Wednesday 23 April 2014

African Groundings: War Resisters International’s African Engagement



This article was published in The Broken Rifle, December 2013, No. 98

 

Find it here:http: http://www.wri-irg.org/node/22754


African Groundings: War Resisters International’s African Engagement  By Matt Meyer

A quick and cursory view of the history of War Resisters International (WRI) – an organization responsible for many wonderful small actions but rarely credited for its inspiration of big and effective movements – had hardly any connection to Africa at all. But that impression would most certainly be incorrect. Though often behind-the-scenes and without fanfare or spotlight, key members of the WRI and the group itself has played significant roles in significant aspects of the continents anti-colonial and anti-war moments over the past 90-plus years since WRI’s 1921 founding. The July 2014 international conference in Cape Town, South Africa is simply the most public – and perhaps the most ambitious – of these historic endeavors.

Background

Though parts of the WRI story can be found in a various articles and books, most notably Devi Presad’s insightful overview, it was at a conference in Italy in 1982 (with no noticeable African representative present) that a young representative of the German section IDK presented a booklet on the theory and practice of WRI. Wolfram Beyer noted:

“Nonviolent action is designed chiefly to provide methods and motivations with the help of which people may achieve emancipation and self-determination and liberate themselves from the ways imposed by the rulers and their military means.” Far from a call for arms reduction or the popular nuclear “freeze” of the day, or even a call for merely individualistic resistance positions, Beyer implored that a true nonviolence could only be carried out “my means of radically-democratic structures.” WRI, as Beyer clarified, has always been rooted in a drive for nonviolent revolution, always distancing itself from “pre-war [WWII] pacifism which was regarded as no more than a vague longing for peace and reconciliation.” This direct actionist perspective, fused with “revolutionary anti-militarism” and a commitment to those who refused to fight on political and not solely religious grounds, formed a unique association – complete with its own early links to African resisters. The term “conscientious objector” itself, Beyer asserted, “was coined by General Jan Christian Smuts (1906) for the brotherhood campaign initiated by Gandhi, of all Asian people living in South Africa.”

It was in the post-WWII world that WRI connections with liberationists on the African continent intensified – at first primarily through the work of five conscientious objectors and militant c.o. supporters: African American objectors Bill Sutherland and Bayard Rustin, Jean Van Lierde of Belgium, Michael Randle of Britain, and Pierre Martin of France. Each in their own way strengthened WRI ties to groups and peoples on “the motherland” and attempted to ground, though the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a militant nonviolence connected to the loose WRI network.

Sutherland, first and foremost, gave his life towards these ends. Re-locating from the USA to the British colony of the Gold Coast in 1953, Sutherland quickly formed a WRI chapter along with some Accra-based Quakers, internationalists and anti-colonialists. His marriage to educator and author Efua Sutherland only drew him closer to the freedom movement, and he (along with his old friend Rustin) took part in early dialogues on strategies and tactics with the man dubbed “the Gandhi of Africa” – Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah’s “positive action” program – a merging of Gandhian technique, non-violent direct actionist politics, and indigenous cultural sensibilities, led Ghana to become the first newly independent nation on the continent. Capital city Accra and Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) became the center not only for Pan-African aspirations but for a new hope among Western peace movement leaders about the possibility for widespread social transformation.

Van Lierde’s own African involvement followed a parallel path a few years later. In the late 1950s in Brussels, on the eve of Ghana’s independence and as the rest of the continent was abuzz with interest in replicating Nkrumah’s example, Van Lierde formed the Amis de Presence Africaine, an organization committed to developing and supporting nonviolent strategies for the liberation of the Congo. He struck a close friendship with Congolese leader and first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba which lasted till Lumumba’s fateful assassination in 1961; Van Lierde remained a strong critic of neo-colonialism and the continuing militarization of Africa till his own passing in 2006. In his preface to the book Marche D’Espoir: Non-violence pour la Democratie au Zaire (1992), Van Lierde wrote that though decades of efforts had been made across the continent for an adherence to nonviolence and justice – beginning, he noted, at a 1958 Pan African conference in Accra which Sutherland helped to organize – “it has been very difficult for us to obtain the approval of the colonial powers” for such peaceful change!

