difficult. The Syrian government has, moreover, succeeded in eliminating, it seems, hotbeds of major intervention supported from the outside. It remains the case that the introduction of groups in the pay of foreign powers put the democratic and social movement in an awkward position. The “movement”—diffuse and unorganized—refused to support the so-called liberation committees, obviously manipulated by the imperialist powers, while also refusing to support the government’s repression. To respond to the terrorism of imperialism’s agents by state terror is not an effective response to the challenge. The solution calls for substantial reforms benefiting popular and democratic forces that exist, and refuse to serve the Muslim Brotherhood. If the government turns out to be incapable of understanding what is required, nothing will stop the tragedy from continuing to its inevitable end.
I have listened to many representatives of the Syrian popular movement, which is extremely divided. Here I should cite Ayssar Midani, Salameh Kailé, Joseph Yacoub, Aziz el Azmeh, Zakaria Khoder, Ahmad Barkaoui, and Michel Kilo. I do not necessarily share their analyses and opinions.
Sudan: Criminal Abuses
On a visit to Khartoum in 2010, at the time the south’s secession was being prepared, I heard analyses and commentaries (particularly from my very dear friend Haydar Ibrahim Ali and from Adlan Hardallu) that led me to believe that awareness of the disaster perpetrated by Turabi’s supposedly Islamic regime was well advanced and, beyond that, that the country’s democratic and progressive forces were preparing a counteroffensive.
It was too late. The people in the south chose independence by an overwhelming majority in the referendum. But the imperialist powers, probably working through the Mossad, had taken the precaution of assassinating John Garang, the only leader capable, not only of uniting the peoples of the south, but also of working with the democrats from the north to change the state of relations between the two states. The outcome was fatal. The south has become another Central African Republic given over to conflicts among mediocre local potentates for control of the country and has descended into civil war. This is the only way for the politicians in question to attract supporters in their pay.
Yemen: Ally of the United States?
The United States supported the Ali Abdallah Saleh regime. The reason is their fear of the Yemeni people, above all in the south of the country. The latter had had a progressive Marxist government, which derived its legitimacy from its large popular support. Today, those forces are active in the social protest movement. Washington and its allies thus fear a breakup of the country and the reestablishment of the progressive government in South Yemen. Consequently, in allowing al-Qaida—largely controlled by the United States—to occupy the cities of the south, with U.S. support, the Yemeni regime wants to create fear among the progressive forces so that they can be pressured to accept the continuation of Saleh in power. The friendships that I have maintained with a large number of leaders from the former South Yemen have provided me with some insights into the nature of the issues facing this country.
2
AFRICA
African Socialisms, Colonial Disasters, and Glimmers of Hope
Independent Africa was divided into two camps from 1960 to 1963: the Casablanca group (Egypt, Morocco, Guinea, Ghana, and Mali), who considered that the independence “granted” by the colonizers had not settled the question of liberation, and the Monrovia group (the other countries) that accepted their situation, described by the former as neocolonialist. African countries are united in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), created in 1963 on the initiative of Haile Selassie. All countries of independent Africa belonged to the Non-Aligned Movement, founded in Bandung in 1955. The spirit of the Bandung Conference had a wide enough resonance to attract not only the African peoples, but also the ruling classes and governments.
Having personally been involved in the continent’s intellectual and political life from that era and even before, I believe that the overview I am going to offer to the reader in the following pages might help in better understanding the vicissitudes of Africa’s attempts to overcome the burdens of colonialism.
The new Africa is fragile precisely because of the miserable heritage of this colonialism. Most African societies are threatened with disintegration, and several of them are now quite far along in this terrible process. The dominant narrative on the subject attributes responsibility for this state of affairs to the “insufficient maturity” of these societies, with the implication that they were decolonized too quickly. As a result, the true cause of the tragedy is ignored: the market. The market itself always works as a centrifugal, disintegrating force. It is only when it is regulated by the state that it ceases to be so. In economies as fragile as those that Africa inherited from the colonial period, this disintegration effect is even more devastating than elsewhere. Here there is no productive system worthy of the name. The market does not create such a system; it has never done so anywhere. It is the state—acting as an instrument of society and of the social compromises that characterize it at each stage of its evolution, including the capitalist stage—that is responsible for creating a productive system consistent with social development. In the absence of this, the market forces quite simply exploit the scattered fragments of a system that cannot offer any resistance since it does not exist as such. Compradorization is the social, political, and ideological form through which this absence of a state is expressed. There is not “too much state” in Africa; there is only a bad comprador administration that is not even a real state. In ideological terms, this situation results in the triumph of individual interests or those of clans and their patronage systems, the absence of a sense of solidarity (class or national), and the restriction of political struggle to vulgar opportunist practices—which in turn depoliticize the people and retard the formation of responsible citizens, an essential condition for democratization.
Neocolonialism, then, develops only on the basis of permanent crisis. It is itself in permanent crisis. That is why different movements have continually challenged it, in various times and places. Even if these movements have not attained the consistency and strength necessary to form an effective and viable alternative—as has been the case up to now—they nonetheless prefigure the requirements for a better future. That is why the waves of what I call national populist (rather than socialist) responses continually follow one another in Africa. The first of these waves—Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Modibo Keita’s Mali, Guinea, the Congo—had barely run out of steam before a new attempt was made in West Africa, Benin, then Burkina Faso, while a rebirth began, perhaps, in Ghana and Mali, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Madagascar in East Africa, then southern Africa. I closely followed all these attempts to construct an alternative to neocolonialism in crisis.
Has this been a failure on the part of Africa? No. We should say that it is a failure of capitalism, which is unable to offer Africa anything acceptable. Today, the Bandung era has come to an end, and the impasse is more desperate than ever. The frontal attack on the peasantry promoted by the WTO’s liberalization project has only accelerated the transformation of the continent into a world of abandoned rural areas and overcrowded urban slums. The inevitable consequence is the rising migration pressure—the new “boat peoples”—while the Europeans persist in not wanting to recognize their overwhelming responsibility.
I shall offer in what follows a sequential picture of the experiences of African socialism and, in contrast, an overview of the miracles without a future, the neocolonial quagmires and disasters.
THE EXPERIENCES OF AFRICAN SOCIALISM
I lived through my second experience of Bandung in Mali (and supplemented this with visits to Nkrumah’s Ghana and Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea). I reviewed this in the first volume of these memoirs. I shall not then return to this stage of the story. The following pages deal only with Mali after Modibo Keita and Ghana after Kwame Nkrumah.
