Interview with Leo Zeilig (February 2025)
Leo is the former editor of the Review of African Political Economy website (https://roape.net/our-blog/ ) and the author of several books on Africa. These include the following two books. E-book copies available on request:
https://tinyurl.com/AfricanStrugglesToday and
https://www.hauspublishing.com/product/lumumba/
Let’s begin from the latest developments in the DRC, how far do you agree with the vision that the current conflict in the largest African country is almost another circle of the Colonial Plunder?
Without question this is part and parcel of a long history of colonial plunder. But there are certain phases we need to be clear about.
To start with, today’s plunder is part of the story of the pillage in the Congo since independence in 1960, but it has many features which have been developing since the late 1990s. What we can see as a new round of regional and international plunder.
Since the consolidation of Joseph Mobutu’s regime in 1964, and the crushing of the resistance to Lumumba’s murder in a period we could call the Belgian-Congolese nexus, ‘plunder’ was relatively organised. This saw, the Congo in its ascribed place in the global hierarchy – run by a compliant, and brutal political class in Kinshasa, and exporting the country’s riches (diamonds, copper, gold and of course uranium).
Artisanal mining rippled across the country in 1970s and 1980s, and from the late 80s and early 90s, the country lost its geostrategic significance to the United States, with the collapse of the state socialist regimes and the end of the cold war.
Yet the central role of mineral exports to the Global North during the wars and mayhem across the Congo from the mid-1990s onwards continued undimmed. However, this was in very different circumstances.
There was a moment of great political hope with the tremendous resistance movements in the Congo from 1991 – Congo’s second revolution (the first being the struggles for formal independence in 1960). This almost toppled Mobutu. Mass struggles, strikes, protests swept across the country for several years, but ultimately failed to find political coherence and organisational consolidation. The regime just about managed to hang onto power.
This failure led to the ascendency of the rebel movement by Laurent-Désiré Kabila in 1997, which spread from the east and eventually took power and the capital. There was widespread political hope, for a brief time.
Kabila had been supported by Rwanda and Paul Kagame but broke with his backers soon after taking power.
Rwandan entered the political and economic scene of the Congo, and this ‘intervention’ has continued – fully acknowledged, encouraged and approved by the West – unabated since 1997. The country supports rebel armies (M23, is but the latest), and artisanal and ‘criminal’ mining operations, militias and directly intervenes itself.
Long denied by the regime in Kigali, the export of raw diamonds and gold, for example – minerals that are not present in Rwanda itself – from Kigali for processing and sale in Europe, and North America has been widely reported by numerous organisations. Some of the most notable were reports produced by UN panels of experts on the illegal export of minerals years ago – these named and shamed Rwanda, and Uganda (to a lesser extent).
Rwanda has been a key actor fuelling Congolese instability and mass murder, while plundering natural resources and minerals – all of this with full approval of the Global North. So, Rwanda has been enriched by this plunder but is also the main instrument used in the “criminal extraction” of wealth from the Congo by the old imperialist players of the first phase of post-independence plunder.
We could also name dozens and dozens of Canadian, Australian, American, Chinese mining outfits who have also been directly involved in the phase of thief and pillage in the Congo since 1997.
In view of the present American pressures on South Africa and its leading political party (ANC) regarding their land policies, how do you see the very basis of the Global South ideology? And to what extent this ideology can present a genuine and viable resistance to the growing American-led imperialism?
Not at all, unfortunately. Here and there we might see a bellicose reaction from the regime in Pretoria to Trump’s reaction to their land reform, or the support for Palestinians who have been exterminated in their tens of thousands in the last 18 months, but this amounts to very little.
Should we believe for a second the “pro-Palestinian” pronouncements of the Saudi royal family, or the same expressions of “solidarity” from the Junta in Cairo? The answer has to be no.
We can’t afford to be fooled by this nonsense – or to see in it any consistent anti-imperialism ideology. Let’s remember, that the ruling ANC-led and defended the butchers of Marikana in 2012 – when 34 striking miners were murdered. But we must also recognise the daily brutality of the South African police against squatters, and the poor across the country (to say nothing of the failure of the ANC since 1994 to implement meaningful land reform).
The ANC is the enemy to the poor in South Africa, and the illusion of its progressive land reform policies, its so-called liberation ideology is a dangerous delusion. South Africa does not provide any sort of pan-African alternative for the continent.
