Political
Scholar Spotlight: Sishuwa Sishuwa - Part 2
The Elite Africa Project would be nowhere without the work of talented scholars, both those who support the project and those who inspire our work. In this series, the Elite Africa Project interviews scholars about their work across different domains of power and what they think a deeper study of Africa’s elites can add to our understanding of the continent. Here is Part 2 of my interview with Zambian historian Sishuwa Sishuwa. Read Part 1 here.
This is the fifth entry in our Scholar Spotlight series. You may also be interested in our previous interviews with Nwando Achebe, Josias Maririmba, Dickson Eyoh, and Gerald Bareebe.
Do you think the study of political leadership in Zambia (or in Africa) has changed over time? If so, why and how has it changed?
The study of political leadership in Zambia and Africa more generally has changed over the last three or four decades. The first studies of political leadership tended to focus on nationalist leaders such as Kaunda, Kwame Nkurumah, Julius Nyerere, and Jomo Kenyatta who brought about independence and ruled uninterrupted for decades. Much of this literature however focused on the ruling elites and thus perpetuated the dearth of opposition characters in the genre of political biography. More generally, such works were effectively nothing but hagiographies that fall within the nationalist literature that celebrates Africa’s twentieth century liberators from colonial rule and gives a veneer of respectability to a liberation aristocracy that felt that it was entitled to rule. This literature also neglects to examine the extent to which these individual leaders were shaped or constrained by their wider and institutional context. As the historian Ian Phimister once noted, this earlier scholarship is characterised by the "patronizing obsequiousness characteristic of those authors now belatedly insisting that they were never nationalist historians but always historians of nationalism." The early studies on political leadership are thus devoid of balanced analysis that may significantly aid our understanding of the nature of political leadership in Africa.
Recent scholarship has cured this weakness. In addition to moving away from the "Big Man" approach to focus on opposition and less successful figures, the new scholarship on political leadership in Africa tends to locate the individual within their times, tracing both the subjectivity and agency of that individual life and treating him or her as historically inscribed, born into a particular social stratum, and constantly shaped by the specific historical contexts the subject inhabited. As Karl Marx once noted:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.
Can we think about ourselves as academics as belonging to an elite group? What kind of power do academics wield over how African politics is presented and understood?
Academics can be considered a distinct elite group. This elite group claims to possess knowledge about various aspects of social, political, economic, and technological development. Many academics also claim to possess analytical skills to understand socio-political dynamics which can be of particular use to politicians and African leaders. In terms of influence and power, academics possess tremendous influence in society as their opinions and views can sway significant portions of the population. For instance, our understanding of how politics works in Africa is, in part, a consequence of academic narratives and representations. Let me illustrate this point with an example that I discuss more extensively in the book. A major weakness of some of the literature on populism in Africa is the tendency to look for unifying patterns of "African populism," emanating from a generalised view that populism on the continent works in a certain way. This is not the way to understand specific instances of populism in practice because the contexts and outcomes are so demonstrably different. There is also a tendency, especially among political scientists, to say that African politics is relatively less institutional than European politics and therefore the capacity for populism is stronger. This assumption may have seemed true once, but not anymore. If we look at European politics now, or indeed politics almost anywhere in the world – Argentina, Italy, France, India, and the United States – populism is thriving. It is therefore more helpful to think about populism as global and local rather than Africa-wide. Yet these perceptions, some would say stereotypes, of how politics work on the continent persist because academics used the tyranny of their intellectual power to construct particular narratives that have left indelible marks on the social psyche of understanding Africa.
But academics can also use their power to inspire positive social change. Here, I am talking about academics who use their minds and research for greater social impact; those who give public expression to the conviction that the acquisition of specialist knowledge should result in its application to causes and communities that need it most. This category of academics, traditionally called public intellectuals, are known to have played significant roles when they have aligned with struggling people for the defence of freedom, the promotion of democracy, and the protection of human rights. This partly explains why, in many countries, academics are viewed with suspicion and many times find themselves on the wrong side of the political authorities – as I did under the previous administration before my academic colleagues from across the world rallied and came to my rescue. Like journalists, public intellectuals are often a target of victimisation, incarceration, harassments, and at times death.
What is your favourite book about political power that you have read recently?
