Ideas of the ‘vanguard party’ and ‘centralised control’ appealed to liberation movements that were looking for ideas that didn’t come from their former colonial powers, writes Nicola de Jager.
Southern Africa’s liberation movements-turned governments have produced dominant party systems, despite multiparty elections. Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe’s liberation movements were infused with the ideas of Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War period. The concepts of the vanguard party, ‘democratic’ centralism, the casting of opposition as enemies of the state found fertile ground in the post-colonial environment. It has created a political climate supportive of centralised rule and hostile to opposition or dissent.
The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has been in control of the country since 1979 and has repressed all forms of political dissent. The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) has enjoyed unbroken incumbency since the 1994 elections. The South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) has controlled the executive authority of Namibia since independence in 1990. Following Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the executive has been filled by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and election periods are characterised by state-sponsored violence and intimidation. In South Africa, the continent’s oldest liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), won every national election since the first democratic, multiparty election in 1994. Until 2024. The May 2024 national elections ushered in a new era as the ANC lost its majority falling to only 40 per cent of the vote. A Government of National Unity (GNU) was subsequently formed. Even so, the ANC retains the positions of president, deputy-president and more than 60 per cent of the cabinet positions. Its political power is still well entrenched.
In southern Africa, the region’s party politics has been significantly influenced by the proxy Cold War. Liberation movements, which turned government post-independence, had been militarily supported and ideologically influenced by the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and North Korea. While the direct influence through arms, training and advice was relatively short-lived, the indirect Marxist-Leninist ideological imprint has been longer-lasting and effected the political culture of the new democracies.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union adopted an expansionist programme into Africa, militarily supporting southern Africa’s liberation movements, with the intention of creating a tier of allied socialist-oriented countries and fermenting anti-Western sentiment. Many of the early leaders of the liberation movements had been missionary-educated, finding that social and economic mobility was often only possible through Christian missions. They tended to be educated pastors, teachers, lawyers and landowners. The Soviet Union justified its support of what it saw as middle class, bourgeois movements by calling for a two-stage revolution: first liberation and then socialism.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 appeared to mean the end of the socialist project. Instead, the Marxist ideology and derivatives have remained prevalent on the African continent. The African political elite were susceptible to the promises of an alternative to the ideas of the former colonialists. As a result ‘African socialism’ took root. Part of the socialist appeal was the ideals of social (i.e. state) control of the means of production. This resulted in the removal of private ownership or at least heavy regulation of the labour market and centralised control by the state, resulting in centralised access to limited resources. These developments led to the suffocation of independent sources of income and power, and thus severely limiting alternative resources for political opposition and civil society to access.
Leninist ideas of the vanguard party and party-control of state power particularly hindered opposition politics. Lenin argued for the need of a vanguard party to lead the working class towards revolutionary class consciousness. He believed that the working class had been deluded by bourgeois ideas and thus needed to be led by a revolutionary party tightly disciplined and controlled by its leaders who supposedly better understood the interests of the working class. Leninist theory thus made provision for a monopolistic party which took sole responsibility for representing and articulating the interests of the working class. These working-class interests would later translate into the interests of the nation, with the vanguard party as the interpreter and voice of the nation’s interests.
If the vanguard party is accepted to act in the interest of the working class (and later the nation), the logic followed that opposition parties then represented hostile interests and should be suppressed. It is therefore no surprise that opposition in many southern African countries with communist-supported liberation movements were and are labelled as counter-revolutionary and anti-transformation, finding themselves beleaguered in the region.
The ANC refers to itself as the ‘vanguard of the National Democratic Revolution’, a Soviet project. And to opposition whether it be opposition parties, the media or civil society as ‘forces opposed to transformation’, ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ and more recently as disseminators of ‘misinformation’ and ‘fake news’.
While the Soviet’s financial and military support was short-lived and limited, it appears that the Marxist-Leninist ideas of the vanguard party, democratic ‘centralism’ and opposition denigration, if not elimination, have been enduring. From this, it can be theorised that a Marxist-Leninist history tends to create a hostile environment for opposition politics and produce a dominant party system in which incumbents conflate party and state.
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