Foreword

This first-of-its-kind book should be of use to everyone with an interest in either Africa or anarchism. Authors Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariwey begin by lucidly explaining the basic principles and practices of anarchism. After outlining what anarchism is and is not, they go on to compare anarchism’s principles and practices to those of other social-change ideologies, specifically to marxist socialism.

The authors then move on to Africa, exploring at length the “anarchistic elements” in many traditional (pre-colonial) African societies. Next they examine the devastating effects of colonialism on Africa’s traditional societies and on Africa’s economic and political structures, as well as the horrendous problems left in the wake of colonialism: underdeveloped, debt-ridden dependent economies with huge disparities between rich and poor; violent ethnic antagonisms caused by the deliberate setting of ethnic group against ethnic group, and by the creation of artificial national boundaries; and European-style governments, legal and educational systems, and military forces, all quite unsuited to African conditions.

Following this, the authors go on to examine the failed attempts at social change by “African socialist” governments in the post-colonial period, with special attention to Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, Sekou Toure’s Guinea, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The unfortunate conclusion they arrive at is that a humane, fundamental reconstruction of society is impossible in Africa, as elsewhere, via government.

This is not a hopeless conclusion, however, as the authors state that there is a way out for Africa — an anarchist reconstruction of its economic and social structures. They also point out that because of the many similarities between anarchist beliefs and practices and those of traditional African societies (which still survive to some extent), Africa seems the most likely of all the continents to witness a true social revolution — a revolution in an industrial age based on the “anarchist elements” in traditional African societies.

On a more personal note, I should apologize to any readers who find a few minor loose ends in this book. There is a reason for this: the authors live in Enugu, Nigeria, and communication with them has been difficult to say the least. (Whether this has been due to inefficiencies in the Nigerian postal and telephone services, or due to deliberate interference by the Nigerian government, I can’t say.) As a result of this problem, it has been impossible to check on a number of minor details, such as first names of a few persons mentioned in the text. Ultimately, I decided it was better to publish the book with a few minor loose ends rather than wait months if not years to contact the authors about these matters.

As a final note, I should also apologize to any readers who might find the title of this book inappropriate. When I accepted this book for publication, I accepted it on the basis of a good topic, good cover letter, and good proposal. The deadline to announce the coming season’s titles was fast approaching, so I assigned the book an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), announced it, and commissioned Cliff Harper to do the cover. At that point, for all practical purposes, the book’s title was set in stone. When the manuscript arrived, I discovered that it was not in fact a history, but something more valuable — a forward-looking book concerned with achieving positive social change. A more fitting title for this valuable book would be African Anarchism: Prospects for the Future.

— Chaz Bufe Publisher, See Sharp Press

Author Preface

Though not abundant anywhere, anarchist literature is especially scarce in Africa. This fact, in part, explains why anarchist ideas are not spreading as fast as they should in Africa and elsewhere, in spite of the crisis of state socialism.

Anarchist development has also been retarded for decades for other reasons, including the theoretical weakness of anarchism. However historically correct anarchist positions might be, without a rigorous theoretical foundation, most workers, peasants and other potential anarchists will remain indifferent to the philosophy.

It’s true that anarchists were among the first to put forward accurate critiques of capitalism and of marxist socialism, warning about where the statist path would ultimately lead. And anarchists also developed superior methods of organization based on genuine mass democracy. The point, however, is that in their critique of marxism, anarchists have failed to explain in sufficient depth the authoritarian side of marxism, and why that authoritarian side is a fatal flaw.

It is against this background that we, members of the Awareness League, have elected to trace the relationship between Africa and anarchism. In doing so, we are impelled by a two-fold sense of historical responsibility: to enrich anarchism and anarchist principles with an African perspective, and to carve out a place for Africa within the framework of the worldwide anarchist movement. There can be little doubt — given the collapse of the authoritarian left — that the time is ripe for this project. But in a world suffused with capitalist and, to a lesser degree, marxist influences — from patterns of childhood socialization to the mass media’s stranglehold on public opinion — the anarchist project faces an uphill climb. This book is our contribution to this daunting task.

This work highlights the opportunities that exist for anarchism, analyzing the concrete challenges that lie ahead. Chapters one and two deal with the history, growth and development of anarchism, from the fierce struggle between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and their followers within the First International to the Spanish Revolution. Chapter three unravels the origins of anarchism on the African continent, identifying certain “anarchic elements” in African communalism and analyzing the social organization of stateless societies in Africa. It traces incorporation of African economies into the world capitalist system and poses the question, “Is there an African anarchism?” Chapter four examines the development of socialism in Africa. Chapter five deals with the failure of socialism and its implications for anarchism in Africa. Chapter six analyzes in detail current drawbacks to the realization of anarchist ideals in Africa. And chapter seven details the ways in which anarchism represents the best, and indeed the only, way forward for Africa.

This work would not have been possible but for the encouragement, solidarity, support and assistance — material and moral — of the International Workers Association (IWA) and its affiliates in Europe and the United States. Special mention must, however, be made of Jose “Pepe” Jiminez, general secretary of the IWA, Mitch Miller of the Workers Solidarity Alliance (U.S. IWA affiliate), Bob McGlynn of Neither East Nor West (USA), Monika Grosche of FAU (German IWA affiliate), Lourdes Redondo Ramajo (Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores — Spain), members of the Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland), the French section of the IWA, and others too numerous to mention by name. We are similarly indebted to all members of the Awareness League in Nigeria, who contributed directly and indirectly to making this work a reality. Finally, Lynea Search also deserves thanks for doing a fine editing job.

— Sam Mbah & I.E. Igariwey

Chapter 1: What Is Anarchism?

Anarchism as a social philosophy, theory of social organization, and social movement is remote to Africa — indeed, almost unknown. It is underdeveloped in Africa as a systematic body of thought, and largely unknown as a revolutionary movement. Be that as it may, anarchism as a way of life is not at all new to Africa, as we shall see. The continent’s earliest contact with European anarchist thought probably did not take place before the second half of the 20th century, with the single exception of South Africa. It is, therefore, to Western thinkers that we must turn for an elucidation of anarchism.

Anarchism derives not so much from abstract reflections of intellectuals or philosophers as from the objective conditions in which workers and producers find themselves. Though one can find traces of it earlier, anarchism as a revolutionary philosophy arose as part of the worldwide socialist movement in the 19th century. The dehumanizing nature of capitalism and the state system stimulated the desire to build a better world — a world rooted in true equality, liberty, freedom and solidarity. The tyrannical propensities of the state — any state — underpinned by private capital, have propelled anarchists to insist on the complete abolition of the state system.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th Edition) characterizes anarchism as a social philosophy “whose central tenet is that human beings can live justly and harmoniously without government and that the imposition of government upon human beings is in fact harmful and evil.” Similarly, The Encyclopedia Americana (International Edition) describes anarchism as a theory of social organization “that looks upon all law and government as invasive, the twin sources of nearly all social evils. It therefore advocates the abolition of all government as the term is understood today, except that originating in voluntary cooperation.” Anarchists, it goes on to say, do not conceive of a society without order, “but the order they visualize arises out of voluntary association, preferably through self-governing groups.”

For its part Collier’s Encyclopedia conceives anarchism as a 19th-century movement “holding the belief that society should be controlled entirely by voluntarily organized groups and not by the political state.” Coercion, according to this line of reasoning, is to be dispensed with in order that “each individual may attain his most complete development.” As far as definitions go, these lend some useful, if superficial, insights into anarchist doctrine. But their usefulness in the elucidation of the rich and expansive body of thought known as anarchism is patently limited. The wide gamut of anarchist theory is revealed only in the writings of anarchists themselves, as well as in the writings of a few nonanarchists.

According to Bertrand Russell, anarchism “is the theory which is opposed to every kind of forcible government. It is opposed to the state as the embodiment of the force employed in the government of the community. Such government as anarchism can tolerate must be free government, not merely in the sense that it is that of a majority, but in the sense that it is assented to by all. Anarchists object to such institutions as the police and the criminal law, by means of which the will of one part of the community is forced upon another part.... Liberty is the supreme good in the anarchist creed, and liberty is sought by the direct road of abolishing all forcible control over the individual by the community.”

Russell justifies the anarchist demand for the abolition of government, including government by majority rule, writing, “it is undeniable, that the rule of a majority may be almost as hostile to freedom as the rule of a minority: the divine right of majorities is a dogma as little possessed of absolute truth as any other.”

Likewise, anarchism is irreconcilably opposed to capitalism as well as to government. It advocates direct action by the working class to abolish the capitalist order, including all state institutions. In place of state/capitalist institutions and value systems, anarchists work to establish a social order based on individual freedom, voluntary cooperation, and self-managed productive communities.

Toward this end, anarchism posits that every activity currently performed by the state and its institutions could be better handled by voluntary or associative effort, and that no restraint upon conduct is required because of the natural tendency of people in a state of freedom to respect each other’s rights.

