Adam Mayer

57203111963

Publications - 9

Resurgent Africa: A Socialist Past, a Multipolar Present: Introduction

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: International Critical Thought

Publication Date: 2025-01-01

Volume: 15

Issue: 2

Page Range: 153-166

Description:

Africa’s 20th century national liberation heroes and African Marxist thinkers have identified Africa’s predicament as one of neo-colonialism. Political experiments in Africa during the Cold War had built on the revolutionary experiences of China (in Mauritania, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, and Benin) and the USSR (in Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, the African National Congress in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Congo Brazzaville, and Madagascar). China’s opening up in the late 1970s, as well as the painful Soviet re-capitalisation in 1991, ushered in the world’s “unipolar moment.” The “Washington consensus” and its neoliberalism destroyed Africa’s potential, deindustrialized the continent, and, with INGO (international non-government organization) conditionality and donor dominated relationships, looted Africa’s primary resources and agricultural produce for Western corporate benefit while perpetuating ineffectual aid systems for the continent’s people. The 1990s brought genocidal wars and the near-disappearance of African statehood, while raw materials found their way to the Global North at giveaway prices. Twenty years of renewed African engagement with China altered this framework in a decisive way: the Belt and Road Initiative has helped rebuild Africa’s infrastructure; China has become Africa’s number one direct capital investor; FOCAC (Forum on China-Africa Cooperation) has strengthened win-win relationships; and China has played a role in building common security with Africa.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2025.2511108

Naija, the missing spectacle: guidebooks on Nigeria in the neoliberal era

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: African Identities

Publication Date: 2024-01-01

Volume: 22

Issue: 1

Page Range: 213-228

Description:

Nigeria, long a quintessential terrain for the expatriate gaze more than the tourist gaze, has now very nearly disappeared as a topic from standard Western issued guidebooks. The gap in publications was very noticeable by the second decade of the 21st century, but it came as a culmination of the country’s diminishing role in those for the last four neoliberal decades. The country has apparently lost its identifiable role as spectacle in global capitalism in the Debordian sense. At the same time, space opened up for radical Western guidebooks and in the last decade, radical homegrown guides that reflect and celebrate the African gaze on Africa, with a new and unashamedly local frame of reference and context. Not surprisingly, this overlaps meaningfully with socialist and feminist political commitment in most relevant literature. This article deals with the projected image of Nigeria in guidebooks foreign, as well as domestic.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2021.2008303

Nigerian Radicalism: Towards a New Definition via a Historical Survey

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: Historical Materialism

Publication Date: 2024-01-01

Volume: 1

Issue: 1

Page Range: 1-36

Description:

Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent's democratisation itself into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government's creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria's radicalism in the twentieth century. Much has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore's 2018 presidential candidacy, with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with protest music such as Falz's This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy's Monsters you Made, both explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe's sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa's giant polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin's and also Nigerian radical thinkers' conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian version via the movement's history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism, human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism, even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing the African's right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them ipob) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a militarised neoliberalism.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1163/1569206x-bja10033

Exporting security to Africa at its most volatile: the GAR-SI Sahel project and the role of Spain’s Guardia Civil in rebuilding Sahelian security

Adam Mayer Andrés de Castro Rodrigo Gaona-Prieto Clara Bañares-Martin

Publication Name: African Identities

Publication Date: 2026-01-01

Volume: 24

Issue: 1

Page Range: 31-48

Description:

Through research based on participant observations, interviews, the application of the Delphi technique and a SWOT analysis, this paper presents a qualitative evaluation of the first phase of the GAR-SI Sahel project, a major project that aims to bring security to the world’s poorest, as well as most volatile, region: the Sahel. Seven experts from military institutes in France, Portugal and Italy participated in the study, as well as six instructors from the Special Training Center of the Guardia Civil based in Logroño, Spain. Phase I of the GAR-SI Sahel project consists of a two-month training program, developed entirely at the Center, with the aim of training future commanders and trainers of the GAR-SI Sahel units of the project’s beneficiary countries Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal. Through several rounds of semi-structured interviews and a categorical classification of the information obtained, this article offers an exploratory and evaluative description of the initial starting situation of Phase I of the project, as well as the progress of some proposals for improvement aimed at consolidating the GAR-SI Sahel project, as well as in its objective, the Sahel region as such, over time.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2024.2324109

The Labour Movement, Marxism, Northern Leftists, Feminist Socialism and Student Rebels in Nigeria, 1963-78

