Comment l’Afrique se paye la présidence française (2011)

Michael Schmidt, écrivain, journaliste et militant sud-africain engagé dans notre organisation-sœur Zabalaza, partage avec Alternative Librtaire une vision bien différente de la Françafrique. Sa sensibilité est celle du continent noir, et si les faits nous sont connus, la manière dont ils résonnent est bien différente.

Il semblerait que depuis peu, en Afrique, on ne serve plus la soupe exactement dans l’ordre habituel.  De curieux renversements s’effectuent en effet, dont le moindre n’est pas celui du Portugal, suppliant son ancienne colonie, l’Angola, de lui venir en aide ; ou encore de voir des citoyens européens se repliant sur leurs colonies de jadis pour fuir la crise dans leurs pays, et accepter des jobs sous-payés dans l’arrière-pays africain (1). 
Mais il existe une relation bien plus ancienne et plus discrète entre Afrique et Europe qui renverse l’image convenue de leaders africains corrompus par une aide-européenne-sous-conditions. Ce phénomène est celui de la valise (en français dans le texte), système par lequel depuis un demi-siècle les dictatures africaines ont envoyé des millions en France pour corrompre le processus politique européen. 
Le premier tour des élections françaises se tiendra le 22 avril prochain. On s’attend que le candidat socialiste François Hollande  prenne le dessus sur le président gaulliste sortant Nicolas Sarkozy, sans obtenir toutefois de majorité préparant le décor à une fuite de capitaux en mai. 
Toutefois, les électeurs français connaissent le système de la valise, il est donc intéressant d’examiner ce phénomène si bien intégré à la conduite des affaires franco-africaines, et qui semble se répandre encore. 
Le 5 octobre 2011, le Centre d’Etudes Françaises et Francophones de la Duke University (Caroline du Nord) organisait un débat intitulé « les colonies rendent la monnaie de la pièce : culture et corruption dans les relations franco-africaines ». Notre article reprend des extraits de ce colloque. 

La France post-coloniale, une république « valisière » 

Philippe  Bernard,  ancien correspondant du Monde  en Afrique,  entama le débat en faisant la remarquer que Robert Bourgi (2), conseiller « non-officiel » de Sarkozy, avait accusé (septembre 2011) son prédécesseur Jacques  Chirac et son premier ministre Dominique de Villepin, d’avoir reçu d’énormes pots-de-vin sous la forme de valises remplies d’espèces, pendant la mandature conservatrice de ces derniers (1995-2007) , aux fins de financer la campagne de Chirac.
Cinq états d’Afrique de l’Ouest et Centrale étaient concernés - Congo, Burkina Faso, Sénégal, Côte d’Ivoire et Gabon. Dans une interview à Canal+, Bourgi soutenait également que la campagne en 1988 de Jean-Marie le Pen du Front National (extrême-droite) fut en partie financée de la même manière. Chirac, autant que Villepin ont nié les allégations de Bourgi. 
Selon la recension par le Telegraph (3) Bourgi, déclarait au Journal du Dimanche qu’il avait personnellement transporté des dizaines de millions de francs chaque année, les montants étant destinés aux courses à la présidence, sous-entendant par-là que le liquide était destiné aux campagnes de Chirac. « J’ai vu Chirac et Villepin  compter l’argent devant moi ». 
Le même Bourgi soutient qu’il fit passer des billets de la part de 5 présidents africains : Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal [au pouvoir de 2000-2012]; Blaise Campaoré du Burkina Faso 
[1987 à ce jour]; Laurent Gbagbo de la Côte d’Ivoire [2000-2011]; Denis Sassou Nguesso du Congo 
[1997 à ce jour] et Omar Bongo du Gabon [1967-2009], que M. Bourgi appellait « Papa ». 
Ensemble, il prétend qu’ils auraient contribué quelques  6,2 million de livres sterling à la campagne gagnée de Chirac en 2002. 
Un sixième leader se serait joint au club des donateurs, le président Obiang N’Guema de Guinée équatoriale [1979 à ce jour] avant qu’un Villepin, rendu nerveux ne mette fin au système en 2005. Toujours selon Bourgi.  
Ce dernier affirme avoir personnellement fait fonctionner le système pendant 25 ans, en échange duquel les dictateurs africains se voyaient accorder d’immenses réductions de leur dettes envers la France, une fois leur « sponsor »  à  l’Elysée. 
Bernard  pense que le système est né de concept de « Françafrique », ce mélange des genres entre intérêts français et africains. 
Secret public depuis les libérations africaines des années 60, à partir desquelles des accords furent signés stipulant que la France userait de son influence pour defender les régimes africains, tandis que ceux-ci donnerait une exclusive à l’ancienne puissance colonial sur ses matières premières et un droit d’intervention militaire, à l’occasion de menaces contre la sécurité africaine.   
Dans les années 80, les gaullistes (opposés alors au gouvernement socialiste de François Mitterand) furent pareillement accusés de toucher un pourcentage des revenus du pétrole gabonais pour financer leurs campagnes – mais sans preuves. 
Le professeur Stephen  Smith,  ancien responsable du bureau Afrique de Libération, et prédécesseur de Bernard au Monde, se souvient des rumeurs disant que « l’argent à destination du bureau du premier ministre étaient dissimulé dans des djembe ». Ce bureau ne disposant pas de l’air conditionné, l’imaginer en train de compter son argent en bras de chemise est assez amusant ». 
Plus sérieusement, Smith se souvient qu’en 1971, au tout début d’un règne qui ne devait finir qu’en 1993  Félix Houphouët-Boigny, président de Côte d’Ivoire avait fait don de « sacs d’argent » au gouvernement de  Georges Pompidou. 
Il y avait, dit Smith “une pratique continue, depuis Charles de  Gaulle [au pouvoir de 1959 à 1969] à Giscard d’Estaing [1974-1981], jusqu’aux gouvernements libéraux actuels ». Tous soutenus par le système de la valise. Ce qui revient, de fait, à un Etat postcolonial informel ».
Il faut se souvenir que cette période – la Vème république – fut créée en 1958 à la suite de la crise qui devait précipiter la France dans la guerre d’Algérie. Nous sommes donc face à un demi-siècle de dictateurs africains, installés et maintenus en poste par la puissance militaire française, qui grâce au pétrole d’Afrique et autres revenus, devait soutenir à son tour, une chaîne de régimes conservateurs en France. Smith note toutefois que le système de la valise à l’œuvre dans les 6 pays mentionnés, était également relayé au moyen d’entreprises françaises présentes dans les anciennes colonies.
Les unes payaient les conservateurs gaullistes, tandis  quels autres s’occupaient des socialistes et communistes. Etant donné la position stratégique de la France en Europe, son influence n’étant égalée que par l’Allemagne et la Grande Bretagne, quiconque est en mesure de se payer la présidence française, s’achète de fait également, une énorme part d’influence en Europe. 
Les politiques progressistes des deux continents ont été rendues inopérantes par ces tractations secrètes.
Smith  raconte son premier scoop  concernant les pratiques occultes du ténébreux Bourgi, pour Libération en 1995. Il s’agissait d’un papier expliquant la manière dont le dictateur zaïrois Mobutu se vit acquitter de ses dettes, hors de toute procédure. Mobutu « éleva son sceptre et je craignis qu’il ne me frappe avec ! ». Robert Bourgi touchait 600 000 euros de Mobutu, pour éteindre un feu et en gagnait un million supplémentaire pour m’empêcher d’écrire le livre que j’avais en cours. » 
« La comptabilité de Bourgi est impeccable, il ne fait affaire qu’en liquide, donc il y a peu de preuves disponibles ». L’argent du pot de vin devait être déposé sur des comptes Sud-africains ou libanais, raconte Smith. 
La portée du pouvoir officieux de Bourgi était considérable. Smith raconte que lorsque Sarkozy voulut qu’on le prenne en photo avec Mandela – vieillissant, quasi-reclus et n’accordant que très rarement de photos -  il suffit à Bourgi d’appeler « Papa » (Omar  Bongo), qui persuada l’ancien président d’Afrique du sud de prendre l’avion pour Paris en 2007. 