There is another place we have to go for the ‘ideology’ and practice you refer to in the question. I see the alternative in the mass movements and strikes that broke Apartheid in the 1980s in South Africa, for example (when many of those resisting the racist regime in Pretoria didn’t know who the ANC were!) But we must also go to the Congolese mass uprising in the 1990s, that I mentioned above. There are, of course, many other examples which I could give.
– You wrote extensively about African radical thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Sankara, Lumumba and more recently Walter Rodney, does Africa still need to revolutionize its positions towards the present world order? And what means are left to achieve this end.
Among those giants of African radical politics – in particular, Fanon and Walter Rodney, there is a huge amount to learn. Fanon’s astonishing power was how he managed to unpick decolonisation as it was happening around him – in real time. The continent was being refigured, and gaining independence, yet Fanon saw how utterly shallow it was and he sounded the alarm. He denounced the ‘lack of ideology’ of the new leaders of independence and saw how colonial powers – with their massive economic might – had absolutely no plans of leaving the continent to find its own path.
Rodney – the great Guyanese revolutionary – writing, and engaging later than Fanon, saw the same failure of independence, but he did two unique things. Firstly, he explored the various projects of the new independent nations to transform themselves and reverse their underdevelopment. At the end of his short life – remember, he was murdered in 1980 in Georgetown in Guyana – he denounced these projects as statist, and bureaucratic serving the interests of a new exploiting class.
Then, secondly, and perhaps his greatest achievement, Rodney turned decisively to the agency of the working class, or working people, as the motor of all political and economic liberation.
No people can be freed by an enlightened leader, or a benevolent dictator. Liberation could only come by their own hand, and their own emancipatory deeds. Rodney is correctly known as the prophet of self-emancipation.
This is our only hope.
What about the future of African Solidarity values, in your point of view, how can we take the concept of African Solutions to African Problems as a serious one?
I think there are two ways of answering this questions. The idea – variously made – of African solutions to African problems, is entirely understandable. The continent has been the plaything of foreign, European (and now also Chinese) interests and interventions for about five hundred years. “Hands off Africa” was the slogan of the pan-African conferences in the late 1950s and 1960s held in Africa, and correctly so.
However, we must avoid the seemingly easy and comforting idea of state-led African solutions to African problems – led by so-called progressive regimes, whether this is the military juntas in West Africa today, or even the well-meaning military regime of Thomas Sankara in the 1980s. Have no illusions, for those struggling to survive in Mali, Niger, or Burkina Faso today (or during Sankara’s years 1983-1987), the rhetoric of fake anti-imperialism means nothing to their lives!
Pan-Africanism has another aspect which can be embraced, and this is the Pan-Africanism of popular workers led struggles from below. This subterranean force – present, visible, active – has been a constant feature of Africa’s political reality and resistance to global – and national – capitalism. We must focus relentlessly on this agency and look closely at how it has been marginalised by a politics and history that has turned its back on self-emancipation and working-class politics.
We could call this the lost subject of African liberation, and today we need to recover this agency in history, and in the contemporary organising, politics and struggles taking place today.
The New York Times has described your latest book about Rodney by admitting that “Zeilig is not stretching when he calls Rodney, ‘A revolutionary for our time”, can you brief us about your own view about our African time?
The title of the book was a fraternal jab at the idea of history always telling us something that had necessarily been consigned to the past: history has its place, but ultimately needs to be catalogued, and studied in libraries.
It seemed to me, researching and writing the book, that Rodney was an activist and revolutionary socialist for our time. How? Well, he was the ultimate theorist of decolonisation, and capitalism. Decolonisation was a project of clearing out the remnants of cultural, political and economic control by former colonial powers – as we have seen above, this has never happened. Rodney saw this and condemned the failure even in the so-called radical projects of post-independence, in Egypt, in Tanzania, or wherever, to break with capitalism.
But then, towards the end of his life, Rodney went further and saw that an anti-capitalist, socialist future could only come about through mass working class engagement, with working people generating their own forms of politics, power and control.
Ultimately, this needed to be a global project not just a pan-African one – if capitalism is relentless, and global, Rodney said, then we (those of us fighting for another world) must match that relentlessness with the political energy of working people. Fanon knew, also, that there was no alternative, no anti-capitalism, which was not international. Total human liberation could only emerge as a global project.