Anarchism in Africa
Class systems had already existed in some African civilisations (such as Nubia, Egypt, Axum and the Hausa Kingdoms) for millennia, but processes of social stratification accelerated from the fifteenth century onwards.
However, once Angola achieved its independence following the Carnation Revolution, people were disarmed by the new MPLA government, which officially adopted Marxism–Leninism as its ideology and replaced the nascent "popular power" with a one-party state, igniting the Angolan Civil War.
[8] The MPLA began to arrest left-wing opposition figures, including Maoists, Trotskyists and anarchists, and broke up workers' strikes for higher pay and better working conditions.
[10] During World War II, many Spanish republicans served as part of the Long Range Desert Group and French Foreign Legion during the North African campaign.
[22] ZACF began to openly support the pro-democracy movement and popularised anarchist ideas among young people, with some members even working within the Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO).
Several democracy activists were arrested and charged with treason, while an article in the Times of Swaziland accused ZACF of having carried out an attack on a police vehicle during a demonstration in Manzini.
Mandla Khoza also attempted to establish a community project in this time, but activity in the following years was limited, due to the poor living conditions of many pro-democracy activists.
[27] This campaign against the monarchy eventually resulted in a coup d'état by a military junta known as the Derg, which overthrew the Ethiopian Empire and established a Marxist-Leninist one-party state in its place.
[30] The Horn Anarchists have been active in the campaign against the Tigray War, which they have described as a "genocide",[30] analyzing it as a product of the rising nationalism and a political shift to the right-wing under the government of Abiy Ahmed and the ruling Prosperity Party.
[38] By the time that the 28 May 1926 coup d'état established a military dictatorship in Portugal, most of Guinea-Bissau had been occupied, administered and taxed,[39] a process that was finally completed by the Estado Novo in the mid-1930s.
[41] Power instead lay in self-administering village committees, which were elected and recallable, rather than in party officials,[42] as Cabral had stated that "we do not want any exploitation in our countries, not even by black people.
[46] According to oral tradition, the Kikuyu people were once ruled by a despotic king who was deposed in a popular uprising, which instituted a democratic system in the place of monarchy.
[46] Popular opposition to the arap Moi government eventually led to the democratization of the country in 1992 and the victory of the National Rainbow Coalition in the 2002 Kenyan general election.
[59][60] The Nigerian anarchist Sam Mbah identified anarchic elements within the Third International Theory proposed in the Green Book of Muammar Gaddafi, particularly in the concept of the Jamahiriya.
[67] The role of the Libyan People's Committees was praised by the Syrian anarchist Mazen Kamalmaz, who argued that they should form the foundation of a new direct democracy in Libya, rather than just acting during the transition to a new regime.
[70][71][72] During the 1980s, the IMF imposed harsh austerity measures across Madagascar,[73] leading to the withdrawal of police, soldiers and government bureaucrats from much of the Central Highlands region.
When the anthropologist David Graeber visited the region, he described the formation of an anarchist community in Arivonimamo, where decisions were made via consensus, apparently leading to a very low crime rate.
[80] After the British colonization of Nigeria, revolutionary syndicalism became a key factor in the anti-colonial resistance,[81] although the trade union movement deradicalized and took a more reformist approach following the country's independence.
[83] In 1981, the socialist politician Abdou Diouf succeeded Léopold Sédar Senghor as President of Senegal, overseeing the country's transition to a multi-party system.
[86] The poor working conditions in the diamond fields eventually gave way to the rise of a Sierra Leonean branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
[90] Swept up in the atmosphere created by what at the time appeared to be a victorious worker revolution in Russia in 1917, the revolutionary syndicalist International Socialist League (ISL) and the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL) dissolved into the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) at the latter's founding in 1921, providing many notable early figures until the Comintern ordered the expulsion of the syndicalist faction in the party.
Unaligned syndicalists like Percy Fisher were active in the miners' 1922 Rand Rebellion, a general strike-turned-insurrection, and strongly opposed the racism of a large sector of the white strikers.
While committed to promoting syndicalism in the unions, ZACF work was in practice largely focused on the so-called "new social movements", formed in South Africa in response to the perceived failures of the African National Congress (ANC) government post-apartheid.
Following the 1989 Sudanese coup d'état which brought Omar al-Bashir to power, a coalition of opposition groups formed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), to coordinate resistance to the new government.
[104] Anarchism in Tunisia has its roots in the works of the philosopher Ibn Khaldun,[105] with the modern anarchist movement being first brought to the country in the late 19th century by Italian immigrants.
As a reaction to the introduction of British capitalism and the beginnings of a vast mining industry, workers in the region began to gravitate towards anarchist and syndicalist ideas, organizing the country's first trade unions.
[110] In 2009, a former AWSM member Malele D Phiri reflected on the new institutional role of trade unions and NGOs in Zambia's civil organization, describing it as the "dialectical opposite" of the ruling structure established by ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe.
[111] In the 1920s, the first wave of anarcho-syndicalism spread throughout much of Africa, with the South African Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) even establishing a section in Southern Rhodesia.
[112] Although the ICU dissolved in the early 1930s, the South Rhodesian section continued to operate as the Reformed Industrial Commercial Union until the 1950s, when the region was incorporated into the Central African Federation.
[121] Dissilusionment with the MDC led to libertarian socialism emerging from the opposition movement, with some Zimbabwean anarchists establishing the Uhuru Network to organise amongst working class communities.
