John Saul is the Editor of Southern Africa Report. He has taught at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique and will be teaching at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2000. Recently John Saul and longtime friend Colin Leys published "Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism," Monthly Review, July 1999.
Dr. Saul has written many books on the general political economy of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Tanzania and Mozambique, including John Saul and Steven Gelb, Crisis in South Africa: Class Defense, Class Revolution. New York: Zed/MR, 1986; John Saul and Colin Leys (ed.) Namibia's Liberation Struggle: A Two-Edged Sword. London: James Currey, 1995; and John Saul, Recolonization and Resistance in Southern Africa in the 1990s, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1993.
Dr. Michael Gismondi is Professor Sociology and Global Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at Athabasca University. He interviewed Dr. John Saul in Edmonton where Dr. Saul was speaking at the 1999 Africa Society Conference.
Aurora: Could you tell us about yourself. How did you become involved in educating people here in Canada about South Africa?
Saul: I grew up in Toronto and completed my first couple of degrees there. I did subsequent work at Princeton and London in the U.K. At Princeton I did a PhD dissertation with Africa as a focus. I then spent a year in England studying Swahili and preparing for a field work sojourn. I went to Tanzania in 1965 because it was one of the more interesting countries in Africa. Julius Nyerere was president, and there was some expectation that interesting things were going to happen.
It was even more interesting once I got there because shortly after I arrived we had the Arusha Declaration. There were many debates at the university and throughout the country about alternatives to the neo-colonial model, which was already so apparent elsewhere in Africa. My wife and I originally went for six months, and we ended up staying for seven years.
Tanzania was also interesting because Dar es Salaam since the early 1960s was the centre of the liberation movements that were running into difficulty realizing their nationalist and democratic aspirations. Because of the white minority regimes, the Portuguese colonialists were loath to give up colonial control. The Smith regime in Rhodesia was blocking transition there, and, of course, there was the apartheid system in both Namibia and South Africa.
While I was working in, and writing and thinking about, ujamaa in Tanzania I was also making contacts with liberation movements. I hooked up with FRELIMO, the liberation movement in Mozambique, and worked with them on some English language publications.
Before I left Tanzania in 1972, I was invited by the president, Samora Machel, to go to the liberated areas of northern Mozambique in Tete province. I went into the liberated areas, and I remember Samora Machel saying to me, “Knowledge of our struggles against the Portuguese is at this level.” And he pinched his fingers very close together. “We want you to help do something about that.” Well, of course, when I returned to Canada, that seemed almost like a directive. But, in any case, I probably would have been involved anyway.
Aurora: What was the level of awareness in Toronto at that time?
Saul: There were other people speaking about Africa in Toronto. Murray McGuiness, a United Church missionary in Angola who had been kicked out by the Portuguese, had come back to Toronto. He just died a couple of weeks ago. He and others were very important in starting with me what was called the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies (TCLPAC). After 1975, when Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea became independent in the wake of the Portuguese coup, we changed the name to TCLSAC, the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa.
Another chap from our committee and I were invited to represent Canadians at the independence celebration in Mozambique because the FRELIMO government said the Canadian government, through NATO, was actually on the wrong side. They wanted a people’s delegation instead, so I ended up sitting beside political dignitaries at the transition ceremonies in Mozambique. That was exciting.
Although the liberation of Southern Africa has been realized in political terms, we still continue our educational work through TCLSAC. Our primary task now is putting out a magazine, now in its fourteenth year, called Southern Africa Report, to keep alive a progressive perspective in Canada and elsewhere on what is happening in southern Africa.
Even though the formal structures of white minority rule have been overthrown in all the territories that I first became interested in back in the 1960s, the whole globalization process continues to be a framework from within which the people have to try and find their way forward. That isn’t easy to do. So I think monitoring the ongoing attempt by people in that region to transform their lives is appropriate.
This activity is not as trendy or sexy as was the anti-apartheid struggle. It was an important struggle. A lot of people were drawn to it. It was so grotesque in racial terms that a wide range of people could very quickly relate to it, and so they should have. That was good, but it is a little harder now when the structures that continue to oppress people operate somewhat more automatically through the vector of the marketplace. This work is not quite as visible, perhaps, but it is equally important.
