Chapter 8

Conclusion

This book has sought to explain the role of social movements in Africa, both historically and today. It argues that the role of popular movements has been neglected in most writing on political change in Africa. Although it is evidently true that both African elites and external forces (Western governments, global markets, and international financial institutions) have decisively influenced the contemporary realities of Africa, this should not blind us to Africans’ struggles to overcome injustice and inequalities and to achieve the societies, economies, and polities they wish to see. The primary, modest aim of the authors has been to place in the public domain evidence of the activities and motivations of social movement activists in this regard, as a rejoinder to Afropessimists who see the continent as a hopeless place whose people are either unwilling or unable to improve their own circumstances.

We have also sought to explore the reasons why, despite their creative and often heroic efforts, African movements have often failed to achieve their aims. This has, of course, been the result of a global political and economic system that is structured to prevent the full realization of the aspirations of most Africans (and indeed most people around the world). Global capitalism, over the past five hundred years and more particularly the last 120 years, has utilized sub-Saharan Africa as a supplier of unfree and cheap labor, raw materials, and land, all of which it has sought to exploit in ways that are inimical not only to notions of social justice, but also to the model of free trade and exchange that the system’s advocates claim are central to its nature. The achievement of political independence and the establishment of new African nation-states in the third quarter of the twentieth century, while a tremendous achievement in which ordinary Africans played a vital role, did not (for the reasons explained in chapter 3) lead to a qualitatively different political and economic order on the continent. The contradictory and ambiguous nature of the African nationalist project, which established indigenous governments on the continent that did not articulate or reflect the wishes of most of their peoples, did not ultimately challenge the subordinate integration of Africa into the global system that was the primary cause of its problems. State-led economic programs (often written by Westerners) that sought to engineer development from above and treated ordinary Africans as passive objects were resisted by Africans with their own ideas of how their economies should develop. African political leaders who imagined themselves as the liberators of their peoples ultimately became responsible for suppressing their movements for a more meaningful form of independence. With the onset of the global economic recession in the mid-1970s, they were responsible for overseeing the drastic cuts in living standards demanded by neoliberal economic models that were equally authored from without, and for policing and suppressing resistance to these cuts.

Postcolonial Africa has seen successive waves of protest against the immediate manifestations of the continually exploitative relationships between Africa and the leading elements in the capitalist system and between Africa’s highly unequal economic and political classes. Africans have continually resisted reductions of their basic living standards and encroachments on their lives and liberties, and at particular times (and for particular reasons) their acts of resistance have coalesced into more coherent movements for change that linked the struggle for economic and social justice with the need for effective political accountability and representation. This book has sought to explain the dynamics of these struggles: why they should be taken more seriously than they commonly are; why they should be regarded as movements strongly influenced by popular and working-class forces; and why these movements, while sometimes achieving their immediate aims, have not ultimately achieved lasting gains for the African masses.

The majority of the book has focused on the experience of African social movements since the pro-democracy movements of the 1990s. It has sought to draw comparisons between the experiences of African countries that successfully moved to formal democracy (chapter 5) and those that, for various reasons, did not (chapter 6). Although the context in which social movements activists operate is clearly more difficult (and indeed dangerous) in the latter than the former, the study indicates that in neither context has the achievement of democracy enabled a qualitative improvement in material circumstances or an effective political articulation of popular aspirations or grievances. The pro-democracy movements, like their nationalist predecessors, contained within them more radical activists and ideas, but did not ultimately challenge Africa’s global subordination and exploitation. However, despite difficult circumstances, particular social movements have been able to win particular reforms or advances that have improved the lives of their constituents or members.

What should be clear to any critical reader is that this study, which provides significant original empirical material on African social movements, the struggles they engage in, and the wider national and international context in which they do so, is that the efforts of the researchers have barely scratched the surface of the rich and diverse traditions, organizational forms, and complex ideas of organizations and activists across the continent. It is hoped that this book, along with the efforts of other researchers working in similar fields in other parts of the continent, will stimulate new research projects and questions on the myriad social movements that are constantly emerging and evolving in Africa.1 In carrying out this study, a number of important themes and issues have arisen that need to be addressed in any such research, which the remainder of this conclusion will address.

