The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  As the revolutionary Communist era finally came to an end in Europe, it was only just beginning in Africa. In 1975 the new government of Portugal granted the colonies their independence; the PAIGC became the ruling party of Guinea-Bissau, and FRELIMO of Mozambique. The road to Angolan independence proved to be a rockier three-way struggle, as the MPLA, backed by the Soviets, fought two regionally based freedom movements – the FNLA and UNITA (both backed at various times by either China or the United States). As the MPLA began to win, South Africa, with the encouragement of Washington, invaded its neighbour. And, though the Soviets were initially unenthusiastic, Fidel Castro sent Cuban troops half way across the world to assist the MPLA, at which point the South Africans retreated, leaving the MPLA holding the field – for the moment at least. Prolonged civil wars soon broke out in both Angola and Mozambique, wars that have been seen as proxy confrontations between the superpowers, but that did not stop their rulers trying to build socialism.

  IV

  In the short story ‘The Secret Love of Deolinda’, published in 1988, the Mozambican writer Mia Couto tells of a young Maputo woman, the eponymous Deolinda, who has a dreary job shelling cashew-nuts. Her life, however, is not without its excitements and one day she returns home sporting a badge bearing the ‘face of an ever photogenic Karl Marx, as if unburdened by the years’. Her father is not pleased; indeed, not recognizing Marx as the renowned nineteenth-century theorist of world history he assumes he is someone Deolinda has recently met, ‘one of those foreigners, who start off as internationalists, and then became aid workers’. ‘Never again do I want to see this fellow’s snout sniffing your bra,’ he tells her. Deolinda meekly obeys and removes the offending object from her bosom to a box under her bed. But every night, before she falls asleep, the badge is retrieved and ‘she would kiss the thinker’s fleecy beard’.75

  Couto, a writer deeply critical of Mozambican Marxism (or ‘Marxianism’ as he called it, ‘out of respect for Marx’), saw its manifestation in Mozambique as a variety of cargo cult – an opaque symbol of Western modernity, both worshipped and misunderstood. And certainly the brand of Marxism imported by the Portuguese African Marxists was at the Modernist, Westernizing end of the spectrum. This is somewhat surprising; given FRELIMO’s history one might have expected its leaders to pursue a more Radical Maoist approach, applying the experience of the guerrilla war of independence to running their new country. But they firmly adopted a Soviet-style Marxism.76 This was partly the consequence of the Soviet alliance, but as has been seen, it was also a response to the perceived failures of indigenous forms of socialism. As Mao himself had temporarily concluded in the early 1950s, a nationalist version of Stalinism was a recipe for entry into the modern world of cities and industry. It had supposedly worked elsewhere, so why not in Africa?

  If anything, the Africans found it even more difficult to launch this project than the Chinese; their states were even weaker, and more fragmented by lineage, ethnicity and a divisive colonial heritage. As Couto’s short story made clear, whilst the Marxist-Leninist project had great emotional appeal to some, it was even more of a dream in Africa than in its Eurasian homeland.

  The conditions for transplanting Marxism-Leninism into Angola and Mozambique were, it must be acknowledged, especially inauspicious. Unlike the French and British colonial empires, which had, at least, left their colonies with functioning legal and administrative systems, the sudden departure of thousands of Portuguese settlers left the new regimes with tiny educated elites and state apparatuses. The new regimes were also forced to nationalize a great deal of industry and land simply to fill the vacuum left by their departing Portuguese owners. But Neto, the Angolan leader and a long-time Stalinist, was more cautious in his efforts to transform the economy than the less orthodox Machel in Mozambique. For Machel, independence was the chance for Mozambique to become truly modern and escape the backwardness he blamed on Portuguese exploitation. As he proclaimed in 1981: ‘The victory of Socialism is a victory of science, it is prepared and organized scientifically. The Plan is the instrument of scientific organization of this victory… Everything must be organized, everything must be planned, everything must be programmed.’77 Mozambicans had to become modern as well. Science was to replace spirit mediums and rain-making ceremonies.

