CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 18, June 2021 Page 1 Online Article The Struggle to Convert Nationalism to Pan-Africanism: Taking Stock of 50 years of African Independence1 he post-Vasco da Gama ep- takes time before it is recognised och of some five centuries Issa Shivji as such, while the old persists be- is a story of the ‘West and Professor Emeritus yond its usefulness. Keeping that T 2 the Rest’. The West constructed University of Dar es Salaam, in mind, I am categorising the first its own story and the story of the Tanzania four centuries (roughly from the Rest. It is a story of plunder, priva- last quarter of the fifteenth century tion, invasion and destruction; it is to the first quarter of the nineteenth a story of permanent wars and pass- Yet in this complexity and variabil- century) of the African encoun- ing peace. It is a story of the annihi- ity, in these major shifts and chang- ter with Europe as the period of lation of pre-European civilisations ing continuities—all of which we as primitive accumulation, or, to use from the Incas of the Americas, so scholars must study and have been the more recent and generic term, called after the European explorer studying—there is a pattern. There accumulation by appropriation. (It Amerigo Vespucci, to the Swahili is a red thread running through it. should become clear later why I civilisation of the eastern coast of That red thread is the process of prefer this term.) Africa. The title of a book describ- capitalist accumulation seen in a ing the Spanish conquest of Mexico, longue durée. While we must, by The period of accumulation the near-extermination of the Tas- all means, resist linear trajectories by appropriation manian Aborigines by the British, that essentialise the march of prog- Within this period we have two the white American dispossession ress of so-called Western civilisa- sub-periods. One is the period of of the Apache, and the German sub- tion, including the stagiest peri- looting of treasures, sometimes jugation of the Herero and Nama of odisation of vulgar Marxists, we directly, sometimes indirectly, un- Namibia, sums it all: Rivers of Blood, cannot surrender to agnosticism or der the name of trade, based on Rivers of Gold (Cocker 1999). eclecticism—that the world is not unequal, rather than mutual ex- k n o w a b l e a n d e x p l a i n a b l e , h o w e v e r The tale of treasures at one end and change. This is the period when approximately. tragedies at the other cannot be un- European powers pursued their derstood, I suggest, without locat- Periodising the Process of singular mission to destroy pre- ing it in the trajectory of worldwide European long-distance trade— capitalist accumulation. No doubt it Accumulation the trans-Sahara trade on the west is a complex story of construction It is in the context of the trajec- coast and the Indian Ocean trade and destruction of cultures and cus- tory of capitalist accumulation that on the east coast of Africa—in toms; a story of the exercise of bru- I want to locate the genesis of the order to establish their mercantile tal power and subtle politics; a spin- grand narrative of nationalism and and maritime hegemony. The pre- ning of epic mythologies and grand Pan-Africanism. To facilitate my European trade systems, both on ideologies. No doubt it cannot be re- paper I am resorting to some peri- the west and the east coasts, were duced mechanically to the capitalist odisation of the process of accumu- governed by Islamic precepts. mode of production nor explained lation. As we all know, all periodi- The gold trade passed through in a vulgar way by theories of con- sation has its hazards—processes Timbuktu on the west, and through spiracy or processes of economics. I overlap and intermingle; the new Kilwa on the east, both of which am suggesting none of that. is born in the garbs of the old and became centres of great Islamic ci- CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 18, June 2021 Page 2 vilisation and learning. Timbuktu Meanwhile, on the European stage, ject. For planters and slavers, ‘The and Kilwa were brutally destroyed capitalism was bursting its contain- Negroes are unjust, cruel, barba- by Portuguese privateers. The ex- ers (to use Prem Shaker Jha’s term, rous, half-human, treacherous, de- peditions had specific instructions Jha 2006: 17) and reconstructing ceitful, thieves, drunkards, proud, to Christianise the ‘natives’ and them. Jha argues that in its 700 lazy, unclean, shameless, jealous to eliminate Muslim traders. years of development, capitalism fury, and cowards’ (James [1938] has gone through three cycles of 1989). The Supreme Court of the As the Portuguese privateers were accumulation. At the beginning civilised United States decided in devastating the African coast in the of each cycle it has expanded the 1857 that ‘Dred Scott could not last quarter of the fifteenth century, size of its container. In the first, it sue for his freedom