If we follow with enthusiasm the process of renewal underway in Africa, Asia and - in certain respects - Latin America in revolt against the suffocating economic oppression of the USA, it is not just for politically strategic reasons, but also regards our theoretical polemic. For who can deny that the revolt of the Earth’s most backward peoples against the states of the most developed but exploitative nations confirms the justness of the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism, and strikes a formidable blow at bourgeois idealism and its by-products? The fundamental argument of the enemies of Marxism is that the ‘ignorance’ of the proletariat prevents, and will always prevent, the organisation of a revolutionary party capable not only of revolting against the domination of the ‘educated’ classes, but also of taking over the social body. According to the bourgeois philistine, the direction of society lies with classes which are the ‘depository’ of culture - in fact, in a capitalist regime, the intellectual class is merely the gilded servant of the capitalist class - so the working classes, who are excluded from culture, could never hope to undermine the class power that towers over them. Well, what is happening in the former colonies proves precisely the falsity of this reasoning.

It is not via culture one obtains power, but vice versa. Peoples who, despite having a remarkable or even glorious civilisation in the past, were kept in a condition of incredible backwardness, here they are, after having chased away their colonialist oppressors, taking giant steps towards the vaunted goals of modern culture and technology. Peoples who until yesterday were still stuck in archaic forms of coexistence have proudly stood up, and there is no doubt that they will soon be on a par with the overweening ‘white’ nations. This proves that culture is also a matter of social strength, i.e. it is conquered by destroying class barriers that prevent the spread of the conquests of knowledge and make them the monopoly of privileged social groups. In ‘civilised’ countries, what prevents the working class from emerging from cultural ‘backwardness’? Its condition as an exploited class. The bourgeois power, by taking possession of even the smallest molecules of vital energy from the wage-earners and squandering them in a crazy production regime, will never allow the working class to ‘conquer culture’.

For the proletariat to cease being a social automaton chained day and night to machines, it will be necessary to shatter the capitalist social order, throw the nation-state into the sewer, and relaunch production with revolutionary criteria that abolish wages and corporate slavery. Only then, after having freed itself from being condemned to forced wage labour, will the proletariat be able to ‘conquer culture’, and break the monopoly that the bourgeois class holds on it.

These considerations came to us spontaneously upon reading the reports of the Pan-African Congress held in Accra, capital of the Republic of Ghana, from 8 to 13 December 1958. While the ‘culture’ of decadent Europe is rotting away and the resources of ‘intellectuals’ are at the service of the most infamous of reactions, it makes an impression to see how men from peoples who, according to white racism, could never rise from a condition of beasts of burden, are standing up, thinking like men, and saying things that would never come out of the mouths of our intellectuals, used to earning a living by prostituting themselves to capitalism.

More than the personality of Kwame Nkrumah, the old fighter of anti-colonialism and prime minister of Ghana, or of other leaders of the African independence movement, the figure of Tom Mboya, a 29-year-old young man who heads the Kenya Federation of Labour, emerged from the historic conference. Without wishing to wax rhetorical, the assembly heard echoed in his proud words the spirit of revolt and the yearning for justice of an entire continent that has suffered the most infamous of oppressions for over four centuries. Mboya’s speeches have, on the other hand, confirmed how in the African anti-colonialist movement there is a diversity of currents and methods, of which we have already informed readers on other occasions, and how the revolutionary current is irrepressible.

Already the fact that the assembly was working in a hall on whose walls ran banners paraphrasing immortal passages from Marxist texts had inspired sympathy and solidarity for those brave fighters for a just cause. One inscription read: ‘People of all Africa, unite. We have nothing to lose but our chains’. This is the closing phrase of the Communist Manifesto adapted to the African democratic-national revolution. Now we are well aware that this does not and cannot have socialism as its immediate goal. But we also know that the surviving islands of primitive communism, to be found in the collective ownership of land still widespread on the continent, may give it a course likely to facilitate in the future the welding together of the national revolt of the African peoples, and the anti-capitalist revolution of the international proletariat.