Elargissement du système de la valise

Professeur Achille Membe, spécialiste de l’Afrique postcoloniale ajoute que la valise est un système de « corruption mutuelle » qui a « menotté la France comme l’Afrique depuis des décennies ». 
« La relation n’est pas seulement corrompue en termes d’argent … il s’agit d’une corruption culturelle qui a émasculé les sociétés civiles africaines en profondeur. Les perspectives sont les suivantes, la France dispose encore de bases militaires sur le continent avec les moyens de dégager un Gbagbo. Mais si elle doit payer le prix fort d’une intervention, elle y réfléchira à deux fois ». 
La mainmise de la France sur le continent africain, selon Bernard, commence à être éclipsée (notamment par les États-Unis) (4): ce qui impacte la monnaie francophone (le franc CFA) lié à l’euro en crise, ainsi que les entreprises françaises qui perdent leur exclusivité auprès des régimes africains, à mesure que le FMI reprend les rênes dans de nombreux pays, ou que la Chine, le Brésil et l’Inde déversent leurs investissements sur le continent. 
Sarkozy lui, veut mettre un terme à un « réseau d’intermédiaires », tels que Bourgi « agissant comme une diplomatie parallèle ».
Pour Smith, la France gagne plus financièrement de ses relations avec l’Afrique anglophone – Afrique du Sud et Kenya en particulier -   qu’il ne le faisait avec ses anciennes colonies, mais il prévient : « on assiste à une multiplication des modèles d’exception à la française : la relation avec la Chine est tout aussi corrompue ; la chasse gardée, le privilège français est devenu mondialisé ».
Membe  ajoute que selon lui, le palissement de l’étoile française est surtout au fait que la France elle-même est entrée dans un processus de provincialisation, de conservatisme culturel et de retrait des affaires du monde – et ce, bien que sa langue continue d’être dominante en Afrique, et malgré l’existence d’une diaspora de lettrés africains.
Toujours pour Membe les « révélations de Robert Bourgi », n’en sont pas vraiment en Afrique, où « elles n’ont pas été perçues comme un scandale » en raison du cynisme qui domine lorsqu’on évoque les relations franco-africaines dont on connaît depuis longtemps le déclin progressif.  
« La géographie n’est plus centrée sur Paris… les Robert Bourgi sont les derniers spasmes d’un équation morte, à genoux, qui n’est plus historique mais anecdotique. La France va devenir une parenthèse ».
Mais il est n’est pas du tout évident que le système des valises soit terminé, ou qu’il ait perdu sa capacité à influencer l’histoire africaine.  
Pour Smith la réputation-même de Sarkozy devint douteuse lorsqu’il barra d’un trait 40%  des dettes du Congo  et du  Gabon, là où Chirac l’avait positionné à 8% seulement. Effectuer des paiements à Sarkozy aurait donc constitué un « bon investissement de la part de leaders africains ».  Si Sarkozy aussi est impliqué, la fin de partie jouée par Bourgi et consistant à déballer l’affaire des valises après 25 ans, et affirmant qu’elles se sont arrêtées avec Chirac, ne vise donc pas à salir Chirac. L’homme est mourant et politiquement fini. Il s’agit donc plutôt de menacer Sarkozy tant qu’il est encore président, le forçant à permettre à Bourgi de se retirer en toute quiétude, sans craindre de poursuite, à 67 ans, dans sa demeure nouvellement acquise en Corse. 
Les racines du système sont à chercher, selon Smith, dans le fait qu’à l’époque où les Européens sont venus en Afrique, ils se sont « déboutonné » enclenchant cette relation fondée sur la corruption. Mais il faut être deux pour danser le Tango, alors que dire du rôle des leaders africains eux-mêmes ? « Si j’étais à leur place, reconnaît Smith, je continuerai d’investir dans la France. Car l’ONU, le FMI … continueront de se tourner vers la France quand il leur faut de l’aide, même si son bras de levier n’est plus aussi efficace. Les choix des présidents africains continuent d’avoir de l’importance ». 
Il est clair que le système des valises va perdurer, pour s’élargir sans doute à de nouvelles puissances -  USA, Chine, Brésil, Inde et Afrique du Sud – et ironie du sort, le taux de croissance du continent étant de 5,5 %, il est bien possible que la capacité de l’Afrique à influencer et corrompre les affaires du monde… augmente. 

