Programma Comunista 1958, n.12

In the anti-colonial movement, Africa was preceded by Asia.

The national-democratic revolution in the colonies – the most important event of this century, after the Russian Socialist Revolution – swept across the entire Asian continent in just a few years, and swept away centuries-old empires with its flood. Africa has been a valuable participant in this great upheaval, but the events there have so far taken place at a slower pace. Only the sector of the continent that is usually referred to as white Africa, because it is inhabited by races that are not properly black, has managed to victoriously lead the uprising.

This does not mean that colonialism had easy days in the rest of the continent. The revolutionary movement began immediately after the end of the Second World War. In fact, it was from 1946 that in black Africa the indistinct movement of revolt against French colonial oppression took organised forms. Beginning in that year, the first modern African parties arose, such as the African Democratic Union (Rassemblement democratique africaine, RDA), the African Convention, the African Socialist Movement, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon. Great struggles for demands broke out, the Parisian trade union organisations emancipated themselves, becoming properly African organisations. Nor is there any lack of direct struggle against the foreign occupier. In 1950, the French government, which the degollist nationalists accused of ’softness’, conducted a bloody repression against the anti-colonialist movement. The Ivory Coast, where the RDA had arisen to then spread throughout French-black Africa, was particularly targeted by the colonialist janissaries, who indulged in an orgy of arrests, deportations and summary executions.

Even more sangry was the repression of the Madagascan uprising, which remained infamous. In March 1947, Madagascar rose up in arms against the French oppressors who responded by perpetrating an appalling massacre. Official French documents themselves admit that over 80,000 Malagasy rebels out of a population of 4,600,000 lost their lives at the hands of the repressive troops. All political activity was suppressed on the island. The leaders of the revolt, including Madagascar’s deputies to the French National Assembly, were referred to the Courts Martial even though they were outside Madagascar at the time of the revolt. Sentenced to death, their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment and they are still in prison today.

Of course, while the Asian peoples were fighting against colonialism, the Africans were not stagnant. It was not only the blacks and Malagasy. How can we not remember the heroic, albeit confused, revolt of the Kukuiu of Kenya? The enormous losses suffered by the insurgents in Morocco, in Tunisia? The seven hundred thousand Algerian dead? It is true that, while not losing sight of African events, we have given more prominence to Asian ones. This has happened for two reasons. First of all, it is in Asia, home to more evolved pre-colonial civilisations, that the economic and social phenomena provoked by the colonialist invasion present themselves in their clearest form. Here, more than elsewhere, colonialism openly revealed its reactionary essence, preventing the development of the subject countries and perpetuating retrograde social relations. Secondly, it is in the Asian revolutionary movements that the phenomenon of the marriage between the anti-Marxist revisionism of the false communist parties of the Moscow school and the radical ideology of petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy, comparable – in a broad sense – to the Jacobinism of the western bourgeoisies of the 18th century, has occurred.

The task of the Marxist who wants to realise the substance of the Afro-Asian upheavals is not easy. The decline of colonialism has not, as many claim, resulted in a changing of the guard between the new and the old imperialisms. The formation of nation-States on the rubble of colonial empires, even if it has not wiped out the economic dependence of the new States on the financial powerhouses of imperialism, is a revolutionary fact, as taught by the doctrine of national self-determination, i.e. separation from multi-national and multi-racial super-States. Separation remains a revolutionary fact, even if it is facilitated by the hegemonic rivalries that divide imperialisms. In the present conditions of the world power relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as the anti-colonial revolution spills over into regimes of bourgeois democracy, the question of the relations between the new independent States and the States of old capitalism is absolutely secondary. Sooner or later, before or after gaining independence, the Afro-Asian States, as bourgeois regimes, will seek ’peaceful coexistence’ with the capitalist giants that dominate the world. What is truly revolutionary is the fact that the abolition of colonialism and the formation of the nation-State unlock, as Lenin put it, the ’powerful economic factors’ that underlie the national-democratic revolution, i.e. liquidate the last remnants of pre-capitalist modes of production. But only those who have unmasked the game of the revisionists of Marxism arrive at such theoretical awareness. These revisionists of Marxism tend – as the experience of the Chinese Communist Party teaches us – to pass off as communist policy the legal bloc with the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie parties, and as socialist the aims to which they tend towards are programmes of outright State capitalism.

