The ethnic issue Claude Gabriel 6,400 characters Sub-Saharan Africa has seen ten years of economic catastrophe. States have less resources available for re-distribution, even through traditional clientelist networks and booty-extraction. Agricultural revenue has fallen, and in some parts of the continent there is a severe land shortage. Nationalised companies are on the brink of collapse. Unemployment is increasing, and so is hunger. Among the multiple mechanisms of dependence which keep Africa in chains, there is the chronic weakness of the ruling classes, and their tendency to exclusively search short-term returns on their investments. Corruption at the highest level of state and corporate power has never really been suppressed. As a result, many oppositionists have come to support World Bank measures which, they say, will at least ensure the regularisation and transparency of economic procedures like privatisation. The continent is excluded and ignored in the international division of labour. Its natural resource now only represent a few percent of world trade. Africa is paying the price of its late colonisation by a system which is in crisis. The central question is the alternative. Which social and political forces can respond to the challenge facing African societies, and begin the long, difficult process of rupture with the current situation. There is no other solution to the development of forces willing to take this path. And this is why, today, even if the whole socio-political context seems unfavourable to the development of a progressive alternative, we should concentrate our analysis and our concerns on precisely these forces. In the early 1990's, a new democratic opposition seemed to be on the rise. These hopes have been, at least in part, crushed. All too often, the parties which appeared in the democratic mobilisations and various national conferences and conventions were linked to parts of the old apparatus, more or less compromised by their connection to the existing regimes. And, more importantly, too many of the leaders of these new parties quickly tried to establish a new income, based on their traditional regional power-base, or by entering into "coalition governments" with the old regime. All in the hope of finding a new way to share out the booty. The tragic events in Kivu last Autumn show the increasingly radical nature of ethnic conflicts. Some of these conflicts have an element of struggle against oppression. Two or three decades of post-independence political power monopolised by one ethnic group, or people from one region of the country, have exasperated those population groups which have been marginalised from the ruling party and the state redistribution system. In other words, ethnic identity can represent a real social consciousness, not just a "false consciousness" hangover from the past. In Rwanda, Zaire and other countries, the ethnic dynamic draws its vitality from the coexistence of a triumphant market economy, state institutions modelled and re-modelled by imperialism, and traditional social structures and power relations, characterised by ethnic and clan power relationships. The personal and group loyalties which have become so important in countries like these are not simply a matter of self-identification or identity, or of linguistic identity. Group identity is often linked to the specific form which property ownership and access to land, water and other resources have under local customary law. Rwanda is a particularly pronounced case: the society was structured in a hierarchy based on ancestral tribal relationships which had in part been abolished, and in part re-created. The group identities which developed are far from anachronistic. They are rooted in the unequal development of the region. The history of these conflicts also shows that relationship between dominated and dominating ethnic or tribal group can easily be reversed over time. Not surprisingly, the prejudices of the various groups in a given country are usually symmetrical. The violence of the current crisis leaves little opportunity for the integration of these identities into a more universal, social, anti-imperialist consciousness. The division of wealth is already socially, ethnically and regionally unequal. It tends to become the subject of rivalries between local notables, military men, and traditional chiefs, who mix their own interests and intrigues with the legitimate interests of "their" populations, which they claim to represent. In Chad, Somalia and Liberia, the state as such has disappeared as a result of this growing fragmentation of the ethnico-military authorities. In Zaire, the army is today nothing more than a network of bandit groups, living on the back of the population. Some African countries have been lucky enough to avoid this degeneration. But there has nowhere been a social struggle which has proved strong enough to show a way forward which would counter-balance the de-structuring effects of such a crisis of decomposition. All of us who oppose those who base their power on exploitation of the ethnic card would do better to understand, and re-state the ethnic issues intermingled in the social formations. What Africa needs is a current which is capable of federating these specific needs in a pluralist, radical anti-imperialist struggle. Democracy is obviously a central demand, capable of guaranteeing the right of oppressed groups to state their case, and use their own languages. Generations of African militants, nationalists and anti-imperialists, have failed to understand this simple truth. Instead, they have stressed their "patriotic" convictions, and rigorously refused to consider any observation which criticised the ethnic reality of life in most African countries. These currents have set more importance on the manipulative gestures of imperialism (e.g. borders) than the complex social reality. Their obsession with the "nation", they were unable to build a real anti-imperialist struggle, which would have to take into account the specific social aspirations of each of the country's ethnico-linguistic groups. How depressing it is to see Zaire's main opposition leaders reacting to the crisis in the east of the country by proposing a national union, led by President Mobutu.