Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change by Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly is the first book to put contemporary popular protest in a pan-African context.
Published by Best Red, an imprint of HSRC Press, Africa Uprising is based on original research in Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi and looks at what is driving the new wave of protest across the continent.
Read an extract from Africa Uprising to learn more about the third wave of African protest:
The third wave of African protest
From multiple directions, crowds converged on Burkina Faso’s National Assembly on 30 October 2014. For days, massive protests of tens or even hundreds of thousands had mounted against President Blaise Compaoré’s effort to push a constitutional amendment through parliament that would allow him a third term. Finally, frustrated at the lack of response from the government, thousands of protesters smashed their way into the parliament compound, setting ablaze vehicles and ransacking the building. Soon, flames flickered up the sides of the white-tiled structure as soldiers stood by and watched. Other government buildings were soon burning, and, despite the military’s attempt to put down the uprising, Compaoré had no choice but to announce his resignation on the following day.
A new wave of protest is sweeping across Africa today. The multiparty regimes and neoliberal economies that emerged from the upheavals of the late 1980s and early 1990s have proved unable to meet popular aspirations for fundamental change. Starting in the late 2000s, what we identify as the third wave of African protest has posed dramatic challenges to the established order in over forty countries across the continent. This chapter introduces this ongoing third protest wave and sets the stage for the case studies that follow – Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan – which together provide an illustrative sample of the diversity of contemporary African protests. Indeed, Burkina Faso’s uprising, occurring just as this book is going to press, has led to the resignation of its president and to an ongoing transitional period. The Burkinabé uprising, in which political society was once again at the forefront, is a powerful reminder that this third wave of African protest retains its strength and will continue as long as the conditions giving rise to it are not resolved.
Political society in the global economy
The precarious livelihoods of urban political society is one of those unresolved conditions, and today’s protest wave represents a vehement rejection of the neoliberal economy by Africa’s poor. The structural adjustment programmes and integration into the global economy demanded by the Washington Consensus and imposed by donors throughout the 1990s and 2000s largely failed to improve living conditions for the majority of Africans. Even where GDP numbers did rise, they were often paired with increasing poverty. As Bibangambah summarizes, ‘on the one hand there is impressive economic performance and on the other there is deepening abject poverty, human deprivation, vulnerability and inadequate social services’ (2001: 128–9). The promised structural transformations in Africa’s economies have also failed to materialize. Instead of industrialization, deindustrialization has become the norm: today, industrial output in Africa represents a smaller share of GDP than it did in the 1970s (Stiglitz et al. 2013: 9). A flood of cheap manufactured products, primarily from China, has further undermined the possibility of meaningful industrialization. New investments in extractive industries, while occasionally driving impressive growth rates, have done little to reverse this trend and have maintained Africa as an exporter of raw materials. Africa’s much-heralded growth has thus predominantly been jobless, accompanied by rising inequality, unemployment, and underemployment.
Exacerbating the plight of the urban poor have been continued high rates of urbanization. Africa is home to more than a quarter of the world’s one hundred fastest-growing cities, with over fifty African cities already claiming more than a million people each. The majority of Africans, it is predicted, will live in urban areas by 2035, as will the majority of the continent’s poor (UN Habitat 2014: 23). Already, 40 per cent of Africa’s population is urban, higher than in India, undercutting the claim that Africa is too rural for urban protest to effect meaningful change (Ford 2012). Africa’s urbanization has been magnified further by rural displacement. Rather than being pulled into the cities by employment opportunities, Africa’s rural poor are being displaced from or dispossessed of their lands by governments seeking to make way for infrastructure projects or land grabs by foreign investors. Today’s rural ‘development’ thus often takes place at the expense of the rural poor and adds to the urban plight.
As has been the case since colonial-era urbanization, newcomers to the city are rarely able to establish secure livelihoods. Urbanization without industrialization means that formal employment is not an option for most, and so urban Africans turn to the long-standing informal or illicit sectors for survival. Housing evinces a similar pattern, as the population of squatter settlements and slums grows twice as fast as that of cities, and peri-urban areas expand rapidly as urban and rural spaces blend together (Davis 2006: 8–11). Adding to this volatile urban mix is Africa’s growing youth bulge. Over two-thirds of the continent’s population is under the age of twenty-four. This expanding youth population is faced with contracting opportunities, characterized as a condition of permanent ‘waithood’ (Honwana 2013). A growing political society of frustrated youth is a recipe for urban uprisings and other forms of possibly destructive political action, a reality not lost on African governments.
As international markets increasingly determine the cost of basic items, including food, needed by urban (and often rural) populations, African lives are at the mercy of price fluctuations made even more unpredictable by the hegemony of global finance capital. When those price swings threaten the survival of already precarious populations, it is no surprise that political society may rise up in protest, as was seen in the series of large-scale urban uprisings in Africa and elsewhere in the global south in 2007 and 2008 (Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009). To reduce these protests to ‘food riots’, however, is misleading. Neoliberalism has solidified the popular understanding of the state’s responsibility for economic deprivation, and so economic demands and political demands merge, as they did in previous bouts of protest. In one analyst’s words, ‘Although the demonstrations and riots were sometimes precipitated by food price rises, the protests usually included demands to reduce political repression, promote political reform and curtail the influence of international firms’ (Bush 2010: 122). African states, recognizing the political threat represented by these protests, tend to meet them with force: in Guinea, for example, more than two hundred protesters were killed in 2007. Despite brutal crackdowns, however, the protests of 2007 to 2008 would prove to be just the start of the wave that continues today.
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- Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change by Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly
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EAN: 9781928246053
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