Michael Schmidt 
Zabalaza
                                                           
1. Un exemple de ces contes (en anglais) : ici
  
2. Né à Dakar, dans une famille libano-française, Il fut admis au barreau de Paris. Ancien conseiller de Chirac et Villepin, Sarkozy lui accordera la Légion d’honneur en 2007.

3. ici  

4. Dans les années 1960s,  il y avait  20 000  soldats français stationnés en Afrique. Ils sont 5000 aujourd’hui, mais avec une capacité technique largement supérieure. Au Mali, toutefois, qui vient de vivre un coup d’Etat, la présence étasunienne est significative, tandis que les Français ont indiqué qu’ils n’interviendraient pas comme ils le faisaient par le passé. Sarkozy a rouvert la base militaire en côte d’ivoire qui sent largement la naphtaline, mais l’intervention française de 2011 se fit sous mandat de l’ONU.

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Acting in Time: Intervention and the Rohingya Crisis

Last week, The Ulu Club for Southern African Conflict Journalists, a project of the Professional Journalists' Association of South Africa (ProJourn) for which I do the administrative work, hosted in conjunction with the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre an event tackling how civil society and the international community could act in order to interdict an on-going genocide as is currently being inflicted on the Rohingya of Rakhine state in Myanmar.

We screened a harrowing Frontline documentary Myanmar's Killing Fields (online here; CONTENT WARNING: graphic imagery). The documentary is arguably one of the best on the Genocide in that it demonstrates painstaking work by Evan Williams and his team in verifying cellphone footage shot by survivors, who were then tracked to the refugee camps in southern Bangladesh - where I worked in April this year - and cross-checking their accounts with those of other refugees, semi-official lists of those murdered, with the reports of other human rights agencies, and cross-referenced to satellite imagery of the burning of Rohingya villages. 

The impressing of Rohingya into concentration camps from 2012, restrictions on their movements and rights to earn a living, the denial of citizenship, and the removal of all metal objects from their homes all strongly prove a concerted and escalating plan to physically eliminate these people. In operations by the Myanmarese infantry - spearhead of one of the largest standing armies in the world, supplied by red-fascist China - from 25 August 2017, acting on the thin pretext of a counter-insurgency campaign against a tiny 200-strong guerrilla force, some 100,000 are believed to have been slaughtered (including the mass rape-killing of women and the burning to death of children); Some 720,000 fled to Bangladesh where they now live in the world's largest refugee camps - under threat of deportation back to the genocidal Myanmar state.

Fascist-Buddhist extremism may seem an anomaly to South Africans whose interactions with Buddhism tend to be limited to that nice auntie who runs their yoga class, but working in the camps in Bangladesh was the second time in a year that I had worked in the aftermath of a Buddhist-initiated ethnic genocide, the other being in Sri Lanka in mid-2017. After the documentary, I recalled that in early 1942, at the time that the first real evidence of the Holocaust was becoming known to the Allies, Burman nationalist mobs were slaughtering Muslim Burmese in the wake of the Japanese fascist invasion of what was then known as Burma. Racist ultra-nationalist monks had been preaching hate since at least the late 1920s. So, with the UN finally (in March this year, confirmed in August) using the term genocide to describe what is going on - crucial as this means the Genocide Convention has to now be activated - how do we intervene and stop the slaughter, which is still on-going though at a lower intensity, according to the latest reports?

That was the thorny question that my panel of Judge Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor for the UN Tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Advocate Shabnam Mayet of Protect the Rohingya, and David P. Kramer formerly of the Free Burma Campaign were asked to tackle. Kramer dealt with the difficult problem of why Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's Mandela figure and the de facto head of state, has not only refused to attempt to stop the slaughter, but expelled the UN's human rights rapporteur, has not allowed investigators to probe the refugees' claims, has allowed journalists looking into the Genocide to be detained on spurious grounds, has claimed the burning of villages is an internal affair that only Burmese can understand, and has refused to even use the term Rohingya (the Burman genocidaires' argument is that the victim population are either not Myanmarese or even do not exist). 

Goldstone offered some hope, saying that a committee of senior UN jurists had offered opinion that for any UN Security Council member to veto an investigation into allegations of genocide would mean they themselves were in breach of the Genocide Convention. And Mayet urged civil society to get involved in the issue - and to publicise the killings as broadly as possible to pressure their governments into boycotting Myanmarese trade and tourism, blacklisting the generals and infantry officers responsible and freezing their assets abroad (as in Singapore), and forcing a UN intervention as occurred in Bosnia. There are no easy solutions, but thanks to all those who turned out for this crucial public event. There is at least one initiative what is being built as a result of the event and I will probably be involved in that - as well as planning to return to the region in 2019 to monitor the situation. I will update this blog as that initiative evolves. I will also soon publish a film of our discussion on my YouTube channel. In the interim, follow @ProtectRohingya on Twitter, and Protect the Rohingya on Facebook here.

