[Marxism] Che in Africa

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan wrote:

"Che's brigade ended up having about 120 Cuban soldiers, and stayed in
eastern Congo until November 21st 1965. In the seven months time the
Cuban troops, together with the Lumumbist guerillas, engaged in over
fifty actions where the opposition suffered several dozens of losses.
Cuba itself lost six soldiers. There were vain hopes that 1,000 white
mercenaries paid by United States, fighting against the Lumumbist
rebellion, would abandon the country. Tanzania then suggested to the
Cuban detachment that they should leave the Congo, a request with which
the Lumumbist leaders also agreed - they decided to suspend the struggle
given the unfavorable conditions. The Lumumbist army was actually routed
by the white mercenaries and armed forces that supplied them with
superior weapons and use of military aircraft. Specifically, the
mercenary-Mobutu forces had full logistical backing and US troop
carriers with marine crews and guards to supply and transport them. Che
summarized this experience of this African episode in "Passages of the
Revolutionary
War: The Congo", and after that began preparing for his trip through
Latin America."


The situation was more complex than this.

Firstly, there were serious problems within the Congo, where the rebel
forces were divided into four different movements most of whose leaders
were, according to Che, more interested in posing as revolutionaries
than doing serious revolutionary struggle.

Secondly, in his assessment of what had gone wrong, Che pointed to the
complex problems of trying to build a political movement in a country
like the Congo of the time.  The working class was tiny and the peasants
were not really peasants in the sense that they were still largely eking
out a subsistence on communal plots, so even demands for land reform
were not relevant as they would be in a latifundia-type situation.

Guevara also found that Congolese recruits were often plagued by
superstitious beliefs which operated against building effective fighting
units.  In a number of situations, Congolese fighters actually ran away
and the Cuban fighters were left to do battle with the state forces and
mercenaries.

Thirdly, the situation in Africa was changing.  The leftist regimes
which were friendliest with Cuba were being overthrown - Nkrumah in
Ghana and Ben Bella in Algeria being the most notable cases.  Other
leaders posed as left, like Nyerere in Tanzania (or was it still
Tanganyika at that time), but were half-hearted in their support.  The
revolution in Africa was generally being pushed back.

Che's evaluation of the Congo experience - published a couple of years
ago as "The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the
Congo" - is very interesting.  It shows that he thought a great deal
about objective conditions and did not just try to arbitrarily apply the
foco theory - in fact the Congo was not fought on that basis.  The
experience in the Congo, and what Che wrote about it, would suggest,
among other things, that Che did not merely rush headfirst into focoism
in Bolivia, as quite a lot of people on the left assume.

I'd say Che is important for a number of reasons.  One is that he
epitomises a revolutionary spirit that is far too often absent in the
'revolutionary' left (the left which *knows* all about how to make a
revolution, preferably in a country a long way away, but isn't prepared
to do anything too radical in its own country).  Another is that his
views about the building of socialism are vital for all of us serious
about human emancipation through socialist revolution.

The years have served to accentuate the importance of these two things,
rather than diminish them.

Phil







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