Sandra Bloodworth

How workers brought down apartheid in South Africa

An explosive youth rebellion organised under the slogans #RejectFinanceBill and “leaderless, partyless and tribeless” has forced Kenyan President William Ruto to scrap a planned finance bill that would have introduced tax increases on many basic services and consumer goods. Red Flag recently spoke with Ezra, a central committee member of the Revolutionary Socialist League in Kenya, to understand how one of the most politically stable countries in Africa ignited so spectacularly.
Could you explain the background to these protests? What has made young people in Kenya so angry? 
Every year a budget is announced in preparation for the new financial year, which begins in July. This year the finance bill was released to the public a month ago, and its content really angered people. Taxes were to be raised across the board, including on basic commodities like bread and rent. People with motor vehicles were to pay taxes; very ridiculous things were to be increased. The cost of education was to be increased, after increasing last year. They were placing taxes on medical treatments for some diseases like cancer. This is just to mention a few. Basically, life was set to become very expensive for the common folk. That’s why everyone came out to the streets to protest.
However, this bill was not the cause of the protest, but the trigger. The cause really is what the regime has been doing since it came to power in 2022. There have been widespread cases of corruption and misappropriation of funds. For example, earlier this year fake fertilisers were distributed to farmers by the government. They were given basically sand, yet the agricultural minister escaped justice. The president is telling people to tighten their belts, yet they live opulent lives with the latest cars, wearing million-dollar watches and $10,000 belts. It is ridiculous for them to tell poor people that life is going to be more expensive in order to service debt. The finance bill aimed to raise 345 billion Kenyan shillings, which is about US$2.5 billion, while every year Kenya loses around US$10 billion to corruption. Politicians benefit from the corruption, and then make ordinary people pay the burden.
So last Tuesday [18 June] was the first of these protests, then this Tuesday was much larger. We have 47 counties in Kenya—35 of the 47 counties participated in the protest, truly one of a kind. So the government panicked. They deployed the military, which the courts declined to green-light, but to our surprise this morning [27 June] the military is all over the streets. 
The military have not brutalised us; that has been the police. The military were escorting people without doing anything. Just right now, as I’ve been speaking to you, we’ve had deaths today in Rongai. Estimates are several people have been killed, and the media are trying to hide it, just like they did on Tuesday evening with the massacre in Githurai. After the demonstration, they sent a contingent of police into the city of Githurai. While it is unofficial, potentially hundreds of people were murdered, which has been suppressed in the media. 
Despite this brutality, today the movement marched to the statehouse in Nairobi. Other towns still had protests, like Mombasa, Migori and Kericho. They are smaller, though, than Tuesday because of the violent repression. 
Most of the discussion on social media from participants describes the movement as leaderless. Is this the case? 
Largely it’s true that the movement is leaderless, partyless and tribeless. But mainly because of how it has been organised through social media agitation, where people have come up to voice their concerns. Random people started Twitter spaces, and hundreds of thousands of people joined to listen to the grievances. Yesterday there was a Twitter space that hosted around 140,000 people to talk about the events of the following day. 
Are the protests all organised on social media?
I think it started on social media, Twitter to be specific, because in Kenya, it’s just the urban areas mainly where people can access the internet. But it’s spread out to the masses every day now. It’s all over the news, it is the only thing being talked about. Now it has spread out even to the people who do not have internet. There are towns, small towns far, far away from the capital that have never had demonstrations. And when the masses hear that a large group of people are in town, they join. On Tuesday, students were joining from many campuses and polytechnics. People were even closing their businesses, people were leaving their jobs and joining in the streets. We had over a million people in the city. That is why the police were overwhelmed and some people managed to breach the parliament buildings. 
Those scenes were incredible to witness. People online were comparing them to the protests in Sri Lanka two years ago that brought down the Rajapaksa government. The protests have forced Ruto to decline signing the bill, so what has been going on since that announcement? 
What people need to know about our current president is that he tends to lie a lot. Ruto’s press conference on Tuesday evening was very threatening. He called the protests an act of treason. However, he appeared far kinder when announcing the withdrawal of the bill, because he was really addressing the world, not us. Despite that, the following day he again deployed the military on the streets. That was the real Ruto. 
An issue now is that Ruto does not have the power to withdraw the bill; only the mover of the bill can. If a bill is refused by the president, but not withdrawn, then it automatically passes in fourteen days—and the next date for MPs sitting is 21 July, far longer than the fourteen days. That is why people continue to take to the streets. So, I think not signing the bill was to calm people down and to get them off the street. But in two weeks, whether he signs it or not, the bill will become law. So, there are plenty of tricks being played by Ruto. That’s why people are still saying that we need to agitate. Ruto has done a lot worse, so he needs to go. The focus has gone beyond the finance bill to anger at the general incompetence of the government. 
Just reading through social media posts from the popular influencers in the movement, it seems the question of what to do next is causing some debate. What are people arguing about where to go from here and how to ensure the bill does not get pushed through? 
After the press conference yesterday, differences started coming out. The people who have been seen to be on the front line, the big Twitter influencers crowdfunding for injured victims, some of them yesterday were telling people now that we’ve won this, let’s just go home. Others argued this needs to continue. The majority of people are with the guys who are for pushing this further. 
So, there is now debate over whether these people have been paid by the government to end the protests. This relates to how other protest movements in Kenya have played out.
Previously, smaller protests led by the opposition leader and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, like last year’s finance bill protests, did not bear fruit because they had a leader. All the government had to do was bring him in and have a conversation with him, bribe him, so that the protests die, and the movement dies. This year, the slogan “partyless, leaderless, tribeless” has caused major issues for them. That is why they are abducting people trying to see if they are leaders. They are trying to call people to see if you are the leader. That is their biggest headache. Who is the leader of this? So that they can bring him into the fold to pacify the other people. But anyone who’s been seen to be around them is immediately banished from the movement. 
I think this is a good tactic not to have leaders emerging for now, because the government is actively looking for leaders. However, as this struggle continues, I think people will start imagining and considering politics. I think this is how organisations will be able to intervene, actively organise and give an ideological aspect to it. 
What role has the Revolutionary Socialist League been able to play? 
As the RSL, we go there with a purpose, because we must be in solidarity with the masses—we fully agree with what they say. So we go to the streets, we try to organise our people. When joining in, we do not carry banners as people just go without anything, to move around. But we also go as a group. Every member of our organisation was there. That is why the authorities thought some of us maybe might be leaders. They’ve taken then leaders of many organisations, that’s why we’ve received threats. You will get random calls asking about where you get your funding from. They knock on your door when you are home. 
Joining the protests is an opportunity to get our message out there because things like this rarely happen. When people take to the streets our members are there arguing that these issues are political. Even when we get a chance to speak in those online platforms and spaces, we talk about the importance of giving it a political and ideological angle. Since the withdrawal of the finance bill, the movement has focused on Ruto Must Go. We have had interest from some people. We hope we will recruit to our group; tens, or maybe hundreds if we are lucky. 
To take a step back for those who are unfamiliar with the politics and history of Kenya, how significant is this youth rebellion?
I think this is very significant. This is one of the most significant things that has happened since independence in 1963, because the stumbling block to unity of the young people in Kenya has been tribalism. People have been organising according to tribal lines. I think that barrier is now broken because youth from all walks of life and every part of the country are united against this regime. There’s a saying that if Ruto leaves, his biggest achievement is that he will have united the youth of Kenya against him, which is a very significant thing. 
And from now on, the politics of the country will be issue based and not tribal based, which will make it easier for organisations like ours to penetrate the people because they’ll be looking for ideas rather than where you come from. This is a very significant moment for us. Whether we win or lose, the politics of the country will change from now on. Of course, there will be small groups of people who will remain with their tribal kingdom, but it will die down in the next election. It will be largely issue-based politics rather than tribal-based politics. 
That sounds like an enormous political shift. Is there anything else you think observers should know that will help us better understand the rebellion? 
Most things are out there in the social media, but there are some things that are being suppressed, like the killings I mentioned earlier. Also, that the struggle will continue, this will not end here. So, stay tuned, because everything is changing. For example, even with the articles that we are writing, we are having to write every day to keep people updated with what’s going on as it changes so quickly. 
I want to finish by saying that this is a very significant moment for us Kenyans because people are struggling in solidarity with each other and trying to overturn a very corrupt and inept regime. Whether we win or lose, this has made a seismic shift in politics across Kenya.