  FRELIMO brought the Plan to a country that may have been even less prepared for it than the Soviet Union of the 1930s, for Mozambique, like many African states, lacked an effective state machine. Soviet and East German expert planners helped the Mozambicans, but expertise in the central office in Maputo could not compensate for a desperate shortage of experienced administrators at all other levels of the economic system. Even the largest state companies struggled: Petromoc, the state oil company, failed to produce accounts for seven years.78 Meanwhile, large amounts of money were wasted on grand projects, such as the failed attempts to establish an iron and steel industry. FRELIMO’s agricultural plans were, if anything, even more ambitious. The regime created huge state farms, which, whilst they increased production, absorbed huge resources. The regime also sought to relocate peasants into new, well-ordered communal villages, with good health services, education and clean houses in neat rows. FRELIMO’s officials were convinced that they would improve the lives of peasants, giving them better government services whilst breaking the authority of chiefs, and creating new, modern socialist people. These projects were reminiscent of European Communist programmes – whether Khrushchev’s planned ‘agro-towns’ or Ceauşescu’s ‘systematization’ of villages – but they were also influenced by a general fashion for grandiose transformations amongst regimes of various ideological hues, including socialist Tanzania’s ‘villagization’ programme. Whilst such schemes undoubtedly contributed to Mozambique’s successes in education and health, in economic terms they performed poorly and were extremely unpopular amongst the peasants compelled, often by brute force, to live and work there.79 By the end of the 1970s, the economic environment was bad for all developing countries, but the rigid utopianism of orthodox Modernist Marxism explains a great deal of Mozambique’s poor performance.

  Nor did the Marxist-Leninist political system help to speed Mozambican development. As the African socialists had predicted, the narrow, sectarian vanguard party proved particularly unsuited to African conditions. FRELIMO cadres may have been well-trained to push through radical programmes, but they were far less successful at securing the general population’s enthusiasm for these projects. The resulting conflict increasingly took on an ethnic colouring. Angola was already plagued by regionally based ethnic rivalries inherited from the colonial regime, but the narrow, authoritarian MPLA (its leadership still dominated by whites and mestiços) only exacerbated them. Shortly after it came to power, it was challenged by a left-wing coup led by the Enver Hoxha-admiring Nito Alves, a prominent black commander of the guerrilla period who had successfully mobilized Luanda slum-dwellers to agitate for more power. Neto’s regime was only saved by the Cubans, but thereafter he chose to impose MPLA-style Marxism-Leninism with Stalinist ruthlessness, savage violence and a brutal secret police.80

  By the end of the 1970s, the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars were ending, but they were soon to reignite as South Africa and the United States renewed their offensive. In Mozambique RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana – National Resistance of Mozambique), established by a white settler-ruled Rhodesia with the help of pro-Portuguese exiles, at first had little effect. But after the beginning of African rule in Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe) in 1979, South Africa began to pursue a much more aggressive policy against the African National Congress, which was launching attacks from Mozambique. The regime poured resources into RENAMO, which waged a highly successful campaign of destabilization and sabotage. In Angola, too, a brief lull in fighting led to renewed war with the American-backed UNITA. The war continued throughout the 1980s, fuelled by Angolan oil, superpower competition, and the highly charged ideological conflict between Marxism and South African aparthe
id.

  Angola and Mozambique joined a host of self-declared Marxist-Leninist regimes in Africa. In 1980, seven of Africa’s fifty African- or Arab-ruled countries described themselves as Marxist-Leninist (Angola, Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Somalia), whilst another nine professed some form of socialism (Algeria, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, São Tomé and Principe, the Seychelles Islands, Tanzania and Zambia). Altogether about a quarter of the continent’s population lived under these regimes. The regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, however, were unusual in coming to power as the result of anti-colonial guerrilla wars, and they had serious ambitions to transform society. All of the other Marxist-Leninist rulers were military, and (bar the Ethiopian case) had far more modest ambitions. Even so, they were very much in the Modernist Marxist tradition – leaching resources from the countryside to fund urban development, favouring city populations over rural ones, and financing a form of welfarism which, with its intense preoccupation with higher rather than mass education, tended to benefit the better-off.

