarxist inclination. To caution against “black racialism and supremacism”. After all, the historical and dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels does seem to suggest that race and, in particular, racial ideology is superstructural and, therefore, a social construct. But a correct and critical materialist analysis of the African condition, as we have stated earlier, would show that you cannot be structurally racist or supremacist without institutional power to enforce that hierarchy.

A Black man can be many things; he can be prejudiced, chauvinistic, yes, even a bigot. What he cannot be, within the present structure of global capitalism, is institutionally racist-supremacist, because that structure grants him no institutional power to disadvantage any other race. It is similar to accusing a propertyless worker who parrots bourgeois sentiment of thereby being bourgeois. A worker without capital remains a worker. We are materialists, after all, for crying out loud! A poor African peasant who dreams of exploiting his countrymen’s labour or looting their resources is, at best, a dreamer. He might be a miscreant or even a thief, but definitely not a comprador.

This is the same false equivalence, restated more abstractly, that underlies the broader Supermarxist position on race: that since white supremacy organises around race, Black anti-racism that organises around race must be guilty of the same error. That logic holds only if one ignores who constructed racial categories, for what purpose, and in whose interest they continue to serve. Race was not invented by the African people it was used to subordinate. It was the institution through which a specific global system of extraction was organised, legally encoded, and violently enforced. An ideology of domination and the legitimate response of the dominated to that ideology are not the same phenomenon, and conflating them is disingenuous.

We have put the deeper danger of this tendency to a Supermarxist comrade before, and it is worth repeating here, as it is politically the most dangerous tendency of all: are the working people of Africa to discard a shared and common experience of racial-capitalist exploitation – an experience that gives them both the reason and the material basis for solidarity across the very borders that colonialism imposed and that neocolonialism now vigorously maintains? Is it not precisely this racial-historical consciousness, grounded in class analysis rather than opposed to it, that arms the toiling class with an account of why and how it is being exploited, and of why it must organise transnationally, continentally, and internationally rather than within the narrow national terms that suit the comprador class? So you see that asking that this form of consciousness be abandoned for the sake of class purity does not purify the class and its struggle; it only serves to disarm it, to blunt its edges.

2: Idealistic Internationalism

The Supermarxist invokes proletarian internationalism as the framework within which African liberation must be organised and treats Pan-African solidarity as false consciousness — a lesser, nationalist substitute for genuine class internationalism.

The historical record of actually existing proletarian internationalism is sobering to say the least. At the moment of its greatest test — the outbreak of the First World War — the internationalism of the Second International collapsed almost entirely, as workers of the imperialist countries voted to kill one another on behalf of their respective ruling classes. The AFL-CIO actively collaborated with CIA operations in Africa and Latin America throughout the Cold War to suppress radical labour movements. The French Communist Party opposed Algerian independence at critical junctures of the liberation war. Ho Chi Minh learnt this lesson firsthand from the French left in the 1920s.8 The abstract international working class did not liberate Russia, Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, or Guinea-Bissau.9

Comrade Adebayo once put the matter even more pointedly to us: consider a Palestinian worker in Gaza and an Israeli worker in Tel Aviv. The latter, in a great many instances, builds the very bomb that will destroy the former’s home, family, and existence. What form of proletarian solidarity can realistically be expected between them on the basis of their shared class position alone in their different societies? The abstraction “worker” does not abolish the concrete fact that one man’s labour is a cog in the very machinery of the other’s destruction.10

Lenin’s own conception in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, explains why. The super-profits extracted from colonial and semi-colonial labour made it structurally possible for the ruling classes of imperialist countries to bribe sections of their own working class with a share of those super-profits. This creates a material stake in the continuation of imperialism among broad sections of the Western working class — a stake that proletarian consciousness does not simply dissolve, because consciousness is a downstream effect of material interests and thus, can not simply override it on demand.

By insisting on this form of internationalism as the only viable path then, the Supermarxist in effect asks African workers to wait for a Western proletarian solidarity that the material structure of imperialist capitalism makes unlikely. If we wait for such internationalism, we will wait forever.

The unity of the oppressed should be a precondition for any internationalism worth its salt. Pan-African solidarity – the building of political economic solidarity among oppressed African peoples and states – on the other hand, is not a retreat from internationalism. It is the only form of internationalism that corresponds to the actual material conditions of African peoples at this historical moment, and it is, paradoxically, what is best positioned to usher in a genuine internationalism eventually.

3: Historical Formalism

“This is what Lenin did in 1917.” “This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Socialism or Barbarism, and I quote.” “This is what Trotsky argued for in Coyoacán.” Historical and international revolutionary experience is treated by the Supermarxist as a prescription, a blueprint rather than as an instructive precedent (a guide to action, not a plan of action), to be understood given its own concrete conditions and learnt from, not mechanically followed.

The irony is that every successful revolution departed significantly from the archetypes that preceded it. The Bolshevik revolution did not replicate the Paris Commune. The Chinese revolution was not a replica of the Bolshevik one. The Vietnamese liberation struggle was not a replica of the Chinese one. Each succeeded in part because its leadership conducted a concrete analysis of its concrete situation and built a political line from that analysis, not from historical precedent.

4: Undemocratic-Democratic Centralism

Criticism, say in the form of raising the race question, or questioning the applicability of a European framework to African conditions, is met not with theoretical engagement but with accusations of being unscientific or unmarxist (you need to study), of being a tool of the bourgeoisie, a reactionary, a Hundenyinist, a nationalist, etc. As a consequence, the Supermarxist insulates itself from scrutiny by making scrutiny itself politically suspicious.

This is a profound contradiction. Democratic centralism, as should be practised by any genuine Marxist-Leninist organisation, requires the fullest internal debate before a political line is determined. A tendency that forecloses such debate through political accusation is not practising democratic centralism. It is practising a form of uncritical indoctrination antithetical to the revolutionary tradition of Marxism-Leninism.

5: Dialectical Dogmatism

At the root of several other tendencies is this one: a failure to correctly identify what comrade Mao called the principal and secondary contradictions of a given social formation at a given historical moment. In the African context, the Supermarxist identifies the principal contradiction as the internal class struggle between the African proletariat and the African bourgeoisie and treats imperialism as secondary, or even tertiary.

This is an error of the first order. As we have already established, the African ruling class is a comprador class ontologically — and a comprador class, by definition, has no objective interest in developing the domestic productive forces. Its wealth does not come from production. It comes from its position as gatekeeper between the African economy and the global one. You cannot fight this class without simultaneously and primarily fighting imperialism. The two are structurally inseparable.

The Supermarxist treats the comprador class and imperialism as two separate, independent parties who happen to find themselves in an alliance — a marriage of convenience one that internal class struggle alone could, in principle, dissolve. But the comprador is not imperialism’s partner. It is imperialism’s creature. The comprador class does not merely benefit from imperialism, the way a contractor benefits from a client. The two do not merely coexist. They constitute each other. The comprador has no existence without imperialism. Strip the imperial relation away, and there is no comprador left at all.11

This misidentification produces another related error: a distorted conception of who the revolutionary subject actually is at this stage of history. Where the ruling class is comprador — where the dominant mode of accumulation is extraction, rent, and intermediation rather than domestic production — the mode of production itself takes a specific character, and the working class it generates takes a specific character as a consequence. Classical Marxist analysis names the proletariat as the revolutionary subject precisely because it is the class whose productive forces capitalism simultaneously develops and exploits and whose collective position within production equips it to seize and reorganise that production.

But what of a mode of production that is barely oriented toward developing productive forces at all? Dangote, the most visible figure of Nigerian capital, does not manufacture in the full sense of the word — he assembles and distributes, with the productive core (technology, capital goods) sourced elsewhere. Moniepoint, the most dominant of the new fintech generation, processes financial transactions; the POS hardware central to its operations is imported, and its own CEO has acknowledged the company struggles to fill engineering roles locally, sourcing critical technical capacity from abroad. So, even the most dynamic examples of Nigerian capital are not, in their structural logic, incentivised to develop domestic productive forces, because their returns flow not from production but from the middleman position itself. The surplus accrues at the intermediary layer and flows outward. The workers this system produces are shaped accordingly, within a mode of production organised around extraction and gatekeeping rather than domestic production.

What, then, is the correct revolutionary subject in this formation? We do not yet have sufficient data to specify its precise configuration — that is a question for the concrete political work ahead. What we can establish here is the fundamental: that the revolutionary subject in Africa is necessarily particular, different from the one theorised out of 19th-century European industrial capitalism or even that of 21st-century American domestic capitalism, and this difference is a consequence of the mode of production itself.

In the same vein, where and what is the place of antagonism, since not every internal class distinction needs to be fought the same way at the same time? The principal struggle remains, throughout, the struggle against imperialism — yet the Supermarxist collapses every domestic capitalist formation into one undifferentiated bourgeoisie, to be opposed identically and all at once. But a comprador class, bound to imperialism by the mutual constitution we have just established, is necessarily different from a genuinely national bourgeoisie oriented, however partially, toward developing the domestic productive forces rather than serving imperialism.

