The Red Flag: A History of Communism (86 page)

The anti-apartheid guerrilla movement in South Africa was in far worse shape than its Mozambique counterparts at the end of the 1960s. It also had special reasons to welcome the Soviets’ renewed interest in the continent, as Moscow had already been giving substantially more assistance to Oliver Tambo’s African National Congress (ANC) than it had to the South African Communist Party proper, which it regarded as too independent (and too white).

A weakened United States did not find it easy to respond to this leftward surge in southern Africa, or to the Soviets’ and Cubans’ willingness to take advantage of it. Nixon and his influential adviser, Henry Kissinger, strongly objected to Kennedy-style efforts to spread democracy, convinced they would not work. Both the US President and Kissinger dismissed the global South as a backward, benighted and incorrigibly authoritarian place which had been by-passed by history. Kissinger informed a dumb-struck Chilean foreign minister that ‘Nothing important can come from the South… The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes on to Tokyo.’
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The Americans’ main concern, therefore, was simply to block Soviet and Cuban influence as effectively as possible, whilst not repeating Johnson’s mistakes by intervening directly. Their solution was to franchise out the struggle against Communism in the Third World to a series of loyal ‘gendarmes’ of various political colourings – from the authoritarian Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Suharto of Indonesia
and Médici of Brazil, to apartheid South Africa, and democratic Israel and Turkey – all of whom would be generously rewarded by Washington for their trouble. Efforts were also made to ‘Vietnamize’ the South-East Asian conflict, withdrawing US troops and creating a pro-American regime that could survive by itself. Finally Nixon hoped that the détente process itself would relieve pressure on American power by dissuading Moscow from intervening in the global South.

Though undoubtedly energetic, Nixon and Kissinger were playing a weak hand; their machinations not only failed to stop the Soviets but left many intellectuals in the Third World enraged and more willing than ever to contemplate Marxist solutions. Moscow, for its part, did not see why détente with the United States should stop it from promoting Communism outside Europe, especially when the United States was continuing to intervene to strangle it (as in Chile in 1973). Moreover, challenged by North Vietnam, Cuba, the European parties and (a much weakened) China, the Soviet authorities became even more determined to retain their international socialist pre-eminence. Party intellectuals in the Central Committee saw opportunities to re-ignite the flame of socialist internationalism at a time when the regime at home was so lacking in ideological sparkle. And the more
realpolitik
-obsessed military regarded the new scramble for Africa as a way of keeping its hand in with the United States in the superpower game.
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America’s gendarme strategy had serious weaknesses. The alliance it fostered with apartheid South Africa was especially damaging, as it seriously undermined Washington’s efforts to maintain the moral high ground in Africa and made it very difficult for African nationalists to feel sympathy with the United States. In Vietnam, meanwhile, Washington’s efforts to establish a powerful American-backed figure in Nguyen Van Thieu failed because his base of support was too narrow. His regime collapsed in 1975, two years after American troops had left, and Vietnam united under Communist rule.

Meanwhile, gendarmes could not always be relied on to hold the line in those regions where the United States believed Communism was spreading. In Allende’s Chile, Kissinger saw a dangerously attractive Communism, and he was determined to change the regime. But he could not rely on local allies; rather he used economic sanctions and covert support for the opposition. Allende gave his opponents an excuse
to intervene when his radical economic policies of land redistribution and nationalization alienated the middle classes and provoked strikes, and in 1973 General Pinochet led a right-wing military coup against the President, claiming that he was rescuing Chile from an economic crisis.
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He proceeded to ban leftist parties and some 3,200 were killed and 30,000 tortured. The United States’ precise role is unclear, but whatever the level of its involvement, the experience of a democratically elected Popular Front-style government being ousted by military force, with the support of foreign backers, had distinct echoes of 1930s Spain. Washington had suffered yet another blow to its standing in the Third World.
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There was, however, one area where the gendarme policy at first sight seems to have worked: the Middle East. When, in October 1973, Arab armies attacked Israel, they were repulsed with American help and the Soviets backed down from their threats to send aid to Egypt. The United States, with its Israeli ally, had shown itself to be the master of the region. But this was to be a temporary victory that was soon to lead to a second defeat for the West, arguably as important as Vietnam, if not more so. The Arab oil producers retaliated by raising prices by 70 per cent, and then by imposing an embargo on Israel’s supporters, including the United States. The oil price shock demonstrated the drawbacks of supporting regionally unpopular gendarmes. A significant redistribution of the world’s resources took place, from oil consumers to producers; indeed it was this that helped finance the Soviets’ African adventures.
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Meanwhile, the West’s economies were hit, and the inflation of the late 1960s worsened, increasing labour militancy as workers fought to preserve their wage gains. It seemed as if capitalism itself was in crisis. In the oil-importing parts of the Third World, the shock was even greater, and bolstered the Marxist view that the time was ripe for radical economic change.

One of the first victims of the oil shock was Marcelo Caetano’s authoritarian regime in Portugal, and with it the Portuguese Empire in Africa. Caetano had been trying to liberalize the old regime, in the face of resistance from conservatives, but in 1974, weakened by the economic crisis, he was toppled by a politically eclectic group of junior army officers, bitter at the conduct of the African wars. The coup was bloodless, and was dubbed the ‘Carnation Revolution’ after the red carnations handed out by the rebels to show their peaceful intent. Far
from signalling the start of the revolution with banners or bugles, the leaders of the rebellion told their supporters to wait for the broadcast of the Portuguese entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

A new broad coalition took power, representing conservative officers and more radical junior officers in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), as well as liberals and Communists.
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Yet Eurovision ballads were to give way to more martial tunes. Shanty-town dwellers took to the streets, occupying buildings and demanding full state housing provision, whilst landless peasants called for the break-up of large estates.
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The MFA, the far left and the Communists – who were much more radical than their Spanish and Italian comrades – began a more fundamental redistribution of property, and legalized massive land seizures. In the north the result was violence, as right-wing paramilitaries, with the support of small-holders, attacked the left. Portugal in 1975 had distinct echoes of Spain in 1936, and Kissinger estimated that there was a 50 per cent chance that Portugal would join the Soviet bloc.
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However, the radicals were weakened by their poor performance in the elections of April, and by the victory of the moderate socialists. It was clear that most of the poor had achieved what they wanted – basic property rights which they believed were rightly theirs – and did not desire a revolutionary transformation of society. The Communists attempted to mobilize the poor against the socialists, but moderates in the army regrouped and the threat of revolution was headed off. The last Communist-inspired revolution in Europe had failed.

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.

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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.