The Congress represented a milestone in the history of the new Africa. Never had such an event occurred in the history of the continent. Kwame Nkrumah could rightly exclaim at the opening of the proceedings: ‘My pride as an African overflows at seeing so many comrades-in-arms who have always fought for a free and united Africa, gathered here, on free African soil, for the first time in the history of our Dark Continent’.

Past and present

The African independence movement had held other important conferences before. But none had reached the level of the Accra Congress, which truly took on continental representativeness, and - far more importantly - clearly defined the political positions of the currents into which the movement is divided. It was attended by delegates from political movements, trade union associations and parties from 25 countries in the continent’s territories, so it can be said that the assembly did have a pan-African character. This fact alone shows how the African revolutionary movement has made tremendous progress in recent times, and how there is an ever clearer awareness among the peoples of the Continent of the great historical shift taking place.

When Kwame Nkrumah, continuing his speech, extolled the united spirit of the African ‘freedom fighters’, he was certainly not being rhetorical. Only the blind can fail to see that colonialism has reached its final agony and that all of Africa will soon be free. ‘Unity must be the cornerstone of our actions. All energies must be devoted to the establishment of a broad national front of political parties having as their basis the same goal: the rapid liberation of the subject countries, the liquidation of colonialism, the liquidation of imperialism, the liquidation of racism and inter-tribal strife. Let us not allow the colonial powers to divide us, for them to take advantage of our dissensions; let us never forget that our continent was conquered because our peoples were divided. Africa must become free in the life span of our generation. This decade is the decade of Africa’s independence.’

Today is not the first time we have said that the greatest historical event since the socialist revolution of 1917 is the upheaval which, at the end of the Second World War, set the Afro-Asian peoples in motion. The revolutionary proletariat cannot but make its own the wish that the next ten years will see the expulsion of the colonialist oppressors from Africa, the not unworthy heirs of the ancient slave traders who once sailed from the Atlantic ports of Europe. But no one, and the delegates to the Congress themselves were perfectly aware of this, can delude themselves that the struggle undertaken can be carried out other than under conditions of extreme harshness, as demonstrated by the ongoing massacre perpetrated by the French against the peoples of Algeria and Cameroon, the ferocious policy of racial discrimination that Afrikaners and British colonists are carrying out in South Africa, Rhodesia and Kenya, and the ultra-reactionary colonial policy of Salazar’s Portuguese fascists in Angola and Mozambique. But the worst enemy is represented, not so much by the traditional rivalries between tribes that delay the formation of large state entities, as by the collaborationist currents that undermine the movement, aligning themselves with the insidious policy of ‘reforms’ flaunted by the governments of the colonialist metropolises: in short, by the social strata, fortunately not of decisive importance, that express particular interests linked to the colonialist monopolies, and of politicians inserted in the bureaucratic machine of the colonial administation.

Already at another important conference, the Congress of Bamako, (20-25 September 1957), the partisans of an energetic action against colonialism had succeeded in affirming the federal principle against the basically collaborationist wing, which supported the opposite principle of unionism, i.e. of the union of the various territories, instituted as autonomous state bodies, with the colonial metropolis. The Congress of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, a large political formation affiliating various parties and movements in French West Africa, was then held. Against the hopes of the representatives of the moderate wing, headed by the president of the RDA Houphouët-Boigny, former minister under Mollet and De Gaulle, delegates of radical tendency rose to criticise the political line of the movement. While Houphouët-Boigny declared himself satisfied with the framework law as a great achievement of the movement, his collaborators (d’Arboussier, Sékou Touré) countered that the institutional reform thus promoted was only justified if interpreted in a federalist sense. In fact, in the hands of its authors, the famous ‘loi-cadre’, vaunted by French social democracy as a panacea for the contradictions caused by colonialism, aimed, by stirring up local particularism, at that ‘balkanisation’ of West Africa that Léopold Senghor, the leader of Senegal’s African Convention, first denounced.