It was then necessary, in order to avoid distorting the meaning of the Afro-Asian upheavals, to fight first of all against the revisionism of the ’communist’ parties linked to Moscow. From now on, we will work on eliminating this imbalance. But before reviewing African political movements, it will be good to deal with some general issues affecting the entire continent.

At the outset, we made the observation that Asia preceded Africa on the Path to emancipation. By explaining the reasons for Asia’s primacy, we will come to understand why Africa lags behind. This is not an academic question. The liberation of Asia had enormous consequences for the African anti-colonial movement. Indeed, the colonialist powers, having been driven from their Asian possessions and forced to entrench themselves in the last remaining colonial strongholds in their hands, drastically changed their methods of repression. The liberation of Asia somewhat facilitated the task of the colonialists in other parts of the world, as it exempted them from having to disperse their forces across an immense theatre of operations. It is obvious, for example, that France, if it still had to keep troops in the former Asian possessions, would find it difficult to maintain not only the Bled, but the cities of Algeria themselves. The ideal condition for a swift victory of the anti-colonial revolution in Asia and Africa would have been the simultaneity of the uprisings on the two continents. This did not happen. It could not happen. Asia could not fail to move and win first, for a series of causes that we believe we can group into three main orders: Asia’s great historical tradition, the influence of the Russian Revolution, and geographical position.

1) Asia’s great historical tradition. European colonialism was an implacable stifler of the forms of civilisation carried out by the subjugated peoples, but it could not carry out its work of demolition in Asia to the extent that it had to in Africa. The pre-colonial era had produced on the Asian continent, the ancient cradle of civilisation, social organisations that had nothing to envy of the coeval European States. The real ’detachment’ between Europe and Asia began when industry disengaged from artisan forms, opening the era of manufacturing and, hence, industrialism. But the leap forward of European industry occurs after Asia (and Africa) fell under colonial invasion. Better, it happens because Asia (and Africa) have descended to the lower rank of colonial, i.e. lands of exploitation and dispossession. Primitive accumulation without European capitalism would not have developed so rapidly, would not have marched at the pace we know, if colonialist pirates had not despoiled the overseas lands.

European domination halted the development of Asia, however it did not wipe out the irrepressible survivals of millennia of history, in the course of which gigantic States had been formed, testifying to the lofty heights reached by the social organisation and cultural evolution of Asian nations. In reality, European colonialism had failed to completely erase Asia’s political independence. Except for the temporary American occupation, Japan never lost its independence. Nor did a century of repeated aggression succeed in definitively subduing China, Asia’s largest State in terms of physical and economic size, social traditions and cultural development. These States, while fighting each other (the inescapable destiny of all nation States) had to keep alive the struggle for independence. It would be in vain to imagine what would have happened if European colonialism had prevented Japan’s independent existence. It is certain, however, that the imperialistic ambitions of Japanese capitalism were to contribute, albeit negatively, to the defeat of European colonialism. Indeed, by invading the ancient European possessions of Asia, the armies of ’Tenno’ were to strike a mortal blow to white prestige.

Asia’s great historical traditions were to prevent the colonialist invaders from imposing total domination on the continent. In the struggle against the colonial rulers, they were dialectically transformed into material forces