Aurora: Could you characterize the “distinctiveness of globalization in Africa” as opposed to an abstract definition of that phenomenon?
Saul: The main way globalization hits Africa has to do with the nature of global capitalism. Capitalism from its inception many centuries ago was a global system. Africa and much of the rest of the world were drawn into the global capitalist system by the colonial project of western European countries. It’s a global system from the point of view of those on the receiving end, Africa perhaps being one of the most grotesque examples, because of the slave trade and other ways in which it was subordinated to the requirements of western capitalism as it became a global system.
It’s nothing new that the main engine of globalization is the capitalist system. On the other hand, certain qualitative aspects of that process have changed. Partly, it has to do with the logic of the economic system, and partly it has to do with the breakdown of the formal alternative that Soviet-style socialism represented.
What is new is that that there has been an intensification, beyond the nation-state, even the imperialist nation-state, of the ability of capital to operate without any hindrance on that global stage. A friend of mine, Colin Leys, has written on globalization and suggests that it’s really about getting away from the claims of the social into a global marketplace where people relate to each other as consumers. He says that the big change is now the real lack of any limitations upon the free movement of capital. He says that a decision has been made to allow for the free movement of capital across what once were national boundaries.
So, what we have now is a global marketplace where qualifications on the movement and activity of capital that national jurisdictions tended to impose are slowly but surely being eaten away. And that’s true in Canada as well. In Ontario it’s very visible. Look at what’s happening to so many of the social safety nets and to labour legislation that were intended to humanize capitalism, not overthrow it in a revolutionary manner, but just rub off the rough edges.
It’s the kind of thing the noted thinker, Karl Polanyi [1886-1964] talked about as the double movement of history. The market has a certain kind of logic, but people have fought to complement the market with social controls and social concerns. That seems to be disappearing as this particular notion of globalization–i.e., the free flow of capital across national boundaries without social questions being raised about it–has taken centre stage.
In Africa this whole process has been accelerated and most dramatically negative in its implications because the colonial legacy of Africa did not transform it all that fundamentally, even in capitalist terms. Africa retains very dependent underdeveloped economies, primarily developed by the colonialists to service the need of western countries, not to service the needs of their people. So what emerged at independence were economies that were weak and vulnerable in the global situation. If you throw those kinds of economies into this increasingly open competition without the capacity for local jurisdictions to put forward concerns of the local populations, then those countries are going to have even less capacity to compete on the global level.
Aurora: What about the African state itself? What of its contradictions?
Saul: African states have not been very prepossessing in the way they have conducted themselves, partly because of the weaknesses I’ve just mentioned, and partly because the first generation of nationalist leaders fastened on power for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of their people. And institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have said these African states are not really to be supported. Rather than supporting states that could actually advance popular interests, social concerns, and more humane considerations in the marketplace, the World Bank and the IMF say, “This just proves our point – states should go, the market should rule. Get the states out of the market.” Africa has been the most vulnerable to this kind of pressure from the particular mode of globalization that I’ve been talking about.
When African states found themselves in debt, partly because of internal problems and partly because of changing oil prices and rising interest rates in the West, the world economy said if you’re going to get money from us to put your house in order you’re going to have to conform to the logic of this neo-liberal global economy. In order for us to help you out of your current economic circumstance you have to scale down your state, get the state out of your markets, and conform even more to the notion of an open economy. In the long run, that’s just not a way that Africa will survive in this type of cut-throat global marketplace.
Aurora: You made an interesting observation in your paper “Liberal Democracy Versus Popular Democracy” that the ideology of democracy plays a role in legitimating all this. Could you distinguish between what you have called the “political science of democratization” and the “political economy of democratization.”