Foreground

It was French atomic testing in the Sahara desert near its West African colonies which next attracted the attention of WRI members, Pan Africanists, and anti-nuclear activists across the globe. Again WRI representative Bill Sutherland took the lead, this time joined by Rustin, British WRI leader Michael Randle, Rev. Michael Scott, and others – including a strong contingent from within Ghanaian CPP rank-and-file and the Accra-based All-African Federation of Trade Unions. French economist and WRI member Pierre Martin, who had been involved in prominent Paris protests against human rights abuses of the French in Algeria, left his job at UNESCO to join the Sahara Protest Team; dozens put their bodies in harms way, marching into the desert to stop the bombing. After a series of local events featuring the international team (and attracting international attention) took place in Ghana, Upper Volta, and elsewhere in the region, the French eventually abandoned their testing plans.

This crucial period – as the drive for independence was spreading throughout the continent and the world, and as civil rights, human rights anti-nuclear, and anti-militarist sentiments were also beginning to take root – saw extended WRI seed-planting in all of these burgeoning movements. The Sahara Protest Team, for example, included a number of West Africans who would go on to become leaders of their own countries once independence would come later in the 1960s. The World Peace Brigades (WPB, forerunner to many of today’s unarmed civilian peace-force organizations) was discussed in earnest at the WRI triennial held in India in 1960; it’s founding in Beirut in 1962 included sponsorship not only from Michael Scott, AJ Muste (leader of several US pacifist organizations, including WRL and the Fellowship of Reconciliation), and Gandhian associate JP Narayan, but also Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. And an Accra-based Conference on Positive Action for Peace and Security in Africa was held in April 1960, with AJ Muste, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Franz Fanon and others in attendance – in what organizer Bill Sutherland termed “the height of influence of the world pacifist movement on the African liberation struggle.”

The early 1960s included talks with both Nkrumah as well as Nyerere (who became founding president of his country in 1961) and Kaunda (who became founding president of his country in 1964) about setting up international nonviolence training centers to help develop unarmed defense and mobilization strategies and practitioners – along the lines of a pacifist “West Point” military college, except without the military. Despite a successful “World without the Bomb” conference in Ghana in 1962, and substantial WRI influence in the Pan-African Freedom Movements of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), these talks never came to fruition as forces of violence and militarism became more extreme across the continent. After the 1966 coup which deposed Nkrumah from power, he became co-President of Guinea with Sekou Toure in an alliance which saw both of them vocal about the need for armed revolution. Fanon’s critiques about the need for psychological purging of the violence of the oppressor led many to over-simplify his writings as a call for armed struggle as the only means for revolution. Along with growing sentiment in Southern Africa since the post-Sharpeville formation of the South African armed struggle and the growth of armed movements in Mozambique, Angola, Southern Rhodesia and Namibia grassroots interest in both tactical and philosophical nonviolence greatly diminished.

The positive connections continued; Kaunda continues to credit WRI, Sutherland, and his pacifist friends with helping him obtain power without arms – in part due to the plans for a massive international march for suffrage which embarrassed the colonial authorities into granting universal voting rights, leading to Kaunda’s election as the first African leader of his nation. But the heady actions of the beginning of the decade gave way to more long-term planning – small actions, intellectual pursuits, base-building and private meetings about how bigger, more lasting and successful movements could be developed in the future.

Pierre Martin, for example, relocated to Senegal with his entire family, where he served as a member of the WRI International Council. The booklet Violence in Africa, penned by Martin and published by WRI in 1968, reviewed the nature of colonial subjugation and suppression, as well as the role of religion, the army, and trade unions in building militarized or de-militarized societies. In a conclusion reflecting on the possibilities for nonviolence in Africa, Martin noted that the little overt support for large explicitly pacifist movements notable in the late 1960s meant nothing, as “non-violence does not attract the attention of the professional newsmen: violence is much more sensational.” Martin urged readers to take careful note that some key indigenous forces in Africa speak explicitly of nonviolence, including the Kibangist Christians in the Congo and the Muslim sect of the Mourides, founded in Senegal “by a saint who resisted the French military colonization by nonviolence.” Martin documented the work of Sheik Amadou Bamba “who has nearly a million disciples” and who influenced many throughout the region, including the activists of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. He ended the WRI booklet by urging all to find their place in the work for peace, quoting Senegalese poet-President Leopold Senghor, between “the crossroads of giving and receiving.”
WRI’s triennial conference held at the end of 1969 in the Haverford, PA (USA) also indicated a deepening understanding of the need for long-term strategies and a two-way solidarity. The conference theme, “Liberation and Revolution,” included detailed reports and dialogues about the connections between means and ends, the role of “liberated nationalism,” and the need to get “beyond all separatism.” A special report on Nonviolent Revolution and Developing Countries was delivered by Bill Sutherland, Indian leader Narayan Desai, and Vietnamese human rights defender Vo Van Ai. The report asserted:

