Fight My Beloved Continent: New Democracy in Africa
By Issa Shivji
Published by SAPES Trust 1992
ISBN 0-7974-1103-8

AFRICA has had a long history of oppression and struggle of the masses from slavery to neo-colonialism.
During slavery, millions of the sons and daughters of the soil were transported to the Americas and the very soul of the people was attacked and destroyed.
White civilisation preached that black people had ‘no soul’.
Issa G. Shivji in his Book: Fight My Beloved Continent: New Democracy in Africa highlights the atrocities that the African has been subjected to by the whiteman and the need to fight for total emancipation.
“The difficulty was that though one could trap (slaves) like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat them both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings with the intelligence and resentments of human beings,” writes Shivji.
The term invincible is crucial because it shows that even though Africans were slaves, they had their ideologies of resistance and revolted against their masters.
Colonialism, too, produced its ideologies of domination and ideologies of resistance.
While the slave had ‘no soul’, the colonised blackman had a soul but according to the whiteman, it had to be ‘rescued from pagan rituals’.
“The Bible and the gun were the instruments,” says the author.
“The native soul had to be Christened while the native body had to be civilised.
“Christianity and civilisation demanded that the ‘native’ be introduced to the discipline of labour and be disciplined like a child.”
For that reason, many African societies, including Zimbabwe, were diverted from the African Traditional Religion (ATR) where Musikavanhu or Mwari was worshipped through ancestors or vadzimu venyika.
Important and sacred rituals done by the Africans were labelled demonic. There was need for a new religion and brainwashing of Africans to accept the God brought by the whiteman.
This was meant to dominate and control the minds of the Africans so that they would not rebel against these colonial masters since the Bible preaches peace and respect for those in authority.
A better place was promised in Heaven so that people were content with whatever situation they faced.
However, this also failed because Africa united and regained its political independence.
The writer notes that Africa has been a hotbed of socio-politico as well as economic struggle and the pivotal role in this struggle has been played by the masses.
Despite all this, the masses have only managed to change their exploiters and oppressors. Writes Shivji: “Hitherto it has been a change in the set of exploiters and rulers.
The masses, the working people, have yet to raise themselves to the position of rulers.”
Shivji notes that capitalists have a tendency to place the workers in strategic sectors like transport, plantations, manufacturing and service sectors to subject them to super-exploitation.
As the state destroys autonomous trade unions and bans strikes all in the name of development, it makes it possible to pay wages below the value of labour power.
“Thus, even the worker survives by cutting into his necessary consumption – that is in a crippled state,” writes the author.
“Once again, we find that commodity exchange is essentially unequal.”
Total emancipation will not be achieved unless there is economic freedom because in most African countries, major economic decisions are in the hands of the Western imperialists.
President Robert Mugabe has always emphasised the need for Africa to be able to stand and speak for herself and to empower her people economically.
For Zimbabwe, agriculture is the backbone of the economy and over
400 000 black households are part of the now booming agriculture sector.
With the success of Command Agriculture, Zimbabwe will soon regain her breadbasket status.
For most of the companies, the shareholding stands 51-49 percent with Government being the major shareholder.
Communities with mining companies have been empowered through the Community Share Ownership Schemes (CSOS) and they have a say and stake in the minerals generated within their communities.
Writes Shivji:“Knowledge, it is said, is power.
Theory is the highest form of cognition of knowledge.
And when the theorisation is from the standpoint of the working people, it indeed has the potential of becoming power, for theory/ideology in the hands of the masses becomes a material force.
That is the kind of knowledge that ruling classes instinctively hate like a plague, for like (a) plague it can have an epidemic effect.
It kills discriminatively.
And the ruling class knows who will be the victims.”
Education, according to Shivji, plays a key role in the ideological struggle.
He notes that imperialists’ ideologies get reproduced in classrooms every day when he says: “Ruling classes and their educators would like to turn out technicians who can be manipulated but not intellectuals who can see and question manipulation.
All dictators hate knowledge.
Militant students and intellectuals, therefore, have to turn these rooms into sites of class struggles (ideological struggles).”
This has to be done urgently because in the case of Africa, neo-colonial education is one-tenth irrelevant and nine-tenths positively harmful.
Hence, the need for Africa to fight for her democratic space.
“Not only should we be talking about a fighting continent, but we must comprehend the direction and the goals of this great fight,” says Shivji.
“The development of forces within African countries themselves, which will provide the leadership and the basis for new politics.
This is what I mean when I talk of the reawakening of politics in Africa, reawakening of mass politics.”
Shivji promises that the move will not be easy, but worth it.
“Of course, at the moment, there are only rumblings, far on the horizon, but there is no doubt that they will become storms,” he says.
“What character they will take, what kind of storms they will be, we cannot tell.
But storms there will be.”