This one is longer than usual, but it does contain the foundation of my book’s argument concerning how Africa arrived at the 21st century. In the spirit of blogging, I link it here to a piece in today’s FT by the Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim on the implications of his country’s impending breakup for Africa’s economic integration. He and I agree that such integration is indispensable to the continent’s development, but the breakup of dysfunctional nation-states may not be an impediment to that.
Africa has become poorer in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated continent around 1900, Africa’s seventh of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average of around 50%. We need to understand this ‘urban revolution’ of unprecedented speed and scale; and specifically to identify how Africa’s urban economies might act as a springboard for economic development in the coming century. The continent is divided into three disparate regions — North, South and Middle (West, Central and East Africa); but a measure of convergence between them is now taking place. Continue reading ‘Africa’s urban revolution in the 20th century’ »
Today’s Financial Times has a global economic analysis of considerable historical vision by Martin Wolf. He takes his key terms from Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). Pomeranz argued that a major gap between China and the West opened up in the late 18th century. Certainly Adam Smith was impressed by the size and development of China’s economy around that time. Some put the divergence earlier. But everyone agrees that it became more marked in the 19th century after the industrial revolution and exploded in the decades leading up to the First World War. Wolf’s thesis is that the best way to understand the world economy today is as a convergence between the leading Asian economies and those of the West, a process that is taking place even more rapidly than the divergence that preceded it. Continue reading ‘Africa in a convergent multi-polar world’ »
Not long ago the same Polity Press that asked me to review Négrologie and contracted me to write my own book sent me another French book on Africa for possible translation, Le Temps de l’Afrique by Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray. Severino was until recently Director-General of the French Development Agency. My review was positive and a translation will be published in August 2011 as Africa’s Moment.
Severino and Ray take off not from Africa dying but from its extraordinary population growth and the development implications of this. The latest projections put Africa’s population at close to 2 billion in 2050 or a quarter of humanity. They say with justice that Europeans (and North Americans too) are blind to what is going on in Africa. They are wedded to a retrograde vision of its past and know nothing of its present, even less of its future. There has never been anything quite like this book, in France or the Anglophone world. Continue reading ‘Full circle: Africa’s moment has come’ »
I live in Paris and for a long time I have reviewed French books for possible translation by British publishers. One of them was Stephen Smith’s Négrologie: pourquoi l’Afrique meurt for Polity Press in 2005. Smith’s book won public acclaim in France, as well as provoking an angry response in the form of the book Négrophobie, for example. Here are some excerpts from my report.
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Stephen Smith is a journalist who knows Africa very well, has worked of late for Le Monde and has published several books. His subject is nothing less than the death of Africa. We all know that much of Africa is in a terrible mess. But Smith feels that this is obscured by a conspiracy to celebrate the native qualities of black Africans. And, in order to gain attention for his thesis, he paints it in exaggerated terms – Africa is committing suicide with the assistance of those who perpetuate the myth of a black essentialism. Continue reading ‘The beginning: Négrologie’ »
The Memory Bank has never truly been a blog. Its purpose has always been self-publishing, the first place to put my papers and videos, and where from the beginning I made my book of the same name available.
Now I have decided to blog about a book I want to write in the coming months. It’s working title is Africa’s Urban Revolution. It is about what happened in Africa during the twentieth century (as opposed to what didn’t happen — ‘development’) and the prospects for significant economic improvement in the next half-century. It is about Africa’s place in world history and its relationship to the shift of economic power from West to East. This book has been brewing for over four decades since my first and only prolonged fieldwork experience in the slums of Accra. It is thus about building a vision of world history out of ethnography.
I announced this book four years ago. It was then called The African Revolution. There are some thirty posts listed here under that category for anyone interested in exploring the prehistory of this moment.
I hope to post 3-5 times a week until I am done. What I plan is a counter to Afro-pessimism, not exactly Afro-optimism, but on that end of the spectrum.
