Facing The Dictators: Africans Speak Out For Democracy EVA COLE, DEAN EMMET, & ANDREW HAMMER

Africa's political development has been troublesome from the first time that Europeans set foot on the continent and called it their property. Four hundred years of subjugation of peoples, lands, cultures, and identities, where claimed territories were exchanged through European wars or agreements having nothing to do with the actual inhabitants, have made the transition from colonial possession to self-determining polity extremely difficult for most African nations. The independence movements of the 1960s held out hope for a new Africa, based upon its own interpretation of socialist principles and liberation. But as the late Guyanan socialist writer Walter Rodney made clear, after independence Africa was still burdened by the continuing economic imperialism of her former colonial rulers. While the new Africa was indeed politically independent, it remained in slavery to the IMF and the same conglomerates that had exploited it before, placing its banks and natural resources at the mercy of those who controlled the old Africa.

Add to the residue of colonialism the persistent barriers of ethnic divisions between tribal groups that were thrown together inside European-made boundaries, and the historical affinity for the absolutist political form of the benevolent tribal chief, and one is left with a continent of diverse peoples struggling to find their way to democracy.

We are going to look briefly at recent events in two nations which provide a cross section of Africa's tumultuous political life since the 1960s: Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

Fatal Coincidences
On 8 June, Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha died suddenly from a heart attack. Abacha was not necessarily more or less brutal than the man who preceded him, former dictator Ibrahim Babangida, who had ruled the nation since 1985. He was responsible for the political murder of the Ogoni rights activist and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa. He did imprison Moshood A. K. Abiola, the man who defeated Babangida in the annulled elections which were supposed to bring civilian rule to the country. But Nigeria has been ruled by military generals for 28 of the 38 years it has been a nation; dictators are not the exception, they are the rule, and part of that rule includes removing one's opponents any way one deems fit. All of which makes the events in Nigeria after Abacha's death interesting.

Abacha was replaced expectedly by yet another general, Abdulsalam Abubakar, amid renewed international calls for immediate political reform and civilian rule in Nigeria. Abacha had promised civilian rule in October, through new elections (in which he had been endorsed by all five legal parties). But Babangida had also promised civilian rule until his defeat by Abiola's Social Democratic Party, so the government's credibility on the matter has long been shattered.

General Abubakar attempted to appease the calls for reform almost immediately, by announcing that he would maintain the October date for elections. In addition, he released several political prisoners and promised more releases. But the focus of Nigerians, as well as the United Nations, was on Abiola, the one political prisoner whose release was being demanded in the streets as well as in diplomatic channels.

Then, after a gaol cell meeting with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Moshood Abiola also died, also of a sudden 'heart attack.' So, in the same too quick way that Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried and executed to 'end the problem,' the man who executed him and his most formidable political opponent were both gone within a couple of weeks. The streets of the nation's cities erupted in demonstrations of outrage over the death of Abiola. Whether or not the official heart attack was an elabourate poisoning didn't even seem to matter to Abiola's supporters; even if it wasn't, the government still killed him by forcing him into the unspeakable conditions of Nigerian gaols.

Facing growing unrest, even in the Northern part of the country (more on this below), Abubakar has now pledged to abolish the five previously 'legitimate' political parties that supported Abacha, and has invited Nigerians to form new parties for an election in.... May 1999. Needless to say, in this new spirit of so-called openness, the ban on Abiola's Social Democratic Party has not been lifted.

Roots and Branches
It is impossible to divorce the political problems in Nigeria from the animosities between its two major tribal groups, which are divided by religion as well. The nation has almost always been ruled by members of the northern Hausa tribe, who are Muslims, while the ruled have been the Christian Yoruba in the south. Thus while Northerners have held on the government, the opposition has been led by the South. The other tribes, the Ibo and the Ogoni, have had their rights steadily trampled by the government from the beginning.

But after the two deaths, Northerners who have become fed up with the nonexistent pace of change have taken this opportunity to voice their own opposition to the government. In other words, Northerners are realising that tribal identity has not and will not help them as they suffer no less than other Nigerians, at the hands of their own chiefs, who have entrenched themselves as Nigeria's ultimate minority, the ruling class. Further, the southern part of the country has always been the most economically productive, and some observers feel that as the South becomes more impatient, a situation where all tribes begin to recognise the urgent need for democracy poses a new and direct threat to the status quo.