As comrade Mao insisted, struggle is constant, but antagonism — open, all-out conflict — is only one form it can take. Whether a contradiction is antagonistic depends on the concrete stage and conditions, not on which class it happens to belong to.12 To treat one category as if it fit every class formation alike, without accounting for this difference, the difference in relation to imperialism (which is primary at this stage) is, again, to get the material conditions wrong, and to get the material conditions wrong is to get everything else wrong.

So we ask the Supermarxist to not confuse the reality they live in with the ideas in their head. Look at the particular history before applying the universal formula. Look at which part of a struggle is actually primary, the part without which the others cannot be sufficiently addressed. Look at whether the two things you assume are separate are in fact propping each other up. Look at whether this particular class relation, at this particular moment, calls for antagonism or a provisional alliance. Just look!

6: Institutional Fetishism

Marxism’s foundational methodological commitment is to look beneath form to material content — it was precisely this move that Marx applied to bourgeois democracy, showing that its formal equality, the universal franchise, the rule of law, the independent judiciary concealed real class domination. The Supermarxist has learnt this thoroughly in the abstract and promptly inverts it in practice. They evaluate political formations by a single standard: whether they constitute, or are led by, or are accountable to, a formal dictatorship of the proletariat in the classical Marxist sense. Formations that do not meet this standard are suspect, excluded from progressive solidarity, regardless of their material content or concrete political practice.

The result is that a contemporary government like that of Traoré’s is condemned as a junta — full stop. That it expelled French military forces, moved to assert mineral sovereignty, challenged the CFA franc dependency, and broke with ECOWAS as an instrument of French — none of this is treated as material evidence of progressiveness.

It is worth stating plainly what this means by the Supermarxist’s own standard: the governments of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom — which hold regular elections, maintain independent judiciaries, and conform to liberal-democratic norms — are, by this logic, more progressive than Traoré’s. That the Supermarxist critique lands in precisely the same political position as the French foreign ministry, the EU, and the Western liberal press should give any well-meaning revolutionary a pause.

7: Anti-Anti-Imperialism

The Supermarxist opposes capitalism (and imperialism) in the abstract and in principle, but in practice, the CFA franc arrangement, the Sahel base network, the funding of insurgencies against governments that step out of line — these are simply the way things are. Just like the weather, they are a given. Imperialism will always do what it has to do; that is its driving logic. What comes into sharp focus instead is the anti-imperialist: its form, its credentials, its distance from the theoretically correct revolutionary subject. The leadership is petty-bourgeois. The party is not a vanguard. The government is a junta. A principled reason is always found.

And yet it is these governments that are expected to meet the threshold of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as though they were governing in a laboratory rather than against the full, organised weight of an imperial system feverishly working to destroy or co-opt them. In essence, the anti-imperialist government’s internal contradictions are treated in isolation, rather than as secondary to the principal contradiction arising from imperialism itself. The Supermarxist does not ask what is possible within the concrete field of forces that actually obtains. They ask why the actually existing anti-imperialist does not look like the theoretically correct one — and, finding the answer unsatisfactory, sanctions it on those grounds. The imperial system, meanwhile, requires no such justification. It simply continues its predation.

What Do Supermarxists Charge?

We shall now state, as fairly as possible, three specific charges the Supermarxist levels against Pan-Africanism, specifically the practical conclusions that follow from the tendencies above and the principal source of the misalignment this pamphlet was written to address.

1: Class is primary; race is superstructural.

Class is always and everywhere the primary contradiction in any social formation. Race, nationality, and culture are superstructural — produced by the material base but not themselves constitutive of it. The working class has no country and no race. To organise politically around race or continental identity is therefore to organise around an illusion, a product of bourgeois ideology that serves only to divide the working class along lines that benefit the ruling class: the African bourgeoisie is a capitalist class exploiting African workers and peasants, and the struggle against it is a class struggle like any other; Pan-Africanism obscures this internal class antagonism by substituting continental solidarity for class solidarity and is therefore a form of false consciousness. The task ahead is to build working-class organisation within each African state to challenge the ruling class that governs it. Organising around race fractures the working class along the very racial lines capital exploits, where a clean class line would not.

2: Pan-Africanism is a retreat from proletarian internationalism.

The correct internationalism is solidarity across national lines with the global working class. Pan-Africanism substitutes racial and continental solidarity for that class solidarity. African workers should build ties with workers in Europe, North America, and elsewhere who share their class interests; to retreat into African solidarity is to accept the fragmentation imperialism has imposed and to abandon the possibility of genuine international working-class movement.

3: No dictatorship but the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Traoré’s government and governments like it in Mali and Niger, as well as those of Iran and China (theocracy and pseudo-workers’ party), are authoritarian and unaccountable; that is, not led by or accountable to the working class. Whatever their anti-imperialist rhetoric, they represent one form of class domination substituting for another. Genuine progressives should not extend solidarity to strongmen or non-workers’ parties simply because they adopt anti-imperialist language. The correct standard is workers’ control of the means of production.

Our Response to the Charges of the Supermarxist

“There is nothing holy or sacred about theories or hypotheses for us, they serve us only as instruments.”
— V.I. Lenin

We shall now attend to each charge in turn and demonstrate why, in the concrete material conditions of Africa today, each one fails – both as a theory and as a guide to practice.

1: On race and class.

Because race originates as ideology rather than as a natural fact — that is, in the Engelian sense, superstructural in its genesis and therefore socially constructed — the Supermarxist concludes it cannot underpin racial-capitalism itself. But that a thing starts as superstructure does not mean it is inconsequential. Money is a good counterexample.

Money, too, has no basis in nature. It is a convention, invented, agreed upon, backed by nothing but collective belief and, state power. There is nothing about the physical universe that requires that a piece of paper, or a number in a ledger, command food, land, or another person’s labour. It commands these things only because enough people, via the coercive machinery of the state, agreed to treat it as though it did. Yet nobody draws from this the conclusion that money is, therefore, “immaterial”, a mere idea separate from the real business of production. To the contrary, money organises production, determines who eats and who starves, and structures entire institutions, precisely because, once constructed, it becomes part of the relations of production themselves.

Race is no different in this one respect. Its genesis, we agree, is historical and ideological (there is no biological basis for it); but once manufactured and enforced by the state, it ceased to be merely superstructural and became constitutive of the economic base itself. Virginia’s slave codes of 1705 fixed African and African-descended people, and no one else, as chattel in law. Kenya’s White Highlands were reserved for European settlers by decree, with African communities confined to native reserves, their land alienated and undervalued, on the basis of race. That legal dispossession is what made cheap African land and, later, cheap African labour available to settler capital, and now cheap tea exports in the first place. The same pattern is evident in policing, in wage arrangements that pay a Black and a white worker differently for the same task, in property statutes that permit one race to own and forbid another, in visa regimes, among many others within and across states.

Genesis and function are different questions. The notion of the state itself demonstrates this in practice even more so. The state, too, is a construct — borders are drawn by treaty and by war, not by nature, and as Africans, we are aware of this quite well. The lines partitioned at Berlin in 1884 are the ones African states and African revolutionaries have had to organise within and against ever since. Lenin called the state “a machine for the oppression of one class by another” — arising only once class antagonism became irreconcilable, and destined to wither away once it dissolves. It is no more natural or permanent than race is.

Yet no one sees a contradiction in naming their party after the state they organise within or against: the Communist Party of the USA, the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of China, the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Naija Marxists.13 They organise at the scale of the state while knowing full well it is a bourgeois form, and knowing full well capitalism is a world-system that exceeds any one of its borders. Nobody says that organising along state lines obscures the class question14, even though the state is exactly the kind of construct the Supermarxist claims race to be. Capitalism must be contested where and how it actually operates, and today, that remains chiefly within and across the “state”. We ask only that race be granted the same courtesy already extended to the state.

Granting that race functions as structure rather than mere superstructure, therefore, the charge that organising around it is “false consciousness” collapses, because false consciousness is when a class has a mistaken grasp of its material interests, and Pan-African consciousness is, on the contrary, the correct understanding of an exploitation that is organised continentally and racially. It is not a substitution of race for class — it is the recognition that in the global capitalist system, race has a function, just as class.

A working class that has become a class for itself is a working class with an identity and every act of class consciousness is, in itself, an act of identity formation. One does not abolish class by refusing to organise as a class; one organises as a class, wields that identity as a weapon until the conditions that necessitated it are gone at which point the identity dissolves with them. And, just as you need class to destroy class, you also need race to destroy race. One does not abolish race by refusing to organise when racialised. One organises against the structure that made race a fixture, and for as long as that structure persists, so does the racial question.

