Part One Jack Goody’s Vision

In a short preface to Production and Reproduction, the first in his series of comparisons between Africa and Eurasia, Jack Goody (1976:ix-x) tells us that ethnography, the aspiration to write about another culture studied intensively through fieldwork, never defined his intellectual horizons. His subject has always been historical comparison and beyond that “the development of human culture”. He deliberately sets himself at odds with his greatest contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), as being uninterested in binary oppositions between the modern and the primitive. Rather he places himself as an actor in a historical period, coming of age in the Second World War, encountering the Eastern Mediterranean, escaping from a prison camp into the mountains of Abruzzo, entering Africa at the decisive moment of its anti-colonial revolution and in its epicentre, Ghana. With European empires collapsing everywhere, he rejects the eurocentric idea that the West is special, looking instead for forms of knowledge that are more truly universal, better suited to the new world society launched by the war.

As a former student of English literature, he knew something about medieval European society and culture. He wanted to connect a newly independent West Africa to the Islamic civilization he encountered briefly during the war. His subject is therefore the comparison of pre-industrial societies, past and present, an ethnographically informed juxtaposition of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He stresses that this enquiry is an extension of his own personal experience, fuelled by social interaction and political engagement. The ultimate historical question is where human civilization is going, but the key lies in the similarity and divergence of regions with an agrarian past or present. Only a series of books could begin to address this question and this is the first of them. It is worth recalling its full title, Production and Reproduction: a comparative study of the domestic domain. The focus is on how human beings produce their livelihood within families and how this influences attempts to secure their future. But Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962) remains his key work. The three themes of the title — how we seek to transcend death materially and spiritually — come together in Goody’s preoccupation with writing itself, a project he launched with The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977).

The time from the Second World War until now has been extraordinary, a period when humanity formed world society as a single interactive network for the first time. This society is massively unequal and riddled with conflict, but now at last there is a universe of communications to give concrete expression to universal ideas. Future generations will want to study this emerging human society and they will look to us for antecedents; but they will be disappointed by the fragmented narrowness of our anthropological vision. For we have been slow to move beyond ethnography. Jack Goody, with Eric Wolf (1982) as his only serious contemporary rival, devised and carried out an anthropological project with a scale to match the world society being formed in his day. How does Goody’s project of historical comparison illuminate the world society emerging in our time? What is his vision of the development of human culture, past, present and future? My own answers are shaped by his, since he was my teacher, but I depart from him in some respects. Reproduction was always so.

World society has not been formed completely in our time nor does it lack antecedents; but think what the human condition was like in 1945 and what it is now. Something tremendous has happened in between. Humanity has been brought closer together in dramatic ways. We have difficulty imagining the processes involved, not least because of national consciousness. Anthropologists, in sticking with their ethnographic method, have not risen to the challenge of documenting this huge shift in civilization. Jack Goody could not settle for just “getting to know another culture”. In reaching for a more universal conception of human history, he knew that he was an active participant in the making of a new world. But, even as he inserted himself into contemporary society, he chose to step back from the modern age. By focusing on pre-industrial societies in Europe, Asia and Africa, he left out any direct consideration of two centuries of machine revolution, the capitalist world economy, the New World in its entirety. But his topic is nevertheless “the development of human culture” and, as I hope to show here, his inquiries do reflect a consistent position on the social priorities of his own time.

A few years after his wartime sojourn in the Mediterranean basin, Jack Goody carried out research in West Africa, a region connected to the Mediterranean by Islamic civilization long before it was colonized by Europeans. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in Northwest Ghana during the decade before that country won independence from colonial rule, he soon established himself as a force in West African anthropology, first as an ethnographer and later as a historian (Hart 1985). Goody was impressed, however, by the similarities and differences between Africa, Europe and the Islamic world. It took him three decades to formalize the terms of comparison; but, when he did, it turned out as follows: Europe may be opposed to Asia as West to East, but the two should be seen as a single entity, Eurasia, opposed to Africa South of the Sahara. This model contrasts with the dominant imperialist stereotype which opposes the West to the Rest. Goody was anxious to avoid any hint of racial hierarchy. Yet he concluded that African societies were fundamentally different from the others in important ways and he wanted to explain why.

He started with kinship and marriage, the domestic relations though which people manage their own reproduction and participate in the wider society. In Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), he concluded that the key to variations in kinship organization lay in the transmission of property, the material link between generations constituted by patterns of inheritance and manifested in religious observances such as the ancestor cult. The book drew extensively on classical sources of British comparative jurisprudence; but Goody balked at making a systematic comparison of Africa and Europe then. In Tradition, Technology and the State (1971), he questioned the habit of transferring categories from European history to the study of pre-colonial states in Africa. Once again his focus was on property forms. European feudalism was based on private property in land and this was absent from traditional West Africa. Why? Because land was scarce in Western Europe, but not in Africa, where the scarce factor was people; and control over them was exercised through monopolies of the “means of destruction” (horses, guns etc.), not the means of production. Africa’s polities were both centralized and decentralized, the former acquiring manpower by force through carrying out slave raids on the latter (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940). Shifting hoe agriculture was the norm, with the bulk of manual labour being performed by women. In both types of society they were hoarded as wives by polygamous older men and their children were recruited to exclusive descent groups. The key to major differences in social organization between Africa and Eurasia thus lay in the conditions of production and specifically in demography, in the ratio of people to the land.

Production and Reproduction takes off from this premise into a global survey of kinship, marriage and property transmission, using the data compiled by G. P. Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (1962-1980). Kin groups in the major societies of Eurasia frequently pass on property through both sexes, a process of “diverging devolution” (including bilateral inheritance and women’s dowry at marriage) that is virtually absent in Subsaharan Africa, where inheritance follows the line of one sex only. [Note 1: See Hann (2008) for a much fuller treatment of inheritance and property in Goody’s work.] Especially when women’s property includes the means of production, in agricultural societies land, attempts will be made to control these heiresses, banning premarital sex and making arranged marriages for them, often within the same group and with a strong preference for monogamy. Direct inheritance by women is also associated with the isolation of the nuclear family in kinship terminology, where a distinction is drawn between one’s own parents and siblings and other relatives of the same generation, unlike in lineage systems. All of this reflects a class society. “Diverging devolution (especially dowry) [is] the main mechanism by which familial status was maintained in an economically differentiated society” (Goody 1976:19). But

Why should the African and Eurasian patterns be so different? I suggest that the scarcer productive resources become and the more intensively they are used, then the greater the tendency for the retention of these resources within the basic productive and reproductive unit, which in the large majority of cases is the nuclear family… Advanced agriculture, whether by plough or irrigation, permits an individual to produce much more than he can consume….[T]he greater volume of production can maintain an elaborate division of labour and stratification based upon different styles of life. An important means of [this]… is marriage with persons of the same or higher qualifications…. Advanced agriculture [also] allows the expansion of population, another factor making for scarcity of land (Ibid:20).

The agrarian economies of all the major Eurasian civilizations conformed to this pattern. They were organized through large states run by literate elites whose lifestyle embraced both the city and the countryside. This is Gordon Childe’s “urban revolution” in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago , where

…an elaborate bureaucracy, a complex division of labour [and] a stratified society based on ecclesiastical landlordism…[were] made possible by intensive agriculture and title to landed property was of supreme importance (Ibid:24).

Africa South of the Sahara apparently missed out on these developments, even though North Africa was one of the first areas to adopt the new institutional package. Goody would never countenance the standard racist explanation for this, the cultural backwardness of black people. To low population density as one explanation he now adds the barrier posed to intensive agriculture by tropical soils. By starting from the relationship between types of property transmission and forms of kinship and marriage, he arrives at a new synthesis of the agricultural roots of civilization.

By the time Jack Goody became an anthropologist, colonial empire was rapidly being dismantled and racial discrimination of the sort practised in apartheid South Africa was becoming outlawed. Yet the intellectual legacy of imperialism still underpinned the anthropology of his day. So he chose to attack the lingering opposition of “modern” and “primitive” cultures by studying the chief activity of literate elites, of which he was himself a leading example — writing. Contrasted mentalities should rather be seen as an effect of different means of communication. The most important of these are speech and writing, orality and literacy. Most African cultures are predominantly oral, whereas the ruling classes of Eurasian civilization have relied from the beginning on literate records. The year after Production and Reproduction, Goody published his most general assault on the habit of opposing us and them, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). This was a pointed repudiation of La Pensée Sauvage of Lévi-Strauss (1962), suggesting that the latter’s lists linking ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ societies to other pairs, such as history and myth, science and magic, far from exemplifying universal reason, were a parochial by-product of mental habits induced by writing. This emerged in a specific time and place and became essential to the reproduction of Eurasian civilization, reducing the status of oral communication that still animates African cultures. Literacy is a key feature of the institutional complex that marked the urban revolution.

In The East in the West(1996) and numerous volumes since, Jack Goody sought to refute the claim, derived from the founders of modern social theory, that the West’s economic ascendancy, driven by capitalism and its machine revolution, could be attributed to a unique type of rationality missing from the less fortunate societies of Asia. [Note 3: The Eurasian Miracle (Goody 2009) sums up this thesis, but the most important text in my view is The Theft of History (2007) reviewed in Hart (2007).] Goody shows first that Europe’s distinctiveness is in most cases either non-existent or has been exaggerated; and second that the rate of adoption of western industrial techniques by Japan, China and India has been faster than it took for the innovations of the Italian Renaissance to diffuse to Northwest Europe. He concludes that eurocentrism obscures Asia’s current economic performance and potential, while misrepresenting western history. It makes more sense to see Eurasia as a single entity, at least since the Bronze Age, where the advantage of particular regions has been highly unstable. Africa, whose exceptional character remains unchallenged throughout the series, tends to drop out of Goody’s focus at this point.

Jack Goody drew on Gordon Childe’s materialist synthesis of the great revolutions that marked the history of human production and society. [Note 2: Childe (e.g. 1942) was a prehistorian of Europe who produced a Marxist synthesis of the stages theory of human social evolution marked by three revolutions in production, the ‘neolithic, ‘urban’ and ‘industrial’. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe.] Childe got the basic framework from L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) which some have seen as the origin of modern anthropology; this was made more widely accessible by Friedrich Engels as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). But they got it in turn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) could be said to be the source for an “anthropology of unequal society” whose leading protagonist for half a century has been Jack Goody (Hart 2006a, Hann and Hart 2011:10-12).