Matt Laidlaw

Youth rebellion scores victory: interview with Kenyan activist

Thirty years after taking office in South Africa’s first democratic election, the African National Congress (ANC) has suffered a dramatic loss in support, registering a vote of just 40 percent at the 29 May national poll, down from 57 percent in 2019. 
The ANC’s electoral fortunes have been in decline since their peak in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the party notched up 65-70 percent of the vote, but this result marks a sharp acceleration in its declining popularity. 
The big drop in the ANC vote marks an end to its political hegemony among those it once led. This is most obvious in the townships where the ANC regularly recorded a vote of 90 percent or more. In Soweto and Tembisa, outside Johannesburg, and Khayelitsha on the dusty and impoverished Cape Flats, the party’s share of the vote dropped to 50 percent. In Umlazi, a township of 400,000 on the outskirts of Durban, the ANC vote plummeted to just 13 percent.
The falling vote share does not fully capture the drubbing, since millions of registered voters stayed away from the polling booths, and millions more, particularly young South Africans disillusioned with what was on offer, did not register to vote. Just 6.5 million out of an eligible voting age population of 42 million voted for the ANC at this election, down from 10 million in 2019, despite the population having grown by 3 million.
The main explanation for the ANC’s dwindling support over the past two decades is its failure to substantially confront the injustices of apartheid, the system of white supremacy that prevailed for most of the twentieth century. 
Living standards for most of the oppressed Black and Coloured population (“Coloured” in South Africa refers to multiracial ethnic communities) rose modestly in the first decade or two after the fall of apartheid, the new government funding programs to deliver water and electricity to poor communities. But living standards are now going backwards. The mass of Black South Africans live in substandard housing with poor sanitation and have inadequate health care, transportation and schools. 
Unemployment runs well over 30 percent, and above 50 percent for young South Africans. Even when the unemployed find work, wages are low. The government has introduced meagre grants, but these are equivalent to just half the income needed to meet the minimal poverty line, and millions of people do not get the grant each month. For tens of millions of Blacks and Coloureds, life has become a desperate struggle for survival.
Not all Black South Africans have suffered the same fate. Black politicians now dominate legislatures at every level except in the Western Cape. Black professors lead the country’s top universities. The chief justice is Black, as are the chiefs of the defence forces. Big business remains white dominated, but thousands of Black figures—including President Cyril Ramaphosa, a one-time trade union leader, later a millionaire mining executive—have become stupendously rich. Such figures use their political connections to win government contracts to enrich themselves, something the government prettifies as “Black economic empowerment”. 
Beneath this growing layer, a large Black professional middle class has also emerged and moved into previously all-white suburbs in the big cities. Inequality in South Africa is among the highest in the world: the top 0.1 percent of the population, 35,000 individuals, own one-third of the country’s wealth.
Corruption was a feature of the apartheid regime but has, if anything, become even more endemic today. ANC politicians at the national and provincial levels have looted the public purse. Jacob Zuma, president from 2009 to 2018, became particularly notorious for his corrupt relationships with the wealthy Gupta family, but he was only the most high-profile case. Grand corruption, in the form of a liberal democracy systematically favouring capitalist interests, has been a feature of all ANC governments.
The grinding poverty experienced by most Black South Africans has fuelled decades of protest. Shack dwellers have fought forced evictions. Township residents have demonstrated against electricity and water cut-offs. University students have occupied their campuses to oppose increased fees. Public sector workers regularly go on strike. The response of the ANC has often been brutal. Dozens of protesters have been killed, most notoriously at the Marikana platinum mine, where 34 striking miners were murdered by police in 2012. For many who still held out hope that the ANC would deliver for the working class and poor communities, the Marikana massacre ended that chapter and confirmed that the ANC was no friend of the common people.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) have given the ANC government left cover. This “liberation alliance” led the struggle to bring down apartheid in the 1980s and early 1990s. But because the alliance partners were committed to a capitalist outcome, they sabotaged the potential for this struggle to go forward to socialism, the vision for a future for South Africa that animated millions of participants.
The 1994 “settlement”, which secured the continued domination of the country’s big business houses while giving state structures a new coat of paint, is responsible for the inequality and oppression experienced by much of the Black population today. SACP and COSATU leaders sometimes huff and puff about attacks on workers and the poor, but for the most part, they apologise for the government. They have been rewarded for their services by senior appointments in government and the public service. In the meantime, their organisations have been hollowed out.
In the absence of any fighting lead from these organisations, the main beneficiaries of the ANC’s loss of support at this election have been the Economic Freedom Fighters and the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, which won 9.5 percent and 14.6 percent of the vote respectively. 
The EFF, led by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, was formed in 2013 in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre and quickly won a following among young Black voters who had no loyalty to the ANC’s elders and believed the government was offering them nothing. The MK Party, founded just last December, pitched itself as a voice for the Zulu population and only narrowly fell short of winning a majority of votes in KwaZulu Natal, the country’s second-largest province.
Neither offers any solution to the pain and suffering of the mass of the working class. The EFF describes itself as socialist, but its main objective is to expand the number of Black capitalists running private corporations and state enterprises. The MK Party is a right-wing populist organisation encouraging tribal chauvinism, more powers for traditional chiefs and attacks on immigrants from South Asia and elsewhere in Africa. It is little more than a vehicle for former President Jacob Zuma to attempt to return to power on the back of a reactionary program. 
Even though the two parties compete for the votes of Black Africans frustrated with the ANC, they have much in common. The EFF’s Malema regards MK as “relatives” of the EFF and described its big vote at this election as “commendable”.
The strong vote for the MK indicates the dangers facing the South African working class in a situation where there is no large left-wing political alternative prepared to fight for working-class interests. In recent years, there have been horrific incidents of Black South African mobs assaulting African and South Asian immigrants on the streets, in their homes and at their businesses to drive them out of the communities. 
Such reactionary sentiments are also reflected in this election in the 16 percent vote recorded by the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu Natal, on top of the MK’s 46 percent, and the 18 percent vote chalked up by the far-right Patriotic Alliance in voting districts dominated by Coloured voters. The ANC’s deportation of immigrants creates the context for this racist groundswell. Social dysfunction and the breakdown of economic life suggest that racist hatred will only get worse unless it is confronted head on.
The dawn of democracy in 1994 gave hope to millions of South Africans that the misery of the apartheid years would pass. Thirty years on, the rotten deal engineered by the ANC and its allies at the time has ensured that those hopes are now extinguished. The situation is bleak and set to get worse under the current line-up of political forces. The task today is the same as in the 1980s: to fight those who have betrayed the working class and poor and build a revolutionary socialist alternative.

