Photo by Magharebia, via Wikimedia Commons

You may not have heard of it, but the West African country of Mauritania has what is probably one of the most vibrant and active protest movements in the world today. Protests drawing tens of thousands of people (out of a total population of just three million) take place almost weekly in the capital Nouakchott, with many smaller protests happening on a daily basis around the vast country. The protests are overwhelmingly nonviolent — even in the face of frequent violent suppression — and have been going on since February 2011.

It would be comfortable to file these protests as another part of the Arab Spring: Mauritania is on the southern reaches of the Saharan Arab belt, and large-scale protests here started with the self-immolation and subsequent death of Yacoub Ould Dahoud, an action mirroring the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, which set off the revolt in Tunisia. As in other Arab countries that experienced large-scale protests, Mauritania is governed by an autocratic regime whose leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, originally came to power through a coup d’état.

But while these similarities exist and the pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world surely have been a source of great inspiration for local activists, Mauritania merits a second look.

Firstly, the range of participating actors in Mauritania are as diverse as their agendas. While a common concern of all protest movements is the end of the rule of Abdel Aziz, there are a host of other issues that various groups want to have addressed, not all directly related to the country’s ruler.

Saidou Wane, a Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania activist speaks during a protest against the government at Fountain Square in April. Photo via Cincinnati.com

Chief among them is the issue of slavery. Some estimates say that up to a third of Mauritania’s population is enslaved (even though the practice has been formally abolished multiple times). Victims are overwhelmingly ethnic black Africans. This creates racial tensions in Mauritania’s multiethnic society, but also religious ones, as certain interpretations of Islam are used to legitimize slavery.

These tensions have forced their way into the open in the context of current protests, with anti-slavery activist Biram Ould Abeid publicly burning Islamic legal manuals discussing the issue. Abeid was subsequently arrested by the authorities, and his case is controversially debated among other activists.

Another very active group, traditionally eyed suspiciously in Western societies, are the Islamists. Organizations like Tawassoul demand a state and society based on principles of Islamic law. While not cooperating a lot with other protest movements, they have been incredibly persistent in their activities against the regime, including protests of Salafist women against democracy (which is seen as not compatible with Islam) and for the release of imprisoned husbands.

More familiar political standpoints are expressed by the traditional political opposition and various youth movements, the biggest of which has followed the modern tradition of naming itself after the date of the first big protest, 25F (February 25, 2011). These groups focus on democratic reform and an end of the reign of President Aziz.

With all these different actors and goals competing for internal support and attention, it is remarkable that protests have almost completely stayed peaceful for well over a year. While protesters frequently face violence from police (including kettling, arbitrary arrests, beatings, water cannons, tear gas and attack dogs), the protesters have employed a wide range of nonviolent tactics.

In addition to traditional rallies, marches, speeches and sit-ins, protesters have occupied public squares with tents and use social media and video live streaming to coordinate protests, document violence and communicate with the outside world.

As the growing momentum of the protests show, these nonviolent tactics have so far fulfilled their goal of mobilizing the general population against the regime. But President Aziz should not be counted out just yet.

While the diversity of the protesters and their goals shows on the one hand that a vibrant civil society and widespread discontent exists in Mauritania, their disunity may still allow Aziz to carry the day. Already, the affair around the Islamic book burning by anti-slavery activist Abeid has allowed Aziz to portray himself as a defender of Islam. Given the incompatibility of demands by pro-democracy activists and Islamists, it is easy to imagine Aziz discovering his inner zealot to rally support from this part of society (a strategy tried and tested on the other side of continent in Sudan).

Another possible development could see Aziz taking advantage of the regional situation. With large parts of neighboring Mali controlled by Islamist groups and the fear of an “African Afghanistan” running high in European, U.S. and African capitals, Aziz could implement some feigned democratic reforms and present himself as a beacon of stability in the region, hoping for (and probably getting) Western military support and closed eyes, ears and mouths in the U.N. Security Council and the African Union.

But given the level of mobilization in Mauritania so far, the pro-democracy movements in Mauritania have a good chance of succeeding against such moves. Looking at successful nonviolent struggles elsewhere, activists in Mauritania could enhance the likelihood of success by working to undermine the foundations of the regime. Actions like strikes and boycotts can be incredibly effective, if well employed. Additionally, the protest movements could reach out to security forces, trying to convince at least elements of them to turn over to their side. After all, police and soldiers need to feel that they will be part of a better future as well, otherwise many of them will go with the devil they know instead of with the change they mistrust.

Occupy Wall Street activists built an impressive coalition of organized labor, immigrant-rights groups and others for a general strike and “day of economic non-cooperation” on May Day. On Tax Day, a broad spectrum of organizations helped protestors spotlight corporate tax loopholes. Assemblies from around New York City gathered in Central Park on April 14 to celebrate, share ideas and talk about campaigns. This month has also seen debate about whether the “99% Spring” week of trainings was an attempt by the institutional left to co-opt Occupy, or whether Occupy is actually co-opting and radicalizing non-profits and unions that were uninterested in direct action before the movement began.

Occupy’s spring resurgence, however colorful, still has not answered certain questions. How is Occupy Wall Street going to consult with organizations? How can this movement draw larger numbers of people into assemblies, committees and participatory structures that can serve their needs, while still connecting the dots between local ills and corporate power?

Relevant here is the story of a small group of predominantly white university students in South Africa in the early 1970s who helped to organize African workers and had a significant impact on the anti-apartheid movement.

It was not easy to do labor organizing in the early 1970s. Africans had been denied collective bargaining rights since the 1920s. The state’s security apparatus was becoming more labyrinthine. Nelson Mandela and others were serving life-sentences for plotting sabotage attacks. In the mid-1960s, the militant South African Congress of Trade Unions had been crushed. By the next decade, there were just a few unions in which African workers were active in parallel wings. Only when black intellectuals and underground members in liberation groups teamed up with white students in Natal and began agitation work amongst workers around the demand for wages above the poverty line did the tide begin to turn.

Steve Biko had recently led students classified as “non-Europeans” in forming breakaway student groups focused on inner resistance, self-empowerment and black consciousness (as well as collective action and self-help). “The strongest weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” he said in 1972. White student activists discovered that blacks students did not want to work with them, however well-intentioned they might be.

At this time, young people were absorbing a potent mix of ideas from abroad. A philosopher named Richard Turner returned to South Africa after studying at the Sorbonne and writing a dissertation on Sartre. He published a pamphlet on participatory democracy in 1972. In Durban, he urged students to see themselves as a revolutionary force, to “humanize” themselves and to reject materialism. Turner was friendly with Biko and the two collaborated on a community development project. With liberation leaders across the continent simultaneously promoting neo-traditional communalism and African unity, a cluster of white students formed a Student Wages Commission to draw media attention to the problem of poverty wages for African workers and to try to “redirect the flow of information” out of white institutions and into the streets.

The students circulated mimeographed pamphlets among workers at factory gates and bus stops. In isiZulu, workers read about the huge gulf separating their wages from what experts said about measurable minimum needs — specifically the “poverty datum line.” In Durban and Cape Town, dockworkers went with students to meetings of the Department of Labor’s Wage Board and used these statistics to demand higher pay, together with a coalition of church and other community organizations. In this way, these students did something similar to what we see happening today; they popularized inequality statistics and made them an idiom of political dissent.

Importantly, these young activists did not spurn help from experienced allies, despite real differences of viewpoint. They learned from established labor leaders. David Hemson and other students initiated a link with Harriet Bolton, the general secretary of a predominantly Indian union. Bolton convinced the students to help her set up an intermediary organization — a funeral benefit savings fund. African workers were still reluctant to form unions after the reprisals of the 1960s, so they could not simply be called out to join a movement.

In an interview with me, one former student organizer spoke of his initial skepticism. Yet this innocuous sounding mutual-aid society would have a surprisingly big impact. It attracted only a few members in 1972. But things changed dramatically in January 1973, when African workers in Durban launched a major and unexpected strike.

Durban newspapers reported that columns of striking workers were marching in toyi toyi step, carrying sticks and chanting, “Filumunti ufilusadikiza!”(Man is dead but his spirit lives). Brick factory workers were the first to walk off the job. Municipal workers and dockworkers followed. Business in the city center slowed for a week. Ships lay idle in the usually busy harbor. And white workers were photographed collecting trash — a newsworthy event in apartheid South Africa. The strike was peaceful and workers refused to identify or send out leaders, lest they be arrested.

One union leader who participated in the strike recalled the electric atmosphere. This former protestor described to me how he felt compelled to stay awake one night in his workplace writing an alternative history of Dutch colonization and apartheid in chalk on the side of a factory trolley.

The 1973 Durban Strikes did not simply occur spontaneously. Dockworkers had agitated for higher pay in 1972; a few months prior to that, contract workers in neighboring Namibia organized a major strike. Some government officials in South Africa had warned that the black-white wage gap needed to be reduced or industrial unrest would result. During the general strike, workers also demanded minimum wages very close to poverty datum line, suggesting that the students’ pamphlets also played a part.

In light of the questions mentioned above — questions about how Occupy can work with existing organizations and also develop ways of consulting with their members — what seems most significant about this story is the aftermath of this general strike.  After workers acted collectively and voiced their anger, members of the Student Wages Commission found a way to seize the moment by building something constructive.

After the strike, which punctured nearly a decade of black labor inactivity, workers felt emboldened. People’s fears about attending public meetings receded. African laborers came to Bolton’s union hall in substantial numbers. When they did, the students helped to enroll them in the funeral benefit fund. It functioned as a cloud-like interregnum between a situation in which African workers were loosely affiliated to local networks but intimidated to do more, and a new phase in which shop stewards were able to organize workers to become active participants in member-led organizations.

In 1974, the benefit fund’s members split into four new proto-unions, which made up the Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council. Amid ongoing debate about how these unions should be structured, that organization blossomed into the Federation of South African Trade Unions in 1979. In 1985, it became the Congress of South African Trade Unions — South Africa’s current umbrella union and part of a three-part alliance with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

In the early 1980s, these unions supported the United Democratic Front. Together, with help from the outside, they created a crisis for the regime by holding massive demonstrations, supporting boycotts, and partnering with civic organizations, youth, street committees and other grassroots groups that fell under the capacious umbrella of the United Democratic Front — an essential coalition in the ending of apartheid. In 1987, the trade union organizations and the UDF collectively organized the largest May Day general strike in South African history.

What’s the lesson here for Occupy? Focus on the aftermath.

Bolton’s low-risk intermediary body was stitched together with the help of a small group of young people who had carved out their own ideological space and developed an appreciation for participatory methods. It grew into organizations with the capacity to turn out huge numbers of people and to be held accountable to the rank-and-file. Already, the group in OWS that planned for May Day has begun preparing to carry the momentum forward into a series of anti-austerity actions being planned in the city for mid-May. This is a promising sign that OWS organizers are thinking about next steps.

After a general strike — after people have lost their fear and begun gathering and speaking out — it is essential for a successful civil resistance campaign to turn deliberately and intentionally to consultation and patient outreach with an eye toward long-term movement-building, even if that means working with existing organizations and meeting people where they are.

Since September 17, 2011, strong networks of activists have formed. Even stronger and more diverse parallel structures are needed, though, if Occupy is going to partner with extant groups and gather the forces needed to fight corruption, put people over profits and spread participatory democracy.

The celebrations of Sierra Leone’s 51 years of independence from British rule yesterday were marked with a special flair: Liberia’s President Charles Taylor, the man widely acknowledged as responsible for the country’s vicious ten-year civil war, has become the first former head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg tribunals of Nazi war crimes. Taylor’s conviction, handed down by the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, lays responsibility on Taylor for aiding and abetting acts of terrorism, enslavement, murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and “other inhumane acts,” including the planning and commissioning of various criminal activities surrounding the 1999 invasion of the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown. Echoing the feelings of many survivors, Leonean nonviolent activist Mohamed Fofanah of the Lam-Tech Foundation and the Messeh Partnership for Youth Development told Waging Nonviolence, “Many people think that the Special Court is a witch hunt, but for me it is not … Charles Taylor stole my childhood.”

Writing for Pambazuka News and reporting directly from the trial, Liberian scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey recounted the nine-year process of bringing the man portrayed as the most notorious African warlord to justice. Though the decision was announced as unanimous, Alternate Judge El Hadji Malick-Sow read out a dissenting opinion, arguing that Taylor was far from the center of those responsible for Sierra Leone’s troubles. With “one man, two wars, and one guilty verdict,” however, it seems clear that an imperfect, selective international process has at least held accountable a leader who clearly profited greatly off of the misery of the people of West Africa.