In the last two centuries, the human population has increased seven times and the rate of growth of energy production has been double that of the population. Many human beings work less hard, eat better and live longer today as a result. Whereas about 97% of the world’s people lived in rural areas in 1800, today half of humanity lives in cities. This hectic disengagement from the soil as the chief object of work and source of life was made possible by harnessing inanimate energy sources to machines used as converters. Before 1800 almost all the energy at our disposal came from animals, plants and human beings themselves. The benefits of modern development have been distributed highly unequally, the prime beneficiaries being the pioneers of western imperialism. This made the world economy of a century ago uni-polar and highly divergent (that is, unequal); whereas today it is multi-polar and convergent as a result of the West’s relative decline and the rise of ‘emerging’ economies like China, India and Brazil.

Despite a consistent barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization — territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucratic administration, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion and the family. This is because the rebellion of the middle classes against the Old Regime was co-opted by that synthesis of industrial capitalism and the nation-state that I call “national capitalism” and humanity’s emancipation from unequal society has suffered reverses as a result (Hart 2009). Consider the shape of world society today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men in suits”, rule masses who are predominantly poor, dark, female and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, try to stem the inflow of migrants seeking economic improvement. Our world resembles nothing so much as the Old Regime in France before the revolution, when Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse.

Africa is the most poignant symbol of this unequal world. In 1950 Greater Europe (including Soviet Central Asia) had twice the numbers of Africa. Today Africa has a population double the size of Europe and Central Asia. By 2050 Africans will be a quarter of humanity and by the end of the century over a third. [Note 4: According to the latest projections of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm, Africa’s population in 1950 was less than 0.25bn out of a world population of 2.5bn (under 10%); in 2000 it was 0.8bn (13% of 6.1bn); in 2050 it will be 2.2bn (24% of 9.3bn); and in 2100 3.6bn (35% of 10.1bn).] Although Africa is still often represented as a land of starving peasants ravaged by war and AIDS, the new reality is burgeoning cities full of young people looking for something to do (Hart 2010). Africa largely missed out on the first and second stages of the machine revolution, but in places it is now ahead in some aspects of digitization. [Note 5: Such as for example Kenya’s pioneering experiment in mobile banking, the M-Pesa (Mas and Morawczynski 2009).] Even so, today development there often consists of irrigation and ox-plough agriculture (Hart 1982). Africa has at last been going through Childe’s urban revolution, erecting state bureaucracies and class society on the basis of surpluses extracted from the countryside. This is not without its contradictions.

Simply as a comparative history of pre-industrial civilizations, Jack Goody’s contribution is enormous; but he has also been telling us something about the formation of contemporary world society. Like Bruno Latour (1993), he says that we have never been modern. Modern democracy is predicated on the abolition of the unequal society that ruled the Eurasian landmass for 5,000 years. Goody reminds us of the durable inequality of our world and suggests that its causes may be less tractable than we think. At the same time, the rise of China and India underlines his warning against European complacency. The world is now simultaneously more connected than ever and highly unequal. The reduction of national political controls over global markets in the last three decades has accelerated the gap between the haves and have-nots everywhere, generating huge regional disparities in the process. Redress for this situation seems further away today that it did in 1945, when Jack Goody set out on his post-war journey.

Let me recap the core elements of Goody’s framework. The key to understanding social forms lies in production and that means the uneven spread of machine production today. Civilization or human culture is largely a consequence of the means of communication — once writing, now an array of mechanized forms, but always interacting with oral and written media. The site of social struggles is property. Are nation-states still an effective instrument for enforcing global contracts? And his central focus on reproduction has never been more salient when the aging citizens of rich countries need to come to terms with the proliferating mass of young people out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too. If human culture is to be rescued from the unequal society that results when agrarian civilization is strengthened by machines, Jack Goody’s anthropological vision offers one indispensable means of contemplating how.

Part Two Africa today: the challenge of development

[Note 6: Hart (2010) is a fuller version of the arguments summarized here. The general question of African development is discussed in chapter 6 of Hann and Hart (2011). Hart and Padayachee (2010) review Africa’s development prospects from the perspective of the continent’s most powerful economy, South Africa. A long-delayed book, The African Revolution (Polity, forthcoming), explains why I believe that Africa’s economic future is brighter than many might imagine.]

I now turn to what has happened in Africa since Jack Goody first went there more than a half-century ago. He has never lost interest in the region of his original field research, but it has not figured prominently in his work since the early years of independence. The African 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” (Hart 2006b, 2010). [Note 7: Robert Neuwirth (2011) has published an engaging round-up of what he calls “the global rise of the informal economy”. I have some sympathy with his preference for a less negative term: he opts for “Système D”, an expression found in the French Caribbean and West Africa, which expresses something of the entrepreneurial inventiveness of the informal economy.]

In order to make sense of the extraordinary transformation of what is after all a highly diverse continent, I distinguish between three broad types of social formation: “egalitarian societies” based on kinship; “agrarian civilization” in which urban elites control the mass of rural labour by means of the state and class power (Hart 2006a); and “national capitalism”, where markets and capital accumulation are regulated by central bureaucracies in the interest of citizens (Hart 2009). These oversimplified categories help me to indicate some broad historical trends. Africa South of the Sahara has a more complex history than is captured by this typology; but its dominant institutions before the modern period may be understood in terms of the classless type based on kinship institutions in the main. The second type, agrarian civilization, covered most of Europe, Asia and North Africa for the last few millennia. National capitalism has only taken root so far in South Africa, until recently for the benefit of whites only. Middle Africa has made a belated transition to the Old Regime of agrarian civilization in the course of the twentieth century, while Europe and North America, followed by Asia, embraced national capitalism. This brought North and Middle Africa closer together as pre-industrial class societies, while South Africa has drawn closer to the rest of Africa since the coming of majority rule.

Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral embraced agrarian civilization long ago. The rise of cities there was accompanied by the formation of states whose function was to supervise a new kind of class society, in which a narrow urban elite extracted agricultural surpluses from an increasingly servile rural labour force. Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Goody (1976), largely missed out on this urban revolution along with its agricultural technology, higher population density and unequal property relations. This is why traditional African forms of kinship and marriage are so distinctive and their societies were, relatively speaking, classless. Even where a measure of stratification existed, redistribution through kinship institutions prevented the emergence of classes with different styles of consumption.

As we have seen, the contrast between egalitarian societies built on kinship and unequal societies based on state power and class division goes back to L. H. Morgan (1877) and before him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754). It cannot be applied unambiguously to Africa and Eurasia before the modern age, even if we try to isolate Black Africa from its Northern and Southern extremities. Africa’s urban history is complex (Freund 2007). The Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades generated coastal urban enclaves in both West and East Africa. The medieval civilization of the West African Sahel was a significant part of the Islamic world. Of the Yoruba agro-cities, Ibadan’s population had reached 200,000 by the onset of colonial rule. Even so, large swathes of Middle Africa entered the modern era with a minimal urban population and their dominant institutions owed a lot more to kinship than to class differences. Indigenous states were common in the early modern period, often emerging in response to European imperial expansion. The grip of agrarian civilization on modern world society is still strong, since national capitalism everywhere incorporated elements of the Old Regime.

Of course, inequality was not wholly absent from traditional African societies. Engels made much of the historical subordination of women, first in tribal societies of farmers and herders, later in pre-industrial states and finally in capitalist societies. Marxists and feminists (e.g. Meillassoux 1981) extended this analysis to the conflict between African males of different age, with polygamous elders commanding young men’s labour through control of access to marriageable women who were in their turn condemned to do most of the work without effective political representation. Gender and generation differences are of immense importance in African societies.

In 1900, Africa had less than 2% of its inhabitants living in cities. By 2000, a population explosion saw the urban share rise to almost half, compressing into one century what took much longer elsewhere. Since Africa’s population is still growing at 2.5% per annum, so too is its relative size in the world, if not yet its purchasing power (around 2% of the world economy according to the World Bank 2010). This urban revolution does not just consist in the unprecedented proliferation of cities, but also in the installation of the whole package of pre-industrial class society: states, new urban elites, intensification of agriculture and a political economy based on the extraction of rural surpluses. African development must build on independent nation-states whose economic base is pre-industrial agriculture (Hart 1982).

The anti-colonial revolution unleashed extravagant hopes for the transformation of an unequal world. These have not yet been realized for most Africans. But the model of development they were expected to adopt was “national capitalism”. Development in this sense never had a chance to take root in Africa. For the first half of the twentieth century, African peoples were shackled by colonial empire and in the second, their new nations struggled to keep afloat in a world economy organized by and for the major powers, then engaged in the Cold War. Yet in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, two-thirds of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies have been and are expected to be African. [Note 8: According to The Economist (6^th January 2011), Africa had six of the top ten fastest-growing economies in 2001-2010 and is expected to have seven in 2011-2015. The latter consist of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria in that order; the other three are China, India and Vietnam.] Africa’s new national leaders thought they were building modern economies, but in reality they were erecting fragile states whose economic base was the same backward agriculture as before (Hart 1982). This weakness inexorably led them to exchange the democratic legitimacy of the independence struggle for dependence on foreign powers. These ruling elites first relied on revenues from agricultural exports, then on loans contracted under dubious circumstances, finally on the financial monopoly that came from being licensed to supervise their country’s relations with global capitalism. But this bonanza was switched off in the 1980s, when foreign capital felt that it could dispense with the mediation of local state powers and concentrated on collecting debts from them. Many governments were made bankrupt and some collapsed into civil war.