Tom Bramble

ANC pays the price for decades of pro-capitalist rule

The system of South African apartheid—the political and economic rule of a small minority of white people over the Black majority—was one of the most heinous ever to have existed. 
Black people were stripped of national citizenship, instead designated as citizens of artificial “Bantustans” (or “homelands”). They were robbed of the right to vote and form trade unions, and their political organisations, like the African National Congress (ANC), were banned. They were allowed to reside or work in “white” areas (most of the country) only with a government pass. If found without a pass, they were arrested, beaten and deported back to the Bantustans. These laws were enforced by a brutal police force and military, which were twice given extraordinary powers in government-decreed states of emergency.
This brutal system, which began in 1948, was eventually demolished in the early 1990s. It was brought down by a mass working-class movement, not simply top-level negotiations by political leaders, as is often taught. The struggle against apartheid holds important lessons for political movements today. Here are a few of them.
<h4>Lesson #1: Apartheid was a product of capitalism</h4>
Most histories paint apartheid as a peculiar aberration. Yet, elements of it prevail today in Palestine, and racism in various forms plagues all capitalist countries. Apartheid in South Africa was an extension of this structural racism, designed to meet the particularly brutal needs of South African capitalism. 
The profits of the white capitalist class were made off the backs of highly exploited Black workers. For a long time, South Africa’s most valuable export was gold, which Black miners dug out of the ground in gruelling conditions and for minuscule wages. In the 1940s, workers fought back and challenged the racist laws that prevented them from residing in certain areas or accessing skilled jobs.
The response of the ruling class was to double down on the repression of Black workers. By controlling the mobility of the entire Black population through the pass system, they could prevent workers from organising against their horrific conditions, as well as direct the unemployed into industries that needed a greater supply of labour. The need to preserve the rule of a small minority, along with the logic of profit accumulation, combined to create the racist apartheid system. 
Although racism is built into capitalism everywhere, the even more brutal and codified system of apartheid was necessary because the white South African capitalist class found themselves in an extreme minority, not only economically but also racially. As Jan Lombard, one of the chief ideologues of apartheid, put it: “If an unqualified one-man, one-vote election was held today in the Republic, a non-white leader with a communistic programme would probably attain an overall majority on a pledge to confiscate and redistribute the property of the privileged classes”.
<h4>Lesson #2: Apartheid was ended through mass working-class struggle, not peaceful negotiations</h4>
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all are its own gravediggers”, wrote Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, referring to the working class. You could say the very same about apartheid. By so openly and brutally repressing the majority of South Africans, apartheid laid the basis for its eventual overthrow.
From 1973 onwards, Black workers began to organise. That year, a great strike wave broke out in the southern port city of Durban, which laid the basis for new independent (and illegal) unions. Over the next two decades, these would swell to become one of the biggest and most militant workers’ movements in the world.
School students and young people joined the struggle, often playing a particularly heroic role. The students of Soweto, a million-strong Black township outside Johannesburg, who in 1976 led a mass school walkout of 20,000 students, deserve special mention. Their decision to riot after police fired live rounds into their protest—killing 23 of them—sparked a nationwide rebellion that took months to put down. School boycotts and youth uprisings in the Black townships that began in the 1980s made sections of South Africa simply ungovernable.
This militancy and radicalism infected the workers’ movement, which by the early 1980s had exploded in size; by 1985, the trade unions had 800,000 members. In November 1985, students and workers in the Transvaal, the country’s mining and industrial heartland centred on Johannesburg, organised a stay-away (meaning everyone stayed at home). An estimated 300,000-800,000 people answered the call.
Two sections of the working class were particularly important: the mineworkers and metalworkers. In 1987, metalworkers in the Mercedes auto factory in East London won a gruelling nine-week strike. Three years later, the firm’s boss complained, “We have had a factory with worker control since 1987”. He detailed in an interview with the South African Labor Bulletin: “Supervisors used to clock in and then lock themselves in their offices for the whole day. They didn’t dare go out on the assembly lines”. When ANC leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, workers fought for the right to make him a car. The car was completed, to the shock of management, with only a fraction of the usual faults.
By 1987, South Africa was on the brink of revolution. The capitalists were terrified and vacillated between offering concessions (but absolutely not the right to vote) and heightening repression.
A mass working-class and popular movement made the legal system of apartheid untenable. South African rulers were terrified that they might lose not just political power, but their economic power also. The recognition of this by the last white prime minister, F.W. de Klerk, was the “pragmatism” for which Western liberals lauded him when he died. Even when negotiations with the ANC began, the Nationalist Party government refused to concede the basic democratic right of “one person, one vote”. It took yet more political general strikes by workers to drag the government kicking and screaming into submission.
We’re taught that it is “great men” who make history. But it was neither apartheid’s last rulers, nor even just the anti-apartheid leaders like Mandela, to whom we owe a debt. It was ordinary people, waging a relentless struggle, who brought down apartheid. This has been the case for nearly every progressive change—whether it is universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, trade union rights, decolonisation or anti-racism.
<h4>Lesson #3: The movement inspired solidarity across the world.</h4>
When white troops fired on Black protesters in Sharpeville in 1960 and when police killed 12-year-old Hector Pietersen during the Soweto uprising, the brutality of apartheid was exposed to millions across the world. Coinciding with the political radicalisation of the 1960s and ’70s, these events sparked an international solidarity campaign that highlighted Western complicity with South African apartheid. 
In many countries, this was organised by the trade union movement, student radicals and Black activists. Here in Australia, opponents of apartheid organised a boycott of the white South African rugby team, the Springboks, when they toured Australia in 1971. The white rugby players soon found themselves flown around by the military and without a hotel to stay in, as the hotel, liquor and transport unions refused to assist the tour. Two leading members of the Builders Labourers Federation were arrested for attempting to saw down the goal posts at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
In 1986, the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group set up a permanent picket of the South African high commission building in London’s Trafalgar Square. The picket lasted for four years, until Mandela’s release in 1990.
The campaigns of global solidarity may have played only a small part in the struggle against apartheid, but they were important steps in building anti-racist and radical politics in their own countries and gave heart to those fighting in South Africa itself: they understood that they had supporters around the world. 
<h4>Lesson #4: Ending legal apartheid wasn’t enough</h4>
Nelson Mandela was declared the first Black president of South Africa on 10 May 1994, after the first election in which Black people had the right to vote. The ANC won 62 percent of the vote. This was rightly regarded as a momentous event in the fight against injustice.
However, ending the legal framework of apartheid could only be a first step. Apartheid had massively impoverished Black South Africans. In 1990, 42 percent of the population lived in poverty, Black unemployment was 37 percent, and only one in five Black households had running water. The anti-apartheid movement had always fought, not just for legal equality, but for real economic and social equality.
The platform the ANC was elected on appeared to recognise the need for drastic change. It promised a massive investment in housing and welfare. But the ANC was hamstrung by its own decision not to challenge the wealth and economic power of the white elite. Long before being elected, ANC leaders met with representatives of South African capitalism, such as Anglo-American, the multinational mining corporation. Mandela and other ANC leaders publicly assured the capitalists that they were not socialists and would not nationalise corporations. Once in power, they delivered on these promises. Neither the first ANC government nor successive governments since have tried to improve substantially the lives of most Black South Africans. 
When platinum miners at the Marikana mine went on strike in 2014, the ANC government sent in police to break it up. They massacred 34 workers—the greatest single use of lethal force by the state since Soweto in 1976. Cyril Ramaphosa, former head of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s, had by then become one of the board directors of the mining company that workers were striking against. He is now the country’s president. 
Capitalism everywhere relies on and perpetuates racism, inequality and misery. Winning real equality would have meant seizing and redistributing the wealth of the mining and industrial bosses—wealth generated by Black workers themselves.
This was possible in South Africa. Millions of workers were organised into trade unions by the late 1980s, and a significant minority were not only willing to struggle for the end of apartheid, but were inspired by a specifically socialist vision. However, this was counterposed to the vision of the ANC and the Communist Party, who sought to limit the struggle to narrowly ending apartheid. These former radicals then went on to establish themselves as the next ruling elite. 
Meanwhile, about two-thirds of Black South Africans are languishing in poverty, according to the South African Human Rights Commission. The World Inequality Lab reported in 2021 that the richest 1 percent have likely increased their share of wealth since the end of apartheid.
The millions of Black workers and students who fought with such heroism and bravery should be celebrated by all those who despise injustice. But to do away with systems of oppression entirely, an even greater struggle against capitalism is required.