2) The influence of the Russian Revolution. There is an important connection between the revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Asia. 1905 is the year of the first Russian revolution. For Lenin, it marks the opening of a revolutionary epoch in Eastern Europe and Asia. In fact, the Russian revolution was followed by revolutions in Persia, Turkey, and China. Especially on the leaders of the Chinese revolution, most notably Sun Yat-sen, Russian revolutionary traditions exerted a great influence. It is not the case here to deal with the articles written by Lenin on Sun Yat-sen. While seeing him as an exponent of petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy and praising his political honesty and steadfastness of character, Lenin scrupulously measured the distances separating the ideology and programme of the Kuomintang founder from Marxist communism. But it was undeniable that the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen, walking in the wake of populism – the tendency to conceive of peasant democracy as a bridge to socialism, and thus to believe that the ’leap’ from feudalism to socialism was possible without passing through the dictatorship of the proletariat – were reconnecting with certain currents of Russian revolutionary thought. Lenin knew that the ideologies and political action of Sun Yat-sen and followers diverged from the aims of communism. Consequently, when it came to dictating the programme of the communist parties operating in colonial and backward countries, he made it a precondition that the communist parties, while co-operating with the democratic, nationalist parties on the insurrectionary terrain, should keep their programmes and organisations distinct. If the Chinese Communist Party, from its earliest actions, confused itself with the Kuomintang to the point of making Sun Yat-sen’s programme its own, sticking the label of communism on it, this is certainly not the fault of Leninism and the international movement.

But this is not the place to return to such questions. What is of interest is to bring attention to the undeniable fact that the influences of the Russian revolution acted as an accelerator on the revolutionary movement, not only in China, but throughout Asia. Events such as the Peoples’ Congress of the East (Baku, September 1920) could not fail to leave a deep impression. The assembly was attended by two thousand delegates from all the colonial and backward countries of Asia and Africa. The Communist International thus placed itself at the head of the anti-colonial revolution. Thirty-five years later, in April 1955, the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference, offering the capitalist West ’coexistence’, came to prove how the Asian revolution, by stopping at the bourgeois-democratic stage, had only partially implemented the Baku programme. The national-democratic revolution in the colonies was supposed, in the grand strategic conception of the Third International, to weaken the camp of imperialism by facilitating the attack of the western proletariat on the bourgeois citadels of Europe and America.

The failure of the western proletariat’s revolutionary attack – immobilised first by the sellout apparatuses of social democracy and then by the Stalinist counter-revolution – prevented the national-democratic revolution in the colonies from overtaking the bourgeois phase. It is clear, however, that regardless of the involution of its social aims, the industrialisation of the huge area formed by European Russia and its Asian offshoots profoundly influenced the further development of the Asian continent. In fact, it is not the outdated models of the West, but the living experience of the Russian industrial revolution that inspire the programmes and political action of the new Asian regimes, not only those that label themselves as Mao Tse-Tung, Ho-Ci-Min, Kim-ir-Sen, but also the others that have the Nehru and Sukarno name as their banner.

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Programma Comunista 1958, n.13

In the first instalment of the last issue, two of the causes that determined the precedence of Asia over Africa in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement were illustrated: a tradition of great civilisation founding States and the influence of the Russian Revolution. We come to the third.

3) Geographical location. This is the most immediately comprehensible factor. Every struggle, war or revolution, is linked to the conditions of the territory. Asian revolutionary movements had to take advantage of the insuperable logistical difficulties created for colonial empires by the excessive distances between metropolises and overseas possessions. The imperial communication routes had been neither long nor arduous for the European imperialist powers, as long as they were able to maintain the naval hegemony they had conquered since the beginnings of colonialism. They suddenly became so in the course of the Second World War, when the explosive development of aviation reduced the offensive power of naval fleets not supported by air power to practically zero. In essence, the powers capable of transforming the old naval fleets by combining the ship and the aeroplane became fit to dominate the oceans, a technical transformation, however, conditional on the existence of an industrial and financial superiority that had now got out of hand for the old European colonialist powers.

Revolution invariably wins on two conditions: that the revolutionary camp is determined to fight; that the reactionary camp is powerless to oppose it. These conditions occurred in the Asian anti-colonial revolutions. The colonialists failed to be physically present in the theatre of revolt, at least to the extent that they could cope with the events. On the other hand, the new hegemonic maritime power – the United States – was powerless to inherit the old colonialism. It is easy to imagine the consequences of a brutal substitution of American occupation for declining colonial governorships. It would have provoked a violent reaction from the European powers and broken the ties that united them to American imperialism. Instead of exposing itself to dangerous isolation, the American government was forced to follow a policy of non-intervention, except to attempt the economic conquest of the new States.

