the organisational imagination

221 Pages·2008·0.74 MB·English

THE ORGANISATIONAL IMAGINATION
IN AFRICAN ANTI-COLONIAL THOUGHT

Thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Leicester

By

Nceku Nyathi
University of Leicester
School of Management

December 2008
Copyright © Nceku Nyathi 08/12/2008
This thesis is copyright material and no quotation from it may be published
without proper acknowledgement.

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“Organise! Organise!! Organise!!! We urged:
Let individuals, men and women, join any of the political organisations, farmers’
unions, co-operative societies, youth movements. No section of the people of this
country should be left unorganised. No individual person should be without
membership in some organisation…the strength of the organised masses is
invincible…we must organise as never before, for organisation decides
everything.”
(Nkrumah 1961: 15)

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Nceku Nyathi

The Organisational Imagination in African Anti-Colonial Thought

Abstract

This thesis seeks to broaden the nature of anti-colonial thinking in organisation
theory through a strategy of ‘reading and rediscovery’ of prominent African anti-
colonial writers and activists portraying them as serious organisation theorists. By
reading these theorists, I show some of the depth and sweep of their thinking,
hoping to prompt a new appreciation of them today. To read these figures as
organisation theorists opens up organisation theory not just to African thinking
and history, but also to a range of organisations that often do not show up in the
canon of organisation studies. This allows us to see a colourful organisation
theory that reflects multiple realities, a postcolonial critique of organisation
development of organisation theory, and opens up the western academy to Africa
as subject rather than object. Here is a different consciousness of identity and
subjectivity, a virtue made of structures (Nkrumah), a radical change and
transformation of the individual and group (Cabral’s bottom-up cultural change),
and of organisation and social formation of the state (Du Bois, Padmore, James,
Cabral, Fanon). This colourful approach is distinct from current postcolonial
organisational analysis and ‘management in Africa’ literatures. I test this thesis by
observing a case study of contemporary African thinking on organisation at the
most general level of society, ubuntu. Ubuntu today straddles the theory and
practice of African cosmology, and the calculating world of private firms in a
profit-taking market in South Africa. Can its mixture of theory and practice and
political ambition fulfil the hopes of this earlier generation? Finally, this is also a
disciplinary project, challenging organisation studies to examine its borders and
limits, for I am seeking at a very personal level, as a southern African of Nguni
origin, to write myself into the consciousness and praxis of that discipline of
organisation theory.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction:
Colonialism and the Organisational Imagination 7

1. Organisational change, development and transformation: 30
W.E.B du Bois; George Padmore and C.L.R James

2. Organisational structure: Kwame Nkrumah 69

3. Organisational Culture: Amilcar Cabral 100

4. Organisational Identity and its politicization: 127
Frantz Fanon

5. Case Study – Organisational Reformation(s) 155
Premising Ubuntu’s Promise

Conclusion 188

References 200

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Acknowledgements

First of all a general ‘thank you’ to all the wonderful people that I met in the last
couple of years, who participated in all phases of this thesis. Many thanks also to
all my colleagues at the University of Leicester, School of Management for
making it such an exciting place to write a PhD. Although I risk omissions, I
would like to express my special gratitude and appreciation in the following lines.

Special thanks to my supervisors, Stefano Harney and Gibson Burrell. To
Stefano Harney I owe my heartfelt thanks for creative inspiration and not just for
the supervision but also for his help in publishing and teaching. I also reserve my
heartfelt thanks to Yaqub Paul Murray for Ubuntu and encouragement throughout
my educational journey. The whole manuscript was also read and commented on
by Yaqub Paul Murray, Gibson Burrell, Martin Parker, and other sections of the
thesis were commented on by Nerva Ndlovu, Mmeli Nyathi, Nothando Tshuma,
Barbara Nussbaum and Alex Magaisa, which has made a great difference: a
million thanks. Many thanks also to Simon Lilley, Gavin Jack, Gerry Hanlon,
Campbell Jones, Ishani Chandrasekara, Ibrahim Umar, Jo Brewis, Asma Alkindy-
Murray; Alice Harney, Michele Bowring, Abdoulie Sallah, Mohamed Shaban,
Tom Keenoy, Sibusisiwe Jensen and Adam Bird; Sverre Spoelstra; Demola
Obembe; Meryem Duygun Fethi, Thulani Thebe, Patty Thebe, Sanelisiwe Thebe,
Mzukisi and Khanyi Qobo; Kelvin Ncube; Gatsha Mazithulela; Theodore Tshuma;
Catherine Burrell; Brenda Tanaye; Thabo and Suku Ntuli; Thulani Mlotshwa;
Mugari Family; Brian Kagoro; Celine Tan; Teresa Bowdrey (for various reasons).