Inequality, hierarchy, and contradiction

As has been made clear throughout this book, a major challenge to any prospective analyst of social movement-ism is to achieve any coherent notion of what does and does not fall within their frame of analysis. The authors have rejected any preconceived notion of what is and is not a social movement, preferring instead a Thompsonian approach of studying movements in motion to make sense of their dynamics, hierarchies, and problems. Non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, self-defined social movements, strikes and riots, the mob and the crowd—all have elements of what constitutes social movement action and all must be considered, together with their engagement with political parties and international agencies, in attempts to critically analyze the role of popular social forces in African societies.

Social movements are not best understood as authentic and unproblematic movements of the people, easily contrasted in a binary way to the powerful and exploitative elite in society. They are, rather, an expression of the contradictions and hierarchies of the societies in which they operate, whose debates and conflicts express inequalities of resources, education, influence, gender, and ethnicity, among many others. This does not, as some might believe, make them “inauthentic” social movements—rather, it makes them real, living articulations of political difference in societies marked by inequality and social conflict.

This means that any analysis of social movement thinking or activity needs to focus not only on a particular movement, but also on the wider context in which movements operate. Individual movements or organizations influence and are influenced by a wider social, political, and economic environment, the analysis of which is usually central to grasping the vital context in which that movement operates. An instructive example is that of trade unions: these cannot be understood simply in their institutional form, by analyzing their internal structures, elected officials, and adopted policies—rather, the actions of their rank-and-file members, their relations with the wider political environment, and their interaction with wider urban (and in Africa, rural) communities of the poor. This is particularly true in an era of economic liberalization and declining living standards; as large numbers of formal-sector jobs are eliminated, the relationship between labor organizations with shrinking memberships and social movements seeking to represent the wider urban poor—including many former union members—is an increasingly important one in explaining the extent of social movement activism. In a number of cases in southern Africa, former union activists have taken their organizational skills with them into new campaigns for the rights of laid-off workers, against the environmental impact of industry, or into new political campaigns and parties.

Secondly, social movement research must always examine tensions and conflicts, not only between particular movements, but also within them—the fight within a fight. Any study of a particular movement should analyze the relationships between a series of (usually unequal) actors: its leaders and officials; its paid employees (where relevant); those it seeks to directly represent and benefit; and those who are affected, directly or indirectly, by its activities. Unequal power relations—between the more and less educated, women and men, different ethnic groups, and a dozen other potential divisions, have the potential to shape social movement discourse or activity.2 The presumption of research should be to assume the existence of such tensions, hierarchies, and inequalities, the better to enable analysis.

Globalization, extraversion, and commodification

African social movements, perhaps more than their Western counterparts that serve as the basis for most social movement theoretical work, have always been influenced by their continent’s long history of globalization. That history was controlled largely by Western powers, but African agency was always highly influential. Ideas of individual and collective freedoms that inform social movement thinking and activism have their origins in the decidedly ambiguous legacy of the Western Enlightenment, which brought modern concepts of democracy and rights to Africa, inextricably tied to Western imperialism and capitalism. Africans, of course, have their own traditions of political representation and change, and African political and social movements in the twentieth century debated endlessly the relationship between Western liberal or socialist universalisms and their particular relevance or manifestations in Africa. African social movements utilized notions and approaches such as self-government, democracy, collective organization, direct action, political parties, and civil society, all of which were in many respects defined in advance by Western thinkers and activists. Although Africans have appropriated, rethought, and reworked such concepts, utilizing them in their own interests and in hybrid forms, tension nevertheless often arises between such globalized forms of organization and resistance and the particular context in which they are conceived of and utilized in Africa. This, coupled with the continent’s continued poverty and subordination in the global context, militates against the development of a specifically “African” form of social movements. Actually existing social movements in Africa are unavoidably hybrid in nature, utilizing and adapting Western ideas, funding, forms of organization, and methods of activism.

However, we do not want to restate a simple truism. We believe that all ideas and organizational forms that have a history are going to be “hybrid” in character. All development is “combined” development, making use of old and new, local and exogenous. It is therefore important to speak of the specific ways Africans have adapted ideas and organizational forms that are (partly) borrowed from the West—as we have tried to highlight at different points in the book. Consequently, we prefer to talk of the unevenness of development. African events, then, are affected by inequality in international relations. In this case, the “hybrid” character of some African events—both ideas and organizational forms—reflects not only the ways Africans have adapted these things to their needs, but how they are shaped partly by Africans and partly by foreign parties according to their needs. The hybrid character that we describe is made up of inherently conflicted elements.

