Note: I wrote this article last summer, and it was published in Canadian Dimension, but in a highly edited way. This is the original, unedited version.

POLICE REPRESSION OF STUDENTS: Another brick in the wall

I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school
— Tom Paxton, “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

For the first time in over thirty-five years, the University of Toronto’s administration pressed charges against fourteen campus activists, who were arrested in late April by Toronto Police, for alleged forcible confinement, mischief to property and forcible detainer. The criminal offences allegedly occurred over a month before the arrests, at a peaceful sit-in staged on March 20 by over forty students and activists to protest fee hikes. The sit-in ended when administrators ordered campus police to violently remove protestors.

This group of protestors, who with other allies would later form the Committee for Just Education, argues for free education, questions the legitimacy of the administration’s authority, and makes its points through constant direct action. This kind of resistance is quite unsightly when UofT’s administration is publicly calling for the deregulation of student fees and massive commercialization of the university, as demonstrated in its Towards 2030 plan. Among other things, this plan blames poor people for not having the initiative to “assume debt” to finance their pursuit of postsecondary education (http://www.towards2030.utoronto.ca/sec3.html).

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Frelimo’s advances in the guerrilla war against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique led to the disillusionment of Portuguese troops and citizens in the colonial mission. While Frelimo attempted to bring about a social revolution in the liberated zones it made military advances in the rest of Mozambique. Meanwhile, in Portugal, internal contradictions came to a head. On April 25, 1974, military officers in Portugal staged a coup against the fascist regime. Hastings notes that “the single most decisive factor behind the April coup in Portugal was the advance of Frelimo in Mozambique” [AH 263]. Although a significant majority of the 80,000 troops in Mozambique by 1974 were indigenous, there were still tens of thousands of Portuguese soldiers deployed there, and many more in Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Also, there were apparently 100,000 draft resisters and deserters who were living outside of Portugal [RL 38].

Negotiations and military struggle for independence

Fighting did not stop after the coup in Portugal, as various military and political figures seemed to have differing ideas about how Mozambique should be managed. Some elements, represented by the Head of State General Antonio Spinola, looked to preserve some kind of arrangement where Mozambique would be part of a federation. Other elements, including the more leftist Armed Forces Movement, seemed to want to get rid of the colonial system entirely [JM 5]. After the coup, the new Portuguese regime looked to negotiate with Frelimo in order to bring the fighting to an end. Portugal’s negotiations team ended up embodying these two tendencies, one of what was perceived as neocolonialism, the other of ending colonialism entirely.

Frelimo’s position remained consistent:

recognition of the inalienable right of Mozambique to independence, transfer of power to the Mozambican people, and acceptance of FRELIMO as their sole, legitimate, representative. [JM 5]

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We discussed in the last couple of pieces how the borders between Mozambique and its neighbours were, sometimes, porous enough for entire communities to cross over. The river Rovuma comprises most of the northern border of Mozambique with what is now Tanzania, and was then Tanganyika, which became a constitutional monarchy in 1961, and fully independent from the British in 1962. Many Mozambican migrants were present in Tanganyika, working on sisal plantations [HW 150]. President Julius Nyerere was committed to African socialism and pan-Africanism, and Tanganyika and later Tanzania thus acted as hosts to the resistance movements of other territories.

There were those rare Mozambicans who were able to go abroad to study (since it was virtually impossible in Mozambique or Portugal for Africans to do so). One of these was Eduardo Mondlane, the son of a Gaza chief from the south, who studied at Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), Lisbon (Portugal), Oberlin (Ohio) and Northwestern (Illinois) [WC 71]. Many gathered in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania to form nationalist organizations dedicated to freeing Mozambique from Portuguese rule. (I want to discuss, perhaps in another paper, the development of Mozambican nationalism in theoretical context.)

Nationalism and Leadership

Mozambican migrants in Tanganyika formed dance clubs and funeral associations [HW 150], which eventually led to the formation of MANU, or Mozambique African National Union, in 1961 — which seems to have been modeled after the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). MANU members mobilized by selling membership cards to Mozambicans, mostly of the Makonde in the Mueda plateau (which was right across the river from Tanganyika). Resentment against the Portuguese was high among the Makonde of Mueda, and was exacerbated by a massacre of demonstrators that took place in 1960.