Anarchists are so implacably opposed to the state system and its manifestations that one of the founding fathers of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, proclaimed: “Governments are the scourge of God.” Mikhail Bakunin elaborated on Proudhon’s propositions, explaining the goal of anarchism as the full development of all human beings in conditions of liberty and equality:

It is the triumph of humanity, it is the conquest and accomplishment of the full freedom and full development, material, intellectual and moral, of every individual, by the absolutely free and spontaneous organization of economic and social solidarity as completely as possible between all human beings living on the earth.

Bakunin goes on to say that “we understand by liberty, on the one hand, the development, as complete as possible, of all the natural faculties of each individual and, on the other hand, his independence, not as regards natural and social laws but as regards all the laws imposed by other human wills, whether collective or separate.... What we want is the abolition of artificial privilege, legal, official influences.”

Such privileges are necessarily the prerogative of the state. And thus Bakunin characterizes the state as nothing but domination, oppression, and exploitation, “regularized” and “systematized”:

The state is government from above downwards of an immense number of men, very different from the point of view of the degree of their culture, the nature of the countries or localities that they inhabit, the occupation they follow, the interests and the aspirations directing them — the state is the government of all those by some or other minority; this minority, even if it were a thousand times elected by universal suffrage and controlled in its acts by popular institutions, unless it were endowed with the omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence which the theologians attribute to God, it is impossible that it could know and foresee the needs or satisfy with an even justice the most legitimate and pressing interests in the world. There will always be discontented people because there will always be some who are sacrificed.

As Bakunin further observes, the state was an historically necessary evil, but its complete extinction will be, sooner or later, equally necessary. He repudiates all laws, including those made under universal suffrage, arguing that freedom does not mean equal access to coercive power (i.e., government via “free” elections), but rather that it means freedom from coercive power — in other words, one becomes really free only when, and in proportion as, all others are free.

It is Peter Kropotkin, however, who provides both systematic and penetrating insight into anarchism as a practical political and social philosophy. In two seminal essays, Anarchism and Anarchist Communism, he declares that the private ownership of land, capital and machinery has had its time and shall come to an end, with the transformation of all factors of production into common social property, to be managed in common by the producers of wealth. Under this dispensation, the individual reclaims his/her full liberty of initiative and action through participation in freely constituted groups and federations, that will come to satisfy all the varied needs of human beings. “The ultimate aim of society is the reduction of the functions of government to nil — [that] is, to a society without government, to Anarchy.”

He elaborates:

You cannot modify the existing conditions of property without deeply modifying at the same time the political organization. You must limit the powers of government and renounce parliamentary rule. To each new economical phase of life corresponds a new political phase. Absolute monarchy — that is, court-rule — corresponded to the system of serfdom. Representative government corresponds to capital-rule. Both, however, are class-rule. But in a society where the distinction between capitalist and laborer has disappeared, there is no need of such a government; it would be an anachronism, a nuisance. Free workers would require a free organization, and this cannot have another basis than free agreement and free cooperation, without sacrificing the autonomy of the individual to the all-pervading interference of the state. The no-capitalist system implies the no-government system. Meaning thus the emancipation of man from the oppressive power of capitalist and government as well, the system of Anarchy becomes a synthesis of the two powerful currents of thought which characterize our century.

Kropotkin posits that representative government (democracy) has accomplished its historical mission to the extent that it delivered a mortal blow to court-rule (absolute monarchy). And since each economic phase in history necessarily involves its own political phase, it is impossible to eliminate the basis of present economic life, namely private property, without a corresponding change in political organization. Conceived thus, anarchism becomes the synthesis of the two chief desires of humanity since the dawn of history: economic freedom and political freedom.

An excursion into history reveals that the state has always been the property of one privileged class or another: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a capitalist class, and, finally, a bureaucratic (or “new”) class, as in the Soviet Union and China. The existence of a privileged class is absolutely necessary for the preservation of the state. “Every logical and sincere theory of the state,” Bakunin asserts, “is essentially founded on the principle of authority — that is to say, on the eminently theological, metaphysical and political idea that the masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must submit at all times to the benevolent yoke... which in one way or another, is imposed on them from above.”

This phenomenon is the virtual equivalent of slavery — a practice with deep statist roots. This is illustrated by the following passage from Kropotkin:

We cry out against the feudal barons who did not permit anyone to settle on the land otherwise than on payment of one quarter of the crops to the lord of the manor; but we continue to do as they did — we extend their system. The forms have changed, but the essence has remained the same.”

Bakunin expresses this thought even more poignantly:

Slavery can change its form and its name — its basis remains the same. This basis is expressed by the words: being a slave is being forced to work for other people — as being a master is to live on the labor of other people. In ancient times as today in Asia and Africa, slaves were simply called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of “serfs,” today they are called “wage-earners.” The position of the latter is much more honorable and less hard than that of slaves, but they are nonetheless forced by hunger, as well as by the political and social institutions, to maintain by very hard work the absolute or relative idleness of others. Consequently, they are slaves. And, in general, no state, either ancient or modern, has ever been able, or ever will be able, to do without the forced labor of the masses, whether wage-earners or slaves.”

The primary distinguishing factor between the wage worker and the slave is, perhaps, that the wage worker has some capacity to withdraw his or her labor while the slave cannot.

G. P. Maximoff does not see things any differently. To him, the essence of anarchism consists of the abolition of private property relations and the state system, the principal agent of capital. He states that “capitalism in its present stage has reached the full maturity of imperialism... beyond this point, the road of capitalism is the road of deterioration.”

But capitalism is not alone here. Marxist state socialism as expressed in the former Soviet Union, from its very inception, provided ample evidence for the anarchist argument. Says Maximoff:

The Russian Revolution... revealed the nature of state socialism and its mechanism, demonstrating that there is no great difference in principle between a state socialist and a bourgeois society... between these societies, seemingly so irreconcilable and so antagonistic to each other, there is really only a quantitative, not a qualitative, difference. And the attempt to solve the social problem by utilizing the methods inherent in rigid, logically consistent power communism, as in the Russian Revolution, demonstrates that even quantity is not always on the side of authoritarian communism and that, on the contrary, when logically pursued to the end, it resembles despotism in many ways.

Thus, says Maximoff, anarchism is the only social force capable of destroying private property and its mainstay, the state; of establishing public ownership and a stateless, federalist organization of society on the basis of the free association of productive units both in factories and towns. Anarchism alone “can assure liberty, i.e., the well-being and the free development of the individual in society, and of society itself. It alone will stop the division of society into classes and will abolish every possibility of the exploitation or rule of man by man.”

The International Workers Association (IWA) is a federation of anarchist labor groups in dozens of countries around the world. While it terms its goals “revolutionary syndicalist,” they are in fact virtually identical with anarchist goals. The IWA’s statutes state in part:

Revolutionary syndicalism is the pronounced enemy of all economic and social monopoly. It aims at the abolition of privilege by the establishing of economic communes and administrative organs run by the workers in the fields and factories, forming a system of free councils without subordination to any power or political party. Revolutionary Syndicalism poses as an alternative to the politics of states and parties, the economic reorganization of production. It is opposed to the governing of people by others and poses self-management as an alternative.

Consequently, the goal of revolutionary syndicalism is not the conquest of political power, but the abolition of all state functions in the life of society. Revolutionary Syndicalism considers that the disappearance of the monopoly of property must also be accompanied by the disappearance of all forms of domination. Statism, however camouflaged, can never be an instrument for human liberation and, on the contrary, will always be the creator of new monopolies and privileges.

Based on the foregoing, we may summarize the theoretical aspects of anarchism: anarchism seeks the abolition of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production — this includes the social relations it engenders, its market processes, and the commodity and wage systems. This is not possible to accomplish, however, without the simultaneous abolition of the state system together with its value systems and institutions, including the legal and school systems, mass media, bureaucracy, police, patriarchal family, organized religion, etc.

The state system is, of course, neither peculiar to nor exclusive to capitalism; it is also a cardinal feature of state socialism, that is, marxist socialism as represented by both the Soviet and Chinese systems. And the state system everywhere displays the same authoritarian and hierarchical features that serve to circumscribe the freedom of the individual, and thus that of society at large.

Anarchism derives from the class struggle engendered by the enslavement of workers and from their historical aspirations toward freedom. Class in this sense is not just an economic concept, nor does it relate merely to the ownership of the means of production: it in fact represents the unwholesome amount of power which a tiny group wields and exercises over the rest of society.

The instrument of this tiny elite, the state, is simultaneously the organized violence of the owning class and the system of its executive will. As the Dielo Trouda group further puts it, authority is always dependent on the exploitation and enslavement of the majority of the people. And authority without hierarchy, without exploitation and loss of freedom, loses its reason for being. “The state and authority take from the masses all initiative, kill the spirit of creation and free activity, cultivate in them the servile psychology of submission.”

The strength of anarchism is predicated on the fact that humans throughout history have been propelled by the quest for equality and liberty, liberty being indivisible from equality, and vice versa. This desire seems to stem from the fact that human beings are basically cooperative rather than competitive.

