John S Saul
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 144048 |
|---|---|
| NOME | John S Saul |
| PRENOMES | John S |
| SOBRENOME | Saul |
| ASSINATURA | SAUL J S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | York University |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 77 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 341 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1968 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2020 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The African hero in Mozambican history
‘A gun shot in the middle of a concert [is] something vulgar, [yet] something which is impossible to ignore’, writes Stendhal, the greatest of political novelists. The same is true of death – especially of death by assassination and death by execution – in the political analysis of Africa. For, as argued here in two linked texts, one in this issue of the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE , and a second in the following issue of ROAPE , s…
The African hero in Mozambican history
Part I of ‘The African hero in Mozambican history’, published in issue 163, launched a discussion of the possible role of the individual in African history ... both in general terms and in terms of understanding more precisely the implications of the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane for the further development of Mozambique. Now, in Part II, this essay similarly considers (in subsection 3) the assassination of Mondlane’s successor as leader of F…
The Zipa moment
This article underscores the importance of the relatively brief life but historically noteworthy emergence of the Zimbabwe People’s Army (ZIPA) within the struggle for Zimbabwean liberation in the 1970s. For ZIPA was a movement that offered both a serious military challenge of its own to Smith’s UDI regime but also the long-term possibility of a far more meaningful liberation than anything achieved since by ZANU’s ‘old guard’ under the orchestrat…
A Flawed Freedom
The unfulfilled Dreams of Democracy
Cela fait maintenant trois ans que la police a abattu 34 mineurs à Marikana, une zone minière située le long de la ceinture de platine dans la province du nord-ouest de l'Afrique du Sud. Cet incident s'est déroulé sur fond d'hostilités bouillantes, initialement déclenchées par des grèves pour les bas salaires. Cela a également été ponctué de violentes tensions entre deux syndicats rivaux – le Syndicat national des mineurs (NUM), affilié au Congrè…
In the name of the people
Lara Pawson has written a brilliant book, albeit one difficult to review for a scientific journal that adheres to the strict rules of argument, proof, and conclusion. For Pawson offers us a far mor
South Africa - The Present as History
Analyses the roots of power, patriarchy, ecological destruction and capitalist dynamics, of anti-apartheid resistance and of on-going movements against inequality and injustice in contemporary South Africa, to show how its contemporary realities are rooted in its past history and earlier struggles for independence. Short-listed for the Deutscher Prize 2014 In 1994, the first non-racial elections in South Africa brought Nelson Mandela and his Afri…
More comfortably without her?’
This article draws on a speech made at the Ruth First Symposium in London in June 2012. It describes Ruth First's role as a writer, political organiser and mobiliser of the freedom struggle within and without South Africa, drawing attention to her intellectual contribution and underscoring the importance of her Maputo years, with their broader significance. It discusses the personal tensions that many had with her, but points out that there was a…
When freedom died’ in Angola
Note of contributorJohn S. Saul was a founding editor of ROAPE and has often contributed to its pages over the years. A long-time liberation-support activist in Canada and in Africa, he has written some twenty books on the southern African region and on related issues of imperialism and under-development, his most recent (2014, from James Currey and co-authored with Patrick Bond) being South Africa: The Present as History – From Mrs Ples to Mande…
The Southern African Victory
This article identifies the successful global anticolonial struggle against racist European rule as "the most significant event of the twentieth century." Yet the article also sees the economic strength of capitalist countries and corporations as having significantly qualified any such victory-with "neocolonialism" (under American hegemony) and, more recently, "recolonization" (by an increasingly globalized and multicentered capitalism) having re…
The transition in South Africa
Locating his argument with reference to his own long acquaintance with Harold Wolpe, one dating from their first encounter as graduate students in Ralph Miliband's London School of Economics (LSE) seminar shortly after Wolpe's escape from prison and from South Africa itself, Saul emphasises in the remainder of his essay the extent to which the victory over apartheid has been only a very partial one. Indeed, a Fanonist picture of a ‘false decoloni…
Tanzania fifty years on (1961–2011)
Introduction to the theme
Mozambique – not then but now
Is Socialism Still an Alternative
[What I’ve written above] sounds to me like a call, to return to [seeking] for a socialist alternative to the commanding global hegemony of capitalism.” So I conclude a central section of my new book Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life.2 Yet the need to follow such a course is more easily asserted than proven—not least, on one hand, in light of the notorious failures of various attempted “socialisms” throughout the last century, an…
Race, class, gender and voice
