Cross posting from the main thread as there's more sense on this one.
I'd suspect that the Soviet holdover in southern African ideas of modern Russia is probably very strong - a lot of the older cadre could well have had their military training in the dear old USSR. A quick scan of the Reuters story about the African peace plan suggests that there is more to it than a simple proposal for an annual sacrifice of Ukraine's first born to the Sauron of Moscow.
The bosses of African nations going on these trips can get to fuck. But there are real reasons why comrades from Africa and South America do sometimes take an 'anti-imperialist' view.
A bloody good piece by Kevin Okoth in the LRB -
Poison is better. Reckon this might be of interest to you Idris
White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa
by
Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75
by
Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
Textbook histories used to claim that independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the 1970s: millions of people, South Africans and Zimbabweans among them, were still battling white minority rule, and the struggle was becoming more intense as the Cold War drew on. The Soviet Union and the USboth had a role in the making and unmaking of Africa’s independence movements, from the relative success of decolonisation in Ghana through the disaster of the Belgian Congo to the costly war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In almost every case, as Susan Williams explains in
White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in
Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and Beijing were staking their own claims to Africa’s postcolonial future.
Ghana achieved independence in March 1957. George Padmore, the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist, and his partner, Dorothy Pizer, travelled to Accra to celebrate the end of British rule. On 6 March, the prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, told an audience at the Old Polo Grounds that ‘the battle has ended and Ghana, our beloved country, is free.’ But Padmore wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Much to their surprise, as Leslie James recounts in
George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below (2014), Padmore and Pizer had found themselves flying to Ghana ‘on a VIPplane with former British governors, the British parliamentary delegation, the Norwegian ambassador and delegations from China, Burma and Malaya’. The presence of Ghana’s former colonisers was disturbing. As C.L.R. James recalled, Padmore had turned to him that evening and said: ‘The people who are dancing here are the ones who opposed ... independence.’
He wanted to hold a different gathering, one that would bring together activists from Africa and its diaspora to discuss decolonisation. The first All-African People’s Conference took place at the Accra Community Centre in December 1958. More than three hundred African political and trade union leaders were in attendance, including Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda and Frantz Fanon. The number of women delegates was small, but Eslanda Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maida Springer and Marthe Ouandié made sure some of their concerns were addressed. The conference was chaired by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan trade union activist who, it later transpired, was in close contact with the CIA. As Williams writes, ‘the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of political and cultural organisations, with the aim of keeping African nations out of Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Africa-America Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s
alma mater, Lincoln University) to the conference, was a CIA front.
The USSR was entering a period of renewed enthusiasm for the Third World. The break with Stalinism that was marked by Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20thParty Congress in 1956 provided an opportunity to renew the Comintern’s anti-imperialist and anti-racist mission. ‘The main thrust of Khrushchev’s policy in the Third World,’ Telepneva writes, ‘was to revive Soviet socialism based on an idealist notion of “Leninist principles”.’ Because the USSR had no military presence in Africa, it relied on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War on the cheap. (The CIA-funded American Society of African Culture, by contrast, was known as ‘Uncle Moneybags’.) In the process, mid-level Soviet bureaucrats, or
mezhdunarodniki, became what Telepneva calls ‘mediators of liberation’: intermediaries between anti-colonial activists and a Soviet leadership that had yet to offer its full military and diplomatic support.
There were also opportunities for internationalists such as Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department, or Ivan Potekhin, the first director of the Institute for African Studies. Potekhin and Ponomarev belonged to a small but influential group of party officials known as the ‘Cominternians’, who were, Telepneva writes, ‘the rare survivors of the Stalinist purges’ – Ponomarev had been denounced as a Trotskyist – ‘who remained committed to socialist internationalism and welcomed Khrushchev’s policy in the Third World’. Potekhin’s attendance at the All-African People’s Conference was a sign of things to come.
The Soviets took note of the Portuguese colonial students in Lisbon in the 1950s, among them Agostinho Neto, later the first president of Angola; Mário Pinto de Andrade, who founded the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); the Portuguese Guinean anti-colonial activist Amílcar Cabral; and Marcelino dos Santos, who became a founding member of the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo). They were all members of the
mestiço-assimilado elite, a social class of colonial subjects considered to be sufficiently ‘civilised’ to qualify for full rights as Portuguese citizens. The scholarships they received were intended to shape colonial administrators. Instead, the students gathered at the
Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a centre in Lisbon that was founded by white African-born students sympathetic to the regime of the Portuguese dictator, Salazar – to discuss the future of Portugal’s African colonies (or, more specifically, how to get rid of the Portuguese). As Andrade later recalled, the group became increasingly interested in Marxist ideas and established contacts with Portuguese communists, although relations were often strained – the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) thought the independence of African nations secondary to the class struggle in Portugal itself. In 1951, Andrade, dos Santos and Neto were arrested following a PCP-sponsored action in Lisbon. Fed up with constant harassment by the secret police, Andrade and dos Santos eventually left for Paris. Neto remained in Portugal, but spent much of the 1950s in prison.
In the autumn of 1958, the USSR invited dos Santos, Andrade and his friend Viriato Francisco Clemente da Cruz to the first Conference of African and Asian Writers in Soviet Uzbekistan. The event brought together 196 writers from 50 countries, including the 90-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois, who flew in from Moscow. Andrade remembered it as a ‘literary Bandung’: a historic meeting of non-aligned writers. (The Soviets had failed to send any delegates to the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations.) Other African writers were unconvinced. In the lead-up to the conference, Alioune Diop, the Senegalese founder of the influential Paris-based journal
Présence africaine, had expressed concerns about Soviet involvement, which he believed would detract from the focus on Black writing and art. When the Soviets refused to pull out, Diop and his journal boycotted the conference. (In its internal report, the Writers’ Union branded him a ‘hostile bourgeois nationalist’.) Andrade, who had joined
Présence africaine as an editor in Paris, was bitterly disappointed. During his time in Lisbon, he’d been enamoured with the Négritude poets Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, both close collaborators of the journal, and thought of the
Casa dos Estudantes do Império as the ‘political home’ of Portuguese Négritude, even if, by the time of the Tashkent conference, he had shifted to the left and considered Négritude too bourgeois to be of any use to anti-colonial activists.
China too had stepped up its efforts to spread its ideology in Africa through military and cultural programmes. Dos Santos and Viriato da Cruz became infatuated with Maoism after their visits to China in 1954 and 1958. ‘The time spent in China,’ dos Santos later reported, ‘was a real school in Marxism-Leninism.’ Viriato da Cruz, the most committed Maoist of the Angolan anti-colonialists, regarded Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful co-existence as a betrayal of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Neto disagreed: he remained much closer to the Portuguese Communist Party, which took its cue from Moscow. When Viriato da Cruz drafted the first manifesto of the MPLA – an organisation he and Andrade hoped would bring together the country’s disparate nationalist movements – neither Beijing nor Moscow had enough influence to determine its ideological position. In 1966, Viriato da Cruz opted for exile in China, where he remained until his death in 1973.
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