Taylor’s defense attorney Courtenay Griffiths may have correctly asserted the beliefs of many when he stated that a fair and impartial international court would insure proceedings against all those responsible for wartime atrocities, including former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush. In addition, as Pailey noted, “durable peace in post-conflict countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia require domestic institution building of justice systems, not an expensive, internationally funded legal apparatus.” The fact that the ICC and similar bodies are fraught with problems, however, does not discount the importance of the verdict against Taylor. Pambazuka’s Horace Campbell put it best:

Pan Africanists must oppose crimes against humanity; depoliticize the ICC at present, and work for the unity of Africa. … Africans must strengthen social justice movements in their societies so that it becomes a moot question as to where to put on trial those who orchestrate the deaths of thousands.

Indeed, over 50,000 were killed in the war in Sierra Leone, and over 150,000 were killed in neighboring Liberia during roughly the same period. Diamonds mined in southeastern Sierra Leone and smuggled through Liberia fueled the purchase of arms, and abducted children mostly under the age of 15 were widely used as combatants. Approximately 10,000 people had their hands, legs or other extremities forcibly amputated by rebel groups. Nevertheless, substantial peaceful initiatives — including music and art therapy, rehabilitation services, and non-governmental educational and support organizations — have become a staple of Leonean life in the decade since the end of the war. Much more may be needed, including an end to the use of child soldiers by the 25 countries which still allow them, but the high-profile guilty verdict and the sentencing which will be handed down in late May still provide concrete emotional relief.

When this writer co-led a health and education delegation to Sierra Leone and Liberia some years ago, the enormity of inter-connected hardships still facing the region was the most striking feature of our time with African counterparts. Psychological stability, perhaps passé from a Western perspective, and symbolic court decisions (especially ones which the U.S. State Department can too-easily cheer at), may rankle the strident desires of leftists from the Global North. Nevertheless, in a country with a still-devastated infrastructure and a total of one active psychiatrist (where the population itself serves well as “therapeutic aids” to one another), the significance of the ICC decision must not be misunderstood by progressives who should be willing to suspend their rhetoric and ideological purity for a deeper analysis of the complexity of on-the-ground conditions.

The ICC is surely a biased body with an agenda too focused on African collaborators and not their Western patrons; traditional, African-based initiatives of restorative justice and grassroots decision-making are absolutely more powerful than a single act of the Special Court. But the Taylor decision is still one positive step — only one amongst many others which have and need to take place — which emboldens the work of civilian resisters who are beginning to build visionary alternatives to the dead-end choices of gangster nationalism or globalized corporate looting.

“There is no doubt that today’s verdict sends an important message to high-ranking state officials,” stated Amnesty International Sierra Leone director Brima Abdulai Sheriff. “No matter who you are or what position you hold, you will be brought to justice for crimes.” Despite the peace agreements which ended the war and the recommendations of a Truth and Reconciliation commission which presided over hearings about the war, no redress has been awarded to those who suffered the most. “Reparations are integral to achieving justice for the victims,” added Sheriff, “and assisting them to rebuild their lives.”

For some peace workers, however, it will take more than money to right the wrongs of the past. “I lost both my parents when they recruited me into the armed conflict at age 13,” reflected Fofanah, who has dedicated himself to youth empowerment work since 2002. Fofanah agreed that much “silent suffering” continues amongst those most affected by the atrocities, but seeing Charles Taylor forced to pay for his deeds is a step in the right direction of saying “no to weapons and yes to democracy.”

This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

In preparation for this event, Occupiers are also thinking about how to grow the grassroots. At the request of Spring Awakening organizer and eviction-defense activist Michael Premo, on March 27 and April 3, Paul Getsos led two trainings on “how to build a participatory, base-building and effective work group/organizing committee.” About 60 people attended the first training, and about 40 attended the second.

Getsos joined Occupy Wall Street last fall. He is a veteran of ACT UP and the gay rights movement, and a co-founder of Community Voices Heard, which is primarily made up of women on welfare. In the trainings, Getsos praised Occupy for changing the national narrative. Quickly and cheaply, it did something that unions and community organizations have failed to do for decades. However, since the fall, Getsos has been pressing his younger, less-experienced colleagues to answer some tough questions.

How will Occupy be able to get 100,000 people in the streets and shut down the New York Stock Exchange? How will it become an outward-looking movement that draws in new people, instead of one with ever-shrinking numbers? How can it build transparent accountability structures and organize people to meet their own needs?

Premo says that he asked Getsos to lead the trainings because “so many people in Occupy have talked about the need to create structures that can do movement work.” Community Voices Heard has able to grow and serve its base by constantly bringing in new people. As one of its documents explains:

An organization or a campaign builds a large base in order to have enough power to win. Numbers matter! The more people we can mobilize to show our power, the more people we will have to make policy changes to improve our members’ lives.

Even if OWS is not exactly an organization or a single campaign, it too must draw more people into its orbit and enable them reach meaningful goals if it is to continue to shape public conversation, deliver policy changes and compellingly model alternative cultures.

It’s difficult to know if Gestos’ trainings (or the Spring Awakening) will affect the direction of the movement. Yet, in the midst of the one-on-one exercises and other tool-sharing sessions, several participants reflected on Occupy meetings and expressed frustration. Some talked about the need for new kinds of structures. Many seemed enthusiastic about the idea getting “directly affected” people into campaigns with “intentionality.” And everyone appreciated the importance of interlinking the efforts of different groups — in theory, at least.

If there were, say, 20 committees with a committed core of 50 organizers each, and if these could mobilize thousands for campaigns, perhaps these committees could get 100,000 people into the streets for one shared action. Moreover, under the banner of the 99 percent, these committees could do base-building — be it by neighborhood or by issue — in a way that would enable the committees to be simultaneously local and global, focusing their attention on the ways in which key issues, like housing, relate to corporate power.

It also remains unclear what the movement’s current capacity is for mobilizing in the first place. The overriding focus right now is May Day — which includes calls for both a general strike and a more modest “day without the 99%” — and that will be an important test of OWS’ strength and its ability to support those who join with it in turn. If the base isn’t strong enough, however, a major call to action like May Day could also present serious dangers.

One of the most significant general strikes in South Africa, for instance, suggests that protests organized by people who are not accountable to one another — people who have not planned their campaign together or agreed in advance about goals and tactics — can leave participants vulnerable to the unexpected and the ugly.

When approximately 2,000 coal miners struck in northern Natal, a prominent Indian politician rushed to the scene and convinced the men to use civil disobedience by marching across the Transvaal border and breaking their contracts. The government would then have to arrest them all or negotiate. In the meantime, indentured sugar workers on southern Natal plantations spontaneously stopped working as well. Railway workers, domestic servants and hotel staff joined the strike — making it “general,” at least among Indians.

The strike’s leader, M. K. Gandhi, was blamed for the violence that occurred during the weeks-long action. According to Joseph Lelyveld’s biography, Durban newspapers frothed about “coolies run amuck” and mobs of men brandishing sticks, wielding cane knives and urging fellow indentured workers to join them. Cane fields were set on fire. One murderously angry planter said he wanted to “teach the whole tribe a lesson.” Workers were sentenced to hard labor without pay for six months. Mine owners imprisoned workers underground. Protesters were whipped. Indians won relief from a tax on ex-indentured workers who wanted to remain in the country (as well as legal recognition of traditional marriages), but the indentured workers won nothing.

When Gandhi’s 20-year sojourn in South Africa ended, he did not forget these experiences. In fact, he would later call off some satyagraha campaigns after months of hard work out of fear of similar disruptions.

One must be exceedingly careful when comparing the United States in 2012 to South Africa in 1911. Some basic points can be made, however. In order to avoid a situation in which OWS organizers find themselves at the helm of actions that turn into a lot of mayhem with little rewards, they need to focus not just on calling people to protests, but on organizing structures through which people can work toward self-interested goals — structures that can withstand disruptions and provocations and give the protesters lasting power.

Events in French West Africa offer a related lesson about base-building. African leaders took advantage of new opportunities to reframe their relationship with France and their employers after the Second World War. Ex-servicemen spoke of “equal sacrifices, equal rights.” African unions, which had been repressed under Vichy rule, resurfaced and found ways to transcend tactics used in the past. They remembered one poorly-planned strike by temporary railway workers in 1938 that led to violent confrontations, eight deaths and few gains.

African unions grew after a general strike in the port city of Dakar in late 1945. Dockworkers shut down the port for 12 days and were joined by civil servants, literate clerks and market sellers. Railway workers did not join the protest in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty (which they were not).

The Dakar general strike showed that workers were willing to band together as “workers,” despite French attempts to divorce a few relatively wealthy “citizens” from millions of “subjects.” Unskilled workers won large pay raises and civil servants won family allowances, although the protesters did not secure equality with the French. But the commonplace colonial argument, heard in South Africa as well, that African families were too traditional (and too large) for men to receive European-style breadwinner wages had to be scrapped.

The Dakar port shutdown was followed by a much larger strike two years later. During the 1947–48 railway workers’ strike from Dakar to Bamako, 20,000 train workers participated. The action lasted five months in some areas and relied on longstanding relationships and trans-regional networks. The movement’s leader, Ibrahim Sarr, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to interviews, Muslim leaders supported the strikers in private, as did women, who provided food, composed songs praising the union and made life difficult for strike-breakers.

The strikers were able to hold out for so long, ultimately, because they weren’t isolated. Rather, the railway men had networks that enabled them to grow their own food or return to rural villages.

After two years of negotiations, the railway workers won the right to unionize and to strike, along with a universal labor code complete with family allowances. They were not transported into a new world of freedom, however. Paradoxically, their victory brought them deeper into French legal structures and the politics of nationalism by allowing a few of the union’s supporters to become successful politicians. The protesters built a movement based on rural-urban, trans-class and trans-cultural networks of solidarity, but soon found themselves vulnerable to being divided once again, now by nationalist politicians oriented towards their own short-term goals.

It doesn’t just matter that there is an organized base, therefore, but what kind of organization, and what kind of leadership structures, unites that base.

The lessons here are simple. First, protests organized by people who are not in two-way relationships, and are not accountable to each other, are protests with a high degree of uncertainty. Who knows who’s coming? Who knows what they will do? This is a problem that many Occupiers know well.

Second, campaigns that pursue only short-term goals can be easily exploited by opportunistic politicians in the long term. This is why the base must have its own forms of decision making.

Third, organizing that does not look at the roots of problems is particularly brittle. Once an immediate solution to an urgent problem is won, the thread between the present and the possible can get cut. Solidarity only for the sake of a short-term goal can leave people vulnerable to co-option and unable to see how immediate problems are part of larger systems.

How can Occupy win recognizable victories against foreclosure, debt, crony-capitalism, militarism, mass incarceration and climate change while also drawing people into transparent structures that serve their interests and enable them to amass lasting power? How can the movement increase and strengthen its base? As Occupiers look toward May Day and a busy summer, they have an opportunity before them now to answer these questions for themselves, in their own ways. The Spring Awakening and Paul Gestos’ trainings are signs that people in some sectors of the movement are already thinking very much in these terms.

To plant to the seed of people-power, organizers need to look honestly at the obstacles before them, including the challenges involved in building a base of support. The words of one historian and war-theorist seem pertinent here. Said Thucydides, “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet not withstanding, go out to meet it.”

Che Gandhi, courtesy Beautiful Trouble and Andy Meconi

When contemplating “The Marriage of Gandhi and Che,” the subtitle of my contribution to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, I was originally thinking of something frilly with lace — perhaps an off-white gown of appropriate drama. Confronting this challenge of representation, Agit-Pop co-founder Andy Meconi came up with a more iconic image expropriation: the smiling old soul superimposed onto the dashing beret. Two great faces that face great together.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

The special timing of this effort has not been missed by any of the media-conscious movement-builders involved. With the birth of a new global people’s movement firmly in mind, the wranglers responsible for Beautiful Trouble understand that “the impossible suddenly seems possible, and all around the world ordinary people are trying out new tools and tactics to win victories where they live.” The urgency of this political moment, in the words of Andrew Boyd, “demands resources that will transform outrage into effective action” — action for building the next revolution.

For many of us, the revolution we seek must understand the connections between means and ends, as well as include the mass-based people power central to effective unarmed civilian resistance. Though the term “nonviolence” has long seemed negative to many, rehabilitating the phrase by reviving the more militant concept of “revolutionary nonviolence” is also a process whose time has come. Mainstream politicians and misguided textbooks have tried to convince us that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were extreme opposites whose visions and practices had nothing to do with one another, but the truth has always been more nuanced, dialectic and complicated than that.