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Skills and Assets Reparations instead of BEE

Michael Schmidt

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) should be dumped in favour of compelling pre-1994 white-owned companies to give assets and transfer skills to blacks as a form of reparations, the annual Anti-Racism Network of South Africa conference heard.

Structural racism within SA’s corporate culture, stretching back to the colonial era, as well as recent incidents in which corporates had provoked public outrage by offending racial sensibilities, emerged as the central focus of the gathering in Johannesburg, which is backed by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation.

Associate Prof William Gumede of Wits University’s School of Governance told the conference that South Africa’s corporate culture derived from the United East India Company (VOC), the 17th to 18th Century Dutch multinational company that was given a charter to run the Cape Colony where whites were at the top and blacks at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and in which “the profit margin was squeezed by paying less and less for the [labour of the] blacks at the bottom.”

This racial colonial practice was transmitted into the culture of the early mining companies in which the balance of the profit was extracted from impoverished black migrant employees. Apartheid merely entrenched this pre-existing racialised corporate culture – and, he argued, was still the dominant company ethic today as blacks were forced to prove their competence well beyond the standards required of whites, while apartheid-style matchbox housing was still considered suitable for them.

Racism was “an interlocking system” that had economic, social, political and intimate aspects that had produced “mass trauma” among its victims of colour, a trauma that had been transmitted inter-generationally. This, Gumede averred, could only be tackled by first changing the racism ingrained in SA’s corporates. And the base of that would be to focus on the dearth of assets accrued by black people because of this inheritance. 

But BEE had been a failure: “We have spent close to a trillion rand on BEE and when you look at the people who have benefited, I suspect it is no more than a few score.” A trillion rand could have been better spent on empowering those previously excluded with assets and skills.

“Because racism has been part of the corporate culture, I think we are going to have to say, companies that pre-date 1994… you are going to have to change it and provide assets to blacks who have been excluded. If you think about it, how many blacks have worked for Anglo American after the last 150 years and their families lived in poverty?”

He suggested that big corporates like Standard Bank, whose employees had been “excluded and traumatised” over decades of exploitative labour should even trace the living descendants of deceased former employees and see how assets and skills could be transferred to them as “a different type of reparations.”

Creative thinking was required, he said, suggesting that with government schools were in a parlous state, pre-1994 corporates could look at adopting all such schools in order to bring them up to par.

Later in the conference, a fiery Mandisa Masego of the Economic Freedom Fighters argued: “Domestic workers are slaves, security guards are slaves, garden workers are slaves; if you earn R1,500/month you are a slave… and those slaves are black.” 

Half of SA’s 40m blacks “are living in abject poverty and we can’t help them because the other 20m… are indebted because they don’t own land, they don’t own property.” She claimed that the function of “BEE lapdogs” was to be placed in corporates to block the upward mobility of other blacks. 

Swedish apparel company H&M gave a detailed presentation to the conference of how it had responded to being taken to task for racism by angry consumers over its advert featuring a young black boy modelling a hoodie inscribed with the slogan “coolest monkey in the  jungle.”

The company had engaged with the SA Human Rights Commission, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and other entities and had engaged staff in anti-racism training, appointed an SA head of transformation, had engaged local black advertising agencies and designers, had expanded its job-creation in SA by a R670m investment, and was assessing the possibilities of sourcing materials locally.

Delegates generally applauded H&M for its response, though one woman said that the chain had demonstrated a racist bias in its advertising before the hoodie furore. But they expressed disgust with the poor response of many SA companies to perceived racism, citing Pick ‘n Pay regarding the “mugs for maids” row. 

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A sketch of the Guangdong-Fukien Revolution 1921-1925

In China in 1912, Liu Szu-fu, better known as Shifu – formerly of the Eastern Assassination Corps, who lost his left hand in a premature explosion in 1906 – founded the Society of Cocks Crowing in the Dark, or “Conscience Society” (Huiming Xueshe) in the city of Canton (Guangzhou), which became an anarchist stronghold. He aimed at building a constructive, mass, anarchist movement, and helped publish the organisation’s journal, Huiminglu (Cocks Crowing in the Dark). According to Miller, between 1910 and 1916, the Australian IWW translated its materials into Chinese and it was Shifu’s Society who published and distributed them, entrenching IWW revolutionary syndicalist ideas in Guangzhou and Shanghai (and possibly also in neighbouring Hong Kong and Macau). Shifu, the preeminent Chinese anarchist in the 1910s, shared the general perspectives of Hsin Shi Chi, and the journal Huiminglu described its views as “communism, anti-militarism, syndicalism, anti-religion, anti-family, vegetarianism, an international language, and universal harmony.”

As a result of Shifu's pro-organisational stance, in Canton, Dirlik argues, “the most significant anarchist activity revolved around labour organisation.” In 1913, a Heart Society was formed: its members swore to accept no military or state jobs and to surrender any privileges. The Society of Anarchist Communist Comrades (WGZTH) was established in Canton in 1914, followed the next year by a branch in Shanghai. The WGZTH slogan Wuzhengfu Gongchan translates literally as "Without Government, Common Production". The Huiming Xueshe's paper was later renamed Minsheng (The Voice of the People) – or Manseang in Cantonese – and survived Liu's death in 1915, being published sporadically and even developing an Esperanto-titled French-language edition La Voco de la Popolo, for distribution in the French-occupied south.

