Democracy is Ours

Course on Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 9

Eduardo Mondlane, 1920-1969

Democracy is Ours

This part is the penultimate (second last) in the present series on Anti-Imperialism, Peace, and Socialism. This part is designed to invite comrades to reflect upon the place of the anti-Imperialist struggle within the entirety of world history.

That is why Issa Shivji’s address on The Struggle for Democracy and Culture (linked below) is used. It explicitly and correctly claims, on behalf of the national-liberation and anti-colonial struggle, that this 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 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, or the 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.

Frantz Fanon, 1925-1961

Issa Shivji, the revolutionary Dar-es-Salaam intellectual, shows very clearly how the 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 start to believe from what you read that it was liberal whites who liberated South Africa from the old regime.

Issa Shivji

The struggle for democracy is ours, not theirs. The struggle for freedom is ours. We are the humanists now. We, the liberationists, are the principal creators of human history and we have been for many decades past. The 20th Century was the liberation century and the first 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, and finish with Imperialism altogether.

Please download and read the text via the following link:

The Struggle for Democracy and Culture, 2003, Shivji (5035 words)

Further reading:

Citizen and Subject, Chapter 8, 1996, Mamdani (7236 words)