Reviewed by Flávio Wanderley Lara¹

The book Looting Africa by Patrick Bond is an important contribution to the political analysis of the continent, as viewed on the inside, based on political economy, with a wealth of information (political events, figures, well considered statements) dealing with life and capitalist reproduction in Africa, since the forms of primitive accumulation (some of which still coexist with contemporary forms) till our days (2005 data); it further deals with the tenuous and sophisticated developments of subimperialism and imperialism in neoliberal manoeuvres to keep draining the continent’s riches (mineral and forest resources, amongst others, African capital flight) and human resources (brain drain and migration) through the impoverishing of its nations and people. Or, in the words of Prof. Issa Shivji of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: ‘Patrick Bond’s book provides a solid theoretical, empirical, and analytical framework proving that the processes of looting the African continent, which started with the slave trade, have continued to this day.’

Those scholars, students and activists throughout the world who have solidarity with the struggle of African peoples for social, political and economic liberation may find in the critical reading of this work, an important instrument for understanding the political economy of the African continent, most especially of those nation-states of Sub-Saharan Africa and particularly of South Africa, where the author is based and thoroughly involved as research professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies in Durban, where he directs the Centre for Civil Society (www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs). He is also visiting professor at York University Department of Political Science in Toronto and is the author of various books on South Africa and Zimbabwe ,including Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance(Zed Books and University of Cape Town Press, 2003).

The viewing of Africa on the inside, based on a political economy approach, and the critical statements about this political economic complex is done didactically and consistently - the Chapters of this book are laid in such a sequence that transparently break the myths and expose the misinformation disseminated about the realities of African peoples at such a crucial juncture for Brazil, when South-South relations are reinforced by exchange prospects in the Southern Common Market (Mercosul/Mercosur) and relations between India Brazil and African Countries(especially South Africa) are intensified. The Book is bound to contribute to abetter understanding of African realities.

Bond’s work demolishes misinformation, myths, stereotypes, geographically referenced and oversimplified determinism and reductionism, such as those expressed by Tony Blair´s Commission for Africa according to whom, Africa is poor, “ultimately, because its economy has not grown.“²

The professor also points to and uncovers the worsening statistics that are brazenly circulated in the media and propagate the biased duality characteristic of the outlook of the power elite. He points out that such outlook is even published in the ostensibly progressive US magazine The Nation, where Andrew Rice, in reviewing books on Africa, issues the traditional prejudices:
“How can one continent be so out of step with humankind’s march of progress? Everyone agrees that Africans are desperately poor and typically endure governments that are, to varying degrees, corrupt and capricious. The dispute is about causes and consequences. One group - call it the poverty-first camp - believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor. The other group - the governance-first camp - holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way.

In addition to a wealth of bibliographic reference on great contemporary authors and their works on the African continent, such as Walter Rodney’s 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa³, Paul Zeleza’s A Modern Economic History of Africa, first published by the African research institution CODESRIA in 1993, covering the XIXth Century⁴ and Frantz Fanon (1963 ) The Wretched of the Earth, Bond acknowledges the contribution of scholars, liberation struggle leaders and social activists such as Adebayo Adedeji, Samir Amin, A.M. Babu, Ahmed Ben Bela, Steve Biko, Dennis Brutus, Neville Alexander, Amilcar Cabral, Fantu Cheru, Ashwin Desai, Ruth First, Patrice Lumumba, Samora Machel, Archie Mafeje, Ben Magubane, Guy Mhone, Thandika Mkandawire, Trevor Ngwane, Njoki Njehu, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Oginga Odinga, Adebayo Olukoshi, Thomas Sankara, Issa Shivji, Aminata Traoré, Ngugi Wa Thiong’the, Harold Wolpe, amongst others , and of many others outside Africa who devoted and have been devoting their lives to the struggle against the capitalist exploitation of that continent.

The banalisation of Africa is painstakingly demystified in the course of the chapters set in a sequence that constructively provides a true insight of the actual and hard reality of this continent and of the looting of its people.

