Raya Dunayevskaya (1961)
1960 was the year when sixteen nations in Africa gained their freedom from Britain and France and when Belgium thought it could grant formal political independence to the Congo while keeping its hold economically and militarily. In the rich Katanga province the Congolese people faced the new fact that white imperialism could speak through a black puppet. Three short days after the creation of the Republic of the Congo, Moise Tshombe declared Katanga’s ‘independence’ and Premier Patrice Lumumba requested U.N. aid. Rooted in this United Nations intervention was a new form of struggle between the two nuclear titans, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Khruschev’s performance at the U.N. was designed to make the world forget that Russia voted for U.N. intervention in the Congo. By removing his shoe and thumping the table with it in protest he separated Russia and the United Nations policy over the Congo in the eyes of the world despite his previous approval of the dispatch of United Nations troops. In taking Lumumba’s side he was engaged in a battle for the mind of Afro-Asia, for it was Lumumba who, across tribal lines, had built up a truly national movement for independence.
Lumumba had asked for U.N. aid because he thought he could use both Russia and the United States to maintain independence. But before he could make use, he was used.
The murder of Lumumba was the inevitable result of American imperialist connivance with Belgian imperialism and its African puppets against the leadership of Lumumba’s Congolese National Movement. The crocodile tears shed by President Kennedy and the U.N. Ambassador were quickly brushed aside the moment it became obvious that Khruschev for his part intended to exploit the murder to establish a foothold through his recognition and support of the Antoine Gizenga regime.
This challenge to the U.N.—U.S. domination of the Congo (and its uranium, cobalt and titanium) led to an immediate American response. Russia backed down, its U.N. Ambassador Valerian Zorin was ordered not to veto the resolution introduced by Ceylon, the United Arab Republic and Liberia to empower the U.N. “to use force to stop civil war.”
Whether the U.N. can stop civil war in the Congo is questionable; that it cannot stop the U.S.—U.S.S.R. struggle for world power is certain. The threat of dismemberment now stalks the tragic Congo. There are already two Germanies, two Koreas and two Viet Nams. Must there now be three Congos?
1960 was a turning point in the struggle for African freedom. Even where Africans, as in apartheid South Africa, were defeated they electrified the world with their mass burning of the hated passes and brave shouting of “Izwe Lethu” (Our Land). Where they had already gained political freedom, in Ghana and Guinea, they began facing the struggle for economic independence. Seventeen newly independent nations were born in Africa — the Cameroun, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Congo Republic (one formerly Belgian, the other French), Dahomey, Gabon, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Ivory Coast, Malagasy (formerly Madagascar), Mali (formerly French Sudan), Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Togo and the Voltaic Republic.
By the year's end, light had been shed on the darkest comers of white supremacist rule, not excluding that of the ‘quiet’ dictatorial terror in Portugese Africa. Sir Roy Welensky's Federation was vigorously challenged by the United National Independence Party round Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia and by the Malawi Congress Party with Dr. Banda in Nyasaland.
Although it is all too obvious that Roy Welensky’s 'multi-racialism’ is but another name for Verwoerd’s fascistic policy of apartheid, white liberals in both Kenya and the Rhodesians have asked why a nationalist rather than a 'multi-racial' political party should be used as the instrument of freedom in Africa. To this question, asked by the Reverend Colin Morris, Kenneth Kaunda has replied:
"When you look at the nations in Africa which have achieved the independence we desire, it will be found that a nationalist movement in each case brought about the solution. No multi-racial political party has yet managed to obtain for Africans their independence.
We are not concerned solely with the rights of Africans; we are struggling for human rights — the inalienable rights of all men. We are engaged in a struggle against any form of imperialism and colonialism not because it has as its agents white men, but because it has many more wrong sides than good ones . . .
I should now add that I believe the only effective answer to our constitutional problems is that the British Government transfer power gracefully from the minority to the majority groups — that is, to the Africans. The happiness that Africans will feel will, I am almost certain, make them forget and let bygones be bygones, and so will be born in North Rhodesia a new state in which black men rule, not to the detriment of any one race, but to the good of all inhabitants because the majority will have nothing to fear from minority groups." (Black Government, A Discussion between Kenneth Kaunda and Colin Morris).
The outburst of elemental creative activity of the African people has, in the short period of a single decade, remade the map of Africa and thereby that of the world. From the outset, when this movement was still eclipsed by revolutions in Asia and the Middle East, it was clear that a quite new, a higher stage in world development had been reached.
It was met by an orgy of violence when it first appeared in France’s Madagascar during World War II and in Britain's Kenya after the war. But the Mau Mau experience taught British imperialism a lesson — that henceforth other struggles for independence should be handled with grace in the hope of retaining economic privilege.