The fact that the status quo is to a great extent propped up by oil conglomerates (most infamously Shell, who was a target of Saro-Wiwa) is disturbingly significant when considering the kind of change that is likely to take place there. The conglomerates would rather keep their cosy arrangement with that status quo, and thus will be supporting the ideas for 'reform' coming not from the proper opposition or the people in the streets, but from the generals.

Nigeria is the largest nation in Africa, and with its rich natural resources, it holds the most promise of becoming a new kind of African nation that could inspire its neighbours towards a uniquely African model of sustainable development and democracy. But that grand idea is now too far away from the current reality. With a now unclear and unorganised opposition, and yet another empty promise of elections from the junta, the only hope for Nigeria's future is sustained direct action from the people themselves and more direct pressure internationally on the military government. Hope is and has been in short supply since Nigeria was born, but the potential of what such direct action and common cause across tribal lines can do is being seen today in the second African nation we're dealing with in this article.

Zimbabwe: Revolution Gone Wrong
Zimbabwe is, in one important sense, a triumph, in that it was born out of and replaced Rhodesia, the post-colonial white enclave created in 1963 after the independence of Zambia and Malawi. With an apartheid policy more rigid than that of South Africa, Rhodesia was led by a defiant group of racists whose regime was brought down in 1979 through an armed struggle that had lasted almost since the nation began. That struggle was in turn led by the man who would eventually become Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe, then a self-described Marxist-Leninist, negotiated a settlement to end the war and took his ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) rebels (now the ZANU Party) into government in March of 1980 after winning internationally supervised elections. He has been there ever since, merging his rival independence faction (Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union - ZAPU) into one ruling party.

Eighteen years after the revolution that created Zimbabwe, a revolution that promised land reform as one of its key objectives, little has been done in the way of land reform. Much has been done to bolster up the power of Robert Mugabe, who has said that 'there is no other party besides ours that will rule this country.' His commitment to the monolithic one party state as opposed to a multi-party democracy is and has always been clear. But the other political problem in Zimbabwe is that the dictatorship has gone from being a one party state to being a one man state. Mugabe and his entourage enjoy an increasingly comfortable 'jetsetting' lifestyle, as he attempts to fashion himself as a statesman of Africa. Through the current constitution, he not only has 65 million dollars (Zimbabwean $) of public funds available to the 'ruling party,' but also has the power to appoint 30 members of parliament, which assures his party a majority. He has pardoned the murderers of his political opponents. And the added tragedy is that at every turn there are African and non-African pundits waiting to tell you that this situation is simply a part of African culture, with its tradition of paternalism and tribalism.

Many more Zimbabweans, however, would strongly disagree with that assessment. Last year saw the loudest and largest labour demonstrations in the country's young history, starting in October with a two-month long strike by doctors and nurses. The Zimbabwe Council of Trade Unions (ZCTU) faced down state censorship of media and police violence to organise a one-day general strike on 9 December which ended in its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, being severely beaten and hospitalised. Despite the enormous difficulty of organising a voice aginst Mugabe, the ZCTU has continued to call work stoppages and other actions, and is taking a lead in the National Constitution Assembly, and organisation dedicated to changing the nation's constiution.

Despite the insistence of Mugabe on a one party state, a tiny political party, the Zimbabwe Labour Party, has sprung up. At the moment the party has no real base, but it is yet another voice for a Zimbabwe with more than one political voice.

And finally, in June of this year, several hundred peasants took the issue of land reform into their own hands by occupying six white-owned commercial farms for two weeks. Their intention was to settle on the land, and make good themselves on Mugabe's constant promises to take back the land that was taken by colonists and corporations and return it to the people.

Contrary to the notion that the citizens of Zimbabwe are comfortable with the 'one father, one mother' concept of autocracy, those citizens have shown a dogged will to stand up for their democratic rights in a nation they want to be a proper democracy. It is true that democracy in Africa must be defined in an African way, but the idea that everyone must have a voice in the affairs of state and society is not something that belongs to a specific time, continent, culture, or worldview. It belongs to anyone anywhere who claims that voice, no matter how difficult the obstacles in their path.

There are no easy answers to the myriad of obstacles that plague Africa, problems which the rest of world must share in terms of responsibilities and solutions. But as in Europe 200 years ago, today Africans in some of the world's poorest nations are beginning to go beyond the existence of nationhood and examine the way that their nations were built. They are looking at the world around them, and asking questions again, this time not just of their former colonial bosses, but of those who claim to be their liberators. While there are no clear courses ahead, many workers and peasants throughout Africa have taken the first step anyway. They are facing the dictators, and demanding more than a flag and a nation state.

The authors are contributing editors to Socialist.