  But if socialism in most of these new military Marxist states looked largely rhetorical, one example did not. Ethiopia was to experience one of the last ‘classical’ revolutions, echoing its French and Russian predecessors of 1789 and 1917. For the last time, an ancien régime was to collapse and give way to a radical Marxist politics, highly reminiscent of Bolshevism.

  V

  In his satirical story, The Case of the Illiterate Saboteur (1993), the Ethiopian writer Hama Tuma described the court in which a series of absurd political trials takes place:

  Above the judge’s chair hung the photo of the Great Chairman of our country. Rumour has it that some overzealous cadres who had the gall to suggest that portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin had to be hung along with that of the Chairman were executed for the crime of misguided internationalism and stunted revolutionary nationalism. However, it is said that the Wise Chairman, in order to placate the Russians (who as you know have extra-sharp ears), built monuments for Lenin and Marx (poor Engels is still waiting for his!).81

  Ethiopia was not unusual amongst Afro-Communist regimes in using Marxism-Leninism for its own nationalist ends, and nor was it exceptional in trying to please the Russians. But there was a special affinity between Ethiopia and Russia, which Marxists of the time noted. For Ethiopian revolutionaries lived in a very different country from other African Marxists, who had come to Marxism through the anti-colonial liberation struggle. Like Russians in the early twentieth century, they inhabited a crumbling, stratified ancien régime Christian Orthodox empire and felt that they were failing to keep up with their neighbours. The history of Russia was therefore a compelling one, and to some it seemed as if they were merely living through the Bolshevik experience, albeit in speeded-up time.

  In 1957, an editorial in a student newspaper declared, ‘both Ethiopians and foreigners are looking to us as the generation that will shoulder the great responsibility of putting Ethiopia on equal footing with the rest of the civilized world’.82 At the time, some believed they might work alongside the Emperor Haile Selassie. Selassie, who had ruled since 1930, apart from a period of exile after the Italian invasion, had been a modernizing autocrat. When he came to power, Ethiopia was an agrarian country largely controlled by aristocrats who enjoyed tax exemptions and labour services from some of the peasantry. It was also a Christian Orthodox empire, which the northern Amharas and, to a lesser extent, the Tigreans dominated, having conquered the non-Orthodox peoples of the south. Selassie tried to reform the regime by developing the economy of this poor agrarian nation by encouraging industry, though it remained small. He also sought to centralize the state and weaken the aristocracy by building up a class of educated officials and a modern army, and the student population rose from 71 in 1950 to about 10,000 by 1973, in addition to those who studied abroad (including some 700 in the United States in 1970).83 Of course, this was a risky strategy, as it assumed that the newly educated be both modern in outlook and prepared to serve an autocrat who claimed to be the descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. As Selassie’s regime became more conservative and repressive, building up his own aristocracy of service whilst preserving many of the powers of the old hereditary nobility, modernizers in the army began to condemn him for allowing Ethiopia to fall behind the decolonized states of Africa. In 1960 they staged a coup, which failed, but which also showed the depths of elite disenchantment. Like its Russian predecessors, the autocracy was increasingly beset by criticism from educated modernizers, peasant rebellions and ethnic insurrection – most seriously in Eritrea.

  In Ethiopia, then, an orthodox Marxist analysis of ‘feudalism’ seemed to make perfect sense, and many students came from relatively humble backgrounds, feeling sympathy for the poor peasantry, and guilt at their privileges, much as their Russian predecessors had. But it was Western, not Soviet, influence that contributed to Marxism’s popularity. Selassie’s regime was closely aligned with the United States, and Western-educated students were especially influential in bringing back the newly fashionable Marxism from American campuses, as were some of the Peace Corps volunteers.

