APY2613/501/3/2018

Tutorial Letter 501/3/2018

Anthropology in an African Context

APY2613

Semesters 1 and 2

Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Please activate your myUnisa account and myLife e-mail address and ensure that you have regular

access to the myUnisa module site APY2613-18-S1 or APY2613-18-S2; depending on which

semester you are registered in, as well as your group site.

BARCODE

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Department of

Anthropology and Archaeology

Anthropology in an African Context

Official Study Material for APY2613

Compiled by

Stephan van Wyk

University of South Africa, Pretoria

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CONTENTS

Administrative matters Anthropology in an African Context (APY2613) 4

APY2613 as an online module 6

Time Management for APY2613 7

Outcomes and Assessment Criteria for APY2613 8

Some Frequently Asked Question 9

Closing Remarks 10

Theme 1: Colonialism, Missionaries, Early Anthropology and

Southern Africa Unit 1: Africa in Context – Four Concepts of Africa, Fourie (2015) 11

Unit 2: Anthropology and Colonialism, Asad (1991) 30

Unit 3: Missionary Work in Southern Africa, Junod and Early Anthropology 32

Theme 2: Anthropology in an Africa Context Unit 1: Origins of ‘Modern’ Anthropology and Debate on Anthropology in Africa 51

Unit 2: The Ideology of Tribalism, Mafeje (1971) 68

Theme 3: Africa and Development Unit 1: African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies, Austin (2010) 78

Unit 2: Decommodifying Electricity in Postapartheid Johannesburg, Bond & McInnes (2007) 103

Theme 4: Africa and Maps Unit 1: Real Size of Africa, Creighton (2015) 126

Unit 2: Imperialism, colonialism and cartography, Stone (1987) 130

Unit 3: The Anthropology of Cartography, Wood (2012) 139

Theme 5: Land Ownership in Southern Africa Unit 1: The Empty Land Myth 152

Unit 2: The Effects of Land Dispossession 159

Unit 3: How to do Things with Land, Ferguson (2013) 172

Theme 6: Africa and the 21st Century Unit 1: State, Region and Revolution in African Development, Hart (2013) 182

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Administrative Matters Anthropology in an African Context (APY2613)

Figure 1: Example of APY2613 myUnisa opening page

Welcome. I am Mr Stephan van Wyk, your lecturer for this module of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology.

For a long period of time Africa has been studied by anthropologists who mainly come from a Western background. This is largely because Africa was colonised by Western powers, specifically those located in Europe, and it was seen as “backwards” by those powers. Although colonialism has been ended formally there are academics who claim the effects of colonialism linger, both in everyday society as well as within the academy.

The starting point for this course is a debate that started in the early 1970s between African intellectuals and European/Western anthropologists about the nature of anthropological research in Africa. By taking stock of this debate, this course asks what an ‘Anthropology of Africa’ might be. The course focus on Africa as a whole but some particular materials from South/Southern Africa is also incorporated.

The course materials consist of six themes in total. Theme 1 will set the context within which the course takes place. This entails that you will mainly learn about certain historical matters regarding colonialism and Africa. It is unlikely that you will be heavily tested on this but it forms a significant part of the course. Theme 2 will cover the academic debate outlined about by looking at some of the main contributors between the 1970 and the early 2010s. Themes 3 – 6 will cover some material of what might form part of an ‘Anthropology of Africa’, although what is covered is not considered exhaustive. Theme 3 will look at the history of capitalism in Africa and pay particular

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attention of the concept of ‘development’. Theme 4 is an interesting theme that looks at the role of maps and how we understand spatiality in that regard. Theme 5 is on questions about land ownership and the history thereof. This theme is about Southern Africa in particular and ethnographic examples of land dispossession is used extensively. Theme 6 is about Africa and the 21st century, and looks how we might ‘think forward’ regarding Africa’s place in the world.

This is an online module where all the assessments for the course takes place on myUnisa. A print version of the study material and the Tutorial Letter 101 will be sent to you in the post. Please take your time to familiarise yourself with the APY2613 myUnisa site once you are registered. The site will provide extensive support to you. In particular, the FAQs tab/tool will cover most basic questions you might have. This module also makes extensive use of the e-Tutor groups. A few weeks into the module each of you will be assigned to an e-Tutor group which is headed by a dedicated e-Tutor. These e-Tutors work semi independently and are there to provide you with direct assistance during the semester. Their contact details will be made available to you and they will be responsible for holding regular online discussions on topics related to the course. They will also be responsible for marking your written work during this semester and as such it is vital that you ensure you understand what your e-Tutor requires of you.

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APY2613 as an Online Module

Unlike many other modules currently taught at Unisa, APY2613 is an online module. All of the assessments for the module takes place on the APY2613 myUnisa site. This counts for the assignments as well as the ‘exam’. This does not mean you have to be online continually, but you will have to be online to submit your work.

Extensive support structures for APY2613 are also available on myUnisa. Once you are registered for the course you should log onto myUnisa and go to the APY2613 main site and take the time to familiarise yourself with it.

As mentioned in the previous section, this module make extensive use of the e-Tutor groups. These e-Tutors will be available to you for direct support with the content of the module throughout the semester. Some of the assessments will also take place in your e-Tutor group during the semester.

The red block below is an example of what the main APY2613 site tab will look like on myUnisa:

Figure 2: Example of how to access main APY2613 site

Please note that there is a difference between the main site and the sites for the e-Tutor groups. The red block below shows an example of what your e-Tutor group might look like compared to the main site:

Figure 3: Example of how to access APY2613 e-Tutor group site

Throughout the semester communication will take place with you via the Announcements tab/tool on myUnisa. The announcements that are made with this tool will be sent to your myLife email address and the e-Tutors will likely make use of this function on their e-Tutor groups as well.

In the above light you MUST activate your myLife email account that is provided to you by the University of South Africa. The university is increasingly making use of emails and as such it is an important part of studying at the university.

During the semester a number of materials regarding the assignments and the ‘exam’ will be made available to you in the Additional Resources tab/tool. Included in these will be copies of the assignments to work offline, feedback on the assignments and information regarding the ‘exam’.

The ‘exam’ for this module also takes place on myUnisa. At the end of the semester information regarding this ‘exam’ will be made available to you so that you can complete the module successfully.

Please read through the Tutorial Letter 101 for more information regarding how this module functions. Also have a look at the FAQs section on the APY2613 main site for important information.

Your myUnisa and myLife accounts can be set up via the myUnisa site:

http://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/myunisa/default/

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Time Management for APY2613

Based on the comments from some students in the past, this module is quite ‘weighty’ and requires you to work hard during the semester. This is not an accident and the module is specifically intended to hone academic competencies on reading, reasoning and writing. In this light you should ensure that you plan your semester well so that you are able to meet the requirements of this module along with the other obligations you have in your life. It helps to set up a schedule where you list the due dates of your assignments for all your modules. The due dates for APY2613 is available in the Tutorial Letter 101 and will also be available on myUnisa (the most up to date information will always be available on myUnisa).

The short list below may be of assistance to you:

Browse through the module site

Take time to browse through the module site and familiarise yourself with the requirements for and demands of the module. This will enable you to see the “big picture” of the whole module. The FAQs tab/tool (on the navigation bar of the module site) is a valuable resource and could be a useful starting point. Evaluate the demands, opportunities and challenges of your personal circumstances and determine how they relate to the assignment due dates and the other relevant learning activities you need to attend to. It may be a good idea to enter these dates in your personal diary immediately.

Compile a personal study timetable

Decide on strategies for planning ahead and compile your personal study timetable. We recommend being disciplined in keeping to your schedule. Perhaps you could start with some preliminary reading and by sourcing the recommended material. The amount of information presented on the module site and the number of assignments to be completed may seem overwhelming at first, but don’t be disheartened!

Approach your studies systematically

Work your way systematically through the study themes, reflective questions and the assignments based on them. Make sure that you meet all the requirements for the learning activities. Use the learning outcomes and assessment criteria and the supporting materials to give you a foundation for the knowledge and skills you need to develop. To help you approach your studies with more confidence, browse through the APY2613 module site and acquaint yourself with how the module operates. Read through the FAQs tool/tab and see how the lecturer will assist you during the semester. The study themes for this module each have a certain coherence and are designed in such a way that deep learning can take place.

Contact your lecturer

Do not hesitate to contact your lecturer if you experience any difficulties with any aspect of the module. You can contact your lecturer either via e-mail, telephone or the Discussion Forums tab/tool on myUnisa. The contact details are available on the Home page of the APY2613 module site.

Contact your peers Please make regular contact with your peers (via your e-Tutor group in the Discussions tab/tool). Engage with your fellow students to clarify and broaden your understanding of challenging concepts and themes. You will find that participating in discussions and continuously reflecting on your learning will help you to expand your knowledge base and develop new skills that you can apply in the workplace. Most students find these discussions (either lecturer directed or with fellow students) extremely useful when preparing their assignments.

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Outcomes and Assessment Criteria for APY2613

Outcomes

Assessment criteria

Students will develop an awareness and thereafter analyse the historical development and contemporary use of commonly accepted social categories such as gender, sexuality, race and class within an African context.

Students will be regarded as competent when they

1. can accurately identify appropriate and relevant literature sources to and supplement their understanding of social constructs such as gender or race

2. demonstrate an understanding of the origins of gender, sexuality, race and class as they are commonly understood and acted out in daily life

3. can analyse case studies showing evidence of a critical understanding of academic arguments

4. are able to compare, contrast and form a coherent synthesis of the historical development of class, race and sexuality

Students will be able to apply the anthropological approach to analyse the relationship between daily contemporary life (the “micro”) and larger social processes over which people don’t have control (the “macro”).

Students will be regarded as competent when they

1. can demonstrate an understanding of the anthropological approach 2. can interpret ethnographic material with the anthropological approach

illustrating the situatedness of people in larger social processes like religion, colonialism, development land ownership regimes, patriarchy and capitalism

3. are able to use the anthropological approach to formulate an ethnographic account of social phenomena in daily life

Students will be able to formulate an argument wherein they reflect on a criticism that has been levelled by “African” intellectuals on “Western” anthropological studies of Africa.

Students will be regarded as competent when they

1. can demonstrate an understanding of the problematic nature of “anthropology in an African context”

2. can illustrate an understanding of the critique levelled against “Western” intellectualism as it pertains to Africa

3. can define what the intellectualisation of pertinent issues related to Africa (such as colonialism, development, landownership and patriarchy) means and can illustrate it with examples

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Some Frequently Asked Questions

CATEGORY

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Communication with the University

Question 1: Whom should I contact with administrative queries?

Answer:

Direct all administrative enquiries for the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology to: Mrs Anna-Mari Pretorius Telephone number: +27 012 429 6067

Question 2: Whom should I contact with academic queries?

Answer:

Direct all queries that are not of a purely administrative nature but of an academic nature, especially about the content of this module, to your lecturer or e-Tutor.

Unisa's telephone system enables you to contact your lecturer directly. If you receive no answer, it means that your lecturer is not in or near his office and you should call later. If you cannot reach him by telephone, you may leave a message with the secretary, Mrs Pretorius (012 429 6067). Telephone calls should be made during office hours (08:30–15:00). Lengthy problems should rather be dealt with by e-mail.

You are welcome to visit your lecturer at his office on the Unisa Muckleneuk Campus (Theo van Wijk Building). Appointments should, however, be made at least three days in advance. Your lecturer cannot guarantee that he can attend to you if you arrive at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology without an appointment.

Lecturer’s contact details:

Your lecturer’s details will be available on the APY2613 site at the start of the semester. You will able able to contact him/her via email or on the telephone. Your lecturer will also be active on myUnisa and will be able to speak to you in forums that are made available to you.

Question 3: Whom should I contact about general student issues?

Answer:

If you need to contact the University about matters that do not relate to the content of this module, please consult the booklet my Studies @ Unisa, which you received with your study material. This booklet contains information on how to contact the University (for example to whom you can write with

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different queries, important telephone and fax numbers, addresses and the times when certain facilities are open).

Always provide your name, student number and module code when you contact the university.

Prescribed book

Question 1: Does APY2613 have a prescribed book?

Answer:

There is no prescribed book for APY2613. The study themes contained in this guide is the study material for this course.

Closing Remarks Take your time to familiarise yourself with the APY2613 myUnisa main site when you start the course. This module is intended to teach your core competencies regarding reading, reasoning and writing. In this light the module will be of use to all students who take it and these skills will have application outside the academic sphere. This module takes a critical approach and you are encouraged to question what you encounter while you are doing the work. It is hoped that you will enjoy this module and that you will build lasting relationships with those you come into contact while doing the best. Best, Stephan van Wyk (Course Compiler)

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Theme 1: Colonialism, Missionaries, Early Anthropology and Southern Africa

Unit 1: Africa in Context – Four Concepts of Africa, Fourie (2015)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain the four ‘concepts of Africa’ as outlined by Fourie (2015)

identify the chronological history associated with the term “Africa”

explain what is meant by ‘imperialism’ in terms of the relationship between Europe

and colonial Africa

identify what the purpose of the Berlin Conference of 1885 was

Key terms

colonialism, Africa, imperialism, Berlin Conference, Scramble for Africa

1. Introduction

As a whole this theme is interested in introducing students to the kind of anthropology that

was first practised in Southern Africa. This first unit is not anthropological as such and is

instead aimed at providing you with certain facts about Africa’s colonial history. To this end

excerpts from Wikipedia and a piece available online by Talal Asad are presented here. This

unit should be the starting point within which you situate much of what will follow in this

study guide. It is important to keep in mind that although Wikipedia is used as a source to

supply you with basic information it is by no means a reliable source of a sophisticated and

comprehensive history of African and the effect that colonialism has had on it.

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2. Four Concepts of Africa, (Fourie 2015)1

Four Concepts of Africa

In This Original Research... Open Access

• Abstract • Introduction • Africa as place • Africa as commodity • Africa as condition • Africa as ideal • Going further • Acknowledgements • Competing interests • References • Footnote

Abstract Top ↑

What makes the words ‘Africa’ and ‘African’ possible and useful? In this article it is argued that at least four internally coherent concepts of Africa exist, and that none of these concepts are ethically neutral. The article is presented as a contribution to attempts at using the term ‘Africa’ in self-critical, reflexive and constructive ways. It could therefore be of interest to all researchers, particularly those in the humanities, who locate their research within the context of ‘Africa’. It is argued that Africa can be conceived of as a place, a commodity, a condition and an ideal. By drawing on mostly primary sources it is shown that the term ‘Africa’ only relatively recently came to refer to a continent, that Africa as a place and Africa as a condition in need of betterment formed the foundation for its commodification, and that Africa only very recently became a self-description of the people who live on the continent of Africa. Each of these concepts of Africa is shown to be based on a particular logic with both strengths and weaknesses.

Introduction Top ↑

What do we mean when we say ‘Africa’?

During the past few centuries references to Africa have become ubiquitous. But what makes ‘Africa’ and its adjective ‘African’ possible and useful? Why do we choose to cluster this particular collection of persons and groups together and call it Africa? This question is made more complex by the fact that the act of description is often not a neutral endeavour but also creates that which is described in its image and likeness.

Some might respond intuitively that the existence of the continent of Africa makes it possible to

1 The original article by Willem Fourie can be found at https://hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/view/2847/html (last accessed on 4 August 2017). This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Thanks is and acknowledgement is given to Fourie and HTS for making this document available under this license.

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invent a word that represents it as unitary. Africa refers, according to this view, to the persons, groups, institutions and structures found on the continent. I argue that the terms ‘Africa’, or ‘African’, are not only geographical designations.

The very existence of the white South African minority group (to which I belong) that continues to benefit from its problematic socio-political history is an indication that there are different and often contradictory concepts of Africa. Many members of this group, for example, choose to refer to themselves as ‘Afrikaners’, or people from Africa. The language spoken by this group is called Afrikaans. Despite its Germanic roots, its name labels it a language from Africa. It would seem as if there is some concept of Africa that makes it possible for members of this group to associate themselves with Africa. However, this group is especially known for its role in creating and sustaining the societal and political system of apartheid. This system was aimed at separating white South Africans from the rest of the inhabitants of the country. A significant proportion of white South Africans were Afrikaners and initially at least chose to refer to themselves officially as Europeans. The rest of the country's population was referred to as non-Europeans, subdivided into numerous groups. The word ‘African’ was reserved for black South Africans, even though it is essentially an English translation of the word ‘Afrikaner’. There clearly existed – and continues to exist – certain concepts of Africa with which many members of this group choose to associate themselves, and other concepts of Africa with which they find it difficult to associate. As somebody who shares some of the features of people who regard themselves as Afrikaners – such as ethnicity, language, patterns of socio-economic privilege and religion – I am confronted with the fact that the meaning of the notion of ‘Africa’ is not self-evident or ethically neutral. This is the case both for the concept as a self-description and as a horizon for theoretical reflection.

The aim of this article is twofold: Firstly, to argue that there is not one, but numerous concepts of Africa; and secondly, to argue that none of these concepts are ethically neutral. This article is not an attempt to provide an exhaustive discussion of all the subthemes implied by the concepts of Africa that I identify during the course of my argument. The brevity of the discussion might leave some dissatisfied. Unfortunately the scope of an article in an academic journal does not allow for a more extended discussion. At the same time the argument will fall apart if I choose not to discuss all four concepts of Africa identified. For this reason I chose to draw mostly on primary sources, in an illustrative way with the hope that dissatisfied readers will judge the value of this article to lie in my proposal for a differentiated and critical use of the term ‘Africa’ rather than in the length of the discussion related to the different concepts. In my view, it would in any event be futile – even impossible – to attempt to argue for different concepts of Africa on the basis of all the contexts in which they appear. The contemporary sources that I do use are in no way meant to represent the state of the numerous academic discourses triggered by my argument. Lastly I need to reiterate that I argue for these concepts of Africa knowing full well that they cannot in any way capture the complexity of ‘Africa’.

Africa as place Top ↑

Even Kwame Nkrumah, a fervent proponent of African political unity, acknowledged the limitations of the use of a merely geographical understanding of Africa, as its inhabitants indeed do not share ‘a common race, culture and language’. Writing shortly after the first wave of independence in Africa, he strikingly describes the plurality of the people who live on the continent called Africa:

Some of us are Muslims, some Christians; many believe in traditional, tribal gods. Some of us speak French, some English, some Portuguese, not to mention the millions who speak only one of the hundreds of different African languages. We have acquired cultural differences which affect our

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outlook and condition our political development. (Nkrumah 1970:132)

Despite the differences amongst people who live in Africa, some might nonetheless argue that the internal coherence of the meaning of Africa should be sought primarily in its designation of the continent of Africa and its inhabitants, as this provides the most neutral and descriptive explanation. In this section I argue that it is indeed possible to conceive of Africa as a place, but that this meaning is neither neutral nor purely descriptive.

The Romans were the first to make Africa a ‘place’, but in a more restricted sense than we understand Africa today. In 146 BCE the Third Punic War ended with the destruction of Carthage. This was the foundation for the formation of Africa Vetus, Rome's first colony in what is today called North Africa. The conflict between Carthage and Rome initially centred on the control of Sicily. However, during the course of the First and Second Punic Wars, Rome realised that control of the region represented by Carthage would stabilise the southern frontier of the Empire (see Scullard 1980:154). It therefore invested a considerable amount of resources in capturing and largely destroying the city founded by the Phoenicians in 814 BCE. One hundred years later, with the Roman victory at Thapsus, its second colony in this region was established, with the name Africa Nova (Daniels 1987:236). Apart from expressing the power of the expansive Roman Empire and securing the frontiers of the Empire, the African colonies also played a major role in providing for the food supplies of Rome (Le Glay, Voisin & Le Bohec 2005:174).

The use of the word ‘Africa’ to name these Roman provinces marks a significant shift from the designations that prevailed before the Roman Empire's expansion. As the Greeks were present in Cyrenaica (present-day north-east Libya) in the 7th century BCE already, a number of Greek texts comment on societies in what is today known as northern Africa. Herodotus's (1890) The histories, written between 450 BCE and 420 BCE, is particularly helpful in appreciating the change signified by the Roman nomenclature. Rather than referring to Africa, Herodotus refers to Egypt (Book 1, ch. 1), Libya (Book 1, ch. 46), Ethiopia (Book 2, ch. 22) and to the persons who belong to these communities. His interpretation of the people and their differences is fascinating. He describes Libyans, for example, as people ‘disliking the injunction of the religious law that forbade them to eat cows’ meat’ (Book 2, ch. 18). Reflecting in another section on the reasons for why Ethiopians and Egyptians, like the ‘Phoenicians’ and ‘Syrians’, practice circumcision, he states that the Phoenicians and Syrians are:

[T]he only nations that circumcise, and it is seen that they do just as the Egyptians. But as to the Egyptians and Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which nation learned it from the other; for it is evidently a very ancient custom. (Herodotus 1890, Book 2, ch. 104)

It is clear that Africa as a name denoting a place was not yet used, and that the Greeks used other words to designate the groups they encountered in what we call Africa. In addition to Libya, Egypt and Ethiopia, the early Greek texts on Africa also refer to Mauretania and the Moors (currently north-west Tunisia and north-east Algeria) and Numidia and the Berbers (currently east Algeria and west Tunisia) (Goodman 1997:276).

What is less clear is the etymology of the word itself. Five explanations are regarded as the most important, namely (1) Leo Africanus's argument that Africa refers to the Greek for a place ‘without cold’ (aphrike); (2) authors from the Hellenistic era claimed that Africa refers to the descendants of the mythical hero god Afer; (3) the argument that ifri is a Berber word for cave and came to refer to the whole continent; and (4) the argument that Africa is derived from the Phoenician word for dust (Ross 2008:9). Shaw (2014) recently provided evidence for a fifth argument, namely that Africa is

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derived from the name of the Afri, a small ethnic group that lived in present-day Tunisia and that were the first ‘Africans’ that the Romans encountered. Afri metonymically came to refer to all of the inhabitants of North Africa (Shaw 2014). The establishment of the Roman army's auxiliary cohort for Africans, the Second Flavian Cohort of Africans, of which the recruitment area was exactly where the Afri resided, supports this thesis (Shaw 2014).

Despite the continuing lack of consensus amongst scholars on the etymology of the word Africa, each of these suggestions, including the most recent by Shaw, share one characteristic. They show that the initial use of the word ‘Africa’ to designate a place is a result of the Roman Empire's colonisation of North Africa.

The term ‘Africa’ remained unstable as a geographical designation for centuries after the demise of the Roman Empire. This was to a large extent a result of changing geopolitics, limited knowledge of the geography of what was to become the continent of Africa as well as the continued use of earlier designations. This is illustrated by the early geographical depictions of Africa. The earliest known printed map of Africa as a continent is that of Antonio Francanzano de Montalbodo, published in 1508 (Betz 2007:78). Its genesis is closely connected to the origins of the Portuguese colonial enterprise and appeared in a book that describes Alvise de Cá da Mosto's two expeditions in the service of the Portuguese king to Cape Verde and Senegal as well as Vasco da Gama's expedition to India, rounding the Cape of Good Hope (Betz 2007:79). The position of the Cape of Good Hope, the width of the continent and major inaccuracies with regard to the Nile, for example, are some of the signs that existing knowledge of Africa was limited.

A map by Sebastian Münster, dating from 1540, became the first readily available map of Africa (Betz 2007:83). Even though this map became famous for its depiction of Monoculi, or cyclopses, in Central Africa, what is particularly important is its use of Ethiopia to designate most of the continent, and Libya and Egypt to denote regions in the north. In addition one finds ‘Africa’ also referring to a region in the north of the continent. In his (for modern readers) upside-down and (for his contemporaries) influential depiction of Africa in 1556, Leo Africanus also uses Ethiopia to denote Central and Southern Africa, and Libya, Numidia and Egypt to denote most of North Africa (Betz 2007:98). The use of Numidia, Libya, Egypt and also Nubia, for example in Paulo Forlani's map of 1562 (Betz 2007:101), remains constant for most of the early colonial period. As Europeans inhabited more regions, maps of these areas also became more detailed and designations were added. Cefala, in a map from 1570 by Abraham Ortelius, for example (Betz, 2007:118) and Monomotapa, in a 1593 map, for example, by, Cornelis de Jode (Betz, 2007:154), increasingly became generally accepted designations for regions in Southern Africa.

Towards the end of the 17th century the view that Africa denotes a place, that this place is the continent, and that this continent can be divided into regions that show some sort of continuity with the regions the Greeks had already identified was firmly established. Robert Morden, in his depiction of Africa in his book Geography rectified (1680) illustrates this. Apart from the usage of names such as Monomotapa, Ethiopia and Nubia, he provides an interesting – if largely fictional – aside on earlier names for the continent, noting that it was called ‘by the Ancients Olympia, Hefperia, Oceania, Coryphe, Ammoni, Ortygia and Ethiopia, by the Ethiopians Alkebu-lam, by the Arabians Ifrichea, by the Indians Befecath, by the Turks Magribon’ (Morden 1680:462). He also shows that in the 17th century there was no consensus on the origin of the word ‘Africa’. Morden presents five options, varying from Africa as a derivation of the Hebrew word for dust [afer] to locating its origin in Afer, the companion of Hercules. He even posits the view that Africa was the ancient name of Carthage (Morden 1680:462).

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Improved maps of Africa and increasing stability in the use of the term ‘Africa’ were the results of exclusively European activities. The political, economic and socio-cultural developments that were taking place within the societies that would constitute the continent of Africa played a nominal role in the birth of the concept of Africa as a place. In fact, when compared to the history of human settlement on the continent, its designation as Africa is a very late development.

Already around 10 000 BCE the presence and proportions of tools, a multiplication of lifestyles, changing strategies of subsistence and changing social and physical environments indicated development and increased diversity in West and Central Africa (Casey 2005:225). Around 2000 BCE speakers of the so-called Bantu languages started to move southwards from the present-day border between Nigeria and Cameroon (Curtin et al. 1995:16). In either a movement that split rather early, before crossing the rainforests of Central Africa, or in a movement that remained unified until after the crossing of the rainforest (cf. e.g. Ehret 2001; Currie et al. 2013) a major dispersal of people took place throughout sub-Saharan Africa. By at least 1000 BCE iron was being smelted in West Africa, with the technology reaching East Africa between 800 BCE and 300 BCE (cf. e.g. Collins & Burns 2007:162). By 500 copper mining started in Central Africa and long-distance intra-African trade in salt, copper, foodstuffs, fabrics and other commodities had developed (cf. Curtin et al. 1995:26).

Between 1220 and 1290 Mapungubwe was trading gold and ivory in exchange for goods from the coast, which included Chinese porcelain and beads from India. Great Zimbabwe, the successor of Mapungubwe and predecessor of Khami in 1450, continued and consolidated the trade (Huffman 2000; cf. also Collins & Burns 2007:165–168). At no point in this early history does one find evidence of a conception of Africa as a place that spans the whole of the landmass. Only very few traces of these developments can be found in references to the existing African kingdoms in West, East and Southern Africa (e.g. Sebastian Münster 1540 [Betz 2007:83]), the important trade post at Sofala in East Africa (e.g. Giacomo Gastaldi 1554 [Betz 2007:95]) and Great Zimbabwe (e.g. Giacomo Gastaldi 1564 [Betz 2007:108–109]) on maps and in texts from this time. Africa as a place and a sense of its increasing diversity – as European knowledge increased – remained an external perspective on the continent.