Concentration of political power at the centre led to primate urbanization, as economic demand became synonymous with the expenditures of a presidential kleptocracy. The growth of cities should normally lead to enhanced rural-urban exchange, as farmers supply food to city-dwellers and in turn buy the latter’s manufactures and services. [Note 9: Sir James Steuart (1767) makes this argument and I drew on it in Hart (1982:160).] But this progressive division of labour was stifled at birth in post-colonial Africa by the dumping of cheap subsidized food from North America and Europe and of cheap manufactures from Asia. For “structural adjustment” meant that African national economies had no protection from the strong winds of world trade. A peasantry subjected to violence and political extraction was forced to choose between stagnation at home and migration to the main cities or abroad. Somehow the cities survived on the basis of markets that emerged spontaneously to recycle the money concentrated at the top and to meet the population’s needs. These markets are the key to understanding the economic potential of Africa’s urban revolution.

Africa’s urban informal economy (Hart 2010) everywhere supplies food, housing and transport; education, health and other basic services; mining, manufactures and engineering; and trade at every level, including transnational commerce and foreign exchange. But its scope varies. In West/Central Africa, where white settlement was minimal, the cities were substantially an indigenous creation and their markets were always unregulated. Foreign middlemen like the Lebanese flourished outside colonial administrative controls. The great ports of the Atlantic seaboard enjoy a degree of mercantile freedom that underwrites their contribution to Africa’s commercial growth. Today Angolan women jump on planes heading for London, Paris, Dubai and Rio, where they stock up on luxury goods for resale in the streets of Luanda. In Southern Africa, cities were built by a white settler class who imposed strict controls on the movement of the indigenous population. South Africa’s informal economy today is hedged in by rules designed to promote modern industry. Elsewhere, in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Kenya, the state has long played a more controlling role than would be considered normal today in Lagos or Dakar.

African nation-states have learned the hard way that they are not free to choose their own forms of political economy. When the world was divided by the Cold War, state ownership of production and control of distribution seemed to offer the best chance of defending the national interest against colonial and neo-colonial predators. From the 80s, the mania for privatization led to ownership being ceded to corporations. Structural adjustment forced governments to abandon public services, lay off many workers and allow the free circulation of money. In the Congo, Angola, Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, failed states and civil wars encouraged informal mining and trade, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of warlords and their followers. The restoration of peace restored limited bureaucratic controls over distribution. The situation is highly dynamic and variable.

Tax collection in Africa never attained the regularity it has long achieved in Europe and Asia; and governments still rely on whatever resources they can extract from mineral royalties and the import-export trade. The new urban classes control and live off these revenues, usually under a patrimonial regime propped up by foreign powers (Mbeki 2009). This constitutes an Old Regime ripe for liberal revolution and the Arab Spring that began earlier this year in North Africa carries great significance for the continent as a whole. The new states and class structures of Africa’s urban revolution are entangled in kinship systems that remain indispensable to the informal economy as a means of social organization (Bayart 2009). The middle classes pass off exploitation of cheap domestic labour as an egalitarian model of African kinship; while “family business” has never lost favour and child labour is still acceptable. Formal bureaucracy, on the other hand, is hostile to kinship, where it is normally viewed as corruption. In the absence of a welfare state, Africans must rely on kinship to see them through the life cycle of birth, marriage, childrearing, old age and death; and this reinforces the power of rural elders who control access to the land in the face of emigration by the youth and women.

The prospect of rapid economic improvement soon in Africa seems counter-intuitive at this time, especially given Africa’s symbolic role as the negation of “white” superiority. [ Note 10: In the last couple of years there has been a spate of literature boosting Africa’s economic prospects. This is built partly on the minerals boom, partly on population growth, partly on belated recognition that Africa has a growing share of world consumption. For an upbeat even breezy version of this story, see Severino and Ray (2011).] Black people have played this role for centuries as the stigmatized underclass of an unequal world society organized along racial lines; and never more than now, when American and European dominance is being undermined by a shift in the balance of economic power to countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia and, within its own region, South Africa. [Note 11: Known as the BRICS, although the South African economy has nothing like the dynamism of China, India and Brazil; and, at around 50mn, its population is much smaller than the others. See Hart and Padayachee (2010) on the case for greater integration of South Africa into the African region.] Rather than face up to a decline in their economic fortunes, the whites prefer to dwell on the misfortunes of black people and on Africa’s apparently terminal exclusion from modern prosperity. Failed politicians and aging rock stars announce their mission to “save” Africa from its presumed ills. The western media represent Africa as the benighted battleground of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine and death. It all goes to reassure a decadent West that at least some people are a lot worse off than themselves.

It is a curious fact that China occupied a similar slot in western consciousness not long ago. In the 1920s and 30s, Americans and Europeans often spoke of the Chinese the way they do of Africa today. China was then crippled by the violence of warlords, its peasants mired in the worst poverty imaginable. Today the country is spoken of as the likely successor to the United States as world leader, while its manufactures make inroads into western dominance on a scale far greater than Japan’s ever did. This profound shift in economic power from West to East does not guarantee Africa’s escape from the shackles of world inequality, but it does mean that structures of Atlantic dominance which once seemed inevitable are perceptibly on the move; and that should make it easier to envisage change. We are entering a phase of new economic possibility, as well as altered patterns of dominance in world society. Africa’s advantage in the current global economic crisis is its weak attachment to the status quo. Africans have less to lose; and the old Stalinist “law of unequal development” reminds us that, under such circumstances, winners and losers may easily change places.

The classical liberal revolutions were sustained by three ideas: that freedom and economic progress require increased movement of people, goods and money in the market; that the political framework most compatible with this is democracy, putting power in the hands of the people; and that social progress depends on science, the drive to know objectively how things work that leads to enlightenment. [Note 12: Goody’s successor as head of Cambridge University’s social anthropology department, Ernest Gellner, wrote Plough, Sword and Book (1988) in which the triad of market, democracy and science are inherently related as the modern replacements for the symbols of economic, political and intellectual technology of agrarian civilization that make up the title.] For over a century now an anti-liberal tendency has disparaged this great movement of emancipation as a form of oppression and exploitation in disguise; and, in common with many social revolutions, this is partially true. Africa today must escape soon from varieties of Old Regime that owe a lot to the legacy of slavery, colonialism and apartheid; but conditions there can no longer be attributed solely to these ancient causes. It is possible that the example of the classical liberal revolutions, reinforced by endogenous developments in economy, technology, religion and the arts, could offer fresh solutions for African underdevelopment. These would have to be built on the conditions and energies generated by the urban revolution of the twentieth century (Hart 2010).

We all know that power is distributed very unequally in our world and any new liberal movement would soon run up against entrenched privilege. In fact, world society today resembles quite closely the Old Regime of agrarian civilization, as in eighteenth century England and France, with isolated elites enjoying a lifestyle wildly beyond the reach of masses who have almost nothing. It is not just in post-colonial Africa where the institutions of agrarian civilization rule today. Since the millennium, the United States (and not only the US), whose own liberal revolution once overcame the Old Regime of King George and the East India Company, has regressed to a form of rentier capitalism where income from politically secured property has replaced the profits of production as the main source of wealth. [Note 13: Rentier capitalism is “a type of capitalism where profit takes the form of property income (interest, intellectual property rights, rents, dividends, fees or capital gains)…The beneficiaries monopolize access to physical assets, financial assets and technologies… Often the term is used with the connotation of parasitism or a decadent form of capitalism.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism.]

It has long been acknowledged that the rise of capitalism in Europe drew heavily on religion as one of its motors. Max Weber (1921) insisted that an economic revolution of this scope could only take root on the back of a much broader cultural revolution. What might be the cultural grounds for elements of Africa’s informal economy to evolve into a more dynamic engine of urban commerce (Hart 2010)? Whatever happens next must build on what has already been put in place. The basis for Africa’s future economic growth has to be the cultural production of its cities and not rural extraction or the reactionary hope of reproducing capitalism’s industrial phase. This in turn rests on:

1. The energy of youth and women
2. The religious revival
3. The explosion of the modern arts
4. The digital revolution in communications
5. The new African diaspora

What follows is a brief sketch of a book-length argument (The African Revolution, forthcoming).

1. African societies, traditional and modern, have been dominated by older men. Women have benefited less from the opportunities men have had and are less tied to their burdens. In many cases they have been quicker to exploit the commercial freedoms of the neoliberal international economy. Even when men and boys have plunged whole countries into civil war, thereby removing state guarantees from economic life, an informal economy resting on women’s trade has often kept open basic supply lines. The social reality of Africa’s cities is a young population without enough to do and a growing generation gap. The energies of youth must be harnessed more effectively and the chances of doing so are greater if the focus of economic development is on something that interests them, like popular culture.

2. The religious revival in Africa, both Christian and Muslim, is a matter of immense significance for the forms of economic development. This is in many cases founded on young people’s rejection of the social models and political options offered by their parents’ generation. Fundamentalist and less extreme varieties of religion, based on the assumption of American dominance or its opposite, make a different kind of connection to world society than that offered by the nation-state. They help to fill the moral void of contemporary politics and often offer well-tried recipes for creative economic organization, e.g. the Mourides of Senegal (O’Brien 1971, Copans 1988). Christian churches are usually organized and supported by women, even if their leadership is often male.

3. In all the talk of poverty, war and AIDS, the western media rarely report the extraordinary vitality of the modern arts in post-colonial Africa: novels, films, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance and their applications in commercial design. There has been an artistic explosion in the last half-century, drawing on traditional sources, but also responding to the complexity of the contemporary world. One example in the last decade is the ‘Africa Remix’ exhibition that toured Europe and Japan, a hundred installations from Johannesburg to Cairo, showing the modernity of contemporary African art (Elliot and Njami 2005). The African novel, along with comparable regions like India, leads the world (Irele 2009). I refer to the creativity of the film industry below.

4. Africa largely missed the first two phases of the machine revolution, based on the steam engine and electricity; but the third phase, the digital revolution in communications whose most tangible product is the internet, the network of networks, offers Africans very different conditions of participation that they already show signs of taking up avidly. In origin a means of communication for scientists and the military, the internet is now primarily a global marketplace with very unusual characteristics. Like the informal economy, it goes largely unregulated; but this market freedom is harnessed to the most advanced technologies of our era. The internet has also generated new conditions for managing networks spanning home and abroad by radically shortening the time and space dimensions of communication and exchange at distance. The extraordinarily rapid adoption of mobile phones (Aker and Mbiti 2010) has made Africa a crucible for global innovations, such as the first multi-country network and use of phones for banking purposes in East Africa. Nor should we neglect the role of television as a transnational means of widening perceptions of community.

