Roland Ngam is a project manager for climate justice at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southern Africa office. Formerly postdoctoral research fellow in the Emancipatory Futures Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), his research and activist interests include climate justice, degrowth, water policy, commoning, community-based power grids and cooperatives.
Vlad Bunea: In your chapter titled Degrowth in an African periphery in the new Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) you write: “Modern value chains are often dispersed, and accountability involves doing two things. On the one hand, it must become everybody’s business to know what farmers receive for their labour, how mining contracts are negotiated, where our meat comes from, who produces our cheap sweatshirts and so on. We must end a world where workers in the Global South continue to endure abuses and exploitation in order to feed the Global North’s addiction to cheap food, fast fashion and technology. […] At the same time, we also need strong collaborations between movements in the Global North and their counterparts in the Global South that work to make sure that what is advertised as ‘fair trade’ is indeed fair. One cannot overemphasise this point, given the horror stories of exploitation that are published every day, from the cocoa plantations of Cote d’Ivoire to the Kenyan companies that provide back-end services for tech companies like Open AI.”
What if the Global North refuses to do its share of degrowth by 2050? What can the Global South do in that case to emancipate itself from the shackles of present-day capitalist exploitation?
Roland Ngam: Two things. If we look around the world right now, we see that there is a lot of questioning, people seeking answers, people examining why life has become such a miserable experience. Predictably of course, some are seeking refuge in the words and easy solutions of right-wing politicians. These of course, constitute the majority that wants to pull up the drawbridge instead of reaching out and conversing with other people and nations. At the same time, and I guess that social media is accelerating this as well, there is a second group that is in constant conversation with the rest of the world. It is finding out that its exploitation is not dissimilar from the exploitation of Bangladeshi factory workers, the artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Mexican farmworker in the USA, young farmers in Europe and so on. This realisation, this awakening is conscientising millions of people every day, and they are creating mass movements, new ontologies and even strategies to heal the world. When the Ogoni people won a US111 million dollars settlement in the Netherlands in 2021, it was thanks in great part to movements like HOMEF in Nigeria working with like-minded Global North partners like Milieudefensie. Sure, there are those in the Global North who want to kick the can down the road. At the same time, there are those who understand that we only have one world, we are linked together in one common destiny and we must all fight to have a liveable planet for our children and our children’s children.
The Global North, which bears the biggest responsibility for the overshooting of planetary boundaries must play its role. At the same time, the Global South is not waiting for the Global North. There is a lot of energy in Africa right now, with thousands of new initiatives relitigating how we eat, dress, farm, build, play and so on. For ourselves. Not as a reaction to what is happening in the Global North. It is a post-growth revolution that will change how young Africans interact with the rest of the world. Many diasporic Africans are packing up and moving back to Africa to join this process. It is mesmerising. Magical. In my forthcoming book, which I am calling Degrowth in an African periphery – from the periphery to the centre, I try to fuse these energies with the teachings of Sankara, Lumumba, Maathai, Nkrumah, Cabral, Nyerere, Shivji, Garvey, many others, as well as our indigenous knowledge systems to posit a rejection of the status of plantation, mine or factory of the Global North and constant fuel feedstock of capitalism, a necessary precondition to charting our own course, and showing that we are enough.
VB: It is quite encouraging to hear about these African transformations from within. I wonder how the process of delinking fits into this picture. In the context of massive imperialist appropriation of resources from the Global South by the Global North (such as land, energy and labour), could you explain the idea of delinking also in relation to this post-growth revolution?
RN: Right, so the whole delinking movement is a big part of it, although I should mention that it is strongest in West Africa. Put simply, delinking is the process of former colonial entities – the imperial periphery - breaking all socioeconomic ties with the imperial core. The Anglophone part of the continent talks more about panafricanism, which subsumes the delinking debate of course. Delinking is strongest in West Africa because it is where the imperial core’s tentacles of exploitation and dehumanisation were strongest. The wave of independence in the 1960s was largely a ceremonial event, because post-1960, France created the CFA Franc zone which gave it control over the central banks of 14 francophone or French-speaking African countries. So France still controls the monetary policy of a third of the continent. They also get right of first refusal over these countries’ gold, uranium, retail banking, infrastructure projects, marine economy and so on. For many years, the economist Samir Amin called for delinking from the parasitic imperial core. With the acceleration of communication after the 2010s, there was a critical mass of young Africans who were ready to act on that dream. That is why activists like Ras Bath, Rokia Doumbia, and others called for France to leave the Sahel. Kemi Seba also famously burned some CFA Franc bank notes at a public event in Senegal. All these calls would later metastasise into support for coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Delinking is the necessary precondition for what Amilcar Cabral refers to as return to the source.
VB: It seems that a degrowth in an African periphery would have a real effect on the average lifestyle in the imperial core which would also need to go through a much steeper process of degrowth. What would be your message for the working families and the moderately wealthy middle class of the Global North, who may not be aware of these overbearing realities of colonialism and imperialism?
RN: In Democracy Matters, Cornel West talks about the disillusionment that has caused too many people to become disengaged, slump into sentimental nihilism because they believe that the imperialistic nihilists are too powerful and the paternalistic nihilists who purport to fight for them are complicit in the crushing corruption that afflicts us all. He calls for engaged demos who have the courage to think, care and fight for democracy matters. We need engaged demos to realise that our struggles are connected, that those who exploit us in the Global South are the same people who exploit you in the Global North, that those who trample the Palestinian’s human rights are the same people who exploit you and cause you to work three, four, five jobs just to survive. These are class struggles and the use of race, gender and LGBTQIA scaremongering to co-op the complicity and support of new-age libertarians will not save you.
A fair world in the Global North is impossible without fairness, freedom, justice, equity and reparations in the Global South. The Gilets Jaunes movement in France, the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the USA and other recent events have caused millions of people to come out and talk about how corporate greed is destroying their lives. AI will make it worse. People like Nkhrumah, Walter Rodney, Efua Sutherland, Jason Hickel, Thabo Mbeki and many others have done a lot of work to expose how the Global North has stolen trillions of dollars from the Global South. By working together, around a unifying ethic that promotes justice, fairness, equity, freedom, etc. we can ensure that corporations pay a fair wage everywhere, that corporations respect nature rights everywhere and that we end the mindless consumerism that is destroying the world and making us work long hours for nothing, missing important family events and quality time with the ones we love. Finally, justice and fairness also means cancelling all debt to the Global South. Global North countries, the imperial core, must pay reparations to the imperial periphery in the form of universal basic infrastructure: roads, bridges, access to electricity, education, healthcare and strong institutions that will work to ensure that the rights of all human beings are respected wherever or how ever they choose to live.
VB: Thank you Roland.
Photo by Martin Bekerman
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