When seeking the internal coherence of the concept of Africa in its designation of a place, it is clear that this meaning of Africa is not as stable or neutral as it might seem, and only of limited use. With regard to the stability of the concept I argue that the conception that Africa is a place, and that this place is a continent, are separate developments. One should also acknowledge that for the first few centuries the conception of Africa as a place was not a conscious self-description used and appropriated by the inhabitants of the continent, but rather a classification or description of a place, conferred by outsiders upon the societies and persons who inhabited it. This challenges the notion that Africa as place is a fundamentally neutral concept of Africa. Concerning its usefulness this meaning of Africa is limited by its inability to account for the vast cultural, linguistic and socio-economic differences between the persons who live in Africa.

Africa as commodity Top ↑

In the previous section I argued that the conception of Africa as a place is of limited use and is not as neutral as it seems to be. In this section I argue that a second internally coherent meaning makes the use of the concept of Africa possible: Africa as commodity. A commodity in this sense is understood as an entity without self-reflexivity that is claimed and exchanged to create value for actors external to the entity. I use the imperialist phase of the colonial era as paradigmatic illustration of the commodification of Africa. This by no means implies that this concept of Africa is restricted to the colonial era. The aim of this section is to argue that Africa has an internal coherence and also as a

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commodity used to create value for actors external to it. The discussion will be limited to Africa as political and economic commodity.

The imperialist phase of the colonial era institutionalised the concept of Africa as commodity, claimed and exchanged to create political and economic value. The establishment of a French protectorate over Tunisia in 1881 can be regarded as the advent of this phase of the colonial era. It was followed a year later by the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 (Wesseling 1996:11–34, 34–51). Whereas the previous phases of colonialism were ‘pragmatic’ and ‘haphazard’, this phase was ‘driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power’ (Young 2009:16). Africa and its constitutive societies became commodities that created political value in Europe by producing ‘national prestige and closed markets in the international arena through conquest’ (Young 2009:31). This is also the period during which more countries entered the political market, notably Germany. Against the background of the start of Germany's imperialist phase, and the competition between a half-hearted coalition between King Leopold II of Belgium and France and an unpopular Anglo-Portuguese coalition, Otto von Bismarck convened the now infamous Berlin Conference (Wesseling 1996:99–104). Between April 1884 and the conclusion of the Berlin Conference the following year, Germany acquired South-West Africa and Togo, with the acquisition of German East Africa taking place the day after the conference (Wesseling 1996:111).

The Berlin Conference, held as separate meetings between November 1884 and February 1885, is the symbol of the political commodification of Africa. The implications of the structure of this meeting are staggering: External actors came together to coordinate their intended activities on an entire continent in order to maximise political and economic value for themselves. The structure of the coordination, the ways in which it was to be executed and the type of value that was to be created made it impossible for any person or group in Africa to grasp or resist their commodification. One of the most powerful tools in this process was the concept of Africa itself. The notion that Africa is an entity made the coordination of colonial intentions possible, and made the prevention of its commodification from within Africa impossible, as most of the persons and groups on the continent at that time could not know that they were part of an entity called Africa.

The primary aim of the Berlin Conference was to settle disputes on different claims to the Congo, and to lay the foundation for settling European claims to African land and trade in the future. Already before the conference many treaties were entered into between representatives from colonial powers and persons identified as local leaders. These treaties were seen as ways to formalise European claims to land and to enable trade, which often included the creation of exclusive markets. The nature and content of many of these treaties were often absurd. The Franco-Italian explorer Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzá, for example, signed the famous Brazza-Makoko treaty with the King of the Bateke in 1880 in which the King ceded all his land to the French in return for their protection. This treaty later played an important role in the eventual establishment of the Congo Free State of Leopold II of Belgium, even though Brazzá was ‘a naval officer on leave’, ‘travelling in the service of a French committee which was a branch of an international philanthropic organisation’ tasked ‘to set up two scientific stations’ (Wesseling 1996:95). An extant British treaty, used in different forms between 1884 and 1892 in more than 50 cases (Worger, Clark & Alpers 2010:235) provides an indication of the one-sidedness of many of these treaties. In this treaty (Hertslet 1894:476), the ‘King and Chief’ cede ‘for ever, the whole of [their] territory’, transferring ‘full jurisdiction of every kind’ and assigning ‘for ever, the sole right to mine in any portion of [their] territory’. The colonial company is recognised as ‘the authorised Government of [their] territories.’ The motivation for signing this treaty is described as ‘bettering the condition’ of the ‘country and people’ of the respective local leader (Hertslet 1894:476) and protection from the colonial company

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as far as ‘practical’ (Hertslet 1894:477).

This does not mean that the partition of Africa took place during this conference. In his initial invitation extended to Paris, London and Lisbon, Bismarck proposed only three agenda points, namely achieving consensus on freedom of trade in the basin and the mouth of the Congo River, freedom of navigation on the Congo and Niger rivers, and principles that need to be observed when taking possession of new territories on the coast of Africa (Wesseling 1996:114). The ‘scramble for Africa’ (cf. Pakenham 2001) was only to start in all earnest after this conference, with the partitioning of the continent concluded two decades later. It is therefore informative that in the German-speaking world the conference is referred to as the Congo Conference (Kongokonferenz) (cf. e.g. Königk 1938).

However, heightened imperialist ambitions in Europe, the increased need for natural resources and new markets, coupled with a belief that Africa holds untold riches and inhabitants in need of civilisation led to this conference acquiring major significance (cf. e.g. Reid 2009). The General Act of the Berlin Conference therefore goes beyond the initial agenda in many respects. It declares, for example, that its signatories have the right to claim more land along the coast of Africa, with only one provision: That they should notify the other signatories in order to ‘enable them, if need be, to make good any claims of their own’ (Berlin Conference on West Africa 1885:ch. VI, Article 34).

In order to enable signatories to ‘make good’ their respective claims on territories in Africa, the years following the Berlin Conference saw the proliferation of bilateral treaties between European countries. Due to limited knowledge of the interior of Africa, numerous treaties were viewed as ‘skeleton treaties’, pending improved knowledge of the areas included by these treaties. If there was no prospect of gaining adequate knowledge of the area covered by the treaty, degrees of latitude and longitude were used to fix its borders (Wesseling 1996:128). Even though all African borders were therefore not equally arbitrary, all of the borders were the result of coordinated activities embedded in a relatively integrated network of political and economic needs and wants of external actors. The result is that, after the partitioning of Africa was completed in 1914, 15 of what were to become African states were landlocked (more than in any other region), 177 African cultural and ethnic groups were partitioned over borders (Englebert, Tarango & Carter 2002:1095–1096), with 80% of the borders of African countries following latitudinal or longitudinal lines (Alesina, Easterly & Matuszeski 2011:246).

For the sake of conceptual clarity one could propose a distinction between Africa as political commodity and Africa as economic commodity. However, in reality these two dimensions of the commodification of Africa were mutually dependent. The General Act of the Berlin Conference,1 for example, starts with the declaration that the trade of all of its signatories ‘shall enjoy complete freedom in all the regions forming the basin of the Congo and its outlets’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch. I, Article 1) and all imports will be ‘free from import and transit dues’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch. I, Article 4). The Congo River shall be ‘free for the merchant ships’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch. IV, Article 13) and a Commission established at the Berlin Conference was to be responsible for deciding ‘what works are necessary to assure the navigability of the Congo in accordance with the needs of international trade’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch. IV, Article 20). Towards the end of the Act the relation between the political and economic commodification of Africa is made explicit. The signatories recognise:

[T]he establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and … freedom of trade and of transit … (Berlin

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Conference 1885:ch. VI, Article 35)

Africa as a commodity with the potential to create both economic and political value, of course, precedes the imperialist phase of colonialism. It is generally acknowledged that colonial activities in Africa up to the mid-1800s were in fact economically driven (Young 2009:17), even if colonies were used as points of coordination for economic activities that took place elsewhere. A helpful illustration is the case of the Dutch East India Company. Dutch merchants founded the corporation in 1602, with a charter from the Dutch States-General giving it ‘a trade monopoly and administrative powers from the Cape of Good Hope eastward’ (Curtin et al. 1995:257). This does not imply that between the 1600s and early 1900s Africa was the most important political or economic commodity of the European states. Indeed, exports from Africa and its markets had a relatively small impact on European economies (for a classic economic view, see O'Brien 1982; Reid 2009:136). Of greater importance for the concept itself and the systematisation presented here, is the disproportionate and at times unintended effects the commodification had on Africa.

Despite the access that this concept provides to grasping the enduring effects of colonialism and the pathways it opens to continued critique of the standards in terms of which Africa is measured, its very usefulness can also be a source of its limitations. Such a concept of Africa runs the risk of portraying Africans as helpless victims and ironically perpetuating their commodification. The people and groups that inhabit the continent are more than the sum of their commodification. In addition, this concept runs the risk of disregarding the differentiated effects of colonialism.

Africa as condition Top ↑

The General Act of the Berlin Conference places the proposed political and economic commodification of Africa within an ideological framework. The document is permeated by the belief that the African condition is one in need of betterment until it is ‘civilised’, and that the signatories of the Act have the responsibility to better this condition by means of trade and political development. The Preamble states the intention of the Act, namely ‘to regulate the conditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilisation in certain regions of Africa’, and thus ensuring all its signatories ‘the advantages of free navigation on the two chief rivers of Africa flowing into the Atlantic Ocean.’ According to this logic, the ‘guarantee of security to trade and industry’ will support the ‘development of civilization’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch., Article 10). This is why they commit themselves ‘to watch[ing] over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being’ in order to ‘[bring] home to them the blessings of civilization’ (Berlin Conference 1885:ch. I, Article 6).

In this section I argue that the concept Africa is also internally coherent as depicting a condition. This concept is closely related to the previous two concepts and expresses a further explanation for the possibility of conceiving and treating the continent as a commodity. Africa as a condition has internal coherence as it is diagnosed as lacking in terms of an externally defined standard and treated by uncritically setting this standard as the remedy. In this section the application of the notion ‘civilised’ to Africa is identified as crude illustration of this logic, and the discussion is then expanded to contemporary descriptions of Africa.

In 1871 the British anthropologist Edward Tylor published what was to become a foundational work for understanding people in Africa, Primitive cultures: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom ([1871] 1920). He regards the ‘savage tribes’ as being at ‘an early stage of the human race at large’, or in a ‘primitive condition’ (Tylor [1871] 1920:21). His argument is based on the assumption that ‘civilisation’ exists ‘among mankind

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in different degrees’ (Tylor [1871] 1920:26). According to Tylor, at least five principles should be applied when assessing the level of civilisation, namely the ‘absence or presence, high or low development’ of the ‘industrial arts’ (which includes metalworking, agriculture and architecture), the ‘extent’ of scientific knowledge, the ‘definiteness’ of moral principles, the ‘condition’ of religious beliefs and ceremonies and the ‘degree’ of social and political organisation (Tylor [1871] 1920:26–27). He regards the level of civilisation the lowest amongst what he calls savages and the highest amongst the ‘civilised’ nations of Europe and America. Between savagery and civilisation he places barbarism and semi-civilisation (Tylor [1871] 1920:39). In his references to Africa, it is clear that he regards most of the people he encountered as either ‘savage’ or ‘barbaric’, and certainly in need of ‘civilisation’ (cf. e.g. Tylor [1871] 1920:163).

Even though the concept civilisation itself is thought to be a product of the Third French Republic, the first written evidence of the word dates to 1766 and denotes ‘the essence of French achievements compared to the uncivilized world of savages, slaves and barbarians’ (Conklin 1997:14, 11–37). ‘Civilisation’ was a unitary concept, based on the assumption that ‘there existed a single universal human civilization capable of winning over from savagery all peoples and nations’ (Conklin 1997:15). In 1870 it was institutionalised as official political doctrine in the form of France's mission civilisatrice. This understanding of civilisation expressed an overly optimistic conception of the stability and the content of European ‘civilisation’ and its ability to address the primitive condition of those found especially in Africa. Tylor is therefore convinced that ‘[it] may safely be presumed that no [civilised] people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism’ (Tylor [1871] 1920:34) as ‘[d]egeneration probably operates more actively in the lower than in the higher culture’ (Tylor [1871] 1920:46). This leads him to the conclusion that ‘barbarous nations and savage hordes, with their less knowledge and scantier appliances, would seem particularly exposed to degrading influences’ (Tylor [1871] 1920:46).

These – and other – texts make it plausible to argue that the concept of Africa had, and in revised form continues to have, internal coherence as a condition. This condition was conceived as a primitive stage of what can develop into a version of European civilisation, and European civilisation is understood in an idealised and uncritical manner. Or, put differently: This condition was quite simply the absence of European civilisation and therefore primitive.

Few authors can match the clarity with which the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl uncritically utilises this standard of civilisation and diagnoses its absence. In 1910 he published Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, translated in 1926 into English as How natives think ([1926] 1985). To be sure, he received criticism from especially anthropologists in English-speaking countries. However, the continuity of much of his thought with ideas that were in vogue makes it an important illustration of the internal coherence of a conception of Africa as a condition. His uncritical use of a European self-interpretation of civilisation as standard is undeniable. In his treatment of ‘primitives’ perceptions’, for example, he concludes ‘primitives perceive nothing in the same way as we do’, as they cannot separate ‘mystic properties’ in the way an object is presented ‘to their minds’ (Lévy-Bruhl [1926] 1985:46). According to him, ‘primitives’ have a ‘prelogical mentality’, which means it would be futile to compare ‘the discursive processes of prelogical mentality and those of our thought, or to look for any correspondence between the two’. In fact, there exists ‘no a priori reason for admitting that the same process is used by both’ (Lévy-Bruhl [1926] 1985:105).

This concept of Africa is clearly ethically problematic. When Africa is conceptualised as a condition, when this condition is conceptualised as the absence of a standard defined and exemplified elsewhere, and when the achievement of this standard is understood as remedy for the African condition, then critical reflection on the limits of this standard is easily abandoned or even disabled.

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This can lead to misjudgement, self-deception, the imposition of unattainable or irrelevant goals and sheer brutality.

This is illustrated in an unintentionally ironic statement by Lévy-Bruhl. His wholly uncritical and idealised understanding of European civilisation leads him to the conclusion that it is especially the ‘primitives’ who run the risk of relying on ‘preconnections, preperceptions, and pre-conclusions’ to the extent that their ‘logical activity’ is disabled (Lévy-Bruhl [1926] 1985:110). For him, the legitimacy of European civilisation is beyond critical reflection, which disabled him from asking what the weaknesses and limits of this idea of civilisation were. He was not able to consider the possibility that alternative forms of civilisation could exist, also in Africa, and that an application of the institutions, aims and practices found in European civilisation might even have a negative effect on certain societies.

In 1959 Léopold Senghor already, prophetically, highlighted this danger by critiquing African leaders of the day. He noticed that the leaders of ‘African peoples who have come to self-government and independence’ showed a ‘lack of awareness … and … contempt for African values’ (Senghor 1979:77). Real freedom is not simply ‘political freedom’ or ‘freedom of bodies’ but indeed the ‘freedom of minds’ (Senghor 1979:77). This type of freedom will not be achieved if institutions are imported ‘without selection’. These views were supported by Sékou Touré, who similarly argued that: ‘Subjective interpretations are at the root of one of the profound misconceptions that prevent a true understanding of Africa's problems and the concerns and activities of her peoples’ (Touré 1963:108). We would be mistaken, however, to assume that Senghor and Touré therefore proposed – and that I am implying – disposing of the institutions from outside Africa. They much rather propagated the critical and reflective use of these institutions. It is in no way the intention to ‘stop [these institutions] at the customs posts’ (Senghor 1979:78). The ideal is much rather the analysis of ‘their forms and their spirit’ in order to see ‘what should be retained and how this can be made to take root in the realities of Africa’ (Senghor 1979:78). The usefulness of this concept of Africa might just lie, paradoxically, in the possibility it creates to reflect critically on the standards in terms of which the state of Africa is measured and the goals that are set for the development of the continent.

Africa as ideal Top ↑

The proposals for concepts of Africa that I have presented thus far have one characteristic in common. They were initially used as an external perspective on the people and groups who reside in what is today called Africa. This has changed, as the different concepts of Africa came to be used and applied not only by people from outside Africa. It is no longer possible to say that only persons from outside Africa view it as a place, or that only persons from outside Africa utilise it as a commodity to create political and economic value for themselves, or that only people from outside Africa use the concept to denote a condition that needs to be improved.

The fourth concept of Africa that I argue has internal coherence in the sense that it reclaims subjectivity and reinterprets selected elements of the socio-cultural, economic and political resources in Africa as a representative ideal. It marks the shift from using the concept of Africa to denote the other to using it to denote the self. It signifies the reclaiming of subjectivity by reinterpreting and thus attempting to redeem a word that was used to objectify and in many cases degrade. Its structure resembles that of a synecdoche, as the part – and indeed specific interpretations of it – is used to represent the whole. The result is that the adjective ‘African’ rather than the substantive ‘Africa’ is often used, in order to qualify the part that is to be representative of an ultimately idealised whole. In this section I argue that this concept of Africa is internally coherent

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with reference to the notions of reclamation, reinterpretation and representation. I argue that ‘Africa’ or ‘African’ can be used to denote representative ideals, which are based on the reclamation and requisite reinterpretation of African socio-cultural resources. In accordance with the previous sections I attempt to draw in an illustrative manner mostly on primary sources and examples.

One of the earliest examples of the reclamation of African subjectivity and the reinterpretation of African socio-cultural resources can be found in the work of Senghor. His response to Lévy-Bruhl's How natives think is one of the most spectacular illustrations of this endeavour. According to Lévy-Bruhl ([1926] 1985), ‘the mental activity’ of the ‘primitives’,

is too little differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from the emotions and passions which evoke these ideas or are evoked. (p. 36)

Europeans find it difficult ‘by any effort of imagination’ to understand the way ‘primitives’ think, because their ‘mental activity is more differentiated’ and they are ‘more accustomed to analyzing its functions’ (Lévy-Bruhl [1926] 1985:36). Senghor responds not by refuting Lévy-Bruhl's argument, but by reinterpreting it. In fact, Senghor deconstructs Lévy-Bruhl's view by seemingly affirming it and using it to construct a caricature of ‘Europeans’. He then uses the deconstruction to explain the reasons for the European colonial enterprise, highlights its effects and affirms the validity of the socio-cultural resources in Africa (Senghor 1979:29ff.).

Senghor starts his response in a quasi-anthropological style, mocking the quasi-anthropology of Lévy-Bruhl: ‘Let us consider the first European as he faces an object…’ (Senghor 1979:29). The African ceases to be that which is investigated, but becomes the investigator. But within the space of a few sentences Senghor dissolves the distinction between investigation and interpretation, and then goes further by dissolving the distinction between interpretation as a merely intellectual exercise and interpretation as an activity with concrete effects:

[The European] first distinguishes the object from himself. He keeps it at a distance. He freezes it out of time and, in a way, out of space. He fixes it, he kills it. (Senghor 1979:29)

It is done with the very same ‘precision instruments’ and the resulting ‘pitiless factual analysis’ that Lévy-Bruhl ([1926] 1985) disparagingly views the ‘primitive’ unable of understanding. Senghor then proceeds by meticulously tracing the results of this enterprise. Senghor echoes and reframes Kant – the pre-eminent European – to make this point: ‘[The European] makes a means of it’ (Senghor 1979:29). He expands the distinction between means and ends by drawing an even more radical conclusion. Making something a means to an end, is ‘a centripetal movement’, which ultimately leads to the assimilation of the other. The European ‘destroys it by devouring it’. This ‘process of devouring’ is, according to Senghor, the true meaning of what is called ‘humanizing nature’ or ‘domesticating nature’ (Senghor 1979:29).

Senghor's response to Lévy-Bruhl ([1926] 1985) – whom he seems to treat as representative for a school of theorists – culminates in his explanation of why this ‘humanisation’, or civilising mission, cannot disable African subjectivity, and why it is possible to reclaim and reinterpret the concept of Africa:

But … what they don't take into account … is that life cannot be domesticated, nor especially can God who is the source of all life, in whom all life shares. (Senghor 1979:29)

In another text he develops this line of thinking further by developing a notion of assimilation that

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negates the French colonial project and affirms the reclamation and reinterpretation of being African (Senghor 1979:33ff.). To be African means to abandon the ‘I’ in order to sympathise and identify with the ‘thou’. An African ‘dies to himself to be reborn in the other, and therefore ‘does not assimilate’ but ‘is assimilated’ (Senghor 1979:32). Realising that he might seem to come dangerously close to providing arguments in favour of colonial attempts at assimilating Africans, he qualifies the reinterpretation of assimilation:

[An African] does not kill the other life, he strengthens his own life through it. He lives with the Other in a communal life, lives in symbiosis: he is born-with and thereby knows the Other. (Senghor 1979:32)

This leads to an African reformulation of Descartes's ‘cogito ergo sum’: The African might say, ‘I smell, I dance the other I am.’ This does not mean that ‘African’ implies the rejection of any form of reason. Senghor argues that to be ‘African’ means to make use of another form of reason, namely ‘reason-by-embrace’ (Senghor 1983:33).

The logic of reclaiming African subjectivity and reinterpreting African socio-cultural resources as representative ideals are expressed provocatively in the concept of négritude. Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the politician and poet from Martinique, played a major role in the initial development of this concept. Césaire, despite not being ‘African’ in a geographic sense of the word, was the first to make use of this concept, and does so in a polemical context. In the surrealist Notebook of a return to my native land (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal) Césaire ([1968] 1995), uses the word to denote what it is not:

my négritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamour of the day my négritude is not an opaque spot of dead water over the dead eye of the earth my négritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral it reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil it reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky it pierces opaque prostration with its straight patience. (p. 115)

In reflecting on the definition of négritude, Senghor draws on work by Césaire to define this reclamation of African subjectivity as ‘the awareness, defence and development of African cultural values’ (Senghor 1979:96) or, elsewhere, ‘the sum total of the values of the civilisation of the African world’ (Senghor 1979:99). The concept does not purport to capture all of the diversity implied by it, and is in this sense a ‘true myth’, namely ‘the awareness by a particular social group or people of its own situation in the world, and the expression of it by means of the concrete image’ (Senghor 1979:97). This reclamation can be described as the ‘symbolic progression from subordination to independence, from alienation, through revolt, to self-affirmation’ (Irele 2011:40).

In Césaire's work already it is clear that the act of reclamation in itself is not enough. That which is reclaimed has been degraded and needs to be reinterpreted – or properly interpreted. Césaire contrasts négritude with négraille, or negridom, and emphasises that his project is not simply one of uncritically reclaiming received terminology. In the Cahier he makes it clear that he is not reclaiming ‘[n]egridom with its smell of fried onion’, which ‘rediscovers the sour taste of freedom in its spilt blood’. Negridom, in contrast to négritude, is ‘standing in the hold / standing in the cabins / standing on deck / standing in the wind / standing under the sun / standing in the blood’ (Césaire [1968] 1995:131).

An interesting element of the initial reflection on négritude is the refusal to develop it as a

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historically static or culturally absolutist concept of Africa. Writing in 1959, Senghor makes clear that the intention is not to ‘[revive] the past so as to live on in an African museum.’ It is much rather about ‘animating this world, here and now, with the values that come from our past’ (Senghor 1979:78). This concept of Africa is also not meant to be culturally absolutist. In one of his lectures Senghor recounts discussions with Césaire on how to reconcile their Marxist convictions with the notion of négritude. He then refers to both himself and Césaire as ‘half-castes’ and argues that cultural contact, borrowing and mixing is necessary in changing and stable ‘external situations’. It enables better adaptation to any situation (Senghor 1979:75).

A concept of Africa as reclamation and reinterpretation resonates with the writing found in other regions of the continent too. Kwame Nkrumah, for example, emphasises the need for Africa to ‘speak by using its own voice’. This needs to start with its historiography. According Nkrumah, the history of Africa ‘needs to be written as the history of our society, not as the story of European adventures’ (Nkrumah 1973:125). Only in this way can it become ‘a map of the growing tragedy and final triumph of our society’ in order to, eventually, ‘guide and direct African action’ (Nkrumah 1974:63). In a letter to a ‘whites only’ school in South Africa on the future of Africa, Julius Nyerere expressly rejects a racialised understanding of Africa that uncritically glorifies what is understood as African history. According to Nyerere, the challenges are neither to ‘be ashamed of our own heritage’ nor to ‘put aside everything which is not “traditionally African” and live forever as though Europeans had never come into contact with us’ (Nyerere 1966:116). Africa as an ideal does not mean a ‘uniform Africa’, as ‘this word “Africans” can include all those who have made their home in the continent, black, brown, white’ (Nyerere 1966:117).

I argue that this Africa as ideal has internal coherence as a fourth concept of Africa, and can be understood as the reclamation, reinterpretation of African socio-cultural resources as representative ideals. This concept of Africa can contribute to explaining the way in which, for example, ubuntu is regarded as ‘African’. Ramose (2002:271), in his influential article, describes ubuntu as ‘the wellspring flowing with African ontology and epistemology’ and can be regarded as ‘the basis of African philosophy’. African ontology, epistemology and in fact African philosophy seem to refer to more than simply ontologies, epistemologies and philosophies that originate from Africa. The assumption much rather seems that there is a single ontology, epistemology or philosophy that can be called African. The same goes for ubuntu: It is presented as not one of many, but as the basis of African philosophy.

This use of Africa in this regard cannot be explained adequately by any combination of the previous three concepts of Africa. It becomes even more difficult when one considers the socio-linguistic origins of the word ubuntu. It is an Nguni word, most often defined by means of the isiZulu phrase ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, or ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ Based on the available socio-linguistic evidence it can be argued linguistic variants of ubuntu can be found in other regions of Africa too, for example, in east Africa where the words ‘umundu’ in Kikuyu, ‘umuntu’ in Kimeru, ‘bumuntu’ in kiSukuma and kiHaya are found, as well as ‘gimuntu’ in kiKongo and giKwese, spoken in central Africa (cf. Kamwangamalu 1999).

However, despite its primary linguistic location in the family of Nguni languages of southern Africa and its presence in selected languages in east and central Africa, the concept of ubuntu still seems to exclude those parts of Africa where Bantu languages are not spoken, especially Africa north of the Sahara. It also – on such a reading – seems to disregard the immense linguistic and cultural plurality of the more than 1000 million people who live in Africa. This challenge is compounded when one takes Metz's differentiated approach to ubuntu into account (Metz 2007). Ubuntu is nonetheless viewed as an African, or even the African, moral and philosophical principle. If one attempts to

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interpret such a statement in terms of, for example, a geographical understanding of Africa, one struggles to make sense of it. The way in which Ramose (2002) uses ‘Africa’ to qualify ubuntu becomes plausible when one views its use as the reclamation and (continuing) reinterpretation of an African cultural resource, and setting it as a representative ideal.

This also highlights the limitations of this concept of Africa. The dangers of exclusivity and essentialism loom large. This is the case despite prominent usages of ‘Africa’ as ideal that uses it as a dynamic and inclusive concept. Such a concept of Africa should therefore not be understood as the search for consensus, but – and here I agree with Gyekye (1995:211) – as ‘the results of the reflective exertions of an African thinker’ that gives ‘analytical attention to the intellectual foundations of African culture and experience’. This will necessarily include disagreement on which resources to reclaim, how to interpret them and the extent to which they can constitute representative ideals.

