Abstract
Few subjects preoccupy scholars of African politics as much as the stabilization of societies emerging out of colonial rule and the historical legacies of colonialism that are at once political, social, cultural and economic. In this timely text, Sam Moyo and Yoichi Mine revisit the question of legacy, inviting critiques and reflections from a range of comparative perspectives whose major concern is to restore a vantage point to the debates on colonialism and the postcolonial state in Africa from the ground up. Departing from the predominant literature on developmentalism, this edited volume sets for itself the task of exploring the notion of ‘African potentials’, that is, ‘mechanisms that are utilized to bring about “conflict resolution and coexistence” in the African settings from below’ (p. 3). Avoiding a nativist reading, the book explores this question through interlocution between African scholars and Asian scholars of African studies, drawing heavily from the fields of history, political economy, sociology and anthropology. To the extent that each particular field presents limitations and challenges to any normative reading of the colonial predicaments generative of conflict, the diverse disciplinary vantage points of critique lend this volume a particularly enriching set of perspectives.
The core debates with which the book engages locate it broadly within political economy, and from that perspective make critical and analytical links between the violence that has emerged from the realm of political contestation and religion, and the liberal democratic project. We must, in this relation, go behind the veil at the core of its celebration of a ‘rising’ Africa to understand the predicaments rendered visible by the continued march of global capitalism on the basis of extroverted growth, deepening insecurity, precarization of livelihoods and alienation of the masses across the continent. The book, however, moves beyond the incomplete transition to the nation-state, in apparent response to a question that haunts the twenty-first century, that of national sovereignty, which, as the various chapters convincingly show, no longer resides in the nation-state, at least not in its Westphalian form, but is rather to be understood in relation to the political economy. To this question, the book offers a sustained critique of new forms of land concentration and capital accumulation on the basis of large-scale farming and transnational agribusiness, viewing this process as ‘the most significant factor in creating a setting for violent conflict and renewed geopolitical militarization in Africa’ (p. 6). Against these externally driven and internally evolving contradictions, the book develops perhaps an overly optimistic notion of ‘African potentials’ as a transformative mode. The authors propose an alternative approach to understanding the conflict dynamics of African society, framing emancipatory politics around a new conception of potentiality, thereby taking issue with the three approaches that have predominated thinking around Africa’s structural predicaments: (i) the neopatrimonial construction of Africa as inherently unstable, self-destructive and ‘backward’; (ii) a universalist subsumption of justice and rights and dogmatic constitutionalism or ‘social engineering’ concealed within the Western liberal thinking of democracy; and (iii) the legacies of late-colonial bifurcation of the state manifest in continued state capture by elites.
The iteration ‘African’ rather than an abstracted notion of ‘human’ potentials emphasizes the structural diversity and distinct historical, spatial determination of societies in Africa. The particular focus on Southern Africa underlines a concern with the distinguishing characteristics of the region’s history, formed as a labour reserve political economy, as compared to the resource extraction concession enclaves of Central Africa and the trade economies grounded in surplus extraction from African peasantries across West and Eastern Africa (p. 15).
The chapters weave together a broad narrative that links the colonial accumulation processes ‘from above’, to the disarticulation of agricultural and mineral enclaves from national economic development, to the growth of petty agricultural commodity production among increasingly differentiated peasantries and to the intense contemporary contestations over land that are the result of these legacies. The questions regarding what is happening to both the labour and resources in Africa— precipitated by the prolonged crisis of the global capitalist system and intensified under renewed waves of accumulation through land dispossession—converge forcefully around the underlying burdens that place social reproduction in the countryside in a particular crisis. The ‘varied and yet converging accumulation trajectories…at the heart of uneven development, exclusion and poverty’ (p.18) then form the crux of the struggle for reclaiming the future of Africa. It is in this structural and agentic reading of history—in its spatial and temporal dimensions—that one of the book’s major contribution lies.