Deaglan Godwin

Lessons from the South African anti-apartheid movement

It was only in July 2008, four years after Nelson Mandela announced that he was retiring from public life and fourteen years after he had been elected president of South Africa, that US President George W. Bush signed a bill to remove Mandela’s organisation, the African National Congress, from the US terrorism watch list. 
Mandela being on that list in the first place is a reminder that the US and numerous other governments were on the side of the apartheid regime for decades. They were prepared to defend any atrocity when it suited them.
It is worth remembering this as governments around the world line up to defend Israel using the language of “historical memory”, “universal values” and “decency”.
Every government that today supports Israeli apartheid, is now (and supposedly always has been) against South African apartheid. But when the question was posed at the time, many were, like today, on the wrong side of history. Yet you’d never know it from what they say these days.
Indeed, the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013 led to an outpouring of self-congratulatory revisionism.
On leaving Australia to attend the memorial service, Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that both sides of Australian politics had campaigned for an end to apartheid. A Toronto Star headline claimed: “Canada helped lead international fight against Apartheid”. But Canadian and Australian governments had done nothing of the kind.
As late as the 1980s, the decade when the international campaign to free Mandela and end apartheid reached its peak and the struggle by the Black South African working class intensified, conservative leaders around the world rallied to support the South African regime—just as they had done for decades.
Following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, decolonising African and Asian countries moved to have South Africa excluded from the Commonwealth. Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, rejected such moves, refusing to condemn apartheid. 
Nelson Mandela’s sentencing to life imprisonment in 1964 left Western powers totally indifferent. In fact, after a voluntary arms embargo was agreed by the UN in 1963 (and widely ignored), the French government increased its trade with South Africa, including becoming the leading supplier of arms to the regime. Within a decade, France was a major trading partner with South Africa, second only to Britain.
The imperialist powers’ support for apartheid South Africa was at least partly motivated by the chance to profit from the supply of super-exploited Black labour that apartheid ensured, and to make money from the arms trade. 
Added to this were the requirements of inter-imperialist competition (in this period, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union), which is always bound to trump humanitarian concerns. In 1969, the commandant general of the South African Defence Force (SADF) summed up this reason succinctly: 
“In the entire ocean expanse from Australia to South America, South Africa is the only fixed point offering modern naval bases, harbours and airfield facilities, a modern developed industry and stable government.” 
And should the West need military help in keeping Russian influence out of Africa, the SADF would provide it.
The arms prohibition that the UN declared mandatory in 1977 after the total failure of the 1963 voluntary embargo simply meant that South Africa developed its own technology, manufactured its own weapons and looked for new military supplies. 
Apartheid South Africa also found a new strategic partner. Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But those links were broken by its wars in 1967 and 1973.
In 1976, Israel invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster—a Nazi sympathiser who had been interned during World War Two—for a state visit. Vorster’s trip laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a force in the international arms trade. 
Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, explained how this worked: “At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating”.
It was only in the late 1980s that the United States, the United Kingdom, and 23 other states passed laws placing various trade sanctions on South Africa. Not because they’d had a moral epiphany. Their victory in the Cold War meant that the release of Mandela and a negotiated settlement involving the African National Congress were now their preferred method to generate stability for future profitable investment in South Africa.
Now that the issue has been settled by history—apartheid having been smashed by the irrepressible organising and mass movement of Black South Africans—the Western establishment clings to the anti-apartheid legacy as a way to make themselves look historically progressive.
This is not the only example of a historical reversal to claim contemporary anti-racist credentials. As Louise O’Shea wrote in <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/when-the-australian-ruling-class-embraced-fascism/">a 2017 Marxist Left Review article</a>: 
“Enthusiasm about Mussolini or the Third Reich is rightly regarded as shameful today, but it was common currency within Australian conservative circles of the 1920s and 1930s. Repression and intimidation of the union movement and the left, a willingness to dispense with democracy in favour of dictatorship and rampant authoritarianism—all qualities the Australian far right admired about European fascism—were widely considered at the time to be both desirable and applicable here.”
The Brisbane Courier wrote in 1923 of Mussolini’s ascension: “every barrier against Communism—and the Fascisti have proved a strong one—is a bulwark of civilisation”. In 1923, the premier of Victoria, Harry Lawson, had a private audience with Mussolini in which he expressed his “keen sympathy with the fascist movement”.
In Britain, Hitler was applauded, like Mussolini, for restoring order and national pride, bringing economic revival and, not least, for suppressing the left and the workers’ movement. Once war began, these embarrassments were buried as if they had never happened, as the “fight for democracy” became the justification for another inter-imperialist slaughter.
Every respectable politician and establishment figure now touts their credentialed anti-Nazism and purported admiration for Mandela. But you don’t get to be on the right side of history when the questions have already been decided.
Today, Israel is the oppressor state. It is <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-happening-palestine-genocide">carrying out a genocide</a> and <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/">practises apartheid</a>. This is history’s litmus test—not past horrors on which everyone can now comfortably agree.

