Since I first encountered Jonathan Langdon’s writing about the struggle in Ada, Ghana, a number of years ago, I have considered his work to be some of the most important in the growing field of social movement learning. African Social Movements and Learning: The Case of the Ada Songor Salt Movement is a further significant contribution.
The book tells the story of a particular struggle, in a particular context – that of a movement defending communal access to the Songor, West Africa’s largest salt yielding lagoon and the livelihood of over 60 000 people. Over a period of decades, the lagoon has been subjected to a sustained process of neoliberal-inspired ‘development,’ exacerbated by the discovery of oil in Ghana in 2008 since salt is a crucial additive in petrochemical processes. State-led granting of concessions to private companies, the proposed removal of communities living around the Songor, and the steady, insidious enclosure of the commons of the lagoon through ‘atsiakpo’ (small private salt pans created on the edges of the lagoon by local and national elites), have all been contested by a movement that has shifted and morphed over time.
Whilst the book focuses on this particular struggle, rooted in a particular context, Langdon situates this within broader social movement learning theory, particularly the learning of subaltern social movements (SSMs) in an African context. In this, he draws on the intellectual work he and I have done together with activists involved in SSMs on this continent (Harley et al., forthcoming). We argue that SSMs display a number of characteristics, including that they are:
Rooted in grassroots organising, and remain accountable to that over time. Because of this, they are always fluid and shifting, responding to the burning issues and analysis of their members.
Integrally connected to people’s livelihoods and being (i.e. including the social, creative and emotional work of being human).
Connected to a strong sense of identity, but an identity which is not absolute but porous – i.e. one rooted in the singularity and temporality of experience, but which goes beyond this, beyond identitarian politics.
Non-partisan, in the sense of beyond political parties, but nevertheless fundamentally political.
Ontological spaces of learning – i.e. it is in their very nature to think their experience and their politics.
Langdon uses this theoretical framing to consider the Songor struggle. He also situates it within the waves of social movement protest across the African continent over time, from the national liberation movements of the 1940s to 1960s, to the redemocratisation movements of the 1980s and 1990s, the mass protests which have characterised the last decade. Thus, the struggle for the Songor is situated both theoretically and historically.
Langdon argues that we should use three lenses in thinking about social movement learning – we need to consider learning in struggle (a relatively long-term process); learning through struggle (in which heightened moments of engagement can reveal important insights); and learning to struggle. Each of these lenses is employed in considering the case of the Ada salt movement. Whilst, as he discusses in detail, members of the movement have learned in and through the struggle, and in the process, learned to struggle more effectively, critically we can also learn from the case of the Ada salt movement. One essential learning is that organic, grassroots, subaltern movements have the greatest capacity to resist neoliberal globalisation. This is precisely because they emerge in struggles that cut across livelihoods and identities, thus resisting both stultifying identitarian politics and narrow self-interest. A second learning is the necessity of remaining dialogue-based, ensuring that processes and thinking are collectively owned, rather than the domain of a small group that knows what is best for all. This allows subaltern movements to reinvent themselves as their context (and hence their struggle) shifts.
The thinking of African SSMs such as the Songor Salt Movement is also profoundly important in helping us think an emancipatory politics; a point which is made by Michael Neocosmos in his recent award-winning book, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a theory of emancipatory politics. Neocosmos seeks to answer the question, “How can we begin to think human emancipation in Africa today?” He constructs a careful argument, in which he identifies essential elements of an emancipatory politics, using as a point of departure that everyone thinks (although not always). Politics, he stresses, is about thought; and to be emancipatory, it must be collective, and it must be related to our doing – it must be practical. In other words, “politics is a collective thought practice.” Emancipatory politics is also always universal, although it always emanates from a particular place. It is dialectic; and it is excessive. By this, Neocosmos means that emancipatory politics transcends the particular, it goes beyond the expressive (identity, difference, interest). Neocosmos considers a number of examples of emancipatory sequences from the African continent and diaspora over a period of centuries. He warns that emancipatory political thought is ultimately fragile, and hard to sustain.
The Ada story, as this book shows, is a complex one; and it is presented here with all its contradictions. Neocosmos says that “whereas academics may be able to detach themselves from a political practice, activists cannot fully avoid the contradictions between subjectivities as expressions of place and their excess: their ‘expressions of place’ because all rebellion is socially located, and ‘excessive thought’ because it sometimes consciously outstrips its location. It is only through gradually resolving these contradictions on a continuous basis that a process of politicisation and emancipation can be sustained” (2016, p. xxv).
It is in relation to this that the struggle for the Songor, and this book, is so important. One of the book’s most important, and original, contributions is the bringing together of social movement learning and storying. Langdon argues that it is through a process of restorying that the Ada movement produces knowledge – revisiting stories, and editing them based on their learning in and through the struggle. He shows how the movement does this, in a collective, dialogic process. The story of the Ada salt movement, and its process of restorying, reveals the collective, ongoing thinking of the movement, as it shifts over time. The story is a story about the nature of this thinking, about the broadening of the idea of who can think, and how good that thinking is – how, in particular, the thinking of women comes to be both acknowledged, and increasingly pivotal, in the collective thinking of the movement. The struggle is rooted in a particular place, in a particular time, related to people’s lived experiences and livelihoods; and yet it is, in Neocosmos’ terms, excessive – it goes beyond identity, difference, interest, in the movement’s absolute insistence on ‘Songor for all.’ The origin stories, and the restorying of these and development of new stories, reveals how this process happens. Perhaps most critically, in terms of emancipatory politics, the Ada salt struggle continues as an emancipatory project; possibly because the process of restorying is precisely the process of gradually resolving the contradictions between expressions of place and excessive thought.
Ben Okri, in A way of being free, says “Homo fabula: we are storytelling beings,” and “we are part human, part stories.” On an ontological level, then, storying and restorying is part of the continuous process of becoming. Okri also says, “stories are always a form of resistance,” and “politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.” By looking at the process of storying in the learning and knowledge creation of the Ada Songor salt movement, Jonathan Langdon provides us not only with a rich account of learning in and through struggle, but also a space from which we can learn to struggle in profoundly emancipatory ways.