The book is organized in three parts. The first part, entitled ‘Structure and Agency’, deals with historically entrenched economic and political structures in the Southern African region, on the one hand, and the popular agency for coping with, and surmounting, the challenges pertaining to the ongoing process of structural transformation, on the other hand. In Chapter 2, Sam Moyo poses the structural questions as pertaining to the racially discriminatory, undemocratic and repressive settler mode of accumulation, which from the 1950s, functioned alongside transnational capitalism to deepen the dispossession of land and landed resources and consolidate a regime of migrant labour. The demands for popular sovereignty that persist in the region post-independence are to be understood in light of the truncated transitions that maintained the structures of exclusion and inequality by the erst-while regimes. The postcolonial condition of landlessness, Moyo argues, places the political dimension of the agrarian question at the centre of conflicts, whose most important manifestation at the turn of the century has been the radicalization of Zimbabwe’s land reform and indigenization programme.
Against the potential threats to Zimbabwe’s radical, albeit tenuous, agrarian transition (marked by intra-class conflict, ethno-regional tendencies among the black petty bourgeoisie and regression to a neocolonial type of politics more malleable to foreign interests), the radical transformative potential lies, for Moyo, in the diversity of rural associations—cooperative movements whose structures allow for the expression and, therefore, transformation of gender relations and customary authority. The clear trajectory of re-peasantization, none-theless, poses new contradictions associated with super-exploitation, self-exploitation and social differentiation, which coupled with the class bias of the state could precipitate new conflicts. This case study of the state and social forces at play places the onus of structural transformation contingently on the possibility of wider political alliances that can affect the struggle against monopoly capitalism while sustaining pressure on the reconfigured state.
In Chapter 3, Grasian Mkodzongi focuses on the ways in which notions of difference have been deployed in the aftermath of the fast-track land reform programme to generate autochthonous sentiment and conceal the uneven nature of land redistribution. Highlighting the synergy between state and social forces, Mkodzongi shows that political parties were central to the way in which people from diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds worked together, as new forms of belonging crystallized around the land occupations, legitimizing ‘outsiders’ claims to land. Core to this analysis are processes of cohesion from below in response to conflicts that followed, or where the effect of the redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe bred ethnic, gendered, race and class conflict. In Mhondoro Ngezi, historically a mining area, the absence of schools, clinics and clean water eventually led to the formation of a local development association and other associational networks and social institutions of mutual reciprocity. Social questions, such as HIV/AIDS, dovetailed with the large-scale mobility precipitated by the land reform process, expressing the social questions of agrarian reform as highly gendered. Here, again, local support groups, rather than state or NGO sponsorship sustained those most affected by disease. Farmer cooperatives, central from 2006 to the way farmers accessed inputs and marketed their agricultural produces, mediated the relationship between new farmers and the states, intervening from below where autochthonous vacuums threatened to alienate newly cobbled communities after the land reform.
Shuichi Oyama, in Chapter 4, revisits the question of customary land administration in Zambia, through a case study of the contradictory thrusts precipitated by the placing of the 1995 Land Act under the traditional authorities. While the Act ostensibly protected customary land rights, it was in reality designed to open vast areas of customary land to investors under the supervision of village headmen and chiefs. Through various illustrations of the adverse livelihood impacts on local communities as a result of land enclosures, Oyama critiques normative, liberal institutionalist approaches to rights, illustrating the indirect paths of land dispossession taking place through the legal recognition of certain progressive land rights, as was the case with the customary tenure regime in Zambia. The ways in which residents experience land law reform appears, as in the case of Zimbabwe, to be overdetermined by class, access to power and social differences.
The second part of the book, entitled ‘National Projections’, elevates the task of social healing and transformation from the local to the national level, as a collective unfinished element of the postcolonial nation-building project. In Chapter 5, Yoko Nagahara reflects on the potential of historical thinking as a medium for conflict resolution in Namibia. Drawing on historiography as a form of possibility for a process of historical accountability, the author sees potential for the resolution of contemporary social and political conflicts in generating an understanding of the histories that correspond with the legacies of the ethno-regional structure created by colonialism. Alongside the power to deny and suppress legacies of conflict stands the power to expose and act on historical facts as ‘shared memory’, with the goal of achieving reconciliation. In Chapter 6, Toshihiro Abe’s exploration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process in South Africa builds on this assertion, showing the possibility of TRC processes to generate autonomous spaces that are both informal and official, in which people can productively deviate from the agenda in the search for reconciliation. Yoichi Mine, in Chapter 7, explores the potential that lies in powersharing arrangements as a means of conflict resolution and co-existence. Drawing a broad canvas across different forms of alliances that have emerged through anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles underlined by Africanist thought, Mine shows how these offered the possibility of conciliatory alliances between Blacks, non-Africans on the continent and people beyond the continent. All oppressed and similarly subjugated people could be called to affirm their loyalty towards an emancipatory path, that is, in an ‘integrated agency’ defining what it means to be African.
