Hello Africa: mobile phones
Martin Konzett made this trailer in East Africa. Thanks to Ken Banks (@kiwanja) for the link.
Archive for the ‘The African Revolution’ Category.
The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa
Africa has become poorer in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated continent around 1900, Africa’s seventh of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average of around 50%. We need to understand this ‘urban revolution’ of unprecedented speed and scale; and specifically to identify how Africa’s urban economies might act as a springboard for economic development in the coming century. The continent is divided into three disparate regions — North, South and Middle (West, Central and East Africa); but a measure of convergence between them is now taking place.
A preoccupation with Africa’s post-colonial failure to ‘develop’ – or to ‘take-off’ — has obscured what really happened there in the twentieth century. The rise of cities has been accompanied by the formation of weak and venal states, locked into dependency on foreign powers and leaving the urban masses largely to their own devices. The latter have generated spontaneous markets to meet their own needs and these have come to be understood as an ‘informal economy’. Whatever its value in bringing to light hitherto invisible economic activities, this concept is largely negative, focusing on whatever is not regulated by state bureaucracy and law. It tells us nothing about the social organization of these practices. In order to understand Africa’s twentieth-century experience – the extraordinary compression of contradictory social developments within a short period — we must first take a long view of the region’s divergence from the general historical trajectory of the Eurasian land mass. Continue reading ‘The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa’ »
The anticolonial revolution
This is the first of three lectures, the culmination of an undergraduate course given at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005-6, that consider the question of how anthropologists might approach the formation of world society in the coming century. The other two were posted earlier. The set is: 1. the anticolonial revolution 2. development and 3. globalisation. All three were filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.
Part 1
Lecture on the informal economy
A lecture with discussion given in the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban in November 2009.
Africa’s urban revolution
Africa’s traditional societies and agrarian civilization
Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as an 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 social forms that organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.
If African ‘development’ is ever to break out of the unhappy pattern established in the last half-century, its engine will have to be sustained endogenous economic growth. But, in order to understand Africa’s twentieth-century experience, we must first take a long view of the region’s divergence from the general historical trajectory of the Eurasian land mass. Continue reading ‘Africa’s urban revolution’ »
The globalization of apartheid
It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined.…that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.
J.-J. Rousseau Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men
Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality [the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory]….The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.
Immanuel Kant Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch
THE GREATEST POSSIBLE COMMERCE BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD THE LEAST POSSIBLE COMMERCE BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD.
Richard Cobden Frieze of the main auditorium, Free Trade Hall, Manchester Continue reading ‘The globalization of apartheid’ »
The theft of history
In 1900, about four-fifths of the planet’s land was controlled by people of European origin. Although European expansion was by then four centuries old, this land grab had largely taken place in the previous half-century and for most of Africa in the last two decades. It was manned by the world’s first population explosion, when European death rates fell faster than birth rates from the 1830s, and was enabled by rapid improvements in technologies for inflicting death on others. It is hardly surprising that the Europeans asked themselves how they came to enjoy what sometimes seemed like an effortless superiority over all-comers. This was also the time when modern anthropology was born with the aim of finding answers. The means seem obviously enough now to have been industrial capitalism, that combination of big money and machine production that took off around 1800 in Britain and a few other places. But where did this come from? It had to be something in the culture of Europeans that accounted for their successful application of scientific rationality to the task of world domination. Soon enough this cultural perception was given a biological foundation as a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and brown and yellow people in between. So, when world society was launched by western imperialism in the course of the nineteenth century, it took the highly unequal form of a racial order which most people had been coerced into joining. Not only the anthropologists, but western historians, philosophers and social theorists set out to explain this European triumph in self-congratulatory terms. And most of them are still content to do so. Continue reading ‘The theft of history’ »
Africa on my mind
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. Continue reading ‘Africa on my mind’ »
Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa
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. Continue reading ‘Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa’ »
The African revolution book project
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 21st 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. Continue reading ‘The African revolution book project’ »