In place of a society organized along class lines, marked by hierarchy and authority, anarchism advocates a self-managed, self-reliant society based on cooperative, voluntary mutual aid and association, and devoid of government (i.e., coercion). In such a society the ownership of the means of production is not the exclusive preserve of any individual or group, and wage labor is nonexistent, allowing the individual ample freedom and initiative for full development. “There will be no demi-gods, but there will also be no slaves. Demi-gods and slaves will both become men; the former will have to step down from their Olympian heights, the latter will have to move up considerably.” In the broad sweep of history, anarchism will take its place as a social order founded on and geared toward a post-capitalist, post-government society.

Importantly, anarchism does not imply the absence of organization. In contrast to the irrational, hierarchical, centralized authority of government and corporations, anarchists accept and indeed respect the rational authority of the expert — an authority of a different type: one based upon expertise and experience, not coercive power.

Anarchists have always recognized the need for organization. For them, however, the question is what type of organization. Anarchists argue for horizontal organization based on decentralization, individual and local autonomy, social equality, and democratic decision making.

Ultimately, anarchism rejects all struggle for state (political) power, holding out as its weapon and method the social struggle of workers and peasants based in solidarity and internationalism. Consequently, the task of emancipating working people must be the work of working people themselves. This emancipation consists of the reduction of the functions of government to zero, ensuring that, at all times, control over all necessary forms of social organization is from below.

What Anarchism is not

Unfortunately, in addition to saying what anarchism is, it’s also necessary to say what it is not. It’s necessary to address the vulgar misconceptions and deliberate, outright distortions that marxists and capitalist apologists propagate about anarchism.

By far the greatest misconception is that anarchism is synonymous with rejection of order or with a state of disorder, involving chaos, destruction, and violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kevin Doyle, of Workers Solidarity magazine writes, “Anarchism has been deliberately slandered and misrepresented, not only by those running [this] society, but also by most on the left. Deliberately, for the reason that its uncompromising and radical critique of society and how to change it poses a challenge that cannot be met except by slander. Its roots and association with the working class of all countries tells the real truth.”

Anarchism is basically opposed to violence, and to disorder, chaos and terrorism as well. Anarchists the world over uphold peace as an overriding value and, consequently, reject war, armies, militarism, and the development and acquisition of technologies that promote war. Anarchists advocate violence only as a form of self-defense.

The statutes of the International Workers Association put the issue in sharp perspective: “While revolutionary syndicalism is opposed to all organized violence of the state, it realizes that there will be extremely violent clashes during the decisive struggles between the capitalism of today and the free communism of tomorrow. Consequently, it recognizes as valid that violence which can be used as a means of defense against the violent methods used by the ruling classes during the social revolution.”

Rejection of aggressive violence and terrorism does not, however, make anarchists pacifists. On the contrary, a successful anarchist movement will face state violence. The way to combat this repressive violence is not through terrorism or through the creation of hierarchical military organizations, but through the creation of community-based defense and educational organizations that are willing to defend their own social structures.

Anarchist advocacy of defensive organizations was born out of a historical recognition of the state as the most brutal and ruthless agent of terror, and the recognition that its use of violence depends almost entirely on the degree to which it feels challenged. Anarchists recognize that the state will do anything, no matter how vile, to maintain its own power.

As for anarchism and terrorism, only a tiny minority of anarchists have taken part in terrorist activities. This is because anarchists recognize that means determine ends, and because they seek to abolish the state system, not to establish a vanguard that would aspire to state power. As the anonymous authors of You Can’t Blow Up a Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism put it:

You can’t blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities. Proponents of terrorism and guerrillaism are to be opposed because their actions are vanguardist and authoritarian, because their ideas, to the extent that they are substantial, are wrong or unrelated to the results of their actions (especially when they call themselves libertarians or anarchists), because their killing cannot be justified, and finally because their actions produce either repression with nothing in return, or an authoritarian regime.

Bertrand Russell adds:

In its general doctrines, there is nothing [in anarchism] essentially involving violent methods or a virulent hatred of the rich... The revolt against law naturally leads, except in those who are controlled by a real passion for humanity, to a relaxation of all the usually accepted moral values. It would be wholly unfair to judge anarchist doctrine, or the views of its leading exponents, by such phenomena.... This must be remembered in exculpation of the authorities and the thoughtless public, who often confound in a common detestation the parasites of the movement and the truly heroic and high-minded men who have elaborated its theories and sacrificed comfort and success to their propagation.

L.S. Bevington sums it all up:

Of course we know that among those who call themselves anarchists, there are a minority of unbalanced enthusiasts who look upon every illegal and sensational act of violence as a matter for hysterical jubilation. Very useful to the police and the press, unsteady in intellect and of weak moral principle, they have repeatedly shown themselves accessible to venal considerations. They, and their violence, and their professed anarchism are purchasable, and in the last resort they are welcome and efficient partisans of the [ruling class]... Let us leave indiscriminate killing and injuring to the government — to its statesmen, its stockbrokers, its officers, and its law.

Anarchism in its present manifestations as revolutionary syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, and anarcho-communism, advocates direct action, but not terrorism or violent acts.

Similarly, anarchism does not imply the absence of organization. As mentioned previously, anarchists reject the hierarchical and authoritarian model of organization that erodes freedom and equality; but they do not reject the horizontal model of organization based on democratic decision-making, decentralization, voluntary association, and voluntary cooperation. Indeed, this form of organization is central to the anarchist vision.

Concerning religion, Bakunin’s God and the State exposed the integral relationship between the church and the state system. It states, “God moving in the world has made the state possible,” in tracing this connection: “It is necessary to think of it [the state] not merely as a given state or a particular institution, but of its essence or idea as a real manifestation of God. Every state, of whatever kind it may be, partakes of this divine essence.”

Organized religion is indeed one of the pillars of capitalist social relationships. It embodies similar hierarchical and authoritarian features as the state and the corporation, and its ideology and institutions are just as antithetical to the individual’s quest for freedom and equality.

It should be understood, though, that some people who profess anarchist beliefs nonetheless still hold some type of religious belief. This may seem contradictory to nonreligious anarchists, but the sincerity of many of these people is unquestionable.

So, what is wrong with religion from the anarchist point of view? In addition to their hierarchical and authoritarian features, patriarchal religions dominate through the induction of fear and irrationality, and thus rob people of self-determination and the ability to think clearly. As well, they have very pronounced intrusive tendencies. Many of the worst intrusive excesses of governments, both ancient and modern, have been the direct result of attempts by religious partisans to legislate “morality” — and to enforce that “morality” at the point of a sword or gun.

Still, most anarchists would agree with the statement of the Geneva section to the Brussels Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association, which says that “religious thought, as a product of the individual mind, is untouchable as long as it does not become a public activity.” Unfortunately, because of the intrusive, authoritarian nature of almost all organized religions, it’s rare that religious beliefs remain a private matter. Thus, most anarchists oppose religion.

Origins of Anarcho-Syndicalism

The word anarchism is derived from two Greek words, “an” and “archos,” meaning “without rule” or “contrary to authority.”

The true origins of anarchist principles date far back in time. Conceived as a way of life or a philosophy which is opposed to every form of government or forcible state control over the individual, anarchism has been a familiar theme for humankind from the dawn of history.

In ancient Greece, Zeno (342 — 267? B.C.E.), the leading light of Stoic philosophy, vehemently opposed the idea of the state’s omnipotence, its intervention in the life of and its regimentation of the individual in society. He consequently proclaimed the moral law of the individual. According to him, although humanity’s self-preservation instincts can lead to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by instilling the instinct of sociability: “When men are reasonable enough to follow their natural instincts, they will unite across the frontiers and constitute the Cosmos. They will have no need of law-courts or police, they will have no temples and no public worship, and use no money — free gifts taking the place of exchanges.”

Similar ideas lie buried in the writings and thoughts of several subsequent philosophers and thinkers up to medieval times. It is highly probable that anarchist ideas have been equally pervasive in Africa.

In his seminal work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin in 1793 anticipated later anarchist principles, although he did not employ the term anarchism. His pioneering work yielded an outline of a decentralized and nonhierarchical society; he advocated the abolition of every form of government. He further called for “the progressive breaking down of all institutions that contribute to coercion and inequality.... Future organizations would be loose and voluntary associations.” A society could perfectly well exist without any government, he concluded; such communities would be small and perfectly autonomous. With regard to property, he declared that the right of everyone “to every substance capable of contributing to the benefit of a human being must be regulated only by justice; the substance must go to him who most wants it.”

Godwin rejected laws, all laws, because the remedy they offer is worse than the evils they pretend to cure.

It was not, however, until the publication in 1840 of French writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What Is Property? that modern anarchism emerged as a force in social thought. Proudhon rejected law and authority in all their ramifications, and for the first time adopted the word anarchism as a positive term. He advocated a society without government, and used the word “anarchy” to describe it.