Going further Top ↑

In the sections above I hope to have shown that there is more than one concept of Africa, and that no concept of Africa is ethically neutral. When we refer to Africa as a place, we find ourselves confronted with a concept that has stabilised only relatively recently as a designator of the continent of Africa and only very recently became the self-description of persons who in fact live in Africa. For most of the lifetime of the term it was used as an external designation with very few points of connection to the self-perception of the people on the continent, their histories and institutions. I also hope to have shown that Africa as a condition has internal coherence and, together with Africa as a place, continues to give the concept of Africa internal coherence as a commodity. Lastly I hope to have shown that the self-conscious reclaiming and reinterpretation of African socio-cultural resources – often in a synecdochic way – make possible a fourth concept of Africa, namely Africa as ideal. But this concept of Africa is also not ethically neutral, as it might run the risk of becoming an essentialist or exclusivist concept of Africa.

As I intimated in the introductory section, I do not regard these as the only concepts of Africa. Also other internally coherent concepts of Africa could exist. Despite the impression that the four concepts that I proposed function independently, it seems plausible that whenever we use the word ‘Africa’ we make use of most of these concepts – and possibly other – to differing degrees. The challenge is to incorporate those elements of the four concepts of Africa that describe geographic, political, economic, historical and socio-cultural elements shared by people on the continent of Africa in a constructive and authentic manner.

But is it possible to salvage and combine the positive elements of these concepts? Even though such a project goes beyond the scope of this article, I nonetheless point in the direction of one such a possibility: Africa as encounter. Is Africa not also to be conceived as a symbol for the encounter between ‘I’ and the other; between imposed and indigenous institutions; between those who thrive and those who barely survive; between minorities and majorities; between different cultures and linguistic groups?

In his poem ‘A salute to the third world’, Césaire brilliantly and movingly points in the direction of such an understanding of Africa. He integrates the diversity of the people and groups of Africa, the enduring effects of its commodification, denigration and self-destruction with the challenge of becoming an authentic place of encounter. In conclusion I cite an excerpt from the poem:

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Look:

Africa is no longer a black heart scratched at by the diamond of misfortune; our Africa is a hand free of the cestus, it is a right hand, palm forward, the fingers held tight; it is a swollen hand, a-wounded-open-hand, extended to all hands, brown, yellow, white, to all the wounded hands in the world. (Césaire 1983:353)

Acknowledgements Top ↑

I would like to thank Zorada Swart, Etienne de Villiers, Florence Nazare, Bernard Slippers and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful exchanges on the article. In addition, the author gratefully acknowledges funding by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that enabled the research that led to this article.

Competing interests

The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.

References Top ↑

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Königk, G., 1938, Die Berliner Kongo-Konferenz 1884–1885: Ein Beitrag zur Kolonialpolitik Bismarcks, Essener Verlag Anstalt, Essen.

Kamwangamalu, N. M., 1999, ‘Ubuntu in South Africa: A sociolinguistic perspective to a pan-African concept’, Critical Arts 13(2), 24–41.

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Morden, R., 1680, Geography rectified: or, A description of the world, R. Morden & T. Cockerill, London.

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Nkrumah, K., 1974, Consciencism: Philosophy and ideology for de-colonisation , Panaf, London.

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O'Brien, P., 1982, ‘European economic development: The contribution of the periphery’, Economic History Review 35(1), 1–18.

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Ramose, M.B., 2002, ‘The philosophy of Ubuntu and Ubuntu as philosophy’, in P.H. Coetzee & A. P. J. Roux (eds.), The African philosophy reader, 2nd edn. , pp. 270–280, Routledge, London/New York.

Reid, R.J., 2009, A history of modern Africa : 1800 to the present, Wiley & Blackwell, Malden/Oxford.

Ross, E.S., 2008, s.v. ‘History of the name Africa’, in J. Middleton & J.C. Miller, New Encyclopedia of Africa , Scribner, Detroit, pp. 9–10.

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Senghor, L. S., 1979, Prose and poetry , transl. J. Reed, Heinemann, London.

Shaw, B.D., 2014, ‘Who are you? Africa and Africans’, in J. McInerney (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Companion to ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean , Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 527–540, Malden/Oxford.

Touré, S., 1963, Guinean revolution and social progress , S.O.P. Press, Cairo.

Tylor, E.B. [1871] 1920, Primitive cultures: Researchers into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom , John Murray, London.

Wesseling, H.L., 1996, Divide and rule: The partition of Africa, 1880–1914, transl. A. J. Pomerans, Praeger, London.

Wikipedia n.d., General-Akte der Berliner Konferenz (Kongokonferenz), viewed n.d., from http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/General-Akte_der_Berliner_Konferenz_%28Kongokonferenz%29.

Worger, W. H., Clark, N. L. & Alpers, E. A. (eds.), 2010, Africa and the West: A documentary history , vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Young, R. J.C., 2009, Postcolonialism: A historical introduction , Blackwell, Oxford.

Footnote Top ↑

1.The most accessible versions of the General Act of the Berlin Conference (1885) can be found online. See Bibliography for references to English, German and French versions.

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Anthropology in an African Context

Theme 1: Colonialism, Missionaries, Early Anthropology and Southern Africa

Unit 2: Anthropology and Colonialism, Asad (1991)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

discuss the moment during which anthropology emerged as an academic discipline

discuss what Asad (1991) holds is the relationship between anthropology and

colonialism

Key Terms:

Talal Asad, colonialism, colonial power, anthropology

1. Asad on Anthropology and Colonialism

The short excerpt below is from an anthropologist named Talal Asad who reflects on the

relationship between colonialism and anthropology/anthropologists. Read it with the idea in

mind that you want to use it for the purpose of better contextualising anthropological work

during colonialism in Africa.

Asad on Anthropology and Colonialism2

These are the opening paragraphs of Talal Asad's 1991 "Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony" in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (George Stocking, ed). It's a short passage, but it frames the questions about colonial anthropology very nicely.

The story of anthropology and colonialism is part of a larger narrative which has a rich array of characters and situations but a simple plot. When Europe conquered and ruled the world, its inhabitants went out to engage with innumerable peoples and places. European merchants, soldiers, missionaries, settlers, and

2 This webpage is found at http://instruct.uwo.ca/anthro/301/asad.htm (last accessed on 20 August 2015). This is an OER.

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administrators -- together with men of power who stayed at home -- they helped transform their non-European subjects, with varying degrees of violence, in a 'modern' direction. And of course, these subjects were not passive. The story recounts how they understood initial encounters with Europeans in indigenous cultural terms, how they resisted, adapted to, cooperated with, or challenged their new masters, and how they attempted to reinvent their disrupted lives. But it also tells of how the conditions of reinvention were increasingly defined by a new scheme of things -- new forms of power, work, and knowledge. It tells of European imperial dominance not as a temporary repression of subject populations but as an irrevocable process of transmutation, in which old desires and ways of life were destroyed and new ones took their place -- a story of change without historical precedent in its speed, global scope, and pervasiveness. It was in this world that anthropology emerged and developed as an academic discipline. Concerned at first to help classify non-European humanity in ways that would be consistent with Europe's story of triumph as 'progress', anthropologists then went out from Europe to the colonies in order to observe and describe the particularity of non-European communities, attending to their 'traditional' cultural forms or their subjection to 'modern' social change. There is nothing startling today in the suggestion that anthropological knowledge was part of the expansion of Europe's power, although there is a general consensus that the detailed implications of this bald statement need to be spelled out. The question then arises as to whether we want to fill in the broad picture of anthropology's growth that is already familiar to us or to illuminate through anthropology aspects of the transformation of which this discipline was a small part. It is possible, at any rate, to deal straight away with some vulgar misconceptions on this subject. The role of anthropologists in maintaining structures of imperial domination has, despite slogans to the contrary, usually been trivial; the knowledge they produced was often too esoteric for government use, and even where it was usable it was marginal in comparison to the vast body of information routinely accumulated by merchants, missionaries, and administrators. Of course, there were professional anthropologists who were nominated (or who offered their services) as experts on the social life of subjugated peoples. But their expertise was never indispensable to the grand process of imperial power. As for the motives of most anthropologists, these, like the motives of individuals engaged in any collective, institutional enterprise, were too complex, variable, and indeterminate to be identified as simple political instrumentalities. But if the role of anthropology for colonialism was relatively unimportant, the reverse proposition does not hold. The process of European global power has been central to the anthropological task of recording and analysing the ways of life of subject populations, even when a serious consideration of that power was theoretically excluded. It is not merely that anthropological fieldwork was facilitated by European colonial power (although this well-known point deserves to be thought about in other than moralistic terms); it is that the fact of European power, as discourse and practice, was always part of the reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the way they sought to understand it. What pre-existing discourses and practices did anthropologists enter when they went at particular imperial times to particular colonial places?

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Anthropology in an African Context

Theme 1: Colonialism, Missionaries, Early Anthropology and Southern Africa

Unit 3: Missionary Work in Southern Africa, Junod and Early Anthropology

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

discuss what early anthropological work in Southern Africa entailed

explain what is meant by “missionaries came to Southern Africa with a ‘civilising’

mission”

analyse the ethnographic work of Henri Junod

Key Terms:

Henri Junod, missionaries, colonialism, the scientific method, naturalists

1. Introduction

In this chapter, we will examine the very earliest

anthropological works written about Southern Africa.

These works come from the late 19th, early 20th

centuries. At this point in time, anthropology as an

academic discipline had yet to be formalised, but

descriptions of people encountered during exploration

missions undertaken by various colonial powers

proliferated. More descriptive and detailed accounts

came from missionaries sent to remote locations with the aim of spreading Christianity.

None of the writing of this time is strictly anthropological in nature, but much of it can be

said to be ethnographic. Ethnography is the writing down of a way of life of people with

an attempt made to be as complete and as thorough as possible. Typically this would

include descriptions of the language and the history, as much as either of those are

possible to write down, and also the religion, daily habits, large and small rituals and

unspoken social rules.

Once we have spent some time looking at the historical context, both globally and

The word “anthropology” is a composite of

two Greek words, Anthropos (Άνθρωπος),

and Logos (λόγος). Anthropos refers to a

human being, while logos is generally

translated as “a study of”. Quite literally,

thus, anthropology is the study of human

beings.

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influencing missionaries specifically, we will look in depth at the work of Henri Junod, a

Swedish missionary working in what we would today call Mozambique.

To have mastered this chapter, a student will need to understand the context in which

early anthropological works were written, including a sophisticated grasp of the biases

and modernist convictions these people held. A student will also be able to give

ethnographic examples to illustrate what early Southern African anthropology consisted

of.

2. Historical context

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of

exploration for Europe and North America. These

exploratory missions were largely driven by economic

incentives. The industrial revolution had caused an

unprecedented need for raw materials and natural

resources, while at the same time also providing the

means to travel and exploit these resources like never before. Alongside these journeys of

exploration, some kept journals. Strange animals, unusual plants and peculiar people

greeted them wherever they went. These travelogues, and books like them, were

immensely popular reading material in Britain and in America, where they provided

titillation and escape. Some of them were clearly fanciful fictions (and were generally

marketed as such), like The journey to the centre of the Earth, but many walked a line

between fancy and fact, and contained some of the earliest written documentation of

people and their way of life. These travelogues are accordingly some of the very earliest

texts one can consider anthropological in nature.

Gold and cheap labour brought the British to South Africa, and with them came travel

writers, naturalists and missionaries. During the 1800s, the four Boer Republics were

formed and disbanded, and there were three wars against the British that devastated

South Africa's people, first the Anglo-Zulu war then the two Anglo-Boer wars. This

followed by the rush of people to the interior of South Africa for diamonds, then gold as

they were discovered in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand respectively. On 31 May 1910,

the Union of South Africa was established. This was politically a time of great upheaval,

violence and change in South Africa.

Consider, as an example of travel writing from that time, an excerpt from Dixie's 1882

book, In the land of misfortune, describing a midday meal at the home of a “Boer” family

– they had just departed from Potchefstroom, and had met a translator on the way

(referred to as their “new friend”). In many ways, this book is exceptional, written by a

woman in a time when this kind of writing was nearly exclusively the domain of men, and

written in a way that is generally less dismissive of indigenous populations than much of

the writing of her peers. Note that her spelling – Esquimaux – is a very archaic way of

When writing dates, the time period 1800 to 1899 is called the 19th century, and 1900 to 1999 the 20th century.

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writing Eskimo, a term considered derogatory in some contexts and replaced with the

more acceptable term, Inuit.

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This text gives us an example of a typical family situation at the time among “Boers”.

Many children, simple fare and a political consciousness that you could ill afford to not

have (whether for, or against the British), typifies a lifestyle, and makes one of the few

descriptions we have of “Boer” life at that time. The addition of personal information

such as the author's hunger and awkwardness in a situation until a translator steps in,

makes this text informal – this kind of acknowledgement of the writer's presence is

something that anthropology returns to only many years later.

More serious texts of this time were produced by naturalists. A famous example would be

Charles Darwin, who described people he encountered as “savages” or “barbarians”.

These texts were intended to be accurate scientific descriptions of the world, which

meant that the writer was never directly mentioned, and that the natural world, or

people being described, was categorised in various ways. The naturalist writers treated

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unfamiliar people and animals in exactly the same way, using the same terms to describe

human beings as they would animals and plants. For the early European explorers, this

was not problematic. At the time, slavery was beginning to be abolished, but

acknowledgement of equality of people based on appearance and gender was still

lifetimes away.

Despite the clearly racist and supremacist attitudes of European explorers, some of these

early texts idolised the so-called “simpler” life people without industrialisation led. This

phenomenon, in literature studies called the “noble savage”, led to rather romantic

descriptions of a life quite different from that of, for example, Victorian England. Here is

an example, from The adventures of Telemachus, by Fénelon, in which he paints the

“savages” as the peace-loving, altruistic part in his story, instead of the far more typical

role they occupied – that of the inconvenient and aggressive bad guy.

On our arrival upon this coast we found there a savage race who . . . lived by hunting and

by the fruits which the trees spontaneously produced. These people . . . were greatly

surprised and alarmed by the sight of our ships and arms and retired to the mountains. But

since our soldiers were curious to see the country and hunt deer, they were met by some

of these savage fugitives. The leaders of the savages accosted them thus: "We abandoned

for you, the pleasant sea-coast, so that we have nothing left but these almost inaccessible

mountains: at least it is just that you leave us in peace and liberty. Go, and never forget

that you owe your lives to our feeling of humanity. Never forget that it was from a people

whom you call rude and savage that you receive this lesson in gentleness and generosity. . .

. We abhor that brutality which, under the gaudy names of ambition and glory, . . . sheds

the blood of men who are all brothers. . . . We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigour of

body and mind: the love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural goodness toward our

neighbours, attachment to our friends, fidelity to all the world, moderation in prosperity,

fortitude in adversity, courage always bold to speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery . .

. . If the offended gods so far blind you as to make you reject peace, you will find, when it

is too late, that the people who are moderate and lovers of peace are the most formidable

in war.

3. The scientific method and the belief in progress

The earliest anthropologists followed the naturalists in their attempts to make

scientifically accurate descriptions of the people they were writing about. This was

necessary to be taken seriously as a scholar and, in so doing, to establish the discipline of

anthropology.

As scientists, these early writers firmly believed that their sensory observations provided

them with true and unproblematic information about the world around them. In other

words, what they saw and wrote down was what actually existed. This is called

empiricism, and it is the cornerstone of anthropological writing. Now, in hindsight, we can

see that loaded language (such as “savage” or “barbarian”) reflects more their ideas of

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the world than the actual, true nature of what they saw. We know that your own biases

affects what you see dramatically, but at the time this was not so.

Their empirical observations were a part of the scientific method. Briefly, the scientific

method requires that you first ask a question, then hypothesise an answer to this

question. Once you have a hypothesis, you must test it experimentally. This experiment

must be repeatable. In the case of ethnography, or anthropological writing, the

experiment is your observation of people. Finally, you analyse your findings and draw a

conclusion, typically either supporting or rejecting your initial hypothesis.

Alongside the attempts to be scientific, the writers in the late 19th and early 20th

centuries had a great belief in the power of science to make everyone's lives better. With

the industrial revolution in full swing, an abundance of natural resources to exploit in

Africa and the Americas, and a generally increasing level of prosperity in Europe, it only

makes sense that they thought this. Medicine, travel and manufacture were all having

regular and impressive breakthroughs. The belief in modernisation, and that through

modernisation there would be peace and prosperity for everyone fuelled much of the

ideological justification for colonialism. Schools, hospitals, bridges and missionary

outposts were built throughout Africa and South America with the idea of bringing the

wonders of modernisation to people who do not have it yet. This idea, that there are

people out there who need “civilising”, is a very narrow-minded idea, and did a lot of

harm. That said, it is a conviction held by many of the writers we encounter here, and will

encounter, as we discover early Southern African anthropology. It is worth keeping in

mind that we, as much as they, are products of our time and our context, and while this

should never preclude criticism where it is due, it should also not blind us to what is still

worth learning from them.

In 1914, and again in 1939, the world was plunged into war. The First and Second World

Wars, on the one hand, brought about incredible technological developments (the

computer, radio, sonar, resuscitation techniques, the list goes on and on), but also

brought with them a great disillusionment in the power of technology. The pre-war

optimism was gone, and would be further eroded by the nuclear disasters of the latter

half of the 20th century.

4. Missionaries: a calling

The belief in progress, and in the ability of science to provide that progress, which

provided much of the ideological impetus for colonial expansion, also aligned rather well

with the Christian calling to missionary work. A missionary is a member of a religious

organisation sent into an area to spread the religious beliefs it ascribes to, and often also

to perform services like education, health care, and to assist with social justice and

economic development. Unlike the typical naturalists or adventurers producing

travelogues, whose writing was largely constrained by their constant travel, missionaries

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would live in one area for long periods of time, sometimes whole lifetimes. This allowed

them to get to know and to understand local customs, ways of life, history, language and

celebratory habits – in a word – it allowed

them insight into local culture.

Many missionaries regarded local culture, and

especially local religious beliefs, as a barrier

to conversion to Christianity at best (or

something to be immediately eradicated at

worst), but some put in much time and effort

to understand the people they lived among.

This understanding often made them very

effective missionaries. It encouraged them to

compromise on some of the strict dogma and

instead use local understandings as a way to

teach Christian principles. From this interaction many of the large churches in South

Africa arose, an excellent example being the Zionist Christian Church or ZCC.

In their attempts to understand local culture, missionaries often captured the language

and history, habits and daily life of the people they lived among in writing. These texts

represent the very first writings we can consider to have used participant observation as a

method to understanding human ways of life. These written works are also some of our

earliest sympathetic texts of indigenous Southern African people. By sympathetic texts it

is not meant that the missionaries writing them were specifically in favour of, or positive

about the way of life they were writing about, but that they did not simply disregard this

way of life as beneath their attention.

One of the finest examples of missionary ethnography of a group of people in Southern

Africa is written by Henri Junod.

5. Henri Junod (1863 – 1934): The life of a South African tribe

Henri Alexandre Junod was born in Switzerland and trained as a Protestant minister at

Neuchâtel, Basle and Berlin. In 1887 his application was accepted by the Swiss Romande

Mission, and he was sent to Edinburgh to study English and medicine in preparation for

his first missionary appointment. This appointment was at the Rikatla Mission in

Mozambique in 1893. As is fairly typical of missionaries sent to remote locations at the

time, he attempted to translate the Bible into Ronga/Tsonga, and to facilitate his

translations he published a Ronga/Tsonga grammar. This was followed by publications on

the way of life and language of the Ronga/Tsonga. Junod established a school for

evangelists at Shiluvane, near Tzaneen. In 1917 a school to train black clergy was started

at Rikatla. Junod retired to Switzerland in 1921 from where he continued his work with

traditional African culture and affairs. When Junod died in 1934, his ashes were returned

Participant observation is the process whereby information about people is gathered not just from a distance or by indirect hearsay, but by the researcher actively involving themselves in the day-to-day activity in whatever context they are studying. It goes beyond interviews and observation as active participation by the researcher is a crucial part of this research method.

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to Africa at his request to be buried at Rikatla.

The life of a South African tribe, HA Junod's ethnographic guide to the Ronga/Tsonga,

appeared in 1912 in two volumes, volume one on the social life and volume two on the

psychic life of the Tsonga/Ronga group of people – that he called a tribe. This work was

reprinted in an amplified form in 1926 and 1962. It has been translated into several

languages and is still regarded as one of the best descriptions of an African society. It is

freely available online and in the Unisa library should you wish to read the entire volume.

Henri Junod was a devout man who gave and

inspired affection from the people around him.

He respected indigenous culture and spread

the teachings of the gospel with tribal customs

in mind. He was a brilliant scholar of wide

interests and sympathies apart from his

missionary vocation. He belonged to many

natural societies and made extensive

collections of beetles and butterflies. He first

identified and had named after him, the

species Papilio junodi and Eumeta junodi. This

firmly places him within the familiar tradition

of naturalists and naturalist studies of Africa

and America.

As a missionary, his writings are always from the perspective of how his observations

either contribute to, or conflict with his aim of bringing Christianity to the Ronga/Tsonga.

Read here his conclusions on various aspects of Ronga/Tsonga culture.

The following excerpt is taken from The life of a South African tribe (Junod 1927:60):

CONCLUSION ON THE RITES OF INFANCY

The rule that a mother "must plough for her child three hoes" is excellent. It is no

doubt a splendid preparation for the future life to have been fed during three years on

mother's milk. Will it be possible to maintain that law under the new conditions of

civilized life which are adopted more and more all through the tribes? Let us remark

that this provision, though it has been inspired partly by the interest for the child itself,

is dictated mainly by a superstition concerning the lochia secretion which is regarded

as highly noxious and keeps the mother in an unclean state for a long time. This

superstition will not withstand the test of science and will pass away. On the other

hand, polygamy has been invented and is flourishing partly on account of this law. A

husband being separated from the wife who is nursing a child will have other women

The Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Unisa has kept the letters, written works and other artefacts of Henri Alexandre Junod and his son, Henri Phillippe Junod in trust since 1974. The documents in the Junod Archives reflect Henri Alexandre's understanding of the Ronga/Tsonga peoples' culture and language. For more information, visit:

http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=22513

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at his disposal. Polygamy is doomed to pass also. For both these reasons, it is to be

feared that this healthy custom will not be maintained in the future. It is a pity and we

ought to do our best to encourage its continuance.

Many young married natives leave their homes and go to Johannesburg to the mines

and stay there for one or two years as soon as they see their wife pregnant. This is

certainly on account of the above rule, but this desertion of the conjugal home is

hardly to be approved.

As regards the whole medical treatment which characterises this period which is more

or less considered as a disease, it has no value at all. The big intestinal worm is, of

course, merely a product of native imagination. Children sometimes suffer from

lombrics, but not more than white children. Convulsions are frequent as a result of

malaria and dysentery, and neither the ever present milombyana nor the bi-monthly

biyeketa nor the powder of the reed can do anything to prevent them. The habit of

always carrying water in the calabash and of never emptying it entirely is harmful. Dr

Garin, our medical missionary, examined some of these milombyana calabashes with

the microscope and found them full of bacteria of all kinds. It is a splendid milieu de

culture for them. However this milombyana custom is hard to eradicate as this

principle is deeply rooted in the Thonga mind: "The child grows by means of medicine"

and even Christian converts respect it. They will relinquish it when some clearer notion

of medical science has entered their heads a time which is still remote, I fear!

From the missionary point of view, let us remark [on] the analogy between the rite of

the broken pot and Christian baptism as administered to children by most of the

churches. Natives readily admit a ceremony of benediction for the little ones, be it

proper baptism or presentation with imposition of hands. But the heathen baptism is a

baptism of smoke... and not of water and it is in relation with mere external dangers

while the Christian rite represents the purification of the soul from its sin and the new

and pure life. Whatever may be the difference between the two customs, we can find

in the animistic rite a point of analogy which can help us in the explanation of the

spiritual sacrament and of its deep significance.

The following excerpt is taken from The life of a South African tribe (Junod 1927:94):

ON CIRCUMCISION

What judgment must we pass on this custom to which some tribes still cling with great

pertinacity? The teaching of endurance and of hunting has certainly some value.

However these rites as a whole have very little worth and are useless in the new

economy of South Africa. The obscene language allowed during the Ngoma tends

certainly to pervert the mind of the boys and forms an immoral preparation for the

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sexual life.

Though the Government could not at once suppress the custom, I think it might use its

influence in checking it. As for the Mission, it has naturally fought against this school of

heathenism, but not always with success; boys, even Christians boys, are wonderfully

attracted by it and many have left their spelling book for the formula of

Manhengwane!

Have we nothing to learn from the Ngoma? One hundred and seventy thousand

children of black South Africa are now attending our schools... more or less regularly.

Hundreds of young men are boarding in our Normal Institutions. Are we always

succeeding in this great educational work? Its results are not quite satisfactory because

most of the children do not stay long enough in the school to be properly taught. As

soon as they have acquired some knowledge of reading and writing, they leave and go

to the towns to earn money. Whatever the teacher may say, they escape... I must

confess that [I] do not control them as well as the Father of the Circumcision...

The Ngoma shows us however that a strict discipline is quite possible with native boys

and that we must deal with them, without any tinge of harshness of course but, with a

firm hand. When the inmates of our institutions complain that the sauce of their

porridge is not savoury enough, we might remind them of the food their heathen

comrades are eating in the Ngoma!

There is a striking resemblance between Bantu circumcision, Jewish circumcision and

Christian baptism.

In Jewish circumcision, the same physical operation was performed, but it was

performed on infants. It had certainly also the meaning of an ablation, a carrying off of

pollution and an introduction into the holy nation. In the course of time, the notion

was spiritualised and circumcision meant the removal of sin. But it had a strong

religious character: Jahve was marking his chosen people by their circumcision. This

religious element is wanting in the Ngoma of the Thonga and the Suto and the national

meaning alone remains.

As regards baptism, the great difference between the heathen and the Christian rite is

evidently this: Christian baptism is not only a religious but also a moral rite. Under its

normal form, which is the immersion of adult catechumens, it represents in a striking

manner the washing away of sin and the admission to the Church of Christ; it is a rite

of passage: separation from the old life of sin, marginal period of instruction,

aggregation to a holy community...

The Ngoma has no such spiritual and moral notions, but it has been inspired by the

same deep and true idea of the necessity in the evolution of man of a progress which

consists in the renunciation of a miserable past and the introduction into higher life.

This idea is certainly one of these rays of light, which we are happy to discover amidst

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the darkness of heathendom, one of these points d'attache to which we can tie truths

of spiritual religion.

The following excerpt is taken from The life of a South African tribe (Junod 1927:125):

ON MARRIAGE CUSTOMS AND LOBOLA

What will be the fate of all these very picturesque marriage customs with the advent

of civilisation? Let us notice that amongst Christian converts, many of them have been

abandoned as a matter of course, the bad habits of tjekela, the assault on the village,

the preparation of beer for instance. The part played by adult go-betweens is

sometimes taken by the elders of the Church, but often young people do not care for

interference and conduct their own business.

The lobola custom is opposed by the missionaries but natives generally fail to see its

evil. We shall come back to this great subject later on when dealing with the life of the

family. Some other rites are preserved, the feast, of course, and we see boys ruining

themselves in order to prepare a glorious wedding with splendid costumes and

abundance of meat. On this point they are rather too conservative!

The religious act has now become the Christian blessing and has taken the place of the

heathen sacrifice to the ancestors; it is followed generally by a procession of the best

men and the bridesmaids who sing popular hymns, sometimes very solemnly worded,

songs of repentance for instance, as they march to and fro in the nuptial village, the

women, even the men, of the two families throwing at each other's heads amenities of

the same kind as in former times. This is a most peculiar mixture of the old and the

new elements and often made us wonder. I think however that these rites are doomed

to fall, because Christian marriage is no longer a collective act, but has been

individualised as well as the many other acts of the psychic life. It remains a social act

indeed, but an act accomplished by two individuals on their own responsibility and by

mutual love.