This is particularly important when one considers the role of African pro-democracy and reformist movements that are funded by and therefore partly dependent on Western agencies—governments, but also international NGOs, think tanks, and donors. The Western powers and IFIs have come to regard certain forms of popular mobilization or protest as useful ways to remove certain particularly corrupt or intransigent governments that have failed to successfully implement structural adjustment programs.3 This should not be interpreted as an argument that sees all protest movements as manipulated by American or imperialist power, but rather an appeal for careful analysis of the specific social forces involved in national political change. The transitions in this study, frustrated and “successful,” were part of these waves of change, but also subject to the same enormous contradictions.

In the 1990s and 2000s, popular struggles that have erupted as a consequence of neoliberal reforms and structural adjustment have often manifested themselves as liberal movements for democracy and human rights. This arises from the fact that governments implementing neoliberal reforms rely on increasingly draconian measures to suppress popular discontent. Chris Harman described these processes well: “The path that began with neoliberalism ends up in quasi-dictatorship . . . the effect is to turn social and economic issues into political struggles around demands for democracy and human rights. In the process people can lose sight of the social and economic roots of these political issues.”4 Unless this link is made, social movements seeking to alleviate the effects of economic liberalization can easily be convinced that the primary answer to their grievances is more formal political or constitutional reform, rather than a deepening of democratic culture and practice that encompasses popular scrutiny and ultimately control of the socioeconomic situation.

In very different ways, the early 1990s saw movements for social, political, and economic transformation across southern Africa mutate into movements led by an opposition elite for democratization and citizenship. In most cases, such elites resumed the imposition of neoliberalism in a new context, eventually setting off a new wave of protests against the effects of those policies. In some cases, the new, comparatively democratic context enabled the reversal or weakening of such neoliberal reforms. In other cases, the democratic gains were themselves rolled back or weakened. In many cases, social movements were politically disarmed and their popular supporters manipulated for set-piece confrontations with the government that did nothing to advance their interests. Some new governments successfully co-opted and corrupted leading activists. Social movement activism was often softened up by the carrot of “participatory democracy” and the stick of economic decline, deforming and distorting activism and agendas. In such circumstances, new waves and generations of activists, frustrated at the failures and compromises of their seniors and elders, came to the fore to seek new and old types of changes, often with little opportunity to grasp why their forerunners had failed to achieve their aims.

The role of ideology, organization, and the scale of protests

The differences between the case studies analyses in this book reveal some important features of social movements. The first, most striking difference is the scale of political mobilization. From 1995, Zimbabwe saw what one activist described as a “sort of revolution,” with urban (and rural) protests increasing year after year. With each new wave of protest new layers of society would be galvanized, deepening the political movement that was tightening around the government. As Brian Kagoro explained, by 1997 “you had an outright . . . rebellion on your hands.”5

The crucial element during this period of “rebellion” was that it was generalized. By the late 1990s, social movement action often became dominated by trade unions. In many respects, the experiences of other countries during the transition—in Senegal, Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya, and Malawi, for example—could not have been more different. The period of the transitions in the 1990s was not marked by massive urban protest and ferment. On the contrary, most of the political decisions were made by a political elite that, although drawn from the ranks of the opposition, was not directly accountable to a wider movement. Although there was a popular groundswell of support for the transition, it did not operate in conditions of widespread political protest, let alone “rebellion.” Activists did not, as a result, reach the level of political development experienced by activists in Zimbabwe.

As a consequence, there are striking differences between activists on the continent, notable particularly at the World Social Forum in 2007 in Kenya (see chapter 7). Zimbabwean social movement activists talked about the euphoria of having been involved in massive social mobilization. Often they conceptualized this activism in general terms of liberation and revolution, terms that do not seem transplanted onto their activism but are a product of the scale of the protests—and the period—in which they have been involved. Elsewhere, while activists might remember the excitement of the campaign and the exquisite joy and hope that were generated by election victories, their horizons were sometimes fixed on more limited possibilities.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons why some movements on the continent are weaker than others, and why activists are animated less by broader ideologies, is what Cherif Ba, an activist from Senegal, described in 2004 as the failure of la formation des militants—training and education of activists: “Political parties must take responsibility for raising the political level of their activists. But what party does this? . . . Therefore activists don’t get the basic training they must . . . political involvement is simply engaged in . . . to support the president or further the aims of a political party.”6