Adam Mayer Baba Aye

Publication Name: Revolutionary Movements in Africa an Untold Story

Publication Date: 2023-01-01

Volume: Unknown

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 96-120

Description:

No description provided

Open Access: Yes

DOI: DOI not available

Reassembling Naija Marxisms: Leftist thought and the socialist movement after 1989 in Nigeria

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: Canadian Journal of African Studies

Publication Date: 2021-01-01

Volume: 55

Issue: 2

Page Range: 331-349

Description:

Throughout the Cold War the USSR was the most important external source of funds, ideological transfers, and organizational help for Marxists in Nigeria. The events of 1989 and the USSR’s subsequent withdrawal from this role created a major hiatus for the Nigerian Left. In this article, I prove that Nigerian socialist movements and thinkers, after a short adjustment period, successfully recovered from the shock of 1989. I present a plethora of coping mechanisms that Leftist intellectuals employed as private survival strategies. I also show that the Nigerian Left as a movement retained their Marxist and radical inspirations, and it also grew and became suffused with a new spirit of human rights, gender sensitivity, and attention to ethnicity from the 1990s onward. The Nigerian Left turned the disappearance of its external backer from a calamity into an engine of growth and ethical conscientization after 1989.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1080/00083968.2020.1842218

Counterhegemony: Radical Economics and the Appeal of State Socialism in Cold War Era Nigeria (1946–1990)

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: International Journal of African Historical Studies

Publication Date: 2021-01-01

Volume: 54

Issue: 3

Page Range: 377-397

Description:

Normative state socialist economic theory appeared in the mid-1920s with Soviet economist Preobrazhensky. In Nigeria, many economic thinkers were influenced by Soviet and other Eastern European economic theory during the Cold War years. Bala Usman and Segun Osoba focused on the destruction of feudal land law and on delinking from the capitalist world economy; Bade Onimode and Ola Oni on emulating state socialist Eastern European economic theory and practice in an effort to overcome structural underdevelopment; Claude Ake in his Marxist phase made use of the Hungarian economist Tamás Szentes’s heterodox socialist development theory that the latter developed while the two were colleagues at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Nigeria’s oil incomes were to be used in all these plans to kick-start heavy industry in the country. As the USSR’s alternative globalization path disappeared and then the Nigerian compradores’ share of profits grew by the early 21st century, interest in these radical classics reappeared in Nigeria.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: DOI not available

Princes of Igboland: inchoate feudalization, feudal masculinity and postcolonial patriarchy in Ifeoma Okoye’s radical feminist narratives

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: African Identities

Publication Date: 2020-04-02

Volume: 18

Issue: 1-2

Page Range: 95-108

Description:

Space for emancipatory projects during military rule in Nigeria shrinks considerably (1983–1999, with short interruptions). This affects anti-feudalist initiatives and radical feminist movements equally. Ifeoma Okoye, the preeminent socialist-feminist writer of Igboland, publishes novels and short stories in these years that deal with women’s lives and that attack post-colonial patriarchy. Her novel Men Without Ears also uncovers the mechanisms by which processes of feudalization come to characterize ethnic Igbo regions that hitherto had had no traditional rulers. Okoye in the novel weaves a narrative around a particularly toxic kind of masculinity, feudal masculinity, which imprints the newly instituted faux Igbo royal and faux Igbo feudatory. In Okoye’s world, Nigerian mainstream academic feminists, criminal uncles who try to disinherit orphans, and Igbo royalty with invented ranks but with very real thugs in their employ, all represent the comprador class that directs the developmental failure of Nigeria under military rule and beyond.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2020.1773239

Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957–2023

Adam Mayer

Publication Name: Military Marxism Africas Contribution to Revolutionary Theory 19572023

Publication Date: 2024-01-01

Volume: Unknown

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 1-324

Description:

Adam Mayer's Military Marxism: Africa's Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957-2023 explores African Marxist theory and the intellectual merits of Afro-Maxist schools of thought to show how they have developed and impacted sub-Saharan Africa from the Cold War to the present. He also discusses the efficacy of the movements influenced by Marxism and how they are contested today. Through in-depth research, Mayer answers the following questions: Who were the African Marxist intellectuals? What happened to these intellectuals in the 1990s in NGO-administered, deindustrialized Africa? How are these theories inspiring popular rebellions and radical anti-Western military coups today? This book explores how Military Marxism, through its own rich and variegated African theory, has continued to inform and guide the practice of various political movements today.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.5040/9781978747524