5. In the last half-century a new African diaspora has emerged, based unlike that formed by Atlantic slavery on economic migration to America, Europe and nowadays Asia. These migrants are usually known away from home by their national identity, but many of them by-pass the national level when maintaining close relationships with their specific region of origin. They are often highly educated, with experience of the corporate business world, while retaining links to relatives living and working in the informal economy at home. One consequence of neoliberal reforms has been that transnational exchange is now much easier than it was, drawing at once on indigenous knowledge of local conditions and the expertise acquired by migrants and their families in the West. Remittances from abroad are of immense importance everywhere, but they are bound to play a major role in Africa’s economic future (Gupta et al 2007).

To speak of economic growth in the future begs the question of what Africa’s new urban populations could produce. So far, African countries have relied on exporting raw materials, when they could. Minerals clearly have a promising future owing to scarce supplies and rising demand; but the world market for food and other agricultural products is skewed. Conventionally, when seeking to diversify away from raw materials, African governments have aspired to develop manufacturing exports, but here they face intense competition from Asia. But the world market for services, cultural commodities like entertainment, education and media, is booming and perhaps greater opportunities lie there. It would be more fruitful for African countries to argue collectively in the councils of world trade for some protection from international dumping, so that their farmers and infant industries might at least get a chance to supply their own populations first. But the world market for services is booming and perhaps greater opportunities for supplying national, regional and global markets exist there.

There was a time when most services were performed personally on the spot; but today, as a result of the digital revolution in communications, they increasingly link producers and consumers at distance. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is the production of culture: entertainment, education, media, software and a wide range of information services (Hart and Padayachee 2010). The future of the human economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), once certain material requirements are satisfied, lies in the infinite scope for us to do things for each other — like singing songs or telling stories — that need not take a tangible form. The largest global television audiences are for sporting events like the World Cup or the Olympic Games. The United States’ three leading exports are now movies, music and software; and this is why they have sponsored an intellectual property treaty (TRIPs) that seeks to shore up the profits of corporations whose products can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost. The central conflict in contemporary capitalism is between this attempt to privatize the cultural commons and widespread popular resistance to it (Hart 2005). Any move to enter this market will be confronted by transnational corporations and the governments who support them. Nevertheless, there is a lot more to play for here and the terrain is not as rigidly mapped out as in agriculture and manufactures. It is also one where Africans are exceptionally well-placed to compete because of the proven preference of global audiences for their music and plastic arts.

Did you know that the world’s second largest producer of movies, after Hollywood and before Bollywood, is Lagos in Nigeria or ‘Nollywood’ (Hugo et al 2009, Saul and Austen 2010)? Most of their movies cost no more than a few thousand dollars, a pattern reminiscent of Hollywood when W.G. Griffith was king. American popular culture is still that country’s most successful export. There is no reason why it couldn’t be for Africans too. The Mourides, a Sufist order founded almost a century ago (O’Brien 1971, Copans 1988), constitute an informal state within the state of Senegal. Their international trading operations are capable of influencing national economies, as when they recently shifted shoe supplies to the USA from Italy to China. Pioneering communications enterprises in Kenya and Ghana are beginning to be noticed for their exciting ability to tailor modern technologies to local demand. As I noted above, mobile phone banking there now leads the world.

Conclusions

According to Jack Goody (most recently, 2010), the relative standing of Eurasia’s regions has fluctuated over 5,000 years, with Western Europe (and its North American offshoots) enjoying some advantage since the Renaissance, especially since the industrial revolution. He utterly rejects any claim that Asia was ever structurally inferior. In most respects, Asian civilizations were well ahead of Europe for much of history. The speed with which they have adopted modern capitalism points to a fundamental similarity that helps us to understand the reversal in economic dominance that is underway now.

Goody set out to deconstruct the racist binaries that organize so much thinking about anthropology and world history. He thinks too much has been made of the industrial revolution as a decisive break in history; that modern capitalism may not be so radically different from its predecessors; and that attempts to associate recent history exclusively with the achievements of the West are deluded. This leads him to assert that many of the cultural features taken to be distinctive of particular regions (notably Europe) may be found elsewhere, often in quite well-developed forms. So, rather than classify whole societies according to the presumed presence and absence of cultural traits, it is better to consider how institutional patterns vary in emphasis and combination. Then the grounds for racial superiority are undermined and economic development is seen less readily as a series of radical breaks. He is right to insist that the legacy of agrarian civilization is still strong in our world and that older forms of capitalism (merchant and financial) have not been swept aside by factory production. But we must still try to understand the economic revolution we are living through, if only to head off global disaster. Marx (1867) and Weber (1921) have more uses in this respect than as mere cheerleaders for western hegemony.

Jack Goody rarely makes it explicit that his whole approach is an attack on cultural anthropology. Like Morgan (1877) and Childe (1942) before him, he explains cultural difference by technological change. The intensification of agriculture (the plough and irrigation) and new means of communication (writing) underpin the unequal class structure of agrarian civilization and explain the cultural differences between Eurasia and Africa. So western supremacists are not only mistaken in assuming Europe’s uniqueness, but they are idealists who fail to grasp the material conditions underlying the differences they celebrate. This leaves two gaping holes in Goody’s understanding of modern world history. I have not been able here (but see Hart 2007) to engage with the first of these, his relative neglect of the machine revolution that has transformed the world in just two centuries. The other is the place of contemporary Africa in his scheme.

Jack Goody’s time spent as an ethnographer in Northern Ghana provided the original ground for his extended foray into world-historical comparison. The problem is that “Africa” forms a binary contrast with Eurasia in his work and the lifestyle of the stateless hoe-farmers he knew stands as its symbol. If Asia is more complex than western stereotypes allow, so too is Africa which has just been through a demographic explosion. “Africa” seems to have lately become for Goody a static abstraction used to support his assault on western disparagement of Asia. This stands in contrast with his early recognition of and support for the anti-colonial revolution in Ghana. The United States and Europe could soon be replaced as the engines of world society by countries such as China, India and Brazil who were not long ago subject to cultural condescension whose premises Goody has undercut. Modern ethnographers too have criticized Western complacency, but their examples have generally been taken out of the context of world history. Jack Goody has excavated a new anthropological vision of our world that is bound to become even more salient as the present century unfolds. His anthropological legacy will last, even if the contemporary rise of Africa is not prefigured in his writing on the continent. I have tried to show here that Goody’s extension of the tradition that I call “the anthropology of unequal society” is indispensable to understanding what really happened in Africa during the twentieth century and may happen there in the twenty-first.

References

Aker, Jenny and Mbiti, Isaac. 2010. Mobile phones and economic development in Africa. Journal of Economic Perspectives 24:3, 207–232.
Bayart, Jean-François. 2009. The State in Africa. Cambridge: Polity.
Childe, V. Gordon.1942. What Happened in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Copans, Jean. 1988. Les marabouts de l’arachide: La confrérie mouride et les paysans du Sénégal. Paris : L’Harmattan.
Elliot, David and Njami, Simon. 2005. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. London: Hayward Gallery.
Engels, Friedrich. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward (eds). 1940. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press.
Freund, Bill. 2007. The African City: A history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gellner, Ernest. 1989. Plough, Sword and Book: The structure of human history. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Goody, Jack. 1962. Death, Property and the Ancestors: A study of the mortuary customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
——. 1971. Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa. London: Oxford University Press.
——. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A comparative study of the domestic domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— . 2007. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— . 2009. The Eurasian Miracle. Cambridge: Polity.
Gupta, Sanjeev, Pattillo, Catherine and Wagh, Smita. 2007. Making remittances work for Africa, Finance and Development 44:2, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2007/06/gupta.htm
Hann, Chris. 2008. Reproduction and inheritance: Goody revisited, Annual Review of Anthropology 37:145–58.
Hann, Chris and Hart, Keith. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity.
Hart, Keith. 1982. The Political Economy of West African Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— . 1985. The social anthropology of West Africa, Annual Review of Anthropology, 14: 243-272.
——. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business, personal and impersonal. Chciago: Prickly Paradigm.
—— . 2006a. Agrarian civilization and world society, in D. Olson and M. Cole (eds) Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the work of Jack Goody, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 29-48.
——. 2006b. Bureaucratic form and the informal economy, in B. Guha-Khasnobis, R. Kanbur and E. Ostrom (eds) Linking the Formal and Informal Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21-35.
—— . 2007. The world in time-space: about Jack Goody The Theft of History, European Journal of Sociology 48:3, 437 – 443.
—— . 2009. Money in the making of world society, in C. Hann and K. Hart eds Market and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 91-105.
—— . 2010. Africa’s urban revolution and the informal economy, in V. Padayachee (ed) The Political Economy of Africa, Routledge: London, 371-388.
——, Laville, Jean-Louis and Antonio Cattani (eds) The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.
—— and Padayachee, Vishnu. 2010. South Africa in Africa: from national capitalism to regional integration, in V. Padayachee (ed) The Political Economy of Africa, London: Routledge, 410-428.
Hugo, Pieter, Abani, Chris and Saro-Wiwa, Zina. 2009. Nollywood. New York: Prestel.
Irele, Abiola. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Amsterdam: Harvester.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Marx, Karl. 1970 (1867). Capital: The critique of political economy (3 vols). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Mas, I. and Morawczynski, O. 2009. Designing mobile money services: lessons from M-Pesa, Innovations 4:2, 77-91.
Mbeki, Moeletsi. 2009. Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s capitalism needs changing. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan.
Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the domestic community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1964 (1877). Ancient Society. Cambridge MA: Bellknapp.
Murdock, George Peter. 1962-1980. Ethnographic Atlas (29 instalments), Ethnology.
Neuwirth, Robert. 2011. Stealth of Nations: The global rise of the informal economy. New York: Pantheon.
O’Brien Donal Cruise. 1971. The Mourids of Senegal: The political and economic organization of an Islamic brotherhood. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Padayachee, Vishnu (ed). 2010. The Political Economy of Africa. London: Routledge.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984 (1754). Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Saul, Mahir and Austen, Ralph (eds). 2010. Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art films and the Nollywood video revolution. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.
Severino, Jean-Michel and Ray, Olivier. 2011. Africa’s Moment. Cambridge: Polity.
Steuart, Sir James. 1767. Principles of Political Oeconomy (2 vols). London: Miller & Cadell.
Weber, Max. 1981 (1921). General Economic History. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books.
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
World Bank. 2010. World Development Indicators. Washington DC: World Bank.