It is not that Che Gandhi seeks to become the new “brand” (Che McGandhi, if you will) by accepting everything those two forefathers believed. This author, for one, does not think that Che’s idea of foco guerrilla warfare has much to offer modern-day radicals; nor do I accept Gandhi’s notions on abstinence and sexuality. The hero-worshiping of both of these figures has done much damage to their most significant joint legacy — that one must give one’s all to a total revolution which is based on love of the people. Che McGandhi’s mass appeal might not yet match the Mc-numbers we’d like — only 300 billion served? How about getting the other six and a half billion their social change with equal portions peace and justice, please? Perhaps we need to invent another prophetic hybrid, this time a West African woman — in tribute to all the women of the Global South who are leading nonviolent revolutions today. Let’s call her Cheluchi NGandhi (points for anyone who can parse the multiple hidden meanings).

What we surely and certainly need, in the U.S. and across the planet, is a new approach toward organizing that includes a sense of humor, breathtaking creativity and a focus on appealing to greater numbers of people without losing sight of how issues and struggles are connected. As we join together for that upcoming uprising, won’t we be causing some beautiful trouble then?

In 2009, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives (before being overthrown in a recent coup), held a cabinet meeting underwater. He sat at a table anchored to the ocean floor, wearing a wetsuit and oxygen tank, and signed a law meant to make the country carbon neutral within a decade.

The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on the planet, with 400 miles of coastline and one of the world’s most densely populated capitals. It is, according to Rob Nixon, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an “invisible nation of no apparent consequence,” and as sea levels rise due to climate change, it may well be the first nation whose entire population becomes climate refugees. President Nasheed’s underwater meeting was a desperate attempt to catch the world’s attention, to add dramatic urgency to a process that, however disastrous, occurs over a period of decades.

The Maldives are far from alone: 43 island states have announced that, without swift global action against climate change, they face “the end of history.” From far away on a bright spring morning, this statement could easily seem hyperbolic — if it were heard at all. But for those at risk, it’s the frightening truth. And therein lies the challenge.

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon writes pragmatically about the difficulties in fighting what he calls “spectacle deficient” environmental crises like climate change, compromised ecosystems and toxic waste, whose victims are spread over place and time; the Maldives’s plight is only one of countless examples, and perhaps even more evident than most. These processes, Nixon says, are “slow violence”: pervasive, devastating — and unnoticed.

Just as slow violence is made invisible by its subtle pace and scattered impacts, its victims themselves are invisible, at least in the tiny and shifting lens of the world media. These are the micro-minorities, the shantytowns downriver from the manufacturing plant, the marginalized women in an already-marginalized society. Often, slow violence “occurs in the passive voice”; the suffering is a shame, of course, but it comes as a side effect rather than through the immediate action of any responsible party, leaving a convoluted trail of excuses and denial. Whose fault is it when a child goes hungry because his region has lost its topsoil and his family cannot grow food? Whose fault is a leukemia cluster that comes 10 years after and 100 miles away from any sort of disaster? I don’t know, but it’s not mine.

Each chapter in the book profiles a writer-activist who uses his or her writing to memorialize and call attention to a case of slow violence. In contrast to scientific or political reports, which are often written with such opaque language that they are inaccessible to both the victims they describe and to potentially-sympathetic outsiders, these writers use their work to build connections between their communities and the outside world, to make accessible that which is hidden.

We see Ken Saro-Wiwa, an Ogoni writer whose homeland in Nigeria was exploited for crude oil extraction, and who led a nonviolent campaign for environmental rights before he was put to death by the state. We see Wangari Maathai shaping Kenya’s Green Belt Movement as a feminist response to militaristic, male-dominated ideas of national security: “Losing topsoil,” she wrote, “should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invading enemy.” Nadine Gordimer’s short story “The Ultimate Safari,” about a group of refugees slipping through South Africa’s Kruger National Park, is read as a commentary on conservation refugees, the illusion of authenticity and the legacy of racism in South Africa’s tourist-oriented game reserves. The books and writers that Nixon profiles become opportunities for reflection, as he contextualizes each topic — dams, fossil fuels, depleted uranium — in terms of its global significance.

Nixon and the stories he tells also cast light on the differences between top-down and bottom-up environmental movements. “Full-stomach” environmentalism in rich nations, for instance, has tended to focus on the preservation of charismatic megafauna and majestic landscapes, often to the exclusion of the people native to those landscapes. This is the environmentalism of Priuses, debt-for-nature swaps, recycling campaigns and dreams of going “off the grid.” Poor-nation, “empty-belly” environmentalists, by contrast, “experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a series of inhabited risks.” Although Nixon doesn’t address the environmental justice movement among poor and minority communities in the U.S. as an example, the principle is similar: environmental justice advocates, like poor-nation environmentalists, are often spurred to action by a direct threat to which the larger society — itself the perpetrator — pays little attention. There’s power to be gained by the two sides coming together, by environmentalists embracing the diversity of their causes alongside activists for women’s rights, minority rights and other rights discourses. If, as Maathai writes, “Poverty is both a cause and symptom of environmental degradation,” then each movement can be strengthened by joining forces with the other.

I thought the book was worth buying for its introduction alone, which presented the idea of slow violence and the practical and political challenges behind fighting it. The chapters that follow are a gallery of horrors: one scene of violence after another, each seemingly insurmountable and somehow less surprising than the last. Yet, remarkably, this is the least depressing environmental book I’ve read in years. By presenting these disasters alongside the writer-activists working to counteract them, Nixon leaves no room for despair. Instead I’m left buoyed, hopeful and — after 300 pages — impatient to learn more.

Chilean arpillera. Photo by Colin Peck.

The earliest proponents of the growing field of peace studies were well aware that their work had as much to do with provoking creative nonviolent conflict as with conflict resolution. That spirit of resistance was alive and well at the University of Massachusetts Amherst last month for the traveling international exhibition “Transforming Threads of Resistance,” which brought together the weavings and stories of women from Chile and close to a dozen other countries throughout Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

Exhibition coordinator Leah Wing introduced curator and activist Roberta Bacic by noting that it is not unusual for “conflict resolution scholars and practitioners to view resistance as a barrier to conflict resolution.” This dynamic can be doubly the case after a peace accord has been reached or a dictator overthrown — when resistance “can be seen as contributing to the perpetuation of the conflict rather than to peace.” Wing argues that this narrow approach “contradicts the wisdom and life experience of most people who themselves have suffered from state violence and who have used resistance to survive and attain their freedom.”

Rooted in the traditional textile craft form known as arpilleras, the practice of stitching colorful threads or cloth onto cut squares of burlap bags has long been an inexpensive way for Chilean women to express themselves. They turn the scraps from food packaging and the torn rags of their lives into striking representations of their thoughts and dreams. During the vicious dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet — which was kicked off on September 11, 1973 by a CIA-directed coup d’etat against democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende — the mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters of the so-called “disappeared” people turned their crafts into symbols of resistance. Although the official militaristic desire was for the lives and legacies of the thousands of desaparecidos to be erased, the arpilleras, then and now, graphically bring to life the struggles of the time. In this way and for these families, historical memory becomes an act of resistance and ongoing social change.

Some of the weavings from the Pinochet era — which lasted until an ever-bubbling series of nonviolent organizations and actions spurred an unstoppable wave of anti-dictatorship sentiment in 1990 — depict simple cloth dolls of women standing in a line, holding a banner with the question “Where are the Disappeared?” Some show more intense imagery, of prisoners languishing in hidden-away torture chambers or of the huge water cannons used to target those brave enough to demonstrate under incredibly repressive conditions. The protesters — often women armed with nothing more than pots and pans, clamoring for help in finding their loved ones — were not only hit with highly pressurized water making it impossible to stand or walk, but were also sprayed with colored dye, so they could be identified and rounded up even if they did manage to get away.

The spectacularly dramatic Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture — named after the father who immolated himself when the Pinochet regime seized his son and daughter — gained a reputation for staging “lightening” demonstrations. These progenitors of today’s smart/flash mobs (coordinated decades before cell phones and “tweets”) brought dozens of activists into the public square, in loud calls for democracy and an end to injustice — handing out informational leaflets and giving on-lookers the courage to oppose the regime. By the time any police or military arrived, the organizers were already gone.

In finding new means of voicing protest and staging collective action through the making of political “crafts,” the women of Chile also often utilized scraps of clothing left over from their disappeared loved ones. “Thus the women used not only their material resources, but something deeper than that” noted curator Roberta Bacic — a former staff person of Chile’s Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) nonviolence network. “They sewed their lives and their loss into the tapestries.”

Based on her work with families and former prisoners after Pinochet was forced out of office, Bacic recounted how the “apparently innocuous” became “acts of subversion.” Arpillera workshops themselves became training centers for civilian empowerment. Although a critic of the accommodation which was reached between the military and the mainstream Chilean political parties resulting in the end of Pinochet’s presidency, Bacic was appointed to the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission and subsequently became a program officer with War Resisters International. Bacic’s global encounters have led her to collect textiles from other parts of the world, connecting and spreading their messages of resistance to ever-widening audiences.

Zimbabwean weaving of "a day we will never forget.” Photo by by Shari Eppel.

Observation and gallery-gazing, of course, is far from the final goal of exhibits like these. The Amherst gathering brought together weavings from Ecuador and Colombia, as well as from Ireland and Germany, where images of devastation and genocide mixed uneasily with images of hope brought about by solidarity. West Bank weavings showcased the plight of Palestinian refugees and a tapestry from Zimbabwe served as the recorded history of “a day we will never forget,” — when attacks on a village brought untold devastation but failed in its attempt to undo the community.

Survival in bleak times must be about making these transnational solidarity connections. The arpilleras, as Roberta Bacic explains, must “act as a reminder to us of what we have, and startle us into seeing what others have lost. And in their startling simplicity, the arpilleras compel us to do something.”

A gunnery sergeant with the U. S. Marine Corps Forces, Africa trains a Ugandan soldier. By Hakeem A. Buuza, via AFRICOM.

We can come to quick consensus that Uganda’s Joseph Kony is a bad man. And while we’re not looking to separate the world into friends and enemies, we can probably get just about everyone to agree that Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been doing some pretty heinous things — crimes against humanity, in international legal terms. The question, then, in this interconnected, faster-than-the-speed-of-Internet world, is what to do about him and the conditions which enable him to continue?

In the viral video “KONY 2012” by the US-based non-governmental group Invisible Children, filmmaker Jason tells his young son Gavin — and the audience of over 100 million who have now viewed his slickly-produced half hour infomercial — that our electronic, Facebook-age “greatest desire” is to belong and connect… to share the love.” I am also a US-based father with a son only slightly older than Gavin, I too have traveled to and long worked for peace and justice in Africa, and I agree strongly with Jason that the only appropriate answer to the every-person question “Who are you to end a war?” is: “Who are you not to?” We are, as Jason suggests, every last one of us shaping human history nearly every day. What, then, will be the world’s new shape?

One urgent task that seemed obvious and evident to me early in my work in solidarity with African people’s movements was to give voice to Africa’s own self-defined and self-determined grassroots struggles. One of the priorities of the peoples of the Global North must be to help provide platforms, showcases and support for our African colleagues such that their priorities, and their power, would be clear in every act of assistance. More than any material or political aid, this sensitivity to unequal power dynamics, with an ultimate goal of equitable power balances (economic, social and otherwise) would best serve the freedom struggle. The idea that our main work in the North would be to spotlight evil African wrongdoers, making the masses of African stakeholders invisible, seemed antithetical to what was needed. One of the best things about Mary King’s Waging Nonviolence essay on “What ‘KONY 2012’ is—and is not” is its reliance on African activists for information and insights on what must now be done in the region for the creation of real peace. But we must go further.

Uganda’s peace practitioners themselves have been outspoken about the needs of their own movements. Ugandan correspondent for Insight on Conflict Stephan Oola, for example, notes that there are over 1,000 local peace-builders in the northern region of his country where Kony and his LRA had been most active. Insight, an extensive network of indigenous organizations working in areas of the world most affected by violence, lists no fewer than 69 grassroots peace groups working in Uganda alone, and—as Oola poignantly states—“none of them have been partnered in this latest campaign.” Though Oola commends Invisible Children’s efforts in building and renovating schools and providing scholarships for Ugandans in need, he correctly critiques them for not even citing the vital work of Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiatives, whose efforts to pursue peaceful means to end the causes of conflict in their region have been noteworthy, effective and in need of additional support. Without key local input, attempts for lasting peace will be, in Oola’s words, nothing but a “non-starter.”

Many Ugandan and central African commentators have written and spoken about the one-sided and oversimplified nature of the “KONY 2012″ video. Reporting from Uganda’s capital city Kampala, Associated Press writer Rodney Muhumuza noted that former United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Olara Otunna has long accused the Ugandan government itself of committing acts of genocide, in part using Kony as an excuse in its policies against the rural north. Otunna, himself a member of the Acholi ethnic group and a leader of the Ugandan Peoples Congress, has termed the decades-long forced relocation of Acholi and other northerners “the secret genocide,” where huge portions of the population have been housed in poorly-equipped internment camps, with up to one thousand perishing weekly.