Civilised Black Africa

Africa also has an important historical tradition behind it. White colonialism did not superimpose its conquest on a world of darkness and barbarism as the most vulgar instruments of white racism claim where the truly semi-wild Africa is reduced to a few races of nomads of the great equatorial forest or the Kalahari desert. And even towards these peoples (pygmies, bushmen, Hottentots) colonialist oppression has acted, let us not say as a factor delaying the development of the subjugated peoples, but as a blind and destructive force that has pushed back the evolution, albeit slow, of the natives. Depending on the resistance it encountered, white colonialism, that ’dispenser of civilisation’ either halted the march of the peoples who had fallen under its yoke or even reversed its direction, burdening the development of already civilised peoples and racial groups that were emerging from the lowest stages of barbarism. This is especially true for Africa.

In an article that claims to be only an introduction to the study of Africa’s political evolution, we cannot deal extensively with the subject of the civilisations that flourished in Africa in the pre-colonial period. We will try to say things quickly, promising to return to them later.

What the defenders of white colonialism do not want to admit is that Africans – not only the Semitic inhabitants of ’white’ Africa, but also the Melano-African races that make up black Africa proper – do not have civilisation to conquer. The blacks, even before the colonialist vultures descended on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, had already given birth to high forms of civilisation. Certainly neither were these social organisations, States, manifestations of cultural development comparable to the countries that fell under colonialism, to Safavid Persia, to the India of the Great Mogol, to the China of the Sung and Ming. If one considers that ancient African societies have handed down nothing but rare architectural monuments of importance, one must conclude that African civilisation ranks – at least in this field – below the pre-Columbian American civilisations – the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas – that have left grandiose examples of stone constructions. But it is certain that black Africa, i.e. that part of the continent less exposed to the influences of European and Asian civilisations, has nevertheless been able, based on its resources alone, to emerge from the darkness of barbarism. We can hardly be accused of opposing white racism with an Afro-Asian counter-racism, if we vigorously uphold these truths.

Africa, no less than other continents, has participated through the centuries in the social evolution of the human species. If the State is a necessary, sinister bridge of passage from barbarism to civilisation, it must be said that Africans knew the art of governing themselves, that is, they were civilised even before slavers and missionaries descended to ’Christianise’ the tropical bush. Thriving empires, organised according to the pattern of feudal hierarchy, arose in western Sudan, on the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, in Congolese Africa, in Rhodesia. Suffice it for now to name them quickly: the Empire of Ghana, the most important and famous of all, founded in the 4th century; the Mandingo Empire of Mali, which appeared at the beginning of the 13th century; the land and naval Empire of Gao. Most evocative of all, because of the mystery that still shrouds its origins, is the fabled kingdom of Monomotapa, which arose on the coast of present-day Rhodesia, in southern Africa, of which ruins of grandiose stone constructions remain that are lacking in other African kingdoms.

These State formations, which held vast territories and diverse peoples under their jurisdiction and maintained commercial and diplomatic relations with Arab Africa and the Mediterranean, testify to the high level reached by African production technology.

Before being thrown into the dungeon of colonialism, the black African peoples went through all the ’stages’ of civilisation prior to that introduced by capitalism: land cultivation, cattle breeding, industry and trade. The economic foundation of modern Euro-American civilisation is industrialism. If African peoples, like Asian peoples, stopped at the threshold of the manufacturing and machine-building phase of industry – the vaunted monopoly of the white race – this should not be explained by a claimed intellectual inferiority of the black race. It is undeniable that African civilisation developed at a relatively slow pace. The Guinean peoples may have displayed advanced technological knowledge, bringing bronze metallurgy to remarkable perfection. The ancient inhabitants of the Sahara and southern Africa may have provided admirable evidence of their artistic sense, leaving masterpieces of cave painting for the admiration of posterity. The black African States may have demonstrated the organisational and administrative skills of the black African peoples. But an examination of African civilisation clearly shows that it proceeded slowly. This can be explained by geophysical as well as historical causes.