The third and final part of the book, entitled ‘The Power of Conversations’, deals with what might be termed as various forms of presentation—the emancipatory potential of popular politics in response to state power. One set of questions are raised through a critical revisiting of African cosmology, ‘the tripartite relationship of nature, the spirit world and human society’ and ‘its significance to social, economic and political practice’—articulated to conflict management and peace-building. Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, in Chapter 8, draws on the occult to show the ways in which informal resistances to state recourse shape, and are shaped by, discourses of power and organize in ways that exceed the liberal parameters of legality/illegality, restoring power to philosophically defined cultural belief systems.
A further study by Mayu Hayakawa, in Chapter 9, counterposes external interventionist attempts at stabilizing Zimbabwe’s economy during the crisis period from 2008, to the dynamism of local populations responding to the government’s ‘unconventional’ responses to the hyperinflation, cash shortages and severe macroeconomic strain on the domestic economy. The negative responses of ordinary people to the unconventional economy, it is argued, ‘may play a positive role in maintaining order and morality in the midst of drastic change and a disorderly, unconventional situation’ (p. 276), elucidating the notion of ‘order in disorder’ produced among ordinary people as a way to detect African potentials. In that unconventional context, activities such as smuggling, theft and prostitution took on a new morality within the notion of ‘crisis as context’—people’s continued ability to act during crisis and develop new bearings that consolidate dominant forms of economic action (kiya-kiya). An engagement with the social and solidarity economy literature might, however, have lent the analysis a less exceptional quality than what the author describes as a moral economy.
In the book’s final chapter, Michael Neocosmos offers a conceptual and theoretical contribution towards a ‘political alternative to violence founded upon concepts and categories inherent in African traditions. . .actually existing popular practices’ (p. 310). Eschewing the language of liberal democracy on terms such as ‘civil society’, ‘governance’, or ‘citizenship’, the author maintains that thinking through an emancipatory politics must begin by thinking through the question of violence, given the fundamental violence of the capitalist system: a politics of peace must be thought through a politics of violence. The potential here lies in the possibility that popular resistance might exceed the subjective limits imposed by the state: the idea that ‘people are capable of thinking “excessively” beyond social interest as they search for alternatives in their daily struggles to exercise some kind of agency over their lives in conditions of political exclusion or “inexistence”’ (p. 314). This critique marks a shift from the structural analysis in the first part, whose central focus is on the state. Neocosmos seeks to move beyond identities of class (objective balance of class forces), ethnicity, gender, mediated through the state and ground his critique in the very potential of thought (as emancipatory) held by each and every one.
Heeding Amílcar Cabral’s call to Africa’s intellectuals to ground their struggles in the actually existing contexts and realities of the people, this book is a powerful convergence of narratives, case studies and reflective analysis of how such a process is already taking place and might be accelerated for the future good of the continent.
Rich in case study material, the book skilfully renders apparent the fact that what colonialism ignored then is not as much a critique of its limitations, as a celebration of those realms of possibility within the structures, psyches, cosmologies and traditional institutions that elided its machination, subjugation and control: those aspects of African political economies of subsistence, governance and culture whose internal composition, although still susceptible to manipulation and myriad contradictions, retain the potential of responding to many of the continent’s extroverted development quagmires.
What unites these articles, what each manages to do, is to resurface an agentic subject, one that is capable of thinking and acting and, therefore, of transcending the limitations and boundaries imposed by a politics modelled on a Western notion of abstract individual subjectivity and a sovereignty modelled on a global rather than local political economy. It is in the latter that the potential of internal mechanisms for resolving Africa’s conflicts is to be found.