Diane Fieldes

You don’t get to be ‘on the right side of history’ on questions history has already decided

“Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger.” It sounds like Victorian-era Britain, but the scene is a cobalt mining operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reported in the New Yorker two years ago. This is a violent reminder that, despite decades of political independence, Africa once again finds itself the target of a big-power scramble for its wealth.
The continent possesses a vast supply of resources: 30 percent of the world’s mineral supplies and roughly 10 percent of its gas and oil. That 320 embassies were built between 2010 and 2016 is an indication of the new scramble for what Belgian King Leopold II in the nineteenth century described as “a slice of this magnificent African cake”. 
Yet this time the Europeans aren’t at the forefront—China is now the preeminent foreign economic power on the continent, responsible for almost a third of all infrastructure projects. Between 2000 and 2019, China invested US$153 billion in large-scale port, railway, dam, airport and even light manufacturing projects. 
The Chinese government has three main aims. The first is to secure resources. The second is to displace Western powers as part of its broader project to undermine US dominance in global trade. The third is the desire to build a network of political allies.
One of the largest projects was the $4.5 billion Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, to encourage more efficient trade with the countries of the eastern peninsula known as the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia has received more Chinese financing than any African state other than Angola. Investments have included the new African Union headquarters, the light-rail system in the capital Addis Ababa, a swathe of industrial parks attracting Chinese textile companies and manufacturers, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
The Port of Doraleh, in neighbouring Djibouti, hosts China’s only international military base. Author Lee Wengraf argues in her book Extracting Profit that the naval base is more about securing assets in Ethiopia than an attempt to rival the US military presence in the region. The port is key to accessing East African markets and maintaining shipping lanes through to the Suez Canal.
In response to the increased Chinese presence, the US has denounced Beijing for preying on impoverished countries and has increased diplomatic efforts across the continent. At the end of last year, President Joe Biden hosted the US-Africa Leaders’ Summit, promising US$55 billion in development assistance and talked about bringing the African Union into the G20. Vice President Kamala Harris is the latest high-ranking official to visit African leaders. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and First Lady Jill Biden have also visited.
The previous Democratic administration of Barack Obama had been positive towards China’s move into Africa. “I want everyone playing in Africa. The more the merrier ... A lot of people are pleased that China is involved in Africa”, the former president said in 2013. But Biden has departed from Obama’s approach. This reorientation is part of a broader US shift to containing China across the world. 
Western commentary now repeats US claims of Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy”. Treasury Secretary Yellen, during her recent trip, called China a “barrier” to debt restructuring on the continent. The implication is that China is playing a nefarious role, much like the colonial powers of old, while the US and its Western allies have more benign, or even generous, intentions. They can spare us the sanctimony. If China is trapping nations through debt, it certainly would have learned how to do so from the Western playbook.
While Africa’s economic underdevelopment can be attributed to European colonialism, in the post-colonial period the United States, with the help of its European allies, ensured that most African states remained economically backward and dependent on foreign aid. Following waves of national revolutions in Africa, post-colonial governments inherited structurally weak economies, and relied on state-led development. For a period, the continent’s economies grew in line with much of the rest of the world.
The US, concerned about the influence of the Soviet Union and access to key commodities, undermined and helped to overthrow governments, such as those of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo because they were deemed unaccommodating to US interests. Washington then ensured that pro-Western autocrats remained in power for decades to come. 
The US also mobilised its enormous economic power, through financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, to dominate the continent. As the world economy went into crisis in the 1970s, African states turned to Western financiers for money. Wengraf argues that these institutions used this as an opportunity to “transform economies of the Global South into ones based on ‘export-led’ strategies—those set up to best serve the market needs of global capital. 
To secure loans, African states “were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labor market laws, and privatization”, Marxist economist David Harvey noted in his 2005 book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. “Thus was ‘structural adjustment’ invented.” 
The structural adjustments were catastrophic. Debts increased along with poverty and maternal mortality rates at the same time as the IMF was pushing for cuts to social spending on healthcare and education. In 1970, 48 percent of sub-Saharan Africans lived on one dollar a day; by 1995 this had increased to 60 percent. The World Bank estimates that by 2030, 90 percent of the world’s poor will be African. That’s a Western legacy, not a Chinese one.
For those acquainted with the results of Western intervention in the Global South, China’s activities might initially seem to be cause for less concern, or even be welcomed. For example, Fred M’membe, presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of Zambia, argues in the Zambian Monthly Socialist: “This Chinese new approach to modernisation offers us a chance to truly free ourselves from centuries of exploitation, domination and humiliation”. 
China’s approach to debt does appear to be more flexible. Campaign body Debt Justice reports that China has been the largest suspender of debt repayments in recent years. China is also lauded for accepting futures on key exports as payments for current infrastructure projects, an approach that appears to benefit cash-strapped countries such as Angola and Ghana. Yet the payments still have to be made, resulting in revenue declines for Angola and Ghana and forcing them to implement austerity to gain debt restructuring. Additionally, China has not suspended debts that incur interest, only zero-interest loans.
Take for example the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway network, a project to connect Kenya to Tanzania via Uganda. Billions had been invested, but the Chinese government ultimately pulled out, leaving the project half constructed and Kenya in serious debt. Or take Ethiopia. Weiwei Chen, a researcher at the University of London, argues, in a recent piece for the Conversation, that China’s manufacturing investment in the country was motivated by the “low water, electricity and wage costs, a large and young labour force and favourable access to the US and EU markets”. 
The sheer scale of the infrastructure projects is one thing that seems to make China different. It is giving some people hope that the investments will finally provide the boost Africa needs to become more economically self-sufficient; to escape the immiseration of centuries of ruthless capitalist exploitation. 
But strategically built infrastructure to support Chinese trade and resource control will not solve Africa’s woes. As an example, the World Bank estimates US$100 billion is needed just to ensure universal internet access across the continent. At the end of the day, the Chinese government is in Africa to produce profits, secure resources and build alliances, not out of some general concern for underdeveloped nations. 
A new imperial race is heating up across the world, and in many regions we can see examples of it. We need to be clear about what is driving the new scramble for Africa and find ways to show solidarity with those who oppose imperialist aggression, whether Chinese or Western.

A new scramble for Africa 

While French President Emmanuel Macron continues his months-long battle to raise workers’ retirement age from 62 to 64, his government is waging war on another front, some 8,000 kilometres away on the island of Mayotte.
Sitting between Mozambique and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, Mayotte is part of the Comoro archipelago. But officially it is part of France. The colonial legacy of capitalism sometimes means that you can be in two places at once. 
Falling under French colonial rule in the 1800s, during the European powers’ “Scramble for Africa”, Mayotte has been bound to the country ever since. A disputed referendum in 1974 granted independence to the Comoro Islands, but Mayotte remained a French territory. In 2011, it was incorporated as the country’s 101st department. 
Today, unemployment among the island’s 310,000 people is 70 percent. More than three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line of €1,100 a month, according to the French national statistical bureau. 
Nevertheless, thousands of migrants come to Mayotte every year from the neighbouring Comoros, where the situation is even worse. Comorans now make up almost half of Mayotte’s population; many are undocumented.
This state of permanent social crisis and dislocation has been fertile ground for the far right—Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally scored a solid victory in Mayotte in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections. 
Le Pen’s vile anti-immigration stand has earned her a sizeable following in the majority-Muslim department. But it is Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, who is about to unleash the violence. Last month he announced the dispatching of 1,800 police and gendarmes to Mayotte—including members of the infamous Republican Security Corps riot squad—as part of Operation Wuambushu (“recapture” in the local Shimaore language).
Their mission—dressed up as a law-and-order campaign against “criminal gangs”—is to expel thousands of migrants from the island and to flatten the shanty towns in which they live. 
Local politicians are doing their part to whip up the anti-migrant frenzy. Salime Mdéré, the vice-president of the island’s governing council, caused a minor scandal when he launched a tirade against young migrants on local television, suggesting it might be necessary to “kill some” for Operation Wuambushu to be a success. 
Mdéré might have been the only one to say it out loud, but the French government’s contempt for human life is clear as day. 
The fight against anti-migrant racism cannot be separated from issues of social class. Every successful attack on the rights of oppressed groups strengthens the hand of the ruling class against the working class. 
The connection couldn’t be clearer when the same police thugs deployed against striking French workers are now terrorising the slums of Mayotte.

