Africa - November 11, 2025

Elections were held in Tanzania on October 29th. These elections turned out to be yet another scandalous fraud, with Samia Hassan, candidate for “Chama Cha Mapinduzi” (CCM), winning with 98% of the vote, despite the banning of political parties and the masses enduring the heavy hand of their oppressors.

This fraud had been foreshadowed in the preceding months when the state attacked labor activists and even politicians from “opposition” parties—who were vying for some of the business deals and profits left over from imperialist plunder of Tanzania—with persecution, imprisonment, forced disappearances, and assassinations.

Thus, on October 29th, the fraud was a self-coup by the government, supported by a police state and the armed forces, to establish a brutal Bonapartist regime. Through this, the government sought to ensure that its party would continue to directly implement imperialist plunder plans.

This electoral fraud, a deep division within the ruling elite, and essentially the fierce repression that accompanied it, were the trigger that propelled the masses into the streets.

That same day, internet access was quickly restricted for the general population to prevent the widespread organization of protests across the country, as had recently occurred in Madagascar and Cameroon, or months earlier in Kenya. Internet service was only restored a few days ago.
The masses rose up in massive political mobilizations. The goal was nothing less than to overthrow the government… They fought with barricades and hand-to-hand combat against the police and the army. Police stations were set ablaze. A huge, independent, mass revolutionary movement was rising up.

In Tanzania, the most exploited layers of the working class have entered the fight, leading the struggle of the entire people.

In martyred sub-Saharan Africa, as is the case in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Gabon and dozens of other countries, and in Tanzania in particular, The main source of labor is child exploitation, which is widespread.

To extract minerals from open-pit mines and to harvest intensive crops like cocoa and cotton, oligarchies and imperialism use the labor of enslaved children.

In the era of slavery, the master waited for the child to grow up so that, as a mature adult, he could be useful as a slave, when he would be stronger and more vigorous. In contrast, paradoxically, in this rotten capitalist system, child exploitation saves the bourgeoisie from paying wages and enslaves them in harvests and mining, taking advantage of the small hands of children, most of whom do not live to be 30.

The uprising in Tanzania is a link in a chain of revolutionary uprisings in Africa against the imperialist plunder of the continent's riches and the brutal exploitation of Black workers.

 Barrick Gold, Cargill, AngloAmerican and a couple dozen imperialist transnationals, along with their partners from the native bourgeoisies, dedicate themselves to parasitizing the riches of the continent, while here and there they impose unprecedented hardships on the masses.

In Tanzania, the revolutionary uprising began to take on the characteristics of a mass civil war. Its most extreme manifestation was the burning of police stations and the tendency of the exploited to arm themselves.
To this, the bloodthirsty government of the CCM responded with a savage counteroffensive of repression and death, murdering more than 1,000 people's fighters.

We are at the beginning of a period of class civil war. The situation and the balance of power are not yet resolved. The exploited understand that without defeating the government and overthrowing the regime, they have no way out. The alternative is to die of hunger under the boot of the murderous state, or to fight for bread, land, and freedom, even if it costs them their lives.

The urban uprising of the working class and the popular masses in this phase of civil war has reached the countryside.

Imperialism has appropriated the few remaining fertile lands in Tanzania, expelling the peasants and subjecting them to hunger and unemployment. Entire villages are being evicted, such as those of the Maasai people. The method of theft is identical to that in Madagascar: "renting" land for decades.  In other words, it expropriates them directly.

The poor peasantry enters a state of revolt and seeks to reach the cities. A revolutionary situation has begun. Its future will be defined not only in Tanzania, but in the chain of revolutionary uprisings taking place in Africa, and decisively so, if these struggles are synchronized with the entry into the fight of the working class of the European imperialist countries and especially, of the workers of the USA.

The revolutionary struggle in Tanzania is underway. The exploited have reached the gates of the "Palace."

The owning classes cannot, and are currently struggling to, adopt a policy of class collaboration, since the masses have completely slipped out of their control and threaten to arm themselves. As we have already seen, the response is open repression.

Like the Indo-Pacific countries such as Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, it is in Africa where the revolutionary sparks in the semi-colonial world foreshadow that it will not be easy for the imperialist powers to try to escape their crisis and bankruptcy by multiplying their plunder of oppressed peoples a thousandfold. Even less so when the workers of the core countries are engaged in massive class struggles. In Italy, a new general strike is being prepared against the Meloni government and in support of Palestine. In France, Belgium, and Spain, the proletariat is waging enormous battles, as are the masses in the US.

The imperialist powers are attempting to divide the world once again, with the Americans on the offensive seeking to regain their hegemony. Class clashes are inevitable. The genocide in Palestine, the war of attrition in Ukraine, which has been occupied by Moscow and colonized by the US, with hundreds of thousands dead, and imperialism poised to attack in Venezuela, foreshadow enormous class conflicts and wars. If the proletariat does not stop it, barbarism will sweep across the entire planet.

What is clear is that in these class struggles, the Black workers' movement is destined to be one of the key protagonists in the international class struggle.

The Black workers' movement, like the world working class, lacks the leadership it deserves. The masses are ready to turn out. The task of refounding the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution, must become the immediate struggle of every conscious worker.

Workers International League (WIL) of Zimbwbe, member of the FLTI

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