EHF posts an extract from Adam Mayer’s Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957-2023 a book which explores African Marxist theory and the intellectual merits of Afro-Marxist schools of thought to show how they have developed and impacted sub-Saharan Africa from the Cold War to the present. Mayer asks: Who were the African Marxist intellectuals? How are these theories inspiring popular rebellions and radical anti-Western military coups today? Mayer explores how Military Marxism, through its own rich African theory, has continued to inform and guide the practice of various political movements today.
By Adam Mayer
African Marxism as intellectual history
“African Communism” is similar to so called “Jewish Communism” in some ways. These are slurs that hide virulent conspiracy theories. The first was an accusation once always on the lips of apartheid era Afrikaner “security experts” who talked of “massive onslaught by Moscow.” Both terms are still widespread neo-Nazi tropes. But this should not lead us to believe that Africans, or Jews, have been unimportant in the history of Marxist ideas, radicalism, or Communism. Some Jews today are unduly embarrased about the role that Jews had once played in constructing the world’s most important revolutionary Communist experiments from East Berlin to Beijing and Moscow. An article about “Mandela’s Jews” some years ago in the conservative Jewish press went as far as editing out the memory of Joe Slovo[1] and his magnificent revolutionary wife Ruth First[2] from a retrospective account of Mandela’s Jews.[3] Both Slovo and First were of course Baltic Jews before becoming South African heroes. My private excuse for writing on African Marxism as a white man and a Hungarian does not end at historical junctures where Jews, my co-religionists, have been relevant to African emancipation. My wife is West African, and my in-laws are almost without exception Gambians. With a topic as controversial as this, being clear on my own positionality seems essential.
Numerous African middle class intellectuals today are also embarrassed about the history of African radicalism, the pan-African movement, the memory of African battles for justice and agency, and especially the history of African Marxists, African Marxisms, African Communism, in the West and the Caribbean as well as within Africa. Despite the obvious role that Communists had played in liberating South Africa from apartheid, or say ridding Guinée of France for decades. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe today calls the entire tradition of national liberation and African Marxism “liturgical incantation,”[4] an “exercise in African victimhood,” “pious dogmas and empty dreams,” esentially a shame for today’s global African intellectual who does not want to antagonize the West but wants to become of it.
Today’s sleek, sophisticated and wordly African career diplomats in Geneva, or American African professionals[5] in Washington, Alabama, or Florida may be embarrassed about the robust history of the phenomenon that I call African Marxism. This meant in fact a transformation of Soviet and “Chikom”[6] foreign policy toolkits called “Soviet Africa” or “Beijing backed socialist experiments” into a more comprehensive, more African “Marxist Africa,” a genuine anti-imperialist world of ideas and praxis. Its theory and efficacy had evolved around the early 1960s but its representatives (as we shall see) are at the forefront not only of Black diasporic thought[7] but also of US and generally Western socialism even today. Whilst diplomats may be embarrassed about his memory, the Burkinabe people wax lyrical about the late Marxist president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara,[8] when they recall their fallen African Communist leader. This book will focus on one crucial but unexpected strand in the African Marxist theoretical toolkit: Military Marxism. I discuss here the theory of movements where African radicals actually decide to fight the intruders, and their reasons for doing so.
African diaspora Marxists are important today in the West. Olufemi O. Taiwo is reshaping Western radical progressive thought on a global scale,[9] Biko Agozino is emblematic in critical criminology worldwide,[10] Biodun Jeyifo still rules literary criticism.[11] Every single author alive, discussed in this book, has enlarged on our knowledge of Africa itself (the living among them include Yash Tandon, Eboe Hutchful, Issa Shivji, Ifeoma Okoye, Amina Mama, Biodun Jeyifo, Biko Agozino, Mahmood Mamdani, Chinweizu in 2024).[12] Today’s American Africans are important actors in what happens to American, as well as Western, socialism. When the rap song This is America came out, it was not only inspiration for a similarly socially conscious rap song This is Nigeria in almost no time, but the other important story was that the original song itself had been co-produced by none other than a Nigerian Marxist social scientist’s (Claude Ake) similarly revolutionary son![13]
Western academic knowledge on Africa is today sadly more reliable, more structured, and probably more detailed than academic knowledge within the African continent.[14] Most major Africa research institutions are located in the West, and their conferences gather everywhere in the global North from Denver to Paris, but rarest in Africa.[15] The reason behind this staggering epistemological imbalance is that the post-colonial and neoliberal order had forced an exodus of intellectuals from their countries primarily to the US, but also France, Europe, and South Africa in the 1990s.[16] This had been a function pointedly not of 1960s independence of African states (and least of all their allegedly “wasted resources” and so called “white elephant projects”) but of the 1980s-1990s neoliberal onslaught on the African middle class.[17] Structural adjustment turned on African institutions, societies, economies, and life worlds. I argue here that this was primarily an effort to restore Western capital’s rate of return on investment in peripheral Africa.