And who, in any case, commoditised race in the first place? Not the African. It was by capital’s own hand – the same process, the same act of primitive accumulation, that commoditised labour. Race and labour were enclosed together by the same mechanism of racial capitalism for the same purpose: to extract maximum surplus from Africans. It was the original enclosure, a structure of domination created and maintained by one group at the expense of another. One side built and upholds the hierarchy while the other has spent over five centuries responding to it.15

Black anti-racism is therefore not a prototype of white supremacy but its antithesis. It is the response of the oppressed Black to the structure of their oppression—and the form of that response necessarily takes the shape of the oppression it is responding to. If you are oppressed as Africans — your land taken as African land, your labour exploited as African labour, your humanity denied as African humanity — then liberation is necessarily organised around the recovery of the humanity, land, and sovereignty taken on those terms. The oppressed have no obligation to dissolve the identity through which they are oppressed as a precondition of resisting that oppression. That demand is not Marxist. It is an imposition that only serves the oppressor.

None of this means class is unimportant or that racial solidarity is sufficient on its own. The internal class contradictions within African communities are concrete and must be identified and struggled with.16 The African comprador class does indeed exploit racial solidarity when it suits them. But the answer to that exploitation of racial politics is not to abandon racial solidarity. It is to give that solidarity its correct revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist content. The task is not to dissolve Pan-Africanism into a colourblind class politics. It is to give Pan-Africanism its correct class character — and to insist that in the African context, you cannot correctly analyse class without accounting for race or race without accounting for class. They are inseparable in the African material condition of today, and any such attempt to separate them is itself politically fraudulent.

2: On internationalism.

Granting the historical record set out above — the Second International’s collapse in 1914, the AFL-CIO’s Cold War collaboration with the CIA, the French Communist Party’s opposition to Algerian independence, among a myriad other instances — the charge that Pan-Africanism is a retreat from internationalism inverts the actual relationship between the two. It is not Pan-Africanism that has failed to produce reliable international solidarity; it is proletarian internationalism, repeatedly, at exactly the moments solidarity was made requisite.

This is not a rejection of the idea of internationalism but its proper situation, a recognition that internationalism among the oppressed has to be built on actually existing shared material interests – the kind a Palestinian and an Israeli worker manifestly do not share by virtue of class position alone and the kind African peoples, bound by a common history of racial-capitalist extraction, manifestly do. In this sense, Pan-Africanism is not an obstacle standing in the way of internationalism. It is the only internationalism Africans currently have the material basis to build and the precondition for any wider internationalism that might one day be built upon it.

This should not be surprising. Capitalism itself did not become the dominant mode of production the moment capitalist relations first appeared; those relations existed within feudal society for centuries. Socialism, and the internationalism attendant to it, should be expected to follow the same historical course, if not at the same historical pace. Without internationalism everywhere, there is, in any material sense, no internationalism anywhere – only its ideal, awaiting the conditions of its own actuality.

A socialist state surrounded by a capitalist world does not stand outside that world but within it, and inside it, it must trade on capitalism’s terms, defend itself militarily, accumulate foreign exchange, and compete technologically, among a great many other pressures no socialist state can simply opt out of by declaration.17

Applied to these concrete conditions, historical materialism tells us that as long as socialism exists only in non-dominant parts of the globe, the dominant relationship between states remains international competition, not international cooperation regardless of ideology. Even a genuinely socialist state would have interests that conflict with proletarian internationalism as an ideal.

What the Supermarxist mistakes for a betrayal of internationalism is, more precisely, the chasm between internationalism as an ideal and internationalism as it actually exists in the world today. What our people would call “audio” internationalism. Beyond the ideal, concretely, for genuine internationalism: let the workers of the Global North seize the means of production in their own advanced countries first, and we shall stand with them in that undertaking, for their victory is as much our interest as theirs. That is all.

3: On revolutionary purity.

Granting that the “material”, not “liberal”, is the correct socialist standard for evaluating a government, the charge against governments like Traoré’s fails to pass the Marxist acid test. It is, in other words, a liberal charge using Marxist pretensions.

The Pan-Africanist-Marxist standard for evaluating a government is material and structural: a political force is progressive to the degree that it advances the concrete liberation of the African people from imperialist extraction and creates the conditions for genuine sovereignty — economic, political, and military. By this standard, the correct question to ask of Traoré’s government is not whether it constitutes a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is whether it is materially advancing or retarding African sovereignty against the concrete forces arrayed against it. And those forces must be accounted for.

Anti-imperialist governments do not exist in a vacuum. They are a product of a global capitalist system of overwhelming dominance — one that controls the international financial architecture, the terms of trade, the military balance of forces, and, as we have shown, the very class structure of the states they govern. They inherit the accumulated structural deformities of colonialism and neocolonialism: economies organised for extraction, state apparatuses designed for intermediation, and working classes shaped by those same conditions. They arise, moreover, without the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and organised working-class movement whose existence the Supermarxist posits as the precondition for any progressive politics.

Comrade Lenin himself, confronting analogous conditions in the colonial world, was unambiguous: the nationalist, the anti-imperialist — the “strongman”, if you insist — who is genuinely breaking with imperial domination must be regarded as objectively progressive at this stage of the struggle, whatever the formal limitations of his political organisation. The question that matters is always the concrete material direction of the movement, not the purity of its organisational forms.

Critique and solidarity, in this conception, are not antithetical. They are dialectical. The Pan-Africanist engages with the internal contradictions of anti-imperialist governments from a position of solidarity with the anti-imperialist project itself — precisely because weakening that project serves imperialism, not the African masses. The Supermarxist, on the other hand, treats them as antithetical — solidarity or critique — and in choosing critique from such a position of neutrality, functions in practice as opposition. That is the crux of the matter. We say a government is progressive if it is materially anti-imperialist. The Supermarxist says a government is progressive only if it is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Conclusion

“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.”
— V.I. Lenin

We began by establishing that Marxism is scientific only insofar as it is grounded in the actual, empirically observed material conditions of the society it analyses — that Marx’s own method proceeded from concrete investigation to theory, never the reverse, and that he said as much explicitly when he restricted his own historical account of primitive accumulation to Western Europe. From this it follows that any application of Marxist categories to Africa must itself begin from Africa’s concrete material conditions rather than from a template drawn from 19th England or 21st-century China, for instance.

We then established what those concrete conditions actually are: that race in Africa is not a superstructural distraction from class but is constitutive to it. It was the primary mechanism by which African capital, land, and labour were originally organised and are still, today, materially structured; that the African comprador class is not a classical national bourgeoisie with an interest in developing domestic productive forces but a transmission belt whose wealth depends on the very relation of dependency that a national-liberation politics would abolish; and that the majority of Africa’s labouring population is not the classical factory proletariat of industrialised nations but a peasantry and informal working population produced by primitive accumulation and structural adjustment. From this it follows that politics organised around the classical proletariat-bourgeoisie axis, blind to race and blind to the comprador character of the local ruling class, is not applying Marxism correctly to Africa; it is applying it incorrectly, however precise its formulae appear.

We then showed, from the historical record itself, that proletarian internationalism, as actually practised, has repeatedly failed to produce reliable solidarity across the imperial divide (metropole-periphery) and that Lenin’s own theory of the labour aristocracy explains why a material stake in imperialism, not a failure of consciousness, is what has repeatedly stymied that solidarity at critical moments. From this it follows that a politics which asks Africans to wait upon such solidarity as their primary strategic orientation is asking them to wait upon something the material structure of imperialism itself makes improbable — and that a politics built instead upon the material interests Africans concretely share with one another is not a retreat from internationalism but the only internationalism presently available to be built upon.

We then showed that the correct materialist standard for judging a government is not its resemblance to a formal dictatorship of the proletariat but the concrete direction of its movement against, or in alignment with, imperialist extraction and domination — because no government in Africa today possesses, or could plausibly be expected to possess, the vanguard party and organised industrial working class that the formal standard presupposes, and because that formal standard, applied consistently, would rank the imperial cores themselves above their anti-imperialist opponents in the periphery. From this it follows that solidarity with anti-imperialist governments, extended critically and without illusions about their internal contradictions, is not a departure from the Marxist method but its correct application and that withholding solidarity on formal grounds converges, whatever the intention behind it, with the position of the imperial powers themselves.

Put these four theses together, and only one political line makes sense. If race is constitutive of African material conditions rather than superstructural to them, if the African ruling class is structurally dependent on imperialism rather than autonomous, if proletarian internationalism cannot be relied upon as the primary strategic axis, and if the correct standard for judging anti-imperialist forces is material direction rather than formal purity — then the primary contradiction in Africa today is not, principally, the African worker against the African bourgeoisie considered in isolation. It is the African people, across their internal class fractions, against imperialism as the global system that produces and sustains that very class structure. This does not abolish the internal class struggle but correctly subordinates it, since that internal structure cannot be transformed while the external relation that produces it remains intact. And the political form adequate to a continentally organised system of extraction can only be a continentally organised politics of liberation: Pan-African in scope, Marxist in method, building the political economy of unity among African peoples as the necessary foundation for any genuinely sovereign socialist path.