In a subsequent book, The Federation Principle, published in 1863, Proudhon elaborated slightly upon his earlier theory of government, favoring the formation of self-governing communities. He found in communism no redeeming feature, preferring instead “anarchist individualism.” He advocated an economic system of “mutualism,” which seeks to rob capital of its capacity to earn interest. It is based on “the reciprocal confidence of all those engaged in production, who agree to exchange among themselves produce at cost value.” Other advocates of mutualism include Josiah Warren in the United States and William Thompson in England.

Anarchism as a social movement didn’t really emerge, however, until the appearance of Mikhail Bakunin. Born on May 30, 1814 of Russian nobility, Bakunin early in life abandoned his military commission and delved instead into philosophy, a preoccupation that brought him into contact with Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge, Wilhelm Weitling, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, George Sand, and Friedrich Engels. His activities brought him repeatedly into conflict with the Czarist government. Weitling’s ideas of a society administered without government, with obligations but without laws, and with corrections instead of punishments, had a lasting influence on Bakunin, as did the ideas of Proudhon. As for Karl Marx, Bakunin attested to the German thinker’s real genius, scholarship, and revolutionary zeal, but was repelled by his arrogance and egotism.

In Italy in 1864 Bakunin founded the International Fraternity or Alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries. By 1867, he had moved to Switzerland where he played an important role in the founding of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. The Alliance’s program provides an insight into Bakunin’s initial ideas. It reads in part:

The Alliance declares itself atheist; it desires the definitive and entire abolition of classes, and [favors] the political equality and social equalization of individuals of both sexes. It desires that the earth, the instruments of labor, like other capital, become the collective property of society as a whole, shall no longer be utilized except by the workers, that is to say, by agricultural and industrial associations. It recognizes that all actually existing political and authoritarian states, reducing themselves more and more to the mere administrative functions of the public services in their respective countries, must disappear in the universal union of free associations, both agricultural and industrial.

Unlike Marx, Bakunin did not clearly set forth his vision of an ideal society. His best known work, God and the State, is a biting, insightful attack on government and religion; in it, he states that “belief in God and belief in the state [are] the two great obstacles to human liberty.” But he does not present a systematic exposition of an alternative to capitalist/statist society.

While Bakunin remains perhaps the most revered figure in anarchism, it fell to those who followed him, notably Peter Kropotkin Rudolf Rocker, and Murray Bookchin, to espouse clearly, systematically, and profoundly the essential ideas on the form, structure and content of an anarchist society. Among Kropotkin’s many works, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, The Conquest of Bread, Anarchism, and Anarchist Communism stand out.

In the the first two works, Kropotkin demonstrated that a scientific and efficient production process would render long working hours unnecessary. “If civilization and progress are to be compatible with equality, it is necessary that equality should not involve long hours of painful toil for little more than the necessaries of life, since where there is no leisure, art and science will die and all progress will become impossible.”

The two major planks of Kropotkin’s argument regarding work were that improvement in methods of production would make work more pleasant, and that the wage system should be abolished. To this end, he rejected any form of coercion or compulsion in human affairs, preferring instead consensus.

In Anarchism and Anarchist Communism, Kropotkin sketched anarchist principles with penetrating clarity:

The anarchists consider, therefore, that to hand over to the state all the main sources of economical life — the land, the mines, the railways, banking, insurance, and so on — as also the management of all the main branches of industry, in addition to all the functions already accumulated in its hands (education, state-supported religions, defense of the territory, etc.) would mean to create a new instrument of tyranny. State capitalism would only increase the powers of bureaucracy and capitalism. True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the center to the periphery.

He was contemptuous of the state system and recommended its comprehensive abolition.

For Kropotkin, the ideal society was one in which the functions of government are reduced to the barest minimum, where “the individual recovers his full liberty of initiative and action for satisfying, by means of free groups and federations — freely constituted — all the infinitely varied needs of the human being.”

Since Kropotkin’s time, many other writers have made significant contributions to anarchist theory, especially to the important task of outlining the possible forms that an anarchist society might take. One of the most important of these writers was Rudolf Rocker, whose most important works are Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism and Nationalism and Culture. Contemporarily, Murray Bookchin has produced many valuable works, such as Post-Scarcity Anarchism and Toward an Ecological Society, and Graham Purchase’s recent Anarchism and Environmental Survival is also worthy of note. It is beyond the scope of this chapter, however, to consider in depth the many possible forms an anarchist society might take.

For our purposes, suffice it to say that the foundation of anarchist theory lies in the rejection of coercion. The flip side — let us say the positive side — of this rejection is the belief in human freedom and equality as the highest good. From these premises, anarchists necessarily reject government (organized coercion and violence) and capitalism (organized economic domination of the individual), and instead embrace voluntary association, voluntary cooperation, persuasion, education, and mutual aid.

Anarchists recognize that means determine ends, and thus the means that anarchists embrace (voluntary association, cooperation, mutual aid, etc.) must necessarily be congruent with their ends. In the long run, this strategy will bear good fruit — a free and equal society; but in the short term this means that quick fixes are unlikely.

Like similar radical doctrines, anarchism derives in the main from humankind’s relentless — if slow and tortured — quest for freedom, as well as from the desire for complete development of individuals through the release of their own initiatives and creative energies. This quest, ever-recurring in human society, is nothing new.

What distinguishes anarchism, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, is that the close relation of the anarchist ideal to human suffering has led to the birth of powerful social movements. It is this that makes anarchism “dangerous to those who batten, consciously or unconsciously, upon the evils of our present order of society.”

The similarities and differences between anarchism and related ideological schools such as marxist socialism, syndicalism, and guild socialism are outlined in the next chapter.

Chapter 2: Anarchism In History

The relationship between anarchism and related social movements — notably syndicalism, guild socialism, and marxist socialism (in its 57 varieties: leninism, stalinism, maoism, trotskyism, social democracy, etc., etc.) — remains as contentious today as it ever was, even though they all share the common goal of the abolition of capitalism and the radical reconstruction of society.

Marxist socialism, of course, derives from the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx, who was inspired by the depressing spectacle of working-class misery in 19th-century industrial England. Many, including Bertrand Russell, credit Marx with producing the first coherent body of socialist doctrine. It had three main planks: first, the materialist concept of history; second, the theory of the concentration of capital; and third, class war.

According to Marx’s materialistic interpretation of history, the substructure, that is, the socioeconomic formation, provides the axis around which other aspects of society revolve. The substructure invariably determines the superstructure, namely social and political systems, and laws and values. However, the economic structure is not wholly determining; the economic, social, and ideological structures are interdependent and interact with one another in various ways, and mutually influence each other.

The theory of concentration of capital correctly anticipated the worldwide emergence of monopolies and oligopolies, spurred by the profit motive and including the export of capital, and culminating in the division of the world into a handful of usurer states and a multitude of debtor states.

Based on the foregoing, Marx conceived capitalists (“the bourgeoisie”) and wage earners (“the proletariat”) as being in perpetual conflict due to irreconcilably opposed economic interests. “The two classes, since they have antagonistic interests, are forced into a class-war which generates within the capitalist regime internal forces of disruption.”

As The Communist Manifesto proclaims: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” A resolution of the class war is possible only with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, it says. Marx was to elaborate on these doctrines in detail in Das Capital, an immensely rigorous and technical critique of capitalism, as well as in a succession of brutally provocative works on capitalist production, distribution and exchange, and social relations.

Anarchism is, essentially, an outgrowth of the socialist movement. We believe that the historical connection between the world views of marxism and anarchism is as important as their marked differences. It is important, therefore, to return to the uneasy relationship that existed between Marx and Bakunin, and ultimately the convulsions within the first International Workingmen’s Association.

Marx and Bakunin, by all accounts, did not get along well. Bakunin acknowledged Marx’s genius and revolutionary zeal; but at the same time he was quick to point out Marx’s arrogance, egotism, and (German) nationalism. The following account is provided by Bakunin himself: “I respected him much for his learning and his passionate and serious devotion (always mixed, however, with personal vanity) to the cause of the proletariat, and I sought eagerly his conversation, which was always instructive and clever, when it was not inspired by paltry hate, which, alas! happened only too often. But there was never any frank intimacy between us. Our temperaments would not suffer it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right.”

This air of mutual antagonism persisted and permeated all facets of their relationship. It was profoundly evident in their involvement in the activities of the International Workingmen’s Association after its founding in London in 1864. The First International had been founded largely by Marx as a platform for all workers and activists of socialist persuasion. The ideas of the First International “spread with remarkable rapidity in many countries and soon became a great power for the propagation of socialist ideas.”

Bakunin was not initially enthusiastic about the International, but that soon changed. While living in Italy in 1864, he founded the Alliance of Socialist Revolutionaries; and in 1869, in Switzerland, he co-founded the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. The latter group applied to join the International, but its application was turned down because “branches must be local, and could not be international.” Members of the Alliance were subsequently admitted in sections after it had disbanded as a separate body in July 1869.