Saul:There are two levels or ways of thinking about political reality. One is to look at institutions and the interplay between interest groups in the political realm. Political science has been quite adept at doing that. Others from within political science programs have also tried to develop what they call a political economy approach, which is concerned with the underlying economic structures that position what happens in the political realm. This political economy approach emphasizes the way in which inequalities in the economic realm have implications for the way in which politics is carried out. It seems to me that you can’t think about political science without thinking about the underlying variables of the class structure of the society and the nature of the global economy. All these things affect and can narrow the arena for real political choice. My own hunch is that you have to bring the insights of political science and the insights of political economy together to make sense of things.
Now, what does that mean for democracy? Well, the currently fashionable discourse among international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank says alongside the adjustment of economies to be more open to the marketplace they also have to be “more democratic.” By democratic, they mean primarily multi-party system.
Some say that this is a step forward because it’s better to have these predatory African states in some way controlled from below by politically democratic activities and institutions. But what does it mean in terms of empowerment of the people who are at the very bottom of the system, that is, the vast mass of the African population who suffered from colonialism, then suffered from post-colonial regimes, and are now suffering from this globalized re-colonization?
Is this really an empowering process for them? This kind of democracy appears to be more competitive than it really is, because if you place those political institutions in the context of the underlying economic realities, the parameters of politics is defined by external economic forces, that is, the holders of the debt such as the IMF and the World Bank. The only people getting in on the action inside the countries are those who are getting some resources back from this entry into the world market. This is a very middle- class politics and a very limited one.
This kind of liberal democracy, which is cast in the political realm and tries to pretend there isn’t a realm of political economy that shapes these things, is very limited. Issa Shivji, the Tanzanian political thinker whose work I’ve drawn on, says we need to think about how to empower the large mass of the people to take much more active ownership of their own lives and life chances and to take control over the globalization process.
Aurora: You mention that Shivji calls for “popular democracy.” What does he mean?
Saul: Yes, he calls for popular democracy. Popular democracy might have some of the same institutions as liberal democracy, but the premise is to encourage people to mobilize themselves to make more demands on global and local economic systems.
The World Bank and IMF are all for democracy as long as it doesn’t go too far. When people start saying the system doesn’t work for them and they want something that serves their interests, these external donors get nervous. That’s a definition of politics they don’t want to hear. They want people to feel their choices are exhausted by the multi-parties that tend to represent middle-class and global interests, rather than ones that might put forward more radical claims on behalf of the people.
That’s where the distinction between liberal democracy and popular democracy is helpful. In Africa, we have a liberal democracy rather than what I call a popular democracy. In some ways the evidence is in: where certain structures of liberal democracy have begun to be established, not only are they taken over by the middle class, but some of the same old predatory politicians have figured out ways to use the system to reinforce their own strength within it.
Much more fundamental political transformation needs to take place in Africa, as elsewhere, to give people real choices rather than the pre-packaged choices they may have become accustomed to and, to some degree, “accept” because there is nothing else for them to choose. In another kind of politics they might become more demanding of humane outcomes and not accept the lowest common denominator that this kind of globalization process presents them with.
Aurora: Either Colin Lees or Shivji talked about how participation can be a kind of narcotic. I think it was questioning the World Bank’s notions of public participation.
Saul: That could be a complementary kind of participation. In the language of some, multi-party democracy equals “participation,” as if democracy is exhausted by this almost market-like choice of alternative political parties. Their language implies we must get development down to the ground so people can take control over it, but, again, their definitions are quite limited. They see participation as involving people in local projects, which is not a bad thing–it starts to give people some degree of empowerment and participation. But unless those local projects add up to a politics that begins to interrogate the larger structures that in the end determine how far any change at the local level can go, then that’s really not participation for a long- term empowerment of transformation of these systems.
The World Bank and its ilk are quite careful to delimit what local participation can be about–it’s about thinking through the implementation of programs. But if a program begins to realize it can’t really make advances at the local level beyond a very limited degree unless they begin to change fundamentally the nature of the national political and economical structures, or until they challenge the structures of global economic power, then it’s no longer participation. Then it’s anarchy or revolution.
Words take on different meanings depending how you relate them to other things. Any empowerment or participation that raises questions about the overall logic of capitalist-driven globalization is not what they have in mind, and it will not be supported. NGOs who do get involved in that kind of transformative politics, as distinct from the local politics of project implementation, soon find that they are not very welcome to the sponsors.