Somewhat absurdly, the CIA had never protested the arrival of African Communist intellectuals in the US of A, if and when they could increase America’s state of knowledge on the old continent, even before Communists had stopped being a national security threat in practical terms in the United States,[18] despite their ruthless suppression of home grown (African American) radicals such as the Black Panther Party.[19] The majority of American African intellectuals I discuss in this book are today, or have earlier been, working in the West, especially since 1990.[20]
Since the spread of internet in Africa twenty years ago however, their influence now regularly transcends their diaspora status and their influence is stronger in Africa itself even than before their emigration. With China focusing on the domestic economy, and Eastern Europe undergoing its post-apocaliptic transformation into a newly pauperised sub-imperialist circle of hell, African intellectuals had no options left in the 1990s. They could not possibly opt for any other vista than the West when forced by circumstances to abandon their academic roles in Africa – later some, notably including Harvard’s Biodun Jeyifo also explored the People’s Republic of China, but this shift is ongoing right now for most, on a larger scale.[21]
This tome differs from others when discussing this epic Africanist academic shift ’away’ from Africa in some important ways, while simultaneously building on them. Recent works place African radical and Marxist thought in a more-or-less Afrabian context.[22] The truly paradigmatic work on Black Marxism has of course been Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism,[23] a monograph that has since then inspired thousands of explorations on the radical Black Atlantic.[24]Atlantic centered Black Marxisms had established deep and early connections between Africa, Black America and the Caribbean, righting a historical hiatus and a moral wrong in the literature (CLR James, Hakim Adi, and an avalanche of research articles in Q1 peer reviewed journals in the last two decades).[25] At the time of George Padmore in the 1930s-1950s, Caribbean thinkers inspired early African Marxisms,[26] and even in the 1970s, a British Guianaian Walter Rodney was a major influence at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.[27] Caribbean thinkers, important as they have been, do not constitute the majority of important African Marxist theoreticians, thinkers, activists, historiographers, belletrists, or socialist-feminists at all, however.
I claim that the Black Atlantic paradigm, despite its historiographic validity and usefulness, has also now been overused. It has often been abused to serve Black Atlanticist paradigms (in US-leaning foreign policy, in cultural orientation, and elsewhere). It has demonstrably shifted attention away from the continent of Africa, and its cross-regional, internal connections in the historiographic sense. In its worst avatars, it has even strengthened the already monstrously intimidating neo-imperial framework in Africanist historiography. It is not only Europe, not only Britain that one must provincialize (á la Dipesh Chakrabarty),[28] but also the entire Anglophone imperial nexus. Not only is late 19th century “Anglobalization” rather misleading (French language ruled the belle epoque’s imagination from France to Cairo),[29]but the practice of “global” intellectual history can easily turn into a category of neo-colonial exclusion.
Startling early 20th century examples, today largely forgotten, have included instances of Anglomania in Black thought itself. Mamadou Diouf and Jinny Prais reconsider William Henry Ferris’s such conceptual construction, embarrassingly labelled the “Negro-Saxon,” and conclude that “Ferris’s concept of the Negro-Saxon (was) based on his understanding of the Anglo-Saxon accomplishments as the highest ideal the world had ever seen.”[30]
I propose to contrast this veritable monstrosity of the “Negro-Saxon” with Nigeria’s Marxist historian Yusufu Bala Usman’s take on Anglo-Saxon culture who had deemed Anglo-Saxon culture as both predatory and naval gazing, insular, parochial, and downright philistine (in comparison with his primary acculturation in the Islamic republic of letters in Zaria of Northern Nigeria in his aristocratic and secluded youth).[31]
Most thinkers that are dealt with in this history of ideas will proudly defy the self-congratulatiory notions embedded in the Anglophone imperial nexus between Africa and Anglia. Indeed in an African context, delineating Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone regions of the continent is all too easy. The old colonial empires had also quite consciously fostered linguistic divisions.[32]
But we might give thought to the following issue here. It was not neoliberal Kenya but socialist Tanzania that achieved better unity, and Guinée, Mali, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, and the People’s Republic of Congo had also arguably done better at tackling internal divisions than their neo-colonialist, capitalist, ethnicist, right wing neighbours.[33] What if we think the unthinkable and posit that even Africa’s one party systems, exactly those very maligned ’military-ideological states’, could do more than others to serve the purpose of people’s and polity’s genuine structural unity? Matthieu Kérékou, Marxist “dictator” of Benin, brought back indigenous languages to Beniois education, Nyerere’s Ujamaa system successfully oversaw Swahilization, while capitalist oriented states deepend their cultural dependence on former metropoles.[34]
What if unity (even national unity) is actually a precondition to power? What Black people in Uganda, as well as the United States today arguably need is power more than anything else, in order to effect meaningful change.[35] When the global intellectual historian Sudipta Kaviraj establishes a classification for his craft, he states that the two possible kinds of intellectual histories are: “(one where) their object of epistemic interest is social history, (…). For a second group of scholars, the objects of analysis are the intellectual systems or processes themselves.”[36] Kaviraj thinks that thought either changes only thought (a sad prospect), or else it uncovers the sources of discontent in reality (as in social history).