At the Fourth Congress of the International in Basel in September 1869, a major rift emerged between Marx and his followers on the one hand, and Bakunin and his followers on the other. Bakunin states that, “It was fundamentally a difference on the question as to the role of the state in the socialist programme. The Marxian view was essentially that the state must be used to bring about and consolidate socialism; the views of the Bakuninists (at this period beginning to be called anarchists) was that the state must be abolished, and that it could never under any circumstances be used to attain either socialism or any form of social justice for the workers.”

The Basel Congress, Bertrand Russell stated in a related account, gave birth to two strong currents within the International. “The Germans and English followed Marx in his belief in the state as it was to become after the abolition of private property; they followed him also in his desire to found labour parties in the various countries, and to utilise the machinery of democracy for the election of representatives of labour to parliaments. On the other hand, the Latin nations in the main followed Bakunin in opposing the state and disbelieving in the machinery of representative government.”

Dissension between these two camps deepened in intensity and scope both within the International and outside it. This culminated in the expulsion of Bakunin from the International at its General Congress in Amsterdam in 1872. There Bakunin had made a case for the International to be made a loose association of fully autonomous, national groups devoted only to the economic struggle as opposed to Marx’s well known preference for a centralized political movement and all that goes with such a movement.

In the end, the International broke up, leaving in its wake two feuding factions embodying the fundamental differences between anarchism and marxist socialism — namely, total rejection of the state system by the former, and its embrace by the latter.

Engels had, in fact, advocated “a very strong government” within the overall framework of proletarian dictatorship to replace the capitalist state. Lucraft, a member of the General Council of the Basel Congress, had advanced the idea that all land in a country should become the property of the state, and that the cultivation of the land should be directed and administered by state officials, “which will only be possible in a democratic and socialist state, which the people will have to watch carefully over the good administration of the national land by the state.” Similarly, the German Social Democratic Labor Party, founded under the auspices of Marx, Bebel and Liebknecht, stated in its blueprint that the acquisition of political power was the preliminary condition for the economic emancipation of the proletariat. The state system was in this sense transitional, pending its withering away in the long term with the full accomplishment of the socialist revolution. At that point, all class differences and antagonisms would be eliminated, resulting in, as Engels put it, the “abolition of the state as a state.” For marxist socialism, therefore, the withering away of the state constitutes an end in itself. Assuming that this were logical and feasible, it would still amount, in the transitional period, to fighting old tyrannies with new ones.

As Bakunin put it, “The Marxians think that, just as in the 18th century, the bourgeoisie dethroned the nobility to take its place and to absorb it slowly into its own body, sharing with it the domination and exploitation of the toilers in towns as well as in the country, so that the proletariat of the towns is called on today to dethrone the bourgeoisie, to absorb it, and to share with it the domination and exploitation of the proletariat of the countryside;...” In other words, the marxists advocated not the abolition of coercive state power, but merely the substitution of a new dominator class for the old one at the helm of the state.

This mistake leads to others, such as advocacy of political parties and, in some varieties of marxism, participation in electoral politics as the primary means of attaining socialism. In his address to the General Congress of the International in Amsterdam in 1872, Marx stated: “We know that the institutions, customs and traditions of separate countries have to be taken into account; and we do not deny that there are countries like America and Britain... in which workers can achieve their goal by peaceful means.” By “peaceful means,” of course, Marx meant electoralism and parliamentary action — simply put, political struggle which precludes tampering with the state system.

Even though both anarchism and marxist socialism have advocated the international solidarity of workers in all trades and in all countries in their economic struggle against the powers of capital, the issue of the state has constituted a major wedge between them.

Says Bakunin:

It is in the real organization of this solidarity, by the spontaneous organization of the working masses and by the absolutely free federation, powerful in proportion as it will be free, of the working masses of all languages and nations, and not in their unification by decrees and under the rod of any government whatever, that there resides the real and living unity of the International.... We do not understand that anyone could speak of international solidarity when they want to keep states... the state by its very nature being a rupture of this solidarity... State means domination and all domination presupposes the subjection of the masses, and consequently their exploitation to the profit of some minority or other.

He adds in another passage:

The Marxists... console themselves with the idea that [their] rule will be temporary. They say that the only care and objective will be to educate and elevate the people economically and politically to such a degree that such a government will soon become unnecessary, and the State, after losing its political or coercive character, will automatically develop into a completely free organization of economic interests and communities. There is a flagrant contradiction in this theory. If their state would really be of the people, why eliminate it?... Every state, not excepting their People’s State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. They say that such a yoke-dictatorship is a transitional step towards achieving full freedom for the people: anarchism or freedom is the aim, while state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses of the people, they have first to be enslaved! Upon this contradiction our polemic has come to a halt. They insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom.

As Bakunin foresaw, retention of the state system under socialism would lead to a barrack regime. Here the workers, peasants and the people as a whole “would wake, sleep, work and live to the beat of the drum; for the clever and the learned a privilege of governing.” Even if such a regime were democratically elected, it could still easily be a despotism. Bertrand Russell explains: “It is undeniable that the rule of a majority may be almost as hostile to freedom as the rule of a minority: the divine right of majorities is a dogma as little possessed of absolute truth as any other. A strong democratic state may easily be led into oppression of its best citizens, namely those whose independence of mind would make them a force for progress.”

Unfortunately, Bakunin’s predictions about marxist socialism have proven to be uncannily accurate. Even some marxists have acknowledged this. One such acknowledgement came from Burton Hall in the Winter 1968 issue of New Politics:

... it is most uncomfortable for a devout socialist to look over the argument exchanged between Marx and Bakunin and reflect that maybe it was Bakunin who was right all the time... not only because of the accuracy of his predictions as to what socialism would look like, if it were ever to come into existence, but even more to the point, because the reasoning on which he based these predictions, reinforced by the historical evidence of the past half-century, seems almost unanswerably persuasive.

But having said that, it’s still worthwhile to elucidate the parallels between anarchism and marxism. Conor McLoughlin outlines some of them: “Both systems were founded on the idea of historical materialism, both accepted the class struggle, both were socialist in the sense of being opposed to private property in the means of production. They differed in that Bakuninism refused to accept the state under any circumstances whatever, that it rejected politics or parliamentary action, and that it was founded on the principle of liberty as against that of authority.” McLoughlin concludes: “One can accept a materialist method of analysis and Marx’s critique of capitalism without accepting the politics of Marx and Engels.

As well, marxism does not reject the anarchist program completely. Both anarchism and marxism champion the aspirations of the wage earner and seek the abolition of the wage system. Marxism, however, quarrels with the seeming impatience of anarchism as well as its willingness to ignore the “scientific” law of evolution which supposedly determines the orderly march of history. Both systems are nevertheless impelled by a common and genuine desire to extinguish the evils of capitalism through the abolition of wage labor, the ways and means of commodity exchange, and, most of all, the needless misery, inequality, and exploitation characterizing the relationship between the have-nots and the owners of capital.

There are similar striking parallels between anarchism, guild socialism, and syndicalism. An outlining of the latter two theories is thus necessary at this juncture.

Guild socialism, made popular through the writings of S.G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole, strives toward autonomy in industry and a drastic curtailment in the powers of the state, but not its abolition. Put differently, for the workers’ guild, the goal is not merely to secure better work conditions, but to achieve socialism through the control of industry. Each factory is to be free to manage its own affairs, including control of production through the supervision of managers elected directly by the workers. “The state would own the means of production as a trustee for the community: the Guilds would manage them, also as trustees for the community, and would pay to the state a single tax or rent. Any Guild that chose to set its own interests above those of the community would be violating its trust, and would have to bow to the judgement of a tribunal equally representing the whole body of producers and the whole body of consumers.”

This tribunal, known as the Joint Committee of Parliament and the Guild Congress, would adjudicate on matters involving the interests of consumers and producers alike. Below the joint committee lie two parallel bodies with equal powers: the parliament (state) representing the community in their capacity as consumers, and the guild congress, representing the community in their capacity as producers. Guild socialism postulates that all social systems to date have perceived society from the point of view of either producers or consumers, but never from both points of view. It thus insists on functional representation as a basis for the organization of society, which necessarily involves the abolition of the wage system. Its theoretical assumptions are summarized in the following.

Capitalism has made of work a purely commercial activity, a soulless and a joyless thing. But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labour for a saleable commodity; substitute self-government and decentralization for the bureaucracy and demoralising hugeness of the modern state and the modern joint stock company; and then it may be just once more to speak of a “joy in labour” and once more to hope that men may be proud of quality and not only of quantity in their work.

Syndicalism, on the other hand, is a social theory “which regards the trade union organisations as at once the foundation of the new society and the instrument whereby it is to be brought into being.” (The word “syndicalism” derives from the French words “syndicat” and “syndicalisme,” which mean “trade union” and “trade unionism” respectively.) Syndicalism advocates direct action by the working class to abolish the capitalist order, including the state, and to establish in its place a social order based on workers organized in production units. The syndicalist movement, in concrete terms, grew out of a strong anarchist and anti-parliamentary tradition among the French working class, who were greatly influenced by the teachings of the anarchist P.J. Proudhon and the socialist Auguste Blanqui.