Obviously, civilisation is a process that unfolds in close dependence with the indefinite expansion of the sphere of social relations between men. Civilisation has a fast or slow pace, depending on whether or not conditions exist for dense and frequent relations between nations and communities. And what form of communication is easier and more profitable than maritime navigation? Well, in Europe and Asia, the natural conditions existed for the progress of navigation and the consequent intensification of intercontinental traffic. Inevitably, production techniques, i.e. culture, were spreading behind the goods. How can one calculate what the vast Euro-Asian civilised consortium would have generated, in the field of material production and doctrine, if favourable geo-physical conditions had allowed for the incessant exchange of experience in all fields between the peoples who inhabited the two continents for millennia? Spain, Italy, the Hellas, Asia Minor, Sinai, the Arabian Peninsula, the vast Indian subcontinent, the Malacca Peninsula, dissecting the great communication routes into a series of small, easily surmountable stages, should have allowed the prodigious evolution from dugout canoe to large cargo and warship, from savage state to civilisation, to be much shortened. The immense necklace of islands and archipelagos that stretches from the Balearic Islands to the Japanese archipelago, passing through Sardinia, Malta, Crete, Ceylon and the three thousand islands of the Sunda Islands, made communication even easier.

The products of mental labour can only be the sum of the social labour of the collectivity, thus they cannot attain the highest perfection if they are prevented from crossing the narrow boundary of clan, tribe, nation, race. The conditions of the physical world have allowed Europe and Asia to be like the great collectors of invigorating currents of activity from innumerable social agglomerates. For the other continents, Africa – and above all the Americas, besieged by two invariable oceans – these conditions were largely lacking. That is why the Euro-Asian civilisation marched faster. The great religions, which were comprehensive conceptions of nature and society, the monumental philosophical systems, the sciences, the masterpieces of literature and art that give Europe and Asia the primacy of civilisation, are the outward signs of a millenary social evolution that had its origin in a deterministic relationship between the physical environment and human aggregates. Races have progressed socially, reaching different levels, not because they are subject to different biological laws, but because they are in a different relationship with the conditions of physical nature.

Because we are convinced of this, we are vigorous enemies of racism that considers differences in social development between races as absolute, that is, independent of the natural conditions within which they socially developed. The relative levelling out of natural conditions, which can now be achieved by employing the great resources of modern technology, will definitively erase social differences between the races of the world. But this cannot be achieved without the use of revolutionary force. Africa’s geographical isolation has long since been overcome by the progress of ocean navigation and, very recently, by air navigation. But Africa remains a backward continent. The impediments posed by nature to the development of its civilisation are technically, and long ago, removed, but it is still unable to catch up with Europe and America as Asia is doing. This means that natural causes have yielded to historical ones. The obstacle that needs to be overcome is the same one that broke the civil order of African peoples a few centuries ago: capitalist colonialism.

Let us examine the great African kingdoms of the pre-colonial era that, facing the sea, had only the immense open ocean in front of them, while they were hindered in their land communications by the two gigantic barriers of the Sahara desert and the great equatorial forest. We continue – it is obvious – to refer to the original Africa inhabited by peoples of the Black race, not to the Africa inhabited by white races (Berbers, Arabs, etc.) which in many respects belong to the Euro-Asian civilisation. The Sahara has not always been an immense expansive desert (though apparently it is “fertile” for the oil companies of today). In antiquity it was covered with large forests, and in the Middle Ages it was still easily passable because it was less arid and depopulated. It is well known, however, that land transport, moreover carried out on caravan routes, is in no way comparable in performance to transport on sea routes. Completely impassable, on the other hand, was the equatorial forest, especially during the rainy season with consequent flooding of rivers, overflowing, and flooding of entire regions.