In 1918, a year in which Sun Yat-Sen established Canton as his Guomindang base, anarchists participated in the first celebration of May Day in China, and formed in Canton a Teahouse Labour Union – the first modern trade union in China – which drew 11,000 members from among trade guilds and teahouse employees. In the next year, barbers were organised, and anarchists were also influential in the Mechanics’ Union through Xie Yingbo. The most important of the anarcho-syndicalist papers at this time was Laodong (Labour). In the same period, Burgmann notes, the Australian IWW was in contact with Chinese and Burmese radicals who translated and distributed IWW materials. These Chinese radicals were presumably located in the British colony of Hong Kong which lies close to the emergent anarchist stronghold of Canton.

By 1921, anarchists also led around forty trade unions in Canton alone, and also played an important role in the union movement in Hunan, and to a lesser extent Shanghai. Chinese anarchists also pioneered efforts to organise the peasantry, and were the first Chinese revolutionaries to speak of the “rural revolution”. The anarchists had some influence on the Chinese federalist movement of the early 1920s, which favoured a relatively decentralised and democratic state, rather than the centralised regime envisaged by Sun Yat-Sen. A key anarchist-federalist was Chen Jiongming (1878-1933): influenced by the ideals of anarchism, and, particularly, by Shifu and Wu. According to Beck, Chen’s federalism resulted in one of the rare instances outside of Manchuria of Chinese anarchists wielding power over a substantial region, their traditional stronghold of Canton: “The anarchist general Chen Jiongming regained Guangzhou [Canton], and he called Sun Yat-sen back in October 1920. They set up a republican government in April 1921, and 225 members of the old Parliament under the 1912 constitution elected Sun president. He [Sun] accepted the autonomy [from the republican government] of the provincial government with Chen Jiongming as governor and commander of the Cantonese army. Chen promulgated a provincial constitution and limited military expenditures to 30% of the budget while reserving 20% for education… Chen Jiongming’s anarchist friends led the trade unions.” This was a de facto anarchist-federalist free zone similar in concept to those of the southern Spanish cities of the 1872-1873 Cantonalist Revolt. In 1922, an Anarchist Federation was formed in the city to co-ordinate and deepen revolutionary activities there and in the rest of Guangdong province and the twenty-six counties of southern Fukien (Fujian) province controlled by anarchist peasant communes and militia.

Also in 1922, provoked by Guomindang activists, the Seaman’s Union went on strike in British-occupied Hong Kong, demanding a 40% pay-rise. It is not certain whether the union was influenced by the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union – which had global reach and was active in many ports that Hong Kong shipped to and from including the neighbouring port and anarcho-syndicalist stronghold of Canton – but it was certainly militant, possessing its own militia which enforced the strike and a food blockade of the port and railways. The strike committee and tens of thousands of Hong Kong workers and their families simply relocated to the safety of anarchist-dominated Canton. An attempt by the bosses to outlaw the Seaman’s Union and to bring in scab labour from China saw the union call a general strike that was heeded by the stevedores, railway workers, bakers, cooks, clerks, servants and “coolies” (general labourers). With more than 120,000 on strike, the colonial government ground to a halt, so the British called in the army, commandeered vehicles, press-ganged workers at gun-point, and banned travel to China. A mass protest at Sha Tin developed into a riot and a massacre, but faced with massive financial losses, the bosses caved in, legalised the Seaman’s Union, released all jailed strikers, gave them a 20% pay-rise, paid compensation for massacre victims and gave half-pay for all the days on strike. The Anarchist Federation of Britain argued later that, because the strikers fail to seize the factories – instead of vacating them – as well as all other centres of colonial power, the colonial elite reconsolidated its power, enabling it to defeat a much bigger general strike in Hong Kong three years later. 

Sun later tried to dismiss Chen “but he was popular from his victories in Guangxi” and it was Sun himself who was forced to flee by Chen’s forces to Hong Kong in a British gunboat. This took Guangzhou out of the Gumindang orbit and put the city firmly in the anarchist camp. In the rural areas of the Guangzhou Commune, the anarchists established the Self-Defence Movement of Rural Communities which as Crisi notes “would serve as the antecedent on a small scale for the heroic deeds in the rural communities of Manchuria”.  In March 1924, according to Damier, the powerful Confederation of Labour Associations (LXL) was founded in Shanghai by anarchists and other non-communist unionists, and was solidly dominated by anarcho-syndicalists, took an anti-Bolshevik line and published the China Labour Herald. In January 1923, Guomindang troops overcame the Guangzhou Commune and dismantled the anarchist free-associative experiment there. Chen Jiongming's Guangdong Army then retreated into the mountains and plains, cities and towns of eastern Guangdong and southern Fukien (Fujian) province where they held out for another three years before being defeated by a nationalist-communist combined force in 1925. Sadly, this example of an attempt at pragmatic anarchist counter-power – a full-blown “Guangdong-Fukien Revolution” combining urban and rural control and co-ordination of needs with a strong emphasis on education, anarcho-syndicalist control of the means of production, and self-defence of the Revolutions’ gains over three years – desperately requires further intensive study.

