March 2005

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Have the Slaves Left the Master's House?

Amanda Alexander is a Visiting Researcher and Mandisa Mbali is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. For the full version of this article, please visit www.wewrite.org.

"The story of the poor goes round and round. But what about the story of the rich? The story not being told is that of the beneficiaries of slavery and colonialism. The story of exploitation that put us into this dispensation, commodified our own life for profit. They divided and ruled. Can we unite and live? Can we unite for the world that will be our world? Let us rise up and begin to tell this story of why they continue to be rich, continue to plunder."

-- Wahu Kaara, Kenyan feminist
activist speaking at the
ASF opening plenary

At the Africa Social Forum in Lusaka, Zambia (10-14 December, 2004), delegates from across the continent noted Africa's history of injustices and oppression through colonialism, slavery, and apartheid, but swiftly moved on to the injustices of present-day, post-colonial Africa: privatization and cost recovery, wars fought over Africa's natural resources, heavy debt burdens, unfair trade, and disease. Contrary to dominant accounts of the continent as an almost biblically 'cursed' 'basket case' and Africans as helpless victims, delegate after delegate emphasized that Africa's poverty, wars, and disease pandemics are causally related to a global economic system that is predicated on the poverty of the many.

Virginia Setshedi from Soweto, South Africa inspires participants at "Resisting Market Fundamentalism: Retirement Planning for the World Bank and IMF," April 2004. Photo: Orin Langelle/Global Justice Ecology Project (www.globaljusticeecology.org)

"The world, it would seem, friends, is at the end of its imagination," Corinne Kumar of Tunisia and Indonesia told the assembled plenary. How much further can the tired mechanisms of domination and exploitation be stretched? Though they are continuously re-disguised, masquerading as World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs or Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, as the New Partnership for Africa's Development or Economic Partnership Agreements, the instruments of oppression remain blatant for those attempting to access basic services like water, land, education, and health care.

Kumar's assertions were echoed by many activists throughout the Forum: it is up to the South -- and Africa in particular -- to champion notions of democracy that are not intrinsically tied to the market economy; to find new notions of power that facilitate, transform, and enhance; to redefine Africa through a discourse of dissent -- one that de-centers, disrupts, and interrupts all that is dominant.

Why the master's tools will never destroy the master's house

In The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Frantz Fanon predicted the exhaustion of Third World nationalism as espoused by many African leaders. Indeed, without civil society resistance Africa's bourgeoisie and its nationalist leaders may end up becoming the 'cheap jack' for Western capitalism and imperialism. As one delegate argued, "the master's tools [neo-liberal policies] will never destroy the master's house [rich countries' economic domination of Africa]." Patrick Bond poses the question: will Africa aim to 'fix' the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and IMF or 'nix' them (Bond, 2003)? Or, in terms of the central problematic posed in our report, will Africa merely substitute homegrown structural adjustments (such as NEPAD) for those originally imposed by the IFIs? Are the foreign overseers such as the Bank and the IMF increasingly confident that they can count on local overseers to carry out their work? Has the logic of 'fiscal discipline' become so normalized that Africa's ruling class has yoked itself with fiscal self-discipline?"

The social consequences of structural adjustment programs have been evident in Africa for over two decades. The very real, human costs were visible as we walked through downtown Lusaka, where the crumbling infrastructure includes broken storm drains, clogged with garbage, which periodically become breeding grounds for cholera. The Lusaka-based Namibian human rights lawyer who showed us around mentioned that as a result of cutbacks espoused in structural adjustments and a high proportion of the country's budget going toward debt servicing, patients attending the country's public hospitals must provide their own drips, medicine, bedding, and food.

Indeed, the "cost recovery" advocated by IFIs is alive and well in Zambia: advertisements on Zambian television announced that cut-offs of electricity were imminent for defaulters over the festive season, and that electricity company employees who assisted them to reconnect would be liable for prosecution. Jubilee Zambia informed us that this year a third of Zambia's budget will go toward servicing odious debt. Therefore, it comes as little surprise that life expectancy in Zambia has been reduced by AIDS and other preventable and treatable infectious diseases to a mere 35 years. The choices facing Africa's leaders are as stark as the slogans on T-shirts worn by activists from the American Friends Service Committee: "LIFE" or "DEBT."

The impacts of neo-liberal policies on ordinary African people's lives brought sharp debates on how African politicians and civil society organizations should relate to IFIs. African politicians are already engaging with IFIs and G8 countries and it was clear to many delegates that the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) can be viewed as the product of such engagements. In this context, an important item on the agenda was African civil society's engagement with IFIs such as the World Bank and Bank-supported programs like NEPAD.

On the second day, a session was held on people's views of "Civil Society Engagement with the World Bank" chaired by Kumi Naidoo of CIVICUS (an international umbrella body of NGOs). Naidoo outlined how CIVICUS's board had for an 18-month period "embarked on a process of canvassing and documenting civil society views on engagement with the Bank."

When the floor was opened, Console Tleane from the Freedom of Expression Institute of South Africa argued that CIVICUS was unfairly seeking legitimation for its engagement with the Bank at the Africa Social Forum. Tleane pointed out that the conversation seemed misplaced at the Forum -- since rather than sharing views on working with the Bank, most ASF delegates were ready to strategize how to bring about the end of the Bank by April 2005. Kenyan activist Njoke Njehu of 50 Years is Enough, a Washington DC-based NGO, agreed, arguing that there have been three major civil society attempts to engage with the Bank, including the World Commission on Dams and the Extractive Industry Review -- and they had all failed. The Bank's primary objective in trying to engage with civil society is to boost its public relations and lend a veneer of legitimacy to its opaque and undemocratic operations. Continuing this theme, a Nigerian NGO representative said that year in, year out she had been to meetings with the Bank and had seen virtually no implementation of progressive civil society organizations' suggestions, except at the most cosmetic level. South African Anti-Privatisation Forum activist Virginia Setshedi then led participating delegates in a protest song against collaborating with neo-colonial forces. Other activists added their experiences and perspectives as well, none supporting the project of further "canvassing" of civil society views on working with IFIs.

