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.”