James McVicar

French government’s war on the poor abroad

A violent conflict has broken out between two rival armed forces in Sudan. This confrontation has been in the making since 2019, when millions of Sudanese overthrew their dictator in a popular revolution, yet the military established itself as the new ruler shortly after. The emerging civil war is a clash of two sections of the ruling class vying for supreme power. If Omar al-Bashir, the ousted former dictator, was Frankenstein, this would be a showdown between his heir and Frankenstein’s monster. 
In just a few short weeks of fighting, more than 500 civilians have been killed and thousands injured. Khartoum, the capital, is at the centre of the conflict. Air strikes and raids on civilian homes have left bodies lying in the streets for days and forced 60,000 residents to flee the city, turning whole neighbourhoods into ghost towns. Port Sudan, in the country’s east, has become a de facto displacement camp as thousands converge there in hope of escaping to Saudi Arabia. An existing displacement camp at el-Gineina in the long-embattled Darfur region has been attacked and almost razed.
The two forces tearing up the country are the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, and General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan of the official Sudanese armed forces. 
The conflict is the product of a breakdown in negotiations over how the RSF would be integrated into the armed forces once what’s described as a “transition to democracy” takes place (the army has been in power since 2021). The negotiations were facilitated by major global powers, including the United Kingdom, United States, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, as well as the United Nations, European Union and African Union. Burhan was unhappy with their proposal for an extended grace period for the RSF before integration and turned to Egypt, which proposed a rival agreement that gave the RSF only two years to integrate. While the mediation teams were hopeful that a final agreement would be signed in mid-April, followed by an official handover to civilian power, this was never going to happen. 
The RSF is estimated to be 100,000 strong. It grew out of the Janjaweed, a blood-soaked militia that gained favour with Bashar’s regime for carrying out horrific genocide in Darfur. Hemedti’s empire extends beyond the RSF—he and his family have amassed a fortune through Al Gunade, a trading company with extensive reach into gold mining and construction. These exploits financed the RSF’s expansion into Africa’s largest private military force, which Hemedti has in turn hired out as foreign mercenary fighters. He is a monster created by Sudan’s rulers, the Gulf States and the West (his forces helped the EU stop migrants fleeing from the Sahel).
Burhan was a high-ranking military official under Bashir, who groomed him for power. He sat at the head of the Transitional Military Council—the body that ruled in coalition with civilians from 2019 to 2021—and became the official head of state in October 2021, when he launched a coup with Hemedti’s support. He is an ally of the Islamist ruling class, which he has kept in power by handing them bureaucratic positions and securing their control of the finance industry. 
 This crisis can be traced back to the betrayals that followed the Sudanese revolution of 2018-19. In 2019, Bashir was ousted after 30 years of rule by a popular uprising that culminated in a weeks-long sit-in outside the military command in Khartoum, demanding democracy. 
The civilian opposition forces, led by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), an umbrella group of more than a dozen white-collar and professional unions, ultimately quelled the revolutionary potential of Sudanese workers. In June 2019, the military carried out a massacre against the ongoing sit-in, provoking a march of millions and calls for a general strike. This was called off at the last minute by the SPA after they signed a power-sharing agreement between civilians and the military in July. The movement was wound up, providing breathing room for the military and cutting off the revolution at its height.
Then, in October 2021, the military launched a coup to snatch power for themselves alone. Sudanese activists were ready to fight; they knew that the military had no real interest in democracy and had been planning this moment for some time. Resistance hit the streets within hours, and a nationwide strike shut down every major industry. Millions marched across Sudan. This time, neighbourhood resistance committees led the movement on the ground. The committees are geographically based, democratic organisations composed largely of youth, and have organised basic service provision and the bulk of the resistance since 2019. British Marxist Anne Alexander estimates that around 5,000 committees now exist across Sudan.
The resistance committees faced severe repression and were unable to stop the coup, but the military also struggled to crush the resistance completely. Instead, there was a stalemate between the streets and the military, and the resumption of doomed negotiations.
Sudan has tragically gone from the revolutionary optimism and determination of 2019 to now being strangled by two warlords. Much of the blame for this rests on the shoulders of the elite civilian forces and international actors: the SPA, the broad civilian coalition Forces for Freedom and Change and the United Nations, European and African mediators. They have sought compromise through negotiations with the most brutal wing of the old regime, the armed forces, while the revolution demanded true democracy, justice for Darfur and wealth returned to the people. 
The first round of negotiations produced the failed civilian-military partnership of 2019-21, and the most recent round intended to make the military step down from dictatorial power by proposing another civilian-military power-sharing arrangement. What the people of Sudan have received is not democracy, but a brutal conflict that risks descending into total civil war. 
When a deal was signed in December 2022, the resistance committees protested for true civilian rule and described the settlement as merely “ink on paper”. Raga Makawi, author of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy, described the agreement as one “which checks off the most popular points in the international community’s agenda but with no roadmap to implementation”. The military had an interest in signing off on a new internationally sponsored agreement so they could regain the international aid and investment that was largely cut off after the coup. The international negotiators primarily sought stability in the country, which borders Egypt and is a vital player in maintaining trade through the Suez Canal, rather than realising the demands of the Sudanese people. If negotiations carried out at the height of the revolution did not bring about democracy in Sudan, why would they now? 
Military dictators do not willingly relinquish power, let alone two who command large armies and control swathes of industry. The negotiations are a strategy counterposed to the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, to enable elite diplomats, politicians and the military heads to determine the outcome of the crisis by sidelining the revolution. Ironically, the only reason the military was prepared to negotiate at all was because of their fear of the revolution on the ground.
The revolution has only ever gotten its power from two sources: the power of the streets, with marches and sit-ins of millions, and, most importantly, the power of the Sudanese workers to cripple an already ailing economy. It was not a lack of revolutionary desire from the people in 2019 that halted the path to democracy, but the compromise with the military pushed by the SPA. 
The resistance committees have been the only consistent force opposing the military; they embody all the militancy, heroism and selflessness of the Sudanese revolution. Their main slogan is: “No negotiation, no legitimacy, no agreement with the Military Council”. The have argued for the military to go “back to the barracks” and for the RSF to be dissolved. 
They have continued to organise since 2021. In October 2022, after months of debate, the committees signed the “Revolutionary Charter for People’s Power”, a thorough outline of the kind of democratic society the revolution demands. 
And now, amidst the war on the streets, the committees have again swung into action. They are helping to coordinate staffing in hospitals and maintenance of downed water and power infrastructure so that basic services can keep functioning. They also provide updates about the location of the fighting, honouring those slain and organising safe passages of escape, all while publishing statements with political demands and arguments not to support either side in the war. 
Despite the current horrors across Sudan, the Sudanese masses continue to display their undying solidarity and strength. Videos have emerged on social media of the reception those fleeing have received in regional towns like Dongola, a northern city on the route to Egypt, where locals flooded the streets, offering food and water to those passing through. 
The military refuse to accept that Sudan will be ruled by the masses, but their efforts to quell the revolution time and again have been thwarted by an indomitable spirit. As these warlords continue to choke life in Sudan, the revolution finds a way to keep alive what small flames it can for the next battles.

