Vol. 77/No. 9      March 11, 2013

Below is an excerpt from Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. The following selection includes facts authors Martín Koppel and Mary-Alice Waters learned from reporting trips to Equatorial Guinea in 2005 and 2008. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
[I]n the mid-1990s, vast reserves of oil and natural gas were discovered deep beneath the country’s offshore waters in the Gulf of Guinea. This increased the ability to substantially expand production and trade, and at the same time deepened economic and social contradictions. …

Within a few years’ time, one of the world’s most capital-intensive, technologically complex, and highly monopolized industries has been superimposed on a foundation in which the existing productivity of labor is a product of millennia of hunting, fishing, and subsistence agriculture, distorted by centuries of slave trading and colonial domination. …

Equatorial Guinea remains a country with virtually no manufacturing. There is a brewery, a water bottling plant, and a cement factory crippled by shortages of imported primary goods. Furniture-making shops and sawmilling operations that produce lumber for construction remain small-scale handicraft operations. With land cultivation beyond subsistence farming largely nonexistent and more than half the population now living in urban centers, almost all food is imported from Cameroon, Spain, and elsewhere. Transportation costs magnify the impact of rising world food prices. The chicken we ate one day came from Brazil. Eggs were from Cameroon.

Those living in rural areas, largely still outside the market, get food from hunting small forest animals or fishing, and from plantains, cassava, malanga, and other plants that grow easily on small pieces of cleared land at the forest’s edge. Most of these foodstuffs are directly consumed, not bought or sold. Along rural roads and in sprawling town markets, many people sell small quantities of remaining food products as well as other goods to scrape by.

At the same time, in less than fifteen years the exploitation of oil and natural gas reserves has turned Equatorial Guinea into the third-largest oil exporter in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola. “It is U.S. companies that are operating the offshore extraction operations, including ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess,” [President Teodoro] Obiang noted in the interview. Marathon also owns the liquid natural gas and methanol plants. In recent years, he added, “a number of other companies have signed agreements with [state-owned] Gepetrol, including Malaysian, South African, and Nigerian oil companies,” for joint exploration and development projects. China is the largest purchaser of the country’s oil.

Exploitation of Equatorial Guinea’s oil resources has accelerated the development of a modern class structure here in the urban areas. While tribal and clan ties continue to dominate social relations in the countryside, these preclass formations dissolve more and more with the increased penetration of the world market and capitalist relations of production.

As has happened in other parts of the world over the past five centuries, capital accumulation is today consolidating a capitalist class in Equatorial Guinea, with expanding private holdings in land, hotels, construction, transport, and other businesses. Through the purchase and exploitation of labor power, this rising class is extracting surplus value and expanding its wealth.

There are growing numbers of small traders, merchants, lawyers, and other petty-bourgeois layers. Drawn by the oil boom, this includes increasing numbers from West Africa, the Middle East, China, and other parts of the world.

A class of wageworkers is being born in Equatorial Guinea, too. As the Communist Manifesto noted about Europe and North America more than 150 years ago, “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.”

Capitalist expansion inexorably draws growing parts of the world into its orbit, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels noted. Today capital is exerting its pull on Equatorial Guinea. Increasing numbers of Guineans are becoming wageworkers for the first time ever, as laborers on road and other construction projects especially. Nearly half the country’s population lives in [the cities of] Bata and Malabo, which are being swelled by stepped-up migration from the countryside of toilers seeking jobs.

The demand for labor has also led to a large influx of workers from abroad, especially from other parts of Central and West Africa—including Cameroon, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nigeria. Workers from Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in Latin America have come to work in hotels, restaurants, and at other jobs. On all the construction sites we visited, most of the skilled workers and technicians are migrants from French-speaking African countries or contract employees from China, North Africa, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere.

As Obiang said in an August 5, 2008, speech to an audience that included many Guinean construction workers, “Equatorial Guinea used to be a country that was held in contempt.” Now, he said, “many are coming here in search of prosperity. We have more immigrants than other countries in Africa. It’s like bees who are coming to taste our honey.”

The growth of the working class and its increasingly international character—as workers bring their skills and experiences from other parts of the world—has increased the pride and confidence of working people here. It is widening their scope.

 
Related articles:
Growing unrest, capitalist rivalries draw US military deeper into Africa
Mali: Class antagonisms grow with commodification of land
 
 
 
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