Black Star News editor Milton Allimadi, speaking at New York’s Left Forum on March 17, also suggested that the Ugandan government shares much of the blame, imploring us that “when you allow Kony to be the focus, you exonerate someone else even more responsible.” By taking Kony and the LRA out of their historical context, the best that can be hoped for are simplistic and ineffective solutions. A more holistic approach has been documented in the work of Uganda’s Raising Voices, whose co-director Dipak Naker has worked extensively in the development of broad-based, child-centered interventions.

The reasons for the recent mainstream flurry of interest in Uganda, Kony and children in conflict may be many. Though some assert pure humanitarian concern, others suggest more suspicious motives, such as the 2005 discovery of oil in the region (and the funding of Invisible Children by those who seek to benefit from the pumping and international sales of the petrol). One thing, in any case, is crystal clear: the message of the “KONY 2012″ video, the Invisible Children organization, and their many bi-partisan politician-supporters is that continued U.S. military might is needed. Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, who also serves as director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, stated that U.S. military and geopolitical designs in all of central Africa is the real reason behind the 2012 crisis about Kony. AFRICOM, the arm of the U.S. military in Africa which has met with tremendous continent-wide resistance and has been in much need of public “rehabilitation,” may have more to do with the current media campaign than many are willing to admit. “Rather than the reason for accelerated military mobilization in the region,” Mamdani asserted, “the LRA is the excuse for it.” Along these lines, Makerere Institute senior fellow Adam Branch asks: “How often does the U.S. government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources?”

Any sensitive, long-term or balanced observer of events in the region will explain that Kony continues to survive and draw strength because of the militarized nature of the region. With every side (except for the unarmed peace-builders at the grassroots) agreeing wholeheartedly that there must be no negotiations, that mediation and conflict resolution shouldn’t ever be tried, and that low intensity war is the best possible strategy for “winning,” the LRA, the Ugandan Armed Forces, and many other armed groupings carry on with impunity and no end in sight. It is only the local population who suffer.

Though just over four years old, AFRICOM (the U.S. High Command on the continent), has had a checkered history at best. As Syracuse University professor and noted pan-Africanist Horace Campbell pointed out in Pambazuka News, AFRICOM’s first field mission last spring in Libya displayed a “new vigor of imperialism” but was a “catastrophic failure” in that it could not take credit for a smooth, clean or quick transition of power away from Gaddafi and towards a more palatable, Western-approved government. Likening AFRICOM to the racist South African apartheid regime and the murderous, tyrannical reign of Mobutu over the Congo (Zaire), Campbell asserts that AFRICOM’s plans for the remilitarization of the continent will also ultimately fail. To quicken that defeat, Campbell suggests, peace movements the world over must understand and work against an effort designed by private military contractors — in collusion with African elites — to maintain the economic plunder of the richest regions of the planet. Conscious that it is this exploitation, in fact, which serves as the root cause of instability and security challenges in war-torn locales, it is the unification and demilitarization of the continent which is needed, along with an “alliance between peace forces in Africa and beyond [to] ensure that this new round of the scramble for Africa will be resisted.”

Africa specialist Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, agreed that AFRICOM’s actions in 2012 have revealed “the fist of the military and its dominant role in U.S.-Africa engagement.” Though AFRICOM was established under the Bush administration, it has been President Obama who has expanded it and put it to direct use, despite its rejection by African governments, scholars and human rights advocates. Since AFRICOM’s inception, Priority Africa Network coordinator Nunu Kidane, also writing for Pambazuka, noted that U.S. military planning was nothing new, “simply a new initiative to ensure ‘command’ of land and resources that in the past was called just plain ‘colonialism.’ As the competition for global resources tightens, not only for oil and minerals, but for basic rights to land and water,” Kidane continued, “we can expect increased focus on Africa as the new frontier.”

Campbell traces the focus of Invisible Children and “KONY 2012″ through the studies of “innocent” narrator and father Jason, who is in fact a trainee at a U.S. Army-initiated institute specializing in technology and communications. Furthermore, Ugandan Black Star editor Milton Allimadi has indicated that the U.S. embassy in Kampala was in direct consultation with Jason and others during the making of “KONY 2012.” The extent of Jason or his organization’s collusion with the U.S. military industrial complex, however, is hardly the issue. The issue, I think, is that so very many U.S. citizens, out of genuine concern for African peoples but a no less genuine history of imbedded racism, paternalism, and a white-man’s-burden sense of “here-we-come-to-the-rescue”-ism, flock to a video as misguided as “KONY 2012.”

That anyone in this information age can believe for a moment that people cannot and do not take care of their own problems in their own neighborhoods on their own terms is a scary one; the problems where this is not the case are always more complex than a Hollywood-style video can convey. That anyone in this age of violence can believe that the U.S. military will hold the solution to violence — and not exacerbate the problem — is equally frightening. That Africa in particular, with so much creative energy and grassroots solutions to teach the rest of the world, can still be viewed as in need of rescuing shockingly shows how backwards our own thinking is.

Jason said to his young son Gavin and to the rest of us: “Turning the system upside down … it changes everything.” With the use of an inverted pyramid, he suggested that power dynamics may be turned on their heads. A local leader, already chased out of Uganda by his own people, and leading a motely group of a couple of hundred at best, might be captured and brought to justice. In my own organization, the War Resisters League, we had an old poster with a pyramid on it as well, and the words emblazoned: “We must have order … but must it be the present order?” We have never been afraid, however, to resist all armies, small and large, and to resist the idea that any army (especially imperial ones) could solve the problems of militarism, violence and injustice.

Gavin said to his proud father that he wanted to grow up to be like his dad: “I’m going to come with you to Africa.” My own son has twice been with me to the continent, which is much less scary than portrayed in viral videos and imagined by most Americans. And it is there, more than anywhere, we have learned the lessons of humility and peace.

Senegalese and Malian soldiers train with U.S. special forces in Mali. By Staff Sgt. Michael R. Noggle, via Flickr.

People took to the streets in Dakar, Senegal, yesterday, celebrating what many had feared would never happen: opposition leader Mack Sall gained around two thirds of the vote in the second round of the presidential elections, and incumbent Abdoulaye Wade accepted defeat, personally calling Sall to congratulate him.

Meanwhile in Bamako, the capital of Senegal’s neighbor Mali, people were slowly starting to venture out to the streets again after a sudden coup d’état brought normal life to a standstill for several days.

Why did democracy prevail in Senegal and not in Mali? Why were people in one country able to express the need for change at the ballot box, while in the other weapons had to speak?

At the time of the coup, Mali was looking forward to holding presidential elections in a few weeks. Having reached his term limit, Malian incumbent Amadou Toumani Touré — or ATT — wasn’t running again.

This made the coup, which was led by young officers without connections to the political establishment, especially baffling for observers and Malians alike.

It was in Senegal, actually, that observers were concerned that violence might break out. The incumbent Wade had staged what some called a “constitutional coup.” Using creative legal arguments and his leverage over the country’s supreme court, he managed to get on the ballot for a third time, despite having introduced presidential term limits into the constitution himself. Many feared that Wade was intending to build a dynasty, handing over power to his son, and would be willing to employ violence against the opposition movement, as well as rigging the vote, to stay in power.

This fear was nurtured by several deaths of protesters and policemen in the run-up to the first round of polls. But violence ultimately became supplanted by cooperation between the various opposition movements.

The strategy paid off. Mack Sall ended up taking about 70 percent of the popular vote, according exit polls. No serious irregularities were reported, and Wade seems to be determined to gracefully bow out, allowing Senegal to continue its tradition of inclusive political decision making. With the exception of the conflict around the independence of the Casamance region, Senegal has managed to address its political conflicts through democratic mechanisms, giving grievances little chance to deteriorate into violence.

The large-scale protest by the M23 and “J’en ai marre” protests also contributed to the outcome and acceptance of the elections. They managed to visibly demonstrate public discontent with President Wade. They also provided a venue for activists of different opposition parties to meet, get to know each other and ultimatively cooperate to the extent necessary to defeat the incumbent. The protests may also have restrained Wade from trying to “manage” the outcome of the vote, or to claim power by violent means. As thousands of people showed repeatedly their willingness to defend their constitution and rights through largely peaceful protest in the streets, the social cost of large-scale rigging or suppression was clear in the eyes of those in power.

In Mali, however, this has not tended to be the case. There, marginalization and violence are virtually ingrained into the fabric of the state, which has been facing roughly one violent insurrection by Tuareg rebel groups every decade. The latest, which has its roots in a complicated history of exclusion and broken promises, began in January but has already engulfed the whole northern part of the country.

Weakened by nepotism and corruption in its ranks, the Malian army so far hasn’t stood a chance against the heavily-armed Tuareg, many of whom just returned battle-hardened from the civil war in Libya. After two months of defeats, the rank-and-file soldiers and young officers stationed in Bamako seemingly had enough and mounted a mutiny, which more or less by accident became a full-blown coup d’état.

The soldiers clearly felt little hope that the upcoming presidential elections would bring any significant change. The political class in Mali and the upper echelons of the security services are perceived as highly corrupt, with links to smuggling networks and Islamist extremists. This also explains the tentative support that the coup had among the general population — although this too is already waning due to incidents of looting by soldiers in the capital.

In the run-up to their respective elections, both Senegal and Mali were presented with major challenges. But where Senegal managed to strengthen its democracy in the face of the contentious candidacy of an incumbent president, Mali was thrown back into military rule after its political elites failed to deal with a rebellion born out of frustration.

The difference, in the end, was a matter of whether these societies had managed to foster an inclusive and peaceful dialogue in which elites can’t simply cling to their power and corrupt practices, and citizens are organized enough to hold them accountable.

Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success.

One of the most recent long walks was taken by four Miami College undocumented students who walked from Florida to the U.S. Capitol in support of the immigration reform proposed in the Dream Act. They called their 2010 march The Trail of Dreams. They not only ended up expanding support for the legislation, but also stimulated five students to add an additional walk of 250 miles from New York to Washington, timed to arrive at the same time as the walkers from Miami. Although the Dream Act was not passed, the action certainly increased the momentum behind it.

In 2009, Tanzanian police set fire to eight Maasai villages to evict 3,000 people who were living on traditional land that the government secretly leased to a wealthy businessman from the United Arab Emirates for his hunting and recreation. Widespread protests were stonewalled by the government. Thousands of women in the region then decided to march back to the village area in April 2010; despite arrests and blockades along the way, 1,500 women made it. The women had as allies a network of NGOs, three leaders of which were arrested as well.

Also in 2010, Costa Rican protesters marched from San Jose to Las Crucitas, over 100 miles, to overturn a government decision that permitted open-pit gold mining. The stakes were high: A Canadian subsidiary wanted to mine an estimated $1 billion gold deposit, even though it would remove 600 acres of yellow almond trees — the main food for the endangered green macaw. The march, along with an occupation, hunger strike and other actions, forced a Congressional vote to ban all new open-pit mining projects, and in a court case the protesters won a ban of the Las Crucitas mine.

Most U.S. activists have heard of the 1965 Selma–Montgomery march in Alabama that brought to a peak a national crisis that forced the U.S. federal government to pass a voting-rights law to allow African Americans to vote in the South. The strategy in the previous cases I’ve mentioned was to use the long march as a “wake-up call” to mobilize a broader campaign for their cause. But in the 1965 civil rights movement, the long march was placed strategically at the end of the campaign, to escalate the pressure when allies around the U.S. were already mobilized.

A variety of tactics had already been used before the march: Alabama blacks showing up at voter registration offices even though they wouldn’t be allowed to register; sit-ins and picketing of white-owned businesses; short marches (sometimes even escalating to night marches — a highly dangerous tactic in that context); and other tactics usually involving tense confrontations and thousands of arrests. The young black protester Jimmy Jackson was shot and killed by police, and the white Unitarian-Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death.

The rising storm of protest around the U.S. forced the Attorney General in Washington to begin working on a voting-rights bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Dr. King to de-escalate in view of the increasing violence. King, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in leadership believed that more pressure was needed. They planned a five-day march from Selma, which had been the center-point of the campaign, to Montgomery, the state capital of Alabama — since voting laws are usually decided by the state government.

The march would be extremely dangerous, passing through rural areas “owned” by the white terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. Three hundred trained people were allowed to go the whole way, with the understanding that thousands could join on a day-by-day basis. Eight thousand people left Selma for Montgomery on March 21. Demonstrators marched through rain, singing and chanting, arriving safely on March 25, although the Ku Klux Klan murdered one more protester as she drove back to Selma.

This successful campaign spotlights two important strategic decisions: one was to place the timing of the walk near the campaign’s end, as a functional alternative to the tactic chosen in some labor-based campaigns: the escalatory general strike. The other was to base the campaign in a location other than where the power holders sit (in Alabama, the state capital, and in the U.S., Washington, D.C.). Because empowerment was a fundamental theme for civil rights organizers, emphasizing the grassroots rather than the seat of official power — and forcing the power holders to deal with the results — was often seen as most effective.

