African Revolutionary
Writers, Part 9
Issa Shivji
Issa Shivji has been a
professor at the University Dar-es-Salaam for four decades. He is an African
revolutionary intellectual of the first rank. Shivji provides our reading text
for today: “The Struggle for Democracy and Culture” (attached).
Shivji has made the
anti-Imperialist case very well, reminding us, among other things, that it is
we freedom-fighters who are the humanists now, and it is the Imperialists who
are the barbarians (a message that is also reinforced by Kenan Malik’s short,
included piece about culture).
Issa Shivji’s address on The
Struggle for Democracy and Culture explicitly and correctly claims, on behalf
of the national-liberation and anti-colonial struggles, that this struggle -
our struggle - carries, for the time being, the banner of progress for the
whole world.
For a long time past, and
into the future, until such time as the struggle for socialism again becomes
the principal one, the National Democratic Revolutions taken together
constitute the main vehicle for human progress, bearing up and rescuing all
that is noble and fine in humanity.
The bourgeoisie is a thieving
class and it will steal the clothes of the revolutionaries without any
hesitation if it sees the smallest, most temporary advantage in doing so. The
Imperialist bourgeoisie wishes to reverse the appearance of its shameful past
and of its hopeless future. It wishes to claim the moral superiority that the
liberation movement has, and steal it.
Issa Shivji shows very
clearly how this monstrous fraud is attempted. The constant Imperialist droning
about “good governance” is the extreme of hypocrisy, coming as it does from the
worst oppressors in history – the force that has taken oppression to the ends
of the earth. Read Shivji. He tells it well. But also note the hypocritical
machinations of our present South African anti-communists, including but not
limited to, the DA. If you did not know better, you could believe from what you
read that it was liberal whites who liberated South Africa from the old regime.
Let me repeat: the struggle
for democracy is ours, not theirs. The struggle for freedom is ours. We are the
humanists now. We, the liberationists, are the bearers of the best of human
history and we have been so for many decades past. The 20th Century was the
liberation century, the anti-Imperial century. That was when we overtook the
others in politics, in morality, and in philosophy - but we were only starting.
In the 21st Century we will finish the job.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Shivji, Struggle for Democracy,
2003, with Malik, Struggle for Culture, 2002.
