African Revolutionary Writers, Part 9
Issa Shivji
Issa Shivji [pictured] 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” downloadable via the first link given
below.
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 itself becomes once again 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 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 – Imperialism. 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.
Please
download and read the text via this link:
Further reading:
Samir Amin, 2004, The American
Ideology (3214 words)
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