Loomnie

This is a guest post by Keith Hart (cross-posted). It is partly in response to Benson Eluma’s piece here on Achebe and Hart. You can leave your comments here or at Hart’s blog.

Benson’s post refers to my previous one, Africa’s hope, which in turn took off from Chinua Achebe’s NYT oped piece. I will not tackle Benson’s critique point for point. What follows is only indirectly triggered by what he wrote. It matters more to me to make a positive case than to refute his or for that matter Chinua Achebe’s.

I should begin by clarifying my use of history. For me the point is to realise some version of what is possible while starting from the actual present of our moment in history. That vision of possibility should be grounded in what we know of the past, but such historical knowledge is always selective and relative to the forward-looking project. We can pitch rival stories into competition with each other, suggesting that A is not B. I did that for polemical purposes with Achebe’s historical vision and Benson does it with me; but in practice most stories are not mutually exclusive and it is usually futile to treat them as such.

At the end of Talking World War III Blues, Bob sings:

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can’t be all right all the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,”
I said that.

West Africans have been waiting a long time for political emancipation and this is closely tied to slavery, colonialism and recent aspirations to economic development. Each century, as we go back, reveals further layers of the problem and, to come to grips with the sources of the region’s economic backwardness probably requires us to take in the whole of the previous thousand years. I believe that Chinua Achebe’s version of that history was tired, if not lazy. Depending on what we have in mind, the historical significance of all the key terms needs to be interrogated.

Slavery is endemic to West Africa. I have a post on it here. The slave trade was a partnership between Europeans and Africans. It took most of the 19th century to be officially abolished and it has persisted in places until now. Domestic slavery can only be understood in relation to kinship and that too has not been abolished. It is contemporary in one form or another. The abolition of slavery in the West, especially as a result of the American civil war, generated much turbulence in West Africa during the latter decades of the 19th century, a situation exploited by the colonial scramble for Africa. Slavery is living history in Nigeria (as Achebe’s novels pointed out), not just something to be pinned on Europeans and Americans long ago.

Colonialism too needs to be thought about outside the box. As John Peel has demonstrated, many Yoruba intellectuals embraced Christianity, western education and the British empire as a way of taking their nation into the modern world. Ghana had an economy larger than Indonesia’s at the time of independence and per capita income on a par with South Korea. The political and economic failures of the last half-century have cast doubt on how the transition to post-colonial states should be viewed. It is not obvious when in the period from the 1940s to the 70s various colonial regimes started to pull out or how independent the successor regimes often were. What is clear is that political recipes for emancipation lacked an effective understanding of conditions in the world at large and over-estimated local powers of self-determination. The result in the early 21st century is that West Africans, especially Nigerians, are still waiting for political forms adequate to their needs and aspirations as world citizens.

What economic system might underwrite these political aspirations? Rather than invoke “capitalism” as a way of avoiding economic analysis, we need to interrogate this term more than any other. I use it in a way similar to Marx to mean a social complex of people, machines and money that over the last two centuries has driven population growth, urbanization and higher energy use in a very uneven way. It takes many concrete forms and is always combined with other economic forms. Capitalism’s mission is to break down the insularity of traditional communities and bring cheap commodities to the masses. It is not the just society humanity deserves, but a temporary bridge to that society. It is of course highly moot where different parts of the world have reached in this process, where they might want to go next and how.

The present moment is specific in that, for the first time, global capitalism has been diversified beyond its North Atlantic origins. In a book published three decades ago, I argued that modern states were being erected in West Africa on the basis of backward agriculture and that, unless significant progress towards machine industry (in the broadest sense) were made soon, these states would devolve to a level congruent with their economic backwardness. I intend to revisit this argument in the present book.

Once again, I have covered a lot of ground in a very telegraphic way which lends itself to polemical distortion. But what can you do in a blog post? I think the triad — pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial — is a weird periodization of West African history and one that will not serve attempts to improve the region’s political economy well now. Rather than insist on my own highly selective account, I would like to discuss the key relevant terms in an open-ended way. But more than that, I believe there are substantial grounds for hope of significant African development at this time. The politicians and the intellectuals (at home and abroad) will probably be the last to find out about it.

Chinua Achebe, one of the greatest writers Nigeria has ever known, recently wrote an op-ed article titled Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope for the New York Times. The piece starts out with the injustices of colonisation and how Africans had no idea about what to do with independence after having gained it. The following two excellent sentences capture the point:

If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin.

and

We are like the man in the Igbo proverb who does not know where the rain began to beat him and so cannot say where he dried his body.