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Like just about any other process, colonization is deeply contradictory. It emanates from the drive to conquer and subjugate for economic reasons, but there’s no such thing as just “economic reasons.” There is pride and prestige involved, and that becomes a significant motivating factor as well. They operate in conjunction. But this matter of pride and prestige comes from the subjugation of entire peoples — and brazen exploitation — and somehow this is transmogrified into a civilizing mission. Colonialism came to bring civilization, commerce and Christianity to the masses, after all. So, really, relax, we’re doing you a favour by occupying your country and killing thousands and perhaps millions of you and stealing your natural resources and, where possible, exploiting your labour. Hooray! But here, I’m not too concerned about how the Portuguese elite used colonialism to feel better about themselves [see PA 108-116]. Rather, I’m going to focus on the imposition of certain politics as they played out in Mozambique.

Indigenato: Citizen and Subject

In 1950, according to a census cited by Perry Anderson, Mozambicans numbered about 5.67 million (not including the Portuguese settlers) [PA 109], and white settlers numbered about 48,000 [PA 100] and mestiços (“mixed”) numbered 25,000 [PA 110]. While official Portuguese ideology was anti-racialist, the regime set up a legal system of differentiation between Portuguese citizens and natives/subjects — needless to say, the categories corresponded to racial lines. The entire system of separation was called Indigenato:

Article 23 of the Decree-Law excludes all natives from any rights vis-a-vis non-native political institutions (i.e. the caricature of voting and common rights possessed by the white population). Article 9 restricts freedom of movement. Article 32 states that work is an indispensable element for the native’s progress and permits administrative enforcement of it. Article 26 specifies that obligatory labour can be enforced for fiscal default. [PA 108]

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No long theoretical preamble here — I’ll try to provide a brief history of colonial Mozambique. I focus mostly on when it gets closer to independence (in 1975), because that’s what we’re gunning for in my paper (and because colonial occupation gets more systematic after the 1880s). I’m also leaving out the pre-colonial history, not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I do think colonialism radically transformed a lot of things, and to whatever extent it preserved, eradicated or transformed pre-colonial relations, that’s what the post-colonial moment had to work with.

Colonialism is brutal, and just about anywhere you go in the world today you can see its after-effects reverberating. There are those who would consider themselves critical and yet try to pass off one kind of colonialism as better than another (because, I don’t know, the French causing a million deaths in Algeria is better than the British causing a few more million in India?), and then there are snots like Sarkozy who imagine that colonialism was the best thing to happen to savage races since Jesus. The truth is that colonialism fucked shit up, everywhere. The violence was tremendous, physically, morally, psychologically, structurally, violence to modes of thought and production of knowledge. Many more forms of violence beside. After significant, bloody and often violent resistance (yeah, even in India, Gandhi notwithstanding) many colonizing powers decided to give up formal political control to the emergent native bourgeoisies of the colonies (something Frantz Fanon referred to as “false decolonization”), maintaining significant political ties and dependent economic relations, i.e., establishing neo-colonialism.

But when it comes to brute force and utter persistence in maintaining formal political control over colonies, Portuguese colonialism wins. (Remember, Rhodesia and South Africa were no longer British colonies, so much as they were ruled by gangs of rich white men, and so that took longer — 1980 and 1994 respectively, and 1990 for Namibia.)

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As I considered my earlier post on the definition of “meaningful development” I realized that a lot of what I said could also be stated in terms of the Marxian theory as I understand it.