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Pik Botha: Our Troll Grandfather

The first time I met Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha, apartheid South Africa's longest-serving foreign minister, he hauled out his cock in front of me. No, I wasn't one of the "Boys of Bird Island", those unfortunates allegedly sexually molested by apartheid kingpins; I was just a cynical Army conscript standing fire picket on a cold night and Pik was dead drunk - well before the party he was attending. In my book Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of Apartheid's Dirty War, I was a little more polite in my recollections:

In 2002, preparing my obituary of Jonas Savimbi, I call
former South African foreign minister Roelof ‘Pik’ Botha for
comment on Savimbi’s death. I’ve actually only encountered
Pik in person once before, in the winter of 1985 when, as
a young soldier at 97 Ammunition Depot, I was put on
fire engine duty for his arrival in a Lear jet at our derelict
landing strip one evening, where he would attend a lamb
spit-braai with Depot O/C Commander Moolman of the
Navy. Botha climbed out of the plane into the biting winter
wind which made orange streaks of the landing flares,
and, apparently already drunk (he had a reputation as a
prodigious drinker), shambled his long, large frame over to
the side of the runway for a leak. At that stage, this was the
closest I had come to apartheid authority and I was taken
aback at his crude informality. Today, however, he is sober
and sharp, and in his trademark slow-grinding nasal drawl
recounts for me how arrangements were made in 1992 for
Savimbi to finally meet face-to-face with MPLA leader José
Eduardo dos Santos in Luanda. Savimbi was paranoid that
it was a trap and that he’d be shot by a sniper as he exited
the aircraft at Luanda, so Botha assured him that ‘I would
climb the aircraft steps to the top before the door opened, so
if they started shooting, the two of us would go together.’
This, for Botha, was the apogee of his relationship with the
guerrilla who, when they had first met, had told him that
after Luanda fell, the apartheid regime would be next. But
Botha’s assurance did not cure Savimbi’s cold feet, and he
stood up Botha and his welcoming committee, letting them
wilt on the blazing hot tarmac; Botha’s friendship with
Savimbi soured thereafter.

Now that Pik is dead (on 12 October at the age of 86) and now that today, Halloween, is the anniversary of the death of his bullfrog of a boss, PW Botha, I thought I'd just sketch a few little incidental bits and pieces that perhaps the major obituaries neglected to mention. Dan van der Vat, writing for The Guardian in the UK, claims: "His nickname, Pik, an abbreviation of pikkewyn, Afrikaans for penguin, derived from his juvenile pride in his first dark suit and reflected his lifelong fondness for donning a dinner jacket and going to a party." I have it differently: he earned the nickname at Stellenbosch University as a womanising student and it stood quite explicitly for Poessie Is Koning (Pussy Is King); which, if true, makes his later feting by Cold War world leaders all the more hilarious. Also funny was a National Party rally in Durban back in the late1980s at which Pik spoke. With his slow diction, he attempted to build towards a climax on the theme of "what every white South African wants is..." only to have a heckler, on the third recitation of this phrase, complete if for him by yelling from the back of the hall "a black lover!"

Van der Vat is, however, accurate in stating that his appointment in 1977 as foreign minister was akin to "promotion to first officer on the Titanic." Still, Pik ploughed ahead, damning the icebergs. And some of those icebergs were pretty alarming: among them were the Latin American military juntas of Videla (Argentina), Pinochet (Chile), Bordaberry (Uruguay) and others including the world's second-longest ruling dictator, Generalissimo Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay. The Latinos, alongside Israel and Taiwan constituted apartheid's firmest polecat pals. I am currently reading John Gimlette's wonderful travelogue-cum-analysis on Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. Pik was still on the rise to foreign minister in April 1974 when Stroessner paid a state visit to apartheid South Africa, a trip reciprocated by prime minister BJ Vorster the following August to Paraguay. The landlocked state was a part of the web of apartheid arms dealing. Vorster fell from grace in the quagmire of the Info Scandal in 1978, but Pik survived to see the installation of a black president, Nelson Mandela, in 1994 - an eventuality that he had predicted in 1986, saying, to the scandal of Nationalist conservatives, that he would be prepared to serve under such a person. 

And yet, as Shannon Ebrahim correctly wrote for Independent Online, "Pik Botha was, above all else, the smiling face of the apartheid regime, from the time he was appointed foreign minister in 1977, the year in which Steve Biko was beaten to death." In other words, he was the increasingly brutal racist regime's leading apologist. He was, she stresses, a key component of sanctions-busting, arms dealing and of the securocrat apparatus and was personally implicated by the Truth commission testimony of Security Branch General Johan Coetzee in signing the de facto death-warrants of twelve people including a six-year-old boy by authorising a cross-border raid on Gaberone, Botswana. But Pik wielded charm as he swilled his hard-tack; expansively and with aplomb. He was photographed in unlikely situations, memorably in Lawrence of Arabia garb astride a camel during talks in anti-apartheid Egypt. 

He was even suspected of being a communist agent by his verkrampte colleagues. Most remarkably, at the very time I met his drunken bulk for the first time back in 1985, he was preparing for PW Botha to make a dramatic early announcement of the end of apartheid. The statement would read: "The government is… abolishing discrimination based on colour and race and is promoting constitutional development with a view to meeting the needs and aspirations of all our communities."  As I wrote: "Had PW agreed to give the speech and pursue the strategy it entailed, all political prisoners and detainees would have been released. Instead, Botha appears to have suffered a minor stroke, after which he regressed and gave his notorious hardline Rubicon speech; by mid-1985 the apartheid authorities had declared a state of emergency in many districts of the country." Wreathed in the smoke of burning tyres, apartheid would fight a bitter rearguard action for another half decade before PW was taken out of the picture and Pik's anticipated reforms could begin. PW may have been "our Pinochet" as I argued in Drinking with Ghosts, but Pik, too grotesque and cunning to be a good fairy godmother, was rather our tricky troll grandfather.

[ENDS]

The Daylight or the Ghosts?