"Ceci tueracela": This, the Christian or Western individualism, will kill that, viz. the

primitive collectivism and all its rites. However original and interesting the marriage

ceremonies may be amongst the Bantu, I do not think they can be as such assimilated

to the new ideal.

Let that ideal inspire new customs befitting its own nature as well as the merry

character of the race!

In explaining the advantages, or the evil consequences, of the custom in the native life,

I have already shown that these latter vastly exceed the former. This shows what

attitude we ought to adopt towards it. But before concluding on this point, let us go

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back to the first principles of sociology.

The White Governments and the religious bodies which are at work amongst the South

African natives are all Christian; they belong to what is called Western Civilisation. Its

conceptions as regards the human person are on a totally different level to that of the

native tribe. Since the Prophet of Nazareth pronounced these immortal words: "What

would a man give for his soul", the era of individualism has set in. The infinite value of

a human being has been discovered and this new principle has become predominant,

not only in the religious, but also in the civil sphere. The proclamation during the

French revolution of the "rights of man", which is looked upon as the greatest progress

made by modern politics, is a direct result of this assertion of the value of the

individual. If every century has to rediscover the formula conciliating the rights of the

individual with the interests of collective Society, we all feel that this proclamation has

been one of the most precious conquests of humanity.

The lobola custom, invented by a society which is still in the collective, or half

collective, stage is incompatible with the enlightened conceptions of Western

civilisation, with its politics, its ideas of civil life, as well as its religion. It is inspired by a

conception of the human person which belongs to another age. Here a wife belongs to

her husband, children belong to their father in a material sense, not in the moral sense

which we can alone adopt with our conception of the individual. A boy is nothing but a

member of the clan, who must perpetuate its name and glory. A girl is nothing but the

means of acquiring a wife for this boy and of so increasing the clan. A wife is nothing

but a piece of family property, bought by lobola, and which is consequently inherited

by other men when her husband dies. They are not moral human beings and free

human beings. The opposition between the collectivist and the Western conception is

absolute and, if we believe that we are right, it is the duty of both Colonial

Governments and Christian Missions to try to amend this state of things in native

society.

The obligation however is not the same for both. A civil Government, undertaking to

rule a tribe brought into subjection by war or put under the Protectorate of a

European power, settling amongst natives still retaining their primitive way of living,

cannot pretend to govern them at once according to the laws of civilised nations. It

would be an impossibility. Such a Colonial Government must respect native laws and

judge cases according to it, otherwise it would not appear to the natives to be just; and

it is indispensable that, in their dealings with uncivilised people, White Authorities

should always satisfy this sense of justice which, is so strong amongst natives. However

I do not think this respect ought to be pushed too far.

Native Commissioners are quite right when they aim at a progressive change of the

laws and customs of primitive collectivist people in the direction of more individual

liberty, so that the principles of native society will be amended, and brought to the

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same base as ours, in course of time. The State has not the power of producing that

evolution, but it must be favourable to it, and it must consider with sympathy every

effort that is made to elevate and purify the social and familial system of the tribe. It

has many means at its disposal to collaborate in this work, as we shall very soon see.

The Christian Missions can alone bring about this transformation, acting, as they do,

on the hearts of the natives, producing individual conviction in the consciences,

opening a new horizon to the minds, creating amongst them a new society. For them

the duty of fighting lobola is absolute, and I cannot understand how some missionaries

think it may be tolerated in a Christian church. By them the following reasons ought to

be taken into consideration, in addition to those already mentioned :

1. The lobola, being a material means of concluding a marriage tends to lessen the

moral conditions of the foundation of a true Christian union, mutual love especially.

We know by experience that individual love of a young man for a young girl, love as we

conceive it, which was scarcely to be met with in the original collective Bantu society,

is beginning to appear amongst the best of our converts. This will become the right

and powerful tie which will more effectually bind conjugal union amongst them.

2. Lobola is intimately connected with polygamy, as a woman bought belongs to the

husband's family and must be inherited by his younger brothers. If this man is already

married, he is bound to become a polygamist. So is the only brother of many girls who

is doomed by the custom to lobola for himself as many wives as the sisters he

possesses.

So all the Missions, working amongst the Natives practising the lobola, ought to agree

upon a decided fight against it with those moral weapons which spiritual bodies ought

exclusively to use. And I would recommend the following rules to be universally

adopted:

1. Lobola is prohibited, viz., any Christian father is not allowed to ask for a lobolo when

giving his daughter in marriage: he is converted; he calls himself a Christian; he cannot

be allowed a practice which is the negation of the moral character of the human being.

2. In the case of widows, be it well understood that, in Christian communities, they are

free as soon as their husband is dead; that they keep their children and that, when

they go home with them, no money can be claimed by the heirs, whether the woman

has been lobola or not.

3. As regards children, the moral right of possession of both father and mother in them

is maintained to the exclusion of a special right arising from the lobola.

4. In the case of a boy marrying a heathen's daughter, we cannot prevent him from

paying a lobolo. The father is the master and, as we have no moral jurisdiction over

him, we cannot oppose his claim. But, be it well understood, this payment will not give

the new husband, who is a Christian, all the rights which accompany the lobola under

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native law. It would be wise to ask for a written stipulation from the husband in this

case, as well as from the Christian father who gives his girl without lobola. Let us be on

our guard here! The lobola being a family property, if the father or the elder brothers

do not claim it, being Christians, another heathen relative will always appear on the

scene and say: “If you do not want it, I claim it! The girl is ours!" I shall discuss this

eventuality later on.

5. When Christian girls, depending upon a heathen father, wish to free themselves

from the lobola, which appears to some of them to be a degrading sale, they ought to

be encouraged to save money in order to redeem themselves. We have seen many

cases in which this proof of energy given by girls has been a blessing for them and for

the Church. The same applies to a young widow, who wishes to lead a pure life and to

avoid becoming the wife of a polygamist heir.

Should all missionaries agree on these points, the practice of lobola would soon

disappear. But the aid of the State, which I think is desirable and quite legitimate, if it

keeps within the limits of its proper domain, could hasten considerably this evolution

of native society and the disappearance of this objectionable custom.

How can a Colonial Government collaborate in this transformation?

1. By an official registry department, particularly a registry of marriages, by means of

which the legitimacy of unions contracted before the Registrar will be established. This

will meet one of the wants which the lobola custom filled, in the uncivilised state of

society: the right of the father will not be contested, though lobola has not been paid.

These native marriages might be registered in two categories, those accompanied with

lobola and those without it.

2. By lowering as much as possible the sum required for lobola. This is within the

province of the state. Everywhere the native chief has fixed the amount, which has

varied very much. I heard the Portuguese Administrator of Manvisa very rightly

suggest to fight the custom by reducing the price. Should, for instance, the lobola be

fixed henceforth at 5, as money is now so easily found, this would in itself ruin the old

heathen practice. The value of a wife would appear so much superior to that trifle that

the whole transaction would appear ridiculous. Moreover any woman would be able

to redeem herself from the servitude of the lobola.

3. Native Commissioners could also do much in assisting girls and widows who make

the courageous attempt to free themselves. It could very well be enacted as a law that,

any widow can free herself of the consequences of lobola by payment of 5, or less, and

that she may keep her children. Such a provision would be only just, as a Civilised

Government cannot allow a heathen to force a Christian woman to become the wife of

a polygamist.

4. We would also ask the Authorities to recognise and proclaim the following principle:

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When the first legal claimant, the father or the elder brother, the "master of the

lobola", renounces his right to it, no other relative is allowed to claim it for himself.

This is very important. Indeed as the lobola is collective property, it frequently happens

that a heathen relative comes forward and says: "I want it". Sometimes the Christian

parents cannot, or will not, oppose his claim. It may even happen that a father has

consented to give his daughter without lobola and, when he dies, his heirs who may be

raw heathen, will lodge their claim for the sum which the man had generously

foregone. This is the reason why we should recommend a statement to be drawn up in

each case of renunciation of lobola. This paper could always be shown to anybody

trying to interfere with a lawful marriage, celebrated without lobola. In the same way

the heathen heirs of a Christian husband, who has paid a lobolo to his father-in-law,

could not lay claim to the widow.

The eradication of the lobola will take long, but it must take place if native society is to

overstep the level of collective social life, and to be raised to the status of a civilised

community. There will be a transition period during which both natives and their

civilisers will have to show much patience, tact and ability; many hard cases will arise.

The story of Fos and Mboza, which I narrate in Appendix VI illustrates these difficulties.

But, whatever they may be, the reform is worth every effort and I will borrow my

conclusion from a native whom I once heard speak with splendid clearness and

conviction on the subject. This man, an evangelist called Zebedea, brought an old

native to me, named Tumben, a Christian who was still very much attached to heathen

customs. They discussed before me this question: Must Tumben claim a lobolo owed

to him, in order to pay a lobolo which he owes to somebody else? The old man

thought he was entitled to make his claim. Zebedea asserted that he was not, and the

evangelist was right. Christian spirituality required of Tumben that he should renounce

the lobola because he was a convert; on the other hand he could not decline to pay his

lobola debt to his creditor who was a heathen, and could not consequently accept the

Christian point of view. The case was hard for the old man and the fight between his

conscience and his interest was sad to witness. Zebedea found convincing arguments:

"These lobola debts", he said, "are ropes which start from the neck of one and go to

the neck of the other. Though your father dies, this rope still ties you, you keep tied to

your father's bones by this cursed rope! Others will get drawn into its coils and the

strands become entangled round you! Cut it and be free!"

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The following excerpt is taken from The life of a South African tribe (Junod 1927:283):

ON POLYGAMY

Practically, what must be the attitude of the Government and of Missions towards this

custom?

1. As regards civilised Governments, having still to reckon with native law, they cannot

at once prohibit every form of polygamy.

But when they have established marriage registration, it seems that they ought not to

allow unions posterior to the first one to be considered as legitimate. These marriages

ought not to be registered, and if this difference were strictly enforced, by and by

natives would become more aware of the illegitimate character of polygamic

marriages. In the Transvaal, the Native Affairs Department at one time tried to fight

against the custom directly in the following manner: as every man has to pay taxes

according to the number of his wives, the tax for the first wife was fixed at 2, and he

had to pay the double of that sum for each extra wife. But the provision was

abandoned later on. The taxation has, however, everywhere the effect of limiting

polygamy. In Portuguese territory natives are taxed according to the number of huts

they possess. As each wife dwells in a separate house, polygamists are more heavily

taxed than others.

Provisions like these are, I suppose, all that a Government can do. It cannot suppress

polygamy as long as the tribal system still holds good. But what a law cannot effect,

moral teaching can and, in fact, the Christian Missions have long ago begun to fight

against this evil.

2. All missionaries, who have lived amongst the Bantu and know something of native

life, agree on one point: Polygamy is incompatible with the high moral ideal, and with

the family ideal which Christianity has brought into the world. Therefore they all work

against it. They all also agree that a polygamist, who wants to become a Christian,

must by no means be prevented from doing so. He is to be accepted as an inquirer and

a candidate for baptism. But divergence of view begins on the question of receiving a

polygamist into full church membership by baptism. We can distinguish four different

points of view on this question, corresponding to four different courses: the

latitudinarian, the idealistic, the extreme and the midway course.

The latitudinarian view taken by Bishop Colenso, for instance, is this: (I quote freely

from Ten weeks in Natal, pages 139-140). "Enforcing separation on polygamist converts

is quite unwarrantable. They have been married according to the practice of their land.

We have no right to require them to cast off their wives and cause these poor

creatures in the eyes of all their people to commit adultery! What is to become of their

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children? And what is the use of our reading to them the Bible stories of Abraham,

Israel and David with their many wives, etc. Let us admit polygamists of old standing to

communion". The only difference which Bishop Colenso would admit, between

polygamists and monogamists, is that the former ought not to be admitted to offices in

the church. The hope of those who hold this opinion is that, as polygamy is not to be

allowed to young people, it will disappear of its own accord in the next generation. I

am afraid, on this point, the reasoning might be wrong. Unhappily, natives, in the

present low state of their moral conscience, are quite cunning enough to delay their

conversion until they are polygamists, in order to enjoy both carnal and spiritual

blessings!

The idealistic view is taken by those who are satisfied with a promise on the part of the

husband, and his extra wives to have no conjugal relations any more, and allow the

separated spouses to remain in the husband's village, and the husband to care for

them and their children. From an ideal point of view, the provision would be excellent

and save much difficulty. But practically it is very dangerous, as we can hardly expect a

native husband to keep such a promise made in order to be baptised. Sooner or later,

it is to be feared that he will again make use of his rights; he will be thus led to deceive

his missionary, pretending to be monogamist, but leading the life of a polygamist.

Experience shows that, unhappily, this fear is too well founded.

The extreme point of view. In some cases missionaries have required not only total

separation, a new and far away domicile for the separated wives, but that the husband

should reclaim all the lobola oxen, in order to break any tie still existing between him

and them. This practice may be legitimate when we have reasons to doubt the good

faith of the converted polygamist. But it ought not to be commended as a general rule,

as it would make separation almost impossible. Would the parents of the separated

wife be ready to give back the oxen, when the union is broken, not from any fault on

the part of their daughter, but only for conscience sake on the part of the husband? In

this vexed question, we must put as few hindrances as possible in the way; as regards

the husband, he must be ready to lose the lobola money which he gave for the

separated wives.

The midway course, which is followed by almost all the Missionary Societies, set forth

in the regulations of the Berlin Society and in the report of the Anglican Conference of

Bishops at Lambeth is the following one: Polygamists must not be admitted to baptism,

but be accepted as candidates and kept under Christian instruction until such a time as

they shall be in position to accept the law of Christ. (Resolution of the Lambeth

Conference; See Edinburgh World Missionary Conference Report of Com. II). Wives of

polygamists, on the other hand, ought not to be denied baptism, if they deserve it, as

it is not in their power to separate from the polygamic family.

This great principle being admitted, many questions of detail arise for which I would

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recommend the following solutions:

i. Which wife should be retained? Is it the first wife, or the Christian wife (supposing

that the others are still heathen), or the wife who has the greatest number of children?

No fixed rule has been adopted by any Mission, so far as I know, and each case must be

judged on its own merits and according to the higher principles of Christianity, the

husband being exhorted to follow the course which is the most beneficial, not to

himself but to the others.

The cast-off wives ought not to be rejected in any way. They ought to return to their

parents, and their former husband ought to facilitate by all means their remarriage

under the best possible conditions. I even think that he ought occasionally to provide

them and their children with clothing, so that they should not feel abandoned. As

regards food, they are not to be pitied, as, amongst the Bantu, it is the wife who

provides the food for the family!

3. The question of the children is the most difficult, and sometimes it is impossible to

solve it quite satisfactorily. When they are still young, they naturally follow the mother.

Fathers find it very hard to part from them. Why? Doubtless on account of their

natural love for them; but, if you search deeper into their hearts, you will probably find

other reasons. Perhaps unconsciously they still think, according to the old Bantu law,

that children, especially girls, must bring a material advantage to their father. When

they really adopt the spiritual Christian point of view that a father has more duties to

perform for the sake of his children than benefits to derive from them, the separation

is no longer difficult.

4. Of course no Christian husband must be allowed to inherit a widow, nor to claim a

lobola should this woman be married to another man.

"The change from polygamy to monogamy must involve great difficulties and even

hardships", said the Bishops at Lambeth. . . "No trouble or cost or self-sacrifice ought

to be spared to make any suffering which may be caused as light and easy to bear as

possible"... However the question at stake is most important. The very fate of the

Bantu Church, and of the future society, depends on its solution, and a strict

adherence to principle is necessary during this time of transition.

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References

Junod, H. 1927. The life of a South African tribe. London: MacMillan.

Additional reading

Lugard, FD. 1997. The dual mandate in British Tropical Africa: methods of ruling native races,

in Perspectives on Africa, edited by RR Grinker, SC Lubkemann & CB Steiner (2010).

Ranger, T. 1997. The invention of tradition in colonial Africa, in Perspectives on Africa, edited

by RR Grinker, SC Lubkemann & CB Steiner (2010).

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 2: Anthropology in an Africa Context

Unit 1: Origins of ‘Modern’ Anthropology and Debate on Anthropology in Africa

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain the factors that gave rise to the critique of anthropology from African

intellectuals

explain what the critique by African intellectuals of anthropology entails

analyse the merits of the critique of anthropology by African intellectuals

explains that sensitivities should be considered when conducting anthropological

research explain how field research should be conducted and what challenges can be

encountered while gathering data during fieldwork

Key terms

ethnography, colonialism, functionalism and structural functionalism, epistemology,

acculturation, the vernacular, participant observation, interpreters

1. Introduction

Modern anthropology, as we know it today, has existed since around the 1920s when

Bronislaw Malinowski was sent to the Trobriand Islands as punishment for not participating

in WWI. It is during his time in exile on the islands that he developed a method of enquiry

called participant observation3 with which to study the original inhabitants of the island. At

the time it was generally only Europeans who conducted anthropological studies and it was

vogue to call the original inhabitants of a place “natives” or, as Malinowski preferred,

“savages”. On a daily basis Malinowski would interact with the natives, learning how they

related to each other, what economic system they used to sustain themselves, what kind of

beliefs they held and so forth. He then wrote these interactions down in a notebook. Once

his exile on the island had ended he used those notes to write an ethnographic monograph4

3 Participant observation is the principle method of study in anthropology and has been since the 1920s. It involves the anthropologist spending long periods of time with his or her research subject and being immersed in their lives. Participant observation often involves what is considered other research methods, such as in-depth interviews or focus groups, although the form in which these come about is authentic to everyday life. 4 An ethnographic monograph is the product of an intensive period of study of a chosen research subject. In one way or another it involves studying people but there isn’t a universal way in which the parameters of an

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called Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).

The influence of Argonauts resulted in participant observation being adopted as the primary

field research method in anthropology but it also spawned a theory5 for understanding

people which Malinowski called functionalism6. For him this theory was a prerequisite the

anthropologist had to adopt before going into the field. It supposed that each individual

person has a number of physical-psychological needs that have to be met such as nutrition,

safety and reproduction. The task of the anthropologist with the use of participant

observation would then be to study how these needs function in people’s lives. In contrast

to Malinowski a man name Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown developed a similar but

competing theoretical framework during the same period. While scholars referred to him as

a “functionalist” and co-founder of that theory, Radcliffe-Brown saw his own theory as

distinct from that of Malinowski’s7. He argued that it is not the individual who is studied but

society as a whole that is studied and in terms of this it is specifically the structure of society

that is of concern. In order to study the structure of society it then means that the

relationships between individuals have to be studied and understood in context. Radcliffe-

Brown drew heavily on the influence of Emile Durkheim who saw society as a type of living

organism and that each part of society is needed for the whole to continue functioning.

By the 1960s a number of changes had taken place in the world. The end of the Second

World War had the knock-on effect that a number of African countries demanded

independence and eventually succeeded in gaining it. The colonial relations which had once

been characteristic between Europeans and Africans were now altered and Europe’s direct

administration of African territories became increasingly limited. Ortner (2006) argues that

the changes taking place during this period resulted in the relatively coherent theoretical

paradigms of functionalism and structural functionalism8 which had dominated for the last

four decades becoming dislodged. They were seen as being unable to take account of

change within society but no coherent theoretical paradigm came to replace what had

existed before. Instead, according to Ortner (2006), a number of new theories were

unevenly taken up within anthropology. The main ones were interpretive and symbolic

ethnographic study are defined. See http://brianhoey.com/research/ethnography/ for a longer explanation. 5 It can be said that the practice of the social sciences, such as anthropology, rests on a combination of three factors. The first is the method – in other words the way in which data is collected and this includes all the implications that go along with it. The second is the unit of analysis – in other words the “thing” that is focused on when applying the method in social scientific studies. The third is the theory – what is meant by this is the framework through which the data is interpreted so that it can be sensibly understood. 6 This theory argues that within society social institutions exist to meet the individual physiological needs (reproduction, food and shelter) and also “group” needs (economics, social control, education and political organisation) (http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism, last accessed on 2 August 2015). 7 See structural functionalism below. 8 Unlike Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown believed that the different parts that make up the structure of a society existed to reproduce that society and that its institutions each functioned to do that. Whereas Malinowski’s theory placed more emphasis on individual behaviour, Radcliffe-Brown’s version of functionalism did not regard individuals as important but rather the social whole of a society (http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism, last accessed on 2 August).

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anthropology9 as set out by Clifford Geertz, French structuralism10 as set out by Claude Levi-

Strauss and the critical Marxist political economy11 mainly being pushed by Eric Wolf.

In a controversial text produced by Archie Mafeje in 199812 he argued that the changes

taking place in the 1960s referred to above had an additional dimension. For him the

changes being outlined by Ortner represented changes within “Western anthropology”. He

argued that there was another critique taking place in parallel from an “African

perspective”. By making this argument he drew a distinction between African-rooted

anthropological research and what he saw as “white”/”Western”-rooted research. For

Mafeje the latter conducted studies about Africans from a position of colonial privilege

which represented Western and colonial interests rather than the interests of Africans

themselves who were the victims of various Western structures of power put in place over

the period of formal colonialism. It is in the 1960s, also, according to Mafeje, that many

African anthropologists, in Africa, abandoned the discipline because they saw it as the

handmaiden of colonialism, a charge to which many “Western” anthropologists took

offence.

Out of the above emerged a debate of sorts, with two interconnected strands, which has

continued to find expression up until the present: (i) how research should be conducted in

Africa; and (ii) who can conduct research in Africa and about Africans. As an addition to this

debate, the question of whether anthropology was the handmaiden of colonialism during

the colonial era in Africa is also addressed by some authors.

Mafeje’s critique for the first point above mainly rested on an epistemological13 question.

His argument was that an epistemological break with a theoretical paradigm rooted in

9 In short, this kind of anthropology studies the symbols and processes, such as myth and ritual, that give meaning to human social life. There are two basic premises to this approach: (1) beliefs becoming understandable when viewed as part a cultural system of meaning; and (2) the actions people take being influenced by how they interpret what’s going on in the world. Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner are the two main scholars associated with this type of anthropology. Geertz was influenced by Max Weber and concerned himself with the operations of “culture”. Turner was influenced by Emile Durkheim and was interested in how society operated and how symbols functioned within that (http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism, last accessed on 2 August 2015). 10 Levi Strauss argued that anthropology should concern itself with the underlying patterns of human thought that produce the cultural categories with which people understand the world. For him these structures were not deterministic of culture and instead operated within it. His work was influenced by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and the Prague School structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Troubetzkoy (http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism, last accessed on 2 August 2015). 11 Keith Hart argues that an anthropology of the kind that Karl Marx would have engaged in would be one that is a “set of analytical constructs of the capitalist mode of production, modified by awareness of the world that preceded and lies outside capitalism” (http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism, last accessed on 2 August 2015). Put differently, this kind of anthropology is critical of the way in which modern capitalism has restructured society all over the world and acknowledges that there is a state of being that existed before it was perverted by a system that placed money before people (in this light capitalism produces inequality and ensures that those who have maintain their material benefits at the expense of those who do not have). 12 Mafeje, A. 1998. Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era? African Sociological Review 2(1):1–43. 13 Epistemology refers to the way in which knowledge is produced. It asks why something is considered knowledge. Typical it involves propositional questions around beliefs, justifications and truth.

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Western thought was necessary and that instead researchers “ought to generate insights

from the data itself” (Nyoka 2012:6). This would remove the problem of the insights

generated serving ulterior motives and instead it would result in more authentic political

representations of the aspirations of the ambitions of Africans themselves when research is

done in Africa14. What follows below is a sort of genealogy of scholarship participating in the

debate that I have outlined above. It does not include all related academic works as it is

impossible to cover all such reading in a course like this but it does cover what I consider to

be some important works in this body of literature.

2. Critique of “Western” anthropology

a. The ideology of tribalism, Archie Mafeje (1970)

Archie Mafeje was the first African anthropologist to critique the manner in which the field

intellectualised its understanding of people living in Africa. He particularly focused on the

way in which the term “tribalism” was applied to explain African behaviour.

For the purpose of learning how to engage with academic material the original article is

included under learning unit 2 of this theme. It should nonetheless be understood as part of

the chronology used in this chapter and that the content in it plays an integral part in this

debate.

b. A critical look at indices used in the study of the social change in colonial Africa, Bernard

Magubane (1971)

At the time Magubane was writing there was a big focus in anthropology on something

known as culture change in Africa. Many of the writers engaged in this focus were trying to

record and explain the urbanisation that was taking place as many African countries became

independent after the ending of colonialism. A popular argument, according to Magubane,

was that Africans were undergoing a process of “acculturation”15 (or put differently,

“Europeanisation” or “Westernisation”). Many of these anthropologists were associated in

one way or another with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in modern-day Zambia16.

Magubane was very skeptical about the way in which these anthropologists conducted their

14 This is my own interpretation of what Mafeje had in mind when he made this argument. He was focus was more on the scientific corrective than on the outcome of his suggestion. 15 This refers to a person, or persons, undergoing a process of change in terms of culture when different sets of culture meet. This term was typically used to describe how Africans adapted to European norms and standards, although in settler societies there was inevitable exchange and mutual adaption. These changes, according to European observers mostly, often involved a change in food, clothing and language, along with the adoption of “civilisation”. 16 Known as Northern Rhodesia at the time.

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studies and felt that the methods and analysis they employed had an inherent Western bias

which produced knowledge that favoured the old colonial order and actively worked against

the struggles of the Africans studied themselves. His specific focus was on the indices17 used

in these studies to represent acculturation and the fact that Western anthropologists, or

colonial anthropologists as he sometimes called them, omitted the role played by the

colonial system as if colonial relations between coloniser and colonised was natural. He

argued that the indices used often rather represented what the anthropologist considered

important in terms of culture change and not what research participants themselves made

meaning of in using those indices. Changing from clothes worn in rural areas to wearing

western clothing, one of the instances Magubane references as an important index that can

cause confusion – a migrant to town may feel forced to wear western clothes and it may not

necessarily represent a change in culture for him or her. A misreading such as this results in

“a subtle imposition of the values of the dominant strata, values meaningless to the

colonised” (Magubane 1971:420). Had the colonial system as an overarching social structure

been considered in the analysis it is likely that the interpretation of wearing clothes in town

would have been significantly different.

An additional dimension to the above is the fact that the colonial system as an overarching

social structure was not considered in the analysis and had it been done it is likely that the

wearing of clothes would likely have been interpreted in a different way. The larger point to

take from this, for Magubane, is that in studies of social change it is necessary to consider

the larger structure of society such as that associated with colonialism, class and race

because not doing so may result in downplaying the monopoly of power by white

colonialists in relation to Africans.

After these general criticisms Magubane then turns his attention to two specific studies that

had been done in Zambia by Mitchell (1956) and Epstein (1961) as a way to illustrate how

African research participants have been misrepresented to embody prestige based on

indices the anthropologists decided are important. Epstein (in Magubane 1971:421,

emphasis his own) analyses Chanda as follows:

Again, Chanda himself acquires prestige because of his light complexion-‘you look European’-and

because of his mode of dress and in other ways he comports himself like a gentleman.

Similarly Mitchell (in Magubane 1971:421, emphasis his own) describes William as follows:

Perhaps I can make the point more clearly if I can describe to you an African who lives in one of the

towns of the Federation. William, who is in the middle forties, is always neatly turned out in a spotless

suit, well dressed and immaculately kept. In fact William is rather conscious of his clothes and once

entered a competition for the best dressed man in town. He would probably take a good deal more

interest in being able to don the appropriate dress, were it not for the fact that his wife feels that it is

below his dignity for a man in his position to associate with the sort of people who frequent the dance

17 In terms of anthropology it refers to a set of indicators that can be used for analyses. It depends on the anthropologist of the anthropological community how this set is constructed and adapted.