However, most of the political left, disoriented after the collapse of Stalinism, have immersed themselves in a political circus of recycled elites. In this circus social movement activists are relegated to the status of cheerleaders, with no real responsibilities except as uncritical supporters of their political leaders. Colin Barker argues for a model of organization based on the desire “to win fellow-militants to a common framework of understanding and intervention. Far from promoting passivity, they encourage activism; instead of neglecting education . . . [it is] their very métier, their be-all-and-end-all.”7

The vision and practice of many activists does not emphasize self-activity or collective decision-making. Discussions in meetings do not turn movements into “talk shops” but into places where decisions are reached through the democratic process of the majority and then acted on. The goal is to create activists who are able to link specific questions and perspectives to more general issues of neoliberalism and regional development. This is a “dialogical engagement” with the wider movement, a process of constant political debate and discussion with other movement militants.8

This phenomenon is linked to an important theme in the book. If social movements can act to bring about social change, they do so with the organizational and ideological tools at their disposal. These resources are fashioned by the movement and conditioned by inherited conditions that inform beliefs, loyalties, and activism. However, these ideas do not act by themselves—independent of social context—nor are they simple reflections of this context. The case studies show us that ideas and organizations (or their absence) can have a vital influence on events.

We have argued in this book that after the second wave of democratic struggles, new governments across the continent followed, more or less obediently, the advice of the IFIs. This common resumption of neoliberalism stemmed from a common failure linked to the inability of protest movements to develop independent organizational and ideological alternatives that could have offered a sufficient counterweight to the global momentum of neoliberal forces. We have argued, therefore, for the need to distinguish between the effectiveness of political activism, against the extreme relativism of much social theory. Some groups did attempt to question not only specific economic reforms but also (implicitly or explicitly) the prevailing worldview of the local and global order. Activists and scholars must extend, develop, and critique these emancipatory alternatives.

The transition confronts us with many paradoxes. We have seen movements led by popular classes challenge governments, unseat incumbent dictatorships, and win (more recently) important incremental reforms and concessions. But in the transitions, these movements frequently came under the leadership of contradictory social forces: ex-ministers, politicians alienated (and ejected) from government office, and NGO and middle-class professionals and bureaucrats. Popular social movements fell under the direction of an intelligentsia driven by its commitment to neoliberal governance. As in the 1950s and 1960s (see chapter 3), this same elite group, deprived of economic and political power by colonialism but with a coherent organizational home and identity in student associations and unions, became the champion of national liberation—but it was an inherently impoverished version of liberation. Frequently tied to the purse strings of the colonial metropolis, they sought a national freedom that would maintain and develop Western political and economic involvement in independence. The position of such elites was, however, undermined by the global economic crisis that arose in the mid-1970s, which undercut the model of development that depended on Western markets for raw African produce and minerals.

The subsequent process of neoliberalism unleashed a succession of protest waves in Africa that widened popular engagement, but elite leaders eventually shepherded and corralled these movements into the narrower and more limited objectives of “good governance” and “liberalization.” Economic liberalization—with its devastating whirlwind of job losses and factory closures—has to a certain extent weakened the organizations and coherence of the African working class while strengthening the role of what Frantz Fanon described as an “avaricious caste.”9

The political transitions in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s occurred in a world fundamentally altered by global geopolitics. Struggles in peripheral capitalist societies have been profoundly affected by the collapse of ideas of national liberation linked to state-led development. In the period following the collapse of the Berlin Wall—which signaled the apparent death of state-dominated strategies for development—ideological confusion consumed many of the social forces that had looked to progressive and left-wing political change. However, the evidence presented in this book shows that social movements continue to effect political change even in the absence of a coherent program for socioeconomic change. Nevertheless, the inherited circumstances and the structural constraints within which they operate inevitably curtail their ability to exercise meaningful agency.

The collapse of vibrant protest movements into limited liberal reformism reflects the limited impact of the protests and rebellions described in this study. These limitations typically derive from the same sources: first, the failure of organizations and social groups within the social movements to distinguish themselves clearly and independently from the political weaknesses of wider political forces, and second, the absence of effective, independent movements that organize in a broad political and social milieu (in townships, factories, and universities). In the presence of such organizations, more radical actions could lead to deeper and more sustained political transitions. Without them, social movements often remain isolated and easily manipulated, and make only a limited impression on the underlying political and economic fabric of the continent.