These natural conditions easily explain, we repeat, the slow progress of Black civilisation from prehistory to the fall of the independent States of western Sudan. But they do not explain the rupture of the great lines of African social evolution. Until the white invasion, isolation had not completely prevented the social progress of Black African peoples. Progress was there; it was slow, but it was there. Then evolution took a frightening leap backwards. This happened when ruthless colonialist oppression took its hammer; striking blows at the native civilisations, then not knowing how to replace them with anything but the methods of forced labour and the thousand indignities of racial segregation.

Enter imperialism

This is not to say that we portray pre-colonial societies idyllically. If we do not spare ourselves in describing their past splendours, we do so to prove the falsity of the apologetic theories of the servants of imperialism, who like to pit colonisers against colonised as civilised against savages. For the rest, we know well that non-European societies, even before they were invaded and conquered by capitalist colonialism, were social aggregates in which social division already prevailed. In Africa, we see that remnants of primitive communism, discernible in the agrarian economy of the Black peoples (Uolof, Sere, Fulbe, Mande, etc.), are accompanied by forms of social division in which the survival of privileged castes, trade guilds, dominant nationalities, etc., are handed down. What really interests us – especially when discussing with certain Marxists who doubt the independent character of the Afro-Asian revolutionary uprisings, which they reduce to mere projections of rivalries between the great imperialisms – is to show how pre-colonial African societies contained within themselves the propulsive elements of social evolution.

But let us continue in our examination of the historical causes of African backwardness. Two forms of colonial robbery were to plunge pre-colonial Africa into a fearful regression: the gold trade and the slave trade. The social consequences of these infamous trades were to cripple African civilisations, throwing them into terror. The very balance between population and territory was to be upset, as entire villages were emptied of their inhabitants, while survivors of the raids fled their places of residence. The economic and social structures were undermined, while the lust for profit overwhelmed the ruling castes themselves, who became slave suppliers, handing their subjects over to Arab slave traders who resold the human cargo to the white traffickers, who lowered their slave ships from the Atlantic ports of Portugal, France and England. But, as soon as America was discovered and the need for labour for plantations became apparent, trafficking was revived in a big way by Christian Europe, and brought devastation to countries that had given birth to world famous States. No less fatal were the consequences brought about by the hunt for gold.

The agony of the old African civilisation lasted until the last century, when the last blow to the surviving indigenous States was inflicted by European imperialism. The resurrection began before our eyes, in the aftermath of World War II. But it is not a restoration. Imperialism, for its own exploitative ends, was forced to introduce wage labour into the shrunken African communities. Black Africa today is a hodgepodge of disparate economic forms where the remnants of primitive agrarian communism (collective ownership of land), patriarchal smallholding, capitalist agrarian enterprise, and modern industry linked mainly to mineral extraction mingle. This economic and social hybrid (in the field of family order denounced by the curious intertwining of matriarchal and patriarchal traditions), typical of pre-bourgeois societies, allows for the time being only one solution: the national-democratic revolution. Theoretically, the possibility of the double anti-feudal and anti-bourgioise revolution – expected by Marx and Engels for Germany in 1848, and by the Communist International for Russia and Asia in 1920 – cannot be ruled out. But this historical eventuality is conditional on the revolutionary attack of the proletariat in the metropolises of Europe and America.

Will Africa liberate itself before the revolutionary fire sets fire to the colonialist metropolises? Or will history, before the disgrace of class domination perishes, give another example of double revolution?

African peoples have been energetically at work. Barely a few decades after the last battles fought to stem the colonialist tide (it was on 2 September 1898 that the last great battle against the British colonialist invader took place in Omdurman) black Africa is on the move again.

The struggle has taken on new forms and tends towards new ends. No longer the preservation of ancient African traditions, but the foundation of the modern nation-State; the goal of the democratic-national revolution. The proletariat, which, rightly according to the Communist Manifesto, is on the side of anyone who fights on the revolutionary level against the existing order, is siding with the Blacks, the Arabs, the Berbers, the Malagasy, in bloody struggle against the last bastion of filthy colonialism.