It is a novel written by Ghanian writer Ayi Kwei Armah entitled The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The book demonstrates, in my view, what I would call the pathology of power. Among other things, it conveys the idea that although the political elites who wield State power tend to think of themselves as extremely powerful, real power resides not in the institutions they control but in the people. In the book, this pathology of power is illustrated, in one scene that I remember vividly, through the actions of a minibus conductor and the driver who appear to possess more power than the passengers on the bus only because of the disunity of the collective. The two, that is the driver and his conductor, managed to expel from the bus a passenger who had not yet reached his destination while the other passengers remained in their seats, totally unconcerned about what was happening to one of them. That scene always reminds me of my formative years.
Growing up in Zambia, I often travelled by minibus, the main mode of public transportation. I was always amazed and quite ashamed for doing nothing about the way the conductor, "call boy" in common parlance, would collaborate with the driver to terrorise an entire busload of adults. The two villains had the power of a monarch over everybody at bus stations and in the buses.
The situation was worse during the rush hour when workers were either going to or returning from work. With buses in short supply, people struggled to get into whatever moveable assemblage of machine passed for a road vehicle. The historic humiliation suffered by many Zambians at the hands of bus drivers and call boys would make for a good PhD study!
The question that bothered me then, and still does now, is: how does it come to pass that physically fit and mentally sound adults would cower before a young, scruffy call boy simply because of his official role? As for women and girls, the abuse that was heaped upon them by this breed of lower end workers was simply abominable. Occasionally, a passenger would rant against either the bus driver or the conductor. But these were the exception rather than the rule. Typically, the passengers cowered before these two. The bus driver and his conductor were the lords of the bus.
Today, as an adult, I have, I think, acquired some measure of understanding of why and how many people chose to be abused and intimidated by bus drivers and their conductors. It is the simple fact that each person got onto the bus as an individual – one would never be sure of the solidarity of all the other passengers in the event of a tussle with the bus driver and his conductor.
On the one hand, the conductor was almost always sure of the full support of his bus driver. He knew very well that the bus driver could easily offload any passenger who refused to do his bidding. He knew too that whatever extra money he made by overloading the bus would be split between the two of them, with the bus driver, of course, getting the lion’s share. On the other hand, the passengers, who were many and had more money between them than the bus driver and his conductor, precisely because they boarded the bus as individuals and cared not to gang up against the bus driver and his conductor, ended up with no power over the bus driver and his conductor. Thus, it came to pass that those two individuals, the bus driver and his call boy, oppressed and abused the majority, who collectively had more financial and other power than them, precisely because the two acted as a team.
Over time, of course, the bus drivers and their call boys came to regard themselves as being “powerful” over their passengers, and passengers came to accept their lot as individuals pleading for a seat in a bus administered by a callboy and his bus driver. And no one would question this extremely strange, lopsided, and quite false distribution of power in a bus. In fact, other passengers would support the bus driver and his callboy in the abuse and oppression of fellow passengers by aiding in instructing other passengers to squeeze themselves into horribly uncomfortable positions as the bus was packed beyond legal limits. This usually happened when someone was late and would quite selfishly force other passengers “to move” so that they too could board the overloaded minibus.
In the minibus industry, the real power (money) is in the hands of passengers. If all potential passengers decided not to board minibuses, the minibus industry would collapse. The minibuses move around and make money only because there are people who decide to use them, as a means of transport. Inside the minibus, real social power is in the hands of the passengers as a collective, not as individuals. Passengers in any fully occupied minibus, acting in unison, can easily control the driver and his callboy. They have, when they choose to act as a collective, more physical, mental, and cultural power over the minibus driver and the call boy.
It is the lack of passenger consciousness of their superiority both in monetary and physical terms, and willingness to act as a collective, that produces the false consciousness of superiority and power in the bus driver and his call boy. The bus driver and his callboy simply suffer from the mental and spiritual disease occasioned by a false sense of power. They have no real power over the passengers. It is the passengers who, unwittingly, have transferred their collective power to these two villains.
It is not too difficult to see how similar laws operate when one considers the situation in many countries today. Let us, for a moment, imagine Zambia as a minibus. Our money would be the vote. The minibus driver would be the president. The call boy would be the political party in power. The passengers are all the citizens of Zambia. When we choose to travel in any minibus, we actually decide at that moment, to be “citizens” of that “bus”, and to “vote” for that bus’s driver, to be our “president”, for the time that we will travel to our destination. The call boy of the bus we choose to travel in becomes the “political party” that organises us inside the bus, as “citizens” or “passengers”.