Neoliberalism, crisis, and revolt

For much of the period under study in this book, conventional social science has viewed Africa from a Western perspective, seeing its problems (and potential solutions to them) through a Eurocentric lens. Today, many of the problems arrogantly perceived as peculiarly African, have pervaded the wider capitalist world. Economic crisis, stagnation, and austerity, long the standard (and lazy) epithets applied to Africa’s political economy, are now apt descriptions of European and North American capitalism. The collapse of market-oriented Western economic models and the need for huge state bailouts of financial institutions by Western governments since 2007, significantly challenge the neoliberal project implemented by the West in Africa (and promoted elsewhere) since the mid-1970s. Approximately eleven trillion dollars (US) was spent globally to shore up banks and insurance companies, principally in the United Kingdom and United States, but also in other G20 countries. Illusions of free markets unhampered by state intervention were dramatically shelved in an opportunistic resurgence of selective neo-Keynesianism. Of course, the reality of neoliberalism since the onset of the “counterrevolution” in the late 1970s involved the state heavily underpinning the financial sector and failing companies.10 Nevertheless, the current crisis may, in David Harvey’s words, demonstrate that there are “no effective long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism.”11

The myth of neoliberalism as the harbinger of prosperity, development, and unparalleled economic growth has been singularly exposed. Instead Europe and America face economic contraction, decline, and (even in the long run) feeble and fragile growth. As we write, the state debt incurred by the bailouts and by the property bubble that burst across Europe and North America is being utilized by politicians who promoted neoliberalism and bailed out its failures to implement deep and prolonged cuts in public- sector spending.12

Even for a casual observer of Africa’s recent history, there are evident parallels with the current global crisis. Debts across the developing world were largely incurred in the 1970s by easy loans from private banks, underwritten by a surplus of petrodollars from Middle Eastern oil. When those loans turned into debts in the late 1970s, the resultant crisis was used to force through structural adjustment programs that fundamentally refigured Africa’s political economy. Throughout the early phases of structural adjustment, the World Bank and IMF spoke piously about profligate spending and bloated budgets and insisted on reforms. Limited state welfare was slashed, education and health budgets savaged, and jobs lost as state support to national industries was withdrawn. The continent would never be the same again.

Today, much of the Western world faces similar austerity that threatens the survival of the postwar welfare state. This book’s analysis of the achievements and failures of Africa’s social movements in response to that continent’s crisis has a particular relevance here. Two decades of revolts were triggered by the debt crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. As we have seen, social movements overthrew governments and brought together coalitions of the poor and the working class. It is important to learn from the successes of these movements in challenging such attacks, but also from their evident failure to generate political alternatives. The resistance that lies ahead may see a vital convergence of movements in the global north and south.

However, the burden of global economic turbulence and speculation continues to fall unevenly—in particular on Africa. The recent rise in financial speculation, an attempt to make profitable bets in the context of a relative squeeze on industrial and manufacturing profits, has seen a massive expansions of bets on “softs”—rice, grain, and other staple foods. The result was spectacular increases in the price of staple foodstuffs, to the particular detriment of the global poor. Food price rises between 2007 and 2009 led to food riots, general strikes, and protests in thirty-five countries across the world, twenty-four of which were in Africa. Eleven uprisings occurred on the continent in that two-year period, directly linked to increases in the price of cooking oil, bread, and rice.13 Any attempt to draw out commonalities and collective action between African and Western social movements in response to the global economic crisis, welcome though that would be, should be alert to the particularly acute African experience of that crisis and responsive to African social movements’ analyses.