The Selma–Montgomery march was directly influenced by knowledge of the March to the Sea in India led by Gandhi in 1930. In that case, the long walk initiated the entire campaign: the Salt Satyagraha. The 240-mile march began at Gandhi’s ashram and ended at the sea, where the marchers made salt in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly of salt manufacture. While the country was already well-organized and probably didn’t need the march to mobilize, the leadership wanted drama to kick off the campaign. The drama was provided by suspense: would the British arrest Gandhi or not? It was a classic dilemma demonstration. If the British arrested Gandhi they would make him a martyr and prove correct his claim that their presence was repressive and illegitimate. If they didn’t arrest him, he, the “Great Soul,” would be the first to make salt and defy the British. Either way, the British were in trouble; the campaign continued on a mass scale for two years and paved the way for India’s independence.

In Thailand, a rural campaign to re-open the Pak Mun Dam, whose construction had turned out to be an economic and ecological disaster for the region, used the long walk in the middle of the campaign. In 2000 the Assembly of the Poor first did a series of protests that culminated in seizing the dam and building villages there, preventing dam workers from gaining access. Although they had studies by academics and the World Commission on Dams to back them up, they realized that their struggle needed more allies, including among the urban poor, working class and middle class. So 150 representatives of impacted villages participated in a long march of 400 miles to Bangkok to win more allies. Once there, they began a hunger strike, created a mock village outside the seat of government, and did a “die-in” to dramatize their outreach.

Their success in winning allies even among the middle class resulted in the government not only compromising substantially — opening the dam gates four months each year — but also effectively ended new dam construction in the country.

In 1978, 26 Native American activists walked 3,000 miles in what they called the Longest Walk – from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Thousands of people joined them at various points along the way. Symbolically they were reversing the Trail of Tears that marked the history of so many tribes, ejected from their homes by white supremacy and made to walk westward. Practically, they were walking to catalyze a new level of energy among allies, against the threat in the U.S. Congress. Congress was considering a set of 11 bills that would — once again — injure indigenous people in the U.S. The Longest Walk succeeded in blocking the bills.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database contains more campaigns that used long walks. Many activists have used this method, turning it into a tactic — as militaries use the term — by attaching it to a very specific objective. Campaigners in various situations have placed the long walk in the beginning of a campaign, or the middle or the end, making it serve one or another of a variety of campaign needs. Its strategic flexibility makes it tempting.

A downside is that effectiveness requires a great deal of organization, and many protest groups simply don’t have the infrastructure to carry it off to get what they want. I’ve known long walks that were intended to build allies but didn’t because the walk attracted hyper-individualists with nothing better to do than string along with the walk and alienate the potential allies along the way. Depending on the culture, those who initiate a long walk need to have serious skills in organization and conflict resolution. Depending on the level of danger, they also need skills in training. I was once called in to assist a group whose long walk resulted in several injuries and deaths among the walkers; we worked hard to build the capacity of the organization in nonviolent self-defense. In future walks, no one was killed.

The long walk is not the only method that has advantages and challenges to implement — most do. However, campaigners who rely simply on marches and rallies risk death by boredom, which is one reason why one of the most effective recent campaigns I know of began with a solemn agreement never to hold a march or a rally! Maybe a long walk is for you. Maybe you’d like to join us on ours? Follow #greenwalk and #m16 on Twitter for more details.

Still from "KONY 2012" representing an inverted pyramid of people-power acting on elites.

A student recently asked me about the now-famous online video “KONY 2012.” The man its name refers to, of course, is Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla group alleged to have forced more than 60,000 children into fighting in armed conflicts in central Africa. As of this writing, the video has been watched more than 100 million times; its makers hope it will “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” My student wrote:

Can a nonviolent movement be virtual, or does it require feet on the ground? The concept of “KONY 2012” appears to be about awareness targeted to North American supporters, not the people of Uganda or Congo where Kony calls home. If “KONY 2012” seeks only to raise awareness, but does not result in organized protest or the arrest of Kony, is it still an effective campaign?

I thought it was a great question, coming at the beginning of an online course at the University for Peace (UPEACE) with 30 mid-career students from literally all over the world, and in regard to a phenomenon that is spreading just as far and wide. My response, however, is that the “KONY 2012” video and what it calls for, whatever its ultimate effectiveness, would not qualify as a true nonviolent resistance campaign, movement or mobilization.

First, I would caution against focusing on the novelty of this video’s medium. Online social media are not in themselves generative. Media do not create movements. Rather, campaigns and movements commandeer media for their own needs to communicate and amplify their organizing. As a general rule, nonviolent movements tend to seize the most advanced technologies available. (For more, see Daryn Cambridge’s webinar, “The Digital Duel: Resistance and Repression in an Online World.”)

Nevertheless, the basic premise is sound that a video like this might hasten the efforts of a local struggle. Such transnational activism can speed the process of building awareness, a critical component of any campaign — although neither a video nor the awareness it spreads should be considered a goal in itself. Consider, for instance, the 1985 student-led consumer boycott in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, which helped to launch third-party international sanctions against that country’s apartheid state and corporations. But “KONY 2012” is different from this kind of tertiary sanctions in significant ways.

What distinguishes a nonviolent movement or campaign from the usual institutionalized politics of elections, militaries and law courts? The historian and chronicler of social movements Charles Tilly says that three elements were involved as modern social movements came into view by the latter part of the 18th century in North America and Western Europe:

1. A sustained, focused, and organized public endeavor making collective claims on the officials of the target group;
2. Techniques of political action, such as special-purpose associations, alliances, and coalitions; public sessions; petition drives; solemn marches and processions; rallies and assemblies; demonstrations; vigils; announcements to media; pamphlets, flyers, placards, and pickets putting across clear statements of objectives and goals;
3. What Tilly calls “WUNC” (worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment) on the part of participants and their constituencies.

WUNC is communicated in characteristic modes of expression that local audiences can recognize. Worthiness can be shown in deportment, neatness of dress, attendance of religious leaders, accompaniment of dignitaries or respected figures, and presence of mothers with children. Unity can be seen in chosen logos, headbands, costumes, marching in disciplined ranks, singing and clapping. Numbers show in signatures on petitions or pledges, messages, and filling streets or squares with people. Commitment is visible when people brave bad weather, or if the very old and disabled are in the throng, or in clear-cut resistance to oppression, or when recognizable sacrifices are being made, such as subscriptions and donations.

In contrast to a one-time mass meeting or petition drive, a campaign goes beyond single events. It links the claimants, the objects of the claims and a larger public. Tilly writes, “Not the solo actions of claimants, object(s), or public, but interactions among the three, constitute a social movement.”

The “KONY 2012” video does involve certain elements of a typical nonviolent social movement. It asks for commitment, requests individuals to sign pledges, solicits money and asks viewers to share the video. It has enlisted celebrities, athletes and performers. It uses slogans, pays attention to recruitment, heeds the meaning of numbers and uses state-of-the-art social media technologies. The organizers have been clever and innovative, developing a website through which individuals might track their impact. Those who contribute to its charity receive well-designed kits to facilitate their ongoing involvement, which are said to be free. Its spokespersons make strong demands upon the Ugandan military, the U.S. government and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which they hope will bring Joseph Kony to justice and set an international precedent.

“KONY 2012,” however, does not stand in solidarity or support of an organized movement of Ugandan resistance. In suggesting that people contribute money to the San Diego-based nonprofit that made the video, which advocates a U.S.-assisted military operation to remove Kony, it’s as if Ugandan civilians are incapable of their own solutions.

This is an atrocious conflict. After Yoweri Museveni took power in Uganda in 1986 and became president through military force, some ethnic Acholis rose up, Kony among them. At an early stage, his LRA received some local support in northern Uganda, but as its assets faded, the militia began to rob the local population. The guerrilla group gained strength in 1994 when the government of Sudan began to back it, thus retaliating against the Ugandan capital for supporting Sudanese rebels. By 1996, Uganda’s government was creating secured camps. Village children were called “night commuters,” as they walked miles nightly to the comparative safety of the camps or towns, trying to avoid abduction. Kony’s goal for the LRA was never apparent, beyond the ouster of Museveni and formation of a theocracy based on the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, local villages have been caught in a terrible crossfire between the Ugandan military and Kony’s LRA, and as many as two million people have been displaced.

The conflict is not cross-border in the usual sense, but it is now a regional phenomenon, further confounding solution. International institutions, courts and agencies of multilateral diplomacy have few relationships to provide handles for enable meaningful involvement. In 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague indicted Kony and other LRA leaders for war crimes, who have eluded capture. Still, it is most unfortunate to imply as the video does that the Ugandans are bystanders in their own struggle. They are, instead, their own best hope.

I am troubled by the whiff of an arrogant underlying assumption that it was not until U.S. Internet technologies came along that ordinary people could alter oppressive conditions. I might feel better if the video pointed out that the United States has conspicuously rejected a role as a state party in the ICC. Or if it mentioned that the United States has never signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a human rights treaty setting out the civil, cultural, health, economic, political and social rights of children.

We find no mention, either, of the exertions of countless individuals and groups working in Uganda through very different means, nor does it leave much room for other promising approaches to this crisis and others like it.

In 1993, for instance, Betty Bigombe, a minister of state working from the prime minister’s office, began face-to-face negotiations in the conflict in Acholiland, in northern Uganda, that arose from Kony’s LRA in 1986. Bigombe, who has recently been writing on the subject with a research fellowship in the United States, has said that the LRA is no longer the problem that it was for Uganda — apart from its responsibility for its egregious crimes in the past. She holds that, now, nearby countries are more affected by the militia’s actions.

At the University of Gulu, a new generation of young peace and conflict instructors at the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, have been working with programs to help the formerly abducted and enslaved children. (Watch Rosebelle Kagumire’s response to “KONY 2012.” A Ugandan journalist, blogger and peace builder, she mentions Betty Bigombe — and is also an alumna of UPEACE.)

When I visited neighboring Rwanda in 2003, people there told me that the entire country would profit from basic elementary education in nonviolent struggle, which could have helped the people to refuse cooperation with the 1994 organized mass murders by the genocidaires (genocide perpetrators). At Rwanda’s National University, in southernmost Butare province, its vice rector, Dr. Jean-Bosco Butera (now director of the UPEACE Africa Programme), told me that as long as the governor of Butare traveled throughout the province and into villages urging the people not to cooperate with the orders to kill coming from the capital Kigali, no deaths occurred in Butare — until he was himself murdered.

This brings me to a key point. As yet, comparatively little research and investigation has been done on the potential for applying the technique of nonviolent resistance to situations where the withholding of obedience and cooperation might thwart organized killings and abductions. Yet a 2003 monograph by Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins, The Anti-Coup, in my view, holds promise for Africa and elsewhere in its analysis of how noncooperation, which is central to the workings of civil resistance, can be used to block military or political usurpation of power through the withdrawal of obedience to an adversary. Its insights could be applied to populations trying to resist mass killings — such as occurred in Rwanda in 1994 and with Kony’s unspeakable crimes. Post-colonial African countries have seen more than their share of coups d’état by conspiratorial bands of soldiers and groups seizing power.

My proposition is that the root causes of some conflicts and coup-type seizures of control may be more effectively addressed through civil resistance, using nonviolent weapons, than through the kind of military intervention proposed by “KONY 2012.” What would happen, for example, if those that Kony has been terrorizing prepared themselves to bring about paralysis by noncooperation, engage in massive subversion of troops, make defiant roving radio broadcasts, conduct general strikes and economic shutdowns? Not only might Kony’s operations be affected, but others aspiring to replace him would be discouraged.

The question of what kind of help really helps is always nettlesome, but we must never stop posing it. In general, the great powers have proved again and again that they are capable of making a bad situation far worse by clumsy and awkward interventions. Western leaders and legal institutions do not have deep knowledge of African traditions for addressing acute conflicts that might be strengthened. The persistence of the LRA and the Kony outrage should be addressed as much as possible by Ugandans and other Africans in order for it to provide a hedge against future coups d’état and repulsive arrogations of power.

The ability of populations to cope with incendiary guerrilla campaigns deserves concentrated consideration. Sharp and Jenkins’s monograph is a good place to start. I would also like to see more research, study and simulation led by Africans. The history of nonviolent action in Africa is extensive, such as that reflected in a study by Desmond George-Williams of Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Yet much more work is needed in examining how Africans past and present have successfully resisted and withheld cooperation from those who would seize power by brutal means.