The call boy and bus driver are at their best persuasive behaviour when they are seeking passengers (votes). As soon as the bus is full, the balance of power shifts. If we choose to act as individuals inside the minibus (our country), the political party in power (call boy) and the president (bus driver) will abuse and oppress us all at will. In fact, if we allow the callboy (political party) to overload (extreme oppression) the bus (country) may crash (conflict or civil war) and many may die, including the driver and his call boy (president and his party)! Inside the bus, just like inside our country, what keeps the majority of people who actually have real power, in their condition of apparent powerlessness, abuse, and oppression by a villainous minority is their inability to act as a collective, to be in solidarity with each other.
Thus, the pathology of power is perpetuated – those who actually have no power act and live as if they have power, and those who actually have real power, act and behave all the time as if they are powerless. All oppression and abuse are sustained by this perverse, inverted logic. Of course, vast protective trenches are dug by those who pretend to have power when, in reality, they are the powerless ones: they exploit the media, invoke culture and tradition, call upon the gods, and generally weave a complex false matrix that amounts to a false consciousness of power.
These powerless people create titles and big labels for themselves – Majesties, Excellencies, Lords, Honourable this or that, etc, in their efforts to hoodwink the masses in whom real economic and political power resides into a false sense of obeyance to them. They manufacture a language and manners which convey to all and sundry this sense of false power. And precisely because those with real power – the masses – continue to act by and large as individuals, these villains continue to lord it over them. Besides the family, school, church, prisons, and hospitals, there are the police, army, intelligence establishment, and all sorts of other institutions to enforce this false power over those who actually wield the power in society.
To claim the right to use these infrastructures of force in society, these powerless people do need a “Constitution” to clearly spell out why, how, and when they can use force to compel those with real power to behave as the powerless wish. For example, in the minibus, there is a silent unwritten constitution which distributes “power” between the bus driver and his callboy and the passengers. Of course the first Article of this constitution is that you should never enter the bus if you have no money to pay for the ride!
How, then, can the passengers liberate themselves from the abuse and oppression they receive at the hands of the bus driver and his call boy? As in any country, the first step is to understand where actual power resides – in the bus driver and his call boy or the passengers. The obvious answer is in the passengers. The second step is to grow this awareness of power among the passengers and to mobilise solidarity among them, and finally to cast away the fear of the oppressive and abusive villainous minority!
When these three conditions are met – knowledge of where real power lies, mobilisation of solidarity, and casting away the false veil of fear of the oppressors, then, and only then, can the liberation of the oppressed take place. At this point, the abused and oppressed are ready to reclaim their power from the villains. And of course, at this point, a completely new Constitution can then be written – one which transfers power into the rightful owners – the citizens.
Reading The Beautyful Ones helped me see clearly that in Zambia today, most of us appear to be quite content to be abused and oppressed by a very tiny minority. As long as this situation continues, we are not ready to reclaim our power from the villains.
Finally, what are you working on next?
I am currently working on a book, tentatively titled Gunning for Democracy, that examines the political role of the military in specific countries of southern Africa since the transition to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s. There is a lot of historical work on the interaction between the military and politics in West Africa, but much less on southern Africa. This does not mean that the army is unimportant; rather, the scholarly neglect is a result of the decline of formal military rule in most parts of the continent, an unwillingness to look beyond formal political institutions and processes, and the emphasis on civil society as the "good guys." These factors have all contributed to a situation where researchers, mainly political scientists, appear to have stopped taking the military seriously as a political actor including in southern Africa, except in Zimbabwe. Yet a strong case can be made about the military’s involvement in politics under the multiparty era in countries where (a) the later national armies were not offshoots of the liberation army (b) the nationalist struggle was not prolonged.
My project uses the case studies of Zambia and Malawi to understand when and how the army intervenes in politics and why under the era of multiparty democracy. In both countries, preliminary evidence from the fieldwork I have conducted so far shows that the army repeatedly refused to intervene at key historic moments in support of the incumbent or one political faction over the other, allowing political actors to compete for power on the constitutional terrain. We often focus on coups in African politics – and yes, we should continue to study them – but there are other positive stories about the army or elements of the army that deserve scholarly attention. So, this is the project I am currently working on, and I am about to approach potential publishers. I have just won a prestigious fellowship at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) that should give me time to finish writing the manuscript, one that I hope will intervene in or contribute to a number of wider debates in African Studies. These discussions include whether democracy in Africa survives on the strength of formal institutions or as a result of mass support for democratic processes and outcomes; the factors that explain the decline of coup attempts across the continent; how the military remains an important political actor since the turn to multiparty politics but may in some cases be more likely to secure rather than undermine democratic gains; and why alternation is becoming more routinised while the power of incumbency is in decline.