This article focuses on the complex conceptual and practical terrain offered by the concept of ‘liberation’, both analytically and practically. It argues that liberation is best considered to be a multi-dimensional process, evoking an approach to its study (and to its practice) that would take seriously its resonance, for purposes of the analysis of Africa, as implicating struggle on the levels of race, class, gender, and (democratic) voice. The …
Arrighi and Africa
From 26 to 29 May of this year a group of us, convened by Carlos Prieto del Campo, came together in Madrid to celebrate the work of Giovanni Arrighi. The plan was that Giovanni himself, together wi
Africa
The paper below has been written by John Saul, and is couched in his distinctive style. But it also represents a piece of collective work, integrating, as it does, a series of working papers by Sau
Eduardo Mondlane & the rise & fall of Mozambican Socialism
However tempting an exercise it may be when contemplating the abrupt removal from the historical process of so exemplary and important a person as Eduardo Mondlane, speculation as to 'what might have been' had he lived is likely to be an exercise of only limited value. In the present case, this is true even for the analysis of the pre-independence period in which Mondlane both made his political contribution and also died. The tensions within Fre…
Mugabe, Gramsci, and Zimbabwe at 25
Twenty-five years after Robert Mugabe brought Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, some might interpret the current, apparent reradicalization of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) political project as a last, leftist, quasi-Gramscian gambit to recapture lost popular legitimacy. Many more, however, see it instead as reflecting the final throes of an increasingly compromised, corrupt, militarized, and unpopular regime. In…
The hares, the hounds and the African National Congress
The utility of framing questions of global inequality in relation to a 'First World' and a 'Third World', a North and a South, or developed countries and developing (or underdeveloped) countries, has been much debated since the end of the Cold War. This article addresses the issue of the perceived weaknesses and possible continued strengths of the notion of the 'Third World' in general terms, and then grounds such a discussion through an analysis…
Africa
This article brings into focus the immediate challenges facing progressives in Africa as they now seek to forge social and political initiatives that can hope to attain power and implement policies able to confront and ultimately to bend the apparent logic of global capitalism - thereby permitting more humane outcomes on the continent. Taking as a starting-point the moment of heightened reflection on such issues that occurred in Dar es Salaam in …
Lubango and After
This article examines the considerable efforts made by some Namibians (notably the 'Breaking the Wall of Silence' committee) throughout the 1990s to keep alive the issue of the Swapo leadership's alleged abuses of power when in exile. These activists' key focus has been the torture and killing of many innocent cadres (labelled 'spies') of Swapo in the movement's detention centre at Lubango, Angola, in the 1980s. The article reviews the difficulti…
The State in Post-Colonial Societies
With recent work of Samir Amin and others, Marxist understanding of African economies has begun to progress; analysis has lagged far behind however. For too long ground has been ceded, by default, to ideologues of establishment science and to their various permutations on themes of political modernization and one-party states. This comment applies not merely to radical Africana of course. A similar short-fall in radicalism's scientific understand…
Nationalism and Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa
In an earlier essay we stressed the poverty of academic debate on the relevance of socialism to development goals in Tropical Africa and advanced the argument that socialism is, in fact, rapidly becoming an historical necessity in order to ensure the further development of the area. At the same time it must be noted that the quality of debate among socialists concerning the actual possibility of revolutionary, socialist transformation in Africa i…
Essays on the Political Economy of Africa
Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa
A noted economist (Perroux) has defined socialism as 'le développement de tout l'homme et de tous les hommes'. Providing the motor for a drive towards socialism there is generally to be found a conviction that man's creative potential can only be fully realised in a society which transcends the cultural centrality of "possessive individualism' and in which a signal measure of economic and social equality, the preconditions for genuine political d…
To define populism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Liberation without democracy? the Swapo crisis of 1976
This article examines the internal convulsions that racked the Namibian liberation movement, Swapo, in Zambian exile in the mid‐1970s. This was a crisis that saw the Zambian army link up with the Swapo leadership to arrest, as ‘dissidents’, well over a thousand of the movement's cadres. Often misleadingly labelled ‘the Shipanga crisis’ (because of the alleged central role in the events of then senior Swapo leader Andreas Shipanga) the crisis actu…
For fear of being condemned as old fashioned’
This article is a theoretical companion to an essay on the ‘transition to democracy’, which we published in our previous issue, ROAPE 72. Here John Saul contrasts two approaches to the understanding of democracy and democratisation, both of which see democratic transition as part of a larger political and economic process, which for one limits the possible scope and sustainability of democratisation, and for the other both threatens but also enha…
