The News: We Are All Alone Together: Popular Protest in eSwatini
Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe
Popular protests against the ruling regime in eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland) have made the international news in the last week, but the most remarkable reportage on the turmoil has been by Magnificent Mndebele and Cebelihle Mbuyisa in the South African publication New Frame. They risked their lives to deliver detailed coverage of police repression and popular protests against long-standing misrule.
In 1994, David Hecht and Abdou Maliqalim Simone published a short book called Invisible Governance that I used to teach frequently. I thought it was a clever and accessible application of more challenging and difficult theoretical work by Achille Mbembe and other intellectuals and scholars. One of the points that Hecht and Simone make throughout the book is that postcolonial Africans in various nations have become skilled at a kind of micropolitical life that takes for granted that the state is a parasitic engine for extracting wealth from the land and the labor of citizens on behalf of a miniscule political elite and various international interests and that there is no formal political opportunity to change that. So people evade authority, mask and misdirect, create hidden circulations of mutual support and accumulation, circulate knowledge about the state and its rulers through rumor. Only slightly joking, the authors suggest that these skills are the leading edge of political life for the entire planet in the 21st Century—that Europeans and Americans will find themselves needing to catch up.
That seems a more serious proposition right now than ever before. All the arrogantly stupid if earnest proclamations that followed on the destructive imposition of neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies to African states in the 1980s about how international organizations could help fight corruption and misrule with conditionalities, all the well-meaning deployments of ‘soft power’ by Western states to try and encourage democratization and political reform in Africa, all the work of NGOs trying to think about human rights, now looks silly in a new way. Basically, who are Americans to be talking to anybody about how to run a democracy or avoid crony capitalism and oligarchic misrule? How to avoid allowing shadowy networks that drain the nation’s resources, property and labor into secret bank accounts? Who is the UK to be giving anybody advice about how to run a government competently with an eye to equity and beneficience for all the people?
The postcolonial state in Africa was built for misrule because the colonial state was—in some sense because all modern nation-states have been, wherever they are or however they came into being. Transferring sovereignty to the indigenous peoples of those states, even with a constitution like South Africa’s, was never even remotely enough to change what really needed to change. eSwatini’s people have groaned under the harsh misconduct of their nation’s police force for decades because those police were trained by their apartheid-practicing neighbors and then were never untrained. eSwatini’s people have groaned under the corruption of their monarchy because it was recreated and given powers through the national form of sovereignty and through the infrastructures of modernity and globalization that it never had.
We can’t look at these protests and ask “well, how shall we help resolve it for them”? Of course, the South African government right next door should be bringing pressure on eSwatini: it’s consistent with their declared values and their national self-interest. But how can they? South Africa has enough of the same problems within its own borders. Of course, the US and the EU and the UK should be bringing pressure. But who cares any more if they do, and what standing do they have to do so?
eSwatini matters; the courage of its people matters. The people’s fight in eSwatini is the same fight we’re all in now (and have been): a fight for our lives and future. Nobody’s standing beyond the goal line, beyond the end of history, secure in democracy, confident in the competency and probity of their government, rooting for those still stuck in the scrum. What we all need to do is keep an eye on one another—and that’s where the courage of journalists and the dedication of doctors and the guidance of teachers and the moral outrage of ministers and the witness of the civil servants who just want to do the job for the people that they’re meant to do matters everywhere. There’s work to do for us, with us, and much of it is simply in hearing the news of our neighbors and brothers as we all work to get to what was promised to us, what is possible for us. We may all become skilled at masking, misdirecting and protecting our inner worlds, but nowhere is that the micropolitics that we truly crave. The citizens of eSwatini want a government that works, leaders who are honest and competent, a fair and free society that makes wealth for everyone. It is not too much to demand.