In his opinion, Europe, which implicated itself by colonising Africa and in the process messing things up, owe it as a duty to help Africans through the current predicaments.

In his conclusion he marshals the usual suspects: godfatherism has to end; the domination of politics by a few half-baked, half-educated leaders has to stop; there has to be a right balance of the power of the executive and the responsibility that comes with that power – in other words there should be a strong form of accountability; people should have more access to official information, and this can be ensured by the passing and signing of a strong freedom of information bill; and of course, we have to have a new patriotic consciousness.

Keith Hart, in the latest in a series of posts he is blogging as he writes a book on Africa, describes Achebe’s piece as an “old school nationalist history of the sort that misled Africans at the time of independence.” He continues:

Achebe’s vision of world history is narrow and backward-looking; the programme advocated, such as it is, takes no account of contemporary world society or of the forces within it that might support African emancipation at whatever level of association; he repeats the mistake of focusing exclusively on politics and law (“seek ye first the political kingdom”); and deals with the economic conditions of democracy only through their negation as excessive ill-begotten wealth. The thinking behind this piece, in other words, has not moved on since the mid-twentieth century.

His own recommendations, among other things [be sure to read the article in full] are:

Some of Africa’s political leaders and activist intellectuals must come to grips with what has been going on in the last century and is going on now. ‘Africa’ a century ago included the New World diaspora created by the slave trade; but it now includes a second diaspora created since 1945 by voluntary migration to Europe, America and increasingly Asia. At a time when India’s hi-tech entrepreneurs are returning home from Silicon Valley in droves, the question of African development must hinge on how this new expatriate population could take part in the continent’s growth. Above all, if Africans are to win some measure of equality for themselves in world society, they must ask how multiple forms of political association at more and less inclusive levels might help them to address the development question. There is little point in waiting for the West’s benevolent intervention.

Regional integration, even Panafricanism, has a better chance in this multi-polar, convergent world than it did half a century ago and that, for me, is where Africa’s hope lies.

I am inclined to agree with Keith Hart. In Achebe’s article, one could almost not find anything about the global power shift that has happened in the past few decades – and that continues to happen. It is almost as if he has a few points that he makes once someone asks him about what is happening in the continent and what can be done. Of course, there is hardly anything to disagree with in the list of things he would like to see happen. However, one leaves the article without feeling as if one has learnt anything new or thought-provoking.

What do you think?

Keith Hart, the economic anthropologist who, from his research with urban slum dwellers in 1960s Ghana, coined the term ‘informal economy’, announced his intention a couple of days ago to kick-start the writing of a book, Africa’s Urban Revolution, with a series of blog posts.

The first in the series appears today, and it is an excerpt of a review he wrote of Stephen Smith’s Négrologie: pourquoi l’Afrique meurt. The following two paragraphs are typical of his take on the book:

There is no systematic attempt to give an account of the role of the great powers in Africa – the USA, allied with South Africa and Museveni, France and Nigeria increasingly drawn together in opposition to these, China and Japan as aid donors. Britain’s remarkable eclipse as an influence is passed over. Smith’s aim is to show that Africa’s present has no future. Perhaps this is true of France and some of its former colonies; and Nigeria’s potential seems to be indefinitely on hold; but the other players are on a roll, with South African capital entertaining expansionist scenarios not seen since the days of Cecil Rhodes and Asian manufacturers tapping into Africa’s burgeoning market.

……..

Even more damaging to this emphasis on a moribund Africa is the astonishing rise of cities in 20th-century Africa. A region which had hardly any urban population in 1900 is now half urbanized. The reality of African societies today is a very young population living in cities with a lot of time on their hands. There has been a cultural revolution in the modern arts as a result of this development, although you would not read about it in this book or in most of the mainstream western media. Rather Africa is portrayed as the unchecked playground of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is systematic and some writers have pointed out the continuity with earlier attempts to advocate genocide on grounds of imperialism. “Exterminate all the brutes”, were the last words of Kurz’s report in Heart of Darkness. (Another of Smith’s books is Africa without Africans!) It is hard to miss an apparently unconscious wish today that Africans would die out, instead of merely performing their role as congenital inferiors in world society. Smith’s relationship to this claim is ambiguous.

I am pretty sure that the series of posts will be excellent, and you should definitely join the discussion. Even if for you, an interest in Africa is nothing more than just a smart career move.

The first in a series of posts on the financial crisis by economic anthrologist Keith Hart, at the ASA Globalog. The series will engage:

long-run historical questions like what this crisis is, with the news as it unfolds in real time and with issues that matter practically to people who don’t have to be reminded that “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Read it in full here.