This is the line the concrete analysis of concrete conditions produces. We close, then, with an appeal to all of us, ourselves included. As we embrace Marxism as a tool of analysis, we must constantly endeavour to turn it upon ourselves. Self-criticism — or more precisely, self-analysis — is essential to our struggle. What conditions do our theory, our proclivities, and our practice engender? Do they, accidentally or otherwise, further consolidate the exploitation of the toiling, proletarian African masses in reality — or do they move toward their liberation? Do they frustrate needlessly the efforts toward a united front, a unity so badly required at this historical moment? Who do these tendencies benefit in the grand scheme of things?

These are questions we must always ask of ourselves, our movements, and our own habits of thought. When we do, it becomes evident that Supermarxism is a disservice to the struggle ahead — and we must disabuse ourselves of it, comrades.

Footnotes

To the distinguished guest speakers, organisers of the Esther Foundation, and everyone gathered here today, I greet you all.

You might be wondering what someone like me is doing here, on this stage. What does a young person like me, who has lived a relatively sheltered life so far, know about justice or injustice? Even I am wondering, I must confess.

The truth is that I’ve not been beaten by a capo who lusts after my girlfriend, neither have I been sexually abused by my lecturer or arrested by my greedy landlord or used as a body double for a politician’s son in prison yet. But injustice is not only these. Injustice is also what you live with and without when your entire society is built on unfairness and has no regard for the supposed rule of law expressed in its constitution but that of brute power. In that sense, most of us in Nigeria live inside and negotiate with injustices every single day. So forgive me if I claim to be an authority, although quite reluctantly, on injustice.

I have seen lives suspended because of societal neglect and heard horrific stories, even if I’ve not lived them. Stories of people locked away for years without trial. Stories of children born behind bars. Stories of atrocities committed without punishment. Stories of an entire generation destroyed by powerful men and women without consequences. And for years, the Esther Foundation has been one of the few institutions that I know that has genuinely continued to struggle against these stories. This is why I, for one, support their work wholeheartedly.

Let me go straight to the point. Nigeria cannot work without justice. It is the prerequisite for any society that hopes to prosper. It is the difference between civilisation and chaos. And there is no justice in Nigeria at this moment. And I want us to try and diagnose why.

To start with, let’s try to truly understand the nature of the Nigerian justice system and, in particular, its prison system. Let’s look at its history, at how it all started.

Because the prison system is a microcosm of a general and total dislocation in our society. You are aware that prison is how the Nigerian state puts away some of the people it hopes to, and in fact needs to, forget, right? It is why they are overcrowded, but there are abandoned Nigerians everywhere: the beggars, the mad and semi-mad people on our streets, and the vagabonds and homeless. In short, the masses, who are all imprisoned too, only this time not within four walls but by a colonial border and their stations within it. Even those who thought they’d japa but are now stranded in foreign, hostile lands.

Speaking of foreign lands, in fact, in Europe, the modern prison was created for this purpose in the first place. In their earliest forms, prisons were called workhouses and were used to confine and control the poor, the homeless, the idle, the vagrants, and anyone seen as a threat to the elites. There was no distinction made between actual criminals and simply poor people, as both were a danger to their private property.

And this was what was exported to us in the colonies. The Nigerian Prison (now Correction) Service in particular, like many other extant institutions in Nigeria, was established by the colonial administration of the British, and it played a significant role in the pursuit of these objectives. That is to conquer and politically dominate the indigenous people, to reorganise their institutions so as to serve the material needs of Britain; to organise the Niger area so as to produce cheap raw materials for the industries in Britain and, at the same time, serve as a captive market for their finished products.

As one Afrikan writer once said, the white man’s prison was full of men who had offended the white man. Prisons were built to keep these ‘offenders’, who posed serious threats to the colonial government, away from their communities. The likes of Samori Ture, Ogendengbe, Fumilayo Kuti, and co., who resisted colonial authority and mobilised the people against its interests.

When McCoskry (a prominent British merchant in Lagos at the time) was appointed acting governor in 1861, one of the first actions he took was to establish a police force consisting initially of 25 constables. This force performed essentially patrol duties at the trading depots of British merchants. By 1872, the Broad Street prison had been established with over 300 of our ancestors locked in it. And as the colony expanded into the hinterland towns, so did its prisons.

Our current prisons are offshoots of these. They did not develop organically from our societies but from colonialism, as we can tell by their practices, from the wigs and garments donned by our lawyers and judges to the facilities and laws of the judicial system entirely. Here, in this present time, our prisons are tools of oppression, plain and simple!

But it was not always this way. There was once a time imprisonment was virtually unknown in Nigeria. It didn’t exist as an institution. Before colonialism, our societies had justice systems rooted in their cultures and were fairer by virtue of this. The law was not separated from everyday community life. Justice was flexible, responsive, humane, and communal. And this is not me trying to romanticise the past, as some would charge. Of course, there were exceptions. There were powerful men like Bashorun Gaa, for instance, who kept their own private prisons for their own ends. There was and still is a lingering presence of the discriminatory Osu caste system.

But in general, the notion of a prison of this nature was alien to us. Precolonial Igboland, in fact, had no prisons whatsoever in historical records. Yet laws were administered and punishment enforced, usually by the entire community. In “Things Fall Apart”, when Okonkwo, during Ezeudu’s funeral, shot and killed the late man’s sixteen-year-old son by accident, he was exiled. Not imprisoned. Not caged. He was banished for 7 years, with dignity and with the possibility of return. I admit that this was a work of fiction, but it says something important because, remember, Igboland didn’t get its first prison until after warrant chiefs were introduced to enforce the imposed colonial laws, so there is some truth to it.

And our societies didn’t disintegrate into anarchy for centuries for lack of such prisons. They must have maintained order because they had justice, and now, to the contrary, they actually don’t. We now have a prison system that punishes people – mostly innocent – who are trapped within it without trial. A system that does not even make provision for their welfare. A system that continues the logic of control long after colonialism has supposedly ended. This is the true tragedy before us and the reason why we are all gathered here today.

As of 2017, of the 68,110 people in the “official” Nigerian prisons, only 21,354 had been convicted. This means that about 70% were awaiting trial, and of those, over half could stay for up to 15 years without any trial. And it is not getting any better. In fact, it is getting much worse.

So what do we do now that we’ve a diagnosis? This is my prescription:

We must retrace our steps. The Afrikan indigenous judicial institutions were biased, not as a bug but as a feature, towards peaceful resolution of disputes and the restoration of social harmony while at the same time upholding the principle of fairness, equity and justice engrained in their very customs and traditions. Otherwise, there was no way our societies could have lasted and remained stable for so long.

Given this, here are my final two kobos:

1. In the short term, let’s support organisations like the Esther Child Right Foundation. They’re doing the Lord’s work right now. They are getting people out who should never have been locked up in the first place. Children born in prison. People who have been waiting a decade for trials that may never come. This work cannot wait; as a wise man once said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

2. In the long term, however, we must work to dismantle this justice system starting from now. We have to be conscious of where it came from and that it was never designed to help but to control us. Then when we finally get rid of it, we build something better, something aligned with the everyday reality of the people.

Thank you.

We offer an antithesis: the iron will. Not a wall to break against, but a will that cannot be broken. A determination of the oppressed that compounds with time.

I

We are radical Pan-Africanists. We reject the present arrangement of our world1 because we have looked clearly at it and concluded that it’s designed for our destruction as a race. Not our subjugation—our destruction. This is not a system that can be reformed. It must be replaced.

In that sense, the choice before us Afrikans is binary: change the world or perish by it.

This, however, is easier said than done. Anyone can call themselves radical, a Pan-Afrikanist, and a revolutionary Pan-Afrikanist for that matter. We are interested only in what works. In what brings the political and economic unity of all Africans closer to fruition. At the end of the day, it is the programme you follow and its effectiveness that matters.

Because make no mistake: this is the most challenging thing any African can attempt. The obstacles are not only institutional and material. They are also mental. They are built into the very fabric of our current world. Which is exactly why this work cannot be postponed.

Either our cause is just or it is not. We have concluded that it is. In fact, it’s not only just but existential. So even though most of our people do not yet see what we see (and may never see it in our lifetimes), we must act as though their lives depend on it. Because they do.

II

Let’s be precise about what stands between us and liberation.

We are faced with both overwhelming opposition and contradictions from within and also from without. Our enemies are powerful and plentiful. We are contending, as our ancestors have and contemporaries alike are, with principalities, deeply entrenched interests, and residual biases that continue to keep Africans handicapped, fighting with both hands and legs, body and mind fractured.

From without: the heirs of colonial empires and the institutions they built.

From within: those who wear our skin but serve them. Also, the quiet indifference of our own people. Millions of Afrikans who are not actively opposed to unity but simply do not care. They are absorbed in their own personal survival.2

From ourselves: our own worst impulses. Factionalism, shortsightedness, parochialism, hypocrisy, and indiscipline. Our inability to organise. To become formidable.