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halls. He is obviously prosperous and the furnishings of his house show it. Each of his bedrooms is fully

furnished with dressing table and so on, and in his own he has a bedside radio. The living room sports

a lounge suite and radiogram. A glass-topped table in the middle of the room is covered by a neat

table-cloth and on it is a vase of flowers. It is true that William goes to work on a bicycle, but there is a

motor-car parked outside his house. Unfortunately it is defunct, but to possess even a defunct motor-

car in an African township is a mark of sophistication...

Magubane’s issue with these sorts of descriptions is that any sociological analysis18 such as

this is confined to the urban experience and cannot go beyond it. By this he means that if

one only observes Chanda and William’s behaviour in town you would get the impression

that the stereotypes, as being “Westernised Africans”, described are the embodiment of

who they are. In the context of the observations being made it is impossible to tell if there is

any pre-existing culture which would significantly alter the kind of conclusions being made.

Part of the reason why only “Western” culture can be observed is because not all traditional

rituals can be carried out in town. As such a decontextualized reading of Chanda and William

can easily lead to making the wrong conclusions about how they perceive themselves and

ultimately how they behave in town.

An additional problem with the work of Epstein and Mitchell is that, due to a lack of

consideration of the larger structures of power at play, their analysis is limited to the views

of their informants19 such as Chanda and William. No matter how honest or true their

accounts are of their lives they are never able to give a “true” or “full” account of life and

society in town because they are only able to give account of the model of society as it exists

in their minds (Köbben in Magubane 1971:423). In other words when relying only on the

accounts of informants it means that the models created by these informants are at best

subjective and it is hard to imagine that they can give a complete or more abstract account

of life in town for Africans.

Magubane argues that a more likely account of Africans’ like Chanda and William is that

they are not as such imitating signs of European prestige but that the wearing of such

clothes can be attributed to various “pressures”. At the time the South African government

often considered Africans wearing traditional garments in town as “vagrants” and thus

prosecuted them (Magubane 1971:426). When Africans converted to Christianity it also

inevitably meant that they had to change clothing habits. In certain cases, such as when

Africans performed work such as mining, it served a utilitarian purpose to change from

traditional clothes to other clothes. In some instances wearing clothes do represent a sign of

status, but for Magubane to single out this feature as the sole reason is highly problematic

and distorts reality.

18 A popular term often also employed by anthropologists to refer to an analysis of society. It often involves the relationship between individuals and society and/or larger social institutions. 19 In recent times the word “informant” has fallen out of fashion as it implies that persons who provide valuable information during field research become silenced after the study is completed and denies them autonomy of their own (see http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/def/informant.htm, last accessed on 12 October 2015). In the context that is used here it refers to a person during field research who provides key information and the term often refers to people who had an extended relationship with the anthropologist during field research.

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Regardless of the ideological blindness studies such as those conducted by Mitchell and

Epstein aren’t to be completely disregarded according to Magubane (1971:427). Instead

value can be drawn from them if they are read within historical context20 with an awareness

of how the colonial situation structures relations in urban settings. The accentuated

importance of clothes attributed to them can only be explained within a situation of

oppression.

In order to address the problem identified in the work of Mitchell and Epstein Magubane

suggests to group the indices of status into two: (i) “those which are ‘functional’ in terms of

urban industrial society and occur both in pre- and post-independence periods”; and (ii)

“those which stem more particularly from the colonial order and have diminished

importance with independence” (Magubane 1971:427). A better contextualisation of indices

would result in a better understanding of social change and the behaviour of African

research participants. Similarly, in studying social change Mitchell and Epstein make the

mistake of accepting that the relations which exist between people under a system of

colonialism would remain eternal and that Africans want to achieve the status of Europeans

rather than overthrowing the system. This is not only an oversight on their part but an

ascription of behaviour to which research participants themselves have no access.

This kind of ascription mentioned above also applies to identity21. In deciding what and who

African research participants are, Mitchell and Epstein’s writing leaves no room for people

like Chanda and William to decide how they want to be in this world. For Mitchell and

Epstein Africans necessarily aspire to be like Europeans because for them it is the only

avenue through which to become fully human, not through attaining independence which

would be a negation of those cultural standards.

Put together these criticisms of Mitchell and Epstein in general represents a criticism of

what is called ethnocentrism22 in academic literature. The portrayal of Europeans in colonial

Africa as carriers of civilisation23 and progress represents at least the potential to

subordinate Africans and justify domination over them. Magubane makes it clear that he is

not saying Mitchell and Epstein were intentionally trying to support the colonial project

(1971:430) but that their research was superficial and unintentionally ended up supporting

not their research participants such as William and Chanda but colonial authorities who

20 The historical context within which a study is situated is always something important to be aware of. Without knowing what the historical context is when doing a study it is impossible to properly understand the present or along which lines future developments are likely to unfold. 21 The concept of identity has become a very popular site of research in the social sciences in recent years. In terms of anthropology identity often relates to how people identify themselves within certain larger groups, how certain people define larger groupings they see themselves belonging to and how certain groups are identified by “outsiders”. In terms of social anthropology it’s important to ask how the term identity is employed when it’s used. 22 Ethnocentrism concerns judging an individual or a group of people’s values by the values on which you draw yourself. By saying this it means that there is a hierarchy of values where some are considered more right than others. 23 The concept of civilisation refers to a type of hierarchy where those at the top are considered the most advanced and in its application here as the stratum towards which all other people should aspire.

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sought to exploit them under a veneer of moral justification.

Magubane at this point in the history of anthropology thus calls for critical reflection on the

manner in which research data is interpreted and to be aware of how the use of certain

“measuring instruments” such as the analysis of clothing function within larger social

structures such as a situation in which colonialism structures the day-to-day relations

between people in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia24.

c. Ethnography of Africa: the usefulness of the useless, Maxwell Owusu (1978)

Much like Magubane, Maxwell Owusu also reflected on, and critically considered, the

methodological and epistemological issues in anthropology when he wrote in 1976. He

concerned himself with quality control in gathering research data as it pertains to studies in

Africa (often conducted by white anthropologists from Europe and North America).

One of the first issues he identified was problems with anthropologists who were unfamiliar

with local vernaculars25 and made use of interpreters26. This often resulted in errors being

made in the translation of local phenomena but was something over which Western

anthropologists were largely uncritical. They presented the work on African societies as

“authentic” to mostly European audiences. A necessary corrective would involve “rethinking

the role of native languages as it affects the general quality of ethnographic data collection,

organisation, and presentation” (Owusu 1978:311). He contends that this is an issue first

raised in a debate between Mead and Lowie in 1939 to 1940 over the use of native

languages in ethnographic fieldwork. This debate has been forgotten in anthropology and

did not receive further attention.

Out of the above debate Mead contends that the fieldworker needs to be able to both speak

and understand the local language but it was more important for her to listen than to speak.

She identified the three functions of language in the field as follows: “(1) the need to ask

questions correctly, (2) the need to establish rapport27 and (3) the need to give accurate

instructions” (Mead in Owusu 1978:313). According to Mead, who agrees with Malinowski’s

opinion, this would allow the anthropologist to grasp the viewpoint and understanding of

the research participant (or “native”, as research participants were called at the time).

Indeed. When an interpreter is employed to assist the anthropologist additional problems

24 Zambia gained independence in 1964. So when Magubane wrote this article (1971) Zambia had already been independent but Mitchell and Epstein produced their works while the country was still formally colonised (1956 and 1961 respectively). 25 The word vernacular refers to the language spoken by people from the area concerned. 26 Anthropologists have from time to time used interpreters when they are not familiar with vernacular languages. These interpreters are often local people who have some form of English education as well and are able to communicate with local people as well as translate what they are saying to the anthropologist. 27 Rapport refers to a certain amount of trust that is built up over time between researcher and research participant, to the point where both parties understand each other and can communicate well.

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arise that may lead to a misrepresentation of events and conversations taking place. At the

time of writing this was a particular problem related to research among African societies

where interpreters were frequently used. According to Naroll the three main sources of

informant error are: “(1) the distorting effects of indigenous cultural theory or stereotype,

(2) the distorting effect of poor choice of informant by the ethnographer and (3) the

distorting influence of faulty memory of the details of a particular unique event” (in Owusu

1978:314).

Owusu later elaborates that there are three stages during which mistranslation occurs by

Western ethnographers studying African societies, they are as follows: “(1) initial, and often

persistent, linguistic and psychological (cultural and racially defined) gaps between the

foreign ethnographers and the peoples they study; (2) the urgent demand for ‘theories’ to

assist the ethnographer in organising his field data and in presenting the conclusions derived

from the data; and (3) the uncritical treatment of ‘authoritative’ ethnographic or

ethnological hypotheses and hunches as accepted or established facts of native life” (Owusu

1978:316).

Of the first Owusu argues that anthropologists unable to speak the vernacular are forced to

assume an “objective”28 posture in order to analyse the research data generated and

present it rationally. By this he means that the anthropologist is unable to associate with his

research participants with the kind of familiarity when connecting with the use of a local

language and as such, when he starts his analysis of the data, he cannot use his

understanding of nuances in a given society to better his understanding of what’s going on.

This cognitive difference, then, can also lead to the creation of abstract structures to which

the research participants themselves do not adhere and do not employ to make sense of

their lives (Owusu 1978:316–317).

Of the second Owusu argues that the use of theories to organise research data poses certain

problems. Many of the theories that existed in anthropology at the time of writing came

about because they developed within a Western perspective on “native” societies and as

such spoke to Western worldviews rather than the worldviews of local societies. These

theories have often been universally applied and as such were biased towards highlighting

the production of a type of knowledge benefitting Western societies. Owusu argues that the

only way in which theories can be truly universal is if Western theories and assumptions are

opened up to scrutiny from contrary points of view (Owusu 1978:317–318).

The last of the three relates to a problem in the reproduction of scholarly works on African

societies. It is when ethnographic accounts are taken as completely objective and factual

28 The issue of objectivity and subjectivity is especially important before the critique of anthropology from within started. Many of the monographs produced before the 1960s were considered to be “objective” accounts of what researchers encountered in the field. The data presented to readers often did not include mitigating details about how the data was produced and ultimately it denies the fact that the data which was produced could have been totally different had a different set of events taken place because of different decisions having been made.

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when they should instead be read as subjective29 texts that are an account of the studies

that were conducted to produce them (Owusu 1978:318).

With all of this said, in the end, Owusu is not arguing that Western anthropologists can

make no contribution or that they have made no contribution. For him it’s unfortunate that

the classic texts on Africa societies will remain to be the main sources many scholars, in

particular Western scholars, consult in their studies in and of Africa. He feels that there is

some value in those texts but that they are limited by some of the issues he raised and that

they should be read in that light, rather than as canons. He also feels Western scholars can

still conduct studies in and of Africa if they have an awareness of their own limitations and

in particular if they keep in mind the limitations of not being able to speak vernacular

languages.

He concludes by outlining three requirements for authentic ethnographies of Africa: (1)

mastery of the relevant African language by Western anthropologists; (2) native scholars

should be critical of the main texts in anthropology on African societies and should be willing

to do the necessary groundwork to fill the gaps; and (3) there should be a frank and

informed dialogue between native African anthropologists and Western anthropologists

who do studies in and of Africa (Owusu 1978:328).

d. Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era?, Archie Mafeje

(1998)30

As mentioned at the start of this theme Archie Mafeje produced a monograph in 1998 which

caused much consternation among other anthropologists, particularly white and Western

anthropologists but also among some African anthropologists. In it he claimed that

anthropology retained a heritage of studying non-European peoples in non-European

contexts and that this form of anthropology was dead. This necessitated deconstructing the

discipline and reconstructing it so that the object of study was no longer the “other”31. He

suggested that a critique from the South32 was necessary to do this and that this critique

had started in the 1960s already (in parallel with a critique from within

29 See point 26 above. When an account is acknowledged as subjective it does not mean the account is unusable. It means there is an acknowledgement that different decisions could have been made or that the data could have been interpreted in a different manner. 30 This section may seem incoherent and all over the place. This is partly due to the text itself. Mafeje wrote this monograph as a criticism of the kind of anthropology practised in Africa but in doing this he did a lot of scholarly work related to the post-modern critique from within Western scholarship about anthropology and also inserted many personal reflections. In some ways the presentation here reflects that but the critique from within Western anthropology has been left out largely as this theme is specifically focussed on the critique from African scholars. 31 In academic writing the Other (or “other” as I wrote it) refers to a worldview which constructs groups of people not belonging to the group of the Self as being subordinate and unequal. According to this view The Other is defined as incapable of reason. The use of this sort of view was often by Western anthropologists when they studied non-Western societies. 32 In the social sciences “North” and “Northern” usually refers to the West and other developed countries.

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Northern33/”Western” anthropology). He was guided by three questions: (1) “the self-

identity and role of African anthropologists since independence”; (2) “the question of

whether there could be an African anthropology without African anthropologists”; and (3)

“whether or not any authentic representation by African anthropologists would necessarily

lead to the demise of representation distinctly ‘anthropological’ as against any other

representation by African social scientists” (Mafeje 1998:2).

In reflecting on these questions and the development of anthropology since the critiques

first started in the 1960s (both from a Northern and Southern perspective) Mafeje suggests

that some success has been achieved in deconstructing anthropology but that nothing

coherent was put in its place and as such anthropology has been fragmented. Part of the

reason for this is the fact, in an African context, that African anthropologists did not

participate in trying to reconstitute the field. The reason for this is the negative association

with anthropology during the period when African countries started gaining independence.

Anthropology was seen by many of the nationalist movements who formed the first African

governments as having been a handmaiden for colonialism and as such they did not support

the practice of anthropology. An additional problem was that some of the strongest African

intellectuals who practised anthropology had also been part of the nationalist movements

and as such found themselves in an unenviable position where they could not fight for the

protection of the field. The end result was African anthropologists withdrawing from

anthropology – some stopped doing anthropological research while others switched to

fields such as sociology34 (Mafeje 1998:20). They only re-emerged in the 1990s at a

CODESRIA conference which had been partly responsible for Mafeje having written this

monograph. Needless to say, for the kind of project envisioned by Mafeje African

anthropologists would have to be part of a conversation to create a more universal and

ethically acceptable anthropology. Mafeje felt that at the conference African

anthropologists had not quite formulated how to reconstitute anthropology as they had

settled on moving anthropology more into an “interdisciplinary” direction. While this

proposal seemed to suggest moving away from national issues Mafeje did not seem happy

with the response as they did not contemplate the implications of their suggestion (his

response, in essence, is that following the suggestion would mean anthropology as a field

ceases to exist and no questions are asked over what value anthropology as a discipline can

actually add to the social sciences) (1998:21, 25).

In the same breath as the above, in his the critique of anthropology as practised in Africa,

Mafeje levelled an interesting accusation at white South African anthropologists by calling

them neo-colonial35 liberals. He held the view that white anthropologists had been socially

33 “South” is the opposite from “North”, it refers to developing countries and generally to countries that were colonised. 34 Although sociology has essentially been the study of Western societies by Westerners for a long period of history, it did not have the same negative association as anthropology and as such continued its existence at African universities. 35 Whereas colonialism is associated with formal geopolitical control of a country via occupation (through

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and intellectually incapable of transcending the problem of alterity36. By this he meant they

had not been able escape their sense of being white and different from their African

counterparts, by which he likely meant both African anthropologists and African research

participants. As proof of this he cited the fact that nearly no studies of whites had taken

place by that point in time and that the anthropology practised by white anthropologists

seemed to disapprove of the idea37 (Mafeje 1998:21).

As a response to the Eurocentric complications to which he objects Mafeje sought to try a

“clean slate” approach by ridding himself of following any specific epistemology, theory or

methodology in his research. Over time he tried to experiment with this deconstructionist

approach and tried to practise what he calls the discursive method, by which he meant

reasoned discussion and exposition (Mafeje 1998:30). By doing this he tried to learn from

his research participants about how they understood and constructed the world, rather than

structuring their thoughts and experiences according to preconceived structures (Mafeje

1998:37). He saw this as a necessary intermediary phase so that an authentic non-Western

anthropology could emerge that would be able to engage with African realities. He calls

what he learns from his research participants “texts” and sees it as his job to decode the

text so that it becomes understandable – in this sense Mafeje is an interlocutor38 and he

sees this move as a definite break with the European subject-object relationship.

e. Blinded by sight: divining the future of anthropology in Africa, Francis Nyamnjoh (2012)

In some ways, like Mafeje, Francis Nyamnjoh also produced a text which has garnered much

attention from both African anthropologists and white anthropologists. He opens his paper

by reciting a well-known story about three blind mice that are placed next to an elephant. In

this story the mice are told that they are with an elephant and they are all very curious to

discover what an elephant is. So they touch its snout, body, tail, et cetera and each time

they are elated at the new discoveries they make. Afterwards when they are alone together

again they discuss among themselves what they learned about the elephant, much like

anthropologists who get together at a conference to deeply discuss their researches. They

argue among themselves who now best understands what an elephant is.

The point Nyamnjoh makes by reciting the story is that in the anthropology about Africa and

military and violent means) or political control, neo-colonialism is characterised by indirect influence over the internal affairs of a country and is often associated with a form of economic exploitation. Whereas colonialism is associated with one country controlling another country (or territory), neo-colonialism often involves exploitation by multinational companies (especially those based in a previous colonial master). 36 This refers to the state of being different. In the social sciences the language used to refer to this usually involves the word “other”. Alterity refers to the idea in this case that white anthropologists see themselves as fundamentally different from their African research participants. 37 He does mention one study that was conducted about whites in Wyksdorp by HG Oxley (1961) but this seems to have garnered no interest at all from fellow anthropologists. 38 Refers to a person who participates in a conversation.

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in particular Southern Africa there exists a fundamental problem. While the three blind men

can now sort of describe the elephant, how do they know it’s really an elephant if they

cannot see it? And even if they could see it, could they really claim to know the elephant or

what it’s like being an elephant merely by observing it?

In his own words he argued

“that many an anthropologist still resists opening up his or her mind to lifeworlds unfolding

themselves through the interplay between everyday practice and the manifold actions and

messages of humans, ancestors and non-human agents in sites of emerging meaning

production and innovative world-making. Ethnographic representations39 of Africa are often

blindly crafted without rigorous systematic dialogue with the Africans in question. Adequate

provision is also not made for competing perspectives and epistemologies within and beyond

our discipline, over and above the token interviews and conversations we undertake in the

field. Even as we are interested in knowledge as co-production, our reflex is to minimise that

co-production with key local intermediaries by either completely ignoring their voices,

contributions and perspectives, or reducing these to a footnote or a list of names and chance

occurrences in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Despite this possibility of co-birth, there is

little anthropological co-production going on. Monological, non-reflexive40 and non-inclusive

representations of parts of an arbitrarily mapped-out and confined Africa continue to be the

dominant mode of comprehending the continent, at the risk of further alienation of those who

– like Sanya Osha (2013: 131) – feel mocked by anthropology as “a marginal academic

discipline that was transformed into a home for academic and social misfits in Europe” and

then transformed in turn into an enterprise of denuding ‘racialised and oppressed Others […]

of voice and constructive representation’. In mapping out this concern, my aim was to put into

conversation the partiality of contemporary anthropological practices with the selection

practices of our subjects of enquiry. Even though some of my most vociferous critics hardly

engaged the central point, the disagreements centred on the problem of South African

representational scholarship as the key way to address my core concern about knowledge

production, epistemology and power. But this is only part of the story” (Nyamnjoh 2013:129).

The above is a quotation out of an additional paper which he had written in response to a

response from a number of white anthropologists who had worked in South Africa. In this

paper he made the point that he feels within the anthropological community centred in and

around South Africa there was a white clique, particularly centred around the University of

Cape Town, to which black anthropologists did not have equal access (Nyamnjoh 2012:69).

In a sense, for him, anthropology is a thing which is owned and belongs to whites. It is a

thing they practise but to which they do not give access to all. He made an additional point

39 Although it may seem that this term speaks for itself, ethnographic representation is an important tool which anthropologists use to explain phenomena which they encountered while doing field research. Something within the field, such as a particular person, is often chosen to represent a wider trend that was encountered while gathering data. 40 Although “non-reflexive” is highlighted here it refers to a practice which has become common in anthropology called reflexivity. Reflexivity is when a researcher properly examines how and why certain research was done, as well as how and why the research is represented in a certain way. Doing this often makes the anthropologist “present” in the text, where as a non-reflexive approach could give the impression that the anthropologist does not acknowledge his or her own role in the production of the knowledge that he or she creates (in other words research is presented as “objective” when in fact there is a lot of subjectivity involved).

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which echoes that of Mafeje – that whites have hardly studied other whites, particularly in

South Africa. He problematised this further by arguing a genre of scholarly inquiry called

whiteness studies41 had gained popularity in recent years but that white anthropologists

had hardly attempted to use the methods it offers to start investigating their “own” (as

opposed to historians who he says had long written about whites and whiteness). He makes

a further point that white anthropologists themselves are likely blinded by their own

whiteness, their own privileges, which gives them the illusion that they are objective in their

approach to reality and that they are beyond question. As such what Mafeje had identified a

decade earlier remained – “othering” was still taking place, even within the anthropological

community42 itself. The implication for Nyamnjoh is that the only way for a black

anthropologist to become accepted among white anthropologists is to become like them

(2012: 74) but that it would never really be possible to be completely accepted which means

that black anthropologists are stuck betwixt and between43.

3. White/”Western” anthropologists respond

a. Reponses to Mafeje

Rosabelle Laville charges that while Mafeje’s criticism of anthropology is certainly true for

the anthropology practised under colonial conditions, it is largely outdated and does not

contend with the immense way in which anthropology had changed by the 1990s due to the

critique from within which he had himself identified (Laville 1998:45). In particular she notes

that ethnography is no longer an authoritative account by an anthropologist nor that it

involves depicting an “other”, and that ethnography now includes the “self”44 in a

meaningful way. However, she does find some value in his call for the creation of an African

anthropology but feels he did not develop his argument fully. She suggests that such an

anthropology might involve indigenous anthropologists who study their own societies (or

European/Western societies) and the transformations that are taking place within them

(Laville 1998:46).

41 Whiteness is a social construction which shifts and changes over time. It describes a dominant cultural way of being which keeps others on the margin. This form of cultural being is normative and is taken as neutral and natural. Other people’s culture and way of being is judged against this standard. Whiteness studies aims to unearth this invisible ideology and show how it operates in daily life. See http://www.ucalgary.ca/cared/whiteness for more. 42 By this I artificially mean a community; the implication is obvious that there isn’t a community because everyone isn’t welcome according to Nyamnjoh. 43 Arnold van Gennep argues that in a rite of passage there are three phases: the pre-liminal phase where a person separates from society, the liminal phase where a person transitions and the post-liminal phase where the person is reincorporated into society. Victor Turner took the second phase and argued that in this phase a person doesn’t belong to the society he or she left and the person doesn’t belong to the society he or she will be reincorporated into either, thus the person is stuck “betwixt or between” (Turner 1987). This is the essence of what Nyamnjoh is arguing, that black anthropologists in South Africa cannot be fully incorporated into the anthropological community which is controlled by white anthropologists, and so they are stuck because they cannot go back to being non-anthropologists either. 44 See footnote 29.

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John Sharp responded to Mafeje by raising three points. The first concerns the “people-

authored texts” which Mafeje had foregrounded and wanted to use for the purpose of

analysis. Based on the text Sharp takes it that an earlier ethnography produced by Mafeje45

serves as an example of what he had meant with “people-authored texts” but he finds that

what Mafeje had largely done instead was use existing ethnographies produced by other

authors which he then “cleansed” by removing all Eurocentric messages. As such, in the end,

he finds that Mafeje is unclear about what precisely he means when he argues for “people-

authored texts”.

Sharp’s second concern relates to Mafeje’s criticism of “Western” epistemology. He points

out that despite Mafeje’s insistence to eliminate all preconceived ideas and categories he

himself draws on essentialist46 notions when he makes a distinction between African

anthropologists and “Western” anthropologists.

As a side point Sharp makes one interesting observation in that the problem with “self-

authored texts” is that there are many matters of people’s lives they take for granted if they

are not pressed to question themselves about it. What he means by this is that there may

indeed be underlying non-Western structures that guide people’s lives but unless there is a

systematic investigation it cannot be unearthed or understood, even though these

structures may have a real effect on how people behave.

Finally, Sharp states that he is open to reorganising anthropology as a discipline and that he

like many other anthropologists have been affected by the debates on the “other” and the

meaning of relativism. However, he feels that it’s a mistake to think that if anthropology is

eliminated as an academic field altogether that the problems associated with the field

would not persist (the problem of othering for instance). He also feels that raising criticisms

such as this may damage genuine attempts to reorganise the social sciences at South African

universities, especially when there are anthropologists who are willing to engage and debate

for change.

b. Responses to Nyamnjoh

Isak Niehaus expressed surprise that Nyamnjoh had “attacked” South African anthropology

(Niehaus 2013:117) because he regards him as having the most prestigious chair on the

continent, the chair of anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He felt it was an unfair

critique and that South African anthropology had made a valuable intellectual contribution

exactly because it was able to transcend racial boundaries (Niehaus 2013:117). He counters

Nyamnjoh’s point that white anthropologists have not studied white South Africans by

45 The theory and ethnography of African social formations: the case of the interlacustrine kingdoms (Mafeje 1991) 46 Essentialisation in this context refers to attributing certain immutable characteristics to a person based on skin tone. This is problematic as it is clear that race is a social construct and that there is no basis for it in biology.

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showing a number of studies that specifically looked at whites and he also explains how

other anthropologists in various ways touched on white behaviour in South Africa.

Like Niehaus, Annika Teppo levelled a similar criticism of the inaccuracy of saying whites did

not study whites. She further responded to a point Nyamnjoh made when he said the study

of poor whites was not significant in relation to whites in general (Teppo had studied poor

whites in South Africa). Teppo responded to this by saying that the “poor white problem”

that developed after the period of the Second Boer War resulted in a massive project led by

the Carnegie Commission to address the problem and it also fundamentally stimulated the

social sciences in South Africa (2013:124). She also contended that the discourse47 around

“poor whites” has to do with class fragmentation, political identity and political mobilisation

around the “poor white” issue. Finally, she shows that while it may be a study of “poor

whites”, it is very much a study of how well-off whites treat them and look at them. It is in

effect a study of larger and more powerful opinions about what it means to be white in

South Africa and as a result what a white person should be48 (Teppo 2013:124–125).

Hartnack (2013) responded to Nyamnjoh by sympathising with many of his views but he

feels that part of the charge against white anthropologists is unwarranted. He refers to the

transformation that had taken place in the anthropology department of Rhodes University

in the sense that there had once been mainly white male anthropologists but that today

most of the staff are female and a number are not white. The older white anthropologists

played a role in recruiting the new cadre and as such he feels Nyamnjoh may not be

completely correct to say that white anthropologists are trying to keep anthropology

“theirs” at the expense of anthropologists who aren’t white (Hartnack 2013:109).

4. Conclusion

This learning unit intended to foreground a critique levelled by African anthropologists of an

anthropology that is seen to have problems related to the kind of knowledge it generates

and to what anthropology itself as a discipline represents. The intention of this learning unit

has been to show that there is a debate that has been taking place within the discipline

between “native” anthropologists and “Western” anthropologists, and that despite the

changes that have taken place within anthropology the issue has still not been resolved as is

evidenced by the most recent exchanges with Francis Nyamnjoh. The responses by white

anthropologists have been kept short on purpose as it is not so much the content of their

response which is of interest here but the way in which self-defined African anthropologists

see the discipline of anthropology and its shortcomings.

