A-Infos (en) Obituary: Wilstar Choongo (Anarchist & Workers' Solidarity Movement, Zambia)

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OBITUARY: HAMBA KAHLE WILSTAR CHOONGO!

THE international anarchist movement will be saddened at the belated news
of the death of Wilstar Choongo,
founder of the Anarchist & Workers' Solidarity Movement (AWSM) of Zambia.
A self-taught anarchist activist, Wilstar first came to the attention of
the movement in 1996 through his lone battle
to improve the salaries of employees at the University of Zambia (UNZA)
where he worked as a librarian -- and
where he built up a formidable collection of anarchist works for the use of
students.
Zambia, a former British colony, gained its independence without much of a
struggle in 1964. The 30-year African
socialist regime of Kenneth Kaunda proved disastrous. The economy remained
essentially extractive, agriculture
shrivelled as farmers flooded into the cities because of urban food
subsidies. Then the collapse of the copper price
in the mid-1970s put paid to any hoped-for recovery.
When Kaunda was defeated by the former Zambian Congress of Trade Unions
general secretary Frederick
Chiluba in the first democratic elections in 1991, the stage was set for
the neo-liberal dismantling of an already
drastically weakened country.
Although Chiluba had climbed to power on the back of a pro-democratic
working class, his Movement for Multi-
party Democracy soon revealed its true colours. Every organised group of
citizens has to be annually licensed
by the police and executions and torture resumed after a seven-year
reprieve.
Although Zambia had played host to many African national-liberation exile
and guerrilla groups (including the
ANC/MK) during the Kaunda era, the inertia of never having fought for its
own independence meant there was no
tradition of grassroots protest, and only a tiny Left represented by the
Socialist Caucus, a Marxist-Leninist
discussion group at UNZA.
People in the shantytowns literally eat mud for the mineral content. In a
two-week period that I was there, five
employed UNZA workers were buried after having died of malnutrition -- and
this as the well-heeled employees
of neo-liberal NGOs managing the structural adjustment of Zambia sported
about with satellite dishes and
Toyota Landcruisers.
It was against this background that Wilstar alone took on the entire
varsity administration in an attempt to get a
pay rise for the staff. Wilstar was taken to court, but he was unbowed, and
he won the pay rise, which encouraged
the starving workers to fight for more. That fight brought him onto the
"organise" anarchist e-mail discussion list
and established links with us at the Workers' Solidarity Federation (WSF)
of South Africa.
Wilstar was born at Kalomo, a town in Southern Province, the son of
small-scale farmers. He joined UNZA as a librarian.
In 1995 and 1996, he contributed critical articles in the opposition The
Post newspaper on the new Zambian constition
that was then being drawn up, arguing for the decentralisation of power. In
1996/97, he was the mainstay of support for
a group of students who had been kicked out of UNZA for daring to call a
non-party-sectarian meeting.
I first met Wilstar when he invited me to Zambia in August 1998 as a WSF
delegate to give a public talk on the common
enemy facing South African and Zambian workers. He was a friendly,
shambling man with a ready grin. I well recall
sitting on the bed in his cramped apartment eating a meal of eggs, bread
and oranges and engaging in fervent
discussions on anarchist strategies.
Shortly after my visit, he and most of the youths of the Socialist Caucus'
UNZA-Cuba Friendship Association, who had
converted to anarchism, set up the AWSM (sometimes referred to as the
Anarchist Workers' Group - Zambia), the
first known anarchist organisation in Central Africa, and one which linked
students, staff and workers.
Wilstar decided against the AWSM becoming a WSF section because of the
great distances involved, but hoped
to maintain regular contact and material and ideological support. In early
1999, WSF proposed that the AWSM become
a WSF section, the South African and Zambian sections to be federated
horizontally.As things turned out, the WSF
dissolved in September 1999 because of the ineffectiveness of its
organisational method, and the far more productive
Bikisha Media Collective, Zabalaza Books and Anarchist Union sprang up in
its stead.
But we last had contact with Wilstar on July 15, 1999. Unknown to us, he
died shortly afterwards, aged 35, following a bout
with malaria that brought on meningitis. Uncomplaining to the end, he had
not even mentioned his illness to his comrades.
He left a wife and three young children. This obitiary was delayed due to
the critical problems of communication
among workers in Africa. The AWSM is believed to have collapsed as a result
of his death.
But although death cut short efforts to build a Central African anarchist
movement, Wilstar's direct-actionist example
of anarchism in practice is still remembered as a great contribution to the
ethics of the emergent Left in the region.
A Socialist Caucus activist described him so: "He wasn't prepared to make
things convenient for himself. His death
is an extremely big loss to the whole fragile Left and UNZA is still
reeling from it." As we say in South Africa when a
militant dies: "Hamba kahle (go well) Comrade Wilstar!"
--  Michael Schmidt (Bikisha Media Collective, South Africa)






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