John wrote:

“A commendably hopeful essay. So far the Egyptian initiative has lofted a Mubarak stooge in his place and the elevated overt military control. These are not hopeful yet, and based on past examples of exactly these non-revolutionary, reactionary shifts, not much can be expected… There is little chance of ensconced and comfortable intellectuals to forego their perks… Al Jazeera is a lucrative business not a public service, and in that it is merely another self-promoting journalistic conceit like CNN, NYT and the others… It is disheartening to see Obama and others citing the giants of dissent, metronomically, stupidly… But then Obama is a millionaire, as the giants became as their hard-fought individual efforts became national and global enterprises. So what else is new.”

Thanks for taking the time to comment, John. It is interesting that several nettimers have written to me privately to say that they like and agree with what I wrote, but yours is the only response to be posted so far. Your comment seems to hinge on the optimism/pessimism pair. I have often been called hopeful or optimistic, even once Dr. Pangloss. But I believe that hope is only worthwhile if it comes with a large dose of realism. We are or could be engaged in constructing paths from the actual to the possible, from the real to the imagined. I consider it a waste of time to try to predict the outcome of events like those the world is experiencing now and we are right to fear the worst.

But revolutions have one undeniable effect, whatever subsequently happens: they clarify the social forces opposed to each other in the present moment. Most of the time these are mixed up in a confused way, making it difficult to take sides meaningfully. It is hardly surprising that politicians and intellectuals should be slow to catch on during a popular uprising. A running joke (for me) is the preoccupation with leadership in contemporary discourse. The best leaders follow the people and give them back what they have done in inspiring words. Lenin arrived at the Finland station after the soviets had taken to the streets. He wrote later that until then he was just another bourgeois parliamentary politician (all that vanguard party stuff), even if an exiled one. But the soviets taught him what was possible and he followed them.

I was attacked for posting Obama’s Friday speech on Facebook, shown photos of him shaking hands with Mubarak and reminded of his complicity in the US’s brutal policy for the Middle East. Many American liberals have turned from being diappointed in him to hating him. But he is the same Obama as before, maybe just another Chicago pol who talks the talk and is as divided as most of us. It is one thing to run for office and make stump speeches, another to be the figurehead of the awesome American state. He was the latter at the beginning of the week and roused himself to be the former by the end of it. Both are him, but the actions of the Egyptian people provoked him to remember his human side. It is always possible to speak to the humanity in everyone and he did then, quite effectively in my view.

Of course the forces of darkness have their own tried methods for subverting popular dissent. I recall reading a letter sent by Smuts advising Lloyd-George on how to put down the Irish rebellion, drawing on South African experience. A British civil servant had scrawled on this “Who does this man think he is? We have been putting down revolutions in India for fifty years!” But the Irish won and so too did the Indians eventually. The rhetoric of established power always speaks of eternity and yes the bulk of intellectuals follow the power. Taking a historical view of this or any other revolution is not about predicting who will win. It is about finding a realistic foundation for joining others who are on the same side and doing whatever you can to promote its ends. That’s why I posted a mesage on nettime, not truly in hope, but you never know.

Apart from making the sides in a struggle clearer, revolutions also show up history in a new light. 1989 made 1917 current history and brought the whole twentieth century into play anew. The Egyptian revolution and its aftermath shows us the history of the last half-century or more in a new light. I had bits of it already, but I never before saw so vividly the parallels between British world dominance in the late 19th century and the US equivalent in the late 20th. The Anglo-Indian superstate was a transnational colossus linked by the Suez Canal from 1870, the same time that Queen Victoria was installed as Empress of India. All the other powers had to react to that: the Russians by invading Afghanaistan, the Germans by building a railway through Persia, the French by competing in Afica. The US-Middle Eastern superstate is not formal, but it is real enough. People write about the Israeli lobby in Washington, but it goes much further than that. And now Iraq is a garrison on the spot. No wonder Obama and Clinton hesitated. At least they didn’t say it was all over before it had properly begun.

My point is that Egypt is not a foreign land as far as Americans are concerned. They may not know it, but their country has included Egypt for over forty years. That makes the revolution internal to the United States. In 1870 17 out of 20 British civil servants lived in India. The Mills designed a blueprint for Oxbridge education with that staffing problem in mind. American involvement in the Middle East today is more remote, but no less integral to home institutions.

“I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. Yet, as you rightly point out, the America that we understand extends beyond the borders of the geographic America. What does this mean for the potential of a second American revolution? Where would it be triggered? Much as the Egyptian revolution was triggered by the events in Tunisia it is possible that America’s revolution would be triggered from a far-off land.”

Saul, Now that the Egyptian revolution is definite, we can pose your question in a new light. Everyone likens events there now to 1989, not least Obama, who also links Egypt to Gandhi, King and the Ghana revolution. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the second Russian revolution, could Tahrir Square be the beginning of the second American revolution? After all, it wasn’t Russians who started the former, but Germans and Czechs, the Eastern European victims of the Soviet empire.

We know that the American empire was launched by World War 2 and has gone through two phases since. The French called the first les trente glorieuses from 1945 to roughly 1975, which was the heyday of the Cold War, but also a period marked by a developmental state on both sides of the Cold War committed to expanding public services and the purchasing power of working people. It was also the time when European empire was abolished by the anti-colonial revolution. After the watershed of the 1970s, we went through three decades of what came to be known as neoliberal globalization in which the power of big money to organize the world for its own benefit was unfettered. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China, India and Brazil as economic powers and the digital revolution in communications speeded up the formation of world society under American hegemony, even as these developments undermined it. This ended with the financial crisis of 2008 and we are now in the uncharted waters of the third period which might take in a full-scale depression, world war, a global democratic revolution, the end of life on earth, who knows? Whatever happens, it will be different.

The second phase of the American empire was put in place during the energy crisis of the 1970s. The US economy depends on Middle East oil. Just as the British empire yoked England to India, the US and the Middle East are a single political entity. When the British and French made their botched attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, the Americans let them fail. First they built up Israel as their proxy in the region, a strategy that culminated in the six-day war of 1967. But the Egyptians and Syrians launched a surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 to which the US, fearful of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, brokered a negotiated settlement. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 in return for the Sinai peninsular and Israel kept Gaza on hold for a future Palestinian state. 1973 also saw the reinforcement of OPEC and a big oil price hike which brought the Saudis into the Middle Eastern settlement as the leaders of a new oil cartel. In the last decade we have seen the installation of US armed forces in Iraq, the second largest oil producer, and a protracted campaign in Afghanistan (Afpak) which has the advantage of diverting attention from the Middle East and of starting a shooting war at the intersection of China, India, Russia and the Muslim world.

It is clear that Obama/Clinton were under strong pressure at the start of the Egyptian protests (themselves a response to the Tunisian revolution, as you say) to support the status quo, that is Mubarak or a stooge from his circle. The house of cards built up in the Middle East was only apparently stable. The Israelis have been increasingly intransigent with impunity, since they could count on the US, Egypt and the Saudis to keep a lid on things, a certainty increased by the formation of Iraq as an American armed camp within the region and the demonization of Iran as the Shiite bogeyman with “nuclear” capacity. And political security led to the accumulation of massive personal fortunes by the ruling elites, mirroring the financial excesses of the credit boom everywhere. This cascading inequality became more acute after the crash of September 2008. Demand in the world economy took a big hit, despite the use of taxpayers’ money in the major capitalist countries to bail out the banks and flood asset markets (but not consumer demand) with hot money. This has cushioned the blow for the time being in America, Europe and Japan at the risk of a sovereign debt crisis, but in many parts of the world unemployment, food prices and energy costs have all risen, making the social legacy of neoliberalism intolerable to the better educated, wired youth whose families are suffering and who see no future for themsleves under the status quo.

There are many scenarios out of 11th February 2011, several of them extremely unpleasant. It is not likely that Americans themselves would take the lead in a world revolution which potentially removes the free credit that the dollar’s hegemony has guaranteed for decades. But if the situation escalates, as seems likely, Americans will find themselves involved in a shooting war on more fronts than they can imagine now, not just the Middle East. Obama at last found the words to say something he probably believes after the Egyptians threw out Mubarak all by themselves. The first American revolution provides the rhetoric and even the substance of the second. American society is Janus-faced, pulled between its heritage as the only genuinely democratic polity on the planet and the imperial plutocracy it has become since. It is already deeply divided, as has been noted by the media of late. But the causes of this division cannot be understood within the parochial limits of American society itself. Who knows what will happen inside America once the impact of the Egyptian revolution spreads?

The Russians dismantled their own coercive bureaucracy instantly and with almost no loss of life. I have always believed in the American people’s practical good sense and love of freedom. The last few decades have seen a massive deterioration in the quality of American public culture, but the United States is still the home of modern democracy and the class that controls politics and the media today will not easily survive the turmoil unleashed in the world from now on. We are witnessing the end of a social form that I call “national capitalsim”. It was lanched in the 1860s by a series of political revolutions of which the American civil war was the most decisive. I would not be surprised if a world revolution triggers serious conflict within the US too.

I have been blogging here for years about the possibility of us launching a third World War soon (see “Conversations with Abdul Aziz“). This is not inevitable, but it is more likely if we don’t even talk about it and have no means of heading it off. I am greatly heartened by the non-violent strategy of the Egyptian protesters and the ease with which seemingly solid power structures have melted away in North Africa, as in eastern Europe in 1989. It is interesting that both regions form the immediate periphery of Western Europe which is not in great shape itself right now. If we embrace the possibility of a global democratic revolution now, rather than after a world war, the direst scenarios may not come to pass.

In American Civilization, CLR James argued that there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. This conflict was most advanced in America. The struggle was for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals, he thought, were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness and critic standing unequivocally for truth had been seriously compromised. The absorption of the bulk of intellectuals as wage slaves and pensioners of academic bureaucracy not only removed their independence but separated their specialized activities from social life.