A Difficult Road
Socialism in Tanzania
African peasants and revolution
Are peasants like a 'sack of potatoes', divided and demoralised, or can they become a revolutionary force? While most of the world's oppressed are peasants and their discontent generates the 'steam of revolution', a 'piston box' is needed to transform it into power. This may be provided either by forms of extraordinary and direct oppression or by organisation and political leadership. In practice it will almost always require both. John Saul exam…
Lubango and After
This article examines the considerable efforts made by some Namibians (notably the 'Breaking the Wall of Silence' committee) throughout the 1990s to keep alive the issue of the Swapo leadership's alleged abuses of power when in exile. These activists' key focus has been the torture and killing of many innocent cadres (labelled 'spies') of Swapo in the movement's detention centre at Lubango, Angola, in the 1980s. The article reviews the difficulti…
Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism
If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continent's southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalis…
The unsteady state
It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the post‐colonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world, scale’ within the colonial social formation. The post‐colonial state, while prone to play a similar role to that played by its predecessor, is something more of an un…
The dialectic of class and tribe
Agrarian Socialism in the Third World
Mugabe, Gramsci, and Zimbabwe at 25
Twenty-five years after Robert Mugabe brought Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, some might interpret the current, apparent reradicalization of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) political project as a last, leftist, quasi-Gramscian gambit to recapture lost popular legitimacy. Many more, however, see it instead as reflecting the final throes of an increasingly compromised, corrupt, militarized, and unpopular regime. In…
Race, class, gender and voice
This article focuses on the complex conceptual and practical terrain offered by the concept of ‘liberation’, both analytically and practically. It argues that liberation is best considered to be a multi-dimensional process, evoking an approach to its study (and to its practice) that would take seriously its resonance, for purposes of the analysis of Africa, as implicating struggle on the levels of race, class, gender, and (democratic) voice. The …
Africa
This article brings into focus the immediate challenges facing progressives in Africa as they now seek to forge social and political initiatives that can hope to attain power and implement policies able to confront and ultimately to bend the apparent logic of global capitalism - thereby permitting more humane outcomes on the continent. Taking as a starting-point the moment of heightened reflection on such issues that occurred in Dar es Salaam in …
Cry for the beloved country
(2001). Cry for the beloved country: the post‐apartheid denouement. Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 28, No. 89, pp. 429-460
The Crisis in South Africa
The strikes by African workers first erupting in Durban in 1972 and spreading throughout the country ever since, the outbursts sparked by students in Soweto and elsewhere from 1976 to the present, the actions undertaken by the African National Congress's guerrillas on the ground (most dramatically evidenced) by the Sasolburg bombings of 1980): these and other developments have been clear signs that the tide has at last begun to turn against South…
Tanzania's Transition to Socialism
Mozambique – not then but now
Poverty Alleviation and the Revolutionary-Socialist Imperative
Professor of Political and Social Science, York University, Toronto. This article draws on personal experience during seven years of teaching in and writing about Tanzania (in the 1960s and early 1970s), a familiarity with more recent scholarship on the country, and reflections evoked by my participation in a memorial workshop on Nyerere at Queen's University, Kingston, in February, 2000. The paper I presented there, 'Julius Nyerere: the theory a…
Liberal democracy vs. popular democracy in Southern Africa
This article accompanies an essay reviewing recent literature on ‘transitions to democracy’, which we publish in our next issue. There Saul contrasts two approaches to the understanding of democratisation. Both see transition as part of a larger political and economic process; for one this limits the possible scope and sustainability of democratisation, while for the other it threatens but also enhances its scope and strength. The latter approach…
From thaw to flood
A cause for celebrations? Who can feel any nostalgia for the palsied regimes of Eastern Europe, even though one may have legitimate fears for the future of such countries as they advance all too heedlessly into the maw of international capitalism? The implications for southern Africa at the ‘end of the Cold War’ is a little more complicated. How is one to assess the costs and benefits of the virtual disappearance of both a Soviet presence and of …
Tanzania fifty years on (1961–2011)
Eduardo Mondlane & the rise & fall of Mozambican Socialism
However tempting an exercise it may be when contemplating the abrupt removal from the historical process of so exemplary and important a person as Eduardo Mondlane, speculation as to 'what might have been' had he lived is likely to be an exercise of only limited value. In the present case, this is true even for the analysis of the pre-independence period in which Mondlane both made his political contribution and also died. The tensions within Fre…