WILDERNESS, WESTERN CAPE, 5 NOVEMBER 2006

I’m now middle-aged, divorced, childless. My hair has
grown out again, shoulder-length, and I have a full beard.
It is 1.00 am and all I can hear outside the windows of
my backpackers’ is the sound of the surf pummelling
the shore. I am exhausted – having driven nine hours to
Graaff-Reinet and back – but wired. PW Botha died five
days ago, on Halloween, and I’m in his old neck of the
woods researching his obituary for the weekend press. The
road from Graaff-Reinet passes through some spectacular
countryside, and I’m delighted to have seen a black eagle
riding the thermals, and a pair of bat-eared foxes hunting
in the veld. The road goes through the town of Uniondale
which lies at the top of the Langkloof, the long valley at
the bottom of which rests the town of Kareedouw, then
on to the pass through the Outeniqua Mountains before
descending to the regional hub of George. As I approach
the mountains, the full moon seems to conjure from the
long and lonely road spooky tendrils of mist which spiral
off the wet tarmac. I shiver: if I am ever going to see South
Africa’s most famous ghost, the Uniondale hitchhiker,
who reputedly disappears from the passenger seat after
being given a ride, tonight will be the night. But I arrive at
the backpackers’, near the coastal settlement of Wilderness
beyond George, without incident. Letting myself in, I
power up my laptop and write the best opening lines of
my career:
‘Pieter Willem Botha lies as cold and dead on the
mortuary slab as Stephen Bantu Biko did in the back of a
police van almost 30 years ago. The Groot Krokodil, whose
vice-like bite struck fear into so many hearts, evaporated
into the night on Halloween like a wraith of mist on the
Outeniqua Pass. The nation is now at loggerheads over how
his legacy should be assessed.’
My obituary then goes on to list Botha’s predecessors
at the helm of apartheid South Africa. Breaking with
the Afrikaans convention of contracting their Christian
names to their initials, I spell the names out in full to give
the piece a serious, measured pace. First there was Daniel
François Malan, who once told parliament that National
Socialism was the wave of the future, and whose regime
rapidly outlawed communism and formalised race
classification and the geography of separate development.
Malan was followed by Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom,
whose regime removed coloureds from the voters’ roll and
unsuccessfully prosecuted liberation movement leaders
who had signed the 1955 Freedom Charter. Hendrik
Frensch Verwoerd, the acknowledged architect of grand
apartheid – its petty versions having been introduced by
the British from the time of their invasion in 1806, and
by the Dutch before them – succeeded Strijdom. Having
banned the liberation movements after the Sharpeville
massacre, Verwoerd was, in a dénouement worthy of
Shakespeare, assassinated by the ultimately sane Dimitri
Tsafendas, a quintessential South African ‘person of
mixed race’, the true common denominator that links us
across all races, in the year of my birth. Verwoerd was
followed by the descent into darkness that was Balthazar
Johannes Vorster. Also pro-Nazi, Vorster lies buried
under a large black marble slab in the remote Eastern
Cape town of Kareedouw.
In weighing up Botha against other world figures, I
decide that he was our Pinochet. Given that they were
contemporaries, and given the anti-communist position
of both regimes on the frontline of the Cold War and the
roughly equivalent death toll of their wars against their
own people, Pinochetist Chile seems the best equivalent
to apartheid South Africa that I can think of. An early
supporter of the pro-Nazi Ossewa Brandwag who later
turned to the uniquely South African fascism of Christian
Nationalism, Botha forged an already anti-democratic South
Africa into a military autocracy along Francoist lines. Botha
not only inherited apartheid’s Manichean world view but
transformed it into a Death-Star, militarising not just the
state but all of society, and giving it a baptism of fire that
arguably even Malan had not foreseen. Botha, for much
of the world, embodies the final phase of white resistance
to the ‘total onslaught’ of democracy more than any other
white Nationalist leader.
I recall that even right-wing American writer PJ
O’Rourke, in his Holidays in Hell, described the country
as ‘a place of evil and perdition’, sustaining whites who
found it normal to throw their cigarettes on the lawn
– because there would always be someone darker to
pick them up. It is hard these days to remember how
strangely grey apartheid was: how reading material was
heavily proscribed and television only introduced in
1976, when the state was certain its propaganda benefits
outweighed the risks of giving people a window on the
world; how the dead right hand of the military reached
into our schools, with proto-military cadet training being
de rigeur for many whites, while facing the assault rifles
of the cadets’ older brothers outside their schools was a
rite of passage for many blacks; and how the dead left
hand of religion rested heavily on society, with sport and
commerce outlawed on Sundays, turning the day into
a featureless wasteland between church in the morning
and listening to Squad Cars, a drama series broadcast
on state radio that lionised the police, in the evening. I
remember how to me, Botha standing stiffly at military
parades in his black Homburg hat with a red carnation
at his breast looked identical to his ideological opposite,
Erich Honecker of East Germany.
And yet Botha was also the harbinger and initiator of
the end of grand apartheid – and was deeply embittered
that the world ignored his efforts, granting the Nobel
Peace Prize and the glory to his successor, Frederik Willem
de Klerk, instead. True, Botha’s hand had been forced by
several broad socio-political changes into adapting what he
once called a mere corollary of ‘good neighbourliness’ to the
new reality. Yes, the nationwide insurgency and sanctions
had put South Africa in an untenable situation, but the
collapse of the bipolar Cold War order presented him with a
fantastic opportunity to both break out of isolation and take
the fire out of the resistance. And the least recognised factor
driving the reforms that he initiated was that the colour
bar had to come to an end for purely economic reasons: the
deliberate underskilling of black labour, a policy that lay at
the heart of apartheid, meant that the country would never
advance beyond the primary extractive industrial sector to
modernise and build secondary manufacturing and tertiary
services sectors; the economy would languish, bypassed by,
and forever merely a provider of raw materials to, a more
sophisticated world. The black workforce, once deliberately
kept dumb as mere ‘drawers of water and hewers of wood’
would have to be dramatically educated and upskilled, or
the entire economy would remain at that primitive level.
And if blacks were to become skilled, then they would have
to be paid well enough to buy their own products in order
to create a domestic market; apartheid was always as much
a capitalist scheme as a racist one.
In my article I note that a cynic would say the white
nationalists only surrendered power to the black
nationalists once the physical barriers that ensured
that privilege would remain secure in its laager were
unassailable. The continuity of separate development
in towns such as Kareedouw under ANC rule points to
validity of this claim. Is the same true of George, Botha’s
former stamping ground, the place where he built his
reputation as a thug who broke up United Party meetings
– in much the same way as a young Nelson Mandela
engaged in punch-ups with the Communist Party? His
former constituency, where he represented the National
Party as a belligerent young MP, is a weird mixture of
retired old-school English-speaking CEOs, backpacking
neo-hippies, bulky young Afrikaans-speaking aluminium
siding salesmen, and inbred backwoods folk straight out of
Dalene Matthee’s Kringe in ’n Bos (Circles in a Forest). Here
you will encounter both cheerful and helpful coloured
municipal staff and will o’ the wisp rumours of shadowy
groups in nearby Sedgefield who continue to celebrate
Adolf Hitler’s birthday each April 20. Despite the new
roads and new licks of paint evident in the black township
of Thembelihle and the coloured township of Pacaltsdorp
– from whence a former girlfriend of mine hailed – they
remain racially distinct ‘locations’, separated from each
other by a deep ravine and from mostly white George by
the N2 highway.
These divisions are an entrenched feature of the South
African landscape, despite all the hubris about national
unity. The journalist and writer Rian Malan, in his seminal
book My Traitor’s Heart dealing with his own family’s
tangled interaction with apartheid – the Malans were key
figures in the Afrikaner saga, from the Great Trek to the
total onslaught – tellingly explains how the ultra-austere
Nederduitse Gereformeerde (Dutch Reformed) Dopper
sect took its name from the dop, the tin cap that in
Voortrekker times was used to put out a candle, a
deliberate metaphor for the Doppers’ reflex to extinguish
the illumination of the Enlightenment, plunging the world
into darkness again.
If former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok’s
statements to the Mail & Guardian this year are true, Botha
issued personal, private orders to chosen individuals
from within the State Security Council. This suggests
that beyond his obvious responsibility for the nuclear
weapons programme and numerous cross-border raids into
neighbouring countries, Botha was personally responsible,
like his Chilean counterpart, for the ‘disappearance’ of
perhaps hundreds of anti-apartheid activists in South
Africa and abroad, among them the estimated 200 Swapo
detainees dumped, Chilean fashion, from an aircraft into
the cold ocean.
The man nicknamed Pieter Wapen (Pieter Weapon)
remained, like Pinochet, beyond the reach of the law he so
regularly flouted. Gerald L’Ange, in his continental study
The White Africans, describes Botha as someone who did
not see himself as others did, ‘a vain bully whose sense
of self-importance ballooned in the thin air of the highest
office’. Yet L’Ange concedes that for all his steeliness, Botha
had a capacity for seeing immediate issues realistically, and
he attempted – though seldom with much finesse – to deal
with them pragmatically. Despite his rearguard initiation of
limited reforms like the scrapping of petty apartheid, driven,
it seems, as much by a strangely sentimental attachment to
the coloured people as by his kragdadigheid, his readiness to
use force, it is for his single-mindedness and aggression that
he will probably be best remembered.
Yet Botha was unceremoniously unseated by FW de
Klerk in 1989 after having suffered a stroke. Until the end,
he was deeply bitter that his vision of ending apartheid – on
his terms and with a permanent sunset clause for whites –
lay in tatters. Botha in retirement seemed toothless, less of a
crocodile and more like the vanishing Knysna elephant he
apparently once saw, looming large over the landscape for
a moment, then disappearing into the scenery as if never
there.
It is now 2.00 am and I type up the concluding lines to
my obit:
‘With national flags flying at half-mast, it is hard to
guess whether this week, Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki will
come to George to bury Botha or to praise him. With race
classification still legal and the geographical bulwarks of
apartheid barely eroded, as mourners sing Botha to his
rest amid the reek of polished piety in the Nederduitse
Gereformeerde mother-church, it will be far from clear
which will prevail: the daylight or the ghosts.’

