Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa 7 November 2007

Jean-François Bayart says that African states, traditional and modern, have always practiced ‘the politics of the belly’; by which he means that they are distinguished by the ways their ruling classes routinely extract revenue from their long-suffering peoples. Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch earlier coined the expression ‘African mode of production’ to describe the most prominent of these methods — dependence on levies from trade monopolies. What both writers are seeking to express in these generalizations is in fact common to all pre-industrial states, namely that the politics of distribution (which usually adds up to what Goody in Technology, Tradition and the State calls control of the means of destruction) far outweighs the organization of production as the economic basis of power. In the case of West Africa, the abundance of land and low population density meant that nothing approaching feudal property ever developed there; and rulers had to look for their staple income to capturing people and goods on the move. (more…)

Africa on my mind 14 September 2007

I’ve got Africa on my mind. Not an old sweet song, more a beat: ta-ta ti-ti ta-ti-ta. I hear it everywhere and it takes me back to those times I spent in Atinga’s gin-bar, tapping out the rhythm on a bottle while the guy sang to a one-string guitar.

I want to tell you a story. It’s about Africa and me. About the world too, I suppose. There are many stories, but this is one you haven’t heard before. Most of them are variations on the Heart of Darkness. Mine is about the coming of The Light. Yes, it’s a Christian story in part and also about the freedom that comes with Enlightenment. It’s about Africa’s coming liberal revolution. Or it could be a neo-liberal story, about a revolution from above, a second imperialism.

You might be an African, in which case you are unlikely to see Africa through the cracked mirror of race, ‘through a glass, darkly’, as St. Paul put it. But there is no guarantee that you know any history, so there may be something in this for you. You might be Asian, looking across at the ruins of Atlantic society and wondering what could be in Africa for you. But more likely, you are American or European and the moral of this story is meant mainly for you. (more…)

The African revolution book project 2 August 2007

A new summary and table of contents for a book of 60,000 words that I hope to complete for Polity Press by next spring: The African Revolution: Africa in the 21^st century world. The two lectures posted on May 16 contain an outline of the argument.

What are Africa’s prospects for the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed and of its relationship to world society in the long run? Africa’s relative poverty has increased in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated and least urbanized major region around 1900, its share of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average. Our task is to understand the unprecedented speed and scale of this ‘urban revolution’; and specifically how the social conditions it has generated lay the groundwork for whatever lies ahead. (more…)

Two Lectures on African Development 16 May 2007

Lecture 1: African development in the twentieth century

1. ‘Africa’ and the question of ‘development’

2. Africa’s traditional societies and agrarian civilization

3. Africa’s urban revolution in the twentieth century

4. A note on the North and South African exceptions

5. Urban commerce and the informal economy

Lecture 2: African development in the twenty-first century

1. The story so far

2. An African liberal revolution?

3. The cultural sources for a liberal revolution

4. Classes for and against the liberal revolution

5. Africa must unite

  (more…)

The African Revolution: development in the 21st century world 23 April 2007

 Revised version of 'A liberal revolution for Africa?' below. 

From Pan-Africanism to national capitalism

I consider here Africa’s development prospects in the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed. Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as a rural exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the world economy, as well as to national and regional markets. Indigenous commerce has so far been approached mainly in terms of the ‘informal economy’. The concept tells us what these activities are not – not regulated by law and public bureaucracy – but little about what they positively are. This has led me to ask what social forms organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources, since they must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.