One hundred years after the birth of human rights icon Bayard Rustin, his complicated legacy pushes us to analyze our own complicated times. Vilified in the 1950s for his open homosexuality and again in the 1960s for “selling out” the radical black liberation movement, Rustin’s own history has been recently rescued by the books and movie correctly extolling his incredible gifts as a grassroots organizer, a charismatic orator and a visionary thinker. As preparations proceed for the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (of which Rustin was the chief architect), and the dreams and nightmares of a new generation are being forged against a backdrop of pepper spray and tear gas, it is time to take a deeper look at the relationship between the movements for peace and for justice — movements which are no more “integrated” now than they were 50 years ago.

It is important first to note that, just as the foundations for much of the 1950s tumult around civil rights were laid by the Tuskegee Airmen and other members of the U.S. Armed Forces of African descent, Rustin was a part of another grouping of World War II veterans. When the black vets who helped liberate Europe from fascism and open the doors of the concentration camps came home to find that democracy and equality was not forthcoming despite their heroic efforts, Rustin and his World War II conscientious objector colleagues had spent their war years behind bars. Many of them, including Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, George Houser and Bill Sutherland, were active in efforts to desegregate the federal prisons they were held in, a daring effort 10 years before the widespread lunch counter sit-in and bus boycott campaigns.

It must be understood as no coincidence that this generation, whose skills were honed and tested at a time when mass sentiment was neither anti-war nor particularly progressive, produced activists whose life-long commitments to fundamental social change led them to become long-term advocates for radical alternatives. Many of the most respected and serious leaders of the civil rights, Pan-Africanist, solidarity, anti-Vietnam War, anarchist, socialist and disarmament movements of the following five decades came out of the small cadre of World War II conscientious objectors who put organization before ego and linking struggles before leftist turf wars. These same activists, coming out of the religious as well as the secular pacifist movements, were amongst the first to label their brand of nonviolent action as explicitly revolutionary — and worked to take over and increase the militancy within the existing groups of their time.

Setting the Record “Straight”

The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.

The classic Journey of Reconciliation photo of nine smiling men, black and white, suitcases in hand, has been used repeatedly to educate the generations since that corner-turning 1947 moment about the “first freedom ride.” When, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court (twelve years before Brown vs. Board of Education) ruled that state segregation laws did not apply to interstate bus travel, the stirrings for a campaign began. The precocious James Farmer, who by age 21 had earned two college degrees and had developed a friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, appealed to the religious pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) to help him set up a group focusing on racial justice. Though the FOR did not agree to directly sponsor the new organization, their Executive Secretary — A.J. Muste, himself a minister and a former labor leader — helped provide the basic support to birth the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer had been FOR secretary for race relations; when he left FOR staff to create CORE, fellow FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and George Houser played a major support role.

The 1947 journey, then, an integrated trip through the upper South directly challenging the new rulings on bus travel, was formally sponsored by CORE, largely organized by FOR staffers Rustin and Houser and made up of a total of 16 men. Of the nine in the well-known photo, Rustin and four others—Igal Roodenko, Jim Peck, Wally Nelson and Ernest Bromley—ended up playing key roles in the leadership of the secular pacifist War Resisters League (WRL) in the decades to follow; Houser and Rustin co-authored the FOR-CORE report on the journey, We Challenged Jim Crow! For defying southern custom, the bus riders were arrested several times, with Rustin eventually authoring “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” a much-read pamphlet on his experiences.

Having served as an organizer of various Free India activities in support of Gandhi and the independence movement, Rustin traveled to India in 1948 for a long-planned conference that ended up taking place shortly after Gandhi’s assassination. Rustin and Sutherland also made regular contact with the burgeoning anti-colonial movements in Africa, with special emphasis on contacts in Nigeria and South Africa. In 1951, the two of them joined Houser in setting up the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which evolved into the American Committee on Africa, for four decades the key U.S. African solidarity network. Working with a small group of existing contacts within the War Resisters International, Sutherland was able to travel to the Gold Coast in 1953 — the British colony that would soon achieve independence through nonviolent civil resistance, and change its name back to the historic kingdom long developed in that West African territory: Ghana. Sutherland remained in Africa for 50 years, an unofficial ambassador of revolutionary nonviolence working closely with the ideologically and tactically diverse liberation movements. But Rustin’s life in 1953 was to take another turn: though never secretive about his sexuality, he was arrested in a car with two other men during a Quaker conference in Pasadena (in California, in part, to raise money for a planned trip to Nigeria). Charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pled guilty to the single, lesser charge of “sex perversion,” as consensual homosexual activity was referred to in California at that time.

Back in New York, the officers of FOR were worried about the reputation of the organization given the new attention which Rustin’s arrest brought up regarding matters of sexual orientation. FOR policy regarding Rustin had been that he remain both quiet and abstinent — refraining from discussing or engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever, publicly or privately. With the California “incident” suggesting an inability to comply with this policy, the FOR asked Rustin to resign from staff; Muste threatened Rustin with firing if he did not comply. His resignation was also marked by a letter of resignation from the Executive Committee of the War Resisters League, but the WRL refused to accept Rustin’s stepping down. In a short period of time, in fact — by August of 1953 — the officers of the WRL (in many ways a sister organization to FOR) decided to offer Rustin a position on their staff, recognizing in him the talents that would later dazzle the young Martin Luther King, Jr. and a new generation of southern blacks looking to intensify the battle against segregation. WRL’s process of hiring Rustin, however, was not without its own controversies.

Though WRL Chair Roy Finch and WRL Executive Secretary Sid Aberman came to a joint agreement that hiring Rustin would provide “a unique opportunity” for the organization, and a proposal was put into place to hire both Rustin and Quaker leader Arlo Tatum as co-executive secretaries, there was much internal debate within the WRL Executive Committee and Advisory Board. Muste and Houser held roles as WRL executive members as well as their staff positions in FOR, but their individual feelings were split about the proposal. Arlo’s own brother Lyle Tatum, executive director of the Central Committee on Conscientious Objection at the time, wrote that Rustin had greater abilities to lead the work of the nonviolent movement “than any other person with even a remote possibility of availability.” Despite this, Tatum called to question whether WRL would be open to public attack if Rustin were to be hired, and whether future American Friends Service Committee and FOR cooperation with WRL could continue with Rustin on staff; he objected to the proposal “solely because of Bayard’s public record of homosexual practices.” Frances Witherspoon echoed the common refrain that “the psychological and physical trouble from which he suffers is not a recent one, but of fairly long standing, and I do not feel that the recent regrettable episode is far enough in the past.” And WRL Advisory Committee member George W. Hartmann, the university psychologist for Columbia University and professor of psychology at Roosevelt College voiced the prevailing “professional” opinion of the time. “Bayard’s ‘malady,’” Hartmann noted, “is a peculiarly obdurate one (according to most clinical experience) and I should be violating my psychological insights did I not enter a plea at this time for persistent vigilance, so that organizationally we do not suffer from any possible ‘relapse.’ I confess I know no easy way to make such ‘preventive hygiene’ effective, but it seems only fair to Bayard that we be as intelligent and humane in helping him—and the Peace Movement—as we possibly can.”

The proposal to hire Rustin prevailed, with some interesting insights expressed amongst the majority. Within the field of psychology was an advisor offering a more forward-looking view in the person of Herbert Kellman, at the time a post-doctoral research fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service at the Psychological Clinic at John Hopkins University. Kellman, now a long-standing professor at Harvard and innovator in the field of mediation, wrote to WRL Chair Finch that “it would be a shame for the pacifist movement to waste the talents, skills, and experience that Bayard has … there is little question that Bayard will be able to handle the job successfully despite his so-called ‘emotional problems.’” Fellow World War II conscientious objector Dave Dellinger, not yet himself an iconic anti-war figure, offered four pages of prophetic support for Rustin, stating that though Rustin’s sexual orientation might be going against the “dominant sexual mores,” there could be “no sense in trying to force on Bayard a Puritanical abstinence from the form of sex which apparently is natural to him.” Suggesting that the WRL and the movement as a whole should be wiser than to continue the position of “rigid abstinence,” Dellinger also noted that “the power of nonviolence works … through dedicated people” and those so dedicated should be educated about the importance of what Rustin had to offer. Comparing the nonviolent positions of groups such as the WRL and FOR with mass-based electoral campaigns, Dellinger wrote: “I would rather take a chance of losing a thousand votes and winning a hundred pacifists, by having Bayard work for us.” Concerned that an irrelevant nonviolent movement could suffer “the unity of the grave,” Dellinger concluded that what Rustin’s “exceptional talents and dedication” brought to the WRL, and what FOR was now lacking, was “a grass-roots, dynamic pacifism.”

So it was, in the fall of 1953, that Bayard Rustin became executive secretary of the War Resisters League.

For Jobs and Freedom

Bayard Rustin’s first years on the staff of the War Resisters League marked a period which historian Scott Bennett has called “the rebirth of the peace movement.” Undoubtedly a good portion of that energy came from the work of Rustin. In addition to directing the League’s general disarmament and anti-war work, youth and student outreach, and general organizational maintenance, Rustin helped the WRL found Liberation magazine in 1956 and pushed for further engagement with the growing civil rights campaigns. Some saw Rustin’s public profile as too controversial to handle, as evidenced by the absence of his name on the influential 1955 American Friends Service Committee booklet he helped to author — Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence — a primer on nonviolent solutions to the Cold War. February 1956 saw the publishing of the first of a series of WRL reports written by Rustin about the movements in the south, called “Report from Montgomery, Alabama.” In case there was to be any doubt about Rustin’s effectiveness, a preface to the pamphlet quoted Unitarian minister Homer Jack that Rustin’s counseling and trainings were especially crucial in the weeks following the mass arrests, and that “his contribution to interpreting the Gandhian approach to leadership cannot be overestimated.” A year later, Rustin authored and WRL published a new report, “Non-Violence in the South,” which outlined the deepening work being done against Jim Crow.

A 1959 WRL fundraising letter penned by Rustin spoke of the “vast changes” which were taking place in the years of the bus boycott and beyond. Speaking about a nationally-publicized North Carolina incident which raised the question of armed self-defense, Rustin wrote: “When the NAACP dismissed Robert Williams as its President in North Carolina because he advocated that ‘Negroes should return violence with violence,’ the Negro community was gravely split and much of the education on nonviolence was undone. Immediately our staff … helped arrange for articles on the subject by both Mr. Williams and Rev. Martin Luther King in the pages of Liberation. We are also bringing Mr. Williams to New York to debate with pacifists on October 1. This will be the first public discussion of the question at which the War Resisters League point of view will be presented in the middle of one of the hottest issues of today.” The “WRL position” was framed and articulated by Rustin — whose commitment to nonviolent direct action was matched by his willingness to dialogue and debate with those who disagreed.

By the end of 1959, however, the anti-segregation and southern empowerment work was too pressing to have Rustin remain based at WRL headquarters in New York. With the intervention and assistance of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was amongst the first unions to successfully organize black workers and challenge the racial divides within the American Federation of Labor, Rustin was asked to work directly as a full-time advisor to Rev. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC actually emerged as an organization to support King’s work with other clergy and lay people throughout the South, growing out of an idea developed by Rustin and implemented by Rustin and legendary organizer Ella Baker (who went on to help found and mentor the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, the “youth division” of the civil rights movement). A 1960 letter from Randolph (who had become close to Muste during Muste’s years as a socialist union organizer) to WRL Chair Eddie Gottlieb thanked the WRL for enabling Rustin to fulfill the “supremely important assignment … in the interest of civil rights.” A letter to Gottlieb from Rev. King reiterated his gratitude to WRL, and that “we are thoroughly committed to the method of nonviolence in our struggle and we are convinced that Bayard’s expertness and commitment in this area will be of inestimable value in our future efforts.” An “inner strategy committee” of King, Randolph, Muste, Gottlieb, Stanley Levison (a NY-based businessman who was a friend and advisor to King) and Rustin was set up to review the work as it related to “its contribution to the cause of nonviolence.”

By 1963, Rustin was immersed in the work for a March on Washington, a dream of A. Philip Randolph’s since the 1940s. When then-President Franklin Roosevelt established the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practice in 1941, effectively banning discriminatory hiring in the U.S. defense industry, Randolph called off the mass demonstration intended to pressure the White House. But the late 1950s, however, marked a time when federal action on behalf of disenfranchised blacks was far from a given, and the growing grassroots initiatives throughout the South could well be mobilized into a massive show of political force. Rustin was acknowledged as the best coordinator for such a unifying task, and the March for Jobs and Freedom, or Great March, was set for August on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Writing as the on-leave WRL executive secretary, Rustin noted that the nation was “in deep crisis in civil rights, North and South.” With the growing popularity of Malcolm X and the black Muslims, the validity and relevance of nonviolence was being called into question. “Fortunately,” Rustin suggested, “the heroic nonviolent resistance in Birmingham has temporarily restored the faith of many black people.” Rustin’s reporting on The Meaning of Birmingham, published in Liberation and reprinted by WRL in pamphlet form as a mobilizing tool for the March, explained that “the mood is one of anger and confidence of total victory … One can only hope that the white community will realize that the black community means what it says: freedom now.”

