Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa

Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. By Roger Southall. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, and New York: Boy dell Brewer, 2013. Pp. 384. $80.00.In this imposing opus, Roger Southall offers a comprehensive comparative account of the rise to power and subsequent "slow death" of national liberation movements (NLMs) in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Once "harbingers of hope and freedom," the African National Congress (ANC), the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) "lost their moral compass" once they acceded to governmental power. Instead of fulfilling the movements' hybrid promises of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism, the incumbent political class in every country instead constructed machine-like party-states that now specialize in elite self-enrichment, while systematically undermining development, democracy, and the rule of law.What explains the NLMs' fall from grace? The author's account begins with settler colonialism, which endowed the Southern Africa region with a relatively advanced, but highly unequal, structure of industrial capitalism. Forced to accept transitional settlements with white property owners as the price of political power, incoming leaders saw that the "transformation" of inherited economies required the party to capture the commanding heights of the state. Thus they "deployed" party cadres throughout the public bureaucracy using criteria of political loyalty rather than technical competence that, fusing race and class, contributed to the rise of a new black bourgeoisie. As the global tide turned from socialism to neo-liberalism in the late twentieth century, former liberation movements became little more than "party machines" for accumulating public and private resources, to be redistributed via patronage to the party faithful and denied to "enemies of the state." Because each country's constitution was often seen as too respectful of minority rights, it was readily circumvented in the process of what was described, in a tired Marxist rationalization, as a "national democratic revolution."While this common narrative illuminates the similarities across the cases, the author emphasizes cross-national differences, especially between South Africa and Namibia on one hand, and Zimbabwe on the other. The latter country underwent the deepest political and economic crisis, culminating in hyperinflation, cholera, and electoral violence in 2008. Moreover, ZANU-PF's hostile relations with the private sector stand in stark contrast to the "unholy alliance" between government and business in the other two countries. By the same token, Robert Mugabe has been far less constrained than Jacob Zuma by a liberal constitution, an independent court system, or a culture of constitutionalism. In addition, South Africa's political settlement was indigenously negotiated whereas transitions in Namibia and Zimbabwe were externally imposed (by the UN and UK respectively). Southall also notes the varying degrees to which nationalism was a unifying force: the range runs from the ANC's inclusive message of racial reconciliation, through SWAPO's efforts to disguise Ovambo domination in a cloak of Pan-Africanism, to the exclusive racial and ethnic nationalism enforced by ZANU-PF rulers in Zimbabwe. …