To define populism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa
A noted economist (Perroux) has defined socialism as 'le développement de tout l'homme et de tous les hommes'. Providing the motor for a drive towards socialism there is generally to be found a conviction that man's creative potential can only be fully realised in a society which transcends the cultural centrality of "possessive individualism' and in which a signal measure of economic and social equality, the preconditions for genuine political d…
The nature of Tanzania's political system
The nature of Tanzania's political system
Planning for Socialism in Tanzania
The African Revolution
The following two articles, which we have been planning to publish for several months, assume a sad timeliness in view of last month's assassination of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the national liberation struggle against Portuguese rule in Guinea Bissao, As Charles McCollester's article makes clear, Cabral was a revolutionary thinker of enormous power and creativity, perhaps the greatest yet produced by the African continent. And John Saul's articl…
Portugal and the Mozambican Revolution
Bourgeois commentators have taken to writing smugly of "the myth of the guerrilla." Yet guerrillas in Mozambique (together with their counterparts in Angola and the independent Republic of Guinea-Bissau) have now brought down the Portuguese government! President Kaunda welcomed Samora Machel, President of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), to Zambia (where the latter had come in June to commence talks with Mario Soares, the new…
African peasants and revolution
Are peasants like a 'sack of potatoes', divided and demoralised, or can they become a revolutionary force? While most of the world's oppressed are peasants and their discontent generates the 'steam of revolution', a 'piston box' is needed to transform it into power. This may be provided either by forms of extraordinary and direct oppression or by organisation and political leadership. In practice it will almost always require both. John Saul exam…
Tanzania
The Revolution in Portugal's African Colonies
Multinationals, workers and the parastatals in Tanzania
Does nationalisation provide the answer to the increasing domination of the mncs? In the Tanzanian case, nationalisation has given the Government, through the ‘parastatal’ enterprises, control of a significant part of the industrial sector, but essentially decision making remains unplanned and uncoordinated. The parastatals remain at the mercy of the foreign technical expert, or of the management agreement with the former mnc owner. The developme…
Socialism in Tanzania
Free Mozambique
June 24, 1975. On the main road to Machava Stadium, Lourenco Marques, Mozambique. Soon to be free Mozambique—the People's Republic of Mozambique. But now, a driving rainstorm, heavy traffic. Will we make it by midnight to see the Portuguese flag come down and the new Mozambican flag replace it? Out of our minibus and a wild dash for the stadium, joined by hundreds of others caught up in the spirit and drama of the occasion, afraid, amidst the mou…
Essays on the Political Economy of Africa
Canada and Mozambique
The unsteady state
It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the post‐colonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world, scale’ within the colonial social formation. The post‐colonial state, while prone to play a similar role to that played by its predecessor, is something more of an un…
Angola, China, and Southern Africa
We publish below two texts received since the publication in our February issue of Azinna Nwafor's "The Liberation of Angola." The first, "China and Angola," is by Clark Kissinger, a New Left student activist of the 1960s who is now a factory worker in the Chicago area and a member of the National Steering Committee of the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association. The second, "Angola and After," is by John Saul, a frequent contributor to MR (mos…
Agrarian Socialism in the Third World
Livres/Books
Tanzania's Transition to Socialism
The Dialectics of Class and Tribe
Marxist and other progressive writers on Africa generally approach the issue of tribalism as one would approach a minefield - and with good reasons
Mozambique
Living in Tanzania, initial base of the Mozambican struggle for independence, I had the opportunity more than a decade ago to witness at close quarters the dramatic developments which were forging, in FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), a strong and exemplary revolutionary organization. A trip to the liberated areas in 1972 enabled me to see on the ground the extent to which such developments were also foreshadowing the construction…
The dialectic of class and tribe
Zimbabwe
Marxists and other progressives have quite correctly celebrated the success of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in the Zimbabwe elections of February 27-29 of this year as a triumph of heroic proportions. Whatever the difficulties which may now confront the Zimbabwean revolutionary process the fact remains that in those three days well over 80 percent of the adult African population of Zimbabwe (those who voted for ZANU and the other wi…
The Crisis in South Africa
The strikes by African workers first erupting in Durban in 1972 and spreading throughout the country ever since, the outbursts sparked by students in Soweto and elsewhere from 1976 to the present, the actions undertaken by the African National Congress's guerrillas on the ground (most dramatically evidenced) by the Sasolburg bombings of 1980): these and other developments have been clear signs that the tide has at last begun to turn against South…
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