A conflict arose between the opposing theses that seemed bound to result in a split, with Houphouët-Boigny staging a walk out. It is true that he then agreed to remain at the head of the RDA; but at the time of the Gaullist referendum on the French Constitution this was seen to be an artificial solution. The RDA sided with the ‘Franco-African community’ but could not avoid rifts and, finally, the proclamation of Guinea’s independence by Sékou Touré.

A few months earlier, on 18 February 1958, the delegates of the three major African parties, namely the RDA, Léopold Senghor’s African Convention and Lamine Guèye’s ‘African Socialist Movement’, signed a document in Paris sanctioning their merger into a large unitary party, later to be called the ‘African Rally Party’. The minimum programme of the new formation, which complied with a vote cast by the Congress of Bamako, was the revision of the framework law and the recognition that the governments of the French West African and Equatorial territories (AOF and AEF) would have greater autonomy.

Thus was forged an instrument of struggle that satisfied the need for unity and the need to confront the colonialist authorities’ divisive manoeuvres aimed at perpetuating the territories’ current administrative divisions; but it still fell back on compromise formulas. The conservative wing of the movement prevailed, according to which there should be no breaking of ties with France, since independence could be achieved within the framework of the ‘Franco-African community’.

From 25 to 28 July 1958, that is two months after De Gaulle came to power, the common front of nationalist parties held its first Congress in Cotonou, Dahomey. The 350 delegates there unanimously approved a motion calling on France to immediately recognise the independence of the peoples of Black Africa, but it reiterated the old thesis of the indissolubility of the ties between metropolises and overseas possessions. One must keep these facts in mind to understand how the Gaullist regime succeeded in the referendum. It is safe to assume that France would not have played the card of ‘consulting’ the African populations if the conservative and pro-French leadership of the RDA party had not shown it could influence the electorate. But it seems the RDA is in crisis, while other parties such as the PAI (African Independence Party), which oppose the policy of collaboration, are gaining strength.

(Il Programma Comunista, no.3, 1959)

The Accra Congress coincided with an important turning point in the history of the Continent. The outcome of the Gaullist referendum of 28 September was not entirely to France’s liking: it gave rise to political transformations that changed the political map of the Continent, even if, at least temporarily, it did not put colonial domination in crisis.

The resounding secession of Guinea, which voted against maintaining ties with France and chose independence, had its logical epilogue on 2 October, the date of the proclamation of the Republic. Other territories, while remaining within the ‘Franco-African community’, opted for the third constitutional formula envisaged by the referendum (status quo, overseas department status, associated state). In this way, the new ‘states’ of Sudan, Senegal, Gabon, Mauritania, Chad and Middle Congo were formed which, from 24 to 29 November, proclaimed themselves Republics. A little earlier, on 14 October, Madagascar, which had suffered heavy colonial domination for 62 years, became independent again, albeit still only formally.

Of course, the independence of the new ‘associated states’ has nothing in common with the actual independence achieved by Guinea and, before that, Ghana. There is more. The hasty decision of local leaders to give to territories, whose boundary delimitations have hitherto served the interests of the dominant power, the suspicious form of independent ‘states’, threatens to favour the process of the ‘Balkanisation’ of Africa, that is, the division of the Continent into a pleiad of weak and defenceless little states, divided, moreover, by burning irredentist issues that would undoubtedly come to light if it were up to ‘national’ governments to resolve the ethnic problems deliberately created by colonialism.

It is well-known that, since the Congress of Berlin, artificial political barriers have been erected between people and people, tribe and tribe, and in the very heart of the nations and of the various races. Evidently, only a large state body with a federal basis would be capable of not only initiating the not easy process of industrialisation, but also ensuring the peaceful coexistence of peoples and languages. Very often, in the past, the same leaders who claimed they were still loyal to France discussed the stirring question of a United States of Africa. But the first step towards this great goal would be taken by those who realised that the indispensable condition for the political unification of the continent and the establishment of large African state entities is winning complete independence.