If the Egyptian revolution has done nothing else, it has issued a wake up call to intellectuals everywhere. It is not outlandish to suggest that this may be the beginning of the second American revolution that James predicted, just possibly the world’s last.

I vividly recall watching the events in Tiananmen Square on TV with an old West Indian revolutionary in his cramped Brixton bedsit. His name was C.L.R. James, it was April 1989 and he died the next month aged 88. Who can forget the Chinese man who stopped a line of tanks by running in front of them? We both felt that this was a historical turning point, as did the whole world. James thought that the Chinese government would probably succeed in putting down the student rebellion; but their protest coincided with an international meeting to which the Soviet leader, Gorbachev, came and CLR told me that Eastern Europe could never be held by the Soviet Union after this. It took a bit more than half a year for the East Germans to bring down the Wall.

James had long believed that there were only two world revolutions left — the second Russian revolution and the second American revolution. He embraced Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement as a harbinger of the first, but his keen sense of unfolding history saw Tiananmen Square as the tipping point. He didn’t live to see his prophecy realised. Perhaps radical regime change in the US would be the last world revolution, since world society as a whole is by now an American fiefdom.

C.L.R. James left his native Trinidad for London in 1932 as a sports writer with some published short fiction and a novel manuscript in his luggage. He was 31 years old and, after loitering in Bloomsbury for a while, he joined the famous cricketer, Learie Constantine, in Nelson, Lancashire, then known locally as ‘Little Moscow’ for its working class activism. There he read his first example of Marxist literature, Trostsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, before returning to London. By the time he left for the United States in 1938, he had become one of the leading Trotskyite spokesmen in Britain, the first black Caribbean writer to publish a novel there (Minty Alley), he got out a couple of pieces on West Indian self-government, wrote the first history of the Communist International (World Revolution), was employed by the Manchester Guardian as a cricket reporter, founded the panafricanist International Africa Service Bureau with his childhood friend George Padmore, involving also Jomo Kenyatta and later Kwame Nkrumah, wrote a London play with Paul Robeson as Toussaint L’Ouverture and published the definitive history of the Haitan revolution (The Black Jacobins) as well as a short history of black struggles for emancipation on both sides of the Atlantic over the previous 150 years (History of Negro Revolt).

According to James, the succesful Haitian slave revolt of 1791-1804 deserved to be seen as being equal in historical significance to the American and French revolutions; yet it had been almost buried from view. The slaves were in some ways the first moderns, uprooted from their origins and made to work in the most advanced form of industrial capitalism of the day, the sugar plantations of the French colony Saint-Domingue, under a system of violent racial domination. Having beaten the French, they fought off armies sent by the world’s great powers, just as Trotsky had to after the revolution of 1917. The British lost an army of 60,000 men in Haiti and the war against Napoleon was set back five years while they raised another one. This was also the heyday of the international movement to abolish slavery. The British prime minister, William Pitt, was persuaded by events in Haiti, coming so soon after American independence, to abolish the slave trade and turn the focus of the British empire from the New World to India.

James’s writing was not simply or even mainly an exercise in black pride. The Black Jacobins ended with reflections on the relevance of the Haitian revolution for the contemporary struggle for African independence from colonial rule. An impressive coalition had grown up in the first half of the twentieth century calling itself Panafricanism and drawing on all parts of the African continent, as well as the European homelands of colonial empire and the New World African diaspora created by the Atlantic slave trade. As a nationalist movement aiming to restore control of African land to Africans and fueled by the dream of a return from the New World, Panafricanism brought together more people from different places and languages than any other at the time or since. James placed himself squarely within this movement. He liked to say “I had a fair wind at my back, the anti-colonial movement”.

In the 1930s, very few people, whether European or African, believed that the colonial powers could be forced to leave soon. James’s political associates on the far left in Europe told him that African independence could only be granted by a successful workers’ revolution in the homelands of empire. He disagreed. What he took from the Haitian revolution was the view that racial domination, when combined with exposure to advanced forms of industrial capitalism, made for a potent revolutionary mixture. In the History of Negro Revolt he set out to describe and analyze the uprisings of Africans and people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic since the Haitian revolution. He showed that the main theatre of action in the 19th century was the New World, but for the last half century Africa had become the principal focus of conflict. He saw that the most promising movements were in the principal concentrations of industry — the South African gold mines, the dock workers in the Gold Coast, the Abba women’s riots in Eastern Nigeria over oil palm exports. Capitalist exploitation + racial inequality = revolution…and sooner than you think!

Well, the Second World War helped, but James was right and almost everyone else was wrong. The collapse of European empire in Africa lagged by only a decade behind its demise in Asia. It took a bit longer to displace the Portuguese and the Southern white settlers, but independence from British and French rule was an inescapable fact within two decades of James making his prediction. Like his Martinican counterpart in the Panafricanist movement, Frantz Fanon, James was quickly disillusioned with the path that African independence took, writing a highly critical account of his friend, Kwame Nkrumah’s turn towards nationalism (Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, compare the long central chapter on “the pitfalls of national consciousness” In Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth).

Egypt plays a pivotal role in all this when seen in a longer-term perspective. Africa is both a continental territory and the home of a race, the place where black people come from. And Eqypt’s relationship to a combination of both is highly contested. North Africa was part of the urban revolution that launched agrarian civilization five millennia ago, whereas most of the rest of Africa was not. My argument here is that this difference has been narrowed by the rapid urbanization of Africa south of the Sahara in the 20th century, leading to the installation there of variants of the Old Regime of preindustrial civilization. But then the whole attempt to separate Black Africa from Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral is an extension of the imperialist cultural logic which divided Western Europe from its neighbours by severing ancient Greece from its historical, geographical and cultural links with the Eastern Mediterranean, including crucially Egypt (see Martin Bernal’s Black Athena).

Many Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries believed that Eqypt was the original source of world civilization and the Afrocentrics (see Cheikh Anta Diop The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality) argue that Eqypt itself should be seen as part of black African civilization. Certainly, if the Sahara seems an obstacle to movement between the Mediterranean and West Africa, the same cannot be said of the East, where the Nile, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean coast have always linked Egypt with the peoples of Sudan, Ethiopia and East Africa and the wide savannah links East and West Africa. Egypt has long been a significant member of organizations defined by the African continent, ranging from the African Union to World Cup football. If Nasser made Egypt the main centre of Panarabism and the Arab-Israeli wars, followed by latterday demonization of Islam in the West (“the clash of civilizations”), have reinforced that perceived alignment, the importance of the North African revolutions for developments in Africa more generally should not be underestimated.

CLR James studied revolutions in history because he wanted to help make them. Right up to his death, he devoured biographies of the leading figures of the French revolution such as Danton. He used to say that in any country you will only find a handful of specialists in politics (including revolutionaries like him), maybe a few tens of thousands. These people dream about change and make plans for change all the time. Most people just want to keep what they have and that is a good thing, he said; life would be impossible without this inherent human conservatism. But “the revolution comes like a thief in the night” (Marx) when no-one is expecting it. Events move very quickly and many people soon discover that there is no going back, they may have already lost what they had or at least can no longer count on the status quo ante. Then something remarkable happens, he said: you may have seen a guy with an umbrella at the bus stop for years; he keeps his head down and says nothing; but now he turns up as a leading organizer of a street committee. Revolution revolutionizes people and everything becomes radically simplified at least for a time: freedom, dignity, democracy as universally shared goals, universal solidarity as a norm. At this time professional revolutionaries may have their uses.

In my next post, I will explore the specific implications of the North African revolutions for Africa. This may help me to define a number of senses that I bring to using the term “African revolution”.

Pioneering communications enterprises in Kenya and Ghana are beginning to attract notice from far afield for their exciting mix of local cultural resources and modern technologies. Mpesa is the world’s leading example of mobile phone banking and Ghana’s gross national product was recently increased by 75% through counting the telecoms sector, for example, which had been previously left out. The Nollywood phenomenon offers morality plays to African audiences at an affordable price. It is often under-estimated in part because Lagos and Nigeria are perceived as being chaotic. Yet in seventeenth-century London, while England was going through its political, commercial and scientific revolutions, herds of wild pigs savaged unwary pedestrians to death and the water supply was undrinkable. The development standard for Africa is set today by the bureaucratized societies of the West, by a type of anaesthetized experience that goes by the name of ‘world-class city’. But it may be that earlier phases of the West’s development offer Africans a more appropriate framework of comparison.

In the second chapter of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), ‘Spontaneity: its strengths and weaknesses’, Frantz Fanon provides an excellent blueprint of how to go about analyzing the class structure of decadent societies that are ripe for revolution, in his case the anti-colonial revolution. He points out that political parties and unions are weak and conservative in late colonial Africa because they represent a tiny part of the population: the industrial workers, civil servants, intellectuals and shopkeepers of the town, a class unwilling to jeopardize its own privileges. They are hostile to and suspicious of the mass of country people. The latter are governed by customary chiefs supervised in turn by the military and administrative officials of the occupying power. A nationalist middle class of professionals and traders runs up against the superstition and feudalism of the traditional authorities. Landless peasants move to the town where they form a lumpenproletariat. Eventually colonial repression forces the nationalists to flee the towns and take refuge with the peasantry. Only then, with the rural-urban split temporarily healed by crisis, does a mass nationalist movement take off. This compressed summary does not do Fanon’s analysis justice. I introduce it as an example of what must be done if we face up to the real possibilities for another African revolution now.

The African states brought into being by independence likewise rely on chiefs to keep the rural areas insulated from the more unruly currents of world society. Where the state’s writ has been fatally undermined, warlords take its place. Since the ‘structural adjustment’ policies of the 1980s, international agencies have systematically preferred to approach rural populations through NGOs, the missionaries of our age, rather than national governments. World trade is organized by and for an alliance of the strongest Western governments and corporations. Some of the latter, especially in remote extractive industries, operate as independent states with the state. The cities, massively expanded in size, still sustain a very small industrial proletariat, since mechanized production is poorly developed in post-colonial Africa. The civil servants have been ravaged as a class by neo-liberal pressure to cut public expenditures. This leaves us with the informal economy of unregulated urban commerce, a phenomenon that is not best summarized by the pejorative term, lumpenproletariat. Clearly, trade and finance are not organized, in Africa or in the world at large, with a view to liberating the potential of these classes. It is not likely, therefore, that a liberal revolution could succeed by relying solely on a popular economic movement from below. There are larger players on the scene and their influence too must surely be felt.