  In 1965 the students in Addis Ababa began a campaign for more rights for tenants and an end to labour dues, with the slogans ‘Land to the Tiller’ and ‘Away with Serfdom’, and by 1968, as has been seen, the student movement had linked its own complaints with the struggle against American policy in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa.84 By 1971, all ten candidates for a Union of University Students election accepted that Marxism-Leninism was the only possible ideology for Ethiopia;85 as one unsympathetic observer remembered: ‘Marxism was presumed to be an unchallengeable truth… every element of youth discontent was defined in Marxist terms. Many did not read about it, but that was beside the point. They were obsessed by it.’86

  It was an economic crisis that triggered the fall of Selassie: the famine of 1973–4, which the regime responded to incompetently, and the oil price hike. The revolution began in February 1974 with a mutiny of junior army officers, resentful at poor conditions and the high-handed way in which they were treated by their senior officers. Their protests were followed by strikes, and, despite an attempt by the new liberal Endalkachew government to prepare constitutional reforms, unrest continued until a group of junior army officers, the so-called ‘Derg’ (Committee), took power in the summer, deposing the Emperor in September.

  At first, the majority of the Derg favoured a form of Nyerere-style African socialism – ‘Ethiopian socialism’ – but from early on an influential group, including the first Vice-Chairman of the Derg, Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, was listening to the vocal and prestigious student Marxist left. Mengistu’s background is obscure, but his father seems to have been a pauper of southern origin who worked as a servant to a northern lord.87 Darker-skinned than most Amharas, he was certainly regarded by many Ethiopians as a ‘slave’ by origin.

  Mengistu felt his lowly background keenly, but he had advantages in politics. He was an expert at judging political situations and hiding his real intentions.88 And for the French journalist René Lefort his humble origins were a real advantage in the revolutionary politics of the 1970s:

  In the head of any peasant in the south or ‘have-not’ in the capital… he incarnates the revenge that justifies usurpation, Robin Hood ascended to the throne. Like those emperors of the past emerging like robbers to conquer the crown and at last bringing the reign of justice to the people.89

  But Mengistu, whilst he claimed to champion the poor, was no Romantic populist. He may have had low status and a limited education, but he made serious efforts to assimilate into the elite Amharas, and he had the oratorical skills to express a passionate Amhara-led Ethiopian nationalism. In some ways, his background was not unlike Stalin’s: looked down on as a member of a conquered southern nationality in a multi-ethnic empire, eager to assimilate into the ‘superior’, more modern culture, and thus to make his way to the
centre of power.90

  Mengistu’s politics were closely connected with his background. Like Stalin, he understood the power of popular mobilization, but he was also determined to establish an ‘advanced’ modernity by means of a highly centralized authority and even brutal force – even though he insisted that the Ethiopian revolution could avoid violence (unlike the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, which, he claimed, had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people).91 Although he at first had little knowledge of Marxism, he, and other radical members of the Derg, were eager to secure the support of the Marxist students.

  The first significant evidence of the Derg’s radicalism was its decision in March 1975 to nationalize the land, handing it over to those who tilled it. The plan, developed by a group of radical officials in Haile Selassie’s civil service (many of them educated in the United States), followed the long-running desire of the Ethiopian Marxist left to abolish ‘feudalism’, and ignored liberal warnings that it would lead to violence.

  Just as Stalin had done in the late 1920s, the Derg mobilized urban students to bring the revolution to the countryside, and both regime and students saw the project in very similar ways: as military-style campaigns to bring enlightenment to a backward and superstitious countryside, thus uniting the nation. The word ‘campaign’ (zemecha) used in the title of the ‘Development through Cooperation, Enlightenment and Work Campaign’ was the one that had described the crusade-style northern Christian conquests of the south in the nineteenth century, and despite their atheism, the students brought with them the arrogance of the past. ‘For centuries,’ the Derg declared, ‘the people in general and the rulers in particular have lived with outmoded beliefs’; ‘These dividing ideas worked against progress and enlightenment.’92