The announcement on 23 November 1958 of the proclamation of the federation between the young states of Ghana and Guinea truly marked a milestone in the modern history of the Continent. The initiative was timely. There had to be an affirmation of the pan-African ideal, while colonialism and its acolytes threatened, as an extreme act of vengeance, to inflict on the Continent the scourge of state partitioning, which would strangle any attempt to pull the African peoples out of the backwardness and tremendous misery that tormented them.

Those attending the Accra Congress avoided euphemisms and spoke with revolutionary frankness, rejecting the blackmail and enticements of the colonialists. Aware of the fact that independence alone would be an illusory conquest, if not accompanied by the unification of the liberated territories within federated state formations, they thus showed that they fully understood the laws of development of the modern economy, which tends to transcend narrow national boundaries; in line with this they passed a motion stating that the ultimate goal of African nations is the creation of a community of independent African states. So, not Afro-European ‘communities’, i.e. perpetuation of African colonial inferiority behind the screen of false ‘unions’ with imperialist metropolises, but an African federation of independent states. It was time to denounce the unionist deception once and for all.

The motion envisages the establishment of five federal agglomerations. A federation of the coastal countries of the Gulf of Guinea from Senegal to Cameroon (in reality, up to now a ‘Mali Federation’ has been formed under Senghor’s auspices, comprising only two French West African coastal states, i.e. Senegal and Dahomey, and two inland and landlocked states, i.e. Upper Volta and ex-French Sudan – this body, which takes the name of the ancient and glorious Mali Empire, we will deal with on another occasion). A second one comprising Mauritania, Sudan, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad. A third with East Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. A fourth with Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, possibly to be joined by Nyassa. And a federation consisting of the Ubangi-Shari and the Middle-Congo. Only the future will tell how much of this grandiose programme can be realised. Indeed, one cannot underestimate the plotting of enormous powers against African independence and the fact that still influential political bodies follow directives that facilitate the disruptive manoeuvres of the colonialist authorities. But we are certain that in the end colonial power will be completely eradicated from African soil and an independent Africa will rise on its ruins. More than the objective decadence of colonial rule and the insoluble contradictions in which it is entangled, we have arrived at this certainty following the demonstration of strength and firmness that Congress has given to the world.

At one point in the final declaration it is stated: ‘The Conference condemns and points out the ignominy of the system of colonialism and imperialism in the British and French colonial territories, which has taken its most extreme and savage forms in Algeria, Cameroon, Central Africa, Kenya, South Africa, and the Portuguese territories of Angola, Mozambique, the Principe Islands and St. Thomas, where the indigenous population lives under a regime of colonial fascism; denounces the spoliation of human and democratic rights proclaimed by the UN Charter; denounces racial segregation, the reservation system and other forms of racial discrimination and the colour barrier; denounces slave labour in territories such as Angola, Mozambique, the Belgian Congo, Southern and South-Western Africa; denounces the policy pursued in territories such as Central Africa and the South African Union, which base the domination of the minority over the majority on the racial doctrine of discrimination; denounces the confiscation of Africans’ best land for the benefit of European colonialists; denounces the militarisation of Africa and the use of African territory for military purposes, especially in Algeria and Kenya’.

Such words had never before resounded in an African assembly; they show how the Accra delegates managed to overcome the hesitations and vacillations that other inter-regional meetings had shown on the terrain of the definition of the principles and programme of the independence movement. It was not for nothing that Nkrumah proudly declared that for the first time the pan-African general staff of the ‘long war’ for independence and unity was meeting to ‘work together, to plan the final assault on imperialism and colonialism, and to realise the four great pan-African objectives: the freedom and independence of all peoples, the consolidation of the new states, unity and community among the free African states, and the economic and moral reconstruction of the continent’.

Legality or violence?