According to Bertrand Russell, “Syndicalism stands essentially for the point of view of the producer as opposed to that of the consumer, as it is concerned with reforming actual work and the organisation of industry, not merely with securing greater rewards for work.” In Appadori’s words, “The syndicalists accept the general socialist position that society is divided into two classes, the capitalist and the proletariat, whose claims are irreconcilable; that the modern state is a class state dominated by the few capitalists; that the institution of private capital is the root of all social evils and that the only remedy for them is to substitute collective capital in place of private capital.”

The syndicalist current manifested itself within two French labor unions in the 1890s, the Confederation General du Travail (CGT — which declared revolutionary syndicalism its creed), and the Federation des Bourses du Travail (FBT), which led to their joining forces in 1902. The secretary general of the FBT, Fernand Pelloutier, himself essentially an anarchist, was influential in the formulation of syndicalist principles. “The task of the revolution is to free mankind, not only from all authority, but also from every institution which has not for its essential purpose the development of production,” he stated.

Class war conducted by direct industrial methods at the point of production, including the general strike, the boycott, and sabotage (as opposed to electoral political methods) is held out as the principal syndicalist weapon. Being fundamentally opposed to capitalism, syndicalism advocates the abolition of the state: “The state was by nature a tool of capitalist oppression and, in any event, was inevitably rendered inefficient and despotic by its bureaucratic structure.”

Proceeding from this standpoint, syndicalists aim at using the strike as a means of undermining and eventually overthrowing capitalism, not simply as a means of securing better working conditions and wages. The ultimate expression of the strike as a weapon is the general strike (a total work stoppage in all services and industries), the aim of which is to paralyze the capitalist system.

Syndicalists are no less contemptuous of state socialism than anarchists, convinced that it is equivalent to state capitalism, with the state being the sole employer (with the police and army to back up its dictates); because of this, they are also convinced that the lot of the working class will be (and has been) even worse under state socialism than under corporate capitalism.

Chapter 3: Anarchistic Precedents in Africa

Continental Africa covers about 11,500,000 square miles, running from the Mediterranean Sea to the Cape of Good Hope, and from the Western Bulge (Senegal) to the Eastern Horn (Somalia), together with the offshore islands of Cape Verde, Fernando Po, Madagascar, Mauritius, Zanzibar, the Comoros, and others.

The territory that lies between the Sahara Desert and the tropical rain forest is the home of a variety of peoples. Between Senegal and Gambia live the Wolor and Tukulor, while between Gambia and the River Niger Valley live the Soninke, Mandigo, Khran, Tuareg, Ashanti, Banbara, and Djula. The Songhai dominate the middle Niger area, and the Masai inhabit the Upper Volta basin. Across the river in what is presently northwestern and north-central Nigeria live the Hausa-Fulani, while the Kanuri live in the northeast. Further south and spreading toward the east one finds the Igbo, Yoruba, Gikuyu, Luo, Shona, Ndebele, Xhosa, Bantu, Zulu, etc. To the north of the Sahara lies Egypt and the Maghredb region, which are peopled by African Arabs and Berbers.

To a greater or lesser extent, all of these traditional African societies manifested “anarchic elements” which, upon close examination, lend credence to the historical truism that governments have not always existed. They are but a recent phenomenon and are, therefore, not inevitable in human society. While some “anarchic” features of traditional African societies existed largely in past stages of development, some of them persist and remain pronounced to this day.

What this means is that the ideals underlying anarchism may not be so new in the African context. What is new is the concept of anarchism as a social movement or ideology. Anarchy as an abstraction may indeed be remote to Africans, but it is not at all unknown as a way of life. This is not fully appreciated because there is not as yet a systematic body of anarchist thought that is peculiarly African in origin. It is our intention in this chapter to unravel the manner and extent to which “anarchic elements” are indigenous to Africa and Africans.

African Communalism

Traditional African societies were, for the most part, founded on communalism. The term is used here in two senses. First, it denotes a definite mode of production or social formation that comes generally, though not inevitably, after hunter-gatherer societies, and in turn precedes feudalism. If one accepts cultural evolution, one sees that most European and Asian societies passed through these stages of development.

Communalism is also used in a second, related sense to denote a way of life that is distinctly African. This way of life can be glimpsed in the collectivist structure of African societies in which: 1) different communities enjoy (near) unfettered independence from one another; 2) communities manage their own affairs and are for all practical purposes self-accounting and self-governing; and 3) every individual without exception takes part, either directly or indirectly, in the running of community affairs at all levels.

In contrast to Europe and Asia, most of Africa never developed past the stage of communalism. Despite the indigenous development of feudalism and the later imposition of capitalism, communal features persist to this day — sometimes pervasively — in the majority of African societies that lie outside the big cities and townships. Essentially, much of Africa is communal in both the cultural (production/social formation) and descriptive (structural) senses.

Among the most important features of African communalism are the absence of classes, that is, social stratification; the absence of exploitative or antagonistic social relations; the existence of equal access to land and other elements of production; equality at the level of distribution of social produce; and the fact that strong family and kinship ties form(ed) the basis of social life in African communal societies. Within this framework, each household was able to meet its own basic needs. Under communalism, by virtue of being a member of a family or community, every African was (is) assured of sufficient land to meet his or her own needs.

Because in traditional African societies the economy was largely horticultural and subsistence based, as Horton notes, “often small villages farmed, hunted, fished, etc., and looked after themselves independently with little reference to the rest of the continent.” Various communities produced surpluses of given commodities which they exchanged, through barter, for those items that they lacked. The situation was such that no one starved while others stuffed themselves and threw away the excess.

According to Walter Rodney, “in that way, the salt industry of one locality would be stimulated, while the iron industry would be encouraged in another. In a coastal, lake or riverine area, dried fish could become profitable, while yams and millet would be grown in abundance elsewhere to provide a basis of exchange....” Thus, in many parts of Africa a symbiosis arose between groups earning their living in different manners — they exchanged goods and coexisted to their mutual advantage.

Political organization under communalism was horizontal in structure, characterized by a high level of diffusion of functions and power. Political leadership, not authority, prevailed, and leadership was not founded on imposition, coercion, or centralization; it arose out of a common consensus or a mutually felt need.

Leadership developed on the basis of family and kinship ties woven around the elders; it was conferred only by age, a factor which, as we shall see, runs deep in communalism. In Africa, old age was — and still often is — equated with possession of wisdom and rational judgment. Elders presided at meetings and at the settlement of disputes, but hardly in the sense of superiors; their position did not confer the far-reaching sociopolitical authority associated with the modern state system, or with feudal states.

There was a pronounced sense of equality among all members of the community. Leadership focused on the interests of the group rather than on authority over its members. Invariably, the elders shared work with the rest of the community and received more or less the same share or value of total social produce as everyone else, often through tribute/redistributive mechanisms.

The relationship between the coordinating segments of the community was characterized by equivalence and opposition, and this tended to hinder the emergence of role specialization, and thus the division of labor among individuals. Generally, elders presided over the administration of justice, the settlement of disputes, and the organization of communal activities, functions they necessarily shared with selected representatives of their communities, depending on the specific nature of the dispute or issue involved.

Such meetings and gatherings were not guided by any known written laws, for there were none. Instead, they were based on traditional belief systems, mutual respect, and indigenous principles of natural law and justice. Social sanctions existed for various kinds of transgressions — theft, witchcraft, adultery, homicide, rape, etc. When an individual committed an offense, often his entire household, his kinsmen, and his extended family suffered with him, and sometimes for him. This was because such offenses were believed to bring shame not only upon the individual, but even more so upon his relatives.

In traditional societies, Africans reached major decisions through consensus, not by voting. What Nnamdi Azikiwe says of jurisprudence in communal Nigeria is no less true of the rest of Africa:

It is based on the concept of settlement of disputes by conciliation. It emphasises the need for amicable settlement of disputes by mutual compromise.... In its operation, the machinery of Nigerian justice shuns technicalities but places more emphasis on redress, impartiality, reasonableness and fair play... the positive legal system of Nigeria seeks to prevent the perpetuation of injustice and to enthrone equity, on the understanding that no person should be unjustly enriched or denied the elementary principles of natural justice.

Likewise, religion held a cohesive role in African traditional society. Individuals saw themselves as living in a world controlled by an invisible order of personal beings of whom they had to take account at every turn. “In such a world, the life of social groups, like other things, is thought of as underpinned by spiritual forces.”

Religion, in this sense, was primarily “a theoretical interpretation of the world, and an attempt to apply this interpretation to the prediction and control of worldly events. Thus, there was always a constant dialectic between religious ideas and principles of social organisation and social form, and these, in turn, mutually reinforced and influenced each other.”

The idea of “spiritual forces” translated into a notion of gods, an earth spirit or a powerful guardian spirit that was personal to individual members of the community. “A man’s social field includes not only relations with other men, but also relations with gods, and that the two kinds of relations have significant effects on one another.... In short, the gods are not only theoretical entities, they are people.” These ideas underpinned the existence of secret cults or secret societies in communal societies. As part of the political organization of communities, the roles of elders, age grades, and secret cults were not viewed as divine in this sense.