South Africa, the one African country to make a go of ‘national capitalism’ and probably the last, is well-placed to lead the next stage of African development as a whole. This reflects of course former President Mbeki’s vision of an African Renaissance. Since 1994, a new national bourgeoisie has begun to emerge there, consisting of old white capital, black politicians and Indian businessmen, linked to Asian and Western sources of capital and with a new opportunity to expand rapidly into their continental backyard. Capitalist development along these lines cannot remain for long satisfied with a political regime granting ultimate power to national sovereignties. Moreover, it is in South Africa’s interest for such expansion not to be seen in exclusively national terms. It should rather be represented, on an analogy with Prussia’s role in German unification, as a drive for African unity initially in a limited economic sense, led by the strongest black government with a Pan-African agenda. And indeed the two most significant continental institutions, the African Union in Addis Ababa and NEPAD (the UN funding body) in Johannesburg are beginning to talk about coordinating their functions. If Africans want to have a say in what happens to them next, they will have to tap old and new social forces to develop their own capacity for transnational association, in the face of the huge coalitions of imperial power mobilizing at this time to deny them that opportunity for self-expression.

Pan-Africanism gave way to the aspiration for national capitalism half a century ago because world society was not organized then to accommodate it. When the anti-apartheid movement led to African independence in South Africa, global thinking took second place to the non-racial nationalism that was always espoused by the ANC. But, as a result of neo-liberal globalization, one of the strongest political movements today is the formation of large regional trading blocs: the EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercosur. This is a good time for Africans to renew the movement towards greater continental unity, at first in economic affairs and as a complement to, not replacement for national governments, since the rest of the world is doing the same thing and they would inevitably lose out again if they fail to do so. If we needed any reminder of the contemporary salience of Pan-Africanism, we have only to note the USA’s recent formation of a unified African military command, with the aim of controlling access to mineral resources there in competition with China.

I have focused on the possibilities for dramatic developments in Africa since, it seems to me, so much thinking about the future there is timid, being limited to ambitions for reprising some earlier phase of the West’s economic history when the door is effectively closed to newcomers. Ideally such developments would be an expression of Africans’ drive from below for democracy and economic freedom; but it is unlikely to take place except within the framework of a revolution from above drawing on forces both external and internal to the continent. I have tried to draw attention here to scenarios that go beyond the limits of current conventional thinking. Africa could make rapid economic advances in the coming decades through a mixture of top down and bottom up forces. But this would require both a radical shift in development strategy and willingness to confront, by whatever combination of peaceful and violent means, the entrenched institutions of economic backwardness. Above all, it is vital for Africans to gain historical awareness of the global context for whatever they attempt locally and regionally. This perspective has largely been missing before.

Real economic progress requires us to go beyond merely documenting the scope of informal economic activities. We need to discover the social and cultural dynamism that underpins its most progressive clusters. What are the social forms that already organize the informal economy and how could their prospects for engaging fruitfully with the national, regional and global economy be enhanced in partnership with the regulatory agencies? Ongoing research into what we may call ‘the human economy’ or ‘economics with people in’ is indispensable to such a programme of development.

It was never the case that a national framework for development made sense in Africa, except possibly for South Africa, and it makes even less sense today. The coming African revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its path, but it will not do so by remaining tied to the national straitjacket worn by African societies since they won independence from colonial rule.

We all know of course that power is distributed very unequally in our world and any new liberal movement would soon run up against entrenched privilege. In fact, world society today resembles quite closely the Old Regime of agrarian civilization, as in eighteenth century England and France, with isolated elites enjoying a lifestyle wildly beyond the reach of masses who have almost nothing. It is not just in post-colonial Africa where the institutions of agrarian civilization rule today. Since the millennium, the United States, whose own liberal revolution once overcame the Old Regime of King George and the East India Company, seemed to have regressed to presidential despotism in the service of corporations like Haliburton.

It has long been acknowledged that the rise of capitalism in Europe drew heavily on religion as one of its motors. Max Weber insisted that an economic revolution of this scope could only take root on the back of a much broader cultural revolution. If Africa’s informal economy has the potential to evolve into a more dynamic engine of urban commerce, what might be the cultural grounds for such a development? As I said, whatever happens next must build on what has already been put in place. The basis for Africa’s future economic growth must be the cultural production of its cities and not rural extraction or the reactionary hope of reproducing capitalism’s industrial phase. This in turn rests on:

1. The energy of youth and women

2. The religious revival

3. The explosion of the modern arts

4. The communications revolution

5. The new African diaspora linked to sub-national identities

I can only sketch an outline of what is a book-length argument.

1. African societies, traditional and modern, have been dominated by older men. Women have benefited less from their opportunities and are less tied to their burdens. In many cases they have been quicker to exploit the commercial freedoms of the neo-liberal international economy. Even when men and boys have plunged whole countries into civil war, thereby removing state guarantees from economic life, an informal economy resting on women’s trade has often kept open basic supply lines. The social reality of Africa’s cities is a young population without enough to do and a growing generation gap. The energies of youth must be harnessed more effectively and the chances of doing so are greater if the focus of economic development is on something that interests them, like popular culture.

2. The religious revival in Africa, both Christian and Muslim, is a matter of immense significance for the forms of economic development. This is in many cases founded on young people’s rejection of the social models and political options offered by their parents’ generation. Fundamentalist and less extreme varieties of religion make a different kind of connection to world society than that offered by the nation-state, based on the assumption of American dominance or its opposite. They help to fill the moral void of contemporary politics and often offer well-tried recipes for creative economic organization (e.g. the Mourides of Senegal, see below). Christian churches are usually organized and supported by women, even if their leadership is often male.

3. In all the talk of poverty, war and AIDS, the western media rarely report the extraordinary vitality of the modern arts in post-colonial Africa: novels, films, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance and their applications in commercial design. There has been an artistic explosion in the last half-century, drawing on traditional sources, but also responding to the complexity of the contemporary world. One recent example is the ‘Africa Remix’ exhibition that toured Europe and Japan, a hundred installations from Johannesburg to Cairo, showing the modernity of contemporary African art. The African novel, along with comparable regions like India, leads the world. I have already referred to the creativity of the film industry.

4. Africa largely missed the first two phases of the machine revolution, based on the steam engine and electricity; but the third phase, the digital revolution in communications whose most tangible product is the internet, the network of networks, offers Africans very different conditions of participation that they already show signs of taking up avidly. In origin a means of communication for scientists and the military, the internet is now primarily a global marketplace with very unusual characteristics. Like the informal economy, it goes largely unregulated; but this market freedom is harnessed to the most advanced technologies of our era. The internet has also generated new conditions for managing networks spanning home and abroad by radically shortening the time and space dimensions of communication and exchange at distance. The extraordinarily rapid adoption of mobile phones has made Africa a crucible for global innovations, such as the first multi-country network and use of phones for banking purposes in East Africa. Nor should we neglect the role of television as a transnational means of widening perceptions of community.

5. In the last half-century a new African diaspora has emerged, based unlike that formed by Atlantic slavery on economic migration to America, Europe and nowadays Asia. These migrants are usually known away from home by their national identity, but many of them by-pass the national level when maintaining close relationships with their specific region of origin. They are often highly educated, with experience of the corporate business world, while retaining links to relatives living and working in the informal economy at home. One consequence of neo-liberal reforms has been that transnational exchange is now much easier than it was, drawing at once on indigenous knowledge of local conditions and the expertise acquired by migrants and their families in the West. Remittances from abroad are of immense importance everywhere, but they are bound to play a major role in Africa’s economic future.

It is a curious fact that China occupied a similar slot in western consciousness not long ago. In the 1920s and 30s, Americans and Europeans often spoke of the Chinese the way they do of Africa today. China was then crippled by the violence of warlords, its peasants mired in the worst poverty imaginable. Today the country is spoken of as the only one capable of standing up to the United States, while its manufactures make inroads into western dominance on a scale far greater than Japan’s ever did. This profound shift in economic power from West to East does not guarantee Africa’s escape from the shackles of inequality, but it does mean that structures of Atlantic dominance which once seemed inevitable are perceptibly on the move; and that should make it easier to envisage change. We are entering a new phase of economic possibility, as well as altered patterns of constraint in world society.

Africa’s advantage in current upheavals is its weak attachment to the status quo. The world economy could easily regress to a condition similar to that of the 1930s. In this case, Africans have less to lose; and the old Stalinist ‘law of unequal development’ reminds us that, under such circumstances, winners and losers can easily change places. I like to tell my European friends who express concern about African poverty, “Don’t worry about them – they have only one way to go, which is up. You should be worried about your own decline.” This applies particularly to my own country, Britain, for whom postponing recognition of the loss of empire has become a way of life in itself. A recent poll reported that Africa has a higher proportion of hopeful people than anywhere else in the world, 30% if I recall. The New York Times couldn’t understand how this could be so, since everyone knows that Africa is the most hopeless place on earth. The idea of Africa as a basket case goes very deep.

To speak of a possible economic upturn begs the question of what Africa’s new urban populations could produce as a means of bringing about their own economic development. So far, African countries have relied on exporting raw materials, when they could. Minerals clearly have a promising future owing to scarce supplies and escalating demand; but the world market for food and other agricultural products is skewed by western farm subsidies and prices are further depressed by the large number of poor farmers seeking entry. Conventionally, African governments have aspired to manufacturing exports as an alternative, but here they face intense competition from Asia. It would be more fruitful for African countries to argue collectively in the councils of world trade for some protection from international dumping, so that their farmers and infant industries might at least get a chance to supply their own populations first. But the world market for services is booming and perhaps greater opportunities for supplying national, regional and global markets exist there.