Sample the experiences of our prophets and institutions birthed for Pan-Afrikanism, and you will find a large dose of these in their struggles. Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara were betrayed. African Stream has been deplatformed. Marcus Garvey was framed, and UNIA was never the same afterwards. Walter Rodney and Malcolm X were assassinated. Julius Malema and the EFF are being hounded. The Black Panther Party was infiltrated. The NAACP was domesticated into irrelevance. The likes of David Hundeyin and Kemi Seba are currently pariahs.

Our every attempt at unity has been crushed or co-opted. So evidently, the road ahead is mountainous and treacherous. Yet we must persist.

III

There is an ancient Chinese fable, retold by Mao. An old man lived in a house blocked by two great mountains. His family had to take the long way around them to reach the world beyond. So the old man decided to move the mountains. He began digging, one stone at a time.

A Wise Old Man saw him and said: “How foolish! You are old, and the mountains are vast. You will die before you move even a fraction of them.”

The Foolish Old Man replied: “When I die, my sons will continue. When they die, their sons will continue. The generations are infinite, but the mountains are finite”.

Heaven heard this and was moved by his determination. Two angels were sent to carry the mountains away.

Today, two big mountains similarly block the path to the liberation of Afrikan people. One is imperialism; the other is internal schism.

The wise among us—the intellectuals and the professionals who should know better and chip in—insist that our struggle against these mountains is impossible. They point to all the challenges. They remind us of how few we are. They suggest we take the long way around to make peace with the mountains, to stop this foolish digging. To watch the race go to ruin. To watch the economic injustice, the rape of billions of Africans continue, not just historically but right now and into the future if nothing is done.

But we know that determination moves mountains. The people will be touched. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be moved? Why can’t these walls be cleared away?

IV

Here is what we know about Power: it is not rational; it does not respond to reason, only to pressure. From the Tsars to the Shahs to the Boers, no oppressor in history has ever relinquished it voluntarily3, and they won’t start today.

This is not cynicism. It is historical materialism. It is the most elementary observation about human nature. Show a single instance in history where those who profited from injustice willingly dismantled the system that enriches them. You cannot, because it has never happened.

The British Empire did not dissolve from enlightenment but from exhaustion. They did not leave India out of generosity. The French did not abandon Algeria from moral awakening. Political apartheid did not end from conscience but from resistance that made its continuation impossible.

In every case, every single case, what preceded liberation was not the oppressor’s goodwill but the development of an unbreakable will to be free among the oppressed. The iron will. The realisation that they are not liberated and the determination that they must be, no matter the cost. The willingness to pay that cost over generations if necessary.

So we do not want the goodwill of our oppressors. In fact, we count that we cannot count on it. Instead, we can count on time.

V

There is a time of weapon, and there is a weapon of time. Both are weapons, but of different orders: one immediate and expedient, the other inevitable and patient (strategically).

Right now, our enemies have the time of weapon. This is the brief moment when their military and economic superiority appears total. When their institutions seem permanent. When their cultural hegemony shapes even how we think about ourselves.

Their advantages seem insurmountable, but we can become the weapon of time. We can make our will so durable that it outlasts their empire. As the Taliban told the Americans: “You have the watches, but we have the time”.

This is not slave mentality in the Nietzschean sense. It is actually the only tried and trusted way an oppressed people secures its place in the world. The means might be different, but the principle is the same. This is how the Chinese did it. The Iranians. The Vietnamese. The Cubans.

They did not prevail because they were stronger at the start. They prevailed because they developed a determination that could not be broken by their enemies’ forces. They built institutions that could survive repression from even history’s greatest superpower.

Our task is similar. We must make Pan-Afrikan unity inevitable through the construction of a determination that all forces, external and internal, will come to recognise as indestructible. Let our enemies see that Africa’s unity is a tide they cannot stem. Even our own people must feel the inevitability of our cause in the marrow of their bones.

VI

How do we achieve this? We are not yet strong enough to enforce Pan-Afrikanism. We do not control an army or a state or capital. Instead, we begin by establishing the one precondition without which no liberation has ever succeeded: a disciplined, organised, self-assured few who act with the certainty of destiny. For no people have ever united (or reunited) by accident. No freedom has ever been gifted. Liberation is deliberate.

This is our starting point. Not with the masses, as most of our people do not yet understand what we understand. We begin with us. The vanguard. A prototype. A nucleus of Pan-Africanists who are already unified in purpose. Who already appreciates that Pan-African unity is not optional. Who are willing to make the sacrifice that this work demands.

How many of us are there among 2 billion Africans? We do not know. Perhaps just a few. But we know it does not matter. What matters is the seed that will grow into a movement, then a force, then a new reality.4

VII

This is where the protocol comes in. To do this, we need to forge a mind resolute in purpose and definite in action. But how?

First: clarity of purpose and conviction.

Before one can act effectively in the world, one must know one’s position with certainty. We must have concrete ideas of the world we want to birth. By concrete, though, we do not mean rote. We mean:

• Historical materialism. An understanding of how we arrived at this present arrangement. The mechanics of colonialism and neocolonialism. The economic and political structures that continue to perpetuate our subjugation and who benefits from such arrangements.

• Non-negotiable principles rooted in the firm knowledge of our historical and material conditions. What are we not going to compromise on? Where are the lines drawn? For us: Africa must be united politically and economically. The current borders are illegitimate. The current ruling class are traitors. The current global order is designed for our total ruin and therefore intolerable.

In essence, we mean to become radical not from anger but from critical analysis. From looking clearly at our conditions and our history and drawing the only rational conclusions. So that when circumstances question whether your action is sensible or extreme, as it surely would, you can confidently answer, “What is sensible is what is just and right for the people”.

Second: organisation and coordination.

To know one’s position is to know one’s duty. Once there is conviction, the next step is to organise with those who share it—your constituency—as there is strength in numbers. Identify your allies clearly5. Then collaborate with those who have been progressively tested and passed. Who will subordinate their egos to the cause. Who will not abandon the work when it becomes difficult.

Build with them. Build actual organisations. Not loose networks. Not social media followings. Structures with clear roles, responsibilities, accountability. Structures that can survive infiltration and repression. That can become stronger through adversity.

This is not about numbers for numbers sake though. You must prioritise quality over quantity. Commitment over sentiment. Ten people who are truly committed are worth more than ten thousand sympathisers.

Third: action.

Do not wait for African unity; instead, actively create it. Do not wait for conditions to improve. Do not wait for the masses to awaken. Do not wait for permission or resources or the “right moment”.

Build now and with whatever you have. Build parallel institutions. Challenge the present arrangement. Expose the ruling class as traitors. Document their neocolonial extraction. For every act of confrontation creates an asymmetry. On one hand, it builds our momentum, and on the other, it also increases the cost of maintaining the status quo.

This is how you manifest the weapon of time. Trust this process. Trust the exponentials. Revolutionary action creates more revolutionaries. When our people see that change is possible, they will join. When they see that the organisation is durable and credible, they will invest. When they see that victory is not just inevitable but also desirable, they will become part of the struggle.

This is the protocol for our victory: conviction, organisation, action. In other words, ideology, fraternity, and revolutionary activity. For it is through our iron will that we will eventually summon the common will.

With time, and through our sustained efforts, the potency and honesty of our cause will erode all obstacles. The conditions necessary for our victory will materialise. Surely, our ranks will swell, our capabilities will compound and our ideas will gain more traction.

A luta continua. Vitória é certa.

African Yeast,
October 6, 2025
Yaba, Lagos

Notes

So why is China such a bugbear to the West?

On a fundamental level, the rise of China has brought back some sanity to the world. That’s why. For a very long time now, most of the world had grown accustomed to the idea that the West has the monopoly on the best ideas, and the West itself has come to believe this. So whatever they promote, the majority among us take hook, line, and sinker.1 We had forgotten that, as the US political scientist Samuel P. Huntington puts it, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.

But China reminds us just when the war of ideas seems to have been won. To question, to not just take the West’s ideas at face value. To again remember that “no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force” as Aimé Césaire said.

This is why China is most dangerous. It is a threat to the West’s monopoly on ideas. It is a living, thriving proof that Western principles are not universal, necessarily good, or even authentic.2

And now, it is not just the “radicals” that are questioning the world order as it is. The mode of production that allows for, beyond its carrying capacity, the exploitation of earth to the brink of all extinction. The system that permits and justifies the widespread inequality today or the live genocide of Palestinians. The prescriptions of the Western-led institutions like the World Bank, the UN, the IMF, etc. The SDGs, the SAPs. The techno-optimism.

So let’s question them more intently. Then let’s form and pursue with conviction our own organic ideas on how our own societies should be organised.

Yes, it is indeed true that as Pan-Africanists, what we are working towards is a union for all Africans.2 So I get the rationale: the idea of class struggle among Africans seems to defy the very essence of our cause, which is to unite rather than divide.