Among the social institutions that bound communities together were the age grades or age-set system. According to Azikiwe, “Usually, age grading divides adult males into elders and young adults — or more rarely into elders, middle-aged, and young adults. The age-grade system is usually fed by a system of age sets, whose members move from one grade to the next.” The rise of age grades was in itself a response to the need for greater communal solidarity, since age grades cut across families and lineages.

Age grades consisted of cohorts of males who came together to perform certain functions and duties. These included farm work for their members (or other members of society who asked for their services), road building, environmental sanitation, burials, and harvest of farm produce. A female equivalent of the age sets existed, although, as we shall see, their relative importance varied from society to society.

Secret societies — so called because their deliberations were kept secret from the public — performed ceremonial and religious functions, claiming to have links with the guardian spirit of the society. Secret societies also performed judicial functions, deciding the more intractable intra-village disputes. More importantly, it was the prerogative of secret societies to execute a community’s decisions and resolutions. Admission into a secret society was open to adolescent males regardless of lineage.

Robert Horton unravels the mystique of secrecy that attends secret societies’ deliberations and activities, which contrasts sharply with the “open free-for-all” of the age-grade system:

This secrecy counters the influence of lineage rivalries in two ways. On the one hand, it protects those engaged in the deliberations against pressure from their various lineages. This makes it easier for them to consider any situation on its merits and to avoid taking up positions inspired by purely sectional interests. On the other hand, it enables the society to announce its decisions to the public as things collective and unanimous.

Members of secret societies wore masks while executing the community’s decisions, which often involved imposing sanctions on offenders. Horton further explains:

This (wearing of masks) makes immediate sense when considered as a device to ensure acceptance of the harsher sanctions applied by the society to offenders.... Where the executives are masked, it is possible for the public to accept their actions, however harsh, as impersonal manifestations of the collective will. If they were unmasked and identifiable, their actions might cause dangerous resentment through suspicion of sectional interest.

Collective action was the underlying social principle, and often there was collective responsibility and collective punishment of offenders.

Both the age grades and the secret societies performed quasi-military and police functions in the absence of a formal military institution, army, or police force. Every adult member of the community took an active part in the discharge of these functions for the good of the community, as a collectivity. Thus, for example, every adult male member of the community would be expected to participate in the search for a reported stolen or missing oxen, sheep, goat, or cow.

Increased production was achieved in communal African societies with the introduction of iron tools, notably the axe and hoe. According to Rodney, “It was on the basis of the iron tools that new skills were elaborated in agriculture as well as in other spheres of economic activity.”

No less instrumental to the achievement of increased production in the communal economy was the age grade system itself; members constituted a standing pool of labor in the service of the entire community.

Several sociopolitical changes in the communal economy accompanied the productive increases. The emergence of skilled iron workers created increasing specialization and division of labor, while increases in production opened up opportunities for trade, profiteering, and the accumulation of disproportionate wealth in a few hands. With expanded trading activities, barter began to give way to the use of metallic objects as standards for valuing other goods.

An immediate fallout of these changes was the gradual breakdown of certain features of communalism and the rise of social stratification, albeit at a very low level. By the turn of the 15th century, several African societies were undergoing a transition from communalism to a class system. Social stratification formed the basis for the eventual rise of classes and the development of antagonistic social relationships, culminating in the establishment of empire states with centralized forms of government in some parts of Africa.

It must be emphasized that, on the whole, although slavery existed in different parts of Africa, especially in areas with the greatest erosion of communal equality, African society never really witnessed an epoch of slavery as a mode of production. Feudalism did exist in some places, but as Rodney has demonstrated, “in Africa, there is no doubt that the societies which eventually reached feudalism were extremely few.” Consequently, some features of communalism continued to hold considerable sway in most African societies, as they do to this day under modern capitalist states. This demonstrates the ancient and tenacious roots of the communal way of life in Africa. At the least, Robert Horton observes, a society that has once known and enjoyed the conveniences of genealogical reckoning does not lightly drop them.

The manifestations of “anarchic elements” in African communalism, as we have seen above, were (and to some degree still are) pervasive. These include the palpable absence of hierarchical structures, governmental apparatuses, and the commodification of labor. To put this in positive terms, communal societies were (and are) largely self-managing, equalitarian and republican in nature.

Despite the marked equality and egalitarianism generally associated with African communalism, there existed a degree of privilege and internal differentiation in some communities, made worse sometimes by the traditional caste system. In addition, the high degree of egalitarianism and freedom achieved under communalism was made possible in no small measure by low levels of production.

So, communalism was not an anarchist utopia. Nowhere is this more evident than in the generally low status of women in some forms of communalism. This was made worse, at least on the surface, by the practice of polygyny (one man married to several women, often sisters). In many African communities, however, tradition and custom accorded certain protections to females; most injuries to them — with the important exceptions of clitoridectomy and infibulation in some societies — were severely punished. And there were some matrifocal communal societies, famous for their tradition of women leaders.

According to Samir Amin, prior to the emergence of empire states in Africa there existed a “village mode of production” which is comparable to Marx’s category of primitive communism. This village mode of production, he says, was characterized by a limited geo-graphical area and was carried on without a central expropriating body, namely the state. Thus, there was no external agency regulating the productive processes.

Similarly, ownership of the means of production was collective, just as social produce was universally consumed. Social surplus was low, and, as Bede Onimode explains, what surplus there was got used up in the reciprocity of gift-giving, which contributed to social cohesion. As the main productive unit of society, each family controlled the use of its own surplus produce. The breakdown of communalism in its pure, undiluted form, and the transition to semi-feudalism in certain parts of Africa, did not substantially alter these facts.

Stateless Societies in Africa

Some historians and scholars have distinguished between two broad groups in pre-colonial Africa: communities that established empire states and those that did not. Anthropologist Paul Bohannan refers to Africa’s stateless societies as “tribes without rulers,” a form of “ordered anarchy.”

Elsewhere, Rodney describes stateless communities as:

Those peoples who had no machinery of government coercion and no concept of a political unit wider than the family or the village. After all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests... One can consider the stateless societies as among the older forms of sociopolitical organization in Africa, while the large states represented an evolution away from communalism — sometimes to the point of feudalism.

The term “stateless societies” has been used in a pejorative sense by certain European scholars to denote backwardness arising from the inability of African societies to establish their own states. State formation in Africa, says the “Hamitic theory,” was attributable to foreign influence, the belief being that Africans left on their own would never have been able to produce anything more than a “low” level of political organization. Among the stateless societies that existed on the continent were the Igbo, the Birom, Angas, Idoma, Ekoi, Nbembe, the Niger Delta peoples, the Tiv (Nigeria), the Shona (Zimbabwe), Lodogea, the Lowihi, the Bobo, the Dogon, the Konkomba, the Birifor (Burkina Faso, Niger), the Bate, the Kissi, the Dan, the Logoli, the Gagu and Kru peoples, the Mano, Bassa Grebo and Kwanko (Ivory Coast, Guinea, Togo), the Tallensi, Mamprusi, Kusaasi (Ghana), the Nuer (Southern Sudan), etc. — numbering today nearly two hundred million individuals in all.

For the purposes of a clear and retrospective understanding of stateless societies, we shall present case studies of three of them: the Igbo, the Niger Delta people (in present-day Nigeria), and the Tallensi (Ghana). Stateless societies tended generally to be agricultural, sedentary, and homogenous in character.

The Igbo

Oral tradition has it that the ancestors of Igbos (also referred to as the Ibo) originated from somewhere in the Middle East. The earliest settlements of the Igbos were at Awka and Orlu, from which they spread south, pushing the Ibibios to the coastal fringes of the Niger Delta. The Igbo generally followed a segmentary pattern of political and social organization. As against large, centralized political units, Igbo society constructed small units, often referred to as “village” political units without kings or chiefs ruling over them or administering their affairs. “In Igbo, each person hails... from the particular district where he was born, but when away from home all are Igbos.” Among the Igbo, there is a popular saying, “Igbo enwegh Eze,” meaning Igbo have no kings.

The smallest unit in the segmentary political system was the extended family with a common lineage; several extended families constituted a ward; and many wards formed a village. The affairs of a village community were controlled by four major institutions: the general assembly of all citizens, the council of elders, the age grades, and the secret societies, that acted as instruments of social control.

There was also the Umuada, a parallel body of women either married into the village or born there. The Umuada played a key role in decision making and implementation processes, as well as in maintaining the social values of the society. It was impossible, for instance, to make a decision on an issue that directly affected women or children without the consent of the Umuada.