How negotiations led to Sudan’s emerging civil war

They say that hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. And the hypocrisy from world leaders has come thick and fast on the death of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was, along with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, the most recognisable figure of the South African anti-apartheid struggle.
Former US President Barack Obama described Tutu as “a mentor, a friend and a moral compass for me and so many others”. Obama obviously ignored Tutu’s moral compass when it came to the Archbishop’s opposition to the US’s evil policies in the Middle East, and his denunciation of the US-led War on Terror and the barbarity carried out in the Guantanamo Bay prison. 
The Queen of England said that she was “deeply saddened” by Tutu’s death, calling him “a man who tirelessly championed human rights in South Africa and across the world”. This is from the woman who awarded prizes to British companies investing in and exporting to South Africa, insulating it from international criticism for many years. As the commander in chief of the British armed forces, she shares responsibility with former PM Tony Blair for Britain’s involvement in the wars in the Middle East and their share of the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq that Tutu so passionately condemned.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described Tutu as “a critical figure in the fight against apartheid and in the struggle to create a new South Africa”. This from a politician who wrote a Daily Telegraph column in 2002 referring to Africans as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and whose Conservative Party condemned Mandela as a terrorist in the 1980s, and whose leader Margaret Thatcher backed apartheid South Africa until the last moment.
Scott Morrison joined the parade of those spouting hypocritical cant, applauding Tutu’s belief in “human dignity and the power of freedom”. Morrison’s belief in human dignity and freedom will be news to the Murugappan family of Priya, Nades and their two children or the hundreds of other asylum seekers still denied their liberty by his government.
John Steenhuisen, leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance, praised Tutu’s efforts “to build a united, successful, non-racial South Africa for all”. That’s pretty rich given that the Alliance’s forerunner, the National Party, governed apartheid South Africa for 40 years and was prevented from jailing Tutu only by its fear of an international backlash.
Politicians and government leaders the world over praise Tutu for his strategy of bringing a peaceful transition to multiracial democracy, while putting to one side the bleak reality that this transition has produced only modest benefits for the majority of Black South Africans. In some cases, they refer to Tutu’s advocacy for the rights of LGBTIQ South Africans and for those suffering from HIV/AIDS, while passing over the fact that Western pharmaceutical companies did their best to block access to antiretroviral drugs for years.
Without exception, these leaders refuse to comment about one of Tutu’s great passions in the 1990s and 2000s—the fight for a free Palestine. As the victim of apartheid, Tutu recognised at once the reality of apartheid Israel. In 2007, he was appointed to lead a UN fact-finding mission into the Israeli attack on the Beit Hanoun district of the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the deaths of 19 Palestinians, including seven children. Barred by Israel from setting foot in the besieged territory, Tutu managed to enter from Egypt, allowing him to talk to survivors of and witnesses to the attack. The following year, Tutu produced a report for the Human Rights Council in which he decried the siege as “abominable” and “a gross violation of human rights”.
“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces”, he wrote. “Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”
Tutu’s willingness to describe Israel as an “apartheid state” was a milestone in the campaign for Palestinian freedom because his unimpeachable credentials gave the description great moral authority. He recognised that this fight was up against a vicious adversary, telling Palestinian activists: “Your struggle will be harder than ours, as Israel’s apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F16s bomb our bantustans killing hundreds of our children ... Remember that.”
But it was not just words. Tutu believed that the tactics adopted to bring the apartheid regime in South Africa to its knees applied to Israel as well. In 2014, he declared his support for the international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign:
“In South Africa, we could not have achieved our democracy without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime.”
Anti-apartheid campaigners had condemned Western companies that, under a rhetorical veil of “neutrality”, continued business as usual with the South African regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Tutu argued that the same standards, and condemnations, should apply in the case of Israel: 
“Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of ‘normalcy’ in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice. They are contributing to the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo.”
The politicians who applaud Tutu for standing up for the rights of oppressed Black Africans decades ago by and large support the oppression of Palestinians. Israel today, like South Africa yesterday, plays a vital role for Western imperialism. Like South Africa in the 1970s, Western politicians regard Israel as a bulwark for Western interests in a strategically important region. 
Apartheid South Africa and Israel were close partners, South Africa being Israel’s biggest market for weapons, including nuclear warheads. In 1976, South African Prime Minister John Vorster, who had been interned during the Second World War as a Nazi sympathiser, was welcomed to Jerusalem by Israel’s leaders.
It was only when the apartheid regime in South Africa was made virtually ungovernable by mass protest and strikes that the West moved against it and encouraged negotiations for a political transition. Israel was the only country to hold out, continuing to trade with the apartheid regime until the very end.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian struggle is not at the same height as the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. And Israel, as Tutu pointed out, is much more determined to continue its regime of oppression and segregation. So there is little pressure on Western governments to extend their sympathies to Palestinians today like they belatedly did to Black South Africans. 
In fact, Israel’s supporters reach for the very same terms to smear their opponents as the defenders of apartheid South Africa did: “racists”, “terrorists”, “extremists”. French President Emmanuel Macron sheds a tear for Tutu, who “dedicated his life to human rights and equality between peoples”, while at the same time condemning the fight for a free Palestine as racist and going so far as to have the Interior Ministry ban Palestine solidarity demonstrations this year. 
Desmond Tutu’s life was one of struggle against injustice. Those politicians who line up to laud him today are not fit to wipe his feet.