Just as the institution of slavery sharpens the political concept of the free citizen by means of contrast (Finley “Between slavery and freedom”), the idea of emancipation suggests a moment of transition to freedom from its antithesis. The abolition movement in the 19th century was a dramatic expression of the universal desire to end an old regime founded on varieties of unfreedom, of which chattel slavery was the most extreme form. Contemplation of the region that supplied most of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, West Africa, is salutary for a number of reasons. First, the most articulate voices on the subject have usually come from elsewhere. Second, slavery within West Africa itself does not afford the perspective of a clearcut contrast between free and unfree labour. Third, the experience of emancipation there was contradictory and delayed. Finally, the subsequent history of the region – colonial rule and postcolonial failure – leaves West Africans with little reason to celebrate the abolition of slavery as a gateway to the political freedoms of the modern world. Continue reading ‘Waiting for emancipation: between slavery and freedom in West Africa’ »
The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani Editors, to be published soon by Polity, Cambridge) is the first expression in English of a project that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Much of this theoretical and practical work is unknown in the English-speaking world. There has been a series of publications: Brazil, Argentina, France (with support from Belgium and Quebec), Italy, Portugal and now Britain, with a mix of academic researchers, political activists and social networks (both national and international). Our authors are drawn from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Peru, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States. Maybe Asia next?
The human economy is not a dream. It exists theoretically and practically, but it has been obscured by the economic models and approaches that dominate the media and universities. There are five sections: ‘World society’, ‘Economics with a human face’, ‘Moral politics’, ‘Beyond market and state’ (social economy), ‘New directions’. The movement is from our common predicament in today’s world, through the human economy as a moral and political project, to attempts to build a new institutional synthesis in practice, while always being open to imagining a better world in future. Continue reading ‘Building the human economy’ »
Global Studio (established 2005) is a place based action research program where international students, academics and professionals come together with local universities, local government , NGOs and CBOs to collaborate with disadvantaged communities.
GS grew out of the work of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers (2002-04) with founding partners University of Sydney, Columbia and Rome. Over the past three years (mainly) architects, planners, urban designer, landscape architects, film makers and industrial designers have worked with community groups in the Johannesburg township of Diepsloot.
The recently uploaded film, Diep Salute, profiles Diepsloot township hip hop artists, made with the aim of also promoting community development and job creation through the arts.
Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. This was symbolized by several moments, such as when the 60s space race allowed us to see the earth from the outside or when the internet went public in the 90s, announcing the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital revolution of communications. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, perhaps even a federal world government, is an urgent one.
The failure of the New York investment bank, Lehman Brothers, in September 2008 triggered a financial collapse whose ramifications are still with us. Predictions of the outcome of the ensuing global economic crisis vary widely. Following a sustained equities rally in mid-2009, some commentators now argue that the recession following Lehman’s demise is already over and the free market ready to assume its inexorable rise, while others talk of a double dip recession, persisting debt deflation and a recovery that could take 25 years. Continue reading ‘A human economy for the twenty-first century’ »
In Architects of Poverty (2009), Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of the recently deposed President, asks why Africans remain so poor compared with the rest of the world. He blames African political elites which from the days of slavery have enriched themselves at the expense of their own people by serving the interests of foreign powers whose only concern is to exploit their countries’ human and natural resources. National politicians today continue this process of accumulation without development throughout Africa. He includes South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government in this critique, claiming that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), the enrichment of a few black individuals with the right political connections, is similarly a pay-off by the white-controlled corporations of the ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’ for adopting economic policies favourable to their interests at the expense of those of the black masses.
Mbeki claims that the ANC was always marginal to the struggle against apartheid within South Africa itself and now relies on powerful paymasters for its ability to rule. The industrial economy launched by Afrikaner nationalists in mid-century has been run down over the last two decades and most South Africans remain poor, without meaningful jobs or the skills to better themselves. This economic strategy is going nowhere, he says, and it has already begun to provoke widespread unrest. Switching leaders from his brother to Jacob Zuma is merely cosmetic. The ANC remains what it always was, an African nationalist elite clinging to power without any programme for an economy capable of advancing the poor majority of citizens. Continue reading ‘South Africa needs Africa’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
