Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change

by Adam Branch, Zachariah Mampilly

For a long time now, Africa’s political landscape has been wracked by violence. In recent years, however, a more positive force has risen in response to that violence: popular protest. Countries throughout the continent, from Tunisia and Egypt to Uganda and Senegal, have witnessed uprisings by a wide variety of people—the young, the unemployed, organized laborers, civil society activists, writers, artists, and religious groups. What is driving this massive wave of popular protest in Africa?

Drawing on interviews with activists across a number of countries, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly offer a penetrating assessment of contemporary African protests, situating current popular activism within a broader historical and continental context. The first book to put contemporary popular protest in a pan-African context, Africa Uprising critically examines Africa’s incorporation into the global economy, the failure of African governments to democratize, the behavior of opposition forces, and the role of African popular culture in the movements. In doing so, the authors provide essential research and insight for understanding African politics at this key juncture in history.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2014

Reviews

[Emmanuel-francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Protests are back or did they ever leave? In hindsight, the 2010s will be seen as a decade of protest, from ‘Occupy Wall Street’ to the Arab Spring and the protests that brought down presidencies in South Korea and Brazil to those of today. Written in 2015, this book looks to take stock of that first wave of protests by focusing attention on Africa, an area often ignored in the discourse around global protests. Even in my introduction, I forgot to mention ‘Rhodes/Fees must fall’, for example. See also the Arab spring being seen as a ‘Middle-Eastern’ phenomenon. As they show in the book, the Spring also had its reverberations below the desert.
Their central idea and the best part of the book, in my opinion, is that protests in Africa are due to the cauldron of the urban poor boiling over, due to the systemic violence visited on them by State institutions. When the pot boils over, those they call ‘political society’ take to the street. Why not the masses? Because that presupposes a sort of unity in the protesting crowds. In their analysis, which makes sense to me, there is ‘political society’, those without anything to lose. These are the systematically excluded urban poor whose daily contact with the State is mediated by violence. Every city has people who have rights and those that are granted rights. ‘Civic Society’, in contrast, are those with something to lose, especially in the African case where the fear, is of losing their place and falling into political society. This finally rouses them in times of economic distress to join actions that would normally be defined as ‘riots’, instead of protest.
In their telling, there have been three such waves of mass protests in African history. The first brought down most of the European governments, the second ushered in multiparty democracy across Africa and the third, to which they devote the bulk of their analysis occurred in the early 2010s. Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia form their case studies. Of those, despite the governments defeating those initial protests, Omar Bashir fell to a second wave, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front introduced the Abiy-fronted reforms and the incumbent Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, rode into power on the back of the spirit created by ‘Occupy Nigeria’ protests documented here. In hindsight, their implication that the protests would not prove as unsuccessful as it seemed at the time has proved mostly correct.
In their telling, the inability of these protests to become revolutions was due to the very real divide between the urban and rural populations. I am sceptical, none of the protesters/movement profiled even came close to attempting an economic analysis of their current economic predicaments other than a woolly anti-corruption/anti-incumbent and worse anti-capitalism narrative. I do not believe in the wisdom of the crowd. That is also a weakness of the book. If you already accept that multilateral agencies are a negative influence and that the ‘Neoliberal agenda’ is horrible, you will find much to agree with here. If you expect to be shown and convinced, nada. It is taken as given. Do you, like me, only know of the Neoliberals as the democracy promoters of the Bush II White House and expect a definition of the term here? Tough luck. I guess we have to go look for a short introduction to Neoliberalism or something. Neoliberalism is the boogieman, much talked about; never seen. That weird WWE interlude, we shall never speak about. The narrative is a strength, economic analysis is not.
From the writer’s academic background, their expertise lies in East Africa; it shows. The chapter on Nigeria was not as in-depth as those on their East African case studies. Those were an absolute delight. I am somewhat surprised at the absence of China. Neoliberalism and Britain get namechecked more than China in a book that focuses on Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan in the 21st century. Also, I’d have booted Nigeria and replaced it with Egypt; considering how much inspiration the activists in the other protests took from it, the absence of Egypt in their case studies was rather jarring. Although ‘Occupy Nigeria’ and its bougie front-men who’d count as part of our [Nigeria’s] 1% was personally amusing.
In sum, interesting. A 3/5 star rating I’m thinking. Gets a bit bogged down in ‘the discourse’ of ‘The Left’ in the conclusion, personally, the kumbaya aspects don’t get my butterflies fluttering and the big words put me to sleep, but the rest of the book was interesting. P.S the part about the militarisation of urban policing being a dangerous trend, I agree with.
Favourite Quote: ‘I will grab that one like a samosa, I will devour him like a cake’- President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent study of the wave of political protests with a new but insightful framework which both details the individual cases as well as using them to build a compelling case for their regional significance.

[Khalifa Said]

There will not be any successful and meaningful uprising in Africa, and elsewhere, if it doesn't attract the participation of the unemployed -- and the underemployed urban youth--, the so-called 'political society.' That is the key message of the book.