Abstract
This chapter traces the trajectories of the Bandung and Pan-Africanist projects to assess the present conjuncture. It is argued that Bandung and Pan-Africanism were, first and foremost, political projects, not subservient to economics. They were ideological rallying points providing vision, hope and dignity to the struggling peoples of the periphery. They were also anti-imperialist in their conception and development, seeking to provide an alternative to imperialist integration. Yet, they were led by bourgeois forces which failed to install an auto-centric development path, and this proved to be their failure as peoples’ projects. The bourgeoisies in Asia and the proto-bourgeoisies in Africa were eventually compradorised, and thus yielding the BRICS and NEPAD projects of today, both integrationist and both subject to the logic of primitive accumulation.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital’ (ibid.: 705).
- 2.
One of the problems with Harvey’s position is that it abstracts from the relation between imperialist Centres and dominated Peripheries with the potential danger of belittling the national question and, thus its obverse, imperialism.
- 3.
As Amin (2012) does in broad strokes in his article, ‘The South challenges globalization’.
- 4.
For an example of this in the case of the exploitation of small peasants, see Shivji (1987).
- 5.
Liberia, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia and Gold Coast, which at the time had internal self-government and became independent in 1957, as Ghana.
- 6.
The account of the South Commission that follows is based on this source.
- 7.
When Nyerere and Wicken received comments on their draft of the first chapter, Joan Wicken wrote to Manmohan Singh (quoted in Prashad 2012: 117, fn):
The Chairman, in talking to me said he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that was worrying him about the draft now, but somehow has the feeling that the tone has been changed so that it no longer gives leadership, or makes people want to do something. He is not sure whether this is still because he doesn’t like pretending that there is no neo-colonialism or need for liberation, or whether it is more than leaving out those words. If you could ‘beef it up’ a bit, and make it more exciting and challenging it would be good. But I don’t know whether that is possible while still leaving it acceptable to the ‘opposition’ [namely, Ramphal and Correa].
- 8.
See, generally, Varoufakis (2015) for the innovative theory of recycling of surplus in the capitalist world.
- 9.
Whatever the illusions of these locomotives of the South may be, they will only be ‘reactors’, not ‘full actors’ in the world economic system, to use Nyerere’s phraseology (quoted in Prashad 2012: 166).
- 10.
ALBA consists of relatively small Latin and Central American countries: Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador and Saint Vincent and the Granadines.
- 11.
These are casual and unemployed working people who have no guarantee of jobs or livelihood, since much of the proletariat was literally decimated as a result of deindustrialisation dictated by the neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes.
- 12.
I develop my position on why I consider ‘working people’ as the agency of the next phase of revolutionary struggles in my 2009 lecture, https://soundcloud.com/issashivji/shivji-keynote-speech-accumulation-and-neo-liberalism, accessed 26 June 2017.
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Shivji, I.G. (2019). Whither Africa in the Global South? Lessons of Bandung and Pan-Africanism. In: Moyo, S., Jha, P., Yeros, P. (eds) Reclaiming Africa. Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5840-0_12
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