Hypocrisy in West’s response to passing of Archbishop Tutu

“A sense of relief” is how Sudanese political activist Muzan Alneel, speaking via Zoom from the capital, Khartoum, describes the mood on the streets of Sudan in the first hours of the coup on 25 October. “I remember seeing people come into the street singing, like they’re singing against the coup and they’re singing against [coup leader General] Burhan, but they’re singing”, she says.
Relief is not an emotion usually associated with military coups. But in Sudan, people believed the coup to be inevitable. There was a failed coup attempt in September; the coup on 25 October clarified the terms of battle and threw the fight into the open. Relief came from confirming what the revolutionaries had been steeling themselves for.
Resistance was immediate. Bank workers announce a strike at 7am, two hours after the coup began. For weeks they had made it known that they would shut down the country’s financial industry as soon as the military deposed the government. People began building barricades. Neighbourhood committees and social and political organisations called for civil disobedience. By the end of the day, the country was paralysed by a general strike. 
In Khartoum, the military erected their own barricades to stop people marching towards the Military Command, but these were quickly overrun by protesters. Tyres burned across every street and barricades were made more elaborate by the hour: tens of thousands had responded immediately to the military’s move. “Let’s have it. Let’s have this fight. Let’s be done with it”, is how people saw the coup, Alneel says. It was a battle that had “been delayed for way too long”.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A protester holds a placard that reads &quot;My friend, death is living fearfully under their boot&quot;." src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/250276879_4446425405464354_2176961365989619682_n.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">A protester holds a placard that reads "My friend, death is living fearfully under their boot"</div>
The crisis has its roots in the revolution that swept the country from December 2018 to mid-2019. That movement began when the ruling National Congress Party’s headquarters in Atbara was burned down by students protesting the five-fold increase in the price of bread. The protests spread, with people initially outraged by the cuts to fuel and bread subsidies, and eventually climaxed with a months-long sit-in outside the Military Command in Khartoum. Omar al-Bashir, the despised dictator of 30 years, was deposed by the military in April. His replacement, Lieutenant General Ahmed Aban Ibn Auf, lasted just 24 hours before the pressure of the movement forced him to step down.
The leadership of the revolution, a political coalition led by the Forces of Freedom and Change, entered negotiations over a transition to democracy. The result was a civilian-military coalition, called the Sovereignty Council, that has ruled the country for the past <a href="https://longreads.tni.org/why-it-hasnt-fallen-yet-lessons-from-the-sudanese-revolution">two years</a>. 
Protesters did not accept the compromise with enthusiasm. On 3 June 2019, prior to establishment of the Sovereignty Council, security forces had attacked the sit-in outside the Military Command, killing, raping and injuring hundreds of people. Strikes erupted in response but were <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6848">quickly called off</a> by the Sudanese Professionals Association, an umbrella group of more than a dozen white-collar and professional unions. 
The Professionals Association led the movement on the ground and was the key force in the Forces of Freedom and Change coalition. Its influence was instrumental in demobilising the revolution and selling the military-civilian compromise. The Professionals Association’s closeness to the protesters, and its reputation for organising resistance to the regime, gave it a credibility that the other political forces lacked.
Calling off the mass movement and instead negotiating with the criminals in the military was a betrayal of the revolution. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who became chairman of the Sovereignty Council and now leads the country, was a political ally and army commander under al-Bashir. He was a key protagonist of the genocidal campaign in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, which killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.
Despite the civilian section of the Sovereignty Council having more weight—six votes to five— Forces of Freedom and Change coalition’s strategy was total compromise with the military. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok implemented austerity measures, such as cutting fuel subsidies, which contributed to crippling inflation on basic goods. The popularity of the civilian section allowed it to sell the agenda of the Sudanese ruling class, despite it being the same austerity that had led to the revolution in 2019. 
The military was momentarily forced to concede to civilian rule, but it was never content with sharing power. The Professionals Association helped to create the conditions for the latest coup by channelling the revolution into an asymmetric power-sharing deal. But the hope for democracy in Sudan never lay in the Sovereignty Council, or any deal with the military. Instead, it lies with the strikes and protests that brought down Bashir and Ibn Auf.
Neighbourhood resistance committees have emerged as an alternative leadership in the renewed movement. They played an important role in 2019 but have become the leading force on the ground today, immediately responding to the coup and organising a “Millions March” on 30 October. 
 
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The membership of the committees varies. Because they are geographically based, they can be composed of the unemployed in Khartoum districts such as El-Haj Yousif in the north and al-Kalakla in the south, or wealthier sections of the population in affluent suburbs such as Al Riyadh. Their more grassroots and activist nature, however, makes the committees the most responsive and democratic bodies in Sudan. Many committees have elected leaderships.
An initial challenge they faced was a continuing countrywide internet blackout. They organised mass leafleting and night marches to promote upcoming actions, including the Millions March. They also organise the distribution of food and other necessities, garbage collection, medical supplies and maintenance of the barricades, which are key to stopping the “thatchers”—the security forces vehicles, which are used to arrest activists in their neighbourhoods.
The committees also play an important political role. They released statements popularising the demands of the revolution, which include “no negotiations, no partnership and no bargaining” with the military and the call for full civilian rule. While they are not explicitly political organisations, young revolutionaries are drawn to them as the most effective organisations to fight the coup. In Sudan, political parties are mostly middle class with a legacy of sell-outs and association with the old regime. 
Alneel argues that the committees “seem to be the main factor that stopped the coup many times up until now” and “they’re the only [force] creating a threat to the system”. They are the only defence against another compromise. For example, the committees in Greater Omdurman, the country’s largest city, rejected the offer of a closed-door meeting with Hamdok and demanded a public address. A press release, shared on social media, read: “Our position is unequivocal: no negotiations, no compromise, and no power over that of the people”. 
The country from 25 October has been engulfed in a general political strike. According to a report on one resistance committee’s Facebook page, in the first week strike participation rates were 91 percent, 96 percent and 100 percent in the oil, banking and education sectors respectively. Similarly high rates have been reported across all industries. Doctors and nurses are refusing to work in military hospitals and treat only emergency cases at civilian hospitals. Committees representing workers in the oil, banking and aviation sectors have put out a coordinated plan for civil disobedience. 
The workers’ movement suffered under the Bashir era, and many unions were controlled by the state. With the old dictator’s fall, space began to open for union organising. While the leadership of the Professionals Association preferred the negotiating table, labour activists in the oil, communications and university sectors established democratic leadership bodies that have been organising the strikes, circulating demands and sometimes coordinating with neighbourhood committees.
The success of the revolution depends on these democratic organisations, particularly the independent unions and elected workers’ committees. They have demonstrated that they can bring the Sudanese economy to its knees in a matter of hours, giving the mass movement a power it does not have simply through the resistance committees. But it is too early to know whether they will use this power to provide a political alternative to more compromises. 
The situation is in flux. In the past week, Hamdok, under house arrest, has met with Volker Perthes, the UN special representative to Sudan, to find acceptable negotiating terms with the military. International pressure for a compromise, particularly from US and Western diplomats, has been intense. 
Another limitation is the lack of any revolutionary organisation that could lead the movement clearly against the compromising forces and argue clearly for the working class to lead the revolution.
Despite the challenges, and the repression that has killed at least fourteen in Khartoum, Sudanese protesters have shown courage and resilience. As Alneel remarked about the Millions March on 30 October: “[It] was huge. I haven’t seen anything this big ... We couldn’t even march because the whole street was full”. 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">MY PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL <a href="https://t.co/1BkzKBLocl">pic.twitter.com/1BkzKBLocl</a>
— Bashy (@ElbashirIdris_) <a href="https://twitter.com/ElbashirIdris_/status/1454442902415884297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 30, 2021</a></blockquote>
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A map showing locations of protests on 30 October" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/251929454_1631971390487878_3306921073448289764_n.jpg" /></div>
Videos have shown young women proudly leading chants and making public addresses. The elderly are seen with tears in their eyes, hugging young protesters. References to poetry are common among chants and slogans. On the day of the coup, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/317737892213356/videos/833103764023793/">a video</a> appeared of a young man scrawling part of a famous Arabic poem on a billboard. “Whenever people decide to live, destiny will heed them, the darkness will come to an end, and chains will be broken”, he wrote, as many protesters cheered below.
The Sudanese people have decided to live, and they are intent on breaking the chains of military rule for good.
<img alt="A propaganda poster for the 30 October “Freedom parades” reading “To break the bonds of the military forever&quot;" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/250063071_4438159169624311_22083465903143353_n.jpg" />
<div class="article_inline_caption">A propaganda poster for the 30 October “Freedom parades” reading “To break the bonds of the military forever"</div>

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