The nature of political change

This brings us to the central question of the nature and degree of political change to which social movements can contribute. Progressive Western analysts of African political history have tended over the last fifty years to seek to identify particular social forces or movements that can form the basis of overarching, self-conscious projects of radical political transformation, usually of the kind that they themselves have already preconceived. Social democrats and liberals saw African nationalism as the answer to the continent’s problems, believing that self-rule in the hands of wise indigenous leaders (whose ideas, developed in Western universities and missions, closely resembled their own) would enable steady and controlled change of the sort appropriate to the continent’s level of (as they saw it) education and civilization. Development advisors eager to implement their blueprints for economic “take-off” and “catch-up” sought to identify indigenous agents of such changes and were constantly disappointed by the inability or unwillingness of the African people to play the role prescribed to them. More radical socialists argued about whether the urban working class, the rural peasantry, or the Westernized intelligentsia would be in the vanguard of socialist or communist revolution on the continent, and were equally disappointed by the dismal results of such vanguardist attempts at radical change. We believe that many of these debates took place away from real struggles in social movements. The discussions in this book show a preference for self- activity of the poor, workers, or the “grassroots.” This is not a moral preference, but it reflects our understanding of the likely agents of major social change—the working class and poor on the continent.

Anticapitalist activists, in theory more open to diverse forms of political expression and organization, have in our experience been similarly disappointed with the failure of African social movements to sound, look, and act like their counterparts in the West or in Latin America. Western observers of many political hues (and their allies among Africa’s elites) have been periodically seized with enthusiasm about Africa’s decade, century, moment, or renaissance—and been rapidly disillusioned with the continent’s enduring failure to meet their expectations in a timely manner.

Meanwhile, Africans—individually but also collectively—have gone about the difficult and often dangerous business of organizing actions and organizations to improve the particular circumstances of sections of their society, of the sort that we have attempted to depict in this book. At times, these movements have coalesced into broader movements for social change that carried within them the potential for a radical transformation of society, a genuine revolutionary change. Whether this potential was achieved or not, it has normally been the case that Western observers have been unable to see past their own expectations and norms to understand the real extent of these social movements’ achievements. We invite radical observers of the continent to see the importance of counter-hegemonic forces that will provide the answer to the continent’s exploitation, marginalization, and suffering, as well as focusing on the myriad day-to-day struggles for change that are Africa’s true story of struggle.14 It is only out of these highly complex and differentiated movements that the organizations and political alternatives to capitalism’s uneven and brutal global hegemony will emerge. Messy, ideologically confused, and inherently contradictory, such struggles and movements nevertheless contain within them genuinely organic seeds of revolutionary change, the only sort that have any chance to take root and blossom on the continent’s fertile soil.

We urge activists not only to focus on these day-to-day struggles, but to discover how they relate to broader issues and bigger struggles to come. It is true that the organizations and political alternatives to capitalism’s hegemony will emerge from today’s struggles, but activists need to make them emerge in ways that will advance their hopes for radical political change. To do that, activists need to learn where to focus their energies, where to build social bases, how to form tactical alliances, and when to break them—in short, activists need to develop a strategic outlook for a longer-term struggle to overthrow capitalism. That does not mean that they need to create a fixed template or to find a single social sector that can provide all the crucial strategic wisdom and social leverage for revolution. While we reject the idea of finding a single counter-hegemonic force that will provide the answer, we refuse to retreat into a focus only on concrete “day-to-day struggle.” Neither posture is genuinely strategic.

This book, we believe, has provided such a strategic position. Our focus has been on the self-activity of the grassroots—and the broadly-conceived working class we have outlined in chapter 2—to combat and ultimately overturn exploitation and oppression globally. We have also asserted the special capacities of urban wage workers within the broad movement of this class. We have stated explicitly the necessity of a militant leadership within this broad movement, one that is able to link specific questions and perspectives to more general issues and that strives to win fellow militants to a common framework of understanding and intervention. We also argue that militants must maintain independence from Western donors and local exploiters to protect themselves against becoming mere cheerleaders in a political circus of recycled elites—while providing a nuanced view of how, under real conditions of capitalism, independence is often a matter of degree.

Our strategic position is clearly one that belongs on the revolutionary socialist and anti-Stalinist left. We hope that activists who read this book—both African and Western—will see struggles and movements as messy, ideologically confused, and inherently contradictory—but that the book will also help them navigate through the mess, clear up confusion, and expose contradiction. While our contribution has necessarily been modest, we are, nevertheless, trying to make a contribution. We do not believe that African liberation will spring only from “indigenous seeds,” because in our globalized world seeds get blown in from everywhere—as we have already stated, all development is “combined” development. Our book may contain ideas that answer some people’s needs in Africa; if it does, these ideas may take root there. Then, if they get passed on and developed and become further “naturalized,” they will be as authentically “African” as any other ideas that any region or group may have. The key point about self-determination will still stand—that Africans will figure out which ideas work best.