because he so Spanish conquerors were dis- grew from the maritime city-states was not a person, but property’ covering the ‘New World’. Vasco of Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan (Zinn 2001: 187). Fathers, bish- da Gama laid the foundation of the and Amsterdam to the nation-states ops, learned priests and men of European invasion of Africa; Chris- of England, Holland and France. conscience found no fault in trad- topher Columbus inaugurated the The quintessence of the second ing in and owning slaves: ‘... we extermination of the indigenous cycle was from the nation-state to ... buy these slaves for our service populations of the Americas and the the colonising state,3 as European without a scruple ...’, declared men Caribbean—the first genocide and powers colonised much of the rest of religion with conscience (ibid. holocaust in the history of human- of the world. The third was from the 29–30). The bottom line was enor- kind. One led to white hegemony, island territory of the small nation- mous profits made from the slave the other to white settlement. From state, Britain, to the continental na- trade and colossal surplus extracted then on, the fate of the three conti- tion-state of North America. Now, from slave labour. James Madison, nents was inextricably linked and in the era of globalisation, on the one of the ‘fathers’ of the Ameri- found its immediate expression in eve of the fourth cycle, it is poised can Constitution, could boast to a the triangular slave trade. to burst the very system of hierarchi- British visitor that he could make The second sub-period, from the cally organised nation-states. 2,000 per cent profit from a single sixteenth to the nineteenth century, slave in a year (Zinn 2001: 33). Whatever the merit of this thesis, Thus were constructed the univer- witnessed the gruesome Atlantic for our purposes two points can be slave trade, the so-called triangular sal ideologies, the grand narratives made. One, that the capitalist con- and the totalising outlooks of the trade. Half the slaves were transport- tainer was never self-contained. ed to the ‘New World’ in the eigh- Western civilisation, which we are Arteries penetrating deep into the living to this day. teenth century. Millions—fifty mil- wealth and treasures of other conti- lion, one estimate says (Zinn 2001: nents fed the process of capital ac- Accumulation by capitalisation 29)—of men, women and children cumulation in the heart of Europe. torn from their continent worked Africa was the theatre of the most Towards the end of the eighteenth the sugar plantations of the Carib- devastating kinds of appropriation. and the first half of the nineteenth bean and cotton plantations of the Two, the ideologies, religions, centuries, capitalism entered the southern states of America to pro- cultures and customs constructed throes of the Industrial Revolu- vide the raw material for Lancashire to rationalise, legitimise and ex- tion (1780 to 1840 by Hobsbawm’s mills, the pioneer of the Industrial plain the processes of accumula- reckoning, Hobsbawm 1968). It Revolution. The African continent tion were centrally premised on was also the period of primitive was looted of its treasures in the the construction of race, in which accumulation within the contain- first sub-period, which also ruined ‘the Self’ was White and ‘the Oth- er. Indeed, the original meaning its established mercantile routes. In er’ Black, the two also being the of primitive accumulation was the second sub-period, the continent referents for the in-between. Ge- confined to the process of appro- was looted of its people, devastating ography itself was constructed as priation of serfs and peasants from its social fabric and robbing it of its such, Europe being the land of the land to work in factories. Marx most important resource. This was White and Africa being the land called it the ‘prehistoric stage of accumulation by appropriation par of the Black. The racist construct capital’ (1887: 668). He theorised excellence—accumulating by appro- found its typical expression in the the capitalist system as if it were priating wealth in the first instance, Other, the Slave—a soulless, de- self-contained. ‘Accumulate, accu- and accumulating by appropriating personalised and dehumanised ob- mulate! That is the Moses and the people in the second. CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 18, June 2021 Page 3 prophets!’ (Marx 1887: 558) was Lenin, from a different point of ‘tribes’ (Mafeje 1971). Tribes were the driving force of capitalism. departure, argued that in the last conveniently divided and sepa- quarter of the nineteenth century, rated in their ghettoes, lest, as co- By dissecting the appearance of capitalism had become imperialist lonial paternalism averred, they the commodity society, Marx as monopoly finance capital sought kill each other given their violent showed how surplus is appropri- new spaces of profitable investment propensity.