With 250,000 people assembled on the Great Lawn from every corner of the country, and its apparent direct effects on the halls of power, interest in mass civil resistance increased. As word spread throughout the U.S. of the mighty “I Have a Dream” oratory of Dr. King, and The New York Times focused attention on the radical testimonial in the speech of SNCC representative John Lewis the morning after the March, the full color photo on the cover of LIFE magazine was that of Randolph and Rustin, standing proudly in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mixing Politics and Resistance, Peace and Freedom

The months and years that followed must have been a blur for most people working full-time on anti-war and anti-racist issues. On the one hand, the March and the movement seemed singularly responsible for forcing the politicians of the time to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Less than six months after the March, Rustin was responsible for an even more massive display of direct action, as hundreds of thousands of parents, students and ant-segregation activists took part in a one-day citywide boycott of the New York City public school system. On February 3, 1964, an estimated 450,000, mainly-black and Puerto Rican students stayed away from their assigned schools (many attending ad-hoc Freedom Schools at local churches and community centers for the day), calling on the city to set a clear timetable for an integrated system that would end the de facto separate and unequal school districts. Peace groups largely supported the effort (Eddie Gottlieb himself was not only WRL’s chair but a principal in the Department of Education), and though short-term goals were not immediately met, the long-term ramifications of such a broad and activist coalition were daunting to the powers that be.

At the same time, however, with an apparent military incident in the Southeast Asian Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S. “police action” in Vietnam was growing more war-like with every passing day. As some leaders suggested that the time had come for the protest movement to escalate its tactics of resistance, Rustin authored an influential paper, “From Protest to Politics,” which outlined a strategic need for the black-led freedom movement to shift away from militancy and resistance in the cause of equal rights towards forging greater social, electoral and economic alliances with the predominantly white trade union movement, liberal churches and politicians for the development of a movement that would probe and correct the contradictions of President Johnson’s proposed “Great Society” for all working Americans.

In this context, Rustin hoped that his colleagues in the WRL and other peace groups would be able to join in the grand coalition which would work at the very center of the U.S. power structure. “One of the most urgent problems in the peace movement today,” Rustin wrote in April 1964, “is how to ‘relate’ the issue of peace to the other great social issues of our day — Civil Rights, unemployment, automation.” While acknowledging that the WRL, because of its commitment to nonviolence, “has at times been termed dogmatic or inflexible in its consistently radical position,” Rustin commented that, based on its early and creative support of African resistance and its flexibility in aligning with the civil rights movement, he knew “of no other organization — in or out of the peace movement — which has more consistently and effectively done this job of relating.” The problem was, there was no agreement as to where the emphasis on such a series of relationships should be put. For Rustin, the choice was clear; when an institute was set up following the passage of the Voting Rights Act — named after and presided over by his mentor A. Philip Randolph — Rustin accepted the challenge of becoming its executive director working to strengthen the civil rights-labor connection. For the WRL and most other peace groups, the choice was to focus on the war in Vietnam, a decision which brought them into further opposition with the U.S. government.

In the early years of anti-war resistance, these differences in emphasis did not cause significant problems. Still writing as WRL executive secretary in July 1964, Rustin asserted that Vietnam was the U.S.’ “dirty war,” like the bloody war for Algerian independence was for France a decade prior. One of the first major anti-war rallies was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and featured both Rustin and Coretta Scott King. In a speech (to be published for the first time in the forthcoming PM Press/WRL book We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America), Rustin exclaimed:

Though Congress refuses to admit it, we are at war. It is a useless, destructive, disgusting war …We must be on the side of revolutionary democracy. And, in addition to all the other arguments for a negotiated peace in Vietnam, there is this one: that it is immoral, impractical, un-political, and unrealistic for this nation to identify itself with a regime which does not have the confidence of its people … I say to the President: American cannot be the policeman of this globe!

Though critics of Rustin claim that his opposition to the war was unclear at best, and that the alliances he made with the AFL-CIO neutralized his nonviolent politics, at the crucial early stages of anti-war movement-building in 1965, the links he made were more than clear: “The actor Ossie Davis,” Rustin recalled, “recently pointed out that we must say to the President: ‘If you want us to be nonviolent in Selma, why can’t you be nonviolent in Saigon?’” There was no restrained militancy in Rustin’s reminder that “the civil rights movement begged and begged for change, but finally learned this lesson — going into the streets. The time is so late, the danger so great, that I call upon all the forces which believe in peace to take a lesson from the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement and stop staying indoors. Go into these streets until we get peace!”

Nonetheless, the strategic and tactical differences in direction proved to be too great. On November 16, 1965, Bayard Rustin formally resigned from his executive position within the War Resisters League, in part because of his “distress and concern” over WRL policies regarding Vietnam. Rustin’s resignation was set in the context of the “great affection” which he felt for the organization, and he agreed less than two months later to serve on the WRL Advisory Council; seven years later, when many contentious splits in the left had occurred during the long course of the extended war, both Rustin and Randolph nevertheless agreed to serve on the League’s 50th Anniversary Commemoration Committee. But the close and consistent contact which had marked over two decades of communication between Rustin and his radical pacifist comrades was, for a time, now broken.

Rapprochement and Renewed Resistance

The late 1960s were at best a trying time for the coalition which had brought together moderate civil rights groups from the South, northern liberals (including the mainstream trade union movement), and radicals who saw the importance of working against the most overt and dramatic instances of racism in U.S. society. With the assassination of Muslim minister Malcolm X, and the ever-escalating war in Southeast Asia, the idea that fundamental change and equality could come about through nonviolent means seemed incredulous to many. Even the greatest symbol of nonviolence (and perhaps its most strategic practitioner) — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., now a Nobel Peace prize recipient — was, by 1968, sounding a bit more open than usual to supporting the national liberation movement of the Vietnamese.

The inroads that Rustin had made with the massive 1964 schools boycott put him closer to the activities of Al Shanker and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which had just won the right to collective bargaining a few years earlier. In 1967, when rumblings about community control of the schools in black neighborhoods began spreading throughout the New York City, Rustin made the fateful choice to side with his labor allies — a move that in many ways defined his split with parts of the black movement. The local autonomy of black-led schools was contrary to the UFT notion of inter-racial worker’s rights and the need for united fronts against the always-recalcitrant Board of Education. In Rustin’s words, Black Power in general and community control in particular were impediments to “authentic revolution,” and a “giant hoax” which “would bring about the opposite of self-determination, because it can only lead to continued subjugation.” Neither fighting against the war, nor working to empower the black community was as important as working with the UFT to ensure the gains of the “integrated” working class. At Rustin’s suggestion, King sent words of support and a donation to Shanker’s bail fund when Shanker was jailed for leading a strike for smaller class size.

Many of the young activists of the SNCC were already harshly critical of Rustin, as the 1964 conflicts at the Democratic National Convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) caused many to lose faith in “the system” altogether — and Rustin’s tepid support of the MFDP and collusion with President Johnson caused a similar loss of faith in him. As historian Clayborne Carson described in a recent presentation, his own more balanced analysis of Rustin took years to develop, after his initial negative feelings as a young person in SNCC. Stokley Carmichael’s moving of SNCC away from nonviolence and towards Black Power intensified these divisions, which were to be solidified in short order. The demoralization which swept the peace and civil rights movements following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King further set the tone for the disunity and confusion which were to follow. In a note from Rustin to Bill Sutherland in Tanzania shortly after the murder, he confessed to being “too discombobulated to write a coherent letter … Martin’s death leaves a fantastic vacuum that nobody — not me and ten others combined — could fill.”

When a fall 1968 UFT strike took place against the abridgement of due process rights of several white teachers by the black-led Ocean Hill-Brownsville community-controlled school district, the historically positive and mutually supportive relationship between New York City’s progressive Black and Jewish communities was torn asunder. A few short months earlier, Rustin accepted the UFT’s prestigious John Dewey Award with a speech on “integration without decentralization.” Rustin was alone amongst black leaders in standing with the union and supporting the strike.

Seventeen years later, this writer — a newly hired social studies teacher whose father was a UFT Chapter Leader throughout the tumultuous 1960s strikes (but whose years as a young activist had led me to significant criticism of the racism in the UFT and elsewhere) — understood the irony and significance of heading towards the main headquarters of the now-powerful teacher’s union, to the offices of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) and its director, Bayard Rustin. Throughout the 1970s, Rustin’s connection to the mainstream labor bureaucracy was solidified through a number of positions and actions. As public spokesperson of the Social Democrats, he helped lead the push for increasing AFL-CIO work on overall economic justice issues — while simultaneously taking strong anti-communist positions and criticizing some liberal positions as well. As a vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee, Rustin traveled around the world on behalf of the rights of refugees, including five trips to Thailand between 1978 and 1987 to spotlight the plight of Vietnam’s “boat people.” As Executive Committee chairman of Freedom House, he was an election observer in Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Grenada; Rustin was central to organizing the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. Now, my own work in the anti-apartheid movement and interest in the Gandhian legacy in India was dovetailing with a renewed interest on Rustin’s part in reaching back to his radical pacifist roots.

At the end of 1985, the War Resisters International held its triennial conference in the province of Gujarat, India — home to Gandhi, his ashram, and so many of the institutions set up by the nonviolent movements of the last half century. A special guest, attending not as a speaker or presenter or honoree, was Bayard Rustin, interested in checking out the organization he had been so integral to. As a public non-registrant who had just become the youngest national chairperson of the WRL, I was in attendance as convener of the theme group on conscientious objection and resistance to conscription. I had also recently developed a special relationship with the newly-formed End Conscription Campaign (ECC) of South Africa, the coalition which was bringing together unprecedented numbers of whites into nonviolent confrontation with the racist regime. ECC’s national director, Laurie Nathan, was with us as part of the theme group, as was ECC activist Peter Hawthorne, South African Council of Churches representative Rev. John Lamola, and a representative of the women’s organization Black Sash. Laurie, Peter and I had traversed northern Europe, England, and India to spread the word of the connections between resisting racism and militarism, but were especially interested in meeting that man who had such a rich but controversial history in making those same links. The interest was unmistakably mutual, as Rustin took a keen notice of the work of ECC and the developments on the ground in South Africa.

In the months that followed, Rustin became a key fiscal and political supporter of the ECC, helping to funnel funds from the Quaker New York Friends Group with whom he had maintained a close connection. The meeting at the APRI offices in the UFT headquarters was one of a growing number of discussions and reunions I took part in, with Bayard’s old colleagues Ralph DiGia and David McReynolds in attendance. At one such get-together, we learned of the forthcoming 75th birthday celebration, planned to fete Bayard at New York’s famed Hilton Hotel. The invitation showcased the sometimes unlikely partners in commemorating the achievements of this complicated man. Germany’s socialist Willy Brandt joined with the AFL-CIO’s arch anti-communist president Lane Kirkland; Indian pacifists Narayan Desai and Devi Presad served as international sponsors alongside Israeli militarists Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, Norwegian actress Liv Ullman, and many others. For us, a rag-tag group of nonviolent campaigners made up a dinner table at the event, including DiGia, McReynolds and I, along with Igal Roodenko and Laurie Nathan — who happened to be in town for a U.S. speaking tour. UFTers Albert Shanker and Sandy Feldman were happily part of the festivities, as we listened to tribute after tribute, including from former SNCC militant turned-U.S. Congressman John Lewis, former Urban League president Vernon Jordan, and recently awarded Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel; U.S. Presidents Ford and Carter each sent greetings. The diversity of attendees and supporters spoke volumes about the ways in which Rustin’s rich life had impacted positively on a wide spectrum of peoples.

One aspect of Rustin’s interest in rapprochement and the grassroots may have been due to the renewed attention he was receiving from the activist community since appearing on the July 1986 cover of Gay Community News. As the LGBT movement was growing by leaps and bounds, Rustin provided a special kind of solidarity by suggesting that the campaign for gay right was akin to the civil rights movement of its time. Rustin cautioned, however, the wise idea that solidarity must always be a two-way endeavor. “If we want some civil rights advocates to help us,” he proclaimed in the Gay Community News interview, “that means we’ll have to be looked upon by civil rights groups as a group that is going to help them.”

And then he was gone. This high-spirited, flamboyant, funny, brilliant, challenging soul force — this strong and courageous spirit who seemed always filled with energy and passion — passed away less than six months after his birthday dinner. The strain of an emergency operation for a perforated appendix caused a heart attack that his body could not endure. But his legacy, like his entire life, was a beacon of the power of positive action. The typically diverse group of people who packed Community Church for Bayard Rustin’s funeral were treated to the same words pledged by March participants in front of the Lincoln Memorial that fateful August day in 1963. An organizer till the very end, his life partner Walter Naegle made sure that each memorial program spotlighted the words which summarized Rustin’s undying outlook:

I pledge that I will join and support all actions undertaken in good faith and in accord with time-honored democratic traditions of nonviolent protest or peaceful assembly and petition … I will pledge my heart and my mind and my body, unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice to the achievement of social peace through social justice.

