Revolutionary Nonviolence: Statecraft Lessons from the Global South

Twenty-first-century political analysts are increasingly realizing that militarism is a dead end: it has become obvious that the ongoing global expansion of the military-industrial complex has not brought us peace, and new research on the effectiveness of civil resistance as a way to expel intruders and topple dictatorships has sparked wider interest in the idea of nonviolent statecraft. But it would be a mistake to see nonviolent state-craft as a new idea. Indeed, the last half of the twentieth century was peppered by creative and often effective attempts at nonviolent policy making in the Global South. Political theorists in the United States have much to learn from a more careful study of the victories and failures of movements in Zambia, Ghana, India, Grenada and elsewhere.

A Nonviolent Revolution in Zambia

In Zambia, after almost a century of largely nonviolent struggle, independence leaders successfully wrested their nation from colonial control, transforming the British colony of Northern Rhodesia into an early example of the power of positive action. The year was 1964. The Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa had threatened to launch an international mass mobilization and pressured the colonial powers to ultimately succumb to the demands of Zambia’s United National Independence Party and their leader, Kenneth Kaunda. From prisoner to party leader to president, Kaunda’s rise to state power was nothing short of meteoric — an especially unusual feat for an avowed pacifist!

During the few years between the jail cell and the presidential mansion, Kaunda traveled to the United States to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He worked closely with leading nonviolent activists, including political leader Rev. A. J. Muste, conscientious objector Bill Sutherland, and peace campaigner Michael Randle, but understood the limitations he’d have once assuming national office. In our cowritten book Guns and Gandhi in Africa, Bill Sutherland shared the torment and challenges that Kaunda shared with him and the other nonviolent activists on the eve of independence. “How, using nonviolence,” Kaunda questioned, “am I going to be able to defend the country against all the spies and agents from Southern Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa attempting to destabilize us?” Together the leading nonviolent activists worked long into the night, struggling with this question, but were unable to provide a clear and well-defined answer to what Kaunda would later call “the riddle of violence and non-violence.” It is a question we are still struggling with today.

A 1970 statue by Zoltan Borbereki commemorates the involvement of the African National Congress in the struggle against South African apartheid.

Creative Commons/Allie Caulfield/Zoltan Borbereki

“The Gandhi of Africa”

Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, while not a principled student of nonviolence like Kaunda, was still heralded as “the Gandhi of Africa” because of his widespread popularity as an anti-colonial leader and because of his early writings on the significance of nonmilitary methods of engagement. His devotion to Pan-Africanism can be seen as one facet of an antimilitary foreign policy, looking as it did to broad unification of the continent beyond both economic and political/ideological poles; his participation in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement should also be understood as a similar attempt at creating international spaces outside the dominant Cold War dynamics of the time.

After a few years as a government leader, and especially in the years after Ghana’s full independence, however, Nkrumah moved away from nonviolence, towards a “pragmatism” that was his ultimate downfall. Authoritarian laws making strikes illegal, preventive detention of dissidents, and growing collaboration with the communist powers created a domestic environment that opened the door for the 1966 coup that ultimately deposed him from power. Nevertheless, even Muste — the “dean” of the U.S. peace movement who had decried the possibilities of nonviolence in Africa just a decade earlier — saw the experiments in Ghana and Zambia as the greatest global possibilities for a nonviolent influence on state power. “We’ve never been so close to government leadership,” Muste noted — and we’re unlikely to soon be so close...