In "No to World Bank-Civil Society Relations," the African Flame, the daily ASF newspaper, reported on the session as follows: "Without a single dissenting voice, participants rejected any dealings with the Bank. The Bank's bad record on the continent and the tons of evidence that indict it for the continued poverty of the African people were cited as the main reasons why any engagement will not be meaningful. The message was clear: there [was] no way that the ASF would entertain any dealings with the Bank."

Finding our own tools: Feminist dialogue

Along with their critiques of neo-colonialism and the lack of democracy in international policy-making, African activists were increasingly outraged at the lack of democracy within the Forum structure. The ASF often replicated prevailing socio-economic, cultural, and political inequalities. In particular, despite a feminist tribunal at the beginning of the Forum, women were often not given sufficient space to raise feminist issues throughout the conference. Plenary sessions and panel discussions were largely devoid of meaningful dialogue and debate. The sole exception was the Feminist Dialogue, where women arranged their chairs in a large circle to form the only space in the entire forum set up for the horizontal movement of knowledge in many directions.

Breaking with the structure of other Forum sessions in which two or three panelists (usually male) addressed an audience for roughly two hours and finished by fielding a handful of questions, the feminist dialogue was constructed as an actual conversation -- open to dissent and debate and allowing ideas to build off each other. By the end of the session, nearly every person present had spoken her or his mind.

Again out of character with much of the Forum, several action items were decided upon. These included gathering and sharing feminist literature from across the continent over an email discussion list and in existing publications such as Feminist Africa, the Centre for Civil Society website and research reports, and WeWrite. Feminist dialogue must be wrestled back from the (mostly Northern) academic spaces which have co-opted and subsequently come to define (and confine) debate.

Those present also strategized ways to hold women who are elected into office accountable. This is gravely needed, as demonstrated in South Africa, where Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has consistently pushed forward policies that have worsened -- and ultimately taken -- the lives of poor, black, HIV-positive women. In Tanzania, Fatima Alloo explained, women activists meet with each female politician upon her assumption of office. From the very beginning of her term -- and often beforehand, during her campaigning -- women activists attempt to become these politicians' primary network and base. Since women so often identify with a system that will "protect" them, the moment that they say "No," they are persecuted. Women activists can thus form alternative forms of protection, and women in high office can draw their power not from the prevailing system of patriarchal control, but from those who understand power's underbelly.

Finally, activists called for further strategizing on helping to make women economically independent. As one activist from the Gambia remarked, we must make it possible for women to get a divorce if necessary, to have some measure of financial independence. In a global economy where women produce over 80% of the resources, and yet own less than 20% of them, the battle for economic sovereignty for women will be long and difficult. However, we will work to assure that women are not further exploited by our own movements, and that we create means for economic independence as we can.

Are our tools sharp enough?

Across several sessions, a number of participants asked similar questions: What are we doing to take the debates here back to the grassroots in our own countries? People are dying of AIDS in my country, aggressive cost recovery means water and electricity are being disconnected, trade negotiations are taking place which may ruin livelihoods, how will this Forum take our struggles forward?

When we asked different delegates how the ASF meetings were organized, they could only answer with even more questions. How, for instance, were the meetings financed? How was the organizing council constituted?

Activists from South Africa's Social Movements Indaba issued a critique:

"The under-representation of social movements in relation to NGOs is reflected in the political content of the Forum. It manifests in the persistence of the notion that the Africa Social Forum is nothing other than a space, in contrast to the perspective that it should have a program to advance our struggle against neoliberalism."

These problems are not unique to the ASF. Other social forums have been critiqued for not culminating in sufficiently concrete political outcomes to advance the struggles of social movements.

Building our own house: From 'space' to action

In order for the Social Forums to continue to have legitimacy with social movement activists they will have to move beyond merely being 'spaces' for debate about 'other possibilities' for the world and towards being forums for debating strategies and tactics and common campaigns. As the feminist session of the ASF showed, making sessions more participatory and inclusive could be an important step in allowing legitimate critiques of the Social Forums and their constituent movements to emerge. In turn, this could allow for more focused political discussions and outcomes at the Forums.

The stakes are high in this debate. As South African Virginia Setshedi said: "People are being disconnected at home, what am I doing here if it doesn't advance their struggle?" Likewise, an HIV-positive feminist activist from Zimbabwe urged, "people are dying of AIDS at home. We need to think of a common platform to campaign to improve their access to treatment." Such activists argued that it takes precious time and resources to attend Social Forums and that they must have something to show for attending such forums.

Capturing Social Forums and blunting their impact is a tantalizing prospect for the World Bank and 'third-way' politicians, and this adds a further sense of urgency to debates about the political direction and future of the Social Forums in advancing the aims of social movements for socio-economic justice. It is clear that social movement activists around the world increasingly wish to 'jealously guard' the Social Forums against de-politicization and an inching towards irrelevant abstraction. Such activists recognize that if they exhaust themselves debating in 'space' they will not threaten the agendas of the Bank or the other IFIs in any serious way. And the blunter the tools of the Social Forums get, the greater the chance activists will simply dispense with them entirely.

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