What prospects do neo-liberal markets hold for the African continent as a whole? Could Africa sustain a liberal revolution of its own — sooner rather than later? What might be the social and cultural conditions for this? Africa’s experience in the twentieth century is often represented as a failure to ‘develop’. This perception obscures what actually happened, a development of extraordinary scale and speed that I call Africa’s ‘urban revolution’. If there is to be an African liberal revolution in the next half-century, it will be fed by social forces that have already taken root in the century that has just passed. (more…)

A liberal revolution for Africa? 8 January 2007

(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8^th January 2007)

I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal economy’ concept (Hart 1973, 2006). But the real sources of the idea were the mostly poor Ghanaians who took in a young English student and allowed me to share something of their lives. Everything I have done since has been inspired by that formative period spent here in Ghana. In what follows, I will not dwell at length on the informal economy concept as such or on the experience that gave rise to it.Rather, I will take advantage of the seminar series’ invitation to consider the next fifty years in this jubilee year of Ghana’s independence. If the ‘informal economy’ concept drew attention to a wide variety of hitherto invisible practices, at this stage we need to investigate more closely what these practices stand for positively. I will argue that they constitute a dramatic expansion of urban commerce, ‘the market’, which just might be the foundation for an economic revolution in Africa during the decades that lie ahead. (more…)

Informal Economy 18 December 2006

The term ‘informal economy’ became current in the 1970s as a label for economic activities that take place outside the framework of bureaucratic public and private sector establishments. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to societies like Britain, where it competed with epithets of deindustrialization – the ‘hidden’, ‘underground’, ‘black’ economy, and so on. (more…)

Polly Hill Memorial in Cambridge 7 June 2006

A memorial celebration of Polly Hill’s life took place in Clare Hall, Cambridge on 28^th May 2006. She died peacefully on 21^st August 2005, aged 91. Chris Gregory, who partly owed his own conversion from economist to ethnographer to Polly Hill, provided the continuity; her grandchildren read poetry; Mark Hill and Caroline Humphrey made short speeches as family representatives; Keith Hart and Murray Last spoke of her anthropological work in West Africa and India; the Indian economist, Sunanda Sen, praised her book attacking development economists; Clare Hall’s President read out a letter from Nick Shackleton; members of the audience gave their personal testimony; and her son-in-law, Alastair Burn, wound up the formal proceedings. (more…)

Empire vs Nation-State 23 May 2006

Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question is mainly about changing fashions among the people who study colonial and post-colonial societies. But its third section, ‘The possibilities of history’, opens up larger questions, particularly in the essay, ‘States, empires and political imagination’ (the longest in the book). Here FC argues persuasively against the tendency to read modern history through its dominant political form, the nation-state, arguing that transnational associations, empires, have been and maybe still are just as important. I endorse the view that studying modern empires — and, by way of comparison, any empires – should be a salutary antidote to the contemporary obsession with national frameworks for doing history. And I quite agree that contrasting British and French styles of colonial empire, as I did for example in my book on West African agriculture (1982), is partly a way of reducing empire to the nation-state. My comments take off from this point of agreement. (more…)

Notes on Cooper’s Colonialism in Question 17 May 2006

Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history

This book is about people who study colonialism. In particular, it asks why there should now be a mini-boom in colonial studies, when once it was virtually unknown. Beyond that, Fred Cooper is clearly fed up with much of this work and especially the conceptual language of recent colonial and post-colonial studies. He finds it faddish and often wrong-headed and he has a point. But it is risky to write about academics without locating them in a history of something else, like society, politics or Africa’s predicament. (more…)

The Book: Table of Contents 3 May 2006

(A book of 60,000 words for Polity Press)

Introduction

Part I The idea of Africa

1. Africa today: ‘through a glass, darkly’

2. Africa on my mind

3. Africa in world history

Part II The engines of inequality

1. Waiting for emancipation: slavery, colonialism, apartheid

2. The intellectuals of the anti-colonial revolution

3. ‘Development’: the post-colonial counter-revolution

Part III What happened in the twentieth century

1. Africa’s urban revolution

2. ‘The informal economy’: the rise of the market

3. The explosion of the modern arts

Part IV Africa’s (neo-)liberal revolution?

1. Moral politics and the religious revival

2. The new diaspora in the information age

3. A second imperialism or emancipation at last?

Guide to further reading