He seems to forget entirely about the possibility of establishing connections between intellectual history and political history, intellectual history and the history of changes in power relations at the top, including revolutions and the people – the locus of power par excellence! Thus it is de rigeur to address the context and praxis (however incompletely) of Marxist and socialist states of Africa here. Not doing so would mean that one subscribes to romanticism where all failed revolutions are equally celebrated but no victorious ones are ever pure and nice enough for the analyst… My Chapter 1 in this volume delineates the political fate of Marxist systems and state socialism in Africa. These are only outlines but to my dismay, I had to discover that even such an outline has not hitherto appeared in the literature!
Adam Mayer, Military Marxism: Africa’s contirbution to revolutionary theory (Lexington Books, 2025).
Adam Mayer is a researcher and writer and currently works at the American University of Iraq in Baghdad. Adam is also the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, 2016) and a regular contributor to radical blogs and journals.
Featured Photograph: a portrait of Burkina Faso’s “military Marxist” Thomas Sankara (Adepo Nicolas, 7 October 2023).
Notes
[1] Joe Slovo was master tactician and operative of the armed fight against apartheid, later minister in Mandela’s government. A good source is: Joe Slovo: Slovo, Foreword by Nelson Mandela, Ocean Press, Melbourne, New York, 1997
[2] Ruth First, Joe Slovo’s wife and comrade, was martyred by apartheid South Africa as one of the continent’s most significant Marxist-feminist thinkers and organizers. I discuss her Marxist theory of African coups in Chapter 2 of this book. See: Alan Wieder: Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2013.
[3] Geoff Sifrin: “Mandela’s Complex Jewish Ties: South African leader’s long relationship with community veered between supportive and hostile,” Aish, Archives, Available on internet at: https://aish.com/mandelas-complex-jewish-ties/, Date of access: 18thApril, 2024
[4] Achille Mbembe: “African Modes of Self Writing.” Identity, Culture and Politics, 2001, Volume 2, Number 1, January 2001, p. 2, Available on line at: http://calternatives.org/resource/pdf/African%20Modes%20of%20Self-Writing.pdf, Date of access: 18th April 2024.
[5] The term is introduced by Ali A. Mazrui, Amadu Jacky Kaba: The African Intelligentsia: Domestic Decline and Global Ascent, Red Sea Press, Trenton NJ, 2016
[6] “Chicom” was disrespectful CIA parlance for “Chinese Communist”
[7] Tunde Adeleke: Africa in Black Liberation Activism: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Walter Rodney (Routledge African Studies), Routledge, New York, 2018
[8] Thomas Sankara, the African Che, was the Marxist military leader of Upper Volta, later Burkina Faso. Fiercely independent, he built on rural and urban grassroots democratic traditions to achieve auto-centered development in the West-African country. His former friend and comrade, Blaise Compaoré, who turned into a sub-imperialist mercenary, had him murdered in 1987, and went on to rule Burkina Faso for three decades, for France. I will dedicate a sub-chapter in this book to Thomas Sankara (Chapter 2). Please see the most significant Sankarologist works there, as well as a description and analysis of Sankara’s own Marxist theoretical output.
[9] Olufemi O. Taiwo: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), Pluto Press, London, 2022; Reconsidering Reparations (Philosophy of Race), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022; Enzo Rossi and Olufemi O. Taiwo: “What’s New About Woke Racial Capitalism (and What Isn’t): “Wokewashing” and the limits of representation,” Spectre Journal, December 18, 2020, Available on line at: https://spectrejournal.com/whats-new-about-woke-racial-capitalism-and-what-isnt/, Date of access: 18th April, 2024. Olufemi O. Taiwo is more radical than his diaspora African Marxist father, Olufemi Taiwo. See a discussion on some works by both in Chapter 3 of this book.