47 Discourse in this instance refers to a specific way of thinking. 48 Teppo did a study of a “white upliftment” village in Cape Town. Poor whites were provided with housing and work, and in return they had to live by strict rules so that they conformed to what was considered appropriate white standards.

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References

Hartnack, A. 2013. A debate on anthropology in Africa. Africa Spectrum 48(1):107–112.

Laville, R. 1998. A critical review of “Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end

of an era” by Archie Mafeje. African Sociological Review 2(1):44–51.

Mafeje, A. 1998. Anthropology and independent Africans: suicide or end of an era. African

Sociological Review 2(1):1–43.

Magubane, B. 1971. A critical look at the indices used in the study of social change in

colonial Africa. Current Anthropology 12(4/5):419–445.

Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & KeganPaul.

Niehaus, I. 2013. Anthropology and whites in South Africa: a response to an unreasonable

critique. Africa Spectrum 48(1):117–127.

Nyamnjoh, F. 2012. Blinded by sight: diving the future of anthropology in Africa. Africa

Spectrum 47(2/3):63–92.

Nyoka, B. 2012. Mafeje and “authentic interlocutors”: an appraisal of his epistemology.

African Sociological Review 16(1):4–18.

Owusu, M. 1978. Ethnography and Africa: the usefulness of the useless. American

Anthropologist 80(2):310–334.

Sharp, J. 1998. Who speaks for whom? A response to Archie Mafeje’s “Anthropology and

independent Africans: suicide or end of an era”. African Sociological Review 2(1):66–73.

Teppo, A. 2013. “Poor whites” do matter. Africa Spectrum 48(2):123–126.

Additional reading

Comaroff, J & Comaroff, J. 2003. Ethnography on an awkward scale: postcolonial

anthropology and the violence of abstraction. Ethnography 4(2):147–179.

Devish, R & Nyamnjoh, F. 2011. The postcolonial turn. Bameda: Langaa Research and

Publishing Common Initiative Group.

Mudimbe, VY. 1988. The invention of Africa. North America: Indiana University Press.

Quinlan, T. 2000. Anthropologies of the South: the practice of anthropology. Critique of

Anthropology 20(2):125–136.

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 2: Anthropology in an African Context

Unit 2: The Ideology of Tribalism, Mafeje (1971)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain the concerns and challenges raised by Archie Mafeje regarding the concept

“tribalism”

analyse the argument Archie Mafeje presents about what is meant when the

concept “tribalism” is used

Keywords

tribe, tribalism, ideology, objectivity, Africa, perspective, culture

1. Introduction

This unit builds on the previous by providing an example of one of the earliest writings by

one of the key authors in the debate between African intellectuals and

‘European’/’Western’/white anthropologists. In this particular article Mafeje (1971)

questions the use of an analytical term that had been widely employed by anthropologists

during the first half of the 20th century. More than this, he argues that although

anthropologists at the time had started to shift away from using the term simplistically, they

still continued to apply analytical categories in problematic ways.

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2. The Ideology of Tribalism, Mafeje (1971)

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 3: Africa and Development

Unit 1: African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies, Austin (2010)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain what is meant by “economic development”

analyse how economic development took place in Africa from around the year 1900

differentiate between “settler”, “plantation” and “peasant” economies in Africa

identify the role and legacy of colonialism plays in postcolonial African economies

Keywords

economic development, history, capitalism, British rule, French rule, structural change,

independence

1. Introduction

“Development”, as a national policy, has been central to most postcolonial states in Africa

from the 1960s onwards. In many respects this has implied that former colonisers ‘assist’

their former colonies and as such they remained key role players in the economies of

postcolonial states.

This study theme pays particular attention to how the legacies of European rule in Africa has

affected postcolonial economic development. In this study unit Austin (2010) systematically

analyses how we might try to understand the difficulties postcolonial Africa has

experienced. In doing this he shows that there are important differences between “settler”,

“plantation” and “peasant” colonies using historical analysis.

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2. African Economic Development and Colonial Legacies, Austin (2010)49

49 This article by Gareth Austin is available at https://poldev.revues.org/78#article-78 (last accessed 3 August 2017). This article has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Credit and thanks is given to the Graduate Institute Geneva for making this key text available in this manner.

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Anthropology in an African Context

Theme 3: Africa and Development

Unit 2: Decommodifying Electricity in Postapartheid Johannesburg,

Bond & McInnes (2007)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

identify the approach Bond & McInnes take towards understanding local level events

identify the continuities between apartheid and postapartheid governance

identify the continuities between apartheid and postapartheid society

explain how the residents of Soweto approach access to electricity in postapartheid

Johannesburg

Keywords

Electricity, capitalism, anticapitalism, Soweto, apartheid, postapartheid

1. Introduction

The first study unit in this theme placed focus on macro level changes in Africa over a long

period of time to understand economic development. This study takes the opposite

approach, it places focus on the micro level and attempts to understand how what is

happening on a day-to-day basis interacts with larger social processes. In this light, Bond and

McInnes (2007) attempt to understand a group of people in Soweto, Johannesburg,

campaigned for access to basic services in the early 2000s and adopted a strategy ‘from the

bottom’ for development.

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2. Decommodifying Electricty in Postapartheid Johannesburg,

Bond & McInnes (2007)

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Anthropology in an African Context

Theme 4: Africa and Maps

Unit 1: The Real Size of Africa, Creighton (2015)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

identify that the construction of geographical maps certain conventions follows that

have an effect on how they are projected

identify what Mercator projection is

Keywords

Real size of Africa, Mercator projection

1. Introduction

This theme is the beginnings of how to think about maps anthropologically in terms of

Africa. In this first study unit Creighton (2015) illustrates why looking at Africa on world

maps is problematic. In later study units this basic principle of questioning will be taken

further.

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2. The Real Size of Africa, Creighton (2015)50

The Real Size of Africa

Image credit: Kai Krause

Our world is an amazing place. However, our view of it isn’t always terribly accurate. In fact, the

50 The original online piece by Jolene Creighton can be found at https://futurism.com/real-size-africa/ (last accessed on 4 August 2017). This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Thanks and acknowledgement is given to Creighton and Futurism for making it available under this license.

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maps that we use often work to reinforce our misconceptions. For example, the size of Europe is often distorted. It appears larger than it really is, while other countries and continents are greatly reduced in size. Once place that is often skewed is Africa; it generally appears much smaller on maps than it is in real life. So here is the true size of Africa, distortion-free.

The artist who created the graphic, Kai Krause, says that this is an image that is made to illustrate just how big Africa is without the very common map distortion known as “the Mercator projection.” If you don’t know, the Mercator projection is a tool that was invented for the purposes of navigation. It utilizes what it known as “cylindrical map projection.” Really, it is just a map. It is rectangular, and the lines of latitude and longitude are all parallel. However, it is useful because the straight lines that appear on the Mercator projection are loxodromes or rhumb lines. This means that they represent constant compass bearing. Thus, it is terribly useful for navigators because, if they want to travel from the United States to France, they just have to draw a line between the two points and the navigator knows which compass direction to continually sail towards in order to reach the destination.

The Mercator map has always been a poor projection for a world map because it represents directions for navigation, not realistic representations of size. However, due to its rectangular grid and shape, geographically illiterate publishers found it useful for wall maps, text book maps, atlas maps, newspapers maps…pretty much any kind of map. In fact, the world map that you see on the nightly news is likely a Mercator projection.

If you don’t see why the Mercator projection is a problem, it gives a kind of advantage to colonial powers by making Europe look a lot larger than it actually is on the globe. As Kraus notes, “the basic fact is that a three-dimensional sphere being shown as a single two-dimensional flat image will always be subject to a conversion loss: something has to give…That ability to use lines instead of curves came at a cost: areas near the poles would be greatly exaggerated. Greenland looks deceivingly as if it were the size of all of South America for instance.”

Because of the Mercator projection, the size of Africa is often hugely underestimated, says Krause, typically off by factor of two or three. In 1989, seven North American professional geographic organizations adopted a resolution that called for a ban on all rectangular coordinate maps. However, such resolutions are often painfully slow to take hold. Their resolution reads:

WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and

WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth’s features and coordinate systems, and

WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on peoples’ impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and

WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it “look right,”

THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also

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display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.

The Economist has their own version of the map. They decided to rework Krause’s map using Gall’s Stereographic Cylindrical Projection (1855). It is noted that this is constituted by two standard parallels at 45°N and 45°S. Distortions are still evident at the poles, but for the most part, the country’s shape is maintained, and their areas are shown correctly. As you can see (below), the results are distinct from Krause’s map. But however you look at it, and whatever map you use, Africa is much bigger than it looks on most maps.

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 4: Africa and Maps

Unit 2: Imperialism, Colonialism and Cartography, Stone (1987)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain what the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 was

explain the Stone’s critique of the view that the Berlin conference was about the

partitioning of Africa

explain the relationship between cartographic practices and imperialism

illustrate an understanding Stone’s argument that imperial cartography is reasserting

itself

Keywords

Berlin Conference, colonialism, imperialism, cartography

1. Introduction

This second study unit for the theme starts to look at the relationship between maps,

colonialism and imperialism in terms of Africa. In the article, Stone (1987) questions

whether it is correct to hold the view that the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 was

responsible for the partitioning of Africa. More than this, he illustrates that there was a

longer standing imperial relationship between Europe and Africa, and this relationship may

not have dissipated in the postcolonial period. Ultimately, the suggestion being made is that

it is necessary to take a critical approach to how maps of places are constructed and what

the reasons for those constructions are.

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2. Imperialism, colonialism and cartography, Stone (1987)

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 4: Africa and Maps

Unit 3: The Anthropology of Cartography, Wood (2012)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

identify why Wood is concerned about how people use maps

explain why Wood holds that maps are not ‘facts of nature’

explain what Wood means when he speaks about what maps do

explain what a map is

illustrate what the relationship between the state and the map is

Keywords

maps, anthropology, cartography, objects, fixity

1. Introduction

This final study unit in the theme starts to consider what an ‘Anthropology of Maps’ might

be by looking at an anthropologist writing about critically understanding maps. The

intention of this unit is to show how one anthropologist has used his own journey as an

ethnography for understanding how subjective maps really are. This study unit should be

read in conjunction with Unit 2, to reflect on what maps of Africa or of countries in Africa

might mean.

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2. The Anthropology of Cartography, Wood (2012)51

51 Wood, D. 2012. ‘The Anthropology of Cartography’ in L. Roberts (Ed.) Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice and Performance (Palgrave MacMillan, United Kingdom), pp. 280-303.

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 5: Land and Ownership in Southern Africa

Unit 1: The Empty Land Myth

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

analyse the myth that the interior of modern-day South Africa was mostly

unoccupied during the period that the Boers trekked out of the Cape Colony

explain why there was a relatively low population density in the interior of modern-

day South Africa at the time of the Great Trek

analyse the myth that the interior of modern-day South Africa was mostly

unoccupied at the time of the Great Trek

Keywords

land, territory, colony, colonisation, myth, Mfecane, legitimacy, identity

1. Introduction

One of the cornerstones of South Africa’s new democracy was, and remains to be, that land

taken unjustly from the black population in South Africa would be returned, within practical

limits, to the descendants who suffered the consequences of their material livelihoods being

destroyed. The Land Act of 1913 was taken as the cutoff point from where land claims could

start. All dispossession taking place before 1913 would not be included in the process of

restituting land.

While this theme is focused on Southern Africa, and specifically South Africa, it should be

read more widely as a way to draw attention to land issues on the African continent as a

whole. The idea for this theme is to highlight the relationships people have with land and

the disrupting effects that displacement can have on people’s ability to provide for

themselves. The theme also seeks to complicate an understanding of land as being primarily

about agricultural production and in the final learning unit James Ferguson critically reflects

on this matter.

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This first unit of theme 5 deals with a myth that was used for much of the 19th and 20th

centuries to argue that the occupation of land by Europeans (later simply known and

referred to as whites in South Africa’s context) was legitimate and that black people had no

claim to it. This myth continues to have a following among some white, right wing groupings

in South Africa up until the present.

2. The Empty Land Myth52

52 “The Empty Land Myth” is taken from South African History Online (www.sahistory.org.za). There is permission to use this article as long as the website is given credit and notified. The link to the article is as follows: http://sahistory.org.za/article/empty-land-myth (last accessed on 15 March 2015).

The Empty Land Myth

The Empty or Vacant Land Theory is a theory was propagated by European settlers in nineteenth century South Africa to support their claims to land. Today this theory is described as a myth, the Empty Land Myth, because there is no historical or archaeological evidence to support this theory. Despite evidence to the contrary a number of parties in South Africa, particularly right-wing nationalists of European descent, maintain that the theory still holds true in order to support their claims to land-ownership in the country.

With his book The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races (1866), W. C. Holden was one of the early writers on South African history to publish a book that used the theory of empty land as an explanation for landownership in South Africa. In order to legitimise European settlement in South Africa Holden argued Europeans and the Bantu tribes had entered South Africa at roughly the same time and that up until that point South Africa had mostly been an ‘empty land’. The theory outlined by Holden claimed that the Bantu had begun to migrate southwards from present day Zimbabwe at the same time as the Europeans had begun to migrate northwards from the Cape settlement, with the two movements finally meeting in the Zuurveld region between the Sundays River and the Great Fish River. This, the theory claimed, gave equal right to the land to whoever could take ownership of it, with force, and maintain that ownership. There were therefore no ‘original’ inhabitants with an ‘original’ right to the land, only two migrating groups who had equal claim to it.

Although Holden was the first to publish the theory of empty land in a book, the theory itself had been circulating in the colony for a long time, with many colonists claiming that they had as great a right to the land as the newly arrived Bantu. Myths of empty and vacant land were

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common currency by the mid-1840s.

Figure 1: The eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, a point of convergence between the Xhosa and the British settlers. Source

The Graham's Town Journal argued in 1838, for example, that the Xhosa had been “the usurpers of the whole of the territory between the Kye and the Fish River” and that the British had more of a right to the land than a people who "had gained a footing in it by treachery and violence". The British were convinced that the Xhosa had only recently entered into the region and had taken the land by force from the Khoikhoi, and so the British had the right to take it by force from the Xhosa. The British based this belief on two observations they had made. The first was that at the time when the British and the Dutch were approaching the frontier there had been a few isolated incidents of Xhosa clans who were fleeing internal conflicts moving into KhoiKhoi territory, particularly in the Zuurveld region such as when the KhoiKhoi Queen Hoho and her clan had been defeated in a battle in the Queenstown area in the 1770s by a group of Xhosa fleeing Rarabe. Despite the fact that these were very few and isolated incidents, the British and the Dutch jumped on them and vociferously used them to make a claim that the Xhosa had clearly taken all the land between the two rivers by the violent expulsion of the KhoiKhoi. That the Xhosa used KhoiKhoi place names for regions and geographic features was also pounced upon by the British as an unequivocal indication that they must have taken the land by force in recent times. Contemporary historical work shows that there was a long period of intermingling and integration between the western Xhosa and eastern Khoi, giving rise to the Khoi place names in Xhosa territory and the permeable nature of the boundaries between the two groups.

Much of the idea of the 'vacant land' myth in African colonial history rests on White misunderstanding - however wilful - of African sovereignty and land use. Most of the Bantu and KhoiKhoi used land in rotation, often leaving large sections of land fallow while they cultivated another region or moved their herds to greener pastures. As pastoralists they would

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migrate through various grazing-grounds, thereby appearing to leave a grazing ground not in current use 'empty'.

An alternative form of the same myth was built around the British and Afrikaner understandings of the Mfecane. The Mfecane, translated roughly as ‘the crushing’, was a time of great political upheaval in the Zulu Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century. Both the British and the Afrikaner used the Mfecane to make the argument that the land they were occupying had been ‘deserted’.

Figure 2: A map of the rise of the Zulu Empire under Shaka during the Mfecane. Source

In the 1850s, when the British began to consolidate the colony of Natal in what is today Kwa-Zulu Natal, they claimed that only 4 000 to 5 000 inhabitants of the land were actually 'indigenous' inhabitants who had a right to that land. The rest of the Zulus living in the area, or moving into it in large droves, were "interlopers", either refugees fleeing the despotic rule of Shaka or Zulus returning to their old homelands after Shaka's Mfecane, which had begun in around 1815 and only came to an end around 1840. Although the latter were understood by the British to be returning to their own lands, the British claimed that "Kafirs have little attachment to any particular locality", implying that the Zulu's would not mind moving to any land and therefore had no particular claim to the land the British had taken. In light of this the British claimed that much of Natal had been 'vacant' land at the time of colonisation and therefore the British had a right to claim it. For the most part they respected the land claims of the Boers who had entered the region just before British colonisation (although these Boers had to submit to British rule), but they used the narrative of refugees and the claim that Zulus were not attached to their land to argue that up to 40 000 Zulus should be removed from the Natal Colony.

When the Afrikaner Trek Boers reached the Vaal Highveld after their incursion across South Africa from the Cape, they made a similar argument to the British in order to justify their

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claims to the land in the Highveld. They claimed that upon their arrival the region was almost devoid of any African inhabitants because, the thinking went, they had all fled in the face of the Mfecane. The Boers believed that the land was deserted and abandoned and therefore theirs for the taking. Part of the Afrikaner Boers mythology also claimed that the Boers had rescued the few scattered tribes of the region by giving them protection against the forces of Shaka. This myth, of a Vaal region that was deserted by the Bantu, is one that still has number of proponents in some Afrikaner communities.

Figure 3: George M. Theal, 1890s Source

In the 1890s, the renowned South African historian George McCall Theal, considered to be the grandfather of South African history, once again gave credence to theory that the Bantu had migrated into South Africa at the same time as the Europeans. In his voluminous works on history, based on an analysis of place names and supposed archaeological evidence, Theal claimed to give scientific evidence that the Bantu people had only begun to cross the Limpopo river at roughly the same time as when Europeans began to settle at the Cape, leaving the rest of South Africa a veritable ‘vacant land’. Theal’s work reaffirmed the myth of the vacant land in South African historiography and in popular memory. By the turn of the nineteenth century the idea that South Africa had been populated by Europeans and Bantu at the same time and that large tracts of Bantu land had been deserted, left vacant, during the Mfecane, became accepted ‘fact’ in South African society.

The myth of the empty land became particularly destructive in the hands of the Apartheid Government. The Apartheid Government used this myth as a justification for their construction of the homelands. Although the homelands in South Africa housed 70% of the population, they only comprised of 13% of the total landmass. The Apartheid Government justified this incredibly unequal distribution of land by claiming that the land in White hands was historically 'empty land', land that had belonged to nobody and therefore could not form part of a homeland. The homelands, they argued, were made up of all the land that had been occupied by the Bantu people, but the rest of the country had had no indigenous inhabitants

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and therefore legitimately belonged to the White inhabitants who had claimed it first.

Figure 4: A map of the ‘Homelands’ under the Apartheid Regime Source

In the 1980s revisionist and liberal historians and archaeologists began to argue against the theory of an empty land. Using new archaeological evidence they were able to show the presence of Bantu like people in the eastern half of South Africa since around 300 AD. They were also able to show that even though there had indeed been a large Bantu migration into the region at a later date, that date was somewhere around the 12th century AD, rather than in the seventeenth century as had been previously argued. Historians began to unpack the ways in which the myth of the vacant land had come into being and were able to show how its emergence coincided with the increasing clashes for land between the Bantu and the British and Afrikaners.

Historians and activists alike also pointed to a glaring omission on the theory of the empty land – the absolute silence on the existence of the KhoiSan (KhoiKhoi and San/Bushman) populations of Southern Africa who roamed much of the south western region of the country. KhoiSan peoples had been living in the region for millennia when the Dutch first arrived. Their plight, and their undeniable claims to the land, gets no reference in the 'empty land theory'.

Myths form an integral part of any peoples understanding of self and their place in the world, and are central to justifying the current distribution of power and resources. The myth of the empty land into which both Bantu and European peoples migrated at the same time, but from opposite directions, arose after the most violent clashes had occurred between the Bantus and the Europeans. Afrikaner nationalists, disillusioned with the British government at the Cape, had migrated out of the Colony and into the east of the country during the Great Trek. The British had encountered vast numbers of Xhosa at the Fish River and had been continuously engaging in battles and treaties with them. By the 1860s, when Woulden propagated his

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theory, this turbulent period had resulted in large swathes of South African land falling under the dominion of either the Afrikaner Republics or British colonial territory. Both these groups were in a position where a foundation myth which gave them the legitimate right of the land they had claimed was central to their own sense of nationhood.

The Myth of the empty land had become a central tenet of both British and Afrikaner identity in nineteenth century South Africa and had been used as a justification for the capture and settlement of Bantu land. The Apartheid Government had transformed the myth to serve its own ends. They used it to support the Homelands Act and to confine the Bantu people to particularly localities, arguing that the rest of the country had been ‘empty’ and therefore could not form part of their Homelands. Since the 1980s however, evidence has shown that the myth of the empty land simply cannot be sustained. Rather than being historical fact, it is a convenient fiction that has served as a political tool.

References

Crais, Clifton. (1991). 'The Vacant Land: They Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa', in Journal of Social History, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 225-275.

Marks, Shula. 1980. South Africa- 'The Myth of the Empty Land, History Today Volume 30, Available at: http://www.historytoday.com/shula-marks/south-africa-myth-empty-land [accessed March 5, 2015].

McClendon, Thomas V. (2010) 'Makwerekwere: Separating Immigrants and Natives in Early Colonial Natal' in Karl Ittmann, Dennis Cordell and Gregory Maddox (eds), The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, pp. 113-129.

Nigel Worden. (2012). The Making of Modern South Africa, John Wiley and Sons Ltd: Chichester, West Sussex.

Pheko, Motsoko. (23 February, 2012). 'Desperate colonial madness', in The Witness, available online at http://www.witness.co.za/?showcontent&global%5B_id%5D=77170 [Accessed 08 March, 2015]

Author Unknown, ‘The Mfecane: Why did the Mfecane occur? The Myth of the Empty Land’, available at http://newhistory.co.za/Part-2-Chapter-4-The-Mfecane-Why-did-the-Mfecane-occur-The-myth-of-the-empty-land/ [Accessed on March 5, 2015]

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 5: Land and Ownership in Southern Africa

Unit 2: The Effects of Land Dispossession

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain how an African peasantry came into being in the 19th century

explain the forces that were responsible for the decline of the African peasantry

explain the processes responsible for people relocating from the countryside to

Qwaqwa

explain what the consequences were of the rapid growth of the population in

Qwaqwa in the 1970s and early 1980s

explain why there was internal differentiation among the “citizens” of Qwaqwa

analyse the social and psychological impact on the people who were relocated to

Qwaqwa against their will

Keywords

peasantry, agriculture, development, underdevelopment, market, labour, wages, land

reform, redistribution, restitution

1. Introduction

This unit should be seen as a natural constitution of the previous unit which demystified a

myth which held that much of South Africa’s land mass was “up for grabs”. This unit places

focus on a specific section of the black population that was dispossessed and forced into a

system of wage labour, namely the peasantry. This is followed by the effects of mass

relocation into one of the Bantustans that was created after apartheid was established. The

unit finishes with one academic’s reflection on why the land reform process, which was

meant to address much of what is discussed beforehand, has not delivered on what it has

set out to do.

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2. Land dispossession reviewed

a. The emergence and decline of the South African peasantry, Colin Bundy (1972)

In this article Colin Bundy posits that there was a period during which Africans excelled

agriculturally and formed a relatively prosperous peasantry before a decline to sub-

subsistence and underdevelopment took place in the reserve areas in South Africa. This goes

against the historiography on the “failure” of African agriculture at the time of writing,

which itself was a corrective history against pro-settler misrepresentation. De Kiewiet,

Macmillan, Marais and others, who wrote against the pro-settler narratives of Theal and

Cory, illustrated the destructive effects of “white rule, the dislocation of traditional economy

and social order, and, especially the hammer-blow of sudden land shortage” (Bundy

1972:369). They held that African agriculture and the subsistence economy failed due to

unscientific methods. Houghton on the other hand held that the failure of African

agriculture was chiefly due to its inability to adapt to new conditions of scarcity and that the

root problem lay in African society’s unwillingness to accept enlightenment and economic

rationality.

Bundy holds that these explanations overlook a period first identified by Monice Wilson

during which African agriculture in reserve areas in South Africa (including Lesotho,

Swaziland and Botswana) excelled and was able to adapt to the requirements of the market

economy. It was only after this initial period of prosperity that decline and

underdevelopment took place. Participation in agriculture was preferred over wage labour

on the terms of white colonists and in doing so Africans moved away from the traditional

economy to successfully compete against white farmers. The failure of this peasantry was

due to the use of political and economic power by colonists to disadvantage them while

advantaging white agriculture.

Bundy’s definition of a peasant is as follows: “a peasant I take to be a rural cultivator

enjoying access to a specific portion of land; the fruits of which he can dispose of as if he

owned the land; and who, by the use of family labour, seeks to satisfy the consumption

needs of his family and to meet the demands rising from his involvement in a wider

economic system” (Bundy 1972:371).

He holds that the rise and decline of the African peasantry more or less formed part of the

following chronology:

(i) After initial contact between colonists and African farmer-pastoralists a peasantry

emerged which sought to meet the needs of the market.

(ii) This participation was favoured by the colonial government at first as the peasantry

created a buffer between colonists and hostile tribes.

(iii) African peasants preferred subsistence drawn from a family plot over wage labour

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at low levels of remuneration. White farmers levied taxes or established quasi-feudal

relations to meet their labour needs before the discovery of minerals. This best fulfilled

the needs of white farmers who were only shallowly involved in market production

anyway and instead it gave absent landlords a rent income. This relationship made that

African occupants were in effect peasants.

(iv) The discovery of minerals in South Africa had the effect that peasants responded to

meet new market needs and a relatively well-off group of African peasants emerged. At

the same time white commercial agriculture emerged alongside the expansion of white

political control. This latter combination was used to increase the cost of agriculture for

peasants so that they would be forced to become migrant labourers to meet their

material needs.

(v) By the second decade of the 20th century the peasantry was so disadvantaged and

the pattern of migrant labour so established that an adequate labour supply for white

South Africa was assured. Urban employers and white agriculture paid low wages for

black labour and it also meant higher wages to white labour assured their political

support to the white establishment (Bundy 1972:372).

Bundy contends that the first African peasants to emerge were among the Mfengu who

migrated from Ciskei into the Cape in 1835 after the mfecane53. These had been Africans

who had lived on missions or close to markets such as that of Grahamstown. They had

adopted agricultural practices after being encouraged by missionaries and by the 1850s

grew produce such as vegetables, wheat, barley, maize and millet. Along with other

peasants who emerged they adopted new technologies, such as the plough, to further their

agricultural aspirations. By the 1870s the African peasantry had evolved to such an extent

that they rivalled and surpassed their white counterparts. One statistician at the time noted

that the native district of Peddie surpassed the European district of Albany in its productive

powers (Bundy 1972:373–374).

These successes had the result that white farmers at the time complained of labour

shortages due to a disinterest by African peasants to work for cash wages. Although some

quantitative measures were taken, such as large-scale land expropriation, little changed in

this pattern of agricultural practice by African peasants, partly due to the fact that

speculators and landowners preferred Africans living on their land and paying rent. At the

time there had been no commercial agriculture and as such the land would otherwise lie

empty had peasants not used it (Bundy 1972:375).