Illustration by Robin Heighway-Bury/Thorogood.net

Despite decades of anti-colonial civilian resistance in Africa, a pernicious movement of land acquisition is overtaking the continent at a rate unprecedented since the conquests of the 19th Century. In a low-profile manner, significantly more than 125 million acres of land—more than double the size of Britain—has been sold to wealthy investors or foreign governments since 2010. With China and India leading the list of national purchasers, and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan amongst the leading multinational corporate plunderers, the countries most affected by recent sales include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Oxfam International has reported that, in some cases, land has been sold for less than forty cents an acre.

Concern about this dangerous trend has begun to lead to nonviolent action on the regional and grassroots level. Within the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union, a July 2009 Heads of State meeting held in Sirte, Libya, under the leadership of Muammar Gaddafi set forth a framework for land policy throughout the continent. “Comprehensive, people-driven land policies and reforms,” they wrote, must be developed and adhered to, such that “full political, social, economic and environmental benefits” go to “the majority of the African people.” The problem is, at a governmental level, presidents and prime ministers presiding over widely different economic systems have shown strikingly similar unwillingness to implement policies for the good of the people.

As International Land Coalition program manager Michael Taylor wrote in his foreword to The Struggle for Land in Africa, the newly regulated, partitioned and “enclosed” land must become “less of a vehicle for the concentration of land ownership and more of an opportunity for those that use the land—women, family farmers, pastoralists, first peoples, tenants, and the landless.” The historic nature of enclosures and economic liberalism, however—as pointed out by Ousseina Alidou, Silvia Federici and others—rarely allows for that type of social progress. “Globalization” and globalized land acquisition in Africa, like the strings-always-attached “foreign aid,” and “colonialism” a generation before have become the dirty words of a continent.

Even in the country with what many have called the best land law in Africa and with one of the strongest traditions of people-centered government, the limitations of state-directed reform has been striking. Mozambique’s 1997 Land Law, which struggled to balance the need for investment with both traditional pastoral land-use histories and the socialist history of state land ownership, has had a patchy implementation record. And while large areas of land are still controlled by local communities, the process of concentrated land grabbing has been cautiously described as “not yet irreversible.”

International authorities have fared no better and often worse—sometimes due to their own negligence. The infamously divisive practices of the U.N. Mission in the Congo (MONUC) led researcher Thierry Vircoulon to correctly generalize (in another contribution to The Struggle for Land) that peacekeepers of all varieties must always be aware of the complexities and underlying tensions regarding land issues in every conflict situation. In the aptly-titled essay “When Armed Groups have a Land Policy and Peacemakers Do Not,” Vircoulon underscores the vital point that land tenure for “average citizens” is synonymous with securing lasting peace.

Though organizing on a mass scale has not yet been part of the grassroots agenda in the Congo, activist Jacques Depelchin of the Otabenga Alliance asserts that “there are signs of revolt of ordinary people against many decades of oppression and dispossession.” Depelchin suggests that a new wave of revolutionary consciousness is on the horizon and ponders what it would take for true justice to emerge. Though not writing explicitly about nonviolent solutions, his queries strike to the heart of the dynamic which underlies most of the violence on the continent and beyond. “When will the rich understand,” Depelchin asks:

that at the origin of their wealth, crimes against humanity were committed? …When will a fair and true dialogue between the rich and the poor looking to abandon the hierarchy dictated by the rich begin? Only then will the healing of crimes against humanity begin.

In the West African country of Mali, an extraordinary series of meetings and dialogues culminated in an international gathering of peasants, pastoralists, and indigenous peoples on November 19, 2011, forming the Global Alliance Against Land-Grabbing. The final resolution of that gathering offered an interesting challenge to the role of the nation-state itself, noting that the post-independence government of Mali had only been around since 1960. How, they asked, could a state barely 50 years old proclaim sovereignty and legitimate power over local communities which have lived on the same land for many generations? “Clearly these nation-states of recent vintage and troubled tenure,” noted activist-scholar Abena Ampofoa Asare, “ignore the political fallout of land grabs at their own peril.”

Another grassroots initiative with broad regional and international potential is the campaign Stop Africa Land Grab. Founded by Nigerian businessman Dr. Emeka Akaezuwa, the U.S.-based movement is fueled by great concern throughout the Diaspora. Their methods have included a petition drive opposing the unfolding “tragedy of epic proportions,” as well as educational and consciousness-raising efforts. Along similar lines, former TransAfrica director and Black Commentator columnist Bill Fletcher, Jr. is calling for a re-conceptualization of the “global African worker” as the focus of new efforts for change. Like the organizers in Mali, Fletcher suggests that the land grab is symptomatic of an economic moment characterized by the restructuring of capitalism away from nation-based centers of struggle. The national liberation movement mentality of the past must now give way to a 21st-century Pan-Africanism which is committed not simply to continental unification, but to economic justice for all.

The new African land grab is nothing short of a direct re-colonization of land and people who have already suffered unprecedented theft, exploitation and oppression. A new movement is also in the making; Fetcher correctly demands that in order for this movement to achieve truly liberating success, it must “not only address race, gender, and class, but it must be centered on the needs and struggles of the worker.”

I’ve often heard it stated flatly at Occupy Wall Street meetings, sometimes with a touch of exasperation, that “occupation is just a tactic.” This can be a hard idea to come to terms with in a movement called “Occupy.” But, to get technical about it, “nonviolent occupation” is #173 on Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, just before “establishing new social patterns.” As the + Brigades and the Singing Foreclosure Auction Blockades have been showing with aplomb, a whole litany of interesting tactics are available to the movement beyond the now-familiar one of occupying space.

On Wednesday, members of the group Occupy Faith unfurled their first “Parable of an Immoral Budget” in an action that combined a “pray-in” (Sharp’s #167) with “nonviolent obstruction” (Sharp’s #172).

Outside of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office in midtown Manhattan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy used the human microphone to decry homelessness. They called for higher taxes on rich corporations, the closing of tax loopholes and respect among decision makers for the value of human life. Next, as this video shows, Michael Ellick of Judson Church led protestors across the street. (It is illegal to protest directly outside the Governor’s office.) At that point, lay and ordained people obstructed the building’s entrance with cots symbolizing the basic right to shelter, which for so many is not being met. They sang and prayed over their neatly-made beds before the police took them away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered on the street to watch and office workers peered out.

There are seeds of something big in Occupy Wall Street’s early spring actions. To be sure, occupying space can be a useful method. It gives protestors public visibility and a central location from which to plan other actions. In my view, however, a push to retake public spaces, while perhaps offering some benefits, carries a surplus of risks in the form of confrontational showdowns with police, negative media attention and the loss of public sympathy. If there is a need for outdoor places where people could wander in, pick up some materials, talk to protesters and begin to get involved, then weekly Sunday afternoon assemblies in Central Park, or regular gatherings in parks around the country, would more than meet that need without the tents or the threat of arrests.

Rather than more encampments, what now seems to be needed most are purposeful actions, like Wednesday’s pray-in, that have a well-researched message and the capacity to recruit and retain newcomers into organized units. Actions like Occupy Faith’s “Parable” cost the movement little, while making a compelling moral argument. Faith leaders — whose dress added to their credibility — presented clear policy demands and used symbols and rhetoric onlookers could easily understand.

Let me offer a cautionary tale from South Africa to illustrate my point. In the drought-stricken Eastern Cape in 1921, a few thousand Xhosa-speaking Christians occupied land in expectation of deliverance. They were called the “Israelites” because they particularly identified with the Old Testament. After their annual Passover gathering, they refused to leave the site. Instead, they built a new state there reflective of their beliefs. Their leader was Enoch Mgijima, a preacher recently excommunicated from the U.S.-based Church of God and Saints of Christ for refusing to renounce his prophetic visions. In what were desperate times for black South Africans, Mgijima’s breakaway group found peace and hope in their encampment. They could escape punishing laws and look forward to the apocalypse that would be the prelude to a wholesale restoration of society.

The Israelites toiled to become self-sufficient. They built sturdy brick structures. They had their own craftsmen and builders. They organized a nursing brigade, a police force, and a judiciary. According to historian Robert R. Edgar, “Church elders governed village life with a court to try people for religious violations.” Children went to a special Bible school. Members prayed together four times a day and sang hymns such as Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon … We cannot sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In this place, the poor became rich and the marginalized sanctified. Simultaneously, the Israelites withheld taxes and refused to heed government orders. Convinced that the end of the world was coming and it was the only way they would be saved, they clung to what had become their sacred ground.

Several factors contributed to the violence that followed. A fast-growing black labor movement was throwing the state’s control into question. Editorialists urged the government to make an example of this lunatic fringe by air-bombing the encampment, if necessary, to show that flouting the government’s rules would not tolerated. For their part, the Israelites declared they were following God’s law. Both sides dug in. At his wit’s end, a white official asked Mgijima to provide the names of all the occupiers. The preacher refused, saying, “Our names are written in God’s book.” Africans had recently been stripped of major land rights. Only a few Africans could vote. Still, government supporters saw the Israelites not as victims of precariousness and exclusion, but the embodiment of all that was wrong with the “native mind.” Unable to see the other side, the state felt compelled to use force.

After several failed attempts at negotiation, including one attempt by African clergy, armed troops were deployed. Israelite men shielded their women and children. After a standoff subsequently reported on in conflicting accounts, government forces killed at least 183 Israelites by machine gun fire. Another hundred were wounded. All the casualties were on the Israelite side, except for one policeman who received a stab wound. The group’s prophet-leader was arrested and the occupiers were evicted.

The end of the physical violence did not quell the psychological frustrations that motivated this movement, though. A prominent white politician admitted that a new “spirit” had arisen in the people. “By ignoring that spirit they would not kill it; they would merely strengthen it,” said National Party leader J.B.M. Hertzog. “The native had come to a consciousness of independence … to a consciousness of himself that no authority would ever be able to suppress.” Moreover, like other religious movements, the “Bulhoek Massacre” had powerful aftereffects. When weighing matters of tactics, African National Congress leaders in future generations remembered the state’s brutal reaction to poorly-armed men praying to be free. They took that lesson to heart and looked to other tactics.

Occupy is a movement about an idea — valuing people over profits — not any one place. By keeping this vision in view, by maximizing pressure on lawmakers standing in the way of a society that puts people over profits, and by minimizing the blows dealt to the movement, Occupy can win meaningful gains. As Judith Butler writes in the recent issue of the movement journal Tidal, Occupy can advance episodically and retain the trans-issue coherence that has distinguished it from other movements. By appearing here and there, by shedding light on the student debt crisis one week and mass incarceration the next, Occupy can continue to question the legitimacy of the existing social and governmental order. It can keep pressing forward with the claim that today’s urgent social ills are connected at the nodes where money corrupts democracy, human life is violated and greed goes unchecked. And, it can keep awakening people’s imaginations by insisting that equality and freedom are not outlandish formulations but possible states of being.

All of this can be attempted without claiming spaces at a high cost to the movement.

If peaceful resisters do manage to occupy new public spaces this spring, and if their legal rights to assembly are violated by government repression, over-reaction by the state may give Americans the distinct impression that their government relies on violence to silence dissent. Perhaps some spectators will feel an increased sympathy with the movement. However, the O-tactic could easily backfire, especially if protesters get into more skirmishes with the police and the movement begins to look like a smattering of pointless street battles. I’m not the first to make this point. But the point is worth repeating. The stakes are high. There are at least 197 other methods of nonviolent resistance to choose from. Why look back to September? It’s time for Occupy to spring forward.

• As part of a campaign to fight violence against women, pictures of victims were hung on walls in the Cerro Gordo neighborhood of Ecatepec, outside Mexico City on Wednesday.

• Tens of thousands of South Africans marched peacefully through their main cities Wednesday to demand the governing African National Congress do more for the poor.

• Hundreds of native Ecuadorans began a cross-country march Thursday to protest policies by President Rafael Correa they say will result in more mining in the Amazon region and threaten the environment and their way of life.

• Hundreds of Saudi women took part in a protest against discrimination and mismanagement at the King Khalid University, in Abha, on Wednesday. At least 50 women were reportedly injured when security forces and religious police moved in to break it up.

• South Korean female workers performed in penguin costumes in Seoul on Wednesday to protest growth in temporary employment.

• Thousands of Taiwanese farmers took to the streets Thursday, staging the nation’s biggest demonstration in years against the government’s plan to allow U.S. beef imports.

• With elaborate make-up depicting bodies bruised, bleeding and burned by acid, four FEMEN activists were arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday to protest domestic violence in Turkey.