[ENDS]

Sparkly vampires need not apply

Below is an extract from the Introduction to my magnum opus, In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages, which weighs in at 515,000 words, and which, after 18 years in research in 14 languages and covering 15 decades since anarchism's emergence in the trade unions of the First International, is the most comprehensive anarchist movement history attempted since Max Nettlau's more than 80 years ago, and which as a result for the first time tells the world-spanning story of what happened to the anarchists after revolutionary Barcelona fell in 1939:

... despite its size, and though I have attempted to be as detailed, where relevant, as possible, this work offers a mere overview of the historical movement. I am told my writing style is dry, lacking in the sort of flair and colour which many anarchists so enjoy; I apologise for that in advance, but my intention is not a social study but rather an ideological, structural and organisational analysis. For a sense of that colour, I would direct the reader to many of the excellent autobiographies and biographies of anarchism’s leading lights. The problem with much of anarchism today is that anarchists themselves prefer their anarchism pale, romantic and doomed… sparkly vampires, really. This book is not for them. It restores to anarchism its true historical weight and contemporary significance for autonomous struggles against dominance, its penetrating global reach, centred on the Latin world and not the North Atlantic, its pro-organisational majority stance, its universal adaptability to local and transnational conditions, and its numerous pragmatic attempts to dismantle vertical power via popular, horizontal counter-power. This work’s ultimate intention is to excite the imagination of activists and scholars to use my illustrations of continuities and challenges as launching-points for further historical, ideological and practical explorations of their own. There is still so much work to be done, for example, on revealing the anarchism and syndicalism of North Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, and South and South-East Asia, let alone on the many borderlands and maritime littorals where anarchism had a transient yet persistent presence – and I hope that is a torch that future generations will take up.

[ENDS]