An African Reflection On Tahrir Square

Mahmood Mamdani

16 May 2011

analysis

Nairobi — Not only has this new way of doing politics, without recourse to arms, bewildered officialdom; it has also sent a chill down many an official spine.

In Uganda, it has provided the lens through which all participants have made sense of a new form of protest called “Walk to Work.”

The immediate background to it was the government’s refusal to allow any form of peaceful assembly to protest any aspect of its policy.

The one exception was a permit the government granted the Pan African Movement, an organisation that had been set up under the auspices of Presidents Museveni and Gaddafi a couple of decades ago, to march in solidarity with Col Gaddafi and the Libyan people, and in opposition to NATO’s bombardment of Libya.

The march was to end up as a rally to be addressed by an army commander.

But the government changed its mind at the last minute, probably because it realised the demo could be joined by opposition supporters, or for that matter anyone disgruntled with government policy, and so the government decided to teargas and disperse its own demonstration.

Soon after that, the opposition announced that it would resort to a new form of protest: It would walk to work in response to rising fuel and commodity prices.

Walk to Work, the opposition said, was not an assembly and so required no police permit.

The result was a true theatre of the absurd as police arrested opposition politicians walking to work and then looked for reasons to justify it.

Thus Salaamu Musumba, an opposition official, was walking with one other person, and was stopped by a policeman. “Have you no car?” asked the policeman.

Musumba answered, “Yes I have.” “Then why are you walking?” Musumba was arrested.

Hidden agenda

Asked what was wrong with walking, the Information Minister suggested that the opposition must have a hidden agenda; if not, why did it not “come up with proposals on how to handle the challenges… instead of going to the streets.”

The Minister of Internal Affairs said the problem was more sinister.

The motive behind Walk to Work was really political, so the organisers should have sought police guidance. But the organisers did not follow official guidelines: “The police was not notified, the organisers did not identify themselves, the routes were not agreed to,” he said.

Asked why the police had sprayed schools and health centres with teargas, he said the fault really lay with those walking: “Some of them, when engaged by the police, decided to run into schools and health centres to use children and patients as human shields.”

The Chief Political Commissar of the Police insisted that since the Walk to Work demo was bound to turn into a procession, the organisers were law-bound to notify the police.

“I have no quarrel with anybody who wants to walk but it must be in accordance with the law by notifying the police and agreeing on the routes and maintenance of order.” Realising the absurdity of calling on people to get a police permit specifying when and where to walk, he added: “Many people walk but this has turned into a political matter.”

Inspector General of Police Major General Kale Kayihura tied himself into knots seeking to explain the distinction between ordinary walking and political walking.

Referring to the leading opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, he said, “Besigye can walk.

There is no problem, and he does not have to notify the police. However, when he wants to use walking or running as a demonstration, then he has to notify us.”

Pressed to explain what was wrong with political walking, the Inspector General of Police said the opposition’s real intention was to create a Ugandan version of Egypt’s Tahrir Square.

When the uprising we identify with Tahrir Square first happened, media commentators dismissed the very possibility of something similar happening in East Africa.

In their view, local society was too ethnically divided to rise up as one.

But events have shown that unity does not precede political praxis; it is produced through political struggle.

This is why the memory of Tahrir Square today feeds opposition hopes and fuels government fears in many an African polity.

To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, the spectre of Tahrir Square is coming to haunt Africa’s rulers.

Observers of Europe have seen in Tahrir Square the spread of “colour revolutions” said to have begun in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union.

I want to place Tahrir Square in a different context by looking back more than a quarter of a century, really three and a half decades, to an event that occurred on the southern tip of this continent, in Soweto.

Soweto 1976 signified a turning point in the South African struggle. Soweto was identified with the onset of community-based organisation.

Three years earlier, in 1973, spontaneous strikes in the city of Durban had sparked initiatives that led to the formation of independent trade unions.

Soweto Uprising, 1976

Together, Soweto and Durban, community-based organisations and independent trade unions, changed the face of anti-apartheid politics in South Africa.

Soweto was a youthful uprising. It marked a generational shift. In an era when adult political activists had come to accept as a truism that meaningful change could only come through armed struggle, Soweto pioneered an alternative imagination and an alternative mode of struggle.

Soweto changed the conventional understanding of struggle from armed to popular struggle.

Ordinary people stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, armed guerrillas, with the people cheering from the sidelines, but as a popular movement with ordinary people as key participants.

The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle. Finally, this new imagination laid the basis for a wider unity

To understand the efficacy of this new imagination, we need to begin with an understanding of the mode of governance, the mode of rule, to which it was a response.

Apartheid rule had split South African society into so many races [Whites, Indians, Coloureds] and so many tribes [Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Venda and so on] — by governing races and tribes, and even each tribe, through a separate set of laws — that even when they organised to remove or reform the law in question, those opposed to apartheid organised and acted separately: the Whites as the Congress of Democrats, Coloureds as the Coloured Peoples Congress, Indians as the South African Indian Congress and Africans as the African National Congress. Each of these qualifiers — Couloureds, Indians and Africans — mirrored how the official census named each population groups.

In this context came a new person, a visionary leader, Steve Biko, at the helm of a new movement, Black Consciousness.

Biko’s message undermined apartheid statecraft. Black is not a colour, said Biko, Black is an experience.

If you are oppressed, you are Black. In the South African context, this was indeed a revolutionary message.

The ANC had spoken of non-racialism as early as the Freedom Charter in 1955. But the ANC’s non-racialism only touched the political elite.

Whereas individual white and Indian and Coloured members of the political elite joined the ANC as individuals, ordinary people were still trapped in a political perspective that continued to reflect the same old narrow racial and tribal boundaries.

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