But our history and current material reality prove that it doesn’t. Let me ask you this: if the unity of Africans is paramount—indeed, if it is a matter of survival, as we are all agreed as Pan-Africanists that it is3—then why has it not yet been realised despite the gallant efforts past and present? It is because there’s a class of Africans in the superset of all Africans (in cahoots with external interests, of course) that are desperately opposed to the project and have and will continue to actively undermine it (whether by design or by instinct) as it threatens the very neocolonial system they depend on.4

So there’s an internal contradiction in our society between the few who benefit from the current system and the many who are condemned by it. How does one resolve such? Here we have a class, the “ruling class”, mostly with power that is evidently unmoved by the plight of the toiling African masses. They will never support Pan-Africanism, which is the antidote to imperialism. In fact, they have made up their minds consciously or otherwise that preserving their own narrow interests at the expense of all other Africans is all that matters.

Then there is us: those conscious among us that want to take the power away from them and use it instead to liberate ourselves and our fellow Africans. This is why our struggle is inevitably, a struggle between those who want to maintain the status quo and us revolutionary Pan-Africanists in conjunction with the African masses who want to wrench it.

Now that we have pointed out the contradiction, let’s try to identify and detail the various groups within each class in clear, unmistakable terms.

First, we have the Potentates, the active ruling class. This group of Africans are the state elites, senior politicians and chiefs, military leaders, top civil servants and intellectuals, prominent religious leaders, and big business figures who are in charge of the state apparatus, means of production and mediate foreign capital. Let’s call them Ajeles because their power is closely tied to facilitating the foreign capital’s exploitation of African resources rather than a truly autonomous African society.

They are the promoters of foreign direct investment, mining concessions, structural adjustment programs, privatisation of the commanding heights of the national economy, and all such malicious exploits. They are the primary agents of neocolonialism which is also consistent with their historical role as the middlemen for imperialism, for slavery, for colonialism, and for all the foreign illnesses that afflict us.

Then we have got in the social strata a level below the Potentates, the Moderates whose defining characteristics are:

• They currently possess a smaller slice of the “national pie” compared to the Potentates.

• And as a result, they aspire, desperately so if I might add, for a much bigger portion in order to enlarge their coasts.

Because of these, there is an implicit arrangement, an understanding, between this group and their ogas. It is usually unspoken, but it is there—that they are each other’s ally given this national condition of domination and exploitation that is without restraint.

It is only natural, this alliance. It is the instinct for self- and class preservation and, when possible, elevation wherever the material condition is such that a scarcity or even zero-sum mindset is required to thrive, as is evidently the case today for Africans globally.

Take, for example, the African continent; all states’ economies are structurally extractive and not productive. That is to say, they rely heavily on the extraction of natural resources of the land and people, even with agricultural commodities (coffee, cotton, cocoa, etc.) rather than creation. A good rule of thumb for differentiating between “extraction” and “production” is simply, is the output raw or refined? And you find out that on the continent, outputs are usually very raw indeed.5

Given such dynamics, wealth concentration in the hands of a few and chronic economic inequality between a tiny elite and the broader society are inevitable, especially when left unchecked by a prudent social system. And as natural resources are by definition scarce, whether it is human labour or land or water, or at least scarcer than human produce,6 devious competition naturally emerges for the control and exploitation of these resources.7

In this competitive landscape for the means of extraction, those that are in possession of some national wealth, relatively speaking, want to first and foremost protect what they have already acquired by any means necessary (how they came to be in possession of this wealth in the first place is immaterial). Secondarily, if chanced, they want to opportunistically increase their possession.

To achieve these aims, they compete opportunistically against one another for expansion while maintaining solidarity—an alliance of some sort, expressed or otherwise—to concentrate their resources in the defence of their existing interests, particularly when threatened by the broader society, as it sometimes happens when conditions become unbearable and there is an eruption of repressed resentment8 by the masses.

Insofar as I see it, these are the driving motives of the “privileged” class, but this is not to suggest that all Africans in these identified groups are conscious actors; that they are aware of their role and impact in our society and purposefully act in such ways as to protect and expand their class interests.9 Nonetheless, whether instinctively or deliberately, by virtue of their action or inaction, the status quo is preserved and even perpetuated.

Still on the question of consciousness, within this class, particularly in the Moderate group, there are those (a tiny few) who are acutely aware of the neocolonial state of affairs and their privileged position in it, which invariably comes at the expense of the toiling African masses, and have correctly recognised the historical and political necessity of acting solely in the interests of a different class (which is the vast majority of all Africans) to liberate all Africans from socio-economic exploitation. I call people in this cohort the Apostates.

Why are they Apostates? Because they realised that the game is rigged and therefore have chosen the revolutionary path by rejecting the logic of their class’s privileges and aspirations due to its inherent contradictions. They have abandoned their narrow material class interests as they must in order to merge politically and ideologically with the people. In the words of Cabral, they have chosen to commit class suicide. They’d rather betray their own class than the masses of Africans, not necessarily out of charity or empathy or some other form of enlightenment (although these could be partly why), but again, out of the acute awareness that the neocolonial state endures, and it’s only by liberating the people that they can genuinely liberate themselves, their nation, and their race.10

What about the masses, who are they?

They are simply the exploited majority, the opposite of those in control of the continental (and even diasporan) resources and economy.11 In more concrete terms and in relation to the system of exploitation which is the common thread that connects them, the masses are the salary workers who have no choice but to exchange their labour for peanuts—a bowl of porridge.

They are the low-ranking police officers who are commandeered to provide private security and run errands for the bigwigs in our society; they are the miners scattered across the thousands of mines on the continent, the transport workers (drivers and not uncommon conductors) who literally drive the logistic systems, the bank tellers who count and record the stolen monies, etc. Their labour is critical to the economy, but just like our ancestors on the plantation, they get none of the surplus value from their effort.

We also have the small-scale (largely subsistent) farmers who make up the vast majority of farming activities on the continent. They live on and from the land, the output of which is largely exploited by the state or foreign interests. They (the state) impose policies on them: the type of crops to grow, the seeds and fertilisers to use, where and when to grow these seeds. They (the states and foreign monopolies) also control the pricing of their produce via the different marketing boards. All these have ensured that the surplus value from their efforts is mostly captured not by them but by the ruling class and their foreign allies.

Then we have the much more amorphous group who do not have a fixed role in the economic and exploitative system in general. They are usually unemployed, and when they are, they live partly by wage labour, partly by small-scale farming or even petty trade. As they are semi-employed, they are in the unique position of being exploited doubly, both as salary earners and as farmers or traders. Also in this category we might add the street urchins, the oppressed unemployed, the students, and the urban poor in general.

Finally, we have those in the informal economy. These are the petty traders and hawkers in our markets (the vast majority of whom are women), the POS agents, the artisans such as the bricklayers, the tailors, the mechanics, etc. These groups are exploited by the state apparatuses in the form of taxes and levies directly (among many others) but also indirectly by the state’s economic policies that favour large corporations so that they get to dominate the supply chains and distributions, and the petty traders in this instance must buy from them at monopolistic prices while being forced into brutal price competition with their peers in the marketplace.

A recurring theme among the masses regardless of the category they fall under is the systemic exploitation of the surplus value from their efforts or resources, and even though a comprehensive exposé is required to flesh out how this plays out in practice today, what is of immediate importance to us is that there are irreconcilable internal contradictions between the classes as a result, both historically and contemporarily, which have manifested in numerous ways.

Let us then examine how these conflicts of interests have played out in our past struggles for African liberation.

Gold Coast

I am in Osu, Accra, as I write these words. I was at Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park (KNMP) just yesterday. While the state is busy monetising the Osagyefo’s sacred memory and legacy, his principles and ideology are evidently lost on it. A simple demonstration is at the entrance. If you were an African but not from Ghana, you would be charged 4x as much entry fee as your “Ghanaian” counterpart. I find it frankly quite amusing, and the reason I’m bringing it up is to serve as a prelude, a mirror that reflects the very nature of the Ghanaian state and what it has been from the onset.

You see, and this shouldn’t actually be surprising to many, the state doesn’t care about Nkrumah and, by extension, the African people in its custody. It doesn’t care about Nkrumah’s philosophy and what his life work actually represents. It cares only about how to exploit his image. Exploitation is at the essence of Ghana and, for that matter, all other African states. They are all manifestations of the original sin of 1884-85 at the Berlin Conference, and their coloniality burns ever stronger today.

Most of the Ghanaian elites pre-independence intuitively understood this phenomenon and just wanted to fight for a privileged place under the neocolonial sun. All they wanted (and still want) is flag independence that preserves their privileges and ties to colonial interests. This has been the driving motivation for all their nationalist manoeuvrings all along.

The beginning of the nationalist movement in Ghana can be traced roughly to the formation of the Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society12 in 1897 to oppose the so-called Crown Lands Bill of the same year, whose purpose was to transfer the control of “unoccupied” lands from the chiefs and community elites to the colonial state. So the elites (lawyers, merchants, journalists, chiefs, etc.) organised to protect their interests and argued successfully in the British court that land belonged to the commons under their customary law.