Similar patterns such as the above had been established in Natal by 1870. Due to a

depression dominating by the mid-1860s and due to scarcity of whites to occupy any of the

land in Natal, land was largely unoccupied and available to Africans in various forms from

which they could choose. Similar to the situation in the Cape, there was a Native Affairs

53 Bundy defines this as Africans who dispersed out of the Natal region in response to the rise of the Zulu state.

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Commission which had complained that the peasants had become so rich and successful in

Natal that they had no interest in supplying any of their labour to whites. Like in the Cape,

proprietors in the Natal Colony found that their easiest source of income from the peasants

was to rent land to them rather than to attempt using their labour. This situation ultimately

forced the Natal government to import indentured Indian labour (Bundy 1972:376).

The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West fundamentally changed South Africa and the

position of African peasants. Demand for African labour increased dramatically. They were

now required in great number in the mines and on white-owned farms which increased

production to meet the new needs of the market. At the same time there were also new

opportunities for African peasants to sell their produce for a greater return – the 1870s saw

a boom in activity among them both in the Cape and in Natal (Bundy 1972:376–377).

The success of the peasantry was, however, not uniform and Bundy notes that there were

important exceptions. A number of districts in the Ciskei where peasants had been

established the longest came to suffer impoverishment as a result of the diamond boom

waning. This was in conjunction with overcrowding in the area and the production of

agricultural goods dropping. Young men no longer had access to land and many were forced

to leave the area in search of work. In some cases land was also dispossessed by the colonial

authorities which further increased the stress in the area. Altogether this meant there was a

great variation in wealth among the peasantry (Bundy 1972:378). Compared to the landless

young men there were small-scale commercial farmers among the peasants who were loyal

to the government and who were interested in profit-seeking over remaining loyal to tribe.

In lifestyle, both materially and ideologically, they resembled “small, solvent farmers of

other races in South Africa” (Bundy 1972:379).

The situation in the Boer republics was vastly different than in the colonies of the Cape and

Natal. Economic life was far behind and there was so little currency available that the Dutch

farmers in the area could only exchange stock or produce in return for labour. The colonists

who had trekked into the area took advantage of weakness created by the mfecane and

dispossessed the African population almost entirely. In practice, however, their coercive

power was so low that Africans occupied and farmed white land almost at their own

discretion in large numbers. So unable was the South African Republic that it barely even

collected any taxes from the African population in the 1870s (Bundy 1972:379).

Two types of peasants emerged in the South African Republic. The first type related to

peasants who occupied state or private land and paid a rent, or avoided it where possible. In

cases such as this little adaption took place and they mostly continued using traditional

farming methods. Where land dispossession had been more complete a second type

emerged. African peasants responded by increasing production in order to try and buy back

land which they had lost. This was particularly the case in the area of Rustenburg.

In the Free State some Africans who did not have access to land were the victims of laws put

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in place to make them offer their labour on white farms. However, the majority of Africans

either managed to establish quasi-feudal relationships or became squatter-peasants on

favourable state or private land. With the commercial economy more established in the Free

State by 1886 than in the South African Republic peasants prospered. Some Dutch farmers

complained that the peasants were too rich to be bothered and wanted nothing to do with

labour. White farmers risked resistance from African peasants if they tried to put too much

pressure on them and as such could do little (Bundy 1972:380).

The discovery of gold in 1886 significantly altered both South Africa and the fate of the

African peasantry. Mine owners wanted a greater supply of labour without having to pay

higher wages. The result of this was a request for more cheap agricultural goods and cheap

labour. As a result of the new mineral wealth the value of land increased dramatically and it

was now less profitable for white land owners to profit from their property by way of

renting land out to African peasants occupying it. This new pressure on the African

peasantry was exacerbated by a rinderpest epidemic that took place from 1896 to 1897 and

killed off most cattle which had been in possession of the peasants – in some districts as

much as 80% of the cattle died (Bundy 1972:381).

The pattern observed in the Ciskei in the 1970s spread to other places such as the Transkei

between 1886 and 1899. Some peasants could still compete favourably on the market but

others were pushed out and left destitute, forced to start participating in migrant work. In

Natal fortunes changed too; white farmers took advantage of the squatter-peasantry’s

insecure tenure and along with other landlords raised rents on their properties to push

peasants off as commercial farming became more profitable.

In the South African Republic and the Free State peasants were harder to dislodge. In the

Transvaal peasants bought large tracts of land to secure their livelihoods free of wage

labour. In the Free State a new form of land occupation known as “farming-on-the-halves”

became practised – African peasants occupied parcels of land, white farmers provided seed

and expected some of the harvested crop to be returned as payment. This resulted in some

peasants growing very wealthy and this form of practice became popular in the Eastern

Cape as well (Bundy 1972:382).

The Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) brought with it mixed fortunes for the peasants. Those

who could take advantage of the agricultural goods needed in the war effort profited.

Others were looted and deprived of their land. But it was after the war that the real assault

on the South African peasantry started in earnest. A number of legislative decisions were

enacted across South Africa to reduce competition from African peasants on the market.

The moment came after the Union of South Africa was created, when the 1913 Natives Land

Act was enacted. Bundy holds that most historians have focused on the fact that the Act

demarcated 13% of South Africa’s land surface which could be occupied by Africans;

however, a more important effect of the Act was that squatters and share-croppers were

reduced to the level of labour tenants (Bundy 1972:384). One result of this was that the

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class differentiation, referring to the growth of small African commercial farmers, halted. As

a result of this it also meant that the creation of a majority landless African population,

which would have resulted in mass urbanisation and the reduction of the rural workforce,

was avoided (Bundy 1972:384).

In the Free State “farming-on-the-halves” had spread further after the war but the Land Act

specifically had provisions to outlaw such practices. In Natal the rent on land was raised to

such an extent that it became too costly for peasants to continue profiting from farming; a

string of laws were put into place forcing more Africans to offer their labour on the market

and a large number of peasants were evicted from occupied land. In the Cape, and in

particular its eastern province, peasants were seen as a threat to white farming interests

because of the success they were able to achieve. In response a number of inhibiting laws

were enacted – the Location Acts of 1892, 1899 and 1909. The Act of 1909 was successfully

used to reduce the squatting population from 40 000 to 7 000 by 1931 (Bundy 1972:384–

386).

By the 1920s the prosperity that was generated through agriculture by the African peasantry

had all but been destroyed. The single biggest reason for this is the shortage of available

land. The peasantry was put under further pressure when squatting on white land was

increasingly done away with. Other factors played a role: (i) input costs to be able to

compete on the market increased – over time it became necessary to purchase farming

equipment and have an education; (ii) transport infrastructure after the discovery of

minerals did not extend to African peasant areas increasing the cost of agriculture; and (iii)

there was no public or private investment in the peasant sector (Bundy 1972:387).

b. Relocation and the problem of survival in Qwaqwa: a report from the field, John Sharp

(1982)

At the start of the 1980s John Sharp and a small team of researchers set out to plug a gap in

the anthropological record on life experienced by Africans who were subjected to staying in

one of the Bantustans in South Africa, Qwaqwa. They included the surrounding countryside

of the north-eastern Free State in their study and set out with the intention of linking the

day-to-day experiences with trends taking place at the macro level. They chose three study

sites: Phuthaditjhaba, the only town in the Bantustan; and two sections of a village in what

is considered Qwaqwa’s own “countryside”. Qwaqwa was the “homeland” designated for

the “South Sotho”, although in reality the population composition of all Bantustans in South

Africa was more complex than the planning of apartheid officials (Sharp 1982:11–12).

Qwaqwa became a homeland in 1969 and was first known as the Territorial Authority for

Basotha ba-Borwa. In 1970 the population was 23 860 and by 1982 it is estimated that the

population was around 400 000, an increase of nearly 2 000%. This was due to rapid forced

population relocation from “white South Africa” (Sharp 1982:13). In many cases people

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were physically relocated by government trucks to Phuthaditjhaba (considered to be

Qwaqwa’s “capital”) but some others had arrived by themselves on the promise of a house.

Many of those living in Phuthaditjhaba had come from urban “white South Africa” where a

policy was in place to favour them for relocation but there were exceptions to the rule.

Many of those living in the “capital” had come from Harrysmith in the Orange Free State

(OFS). Others had come from smaller towns in the OFS and the Cape. In some cases people

had come from as far as Alexandra (in Johannesburg) and Nyanga (in Cape Town). Compared

to Phuthaditjhaba, many of those living in the closer settlements had been relocated from

rural “white South Africa”. They had come from areas such as Reitz, Wesselsbron and

Clocolan in the hinterland around Qwaqwa. Unlike those living in “town”, many were not

forcibly relocated and had come by themselves with the hope of a better life. Sharp is,

however, cautious not consider this movement voluntary (Sharp 1982:13–14).

Based on interviews with people who relocated from the “countryside” Sharp argues that

they are exposed to a greater possibility of impoverishment. This is not something that takes

place uniformly or at the same pace. He holds that it depends largely on where a person was

relocated from and whether or not the person had time to plan their move. As stated

before, they had no choice about being relocated to the “closer settlement” outside

Phuthaditjhaba (Sharp 1982:15–16).

The first case Sharp deals with is a shopkeeper who is in the difficult position of deciding

whether to move to the closer settlement or to the town in Qwaqwa. As an urban resident

in “white South Africa” he has the option to move to Phuthaditjhaba and he stands a greater

chance to make profits in the closer settlement if he’s able to get the authorities to give him

a special permit. However, he is unsure whether he’d get it and he would give up certain

rights in the “white” town he is planning to relocate from. To complicate matters, his father

had passed away and there was responsibility on him to look after his widowed mother in

the closer settlement (Sharp 1982:16).

Many others in the closer settlement, however, were not as fortunate as the shopkeeper

and did not have the same opportunities available. Up to a third of the people were

unemployed, while those who did have employment were mostly involved in migrant work

or commuted daily to Harrysmith to work. From the research material it is also clear that the

level of social reproduction is lower in the closer settlement compared to the town. This is

likely connected to the fact that the Qwaqwa national authority spends more resources on

Phuthaditjhaba where they make provisions for the building of houses and spend money on

infrastructure. In the closer settlement expenditure is limited to schools, access to dirt roads

and water supplies, with inadequate monies spent on clinics. Sanitation is left as the

responsibility of individuals. Access to work is also far harder for those living in the closer

settlement –the industrial area is located in the town and offices related to finding work are

also located there. And although pensions are paid out in the closer settlements, any issue

that is picked up still needs to be sorted out in town which is located roughly 20 km away

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(about a third of all people qualifying for a pension did not receive them as required) (Sharp

1982:17).

The second case Sharp looks at is that of a pensioner who had worked on the railways for

twenty two years. He had first sent his wife and children from the OFS countryside to live in

Qwaqwa and then later joined them when he retired. He had sent his wife there because

the farm owner of the farm on which she had lived was unhappy that the now retired

railway worker had not lived there and worked for the farmer. His brother had also moved

to Qwaqwa but he died shortly after arrival and left his frail wife in the care of the retired

railway worker. The wife of his brother qualified for a pension and had asked the pension to

be transferred to Qwaqwa because she could not make the travel out of the homeland to

receive it unlike many other pensioners who did. Once relocated they had trouble getting

access to the now transferred pension. It was all the more troubling because the retired

railway worker had become a petty official in the Qwaqwa bureaucracy and even so he

could still not find out what was happening to the pension. His fear was that the pension

was being pocketed and many others in the closer settlement considered the homeland

authorities to be corrupt (Sharp 1982:17).

Many of those sidelined from the formal labour market in the closer settlement found it

difficult to engage in other activities. Unlike in town where large numbers of women took to

the streets to vend to salaried employees working for the Qwaqwa authorities, in the closer

settlement such activities were absent as there was no market available to them. Those who

tried other activities such as pot and mat making found it difficult to make a success and

they were left to depend on remittances from family members involved in migrant work to

start or maintain their activities. Even businessmen in the closer settlement were not a

unified stratum and many struggled to maintain them. It is only those with access to the

authorities that seemed to represent a stable stratum able to succeed (Sharp 1982:17–18).

What Sharp learns from the research here is that even within the periphery there are

different levels of deprivation and that some are more disadvantaged than others. This is

particularly the case when Phuthaditjhaba is compared to the closer settlement. Relatively

speaking those in the closer settlement are more disadvantaged than those in the town who

have access to housing and a market. Psychologically this difference also had an effect –

while those in town were bitter that they were forcibly removed from “white” urban areas

in South Africa they were also paternalistic towards “poor” people in the closer settlement.

In the closer settlement people pointed to problems like having to pay rent in town but

when asked said they would move to town if they were able to find secure work. Sharp

contends that the overall effect of this differentiation between town and closer settlement

is that in the face of an overall decline those in the town seem willing to vigorously defend

the little they have.

The third case Sharp looks at illustrate that an overall decline was taking place in Qwaqwa. A

construction worker lost his job in 1982 and shortly afterwards he lost his wife to

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tuberculosis. He moved in with his two youngest sons who had contracts with a building

firm but they both lost their jobs shortly after he moved in. For four months straight,

without success, both his sons went to look for work at the labour bureau in town. The

household was dependent on a female family member living close by but she stated she

could not continue supporting them for much longer. The former construction worker was

sitting in one room on a daily basis, seeming dazed and stating that he was “finished”. He

thought his former employer had applied for unemployment insurance but nothing came of

it and with another 15 years until pension age it was unlikely that he would get more work

in construction. He lost the will to look for work and was totally unskilled (Sharp 1982:19).

Having identified some of the broad trends that could be discerned at the time Sharp turned

his attention to asking what the conditions were like on the farms in the OFS countryside

from where the majority of those finding themselves in Qwaqwa came. Although interview

research was not done in the countryside some information could be extracted from the

interviews done in the homeland. The first case he looked at in this regard was of an old

man who arrived in Qwaqwa in 1966. He had lived on a farm all his life, his wife grew up on

the farm next to the one he did and he raised his children there as well. He was on good

terms with the farmer and could keep unlimited stock on the farm. He had 40 cattle and 50

sheep, and he had his own fields. He was also paid some cash for his services on the farm.

When the farmer retired he was asked to look after the farm and ran it himself. When the

farmer decided to sell he felt the new owner would not continue the good relationship that

had existed and as such the old man decided to move to Qwaqwa. His sons were not keen to

farm and one had already been involved in migrant work. He sold his stock and then decided

to move (Sharp 1982:19–20).

The second case is of a housewife who had moved to Qwaqwa in 1973. She had also spent

her whole life on a farm. At the time she moved her husband was still involved in migrant

work until 1982. In 1972 she and her husband decided to move from the farm they were on

to another on the basis that the new farmer would pay them more each month. However,

they soon discovered that they also had to pay a high rent on the new farm. As on the

previous farm they had unlimited grazing but unlike before they received no field on which

to plant. She had worked on both farms but the family was not happy with all arrangements

and they finally left in 1973 for a number of reasons. The farmer allowed them to stay on

the farm on the basis that her whole family would work for them but her sons were not

interested in farming. The trade-off between cash and access to land also did not sit well

with them and it is for these reasons that they moved in the end (Sharp 1982:20).

The third case had to do with a man who had also moved to a new farm before moving to

Qwaqwa in 1981. Conditions on the new farm were not perfect. He had limited access to

land and because of being a new arrival was not allowed to keep any livestock as compared

to people who had already been living there. He gave several reasons for moving to

Qwaqwa in 1981 – he felt he worked too long for too little pay, he felt migrant work would

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pay better and that his wife would be able to work in Qwaqwa, he wanted his children to

receive a better education which he felt was not possible on the farm and he felt his

widowed mother living with him was living in conditions that were not secure for her (the

farmer was reportedly not happy with his mother living with him) (Sharp 1982:20).

Sharp is hesitant to draw too many conclusions from the limited amount of information

from these cases and other similar interviews not mentioned here but he feels there are

certain patterns that can be identified. Before 1970 conditions had been somewhat better

for those living on farms. After 1970 the cash component of the wage on a farm had been

nearly universal on all farms and restrictions on access to land had started to creep in. In

some cases no access was given to land at all while in others people had received less access

than they had in earlier years. People were also able to keep less cattle than they did before

and a new form of wage in the shape of a ration had been introduced (such as a number of

bags of maize). In earlier times these rations had been given as a bonus over and above

other payments whereas it now became a replacement. Farmers no longer gave out

separate fields to different families and instead assigned certain rows in a field to certain

families. It also became harder to sell livestock on the market as the introduction of new

grazing rights by farmers had negative effects (Sharp 1982:21).

In earlier years in the OFS paying wages had been less common and full access to land had

been common. Sharp argues that the effects of the 1913 Land Act had been fought in the

countryside as much, if not more, as it had been fought in parliament and that the

transitionary effects of the Act did not take place uniformly. The banning of sharecropping

contained in the Act for the OFS does seem to have had some effect though none of the

people interviewed could recall a time when such relationships existed before. They all saw

themselves as farmworkers first and that being able to do their own farming was something

secondary (a compensation for being a farmworker). And despite the freedoms some had,

none felt they had complete freedom. One farmer suggested the reason why conditions

changed so slowly in the north-eastern part of the OFS on farms was because mechanisation

took place at a slower rate there than in the rest of the province – this was due to the fact

that it was a mixed farming area (between cattle and maize) rather than a maize area like

other parts of the province. What changed by the 1960s is a greater degree of

mechanisation along with the aggregation of farms into larger units. The result of these

changes was not only a move to Qwaqwa but a movement between farms as seen in some

of the cases mentioned (Sharp 1982:22).

One of the things learned from having looked at the cases above is that over time the

dominance of the family unit slowly declined. By the 1970s white farmers had allowed men

to participate in migrant work granted that other family members remained available to

help on the farm. During this transitionary period it’s also apparent that in moving between

farms farmers started to replace perks in kind (such as giving access to grazing land, rights to

milk, rights to firewood) with cash wages. This concomitant result was also that real wages

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were dropping over time – meaning the cash wage did not replace the value of the perks

that had been given before. While this was a problem, what eventually pushed families to

move to Qwaqwa from the countryside was when all the sources of income (what’s left of

perks in kind, cash wages on farms and migrant wages from elsewhere) could no longer

sustain the family holdings on a farm. This started to happen en masse from the late 1960s

and through the 1970s, which partly explains the high rate of population growth in Qwaqwa

by 1982 when the article was published. What contributed to this growth was also the fact

that some older people had chosen to move to Qwaqwa when they knew one of their sons

would not replace them on the farm as had been expected by the farmer and not wanting to

deal with growing insecurity on the farm they chose to leave – during this period many of

the children who had gone to work for migrant wages did not want to return to do farm

work (Sharp 1982:23–24).

Sharps states that arrival in the closer settlements in Qwaqwa from the rural “white South

Africa” meant that people had to wait between six months and two years in transit camps

for the village head to assign them a dwelling site. This left them open to extreme

exploitation by petty officials. Conditions were particularly bad in 1982 which was a time

when people had little resources upon arrival after not being able to prepare much before

leaving the farms from whence they came. This is in conjunction with the impression that

changing wage conditions on farms left new arrivals worse off than those who had come

during the 1960s when payment in kind had been more prevalent. This also played a role in

who managed to establish small businesses – residents who had arrived earlier had more

resources to draw on and maintain their enterprises whereas there was little room for new

arrivals to gain any foothold in entrepreneurial enterprises. By now most new arrivals

depended completely on migrant wage remittances but these were not enough to sustain

people’s livelihoods on their own. Sharp found that an adequate livelihood depended on the

ability to combine various sources of income, and that earlier arrivals in the closer

settlements were the ones capable of establishing and maintaining these various sources of

income. This difference between earlier arrivals and late arrivals may result in the

development of different stratums eventually (Sharp 1982:26–27).

Sharp concludes that it is important to understand the involvement of people in large-scale

processes such as mass relocation, and anthropologists in particular are equipped to take

account of the “micro” in this process (Sharp 1982:28).

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c. The land question: exploring obstacles to land redistribution in South Africa, Lungise

Ntsebeza (2011)54

Ntsebeza takes a look at the slow pace of land reform in South Africa and sets out to

investigate two key issues that had played, according to him, a role since the transition in

1994 to full democracy in South Africa – the entrenchment of the property clause in the

constitution and the weakness of civil society organisations to place greater emphasis on the

need for land reform.

According to Ntsebeza some hold that the state has been reluctant to enact the clauses in

the Constitution that allow for the expropriation of land and that the reason for this lies with

the fact that doing so would antagonise white farmers. Another view is that the leftist forces

within the tripartite alliance (between the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP) were defeated during

the process of negotiation for a settlement and when there was a shift in policy from the

RDP to GEAR (Ntsebeza 2011:17).

He, however, holds that a more substantial explanation lies in a global context and that the

defeat of the Soviet Union had a major effect on the ANC in that it no longer had direction.

His argument here is that a number of communists and socialists have had an impact on the

ANC over the years and that their influence on the Freedom Charter bears testimony to this.

He holds that the pro-capitalist climate that dominated after the fall of the Soviet Union

must have been too strong for more radical sentiments to ensure that land expropriation

would take place. The result of this was that the “willing buyer, willing seller” model was

adopted instead (Ntsebeza 2011:17).

It’s also clear that the international context within which debates about farming take place

plays a role in putting pressure on the ANC not to adopt radical policies to expropriate land.

A section of the white farming community in South Africa holds that a threat to land security

will jeopardise their own ability to continue successful agricultural enterprises (Ntsebeza

2011:19).

Ntsebeza concludes by saying it’s clear that the market-led approach to land reform will not

undo the years of colonial and apartheid dispossession. Here he holds that the “willing

buyer, willing seller” model does not work and that protection of the property clause in the

Constitution is problematic. A debate should be opened up which includes an

acknowledgement of “colonial conquest, land dispossession and the fact that commercial

farming triumphed as a result of the naked exploitation of black labour” (Ntsebeza 2011:20).

His final suggestion is that the indigenous people of South Africa who suffered these

injustices should be the ones to lead the debate and that all people sympathetic to them 54 There is acknowledgement here that in the years since this publication more has been said about the model used to redistribute land. The main thing of importance to consider here is rather that some understanding of why land reform has been so slow since 1994 is necessary. At the time of writing this it’s hard to say what decisions will be taken in the future but whatever it is will have been affected by what has happened in the past.

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should play a supportive role (but not a leading role) (Ntsebeza 2011:19–20).

References

Bundy, C. 1972. The emergence and decline of the South African peasantry. African Affairs

71(285):369–388.

Ntsebeza, L. 2011. The land question: exploring obstacles to land redistribution in South

Africa. In I. Shapiro & K. Tabeau (eds.), After apartheid: Reinventing South Africa?

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Sharp, J. 1982. Relocation and the problem of survival in Qwaqwa: a report from the field.

Social Dynamics 8(2):11–29.

Additional reading

Du Toit, A. 2013. Real acts, imagined landscapes: reflections on discourses of land reform in

South Africa after 1994. Journal of Agrarian Change 13(1):16–22.

Fay, D & James, D. 2008. The anthropology of land restitution: an introduction. London:

Routledge.

Hall, R. 2004. A political economy of land reform in South Africa. Review of African Political

Economy 31(100):213–227.

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Anthropology in an African context

Theme 5: Land and Ownership in Southern Africa

Unit 3: How to Do Things with Land, Ferguson (2013)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

analyse the debate and discourse around the importance of land not only from the

perspective of its importance for agriculture but also from a perspective which

recognises a multitude of other ways in which land can function

1. Introduction

This learning unit is intended to illustrate that “land as agriculture” is but one way to

understand land and that in fact there are a multitude of ways that land should be analysed.

Ferguson (2013) shows clearly that land is also intimate tied to networks of exchange

between people and that the reduction of land ownership to “agricultural” hides this

matter. His suggestion is that debates on land ownership in Southern Africa should be wider

in scope than merely using land for agricultural purposes.

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2. How to Do Things with Land, Ferguson (2013)

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Anthropology in an African Context

Theme 6: Africa and the 21st Century

Unit 1: State Region and Revolution in African Development, Hart (2013)

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit you should be able to

explain why emancipation, according to Keith Hart, has been elusive for people living

in Africa for so long

explain why Keith Hart argues that African states have historically not had the

freedom to choose their own forms of political economy

analyse Keith Hart’s assertion about the possibility of a revolution that will pull Africa

out of the doldrums and place it on par with other regions in the world

Keywords

development, racism, revolution, government(s), state, economy, class, capitalism, Africa

1. Introduction

The piece below is written by Keith Hart, an economic anthropologist with an interest in

making the world a better place to live in. One of his most recent ideas is to unearth what

he calls the “human economy” and to use it to help establish an alternative to what many

refer as the dominant “neo-liberal order”. By this he means that there are forms of practice

and behaviours among people that are fundamentally human and do not follow the market

logic espoused by the “neo-liberal” line of thinking. This can be usefully incorporated into

something which could return to people the ability to partake in decisions that

fundamentally affect their own lives (whereas, at present, the economy and markets are

distant things to ordinary people but which play a role in their daily lives).

Although this piece is not written in light of unearthing the “human economy” it can be seen

as part of the larger project aimed at transforming the world into one that is fundamentally

human. His focus here is on Africa and by way of historical and social analysis he highlights

what he believes is necessary to change the fortunes of the majority of Africans.

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2. State, region and revolution in African development55

State, region and revolution in African development By Keith Hart | July 2, 2013 0 Comment

Africans wait for emancipation in an unequal world

We live in a racist world. Despite the collapse of European empire and the formal adoption of a façade of international bureaucracy, the vast majority of black Africans are still waiting for meaningful emancipation from their perceived social inferiority. The idea that humanity consists of a racial hierarchy with blacks at the bottom is an old one. But the Caribbean economist, W. Arthur Lewis, argued that the division of the world economy between rich manufacturing exporters and poor raw material exporters became entrenched in the decades before the First World War.[i] That bipolar economic order has been shifting for some time now, largely as a result of the emergence of Asian powers as engines of capitalist growth.

Now there is much talk of economic growth in Africa. In the present decade, 7 out of the 10 fastest-growing economies (as conventionally measured) are African.[ii] In 1900 Africa was the world’s least densely populated and urbanized continent with 7.5% of the total. Today it is double that, with an urban share fast approaching the global average. According to UN projections, Africa will be home to 24% of all the people alive in 2050, 35% in 2100. This is because its annual population growth rate is 2.5% when the rest of the world is ageing. The Asian manufacturing countries already recognize that Africa is the fastest-growing market in the world. This could provide an opportunity for Africans to play a stronger hand in international negotiations. If they succeed in standing up for themselves, it would be a world revolution, the end of the racist world order, no less.

For centuries Africa supplied slaves across the Atlantic, but also to the Indian Ocean and Arab worlds. The movement to abolish slavery was officially completed in the late 19th century. But emancipation is rarely as simple as that. In West Africa, abolition was a disaster.[iii] The internal drive to capture slaves continued apace and, despite a shift to their use in domestic production, supply soon exceeded demand. The price of slaves fell drastically, leading to their widespread abuse. Colonial empires were then justified by disorder in West Africa and by the drive to abolish the Arab slave trade in East Africa. But colonial regimes still often relied on indigenous slave masters. Much later, when these regimes fell, Africans were offered emancipation once more, this time through national independence. Most African economies then regressed for a half-century. Ghana had an economy bigger than Indonesia’s in 1960 and per capita income on a par with South Korea’s.

55 This piece is taken from http://thememorybank.co.uk/2013/07/02/waiting-for-emancipation-towards-an-african-liberal-revolution/ (last accessed 11 September 2015). The author himself holds a position that strict copyright is not productive in terms of intellectualisation but that at minimum original authors should at least be referenced. His name is Keith Hart as can be seen and the piece is taken from his website which is http://thememorybank.co.uk/.