In Chapters 1 and 2, e.g., he points at the causes of social inequality, racism, patriarchalism and poverty at the root of Africa’s underdevelopment, which paradoxically became worse even after “independence” of the continent’s nations for which progress seems more and more distant, given the process of instability of their markets and volatility of financial capital movements. Dealing with the paradox of “uneven and combined development” he calls the attention to GDP growth statistics at the level of these nations, which do not reckon the capital flight, and do not subtract the brain drain, present and foreseeable environmental liabilities as compared to a “genuine progress indicator - GPI”. In Chapters 3 and 4, the “merit of reform of traditional markets” is analysed from their voracity in decapitalising those countries and their economies, countries whose leaders and elite are involved in a global power system formatted as African integration in the imperial circles of trade, aid, finance and investment. The concepts of “privatization of the atmosphere” and of other environmental resources in their process of environmental degradation and of the very reproduction of life in the “reprivatisation of social reproduction” via the market and the growth of violence are exposed by Bond. He deals with the traps of unfair trade, with the illusions about foreign debt “relief” and with the depletion of African wealth, including archaeological treasuries and works.

In Chapters 5 and 6 he reviews the escalation of militarism and repression, as well as the in situ growth of neoliberalism and its global apartheid African agents vested in their role as comprador type leadership and also deals with the controversy on South-African subimperialism.

In Chapter 7 he opens an optimistic perspective on the current social movements in Africa, especially in South Africa, putting forward an important challenge for the analysis of civil society’s resistance – two ambivalent and contradictory visions opposing the status quo and its mystique:
“The problem is simple: that gaze to the powerful takes for granted that the G8, the WTO, Bretton Woods institutions and Third World state elites are the solution, not the main part of the problem.”

When quoting critics of the “Make Poverty History” campaign (which took place involving celebrities concurrently with the G8 Summit in 2005,) Bond’s criticism becomes even harsher:
“By being too dependent on lobbying, celebrities and the media, by failing to give ownership of the campaign to southern hemisphere social movements, by watering down the demands agreed by grassroots movements at the World Social Forum, and by legitimising the G8 summit, the campaign was doomed from the start. Ten out of 10 on aid, eight out of 10 on debt? More like G8, Africa nil.”

The defence of the MDGs- Millennium Development Goals is paraphrased as a “major distraction gimmick”.

Patrick Bond reminds his 2004 book, Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms (new edition in 2006) and ponders.“ that official commitment worsens poverty rather than reduces it. The UN bureaucrats do admit that while ‘Monterrey, Doha and HIPC hold great promise to make significant contributions to the achievement of the MDGs, however, progress thus far has been extremely slow.’ As Monterrey, Doha and HIPC all show, global elite commitment on aid, trade and debt relief are, in short, so far short of progressive change, that reaching the MDG targets is impossible. ”

But, on the other hand, he reminds that lately African grassroots movements have been growing in the struggle since the “first wave” of ‘IMF Riots” and popular struggles from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s that might be seen as a ‘precursor to the contemporary phenomenon of the “antiglobalization movement”; a “second wave”, in the 1990s more politically explicit and with wider objectives staged protests in 30 countries, just in 1991.

Finally, he raises the possibility of an emergence of a “third wave” by more focussed social movements, as e.g. the various demonstrations and movements throughout Africa, as the 2004 anti-IMF strike called by the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, in which half a million workers participated, amongst other events and programmes of linkages of activist within Africa, more and more determined, as members of Jubilee Africa, in 2004 in Cape Town working on the ‘Illegitimate Debt Audit” and the controversial subimperialist role of South Africa in using the NEPAD - New Partnership for Africa’s Development of the African Union to promote neoliberalism in the African continent in favour of the transnational companies, when those groups demanded:

• • full unconditional cancellation of Africa’s total debt;
• • reparations for damage caused by debt devastation;
• • an immediate halt to the guidelines of Bretton Woods institutions as expressed in HIPC and PRSPs and the disguised structural adjustment programme through NEPAD and any other agreements that do not address the fundamental interests of the impoverished majority and the building of the sustainable and sovereign Africa; and
• • the comprehensive audit to determine the full extent and real nature of Africa’s illegitimate debt, the total payments made to date and the amount owed to Africa.
  He reviews the various “Programmes to end the Looting”, the space for cooperation of networks and concludes when reviewing the challenge “from looting to liberation”, that “ the solution to the looting of Africa is to be found in the self-activity of progressive Africans themselves, in their campaigns and declarations, their struggles – sometimes victorious but still mainly frustrated – and their hunger for an Africa finally able to throw off the chains of an exploitative world economy and a power elite who treat the continent without respect.”

A translation into Portuguese is currently being prepared by Instituto Comáfrica and shall be published in 2007.