They claimed to be defending “communal land rights” from foreign seizure, but in reality, it was a fight to maintain their authority over land distribution. The chiefs, as custodians of communal land, could allocate land for settlement or farming or even sell it. Merchants and wealthy farmers (like Paa Grant later in the UGCC, which I will come back to) also needed land for cash crop production. Lastly, the educated professionals, especially the lawyers, could act as agents and provide other legal services for land transactions and even disputes. So they formed a coalition, and the success of this set two important precedents:

1. The elites could organise politically and effectively to defend their interests13 when threatened

2. When they do organise, they need not prioritize the masses even while claiming to represent “the people”—the colonial arrangement made this both possible and viable

These legacies would be carried directly to the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). By the late 1940s, new economic pressures from the cocoa marketing boards and general colonial economic policies during and immediately after WWII had threatened the wealth and influence of a new generation of elites just as the Crown Lands Bill had once threatened their land authority, so they formed a political party to negotiate reforms with the colonial government.

Elites like Paa Grant, a wealthy timber merchant at the time,14 steeped in the traditions of ARPS, financed the UGCC with the primary aim of winning concessions from the colonial system without jeopardising it—a system that was responsible for their privileges in the first place.

The likes of Nkrumah, Afro Gbede, Kojo Botsio, were the Apostates who threw a wrench into their plans.15 They, on the other hand, wanted to dismantle colonial authority completely, not negotiate it. So they identified with the masses, formed the CPP, and took the struggle to the people: the jobless and marginalised African veterans of WWII; the workers earning low wages under extremely harsh conditions; the small-scale farmers defrauded by the cocoa price fixing and who felt the effects more acutely; the students and young ones who were starting to become more politically conscious. “Self-government now!” and it worked.

At least temporarily. However, the struggle carried forward post-independence between Nkrumah’s camp and the super-elites, and it unavoidably became a deeper, hostile confrontation. We all know how it ended. With the backing of the military and other state security apparatuses and their foreign allies, Nkrumah’s camp was toppled, and power in Ghana shifted decisively away from mass-oriented, pan-African politics16 and into the hands of a narrow elite bloc. The masses have, for the most part, been sidelined ever since.

The Colony of Kenya

Unlike most other sub-Saharan regions (e.g., Ghana, which I just talked about) that mainly served as sources of labour, raw materials, or both, Kenya, like Algeria and South Africa, for example, was a “settler colony”. Its environment, due to the Kenyan Highlands’ high altitude, had a temperate climate with a lower malaria rate of infection, relatively speaking, making it possible (and also suitable) for Europeans to live permanently. It also has highly fertile, volcanic soils that are perfect for cash crops like coffee and tea.

These factors, their combination I mean, was rare in tropical Africa, making Kenya one of the few places on the continent post-Berlin Conference where Europeans settled and did not just limit their enterprise to extraction. At its peak, the European colonial project had roughly 70,000 invaders17 with about 7.5 million acres of the best land expropriated to them. Remember the Crown Lands Bill of 1897 in Ghana that was “defeated” by the Ghanaian elites? Similar legislation was introduced in Kenya successfully during the same era, which was how the aforementioned landmass got reserved exclusively for European settlement.

The consequence of this dispossession for the Africans of those lands, particularly the Kikuyu whose ancestral lands lay in the very heart of the White Highlands (as it would later be known), was and, spoiler alert, is still devastating. Many were forcibly removed and became landless squatters on what had become European farms, allowed to live there in exchange for cheap labour. Others turned to urban wage labour so that they could pay the hut and poll taxes now imposed on them by the colonial authorities.

Since land was and still is central to African identity and kinship, the social structures in these communities (Kikuyus, Merus, Embus, etc.) got decimated. Their very survival and existence was at stake, and by the 1940s revolution was in the air. Their grievances over landlessness and the general exploitation had congealed into an armed struggle. The Mau Mau movement was birthed, and it was mass-based, driven by peasants and landless workers, and for them, the struggle was literally for “land and freedom”. Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru.18

Given this background, is it not unbelievable that the land grievances the Mau Mau fought for still persist till today, over sixty years since the so-called independence? So what happened? It is the same dynamic of the African elites vs. the masses at play again in this instance and, for that matter, every other instance across the board. It’s like a tropical plague to which we are not yet immune, at least circumstantially.

I mentioned earlier that the liberation movement of the Mau Mau was mass-based and therefore, due to the colonial conditions, by default anti-elitist. It sought to not only send the Muzungus back to their homes abroad but also free the people from the local elites who were the Muzungus’ natural allies in their oppression. So the fighters fought not only the European soldiers but also their local collaborators and loyalists.

This struggle cost Britain significant military and economic resources. It helped shift the political reality and precipitated constitutional talks—the so-called Lancaster House Conferences. And this was how the African elites captured the political process. The Mau Mau had no representation in these discussions at Lancaster House,19 so its interests were totally betrayed.

Their radical demands20 for the restoration of stolen land to the rightful owners; freedom from colonial domination (Uhuru); political power to the masses rather than the indirect rule which empowered only those loyal to the British; the dismantling of the colonial economy that had reduced Africans to cheap labourers on their own lands for the Europeans and their African collaborators; and cultural autonomy and rejection of forced assimilation into colonial “modernity” were all sidelined in favour of economic and political compromises acceptable to Britain and the Kenyan elites.

The Europeans got guaranteed protection of the stolen land, so there was no forced redistribution of land,21 and more generally, the economic arrangement in place hitherto was preserved. The Kenyan elites secured political power (only nominal and internal) under their control and with patronage from the British. They also got privileged access to land that the Europeans were willing to sell via loans facilitated by Britain and the World Bank. They basically stepped into the shoes of the European settlers rather than dismantling the system itself.

The masses, on the other hand, despite their enormous sacrifices, got little to no redistribution of land. Many ex-fighters and also the people in general remained landless, marginalised and excluded from the new dispensation. The Mau Mau weren’t even officially recognised as legitimate freedom fighters until 2003 by the Kenyan state. Jomo Kenyatta himself said as much—that the Mau Mau was a disease that had been eradicated and must never be remembered again. I suppose this was uttered by him after he sent the Kenyan army to eliminate the remaining holdouts who continued with the struggle post-independence and insisted that they should get land and be absorbed into the civil service and Kenyan army. At the same time he was persecuting the fighters, his family and cronies were busy acquiring vast tracts of land, thereby cementing their place as the new settlers alongside the privileges and contradictions that come with it.

The Union of South Africa

Just as the Kikuyus, Massais, Nandis, and many more were systematically dispossessed of their lands in Kenya, in the region that is now known today as South Africa, the Zulus, Xhosas, Pedis, etc. faced a similar fate. By 1913, only 7% of the available lands were accessible to them, and outside of these “reserved” lands, they were prohibited from buying or leasing land. This policy effectively created a large landless African population forced into and dependent on wage labour on European-controlled farms, mines, and factories, which then laid the foundation for the apartheid system.

So it is against this backdrop, in the wake of an ever-growing, hegemonic system of oppression and exploitation, that the Congress of the People was convened by the ANC and its allies and the Freedom Charter was declared and adopted. In preparation for the congress, the united front volunteers spread across the country to collect "freedom demands" from the people, and the people submitted their demands on land, housing, education, wages, rights, and so on. About 3,000 delegates attended the congress itself, representing various communities, trade unions, political groups, etc. In essence, the congress was mass-based and a legitimate representation of the people’s will at the time, and this was reflected in the declarations in the Freedom Charter.

• “The People Shall Govern!”

• “The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It”

• “The People Shall Share in the Country’s Wealth”

The aspirations of the masses—political freedom and economic justice—were clearly articulated and embodied by the charter, and it was the official programme of the ANC from the 1950s onwards, at least purportedly.

For many, the charter became the blueprint for genuine liberation. It provided the impetus for the prolonged struggle against apartheid thereafter. Through each of the milestones in the struggle—from the Sharpeville protest to the armed insurgency of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the worker resurgence in Durban, the Black Consciousness awakening, the Soweto Resistance and COSATU’s mass mobilisation of strikes and boycotts—the vision of the Freedom Charter endured.

Only for its promise to meet the same recurring compromise in the ANC-led political negotiation with the apartheid regime and its foreign backers. After decades of the people fighting and dying through Sharpeville, Soweto, COSATU, and many more, rendering apartheid untenable and South Africa ungovernable for the regime, the CODESA negotiated settlement yet again represents an arrangement that the elites and the oppressors of Africans found palatable while shortchanging the masses.

The apartheid regime “surrendered” its monopoly on political power and retained its economic gains and dominance. The land, mines, banks, and industries remained under its firm control. In exchange for this, the ANC elites got entrée into spaces of power and privilege that had hitherto been limited to them. They, seizing on the opportunity, promptly transitioned into the new ruling class. They created economic empowerment schemes, patronage networks, etc. that benefit them predominantly in collaboration with the Afrikaner and, in general, European elites of the previous apartheid regime.

