Category: APE
When I started out in the 1960s, most of what anthropologists’ knew about African cities came from the Manchester school who worked in Central/Southern Africa, mainly in Northern Rhodesia (which became Zambia and was best known for the Copperbelt). Cities in this region had been largely built and were controlled by white settler regimes. The […]
There is no doubt that my life was transformed by the two and a half years I spent in Ghana, 1965-68, much of it doing ‘fieldwork’ in a slum of the capital city Accra. Writing a doctoral thesis was straightforward enough, although I felt I had to disguise my own participation in what I described. […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some general and personal considerations 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 […]
The problem 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 […]
The development of capitalism No-one can deny that the human presence on our planet has undergone remarkable development in the last two centuries. In 1800 the world’s population was around one billion. It had grown slowly over the previous 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture. Cipolla (1968) estimates that births regularly exceeded deaths by […]
We are all part of a long struggle between inequality and democracy. They are each other’s opposite. If the democratic goal is for the people most affected by decisions to have the biggest say in their making, this becomes impossible when the resources that they bring to the process are vastly unequal. In the twentieth […]
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.