Aurora: I want to take you back a bit to the other side of this argument. I read the paper you are presenting tomorrow: “Globalization, Socialism and Political Science Fiction.” In that paper you used the phrase that political science today demonstrated “an uncritical acceptance of the giveness of global capitalist hegemony within African society.” Could we go there for a few minutes?
Saul: Well, I generalize to my peril, but in that paper I try to show the way in which some of the grand old men of American political science have re- emerged to put forward a very narrow position of what’s possible. They made their peace with global capitalism and tried to define African studies on the terrain that’s left over once they accepted that there’s no real alternative in the economic system.
However, if the global economic system doesn’t work for Africa, it may well be that there are still problems about what an alternative would look like. You either move on to discuss what kinds of politics might begin to throw up alternatives with more humane consequences in the long run, or you become pessimistic. The Polish-American Adam Prezorski in a very dour way says capitalism is irrational, socialism is unfeasible, and in the real world people starve, the conclusions we have reached are not encouraging ones. It’s kind of scary when you think of it in those terms. I do tend to think that capitalism is irrational. I know that socialism, or whatever we call it, has not been that successful in the “real world,” but the impulse to resist this lowest common denominator of the marketplace is one that Africans, as well as we, are going to have to rediscover.
Aurora: You have said that “democracy under socialism would be more meaningful.” I think you were counterpoising it with notion of thin democracy. Could you talk at little bit about that?
Saul: Yes. It comes back to some points we discussed earlier. If the economic system is taken as given, and if many of the most important decisions about our lives are made by the market, particularly the market under the hegemony of large concentrations of capital that increasingly dictate outcomes–in the financial sphere, in the productive sphere, in the services sphere, in the information sphere–then what’s left over for real political debate is limited. In Africa this is quite dramatic.
The IMF and the World Bank tell these countries what to do. Their situation within the marketplace dictates to them a whole range of policies including, for example, the running down of the state, privatization, cutting back of services, etc. What is an election really about if the marketplace, the large concentrations of capital, and a thin band of locals who are plugged into the global system have already predetermined the outcomes?
Democracy is thin if the most that people can do is choose parties, the difference among which is minimal indeed, partly because these parties reflect vested interests in their own societies, but also because at the moment there is not much for them to differ about. They may differ in the fine tuning on issues of production and the like, but on the crucial issues of development, long-term economic structure, and changing the quality of people’s lives in socioeconomic terms, it seems the results are being dictated to us. So we democratically interact around what’s left over.
On the other hand, if the marketplace doesn’t produce sufficiently humane or productive outcomes, as is the case in Africa, we need to figure out ways to do something about it. We need political organizations that emerge from the bottom up to offer real choices, rather than these phantom choices, but they better have a strong popular following and some institutional capacity to fight for space in the marketplace and with powerful western governments. This kind of democracy where people take control over their own lives has a lot more substance to it than merely going out and marking an X beside a party that is not really all that much different from the others on the page. That’s when democracy becomes popular. It becomes less thin. It is more substantive, energetic, meaningful, and real about what determines people’s lives, that is, these larger production processes. Presently that question is being monopolized and “settled” by the hegemony of this particular kind of globalization process.
Aurora: Could you tell us a bit about the thesis or the general drift of your talk tomorrow at the Africa conference?
Saul: I’m talking about South Africa. It’s a challenging topic because you want to be careful not to take away from the sense that something extremely important has been achieved there. This was, after all, the last remnant of institutionalized, legalized racism that has been overthrown. Ten years ago people didn’t think that apartheid was on its last legs, that it still had a long way to go. Yet, it has been transformed, largely by people struggling on the ground against it, together with a certain amount of international pressure and sanctions.
In 1994 there was an election, and Mandela became president. These were important achievements, but the underlying question is still not resolved in South Africa. I think there was a lot of hope that because of the nature of the liberation struggle– it was such a broad based popular movement–that once the African National Congress got into power it would be forced to raise more radical questions about the South African socioeconomic structure. By and large, that has not happened. The ANC, like so many other governments, has been forced into a neo-liberal frame driven by this particular definition of globalization.