[10] Biko Agozino, a Nigerian-American academic, towers above US critical criminologists in his understanding of race in relation to class. Some of his works are: Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason, Pluto Press, London, 2003; Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation (Routledge Revivals), Routledge, Abingdon, 2020. His “The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent.” Review of African Political Economy 41, no. 140 (2014): 172–84. doi:10.1080/03056244.2013.872613 is, or it should be, foundational for our understanding of Marxism itself.
[11] Biodun Jeyifo is the world’s number one Wole Soyinka scholar, and the pioneering literary critic of African drama in general. Biodun Jeyifo: Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. I draw on Jeyifo’s Marxist political economy in my Conclusion in this book.
[12] See Yash Tandon, Eboe Hutchful analysed in Chapter 3 of this book. See Issa Shivji’s thought introduced in Chapter 2 (the early Shivji) and Chapter 3 (the late Shivji). See Ifeoma Okoye and Amina Mama briefly mentioned in Chapter 3 of this book. Biodun Jeyifo appears in the Conclusion of this book. See Biko Agozino, Mahmood Mamdani, Chinweizu analysed especially in relation to African Military Marxism, in this book’s Chapter 4.
[13] The father had probably fallen victim to the unhinged military dictator Sani Abacha’s personal revenge because of the mild mannered professor’s unwavering commitment to minority rights in the Niger Delta, almost three decades ago. Abacha, more fascist in ways than Mussolini, banned even government sponsored trade unions in his country Nigeria.
[14] Olufemi Taiwo: Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2014
[15] CODESRIA in Dakar (The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) and a number of others are exceptions. See Ali A. Mazrui, Amadu Jacky Kaba: The African Intelligentsia: Domestic Decline and Global Ascent, Red Sea Press, Trenton NJ, 2016
[16] Toyin Falola, Adebayo Olebade: The New African Diaspora in the United States (Routledge African Studies, 21, Band 21),Routledge, Abingdon, 2018
[17] See chapter 3 of this book on this onslaught especially as it will affect African Marxist intellectuals.
[18] Susan Williams: White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa, Hurst & Co, London, 2021
[19] Elaine Mokhtefi: Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, Verso, London, 2018 is an excellent resource on the connections between Black liberation in the US and African national liberation movements.
[20] See Chapter 3 of this book for details.
[21] With the slow and gradual erosion of standards in US academia relative especially to the PRC’s similarly slow but steady rise, African academics have been pioneers of working in China already in the early 2000s.
[22] The term Afrabian appears first in this context in Ali A. Mazrui, Amadu Jacky Kaba: The African Intelligentsia: Domestic Decline and Global Ascent, Red Sea Press, Trenton NJ, 2016. The best recent tome in Arabic on African Marxism is: KribSoo Diallo: Pan-Africanism: Between Class Struggle and Radicalism, Cairo: Arweqa Institution for Studies, Translations and Publishing, 2021. An English translation of this edited volume is being prepared (2024). A very relevant source in English is: Grant Farred (ed.): Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2022, especially the chapter Zeyad el Nabolsy: “Paulin J. Hountondji on Philosophy, Science and Technology? From Husserl and Althusser to a Synthesis of the Hessen-Grossman Thesis and Dependency Theory” (pp. 34-63 in Farred).
[23] Cedric Robinson: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Zed Books, London, 1983.
[24] Including Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.): Global Intellectual History (Columbia Studies in International and Global History), Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, see especially the discussion on p. 206
[25] CLR James: Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Secker and Warburd, London, 1938
[26] Hakim Adi’s works are foundational here. Hakim Adi: Pan-africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939, Africa World Press, Trenton and Asmara, 2013. Also by Hakim Adi: Pan-Africanism: A History, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.
[27] For a short discussion on Walter Rodney, please see Chapter 2 of this volume.
[28] Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000
[29] Moyn and Sartori, ibid, p. 18
[30] Mamadou Diouf and Jinny Prais: “Casting the Badge of Inferiority Beneath Black Peoples’ Feet”: Archiving and Reading the African Past, Present, and Future in World History, In: Moyn and Sartori, ibid, p. 405
[31] Yusufu Bala Usman: For the Liberation of Nigeria, New Beacon Books, London, 1979. For a discussion on Bala usman, see Adam Mayer: Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria, Pluto Press, London, 2016, pp. 116-126
[32] Fredrick Cooper: “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?,” In: Moyn and Sartori, ibid, p. 290
[33] See the details in Chapter 1.
[34] See a detailed discussion and proof in Chapter 1 of this tome.
[35] Olufemi Taiwo: “Our Problem is Power,” Seminar Series, Available on line at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GQCmA8h3Uw&t=1141s Date of access: 18th April, 2024.
[36] Sudipta Kaviraj: “Global Intellectual History: Meanings and Methods,” In: Moyn and Sartori, ibid, p. 295.