Although de Gaulle’s France had learned nothing from its bitter drawn-out war with Moslem revolutionaries in Algeria, it had learned from tiny Guinea’s brave resounding “No” that it should change its tune in former colonies of sub-Sahara Africa. Since then the tidal wave of freedom has engulfed the former British, French and Belgian empires so that in two short years nineteen independent nations — those listed above added to Ghana and Guinea — have emerged in Africa.
Freedom’s handwriting is on the wall for others. 1961 has already seen the addition of Tanganyika and even where there is a counter-revolutionary white settler element as in Kenya it is plain that those who are fighting for freedom have no intention of admitting delay. Freedom’s tocsin has been sounded throughout the African continent. West and East, North and South.
As the Africans surge towards freedom the leaders of Russia are ever ready to exploit their own particular perversion of Marxism. That present-day Communism is flatly opposed to the ideas of Marx was made clear by the brutal suppression of the revolution in Hungary. Khruschev’s U.N. performance in the summer of 1960 was translated, by the 81 Communist Parties that met in Moscow in December, 1960, into a theory about “the independent national democracies." Those who are ready to believe that Russia stands for freedom, at least in Africa, might take a closer look at the record of the ’fifties.
Up until 1953-4, Russian leaders showed very little interest in Africa and called Kwame Nkrumah “a nationalist stooge for British imperialism,” a label previously reserved for India’s Nehru. Russian Communism was suspicious of the uncommitted non-Communist world, especially in Africa, if for no other reason that it had no one there. Nor was there anyone with whom to create a ‘popular front.’ There was neither a substantial proletariat nor a significant native African bourgeoisie. The middle class intellectuals who led the movement were educated not in Moscow, but in 'the West.' If these people had had a dream — and they did — it was not of Russian Communism but of Pan-Africanism. For the time being as could be seen from the example of Ghana, the first country to gain its independence, the leadership was closer to Great Britain than to Russia.
Khruschev saw a new world emerging that owed nothing to Russia and showed no inclination to follow the Russian path. He had to intervene lest he lose this new world. Hence the performance at the United Nations and the allegedly unstinted support that the manifesto of the 81 Communist Parties gave the “independent national democracies.”
In 1956 Khruschev first declared that imperialist war was “not inevitable.” His famous speech against Stalinism at the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party permitted him, a Stalinist, to travel henceforth under 'unsullied' colours of ‘Marxism-Leninism’! He was thus able to appear as an exponent of a theory of liberation before countries which had gained their freedom from Western imperialism by their own sweat and blood.
De-stalinisation was the first step in the change of the Russian line. But what generated self-confidence and over-confidence in the Khruschev of the late 1950s was the sputnik. Where Stalin had been wary of neutrals unless he could fully control them, Khruschev gave them the bear-hug and told them they could go their independent way. The new manifesto explained: “A new historical period has set in in the life of mankind: the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America that have won their freedom have begun to take an active part in world politics.” If anyone doubts that “world politics” is Communist politics, let him read the manifesto!
The lesson in “world politics” Khruschev is giving the Afro-Asian-Latin American world, that war is “not fatally inevitable,” does not mean that the Russia of sputniks and I.C.B.M.s subordinates its policy in any way to that of the West. On the contrary Russia champions “peaceful co-existence” because the war that is “not fatally inevitable” means that the West is walking on thin ice lest any small war start the nuclear holocaust. Therefore the “independent national democracies” may go far indeed in challenging the United States, and Russia will do all it can to help. In a word, “peaceful co-existence” is the careful nurturing of every crisis from the Congo to Cuba.
To escape being torn between the two warring poles of state capitalism, America and Russia, the African masses must turn directly to the workers in the technologically advanced countries whether they are Russian, West European or American. It is in this context that the American and European struggles against automation, with its division between mental and manual labour, are to be seen.
The self-activity of the Negro in America since the successful Montgomery bus boycott and especially since the sit-ins, is a reservoir of strength for the African revolution. It is not just that the Negro identifies himself with the revolution as a question of colour, it is that he is revolutionary in his everyday life, in his struggle with existing society and in consequence has an immediate and deep perception of the meaning of African revolution. And because of the Negro’s unique position in American life he is a spur to the American working class as a whole.
In the mass demonstrations in London against the Sharpeville massacre and in the “Boycott South African Goods” movement, the British common people have shown an affinity with all those fighting for freedom in Africa. This affinity is not limited to demonstrations of sympathy; it is inherent in the daily struggle against capitalism.
Without the aid of the majority of the workers of a technologically advanced country neither the African nor the Asian revolution can escape capitalist exploitation and the bureaucratic State Planner.
In June, 1959, when I first analysed the African revolutions, I asked whether “this great awakening (is) to be confined to a half-way house doomed to stand at the cross-roads. Must it choose. . . one of the two poles of state capital — Russia or America?”
The answer I gave to that question then, in the first edition of this pamphlet, seems to me to be as valid today as it was two years ago.
April, 1961. Raya Dunayevskaya
Detroit, Michigan,
USA.