But even more important was to be the work of the conference when it came to discussing methods of struggle. Legal struggle or armed struggle? From this debate emerged the strong personality of Mboya, the young trade unionist from Kenya who chaired the conference. He did not hesitate to contradict Nkrumah himself who, despite his attachment to the cause of African independence and the intense political work he has carried out to ensure its triumph, he is against violent struggle on principle. Evidently, he is influenced by the particular situation of the former Gold Coast, which became the Republic of Ghana following a fierce struggle punctuated by strikes and demonstrations, and culminating in a long process of negotiations with the occupying power. But it is equally clear that the doctrine of non-violence cannot be accepted by Africans languishing under regimes of open military repression, and it fell to Mboya to claim the right to revolutionary action. It was no coincidence that the revolutionary tendency of the movement was personified by a delegate from a country, Kenya, that in past years led a courageous struggle against British colonialism, which was particularly rapacious and despoiling there, leaving 24,000 dead on the ground, while another 160,000 blacks were thrown into concentration camps and prisons.

It is unfortunate that the conference proceedings are not available and that we have to be content with newspaper accounts, but what is reported from Mboya’s speech is sufficient to give a clear idea of the political tendencies of the extreme wing of the pan-African movement. He said, in polemic with Nkrumah: ‘The liberation movements cannot renounce the struggle, even armed, even violent, when it is to violence, to armed repression, that the imperialists resort to curb and destroy the struggle of the African peoples for independence and unity’.

We spoke at the beginning about the causes that determine cultural progress. The indirect proof that the old ruling classes of the bourgeois West are in full meltdown is the fact that one has to go to Africa to hear such words. Without boldness and intellectual honesty there is no cultural progress. But where is the European or American convention in which the enormous brains of ‘white civilisation’, overburdened with culture, are capable of acts of intellectual courage like those performed by obscure fighters from the African savannahs?

‘The flaming sword and the poisoned word of the colonialists who subjugated us in the past,’ said Mboya, ‘are difficult to use today. The flaming sword is blunted, the poisoned word has proved false, and Africans have learned to take the antidote of truth. But the imperialist powers do not let up, and they are adopting a new technique. Unions replace empires and spheres of influence have become part and parcel of Motherlands, without national identity. The perverted logic of colonialism wants Algerians to be French’.

The African leader could not have hit the target more accurately. The perverted logic of imperialist capitalism! It is absolutely true that ‘white civilisation’ is rotten precisely in that part of itself it was so proud of: its intellectual capacity. The fermenting of the bourgeois revolution was made manifest in Europe, in past centuries, by its attacks on the superstitions and idols of the dominant culture. The fact that black peoples are now able to penetrate the essence of imperialism, to stand up and overthrow the ideological idols of the western bourgeoisies, without the latter being able to react otherwise than with bestial repression and mass murder, is further proof that a great revolution is underway in continents already the seat of the most shameless colonialism.

No less drastic is the intervention of the Algerian Liberation Front delegate: ‘The choice of the form of struggle against the colonialists does not depend on the oppressed peoples. Violence lies in the very nature of colonialism and imperialism’. In turn, the representative of the ‘Union of the Peoples of Cameroon’, arguing the need to support the fight of the Algerian insurgents, stated: ‘Our compatriots will continue to fight with weapons in hand and it would be ridiculous for us to speak of non-violence, as colonialism itself is based on violence and there is only one means to get rid of it’.

The firm defence of the revolutionary principle against the moderate current, the proponents of ‘peaceful action’, was not in vain. The conference, while affirming in its final resolution the thesis that independence can be won by peaceful means, agreed to include in the document a cornerstone thus conceived: ‘The conference equally accords its support to all those who are forced to employ violent methods to cope with the brutal methods by which they are held in subjection and exploited’.

So one can conclude in reaffirming that the Accra Congress, by giving a convincing measure of the intellectual and political maturity of the African peoples, of the equilibrium and at the same time the great courage of peoples regarded by the prevailing philistinism as beasts, marked a milestone in the Continent’s progress. Africa was a giant of immense strength and inexhaustible wealth, languishing despondent and hungry. Now it can be said with certainty that it is a giant on the march.