Between May and June 2006 I visited the School of Business Leadership at the
University of South Africa and Wits Business School at University of
Witswatersrand. In particular would like to thank Mthuli Ncube, Stella Nkomo and
Lize Booysen for the invitation to South Africa and their impartial interest in my
research focus. Special thanks goes to Tamu, Nosisa and Rati Dube; Stephen
Bardwell, Nerva and Tracey Ndlovu for their exceptional hospitality.

I am extremely grateful for the kind support and love from my wife Nothando
Tshuma and son Miles Awakhiwe Nyathi who have made it possible for me to
stay sane. Thank you for your tolerance and constant support. Many thanks also
to Mrs I Tshuma and Mr W Tshuma for assisting in watching over my son Miles
so that I could write the thesis in the end.

Finally, my gratitude is towards my parents, Prince and Ebba Nyathi and the
revolutionary anti-colonial thinkers and their sacrifices, I stand tall on their
shoulders today.

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Introduction

Colonialism and the Organisational Imagination

The canon in organisation studies1 is not characterised by an abundance of
engagement with theory from the global South (exceptions, Mir et al. 1999; Jaya
2000; Cooke, 2003, 2004; Prasad, 2003). This thesis, however, is not so much
about provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000; Prasad, 1997), and
organisation studies, but about enlarging the history of anti-colonial thinking, and
with it, organisational thinking. To regard a series of key anti-colonial thinkers as
organisation theorists may seem to reduce or misread these thinkers. But it is my
contention that it offers us the chance to gain something new from these thinkers,
and to appreciate them anew. I also believe it will help us to enlarge our sense of
what can be included in organisational thinking, as we see nations, world
economies, peoples, parties, and races organised in the thought of these
extraordinary figures. For, to borrow an eloquent passage from Robert Young
(2001: 226):
“Attention to this history also illustrates three related points: first, the significant success of the
organisational activism of the Communist Party at a grass roots level in many colonies. Second, it
confirms the extensive international links of the anti-colonial movements. Third, it shows how
independence movements typically took the Marxist anti-colonialism of the Communist Party and
transformed it creatively according to their own, already established political priorities. These factors in
the African anti-colonial movements could be also demonstrated in different ways with respect to anti-
colonial and imperial activism in Asia or Central and South America.”
The roots of all this ‘organisational activism of the Communist Party at a grass
roots level in many colonies’ that Young (2001) refers to can be traced to the
source and efforts of Lenin and what became known as ‘Leninism’ (Stalin, 1939;

1 Organisation Studies has its proximate historical roots in the socio-political writings of nineteenth century
thinkers, such as Saint-Simon, who anticipate and interpret the nascent structural and ideological
transformations wrought by industrial capitalism (Reed, 1996). Organisation studies today generally refers
to many and varied approaches to the study of organisations. There are a number of subjects of study that
fall under this broad umbrella (e.g. management, change, motivation and leadership theories, etc.).
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Meyer, 1957; Conquest, 1972; Besancon, 1981; Zizek, 2004; Harding, 2006).
The term "Leninism" itself did not exist during Lenin's life. It came into
widespread use only after Lenin ended his active participation in the Soviet
government due to a series of incapacitating strokes shortly before his death.
Leninism refers to various related political and economic theories elaborated by
the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Lenin, and by other theorists who claim to be
carrying on Lenin's work (Stalin, 1939; Meyer, 1957; Conquest, 1972; Besancon,
1981; James, 1992; Zizek, 2004; Harding, 2006). Leninism builds upon and
elaborates the ideas of Marxism, and serves as a philosophical basis for the
ideology of Soviet Communism. The thinkers that I seek to recover in this thesis
were largely influenced by Leninist thought (to various extents: they are of course
very different in their orientation and way of thinking) by something which has
come to be called ‘Leninism’. The works of all anti-colonial leaders bear
testimony of this. Here I tread very carefully because the linkage of these
thinkers to Leninist thought also conjures up connections to other familiar tenets
like ‘Socialist, Marxist-Leninist, Communist, Marxism, and Leninism/ist for
example, and caution that these terms all mean very different things, and they
did to these thinkers as well, who would have used these words very precisely
and very differently over time.

Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution provided the example of people who were
able to throw off a king and his police and set up a new society. The Russian
revolution therefore became the second successful anti-colonial revolution after
the Haitian (James, 1938; Conquest, 1972). It is only with Lenin’s contribution
(and practice) to the national question that an irreversible break with
eurocentrism (still quite present in Marx and Engels, although Marx has an
interesting and positive evolution in that respect) happens within the Marxist and
socialist tradition (Munck, 1986; Anderson 1995; Young, 2001). For Lenin, the
nationalism of the oppressed nations and colonial people (and also of the
‘peasant nations’ with which they overlap to a large extent) is fully acknowledged
as an independent revolutionary factor and integrated in a ‘systemic’ analysis of
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the contradictions of world capitalism (‘imperialism’) (Lenin, 1902, 1915; Minh,
1924; Stalin, 1936, 1939; Harding, 1996, Zizek, 2004). A new emphasis on the
fact that ‘Africa’ was just as important in the struggle for freedom as London or
Paris was something the Soviets almost alone at this point among European
peoples were saying. Lenin’s (1915: 6-9) polemic spelt out that:
“We demand freedom of self-determination, i.e., independence, i.e., freedom of secession for the
oppressed nations, not because we have dreamt of splitting up the country economically, or of the ideal
small states, but, on the contrary, because we want large states and the closer unity and even fusion of
nations, only truly democratic, truly internationalist basis, which is inconceivable without the freedom to
secede. Just as Marx, in 1869, demanded the separation of Ireland, not for a split between Ireland and
Britain, but for a subsequent free union between them, not so as to secure ‘justice for Ireland’, but in the
interests of the revolutionary struggle of the British proletariat, we in the same way consider the refusal
of Russian socialists to demand freedom of self-determination for nations, in the sense we have
indicated above, to be a direct betrayal of democracy, internationalism and socialism.”
Lenin therefore created the space which explored these debates and these are to
be found in the first period of the Third International, especially its second
congress and the Baku congress of the peoples of the east (Trotsky, 1945;
Degras, 1971; Harris, 1990; Halliday, 1999; Young, 2001). It should be stated
strongly that, for Lenin at least, self-determination was not a mere slogan, but a
principle he put into practice with immediate effect within the former Russian
Empire following the Bolshevik Revolution. This is how the connection between
Leninist thought and these anti-colonial colonial thinkers is forged. Ho Chi Minh
(1924: 2) captures the significance of Lenin when he asserts in the obituary that
he writes by stating that “in his life-time he was our father, teacher, comrade and
adviser. Nowadays, he is the bright star showing us the way to the socialist
revolution”.

In this thesis I am much more interested in focusing on Africa. However, Young’s
(2001: 5) attention to this global history is remarkable in that he is able to
illustrate this unity in diversity and therefore able to make interesting
organisational connections by the adoption of the term ‘tricontinental’ “which
marks an identification with the great Havana Tricontinental of 1966, which
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initiated the first global alliance of the peoples of the three continents (Africa,
Asia and Central-South America) against imperialism.” Young goes on to say that
“this was the founding moment of post-colonial theory in its journal, the
Tricontinental.” I shall explore the problematic concept of the term ‘postcolonial’
later in the chapter. The Tricontinental anti-colonialism always involved an
embodied politics and theory which Young (2001: 218) describes as “a politics
and theoretical critique developed at an ideational level but at the same time put
into practice through material strategies and practices.” For others this political
discourse has been delineated as the ‘Third World socialism’. The disadvantages
of the term ‘Third World’ have been well rehearsed and been subject to sustained
criticism, either because “identification with it has been perceived as anti-Marxist
(Marxist states made up the ‘Second World’), or because the notion ‘third’ came
to carry a negative aura in hierarchical relation to the first and second, and
gradually became associated with poverty, debt, famine and conflict” (Hadjor,
1993: 3-11). In this thesis, therefore the term ‘Third World’ will be generally
avoided, and the geographical, locational and cultural description of the ‘three
continents’ and the ‘tricontinental’ (i.e. Latin America, Africa and Asia) is
preferred to “avoid the problems of the ‘Third World’, the bland homogenization
of ‘the South’, and the negative definition of ‘the non-west’ which implies a
complete dichotomy between the west and the rest which two or more centuries
of imperialism have hardly allowed” (Young, 2001: 5). The term ‘Third World
socialism’, however, was used by leaders such as Nyerere, Nasser, Nehru, for
example who saw a non-Soviet/non-communist version of socialism as the
answer to developing their nations (Nyerere, 1968; Beling and Totten, 1970;
Hayes, 1996; Smith, 2003).

In this thesis I attempt to recover the thought of W.E.B Du Bois, George
Padmore, C.L.R James, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon as
organisation theorists to revive and enrich them, and also to gain a new
perspective on organisation at the same time. I have particularly selected these
thinkers because of their pioneering and influential work in contributing to the
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