“A revolution should not lead to imitation of the affluent society… Several developing countries do already have people’s movements, traditions and in some cases even government policies that take into account the risks involved in both poverty and in affluence, and are trying to evolve their own methods of integrated development… A nonviolent revolution will have different characters in different parts of the world, and the conference believes that nonviolent revolution in the developing countries would mean a qualitative social change based on the principles of self-reliance, dignity of labor, respect for the individual, the spirit of service and sharing among the members of the community, participatory democracy and a face-to-face society.”

New Ground

Some of these conversations came full circle in 1985-86, at another WRI triennial in India, this time hosted by Desai and including participants Bayard Rustin, WPB founder George Willoughby, representatives of the South African Council of Churches and the women’s group Black Sash, and some youthful participants (including this author). A few years earlier, on a trip to Mozambique and Zimbabwe, US reporter Julie Frederikse noticed me sporting a broken rifle tee-shirt and took me aside to tell me about a meeting her South African husband Stelios was having with some young chaps from across the border. A few white South African boys had come to Harare to visit former conscientious objector (CO) Stelios about their plans to launch a more mainstream project linking a call for an end to conscription with calls for racial justice and an end to apartheid. Within a day, we all joined together for a dinner to discuss the possibilities of international support for such work, and – shortly thereafter – the world learned of the highly creative, barrier-breaking End Conscription Campaign (ECC). The ECC phenomena not only helped work alongside South Africa’s mass democratic United Democratic Front to bring unprecedented white folks closer to an anti-apartheid perspective, it also inspired thousands across the globe in showing how making the links between peace and justice issues could be done in a fun way, empowering for all. WRI’s distinctive support role throughout the 1980s was a prime example of mutually beneficial solidarity. And the India triennial solidified that solidarity, as new relationships were forged and old ones rekindled in the light of what would be the final phase of ridding Africa of its final, seemingly intractable colonial outpost.

WRI contemporary work in Africa center around three major inter-related projects developed in the 1990s: the Bangkok Women's Conference of 1992, the formation of the Africa Working Group (AWG) in 1994, and the International CO Meeting in Chad in December 1995. "Women Overcoming Violence: Redefining Development and Changing Society through Nonviolence" held in Bangkok in December 1992 was WRI's best-funded conference yet and had more African participants than any WRI-related project since the campaigns of the early 1960s. For the most part, however, the numbers were not reflective of a shared political context: most of the African women participants turned out to be from NGO service organizations rather than from community-based groups and movements. A more incremental and organic approach to outreach and networking was needed. In 1994, the WRI Africa Working Group was formed, in part in response to the successful work of the WRI Latin America Working Group in developing cross-movement networks throughout South and Central America. The Latin America Working Group related both to the broader WRI structures as well as to the Latin America-wide Servicio Paz y Justicia organization, which has a more theological orientation.

Meeting in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil at the time of WRI’s 1994 triennial, the Africa Working Group brought together the growing contacts which WRI had made with the South African mass democratic movement, a grouping of European-based Africans and African solidarity specialists, and several North American African academics and activists. It has held meetings and seminars at every subsequent WRI conference, and has been responsible for reporting on relevant issues, including, for example, in the publication of 1996 Peace News dossier “Peace and Reconstruction in Africa.” As Narayan Desai coached us in 1986, the AWG has always emphasized South-South collaboration and skills-building, with support people in the North working to help facilitate rather than moderate that independent contact.

As a loose networking tool, the WRI AWG has been responsible for strengthening African participation – in numbers as well as content – at WRI conferences, materials, and related activities. One such conference was the International Conscientious Objectors Meeting, held in Chad in December 1995. This historic gathering showed that the classic Western conception of conscientious objection tends to be alien in most African settings. Despite strong political unity between the WRI, CO and African representatives from Chad, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville and beyond, the issues around “the Right to Refuse to Kill” clearly needed to be reframed. Subsequently, WRI has been documenting the human rights issues arising from military service and forced recruitment in Africa, using this in evidence in asylum tribunals, presenting it to the UN Human Rights Committee, and publishing it in our own media and reports. In addition to work with national struggles where conscription and CO issues have had direct effects – such as in South Africa and Eritrea – WRI members in the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century have been engaged in studies and solidarity involving the psycho-social empowerment of former child soldiers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and Rwanda. WRI is recognized as a leading international authority on these issues, and was recently invited by the United Nations to testify at an Experts Conference on Eritrea, held in Pretoria in November 2013.