Members of the council of elders were usually heads of extended families and were sometimes required to perform priestly functions. To this day, general assemblies of all citizens are a common feature of Igbo society. It is the duty of the town crier, wielding his gong, to go around the village in the evening after villagers have returned from their farms to summon everyone to the village square at a specified time. The purpose of the assembly is often tersely stated. At the village square, elders outline an issue in detail and the people are expected to air their views as forthrightly as possible, until a consensus is achieved. Neither the elders, the secret societies, nor the age grades could drag the village into a war or armed conflict without first consulting a general assembly for a decision. The small scale of Igbo social institutions made true democracy possible. According to historian Isichei, “one of the things that struck the first Western visitors to Ibgoland was the extent to which democracy was truly practiced. An early visitor to a Niger Igbo town said that he felt he was in a free land, among a free people.” Another visitor, a Frenchman, said that true liberty existed in Igboland, though its name was not inscribed on any monument.

Despite the segmentary lineage system of the Igbo, there existed links which brought several groups together as one people. Chief among these links were marriage and trade. [West Africa in general is known for its tradition of women traders — Ed.] Igbo custom and tradition encouraged intervillage marriage. Of the greatest importance in forging bonds of unity among the Igbo were the oracles, who served to bring them together to common shrines.

Being forest-dwelling people, Igbos grew enough food to feed themselves, using communal labor provided by both the age grade and extended family systems. Igbo social organization, like that of the Niger Delta people, Tiv, and Tallensi, manifested a definite inclination toward leadership as opposed to authority. Yet there were a few exceptions in Igboland, like the Onitsha and Nri communities, that had their own chiefs.

The Niger Delta Peoples

The peoples of the Niger Delta can be divided into Ibibios, Ijaws, Urhobos, etc. Slave trade was rife in this area in the 17th and 18th centuries. The people were mostly traders and farmers. The basis of political cum social organization in this area was very small units, referred to as the “house” system, complete with extended families, age grades and secret societies. The latter played an important role among the Ibibios particularly, where control of political institutions was in the hands of members of the secret societies rather than lineage groups, as was the case in Igboland.

A “house” consisted of a farmer or trader, his slaves, his own descendants, and those of his slaves. A number of “houses” comprised a city-state. Inter-house disputes were settled by a city assembly made up of house chiefs and presided over by an elected chief.

The Ijaws were divided into four main clans or city-states: Nembe, Kalabari, Brass, and Warri. The town assembly was responsible for communal policy making. The “Sakapu” secret society exercised both administrative and judicial functions. The mode of organization of the Urhobos was similar to that of the Ijaws in all respects. However, one group in the Niger Delta, the Itsekiri, had a centralized kinship pattern of government, similar to those of the Bini and the Yoruba.

As time went on, in certain areas the house system changed. With increased involvement in the booming overseas slave trade and later in legitimate trade, the house system, previously organized on the basis of lineage groups, was replaced by what was known as the “canoe house system.” Under this system, people from different lineage groups combined to form a corporation for the purpose of trade.

The Tallensi

The Tallensi occupy the northern territories of the old Gold Coast (now Ghana). Today, they are peasant farmers, engaged mainly in the cultivation of cereal crops. The essential feature of their traditional agriculture is mixed farming, involving permanent and stable settlements, which profoundly influenced the social organization which was based on the clan system.

Clusters of homesteads were known as “suman.” A residential aggregate constituted a clan, or a group of clans, members of which were kinfolk by consanguinity. Rights and duties, privileges and obligations were vested in corporate units, and any authorized member could act on behalf of the unit or clan. Each lineage was headed by a senior male member, who together with other clan elders constituted a repository of social and ritual responsibilities. Both the age grade system and the practice of convening mass assemblies to make crucial decisions were prevalent among the Tallensi. Groups and not individuals constituted the source of political authority.

The various clans depended, for the most part, on communal labor. It was possible for large lineages within clans to accumulate wealth based on their size; however, no social privileges attached to wealth. Socially and politically, therefore, the Tallensi were a homogenous, sedentary and egalitarian society.

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What is immediately prominent in our consideration of stateless societies is the absence of centralization and concentration of authority. For the most part it is difficult to point to any individual as the overall head or ruler of different communities. The exercise of leadership in the sense of full-time authority was similarly unknown. Whatever authority that existed often affected very limited aspects of the lives of individuals. At the same time, classes hardly existed in these traditional societies. It is indeed doubtful whether an equivalent for the word “class” exists in any indigenous African language — and language reflects the thoughts and values of those who speak it.

Increased productivity and specialization in the use of tools, together with increased trading activities between various communities on the one hand, and with outsiders on the other, gave rise to a steady growth of private property, internal differentiation/stratification, and semi-feudalism. Warfare, conquest, and voluntary borrowing were some of the other factors at work during the period of colonial transition.

Early authority patterns were commonly codified in ritualized forms of leadership. Even where systems of social control increased in scope, ritual leaders in many cases continued to exert a moderating influence over secular leaders. Empire states were established at Kanem-Bornu, Songhai, Mali, Oyo, Sokoto, Benin, Zulu, Ngwato, Memba, Bayankole, Kede, Somuke, Hausa-Fulani, etc.

Colonialism and the Incorporation of Africa into the World Capitalist Economy

Africa’s incorporation into the world capitalist economy was preceded by the systematic penetration of capitalist influences into the continent prior to colonialism. But colonialism accelerated and solidified the incorporation process.

Capitalist influences first made themselves felt in Africa during the quest for economic expansion that accompanied and followed the industrial revolution in Europe. One of the first and most important of these influences was the slave trade. Capitalist penetration further increased through mercantilist activities and the operations of foreign businesses in African coastal areas toward the end of the 19th century.

It should be emphasized that the process of penetration and the subsequent incorporation of the different African societies into the world capitalist economy was not an even one, and did not take place simultaneously all over the continent. In the Muslim societies, Islam was an important feature of the incorporation process, as well as a source of resistance to it. On the one hand, Islam provided a source of inspiration for resistance, while on the other it provided a basis for class collaboration between Muslim aristocrats and colonial administrators.

All over Africa, the new gospel of free trade provided the ideological basis for the expansion of British, German, and French trading in the coastal areas. Following the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, a violent scramble for the partition of Africa ensued among the major European powers, marking the beginning of true colonial domination and the enthronement of imperial interests over those of traditional societies. The imposition of colonial governments was an expression of this domination, and economic motives, primarily the quest for markets and raw materials, constituted its raison d’etre.

There were two stages in the process of incorporation, in which the state served as a vehicle for capitalist penetration and ultimate engulfment of production and distribution in the colonies. The first stage was violent conquest, and the next was economic domination and enslavement of the native peoples. Forced labor was prominent among the mechanisms adopted by the colonial powers to eliminate traditional economic organization.

In addition to military actions, conquest involved the forceful ejection of natives from their lands, which were then seized by the colonialists. And this seizure was protected through the violent suppression of all forms of dissent by the coercive apparatus of the colonial state.

The period of conquest was followed by the introduction of new production processes. The fundamental objective of this restructuring was to bind the incorporated economies into the world economy. The critical weapons here were monetarization (the introduction of money), trade, wage labor, taxation, and investment, coupled with the development of appropriate social institutions and infrastructure. This always involved the introduction of incentives aimed at dissuading the local populace from investing in areas of local need, and instead to turn to production of cash crops and related goods and services.

It was primarily to this end that a monetary system was introduced. By a monetary system, we refer to the use of money (that is, inherently nonvaluable objects or tokens) not only as a medium of exchange, but, more importantly, to the elevation of money and its accoutrements to a level of cultural preponderance within both the economy and society as a whole. Money is, after all, the basic prerequisite of a market economy, without which exchange and economic growth are impossible. The process of monetarization thus went hand in hand with the spread of capitalist relations of production.

As noted earlier, a capitalist economy requires the establishment of social and political institutions that reproduce and regulate class relations. The colonial education system served such a purpose. Together with the church, another agent of socialization, it provided ideological justification for the emergent capitalist mode of production in Africa. As well, it’s worth noting that there was no clear cut distinction between the state and the church on the one hand, and the church and the school on the other — they formed an integrated system of ideological support for colonialism/capitalism. Indeed, colonial education was a common basis for class alliance between colonialists and local bureaucrats. Political parliamentarianism was the inevitable result of such education.

Overall, the process of Africa’s incorporation into the world capitalist network started during the latter stages of communalism, lasted through feudalism, and continues to the present day in the form of neocolonialism.

The Impact of Incorporation

The ultimate result of Africa’s incorporation into the world capitalist economy was the destruction of the traditional pre-colonial communal mode of production. As the capitalist mode developed, it confronted the noncapitalist mode, violently transforming various communities, turning their lands, resources, and products into commodities. Countless thousands of able-bodied young men were uprooted from their homes to work in capitalist enterprises, and the remaining population was compelled to grow only those crops that possessed exchange value-cash crops.

The critical point here is that the destruction of the traditional economic system did not give rise to a fully capitalist economy; the end product was, rather, a distorted, unbalanced capitalist structure. This occurred because Africa’s incorporation into the global system was peripheral. Complementarity and reciprocity between the various sectors of the economy were absent. Misarticulation was further characterized by a lack of vital linkages within the production process. That is, capitalist development in Africa was characterized by lack of integration. Under colonialism, businesses operated to serve external markets, and usually had little connection with each other; and businesses that would have served internal needs were often syst