My second-last paragraph pointed out that individuals often have an individualized perspective on development (e.g., the necessity for education) even though these perspectives may be widely shared. Here we have an example of the dialectic between immediate needs and objective needs. The immediate need of many in Mozambique is an increase in income by which they can sustain themselves. Many have realized that being educated, or getting their children educated, leads to an increase in income. They thus strive to get at least some of their children (if they survive) educated. We’re still at the level of immediate needs here, the necessity of education is individualized and it becomes dependent upon a transaction. Compare to Adorno (though he isn’t talking about a society like Mozambique’s):

Not only are needs satisfied purely indirectly, by means of exchange-values, but within the relevant economic sectors produced by the profit-motive, and thus at the cost of the objective needs of the consumers, namely those for adequate housing, and completely so in terms of the education and information over the processes which most affect them.

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I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to work on a paper on the politics of Mozambique. The reasons for this are both political and personal, and the ways in which these two intersect. It was due at the end of April, which seemed reasonable at the time, but then a whole series of events followed and life in general took a tanking dive and I’ve been trying to deal with a lot of that. I haven’t been able to work on the paper, and when I try, I fail quite miserably.

But if I can’t bring myself write on Mozambique, perhaps I can write about writing on Mozambique (argh, postmodernism’s revenge!). I’ve done a bit of research — having gone through dozens of journal and news articles and a few books. All of this raises more than a few questions for me, to which I have no satisfactory answer. I hope my musings here will help to, at least, organize the issues for me and give me focus in writing the paper.

I took the class in the first place for a few reasons. I could have taken David McNally’s class on Marx’s Capital — which would have been fantastic, no doubt — but I felt like I needed a grounding in the way capitalism works, internationally, on the ground. I have more than a passing interest in the politics of southern Africa and I wanted, also, to examine how the post-colonial moment has been working out (answer: not well). Also, I heard that this might be one of the last times that John S. Saul would be teaching the class (and, indeed, it was the last class he taught), and that it was worth it to take a class with him. (Saul is a noted scholar-activist, and he was involved in the struggles against colonialism and apartheid, back in the day.) Of course, I also heard and kept hearing other stuff about Saul — vague and non-specific rumours, all of which turned out to be unsubstantiated; and the fact that he seemed to assign his own work a lot was a bit disconcerting, but ultimately, it wasn’t a problem at all.

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In what can only be called a freak burst of actually getting someone to do investigative journalism, The Star has managed to put together a brilliant series of stories on Crime & Punishment. I’ll be trying to parse through it in the coming weeks, but it looks really good. Check it out.

“Working within the system” to produce change that is substantial and transformative is kind of like trying to insert a third team into a standard foozball table without any tools or supplies while obnoxious, rich fat white male brats play the game.

I just finished writing an article about police repression of dissent a couple of days ago, which may get published somewhere, and which I will post here when it does. It’s basically about how police get funding as social services get cut, and how they use arrests as a method of intimidation and marginalization — against activists but also against the poor and racialized groups.

As I finished writing it on Saturday and Sunday, OCAP activists staged a demonstration at Allen Gardens which the police repeatedly interfered with. The next day, Monday, they arrested an OCAP activist. The next day, Tuesday, they announced an infusion of $5 million from the province to fund more cops. And the next day, Wednesday, police chief Bill Blair announced that there would, in fact, be armed and uniformed police officers strolling the halls of our city’s schools. And a “linchpin witness” in the “homegrown terrorist” Toronto 18 trial testified in court that the police and crown’s case was weak.

And this from a New York blog, AngryBrownButch, posted two days ago:

It’s not about arresting people who are actually doing anything wrong – after all, observing the police is not officially a crime, though I’m sure they wish it were. No, they do it to scare us, make us too scared of arrest or other retaliation to hold them accountable.

And you know what? Sometimes their fear tactics work. Getting arrested is fucking scary, and even just getting messed with or threatened by the cops is daunting. Especially when I’m alone, I get nervous to stop and watch the cops. Not even question them, not even take pictures, and certainly not even anything close to intervening – I get scared of standing nearby and looking at them. And that fear pisses me off. When I’m with someone else, it’s easier; with a group, even easier. The fear makes sense – cops and the power they wield are scary – but we can’t let it stop us from practicing our civil rights and our civic duties in holding them accountable.

Perhaps one of the easiest things to take for granted in this society is that the police are here to “serve and protect” us. Sure. But that depends entirely on how you define “us.”