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Now, despite an economic recovery, the Asian countries are more than twenty times larger than Ghana on both counts. Apartheid was defeated in South Africa, but two decades later the country is more unequal and unemployment is massive, while the government shoots its own people if they complain. Writers coin metaphors for misrule throughout the continent: “The Postcolony”, “Politics of the Belly”, “Architects of Poverty”.[iv] Africans are still waiting for equal membership of world society. But they have never encountered more favourable conditions than now.

‘Africa’ is either a continental territory separated from the Eurasian landmass by the Mediterranean and Red Seas or the place that black people come from. But ‘the land of the blacks’ is hard to pin down. ‘Africa South of the Sahara’ may make sense from a European perspective, but not in the Northeast region, where the Nile links Egypt to Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and the Great Lakes. The African continent consists of three disparate regions — North, South and Middle (West, Central and East Africa); but a degree of convergence between them is now taking place. Preoccupation with Africa’s post-colonial failure to ‘develop’ has obscured what really happened there in the last century. The rise of cities has been linked to the formation of weak and venal states which depend on foreign powers and leave the urban masses largely to their own devices. The latter have generated spontaneous markets to meet their own needs which are now understood to constitute an ‘informal economy’.[v]

Jack Goody has tried to explain why the institutions of Africa South of the Sahara diverged so strongly from the Old World civilizations of Eurasia and North Africa.[vi] He based his explanation on low population density in Africa, so that people were scarcer than land there, intensification of production was weak and the property foundations of a class society were never developed. As shorthand for summarising the history of a highly variegated continent, I rely on three ideal types with parallels in the classical anthropology of world society: non-states, traditional states and modern states. These types are not used here as stages of social evolution or to divide contemporary history into periods. Goody himself was rather vague about the time frame of his statistical analysis which was informed by his own ethnographic research among tribal peoples of Northern Ghana. I distinguish between ‘classless societies’ based on kinship; ‘agrarian civilizations’ in which urban elites control the mass of rural labour; and ‘national capitalism’, where markets and capital accumulation are regulated by central bureaucracies on behalf of citizens. The first is as old as humanity itself; the second dominated Eurasia since the Bronze Age; and the third became the main form of economy in the 20th century.

In the twentieth century, a general population explosion saw a jump in Africa’s urban share from under 2% of the population to almost a half, compressing into one century what took much longer elsewhere. This urban revolution is not just a proliferation of cities, but also involves the installation of the whole package of pre-industrial class society: states, urban elites, intensification of agriculture and a political economy based on extraction of rural surpluses and the city bazaar.[vii] The classless type based on kinship predominated in Africa South of the Sahara before the 20th century; agrarian civilization was established in North Africa soon after the urban revolution in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago; South Africa was the only country to adopt national capitalism (for whites only) from the late 19th century, at the same time as Europe, North America and Australasia. The predominantly egalitarian societies of Africa’s Middle Belt made a belated transition to agrarian civilization in the course of the twentieth century, first under colonial and then post-colonial rule, while most of Asia adopted national capitalism as a model. These developments brought North and Middle Africa closer

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together as pre-industrial class societies, while South Africa is now becoming more like the rest of Africa, following black majority rule. The fastest-growing economies today are not from the North (where popular insurgency has now taken hold) or South Africa (which shares the economic weakness of the Western economies), but the region in between.

The anti-colonial revolution unleashed 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 off. In the early twentieth century, African peoples were shackled by colonial empire and later their new nations struggled in a world economy organized by and for the major powers, then engaged in a Cold War. Africa’s new leaders thought they were building modern economies, but in reality they were erecting fragile states based on the same backward agriculture as before. Either some sectors of the economy had to raise productivity levels by adopting machine methods or the state would devolve to a level compatible with its small-scale productive base. [viii] This structural weakness inevitably led them to exchange the democratic legitimacy of the independence struggle for dependence on foreign powers. Africa’s new ruling elites first relied on revenues from agricultural and mineral exports, then on dubious loans funded by the oil surplus of the 1970s, finally on a financial licence to supervise their country’s relations with global capitalism. The bonanza was switched off in the early 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 countries collapsed into civil war.

Concentration of political power at the centre in the post-colonial era led to primate urbanization, as economic demand became synonymous with presidential accumulation. 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.[ix] But this progressive division of labour requires a measure of protection from the world market at first and it was stifled at birth in post-colonial Africa by the dumping of subsidized food from the West and of cheap Asian manufactures. ‘Structural adjustment programmes’ imposed by the IMF meant that Africa’s fledgling national economies had no protection from the strong winds of world trade. A peasantry subjected to violence and political extraction had to choose between stagnation at home and migration to the main cities or abroad. Somehow the cities survived through markets that emerged to meet the population’s needs and to recycle the money concentrated at the top. These markets are the key to the economic potential of Africa’s urban revolution.

Africa’s urban informal economy 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 controls. The great ports of the Atlantic seaboard always enjoyed a mercantile freedom that now underpins their contribution to Africa’s commercial growth. 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, however, cities were built by white settlers who imposed strict controls on the movements of Africans. South Africa’s informal economy today is hedged in by rules and interests (not least the unions) 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

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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 national interests against foreign predators. This phase of post-colonial development was tolerated by the West until the watershed of the 1970s. The World Bank and IMF then imposed cutbacks on public expenditure and before long failed states became commonplace. From the 1980s, the mania for privatization led to ownership often being ceded to transnational corporations. Structural adjustment forced governments to abandon public services, lay off many workers and allow the free circulation of money. In countries that succumbed to civil war, informal mining and trade were encouraged, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of warlords and their followers. The situation is highly dynamic and variable.

Tax collection in Africa was never as regular as in Eurasia; and governments still rely on whatever they can extract from mineral royalties and the import-export trade. New urban elites live off these revenues in a patrimonial regime propped up by foreign powers. Rents secured by political privilege are the chief source of wealth. This constitutes an Old Regime ripe for liberal revolution. This is why the recent insurgencies in North Africa are significant for the continent as a whole.[x] The new states and class structures of Africa’s urban revolution are entangled in kinship systems that remain indispensable to the social organization of the informal economy. 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 widely acceptable. Formal bureaucracy is hostile to kinship, where it is normally viewed as corruption. In the absence of a welfare state, Africans rely on kinship to see them through the life cycle of birth, marriage, childrearing, old age and death; and control over access to the land reinforces the power of rural elders over young men and women.

Hernando De Soto has pointed out that, whereas developing countries like Peru were once stuck in a colonial mercantile system, they are now stifled by an international bureaucracy that works only for the rich countries who would never have developed, if their infant capitalist economies had been saddled with similar encumbrances.[xi] The imposition of taxes on international trade goes to the heart of this crisis for democracy today. Politics is still mainly national, but the economy has gone global. It is both over- and under-regulated at the same time. Nowhere is this problem more urgent than in Africa.

African development in the 21st century

Every person of African descent, whatever their actual history and experience – they could be Barack Obama, for example — suffers the practical consequences of being stigmatized by colour in a world built on racial difference. This situation will only be ended when economic development guarantees Africans political and cultural equality in that world. Many citizens of the rich countries believe that growth is no longer a priority and should be reversed, but the world’s poor know what they are missing and that ‘development’ is the answer. So what does development mean in the African context and how is it to be achieved in the century to come?

In 1800 the world’s population was around one billion. At that time less than 3% of humanity lived in cities; the rest extracted a livelihood from the land. Animals and plants were responsible for almost all the energy produced and consumed by human beings. A little more

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than two centuries later, world population has reached 7 billion. The proportion living in cities is about a half. Inanimate energy converted by machines now accounts for the bulk of production and consumption. Taking the period as a whole, the human population has been growing at an average annual rate of 1.5%; cities at 2% a year; and energy production at 3% a year. Many people now live longer, work less and spend more as a result. But the distribution of all this extra energy has been grossly unequal. A third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands. Americans consume 400 times more energy than the average Ugandan.

‘Development’ thus refers first to this hectic dash of humanity from the countryside to the city. The engine driving economic growth is assumed to be ‘capitalism’. Development then means trying to understand how capitalist growth is generated and how to make good the damage it causes in repeated cycles of creation and destruction. A third meaning refers to the developmental state of the mid-twentieth century, the idea that governments are best placed to engineer sustained economic growth with redistribution. Pioneered by Fascist and Communist states, this model took root in the colonial empires around the Second World War, was adopted after it by the leading Western industrial societies and then became the norm for developing and newly independent countries until the 1970s.

The most common usage of ‘development’ over the last half-century, however, refers to the commitment of rich countries to help poor countries become richer. This commitment was at first real enough, even if the means chosen were often flawed. But after the watershed of the 1970s, it has faded. If, in the 1950s and 60s, the rapid growth of the world economy encouraged a belief that poor countries too could become rich, from the 1980s onwards ‘development’ has more often meant freeing up global monetary flows and applying sticking plaster to the wounds they inflicted. Development was thus the label for political relations between rich and poor countries after colonial empire.

There have been massive discrepancies in regional development since the collapse of the European empires. Many Asian countries installed successful capitalist economies, with and without western help, triggering an eastward shift in the balance of global economic power. But Africa, the Middle East and much of Latin America, stagnated or declined since the 1970s – a pattern from which Africa now seems to be rebounding. Various development models have emerged from this regional divergence, with an Asian emphasis on authoritarian states being opposed to Western liberalism and radical political alternatives coming out of Latin America.

There are two pressing features of our world: the unprecedented expansion of markets since the Second World War and massive economic inequality between (and within) nations. Becoming closer and more unequal at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Forbes magazine reported in March 2009 that the top ten richest individuals had a net worth between them of $250 billion, roughly the annual income of Finland (population 5 million) or of middle-ranking powers such as Venezuela (28 million), South Africa (49 million) and Iran (72 million). The same quarter trillion dollars equals the annual income of 26 Sub-Saharan African countries with a combined population of almost half a billion. Providing adequate food, clean water and basic education for the world’s poorest people could be achieved for less than the West spends annually on makeup, ice cream and pet food. Car ownership in developed countries is 400 per thousand persons, while in the developing countries it is below 20. A report published just before the millennium claimed that world consumption increased six times in the previous two decades; but the richest 20% accounted for 86% of private expenditure, the poorest 20% for only 1.3%. Africa, with a seventh of the world’s population,

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then had 2% of global purchasing power.[xii]

What could Africa’s new urban populations produce for the world economy? So far, countries have relied on exporting raw materials, when they could; minerals clearly have a promising future owing to scarce supplies and escalating demand. The world market for food and other agricultural products, however, is skewed by western farm subsidies and prices are further depressed by the large number of poor farmers trying to sell their crops. Conventionally, African governments have aspired to manufacturing 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 supply their own populations first.

Exchange between cities and their hinterlands has so far been frustrated for post-colonial Africa whose fragmented sovereignty leaves its 54 countries in a poor international bargaining position. Any collective appeal for greater protection would require serious political coordination of a sort not seen before. The world market for services is booming, however, and perhaps greater opportunities exist there. 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 lies in the infinite scope for us to do things for each other — 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. Any move to enter this market will confront transnational corporations and the governments who support them. Nevertheless, the terrain is less rigidly mapped out here than in agriculture and manufactures. Africans are well-placed to compete in this field because of the proven global preference for their music and plastic arts.

Classes for and against a liberal revolution

The liberal revolutions that launched modern western society between the 17th and 19th centuries 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 how things really work. 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 just to these crimes against humanity. The socialist revolutions of the 20th century – and the ideologies that sustained them – are less relevant to Africa’s current circumstances than classical liberalism. The energies generated by Africa’s urban revolution are already manifested as endogenous developments in economy, technology, religion and the arts; and they could be harnessed to radical change if freed from constraining ideologies.[xiii]

Any new movement would soon run up against entrenched privilege of course. It is notable, however, that world society itself today resembles the Old Regime of agrarian civilization, with isolated elites enjoying a lifestyle beyond the reach of masses who have almost nothing. Rousseau’s condemnation of 18th century France rings as true for our world as for then: “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”.[xiv] The institutions of agrarian civilization are alive and well, not just in post-colonial Africa. Since the millennium, the United States, whose own liberal revolution threw out the Old Regime of King George and the East India Company, is now a rent-seeking

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plutocracy that regressed under George W. Bush to monarchical politics in the service of corporations like Halliburton. The greatest riches are no longer acquired through selling products cheaper than ones competitors; rents secured by political privilege — such as Big Pharma’s income from patents, Hollywood’s monopoly revenues from DVDs or tax revenues used to bail out the Wall Street banks – keep the superrich afloat today.[xv]

In The Wretched of the Earth,[xvi] Frantz Fanon provided a blueprint for class analysis of decadent societies ripe for revolution, in his case the anti-colonial revolution. Political parties and unions were weak and conservative in late colonial Africa because they represented only a tiny part of the population: the industrial workers, civil servants, intellectuals and shopkeepers of the town, classes unwilling to jeopardize their own privileges. They were hostile to and suspicious of the mass of country people. The latter had customary chiefs supervised by the military and administrative officials of the occupying power. A nationalist middle class of professionals and traders confronted the superstition and feudalism of traditional authorities. Landless peasants moved to the town where they joined the lumpenproletariat. Eventually colonial repression forced the nationalists to flee the towns and take refuge with the peasantry. Only then, with the rural-urban split temporarily healed by crisis, did a mass movement take off.[xvii] We must replicate Fanon’s method if we wish to identify the potential for another African revolution.

The independent African states likewise rely on chiefs to keep the rural areas insulated from world society’s unruly currents. Where the state has failed, warlords take their place. Since the ‘structural adjustment programs’ of the 1980s, international agencies have approached rural populations through NGOs, the missionaries of our age, rather than departments of national government. World trade is organized by and for an alliance of the strongest governments and corporations. Some of the latter, especially in remote extractive industries, operate as independent states with the state. Bloated cities still sustain a very small industrial workforce, since mechanized production is poorly developed in post-colonial Africa. The civil servants have been ravaged as a class by neoliberal pressure to cut public expenditures. This leaves the informal economy of unregulated urban commerce. Clearly, trade and finance are not organized, in Africa or 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. If Africans want to have a say in what happens to them next, they will have to develop their own transnational associations to combat the huge coalitions of imperial power that would deny them self-expression.

Panafricanism, which sustained the anti-colonial revolution,[xviii] gave way to aspirations for national capitalism half a century ago because world society was not then organized to accommodate it. After the ANC won power in South Africa, non-racial nationalism took over from the anti-apartheid movement’s global appeal. Even so, one of the strongest political movements today is the formation of large regional trading blocs in response to neoliberal globalization: the European Union, North American Free Trade Area, Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Mercado Commun del Sur. So now is a good time for Africans to renew the movement for greater continental unity. A national framework for development never made sense in Africa and it makes even less sense today. The coming African revolution could leapfrog many of the obstacles in its path, but not if African societies continue to wear the national straitjacket they inherited from colonial rule.

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Freedom and protection in the early modern revolutions

The American, French and Italian revolutions all combined mass insurgency with an extended period of warfare focused on removing fragmented sovereignty, unfair taxes and restrictions placed on movement and trade, while German unification has a similar focus, but followed a different political trajectory. The success of the British in establishing a global free trade regime in the 19th century, following Adam Smith’s arguments in The Wealth of Nations, as well as the revival of that regime as economic orthodoxy in the last few decades, has obscured the complex dialectic of freedom and protection in the early modern period whose imperatives were laid out in Sir James Steuart’s Principles of Political Economy, published a decade before Smith’s.[xix] The first problem to be overcome was impediments to trade caused by divided sovereignty within and between states. Development under these circumstances was seen to depend on removing these barriers to trade. At the same time, these incipient free trade areas needed a measure of protection from unregulated global flows of commodities and money, so that their own agriculture and manufactures could benefit from supplying newly consolidated home populations. The case of the French revolution is particularly illuminating on this point.

In 1793, the Terror was unleashed on several targets including the Girondins, a moderate faction based around Bordeaux. At the same time, the Bretons raised a ‘Royal and Catholic Army’, supported from the sea by Britain, against which the revolutionary Republic sent out an army of its own to fight in a terrible conflict, known as the War of the Vendée.[xx] The port city of Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire, was France’s largest, being heavily involved in slavery and trade with the Caribbean. It stood out for the Republic and was besieged by the Royalist army. The battle for its relief was decisive for the revolution, as was the shippers’ financial support for the Republican army. Some 4,000 Catholics and presumed Royalists were publicly executed by drowning inside the city, an episode that came to be known as ‘the national bathtub’. Why did the Nantes bourgeoisie risk so much for the Revolution? One main reason is that France, although centrally administered by the monarchy, was then a patchwork of local fief-holders, each of whom exacted what they could from people and goods moving through their territory. The Republic promised to end all that. This was after all a liberal revolution whose aim was to abolish restrictions on movement. The Nantes shippers had an interest in reducing the costs of moving their trade goods inland and so they allied themselves with the forces of democracy.

In what became the United States, after American and Dutch smugglers led resistance to the East India Company’s tea monopoly and to British taxes offsetting the crown’s military costs, the revolutionary government faced rebellions of its own over excise duties imposed on alcohol production. The Italian Risorgimento too was backed financially by the industrialists of Milan and Turin who wanted a unified national home market and unrestricted access to world trade instead of Austrian protectionism and internal territorial divisions. In all three cases, the power of merchant and manufacturing capital played a decisive part in the revolution.

Long before the European Common Market became the European Union, the Prussian Zollverein was launched in 1818 and culminated in the German Empire. In each case political unification was preceded by a customs union lasting half a century.[xxi] The Zollverein was a piecemeal attempt to harmonise tariffs, measures and economic policy in scattered territories controlled by the Prussian ruling family. Overrun by Napoleonic conquest and British commercial expansion, the Germans attributed their vulnerability to extreme political

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fragmentation. Prussia’s main aim was to expand a protected zone of internal free trade from which the Austrians were excluded. By the 1860s, most of what became Germany had joined the customs union. Their leading economist, Friedrich List, proposed a ‘national system’ of political economy designed to prevent Germans from becoming just “drawers of water and hewers of wood for Britain”.[xxii] List emphasized the scope for innovation within an expanded free trade area protected from the cold winds of the world market. Similar proposals were espoused by Americans like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay.

Towards greater integration of African trade

The Union of South Africa was founded in 1910. Its structure was federal, bringing together provinces with disparate histories, geography and populations, while being linked to a patchwork of neighbouring territories under British rule. A South African customs union (SACU) was formed in 1889, the oldest of its kind extant.[xxiii] This was tightly controlled from Pretoria; but President Thabo Mbeki wanted to make relations with South Africa’s neighbours more equal, democratic and consensual; so members were granted more independence in their trade relations. The smaller countries signed separate agreements with the European Union, subverting South Africa’s attempts to control their entry and draw revenues from their importation. As a result SACU is now in disarray.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has been expanded greatly since the fall of apartheid to make it the largest regional grouping in Africa. But the reality is a maze of national restrictions on the movement of people, goods and money, crosscut by bilateral deals of bewildering variety. Under the ANC, the sense of division between South Africa’s own citizens and the many Africans who come there to live and work has been heightened. Somehow South Africa must break with ‘capitalism in one country’ and its plethora of confusing and contradictory bilateral deals. In fact, under President Mbeki, not much happened at the level of SADC, since his attention was firmly focused on reforming regional cooperation at the continental level.[xxiv]

Mbeki’s idea of an ‘African renaissance’ expressed the belief that a black majority government in South Africa might be a leading catalyst for an African economic revival based on greater political coordination between what had before been easy pickings for the world’s great powers. The Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa was reconstituted as the African Union (AU), with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) as its economic arm in Johannesburg and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) as its political arm. A Pan African Parliament (PAP), composed of representatives nominated by member states, also sits in Johannesburg. The principal economic measures proposed were a single currency for Africa as a whole, a continental central bank and trade harmonization. Thabo Mbeki’s initiative was aimed exclusively at the very political class that has failed Africa so often since independence. He did not factor civil society movements into his plans.

Africa currently consists of a labyrinthine confusion of regional associations which do little to strengthen their members’ bargaining power in world markets. On the ground, however, African peoples maintain patterns of long-distance movement and exchange developed over centuries despite their rulers’ attempts to force economy and society into national cages. This is one major reason why so much of the African economy is held to be ‘informal’: state regulations are routinely ignored, with the result that half the population and most economic activity are criminalized and an absurd public effort is wasted on trying to apply unenforceable rules. Classical liberalism offers an answer to this chaos — the widest area

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possible of free trade and movement with minimal regulation by the authorities. Paradoxically, three decades of neoliberal globalization have done much to discredit this recipe, since political initiatives, even in pursuit of free trade, are anathema. Yet the policy conclusion is inescapable: the boundaries of free commerce and of state intervention should be pushed beyond the limits of existing sovereignties.

A single currency and central bank are inappropriate to this stage of Africa’s development, given the disparities between member states. The global economic crisis has shown up vividly the limitations of such institutions for the Eurozone.[xxv] The existing distribution of regional associations needs to be rationalized, administration simplified and rule conflicts abolished. In South Africa’s case, SACU should probably be abandoned so that SADC might be built up as an effective customs union with one set of rules for all members. The present need for visas to travel between many SADC countries and the maze of bilateral deals and tariff barriers make a mockery of the ‘economic community’. A consistent policy of trade liberalisation would free up the movement of people, goods and capital within the region and allow existing informal practices to conform more closely to economic rules. Then perhaps SADC could reach out to other African regions such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) – dominated by Nigeria, with whom South Africa already has an economic alliance. The political elites can’t be kept out of all this, but the driving force for regional integration on this scale would have to be a broadly-based social movement animated by Africans’ drive for self-determination.

The AU and especially its economic arm, NEPAD, could try to persuade the rest of the world that Africa’s poverty is a drag on the growth of the global economy. If Africa’s infant agricultural, manufacturing and service industries are to develop, there must be international agreement that the continent deserves special protection, at least for a period. Making such arguments more persuasive than they are at present is the context for a revival of Panafricanism. To that end, continental and regional strategies need to be pursued side by side.

Conclusion

Africa’s current advantage is its weak attachment to the status quo. The world economy is in crisis for sure, but Africans have less to lose. The old Stalinist ‘law of unequal development’ reminds us that winners and losers can easily change places.[xxvi] Africa’s healthy prospects for rapid economic improvement soon seem counter-intuitive to many, given its historical role as the symbolic negation of ‘white’ superiority. Rather than face up to Africa’s rise and Europe’s corresponding decline, the whites prefer to dwell on the continent’s misfortunes. Failed politicians and ageing 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 is a curious fact that China occupied a similar slot in western consciousness not long ago. In the 1930s, people in the West often spoke of the Chinese as 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 an economic superpower, its manufactures making inroads into western dominance on a scale far greater than Japan’s. This profound shift in power from West to East does not guarantee that Africa will escape soon from the stigma of inferiority, but the structures of Atlantic dominance that once seemed inevitable are perceptibly on the move; and that makes it easier to envisage change. Humanity is entering a new era of social

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possibility. Africans’ drive for emancipation from an unequal world society affects all of us. In that sense an African revolution would be a world revolution.

[i] W.A. Lewis The Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton, 1978).

[ii] According to The Economist (6th 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.

[iii] Keith Hart Waiting for emancipation: between slavery and freedom in West Africa (1996) http://thememorybank.co.uk/2010/03/20/waiting-for-emancipation-slavery-and-freedom-in-west-africa/

[iv] Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony (London 2001); Jean-François Bayart The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly (Cambridge, 2009); Moeletse Mbeki Architects of Poverty: Why African capitalism needs changing (Johannesburg, 2009).

[v] Keith Hart‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies 11.3: 61-89 (1973); ‘Bureaucratic form and the informal economy’, in B. Guha-Khasnobis, R. Kanbur and E. Ostrom (eds) Linking the Formal and Informal Economies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 21-35 (2006); ‘Africa’s urban revolution and the informal economy’, in V. Padayachee (ed) The Political Economy of Africa, Routledge: London, 371-388; ‘The informal economy’, in Hart, Laville and Cattani (eds) The Human Economy: A citizen’s guide, Cambridge: Polity, 142-153 (2010).

[vi] The first volume of a score of books was Production and Reproduction: A comparative study of the domestic domain (Cambridge, 1976). Keith Hart Jack Goody’s vision of world history and Africa’s development today, 1st June 2011 http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/01/10/jack-goodys-vision-of-history-and-african-development-today/.

[vii] Childe’s ‘urban revolution’: V. Gordon Childe What Happened in History (London, 1954).

[viii] Keith Hart The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (Cambridge, 1982).

[ix] This focus was advocated by Sir James Steuart Principles of Political Economy, Edinburgh: Cadell (1767).

[x] For a prescient study of the Ben Ali regime’s techniques of domination, Beatrice Hibou The Force of Obedience: The political economy of repression in Tunisia, Cambridge: Polity (2011).

[xi] Hernando de Soto The Other Path: The economic answer to terrorism, New York: Basic Books (1989); The Mystery of Capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else, London: Bantam (2000).

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[xii] United Nations Development Program Human Development Report (1998).

[xiii] A fuller treatment of these and related issues may be found in ‘Two lectures on African development’ (2007) http://thememorybank.co.uk/2007/05/16/two-lectures-on-african-development/.

[xiv] Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on Inequality (London, 1984 [1754]: 137).The classical source on 18th century France is Alexis de Tocqueville (F. Furet and F. Mélonio eds) The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, [1856] 1998).

[xv] Dean Baker The End of Loser Liberalism: Making markets progressive (Washington DC, 2011).

[xvi] Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (New York, [1961] 1970], chapter 2 ‘Grandeur and weakness of spontaneity’.

[xvii] Mahmood Mamdani bases his argument in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Oxford, 1996) on this need to heal the rural-urban divide.

[xviii] C.L.R. James The History of Panafrican Revolt (third edition, New York, 2012 [1938]).

[xix] See Note 10; Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1961 [1776]).

[xx] Victor Hugo’s last novel, Ninety-three (1974), reconstructs these events.

[xxi] W.O. Henderson The Zollverein (Cambridge 2013 [1939]).

[xxii] Friedrich List National System of Political Economy: Volume 1 History (New York, [1841], 2005).

[xxiii] Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee South Africa in Africa: from national capitalism to regional integration, in V. Padayachee (ed) The Political Economy of Africa (London, 2010), Chapter 22.

[xxiv] Christopher Clapham, G. Mills, A. Morner and E. Sidiropoulos Regional Integration in Southern Africa (Johannesburg, 2001).

[xxv] Why the euro crisis matters to us all http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/04/04_Hart_WhyTheEuroCrisisMatters.pdf

[xxvi] Neil Smith Uneven Development: Nature, capital and the production of space (Athens GA, 1984).

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Additional material:

a. This link is an audio recording of Keith Hart giving a lecture on what he calls the

prospect of a liberal revolution in Africa. It builds on the piece above:

http://downloads.sms.cam.ac.uk/1725479/1725487.mp3

b. This link is a video of Keith Hart speaking about what he conceives of as the “human

economy”. Find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb8jQXRTTHE

c. The link below is a link to The Human Economy Blog. It was launched as part of a

programme by the same name which is housed at the University of Pretoria but it

forms part of a larger network around the world which seeks to transform the

economy, markets and money into something more human. This is a good place to

see how anthropology can be applied to various issues going on around the world at

present. Find it here:

http://thehumaneconomy.blogspot.co.za/

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Definitions from AnthroBase.com:

http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/def/informant.htm

(last accessed on 12 August 2015)

Guide to anthropological theories and approaches:

http://anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Functionalism

(last accessed on 2 August 2015)

Real Size of Africa:

https://futurism.com/real-size-africa/

(last accessed on 1 August 2017)