There was a time when most services were performed personally on the spot; but today, as a result of the digital revolution in communications, they increasingly link producers and consumers at distance. The fastest-growing sector of world trade is the production of culture: entertainment, education, media, software and a wide range of information services. The future of the human economy, once certain material requirements are satisfied, lies in the infinite scope for us to do things for each other — like singing songs or telling stories — that need not take a tangible form. The largest global television audiences are for sporting events like the World Cup or the Olympic Games. The United States’ three leading exports are now movies, music and software; and this is why they have sponsored an intellectual property treaty (TRIPs) that seeks to shore up the profits of corporations whose products can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost. The central conflict in contemporary capitalism is between this attempt to privatize the cultural commons and widespread popular resistance to it. Any move to enter this market will be confronted by transnational corporations and the governments who support them. Nevertheless, there is a lot more to play for here and the terrain is not as rigidly mapped out as in agriculture and manufactures. It is also one where Africans are exceptionally well-placed to compete because of the proven preference of global audiences for their music and plastic arts.

Why do you think Hollywood is where it is? A century ago, film-makers on the East Coast struggled under Thomas Edison’s monopolies of electrical products; so some of them escaped to the Far West and kicked off the movie industry with as little regulation as possible. For his first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Walt Disney ripped off a Buster Keaton movie, ‘Steamboat Willie’. Now the Disney Corporation sues Chinese cartoonists for illegal appropriation of the Mickey Mouse logo. Did you know that the world’s second largest producer of movies, after Hollywood and before Bollywood, is Lagos in Nigeria (‘Nollywood’)? Most of their movies cost no more than $5,000, a pattern reminiscent of Hollywood when W.G. Griffith was king. American popular culture is still that country’s most successful export. There is no reason why it couldn’t be for Africans too.

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 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.

The Manchester anthropologists (Max Gluckman, Bill Epstein, Clyde Mitchell and others) insisted strongly that this normative division was false. An African living in the town was a townsman with urban associations and relations, not a displaced villager. Class politics mattered more than race or traditional culture. This stereotype had been challenged, for example by Philip Mayer working in Port Elizabeth, South Africa; and some West African anthropologists like Michael Banton and Kenneth Little had pointed to very different conditions in that region. But still the Manchester paradigm of “African urbanization” was dominant.

West African cities, by contrast, were built and supplied by Africans who moved freely between them and the countryside. White settlers were largely absent and mines were a relatively small part of the regional economy. A tiny colonial administration relied heavily on self-organized rural regimes for government. Commerce was controlled by European merchants, but their Lebanese counterparts were quite successful in inserting themselves into the import/export trade. The most significant export commodities — cocoa in the Gold Coast (later Ghana) and groundnuts in N. Nigeria and Senegal — were almost exclusively in indigenous hands. This meant that West Africans, even when there were few earlier precedents for urban settlement, largely built these cities, supplying them with housing, transport, food, infrastructure and a wide variety of commercial services including marketplaces where indigenous traders (often women) predominated. Understanding this is a valuable corrective to the implicit notion that anything modern must have been introduced by whites in Africa.

I discovered quite soon that most West Africans could not plan to spend their lives in the city or to treat those lives as being exclusively urban. They tended to grow up in the countryside and, even if they found urban employment, needed rural kin for food supplies and help with marriage, to raise and educate some of their children and to provide support in the event of sickness or worse. It was unsurprising therefore that the migrant workers I knew expected to retire back home. One of my first published papers emphasized how ethnic identity was reinforced by these life cycle considerations, with marriages and funerals as the principal focus of social life in the city. I came to see rural and urban areas as a single field traversed by social networks in all directions. In retrospect, this was a vision of society as essentially translocal, an anticipation of globalisation as it later unfolded, but here mainly within the boundaries of the new nation-state.

I have mentioned that I was never able to complete a monograph based on my urban ethnography. Bizarrely, the only book I produced based on my West African research was The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (1982), a historical survey of the literature originally commissioned by USAID. There are no living people in this account and I probably wouldn’t recognize a millet stalk if it hit me in the face, so my treatment of agriculture is rather abstract. I concluded that the concentration of economic resources by political means in a few primate cities would lead to disaster unless backward agriculture or some other sector generated modern machine capitalism. At much the same time, a friend of mine, Paul Richards was writing Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (1985) based on his ethnography of small farmers in Sierra Leone. he was rightly contemptuous of my ignorance concerning farmers, but my historical analysis proved to be more prophetic than his celebration of their ingenuity. In the course of writing the book, I learned one thing that might help to explain my failure to write an urban ehngoraphy. It now seemed to me that West African cities were not distinctive from the surrounding countryside, but were rather extensions of long-established agrarian societies.

When I graduated to the field of development studies, the picture of West Africa’s cities was just as distorted as one you might get from boorowing a Manchester school perspective. Here the emphasis of the economists was on the new states’ ability to pursue a neo-Keynesian development program. How could ‘we’ (the politicians, bureaucrats and their academic advisers) provide the jobs and other needs of the hordes flocking into the cities at the time? It was assumed that such provision had to come through the bureaucracy and conform to state-made laws. My paper on ‘informal income opportunities and urban employment’ pointed to the wide range of economic activities that were invisible to bureacracy. But even I saw them through a statist lens (“seeing like a state”), hence the term ‘informal’, not regulated by the bureaucracy. At that time I assumed that the bulk of economic progress must come though public and private sector enterprise of a corporate type.

The informal economy was never adequately described or defined, but these days it is commonplace to read assertions that African economies are 70-90% ‘informal’. Certainly the deregulation undertaken over the last three decades of neoliberal economic policies have led to a radical informalization of the world economy, not least in Africa. But to label these activities ‘informal’ is to avoid identifying what they are positively for or how they are organized, by which social principles.

I would say that the last half-century has seen a massive transfer of population to the cities, where most people have been left to generate their own forms of commerce. The informal economy in this sense has been a holding operation allowing many people to survive in the city and some to flourish. Whatever is coming up next will draw to some extent on this sprawling self-organized economic activity. Our task is to find out more about the promising sectors spawned by such a development.

When I started planning this book three years ago, I wrote an unbuttoned personal account of that fieldwork called Africa on my mind. Maybe something like it will find a place in the present version. Maybe not. But the point of this post is to trace how the idea of an ‘informal economy’ grew out of that ethnographic fieldwork. Forty years later, it seems to me that the concept stands in the way of understanding how Africa’s unregulated urban commerce might generate sustained development in the coming half-century.

I went to Ghana to study the transformation of rural-urban migrants into citizens by means of political parties, voluntary associations and public education. This was a time, the mid-60s, when western youth looked to the leaders of the anti-colonial revolution for political inspiration. In any case, Ghana was a police state and no-one wanted to talk about politics, even less do any publicly. On the other hand, in Nima where I chose to live, the streets were humming with freelance economic activity. So I decided to study that. When I returned to Cambridge, I was introduced to the American sociologist, Edward Shils, and he said “Ah, the Mayhew of Accra!”. I hadn’t heard of Henry Mayhew, but I soon found out. In fact I hadn’t read much at all, but I had a strong belief in the originality of my discoveries.

The people I chose to study included the Tallensi, made famous by their ethnographer, Meyer Fortes. He wanted me to stay on in Cambridge after my PhD, but I was reluctant to get drawn into the local coterie of Ghanaiologists. I felt that I knew Accra’s street economy as well as or better than the people themselves. But I was as ignorant as them about why the great events of the last couple of years had happened — the collapse of the world cocoa price, the consequent shortages, the military coup that ousted President Kwame Nkrumah, in short the beginning of a catastrophic economic downturn that lasted a quarter century or more.

Ghanaians bought large amounts of cloth from Manchester, my home town, but I had no idea how that came about. The world of ‘development’ that succeeded colonial empire was more or less a closed book to me. I knew that the historical political economy of West Africa’s situation a decade after independence could not be grasped by hanging out in bars or by reading anthropologists’ rather abstracted monographs. So I applied for and got a job in East Anglia’s Overseas Development Group which specialised in consultancy. My idea was to carry out ethnographic research at the level of states and international agencies and, from this beginning, I did just that over the next decade while I was failing to produce a fieldwork-based monograph.

This required me to talk to my colleagues, most of whom were economists. Our exchanges would go something like this:

Economist: Is the marginal productivity of agricultural labour zero in Northern Ghana?
KH: What does that mean?
E: I am thinking of Lewis’s dualistic theory of labour migration between traditional and modern sectors. It is assumed that people could leave the former without reducing total output there.
K: Does it make any difference what income they get from working in agriculture?
E: What do you mean?
K: Well, most of the farm work is done by young men, but their elders control the distribution of the product. So, if they leave to work in the towns, whatever they get there is their own and more than what they have at home.
E: What do you call that kind of organization?
K: Lineages or unilineal descent groups. A French Marxist, Pierre-Philippe Rey has written about the ‘lineage mode of production’ in West Africa.
E: And you say economists like jargon too much! There is a new version of the Lewis model by Harris and Todaro that hinges on rural-urban income expectations.
K: Maybe we should collaborate on an article, ‘The lineage mode of distribution: a reflection on the Lewis model’…

In this and other ways, I learned that I could make a satisfactory academic living by acting as a broker from anthropology to economics and back again. But I wanted to change both disciplines by synthesizing them. I realised that I would have to learn to communicate in the economists’ language, since they were professionally dominant in the field of development. So for three years I worked part-time as a journalist for The Economist, producing reports of West Africa. Through this work, I learned what I call ‘economese’ – how to sound like an economist without any formal training in the discipline.

This served me well, when I launched what became the concept of the informal economy in 1971-73 (the complicated story of this launch appears in several of my essays listed here under The African revolution). My original paper had two parts: the first was a vividly written ethnographic account of life in an Accra slum (I have been there and you haven’t); the second drew on my conversations with economist colleagues to present my argument in terms they could understand. What more can I say about the informal economy here? I was reluctant to accept that this would be my best-known contribution to the study of development. But it is and probably always will be.

I knew that I had sacrificed a lot of what I learned thrugh particiapnt observation to make an impact on the policy-makers. People’s lives were subsumed under huge collective abstractions. Now I want to return to that level of concreteness within a bigger picture than I was capable of at the beginning. In that sense, this is the book of my fieldwork long ago, but there won’t be much detail visible to readers since I have a lot of ground to cover.