This year marks the 57th Anniversary of the existence of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was founded on 25 May 1963, in Africa Hall. On that day 32 representatives of independent nations of Africa signed the OAU Charter in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Currently the membership is 55 countries with, Morocco becoming a member in 2017.

The advent of the OAU was the buildup of historical currents, over centuries, of radical uprisings against slavery and anti-colonial resistance by Africans, on the continent and in the Diaspora. The African Union (AU) was founded in 2001, in the reshaping of the OAU, to continue with the same mandate of the OAU Charter now that Africa has entered a postcolonial state system that is still fragmented. The OAU was mainly formed with the intent to liberate countries in Africa that were still under the yoke of political colonialism and white oppression. Following the end of colonialism and white oppression in Southern Africa, the OAU refocused its objectives to promote economic and social development, it is now known as the AU.

“An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena.” -African Union

Without the concept of Pan-Africanism there would be no AU. The term “Pan-African” was coined by Henry Sylvester Williams who organised the London Pan-African conference in July 1900. Pan-Africanism represents the complexities and dynamics of black intellectual thought, an ideology with multiple currents. It embraces the holistic cultural, historical, spiritual, political, artistic, scientific and other philosophical legacies of Africans since antiquity to the contemporary. In its highest expression and at its essential theoretical core, Pan-Africanism is a supremely logical treaty on radical black decolonisation.

The founding fathers of the AU and the pioneering thinkers of Pan-Africanism had genuine hopes and visions for the continent. As the new generation, we must remember them as we approach the 57^th Anniversary of the AU.

To better understand the trends on the African political landscape, we must analyse is the Pan-African Congress movement (PAC) of W.E.B Du Bois. In 1945, the fifth congress of the PAC was held in England, organised by trade unionists and radical African nationalist students. Present as students were Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. Both became the first presidents of their independent countries. In 1958 the All-African People’s Congress was convened in Accra. This was the first Pan-African meeting on African Soil. The conference in Ghana was attended by Frantz Fanon of Algeria and Patrice Lumumba of Congo. The hosting country was significant, as Ghana was the first African country to gain independence from colonial rule.

In the 1961 United Nations General Assembly, the then Ethiopian Foreign Minister, Ketema Yifru, proposed the creation of regional organisation of African States, and he also voiced Ethiopia’s commitment to the total eradication of colonialism from the continent. Ketema Yifru was also instrumental, as an African diplomat, in bringing the Casablanca and Monrovia groups together to become founding member states of the OAU on 26 May 1963.

These are some of the key diplomatic occurrences that contributed towards the establishment of the AU. The AU is the highest intra-continental forum we have. Despite its shortcomings, it represents the hopes and visions of the African people. It is better to have the skeleton of a dream than to be completely without foundations that give directions and building blocks.

This is the part where I am supposed to elaborate on the enemies of African Unity: Neocolonialism, Economic Imperialism, the Washington Consensus, the Bretton Woods institutions and structural adjustment programmes. We understand the affects of donor funded, externally instigated, military coups on the decolonisation process, and how political instability that benefits the globalist capitalist class, have delayed the economic and social coordination, integration and unity of the African continent.

There are declassified files that prove the involvement of western government agencies in the fueling of dissidence and teleguiding regime change in Africa. Wikileaks has provided such evidence.

As Pan-Africanist thinkers, we must be conscious of these realities when working in the international development field, whether we work in the private, public or non-profit sector. In 2015, under the chairmanship of President R.G Mugabe, the AU adopted Agenda 2063. It is a policy framework that articulates the political and economic vision of the AU. It is the responsibility of both Governments and civil society, throughout the African continent to implement projects that actualise the Agenda 2063 programme. The content of the Agenda 2063 framework must be mainstreamed to make grassroots communities and activists aware of the concepts and plans. This would help facilitate a Pan-African development paradigm discourse within African communities.

Revolutionaries should acquaint themselves with this strategic framework that speaks of a statecraft ideology ratified by all member states of the AU, to implement accelerated social and economic transformation on the continent. As motive forces of the African Renaissance, it is our duty to mainstream Agenda 2063 and commit ourselves to achieving the 7 Aspirations as outlined:

1. A prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development.
2. An integrated continent politically united and based on the ideals of Pan-Africanism and the vision of Africa’s Renaissance.
3. An Africa of good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law.
4. A peaceful and secure Africa.
5. An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics.
6. An Africa whose development is people-driven, relying on the potential of African people, especially its women and youth, and caring for children.
7. Africa as a strong, united and influential global player and partner.

There is a need for mass ideological orientation towards a Pan-African development paradigm that will accelerate the unification of Africa. Only by attempting to grasp the theoretical foundations, will one see the bigger picture, otherwise we will continue to base our opinions on the shadows on the wall. The Pan-African is an emancipatory and enlightenment movement which requires constant expansion in theory, to subvert agencies of division while completing the unfinished business of uniting the African continent. In the words of Kwame Nkrumah, “Our objective is African union now. There is no time to waste. We must unite now or perish.”

Hein Scheepers is the regional spokesperson of the EFF in the southern cape region.

I literally spilled my tea reading Mandisi Gladile’s essay wherein he peddles a conspiracy that sex work is not work. Gladile’s misconception on the concept of sex work is not only unstudied but also dangerous for women working as sex workers in South Africa.