The prototypical example is the case of Cyril Ramaphosa, who is the current leader of the ANC and the coalition government. He started out as a trade union organiser who was deeply identified with the radical promises of the Freedom Charter. When negotiation with the apartheid regime began, he was the ANC’s chief negotiator. After the CODESA settlement was made, he shifted to business, and through the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) scheme, he enriched himself by partnering directly with major corporations with terrible colonial pasts.

He acquired stakes in Anglo American mines of the Oppenheimer family (a bastion of the settler economy). He partnered with Sanlam and other Afrikaner-owned conglomerates and so on. In just a few years after, by the 2000s, he had become one of the wealthiest people in South Africa. Meanwhile, the miners he had once led continued to languish in poverty. 3,000 of them striked at the Marikana mine of Lonmin—a corporation he had stakes in and served on the board of—demanding better pay and were gunned down in 2012 by the state police, killing 34 miners and injuring dozens more. This was the single bloodiest massacre of the people by the South African state since Sharpeville (1960).

What happened to the “The People Shall Share in the Country’s Wealth!” promise of the Freedom Charter? While he, Ramaphosa, went from a “militant” labour leader demanding radical redistribution of the wealth of the state to a billionaire embedded in the very structures he once opposed and presides over the affairs of the country, South Africa remains the most unequal society in the world, with the top 10% (mostly Afrikaners and people of European descent alongside a tiny cohort of Africans) controlling over 85% of the country’s wealth. Nearly 80% of the country’s land remains in Afrikaners’ hands. Around 50% of South Africans live below the national poverty line. About 40% of Africans are unemployed, and the unemployment of the young people of working age is even worse, at a staggering 60%+.

The South Africa example, alongside those of Ghana and Kenya I referred to earlier, is safe to say, has provided us with a snapshot of the conflicts of interest that have existed historically and persist today in one form or another across the continent and the diaspora. We can go on and refer to the pre- and post-independence experiences in Haiti, Brazil, Nigeria, Liberia, not to talk of the Françafrique countries, and on and on like that, but it is of no use. It should be well established by now that the abject betrayal of the liberation of the African masses by the elites among us is a recurring and near-uniform occurrence.

This is not to say that this is a uniquely African phenomenon; in fact, to the contrary, it is a common denominator across all modern human societies and even ancient ones alike, from the Balkans to Cape Town to Sydney. Every society has and is constantly striving to reconcile this contradiction between what is optimal for the few and the many when they are in conflict.

What separates our African situation in this era is not the existence of this contradiction per se but the fact that it has reached a breaking point: the compromise has become terminal and an inevitable collision is in the offing, for something must give.

To paraphrase Fanon’s accurate observation in The Wretched of the Earth:22 “The national bourgeoisie increasingly turns its back on the interior, on the realities of a country gone to waste, and looks toward the former metropolis and the foreign capitalists, who count on its obliging compliance. Since it has no intention of sharing its profit with the people, it discovers the need for a popular leader whose dual role will be to stabilise the regime and to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie”.

This is why things will fall apart; the centre cannot hold. The ruling elites cannot both serve foreign capital and uplift the masses, as the two are fundamentally opposed. No balancing act is possible (in the long run) because the interests of the masses are in direct conflict with those of imperialism. For a while, the ruling class can continue to pacify the people and disguise their treachery largely. But because the elites have no concrete economic base of their own, they cannot create significant industry; they cannot transform society; they cannot deliver genuine development and advancement. Its continued survival will depend increasingly on serving foreign capital loyally.

So the extraction of surplus value from the people would deepen, inequality would then widen, and the masses would become even more destitute. The people may not always see the hidden hands of foreign players in their affair, but they definitely feel the degeneration of their material conditions, so their disillusionment with the status quo will continue to grow. And just like the Mau Mau movement, for example, the people’s eventual revolt is inevitable.

As revolutionary Pan-Africanists, our duty is to recognise this inevitability and prepare for the coming collisions—even to help expedite them by organising the people—so that when they do happen, we can protect the revolutions from being hijacked yet again by those invested in preserving the status quo.

It is based on this that I say that Pan-Africanism for us23 without a radical change to the political and economic reality of the African masses—one that prioritises their interests—is fraudulent. And such a change without a class struggle is impossible. Therefore, Pan-Africanism, if it is to genuinely liberate the African race, is by necessity a class struggle.24

PS

To those who have asked me: even when we upend this oppressive system, won't a new elite class25 be manufactured by the neocolonialists or crop up organically within our Pan-African union, and the cycle would just repeat itself? So why not accept reality as it is?

To this, I say your concern is legitimate. But one, it is always worth striving for a fairer system regardless of future challenges; and two, the only way to deny any class the means to sell the African masses out—the lasting solution—is to consolidate our revolution so thoroughly as to destroy the neocolonial link root and branch.

And to those who point out to me that inequality is a global phenomenon and that the productivity of the world has never been any higher, yet inequality has never been worse than today, I say that first and foremost, we are talking about the relative inequality within our specific context. For structurally extractive economic systems like ours, the national wealth is essentially fixed and, more importantly, never increasing even when new resources are discovered.

This reality, when combined with the neoliberal, neocolonial arrangement where whatever exists as surplus is syphoned upwards and abroad, makes inequality not just a fixture in our society but progressively more severe for us.

The global nature of inequality does not absolve us of the responsibility to address our own particular manifestation of it—indeed, it means our struggle is part of a worldwide confrontation between the exploiters and the exploited. And this is precisely the reason why our Pan-Africanist project must be grounded in class consciousness from the beginning.

Notes

But we are no dogs. Far from it.

We have indeed experienced untold evils across generations, from the times and hands of Cambyses to Leopold and beyond. Slavery, insurgencies, famine, cultural imperialism, biological warfare, economic sabotage, structural adjustment programmes, apartheid. The list of disasters runs as long as the Nile. So due to this, our ancestors must have, generation after generation, layer upon layer, like accumulating fat beneath the skin against the cold, hostile world, built coping mechanisms to survive these traumatic experiences, leading all the way to the present time.

This, then, we can attribute to our quiet acceptance of the everyday indignities and iniquities that would revolt others. Which is responsible for the myth of our exceptionalism in and to suffering. We tell ourselves that we are the most resilient people on earth. Who else could have experienced such relentless attacks and still endure as we do today? Only we could function in dysfunction and survive in, and even embrace, this primitive, chaotic state of being, we reassure ourselves.

This is cope. This notion—a by-product of our condition—is demonstrably false. One only needs to do a random walk through history to notice a lot of counterexamples. As James Baldwin once said, we think our sufferings are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then we read.

Yes, we have endured. But so have others. Look at the Armenians, or is it the Kurds, the Romanis, or the Tamils and the Untouchables of the Indian subcontinent or the Comanches? Have they not endured atrocities at the hands of their fellow humans, sometimes far longer than we have? What about the Russian serfs or the Slavic people in general? Were not the Jews of mediaeval Europe, from the time of Titus, subjected to various forms of degradation until the Holocaust? And did not some of their own people, like Jabotinsky, recognise and point out these very same patterns of maladaptation among themselves?

I am not trying to compare apples and oranges here; my point is simply that those that suffer, suffer what they must, and there are no special genes or destiny for suffering and smiling that we Africans particularly possess, as some like to suggest and would want us to believe.2 Suffering is suffering, and even though different groups of people respond to it differently, no people are born to suffer more or be more used to it than others.

The greatest victory of the tyrants of this world is not when they break us; it is when they convince us that being broken is our natural state. When we begin to take pride in our chains, to compete over who wears them most gracefully, to celebrate it, and to pass servitude down to our children, even if, and especially when, it is done unconsciously.

But we were not born to crawl. We were not created to make peace with injustice, to find comfort in humiliation, or to raise our children in the graveyard of our own smothered dreams.

We are not animals in the zoo of life, conditioned to accept the cage, shock after shock, until we no longer attempt to break it even when the cage is evidently breakable.3 We are human beings, possessed of will, of choice, of agency, of the divine spirit that demands dignity. We are the indigenous people of earth, the origin of mankind, the children of the Nile, the heirs of Napata.

And to those of us who would rather cling to the cage than leap out towards the uncertain, I say, “Take note”. The world does not accommodate the long-suffering. It does not admire the people who survive everything but lose themselves in the process. It respects and listens to only those who declare determinedly, “This far and no further”. If you continue to endure, you will continue to be degraded. If you want to live, truly live, then you must destroy this cage of shock.

Yes, it will be hard and uncertain! But the good news is that if our helplessness is learned, then it is not inherent. And if it is learned, then it can be unlearned.

So declare with me: we are not Seligman dogs. Rise up. Not tomorrow, not when conditions are perfect, not when permission is granted by those who profit from your prostration. Rise up now.

The first step is internal; you must refuse to find virtue in or reason for your own degradation. The second is external: refuse to permit it in and to others. The third is eternal; empower the people so they may guard and never surrender their African dignity.

Notes