Since 2001, the WRI established a formal “Right to Refuse to Kill (RRTK)” program, which has dealt with such as issues as under-age recruitment, the collective punishment of families who evade military service, and the role of women who encourage men not to fight (including flogging in the Sudan). RRTK has been building up a network of African advisers, mainly of exiles. Africa Working Group co-convener Elavie Ndura and I (a founding co-convener since 1992) worked in conjunction with Africa World/Red Sea Press with many of these advisors and new WRI network members from Africa to produce narratives of the current challenges and opportunities. A two-volume set of activist and academic papers documenting contemporary grassroots civil resistance campaigns, actions, leaders, organizations and movements was published: Seeds of New Hope: Pan African Peace Studies for the 21st Century (2008) and Seeds Bearing Fruit: Pan African Peace Activism for the 21st Century (2010). With a foreword by Kenneth Kaunda and an emphasis on new voices and topics, including a special focus on gender and a chapter on sexual orientation by Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe director and WRI Council member Chesterfield Samba, Seeds of New Hope attempted, in Johan Galtung’s assessment, “to bring Africa to peace studies and peace studies to Africa, hopefully for the benefit of both.” With even greater grassroots WRI AWG input, including reports on the work connecting child soldiers and counter-recruitment, Seeds Bearing Fruit helps push the period of long-term planning and slow, small development to a new era of mass unarmed action and popular campaigns showcasing people’s power.

Together, the Seeds books grow from our insights gleaned from Bill Sutherland’s legacy and teachings:

“When we were working for an end to colonialism there was excitement in the air,” Sutherland noted, “but also with us were the weaknesses which would lead to the troubles still to come. Today, there is much grief, war and violence throughout Africa, but we must look beyond the headlines which only report on the negative things. In this work, in these stories of new resistance, lie the seeds of new hope.”

Renewed Ground

Concrete fruit of a distinctly Pan African variety grew prosperously at the WRI African Nonviolence Trainers´ Exchange meeting, which took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in July 2012. Through a participatory methodology, the training explored four main topics: Nonviolence (nonviolence as a principle and nonviolence as a technique); Gender and sexualities (integrating a gender perspective in active nonviolence); Nonviolence and global movements (recent and current African Nonviolent Movements and beyond the so-called “Arab Spring,” including the case of Egypt and influence in the region); and Nonviolence training (Nonviolence Training and its Role in African social movements).

It was at that meeting that the African Nonviolence and Peacebuilding Network was formed, with Soweto-based Sipho Theys and former Parliamentarian Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge serving as co-chairs. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who is also playing a leading role in the organization of the July 2014 WRI conference along with her group Embrace Dignity, noted: “The creation of the African Nonviolence and Peacebuilding Network is a significant moment in that we now have the opportunity to build on the on-the-ground work happening all across the continent, to break the isolation which so many feel. I like to think about it going beyond training to peacebuilding, going to the root causes of violence.”

Getting back to the roots – of both war and war resistance along the broad continuum of nonviolent direct action – seems like an appropriate goal given the WRI’s 90-plus years of engagement with African Liberation. As we experience new and renewed levels of mass moblization, small and now-not-so-small-actions playing a role in developing even larger and hopefully more effective democratic movements for justice and peace, now is the time to do more than just network. Together we must act.

**

Matt Meyer is a New York City-based author, educator, and activist, who serves as War Resisters International’s Africa Support Network Coordinator. A UN representative of the International Peace Research Association, Meyer is editor, author or contributor to a dozen books, including Time is Tight: Urgent Tasks for Educational Transformation—South Africa, Eritrea, and the USA; and (with Bill Sutherland) Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation. Archbishop Tutu, in his Foreword to Guns and Gandhi, noted that “Sutherland and Meyer have looked beyond the short-term strategies and tactics which too often divide progressive people. They have begun to develop a language which looks at the roots of our humanness beyond our many private contradictions.”

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