Sex work constitutes the rendering of sexual services in return of money and/or other related favours. Recognition of sex work as work serves to reinforce agency to mostly women sex workers, recognising that they can use their body in a sexual manner to make a living. More than anything, recognising sex work means seeing the sex worker as a Being.

This response disproves the two objectives canvassed by Gladile, “[s]ex work as real work is a fallacy and an idea whose ideological lineage is drawn from a petty-bourgeois mode of situation-analysis...”

Gladile, starts by defining what a worker is using the Marxist tools of analysis (mostly a revisionist reading of the Communist Manifesto and nothing much else). It does not appear clearly, what Gladile is trying to achieve with this definition. At first, one would think that Gladile rejects all forms of markers to indicate who or what constitute a worker in the exploitative capitalist dispensation but a closer reading suggests that what he is actually saying is that some workers are better than others, and therefore sex workers are not workers in the classical Marxist sense.

In introducing his narrow concept that sex workers are not workers Gladile makes a painfully unstudied assumption that work is not gendered. In his definition, he assumes that Marxist theory defines a worker as a “Marxist subaltern who is scientifically accepted to be exploited by variable- capital, its class enemy!” He further goes on to say that, “a worker is someone who slaves away in a plantation in return for a wage.” He then concludes that, “the boss who is usually the owner of the means of production privately appropriates the social product which gives rise to the irresponsible contradictions of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”

Gladile’s definition effectively does good to unsee the sex worker as a worker and is thus a representation of the very typical non-gendered approach to Marxism. Luckily, we have several Marxist feminists who have for decades written to disprove this non-gendered definition of work. The definitions made by Gladile are glaring of misogyny when he speaks of a sex worker and the buyer as placed on an equal footing, and arguing that they are equally exploited by the capitalist system in that they do not own the means of production. This is a dangerous observation to make especially in the South African context. Arguing that both the buyer the buyer and the worker are exploited in a capitalist society does not in any way take away the status of a sex worker being a worker.

In understanding the sex worker as worker using the feminist Marxist theory of analysis, I borrow from Leopoldina Fortunati, an Italian Marxist feminist who gives us a much clearer and gendered definition of what a worker is. Leopoldina argues that it would be absurd of us to think that sex work is anything but work. She states that sex work constitutes production in which the proceeds thereof are not of the sex worker.  The sex worker as a proletariat in which she is the producer of capital through labour is constantly alienated from her proceeds.  The sex worker as a proletariat is constantly on a destructive mode.  This means that she is fighting hard in order to escape the system that seeks to perpetually alienate her. This is evident in the continuous and more visible protests on the decriminalization of sex work from the various sex work organizations.

It is hard using a gendered definition of sex work to imagine how and where could sex work be defined as anything but work. 

Gladile further makes an astonishing argument that in the African context, there is no evidence that sex has ever been used in exchangeable endowment. Mere lived experience of an African easily disprove this myth if carefully observed.  In this part, I use two examples in Africa to demonstrate how sex has been used as an exchangeable endowment for measuring a woman’s worth or as reward for good behaviour. In the first example, we can easily observe how sex is used in the widely known phenomenon of ILobolo practised by several Africans to initiate the process of marriage. During Lobolo negotiations one can easily make an observation that can lead to a conclusion that sex amongst other factors is used to mark the worth of the woman. In this instance, you see the negotiators deliberating on what the amount of the Lobolo should be based on how many children the woman have or how old the woman is. This is linked to the sexual experience that the woman has (which is linked to the number of children she has in contrast to when she is said to be a virgin) and how much more sex can she still give in expanding the family to which she is to marry (this is likened to when she is a bit older because she stands less chance of producing more offsprings to the family). Of course, all this is linked to sex being an exchangeable endowment.

In the second example, I use Ifi Amadiume’s “Male Daughters and Female Husbands” to demonstrate how sex was used for a reward of good behaviour by women of the Igbo culture. In the Igbo culture, it is believed that women’s best weapons were their labour and also their bodies in relation to sexual services that they offered their partners. If a man behaved well, brought wealth to the family and treated her wife with dignity in the community, it was common practise that Igbo women would reward their husbands with good food and offer them sexual ‘privileges’. The same was applicable when a husband had been bad to their wives, ill-treating t hem in the market and failing to provide for them; the women would retaliate by not offering any sexual advances to their husbands and refusing to serve them with delicious meals.

In summation, I have shown that Gladile’s exposition is nothing but a curious case of intuitive Marxist revisionism rather than a contextual study of the calls for sex work to be legally recognized as work. Revisionism is an age-old misnomer that Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao Zedong warns all serious Marxists about; to recite the Communist Manifesto without taking into account the prevailing realities such as the violence on women’s bodies, is to vulgarize Marxism. In this instance, Gladile vulgarizes Marx to advance his own anti-women hetero-misogynistic patriarchal attitudes. A reading of Marx, outside of the context of gender struggles and the scholarly interventions of Feminist Marxists such as Fortunati, is incomplete and leads to wayward formulations/conclusions. It is opportune to say that even if Gladile’s reading of Marx was ideologically sound, we would still tell him that Karl Marx is wrong, because there is no revolutionary theory that can contradict lived experience, such a theory would be useless and out-dated.

***Thuli Zulu is a human rights and social justice candidate legal practitioner; she writes in her personal capacity.