And that’s problematic because whatever the political achievements–one person one vote, democratic outcomes, ANC and Mandela in power– South Africa still has a legacy of a racist history and apartheid, and of capitalist development or misdevelopment that has created about the most unequal country in the world in terms of the gap between rich and poor. To a large extent, that gap is still between blacks and whites, although some blacks have moved into the upper echelons.
The ANC argues that South Africa has no choice but to follow the globalization process, and slowly but surely it will become more competitive globally and will expand economically. Then it can redistribute to the poorest of the poor. The ANC has moved away from any notion that we should challenge the logic of globalization and figure out ways to empower people in their day-to-day activities in such a way as to go beyond mere liberal democracy where we choose the ANC instead of party X or Y and instead become a movement that transforms things more fundamentally.
Tomorrow, I am going to ask, “Is this an accurate picture? Is what we’ve seen in South Africa, unfortunately, closer to a false decolonization in the way that Frantz Fanon used to talk about it, than to a real empowerment of people, however crucial it was to get rid of apartheid and white minority rule?”
Some say that it’s only four or five years since independence, so it’s too early to tell. But still questions can be asked: Are things moving in a direction that are laying the groundwork for real transformation, or is South Africa getting locked more and more into this kind of globalization process? I tend to think the second is the stronger hypothesis, although it is certainly open for debate. If the evidence suggests the ANC is not moving forward on these fronts, why is that the case? It may partly tell us just how strong global capitalism and its definition of globalization are. Even the ANC, with a strong political project and widespread mass backing has not been able to break through the lid of this logic, or illogic, of capitalist-driven globalization.
Others say it’s a little more complicated than that. Some Africans in the ANC and beyond are getting a cut of the action. What we are seeing is a co-option of the leadership of the ANC and other rising black classes into the system, leaving the rest behind. The question arises, to what extent is there no other alternative? T.I.N.A., as they talk about it in South Africa, There Is No Alternative. Just make the best of it and try to be competitive.
So, that’s something I want to put on the table tomorrow. I sometimes play a kind of parlour game with some of my students, not in class, but outside class. If you had to weight the balance between the structures that impose a narrow range of solutions on the ANC, and the ANC’s own propensities to choose the less rather than the more aggressive options, what percentage would you give it? Is it 75 per cent globalization, 25 per cent failure of the ANC? It’s a game, rather than a science. Some say, “The ANC has sold out. It should be 25 per cent global, 75 per cent ANC.” Others say the global situation is such that any country, let alone South Africa, would have trouble coming up with an alternative. It should be 75 per cent globalization and only 25 per cent ANC failures.
This will all come to a head maybe not in this election, but perhaps in the next. People like Thabo Mbeke, who’s replacing Mandela, are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They have chosen to propitiate multinational corporations and the logic of globalization, but they’ve got a vast mass of the population who haven’t seen any real return, other than the ballot, or the changes that are supposed to have taken place. They still see whites as fundamentally privileged in South Africa, with some blacks joining them. Their own situation is not transformed.
In the short run this will not affect the ANC’s electoral chances. I intend to be there in May to see this for myself. I’m going to teach in South Africa for six months next year, so I want to get closer to the ground on some of these questions. In the short run the ANC probably won’t have any trouble winning the election, but there may be fewer people voting. One of the problems is getting people to think it’s important enough to vote because they are not sure that this liberal democratic system and the role the ANC is playing within it actually serves their interests or empowers them very much.
In nearby Mozambique, where they introduced liberal democracy in the last local election, only 15 per cent of the population bothered to vote. The Prime Minister said that’s because everybody was so satisfied. But, of course, it’s not. It’s because people have abandoned this political system for being unable to speak to their real needs. That’s liberal democratization: formal competition between political parties, but no real substance of empowerment from the base in terms of what might eventually be necessary to allow people to transform their lives.
© Copyright 1999 AURORA
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(1999). Aurora interview with John Saul: February 26, 1999. Aurora: