African Sociology - Towards a Critical Perspective - The Collected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane 0865436606, 0865436614

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The Collected Essays of

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane With a Foreword by Masilela NtongeU

3-0'O C

African Sociology

AFRICAN RENAISSANCE SERIES General Editor: Ntongela Masilela

RENAISSANCE ■ SERIES ■

Advisory Board: Elliott Buder Evans (United States), Mazisi Kunene (South Africa), Bernard Makhosozwe Magubane (South Africa), Esikia Mphahlele (South Africa), Lewis Nkosi (South Africa), Phyllis Ntantala (South Africa), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) Manuel Olivella Zapata (Columbia).

One of the most dramatic events in the waning moments of the twentieth century has been the democratic seizure of political power in 1994 by the black majority in South Africa. This momentous occurrence in African his¬ tory brought to a close the era of European classical colonialism which had officially begun at the Berlin conference of 1884-85. It is not wholly surprising that so epochal a closure would usher in a new beginning governed by a grand idea: the idea of con¬ stituting and constructing an African Renaissance. In South Africa, the idea of an African Renaissance has captivated the imagina¬ tion of the nation. This majestic notion was first broached by the then Vice-President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, in 1996. No other postulation of an idea in modern African political and cultural history has had greater acceptance by a wide segment of the African people. In West Africa, Wole Soyinka has argued that the African Renaissance would be unrealized if it did not encompass both the grander and tragedy of contemporary Nigeria: in other words, the making of an African Renaissance must encompass the full participation of both the continent and the African Diaspora. In East Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has postulated that the African Renaissance must engage the artistic expression of African languages and their political ramifica¬ tions. From the perspective of the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, the African Renaissance has been constituted by the democratization process, which has recently been occurring in Africa. What then are the historical possibilities of the African Renaissance? It would seem that one of its central preoccupations should be the analysis of the consequences that have followed the violent entrance of European modernity into African history. Within this historical understanding, the African Renaissance should be about the mak¬ ing of African modernities and modernism(s). As such, it is a historical project whose objective is the construction of new epistemologies, new perspectives and new rela¬ tionships. The African Renaissance should articulate the African past as contemporaneous with the present. The African Renaissance Series, launched by Africa World Press under the general editorship of Professor Ntongela Masilela aims to publish books that recon¬ stitute the lineages of historical particularity and historical relatedness of African nation¬ al cultures, and also those that configure the epistemological map between African, the African Diaspora and the World Economy.

African Sociology Towards a Critical Perspective

The Selected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane

Africa World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 1892 Trenton, NJ 08607

P.O. Box 48 Asmara, ERITREA

Africa World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 1892 Trenton, NJ 08607

Copyright © 2000 Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane First Printing 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cover and Book Design: Jonathan Gullery Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Magubane, Bernard. African sociology—towards a critical perspective : the collected essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane / by Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-86543-660-6 (hb). - ISBN 0-86543-661-4 (pb) 1. Sociology-Africa. 2. Africa-Social conditions. 3. Africa-Politics and government. 4. Africa-Colonization. I. Title. HM22.A6M36 1999 301’.096—dc21 98-62239 CIP

Dedication TO MY COLLEAGUES AT THE University of Connecticut

1970-1997

Contents Foreword: Foreshadowings in the Making of an "African Renaissance" Ntongela Masilela .ix 1.

Crisis in African Sociology

2.

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look.27

3.

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa .55

4.

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism .85

5.

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor: A Critique of Conventional Wisdom or A Case Study in the Functions of Functionalism with John O'Brien

6.

.1

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

.101

.119

7.

The "Xhosa" in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology: A Failure of Method and Theory .149

8.

Urban Tribalism: Theory and Ideology

9.

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa .199

10.

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues .235 with Amelia Mariotti

11.

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa.261 with John Yrchik

12.

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis:' A Polemic on Southern Africa .285

13.

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues .309

14.

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class .335

.173

15.

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation From Colonialism: Cabral's Legacy.377

16.

The Political Economy of the Black World— Origins of the Present Crisis .405

17.

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and The Housing Question (1872) Revisited: Their Relevance for Urban Anthropology .423

18.

Race and Class Revisited: The Case of North America and South Africa .465

19.

On The Political Relevance of Anthropology with James C. Farris

20.

The Round Table Movement: Its Influence on the Historiography of Imperialism .517

Notes

.499

.557

Bibliography

.587

Permissions.609 Index

611

Foreword: Foreshadowings in the Making of an “African Renaissance” Ntongela Masilela

The extraordinary power of the essays by Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane assembled in this anthology exemplify the kind of research and analysis the New African intellectuals and political leaders of the African National Congress Youth League would have found com¬ mendable, if we can judge from a series of newspaper articles in 1947 calling for the founding of an African Academy of Arts and Sciences. With this suggestion in their political and intellectual forum, Inkundla ya Bantu (Bantu Forum), Anton Lembede, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Sisulu, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Nelson Mandela, A. P. Mda, Congress Mbata, Oliver Tambo and others sought through the ideol¬ ogy of New Africanism to put forth new agendas, new perspectives, new histories, new purposive actions by means of which the oppressed African people could overthrow white settler colonialism and European (British) imperial domination. In this wish to establish an Academy, the Youth League New Africans were attempting to do on an intel¬ lectual and epistemological plane what the first generation of New African intelligentsia, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Solomon T. Plaatje, R. V. Selope Thema, H. Selby Msimang, John Dube, Richard Msimang, Alfred Mangena, Silas Modiri Molema and others, had achieved on the political and philosophical plane by founding the African National Congress in 1912: The Regeneration of Africa. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the principal force behind the founding of this political organization as a response to the disenfranchisement of Africans by Europeans (British and Afrikaners) with the coming into

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

being of the Union of South Africa in 1910, in a major and historic essay of 1905, wrote the following arguing for the historical necessity of realizing New Africanism as a means of bringing about the Regeneration of Africa: “Yes, the Regeneration of Africa belongs to this new and powerful period! By this term, regeneration, I wish to be understood to mean the entrance into a new life, embracing the diverse phases of a higher, complex existence. The basic factor, which assures their regeneration, resides in the awakened race-consciousness. This gives them [Africans] a clear perception of their elemental needs and of their underdeveloped powers. It therefore must lead them to the attainment of that higher and advanced standard of life...The regen¬ eration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world. The African is not a proletarian in the world of science and art.”1 Appropriating the idea of the Regeneration of Africa from African American intellectuals of the nineteenth-century, specifically from the first Pan-Africanist Martin Delany and the incomparable educator Alexander Crummell, Pixley ka Isaka Seme called for the emergence of a new historical consciousness among Africans (i.e. New Africanism) to enable them to make proper choices and decisions at the moment of entrance into modernity. In his estimation, the fundamental mis¬ sion of New Africanism was to invent African Nationalism, conse¬ quently the monumental event of 1912. For Seme the following was axiomatic: New Africanism + African Nationalism + African National Congress = Regeneration of Africa and Liberation of the African People. Aware that the founding of the ANC Youth League in 1943, as a way of re-invigorating the parent body, was not by itself sufficient in furthering the historical and political vision of Pixley ka Isaka Seme and that of the first generation of New African intelligentsia, Anton M. Lembede; himself belonging to the third tier of this intellectual constellation, (the New African Movement), proposed the notion of the African Academy as a way of facilitating the production of New Knowledges and New Epistemologies: “We need science to assist us in our present stage of transition and we shall need it more increas¬ ingly thereafter. To the question: What knowledge is of most value— the uniform reply is: science... Art is indispensable to a nation in the process of being born. We need artists to interpret to us and to the world our glorious past, our misery, suffering and tribulation of the

Foreword

present time, our hopes, aspirations and our divine destiny and our future; to inspire us with the message that there is hope for our race and that we ought therefore to draw plans and lay foundations for a longer future than we can imagine by struggling for national freedom so as to save our race from imminent extinction or extermination. In short, we need African Artists to interpret the spirit of Africa.”2 Jordan K. Ngubane, exercising his responsibility as editor wrote an Editorial in Inkundlaya Bantu in which he called for the involvement of as many of the New African Masses as possible in the actualization of the African Academy: “We should like to make it as comprehensive as possible and in this regard should be very grateful if our readers could furnish us with the names and addresses of authors, poets, historians, musicians, painters and other artists of our race in various parts of the country.”3 The traumatizing and unexpected death of Anton Lembede at a rela¬ tively young age of 33 years a few months after tabling this proposal seems to have scuttled the ANC Youth League New Africans from actually launching an African Academy. H. I. E. Dhlomo, a member of the second intellectual generation of the New African Movement, did not belong to the national body of the ANC Youth League, but was affiliated to its regional body in Natal, traced the history of an earlier attempt to found the African Academy in 1936 when an organization called African Authors Meeting was founded in Bloemfontein involving both Africans and Europeans. Dhlomo observed that in the 1940s a specifically African organization was called for: “Meanwhile the spirit of African nation¬ alism, independence and self assertion had gone on apace. Some Africans felt that the initiative for a movement or institution of this kind should come from the Africans themselves. In a way it was in response both to this new call and the old necessity for such a body that Dr. [Benedict Wallet] Vilakazi decided to convene a meeting for the purpose.”4 The tragic death of Benedict Bambatta Vilakazi a few months after that of Anton Lembede in 1947, also seems to have pre¬ vented the realization of an African Academy in this instance. Given these tragic unfoldings, it would not be too extravagant to claim that the essays, other writings and columns of H. I. E. Dhlomo in Ilanjya lase Natal (Natal Sun) from 1943 to 1955, were a symbolic repre¬ sentation of what an African Academy of Arts and Sciences would have been intellectually capable of achieving in the Humanities, had its founding been realized.5 In contrast to Anton Lembede and Benedict

XI

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Vilakazi, who seem to have articulated the necessity of an African Academy in relation to African creativity, H. I. E. Dhlomo emphasized its possible principal task of facilitating research by African intelligentsia, given that at the time premier ‘white’ research universities were verboten to Africans for undertaking such a task. This necessity of estab¬ lishing an African Academy was a central preoccupation of New Africanism before the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 destroyed this phi¬ losophy of the new invented by a modernizing new African intelli¬ gentsia in the first half of the twentieth-century. From 1960, when the African National Congress, the PanAfricanist Congress and the South African Communist Party were banned and forced into exile, to the Soweto Uprising of 1976, the struggle to overthrow white settler colonialism and break its linkages to imperial centers in United States and Europe was largely based abroad among South African political and intellectual exiles. It was during this interregnum or period that the scholarly essays of Professor Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane began making their dramatic appear¬ ance: the first one, “Crisis in African Sociology,” appeared in a Kenyan cultural and literary review of high repute.6 Although Magubane’s prodigious work written in exile is a post-New African Movement phe¬ nomenon in South African intellectual and cultural history, it is fasci¬ nating and entrancing to see how it continues certain thematic patterns, yet in many instances going beyond them, epitomized by many New African intellectuals, be it R. V. Selope Thema or S. E. K. Mqhayi or Solomon T. Plaatje or B. M. Khaketla.7 Since the name of H. I. E. Dhlomo, arguably the most vital force of the New African Movement together with R. V. Selope Thema, has already been mentioned, it is instructive to juxtapose his name with that of Magubane in tracing the patterns of convergences and divergences between the New African intellectual preoccupations and the post-New African Movement expe¬ rience. In appropriating in the 1940s W. E. B. Du Bois’ construct of 1903 about the New Negro Talented Tenth to forge the concept of the New African Talented Tenth in theorizing a new historical phase of New Africanism, H. I. E. Dhlomo was continuing an intellectual tradition in our country of seeing parallelism or ‘adjacency’ between the his¬ torical experience of new negroes in United States modernity and that of new Africans in South Africa modernity.8 Beginning with the Xhosa cultural renascence of the 1880s around Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion) newspaper with John Tengo Jabavu, Elijah Makiwane, and xii

Foreword

Walter Rubusana, when Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba argued for the importance of George Washington Williams’ History of the Nejjro Race in America, 1619-1880 for their intellectual discourses, through R. V. Selope Thema writing an autobiographical essay called “Up From Barbarism” modelled on Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, and Solomon T. Plaatje modelling his Native Life in South Africa on W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, to Richard Wright’s Native Son profoundly influencing Peter Abraham’s Mine Boy, and Richard Rive modelling his collection of short stories African Songs on Langston Hughes’ poetry, the two historical “Black Atlantic” experi¬ ences across the ocean have seemed inseparable from each other. From the 1880s to the Sophiatown Renaissance of the 1950s this insepara¬ bility has been astonishing; in fact it continues in the 1990s between, for instance, music of the late Thelonios Monk and that of the bril¬ liant South African jazz pianist, Bheki Mseleku. Rather than borrowing a concept in order to construct a map of intellectual history as H. I. E. Dhlomo did, or a historical perspective for the composition and structuring of a book as Solomon T. Plaatje had earlier done, surpassing the ingenuity of New African intellectu¬ als’ modernist practices, Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane compre¬ hensively appropriates W. E. B. Du Bois’ Marxist philosophy of history. It is this philosophy of history which is preoccupied with the dialec¬ tics of transformation and transcendence, that informs the majority of essays in this anthology. Informed by the dialectics of history, Magubane continually makes reference to Leninism is in his critique of imperialism in Africa. Consequently, a central distinction has to be indicated that whereas the New African intelligentsia believed that New Africanism should be driven by the ideology of African Nationalism, be it of the variant of Anton Lembede or Jordan Ngubane or H. I. E. Dhlomo, in the post-New African Movement, Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane has postulated Marxist dialectics as the driving instrumentarium. This brings forth another observation that the epistemology of these essays is informed of the happenings within European Marxism, by way of the English Marxism of Perry Anderson and the Western Marxism of the Elungarian Georg Lukacs. Within the struc¬ ture of South African intellectual history, Magubane counterposes African Marxism to African Nationalism.9 It is perhaps appropriate to point out here that Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane was among the first African intellectuals to appreciate and critically absorb the signif¬ icance of the great African Marxist from Cape Verde, Amilcar Cabral. xiii

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

One of the most captivating essays in the anthology is on Cabral, which Magubane presented in Cape Verde itself in 1983, on the tenth-year commemoration of his assassination by the fascist agents of Portuguese imperialism: “Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy.” The essay concludes with these stirring words: “This is the legacy of Amilcar Cabral which inspires the African National Congress in its struggle against apartheid.” It is greatly exhil¬ arating reading these words in the context of the recent defeat of apartheid in 1994, the abominable system that was an obstacle to Harold Cressy, Charlotte Manye Maxeke, and Yusuf Dadoo and oth¬ ers in achieving more exemplary things than the enormous achieve¬ ments they have bequeathed to us. Not surprising, it is Cabral’s Marxism that informs the conception of African history theorized and realized in these formidable essays.10 Another innovativeness that continues the legacy of New Africanism yet surpasses it in the context of the historical problemat¬ ics of the post-New African Movement, is that whereas the intellectu¬ al compass of the New African intelligentsia was specifically pointed to the United States within the black world, that of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane’s leads to the exploration of the complex intellectual topog¬ raphy of the whole Diaspora. Reflecting the central concerns of the New African intellectuals, Benedict Wallet Bambatta Vilakazi noted the following in his doctoral dissertation, The Oral and Written Literature in Npuni, a document which held a high reputation among these intellectuals: “In prose it should be easy to follow the example of Langston Hughes, who, though dealing with a Negro colour bar, race-discrimination and lynching, yet writes without bitterness or vitu¬ peration, and such simplicity and restraint that few readers of any race are able to put down his books unmoved... While there is much to be learnt from Negro artists by our African writers in English, we may nevertheless praise them for what they have achieved, for most of them have gained their knowledge of journalism from mere reading.”11 Rather than confining himself to United States for the lessons to be had, Bernard Makhosezwe Magubene constructs a canon of radical political and cultural outlook that encompasses both Africa and the Diaspora: The World and Africa by W. E. B. Du Bois, Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams, The Black Jacobinsby C. L. R. James, Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney and The

xiv

Foreword

Shaping of Black World By Lerone Bennett. This listing appears in one of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubanc’s essays of synoptic synthesis: “The Political Economy of the Black World — Origins of the Present Crisis,” a title which alludes to the forged synthesis of Perry Anderson’s European Marxism and the Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois. Here it needs to be observed that Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were among the earliest African intellectuals in the late 1960s to incorporate Frantz Fanon into African intellectu¬ al discourse, the Kenyan on the cultural plane and the South African on the political plane.12 Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and W. E. B. Du Bois have left the most significant imprints on this anthology of essays. “The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis” belongs on the high level of achievement like the other essays which quest for various forms of syntheses: “Crisis in African Sociology” (1968), “The Evolution of Class Structure in Africa” (1976), “Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues” (writ¬ ten with Amelia Mariotti, 1978), “Toward a Sociology of National Liberation From Colonialism” (1983), “Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class” (1983), “Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and The Housing Question (1872) Revisited: Their Relevance for Urban Anthropology” (1985). Since the New African Movement was concerned with the con¬ struction of modernity in South Africa, it is logical that many of its intellectuals were preoccupied with theorizing the roles of the city in the making: Solomon T. Plaatje on Maseru and London; H. I. E. Dhlomo on King William’s Town, Durban and Bloemfontein; Z. K. Methews on Florence; Ezekiel Mphahlele on New York City (Harlem) and Maseru; R. V. Selope Thema several times on Johannesburg; Nat Nakasa on Johannesburg and New York City (Harlem); and Lewis Nkosi on Johannesburg, New York City (Harlem), and Paris.(The last two figures represent the last and forth tier of this intellectual con¬ stellation.)13 While they were primarily concerned with the making and construction of these cities and the politics of racial oppression encountered in them, Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane in several essays in this anthology examines the urban space as a cite in which the exploitative social relations of capitalist production are reproduced infinitesimally, and also interrogates the social relationships of these cites where the working class continually forges the politics of resis¬ tance. For Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, much more than had been

XV

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

the case with New African intellectuals, the urban space is a contestatory and dynamic zone. The achievement of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane is impressive on yet another level when it is noted that his essays can be sitLiated in continuity with other South African intellectual traditions: that of ‘native’ Marxism and of the political essay. The two principal prede¬ cessors in this context are Albert T. Nzula and Govan Mbeki. The nature and the depth of this influence is perhaps best captured in a poem by Mazisi Kunene, our greatest poet this century, who himself has left an indelible mark on Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane: Path in the sand, Whose feet are these that lead to the shade Criss-crossed in all directions? Each time I follow them they end in the forest. Then I look up to the sky Searching their mystery. I see shadows returning home in the afternoon. When I am left alone with the night, I hear voices babbling With the wisdom of other nations. I approach them: Suddenly they stop with the wind Then I hear footsteps striking the hours.14 For Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, the “Path in the Sand” was that of Albert T. Nzula and Govan Mbeki who appropriated the “wisdom of other nations” in the form of Marxism and nativized it, the former by making it reveal the political action of worker mobilization that would have to be taken to overcome the horrendous consequences on Africans of the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, and the latter by making it forge class political unity across ethnic barriers in response to Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 which established the Bantustans. It is per¬ haps this essay of Albert T. Nzula, which invokes Lenin’s Imperialism: The Last Staple of Capitalism several times, and expresses Nzula’s grat¬ ification with Lenin’s passionate identification with the Bambatta Rebellion of 1906, which most impressed Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane for he himself invokes this classic Marxist book several times in some of the essays assembled in this anthology.15 Govan Mbeki on the hand imparted to Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, the principle

XVI

Foreword

that a political essay must be informed by historical imagination.16 Rather than writing political essays per se, Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane incorporated this brand of Marxism and this form of the historical imagination in his scholarly essays. Govan Mbeki and Albert T. Nzula were not the originators of the African political essay in South Africa. This genre was arguably found¬ ed by Richard Msimang’s pamphlet Natives Land Act 1913: Specific Cases of Evictions and Hardships and Solomon T. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa— a generic form necessary as an immediate response to a particular historical conjuncture. What Albert T. Nzula and Govan Mbeki seem to have done is to have infused it with a materialist phi¬ losophy. The synthetic strength of this ‘Marxist political essay’ is evi¬ dent in this passage by Govan Mbeki: “The Bantu Authorities Act is a demonstration of the contempt of the Nationalist Party for the mass¬ es of common men, and for the African people. With blind faith in the magical powers of a handful of chiefs and their hangers-on, they hope to turn back the wheel of history and to see the African people revert to a state of tribal innocence, at war among themselves and an easy prey to exploitation and oppression. But Verwoed and his men are due for a rude awakening from their dream. They know not with whom they are dealing: the children of mine and factory, with over a centu¬ ry of bitter lessons of the need for African unity, with minds open to the invigorating experiences of working people at home and abroad, who have hearkened to the inspiring call of the African National Congress.”17 One can only imagine the effect of such a passage on an undergraduate student like Magubane at the University of Natal in the mid-1950s, who was later to write some of the penetrative post-colo¬ nial African scholarly essays. The uncompromising combativeness of the many essays could best be characterized as what the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser postulated as “class struggle in theory.” Profoundly influ¬ enced by Georg Lukacs, many of the essays are principally concerned with methodologies, conceptual frameworks or structures and histor¬ ical verification. They undertake an ideological critique of all that is perceived as a misrepresentation of Africa in Western epistemological thought. The most devastating critique is launched against British and South African social anthropology, whose ideological perspective are governed by Functionalism, Pluralism and Empiricism: all three are enamored to description thereby dispensing with explanatory and anaXVII

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

lytical systems. Arguably, the effectiveness of this critique is one of the most devastating ever launched in post-colonial Africa. One measure of the success of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane’s essays written over a quarter of a century is that Functionalism, Pluralism and Empiricism have all collapsed as orientalist representation of Africa. This episte¬ mological and ideological critique of orientalism in Africa by a South African in exile has helped to establish the historical conditions of pos¬ sibility that enabled such books as V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike’s Black African Cinema and Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness to emerge in the 1980s and in the 1990s: brilliant episte¬ mological constructions by Africans representing themselves. A ‘definitive’ appraisal of the achievement of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane may still be too early, but it is possible that he may turn out to have been the most vital intellectual force within the African National Congress during the Exile Period, as much as FEI.E. Dhlomo has begun to emerge as having been the most vitalizing intellectual force within the upper echelons of the ANC in the 1950s before the catastrophy of I960.18

xvm

Crisis in African Sociology

History is neither mere action, nor vertiginous freedom, nor frivolous creativity, but it is the persistent attempt to do the best we can with the knowledge of the moment. If we are told that ‘truth lies in the poor,’ it simply means that the falsity of society lies in its oppression, which however much it is masked by idealism and argumentation is revealed in the poorest of the poor. —Wilfred Disan in Marxism ofJean-Paul Sartre No subtlety of perception is required to determine that contemporary African Sociology is in crisis. Each year brings forth a crop of books and articles on various aspects of African social life. They are mere pro¬ duce, not as food for thought — dry as dust. The African whether a student or teacher, if he wants to know what happened during the colo¬ nial era, finds himself trapped behind a lot of trivia and apologetics. The Sociological books on Africa somehow fail to account for what journalists and novelists know — that behind the facades built by colo¬ nialism are nothing but empty forms which instead of serving the forces of life and furthering their growth, stifle and destroy them. For instance Kwame Nkrumah speaks of the grim emptiness that faced him and his government on assumption of independence, the gaps and deficien¬ cies. “Behind it all,” he writes, “was the refusal to use our wealth for our development, not only were our natural resources extracted but the benefits of their exploitation came, not to us but to the metroresources politan country.”1 The reasons for this crisis or what I may call triviality in African social science derive from many sources: there were strong pressures for example from established interests that prevented any serious dis-

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

cussion of the nature of imperialism and colonialism. What became of social anthropology, particularly that attempted to treat the effects of colonial rule, was merely the putting of the current practice into learned jargon. It generalized the notions entertained by plain man, introduced a minimum of logical order into them, and then fed them back to their originator as the latest word in sociological wisdom about Africa.2 In their deference to the activities of colonialists the African social scien¬ tists betrayed their African subjects. The indifferent material world was always constructed in favour of the activities of the colonialists. In an article submitted before the second International Congress of Africanists held in Dakar, Senegal, Professor Frankenberg has touched on the historical prejudice of social anthropologists. He has written3 Africa rightly has a suspicion of things imperial and imperial¬ ist. Tied in with the colonial structure in many parts of Africa was the government anthropologist. Anthropology has asso¬ ciations with the primitive. Anthropologists have called their books “Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe,” “Seven Tribes in British Central Africa,” “The Material Life of the Simple Peoples,” and “Primitive Government.” [His emphasis]. It is not surprising that anthropology and its practitioners have fall¬ en into at least disrepute, at worst hatred in the Third World. The colonial system as a productive system of exploitation had to have scribes and an ideological superstructure built to maintain and justify it. Much of what was written about Africa and the African was such that those who were subjected to colonial rule were left unsettled in their ignorance — hence the equal number of Ph.D.’s and P.I.’s (Prohibited Immigrants) that students of Africa received. J.D. Bernal has rightly observed that “knowledge of society is never a passive dogma; it is always active either in preserving or in destroying a social system.”4 The fact that any book on social change in Africa is a favourable balance sheet of the benefits of colonialism is no accident. It was then part and parcel of the process of conditioning for those Africans who had received formal education. In an interesting paper Kathleen Gough points out that, “applied anthropology came into being as a kind of social work and community development effort for non-White peoples whose future was seen in terms of gradual educa¬ tion; and amelioration of conditions many of which had actually been imposed by their western conquerors in the first place.”5 She also says

2

Crisis in African Sociolocy

that anthropologists, either because of the ideas of the time or because they could do nothing to dismantle the imperialist system, tended to accept its framework. I would go further and say that the aim of most social anthropological work was to find out how alien rule could be imposed on African society with a minimum of friction. Social anthro¬ pologists seemed never to have doubted the permanence of colonial¬ ism. The acceptance of the permanency of colonial rule meant looking at the African and his reaction in a distorted and one-sided manner — hence the limited value of much that was written when the African was a colonial subject. Recently there seems to have been a great deal of heart-searching among certain cultural anthropologists about the possibility of anthro¬ pology as a discipline ‘dying’ with the ‘extinction’ of what are known as ‘primitive’ peoples. In an article, Leo A. Desperes writes: “Judging from discussion in the literature and professional meetings and con¬ ferences, a problem has developed in anthropology, and it seems to be taking on the characteristics of a major crisis. The problem involves the impending extinction of the so-called primitive societies in which anthropologists have done most of their work and the growing real¬ ization that anthropology’s future as a scientific discipline depends upon the ability of anthropologists to define and undertake meaning¬ ful research in the so-called complex societies.”6 This is indeed a serious problem, serious because a failure to account for change was built into the subject as a theoretical discipline. After the First World War social anthropologists (to apply E.H. Carr’s stricture against some historians to sociologists) walked the continent of Africa, among the so-called primitive tribes without a scrap of phi¬ losophy to cover them, naked and unashamed in the anthropological Garden of Eden. They looked for the exotic and erotic — so that we discover in some of their works the typical stereotypes of African soci¬ ety, primitive, stagnant, unchanging, a race whose only possible use to science or human advancement was to serve as raw material for anthro¬ pological studies. When they began to study social change they expe¬ rienced a fall from their state of grace. They failed to explain social changes that were taking place in African society as a result of the impo¬ sition of colonial rule, except in mechanistic and ethnocentric terms. They saw in what they called westernized Africans, tribesmen who were becoming like themselves, i.e. Europeanized. This was because they confused the appearance for reality, and also because explicitly or

3

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

implicitly they accepted ideologies of White supremacy and its “civi¬ lizing mission.” However, much more than the failure of social anthropology to account for social change, I think the greatest indictment against many a social anthropologist lies in the types of research they did. The powers-that-be held the purse strings and accordingly many an African social anthropologist declared a moratorium on exposing the true nature of colonial rule. The social anthropologist learnt to accommo¬ date truth to safety, to produce, that is to say, monographs which were enough like reality to be credible but not enough like it to be unsafe. By this means, he was able (or thought himself able) to serve both truth and self-protection at the same time.7 Sometimes the social anthropologists, afraid to touch the explosive materials, escaped into the study of relatively innocuous issues. If one read through such stud¬ ies as the Kalela Dance, by Clyde Mitchell, Social Change in Modern Africa, edited by Aidan Southall, Social Problems of Change and Conflict, edited by Pierre van den Berghe,8 P.C. Lloyd, Africa in Social Change, or any monograph on migrant labour the truth of what I am saying is obvious. These studies (the list is not exhaustive) either ignore the colonial situation, or, if they take it into account, they regard it as a natural landscape which enables them to condone its effects on the grounds not only of its immediate effects on the world economy, but also on its long term consequences for what are called the backward peoples. After all, it is said that modern nation states in Africa are the creation of Belgian, British and French rule. Modern education, towns and other ‘civilizing’ agencies are said to be part and parcel of this rule. This argument has enabled some social anthropologists to ignore alto¬ gether or to minimize the suffering, exploitation and complete degra¬ dation that was and still is the lot of the Africans. In a review article, “African Intros,” Thomas Hodgkin points out how this rationalization of the past doings of colonialists is done by certain historians: It is interesting too, as he writes, “from the stand point of time to think of the colonial period as an interesting interruption .... in the evaluation of independent African states. But what is crucial is the way in which this episode is presented. On this point the authors have no doubts. The colonial phase of African history was not merely ‘inevitable’ (the word itself is frequently

4

Crisis in African Sociology

used) but on balance, ‘progressive’ and therefore desirable. How is this idea worked out? Much stress is laid on the benef¬ icent activities of missions... ‘the first really unselfish Christian activity in Africa.’ The African young for whom, presumably ... this book is mainly intended are encouraged to approve of the fact that imperialist powers made war on their ancestors and (not until the 1914-1918 war) on one another.9 The social anthropologists who are concerned with drawing the bal¬ ance sheets of the benefits of colonial rule, like their counterparts in history, refuse to accept the ugly truth that colonialism and imperial¬ ism never were philanthropic, nor were they ever the necessary agents for social progress. The writers of African social and historical sciences, because of the guilt they feel about the doings of the Whites in Africa, feel that they must whitewash the past and in so doing they are pre¬ vented from experiencing the true meaning of colonial rule for those who are its products. In their assessment of the colonial past they fail to bring out the past in its various ugly manifestations as the pre-his¬ tory of the present ugly scene. Thus what we get as African social sci¬ ences are rationalizations of European rule. History and the social sciences are written with a view to winning the minds and hearts of young African students. Let me illustrate what I mean. In a personal memoir to Paul Baran, author of The Political Economy of Growth, Paul M. Sweezy quotes a report to Blackwell’s publishers from a reader who had been asked to advise on cutting the length of the manuscript. The reader made this unsolicited observation: You have not asked my opinion on the book. May I give it none-the-less? The author is a communist. No doubt the administration of underdeveloped countries by Britain and other colonial powers has been, and is by no means perfect. But according to the author everything the Western World did in the underdeveloped countries has been for their own advan¬ tage, and the underdeveloped countries have always been exploited. He puts the worst interpretation on all Western motives. However, it is the reader’s final sentence which is revealing and of inter¬ est to me. “I think,” the report concludes, “that if the book was read by say an African student with little knowledge of history he might be

5

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

seriously misled.”10 What this reader points to is the obvious truth that certain intel¬ lectuals who have worked and written about Africa are unable to grasp and render intelligible the historical reality of colonialism. The tragedy of three hundred years of devastation of the African continent was therefore not the centre of their accounts. Worse still, even those who realized this devastation still look at the African through the blurred light of caricature and vulgarization. I say this, not because I am unaware of the great changes the fields of African social and historical sciences have undergone in the last ten years. I say this because even if it is no longer fashionable to purvey the notion of intrinsic difference between the ‘anthropological’ and ‘sociological’ societies, implied in the ‘end of anthropology’ contro¬ versy, the mood behind most recent studies, the manner of conceptu¬ alization and even the style of discourse, still partakes implicitly of the past heritage of social anthropology and other social sciences. The achievement of political independence has resulted in a few conces¬ sions here and there, sometimes accompanied by admissions of earli¬ er mistakes. In the rest of this paper I am going to discuss two papers. One is by Daryll Forde and sums up the work of the African International Institute: “Anthropology and the Development of African Studies;”11 and the other is by Max Gluckman; “Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution,”12 summing up the twenty years of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute.13 These papers touch on issues which in my mind exemplify the poverty and trivia I associate with African social studies. The authors are men of great intellectual stature in the field of African studies and therefore examining their papers, which sum up their work and those of their students and col¬ leagues is more than a worthwhile exercise. I want to make clear, how¬ ever, that I am not trying to judge the value of Daryll Forde and Gluckman’s ethnographic works. I am using these articles because they sum up social anthropologists’ attempt to study social change and exemplify certain trends in that particular area of social analysis. In his paper Daryll Forde writes that earlier anthropologists “assumed that for the study of traditional institutions the more obvi¬ ous and supposedly superficial effects of colonial rule and modern com¬ merce or missions could be ‘bracketed away’ and discounted from the contemporary scene as being both generally remote from the daily con6

Crisis in African Sociology

cerns of the people with little apparent influence on social structure and values.” Having recognized this shortcoming of earlier social anthropologists, Daryll Forde himself does not do better when he takes into account the colonial situation. He fragments colonial influences in terms of influences of administrations, missions and managers of trading firms with particular policies and sanctions that they introduced to change African values. This approach of course is unsatisfactory. Colonialism was more than the influence of isolated factors. It was a complete hegemonic system which, when stripped of all rationaliza¬ tions of humanitarian propaganda contained in a lot of what goes for sociological analysis (which informs a lot of what Daryll Forde says in this paper), was simply uncalled-for domination of one group over another. For it meant one thing to the oppressor, the colonist, and another to the oppressed, the colonized.14 For the rulers, it meant profit and imposing of their value system on the oppressed. For the colonized it meant the loss of their value system, degradation, dehu¬ manization and torture. In the name of what Daryll Forde calls the task of‘educational and social advancement’ alienation dominated the scene in the colonized world. The assessment of the contribution of social anthropology to African studies by Daryll Forde seems a little too eager to re-write the past in order to secure what can only be recognized as the ideological purpose of the present.15 Whilst Daryll Forde says that the International African Institute was concerned with the disintegration of African societies, he in fact mentions no studies done in the most important areas of the nature of colonialism, cultural dislocation, alien¬ ation and colonial exploitation. The result was that the small-scale stud¬ ies in which social anthropologists of the African Institute engaged tended to create piecemeal technical thinkers, who, accepting the framework of colonial society, became adept at seeing small advantages here and corresponding defects there: but were unable to see in a dialectical way how specific defects were in fact rooted in the large structural pattern of colonialism. Praising the effects of colonial rule Daryll Forde writes, “Yes the positive achievement in the transforma¬ tion had been considerable. By the standards of mid-nineteenth cen¬ tury turmoils in tribal Africa the degree of order and progress was remarkable. There was new freedom of movement. New remedies for ancient and thereto fatalistically accepted ills were becoming available. There were new opportunities for wider experience, greater material

7

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

rewards for the bold and many small but significant and stimulating increments of comforts and new aspirations to be had by the many. In a few coastal centres in West and East Africa, participation in overseas trade and Western education had already been long established, and despite such black sports as forced labour for plantations the twentieth century had brought far greater security, considerable material advance, and new promise to a multitude of tribal people.” (My emphasis.) The paper by Max Gluckman attempts “to summarise some results which have emerged from the work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute staff of anthropologists through the last twenty years. This work covered both urban and tribal situations.” Gluckman then explains that “perhaps out of the traditions of anthropology we have been interested largely in the problem of why tribalism persists both in tribal areas and in towns, in spite of the industrial revolution which has produced such great social changes.” Gluckman then goes on to show how ‘urban tribalism’ works as opposed to ‘rural tribalism’. He writes, “Our main argument is that in rural areas membership of a tribe involves participation in a working political system and sharing of domestic life with kinsfolk, and that this continued participation is based on present economic and social demands, and not merely on conservatism. On the other hand, tribalism in towns is a differ¬ ent phenomenon entirely. It is primarily here a means of classifying the multitudes of Africans of heterogenous origin who live together in towns.” This approach poses several important issues. Who classifies the Africans and why do they want to classify them in this way. If it is the anthropologist who classifies he must tell us why he chooses to use this criterion. C. Wright Mills has pointed out that, “In order to judge the problems and methods of various schools of social science, we must make up our minds about a great many political values as well as intel¬ lectual issues, for we cannot very well state any problem until we know whose problem it is.”16 Because tribalism formed the cornerstone of ‘indirect rule,’ the method chosen by Gluckman and his associate proves to me that it was the goal of social research to serve the admin¬ istration rather than explore problems of social science. It will be obvi¬ ous when we go on with our critique of this paper that Gluckman and his associates by their method ‘accepted’ the framework of colonial society, and therefore the fundamental shortcoming of this method was that it conveniently left out of account the special character of the

8

Crisis in African Sociology

colonial situation and its effect on traditional social structure. But any¬ one who accepts the full intellectual task of social science cannot mere¬ ly assume the structure of any society. “In fact it is his job to make that structure explicit and to study it as whole. To take on this job is his judgement.”17 Seemingly to avoid analysis of social structure is to avoid its implication for social behaviour. The approach which searched for urban tribalism outside the colo¬ nial situation failed to explain in a meaningful way some of the issues that it raised. Several questions are germane to the reasons why trib¬ alism should survive the industrial changes as a factor in urban areas. True one is a member of some group i.e. one is a conformist, so to say. But the essential question is to ascertain the socio-historical character of that conformism.18 Can one really speak of rural tribalism as a ‘work¬ ing political system’ in the face of the disintegrating effects of colo¬ nialism on traditional African societies? It is my belief that practice is of great essence in judging the issues that are of intellectual interest. Human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice. Therefore when I criticize this method of approach it will be in the light of colo¬ nial practice. The truth of any knowledge is determined not by sub¬ jective feelings, but by objective result in social practice. Before I go further let me look at the reasons which Professor Gluckman and his associates gave for this conformism by Africans. In order to earn the money we all know them to require}9 Africans in Northern Rhodesia must go out to work, for longer or shorter periods, in mines and other labour centres. But they consider they have little security in their life in towns. It is dif¬ ficult for them to rear their children as they would like there: ‘till recently they could not own houses, and few now can do so... In this situation, they look for security to their tribal homes; ever-present needs in the modern total field where they make their living, as well as sentiment, tie them to the rural areas. These tribesmen are therefore earning their living in two widely separated areas, and ultimately they feel that their main security lies in tribal land — and objectively this seems to be true. (p. 77). There are too many controversial issues which this passage raises and some of which in fact have been misinterpreted and are contrary to the true facts of the Central African situation. If the study of appearance

9

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

often beclouds reality, in this passage the obfuscation becomes pitchblack. In the first place the need for money the African is supposed to have was imposed by White colonial society to compel him (the African) to leave his subsistence economic life. Why they need the money is a matter that ought to be pointed out together with the mech¬ anisms that were used to induce Africans to seek this money. Merely to describe these needs without giving them their historical and struc¬ tural context, which are features long and accurately recognized as fun¬ damental to understanding of human behavior, amounts to what Mills calls ‘savage neutralism’. The movement of Africans from what was called their tribal areas (as if the other areas where the mines were opened were not theirs) to the mining towns of Central Africa was unique in many respects. The compulsions used to force Africans to go to the mines were something new and could not be taken for granted. Any social anthropologist must be aware of this. Secondly, the opening of the mines created a process of artificial urbanization which was characterized by industri¬ alization based on capital, equipment and technicians from abroad.20 Such an urbanization was not based on internal factors which had char¬ acterized industrialization in Western Europe. The crucial question is: what effect does this imposition of a new extractive industry have on the indigenous population? It must be remembered also that this exter¬ nally imposed extractive industrialization and concomitant urbaniza¬ tion did not have either as an aim or result the all round economic development of those countries. The cycle thus set in motion did not have all the cumulative local effects which could have been observed in Europe in connection with the same phenomena. On the contrary the administrative actions of the colonial administration and White set¬ tlers in Central Africa (who had grown rich on the export of raw mate¬ rials) strove to hamper the progress of indigenous urbanization, except when it was good for production. Pierre van den Berghe has written that: “In classical pattern of European urbanization and industrializa¬ tion, the transition has been predominantly diachronic and unidirec¬ tional. Peasants have gradually moved to the cities, adapted to the urban environment, and settled there permanently. In Africa, on the other hand, there has typically been a long range tendency towards increasing urbanization, but simultaneously, there took place a con¬ stant two-way, cyclical immigration of workers to and from urban cen¬ tres. Not only have African societies undergone a steady transformation over time, but large numbers of people are ‘commuting’ at any given 10

Crisis in African Sociology

time between two widely different types of social environment. Through the large-scale use of migrant labour by much of White indus¬ try, the social change brought about by economic forces has been much more traumatic and disruptive of traditional peasant society than would have been the case with gradual one-way migration. First the African migrant worker is separated from his family for long periods; and, sec¬ ond, cyclical two-way immigration necessarily involves a much greater proportion of the population in a shorter time space.”21 Quite obviously the subject-matter which social anthropologists dealt with had greater political and ideological content, so that it was not just enough to comprehend the situation at one point in time or to describe a part of it however minutely. Its cumulative and dynamic over-all effects should be brought out in order to illuminate the facts. History, in other words, is all of a piece and it rests upon the process of formation and transformation of society subject to political manip¬ ulation. To recognize in the movement of Africans from rural areas to the new towns no longer the fugitive phenomenon of a meteoric dis¬ turbance but a new social fact, there was need of a substantive theory to explain the new situation and such a theory should not be a simple comment on the status quo. To say that an African townsman, or an African miner is a miner like miners everywhere, was no explanation of a historic movement, which was a transition from one form of social anatomy to another, in spite of the view that Africans must be spared the dangers of industrialization and town life which were supposed to ‘spoil’ them. Political interests made it impossible for the African migrant worker to find conditions allowing him to become a real town dweller, housing for instance in the Copperbelt was tied to the job and those Africans who were not employed in the mines had no right to be in the area. What were the cumulative effects of this? The failure of the liberal social scientists to point out the impera¬ tives of the colonial system was their single greatest weakness. While they were capable of great penetration beneath the appearance in the study of traditional social structures, when it came to the analysis of the effects of colonial rule and social change, the social anthropolo¬ gists were always content to remain on the surface. Gluckman does not concern himself about the original of the needs for money. The charge which Marx levelled against Ricardo and bourgeois economists could well be applied against African social anthropologists that “these economists instinctively saw, and rightly so, that it is very dangerous

11

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus value”22 but this time the origin of certain features of colonial rule would have spelled danger to those exposed to them. The shallowness of Professor Gluckman’s analysis of what he calls Africans’ awareness of the insecurity of urban life arises from the fact that because of his method (to be dealt with below) he leaves out of account the colonial situation which created insecurity no matter where the African was. The trajectory of British colonialism in Central Africa was of the industrial-extractive type. The important question is, what type of labour does one need for such extractive industries? The inse¬ curity Gluckman talks about was fundamental to the migrant labour. To get labourers to migrate from their homes, administrative coercive measures were used initially but later the socio-economic factors began to act on their own. The U.N. Report for 1965 declares, “Where migrant labour has been drawn from the indigenous agricultural economies in high proportions, this has often had a deleterious effect on crop output and on farming practices, giving rise to a vicious cir¬ cle in which the outflow of labour reduces productivity, and falling productivity increases still further the pressure on workers to seek wage employment.” More often than not the migrants lost their stakes in the old subsistence economy even as they failed to catch the mirage of wage employment.23 Because of the demands of the colonial econo¬ my, to quote Marx once again, “This loss of the old world with no gain in the new one imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the pre¬ sent misery of the people.” The use of third person “they” by Gluckman shifts the blame for this melancholy from the workings of the colonial economy to the Africans, which is a less than ingenious way of absolving colonial rule. If one looks only at African reactions one gets a one-sided understanding of historical society and this of course distorts the situation. Northern Rhodesia during colonial times presented what Roger Murray, writing about the Congo, describes as “an eloquent example of the fundamental disjunction characteristic of colonial economics. The ‘advanced’ sector (camps and towns) was abstracted from its envi¬ ronment, and more organically and closely related to the metropoli¬ tan country than its own rural hinterland. No steady expansion of the internal market was possible. The position of the urban work force itself was unsteady, reflecting the oscillations of company policy and the world economic conjuncture.”24 This disjunction explains the rural 12

Crisis in African Sociology

exhaustion that is so characteristic of rural Zambia today. It is the soci¬ ological consequences of this colonial system that we look for in vain in what goes tor analysis of social change in modern African studies. Given this disjunction, the rural areas offered an illusory security. In considering the African urban population social relationships, we must remember that one of the pre-requisites of wage labour and one ot the historic conditions for capitalist development was the break-up of the primitive community, and in Central Africa too it was broken. So profound was the crisis in many African territories that the British imperial authorities, aware that they were standing on the abyss of a complete agrarian breakdown throughout East, Central and Southern Africa sought at a late hour to shore up the crumbling structures. There is no better evidence of this agrarian breakdown than that of the Pimm Report for Northern Rhodesia, the Keiskamahoek survey and the Tomlinson Commission in South Africa, and the East African Royal Commission on Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. Given the dismal pic¬ ture contained in these documents it is both deceptive and meaning¬ less to speak of “objective security” in rural areas or even of tribalism as an enduring phenomenon. The African society, having lost forever its traditional cohesion, could now be held together only by the inge¬ nious authors of this disintegration and the search for urban tribalism was probably to be the theoretical basis for this ‘reconstruction.’ Because of their search for tribalism, Gluckman and his associates have been off on a false track in their analysis of African behaviour in Central Africa’s urban areas. In analyzing the changes from mechanical to organic solidarity society Durkheim has pointed out that: The two societies really make up only the same reality, but none the less they must be distinguished... The first can be strong only if the ideas and tendencies common to all members of the society are greater in number and in intensity than those which pertain personally to each member. It is much stronger as the excess is more considerable.25 What Durkheim is saying in this passage is that in a ‘normal’ situation, where traditional relationships are not maintained for political ends, we would expect that ethnic or tribal ties or loyalties of the individu¬ al would give rise to secondary or voluntary associations, which would become more numerous and separate from each other. The tribal aspect of group life would decline in importance. But of course all the sec-

13

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ondary relationships cannot exist without an underpinning of prima¬ ry ones. That is, in this situation elements of the primary and secondary relationships are blended together in a dialectical synthesis. The use of the notion of tribalism to describe ‘urban African social relationships’ is inappropriate and confusing. The term tribalism has shortcomings which are historical and ideological. The term has associations with the ‘primitive’; when the term is used to describe the urban cultural patterns there is slurring of the importance of the changes that take place. And further there is need for a precise distinction between the ‘tribal’ and the ‘urban’ which arises from the fact that a specific form of social relation is not always correlated with the same social behaviour. In every concrete colonial situation there were two distinct sets of problems: the controlling attitudes and behaviour of the Whites towards the colonized and the reactions, attitudes and behaviour of the colonized towards the Whites colonial society. Since the dominant pattern of life in urban areas of Central Africa had been imposed by the Whites in their own selfish interests this must be spelled out. The views of the African in urban areas about where their security lay would not mean much unless checked against those of the Whites. Being denied permanency26 of residence in the areas where he worked and lived whilst employed, the African developed bizarre attitudes to urban residence. The co-existence of two world views, often contradictory, should not just be described but should be explained. The contradic¬ tions manifest in a people working and earning their living in one place and finding ‘security’ elsewhere was an expression of a deeper contra¬ diction in their lives which lay at an historical and sociological level, which the narrow a-historical approaches of Gluckman and his associ¬ ates and Daryll Forde and his institute could not explain. The purpose of a study of social change should be to discover and analyze and illustrate the inner laws of social change and development. What we want to know from a sociologist — as distinct from the anti¬ quarian — is how changes in the ‘means of earning a livelihood’ affects the mechanically solitary communities and the nature of organic soli¬ darity that develops. I agree with Vilakazi — “that it is difficult, for example, to come away from reading a monograph on Africa by a British anthropologist of a decade ago without a strong suspicion that the writer was consciously or unconsciously influenced in his analysis by the British colonial policy of‘indirect rule’, which made him lay too much stress on the persistence of traditional beliefs and customs even

14

Crisis in African Sociology

in cities, and thus gave support to the administrative scheme of ‘tra¬ ditional authorities’ in urban areas. ‘Urban tribalism’ became an easy descriptive label for African life in cities according to this type of anthro¬ pology.”27 The contributions of Gluckman and his associates and Daryll Forde and his International Institute to the understanding of problems of colonial influence and change in Africa, however substantial in volume, are essentially incidental. If space were available, it would be worth¬ while to examine in some detail the treatment of a number of impor¬ tant sociological topics dealt with by Gluckman and his associates to demonstrate how the failure to take into account the colonial situa¬ tion and its mechanisms gave rise to false problems, like the persistence of tribalism in towns, and led to erroneous conclusions.28 The bare mention of a few examples should suffice. Take for instance the treat¬ ment of Tribal Elders.29 Whilst Epstein rightly observes that new asso¬ ciations were developed by Africans, and whilst he points out that attempts by mining authorities to work with authorities based on trib¬ al affiliations were rejected by Africans, in assessing the historical rea¬ sons for the imposition of Tribal Elders he gives a one-sided explanation. He feels that Tribal Elders worked well when they were introduced. But he makes no effort to examine the Tribal Elders sys¬ tem in the light of African interests: Faced with thousands of Africans of different tribes, he writes, “the mine officials, reasonably enough thought that it would be wise to deal with them through representatives of their tribes as groups. Therefore the Compound Manager instituted a sys¬ tem of Tribal Elders, who were elected, and given special robes and special houses. He planned that the mine management could communicate with its African labourers through the Elders, while the Elders in town would inform the manage¬ ment of the wishes and complaints of their tribesmen... The people themselves welcomed this institution... Most of the Elders chosen by the Africans themselves were fairly closely related to the royal families of the tribes concerned. The authority system of the tribes was projected into the urban, industrial sphere.30 This interpretation of the Tribal Elders is an excellent statement of practical sociology. The men who owned the mines in Central Africa

15

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and practised company rule in the Copperbelt were concerned with how best to exploit African labour. The working of African societies interested them only in so far as they furthered this aim. The very fact that they recruited single males and left their families to disintegrate in the rural areas should suggest this. Gluckman, through Epstein, on the other hand, tends to over-emphasize in this passage the ideas with which naked power used to rule Africans in the mines was rational¬ ized. Problems of power or lack of it are therefore seldom considered. What the mine management was doing, in my view, was to follow the sociological ‘bracketing away’ of urban life, which the social anthro¬ pologist Daryll Forde had said was possible. The acceptance and rejec¬ tion of Tribal Elders proves the Marxist contention that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of truth of his knowledge of the exter¬ nal world. The bogus nature of the Tribal Elders was discovered in the process of social practice. When the Tribal Elders proved to be the tools for the miners’ administration, the African drew his lesson and corrected his practice, and forced the mine management to recognize his trade unions, which organization corresponded to the new situa¬ tion in which he worked. The sociological explanation of why the Tribal Elders system worked well until 1935 must be matched against the attitude of the White society towards the institution of tribalism everywhere. To illustrate this we are going to look at a statement made by a group of European businessmen before a Committee appointed to inquire into the high cost of building in the territory of Northern Rhodesia in 1951. Among other things they said (about Africans in urban areas): He [the African] is born into a position within that group which he takes for granted. It never occurs to him that he may attain a higher position, which means that he has a very restrict¬ ed range of wants. For these monetary wants, probably not much more than tax and bride price, he comes to urban areas. There he does not look for a very great deal and the more eas¬ ily and quickly he can satisfy these wants, the better. Big money does not interest him, as it leaves him with two alternatives upon his return to the community: either he will be exploited by his relatives or he can set himself upon a higher standard of living which will make him unpopular and cause him to lose his social position in the community. The rural migrant work16

Crisis in African Sociology

er who intends to go back is therefore not only much less responsive to normal incentive than the detribalized man, but is also mainly responsible for the large turnover so evident in African labour.31 Gluckman and his associates and White businessmen seem to share similar beliefs that tribalism and tribal consciousness were such an intrinsic feature of the African world view, that even changed circum¬ stances would not alter tribal alliances. For instance Gluckman, citing Epstein, saw a paradox that Tribal Elders during the 1935 strike came to be associated by African miners with the mine management, even though their background was asso¬ ciated with traditional authority. Because of the one-sided analysis of what was going on in the Copperbelt Gluckman and his associates saw only paradoxes, but in actual fact the behaviour of the miners is per¬ fectly explicable. The migrant labour system and the transplantation of the tribal authorities to the urban situation were meant to prevent mutual assimilation, the formation of a common outlook and the growth of class solidarity among the diverse groups that were recruit¬ ed for the mines. When Epstein says that the Tribal Elders worked well initially he does not tell us for whom. Does he mean that the frag¬ mentation of the workers prevented them from gaining cohesion and finding a socio-political identity? This brings me to the second question, important sociologically — that is, the corruption of the role of tribalism and tribal groups among Africans. There is a general miscalculation among Africanists concerning tribal loyalties. It is assumed that tribal loyalties are such a vital force that they would incapacitate any efforts at unity. Therefore when the mine management imposed tribal authorities to look after the affairs of the mines, it thought that it would enable it (the mine management) to fan all the workers’ mutual dislikes and antagonisms. This would deny the miners the right to raise demands and to defend themselves through trade unions. Such a picture is typical of socio-psychological interpretations of society. What is considered real, deter¬ mining and important is that which lies on the surface of social life: direct interaction relationships requiring physical identity. Therefore real social relations, those outside the ‘tribe’, remain outside the vision of the ‘tribalistic’ approach except with the help of hindsight. Yet it was precisely these real relations, into which the individual as a mem¬ ber of a particular class enters with members of another class, that were 17

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

important ones, as the rejection of the Tribal Elders confirms. The constantly affirmed concern of ‘respecting the culture of the native populations’ according to our view therefore did not signify tak¬ ing into consideration the values borne by the culture, and incarnat¬ ed by men. Rather, this behaviour betrayed a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden traditional divisions.3^ Tribalism as the statement of European businessmen quoted above, was used to justify differential treatment of African workers from white workers. This aspect of the role of tribalism was not considered by Gluckman and his associates. All that they sought for in urban tribalism, was the structuring of new groups in towns. The differential treatment of African workers in towns because of the belief that they earn their liv¬ ing in two placed confirms Fanon’s perceptive observations that: The setting up of the colonial system does not of itself bring about the death of the native culture. Historic observation reveals, on the contrary, that the aim sought is rather a contin¬ ued agony than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture. This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against its members. It defines them without appeal. The cultural mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking.33 The study of the Tribal Elders as an institution set up by colonial author¬ ities ought not to have been confined to the superficial level of the expressed ‘respect’ for the African institutions by the mine owners. It ought to have been studied and explained in the light of colonial prac¬ tice everywhere. Among the various methods of keeping the colonized weak and tractable, none was more crucial than building barriers between the ethnic groups in order to prevent development in practice of inter¬ tribal solidarity based on class (or nationalistic) lines.34 If this aspect of colonial rule was considered, the other meaning of the Tribal Elders sys¬ tem would have been at least pointed out. The colonial administration and the mine owners in Central Africa set up a machinery of rule to enable them ‘to squeeze from the people their utmost might, the last dregs of their labour’ without wanting to bear the responsibility for their welfare in old age or in times of crisis. At the time these studies were conducted colonial rule had broken down the entire framework of African society without any symptoms of reconstruction yet appearing.

18

Crisis in African Sociology

Now let us look at the significance which Gluckman and his asso¬ ciates have attached to the 1935 strike which discredited the Tribal Elders. “The significance for us of this strike,” he writes, “is that it brought into the open the emergence within the African urban popu¬ lation of affiliations based on what we call ‘class principles’. The African Union after its victory has been split by a division of interests between component categories with independent interests. This division on ‘class’ lines has what Epstein calls a ‘pervasive’ effect spreading into many institutions.”35 What is the nature of the classes that were forming? And what were their attributes? To illustrate the formation of classes Gluckman uses a study of The Kalela Dance by Clyde Mitchell.36 In this study we are told, Mitchell was struck by the fact that despite the fact that the Kalela was a tribal dance, manifesting surface tribal competitiveness, the dancers had named their hierarchy of officials after British or civil duty. “Moreover, the dancers did not wear tribal dress: instead they were dressed in smart and clean European clothes, and they had to maintain their tidiness and smartness throughout the dancing. This was insist¬ ed on, although the dancers themselves were mostly unskilled and poorly educated labourers. He interprets the dance as reflecting the aspirations of all Africans for a European way of life, or civilization, and he shows from the data how the values implicit here form a pres¬ tige scale for all Africans.” (p.74) The criteria was, according to Gluckman, “the distinctive ‘modern’ dress of the Kalela dancers”, which “may thus be assigned to the importance of the ‘European way of life’, and the part it plays in the stratification of the African popula¬ tion of the Copperbelt.”37 The substitution of appearance for reality was never better exem¬ plified than in the conclusions quoted above. The problem of differ¬ entiating between what appears to be true and what really is has always been central to every scientific discipline. Failure to study both appear¬ ance and reality leads to one-sidedness and hence to error. To draw conclusions from “appearance in this sense, takes on the quality of illu¬ sion not simply because it is a superficial view of phenomena, but because it is a superficial explanation. Understood in this way appear¬ ance is an ideological construct whose foundation is faulty and there¬ fore emerges as false representation.”38 What Mitchell says about clothes and African aspiration proves that what is perceived cannot at once be comprehended, and that only what is comprehended can more deeply be perceived. The construction put 19

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

on the meaning of clothes and cleanliness cannot just be interpreted in this one-way and ethnocentric manner. The Africans working in the Copperbelt could not produce their traditional dress and had all their wants provided for by the European factory. The interpretation put on the wearing of ‘European clothes’ falsified the notion of ‘class forma¬ tion’ in the Copperbelt. It shows how easy it is to be taken in by out¬ ward appearance and to miss the hidden inner meanings of life, i.e. the struggle to be decent and human. The use of the notion of ‘social class’ and social stratification is confused. Countries of Central Africa, as a result of the extractive indus¬ tries, had experienced a complex division of labour with the conse¬ quent role differentiation among Africans who were employed in the mines and other occupations associated with the mines. A useful way to order such role differentiation would be through the use of the notion of social stratification, because this notion is descriptive and implies sets of positions in a hierarchial arrangement. To interchange the notion of social class even in parenthesis and that of social stratifi¬ cation obscures reality. Social class is an analytical concept implying a primary reality of division in society based on the relationship of indi¬ viduals to the primary means of production. Class division implies polit¬ ical action, i.e. organized attempts to transform the whole of society in this case, the elimination of colonial rule and establishment of African majority rule. The impact of colonial rule produced in any colonial society, includ¬ ing Northern Rhodesia, a crisis within that society compelling the inner forces of that society to make a choice between clinging to traditions rendered obsolete by events or developing new patterns of culture bet¬ ter able to meet the new challenge.39 For me there are two funda¬ mental ways in which Africans might react to their new situation. They might react nationalistically: that is, they might seek liberation as a group able to control its own affairs, and to deal equally with other sovereign groups — in other words, as a nation. This of course they did. Or they might react by seeking to knock down the fences which imprison them and simply merge into the larger society around them, i.e. follow the solution of the colonial problem, which is known as assimilation. This of course they rejected — thus making the conclu¬ sions of Mitchell and Epstein invalid. One therefore cannot limit the situation that was developing in the Copperbelt and boiled over in the crisis of the labour strike of 1935

20

Crisis in African Sociology

only to result in the emergence of ‘associations based on class princi¬ ples’. Moreover, the nature of the classes which Mitchell detected and their aspirations were just an illusion that was incorrect. If it was true that Africans aspired to a ‘European way of life’ they ought to have been bulwarks of the status quo. “So long as people — particularly the workers — are bound by these illusions, they are immobilized. Once they escape from the illusions they become capable of acting in con¬ formity with reality — that is, acting to change matters in ways that a scientific understanding shows they can be changed.”40 If we take the Central African situation in its totality, i.e. includ¬ ing the colonial factor, we can explain better what was developing among the African population of the Copperbelt — i.e. the nature of opposition to white rule and opposition that existed and continues to exist among Africans of different tribal groups. To limit analysis to the emergence of classes whose aspiration was to goals of a European char¬ acter was a convenient way not to recognize the forces of trade union consciousness and nationalism, all wrapped into one, that were build¬ ing up and which offered a direct threat to white rule. The Tribal Elders that were appointed to look after the affairs of ‘tribal groups’ in the Copperbelt failed, despite everything, to ossify tribal structures and to prevent the Africans working in the mines from forming organic inter¬ dependent organizations against their white employers. The ‘indirect’ rule through the Tribal Elders was intended to make sure that ethnic groups brought to the mines continued as before, with little or no intra-territorial acculturation because this would drown white rule. The lack of organic unity explains the tribal affiliations recognized by Epstein at an inter-African level of relationships. It is therefore incor¬ rect to abandon the structure of the colonial society when accounting for events in Central Africa or even to take it for granted. The white settlers and the mining authorities by their actions of fostering trun¬ cated tribal institutions meant to create conditions which would pre¬ vent the development of a national consciousness among different ethnic groups, but this ‘international rationality’ of the dominant stra¬ ta had not taken into account the ‘unintentional rationality’ which the new towns and working conditions in the mines would foster in the disparate African elements. My viewpoint which considers the influ¬ ences of the colonial structure as having a pervasive influence enables me to explain the collapse of the Tribal Elders, the rise and nature of African nationalism and the ethnic conflicts that arise without resort

21

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

to psychological explanations which are patently subjectivist and do not help in the scientific understanding of these phenomena. Perhaps a word about the conceptualization of class by Gluckman and his associates is necessary. And this may throw some light on that baffling problem about why nationalism in Zambia was a rural rather than an urban phenomenon. We have already alluded to the disjunction characteristic of all colonial economies. The extractive industrial econo¬ my of Zambia by-passed the development of an internal market and an articulated commercial economy. “Workers” were formed not through a historical process of material and cultural evolution within the society, but were created by decree to serve a distant imperial metropolis.41 The migrant labour system did two things: it dumped the urban proletariat in the so-called native areas, and dependence on wages by those who remained in urban areas inhibited them from becoming a self-conscious class. The structural instability and lack of integration of the economy to the surrounding countryside produced a series of unresolved contra¬ dictions: urban-rural disparities, the crystallization of zonal groupings around the various centres of economic activity, and masked antagonism of privileged salariat and depressed proletariat. Zambia never developed an intelligentsia42 and there was never an analytically and factually dis¬ tinct petty bourgeoisie; what you had was a relatively privileged (in terms of wages, cultural standards, stability) section of the salariat. The formation of classes in Africa would be absolutely incompre¬ hensible when examined independently of the ownership of the means of production in the colonial society. “Class formation” among Africans ceases to exist as a separate problem when related to the larger system of production in a particular colonial country, because in fact they are the products of this larger economic whole. Therefore to define class¬ es the way Mitchell does is not meaningful. Objectively its social pur¬ pose was to keep the Africans from realizing what their place in colonial society was. From what I have said above, I hope I have exposed the pseudo¬ scientific pretentiousness of the “Urban Tribalism” approach. Besides the fact that the word ‘tribe’ has certain ideological connotations, the tribalistic approach seems to me to have been intended to allay the fears of the whites against the spectre of African nationalism, whilst appealing to them to be aware of those elements within the African community that were soon to assume the leadership in the struggle for national emancipation.

22

Crisis in African Sociolocy

The paper discussed here also refers to the methodology that was used and the units that were considered meaningful for study. Method has to do with how we ask and answer questions with some assurance that the answers will be more or less durable. The most favoured method was that of structural functionalism. Daryll Forde in his paper criticizes the limitations of the method: its tendency to give an impres¬ sion of stability and inevitability and also its a-historical nature. He cautions that “It has to be borne in mind that any theoretical short¬ comings as to the explanatory status of functional studies have not detracted from the great value of an approach to the field research which sought, through participant observation and systematic record¬ ing, to portray the contemporary cultural and social life of a commu¬ nity, tribe, or chiefdom in action, and to analyse as structural elements the many patterns of social relations and ideas that ordered various parts of the social field.” (p. 396). On the question of method Gluckman states: “Two important, and to some extent opposed, methodological principles have influ¬ enced our approach. The first is the standard rule of anthropological research that one must collect data by direct observation of a restricted field of social life; and that these data primarily determine the lines of one’s analysis. This entails an emphasis in analysis on actual social sit¬ uations which have been observed — law cases, the boycott of a butch¬ er’s shop, a trade union meeting, a tribal dance in town, the activities of married couples in the urban setting, and so forth... The second principle arises from a general orientation in sociological analysis. This is the assumption, which is confirmed by empirical observation, that in the new Central African towns we are dealing with a system, though not of course a perfect system, with a close, repetitive pattern... Since we are examining a structure of social relations, we know that it has to be analysed in terms of roles; and that these roles will themselves influ¬ ence the behaviour of the occupants of the roles, whatever their origin and their personal differences of temperament.” (p. 68). Several objections can be raised against the methodologies that have been followed by Daryll Forde and his Institute and Gluckman and his associates. Functionalism as a method has been criticized and we are not going to go into the criticism. Participant observation and systematic recording of a restricted field of social life can only result, and in fact, has resulted in a vast and growing mass of‘dry as dust’ fac¬ tual accounts of minutely specialized monographs. This method per-

23

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

formed a definite function — it eschewed theory and produced indi¬ viduals knowing more and more about less and less. Lack of theory connecting these minutely researched monographs helped to create all the problems associated with abstracted empiricism and what C. Wright Mills calls the restriction rather than the release of the sociological imagination. Furthermore: what was the restricted field selected for study and what criterion was used to choose it? These are important questions. “Asking the right question,” as the saying goes, is more than half of getting the right answer; and asking the wrong question — such as choosing the wrong whole — assures never getting the right answer at all.43 As is well known and as Gluckman admits, the material for their observations was law cases, the boycott of butcher’s shops, trade union meetings, etc. These restricted fields were looked at in isolation but any study of a colonial type situation must face the fact that any type of colonial system cannot be understood without a direct analysis of the specific economy and society of the colonial power. This truism was not followed by either Daryll Forde or Gluckman. Any society, including the colonial one, was at once a structure which could only be understood in terms of the interrelationship of its parts, and a pro¬ cess which. could only be understood in terms of the cumulative weight of its past.44 The functionalist method of approach and that of partic¬ ipant observation represented extreme attempts to divorce the two dimensions altogether. The second methodological issue in the case of Gluckman is that of looking at “Social relations in terms of roles.” One reifies action by confining one’s analysis to roles. “Actions are perceived as standing sep¬ arately from their performer. In other words, actions are conceived as roles and the actor as an embodiment of roles... If one now goes on to theorise on the basis of this consciousness, one may develop a soci¬ ology that regards roles rather than people as the prime reality... No one exists any longer, but roles interact in a sort of ectoplasmic exchange... Roles are reified by detaching them from human intentionality and expressivity, and transforming them into an inevitable des¬ tiny for their bearers.”45 Thus to look at the urban African situation in a colonial society in terms of roles eliminated the human actors and mystified their true character of subjection. The structural system which produced these roles was conveniently forgotten. During the colonial era the African

24

Crisis in African Sociology

lost his right to be human. Every day when he came into contact with the white society he played a role in which he was insulted and had to take it in silence. Under the pretext of “civilizing him” the colonial institutions spread revolting and insipid images of himself that the oppressors wanted him to accept, and limiting one’s analyses to these roles was stopping at the water’s edge of social analysis. However, soci¬ ology betrays its task if it studies merely such “givenness” but not the various processes of becoming this “givenness.” From what I have said it will be obvious that the triviality and bare¬ ness of African social anthropology arise from the units that were select¬ ed and from the methods that were used. A small scale study, like The Kalela Dance, typifies all the poverty associated with African studies. Mitchell in this study was able to bend and distort facts. The objective reality of alienation that was reflected by the dancers was misinter¬ preted by bending and distorting facts. When one reads the conclu¬ sions that Mitchell derived from the study of the Kalela one is reminded of statistics that are not based on count, but, arbitrarily deter¬ mined, force reality into compliance. Now for instance, the wearing of European clothes meant for Mitchell aspiration to a “European Way of Life.” When Mitchell reached this specious and superficial conclusion he did not use the sociological imagination with its built-in procedure of looking beyond the superficial appearance, and which carries with it a logical imperative to unmask the pretentious from the real. In the realm of the social sciences, and especially in the study of the operation of the colonial system, the task of distinguishing between surface phe¬ nomena and inner meaning is of essence. Believing in the idea of cul¬ tural hierarchy, and seeing little virtue in African cultures, Mitchell’s observations of the Africans, who under difficult conditions of the min¬ ing towns were trying to make their lives worthwhile, have been dis¬ torted. The struggle to be human under inhuman conditions means for Mitchell an emotional submission to Europeanness and this is patently wrong. In almost all monographs attempting to study social change in Africa, the figure of the white man is writ large. “Everything great, everything fine, everything really successful in human culture, was white.”46 Some white social anthropologists when writing about social change in Africa are torn between the demands of truth and pro¬ paganda necessities to rationalize the dehumanization and alienation so apparent in the new African towns. “They transform an individual-

25

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

istic form of socialization into extra-social, natural attribute of the indi¬ vidual.47 In this way they distort cultural contact into a one-way flow of benevolence. This means that the analysis of social change had to be couched in normative terms and became unique in that it was not addressed to the “objective” reality as such but to the objectives desired by the formulator or by those in whose service he stands. Fanon has rightly pointed that, “The unilateral decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric sociocentric definitions... The doctrine of cultural hierarchy is thus but one of aspect of a systematized hierarchization implacably pursued.”48 In conclusion I may point out that the two papers discussed above are examples of analysis of social change in which the most crucial aspect — the colonial situation — falls outside the conceptual frame¬ work of the analysis of social change. Social change therefore appeared to take place in a field and change was portrayed as not referring to the structural modifications of colonial society, but as referring to atti¬ tudes and aspirations. It was quite obvious too that the problems of the study of social change for those who accepted the colonial situa¬ tion were to harmonize the aspirations of the colonized with those of the colonizer. If therefore a certain description of the material world was essential to that unity, then what was chiefly required of the descrip¬ tion was not to be correspondent with facts but persuasiveness and reassurances to the dominant strata about the desirability of its posi¬ tion. The historical structure of colonialism was thus described as a mere assemblage of its constituent parts and external relations. An attempt¬ ed understanding of reality that is fixed upon isolated aspects of a total¬ ity necessarily falls short. The attitude I take in this paper was that the colonial social structure was more than the influence of its parts. Its essence was the manner in which the parts exemplified the logic of the whole. My attitude was a critical one towards certain tendencies cur¬ rent in African social studies at the present time. These are tendencies either to ignore the colonial past or to talk indifferently about it, and to limit analysis to the level of appearances rather than to probe deep into the essence of things. It was my view that social anthropologists who accepted the colonial framework were unable to probe beneath the surface because a real knowledge of colonialism would have had serious implications for “real” social change.

26

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

So let us look at history as history—men placed in actual con¬ texts which they have not chosen, and confronted by indi¬ vertible forces, and with an overwhelming immediacy of relations and duties and with only a scanty opportunity for inserting their own agency and not as a text for hectoring might-have-been. —E. P. Thompson1

I Since independence African societies have been experiencing profound and pervasive cleavage and strain. But what kind of strain is it? What are the likely consequences to it? Searching for answers to these ques¬ tions in books and articles is disappointing, for by and large these lit¬ erary attempts offer, not an analysis of the conflict, but simply an account of its symptoms. Like most writers on the sociology of colo¬ nialism they abstract from the fundamental relations of colonial struc¬ ture and treat symptoms as underlying causes. Thus in his interesting paper on Social and Cultural Pluralism M. G. Smith (1960, pp. 763-77) abstracts the incompatibility of institutions as a fundamental feature of all colonial conflicts. The works by other pluralists, van den Berghe (1965), Leo Kuper (1965), W. Arthur Lewis (1965) and Clyde Mitchell (1956, 1960), are skeptical about this and add other characteristic features which are considered to be units of cleavage like ethnic or racial units, the cul¬ tural diversity in basic patterns of behavior, and social pluralism. But

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

all these studies do not give their analysis an historical dimension, the units of cleavage are treated as though they were innate and as though the structure of society were static. They do not attempt to construct what Perry Anderson (1965, p. 12) describes as a ‘totalizing history’ either of the structural system of tropical Africa or to make an eco¬ nomic and political analysis of tropical Africa but allow ethnic and racial conflicts to ‘play themselves out’ in a social vacuum. Yet, until our view of tropical African societies today is grounded upon some vision of its full effective past, we will continue to lack the basis for an under¬ standing of the dialectical movements of these societies and hence— necessarily—of the contradictory possibilities within them, which alone can explain the present ubiquitous and pervasive crisis.2 The central issue in the analysis of conflict in African societies is that it should not be isolated in space and in time, but that it should be looked at in the context of the historical structure of colonial rule and methods it used. It is further the task of social scientists to derive conflict from the social structure and not to relegate it to psycholog¬ ical variables (tribalism) or to innate hatreds between ethnic and racial groups. It is customary for the ex-colonial countries to yearn for and to celebrate the ‘order’ that was imposed by colonial administration. I am quite conscious of the fact that all societies must achieve some degree of coherence and stability in order to be thought of as societies at all. However, no society is static and without internal divisions and frictions characterized by occasional conflicts. The nature and mean¬ ing of these cleavages and conflicts is what any theory of society should take into account and explain in depth. We can begin to confront the present day conflicts in tropical Africa by understanding clearly the dialects of what G. Balandier (1965) calls the ‘colonial situation’ or what A. G. Frank (1967, p. vii) describes as ‘the metropolis-satellite structure of the capitalist system’. The present day conflicts stem from the differential impact of colonial and imperi¬ al rule on these societies. At issue therefore is not ‘ethnic honour’, but the relations of various ethnic groups to their means of livelihood and the nature of political regimes that were established when these terri¬ tories were colonized and when they ‘achieved’ political independence. The political independence which these tropical African societies achieved was that which in most cases meant, initially, a change of administrative personnel but no change in the rules for the new gov¬ erning class; the economic and institutional system which had sustained

28

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

colonial relations was left intact. Professor Robert Lynd (1959, p. 26) in a paper on Power in American Society as a Resource has written: To attempt fundamental change in institutions of a kind that affects the basic character of organized power in a given soci¬ ety, without changing the social structure of that society is like trying to drive a car forward with the gears set in reverse. The negotiated independence has created its own myths which have found ideological rationalization in the collective memory of both the old and new administrators of the colonial estate. The fact that twothirds of the ex-colonial world won independence without a struggle has been used as proof that the colonizing powers had discharged their duty in preparing these areas for political responsibilities. Any collapse in the political system after independence is explained in terms of the hastiness with which the metropolitan power withdrew before those who were to succeed had received sufficient grooming or in terms of the primordial animosities. The second myth is that tribal or ethnic differences are so intrinsic and divisive that only an external power can contain them. This, of course, contains no mention of the post-World War II surge of nation¬ alism which forced the colonial powers hastily to withdraw formal polit¬ ical control while retaining an economic stranglehold, or the faulty structures on which colonialism was built. This, together with neo-colonialism as a system of economic, political and ideological means and methods, has had disastrous effects on post-independent Africa. The external economic interests have been able to preserve and to extend their influence in their former colonies by playing on ethnic suscepti¬ bilities. Yet, the ethnic, racial and other features of cleavage in Africa are isolated in space and in time by pluralist writers. Leo Kuper (1965, p. 113), in giving reasons for the choice of this concept of pluralism to describe African societies, states the case well for the pluralists: The concept of the plural society seems theoretically useful and stimulating. Almost all societies in Africa were plural in the sense in which that term is used below. The concept has refer¬ enced to pronounced cleavages between social units.3 If the cleavages were complete, the social units would constitute dis¬ tinct societies. The plural society thus implies that the units maintain at least a minimum of relations with each other, that there is a measure of integration and constraint. 29

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Here we have the basic problem with the notion of pluralism: in pre¬ colonial Africa the ethnic groups were fairly well-defined and self-con¬ tained units with clear boundaries, but colonial rule and the partition of Africa split them apart. Where they were brought together, even against their will, they were denied any chance to develop institutions which would foster organic solidarity. The governmental regulation of units in artificial unity is not explained by the concept of pluralism. This has acted as a powerful mystification of the real social relations between the ethnic units in the imperialist states and the ex-colonies. For reasons ideological and otherwise, there is a general reluctance among pluralist to analyze the African societies in the context of the colonial situation or as extensions of capitalist societies. This results in a tendency to regard any crisis as having been generated by forces whol¬ ly independent of capitalist characteristics, but as reflecting instinctu¬ al antipathies among ethnic groups. Thus Kuper in the same paper comments further, that “the South African government policy of Apartheid is a theoretical model of the principle of pluralism devel¬ oped,” and he goes on to state that cleavages are “maintained and heightened by exclusive sentiments derived from the narrow contain¬ ment and cultural differences.” The effects of the policy of divide and rule which are based on the exploitation of the presumed ‘hostility’ existing between the various groups was not examined to see how it had contributed to the present day African problem. During the colo¬ nial era the relations between the sub-societies in the last resort were regulated by force and dominance, whilst the ‘hostility’ which existed between the ethnic groups seemed to help the imperial power to bal¬ ance the various groups and to give credence to the theory advanced by pluralists. Furthermore, after independence the ‘peace and order’ of the colo¬ nial era seems to give way to strife and turmoil. To explain this ‘Hobbesian state of nature’ more could be done than to attribute it to the intrinsic nature of the pluralities? Most of the theories by plural¬ ists find tribalism to be the source of these conflicts and predict that, because tribalism is rooted in human nature and primordial identities, African societies will always be wrecked by irremedial, internal con¬ flicts. It would perhaps be useful to let the ‘pluralists’ speak for them¬ selves—not in incidental and untypical quotations taken from their context, but in statements that represent the main content of their thinking on this question. It will be obvious from these statements that 30

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

no distinction is made between multi-tribal and multi-racial societies. W. Arthur Lewis (1965, p. 66), has written that: Plurality is the principle problem of most of the new states cre¬ ated in the twentieth century. Most of them include people who differ from each other in language or tribe or race, some of these groups live side by side in a long tradition of mutual hostility, restrained in the past only by neutral power. French writers use the word ‘cleavages’ to describe a situation where people are mutually antipathetic, not because they disagree on matters of principle... but simply because they are historic ene¬ mies. Cleavage cannot be overcome by argument and economic concessions...because it is not based on disputes about princi¬ ples or interests. The same type of observation was made in a Northern Rhodesia Legislative Council debate by Mr. J. M. Thompson who stated: Our knowledge of our native inhabitants leads us to believe that we need have no anxiety about any internal disturbance or any large scale uprising. There is no cohesion among the important tribes in this territory and there is no likelihood in the near future. In fact, the most important tribes cannot even speak each other’s language or communicate with each other in any way and it would be difficult for them to discuss any matter of any importance at all.4 Leo Kuper (1965, p. 120), has written: The effects of a common subordination and hostility are relat¬ ed in a complex way with the total situation...Prior to inde¬ pendence, the hostility tribesmen felt for their western overlords must have been great enough to overcome any repug¬ nance for each other, in many areas; a united front must have been perceived as offering better prospects of power than trib¬ al divisions. With independence, or for that matter on the threshold of independence, neither of these conditions neces¬ sarily applies, and one of the major problems in many of the new states is the maintenance of a unity temporarily achieved under quite different conditions.

31

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

M. G. Smith, after discussing what constitutes plural societies as opposed to class-divided societies and multi-racial societies, concludes (1960, p. 74): Since the plural society depends for its structural form and con¬ tinuity on the regulation of intersectional relations by govern¬ ment, changes in the social structure presuppose political changes, and these have a violent form. Pierre van den Berghe (1965, pp. 78-9) writes: A society is pluralistic to the extent that it is structurally seg¬ mented and culturally diverse. In more operational terms, plu¬ ralism is characterized by the relative absence of value consensus; the relative rigidity and clarity of group definition; the relative presence of conflict or, at least, of lack of integra¬ tion and complementarity between various parts of the social system ... Clearly South Africa is one of the world’s most plu¬ ralistic societies. Structurally, the deepest cleavage is the racial one which divides the population into four main antagonistic and hierarchized color-castes. The economy consists of two largely unrelated sectors: a high-productivity money economy and a .ra&sistence one. Governmental pluralism expresses itself in the coexistence of what, until a decade ago, was a parlia¬ mentary democracy for the Whites and an arbitrary colonial administration for the Africans. This dual political structure is reflected, among other things, in the simultaneous operation of widely different legal systems with overlapping and often conflicting jurisdiction. ...Apartheid is not only a pluralistic ide¬ ology, but it also strives to re-establish an identity of cultural and structural cleavages and it ignores the existing discrepancies.

J. Clyde Mitchell (1960, p. 19) in his inaugural lecture at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Tribalism and the Plural Society, describes the life of an African named William who lived in one of the towns of the now defunct Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. William, who was already neatly turned out in a spotless suit that was well pressed and immaculately kept, was also an Ng’anga and prac¬ ticed the traditional type of medicine. The new social situation was described thus:

32

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

We are presented here with a situation in which people oper¬ ate simultaneously with sets of norms derived from the two opposed parts of a ‘plural’ or ‘composite’ society. Yet the two sets of beliefs apparently do not conflict. Clearly we are not dealing with an integrated cultural system but with one in which quite disparate systems of beliefs may coexist and be called into action in different social situations. This seems to call for concepts which do not assume the harmony and inte¬ gration of parts of a social system. We need to examine close¬ ly the exact degree of interdependence of institutions—indeed to find out whether there is any interdependence. Here I have attempted to select analyses and conclusions based on what are called “plural” societies. Common in all these statements is the slur¬ ring and blurring of the real and true features of the colonial oppression of the African. These analyses are a good example of the relations between analysis and ideology. They confirm Gunnar Myrdal’s observations (quoted in Robinson, 1962, p. 18) that “our very concepts are value loaded” and “cannot be defined except in terms of political evaluations.” The concept of pluralism becomes a lullaby that brushes away further enquiry. There has been an irresistible attraction recently to the concept of pluralism among Africanists. It is a concept which enables one to make indifferent criticism of a multi-racial colonial society, whilst one pleads for a change of heart. When used to describe multi-tribal situations it councils political despair, it makes racial and ethnic conflicts appear as natural to such situations. No economic and social analysis of Africa is found in all these writings. Specifically there is no analysis of the class structure as it was formed through the colonial structure. Nor does the concept allow for such economic-social-political analysis. No concept is simply a label which does not explain the nature of the conflicts. The idea that the conflicts, which plague and threaten Africa today, are due to inborn antipathies and not to drives built into the society is not scientific. Such notions, because they foster the belief that nothing can be done to change the situation, can produce harmful consequences. The association of tribalism with dissensions and conflict can also be gleaned from this observation by J. Clyde Mitchell (1956, p. 18): Tribal fights are no longer common on the Copperbelt but the opposition of the tribes to one another can be observed in many other situations.

33

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

These observations have reduced the notion of tribalism to a term of abuse inside as well as outside Africa. Each time there is government instability the word “tribalism” is beamed through the radio services in an “I told you so” manner. It seduces the foreign listener into a resigned state of hopelessness about the future of Black Africa. Thus when the issue of Southern Africa is discussed there results a great deal of ambivalence because a change in the status quo might create “chaos.” The African politician is also provided with a convenient “peg” on which to hang all of Africa’s ills. The explanation of conflict situations in Africa in terms of plural¬ ism or tribalism represents to my mind the triumph of stereotypes over reality. It proves that our perception of reality is often crystallized in a collection of stereotypes and we become so fond of these, so much at home with them, that we conveniently avoid looking at the real facts. The evidence of the recent conflicts in Africa strongly suggests that we confront in these conflicts, not irrational outbursts due to tribal sen¬ timents, but the reality of historical forces of colonial maladministra¬ tion and the workings of neo colonialism. By neo colonialism I wish to imply the same meaning as given in the “Resolution on Neo-Colonialism” accepted by the All-African People’s Conference held in Cairo, March 23-31, 1961.5 The resolu¬ tion stated: After reviewing the current situation in Africa: considers that Neo-Colonialism, which is the survival system, in spite of for¬ mal recognition of political independence in emerging coun¬ tries, which become the victims of an indirect and subtle form of domination by political, economic, social, military and tech¬ nical, is the greatest threat to African countries that have newly won their independence or those approaching this status. Emphasizes the example of the Congo, the French Community, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which indicates that the colonial system and international imperial¬ ism, realizing their failure in facing the development of revo¬ lutionary movements in Africa, make use of many means to safeguard the essential of their economic and military power. There is no denying here that parochial loyalties may express them¬ selves in tribal terms. But of course these are always based on perceived material interests by those who exploit them.

34

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

II It may be fruitful at this juncture to specify what I understand by trib¬ alism. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the word tribe has three meanings and it may mean: (a) a group of persons forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor, spec, each of the twelve divi¬ sions of the People of Israel claiming descent from the twelve sons of Jacob; (b) A particular race of recognized family; (c) A race of people, now applied spec, to a primary aggregate of people in a primitive or barbarous condition under head¬ man or chief. For my purposes I will use the concept of tribalism to mean, at an ide¬ ological level, a consciousness of belonging to a primary group whose language, customs and myths are your own and with whose members you feel a certain solidarity. In its basic form tribalism, like family feel¬ ing, is natural and there is nothing inherently antithetical in it to the greater loyalty due to the nation. At the economic level tribalism means a self-sufficient economic life based on subsistence agriculture, handi¬ crafts, village industry and barter. As a self-sufficient system it has his¬ torically been unable to survive the introduction of a money economy. In tropical Africa tribalism was deliberately “destroyed” by imperialist policy in order to create a body of men deprived of their subsistence and so compelled to sell their labour on European-owned farms and mines. These labourers suffered many ills, among which was seasonal unemployment but then what subjective explanations do they give to their misery? or is it possible to construct a theoretical system that can explain the psychology produced by this situation without flying off into metaphysical heights? With these definitions in mind, I can proceed to look at tribalism and the misuse of the term. Desmond Guiry (1967) has observed with regard to the conflict in Nigeria that: Now, as then, the use of the word tribalism has clouded the real issues involved by enveloping them in what seems to be a primitive and barbarous mystique peculiar to ‘The African’. Seeking to explain the present crisis in Nigeria by the use of

35

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

such a blanket term as ‘tribalism’ is just about as enlightening as trying to explain the causes of the First World War in terms of German ‘militarism’. There seems to be a basic preconcep¬ tion in the columns of such papers as The Daily Express that African politics operate on an entirely different plan than those of Europe or any other ‘civilized’ part of the world. They belong to the same category as phrases like ‘the inscrutable East’ and ‘The Dark Continent’. Basil Davidson, according to Guiry, also regards: the use of the term ‘tribe’ as a mere mystification, and lays a great deal of blame for its misuse on anthropologists who, he says, have cultivated a habit when writing about African soci¬ eties of creeping in the back door of political reality instead of marching boldly up the front steps. Richard L. Sklar (1967, p. 7) has made a similar observation: By and large, journalists who write about the melancholy events are content to cry ‘tribalism’, and opinions of journalists weigh heavily on the students of contemporary history. It takes intel¬ lectual courage and a measure of theoretical conviction to resist them. The tyranny of day-to-dayism (or journalistic scholar¬ ship) is not less stultifying to political science than the older African tyranny of administrative scholarship. Deference to the stereotypes of the mass media can be as shortsighted today as deference to the biases of the colonial administrator. It may be that the use of the word “tribalism” is based upon widely held preconceptions about African societies. It would not be wrong to assume that the third definition in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary dic¬ tates the use of the word “tribe.” The mirror of historically bound minds still reflects distorted visions of social processes in Africa even today. The great misfortune of this historical prejudice is that it avoids a confrontation with the present problems of African reality. The per¬ ception of the African as a tribesman immersed in his essential primi¬ tiveness and beyond the pale of civilized decency has been undeniably exhilarating in both the psychological and economic sense and has led to beneficial consequences, in a materialistic sense, to his exploiters. The back log of problems which African societies inherited from many years of plunder; the distortion of boundaries demarcating one ethnic group from another; the deliberate undermining of the fabric of these 36

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

African societies and the present-day intrigues of imperialism are not examined to see how much they influence the “chaos” so pervasive in African societies today. Richard L. Sklar, in the same article, makes a further observation: Even problems of tribalism in Africa may be related to the forms of external dependence. In his memoirs of the Katanga rebel¬ lion, Conor Cruise O’Brien remarks on the curious fact that the Baluba of Kasai abandoned secession and made peace with the Lulua people when American policy came down decisive¬ ly in favour of a united Congo...O’Brien speculates that the Baluba’s attitudes might have been influenced by American companies—that have the mining interests in Kasai. In an article ‘The Present Malaise in Africa: Who is Responsible?’ (Anon. 1967), a similar observation to the above is made: In several African counties different tribes are aligning with certain foreign countries almost en bloc. Foreign commercial firms are flirting with what in their view are economically important tribes or social groups. To look at African social conflicts as stemming from tribal differences, or what is called pluralism, is often an exercise in complacent but inac¬ curate and misleading academic endeavour. Because the premise of “tribalist” is false and pays attention to mere symptoms of a much deep¬ er problem, whatever prescriptions are made to cure the “sickness” of African societies would result, as the controversy among pluralists is now making clear, in empty and scholastic word spinning. The point is that most African governments are too dependent on Western finance capital to reassert African national interests against Western monopoly interests. They have not yet been able to release their economies from the paralysing hand of Western capitalism. A serious effort to under¬ stand African conflicts would not ignore the study of the ownership of the primary productive forces. It is the economy out of which social psy¬ chology and various ideologies emerge. Plekhanov (1961, pp. 70-1) has observed rightly that: In appraising this situation one might take into account not only the distribution of the national income, but also the whole organization of production and exchange, not only the aver¬ age quantity of the products consumed by the workers, but 37

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

also in particular its form, not only the fact of enslavement of the working class, but also the ideas and concepts which diverge or may emerge in the head of the worker under the influence of this fact. Obviously the analysis of conflict situations in Africa must take account of a whole series of historical objective and subjective factors which lead to such conflicts and may give a clue to the analysis of particular conflicts. This means a consideration of the material basis of society, the nature of the social system, the political organization, the struc¬ ture of social consciousness, or both the ideological and socio-psychological orientation, and views of the ruling classes and their individual social groups and rivalry between the various groupings in the ruling circles. If we accept the above formulation, “tribalism” in the present con¬ text of African societies, where the major means of production are owned by external monopolies, may serve functions that are quite dif¬ ferent from those assumed by pluralists. Before political independence was achieved, economic exploitation lay at the root of popular dissat¬ isfaction. It is my contention that the economic structure of society is a far from indifferent condition for the development of conflicts. It must not be assumed that I am trying to use foreign monopolies as a scapegoat; I am not; but I do say that they should not be ignored com¬ pletely. The objective failure of African governments to fulfil the promise of “revolution” has often translated itself into subjective terms which identify individual or group deprivation with the tribal origins of those who are supposed to distribute the “spoils” of political inde¬ pendence. Peter Marris6 (1966, p. 14) agrees with my conclusion: The dangers are much greater where people of a particular tribe are conspicuously associated with a position of advantage. So for instance, the disaster which has befallen the Ibo in Northern Nigeria arose partly because they held many of the clerical and administrative posts in the North, pre-empting jobs which the Northerners felt should be for them. In the same way, the Asians in East Africa are vulnerable because of their control over commerce. Where an economic grievance can fasten, with more or less justification, on a tribal group, the combination may lead to a violent outburst. A much more diffused frustra¬ tion is released in hatred of the outsider. And politicians faced

38

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

with the problems they cannot handle, are under constant temptation to exploit frustration in just this way. By deflecting it upon a group of outsiders, a political leader can disguise his own failure to satisfy expectations by heading the hunt for a scapegoat. Foreign influences, of course, cannot do away with the fact that the features and peculiarities of the social ideas in a given society are explained in the final analysis by the fundamental inner cause of its development—the degree of its own economic relations.

Ill I have maintained that the nature and scope of social change in Africa is, to a large extent, an unthought-out phenomenon. The reduction of the conflicts to tribal differences and the description of tropical African societies as plural societies is often a meaningless over-sim¬ plification. The concept of pluralism is too broad and spongy, it absorbs everything and anything, and when squeezed squirts out a never-ending stream of intellectual confusion because of the failure to agree on what is the primary feature of pluralism. All societies manifest plural features of one kind or another, except that they are not plagued by the cleavages which are found in tropical African soci¬ eties. The problems that are experienced by these societies demand better perspectives and understanding because, theoretically, they can yield a lot of insights. If scholarship is not to betray its function, it must give us insights into the nature and sources of these conflicts. Did the transfer of formal political power involve meaningful changes in the social structure which was created during colonial times? Why have African politicians found it so difficult to correct the weaknesses in their society which provided conditions in which colonial power could flourish? Geoffrey Bing, in the book, Reap the Whirlwind (1967), provides a partial answer: Colonialism has never consisted merely in rule by an alien power. It brings in its train a series of commercial, financial, military and social relationships which do not disappear at the ending of imperial rule. Those who ‘prepared’ African colonies for independence had no finality of purpose. After indepen¬ dence they can use their subtle influences to put tribe against tribe and class against class etc. 39

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and Machiavelli, in The Prince (Chap. V), gives as one of the methods of controlling ‘free’ states, that of allowing them to live under their own laws, taking tribute of them and creating within the country a govern¬ ment composed of a few who will keep it friendly to you. Because this government, being created by the Prince, knows it cannot exist with¬ out his friendship and protection and will do all it can to keep them. What is more, a city used to liberty can be more easily held by means of its citizens than in any other way, if you wish to preserve it. To understand the conflicts in Africa a fresh approach is demand¬ ed as to what happened during the colonial era. The social structure and psychology that was created by colonial rule must be studied and analyzed. The analysis of the colonial social structure will give us an insight into the function and cause of black/white conflict and inter¬ tribal conflicts. Colonialism was a system with a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology and a set of psychological pat¬ terns. The foundation of colonialism, in what are called White settler societies, was a tiny white population (in relation to the African pop¬ ulation) which with the help of the metropolitan power was established as a dominant and exclusive political and economic force. For the white settlers, as well as the metropolitan power, the Africans were either a sufferable nuisance or part of the natural landscape to be exploited. To exploit this new environment required a special ideology, a psycholo¬ gy and a political and economic power which would uphold white interests as paramount, with everything else subordinate to these val¬ ues.7 But when ‘virgin’ lands are opened up some of the natural envi¬ ronment is left untouched until such time that a need arises for it to be tamed. It may be said that I am exaggerating the situation, but if one reads a booklet with the title Lusaka, 1935 produced for private circulation by Jonathan Cape of London, the truth of what I am say¬ ing is not in doubt. The miscellaneous African population of the Capital has, for purposes of accommodation, been divided into two classes, personal servants and others, and these classes have been pro¬ vided with separate compounds. It has been considered wise to discontinue the practice of providing each house with its own Native Compound. Quarters are only provided for one unmarried boy on each plot. The other servants with their fam¬ ilies live at a distance in the Personal Servant’s Compound. Thus, the residential areas are freed from picaninns and other 40

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

manifestations of domestic untidiness (quoted in Wina, S., 1968). The sentiments expressed in this document are indicative of the attitudes of many, if not all, white settlers towards the African. In such a situation the question of the inevitability of conflict becomes the question of whether or not the white settlers would give up their world, which they identified quite properly with the subordination of the indigenous pop¬ ulation, without armed resistance. The white settler’s pride, sense of hon¬ our and commitment to his way of life made a final struggle so probable that events, except in a few instances like Zambia, dictate that one call it inevitable without implying a mechanistic determinism against which man cannot prevail. The ultimate issues are those of history as a social process and the place of men within it. The concept of pluralism, and the arguments advanced to support it, sail off into a fog of metaphysics masquerading as social analysis (Genovese, 1965, p. 8). The empiricism characteristic of African studies is inadequate because it fails to reveal in a concrete way the manner of the historical activity of individuals. This has unfortunate consequences: it focuses attention on the epiphenomenal factors rather than on the realities of social structure. And this has further unfortunate results for political practitioners: to try to do something which is inherently impossible to achieve, like political stability and the general welfare of the citizenry, is always a corrupting enterprise if the given structural system vitiates against meaningful change. One cannot eradicate or exorcise tribalism by mere exhortation, one must correct those structural weaknesses that breed tribal sentiments. The study of conflict in a society embracing various ethnic units must, if it is to be meaningful, take into account the relation of the component units to the means of production. Most of the sharp con¬ flicts in society are not about honour but can be traced, in the final analysis, to the manner in which individuals earn their livelihood. It is often an unrewarding endeavor to limit one’s analysis to the ideolog¬ ical assertations of participants. “Ideas become a great power, but on the indispensable condition that they are able to embrace and reflect reality, the course of history, the relations between individuals” (Plekhanov, 1961, p. 92). The plural societies of Central Africa, because of the manner of their coming into being, are a very interesting point of departure from which to study the nature of conflict in the new states. 41

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

FurnivalPs work on plural societies, which seems to have inspired the present day interest in the problems of pluralism, may serve as a starting point for the analysis of social structures inherited by inde¬ pendent governments in tropical Africa. FurnivalPs thesis is straight¬ forward: in tropical countries which have been subjected to European colonization the free play of economic forces has resulted in the cre¬ ation of multi-racial societies which have no overall common standards or culture save that of animal existence on the one hand and economic competition on the other. Under colonial domination one finds a med¬ ley of people who “...mix but do not combine. Each group holds to its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the mar¬ ket place in buying and selling” (1948, pp. 304-7). Most pluralists have taken this casual observation and projected their prognostica¬ tions—that in a plural society, because of the destructive cultural pecu¬ liarities, there is bound to be a pervasive conflict and dissension, deriving from the inherent exclusiveness of groups. Flowever, the other argument in Colonial Policy and Practice is that even though laissez faire economics and colonial forces bring together racially diverse pop¬ ulations, these forces act as a ‘solvent’ of traditional culture and val¬ ues, creating conditions of social atomization in which a highly individualistic society is held together by the twin forces of market rela¬ tions and colonial domination. Furnivall (1948, p. 306) writes: On looking at plural society in its political aspect one can dis¬ tinguish these characteristic features: the society as a whole comprises separate racial sections; each section is an aggregate of individuals rather than a corporate organic whole, and as individuals, their social life is incomplete. What this means, if applied to Africa, is that the territorial states result¬ ing from the colonial partitioning of Africa were for the most part pure¬ ly artificial entities.8 The divergent elements were often tenuously linked by an imported British or French oligarchy which served as an effective unifying bureaucracy. During colonial times little or no effort was made to relate the disparate cultural and linguistic groups, let alone to nurse them into a sense of organic unity. In an organically solidary society, according to Durkheim,9 “individuals are grouped...no longer according to the particular social activity to which they consecrate themselves. Their natural milieu is no longer the natal milieu, but the occupational milieu. It is no longer real or fictional consanguinity which

42

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

marks the place of each one, but the function which he fills.” In colonial Africa, very few political institutions and usages were introduced common to the various parts, in spite of the fact that Africans were involved in the labour market. Africans met in the labour market, worked there “temporarily” and were sent back to their “native” reserves. Whilst they were thus employed every effort was made to keep their “tribal consciousness” alive through the use of trun¬ cated traditional institutions like Tribal Elders in the Copperbelt towns of Northern Rhodesia. I may observe here that when tribalism was a viable force, i.e., during the period of conquest, every effort was used to destroy it because it provided a basis for organized resistance to alien rule. Reigning Kings and Chiefs were banished or replaced with pre¬ tenders. Therefore “indirect rule,” which has received a great deal of exaltation as an ingenious device to adapt African traditional institu¬ tions to modern usage, was an expediency which merely recognized the existing cultural entities, which for better administration and eco¬ nomic viability had to be brought together. Thus during the colonial era each culturally disparate unit continued as before, with little intra¬ territorial acculturation. The centrifugal tensions gripping most of the African colonies as they emerge into independence; the stage at which intra-territorial and intra-cultural contacts first become real and polit¬ ical are rooted in the colonial policy of Indirect rule—often another name for “divide and conquer.” It may be said that ‘Indirect rule’ was not used in all instances. But as Peter Worsley (1967, p. 38) has pointed out: Constitutional theorists remote from the field of events they are writing about have not always noticed the frequent irrele¬ vance of the distinction between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ rule at this level and in this kind of situation. Often, nominally ‘indi¬ rect’ systems, whether used by the French in North Africa, the Dutch in Indonesia, or the British in Tanganyika, involved as much control over, and manipulation of, the ‘traditional’ authorities, and the appointment to office of quite untraditional figures, as any system of‘direct’ rule. Since they did not exist ‘chiefs’ had to be invented for peoples like the Kikuyu or the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia. Indirect rule was thus really a method to ‘freeze’ the social order, and it inhibited change in the name of conformity with immemorial cus-

43

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

toms. This price of the mummification of tribal institutions was to be paid for ultimately in explosions like those in the Congo in 1960 and in Nigeria in 1966, and in the organization of Apartheid and the Bantustans in South Africa. Much that has been said about the failure of indirect rule applies equally to the French policy of assimilation and association. “Assimilation” sought the general extension of the rights and privi¬ leges of French citizens to the “Gallicanized” African or the notables evolves. But while assimilation sought to integrate the notables evolves into the general life of France, “association” left the helpless masses to the rule of French administrators, who adumbrated or exhumed what remained of customary law. Given this “mechanical” solidarity imposed during the colonial era, what becomes of even greater interest in Furnivall’s analysis is the assessment of the post-war colonial policies, in particular their short¬ comings and probable effects. He shows that basic to these new poli¬ cies was the idea that economic development was the foundation for colonial welfare and for the transition of these societies to political independence; but this development must be along lines which would not jeopardize the metropolitan interests. In other words, political independence must serve merely to speed up the development of the colonial estate and enhance its value as a business concern to the colonial power...now if the tropical peoples are to be enabled to promote their own welfare, it is necessary to create an environment in which they enjoy the requisite status, a sufficient motive and adequate means to do so. The promotion of welfare is possible only in an autonomous society. Furnivall goes on to state that: ...economic freedom may, and in the tropics ordinarily does, result in economic bondage to the moneylender or employer.... and that: ...in social as in civil engineering, form does not give birth to function. Western political institutions have proved disap¬ pointing in the tropics, and consequently we now impose con¬ ditions on political advancement, postponing autonomy until 44

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

some remote future when by welfare measures the people shall have been endowed with the qualities requisite for working Western institutions. Basil Davidson (1967, p. 206) has made a similar observations: More or less consciously, the British and the French were eager to hand their power to elites who would keep the African would safe for capitalism, above all for their own capitalism. However, despite the limitations of the concept of pluralism as used by Furnivall, among the recent pluralists the concept becomes not only a distortion of the social realities but a despairing philosophy. For M. G. Smith, for instance, Norman England was a plural society, Maradi, Nigeria was a plural society, Uganda was a plural society, South Africa, etc., is a plural society. Pluralism, as used in this sense, covers such dis¬ parate social and economic historical formations that it loses its validity. In south and central Africa, a cross-cultural situation has developed over the years due to the twin forces of industrialization and urban¬ ization, which was accompanied by the disorganization of traditional societies. In this kind of society, basic contradictions result; and these are of a two fold nature. On the one hand, economic integration (via the labour market) allocates a role in the productive system to the Africans that outweighs by far their role in the social and political insti¬ tutions. That is to say, disharmony exists between structure and super¬ structure. Secondly, the ruling interests attempt to combine capitalism with serfdom by trying artificially to freeze the ethnic cleavages and to off-set the effects of economic integration by adopting segregation techniques, which are pushed to the extreme and absurd length of denying Africans any claims to a share in the wealth they produce in the so-called White sector. The closer the degree of economic inte¬ gration, the greater the degree of compulsory and contrived political and social segregation. The contradictions were by no means a consequence of pluralism in any sense of the word, but result from deliberate and tortuous attempts by the white rulers to retain their monopoly of economic and political power. Of course even within the ruling strata there are minor differences about the application of apartheid, with the industrial class¬ es favouring some “relaxation” of certain apartheid inconveniences and some “free” flow of African labour, but the farming and mining inter¬ ests, who cannot compete for free labour, favour restrictions. These 45

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

differences are not fundamental, because both interest groups believe in the super-exploitation of the Africans. The main criticism to be levelled against present day pluralists, therefore, is that the notion of pluralism describes only a multiplicity of ethnic or cultural groups within the confines of a single nation-state, and tells nothing about the relationship between the groups. Plural here means only “multi” and should be qualified by reference to con¬ crete historical situations. Secondly, pluralism in classical political the¬ ory has a quite different origin and connotation. Laski, Figgis and other “pluralists.” Earlier in this century, argued that the state was not in fact omnipotent, that every government had to take cognizance of a vari¬ ety of institutions and functional groups (parties, churches, trade unions, co-operative societies, employers’ organizations and the like) which claim an amount of autonomy in their internal affairs, and act as a brake on state power. De Tocqueville saw the role of voluntary associations in the American political system in this light. This theory of a distribution of power emanates from the medieval doctrine as developed by Giercke and other German writers, who asserted that the feudal state was no more than a primus inter pares, and attacked the notion of state supremacy on this ground. Laski and others used the theory for liberal ends as a way of asserting individu¬ al claims against state authority. The essence of the argument was that voters in the modern state appear in a number of roles—as members of families and other institutions—and use their political power to defend these against encroachment by the state authority. Pluralism, as so used, implies a measure of equality of bargaining power between the groups that make up the society. But in a colonial situation the indubitable fact is that equality between the exploiters and the exploit¬ ed is impossible. Sociologists and some present day political theorists divest the con¬ cept of this content of political power. Andrew Murray (who tried to develop a philosophy for apartheid) argued for instance that South Africa was a “plural” society, and that African ethnic groups had or should have their measure of autonomy such as envisaged by segrega¬ tionists, and further that their approach was more genuinely “liberal” (being in accordance with medieval doctrine) than the “atomistic” lib¬ eralism of J. S. Mill and other 19th century liberals. This of course is manifestly false. Africans in South Africa have no parity of bargaining power with whites, and cannot defend their par-

46

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

ticular interests against the white supremacists. The same observation applies to the relationship between colonial governments and indige¬ nous populations in all colonies. In brief, the colonial society is the opposite of a “plural” society as contemplated by the pluralists. The pluralists we are criticizing here do not examine the dynamic inter-relations between the pluralities, and, therefore, they miss the point of how in fact these societies function in terms both of power and of economics in a given neo-colonialist society. By breaking the society into a series of mutually exclusive pluralities, except for the uni¬ fying power of the state, they separate the state in essence from the main class structure of society, and, therefore, are in danger of trivial¬ izing some of the very important questions which they have raised. Not having worked out the socio-economic structure of what they call plural societies, the conflicts which result are magically reduced to problems of ethnic psychology. The categories used to analyze society are important for they arise either from attempts to change the world or from attempts to resist that change, the pluralist vogue soon after Africa’s emancipation from the brutalities of colonialism becomes even more dangerous. FurnivalPs notion of pluralism, unsatisfactory though it is, may be useful as an indicator of mechanical solidarity obtaining in colonies of exploitation. Furnivall’s analysis of colonial structure in tropical countries and the conditions which must be met before independence can be grant¬ ed is important in understanding the post-independence colonial con¬ flicts in certain colonial situations, e.g. those Maunier calls colonies of “exploitation.” In Africa this would apply to colonies where there were no settlers. The structural cleavages based on racial, ethnic and cultural dif¬ ferences are built into such colonial situations just as much as neo¬ colonialism as a system of economic, political and ideological controls is woven into the colonial situation at independence. There is no bet¬ ter evidence for this than the instructions given by Sir Arthur Benson, the Governor of Northern Rhodesia. On 8 November 1955, the Governor sent the following instructions to the Executive Council of Northern Rhodesia on “The Development of an African Country Market Town in the Northern Province” (quoted in Wina, A., 1968). The instructions may be looked upon as a ‘sociological’ interpretation for the future of internal tribal trends. The Governor wrote:

47

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Above all other people in this country (with the exception of the Melozi), the ba Bemba are our problem children....They have an intense national or tribal consciousness. They provide a few of the very best, they also provide a big majority of our very worst. In other words they are not neutral or nondescript people, they can either be a tremendous cause of trouble in the territory or a valuable asset. This particular national character¬ istic is evidenced in this desire for a Bemba national school; in the dislike which other tribes have for them; and in, neverthe¬ less, the fact that other tribes follow them (take them out of Congress and take them out of the African Mine Workers Union and both organizations are dead) make the ba Bemba the key to the future of Northern Rhodesia. For some years to come anyway, the Malozi will have their eyes firmly fixed on Barotseland whilst the ba Bemba and others, having nothing at the moment on which to concentrate in their own hands, rivet their attention on the railway line area. We can either take this national characteristic of theirs, this trib¬ al urge, and guide it and build it into something useful for the country, or we can, as we have in the past, content ourselves with looking askance at it, and permitting it to play the devil politically, economically and socially with our future. Thus the ba Bemba were to be manipulated to destroy both the nation¬ alist and the labour movement for the sake of ensuring the continued rule of the white settler minority. This confirms Furnivall’s assertion (1948, p. 543) about the guar¬ anteed failure of Western institutions in the tropics, which failure, he says, must be ascribed chiefly to the environment: ...the plural society of tropical economy in which the political institutions of Western homogenous society are unworkable. In such an environment Western political institutions aggra¬ vate the internal tension in a society divided against itself, and are inconsistent with self-government; like welfare measures, they are perverted into an instrument of economic progress. The attempt to adapt tropical society to Western principles and insti¬ tutions instead of adapting Western principles to tropical societies has not materialized out of nowhere, but is the successor of classical colo48

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

nialism. That is why political independence was reduced to a mere for¬ mality. In looking at an array of independent African states one can distinguish between “false” and “true” decolonization. It has been common to speak of the winning of formal political independence by a former colonial territory as “a step” towards genuine liberation. This was clearly the case in countries where independence meant the trans¬ fer of political power from a colonial bureaucracy to a progressive African government—as in Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania and Zambia. It was clear in territories like Lesotho, Malawi, Botswana or in most of the French-speaking African states—where independence meant the substitution of African bureaucrats for the domination of European bureaucrats. Granted that this too must be regarded as in some sense “a step” it certainly is a relatively small one.10 It helped to keep the liberated countries within the capitalist sys¬ tem and to prevent them from putting through any major social and economic changes. Here then in brief was an aspect of the background of tropical African societies which would throw some light on the post¬ independence conflicts that have caused cynicism and consternation about African abilities to govern themselves.

IV This background influences class formation and complicates the class struggle. The progress of African independence is increasingly reveal¬ ing the dual position and role of the petty bourgeoisie in Africa’s eman¬ cipation in conditions of “pluralism.” The petty bourgeoisie in Africa is weak and develops as clients of foreign monopolies—hence the antag¬ onism between the proprietary and proletarian trends within it—after independence the members of this class vacillate between counter-rev¬ olutionary and revolutionary action. When fighting the colonialists the members of this “class” used revolutionary nationalism and manipu¬ lated the genuine grievances of the exploited urban proletariat and rural masses to achieve political independence. Once in office, they use their political power to “get ahead” and “get rich” as managers and agents of neo-colonial monopolies. The rest of the people can eke out an almost proletarian existence in areas which are not profitable for the monopolies to bother with. These trends were nowhere better demon¬ strated than in Nigeria prior to the two coups d’etat. Nigeria, as already stated, perhaps offers the most striking exam¬ ple of a “plural” society in the Furnivall sense and of the nature and workings of neo colonialism. 49

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

In a plural society the sections are not segregated; the mem¬ bers of the several units are intermingled and meet as individ¬ uals; the union is not voluntary but is imposed by the colonial power and by the force of economic circumstances, and the union cannot be dissolved without the whole society relapsing into anarchy (1948, p. 307). The federal system of government imposed as a price for political inde¬ pendence in Nigeria was to enable the major nationalist parties in that country to promote both the selfish and patriotic ends of the Nigerian bourgeoisie. The functioning of the Westminster Parliamentary sys¬ tem until two years ago did not solve any problem because it had no roots among the people. The federal structure provided external and neo-colonialist interests with strategic positions to manipulate the Nigerian society to its own advantages. Whilst the federal system lubri¬ cated the machinery of production, it multiplied the complexity of social life, and the lubricant turned out in the end to be nitroglycer¬ ine. (Cf. Furnivall, 1948, p. 542.) The Federal system enabled each party to secure its power in a region of the country by an appeal to ethnic sensibilities among other things. Those privileged class interests entrenched in the regions were opposed to any fundamental transformation of the regional power system. Time and again they (the bourgeoisie) have been willing to perpetrate electoral frauds at the risk of violence and secession in order to prevent radical political change. Tribalism has been their most trustworthy weapon against change (Sklar, 1967, p. 6). Time magazine, surveying the Nigerian scene, could not contain itself about the progress there...Along with pride in status and problems of self-government, independence for the thirty-one nations of black Africa the emergence of the black business man....Nowhere is the new African business man doing better than in Nigeria...with a population of 55 million—and an econ¬ omy that grows 4% each year, the number of Nigerian mil¬ lionaires is growing almost as fast as the country itself.11 The multiplying millionaire class, which Time magazine speaks so glow¬ ingly about, was developing in a country in which in some sections 50

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

extremely powerful feudal relationships still exist, while monopolies of more developed countries retained their grip on this enormous area abounding in raw materials and markets. Furthermore, according to a report on The Development of African Private Enterprise made in 1964 for the U.S. National Planning Association by T. Geiger and W. Armstrong, the Nigerian Ministry of Commerce and Industry has esti¬ mated that there were roughly 200,000 Nigerian entrepreneurs, the great majority of whom were partially or wholly engaged in small retail¬ ing activities. “Their incomes are mostly low!” A 1959 report of the Nigerian Government indicates that about 85 per cent of the African traders in Lagos earned less than $420 a year—and this is “probably higher than in most other parts of the country.” According to this report a census in Ghana showed “over 100,000 enterprises of all sizes, of which 1,200 employ more than 10 people.” It adds that most of these, as in Nigeria, are small retailers with low incomes. Geiger and Armstrong conclude: “that modern forms of indigenous private eco¬ nomic activity are only beginning to develop in countries of tropical Africa, except for Nigeria and Ghana.” The collapse of Nigeria, which until recently was regarded as Africa’s only show piece of the Western success in colonization, has many implications and confirms Furnivall’s thesis that economic forces create and maintain a plural society. He wrote: Since colonial relations are predominantly economic, colonial practice is conditioned by economic laws...(and) the working ofthe laws has certain features common to all dependencies...a dependency is kept alive, as it were, by artificial respiration, by pressure exercised mechanically from outside (1948, p. 8). Because the various sections meet only in the market place Nigerian society was characterized by the feebleness of social will which even¬ tually led to dissension. Furnivall argues that the plural society arises where economic forces are not tempered by social and moral consid¬ erations; instead they determine social order. What Furnivall says is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of Chief Kola Balogun (Davidson, 1967, p. 209). He was lately in trouble with the critics for explaining how a capitalist solution for Nigeria must really work if it were to have any prospect of success. The occasion was his having rented his own house to the national shipping line, of which he is 51

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Chairman, at what was thought to be a very handsome price. Newspapers like the Lagos Daily Times took powerful excep¬ tion to this. They argued that a man in Chief Balogun’s posi¬ tion had no right to make money in this way. But the chief was not disturbed. He replied to his critics with an argument from the ethics of early industrial Britain. What he wanted to know was how any enterprising man could gather capital unless he could make money in every way available? When the Federal Republic of Nigeria achieved “nationhood” it did nothing to repair the ill-effects of economic forces in the past, nor did it attempt to bring its economy under Nigerian control so as to pre¬ vent further damage. Chief Balogun’s solution of development along capitalist lines was impossible under the present international and inter¬ national conditions of Nigeria and other ex-colonies. Internally domes¬ tic capital was weak and was largely an instrument or affiliate of foreign capital. The tragedy of the African burgeoning capitalist class of Chief Kola Balogun’s type is not that it is immature, but that it is an anachro¬ nism. The period of its birth coincides with a period in history when capitalism is represented by world-wide monopolies. Consequently it is paying the price of being the last to emerge: The trouble for these elites is an old one. You cannot have cap¬ italism without capitalists or build a capitalist system without a capitalist class. And you cannot build a capitalist class with¬ out directing the wealth of the many into the pockets of the few in ways that are at first very crude and therefore very obvi¬ ous. What you require, in short, is a period of primitive accu¬ mulation (Davidson, 1967, p. 209). The second tragedy therefore of the African bourgeoisie, as already pointed out, is that it depends upon outside approval, sponsorship, guidance and aid. When formal political independence was granted the African economies were in fact subsidiaries to those of the metropoli¬ tan countries. Again, Nigeria offers a classic example. It was there that models for United States co-operation with African countries were worked out. One theorist of this co-operation, Robert Flemming, worked in Nigeria under the Rockefeller Fund programme. He is a missionary for the idea of private enterprise. For two years he has been conducting feasibility studies of business. Thus his efforts have been almost entirely devoted to identi52

Pluralism and Conflict Situations in Africa: A New Look

fying those business enterprises that would appear profitable in Nigeria and that could be set up by combining local financ¬ ing with help from abroad. He stands for integrated owner¬ ship and direction with the directing power in the hands of the Nigerians (Tilman and Cole, 1962, p. 245).

V From the above it will be obvious that the roots of the modern con¬ flicts in tropical Africa reach very deep, but the present outbreak of conflict cannot be attributed to primitive identities like tribalism, but should be traced to the socio-economic structure inherited from long periods of colonial rule and exploitation. What has taken place in Africa, and Nigeria in particular, is what Marx (1964, p. 492) calls “a politi¬ cal revolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing.” Marx then asks and answers what I consider to be a crucial question for Africa: What is the basis of a partial, merely political revolution? Simply this; a fraction of civil society emancipates itself and achieves a dominant position, a certain class undertakes from its particu¬ lar situation a general emancipation of society. This class eman¬ cipates society as a whole, but only on condition that the whole of society is in the same situation as this class, for example it possesses or can acquire money or culture. In fact the whole premise of negotiated independence was this. Hence the great suspicion that the former metropolitan countries show to individuals like Nkrumah, who “betray the colonial interests.” From our review of Furnivall’s notion of plural society we have seen what kind of pillars the colonial house stood upon. After inde¬ pendence, when its pomp and ceremony are over and the masses of the population have danced their ankles sore and shouted their voices hoarse, they revert back to the old stupor. They do not feel any great involvement in the new nation because their position has not changed. The elan that was used against the colonial power either dissipates or is redirected by those excluded from sharing the national loot into frat¬ ricidal struggles which find expression along tribal lines. The content of post-independence tribalism seems actually more related to the shar¬ ing of a pie which is divided between local and external interests. In these circumstances tribalism is not an abstract argument about hon¬ our. The conditions of a plural society produce among the various sec-

53

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

tions an aggressiveness which is mostly turned inward or turned upon the local community; turned against “alien” tribes or results in a pro¬ found yearning for salvation which finds expression in magic or reli¬ gious cults. The sporadic outbreaks of violence against “other” tribes expresses some of the cleavages in a colonial society, but also they are indicative of the extent of mass discontent which is rooted in condi¬ tions of perceived hardships rather than in a tribal difference per se. Paul Mercier (in van den Berghe, 1965, p. 492) has observed that: The paramount fact is that modern differentiation arises from the degree of economic and educational development; the nature of religious transformation etc., cumulative with tradi¬ tional differentiations. The stress on the latter serves as a means, expressing among other things, the grievances concerning disequilibria and inequalities. From this we can extrapolate that the real conflicts within the tropical African societies are going to arise more and more over class interest on the one hand and over competition for power on the other. In the class struggle, trade union tactics will be used even though at first it will not be the consequence of the workers’ own active unions, but because of the nature of the labourer-employer relations. An inchoate mass of tribesmen initially come together on the basis of ethnic origin; but the maintenance of wages—this common interest which they have against the employers—is over-riding and brings this inchoate mass together again in the same idea of resistance and combination. In the struggle the tribal language will be used, but even while tribalism may be evoked and even perceived as a major cleavage, it may be an expres¬ sion of quite different bases of conflict in these societies. Tribalism here may become a mask for class privileges. “There will be a non-traditional wolf under the tribal sheep-skin” (Sklar, 1967, p. 6).

54

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa

This assumption that of all the hues of God, whiteness is inher¬ ently and obviously better than brownness or tanness leads to curious acts... —W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn The others can contribute to the person’s self-fulfillment, or they can be a potent factor in his losing himself (alienation) even to the point of madness. —R. D. Laing, The Self and Others

I Colonialism imposed the urban order on the conquered indigenous societies of southern Africa, for example, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Rhodesia, Kenya, and South Africa. This order involved patterns of social organization, economy, administration, religion, and culture. A study of the ways in which the people colonized have reacted should include the nature of these patterns. After the wars of conquest, min¬ erals were discovered in southern Africa. To extract them, it became necessary to carry out a crash programme in producing among the African peasantry an unskilled labour force to work the mines and to complement the imported white skilled labour. In the “new” society that was thus created, white domination was not only economic but political and cultural as well. Any theory of change in the patterns of behaviour of the indigenous population must take into account this total situation. There is a considerable body of literature dealing with problems of what is called “acculturation” and social change. The social anthro¬ pologists most engaged with this phenomenon in Zambia have been

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Wilson (1942), Mitchell (1956, 1960), and Epstein (1960, 1961; Epstein and Mitchell 1959). Many others have written about the same process in Africa (Banton 1961; Heilman 1948; Sofer and Sofer 1955; McCullough 1956; Little 1955; 1965; Xydias 1956; Fraenkel 1964; Mayer 1962). These scholars have been mainly occupied with the study of the symbols of “acculturation,” another word for what some called “Europeanization” and/or “Westernization.” The indices they have found most indicative of both the process of acculturation and the for¬ mation of new status groups in the urban situation are “European” clothes, occupations, education, and income. The importance of “European” clothes among urban Africans has received greatest emphasis. In the choice of these indices, these anthropologists, instead of treating the colonial system as an essential dimension of the new social structure, have tended to take it for granted, or to assume that its gen¬ eral characteristics are known. Attention has been focused on the behaviour and value systems of the Africans in towns — the objects of investigation — as though they exercised free choice. Consequently their attitudes and actions have been distorted; some features have been given exaggerated emphasis, while others, less noticeable but in the long run more enduring, have tended to be overlooked. A total historical analysis of social change would, as a matter of course, take into account the following stages in “acculturation”: 1. An initial period of contact between the invading whites and Africans: African resistance to white rule of formerly independent chiefdoms, and white use of physical force to overcome African resistance. 2. A period of “acquiescence”: some Africans, alienated from their traditional society, are impelled to acquire the techniques and social forms of the dominant group, as shown by adopting its religion, going to school, and assimilating value patterns and cultural traits func¬ tional in the new order. 3. A period of resistance in a new way: Africans develop a “national” consciousness that transcends “tribal” divisions and con¬ front the colonial power with the demands of national liberation. These stages of resistance overlap and take different forms, but all must be considered in any survey of the totality of manifestations of social change at any one time. The sociologist will overlook significant developments and misinterpret the phenomena he observes if he does not relate his findings to the framework of the colonial system and to

56

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

the type of conflict that is dominant or latent in the society. This colo¬ nial order must be his ultimate frame of reference, within which he seeks his indices of change. In fact the history of the colonial situation, as opposed to its economics, its politics, its sociology, and its psychol¬ ogy, is in large measure a history of the variety of African responses to the new situation, a history of the ways Africans came to terms with a new set of forces, the ways they accommodated, resisted, or escaped. The history of the colonial situation is in large part the history of African resistance to white rule, of the African “politics of survival” which marked the height of the colonial era, of the African national¬ ists’ movement, which brought national self-determination (Legassick 1970:1). In the studies that are being critically reviewed here, there is no image of the colonial social structure. We are presented with a situa¬ tion in which there was a one-dimensional response — in which colo¬ nial values and psychology were accepted without question. The anthropologists implicitly believed not only in the inevitability, but also in the rightness of white conquest of the African. Hence, the colo¬ nization of the African personality that accompanied economic and political subjugation was assumed to be natural. The sociology of social stratification, it will be seen, was therefore complimentary to white images and very unfavourable to black images. Writes Mphahleie (1967:36-37): I have assimilated the education only the West had to offer me. I was brought up on European history and literature and reli¬ gion and made to identify with European heroes while African heroes were being discredited, except those that became Christians or signed away their country and freedom; while African gods were being smoked out. I later rejected Christianity. And yet I could not return to ancestral worship in any overt way. But this does not invalidate my ancestors for me. Deep down there inside my agnostic self, I feel a rever¬ ence for them. The historical reasons for discrediting what was African lie in the ide¬ ology of imperialism, enshrined in Social Darwinism, trusteeship, and the “Dual Mandate.” The trustee’s duty was to develop his “charges”; his success was determined by the extent of absorption or emulation of his culture by the subject people. The result was that studies of social

57

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

sion. In seeking to identify these elements, the anthropologists con¬ sidered only the subjective aspect of reality. The result was confusion and faulty attributions and imputations: confusion between the direct experience of the investigator and the experience of the colonized, between the nature of the colonized’s actions and the attributions the analysts made to these actions. The importance assigned to clothes1 is a subtle imposition of the values of the dominant strata, values mean¬ ingless to the colonized. The indices selected do not accurately repre¬ sent African reality in urban areas. Clothes, occupational ranking, and education as indices of prestige or social stratification correspond nei¬ ther to the primary reality2 of a society divided racially or into eco¬ nomically based classes, nor even to the secondary reality of limited individual mobility within the colonial system. The style of analysis used in these studies has acted, politically as well as sociologically, as a powerful mystification of the real social forces at work. It will be shown later in this paper that the possibility of political action by Africans to change the status quo has been denied implicitly by the way in which social change has been conceptualized. These studies are a bad exam¬ ple of what Mills (1961:54) calls abstracted empiricism: Insofar as studies of stratification have been done in the new style, no new conceptions have arisen. In fact, the key con¬ ceptions available from other styles of work have not been “translated”; usually, quite spongy “indices” of “socio-eco¬ nomic status” have served. The difficult problems of “class con¬ sciousness” and of “false consciousness,” of conceptions of status as against class, and Weber’s statistically challenging idea of “social class” have not been advanced by workers in this style. Moreover, and in many ways most grievously, the choice of smaller cities as “the sample area” for studies persists might¬ ily, despite the quite obvious fact that one cannot add up any aggregate of such studies to an adequate view of the national structure of class, status, and power. The studies that are being critically reviewed here do not even take a city as a unit of analysis. Their unit of analysis is the individual rather than the social formation of colonialism with its complex social rela¬ tions. It will be quite obvious that these studies tend to obscure the colonial, racial, and class structure of society and to play down the monopoly of power by the white colonists in relation to the Africans.

58

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

But as Kuper (1965:xi) points out with reference to South Africa: Class formation among Africans cannot be analyzed simply as an attribute or correlate of the occupational differences between them. It must be related to the overall structure of South African society, and to the transition of Africans from a tribal matrix to a system of racial domination. The classes emerge out of the tribal matrix and develop in the context of a racially structured society. Inevitably there is interaction between tribe, race, and class, each of which may provide a basis for association and loyalty. The studies in question are not concerned with how the colonial social order worked to limit every aspect of African life. Colonial sociology did not deal with the exploitative colonial relations of production and the nature of classes in such a society. It concentrated on prestige and status groups of individuals. It considered only their aspirations, divorcing itself from the daily miseries of discrimination which led to the struggle for national emancipation. Because these studies looked only at individuals, Africans were portrayed as aspiring to what were called “goals of a European character.” These studies obscured the fact that, if Africans “aspired to a European way of life, “ they were only expressing a desire to escape from the sad condition colonialism imposed on them Some of the British social anthropologists who have studied social change have failed to distinguish between the economic, political, and social-cultural plans of colonial reality. Toynbee (1934:53) writes: While the economic and political maps of the world have now been ‘Westernized’ almost out of recognition, the culture map remains today substantially what it was before Western society ever started on its career of economic and political conquest. On this culture plan, for those who have eyes to see, the lin¬ eaments of the four living non-Western civilizations are still clear. To permit a careful and detailed evaluation of the indices of social strat¬ ification, I shall examine their use in the writings of two social scien¬ tists in particular — Mitchell and Epstein. I do so because I have worked for three years in Zambia, the area in which they did most of their research, and have thus become quite familiar with their works. Nonetheless, my critique extends to many other studies that have used

59

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

similar indices and methods. My presentation will be schematic and probably over-simplified and, as such, may not do justice to the sub¬ tleties and complexities of the authors’ arguments. To the extent that such a schematic presentation serves to highlight the faults of the indices they used, however, I believe my method is justified. The ide¬ ological content of these indices is often buried under subtleties and qualifications, but even so it grates on the mind.

II In an article on the networks and urban social organization, Epstein (1961:31) gives us in extenso and without comment an account based on a num¬ ber of texts prepared for me by an African which records his movements around the town and the contacts he made with various people in the course of a number of days. From the accounts of this African, Epstein arrives at many often unwar¬ ranted conclusions. For example, he writes (1961:51): But, as in the case of kinship, tribalism involves more than a mere delimiting of the range of interaction. Membership of a tribe also imposes an obligation, vaguely defined though it may be, to give mutual aid and support. Amongst fellow tribesmen one is always at home, for all share certain common interest which set them apart or in opposition to other tribes amongst and with whom they live and work in towns. Epstein makes this further observation, based on the same African’s notes (1961:52, emphasis added): In the Ndola context some of the marks by which a man of prestige is known are indicated in Chanda’s account of his visit to his brother-in-law and his conversation with Francis. He had called on the former in order to see his sister, he said, but it is likely that he was more interested in hearing whether Martin brought him back a “fever coat” from Elizabethville.3 A num¬ ber of observers of the Northern Rhodesia scene have already remarked the importance which Africans attach to matters of dress.... Here, then, the prestige accrues to the African who dress¬ es smartly in the European fashion. In fact, Epstein goes still further to say (p. 52, emphasis added): 60

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

Again, Chanda himself acquires prestige because of his light complexion — “you look like a European ** — and because of his mode of dress and in other ways he comports himself like a gendeman. Mitchell (1956a: 15, emphasis added) gives us a description of William which corresponds closely to that of Chanda given by Epstein. 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 com¬ petition for the best dressed man in town. He would probably take a good deal more interest in being able to don the appro¬ priate 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 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 mid¬ dle 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 bicy¬ cle, 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....5 William reached middle primary school successfully and by local standards is reasonably well educated. With his wife he is a regular churchgoer.... Milk, bread, jam and butter, and many other types of European foodstuffs appear regularly in his diet and he drinks European beer in preference to African beer. Unlike most of his fellows he eats his meals with a knife and fork instead of with his fingers in the traditional way.... We have here, then, the picture of a typical urbanized or “detribalized” African — prosperous and living a civilized life, settled in town and never likely to leave it.

61

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

Later (p.18) Mitchell tells us that William’s interest in dress and in displaying the accoutrements of Western civilization betrays his involvement in a system ot prestige which can only be understood in terms ot the relative positions of Europeans and Africans in this society. His wear¬ ing of the white coat and the case cards can only be under¬ stood in terms of the very high prestige that Western medicine has amongst the African population. In a footnote (p.16) Mitchell tells us that William has tea sent down to his room at ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. When it arrives he stops his consultation and takes time off to have a cup of tea. It was explained to me that it is only someone with the prestige of a European doctor who can stop to drink tea while his patients are waiting outside to see him! Lest I be accused of misconstruing harmless statement as incriminat¬ ing evidence, let me look at another statement by Mitchell (1956a, emphasis added): There are thus several features of the Kalela...but the most sig¬ nificant feature...is that kalela is essentially a tribal dance. Kalela and its song emphasize the Unity of Bisa against all other tribes on the Copperbelt. We might well expect, in a tribal dance of this sort, that tribal insignia be worn...But the kalela dancers are attired in the smartest of European wear and there is noway of telling a Bemba or Anshi kalela team from Bisa one...Nor do songs recount the exploits of Bisa culture heroes.... Instead, the songs concern familiar Copperbelt situations, the charac¬ ters are familiar Copperbelt characters, and the songs are set in sections of the locations. The language of the songs is Copperbelt Bemba, and English and Kitchen-Kaffir words and phrases abound. The songs are composed in towns for the amusement of people in towns, and they deal with events and commonplaces with which these people are familiar. In other words, we are presented with an apparent para¬ dox. The dance is clearly a tribal dance in w'hich tribal differ¬ ences are emphasized but the language and the idiom of the

62

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

songs and the dress of the dancers are drawn from an urban existence which tend to submerge tribal difference. Mitchell then tells us (pp. 13-14, emphasis added): The Europeans are in a position of social superiority and the Africans aspire to the civilization which is the particular char¬ acteristic and perquisite of the socially superior group. The civ¬ ilized way of life thus provides a scale along which the prestige of Africans in urban areas... may be measured. At the top of the scare are the lower professional and white collar workers and successful traders, who are meticulously dressed, have European furniture in their houses, speak English to one another, read local newspapers printed for the European public, eat European-type foods, prefer Western to traditional music, choose bottled beer in preference to traditionally brewed beer.... The African use of the European way-of-life as a stan¬ dard against which they can measure prestige may thus be seen as a type of reference group behavior. One can analyze these conclusions at several levels. If Africans were free agents, as a sociological analysis of African reality in towns these conclusions would be obviously naive, superficial, and of no real sig¬ nificance. But since Africans were a colonized people these studies show that the conquest of the black man was not a momentary act of vio¬ lence that stunned his ancestors alone and then ended. The African conquest was only the beginning of an endless process in which the initial act of conquest was buttressed and institutionalized in socio¬ logical writings. In these writings the supremacy of white values is pre¬ sented with an aggressiveness which could only be satisfied finally when the culture of the colonized was reduced to nothing and when the col¬ onized himself loudly admitted the supremacy of the white man and his values. Hence the superlatives used to describe Chanda and William. George Grey, one-time Governor of the Cape, was to express the pur¬ pose of “civilizing” Africans in these terms (Mackinnon 1887:242): Gradually to make them part of ourselves with a common faith and common interests; useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue — in short a source of strength and wealth to the colony, such as Providence designed them to be.

63

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Or, these conclusions could be an expression of what Toynbee calls “egocentric illusions.” This is sociological analysis that serves ideo¬ logical distortions by covering up problems of alienation. It is, after all, true, as Ossowski (1963:90) has said, that whenever there is a tendency to efface the distinctness of social inequality — whether this is motivated by a desire to deaden the sensitiveness of the oppressed classes or to appease the con¬ science of the privileged and reconcile the existing state of affairs to tea social ideology they profess — we find in the image of the social structure an inclination to give priority to mutu¬ al dependence in inter-class relationship. To look at William and Chanda outside the colonial context and to attribute to them the motives which Mitchell and Epstein have ascribed is to indulge in sociological analysis that revives the image of Crusoe and Friday. In the analysis quoted above William and Chanda emerge as bastardized conformists, as passive accomplices of their own enslave¬ ment, for they have been reduced to stereotypes in order to rationalize the alienated condition of the Africans who lived in towns under most cruel conditions. Surely it must be quite obvious to anyone that an African living and working in a town could not carry out some of his traditional practices. In adopting what Louis Wirth calls “urbanism as a way of life” he was not therefore being a bad imitation of anyone. If he drank bottled beer (let us not forget that he was not allowed to brew his own), listened to recorded music, sported furniture in his house, he merely took his place in the scheme of things as they were. Nevertheless, an exploitative society always creates its own “Fridays” — very often unconsciously — by using for the exploited group those stock images which justify its emotional and economic needs. Sociological characters like William and Chanda were strictly con¬ fined within the limits of their colonial urban experience. Neither they nor the sociologist could recognize any pre-existing culture which would have enabled them to synthesize their new experiences. Whatever else Chanda and William were, as stereotypes of the so-called Westernized African — as social instrumentalities — they were key fig¬ ures in a magical rite by which the exploiting colonials sought to resolve the dilemma arising from the condition of the African in colonial towns. The description of Chanda and William quite evidently are not “scientific,” but are vindications of the pre-eminence of what is called “Western civilization.” In short, William and Chanda are presented to 64

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

us behind a smoked glass in order that the gratifying spectacle of a “Westernized” surface may not be disturbed by any conception of the native fires which blaze underneath (Toynbee 1934:53). The descrip¬ tions are doubtless correct at the superficial level, but in the choice of superlatives used to describe, for example,’’Western clothes,” an ide¬ ology has been impressed upon the cultural complexity. Clothes and light complexion are made to mean what Mitchell and Epstein say they mean. Mitchell and Epstein often substitute assertion for demonstration as the methodology of social science. They adopt a technique of repeat¬ ed assertion for certain of their opinions, notably their assertion for certain of their opinions, notably their insistence that the whites are a reference group and that the “European way of life” or Western civi¬ lization sets the goal to which Africans aspire. The task of persuasion on this matter is indeed onerous, and so the repetition reaches the point of monotony. Never did Marx (quoted in Aptheker 1955:116) speak more truly than when he said the greater the development of antagonism between the grow¬ ing forces of production and the extant social order, the more does the ideology of the ruling class become permeated with hypocrisy...the more does the language used by the dominant class become sublime and virtuous. These social scientists have, it would seem, an unconscious ideologi¬ cal and psychological disposition to vindicate the cultural supremacy of whites over Africans. The Africans they describe as seeking Europeanization are men who, though politically enslaved and eco¬ nomically exploited, were nevertheless successfully creating a new cul¬ tural synthesis to correspond to the new situation and to express more accurately their ego ideals. To conceptualize this new reality the way Mitchell and Epstein have done, however, confirms Fanon’s (1967;33, 35) observation that the unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immedi¬ ately encountered is the rebound of egocentric sociocentric definitions. There is first affirmed the existence of human groups having no culture, then of a hierarchy of cultures; and finally the concept of cultural relativity. We have here the whole range from overall negation to singular and specific recogni65

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tion.... The enterprise ofdeculturation turns out to be the neg¬ ative of a more gigantic work of economic and even biologi¬ cal enslavement. The doctrine of cultural hierarchy is thus but one aspect of a systematized hierarchization implacably pur¬ sued.... Vulgur racism in its biological form corresponds to the period of crude exploitation of man’s arms and legs. The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the cam¬ ouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism. This, of course, does not deny that wherever white settlement was established, African life was changed, though not destroyed. The ini¬ tiation of the African into the industrial culture is one of the most important social processes taking place in Africa today. Purely naive and uncritical social analysis will see either the “ruination” of the “noble savage” or the “vindication” of white cultural supremacy. But serious sociological analysis shows that when two cultures, differing in their technological development, meet, adjustments, often accompanied by violence, are inevitable. It also shows that the society that is cultural¬ ly and technologically weaker does not simply yield to the stronger. They yield to one another, each undergoing profound modification. A dominant culture is not untouched by those it dominates. I need not examine here the rest of the ideological superstructure based upon the colonial situation. Now that Africa is independent and the agony of foreign rule is abating, it is clear that the most important feature of the new towns of Africa is the growth of a new society in which African and “Western” culture are bound together in the closest co-depen¬ dence and co-recognition.6 Other errors in Mitchell’s and Epstein’s works are methodologi¬ cal. The informants, no matter how honest, interested, and intelligent, can never be relied upon to give the “true” picture of the situation. Kobben (1967:10), for instance, writes: What is obtained in such cases is not the society itself, but the model of this society as it exists in the mind of the informant. This model may, and often will, deviate greatly from reality, since such an informant is necessarily biased in all sorts of ways. He may, for instance, be polygynously married, a member of the upper class, and a landowner; all these factors influence his 66

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

view of the social situation. Even irrespective of this, the infor¬ mant will tend to represent the ideal as if it were reality, either because he is ashamed of departures from the ideal, or because he does not consider them worth mentioning. A second methodological issue is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It is one thing to talk about the structural significance of a “value” and another to speak of its psychological significance for the individual members of the society. In the former case we are concerned with an observer’s conceptualization of the elements of significance in the maintenance of the structural model of society. In the latter we are examining concrete psychological phenomena relating to discrete social sectors. To identify what is conceived to be structurally significant in a society with what is significant to the individual member is wrong. In short the cognitive map or equilibrium model of the anthropolo¬ gist or any other external observer need not be the same as that of indi¬ vidual members of society observed (Patterson 1966:154). Another objection is more fundamental. Photographic description of human reality always fails to show the transformation taking place in the reality described so minutely. It transfixes reality and in so doing devitalizes it. There has been in the social sciences an accumulation of minute details, for the most part unaccompanied by a search for pat¬ terns. One sees no forest, only trees; no whole, only fragmentary parts. Sociology has become blindly empirical and fruitlessly static (Fust 1950:74). It discusses only the present and forgets the deep-rooted effects of colonialism and its ideology of white supremacy. Writes Georg Lukacs (quoted in Sweezy 1962:5): The un- and anti-historical core of bourgeois thought appears in its most glaring form when we consider the problem of the present as an historical problem. One can better explain the behaviour of William and Chanda in the context of the exploitative colonial situation. Colonialism has violated these two African males as a senile old man, incapable of impregnat¬ ing with anything besides the diseases of senility, violates a healthy young woman. “Indeed,” writes Sartre (1968:38), colonization is not a mere matter of conquest...It is by its very nature an act of cultural genocide. Colonization cannot take place without systematically liquidating all the characteristics

67

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

of the characteristics of the native society — and simultane¬ ously refusing to integrate the natives with the mother coun¬ try and denying their access to its advantages. Colonization is, after all, an economic system; the colony sells its raw materials and agricultural products at a reduced price to the colonizing power. The latter, in return, sells its manufactured goods to the colony at world market prices. This curious system of trade is only possible if there is a colonial sub-proletariat which can be forced to work for starvation wages. For the subject people this inevitably means the extinction of their character, culture, customs sometimes even language. They live in their under¬ world of misery like dark phantoms ceaselessly reminded of their sub-humanity. In contrast, Mitchell (1956a:12) says: It might be argued that the dance provided an excellent medi¬ um for the expression of hostility towards a ruling group through satire and that, in fact, this was the main satisfaction in it for the participants and spectators. I have no evidence that this was indeed so. My Yao informant did not suggest it, and certainly in the kalela dance today there is no sign of any satire of European behavior. In this analysis we are presented with a situation in which the African had no consciousness of unnecessary deprivation. Had this been the con¬ dition of the people of Northern Rhodesia, the vision of independence might have been no more than a forlorn and idle dream. There might still have been a few mongrels, more concerned with their chains that with their fine clothes who wanted to fight for national independence, but they would have been few and the rest would have been a bulwark of the status quo. However, Powdermaker (1962:91) has written: Although the Africans knew their standard of living was improving and was decidedly higher than in rural and in other industrial areas, a deep bitterness underlay their complaints about wages. For the economic order of the Africans was not an entity of itself, but part of a biracial community in which Africans were well aware of the big disparity between their earn¬ ings and those of the European workers.

68

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

III One method employed by these anthropologists for determining social strata among Africans is that of having informants rank occupations in terms of social prestige. Mitchell and Epstein (1959:208 )7tells us that the rank order of occupations we have derived follows a pat¬ tern familiar to us from similar studies in European commu¬ nities. At the head of the list are “brain” workers, followed by the skilled workers and supervisors, while the unskilled manu¬ al workers are at the bottom. They further tell us (p. 209) that “in the studies in Western soci¬ eties there seems little doubt that occupation is a highly important index of social status.: They then state their own point of view (p. 211, emphasis added): ...the social grading of occupations among town Africans in Northern Rhodesia, as in other parts of Africa, is related to the degree to which the occupation calls for qualifications which would enable the incumbents to follow what they consider to be a “civilized” way of life. In other words, the social grading of occupations reflects the more generalize prestige system which manifests itself as the emulation of the way of life of the socially dominant Europeans. They conclude (p. 212, emphasis added): It appears, therefore, that in urban African communities in gen¬ eral the concept of‘Western Civilization’ or ‘European-way-oflife’ provides a scale along which African townsmen are able to measure prestige and so to ascribe social status to the many and diverse individuals with whom they are thrown into association. In other words, as a category, the Europeans, because of their dominant position, have served in Nadel’s sense as an elitfi for Africans in towns of Northern Rhodesia. Nadel, it will be recalled, subjected the concept of an elite to penetrating anal¬ ysis and has suggested that several characteristics distinguishing elites from other high prestige groups. If we apply these criteria to Europeans vis-a-vis Africans we find they are all satisfied.

69

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

They then discuss the notion of social class (p. 215), saying that it implies some degree of consciousness of kind, some feeling of common cause with others in the same position vis-a-vis those either below or above one in the prestige scale, and this degree of common cause must be sufficiently well developed to be able to mani¬ fest itself in corporate action in certain stress situations. Social classes, therefore, when they come into being, operate partic¬ ularly within a framework of political relationships within the community. Does this situation exist in Africa? Mitchell and Epstein continue (p. 215, emphasis added): But these events are not sufficient in themselves for us to posit the existence of a class structure in urban African communi¬ ties... It is possible that with the increasing differentiation of urban African populations on the basis of wealth, skills, edu¬ cation, standard of living, and so on, u class structure on the lines of the Western Model may well develop. But at the moment all that we can say about the situation in Northern Rhodesia is that, while there is a fairly clear-cut system of prestige based on the outward marks of Western civilization...this prestige scale does not yet provide a basis for the recruitment of cor¬ porately acting groups. In the colonial situation of forced subordination, to talk of the white oppressors as forming a prestige group to which Africans aspire pre¬ supposes not only freedom on the part of the subordinate group, but also consensus on the legitimacy of colonial social relations. Another nuance of the designation of superiority as prestige is voluntary homage to the superior person. In terms of political action, stratification by prestige implies a continuum of more or less clearly defined status posi¬ tions. These positions are determined by a variety of factors; and not simply by property ownership and monopoly of power, which is incom¬ patible with the formation of massive social classes and with the exis¬ tence of a fundamental conflict between the classes. The relations between status groups at different levels are relations of competition and emulation and not conflict (Bottomore 1964:26). In concluding that in Northern Rhodesia the prestige scale did not

70

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa

yet provide a basis for the recruitment of corporately acting groups, Mitchell and Epstein assume that no conflict existed between Africans and their white overloads; and this is historically incorrect. Clegg has written, for instance, that the Merle Davis investigation discovered that in the Ndola town-location of Northern Rhodesia 52 of the more edu¬ cationally and financially advanced Africans had formed a Native Welfare Organization, which met for discussion once a month. Smaller organizations also existed in Lusaka, Broken Hill, and in the Roan Antelope mine compound. According to this report three out of four leaders admitted that their organizations existed to safeguard the rights and interests of the Africans of Northern Rhodesia (Clegg 1960:77). The method of ranking occupations and then extrapolating from such conclusions the existence of class is patently subjectivistic. It is a method which gives a mere photographic description of the system of stratification without revealing its dynamics. It enables the respondents to describe the criteria by which they evaluate their own and other peo¬ ple’s positions within a hierarchy of social prestige; it does not deter¬ mine the objective basis of their motives and intentions. The question, politically and sociologically most interesting, of whether Africans con¬ sidered just or necessary the system of stratification in which the whites enjoyed all the fruits of their labour, and whether they accepted or tried to change it, is not investigated. Although Mitchell and Epstein are aware that in Western Europe classes make possible corporate action, they have ignored this phenomenon in the Africans of Northern Rhodesia. They have illegitimately assumed that since Europeans were an elite and reference group, Africans were more interested in emu¬ lating them than in organizing to change the status quo. This may have been true at an individual level, but it does not reflect the actual issues of disagreement. The fact that Zambia is independent today shows how irrelevant and superficial their analysis was.

IV What, then, are the indices of social change? In my opinion, they vary according to time and place and to particular environments. In any colonial country the effects of colonial relations are pervasive, so that even the people of traditionally rural areas, whose supposed non-mar¬ ket subsistence economy is often said to isolate its inhabitants from towns and mines of colonial exploitation, find themselves fully inte¬ grated into the same colonial structure, albeit as super-exploited vic¬ tims. Thus the villager, the farm worker, the miner, and the clerk 71

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

represent not only different strata, but also different stages in a con¬ tinuum. It is legitimate for the sociologist to concentrate on one or another stratum or type of community, but he should never lose sight of the true scale or of the uneven nature of development. The peasant who continued to practice subsistence farming in a remote area what also liable to pay tax, to be visited by the district offi¬ cer in his capacity of administrator and judiciary, or to experience a restriction on his own culture such as that imposed by “witchcraft” ordinances, the suppression of the old military organization, and the subordination of his chief. Some Africans were more directly involved in the colonial order, as were those who worked for a settler or in the mines, who were recruited to the towns, or who received formal edu¬ cation or joined a Christian church. Living in an urban setting, for instance, an African was unavoid¬ ably involved in a money economy. He had to buy his clothing, food, furniture, utensils; and the goods that he was offered in the shops come from the factories that catered to an industrialized society. The acqui¬ sition of “European” goods was not, therefore, in any sense “imita¬ tive” or indicative of status, but a necessary consequence of being absorbed in a milieu dominated by factory-made goods. A similar com¬ pulsion dictated the acquisition of cultural values, such as Christianity. To obtain a school education, Africans were obliged to embrace Christianity, since education was in the hands of missionaries. The adoption of Christianity had many consequences, such as the accep¬ tance of monogamous marriage, the wearing of European-style cloth¬ ing, and the abandonment of characteristic traditional pursuits such as beer-drinking, circumcision schools, and traditional forms of worship. Why then, the question might be legitimately asked, did Africans use their meager earnings to invest in clothing and “European” fur¬ nishings? I think it is true that Africans did attach some importance to clothing, furniture, food, education, and occupation — but not as mere “indices” of status. To dismiss the drives behind these things as mere status-seeking is a mark of condescension, of the arrogance typical of middle-class social scientists who, having been accustomed to “good standards” since infancy, profess to see in working-class ambitions a conscious imitation of upper-class attributes. In reality, of course, edu¬ cation and occupation, as well as a taste for conventional clothing and food, are instrumental in the struggle for power. The African cannot dispel the feeling of inferiority engendered by the system until he is

72

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

able to meet and deal with the “superior” classes on their own terms as regards education in the broadest sense — and that includes styles of dress and diet. I he social tendencies of a people, therefore, always arise from actu¬ al needs within the people, and not through mere imitation of foreign models. It is possible, certainly, to learn from other countries or other times; but people take from these sources only what they can use, what corresponds to a need. Naturally one does not go to the trouble of inventing a new item when an existing one is handy. The fact that a new item comes from abroad does not answer the question of why it finds use; that can only be explained by actual needs of the people themselves (Kaustky 1953:265). T he role of modern industrial development in the social and spir¬ itual crisis of the colonies was indeed great. The “acculturation” which took place while Africans were under colonial rule was much more than aspiring to “goals of a European character.” Van den Berghe (1964:64) has said: ‘Detribalization’ is, thus, not simply the product of selective borrowing, with or without reinterpretation, from Western cul¬ ture. It is also a process of cultural dislocation and disorgani¬ zation initiated by the impact of external forces (such as industrialization and political subjection), and a process of readaptation of the traditional institutions to the new condi¬ tions. Much of what is sometimes interpreted as culture bor¬ rowing is in fact the result of internal readaptation to change. For example the increasing predominance of nuclear as opposed to extended families among urban Africans is not so much an ‘imitation’ of the European type of family as an adap¬ tation imposed by the urban conditions, restrictions on inter¬ nal migration, etc. Similarly, the donning of “Fluropean” clothes can be attributed to a variety of pressures. One of these was compulsion, the result of gov¬ ernmental decree — at least in South Africa, where Africans wearing their traditional garments ran the risk of being prosecuted as “vagrants” or for “public indecency.” Secondly, as already indicated, conversion to Christianity inevitably meant a change in clothing habits. Thirdly, I think it can be argued that the clothing had a utilitarian purpose, at least in some situations. A miner could not work efficiently or in safe-

73

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ty if he did not wear protective clothing: boots, trotisers, and a hel¬ met. Similarly, it is difficult to envisage a clerk in an office wearing only a loin-cloth. Finally, there is the element of status which Africans, like other people, associate with clothing. To single out this feature in iso¬ lation from other motives and drives is a great distortion of the facts.

V For all their insights, Mitchell’s and Epstein’s detailed portraits of urban Africans seem bland and pointless now. Their influence has been greater than their intellectual substance because they assumed an ideal model of black/white relationships in which inequality existed but was not invidious. One may ask whether on the empirical level colonial soci¬ ology may not have had the advantage of intellectual rigor. By being apolitical, however, colonial sociology only expressed, more or less lucidly, the historical dead end into which the colonial system — which would be tantamount to questioning the validity of their own position — so they contented themselves with registering what existed. Still, even what they registered was suspect. Describing the world is a form of interpretation which implicitly raises the problem of criticizing it, and a critique may lead to the possibility of transforming the world. Colonial sociology, therefore, took refuge in the intellectual security of minutely detailed descriptions. It was technology, brought by colonialism, which promised the African release from the brutalizing effects of colonial exploitation. Men cannot unmake history; thus it was not a question of imitating or aspiring to “European culture,” but a matter of using industrial¬ ization, modern medicine, and modern science in general to work in the interest of mankind rather than against it. Disruption of traditional cultures by modern industry makes possible a modulation of people’s way of life, allowing a more creative use of their energies. Each spe¬ cific change of life described by Mitchell and Epstein can therefore be interpreted as a response to industrialization. Such interpretation, how¬ ever, necessitates keeping in mind the inclusive status reordering through which industrialization is realized in any particular commu¬ nity. Efforts at “imitating” what is ethnocentrically called a “European way of life” arise from the destruction of a previous way of life and the associational ties which that way provided (Stein 1960:53). It is quite obvious from what has been said above that the indices selected to study prestige groups among Africans became “master sym¬ bols of legitimation” (in Mill’s terms) of the colonial status quo. Such 74

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa

symbols do not form an autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify the arrangement of power and the positions of individuals within this arrangement. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power as it exists in present society (Mills 1961:37). The transformations which have been taking place in Africa since the advent of colonialism are historical. Such processes must therefore be conceived in historical terms (Mills 1961:15): Many of the conceptions most commonly used in social science have to do with the historical transition from the rural com¬ munity of feudal times to the urban society of the modern age; Maine’s ‘status’ and ‘contract,’ Tonnies’ ‘community’ and ‘soci¬ ety,’ Weber’s ‘status’ and ‘class,’ St. Simon’s ‘three stages,’ Copley’s ‘primary and secondary groups,’ Durkheim’s ‘mechan¬ ical’ and ‘organic,’ Redfield’s ‘folk’ and ‘urban,’ Barker’s ‘sacred’ and ‘secular,’ Lasswell’s ‘bargaining society’ and ‘garrison state’ — these, no matter how generalized in use, are all historically rooted conceptions. Even those who believe they do not work historically generally reveal by their use of such terms some notion of historical trends and even sense of period. If we accept the role of industrialization even when accompanied by colonial subjection, we can then begin to ask the ideological meaning of the studies we have been examining (Lewis 1968:329): Ideological issues are sometimes regarded as of secondary or no importance — a mere exercise of nimble wits. But Marx rightly said that the ruling ideas of any period were those of its ruling class, and these are by no means only political or eco¬ nomic ideas, but legal, moral, scientific, and literary notions. Nor do they only reflect their origin.... The significance of reac¬ tionary ideologies lies in the fact that ‘they hamper the devel¬ opment and progress of society.’ They react upon society to play an immensely important role in deflecting men’s thoughts from real issues, falsifying their understanding of events, paralysing their wills, and spreading despair regarding the nature of man. The last point needs to be emphasized, not merely for its evident importance at this stage of Africa’s development, but because these

75

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

studies have laid a basis for African sociology. It is my purpose to expose them as unwittingly apologetic of colonial rule, and this necessitates a critical attitude towards the assumptions behind the analysis. We of course cannot ignore social stratification as reflected in consumption patterns, occupation and income or social prestige as experienced by individuals, but these features are subsidiary to social analysis which takes into account the objective situation that Africans were oppressed by colonialism and that their values were distorted by such a system. It does not carry one very far to be told about “African aspirations to a European way of life” unless the political implications of such aspi¬ rations are also spelled out. The development of classes does not lead to a static situation, but creates a dynamism which facilitates social change where “change” refers not to internal modifications within a given social system but to the total (“historical”) transformation of the whole society. For the purpose of such a theory (which could dispense with photographic accuracy in depicting social trivia), the two-class model (with the whites subsumed under the general category of the oppress¬ ing group rather than a reference group) would be adequate (Lichtheim 1968:61). Any change in the lives of the colonized which does not concern itself with the alienative aspect of domination, and which does not con¬ cern itself with the alternatives which haunt the established order as subversive tendencies, is “therapy” for the acceptance of alien rule. The idea of “Europeanization” as entailing a process of “assimilation through aspirations” to European values and norms contains presup¬ positions indicative of the nature of one group’s domination over another. According to Anderson (1965:30), hegemony was defined by Gramsci as the dominance of one social bloc over another, not simply by means of force or wealth, but by a social authority whose ultimate sanction and expression is a profound cultural supremacy. This imperative order not merely sets external limits to the actions and aims of the subordinate bloc, it structures its intimate vision of itself and the world, imposing contingent historical facts as the nec¬ essary co-ordinates of social life itself. When the wearing of “European clothes” becomes one of the most important indices through which African aspirations to a “European way of life” are studied, then the method of analysis indeed becomes

76

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

what Goodenough (1963:chapter 8) calls a technique...aimed at inducing outward conformity with the desires of others. They may be effective in getting people to change the public image they present to others, but they do not necessarily have much effect on their private value of them¬ selves.9

VI The major sociological contribution of the studies cited is their implic¬ it consecration of the hegemony of white colonists. Their method of approach to and analysis of social change has provided ideological binders as to the true condition of urban Africans. Even if one accepts the findings of such studies, at least they must be rooted in a specific historical context. The economic, normative, and false-relational aspect of the colonial situation must be spelled out. Clothes could only have the importance attributed to them in a situation of oppression where all other avenues of self-awareness were pre-empted by a white settler community. It might be instructive to compile an index of status in the post¬ independence period and compare it with that of the colonial days. What are the present criteria of “rank”? Wealth, occupation, educa¬ tion, and power seem to be constant factors in both stages but they find expression in different forms. No African in the colonial period could match the positions occupied by a president and his ministers today. If in colonial days, education was geared to conversion to Christianity, the two are not necessarily linked now, and this suggests that Africans can and will receive education without being Christianized. Africans no longer attach importance to the conven¬ tional clothing of an office worker; instead, there is a strong impulse to find an alternate form of dress, often called “traditional” and quite different in design from the “European.” We can therefore group indices of status into two categories: those which are “functional” in terms of urban industrial society and occur in both pre- and post- independence periods, and those which stem more particularly from the colonial order and have diminished in importance with independence. Mitchell and Epstein and others failed to make a correct assessment because they accepted the colonial sys¬ tem as “external,” as a condition in which Africans would try to achieve equilibrium, instead of a system which they were anxious to overthrow. 77

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

If one looks at what are called African aspirations without specify¬ ing the context in which these aspirations are manifested, one may miss the fact that the colonized may “present themselves in the guise we desire just because we desire it,” and we may “insist that this guise reflect the way they truly want to feel about themselves” (Goodenough 1963:218). More than that, all science, as Marx pointed out, would be superfluous if the appearance and the nature of reality were whol¬ ly identical. The result of judging people’s desires and aspirations by “outward marks of Western civilization” was that the colonized temporarily lost their own individual perceptions and evaluations and were placed in what Laing (1961:21) calls a false position. The falsity of this position can only be realized in retrospect because while a person is alienated he may be “real.” I say this because the achievement of political inde¬ pendence has in many cases led to an inversion and negation of the colonial superstructure and all it entailed. Mphahlele (1963:137) writes that “this often means in essence the restoration of traditional values, ways of life, and eating and dressing habits.” Individuals and groups have what Cooley called a “reflected self.” The history of collective self-representation is very important, and evi¬ dences, in a sense, the evolution of self-consciousness. Each phase of this development is characterized by the nature of those others in whose image men view themselves. When a group begins to take stock of its position in a new situation, it deals critically with a set of ready-made interpretations. The whites gave Africans many such ready-made def¬ initions, and some of these definitions were implicit in the indices sup¬ posed to characterize African aspirations and social change. A collective definition such as the white gave to the African was not a mere hypothesis or a replacement of theory, it was a source of collective habits.10 As interpreters of the colonial social order, the white social anthropologists almost always construed it in their own favor, i.e., in these studies there was unselfconcious self-adoration. For the colonized these studies could create a feeling that their indigenous cul¬ ture was nothing to be proud of, a feeling which would then lead the colonized to see their past as dark barbarism, from which colonial sub¬ jugation had rescued them. It is evident that as long as a group is dom¬ inated by another, it “accepts” and “lives” the role imposed on it as a matter of course. Gerth and Mills (1961:88) make the rather relevant observation

78

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

that if a nobleman has power he may ...force the obedience of the peasants to him, and then inter¬ pret their obedient gestures as confirming and facilitating his honorable image of self. The colonial situation was that of forced subordination; we must judge in the light of this reality the values and images to which Africans “aspired” before we accept them as genuine. To what extent the colonial situation contributed to an inadequate self-appraisal on the part of the African cannot yet be determined. The indices chosen to measure African aspirations became a suggestive framework by means of which the dominant white colonial groups inhibited independent self-awareness among subordinate African stra¬ ta. The actual experience of the colonized and their awareness of the irreconcilability between theory and practice in the colonizing power led to the beginnings of a long search for a new world view. I do not deny here that individual interpretations of African behaviour are important, but I maintain that the first facts to be estab¬ lished are the physical organization and position of the individuals. Once these are established we may then surmise the consequences of the structural situation and how it affects behaviour patterns. Another angle to the “Westernization” hardly touched by those who study urban African social life refers to an added dimension in the African personality. In the positive sense, the absorption of the intel¬ lectual aspect of colonization was thought of merely as a weapon that helped the black man to penetrate the white man’s mind, which was represented in the external world the African needed to grasp. The African could also exploit this external world for cultural reasons that, paradoxically, unified disparate nationalities and ethnic groups. In this sense the African’s receptiveness enriched his personality and made him spiritually superior to the white, who have never, as a group, tried to live the black man’s culture. At the other level, the African merely thinks of the layer of what was called “Westernization” as something that was not itself uplifting, but only served to make him more aware of this Africanness and to accentuate this “native” dimension. The negritude-minded peoples of French-speaking Africa explain their attachment to “Western values” in terms of the need to adapt Western technology to the African context in order to fashion what Senghor calls “la civilization universelle.” In the same way, black

79

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Americans repudiate the white man’s assumption that he is the right¬ ful custodian of civilized standards. The American blacks, it should be remembered, share what is called the “Western way of life” fully because of historical circumstances. Like all once-colonized people, the African has this second dimension which provides more channels of expression, but this second dimension is not, as white interpreters of the African scene have believed, a badge of “civilization” and there¬ fore elevating. The wearing of “European” clothes by Africans assumes a different meaning when considered against the historical background of the general transformation of all traditional societies. It never occurred to Epstein that if Africans measured their pres¬ tige in terms of “fever coats” or European clothes (which may be in various stages of disrepair) or if they valued a light skin, then they were in a warped psychological state. “Fever coats” and light skin could only become items of prestige in the social phantasy system in which the African had been submerged as a result of colonialism. In the prizing of such things as a light skin we see the brutalization of the black man by colonialism in its barest, yet most subtle, form. Surely it must strike one as curious that a people, obviously black, should rate a light skin high and a black skin lower. In this masochistic and self-denying fixa¬ tion we see the alienating effects of colonial rule. The colonized man was warped psychologically. He had come to see himself as the colo¬ nizer saw him. Thus, even his personality was a warped reflection of his oppressors. Epstein, Mitchell, and the others, however, never inves¬ tigated the sources of this mass “insanity.” If an individual believed he could acquire prestige only by wear¬ ing “European clothes,” then he was nothing more than a slave, for it was only in colonial enslavement that the “Europeanized” African per¬ sonality appeared. To define the African in these terms alone was pos¬ sible only when he was a colonial subject, and had the further consequence of destroying the African sense of independent being. In this way, the studies considered here omit and even obliterate the potential for revolution in their sociological characters. They over¬ emphasize and extol what to their authors seemed acceptable to the colonial “mission.” It is clear that a “Europeanized” African can never, save humorously, aspire to be an independent identity. As a conse¬ quence of such assumptions and perspectives, the African was left bereft of any claim to his self-determining black identity. As long as the myth of the human and cultural inferiority of the African was accepted, the 80

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Chance in Colonial Africa

African could never reach the status of self-identity and self-esteem required for protracted nationalist struggle against colonial subordi¬ nation. The problem of identity was for the colonized African a very impor¬ tant one. It is quite clear that a person’s “own” identity can never be completely “abstracted” from his identity for others,. The colonial Europeans never accepted the African, let alone the so-called Westernized African. In their eyes, in fact, the more “Westernized” an African was, the more “spoilt.”11 Historically, Western ideologists have denied the African any contribution to human progress. The studies which identify the feeling of worthiness among Africans with “Westernization” (in particular, clothes) perpetuate and give credence to the notion that the Africans were devoid of anything to be proud of. In associating worthiness with a European identity,12 Epstein, Mitchell, and the others have contributed to that political and cultur¬ al subordination of Africans to the standards of Europe and to the prej¬ udices of the colonial power that was the essence of colonialism (Emerson and Kelson 1965:19). They deny the validity of African social and cultural systems by describing Africans as aspiring to “a European way of life.” The African, according to their studies, becomes human in proportion to his adoption of the colonizing country’s cultural stan¬ dards — not with the attainment of independence, which is a nega¬ tion of those cultural standards. Thought is subject to extra-theoretical factors of the most diverse kinds. These factors not only influence the genesis of ideas, but pene¬ trate into the form and content of such ideas further determining the scope and intensity of experience and observation (Mannheim 1934:240). The tragedy of Epstein’s and Mitchell’s approach is that by sub¬ mitting to the tyranny of an administrative scholarship (Sklar 1967) that proclaimed as its mission the civilization of the world, it failed to confront the reality of the object of its study. Colonialism and imperi¬ alism had robbed the Africans of their independence and their land; the sociology of colonialism robbed them of their culture and identi¬ ty. Is it surprising that the “natives” refused to submit to this spiritu¬ al rape and that independence has provided an atmosphere in which Africans can rescue whatever remained of their culture from the colo¬ nial ruins? Human reality is both social and psychological and is presented to

81

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

the mind’s eye in layers of more or less depth. These layers of course interpenetrate and mutually influence one another. At what we may call the first level of social-psychological reality are feelings, inclina¬ tions, attitudes, and tastes. This level represents unconscious emotional forms of orientation and is reflected in habits. The second level includes character traits and features of an individual’s psychological make-up, and also such conscious reflections of the conditions of his experience as appear in the expression of attitudes, opinions, tastes, and manners in intercourse with other people. At the third level are experiences that are consciously and fully thought out and expressed in the form of judgements, conclusions, and results of comparisons. These experi¬ ences can be said to be intellectually evaluated. On the basis of his eval¬ uations, opinions, and judgements, we can determine how much a given individual considers himself a representative of a certain class or group. The fourth level consists of customs, traditions, rites (all of which are specific forms of reflection over a long period), and the ele¬ ments operating in the immediate conditions of people’s existence. A characteristic feature of many social-psychological phenomena is that they arise under the influence of at least two factors: personal experience and mediated experience or ideology. Marx expressed what I am saying in these words (Marx and Engels 1960:19): consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness con¬ cerning the immediate sensuous environment and conscious¬ ness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time it is conscious of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature. The question which is crucial for my purpose is: at what level of socialpsychological experience is it that “Europeanization” stratifies the African urban population? Colonial prejudice limited the African’s par¬ ticipation to his work situation. It restricted his entry not only into the human cultural scheme but also in the marketplace. His labour might be purchased in the marketplace, but his social existence was supposed

82

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa

to remain outside the industrial culture. Consequently, urban Africans could not internalize the industrial culture; they were merely uproot¬ ed and divorced from the enrichment of their own culture, without receiving any substitute other than objects; they were sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, being without love, being true to nothing (cf. Lewis 19959 fix).13 Admission to a money economy should not be dis¬ missed, but its limitations under colonialism should be understood. Indigenous crafts and “industry” could not hold their own against powerful foreign competition. The acquisition of so-called European clothes and other gadgets was the most visible sign of contact with and involvement in a money economy. These new acquisitions, however, were not rewarding because they, as items of class distribution, could not have any significance in the lives of the Africans. Thus “Europeanization” is confined to the outermost layer of African socialpsychological reality.

IV The studies we have looked at are infused with the ethnocentricism characteristic of the view of the privileged strata. Here we see not so much an analysis of culture contact and change as a pragmatic propagandization of certain ideals in the guise of sociological analysis. To portray culture contact the way Mitchell, Epstein, and others have done is to interpret ideas in terms of their actual service rather than in terms of their face value (Gerth and Mills 1954:189). Such interpretation of data became both weapon and excuse in the struggle of groups. Mitchell portrays the Europeans as agents of civilization; he views the pathological alienation of the African from his culture as a prestigious mark of civilization. If such interpretations could take hold in the minds of the Africans, they could become a material force justifying white oppression and economic exploitation. In Mitchell’s and Epstein’s analyses, as Weber (1964:189) observed, the caste structure brings about a social subordination and an acknowledgement of “more honor” in favour of the privileged caste and status group. This was due to the fact that in the caste structure ethnic distinctions as such became “functional” dis¬ tinctions within the political socialization. In the use of such concepts as “civilizing mission” and Westernization, and of such indices as clothes, etc., to describe the formation of new urban groups, we see primarily an exuberance on the part of anthro83

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

pologists which serves principally to conceal an apology for the wretchedness imperial exploitation had imposed on the African. Matthew Arnold once taught that the object of studying the best that has been taught or said is to criticize our present mode of life, to make us see the object as it really is; but instead the study of our classics (if what has been written in African sociology can be so described) seems to blind us to reality, to mystify the very basis of our experience: our way of seeing, feeling, knowing (cf. Kampf 1968:311). My criticism of Epstein and Mitchell must not be interpreted as saying that they were tools of colonists or imperialists, but only that their interpretation of phenomena was at times extremely superficial and at best ethnocentric. Their analyses failed to overcome their European perspective. As men who basically accepted the “civilizing mission” of imperialism, their analyses rationalized and attempted to improve the imperial system. The result was a divided effort at social analysis and propaganda which produced a hodgepodge of eclectic and mechanistic formulations. While in some respects their analyses were appropriate to both objectives, they did not culminate in any single coherent theoretical pattern. In fact, some of the critics who operated within the limits of capitalistic imperialism gradually became accepted as participating advisors. Studies such as those of Epstein and Mitchell were used as material for creating a framework of regulatory reforms to foster more effective functioning of the colonial system. One can do no more than to conclude with the words of a Guinean poet: I feel ridiculous in their shoes, in their dinner-jackets, in their starched shirts, in their stiff collars, in their monocles and bowler hats. I feel ridiculous with my toes, never meant to sweat from morn to night, when they are freed, with my limbs, swaddled and weakened taking about the beauty of my body in a loin-cloth... —Leon Damas, “Solde”

84

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

Empire-building has been prevalent over long stretches of history, but the use of the term imperialism to cover all such activity leads to def¬ initions that stress the superficial and avoid the essential. The imperi¬ alism we are interested in is that which Lenin describes as a special stage in the development of the international politicoeconomic system which arose among capitalist nations toward the end of the nineteenth cen¬ tury. The expansion of capitalism to Africa, Asia, and Latin America created relationships in those areas that involved the very means of existence of capitalist nations, who became obligated to protect the markets and source of raw materials upon which their internal eco¬ nomics increasingly relied. Imperialism in this sense provided the broad structural underpinnings of capitalism (Cox, 1964: 9). Before I turn to the problem of South Africa and imperialism, I would like to point out the duality of imperialism, which is both a vital part of good business to those who benefit from it, and a most oppres¬ sive system to those who are its victims. The role of imperialism as a fundamental component of the economies of leading capitalist nations is to maximize and stabilize domestic income at the expense of people in other countries. Quite obviously, South Africa’s problems can only be understood within the wider framework of world imperial domination as a whole. It has been the unfortunate circumstance of South Africa to suffer not one, but two relatively distinct yet clearly interrelated forms of foreign domination—white settler colonialism on the one hand and direct and indirect imperialist exploitation on the other. The situation in South Africa makes it possible to trace the ways in which imperialism origi¬ nates and develops in new areas. Among South Africa, Britain, the United States, West Germany,

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

France, and Portugal, there exists a complex network of horizontal and vertical economic, political, diplomatic, and military relations of con¬ siderable importance. These networks themselves change in form and emphasis over time as the fortunes of particular imperialist countries fluctuate with wars, depressions, financial resources, and the contest for world supremacy between capitalism and socialism (Martin, 1970: 19). Thus, when Britain was the leading imperialist nation, she was also the arbiter of the affairs of South Africa. It is impossible to examine the role of imperialism in South Africa without taking into account the situation in neighboring territories. In the late nineteenth century, Portugal, a backward country, came into possession of valuable real estate in South Africa as a result of British apprehensions concerning French, German, and Belgian pen¬ etrations into Equatorial Africa. During the “scramble,” Portugal, how¬ ever, was to be regarded in turn by England as a satellite, one whole role and holdings in Africa were all replaceable, if need be. The case of Portugal and South Africa shows clearly that modern capitalism, even as it becomes increasingly internationalized, coordi¬ nating the economic activities of many states within a single world imperialist system, also manifests a tremendous diversity of national characteristics. The traditional satellite position of Portugal and the Portuguese colonies in relation to the British Empire is reflected in the monopolist capitalist combines (see below) from Britain, the United States, and South Africa that have divided the Portuguese territories among themselves for exploitation. So far, they have done this through the authority of Portugal, which is too poor to efficiently exploit many of the resources of its colonies. In this matter, Portuguese sovereign¬ ty has not always been a primary consideration. Since the accession of the United States to the position of leading capitalist nation, the role once played by Britain vis-a-vis Portugal is being gradually assumed by the United States. This change is pro¬ ducing a multiple, complex structure of exploitation of Africans in Portuguese possessions. Within the pattern of imperialism, the South African bourgeoisie benefitted greatly from direct and indirect partic¬ ipation in exploitation of British and Portuguese colonial possessions. Britain, in fact, encouraged such exploitation by making her former dependencies appendages of South Africa. After World War I, South Africa received the mandate to South West Africa, a former German colony, and continues to govern this

86

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

area today, in the face of UN objections, as a part of her own nation¬ al territory. In 1946, African leaders from South West Africa demand¬ ed UN assistance in the release of their country from racist South Africa, but the response of the British and U.S. delegates was such that effec¬ tive action was virtually sabotaged. South Africa rewarded AngloAmerican imperialism by turning over a two-thirds share of the Tsumeb copper mines to Morgan and SearPs Newmont Mining Company, again reflecting South Africa’s unique position in imperialist calculations (Parlo, 1951: 39). The Portuguese colonies, and the former British High Commission territories, therefore, were planned economically to be little more than reservoirs of cheap mining labor for South Africa. Since their inde¬ pendence, these former British territories are being manipulated as South Africa’s co-prosperity sphere, through a combination of South African and international finance capital. South Africa, a satellite of the leader capitalist nations, has, in relation to regions and territories with¬ in and on its borders, assumed the role, therefore, of a national metropolis and is pressing actively for recognition of its “special role” as a bulwark against communism in Southern Africa. Relying on the increased economic power of the country, South Africa-based monop¬ olies are out to dominate the economy of the region. As we shall see, they have already seized important positions in Portuguese colonies and have made large investments there. Exploitation of satellites by nonleader capitalist nations tends to be unusually severe. Among the reasons for this is the fact that the sec¬ ondary nation itself is exploited by the dominant capitalist powers, and, hence, the pressure of exploitation on its satellites is multiplied in its effects on the indigenous populations. The typical exploitative devices—the withholding of modern education, discouragement of political participation, promotion of “cultural parellelism,” racial intim¬ idation, and coercion—are manifested in the extreme by Portugal in its colonies and by South Africa vis-a-vis its African population. A dependent capitalism in South Africa has sustained itself by the ferocious exploitation of its internal and external subcolonies.

87

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

South Africa’s Relation to Britain and the United States Analyzing capitalism in its monopoly state, Lenin singled out from among colonial and dependent countries, the colonies proper—for Britain, there were the territories occupied by European settlers (Canadian, Australian, South African), and were called “white” domin¬ ions of the Empire. These dominions were, in effect, independent sovereign states or secondary imperialist powers closely associated with British imperialism. British finance capital and interests are strongly entrenched in them today even though they are increasingly subject to the counterpull of American finance-capital. The bourgeoisie of the “white” dominions may be regarded as offshoots of the British bour¬ geoisie. Their effective independence reached final, full legislative recognition by the British Parliament’s acceptance of the statute of Westminster in 1931. From this time on, South Africa, politically, was fundamentally an independent nation, free to shape its own constitution and laws. This shift in political status corresponded to the shift in economic depen¬ dence. America had gradually moved in where British capital could not hold its ground. Behind the increasing independence of the British dominions and orientation toward the United States lay the disinte¬ gration of Britain’s financial strength as well as the death of the sys¬ tem based on the gold standard. World War I had signalled the definitive decline of the British Empire and enormously increased the power of the United States and its dollars, and the dominions, which had originally been developed with British capital, now looked to the United States, for this reason, I will base my exposition of the role of imperialism in South Africa mainly on American corporate penetration of South African industries. It would not be difficult, needless to say, to cite analogous facts from penetration by German and Japanese impe¬ rialism, for instance. Beginning in 1880, mining was practically a monopoly of British capital, and its control was exercised by the most pronounced form of enclave—the chamber of mines. Since 1917 American finance capital played, and continues to play, a significant role. As early as 1885, an American named Edward McMurde began construction of the Delagoa Bay railroad, which was of crucial importance to Kruger’s Transvaal Republic. It was not, however, until 1906 that the first major American

88

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

capital investment in South Africa occurred. Finally, toward the end of World War I, penetration by American capital was carried rapidly for¬ ward, and the process has been accelerating ever since. In 1917, Oppenheimer became convinced of the possibility of gold mining industry outside the known limits of the Weswatersrund gold mining; and to launch himself in South Africa and obtain capital and dollar exchange, he called on American financiers to contest the British domination of South African mining. Writing to Herbert Hoover, Ernest Oppenheimer stated: “If American capital wishes to obtain a footing in South African mining business, the easiest course will be to acquire an interest in our company” (Gregory, 1962: 13). By inviting American capital, Oppenheimer showed an acute awareness of the decline of Britain as a leader capitalist nation. The invitation exempli¬ fies the conflict between British and American capitalism, as well as a tendency toward the merger of British and American interest in AngloAmerican imperialism. It demonstrates also how U.S. imperialism in the underdeveloped countries first infiltrates those sections of the econ¬ omy that are most profitable and hold the greatest promise of expan¬ sion. Morgan interests, in accepting Oppenheimer’s offer, made a highly strategic move. There is now little American capital in the group, but strong links with Morgan have been retained; for example, Kennicott Copper, a Morgan firm, lent millions of dollars to help estab¬ lish Orange Free State mines. The formation of the now famous Anglo-American Corporation (A.A.C.) in 1917, thus, was to be an important factor in opening the way for American financial involvement in the South African econo¬ my. The invitation to American capital revealed the disparity between advancing American capitalism with limited colonial holdings and the weakening British imperialism with vast world colonial possessions. It foreshadowed the consequent control of wide markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials, and spheres of investments through cooper¬ ation between these two dominant powers. Once the initial step was taken, American financial involvement proceeded apace, and, by 1929, American corporate investment in South Africa totalled $77 million, about three-quarters of total American investment on the continent. In the fifty years of existence, the Anglo-American Corporation has become the center of a complex of companies with a capitalization greatly exceeding that of the parent concern (Gregory, 1962: 94). Though the immediate objective of the

89

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Anglo-American Corporation was the opening of the Far East Rand Mines, Oppenheimer had a much higher objective. He set forth his ambitions as regards the diamond industry in a letter to his American associates dated November 1, 1921, in which he wrote: Further to this, from the very start, I expressed the hope that besides gold, we might create, step by step, a leading position in the diamond world thus concentrating by degrees in the Corporation’s hands the position which the pioneers of the diamond industry (the late Cecil Rhodes, Werner Beit, etc.) formerly occupied (Gregory, 1962: 96). On May 6, 1920, Oppenheimer intimated further his ambitions to his American friend, saying that he had a firm belief in a great industrial and agricultural future for South Africa and that he was satisfied that the right policy for this corporation (A.A.C.) to pursue is to investi¬ gate any attractive proposition that presents itself and not merely to confine its activities to the mining enterprises. “The Anglo-American Corporation should be, and is, ready and anxious to play its part in the industrial development of South Africa” (Gregory, 1962: 97). The present activities of the Anglo-American Corporation and its subsidiaries cover a very wide area. In the 1920s, Anglo moved to Zambia (then called Northern Rhodesia) where today it controls the majority of the copper-belt concessions. Another American company, Rhodesian Selection Trust, shares concessions in Zambia, and also has a major interest in new mineral developments in Botswana and Swaziland. Anglo-American Corporation (American-stimulated and American-financed) controls in South Africa gold and diamonds, cobalt, uranium, vanadium, iron, copper, coal, platinum, and other metals and minerals. It is involved in industrial activities of diverse kinds—merchant banking, estate management, consultancies, and so on through a long and varied list. American investment in the AngloAmerican Corporation is now some $100 million (Gregory, 1962:97). Not only is this far and away the most important “interest group” in the shaping of South African policy, it is a determinant group, exert¬ ing an influence of tremendous importance. The core interest of international imperialism in South Africa is, of course, in gold and its by-product, uranium, and South Africa has been described as by ‘far the most prolific single source of the free world’s gold supplied.” The more one looks at the structure of the gold indus-

90

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

try, the more one understands the structure of white supremacy in South Africa. As an industry of imperialist exploitation par excellence, its development necessitated the structure of oppression. Gold is not an item of consumption, and therefore the mining interests could not care less what the wage structure of the labor force is. In fact, it could prosper only by paying minimum wages. In order to understand the relations between classes in South Africa, it is necessary to understand also the relation of South Africa to other countries within the entire sphere of imperialist production. The price exacted by South Africa for its possession of gold is British and American appeasement of racial oppression and white prejudice. Since it has based its growth largely on the influx of foreign capi¬ tal, South Africa has developed the distinct characteristics of a depen¬ dent country. This can be seen in the key economic area most affected by foreign investment. This foreign penetration of the South African economy is a striking illustration of Lenin’s thesis that “big finance capital of one country can always buy up competitors in other politi¬ cally independent countries, and constantly does so.” He described this involvement as annexation “in the economic sense, without infring¬ ing political independence.” Growing American corporate interests in South Africa cement the horizontal and pyramidal structures of the economy and provide links between the South Africa-based finance capital of Anglo-American and Metal Climax and the U.S. power struc¬ ture. U.S. News and World Report (1968: 98) stated that Americans doing business there are looking forward to the day when South Africa will be the industrial and financial hub of the whole continent.

American Capital and Industrialization in South Africa It is true that some U.S. businesses went into South Africa early at the invitation of men like Oppenheimer and that at the time, the issue of racism and imperialism was taken for granted as the fate of darker-skinned mankind. The new post-World-War-II capital, however, went into South Africa to take advantage of the high profits due to the whittling away of African trade union bargaining rights. These were also the years in South Africa when British capital was feeble and could not withstand compe¬ tition from the United States. In 1943, according to the U.S. Treasury, U.S. investment in South Africa amounted to $86 million. Between 1943 91

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and 1951, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, this invest¬ ment had grown by $30 million (Davidson, 1962: 271-272). The same process was continued throughout the 1960s and in particular after Sharpeville (where South African police shot and killed 69 unarmed Africans), as U.S. firms in such basic South African industries as auto, oil, rubber, and metals rose from $286 million to about $880 million. Sales of U.S. companies operating in South Africa hit $826 million in 1969, up from $335 million in 1961, and U.S. exports to South Africa came to another $514 million (Newsweek, 1971: 80). The export of capital raises the question of political control of the country where capital is invested. Direct and indirect American and dol¬ lar area investment in the public authorities sector accounted for 40.7%. Compared to the figures for United Kingdom investment in the pub¬ lic authorities sector, only 7.5% of its total investment in South Africa in 1964, the date for U.S. investment appear to reflect a substantial American stake in the political future of the South African government (Legassik and Barnett, 1966). Finance capital, it has been said, does not want liberty, it wants domination. The relation of the exporter of goods to the customer, for instance, is one in which each operation is com¬ pleted in a short term, and only reasonable political stability is required. But the relation of creditor and debtor is a long-term one, which inevitably gives rise to the demand for security, if not outright political control, of the country where capital is invested shows weakness. After the Sharpeville massacres, there was a slight possibility of change in the structure of power from which international capitalism benefited, and the immediate response was panic. Shares on the South African stock exchange fell in value by $1,750 million. Gold and for¬ eign exchange reserves slumped from $439.6 million to $238 million as $271.6 million in foreign capital fled the country. International and national capitalist spokesmen, fearing that the crisis signalled the pos¬ sibility of organized African revolt, called for measures to redress African grievances. The chairman of Anglo-Vaal, the president of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Ernest Oppenheimer, and even Charles Engelhard called for relaxation of repressive laws. Even conservative Afrikaner business, the rural bourgeoisie, and some cabinet ministers asked for changes, especially when Sharpeville and the follow-up strikes were compounded by an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister Vervoerd. The situation was rescued and restabilized by the combina¬ tion of “big stick” methods and American financial aid. The govern-

92

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

ment banned African organizations, arrested the leadership, and adopt¬ ed repressive methods that virtually destroyed any overt resistance. But it was American effort after 1961, the year South Africa was expelled from the Commonwealth, that was to save the economy. In its role as benefactor, the United States contributed in 1961 almost the entire amount of foreign exchange needed to reverse the precipitous decline of the South African economy. In December 1960, the International Monetary Fund allowed South Africa to draw $30 million of her credit, and within six months had extended another $75 million as short-term credit. A year later, South Africa received two loans from the World Bank, totalling some $25-28 million—once again for railway and electric power development. The First National Bank of New York, which had two branches in the republic, extended a $5 million loan to the government’s Industrial Development Corporation. Chase Manhattan contributed $10 million, and together with Dillion Reed ensured that the consortium’s revolving credit was extended for two years at the end of 1961, as it has been extended since. Charles Engelhard reaffirmed his personal commitment to apartheid in September 1961, when he raised $30 million in the United States for his Rand Selection Mining Group. International Harvester, Newmont Mining, Universal Laboratories, Owens Corning, Pfizer, Underwood, and others all announced investment expansion (Legassik and Barnett, 1966). By the end of 1962, in fact, the United States investment, hav¬ ing fallen off in 1960, had topped the previous high point ($323 mil¬ lion in 1959) and amounted to $442 million. The 80 American corporations of pre-Sharpeville, South Africa, had risen by 1962 to some 175 and today are in excess of400 (Legassik and Barnett, 1966). To protect their investment, the American corporations decided to strengthen the South African government economically rather than to intervene politically. One wonders what the aid would have been in the South African government was threatened by collapse. In the process of its development, just as in the struggle with its internal contradictions, South Africa’s capitalism relies increasingly on financial support of the imperialist powers, just as the imperialist monopolies rely for the security of their investment on the ability of the South African regime to maintain stability. The strategy of South African industrialization in the 1960s was dictated not only by concern to develop the industrial forces of pro¬ duction, but by fiscal and, in part, military technical considerations,

93

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and it was to move toward self-sufficiency in key areas so as to offset the possible sanctions voted by the United Nations. Thus, national resources have been used to develop materials of strategic value (oil, explosives, war material, and the like). American capital was ready to oblige, in quantity and direction, in these areas. American investment has played a major role in those sectors of the economy that contribute to extensive heavy industrialization, military material, and long-range growth. A qualitative analysis reveals that American investment is high¬ ly concentrated in these critical areas (Legassik and Barnett, 1966). It is not simply the cement of capital invested in South Africa that mat¬ ters, but the areas where it is applied. These are usually sectors that are vital to South Africa’s military might.

Imperialism and Relations Between South Africa and Her Neighbors In addition to its dependency, South Africa plays another rather pecu¬ liar role in the imperialist division of labor. It holds, as we have seen, first place in the productions of gold, diamonds, and other minerals. As an exceptionally large buyer of machines and equipment, it consti¬ tutes a vast and rapidly expanding market for industrial goods, includ¬ ing armaments, supplied by Britain, France, and other imperialist nations. Furthermore, South Africa is particularly valuable to the impe¬ rialist system because of its reputation (not without foundation) as a “politically reliable” capitalist country. For these reasons it has long been an object of attraction for foreign investment, which has used it, among other things, as a route through which monopoly capital, already entrenched there, can find access to the Portuguese colonies. South African capital itself participates as a junior partner in the exploitation of the less-developed regions on its periphery. The pro¬ cess has been carried out through exploitation of the indigenous pop¬ ulations who create the surplus value shared between external and internal capitalists. The regions and territories of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, and the Portuguese colonies were earlier pressed (through eco¬ nomic necessity) to adapt themselves to the labor needs of South Africa. But recently British and American finance capital has produced ramifi¬ cations in Portuguese colonies the future outcome of which could be very serious for liberation movements. The international “capital nexus”

94

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

penetrates and links Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Namibia (S.W. Africa), Angola, Zambia, the Congo, and so on and points to the importance of this subregion in imperialist con¬ siderations. The Cabora Bassa Dam in Mozambique, and the Kunene Dam in Angola, together with oil exploration, are ways to prop up the Portuguese presence in these areas and thwart liberation movements. The strategic advantages of Portuguese-South African collabora¬ tion, supported as it is by imperialism, are many, but one of the most important has to do with oil. Despite extensive efforts, no significant deposits of oil have yet been found in South Africa, but, in the Portuguese enclave of Cabinda alone, 7.5 million tons of oil per year are being produced. Since 1966, the Gulf Oil Corporation, exploiter of the Cabinda resources, has invested over $130 million in Angola. The Cabinda region of Angola has become the most contested area of the war between Portugal and the revolutionary forces of the Movement of the Liberation in Angola. Huge amounts of money have been invested to construct a petroleum port, a storage area, and a telecommunication system, while Gulf Oil’s camps are surrounded by eight-foot barbed wire fences and spotlights and patrolled by armed guards. Portugal needs gulf capital not only to identify American cor¬ porate interests with her oppressive designs, but also to supply her 150,000 troops stationed in the colonies of Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique with necessary support. South Africa needs Cabinda oil because in the event of UN sanctions or blockades, this supply could satisfy the needs of most of South Africa. Besides Cabinda, Gulf Oil Corporation, a subsidiary of Gulf which (as already stated) has the monopoly of exploration and production of the Cabinda enclave in Angola. Diversa, a Dallas, Texas, oil corpora¬ tion, has recently received 20,000 square miles in Angolan conces¬ sions, while Mobil and Texaco act as distributors of fuels and lubricants in that country. In Mozambique, oil-producing regions are divided primarily into three areas: H. L. Hunt (Hunt International Petroleum) controls concessions covering 18,000 square kilometers, including the promising delta areas around the mouth of the Zambezi River. Mozambique Gulf Oil Company controls about 100,000 square kilo¬ meters to the south of Hunt International. Texaco has recently received concessions in northern Mozambique. Butane gas deposits discovered by Mozambique Gulf will soon be piped directly to the Transvaal, cen¬ ter of South African industry (Legassik and Barnett, 1966).

95

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Imperialism and the Social and Economic Relations in South Africa and its Satellites The social and economic relations inside the South African countries are tied up in terms of domination and subjection. The structure of white supremacy is the significant factor in these relations, founded as they are on the subjection of the Africans—and this is what “cheap labor” really means. It is this imperative which has produced the pre¬ sent chronic system of racial oppression and exploitation, for the mate¬ rial interest of British and American imperialism has been linked directly to the profits from cheap African labor. Industrial development in South Africa which, as we have seen, was carried out jointly by British, American, and South African gov¬ ernment capital, has gone hand in hand with the attempt to find new ways of binding the African to “preindustrial” conditions of exploita¬ tion, contrary to those who say that economic growth will undermine racial oppression. The tide of new American capital is flowing into the same social and economic structure that has already produced untold misery among Africans. I have pointed out above that American capital is concentrated in the extraction of minerals and other strategic materials. The wages paid in the mines are the lowest to be found anywhere in the world. In 1890 about 40,000 Africans were employed in the mines (and about 5,000 whites). For the past 70 years, the number of Africans has been steady at about 4,000,000 (and about 40,000 whites), though lately it has tended to fall. In 1890, the average pay of Africans on the mines was about $13.50 a month. In 1943, the National Mine Wages Commission reported that the average pay for underground African miners was $ 14.50 a month. According to a survey done by the University of Cape Town in 1968, the wage structure of the gold mining industry for the African is now lower than it was in 1911 and stands at something like $21 a month. The study pointed out that the white/black earnings gap widened from 11.7 to 1 in 1911 to 17.6 to 1 in 1966. Frankel quotes a South African authoress as writing that, “Nothing has changed so little in South Africa as the black men’s rate of pay.” It is necessary to get these few facts clear, because they not only govern much of the socioeconomic structure of South Africa, but rep¬ resent the main attraction for foreign capital. It is fashionable nowa-

96

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

days to argue that economic growth would ease the system of racial oppression or that if foreign investments were withdrawn Africans would be the first to suffer. These arguments are at best hypocritical. Nowhere in the world today, perhaps, does there exist a greater contrast between reputation and reality than between the tow¬ ering legend of the white man’s civilization and the grim truth of it for the African worker. But nowhere in the world, no less, does there survive a greater contrast between master and ser¬ vant than survives between the mining company and the African miner [Davidson, 1962: 100]. And in no area of the economy is foreign capital so entrenched as in the mining industry—especially gold mining. J. A. Hobson had a remarkable foresight when he wrote that the “new imperialism” of South Africa would forge its own path in life. The absorbing aim of the big business politicians, financiers, and adven¬ turers of South Africa, he wrote, will be to relegate British imperial¬ ism to what they conceive to be its proper place, that of an ultima ratio to stand in the far background while colonial imperialism manages the business and takes the profits (Davidson, 1962: 100-101). A South African brand of imperialism supported and financed by American cap¬ ital and having a political career of its own has emerged. The dynam¬ ics of the “new imperialism” are threatening to engulf the whole of South Africa in a ‘racial” confrontation. American finance (as I have demonstrated) has been wading with both feet into this explosive and exploitative situation, producing a condition that offends enlightened opinion in the world. Conclusion From what has been said above, it is quite obvious that every country integrated within the system of capitalism passes through various stages of decreasing or increasing dependence upon other capitalist countries, but in general the tendency of capitalist development is toward an everincreasing growth of world ties, which is expressed in the growing vol¬ ume of foreign capital invested in the satellite countries. South Africa’s dependence upon Britain, the United States, France, and other impe¬ rialist countries bears qualitatively not only on the internal develop¬ ment, but on her ability to defend herself against internal uprising. Given the global context and the general condition of interdependence 97

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

among imperialist powers, issues of exploitation, race conflict, and oppression become national issues only insofar as particular societies are not economically, politically, or culturally dependent on other soci¬ eties in the sense of being controlled by the other societies or agencies of them, and, hence, if they were historically dependent, only insofar as they cease being so. Thus, analysis of class relations and racial oppression in South Africa requires an analysis of its international relations, too. One of the fail¬ ures of sociology in the study of South Africa so far is the tendency to isolate it from the imperial sphere to which it belongs and with which it is inextricably intertwined. South Africa no doubt enjoys a relative autonomy from the imperialist world. This autonomy, is, however, rel¬ ative, because South Africa lives off the imperialist camp and depends on it for the perpetuation of its domination. Its prosperity and future are, in the last instance, bound by the general logic that governs world imperialism. With the rise of imperialism, the extent to which a particular coun¬ try at a particular time is a national society, organized at the national level, is clearly very much a variable condition, a matter of degree. In particular (and as we have seen above), it varies inversely with the power of constituents’ local units to organize their own affairs. From 1880 to 1920, South Africa was not even a junior partner of British imperi¬ alism but was a mere possession, and these were the years in which racial discrimination was built. Beginning in 1917, with the formation of the Anglo-American Corporation financed by American capital, there was a gradual shift and integration of South African capital and American capital, which, in time, would make South Africa the fore¬ most African industrial power. But even this has not changed financial dependence. Foreign capital still flows to South Africa in abundance. Total foreign investments now probably exceed R5,000 million ($7,000 million; Gervasi, 1970: 3). The political side of the process is well known. The conditions under which the Africans live today as outcasts in the land of their birth are the direct result of the pyramidal structure of capitalist exploitation, which step by step, with diabolical ingenuity, has evolved with one pur¬ pose—to enslave the African peoples of South Africa for easy exploita¬ tion. The South African state was built on black labor, but the black man himself was not allowed to share in the fruits of this labor. Investigation of the development of racism in South Africa and loca-

98

The South African Problem as a View of Imperialism

tion of it in the economic structure of world imperialism enables us to see racism not as an aberration of particular individuals, groups, or coun¬ tries, but as integral to the structure created by capitalism and imperi¬ alism. Because racism has been manifest in precapitalist states, some writers have tended to disassociate it from capitalism. The manifesta¬ tion of racism under different socioeconomic conditions is qualitative¬ ly different from its manifestation under capitalism and imperialism. With the advent of imperialism, white settlers everywhere wanted to absolutize their economic, political, and social supremacy over the so-called natives, through various racist ideologies proclaiming the supe¬ riority of whites and the inferiority of blacks and browns. These ide¬ ologies were complemented by a legal pseudo-caste system that would both instrumentalize and justify an eternal domination. Within the framework of imperialism, all Europeans were privileged, all were arriv¬ istes, all found their positivity in the negation of the black and brown humanity (Murray and Wengrutt, 1963: 19-20). Under capitalism, the key roots—the mini-springs of racism—were based on territorial, eco¬ nomic, political, and military conquest. In the age of enlightenment, and with the doctrine of equal rights of man, racism was the inevitable ideology for those nations wishing to overstep their natural territorial limits or seeking to deny that a large number of their subject inhabi¬ tants could ever attain national status and citizenship. Racism transcends the theoretical category of nationalism (Crick, 1967: 84).

99

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor: A Critique of Conventional Wisdom, or A Case Study in the Functions of Functionalism

B. Magubane and J. O’Brien

Today we can accept neither old nor new ideas without ques¬ tioning the structure and methods of the research pursued — and even the personal motivations of the investigator. In fact, a major concern in the methodology of modern scientific pro¬ cedures is the search for the relationship between the subject matter studied and the personal position of the researcher. That is to say, social and cultural situations are related to the researcher’s ideas and values.1 Almost all colonial regimes in Africa have preferred to employ Africans as migrant laborers; and the system of labor migration has been a sub¬ ject of inquiry by both social anthropologists and economists. However, these studies reveal major weaknesses of both a theoretical and methodological nature. Here we shall summarize social anthro¬ pological and economic arguments on the causes of migrant labor. Then we shall propose a methodological and analytic critique and sug¬ gest alternative explanations of the prevalence of labor migration. Our aim is not to study the various colonial strategies whereby Africans were harnessed to their new productive roles, but it is to make a critical appraisal of studies that have investigated the process of African incorporation into the colonial economies. We want to show with

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Marx2 that vulgar anthropology like vulgar economy feels particular¬ ly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic rela¬ tions, and that these relations seem to the anthropologist to be more self-evident the more their external relationships are concealed. “The philistine’s and vulgar economists’ way of looking at things stems... from the fact that it is only the direct form of manifestation of rela¬ tions that is reflected in their brains and not their inner connection.”3 Here Marx provides us with a conception of the minimum neces¬ sary condition to be satisfied by any work aspiring to scientific status: namely that it grabs the totality as well as the parts and uncovers the interconnections concealed behind the appearance. To this extent stud¬ ies of migrant labor in Africa fail to meet the minimum requirement of scientific validity.

The Nature of the Economy Implanted by the Colonial Regime What we are dealing with in a colonial situation is not economic devel¬ opment in general but a historically specific form of economic growth and labor exploitation. Any colonial power is faced with an initial prob¬ lem when it moves to valorize the economic resources of its colony: How is it to mobilize enough manpower to get an efficient apparatus of exploitation working? As it is almost invariably confronted with a rural subsistence economy, how is it to siphon off labor for a new exchange sector?4 In extending its economic system to Africa, European imperialism sought both to extract primary commodities, necessary for the main¬ tenance and continued growth of production profits in Europe, and to open new markets for its manufactured products. To ensure the sys¬ tem’s capacity to generate profits, two “modernizing” operations had to be carried out: The African labor force had to be molded into a cheap and malleable source of surplus value and African peasant social structures and household industries had to be undermined. The lure of wages and new goods was not sufficient incentive around which a free labor market automatically evolved. The Africans, operating with¬ in their own viable indigenous economies, had no need to sell their labor. And the colonists could maintain neither the level of their prof¬ its, nor the system which generated those profits, if they allowed free competition for labor in primary production. Thus, European impe-

102

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

rialism was faced with the necessity of extending the capitalist system to Africa while altering the capitalist relations of production to fit the resources and conditions of these areas. The rise of industries in South Africa... created a demand for industrial workers among nomadic or pastoral peoples, who until Europeans came into contact with them, were ignorant of the uses of money and who, therefore, cannot (sic) be dragged suddenly into the industrial labour market by the ordi¬ nary law of supply and demand. The existing labour scarcity might indeed have been expected, for it is not likely that a... people, who before the advent of Europeans lived their own life, in which industrial employment had no place, should at once acquire the needs and habits of industrial communities and come out voluntarily to meet the labour demand which the introduction of such communities into their midst has cre¬ ated. The only needs, pressing needs... (are) those of food and sex, and the conditions of native life in Africa are such that these as a rule are easily supplied.5 The solution to this problem survives today in the form of the migra¬ tory labor system. Through the use of force and the manipulation of the extra-economic constraints characteristic of precapitalist relations of production, imperialism succeeded in altering indigenous subsis¬ tence economies to the extent that they were no longer viable as closed systems. It thus forced Africans to seek “supplemental” sources of income in the growing money economy. The migrant labor system, then, represents an ideal arrested thresh¬ old of acculturation.6 It systematically undermined the traditional soci¬ ety while simultaneously refusing to integrate the peasants into the new culture. To integrate the African labor force fully into the colonial econo¬ my would have undermined the order of inequality on which the entire colonial system rested. Migrant labor’s unique value was that it was an instrument of rigorously limited and controlled “acculturation.” It substituted for the products of household industries cheap manufac¬ tured goods produced in metropolitan industries. It created a situa¬ tion in which the African was turned into “his own slave driver” through the “inner compulsion” which anthropologists describe as the need for money. “African reserves were regarded by whites as ‘reser-

103

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

voirs of labour’ and congestion, landlessness, and crop-failure were welcomed as stimulants to the labour supply.”7

Migrant Labor: A Summary of the Bourgeois Studies Bourgeois analyses of African migratory labor systems have been of two basic types: social anthropological and economic. The unit of anal¬ ysis employed by both has been the individual African whose life is abstracted from his total life situation and analyzed in terms of his psy¬ chological motivations, while the colonial situation is either taken for granted or ignored. The empiricism of this approach overvalues the data of immediate experience, and replaces the problems of social and political structure with opinion survey. The anthropological works in this field on Southern Africa, by Schapera, Van Velsen, Mitchell and Watson, are representative of this approach, while the writings of Berg, Baldwin and Houghton represent the economists’ view. The studies of migrant labor in Africa by anthropologists demon¬ strate their origin in the context of imperialism. British social anthro¬ pologists saw the Africans they studied as people trapped between the needs of what they called “tribe” and the demands of a money econ¬ omy, with participation in the migratory labor system the most effi¬ cient compromise. According to Schapera, there were four categories of desires and motivations of migrant Africans: 1) social psychological factors; 2) economic necessity; 3) propaganda; 4) political pressures. These categories are unrelated to the needs of the political economy of the colonial system, except insofar as those needs are reflected in the consciousness and desires of individual colonialists. Thus Schapera (1947) concluded (and was concurred with by Van Velsen) that the causes of migratory labor lay in the outlet it afforded for African adven¬ turesomeness, the escape it provided from the dull and lonely life at cattle posts, and the fact that it had come to be regarded by Africans as a form of initiation into manhood. Mitchell8 found that economic needs forced African men out to distant labor centers for cash wages, while the tribal social system, through each individual’s network of social relationships, held men in. The compromise which Africans found between the centrifugal force of their economic needs and the centripetal force of their tribal system was the great circle of labor migration. Watson9 seems to agree largely with Mitchell, except that he states

104

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

explicitly that the new economic needs forcing Africans out into the cash economy are necessities since the Africans themselves consider them necessities. The existence of the cash economy brings Africans into contact with such products of Western civilization as steel tools, manufactured clothing, pots and pans, schools (which charge fees) and taxes. The only way to acquire these things is by entry into the cash economy through wage-labor. Thus the colonially imposed economy becomes a seemingly neutral arena in which the colonized can satisfy their rising expectations. In these studies African consumer appetites are fragmented into discrete units corresponding to the social and eco¬ nomic fragmentation of African society. For the economists Berg,10 Baldwin,11 and Houghton12, the migratory labor systems of Africa serve to bridge the gap between “primitive” and modern economic systems. They assume that labor migration arises through the efforts of Africans to adapt (or the efforts to adapt the Africans) to their existence within a “dual economy,” and that it represents a “harmony of interest” between the colonial econ¬ omy and traditional structures. They take the alienating order for grant¬ ed and think only in terms of categories which reflect the alienated relations of production. However, their arguments diverge in signifi¬ cant respects: Berg defends and justifies the migratory labor system of West Africa, Houghton criticizes and condemns the social effects of the system in South Africa while reluctantly accepting that system as an economic necessity, and Baldwin’s ostensibly “impartial” analysis reflects a deep commitment to the system. Berg chooses to deal exclusively with economic factors, claiming that new evidence (which he chooses not to disclose) suggests that the deleterious social effects of labor migration had been exaggerated. He found labor markets in West Africa to exhibit the tendency “to be high¬ ly flexible and sensitive, close approximations to ‘perfect markets’ in the economic sense”13, and thus analyzable in terms of “free compe¬ tition” among independent economic agents who buy and sell labor. If anybody in these “perfect markets” enjoyed an advantage it was the sellers of labor. Since the populations of West Africa were small and engaged in vigorous subsistence economies, located in interior savan¬ na regions far removed from the coastal forests where the demand for labor for mines and cash-crop farming was great, and since the African populations had little desire for new goods, the outside economy was forced to provide some incentive for Africans to come to work for 105

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

them. The outside economy solved its problem by offering temporary seasonal employment to Africans during the dry season, the slack time on the savanna and the busiest time in the forests. This arrangement afforded the African the opportunity to augment his income without impairing the stability of the village economy. At the same time, it pro¬ vided the outside economy with necessary labor. Berg concludes that the migratory labor system represents an “efficient” adaptation to the economic environment in West Africa.14 Implicit here is the assump¬ tion that African economies could not have advanced except through being drawn into an external market economy. Baldwin bases his work on the migratory labor system of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) on the opinion surveys and analyses of social anthropologists (chiefly Mitchell and Watson). He utilizes what he calls the “Target Worker Hypothesis.” According to this hypothesis, the African laborer goes to work in the towns and mines with a fixed sum of money in mind which he wants to take back to the village as soon as he gets it her returns to the rural economy. Thus, raising wages only serves to decrease the individual African’s supply of labor power for application in the industrial economy. Consequently, Baldwin’s strategy for employers involves calculating the cash needs of the African worker — taxes (imposed by Europeans), bridewealth, European produced goods — balancing them with trans¬ portation costs and living costs (for the worker alone) in town and coming up with the minimum wage necessary to keep the African in town and working for the maximum length of time. Baldwin’s analysis is very similar to Berg’s; he uncovers the “caus¬ es” of labor migration in the individual preferences of Africans, who, spurred by a few “incentives” (such as the creation of a need for cash through imposition of taxes), are drawn into the urban economy on a part time basis, thus fulfilling European interests as well as their own. Baldwin, however, recognizes the crucial importance of social factors, but in his functional account, these are transformed into economic variables to be considered along with wages and prices. Thus, the main¬ tenance of the rural sector is in the best interest of the African because he finds life more pleasant and less expensive there. For his employer, on the other hand, it represents a “built-in employment insurance sys¬ tem”,15 absorbing surplus labor during slack periods in the copper industry and absorbing the social costs of labor reproduction (social¬ ization, medical and social welfare and retirement costs). The need of

106

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

the colonial economy is, thus, the exclusive purchase of surplus labor; wages can be driven down to bare subsistence sine the worker’s own reproduction is taken care of elsewhere. Like Berg and Baldwin, Houghton sees migratory labor as a bridge from the “primitive” economy of the rural sector to the “dynamic” economy of the urban areas. But where it represents for Berg and Baldwin an “efficient” adaptation to the economic conditions in West Africa and Northern Rhodesia, Houghton considers the South African migratory labor system “...an evil canker at the heart of our whole soci¬ ety, wasteful of labour, destructive of ambition, a wrecker of homes and a symptom of our fundamental failure to create a coherent and progressive economic society.”16 It represents the domination of a lower by a higher form of “industrial civilization,” which has inhibit¬ ed development in the African sector. Yet Houghton insists that “migratory labour cannot suddenly be abolished because the very sur¬ vival of both white and black depend upon it...”17 (emphasis added). Thus, for Houghton, labor migration as it exists in South Africa is not a necessary expression of the political and economic system of which it is a part, but is rather an unfortunate aberration in an otherwise ratio¬ nal system, resulting from either the incompetence or malevolence of the individuals responsible for running that system. Such an argument can only be supported by a set of assumptions very similar to Berg’s, a set of assumptions which accept colonial relations of production and see the development of Africans as necessitating their incorporation into the European industrial economy. The main difference arises from Houghton’s attempts to grapple with the social effects of labor migra¬ tion which Berg chooses to ignore and which Baldwin converts into economic factors. Otherwise, how could such a system be at one and the same time an economic necessity for the survival of black and white and an “evil canker at the heart” of the society which supports it? Houghton’s study focuses primarily upon the “injustice” of the sys¬ tem while ignoring the larger political considerations. Houghton’s con¬ fusion about its efficiency arises from his attempts to view the system simultaneously from the perspective of the needs of the capitalist eco¬ nomic system and from that of the social needs of the Africans. He rec¬ ognizes what Berg misses; that the migratory labor market is anything but a free market, that migrant laborers are exploited by the system which employs them. This situation Houghton deplores, but he is unwilling to recognize the fact that humane management of this inhu-

107

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

mane system is impossible. He notes correctly that the continuation of labor migration is necessary to the survival of the existing econom¬ ic system and the position of the white population of South Africa, but he incorrectly concludes that the survival of the black population also hinges on the maintenance of the migratory labor system. Houghton reveals the dilemma facing bourgeois thought — that it has to stop in theory where it has to stop in social practice, i.e., it cannot supercede the reality from which its status is derived.18 The studies of the causes of migrant labor can and will be criticized at four levels: 1) underlying assumptions; 2) methodology; 3) formal concepts derived from implicit or explicit ideological commitments; 4) the practical consequences from the point of view of analysis. The work of British social anthropologists, in its ideological pre¬ suppositions, gave aid and comfort to the Colonial Office by pre¬ empting the very future of the societies it studied; it assumed that the colonial political economy was positively functional and in equilibri¬ um with the needs of the traditional sector.19 Instead of being con¬ cerned with how Africans might live in an economy under their own control, functionalism undertook the task of showing how well the Africans lived under the then extant colonial system. This academic interest became either an apologia for the status quo, or a “scientism” which insisted that objectivity about method must involve neutrality about ultimate issues. The social reality of exploitation is thus a real limitation on scien¬ tific truth, transforming science into a justification of the status quo. In bourgeois society, it is not ideology that is based on science, but science that is based on ideology.”20 Thus the implicit yet central assumption of these scholars is that the development of imperialism was natural, inevitable and in harmo¬ ny with the traditional structures. Balancing between the needs of impe¬ rialism and scientific truth, these scholars resolved their dilemma by finding a balance between traditional societies and imperialism. To establish the “harmony of interest,” Houghton, for example, separates the human condition of the African from its contest within a set of power relations and policy formulations which impinge upon the African migrant but over which he has no control. Many social scien¬ tists who have studied migrant labor have uncovered virtues in terri¬ ble conditions, e.g., Watson tells us that imperialism has even strengthened “tribal” institutions.

108

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

The advent of Europeans has not destroyed tribal institutions. II anything, industrial employment has enhanced the value of tribal ties and loyalty to chiefs... An African may move from his tribal area to a town, engage in paid labor, and take part in social and economic organizations such as trade unions, that he may find there. But these organizations are relevant only to his status as an industrial worker, and have no place in the sys¬ tem of subsistence production, which is controlled by tradi¬ tional tribal social relations.21 There is a lot of evidence to contradict Watson’s idealized separation of the spheres of interests in which the African moves e.g., the Pirn Report of the then Northern Rhodesia, the Kieshamahock Survey in East London, the Tomlinson commission in South Africa, the East African Royal Commission in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, and the U.N. Report (1953). Let us turn to the problem of essence and appearance as the mystificatory aspect of fetishism. “[I]t will be well”, Geras tells us “to make a secondary distinction: between (a) those appearances, or forms of manifestation, in which social relations present themselves and which are not mystificatory or false as such, inasmuch as they do correspond to an objective reality; they become mystified only when regarded as products of nature or of the subjective intentions of men; and (b) those appearances, or forms of manifestation, which are quite simply false, illusions in the full sense, corresponding to no objective reality.”22 By attributing migrant labor to the consciousness or subjective intentions of Africans, the functionalists made the first kind of error. An initial look at the methodology of those who have studied migrant labor indicates a number of scientific shortcomings. The assumption that the colonial situation was unchanging if not unchange¬ able made it impossible for the functionalists to rise above the subjec¬ tive standpoint of the individual and his reactions. Given that rationale, whatever alienated adjustments Africans tried to make in situations where they were not self-determining were given a functional inter¬ pretation. The mechanistic and functional theory is highly valuable as a current in psychological research. It fails, however, when it is placed in the total context of life experience because it says nothing concerning the meaningful goal of conduct, and is

109

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

therefore unable to interpret the elements of conduct with ref¬ erence to it. The mechanistic mode of thought is of assistance only as long as the goal or the value is given from another source and the ‘means’ alone are to he recreated. The most important role of thought in life consists, however, in providing guidance for conduct, when decisions are made. Every real decision (such as one’s evaluation of other persons or how society should be organized) implies a judgment concerning good or evil, con¬ cerning the meaning of life and mind.”23 (emphasis added) Another weakness of these studies is that they were essentially attitude surveys. Even if human action cannot be understood independently of the meaning which the actor gives it, it is also important to recognize not only the structural determinants of behavior of which the actor may not be conscious but also the false consciousness of the actor. Activity has an objective structure which is often discrepant with its intended meaning. Migrants may act under the belief that they desire European goods, money, etc., but defining their activity as they com¬ prehend it may lead the social scientists to misconstrue their acts. That is, there is an explanation of behavior which lies outside the cognitive structure or the value system of the subject.24 Some key concepts used in functional studies of migrant labor, are “rural and urban sector”, “plural society”, “realistic society” and “mod¬ ern/traditional society”. The margins of these societies, “dual” or “plu¬ ral , are supposed to touch usefully without creating an invidious condition for either. Thus, Mitchell writes: The circularly migration of men here may be seen as a device to maintain and preserve the unity of the family where they cannot achieve this because of the paucity of local economic resources. The circulation of migrants between town and coun¬ try in terms of this argument stems from the separation of the places where the opportunity for earning money exists and the places where a person’s major social and personality ties and obligations are located.25 Gluckman confirms Mitchell’s thesis of the “dual” society: It has to be stressed that the migrant laborer moves not only between two places with different modes of production, con¬ sumption, and the like, but also between two distinct types of

110

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

social system. The tribal system is one which has its own goals and values, even though some of them are radically changed from the traditional past. Here the migrant laborer on his return home can become again, more than in the towns, a man with a variety of roles, with clear affiliations to others, and with culturally approved goals. He can marry, raise children and acquire satisfaction and prestige there. He can seek prestige within the tribal political system, or in other domains of its total system.26 In attempting to explain the migratory labor system as the collective result of the efforts of individual Africans to satisfy their needs and desires, social anthropologists deny the existence of that system as a coherent economic structure. For the dualist, the migrant laborer chooses freely to fulfill his own needs and desires through participa¬ tion in the migratory labor system. As such, this freedom of choice places the responsibilities for the system, with all its damaging effects and seeming irrationality, squarely on the shoulders of the Africans themselves. But what rational man would deliberately choose to trav¬ el hundreds of miles away from family and friends to live in squalid conditions and work at dangerously heavy labor in a mine 16 hours a day for a pittance? The answer, of course, is that no rational man would choose to do so. Thus, the essence, the implicit conclusion, of the argu¬ ments put forth by social anthropologists, is that the African “natives” are irrational, that they don’t know (or perhaps care?) how to act to their own advantage, and that white men are justified in exploiting them. The truth of the matter is that the migrant laborer exercises noth¬ ing remotely resembling freedom of choice when he “chooses” to par¬ ticipate in the system or to leave his family behind; the other alternatives are economically unviable or even more odious than labor migration. And it is no accident that this is the case. Migratory labor fulfills the needs of the implanted capitalist economic system, and therefore, the explanation of it must be sought in the requirements of that system not in the psyches of the individuals it exploits. Unlike social anthropologists, bourgeois economists have attempt¬ ed to examine the migratory labor systems of Africa in terms of their relations to the economic system of which they form a part. They have found that labor migration is indeed an economically “efficient adap¬ tation.” What they do not see is that this is true only, when migrant labor is viewed from the perspective of the capitalist economic system and 111

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

its needs. Neither Houghton nor Berg nor Baldwin recognizes the fact that white and black interests are in antagonistic conflict and cannot be resolved within the present economic and political system, for this system is designed to fulfill the interests of a particular social class. It is this reality, the nature of the wider economic system of which migra¬ tory labor is a part, which must be dealt with, not obscured in a mire of unarticulated assumptions, if the phenomenon of labor migration is to be understood.

The Dominant Ideology The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.27 The central problem, which the “harmony of interest” analysis fails to identify, is that the extractive economic system did not seek to convert African peasants into wage laborers, but had to employ masses of unskilled workers in the specific historically and economically deter¬ mined conditions of South African mining and cash-crop farming. The conditions were that the wages paid to Africans could not include the cost of sustaining the family of the workers; that the wage-earner and his family be widely separated in space; and that this separation endure for uninterrupted periods of considerable duration, yet not so long as to break the ties bind¬ ing the worker to his ‘tribal’ domain.28 This was a matter of a “rational” calculus of cost in which the power¬ less African counted only as an object, not as an independent economic agent with his own “rational” calculus. Thus, in the model which assumes the harmony of interests, the causal sequence — the subor¬ dination or domination of the African worker by the whites — is omit¬ ted. Ultimately, the sense of the Africans’ struggle with an alien reality to which they are subjected is not even considered a possibility. Such mystification is, of course, the very purpose of ideology. The analyses of these authors are accommodated within the socio-political param112

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

eters conceived, drawn up, and imposed by the white colonialists. Thus, in looking at migrant labor, they do not look at the system as a whole, much less at how it effects the human condition. The traditional struc¬ ture is made to appear isolated, when in fact the colonial government controlled the lives of Africans everywhere in the colonies. There are not “two distinct types of social systems.” Thus, those who study migrant labor are led to accept conscious¬ ly or unconsciously the “naturalness” of the splitting of the migrant’s family, i.e., the father going off to a distant labor center and his wife and children staying behind. How can one speak of the “circulating migration of men” as a device to preserve the unity of the family, except as ideological moral rearmament? Those scientists whose analyses are accommodated to the on-going system become ham-strung in the choice of their concepts. The preservation of the status quo limits inno¬ vative concepts to what is immediately useful for the perpetuation of the status quo.

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor One of the pre-requisites of wage labour and one of the his¬ toric conditions for capital is free labour and the exchange of free labour against money, in order to reproduce money and convert it into values in order to be consumed by money, not as value for enjoyment, but as the use value for money.29 This necessitated the creation of a class of “free” wage-earners artifi¬ cially separated from the land. Expropriation and taxation produced the required labor. This is important in understanding the exploita¬ tion of laborers under capitalist conditions everywhere, but it is also of importance in explaining the special circumstances of migrant work¬ ers in particular. For in Africa, when the extraction of minerals and cash crops by Europeans for the accumulation of capital began, the African was separated from his means of livelihood — control of the land — and was converted into a wage laborer, but his labor-power did not become free labor which he could exchange at its historical value for money. This is the crux and meaning of migrant labor: it is a deliber¬ ately contrived system of extraction of surplus value without incurring the social costs of labor. Luxemburg (even though she was not specif¬ ically concerned with systems of labor migration) touches the heart of the matter: 113

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Since the accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without non-capitalist surroundings, we cannot gain a true picture of it by assuming the exclusive and absolute dom¬ ination of the capitalist mode of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammeled accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majori¬ ty of resources and labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production — this being the historical milieu of accumulation capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social organization... And in fact, primitive conditions allow of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capi¬ talist social conditions.30 For the African peasant, labor migration meant performance of obli¬ gatory service and exploitation by agents of imperialism through polit¬ ical-legal compulsion.31 The “Native Reserves” in which Africans are confined in South Africa provide an example of these conditions. The South African gold industry could not manage without the resources and labor power of the African, maintained through the reserve sys¬ tem at a level of pre-capitalist existence. Rand ores are of very low grade and lie so deep that under normal conditions their extraction could not even approach economic viability: about 160,000 tons of ore have to be processed to wring out a single ton of gold. Mines with richer utT cr! accessible deP°sits than this have simply been abandoned in the U.S.A. and Australia, where the labor force has emerged as a devel¬ oped working class and gained some collective bargaining power. South Africa maintains the largest gold industry in the world. There is only one reason for this; the presence of Africans in the native reserves which ensures a subsistence work force.3^ The case of the South African gold mines is not unique. Most of the jobs done by migrant laborers in South Africa and elsewhere are fatiguing, dangerous, dirty, or debasing. Without the constraints of the native reserve system, which force Africans to work for low wages under these conditions, these jobs would have to be paid at the his¬ torical value of the labor power of those who undertake them; a wage that would enable African workers to satisfy the historical needs of a uropean and that would compensate for the repugnant character of their social labor. 114

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

Such a wage would be very high; probably considerably high¬ er than that paid in present-day capitalist civilization for jobs which are reportedly very skilled, but which — because of the desirability, conveniences and ‘social status’ they provide — are much more sought after than the jobs of building work¬ ers, bricklayer, navy, or iron-workers. In other words, the pay¬ ment of this manual labour-power at its historical value — the price that would prevail on the labour market if the criteria of capitalist society were themselves fulfilled — is a structural impossibility for this society. The maintenance of the social hierarchy, and scale of values on which capitalist civilisation rests, and thereby the survival of bourgeois society and its mode of domination, depend on the possibility of excluding form this civilisation and its labour market a decisive fraction of the working class.33 It should be noted that this dependence is not solely economic: the political advantages of migratory labor to the capitalist class are of even greater importance, “...since massive reliance on immigrant or migrant labor enables a basic modification in the social and political structure of the indigenous population to be artificially produced.”34 In Africa it prevents the emergence of a coherent proletariat, preserving and exaggerating, as it does, “tribal” divisions among workers, and weak¬ ening their ideological force and cohesion. It depreciates the economic and social value of manual work, on the one hand, and elevates tech¬ nical, intellectual, and tertiary work, on the other hand. By assigning a racial basis to this separation, it inflates the social and political impor¬ tance of the “middle strata” and encourages white working people to identify themselves ideologically with the white petty bourgeoisie.

Conclusion In this paper we have attempted to show the contrast between the the¬ oretical description of migrant labor, found in anthropological and economic analyses, and the actual meaning of migrant labor in the political economy of Africa. The circulation of labor, which the anthro¬ pologist says characterizes African labor, and the “target worker hypothesis” of the economist are theoretical models of groups who trade, to their mutual advantage, under conditions of equality, reciproc¬ ity and freedom. But migratory labor, which still characterizes most of

115

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Africa, and in particular white-ruled Southern Africa, is based on the division between superior and subordinate, rather titan on a division between equals and is anything but mutually beneficial. It is tanta¬ mount to forced labor and robbery. That this side of the story was ignored is not surprising, “...for in the tender annals of political econ¬ omy the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.”35 The use of migratory labor in Africa illustrates that for capital accu¬ mulation to work ...two different kinds oi people must meet in the market (and later in the labor process), on the one hand, owners of money eager to increase their capital by buying other people’s labor pow er, on the other hand, free laborers unencumbered by pre¬ capitalist obligations or personal property. Once capitalism is on its legs, it maintains this separation and reproduces it on a continuously expanding scale.36 Migrant labor represented the extreme form of looting African labor in the dawn of imperialist production. In Africa, imperialism estab¬ lished not a market economy, such as emerged in the “mother coun¬ tries , but plantation and mining economies; migratory labor represented an aspect of the political economy of primitive underde¬ velopment.37 However, bourgeois anthropological analysis, like that of all bour¬ geois social sciences, is not an analysis of the nature of migratory labor, but is one which adapts to building upon the dominant class ideolo¬ gy oi capitalist society. Previous to imperialism, there was no coherent andiropological discipline with an organized body of practitioners who insistently proclaimed their potential practical value to the empire and demanded financial support for their studies while the Colonial Office apparently ignored them. The truth of the matter, of course, was that the arm-chair anthropology of racialism practiced by these pioneers was much more useful to the empire than any field study could have been; conquest was the major concern and for conquest all that was needed was guns and a hunting license, which the prevalent racial the¬ ories provided.38 It was not until after conquest, when the question of administration came to the fore, that anthropologists, armed with new theories of functionalism, were recruited to investigate African societies already transformed through conquest and the implantation of a capitalist 116

The Political Economy of Migrant Labor

economy. The task of the anthropologist was to provide ideological rationalization and useful information for the maintenance of the sta¬ tus quo. In this situation the anthropologist stood poised between the ruling class and the subjugated population, his eyes turned downwards and his palm upwards: “Eyes down, to study the activities of the lower classes, of the subject population — those activities which created prob¬ lems for the smooth exercise of governmental hegemony.”39 Social anthropology has risen to its present eminence and pros¬ perity on the blood and sweat of the poor and oppressed, who resist¬ ed having their interests brought into “harmony” with the interests of imperialism; “...it owes its prestige in this [British] society to its puta¬ tive ability to give information and advice to the ruling class of this [British] society about ways and means to keep the people down.”40 Ideologically, the “conservative wing” (of liberalism) in anthro¬ pology applied the harmony doctrine directly to the unreformed colo¬ nial social order and profited greatly in terms of prestige for its “realism”. Since theoretically social anthropology could not transcend the facts of the status quo, it abstained from speculating about any order of society other than the present one. It studied society as it seemed to be and actually came to lay the foundation for the modern study of African society.41 Migrant labor was regarded as an inevitable condi¬ tion for introducing the “primitive” African into the modern econo¬ my, despite the social and economic problems it involved. Yet this was not a necessity of the African subsistence or pre-capitalist economies. Migrant labor was not due to natural or social-psychological causes, but to a political policy and an economic style heedless of social costs and human lives, or of anything except profits. The African version of enclosure was intricate and complex, and migrant labor was its conse¬ quence. Not much work has been done in this area, but there is a press¬ ing need to investigate the particular conditions of the different systems if we are to understand the dynamics of underdevelopment in Africa. It is important to realize that the concepts we use, the method we apply, and the units we do or do not select for analysis have a direct bearing on our ideological standpoint. Although there are attempts at understanding social reality, they petrify into a form of social reality and folklore as time goes on. The “target worker hypothesis,” built uncritically by economists upon the analysis of social anthropologists and accepted as social reality, formed the basis of government and employer policy, and entered into the folklore as justification for pay-

117

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ing Africans the most paltry wages. Thus, the fragmentation of reali¬ ty implicit in the mode of analysis of anthropology and economics served to allow each to abrogate its responsibility to view the total sys¬ tem. It remains to make explicit that in Capital the distinction between essence and appearance is, as well as everything else, a distinction also between the totality and its parts. Each sim¬ ple relationship or fact is an appearance whose full meaning or reality is only articulated by integrating it theoretically within its total structure.42 In order to destroy the functional relationship of anthropology to the status quo of power relations it is not sufficient simply to discard the functional approach: we must turn our eyes from exclusive focus on the subject population and begin to look at the total picture, a picture undistorted by our fear of the imminent slap to our upstretched palm. This we must do if we intend to get down to the serious business of helping to understand and alter the dynamics of underdevelopment in Africa and elsewhere.

118

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more fero¬ cious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. —C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

A Preliminary Note Poverty is not written in the Stars, underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs. —Edward Galeano, Open Veins in Latin America Recent historical developments have brought about the importance of elaborating the problems of underdevelopment. The recent United Nations Assembly on raw materials highlighted the urgency of a prop¬ er understanding of the forces of work in the poor countries of the world. Houari Boumedienne, the President of Algeria and initiator of the Conference, set the stage for the issues: Today, international relations are dominated by a many-faceted world-wide confrontation pitting the forces of liberation against the powers of domination and exploitation, and these powers in fact pose a renewed threat to recently acquired inde¬ pendence whenever their privileges are contested. (Nicolaus 1974ii) This paper, written in September 1973, was an individual attempt to arrive at a clear understanding of the issues of underdevelopment in Africa. As I wrote the manuscript, it was quite obvious that a prin-

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

cipled position is required for a theorist of underdevelopment if he is to arrive at truly scientific conclusions about the present state of under¬ development in Africa. For the continuing struggle, scholars who sym¬ pathize with the underdeveloped part of humanity must, at every stage, reevaluate the old myths the past scholarship has created. Every study, if it is based on false theoretical and methodological principles, can be a disservice to the understanding of underdevelopment. In the course of constructive critical analysis of certain misleading positions, it is pos¬ sible to deepen an understanding of what is actually happening, or what should be done, to fight under development. There are, today, various theories of “modernization” and/or “economic underdevelopment” united by an unstated assumption. They presume that the underdevelopment observed in the former colonies can be isolated from the international system of capitalist development — and examined on its own terms. Thus, there are today economic, political, sociological, anthropological and even psycho¬ logical theories or non-theories of modernization and/or under devel¬ opment. On this derivative level, theories of modernization become descriptive rather than critical. When one begins a survey of the pro¬ liferating theories, one is forced to recall Rousseau’s accusation: “We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and poets in plenty, but we have no longer a citizen among us.” (quot¬ ed in Zinn 1970:1).

The Politics of Modernization Theories The contemporary epoch is characterized by the emergence of the for¬ mer colonies into independent nationhood. The independence is not only political, but it is economic and social as well. As such true inde¬ pendence of the former colonies is a direct threat to the affluence of the former metropolitan powers. Further, the emancipation of the for¬ mer colonies takes place in a world that is defined by the struggle between world capitalism and socialism. Imperialism used the theories of modernization as one of its most refined ideological instruments to influence the people in the former colonies. Thus, modernization the¬ ories reflect as well as the description of conditions in the former colonies, the unarticulated attempt to undermine the validity of social¬ ist solutions to the problems of underdevelopment. Even the termi¬ nological description of the former colonies, as “underdeveloped” and now “developing” societies reflects implicit manifestation of what 120

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

Szentes calls “orthodox apologetics.” (1971:13). In this paper I want to first illustrate, by a few examples selected from the various fields, the ideological orthodoxy that informs current bourgeois theories of modernization. Secondly, I want to distinguish between genuine and ahistorical, or spurious comparative studies of underdevelopment. Thirdly, I want to look at four studies dealing with the subject of modernization in Africa — one a theoretical work, anoth¬ er a work focusing on a small area. (The author studies social change on the individual.) The third study looks at modernization at the national level, and the fourth looks at one attempt of modernization at a national level that failed. Though the selection of these books was arbitrary, it is interesting because it shows the ad hoc nature of the modernization studies. A vast body of critical literature, pointing to the conceptual and theoretical inadequacy of studies of underdevelopment, already exists: Frank (1967), Szentes (1971), Rodney (1972), Ribeiro (1972), and many others. I cannot overemphasize the importance of even more critical appraisal of bourgeois literature of modernization. And it should be appraised from many angles. I cannot agree more with Robert Lynd’s observation that “This is a critical time for the social sciences, not a time for courtesies.” (1967). My own point of departure is to illustrate, with examples drawn from various disciplines, MyrdaPs asser¬ tion, and to show that bourgeois theories of modernization are, in fact, inspired by a common ideology that seeks to undermine Marxism and the socialist road of economic development. At this point, it may be worthwhile to recall St. Ignatius Loyola, and the Society of Jesus, that was officially chartered by the Pope in 1540, to fight against the European Reformation and the Revolutionary ideas of Luther and Calvin. To check the decay of the Catholic Church’s orthodoxy, the Jesuits entered German Universities in numbers and soon predominated in the teaching of theology. St. Canisius, the great publicist of orthodoxy and the leader of the German Jesuits, often emphasized that “a good writer is worth more than ten professors.” (Anon 1968:366). In the struggle between the socialist and the capitalist road of eco¬ nomic development, the theorists of modernization are surely in the forefront of those who would do for the status quo and the capitalist road what the Jesuits did for Catholicism—persuade the underdevel¬ oped society that the Western model of economic growth is the only

121

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

one applicable to their condition. This is an insurmountable objective. It involves creation of palatable euphemisms to describe the econom¬ ic condition of the former colonies and absolving the former metropoli¬ tan countries of any blame regarding the state of affairs in the former colonies.

What is modernization and/or underdevelopment Before proceeding to a discussion of the inadequacy of the theories of modernization, let us see what those who have talked about modern¬ ization mean by it. According to Apter (1967:v), modernization means “the spread of roles which functionally linked and organized in indus¬ trial settings, make their appearance in systems lacking an industrial infrastructure.” Apter goes on to say that we can ‘compare societies in terms of degrees of modernization by assessing the spread and prolif¬ eration of modernization scales. The task is to evaluate the political prob¬ lems produced by the lack of integration.” (emphasis added) (p.v). For Daniel Lerner (1967:21-38) modernization is a “lexicon, the social process of which development is the economic component. If economic development produces ‘rising output per head,’ then mod¬ ernisation produces the societal environment in which rising produc¬ tivity is effectively incorporated.” Lerner considers “as modern a society that is capable of‘self-sustaining growth’ over the long run.” The attainment of “self-sustaining growth” involves far more than eco¬ nomic process of production and consumption. “It involved the insti¬ tutional disposition of the full resources of a society—in particular, its human resources.” (p. 21). Central to Lerner’s thesis is the proposition “that there is a simple process of modernization which operates in all societies, regardless of their color, creed or climate, and regardless of their history, geogra¬ phy or culture. This is the process of economic development, ...which cannot be sustained without modernisation.” (p. 22) The characteris¬ tics of developed and underdeveloped societies are then outlined: Most developed societies feed their entire population at the rate of 3,000 or more calories per head per day with 20 percent or less of their labor force employed in agriculture. Most underdeveloped societies employ 80 percent or more of their entire population with the minimum caloric requirement, (p. 23) Lerner also discusses the problem of unemployment in the urban

122

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

areas of underdeveloped societies which he says result from the “decou¬ pling” of the twin processes of urbanization and industrialization, (p. 25). The solution to this problem does not lie, according to Lerner, in the idea of enriching yourself by the plunder and booty of defeated adversaries. “Getting a bigger slice of the other fellow’s small pie will impoverish him without enriching you. Beggar thy neighbour, in the neighbourhood of poverty, is a game without profit to the winner.” Modernization, according to Lerner, can be attained only through the use of democratic institution. The leaders of the underdeveloped world, (And Lerner singles out Sukarno, Nkrumah and Nasser) who he said tried harder than most “charismatic” leaders to involve their people, but because of their autocratic cult of personality could not be checked by public opinion and uncontrolled popular vote failed to modernize. “Without some institutional procedure to activate....pop¬ ular controls, there is no democracy and no democratic development.” (p. 30) Lerner says that Africa is fortunate, in that being the least devel¬ oped continent in the world, it has the chance to survey a variety of modernizing efforts in different times and climes, and can evaluate them with reference to its own condition of life. (p. 35) He warns Africa against what he calls the politics of blackmail-and-bribery. The rule of the politics of blackmail is that if we can’t get what we want from the United States, on our own terms, then we’ll get it from the Soviet Union (p. 37). In another paper (Magubane and Mariotti, 1976), we have criticized Lerner’s position. He makes serious factual and historical errors. African urbanization, for example, does not suf¬ fer from the mysterious decoupling of urbanization and industrializa¬ tion, but rather from the action upon her of the colonial factor which forced on her shanty-town urbanization because of a one-sided devel¬ opment of primary resources geared to the needs of the metropolitan countries. Development of modernization is seen by Eisenstadt (1966:1) as “the process of change towards those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and have then spread to other European countries and in the nineteenth and twen¬ tieth centuries to the South American, Asian and African continents.” For Almond and Coleman (1966:16) knowledge of “Western com¬ plex systems” is said to provide a basis from which a model or ideal

123

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

type of developed society can be derived and this is then juxtaposed against one of traditional or underdeveloped society drawn from anthropological accounts of small-scale and isolated non-Western com¬ munities. (cf. Brett, 1973:4) While it may be useful, and even interesting, as Petras (1966:489490) says, to note in quantitative terms how one country compares with another in terms of development, the framework of Apter, Lerner, Eisenstadt, Almond and Coleman leaves totally out of account what is more decisive: the role of imperialism, and the power relations between Africa and the former metropolitan countries as a result of this fact. The degree of control that the former metropolitan countries exercise by the control of the economy, trade and world markets for raw mate¬ rials is overwhelming. It feeds the metropolitan countries and drains the newly independent countries. The bourgeois method of compar¬ ing the developed and underdeveloped countries loses “the dynamics of inter-systems relations, the interrelations between the dominant industrial countries and the subordinate primary producers.” This is because “the focus is on discreet problems in a static comparison of the developed and underdeveloped nations.” (Ibid.:490) This criticism of Petras applies as well to Manning Nash (1963:5), who has outlined what he calls three stages of attacking the problems of social change and economic development. He writes: The first mode is the index method: the general features of a developed economy are abstracted as an ideal type and then contrasted with the equally ideal typical features of a poor econ¬ omy and society. In this mode, development is viewed as the transformation of one type into the other. Developed exam¬ ples of this mode are to be found in Hoselitz’s Sociological Factors in Economic Development, or Parsons’ Structure and Process in Modern Societies, or in some of the work of the soci¬ ologist Marion J. Levy, Jr. . . . The second mode is the acculturation view of the process of development. The West (taken here as the Atlantic communi¬ ty of developed nations and their overseas outliers) diffuses knowledge, skills, organization, values, technology and capital to a poor nation, until over time, its society, culture and per¬ sonnel become variants of that which made the Atlantic com¬ munity economically successful. Examples of this line of

124

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

reasoning can be found in Moore and Feldman, Labor Commitment and Social Change in Developing Areas, and in Lerner’s Passing of Traditional Society, or in the many accounts of how the Soviet Union and Japan ‘did it’.... The third mode... is the analysis of the process as it is now going on in the so-called underdeveloped nations. This approach leads to a smaller scale hypothesis, to a prospective rather than a retrospective view of social change, to a full accounting of the political, social, and cultural context of development.... In another discussion of economic development and “modernization” Nash (1966:122) has this to say: The industrial revolution is the basis for tremendous growth of population and per capita income in the past two centuries. Participation in this stream of cultural history is the core of modern economic development. The concern with economic growth and cultural change is hence an interest in discovering the conditions under which different societies and cultures either discover, invent, or accept the essentials of the techno¬ logical and economic revolution ushered in around 1750. Subsequently, Nash further remarks: If Burma fails to make the transition to a modern welfare poli¬ ty and economy, the failure will be one of human effort, a reflex of the society, culture, and personality of the Burmese, not the act of an indifferent or malevolent universe. (Ibid.: 136) (empha¬ sis added) It is important to note the striking similarity in the views of the vari¬ ous writers thus far quoted. It does not matter whether they are talk¬ ing about Africa or Asia, their assumptions of underdevelopment are still the same. What the writers call the Atlantic community is supposed to provide a model for development. However, Eric Hobsbawn (1968:7) cautions against this mechanical model: In the first place Britain developed as an essential part of a glob¬ al economy, and more particularly as the centre of that vast for¬ mal or informal ‘empire’ on which its fortunes have so largely rested. To write about this country without also saying some¬ thing about the West Indies and India, about Argentina and 125

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Australia, is unreal....For instance, how the industrialization of Lancashire prolonged and developed slavery in America, or how some of the burdens of British economic crisis could be passed on to the primary-producing countries for whose exports we (or for that matter other industrialized countries) were the only outlet. ...(T)he purpose of such remarks is sim¬ ply to remind the reader constantly of the inter-relations between Britain and the rest of the world, without which our history cannot be understood. It is no more. Boeke (1953:20) has outlined several sets of development/underdevelopment antitheses — all of which result from different “mental urges” of the two kinds of societies. He rejected the idea that the devel¬ opment/ underdevelopment antithesis could be the political and eco¬ nomic heritage of colonialism and imperialism: If one keeps in view the economic character of dualism, both the dustbin term ‘colonialism’ and the antithesis native-foreign become equally objectionable: they belong to entirely alien spheres, they are anything but economic.... Hitherto economic ‘dualism’ and ‘colonialism’ have been confused by identifying capitalistic interests with foreign domination. It is to be hoped that with the obtaining of national sovereignty the true char¬ acter of economic dualism will be acknowledged sincerely and logically, for its negation is decidedly not to the interest of the small man. These examples are enough for us to make a tentative conclusion: It seems that a series of positions are adopted in a pragmatic fashion. Then they are reiterated often enough by members of various disci¬ plines until they petrify as folklore. It is also quite obvious that the cur¬ rent modernization theories are intimately bound up with the events caused by the demise of colonialism and the emergence of neo-colomalism. As long as the colonial system existed and the underdevelop¬ ment of the colonies was the extension of the metropolitan country’s productive forces, their economic spoilation (colonies) did not become a problem of the world economy, (cf. Szentes, Ibid.: 19). The long-sustained disinterest in the problems of what are called developing and/or underdeveloped countries, on the part of the social scientist (in particular, anthropologist), who studies these societies, is itself of great interest and needs to be studied. The bias of bourgeois 126

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

theories of underdevelopment according to Mrydal (1968) asserts itself in cold war considerations which excludes objective research, and in the insistence upon concepts and theories which may have validity in the Western setting but which remain totally irrelevant as regards the actual problems of the underdeveloped part of the world. The theories of modernization arose after the Second World War in the midst of the Cold War to explain away underdevelopment. W. W. Rostow’s book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, is a classic case in the genre of Cold War scholarship. The publisher advertised the book as follows: This book is a generalization from the whole span of modern history. It gives an account of economic growth based on a dynamic theory of production and interpreted in terms of actu¬ al societies. It helps to explain historical changes and to predict major political and economic trends; and it provides the signif¬ icant links between economic and non economic behavior which Karl Marx failed to discern, (quoted in Baran 1969: 52) Rostow himself asks the reader to “note the similarities between his [Marx’s] analysis and the stages of growth; and the difference between the two systems of thought, stage by stage.” (pp.52 f.) Hot and cold wars for the division of the world among imperial¬ ist powers have tortured the earth since the last quarter of the last cen¬ tury. The effects of the ideological struggles to win the hearts and minds of man in the former colonies or to retain them within the orbit of neo-colonialism has affected the social sciences in undetermined ways. The theories of modernization are therefore a case study in the ideological war going on in the world today. Few have written more perceptively on the subject of underdevel¬ opment and the colonial situation than Paul Baran in his classic study The Political Economy of Growth (1957). After his untimely death, in a personal memoir Paul Sweezy (1965:45) tells us that Blackwell’s pub¬ lisher wanted substantive modifications to be made in the manuscript. Baran was not willing to do it. One of the readers who had been asked to review the book had made this unsolicited comment: You have not asked for my opinion on the book: may I give it nevertheless? The author is a Communist. No doubt the administration of underdeveloped countries by Britain and other colonial Powers has been, and is, by no means perfect. 127

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

But according to the author everything that Western countries have done has been for their own advantage, and the under¬ developed countries have always been exploited. He puts the worst interpretation on all Western motives. He contrasts Russia s treatment of underdeveloped communities. Here he gives too much space to what the theorists claim that they will ultimately achieve, disregarding all past and present exploita¬ tion. Admitting that the Communists imposed their agrarian revolution by force, he simply writes off all the hardship and injustice entailed as the ‘necessary birthpangs’ of the socialist state. (Sweezy 1965:45) Sweezy then goes on to quote the final sentence where, precisely, he says the “dog was buried. I think that if the book were read by, say’ an African student with little knowledge of history, he might be very seri¬ ously misled.” (p.46). This little incident illustrates the crux of the ide¬ ological war informing theories of modernization. My point is that many of the bourgeois theories of modernization, consciously or unconsciously, are apologies for the rape of the former colonized people. The issues they deal with are, in most cases, not sci¬ entific questions or problems of underdevelopment and therefore have no place in any truly scientific exercise in the political economy of underdevelopment. They are ideological defenses and often reduce the problem of underdevelopment into trivia by studying esoteric aspects of the colonial situation. A lot of energy is dissipated in pretensions conceptualizing about the nature of economic growth; schemes and models and systems are invented which have the air of profundity and which may advance careers, but hardly anything else. (cf. Zinn 1970-8) The preoccupation with the ghost of Marx infuses and vitiates Apter’s book already referred to above. Distinguishing his approach from the supposed Marxian approach Apter writes: (p. 8) The Marxian-existential leads to a single plane of reality, the material. The probabilistic leads to a factoring of truths observed at each layer of reality—a probabilistic consensus (not truth but likelihood). The Marxian-existential, by virtue of its emphasis on “totalization” (synthesis), makes that single real¬ ity all-encompassing and therefore too gross to provide answers to questions that lie within it. Is it really useful to study class today or is it more interesting to study the total situation of choice and

128

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

the role of class in that situation ? Indeed, we need to know more than the ways in which the instruments of competitive conflict reflect material aspects of life—rather, we must see them in the context of our understanding of choice and the precise nature of the relationships involved in choice. This brings me to the concept of choice itself, which I regard as the focal point of the social sciences, uniting normative, structural, and behavioral theory, (emphasis added) Such subtlety suggests, I concede, a carefully cultivated antidote to Marxism. The obstacles met by present day Marxism, observed Plekhanov, eighty years ago (M.D 90-1) are incomparably greater than those that Newton’s theory came up against on its appearance. “Against (Marxism) are directly and decisively ranged the interest now in power, to whole influence most scholars subordinate themselves of necessity.” The real conditions of the Third World, so-called, stands in such contradictory intimacy to the capitalist world’s prosperity, that ideolo¬ gists of the former metropolitan countries find themselves forced to cre¬ ate ad hoc explanations of this sorry state of under-development. “The result is a kind of semi-subconscious ‘conventional-lie’ which, of course, can have only a most injurious effect on theoretical thinking.” (ibid:91) Behind the bourgeois theories of modernization lies a desire to conceal and gloss over the indisputable link that exists between the activities of imperialism and the poverty of the so-called underdevel¬ oped areas. To emphasize the links between Third World poverty and the affluence of the capitalist world is not just a question of “brood¬ ing on the past” on my part — although it is hard to read history with¬ out doing some brooding. Even today, the neo-colonial links that continue to link these societies to imperialism are producing a wors¬ ening situation. The present division of the world between what today is known as the developed and underdeveloped world, commenced at certain moments in history — the moment when the productive forces of the underdeveloped world were usurped by imperialism. Under neo-colo¬ nialism the processes that underdeveloped Africa, Asia and Latin America continue to operate. Therefore, in underdeveloped countries, we are faced as much with a historical continuity of successively unleashed effects of the colonial situation as with simultaneous inter¬ active functional contrasts of development and underdevelopment (cf. Rebeiro 1972:28). 129

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Impelled for reasons of ideology to destroy Marxism, or to dis¬ credit the socialist road of economic development, academic social sci¬ entists limit their researches to comparisons of developed and underdeveloped societies that avoid historical explanation. The theo¬ retical horizons of bourgeois social scientists rarely go beyond a search for psychological, cultural and structural factors that are supposed to inhibit development. According to Apter (ibid.:9-10): ... modernization as a process leading the state of modernity, begins when man tries to solve the allocation problem, just as social science was born with the study of choice and preference. ...modernization as a non-economic process originates when a culture embodies an attitude of enquiry and questioning about how men make choices—moral (or normative), social (or struc¬ tural), and personal (or behavioral). The problem of choice is central for modern man. The cumulative effect of innovation through industrialization in those parts of the world that became the most dynamic and explosive was to make it clear that moder¬ nity was not the property of the few\ or of a scientific elite, but rather a fact of culture. Hence, in these times, more than ever before, it is not only interesting but also important to recognize this characteristic of modernity: choice. Societies are now able to choose a direction and means of change. For this reason, theory that can explain how men choose is important. For this reason too, the normative aspects are critical. (Emphasis added) Here then we have the crux of the issue of underdevelopment— choice. The underdeveloped countries have a choice of adopting those value systems and structures which are conducive to development. For Apter to quote Ribeiro, “The underdeveloped people’s condition of back¬ wardness, as a point of departure would progress by addition of mod¬ ernizing traits until they attained the present situation of the industrial capitalistic societies, viewed as ideal models of social order, (op. cit. p. Apter’s analysis is grotesquely smug and hypocritical. Yet it lends itself admirably to ideological purposes. To understand Apter’s view of development it is necessary to understand what he takes for grant¬ ed, i.e. those things about the developed society which he regards as settled. The factors he selects as being responsible for Europe and America’s development have nothing to do really with what actually 130

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

happened historically in those countries—there is nothing said about slavery, violence, cupidity and oppression of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Never was Engels’ observation more true that the more “civ¬ ilization advances, the more it is compelled to cure the evils it neces¬ sarily creates.” What goes as the theories of modernization is simply “conventional hypocrisy” which was unknown to earlier forms of civ¬ ilization (Engels 1972:36). The modernization of Europe in the sev¬ enteenth century was achieved by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in European societies. According to Engels: From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society but of the single scurvy individual—here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them mod¬ ern wealth could not have completely realized its achievement. (Ibid.:235-6) Perhaps the greatest indictment that can be levelled against the socalled theories of development is that they are simply wrong; they are what the theorists want it to be, rather than a record of how Europe and America achieved their development. There is a kind of determi¬ nation to embellish the capitalist road of economic development so that the present generation is denied the full knowledge about the past. Maybe the record is simply too grim to be taught to “children.” Fanon, like Engels, finds in the development of Western Europe, “only a suc¬ cession of negations of man and an avalanche of murders.” (1963:236). The theories of modernization support the type of scientific research that is satisfied with copiously documenting the difference between backward and advanced societies, and that records in equal detail the contrast of modernity and traditionalism (cf. Rebeiro op. cit.:22). By believing and seeking answers to the problems of underdevelopment in the underdeveloped economy, these studies perform an ideological func¬ tion; ideological in the sense that they reflect an attempt by some European and American intellectuals to legitimate and justify the sta¬ tus quo. The true explanation of underdevelopment lies as Rodney (1972:30) has so well stated it: “in seeking out the relation between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.” Therefore, the division between “devel-

131

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

oped” and “underdeveloped” nations can be explained only by histor¬ ical and social reasons and to a large extent by the history of capitalism itself. (cf.Mandel 1968:442). The only purpose that can be served by studies that look for causes of underdevelopment in the underdevel¬ oped countries themselves is to induce in the backward nations an atti¬ tude of resignation to their poverty (cf. Ribeiro op. cit: 22). To what extent can the continued state of underdevelopment in the former colonies be attributed to their cultural or psychological pecu¬ liarities as opposed to the structural characteristic of the world domi¬ nated by imperialism? Resolution of this social issue would obviously have implications for the strategies of development including the prob¬ lem of how to do away with the imperialist system. When solutions to problems involve the negation of a whole historic epoch, those faint of heart are likely to resort to all kinds of pragmatic explanations. This is more so when there seems to be no chance of solving problems except by the reconstruction of the world; at such times attention turns toward psychological problems which social injustice itself has made acute.

Empiricism and Modernization It is typical of contemporary bourgeois scholarship, whether in eco¬ nomics, sociology, politics or anthropology, to avoid general theoret¬ ical problems, i.e. to study not society as a whole in its historical development, but merely to consider separate, regional or village aspects of social development. Innovating behavior, resistance to change, and the effect of tradition or of value systems constitute the major areas of concern for empiricists. Recently there has emerged a proliferation of studies devoted to village change or individual change and modernization. Some studies even select religious sects to study their role in spreading so-called modernizing values and influences. While it is true as Frankensberg (1968:v) states that the understanding of general problems requires specific studies, it is also true that specific studies that simply ignore the larger issues could be utterly useless, and an exercise in theoretical futility. I have argued elsewhere (Magubane 1971:425) that while it is legitimate for a social scientist to concentrate on one or another stra¬ tum or type of community, he should never lose sight of the true scale or of the uneven nature of development and underdevelopment. The present situation in Africa is indeed complex and many-sided, t is characterized by disparity in the influences of the colonial situa132

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

tion which created a patchwork of social, political and economic struc¬ tures and ideas. It was this patchwork of social, cultural and value sys¬ tems that became the historical inheritance at the achievement of independence. The struggle for economic independence and social change after political emancipation is confronted with the necessity to consolidate the unevenness created by colonial developments. The function of the social scientist investigation of a particular country, area, region or even individual change is to provide a picture of the lives of people and the influences that affect their lives. Towards this end the social scientist must study the present conditions of exis¬ tence, the ideas and feelings of his subjects and the entire structure of currently existing social relationships as they are or were influenced by the colonial situation. According to Beattie (1959:47) the social sci¬ entist deals with three different kinds or levels of data: (i) “What actu¬ ally happens, (ii) What people think happens, (iii) What they think ought to happen, their legal and moral values” and I would add the fourth, what happened in history that has a bearing on what the indi¬ vidual thinks happens or what is actually happening. Beattie cites Levi Strauss in asserting that “what actually happens” is itself a “construct of the analyst” and “not necessarily that of the people studies” (Ibid:57). Social Change and the Individual: A Study of the Social and Religious Responses to Innovation in a Rural Zambian Community (1968) provides an excellent example of empiricism that sweeps the real issues of underdevelopment under the rug of “objective anthro¬ pological analysis.” In the preface, Ronald Frankenburg lauds Long’s book for what he conceives to be a clear insight into the social reality of post-colonial Zambia: Dr. Long here sets out to document in detail, in one district, the kinds of socio-economic changes that were taking place as Zambia approached, achieved, and consolidated independence. He shows the factors responsible for the mergence of various new social forms, (p. vl) Long is critical of what he labels “structural approach” which “con¬ sists of a series of synchronic structural analyses of the major social groupings, social positions and institutional frameworks of a given social system at successive time periods.” (p. 6) The major drawback of this approach, according to Long, is that “it provides no convinc-

133

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ing assessment of the factors responsible for change, nor does it pro¬ vide a basis from which to offer prognoses about probably lines of development.” (p.7) Interestingly enough, this is also the major draw¬ back in the author’s approach for he severely limits the important oper¬ ant variables that impede real change and development of Zambia (i.e. its past colonial imprisonment and its continuing unequal relationship with developed Capitalist countries). This line of investigation would probably be dismissed by Long, for it would certainly lead him to con¬ clude that the real factors for change in Zambia lie outside of the coun¬ try, indeed, outside of Africa. However, it is my belief that the imposition of colonial rule on any people introduces the most funda¬ mental and pervasive sort of “Social Change,” upon their culture, and by its every nature necessarily subsumes all other empirically recog¬ nizable changes, (cf. Shapiro 1973:1) In his introduction, Norman Long states what he considers are the priorities of his investigation: One can meaningfully study the processes of social change tak¬ ing place within a community by focusing on those types of social situations which exhibit most clearly the operation of new perameters for action, (p. 5) He then proceeds to discuss changing settlement patterns brought on with the advent of the plough. The change from an agricultural sys¬ tem based on axe technology to plough cultivation wrought changes in existing institutional forms: the settlement pattern moved from the matrikin group to nuclear-type family units. The emergence of cash¬ cropping displaced the traditional subsistence agriculture. New pat¬ terns of social status emerged. The village headman’s prestige dwindled with the ascendance of the chief’s and district commissioner’s, (both representatives of the colonial administration.) Elaborate details flood discussion of the above while little attention is given “to those factors responsible for the change.” (If the introduction of a new technology is said to be the cause, where did this plough come from? Who had the capital to buy the plough? Why was it introduced and in whose interests?) Much attention is placed upon the person of the social innovator, one “....who manipulates other persons and resources, discovers new channels for exploitation or utilizes traditional relationships and val¬ ues in attempt to achieve some new type of goal, or who devises novel

134

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

means to attain some already recognized end.” (p.5) Situational anal¬ ysis provides the means for Long to investigate the alternate ways cer¬ tain individuals acquired land, labor, capital and expertise to set up their farms. The underlying assumption here is that this path is open to all individuals. Long illustrates the factor of choice as follows: It is argued, for instance, that the range of choices open to a particular farmer at any one moment in time is not only deter¬ mined by what he already has in the way of capital and exper¬ tise or by the previous decisions he has made, but also by the network of multifarious social ties which link him with other actors in the situation, who like him, have their own expecta¬ tions. (p. 40) Long’s analysis does not supply any information about the colonial sit¬ uation. In fact, he examines the history of Zambia only as far back as 1950. Such a cut-off point is too limiting for a full interpretation. The subjugation of the area by Britain is given a very cursory mention in only two pages while a few more pages are devoted to the division of the district to parishes. The influence of what is called the Copper Belt region which is a foreign controlled enclave of economic growth hard¬ ly receives a mention, when it is a truism that no aspect of Zambian life has not been affected by the “development” along the so-called “line-of-rail.” Now and again, references are made to those who have “recently returned from town, [who] having spent a considerable peri¬ od in wage employment....had sufficient capital to set up as peasant farmers....” (p.237). What is sufficient capital remains a mystery. Finally, Long’s discussion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is superficial and trivial. He tells us that he aims “to explore more fully, in relation to a specific empirical situation, the Weber thesis about the ways in which a religious ethic influences social behaviour.” (p. 201) In this attempt to apply the Weberian thesis of the correlation between forms of religious belief and practical ethics, there is very little critical analy¬ sis of the applicability of these ideas to the Zambian situation. To the extent that Long ignores or neglects the colonial situation and its pervasive and systematic implication for social change, his study must be judged inadequate despite Frankenberg’s fullsome praise. Long’s study is an example of the low level and generalizing descrip¬ tive type of study which cannot generate any theory of social and indi-

135

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

vidual change. Although such analysis helps clarify individual under¬ standing or false consciousness about local level processes, both eco¬ nomic and cultural, it generally fails to link up with larger historical forces which are determinative of peasant behavior, but which lie beyond individual day-to-day conception of the social situation, (cf. Henderson, 1972 Manuscript). Empiricism a la Long raises opinion — that is, individual assertions — upon a pedestal, and ignores the general — the laws of the historical process that have produced the facts. Opinions have a false component which can only be corrected by the social scientist who has a total grasp of the situation. That is, opinions must be examined in their historical interrelationships, and not just in their specific manifestations: Durkheim wrote: ..social life should not be explained by the conception which participants have of it, but by the fundamental causes which escape their consciousness; and we think also that these caus¬ es ought to be sought principally in the way in which associ¬ ated individuals are grouped. It is only in this condition that history can become a science and sociology, consequently, exists. (1964:287) The role of religion in the colonial scheme of things and its subsequent influence on behavior needs to be spelled out. The influence of reli¬ gion was not only innovative. According to Suret-Canale (1971:355), “The trinity which, from the beginning, presided over the colonial ven¬ ture consisted of the military officer, the administrator and the mis¬ sionary.” The last named, although on the margin of the official establishment, was often more important than the other two. Napoleon, with his usual cynicism, had already observed that the mis¬ sionary’s role enable him to “cover up political and commercial inten¬ tions.” In a colonial situation one cannot simply impose Weber’s ideas about the role of religion in a pragmatic and mechanical way as Long does in his study of the Watch Tower. The Christian Church, in the colonies, was always happy to see the culturally oppressed peasants and workers let off steam in revival meetings or drift along in their indif¬ ference and passivity. The Watch Tower movement in Africa is precisely the kind of movement that indulged the masses in their illusions and spontaneity and thus channelled popular discontent to harmless goals. There is more adequate historical influence of religion in Africa discussed by Perry Anderson (1962:102-3) important enough to jus-

136

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

tify quoting at length: The conversion of the native population represents, even if only symbolically, its incorporation into the mental and cultural uni¬ verse of the white. It thus has the value, even to the most athe¬ ist and anti-clerical administration, of initiating the process of disciplined adaptation to European cultural norms.... Christianity in colonial areas is a domestication of the indige¬ nous population: objectively, it breaks the Africans into European thought and mores, subjectively it frees the European of his ter¬ rors of the African by including him within the same canon as himself. At the same time, it has a crucial additional merit for any colonizer. It represents an ideal arrested threshold of accul¬ turation for the natives. A colonial system needs a subject pop¬ ulation with a certain minimal level of Europeanization, for purposes of order and exploitation. On the other hand, too great an assimilation of European culture and techniques would directly threaten the inequality on which the entire colonial order rests. The Christian religion offers almost the perfect device for securing the fruits of the first without incurring the dangers of the second. (Emphasis added). These historical facts are not altered by independence or occasional individual enterprise of particular religious sects. In any given form or at any given moment, a particular religious sect will act as the bulwark of a certain type of society or as an instrument of undermining the integrity of traditional societies. It is this colonial aspect of religious bodies like the Watch Tower that Long leaves aside. The modernizing influence of religion is therefore not a simple matter. When Long dis¬ misses the role of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in urban areas, he is more to the point. He states that a substantial proportion of these “relatively deprived individuals” become Jehovah’s Witnesses because member¬ ship: offers them some compensation for the low occupational sta¬ tus they occupy in the urban mass, a highly articulate ideolo¬ gy of social status which matches their own style of life aspirations, and the promise of a better life in the New Kingdom to come. (p. 229) Long’s analysis gives a one-sided and distorted picture of the Watch

137

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Tower movement in the rural areas. Contrary to professor Frankenberg’s assertion, Long’s study can tell the Zambian Government nothing about local issues of development and social change. I think it a disservice for Dr. Long to take Weber’s seminal idea about religion and the Protestant ethic and to deal with it in so frivolous a manner. We need serious local level studies and we need revolutionary perspec¬ tive to free us from the chains of exploitation — economic, social and psychological. We do not need simplistic ideals like those of Dr. Long who takes the religious delusion of the victims he purports to feel so deeply about, but makes of their alienation a positive virtue. Why is the Malawi Government suppressing the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Why did the Zambian government suppress and banish the Letshina movement? Was it because these governments did not understand the positive value of these religious sects as modernizing influences? Now let me turn to another study by Ukandi Godwin Damachi, Nigerian Modernization: The Colonial Legacy (1972), with an intro¬ duction by Wilbert E. Moore. In the foreword, Moore tells us that despite all difficulties, “modernization in Nigeria has been going on rapidly. Indeed, in the form of urbanization, the pace of change out¬ strips the expansion of urban facilities and of regularized employment in the modernized sector of the economy.” (p. xii) Unlike Long, Damachi not only recognizes the action of the colo¬ nial factor, he also looked at modernization from the perspective of the nation. He tells us that the tendency toward industrialization and urbanization, which is both directly and indirectly due to the action of the colonists, is one of the outstanding characteristics of presentday life in Nigeria. “Indeed the colonial situation involved not only intervention and the introduction of new techniques and cultural mod¬ els, the appearance of new processes of social differentiation, it entails with respect to the dominant minority which is the ‘foreign elite,’ a reorientation of the social structure. In overcoming the tradition of equilibrium, it sets a chain of radical social change into motion.” (p.3) Damachi’s study is focused upon the effects of colonialism and its concomitants (industrialization, Westernization) on some of the tra¬ ditional institutions and values. Stress is laid on colonial and industri¬ al effects on the traditional values, beliefs and religion. “A look at the gradual value change is vital for several social scientists today, notably ethnographers and other social scientists” (p. 5). Damachi’s approach regards the traditional Nigerian society as a dependent variable and

138

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

“industrialization as a concomitant of colonialism” are taken as inde¬ pendent variables introduced on the dependent variable, (p. 5) I have criticized Long for ignoring the colonial situation and for being too narrowly focussed. Damachi on the other hand has an extremely charitable view of the role of the colonial situation. In the concluding chapter, “The effects of industrialization on the tradition¬ al Nigerian society—a colonial assessment,” we are told that “The colo¬ nial power provided the infrastructure on which progress in the ‘independence’ period depended: an entirely new administrative machine, reaching down to the village in the most remote areas; a net¬ work of roads and railways; a basic service in health and education. Nigerian export of primary products brought considerable wealth to the people.” (p. 107, emphasis added). Contintiing his charitable analysis Damachi writes that “missionaries introduced the Western script and made it possible for Nigerians to learn Western values which have been the impetus behind industrialization and modernization.” (p. 108). Damachi concludes his study by saying that, “Most of the points raised here obtain in many other developing nations which are in the process of industrialization.” (p. 115) In assessing the consequences of colonization one must, as an ele¬ mentary principle, distinguish between what Robert K. Merton ( 1949) calls the manifest and latent consequences of certain types of actions. That is, what was the goal of colonialism and in working to achieve this particular goal, what was colonialism forced to do, i.e. what were the consequences of a colonial situation. In an outstanding article Waterman (1969) writes that: Metropolitan capitalism was not interested in creating copies of itself [in the colonies] but only in certain and narrowly-lim¬ ited kinds of economic activity.... Colonial rule itself deeply dis¬ rupted traditional and political structures, again creating not those typical of the metropolis but those specific to the colonies. Thus the infrastructure of roads, railways, the educational system, the introduction of Christianity and other forms of social differentiation are born during the development of the colonial mode of production and exploitation, and are not the intended developments from the beginning of the system. These developments occur in spite of the colonial situation. The development of the colonial situation makes

139

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

possible and even necessary the appearance of certain categories and roles. To invest these categories and roles as the positive contribution of colonialism is a value judgment not warranted by post-colonial devel¬ opments. Damachi uncovers virtue even in the terrible disruption of African traditional societies. Comparing the disruption of the indus¬ trial revolution and the disruption caused by the colonial situation Basil Davidson (1968:277) writes: The first [industrialization] destroyed, but also, after its fash¬ ion, mightily rebuilt afresh, the second, having gone far to ruin what it found, could only leave for Africans the task of making a new society. No such new society came into being during the colonial period. Little was left behind but an utter impover¬ ishment of the old society, a chaos of ideas and social relation¬ ships .... When the principal colonizing powers eventually withdrew, everything of basic social meaning remained to be begun or rebuilt afresh. Fanon, for instance, sees in the colonial elites nothing but spoiled chil¬ dren of yesteryear. The colonized so-called bourgeoisie in Africa is the caricature and a masquerade. It is a class devoid of the capitalistic ethnic which, in metropolitan countries, drives the bourgeoisie relentlessly for¬ ward in a ceaseless quest for invention and expansion. The psychology of the national bourgeoisie is that of the businessman, not that of a cap¬ tain of industry. Its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflages, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism. In Africa, Fanon writes: The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner. But this same lucrative role, this cheap-jack’s function, this meaness of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolise the incapa¬ bility of the national middle-class to fulfil its historic role of bourgeoisie. Here, the dynamic, pioneer aspect, the character¬ istics of the inventor and of the discoverer of new worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisie are lamentably absent. In the colonial countries, the spirit of indulgence is dominant at the core of the bourgeoisie; and this is because the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie, from 140

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

whom it has learnt its lessons. It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention, stages which are an acquisition of that Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances. In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jump¬ ing ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth, (pp. 124-5) Africa, like every other colonized country, was left with a social struc¬ ture which, combined with its new neo-colonial status and severe inter¬ nal problems, will probably condemn this extremely exploited continent to perpetual underdevelopment unless radical changes are undertaken. “Underdevelopment is structured by the patterns of his¬ torical movements of international economy; underdevelopment is cemented by the dependent position of national oligarchies in inter¬ national stratification.” (Johnson 1973:104) The last study that I want to refer to is that by Roger Genoud, Nationalism and Economic Development in Ghana (1969). For any¬ one interested in the problems of modernization in Africa would agree that an understanding of the Ghanaian experience is essential to an understanding of the path of modernization and the structures that inhibit such development. Genoud in this book sets out to show that the Ghanaian experience is to be understood in terms of the process of decolonization. That is, before a country that was a colony can mod¬ ernize, it must first of all decolonize—free itself from the neo-colonial structures and the dependent petty bourgeoisie. Genoud considers in some detail the political and economic character of Ghana at inde¬ pendence. Its social structure was characterized by an embryonic and dependent capitalist class and a marginal though “privileged” work¬ ing class. Ghana was also dominated by an enormous “middle class” (i.e. self-employed population of farmers, petty traders and artisans). The political strategy of the Nkrumah regime in the early period was to invest in the infrastructure and to try and meet the demands for improved standards without changing basically the inherited colonial structures and relationships. At the end of the 1950’s, the declining reserves and the falling prices of cocoa obliged the Nkrumah regime to make its first fundamental choice between neo-colonial subordina¬ te

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

tion or growth and development free from neo-colonial handicaps. However, the regime was forced to postpone the new program because of the political struggle with the colonial petty bourgeoisie of the old intelligentsia and the wealthy cocoa farmers. This opposition had given rise to regionalism and ethnic separatist tendencies (or what our ethnographers call tribalism). The examination of the social, eco¬ nomic and political development of Ghana by Genoud reveals the essence of the problems of modernization in Africa. The problem of modernization is “posed by the passage of a traditional economy and society, which have been modified and altered by the colonial impact, to a more advanced stage of economic and technical development” (p.202). To break the neo-colonial noose, Nkrumah was forced to adopt a socialist strategy because, “capitalism had already had its turn in Africa, for 50 years, 100 years or more, and Africa [was still] underdeveloped. In other words, capitalism, as far as development [was] concerned, [was] seen as having already failed.” (p. 205). It goes without saying that for leaders like Nkrumah, Nyerere, Sekou Toure and others, the choice of a socialist road of economics is dictated by historical neces¬ sity. Their policies confirm Fanon’s (1967:78) observation that: The concrete problem we find ourselves up against is not that of a choice, cost what it may, between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by men of other continents and of other ages. Of course we know that the capitalist regime... can¬ not leave us free to perform our work at home, nor our duty in the world. Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand the choice of a socialist regime, a regime which is com¬ pletely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt. Bourgeois theorists (or should I say propagandists) of development assert or have need to assert that the spread of socialist methods of development in the former colonies have been and are dictated by choice or simply are voluntaristic in nature. However, the truth of the

142

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

matter is that the socialistic solutions to the problems of economic backwardness are not a hypothesis based on a free choice. The social¬ istic solution is a historic necessity; necessitated as much by the his¬ toric facts that underdevelopment in the former colonies begins with the intervention of the colonial factor as by the advances made by socialist countries and those former colonies that chose a socialist path. The transformation of society along socialist lines has been prompted not by the subjective decisions of isolated personalities, but by histor¬ ical necessity. According to Rodney (1972:19) Imperialism was in effect the extended capitalist system, which for many years embraced what world—one part being the exploiters and the other exploited, one part being dominated and the other acting as overlords, one part making policy and the other being dependent. Why one must ask are bourgeois theorists so preoccupied with”refutations” of Marxism? Lenin (1908:81) wrote that there is a well-known saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests, attempts would certainly be made to refute them. Marxist theories of develop¬ ment which link the morphology of underdevelopment to ravages of colonialism and imperialism provoke the most rabid opposition from the cold war scholars and apologists of imperialism. The Marxian methodology, of course, serves to identify the true source of under¬ development. Marxism points out that the state of underdevelopment is not the result of a curse, but is the result of human actions. We agree with Szentes (op. cit.1971) that: Substituting any description of the surface phenomena of underdevelopment for a theory of underdevelopment is total¬ ly unacceptable. Only a historical explanation, a historically ver¬ ifiable theory is good enough. It is just the most practical policy of liquidating underdevelopment which needs such a histori¬ cal explanation! Whether a given policy and the underlying the¬ ory is correct or not will finally be decided of course, only by future events, by the history to come. This is the final histori¬ cal verification! Any prediction, however, as to whether future history will or will not verify the policy of the present and its underlying theory, can be made only on the basis of the knowl¬ edge to what extend this policy and theory are based upon the historical lessons of development from the past to the present. 143

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Conclusions One must recognize with Barrington Moore, Jr. (1965:5) that in cer¬ tain respects the tasks of applied and theoretical sciences are mutually contradictory. The applied scientist seeks to create an accurate map of a small portion of reality. The social scientist who wishes to explain and ultimately predict the behavior of a particular social group will want to learn a great deal about the specific history, economic, political and other forces that impinge about the behaviour of this group, as well as the organizational features of the group, in particular its capacity to resist certain types of strains and influences or to abstract and digest new technology and other technical additions. He is not necessarily concerned with mining facts for or against some hypothesis. On the other hand, the theorist endeavors to understand social life, i.e., the developmental process of human society. Human society and its development is not an abstraction to be neatly tied up in some academist’s definition. Human society is a chang¬ ing thing, and its real meaning is apparent only in its history. The social scientist who wishes to construct a logically integrated theory of under¬ development and/or modernization must attempt to trace the histor¬ ical origins of underdevelopment, as fact and idea, and discover how in both respects it came to take the form it is today. The historical approach will enable the social theorist to eliminate as many “pertur¬ bations and irrelevant factors and forces as possible. During the colo¬ nial era Africa and other colonized parts of the world fell into a condition of arrested development. In the meantime Europe was enriched with the products of the spoilation of the colonies and matured as a capitalistic formation. Do the bourgeois theories of underdevelopment account for the facts of lack of modernization in Africa, etc.? We have seen in the pages above that the theorists of modernization resort to the unsound pro¬ cedure of formulating ad hoc explanations, thus vitiating the possibil¬ ity of a coherent theory of the phenomena of underdevelopment (cf. Petras op cit.: 481-2). Is underdevelopment merely the relative dif¬ ference between the developed and underdeveloped countries? Is it an aSSregate of certain attributes deemed characteristic of developed countries? Is underdevelopment a complex system or a structure? All these and many other interpretations of underdevelopment do exist, (cf. Szentes op cit.: 17) The pragmatic explanations of underdevelopment create a verita144

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

ble confusion. They turn theory into ideology, and use it as a means of obfuscation and obscuring reality rather than clarifying. The bour¬ geois theorists of underdevelopment use their science as a means of defense of the status quo. The theoretical horizon of bourgeois approach, let me repeat, rarely goes beyond a search for psychologi¬ cal, cultural and economic factors more or less propitious to the intro¬ duction of technological innovations or the emergence of innovative entrepreneurs. To study what they call social change or modernization the social scientists according to Ribeiro (op. cit.:24) ... select concrete contact situations in which archaic and mod¬ ern representatives of the national society’s ethnic stocks are contraposed. Such situations are the object of exhaustive, painstaking observations, which are expected to aid in the for¬ mulation of a general theory of cultural change. In point of actual fact, however, having been isolated previously from the historical sequences in which they were shaped, from the national context into which they are introduced, and from the world economic system in which they arise, these situations cannot contribute to explaining even themselves. Development and underdevelopment from our point of view are simul¬ taneous processes. As Galeano (1973:30) puts it: “Development devel¬ ops inequality . . . The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its parts, and this inequality assumes ever more dramatic dimensions. The oppressor countries get steadily richer in absolute terms—and much more so in relative terms—through the dynamic of growing disparity. The capitalist ‘head office’ can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know the myths can¬ not be eaten.” Do the empiricists meet the canons of applied science? Hardly! Most empiricist studies involve a series of guesses about the important variables that may characterize and explain change, (cf. Mills 1962:566). Empiricist studies attempt to explain the exact workings in every respect of the system it studies. There is only one difficulty it encounters, it cannot say where the system is going and in any case empiricist science in fact justifies the way the system is ordered. By selecting a narrow segment of social life and examining it in detail and on the basis of limited factual data, at best can only uncover relation-

145

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

ships existing at the surface of social life. Engel’s remark that naked empiricism very closely approximates belief in miracles was very much to the point. It was the thesis of this paper that this is precisely the role of bour¬ geois theories of modernization and/or underdevelopment — to cre¬ ate myths. In the Cold War between the former metropolitan countries and the socialist world, nearly all the scholars in the field of modern¬ ization studies become ideologies against the socialist road of economic growth and development. Thus, the so-called development theories, if taken seriously by the so-called developing societies, can become a means of containing the new insurgent development forces (Petras op. cit.: 494). The theories of modernization are manipulated at will in the space of ideology. A model for the study of economic development in Africa should consider the dependency of the developing countries to the imperial¬ ist world as an independent variable, and the national social structure and economic institutions as intervening variables, (ibid.: 499) The theoretical keynote against the studies that replace the total¬ ity of reality by aspects and forms in which it appears, that fragment reality along disciplinary lines or against empiricism that isolate indi¬ vidual areas and cannot or refuse to see the totality of the historical process is the Marxian category of the totality. According to Perry Anderson (1962:13), “a totality is an entity whose diverse structures are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered sep¬ arately is an abstraction.” To select an aspect of reality distorts its meaning, just as the study of religion as only a modernizing influence can distort its real meaning. Studied from the totality of the colonial situation, religion as prac¬ ticed by the Watch Tower ceases to be a modernizing ideology and becomes an ideology that distorts men’s minds and which necessitates overcoming by a rational view of the world. For the empiricist society is reduced to a series of unrelated facts. This permits an empiricist to select any and every segment of a society for study depending on the availability of funds. Empiricism in fact degrades the struggle for over¬ coming the historical structures of underdevelopment from its socio¬ political and economic transformation (which can only be achieved by the overcoming of all neo-colonial entanglements) to a series of unre¬ lated investigation aimed at changing values and beliefs for the pur¬ poses of creating isolated enclaves of development with no relation to

146

Ideological and Theoretical Problems in the Study of Modernization in Africa

the general development of the entire society conceived as a totality. Coming as they do from bourgeois society, in which programs for the poor involved small incremental changes, the theorists of moderniza¬ tion generalize these paltry changes to the national level. Could this be because any radical changes in the developing societies cannot be achieved without destroying the interests of the monopolies from the metropolis? We cannot accept the bourgeois point of view regarding the caus¬ es of underdevelopment, we cannot let ourselves see only isolated parts of the underdeveloped societies. We must seek the contradictions that have produced underdevelopment in the societies that have most of the world resources not in their psyches but in the usurpation of these resources by imperialism. The developing societies can only free themselves from the chains of underdevelopment by grasping the historical nature of underdevel¬ opment. This would also enable them to evaluate every project under¬ taken. If it does not correct the historical negation of these societies then it is simply tempering. It is applying a band-aid to a cancerous infection! Modernization would be meaningless unless it is the ideo¬ logical reflection of the objective historical necessity of socialism. The primitive underdevelopment of Africa is the adverse side of the devel¬ opment of the world system since the slavery era. Since development and underdevelopment are contradictions inherent in the nature of capitalism, the continued links between Africa and that capitalist sys¬ tem can only aggravate and worsen underdevelopment. One cannot agree more with W. E. B. DuBois (1961:189) when he wrote regarding social sciences and black folks: So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Aeschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flick¬ ered, flamed and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, [so long shall]... igno¬ rance and unhallowed prejudices [prevail]!

147

i

v

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology: A Failure of Method and Theory

Today we can accept neither old nor new ideas without ques¬ tioning the structure and methods of the research pursued— and even the personal motivation of the investigator. In fact, a major concern in the methodology of modern scientific pro¬ cedures is the search for the relationship between the subject matter studied and the personal position of the researcher. That is to say, social and cultural situations are related to the researchers’ ideas and values. —Camara 1967:100 URBAN SOUTH AFRICA is a product of the very recent history. The discovery of diamonds in Kimberly in 1867 and gold in 1886 were portents of changes that transformed the rural communities into an urban-industrial society in a space of a few generations. If we admit that the town is a social-economic formation, and not merely a cul¬ tural unit, urbanization in South Africa was attended by unique fea¬ tures. It did not develop out of the gradual improvement of local industries or local farming; it conquered the country from outside with the economic culture of industrialized Europe (especially British) behind it. When the mode of production was agriculture and cattle farming, the desire to obtain and extend landed property was the ruling pas¬ sion of the Dutch and English settlers in their competition with the Africans. Thus a legacy of conflict between White settlers and Africans gave urbanization in South Africa a peculiar configuration. Tensions that arose in struggle for land in the frontier were carried over and compounded in the new urban settings. These conflicts, in a society characterized by conquest, markedly affected the process of urban

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

growth and distorted the “truth” that the towns were a sign that the society was undergoing an industrial revolution, in which the produc¬ tive forces and a large part of the population are transferred into the urban center (cf. Welsh 1971:172). In South Africa, urbanization and industrialization highlight the fundamental disequilibrium between the “urban capitalist” sector, pos¬ sessing almost all the wealth and amenities, yet assumed to be for “Whites” only, and the “traditionaP’sector, chronically underdevel¬ oped, socially disorganized, technically retarded, economically bankrupt, and its manpower economically harnessed to serve the pros¬ perity of the “White” sector. The cause of the dichotomy is funda¬ mentally economic, but its more immediate and visible determinants are conditioned by national and local policies of the country. These policies produced paradoxical effects in the consciousness of groups affected by the twin processes. To exclude Africans from permanent settlement in town the White rulers organized asphyxiating legal repres¬ sive structures. To understand this process, one must grasp the objec¬ tive socio-economic historical process to which man is subject in society and the effect of these objective facts on the consciousness of individ¬ uals in their everyday existence. This paper discusses three works entitled The Xhosa in Town (Mayer 1961; Reader 1961; Pauw 1963) archtypically representing to me some of the deficiencies of urban anthropology in South Africa. What it is that makes “anthropology” such a hated word in Africa and a hand maiden of imperialism is a fact not well recognized yet. In many mono¬ graphs dealing with social processes in Africa, many doubtful, mistak¬ en, and often pernicious theses have been accepted as working “truth,” and form a major part of comparative and conceptual framework assumed to describe the patterns of urbanization and responses to urban life by Africans. An unconscionable fuss, for instance, is made over the book reviewed here (particularly by European and American scholars), and has given concepts developed in these studies a grow¬ ing life of their own, turning them in fact, into ideology which fixates thought. Some of the concepts popularized by these books will here be crit¬ ically assessed for their practical, ideological, and theoretical meaning. This I will do by focusing on the method and on models of social struc¬ ture or units that were constructed and analyzed. The exposure of errors in any discipline is a small price to pay. Also, I will show that the

150

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropolocy

chosen theme of this trilogy, although expressed in very impartial and “objective” terms, is nothing but pseudo-scientific defense of economic and political interests of the White society. The deficiencies of these studies are not peculiar but stem rather from fundamental premises of urban anthropology as it developed in Africa. In fact, these criticisms apply to innumerable other monographs of the same order. According to Kuhn (1970:43-51) every field of scientific endeav¬ or rests on a paradigm, i.e., on a conception of reality accepted by prac¬ titioners of the discipline. The questions any science asks are fundamentally limited and conditioned by its underlying paradigm, which is often delimited by the focus of research which may become a hindrance rather than a stimulus to further advance. When this hap¬ pens, the science in question enters into a period of revolutionary cri¬ sis. The previously existing consensus among its practitioners needs to be superseded. What is now required is a new paradigm. Since older members are unable to free themselves from their training, loyalties, and preconceptions, the younger ones must break the habits of the past. This is the spirit which informs this article.

South Africa and the Development of Urban Anthropology Urban anthropology, as a branch of social anthropology in Africa, began in South Africa, a country that was the first to confront African urbanization. Therefore, a glance back at the models and assumptions that were used in the study of urbanization there may be fruitful. Despite some disagreements among urban anthropologists, research and graduate training in this area has been governed by consensus at many levels, especially theoretical and conceptual. Underlying this con¬ sensus was the practical utility to which knowledge of laws of social change could be put. Like most intellectual exercises, the theories and concepts that evolved in the study of social change in Africa can be more fully understood if its social context is taken into account. One must also recognize that applied and theoretical sciences are mutual¬ ly contradictory. The applied scientist seeks to create an accurate map of a small portion of reality as a background against which interpreta¬ tions are presented and policies prescribed. In 1922, Radcliffe-Brown posed what he called the problem of “Bantu Sociology” in South Africa thus:

151

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

In Africa more perhaps than in any other part of the world, social anthropology is a subject not merely of scientific or aca¬ demic interest, but of immense practical importance. The one great problem on which the future welfare of South Africa depends is that of finding some social and political systems in which the natives and whites may live together without conflict and the successful solution of that problem would certainly seem to require a thorough knowledge of the native civilization between which and our own we need to establish some sort of harmonious relation. Every day the customs of native tribes are being altered by action of the legislature and the administra¬ tion, by the action of our economic system through the teach¬ ings of missionaries and educators, and through contact with ourselves in innumerable ways, but we have hardly the vaguest ideas as to what will be the final results of these changes, upon the native and upon ourselves. There seem to be some who opti¬ mistically trust to the action of the natural laws that regulate the social development of man; but the forces of history some¬ times lead to progress, sometimes to disaster. And it does, at any rate, seem certain that if certain existing tendencies are per¬ mitted to go unchecked occasions of conflict such as the Zulu rebellion, Bulhoek and Bondelzwarts (African rebellions) will become increasingly frequent (1922:38). Radcliffe-Brown adds that “in the establishment of the department of social anthropology in the University of Capetown this practical impor¬ tance of the subject has been kept constantly in view, and the teach¬ ing and research are being organized on this basis” (1922:38). Radcliffe-Brown then distinguished and pointed to the superiority of the functionalist1 approach over historical or ethnological approach in terms of practicality. “The aim of this method (functionalism) is not to reconstruct the history of a people but to interpret their institutions in the light of general laws of sociology and psychology” (Ibid.:39). Radcliffe-Brown concludes that “the study of such problems, the soci¬ ological and psychological problems of native life, is certainly far more likely to lead to results of practical value to South Africa than the study of ethnological problems” (1922:40). Malinowski, who visited South Africa in 1934, provides further guidelines. He writes (1945:161-162):

152

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology

The ethnographer who has studied culture contact and assessed its forces, its potentialities and dangers, has the right and duty to speak as the Natives advocate. But he can go no further. Decisions and the practical handling of affairs are outside his competence. His primary duty is to present facts, to develop concepts theoretic ally \ alid and practically useful, to destroy fic¬ titious and empty phrases and thus to reveal forces and factors which are relevant and active. Through comparative study he can discover and define the common factor of European inten¬ tions and African response. He can lay bare the source of mal¬ adjustment. These, at times, he will find are due to intrinsic conflict of interest, or again, from almost adventitious misun¬ derstanding. . . . Knowledge gives foresight, and foresight is indispensable to the statesman and to the local administrator, to the educationist, welfare worker and missionary alike. The discovery of long run tendencies; the capacity for far-seeing and forecasting the future in the light of full knowledge of all facts involved, competent advice on specific questions—these are tasks of the contact ethnographer as a practical aspect (my italics). Since Radcliffe-Brown (1922) and Malinowski (1934) visited South Africa, many studies of social change, in particular, of Africans in urban situations, have seen the light of day.2 The essential features of practi¬ cal anthropology would be to identify out-moded features of tradi¬ tional consciousness so as to objectify these in legislation as immutable laws of nature. Brookes expressed the role of anthropology as an admin¬ istrative tool thus: The glorification of tribalism and all the old customs, precisely because they are old, a kind of twentieth century adaptation of the ‘noble savage’ theory, has had direct effects upon the Union Native Policy, for here what I have called the ‘Anthropological School’ came into immediate contact with life. It stands behind many of the provisions of the Native Administration Act of 1927, by which the chief has been made an important part of the administrative machinery. One of the chief complaints made against the Act has been that it tends to assimilate all Natives to the position of Tribal natives in the Reserve. Others may exist, they may even form the majority, but they are an embar-

153

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

rassing phenomena. They do not live as the social anthropolo¬ gist thinks they ought to live. They do not think on the lines which the Department considers suitable for natives. They obsti¬ nately refuse to develop ‘on their own lines.’ No matter! In the sacred name of science they must conform to the theories which science has just begun to abandon. So the law operates for all, and there is no hurry to introduce the system of exemption timidly mentioned in the Act (1927:137-138). The focus and concept developed in the study, The Xhosa in Town, a triple volume work written in the years 1961-63, makes sense only in the light of this background. It is a classic coordinated study of the city of East London in the Cape Province. Philip Mayer (the senior member of the research team) calls East London a “White town” (1961 :xiii) despite its 65,000 African population, including what Mayer calls a nucleus of born and bred townspeople. What makes East London a White town is not clear, except that in South Africa the “Whiteness” of an area is intended to undercut the status of Africans as permanent residents of an area. “The Blackman’s Portion” (Reader 1961), the first volume to be published, gives a historical survey,3 the demography of the town, the struggle for subsistence and problems of accommodation. The method adopted is sociographic, and where sociological themes are pursued, they are made to serve the sociographic picture. “The Townsmen or Tribesmen” (Mayer 1961), the second in the series, is the most impor¬ tant, in the sense that it is here that the theoretical concepts that have become part of the conventional wisdom are discussed. It shall receive most attention in this review. Briefly stated, it deals with “becoming urban” (or resistance to urbanization). “The Second Generation” (Pauw 1963), the third volume, is a socio-cultural study of the endresult of African urbanization. The practical demands, however, posed difficulties for those who studied the process of urbanization in Africa. They could not formu¬ late acceptable criteria or “urbanization.” Mayer in his study claims to offer not only a sociological explanation to the facts he observed, but to attach an acceptable meaning of what he calls a perilous phrase— “the process of urbanization.” Thus he tells us that: This book deals with migrant life in East London, but not pri¬ marily with the migrants’ adjustment to the white world as

154

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropolocy

such: i.e., not mainly with race relations, work situations or the contacts between tribal and white people’s expectations. The “two worlds” with which we shall be concerned are those of tribal Xhosa and urban Xhosa society, with only indirect refer¬ ence to the third or White (1961:2). Mayer is conscious of the fact that there are “regulations deflecting what would otherwise be a rather powerful drive towards urbaniza¬ tion” (1961:225). The implication of these regulations for the behav¬ ior of Africans is, however, never investigated. In formulating his criteria for the “process of becoming urban,” Mayer used subjective criteria. These included among other things a man’s stated intentions of remaining in town and/or of bringing his family to join him there (ibid.:8). Mayer as a result divided the African population of East London into three “ideal types”: the “town-rooted,” the “countryrooted,” and those who are in between, the “double-rooted.” These latter are individuals that are simultaneously town-rooted and urbancultured and country-rooted (ibid.:224-225). “The fact that some Xhosa in East London are town-rooted, while others are country-root¬ ed constitutes a social division of major importance in town” (ibid.:68). For whom? This is not spelled out. Mayer explains that the countryrooted and town-rooted are not exclusive categories, many persons in East London are, at one and the same time, “town-rooted immigrants” and “country-rooted migrants” and thus “double-rooted” (ibid. :910). Despite their involvement in the urban economy, we are told there are many fields of behavior in which the country-bred and town-bred Africans in East London tend to act differently. Mayer was interested to see how these differences are reduced more by some categories of country-bred than by others; i.e., he was interested in problems of dif¬ ferential adaptation. Again the question that comes to mind is, “Why?” There are two types of responses by Africans to urbanization: “con¬ servative” and “progressive.” Mayer tells us that like other writers interested in the African in town, he was concerned with the inter-play between “urban” and “trib¬ al” phenomena among them. Mayer quotes the findings of Gluckman, Epstein, and Mitchell, in the Copperbelt of Zambia, where the devel¬ opment between the workers’ sectional (tribal) interest and their com¬ mon (urban) interests were sociologically noteworthy. In East London, however, the salient sociological developments were that trade unions 155

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

did not transcend tribes. In fact we are told in passing that there are no trade unions in East London because any opposition to White employers or authority is forbidden. In East London, social opposi¬ tion appears between those Africans who regard themselves and are regarded as townsmen and those who are regarded as “being in town but of the country.” Influx control, again we are told in passing, accen¬ tuates these divisions between the so-called “Red” (country) and “School” (town) categories, reflecting a “bitter conflict” over the desir¬ ability or undesirability of adopting “White people ways,” which has split the Xhosa for several generations. “Townsmen and countrymen, Red and School are the basic categories of social interaction within East London location” (1961:xiv). Further, Mayer is concerned with identifying the processes that encourage resistance to the process of urbanization—which manifests itself in doggedly “tribal” behavior of some people at work or in leisure situations. Because of its location, East London has long experienced what Mayer calls “obstinate tribal conservatism” (1961:xv).4 The third volume, “The Second Generation,” deals with the “town-rooted” Xhosa. According to Pauw, the second generation Xhosa are fully urbanized, in the sense of having all their important personal ties bounded by the town, that they will live and die in town, having no major interest elsewhere and nothing to go back to in the reserves. According to Pauw the process of urbanization is greatly influ¬ enced by an idealogy. Among the rural Xhosa one finds two rival ide¬ ologies: that of the “school” section who approve Christianity, formal education, and Westernization; and that of the “Red” section who obstinately prefer “real old Xhosa ways,” including the pagan religion. It is the ideology which forbids the members of the “Red” from stay¬ ing in town longer than is necessary, or from rearing their children there. Pauw also found that there are significant instances of the persis¬ tence of behavior patterns oriented to traditional Xhosa culture even among the “School” people. For example, lobola is still practiced, and male initiation; the latter being the “purest” example of a traditional institution persisting in town (1963:195).

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Methods of Investigation When we speak of the methods of sociological investigation, we refer not only to the underlying principle, but also to the technique of inves¬ tigation. The questions posed are enhanced or limited in a fundamental way by the practicality or theoretical nature of the enterprise. These demands suggest what the scientist takes to be major units of his inves¬ tigation. In the case of practical research the issue becomes not one of relevance of research, but rather of relevance for whom and for what. Practical or theoretical demands have a strong connection with the ter¬ minology and system of classification adopted by its user. “The results of field research are .. . dependent on what the researcher ‘brings with him’ when he undertakes his studies” (Gross 1968:23). Mayer states the aim of his research as follows: One of my aims has simply been to record. It seems fair to say that in South African cities today, despite the long history of coexistence by White and Black, one half knows little about how the other half lives. I have therefore made a point of including much detailed illustration of the lives and outlooks of the migrant workers (1961:xiii). In “The Second Generation,” Pauw tells us that the approach to his study was primarily one of fact finding: My interest as a missionary prompted the desire for first-hand factual knowledge of urban Bantu. Further this approach was suggested by the more practically oriented interest of local bod¬ ies, particularly the Buffalo River Catchmen Association . . . Nevertheless, an attempt has also been made to relate the mate¬ rial to some theoretical trends in social anthropology (1963:xvii-xviii). Only by endowing his work with “theoretical” significance can the practical researcher conduct his activities with some reassurance. The methodology that was followed in pursuance of these practical goals is that known as survey plus behavioral science method. The most fal¬ lacious aspect of this method is to tear out individual minor facts to juggle in the examples. For this method, selecting chance examples (like the histories) presents no difficulty at all, except the purely neg¬ ative value. “Minor facts, if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are arbitrarily selected and torn out of con157

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

text, are merely things for juggling or even worse” (Lenin 1964, Vol. 23:272). To reveal how the two halves think and live demands looking at the total society and asking honest questions and giving honest answers. Although science has to deal with facts, the study of facts must not be limited to their superficial description. In each individual case, the truth of the facts hinges on the historically given concrete situations. The true meaning of the facts does not remain at a purely empirical level, it does not lie merely at recording, but at explaining facts, to disclose their essence. This can only be done with a theory which enables the scientist to see the overall picture of the process, and the intercon¬ nection of the facts engendered by this process. It is doubtful that Mayer and Pauw understood the meaning of the facts they observed. Some random questions that would reveal the dimensions of the African situation in South African towns (and which are ignored by Mayer) are: (1) What are the consequences of the fact that Africans in South Africa are a conquered subject people who lack not only self-determina¬ tion, but who have been incorporated as an indispensable part of the productive forces of the country? (2) What peculiar personality formations result when, as a result of defeat and incorporation to industry, people are forced to live lives of outward submissiveness, while trying to keep intact in their hearts a sense of worth of their humanity? (3) What are the personality mechanisms that sublimate national and class resentment, which, if expressed, would carry penalties vary¬ ing from imprisonment to death? (4) What is the African’s attitude to his partially destroyed culture? Does repression affect the African’s attitude to his culture, customs, and his attitude to the dominant group’s customs and culture? (5) How did defeat and repression of the African affect White atti¬ tudes, morals and way of life? (6) Does the African accept his humiliation? If not, what attempts is he making to change the humiliating conditions? The Xhosa in Town avoids the study of socio-historical determi¬ nants of behavior. The behavioral method is specifically suited to the study of the status quo orthodoxies and habits which though in a state of rapid dissolution can be utilized as effective means of social control. Knowledge of traditional values and attitudes in a situation of stress is

158

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basic to an understanding of factors that produce acceptance or resis¬ tance to certain changes. Therefore, an intensive investigation aimed at discerning motivational patterns is imperative. The result of such an investigation can become a master ideological weapon in justifying and facilitating imposition of certain social control. In the trilogy, while one learns a lot about what happens “in the heads of the Xhosa,” i.e., in the psychic structure of a peasant popu¬ lation subjected to the twin processes of industrialization and urban¬ ization that are outside their control, and while one also learns what suspicions and fears people from different ethnic groups, regions, and background harbor for one another, the social structure which fosters the attitudes and influences the psychology of people is completely obscure. One also learns what features lead to the lack of development of class or national consciousness and what factors inhibit this process. In Pauw’s book (1963:18), one learns that “the move to town has often been ‘patterned’ by factors inherent in the traditional culture and social structure, such as witchcraft beliefs, customs relating to widows and daughters-in-law, rules of inheritance, and patriarchal family orga¬ nization and polygamy.” If one wanted to improve the efficiency of domination, such information is indispensable; that is, if a new physi¬ cal situation comes into being, and if a new consciousness that devel¬ ops under the new physical conditions is to be harmonized with the highly developed consciousness of the ruling classes, then it is all the more essential to unravel it. The study, The Xhosa in Town, defines in great detail the psycho-sociological processes that characterize the dayto-day thinking of the Africans in East London. Another example of this is the description of migrants with looseknit and close-knit networks, and the implications for the individual of the difference between having continuous and discontinuous net¬ works of social relations. Mayer describes the role of network con¬ nectedness in the differing cultures of “Red” and “School” Xhosa. The close-knit networks and cultural uniformity are related parts of a syn¬ drome of features associated with “Red” Xhosa migrants, whereas loose-knit networks are related parts of a syndrome associated with “School” migrants. Accordingly, “country-rootedness” and “townrootedness” should be studied in relation to the degree of “civiliza¬ tion” and equally in relation to “tribalism.” Of even greater practical importance is Mayer’s description of the process of “encapsulation.” According to this idea, the “Red” Xhosa

159

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may spend many years in town and remain carefully insulated from the typical diversions and blandishment that the city has to offer; they are in town, but never of it. There are three types of analytical models he distinguished: (1) a model of “one way change” where the central expectation is that the migrant on coming to town abandons his “trib¬ al” roles and norms altogether and becomes “detribalized” and “urban¬ ized”; (2) the “alternation” model—this model invites us to see the migrant not as changing his culture, but as participating in both rural and urban social systems; and (3) what Mayer calls “a somewhat dif¬ ferent alternation model,” which means that a man even while actual¬ ly in town can be still alternating (1961:285-293). What does all this mean, or what causes these three types of respons¬ es? According to Mayer these are due to the “Red” syndrome that stress¬ es the superiority of the traditional, undiversified institutions, resulting in conservatism. The conservatism of the “Red” is also due to the func¬ tion of ancestral spirits who are believed to be in town to pull the migrants back to the ‘ways of the ancestors,” and represent the supreme moral authority. The “Red” migrants can thus use witches to excuse their behavior when they break any part of the ancestral code. The syn¬ drome of the “School” Xhosa is more tolerant of diversified institu¬ tions, resulting in a single-strand type of relations and loose-knit networks, and carries within itself the dynamic of change. Those “Red” Xhosa who change and accept urban ways are described by Mayer as deviant or neurotic personality” (1961:182). This conclusion is based on six “case histories” reported in from ten to fifteen lines. Mayer then gives what he calls a historical explanation of these types of personalities: the two groups of Xhosa react differently to the urban situation because their ancestors reacted differently to conquest over a hundred years ago. Some accepted Christianity and formal edu¬ cation from the conquerors, and others refused (ibid.:293). Now when one wants to organize facts to contribute to knowledge, one is careful to base classification upon essential qualities. But suppose that instead of organizing knowledge, you set out to organize ignorance and prejudice and to justify certain policies. You then select the unessential rather than the essential qualities. You will entirely con¬ ceal the question how and why a particular phenomenon is what it is. And as Levi-Strauss points out: .. . conscious models, which are usually known as “norms” are by definition very poor ones since they are not intended to 160

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology

explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them. Therefore, a structural analysis is confronted with a strange paradox well known to linguist, that is: the more obvious structural organi¬ zation is, the more difficult it becomes to reach it because of the inaccurate conscious models lying across the path which leads to it (1963:281). By focusing their lenses on norms of the African “half,” with complete disregard of the larger structure, Mayer and Pauw divorce the social behavior of Africans from the objectively shaped system of social rela¬ tions. This, of course, strips the problem of the African in South African towns of its economic, political, class, moral, and spiritual meaning. In the trilogy, the African is portrayed as being both in the grips of an outmoded consciousness, and, at the same time, changing accord¬ ing to some abstract “Westernized” model. The ideal types, “Red” and “School” typify “conscious models” and abstracted empiricism. Pauw and Mayer never go beyond the “objectivity” of obvious facts. There is, in fact, stubborn refusal to go beyond the obvious “facts” so as to throw light on the real cause of the social types then observed. The purely historical and specific relationships between people, in Mayer’s analysis take on the appearance of “natural facts,” of eternal varieties which simply express the way the world is, has always been, and always will be. But as Lukacs points out:5 The historical character of the “facts” which science seems to have grasped with such “purity” makes itself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolu¬ tion they are involved in continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of a definite historical epoch, namely capitalism. When “sci¬ ence” maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific con¬ ceptualization and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting point for the formation of scientific con¬ cepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society, it uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unal¬ terable foundation of “science.”

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Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

In order to progress from these “facts” to facts in the true meaning of the word it is necessary to perceive their historical conditioning as such and to abandon the point of view that would see them as immediately given: they must themselves be subjected to a historical and dialectical examination (1971:7). The methodology of Mayer and his associates reflects its conservative posture, in its ability to perceive the world in any but the mask of mys¬ tification. Thus it makes it possible for its practitioners not to question the exploitation and oppressive relationships which the structures of a colonial type society create. The truly comprehensive understanding of social forces in a process of social change requires more than an anal¬ ysis of the victims of oppression. It requires also the study of the sys¬ tem of domination itself; particularly of the mechanisms whereby the ruling class participates in the process of change itself—how the rul¬ ing class operates to maintain, adapt, and modify the social structure of the dominated, and how it enforces its will (cf. Stavenhagen 1971:337). Class or national consciousness of the subject people is neither ready formed, nor is it completely absent. Its manifestation is inhibit¬ ed by historical factors of custom, language, and ethnicity. In a situa¬ tion of change, these elements are not present in a pure form, but are permeated, mixed and interwoven with opposing psychic meanings and forces, some progressive and some retrograde. A conservative anal¬ ysis is interested solely in the subjective reflections, and the effects of objective factors in and upon the variety of trivial everyday matters are virtually obscured. When a national sociology is developed, the extent of its identifi¬ cation with the status quo is indicated by the lack of alternatives it offers to replace the official reality. Man’s domination by man can be reduced or enhanced in terms of existing directions of intellectual inquiry. Suggesting transcendent alternatives to the ongoing “reality” was at the base of evolutionary anthropology when it developed. But the anthropology of social change from Radcliffe-Brown’s days on has such a strong identification with reality as it is officially defined, that the craftsmanship of Mayer and his associates does not transcend the imme¬ diate facts; i.e., it is fast bound to its self-created immediacy (cf. Lukacs 1971:94). Mayer and his associates’ anthropology is, of course, not an “accep162

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology

tance” of the official orthodoxy. They do not accept the government thesis that all Africans are temporary sojourners in the city. They rec¬ ognize that some Africans are permanently settled in towns. The nature of their criticisms however, ends where it should begin—it cannot tran¬ scend a White dominated structure and the ideology serving such a society. Their criticism finds its relevancy and completeness only with¬ in this totality, and any changes it envisions or sees being generated are anchored to this whole. Ideologies (Shaw 1971:102) are world views which, despite their partial and possibly crucial insights, prevent us from understanding the society in which we live and the possibili¬ ty of changing it.

Concepts as Ideology The vast array of concepts that have been used by social anthropolo¬ gists of change—as well as being tools to describe objective reality— are concepts emerging directly from the investigator’s concern with what he considers acceptable moral and social trends produced by the colonial situation; that is, the social anthropologist of change often uses “subjective” judgment when he selects what concepts and words to use to describe colonized subjects (see Magubane 1968). In fact, these concepts are as much, if not more, the products of political con¬ sideration as of their scientific utility. The White settler, who is often unconcerned with sociological rel¬ evance of the words he uses to describe those he exploits, also sets out to reshape their identity by calling them names. The dehumanized image of the African which the White settler carries in his mind some¬ times comes from the conceptual images found in books, but also from those used in daily life. South Africa provides a classic case of the bat¬ tle for conceptual relevance. Those in power—the Whites—have found it in their interests to deindividualize and dehumanize the Africans, since the more depersonalized one is, the more impotent his projects will be, and the less he will attempt to bypass the status quo. According to Gross (1968:24), “Since we are constantly con¬ fronted with misleading nuances of meaning, expressible in symbols generally beguiling, our language should be probed repeatedly, for those avowals of human experience that petition the widest alle¬ giances.” The trilogy provides a good example of how language can be abused, a fact which somehow has escaped the attention of most Africanist social scientists. Words do reveal the repressive character of 163

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

“ordinary language,” particularly in an administered universe of dis¬ course. The language chosen by Mayer, despite explanations by Houghton (Reader 1961 :v-vi) reflects the conservative mood that has become self conscious. Now we can undertake the process of demys¬ tification of the words coined by Mayer—words which have unfortu¬ nately received wide acceptance. The designations “Red” and “School,” “tribesmen” and “towns¬ men,” “Christian” and “pagan,” “Westernized,” “civilized,” and “trib¬ al,” and worst of all “native” and “Bantu” are not only ideological, but are racist terms. The very title of Mayer’s book, Townsmen or Tribesmen is jarring and reflects the subjective influence on his whole discourse of the politics of African oppression. In the trilogy, the African is described only in primitive concepts. There is complete refusal to use concepts associated with the process of secularization which takes place when peasants are urbanized. On the verbal level, the trilogy accepts not only all the current gov¬ ernment cant about the African, but a refusal to transcend the con¬ ceptual status quo. It is not easy for those who have not lived in South Africa to fathom the intellectual commitment to the status quo which is reflected in the choice of vocabularies to describe the African. All the words listed above have political overtones of what Sartre has called the world of men and the world of the “native.” Kaffir, for instance, is an Arabic word meaning unbeliever—and in South Africa there are surely Whites, Indians, and Coloureds as well as Blacks who are not Muslims. As applied to Africans prior to con¬ quest, it justified wars of conquest and land dispossession. The word “native” succeeded Kaffir and it defined Africans “out” of the socio¬ political system. It reduced them to what Toynbee calls “flora and fauna and not men with passions as Whites. Hence, they were at the disposal of whoever wanted to use them as labor. Toynbee writes: So long as we think of them as “native,” we may exterminate them or, as it is more likely today domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them (1964:54-55). When the word “native” gained notoriety, it was replaced by the word Bantu an absurdity, because the word Bantu means only people and can at best describe a great linguistic stock. Who then is not Bantu?

164

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This is the term which the writers of this trilogy use with abandon and without blinking an eyelid. All these terms, of course, are an attempt at the linguistic level to circumvent the African claim to full citizen¬ ship to his native land. (Mayer’s designation of East London as a White town is part of this syndrome.) “European,” the term by which the Whites want to be known in South Africa, does not deny that among them there are Dutch, French, Belgian, English, and German “tribes¬ men,” etc. In fact, Pauw refers to these groups as White South Africans, while discreetly avoiding the word Black South Africans. We point this out because the sociological vocabulary used to describe Africans has tended to achieve a life of its own, congealing into cant. It has become an unexamined shorthand to escape confronting the ugly realities behind being called “native” or “Bantu.” The tyranny of words is only less absolute than that of men; but whereas elections, revolutions, or just the dreary passage of time can do away with human tyranny, patient analysis and redefinition are required to remedy the linguistic affliction (Haas 1969:3). What is clear is that the terminology chosen by the writers of this tril¬ ogy must be challenged both on a scientific and moral level. Static cat¬ egories like the words “Red” and “School” freeze individuals in time and space, so that they cease to be discussed as living men and women, with a past and a future—they have only an eternal present like when Mayer discovers the separation between the “School” and “Red” a hundred years ago when their ancestors made a choice after conquest whether to be “Christian” or to remain “pagan.” This choice is present¬ ly being reinforced by the “spirits” of these very ancestors. Could there be a more depersonalized state of being? Fanon refers to attempts by conquerors to strip the colonized of their identity, which leaves them with two choices; to imitate a “White” identity or to search in vain for the earlier identity which circumstances not of their making have forced them to transcend. Mayer tells us that the “Red” Xhosa in town has a chance to educate himself. Illiteracy and other rustic attributes are initial handicaps to changing the style of life in town, but they are not insuperable ones. A “Red” migrant who is really determined to civilize him¬ self can find ways and means in town (1961:285).

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Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Are traditional customs and modes of behavior incompatible with urbanism? Needless to say this assertion is made because Mayer ignores the economic and political aspects of the situation. When Fanon talked about every colonized person coming face to face with the language of the “civilizing” nation, he was expressing the truth that is very well demonstrated in the trilogy. Truly, according to Mayer, the Black man in South Africa is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the White man’s ways. He becomes white as he renounces his blackness, his tribal ways. Mayer writes: The suggestion is, that the general relegation of Red migrants to the bottom of the class ladder in town does not only reflect their inability to rise by reason of lack of skills, but is also due to the persistence in acting out parts according to the expec¬ tations of the home peasant society, instead of the expectations of local (non-Red) society (1961:286). Here “scientific” analysis is converted into an ideological weapon against the so-called “Red” migrant. The implications of urbanism as a way of life make it difficult for some social anthropologists to accept the African as an urban social type, presumably because the African diverges from the basic assumption of the “anthropologically pure type native,” and politically because an urban African constitutes a definite threat to White supremacist ideologies accustomed to dealing with unequivocal sets of formulas which are applied to the “ideal native.” This has been the cognitive dissonance the South African government has lived with—a dissonance which has now compelled it to “retribalize” the Africans in towns by a system of “tribal” classification under what it calls Urban Tribal Authorities (cf. Njisane 1969). Mayer’s anal¬ ysis could help the government to resolve this dilemma by offering pseudo-scientific evidence of the African resistance to urban ways. Here is another typical example of tribalistic analysis: The triumph of encapsulation is that through its institutions the home agents of morality have been enabled to extend their grasp over distance and over time from the rural homestead into the heart of the East London slums. The long arms of the parents, the long arms of the ancestors are constantly pulling the Red migrants back out of reach of the “perils” of urban¬ ization (Mayer 1961:94).

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The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropolocy

Conquest and imposition of a colonial type situation on the indigenous people in South Africa brought fundamental divisions among its peo¬ ple of a social nature. And these divisions constitute a totality, that is, an historical structure whose diverse parts are bound together in such a way that any one of them considered separately is an abstraction. It is not an aggregated sum of parts. These divisions were products of eco¬ nomic growth, administrative action, educational policies, missionary activity, etc. There was separation of the victors and the conquered, of employers and employees, of city dwellers and rural dwellers, of edu¬ cated and uneducated, of Christians and non-Christians. The process of change and urbanization is part of this dialectic (for which colonial type control of the African is responsible in the first place, but which is now influenced by the very conditions it helped to bring about). Through psychoanalytical sociological deductions, Mayer abandoned the solid ground of science for fruitless, idealistic reasoning.

The Politics of a Political Social Analysis C. Wright Mills defined what he called the classic tradition in the social sciences in these words: The classic tradition is most readily defined by the character of the questions that have guided and still guide those who are part of it. The questions are generally of a wide scope; they concern the total societies; their transformations, and the vari¬ eties of individual men and women who inhabit them . . .The structure of society and the mechanics of history are seen with¬ in the same perspective and within this perspective changes in human nature are defined . . . their intellectual problems are relevant to the public issues of their time and private troubles of individual men and women. More than that they have helped to define more clearly the issues and troubles and the intimate relations between the two (1960:4). This tradition was to be seen in the sociologists’ concern with issues like oppression, wage slavery, and exploitation, the ultimate irrationality of impersonal forces supposedly under the control of reactional men. Philip Mayer and his associates cannot be said to be concerned with important issues that plague urban South Africa today. They are con¬ cerned with problems of “culture contact” and how the culture of the dominant group has been copied by the subordinate group. Even on 167

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

this level, Mayer and others treat us to trivialities of the very process¬ es of “culture contact.” The problem of culture change is disassociat¬ ed from the fundamental socio-economic changes and is examined as something which exists by itself in the consciousness of people. The impact of European rule on the culture and institutions of the African was the impact of the dynamic forces of capitalism on precapi¬ talist formations whose thoughts and habits, however sophisticated and advanced in their own way, could only advance slowly because of cer¬ tain inherent limitations. And yet, curiously enough, the agents of these dynamic forces (Europeans) were not only unconscious of their mis¬ sion, but, as a class, they actually, represented no such programs. In South Africa, they have in fact, been engaged in the denial of this mis¬ sion—they have attempted by various methods and strategies to apply breaks to the very change and progress they claimed to be agents of. If change came, that is if Africans were “Westernized” as we are told in this trilogy, it was in spite of the Whites or it was incidental and an unexpected consequence of their other activities. The exploitation of the mines and the growth of primary and secondary industries cre¬ ated towns in which Whites and Africans lived. The urban environ¬ ment produced a new synthesis in the urban culture to which both Whites and Africans were exposed. Instead of explaining this synthe¬ sis scientifically, social explanation is converted into propaganda for white values. Lukacs, criticizing what he calls reification which consists precise¬ ly in the inability to transcend facts as facts, writes: the ossifying quality of reified thought with its tendency to oust the process is exemplified even more clearly in the ‘facts’ than in the ‘laws’ that would order them. In the latter it is still pos¬ sible to detect a trace of human activity even though it often appears in a reified and false subjectivity. But in the ‘facts’ we find the crystallization of the essence of capitalist development into an ossified, impenetrable thing alienated from man. And the form assumed by this ossification and this alienation con¬ vert it into a foundation of reality and of philosophy that is per¬ fectly self-evident and immune from every doubt. When confronted by the rigidity of these ‘facts’ every movement seems like a movement impinging on them, while every ten¬ dency to change them appears to be a merely subjective prin¬ ciple (a wish, a value judgement, an ought). Thus only when 168

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology

the theoretical primacy of the ‘facts’ has been broken, only when every phenomenon is recognized to be a process, will it be understood that what we are wont to call ‘facts’ consists of processes. Only then will it be understood that the facts are nothing but the parts, the aspects of the total process that have been broken off, artificially isolated and ossified (1971:184). What is meant here is that empirical anthropology raises contempo¬ rary facts as immutable evidence to justify the status quo and ignores the general laws of historical process. The term apolitical covers many errors, but generally means the discussion of human activity in “igno¬ rance” or disregard of the influences of social institutions, political manipulation, etc. (Dennon 1969:290). A narrow segment of social life is analyzed on the basis of limited factual data, and in the best of cases, the relationships existing at the surface of social life are discov¬ ered. Since the deeper processes are outside the scope of investigation, attention is not infrequently attracted to the “piquant” aspect of life, and the lack of theory is replaced by hunting for sensation. In the ideal types “Red” and “School” we are presented with a “foundation of real¬ ity which is perfectly self-evident and immune from doubt.” When we regard these facts as the outcome of the operation of certain generic political processes we are confronted by the “facts” in their most threat¬ ening form of immutability. The ideal types become primordial fixed essence. Here is a further example from Mayer: In what has been said about the process of urbanization and the dropping or rejection of extra-town ties, an antithesis has been implied between two types of people who live side by side in town; namely the migrant and the “Urban African.” It will be noticed that the adjective ‘urban’ ought properly to have a different connotation in each of the three models . . . a) In the ‘detribalization’ model, the urban tribal antithesis is conceived principally as an antithesis of different human con¬ dition, or ways of life. Urban might then serve as a near syn¬ onym for ‘westernized’ or ‘civilized’ or detribalized. It would seem permissible . . .to speak of an ‘urban African’, meaning one who has reached the end of the road of culture change, completely losing his tribal culture and/or status within the tribe (1962:315).

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Social anthropology involves two levels of analysis, empirical and the¬ oretical. The former involves observation and gathering of data, the latter explains these facts. The explanation of facts can be subsumed by general theory. The fallacy of abstracted empiricism is the confu¬ sion of the inessential with the essential. Thus, instead of analyzing the sources of economic change and its impact in the evolution of peasant society and the peasant conversion into a proletariat class completely torn asunder from all that was meaningful in his traditional life, Mayer presents us with an abstracted cultural evolution. Of course, the ide¬ ological advantage of this vulgar culturalism is that while it pronounces it possible for a “savage” to become a “barbarian” and a “barbarian” to become a “civilized” person, like its vulgar biological evolutionism, it implies the ranking of human society in terms of inferior and supe¬ rior, thus justifying the brutalization and exploitation of the inferior for the sake of their own “civilization” (cf. Moore 1971:38). If an African was born in town and he accepts urban ways, those who think of him as essentially a “tribesman” may think that he has surrendered his traditional ways and values and has become “Westernized.” But if he is born in town, there is nothing to surren¬ der; he merely takes his place in the scheme of things as they are (Mphahlele 1964:616). That is, individuals from culturally diverse groups subjected to similar socio-economic conditions tend to pro¬ duce similar kinds of social groupings; for example, the family with a similar system of values and habits. Human beings, the African included, respond to demands which are placed on them. The so-called “urban/tribal” antithesis must not be studied apart from its social content, but rather in its economic, technological, and political setting. The study of urbanization would have to lead, therefore, to crucial social questions about the South African society. Why is the government so dead set against African urbanization? The fragmentary, “apolitical,” and ahistorical approach of Mayer and his associates is incomplete and misleading. It is merely common sense description and classification. What is the function of this type of study? On the social level, this type of social anthropology performs the function similar to that of a stereotype; by not contradicting the reality in which its very concepts and analysis are anchored, it conditions the reader to accept the status quo as inevitable. On another level, and because of the low level of abstraction, what we get is a partisan reportage of current African prej-

170

The “Xhosa” in Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology

udice in the towns. In a section dealing with African nationalism, Pauw gives us a picture of Africans who, abstractly, are attracted to African unity but who, at the same time, are obsessed with “tribal” loyalties, he gives us the attitudes of his respondents toward the national lead¬ ers, which by innuendo discredit them. He also treats us to superficial stereotypes which the Xhosa have for the Sotho and Zulu. The whole exercise amounts to a gigantic intellectual effort to show how Africans hate one another without explaining the conditions causing such prej¬ udices, and thus enables those who regulate their lives to condition them to think in narrow parochial terms. If those in power know what these prejudices are, they can better devise ways of manipulating these to achieve results to maintain their rule. “In the social sciences theo¬ retical conceptions sometimes anticipate life and become a guide for men of action” (Ossowski 1963:3).

Conclusion Recently several monographs have been written about some aspect of African life in towns which do not lead to any comparable increase in general understanding of what is happening in those towns. This results both from defects of method, and to inadequate assumptions. A good anthropologist can write well on a limited subject if he takes account of the larger whole in which his chosen area is located. An inferior one confuses the need to isolate a small portion of the whole with the license to assume that the portion acted in isolation (cf. Magubane 1968). The “urban” and “tribal” Africans are two sides of the same coin —development and underdevelopment—due to the uneven intrusion of forces of capitalism and the consequent abstraction of individual African males from their society to serve a colonial type economy. This was to create in South Africa aberrant and inhuman social structure; the polarization of resources and opportunities, social and cultural frac¬ ture, and this extreme irrationality is being maintained by cultivation of racism and a military industrial system that is the most formidable in Africa. The falsity of South Africa lies in its attempt to ossify Africans in archaic “tribal” molds under hereditary rulers instead of accepting them as full citizens of the South African state. This fact cannot be masked by what Mayer and his associates call “Red” and “School” syn¬ dromes. The trilogy reviewed here reveals one disturbing fact that racial bigotry and ideological biases can be well articulated under the guise of “scientific analysis” in the social sciences. But even more than this, 171

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

the books reviewed here are a confirmation of the charge made by Claude Levi-Strauss that: Anthropology is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contained by disease they were unable to resist (1966:126).

172

Urban Tribalism: Theory and Ideology

To become kindred in spirit without being kin in blood—that is what only man can do. —Nikolai Gogol In this paper I intend to examine the use of the term tribalism in African sociology. “Tribe”, “tribalism”, and “tribal conflict” are perhaps the most loosely used terms in the vocabulary of African social sciences. An attempt to question their use might seem an idle effort, for the fact that Africa is made up of “tribes” is so much taken for granted that even the most enlightened Africanist finds himself using the term with¬ out qualification. Indeed, the idea that tribalism is a sociological fact in Africa is one of the most fundamental axioms the anthropologist has worked with. One need only to look at the number of recent tribal maps to see how entrenched the notion is. Like Africa, there is no African. Instead there is a conglomer¬ ation of tribal members, town people, and those half-way between town society and tribal society. The African—to use the traditional abstraction today—is primarily a villager, who lives off subsistence agriculture and gains his social sustenance from a traditional system. Although the impact of the West is beginning to shatter the tribal systems which previously exist¬ ed in Middle Africa, it remains true that in one or another form tribalism is still the dominant fact of African life. Ideally the tribal African is born into his age group within the tribe and pro¬ gresses through maturity to old age within the structure of the tribe. The tribe, ideally again, provides him with a self-con¬ tained existence that is consistent with itself, and in which each of the parts—economic, social, religious—mesh together to

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

form a unique mode of existence for each tribe. The individ¬ ual is nothing without this tribal world, and the very fact of this uniqueness creates the intense feeling of up-rootedness which the individual experiences when he is forced to leave it. This is the traditional context of the tribalism in most of Middle Africa. For tribalism is still the norm of life not only for those Africans who continue to live in tribal units scattered over this part of Africa, but also those who have moved to towns of the area.1 This passage represents all that is objectionable in the use of the word “tribe” and all its derivatives. Africans in this passage are not only typed as tribesmen, but also frozen into this primordial identity. Their conquest and colonization, which in fact is the precondition for their representation into “tribal” entities, is ignored. The essentialization of the “tribal” identity denies any mutability or adaptability in African char¬ acter and excludes any assimilation which is part of urbal experience.

Deconstructing “tribalism” Words have a tendency to persist when the reality that lay behind them has changed. In fact, it is inherent in our intellectual activity that we seek to imprison reality in our description of it. Soon before we know or realize it, it is we who become prisoners of the description. From that point on, our ideas degenerate into a folklore, which we pass to each other fondly thinking we are still talking of the reality around us.2 A few voices have been raised against the use of the term tribalism3 by, among others, Pierre van den Berghe, Paul Mercier, Immanuel Wallerstein,4 and Raymond Apthrope5; and references to their objec¬ tions will be made below. But in spite of their objections a great num¬ ber of anthropologists find it difficult to question the axiom upon which their science and activity is based. They simply take it for grant¬ ed that Africans are essentially tribesmen, tied to their tribe by an indis¬ soluble and instinctive tribal chord. I criticize the use of the word “tribe” in the same spirit as Ashley Montagu, who writes that: ...in science as in life, it is good practice, from time to time, to hang a question mark on things one takes for granted. And such questioning is important because without it there is very

174

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

real danger that certain erroneous or arbitrary ideas which may originally have been used merely for convenience, may become so fortified by technicality and so dignified by time that their original infirmities may be wholly concealed.6 Social concept must be seen primarily as short-hand answers to ques¬ tions we ask of social reality. Concepts are meaningless apart from ques¬ tions asked. The questions asked are determined by the problems we want to “solve.”7 Forgetfulness of questions which are the starting point of inquiry leads us to ignore the substantive assumptions “buried” in our concepts. The tribe as both an administrative and anthropological unit was at stake when Africans began moving to and settling in towns. So it became a preoccupation of anthropological research to find the “workings of tribalism” in towns. If the “tribal consciousness” was seen to be supplanted by, say, “class conscious¬ ness”, it was the duty of anthropological theory to “reconstitute” it. Tribalism is one of those words which have not only been digni¬ fied by usage but have also been elevated to a fetish. When I question the use of the word “tribalism,” I do not thereby deny the existence of elements of traditionalism everywhere in Africa. Of course, these exist, but by what concepts can we adequately describe the individual who has moved from a traditional existence in a rural to an urban area? This would mean that the traditional system is the historical as well as the analytical base-line of any analysis. It was these traditional units that met the white man when he came in search of gold or slaves or other forms of commerce.8 It was these traditional social units which became fragmented under the impact of colonialism and imperialism. Of course, the colonial impact varied from region to region. Anthropologists have failed to focus on the historical changes which have been going on in Africa since the advent of colonial rule. To say that the African world is that of a village or the tribe is only a small part of a complicated situation. Left to themselves Africans might be still predominantly villagers, or if you care “tribesman.” But they were not left to themselves. They were invaded, taken under foreign control, and turned into servants of others. The writers who think that the African is basically a tribesman have refused to study the manner in which the system of colonial domination infused the whole society, destroying the content of traditional social structures and reducing them to a caricature. On the historical evidence, it would seem that slavery, colonial 175

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

rule, and imperialism have everywhere introduced changes in African societies which ought to have substantially modified the structure of African traditional societies, and that these changes would call for new concepts which have to do with the historical transition of African soci¬ eties from rural small scale and self-sufficient community to urban soci¬ ety. In any case, concepts should mirror the process of change as adequately as any concept can, and not falsify and obfuscate reality. As Montagu points out: Terminology is extremely important, and — it is rather more desirable to allow the conditions or facts to determine the meaning of the terms by which we shall refer to them, than to have pre-existing terms determine the manner in which they shall be perceived and ordered, for pre-existing terms consti¬ tute pre-existing meanings, and such meanings have a way of conditioning the manner in which what we look at shall be per¬ ceived.9 As I will show from examples below, each time the term “tribalism” is used with reference to Africa, in reality it is frozen with pre-existing categories. Those who use the words “tribe” and “tribalism” have developed reflexes, regulators which enable them to disarm or neu¬ tralize fresh experience by translating it into familiar terms, much as a sleeper weaves the sound of his alarm clock into his dream in order to go on sleeping.10 When tribalism is applied to urban associations or conflicts, it makes it very difficult for most Europeans, and unfortu¬ nately some Africans, to open their eyes to new events and experiences. Events as electric as the Congo conflicts of the 1960’s and the Nigerian conflict of 1967 are quickly pigeonholed without further analysis by being described as “tribal.” Pierre van den Berghe offers some clarification of the obscurities surrounding the use of this term: The term ‘tribalism’ in the political context has been used in at least three different senses as a synonym for ‘ethnicity’ and in opposition to ‘nationalism.’ ‘Tribalism’ has come to mean feel¬ ings of particularism associated with an ethnic group, usually but not always a linguistic one. When these feelings have led to political movements, the latter have often been held to have centrifugal or separatist effects in the so-called nationalism of the central government... The second usage of‘tribalism’ also 176

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

contributes its share of conceptional confusion. ‘Tribalism’ has also been held to mean ‘traditionalism’ or ‘cultural conser¬ vatism,’ as opposed to modernism. From this dual usage of the term, the implicit assumption has often been made that these two dimensions of‘tribalism’ were identical or at least co-vari¬ ant in a simple and direct fashion... Thirdly, ‘tribalism’ has meant the antithesis of ‘urbanism’ with the further facile assumption that ‘urbanism’ was synonymous with ‘modernism.’11 I am going to add a fourth use of the term tribalism which, to me, is most damaging to analytical and theoretical insights. When the term tribalism is used, anthropologists fix in an inert subjectivity on African action as being due to an intrinsic quality called tribalism, rather than as expressive of intentions of thinking individuals who seek out objec¬ tive and subjective ends. The individuals are defined as the embodi¬ ment of an abstract quality—tribalism—of which a voluntary association—a marriage, or any act—is the symbol. Another problem with the word tribalism as used in African social sciences is that there is no distinction of affiliations or sentiments based on family lineage, village, district, common language or common cul¬ ture. All these affiliations seem to be embraced by the concept of trib¬ alism. In fact the word tribalism functions as a metaphysical mystification in the sense that the actual process by which people become conscious of belonging together is forgotten. Any kind of eth¬ nicity is no longer a specific and natural expression of the others’ life, but rather becomes an essentialized entity called “tribe” — which serves to characterize the other in a typical and anonymous manner. And African actions are portrayed as an expression of this abstract quality and a timeless consciousness — tribalism. Thus, tribalism is made an explanation of a wide range of social phenomena like economic and political conflicts, strains and stresses in society, states of what is called underdevelopment, and the like. Instead of researchers carrying out detailed empirical inquiries into the structure and relationships of individuals and groups which have been forced to migrate to cities, they resort to the use of the term tribalism to account for a variety of social and political organizations.

177

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

“Urban tribalism” Let me discuss what social anthropologists call “rural tribalism” as opposed to “urban tribalism.” I want to show that such verbal coinage is useless. Urban tribalism often means the survival, resilience or adapt¬ ability of traditional sentiments in spite of colonial impact, industrial¬ ization and urbanization. As Apthorpe puts it: It was this enduring social structure, this lasting ‘tribal social cohesion,’ that social anthropologists took as their profession¬ al and public duty first to discover and then to uphold, social¬ ly, morally, and politically.12 There seems to be confusion between “tribe” as found in the tradi¬ tional rural communities and what is called “tribalism” in urban areas. What compounds this confusion is the suffix “-ism” which according to the English Oxford Dictionary implies “a form of doctrine, theory or practice having or claiming to have a distinctive character or rela¬ tion.” The dictionary goes on to state that “tribalism” is chiefly used disparagingly, and sometimes with implied reference to schisms. Therefore, tribalism as an urban manifestation would seem to be a state of mind: an attitude a group elevates, in spite of this new social situa¬ tion, into primary importance which implies suspicion and perpetual conflicts with alien others. For instance in his discussion of the Kalela Dance, Clyde Mitchell tells us: Tribal fights are no longer common on the Copperbelt but the opposition of tribes to one another can be observed in many other situations.13 But is this what really happens in urban areas of Africa? I do not think so, nor does the evidence suggest such a conclusion. Mitchell, who has written extensively on the problems of African urbanization, uses the term tribalism in a vague and loose manner, sometimes meaning one thing and sometimes another, sometimes thinking one thing, yet writing another. In his study of the Kalela Dance, he defines the tribe thus: A tribe in the rural areas is a group of people united in a sin¬ gle social and political system sharing a common set of beliefs and values. We use the word ‘tribe’ in this sense, therefore, to denote the group of people who are linked in one particular

178

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

social system. But when we talk about tribalism in urban areas, we reter not to the linking of people in a patterned structure, i.e. a tribe, but rather to a sub-division of people in terms of their sense of belonging to certain categories, these categories being defined in terms of ethnic criteria.14 In another study, “Tribalism in Towns,” Mitchell invents tribalism for Copperbelt natives in order to justify imposition of “tribal elders” as a means of controlling workers in the copper mines — workers who were actually developing class sentiments. He writes: One of the most important breaches in the relentless front of the impersonal industrial society is the community of feeling arising from common membership of a tribe. Frequently this is demonstrated in the way in which burial societies, football teams, dancing teams and similar grotips are organized along tribal lines. Often however, the operation of tribalism, though it is nonetheless there, is much more difficult to detect. This hidden tribalism is shown for example in the number of mar¬ riages between people of different tribal origins. These mar¬ riages are thought to be very common, but against what standard should their frequency be measured? They are cer¬ tainly more frequent than in tribal areas, but if they are com¬ pared with the number of marriages which would occur between people of different tribal origin if the spouses were to choose their partners entirely without regard to their tribe, then we see that, on the whole, spouses choose their partners more from their own tribal groupings.15 And in “Africans in Industrial Towns of Northern Rhodesia,” Mitchell compares the backgrounds of Africans in towns and of the English urban dwellers: The differences must be related... to the social backgrounds of the people from whom the towns of England and Africa drew their numbers. The salient feature of African rural society is that kinship dominates all social relationships. A man’s status in a tribal society is largely determined by his position in a kin¬ ship group. He lives in a village area almost invariably because he is a kinsman of a village headman; he cultivates his gar¬ dens through succession with a kin-group... For African tribes-

179

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

men... the kinship system tends to reduce all types of social relationships to a few categories, and there are customarily defined ways of proper behaviour towards persons in these cat¬ egories. In England the social structure in the rural areas has developed from a feudal system in which a man’s position in society was determined not by kinship but by his relationship to the lord of the manor. Land rights were an essential element of this rela¬ tionship. The feudal system gave way to a society in which social relationships were determined particularly by the position men held in a system of social classes between which standards of living increasingly became the main distinguishing feature.16 [All emphasis this author’s unless otherwise noted.] What does this mean in terms of the reality of the urban situation? In the same study, Mitchell tells us: People in rural areas are apt to take their tribe for granted, but when they come to town their tribal membership assumes new importance. Where there is such ethnic diversity, fellow tribes¬ men feel they have sufficient in common to stand together in the face of other tribes in spite of their previous lack of associ¬ ation. There is therefore an active manifestation of tribalism in urban areas. Because tribal characteristics are easily displayed in dress, behaviour, and in particular, in speech, tribalism becomes the most important means whereby day-to-day relationships on the Copperbelt are organized... It should be emphasized that this tribalism is something new which had grown up in indus¬ trial areas to meet the new situation in which Africans find themselves. It is quite different from tribalism in rural areas, where we imply the whole structure of the tribe, based as it is largely on land rights and kinship. Tribalism in towns provides categories into which people may arrange themselves in dayto-day interaction. It follows that the system of social control appropriate in a rural area will not necessarily operate in a town, indeed it is difficult to see how it can; still in the tribe much of the social control is exercised through the ancestor unit by senior kinsmen.17

180

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

These two passages exemplify the nature of analysis that had an applied purpose. That is, social analysis as a tool of colonial control. Such con¬ clusions provided administrators with a theoretical framework and a practical justification for the use of chiefs as representatives to control migrant workers in towns and cities. Clyde Mitchell’s statement of what constitutes tribalism in towns raises many important problems which are not mere questions of terminology, but involve methods of analysis of social change. Since Mitchell has not given a clear and explic¬ it definition of tribalism, we do not know precisely what he considers to be its root, nor what the quality of the relations predominating in these urban organizations are like. The word is used merely as a label rather than as an explanatory concept. The use of the word exempli¬ fies the process of reification in that concrete actions become a mere mimic repetition of the prototypical actions embodied in the tribe. Is Mitchell correct to describe the feeling of “brotherhood” abroad as indication of tribalism? From the manner in which Mitchell uses the word, it is quite clear that it has a great versatility, and in a scientific endeavor, even of the social sciences, such versatility is worse than use¬ less; it is confusing.18 The social anthropologists who are obsessed with finding tribalism, hidden or overt, seem to emphasize those aspects which divided Africans rather than those which created unity. L.A. Bassey points out: A group of intellectuals with a camouflaged interest in Nigeria arose and manipulated their research procedures to prove and teach us that we were not a people but many peoples. Such works as The Nigerian Footwear Industry by E. Wayne Nafzger, Deeds and Dreams by Robert LeVine, Population and Political Systems by Robert Stevenson and others, are mere dots in the encyclopedia of our ‘differences.’ Almost nothing is found in this encyclopedia on our similarities. And yet it is very true that our similarities are more numerous than our ‘differences.’ The saddest point is that some of our leaders have joined the cho¬ rus of this philosophy of negativism. Even chief Obafemi Awolowo, has seen Nigeria’s ethnic groups as ‘nations.’ To him Nigeria should have as many states as there are ‘nations,’ or about 60, according to his estimate!19 Behind so-called tribal social organizations are individuals who are pro¬ ductively active in a definite way and who enter into definite social and

181

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

political relations. The function and evolution of structures are irre¬ ducible and their differentiation should be explained by the transfor¬ mation and evolution of their function. Godelier writes: It would be possible, for example, to guess that the appearance of new conditions of production in archaic societies will mod¬ ify their demography, demand new forms of authority and bring with them new relations of production. It is a fair guess that beyond a certain limit the old kinship relations will no longer be able to fulfill these new functions. The latter will develop outside kinship and will bring forth distinct political and reli¬ gious social structures which in their turn function as relations of production. It is not the kinship relations that are trans¬ formed into political relations, but the political function of old kinship relations which develop on the basis of new problems.20 In the realm of the social sciences therefore the task of distinguishing between surface appearance and inner meaning is of essence. But social anthropologists regard the “tribesman” in abstract isolation, hence they fail to see the process of development of new social relations under changed circumstances, nor the interactions between traditional social structures and the new structures imposed by colonial rule. The static meaning of tribalism makes it inadequate to describe the African condition since the advent of colonialism. In the new urban areas of Africa we cannot say that the African is “a tribesman” but that he is on his way to being an urbanite, which means that in the histor¬ ical process man is capable of transcending himself. “By developing production by living, that is, men develop social relations with each other whose form ‘necessarily’ alters with the change and growth of the productive forces.”21 Weber, for instance, in developing his conceptual framework to describe the German society which was evolving as a result of indus¬ trial growth and urbanization writes: A social relationship will be called ‘communal’ (Vergemeinschaftung) if and in so far as the orientation of social action, whether in the individual case, on the average, or in the pure type, is based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether effectual or traditional, that they belong together. A social rela¬ tionship will, on the other hand, be called ‘associative’ (Vergesellschaftung) if and in so far as the orientation of social 182

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

action with it rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of inter¬ ests or a similarly motivated agreement, whether the basis of rational judgment be absolute values or reasons of expediency. It is especially common, though by no means inevitable, for the associative type of relationship to rest on a rational agreement by mutual consent. In that case the corresponding action is, at the pole of rationality, oriented either to a rational belief in the binding validity of the obligation to adhere to it, or to a ratio¬ nal expectation that the other party will live up to it.22 This means that what is called the recrudescence of tribalism in towns is in fact not tribalism, as a subjective or ideological reaffirmation of the tribe. The tribe is not a voluntary association which men can enter and leave as they choose, but its organization is a necessity of social life and imposes itself accordingly on the reluctant.23 The tribe is not a social unit which comes into being through conscious design. Like urban tribal units, one finds oneself belonging to it as one belongs to one’s home. In urban areas Africans form associations. They do not create them out of nothing, but create them under circumstances directly encoun¬ tered, given and transmitted from the past, to paraphrase Marx. This situation has been seen elsewhere, where urbanization has taken place: that large population dumpings of high density which are essentially an agglutination of separate and distinct, non-interacting communi¬ ties have existed. In these situations human behavior is largely the prod¬ uct of the primary group. It has also been found that in cities, although heterogeneity is present, confinement to contacts with one’s own cul¬ tural group is also possible in varying degrees — even to complete iso¬ lation. In fact, large population size may actually facilitate isolation and insularity. This is evident in the history of immigration to the United States. Some immigrants have chosen to continue to live in enclaves within the metropolitan areas and thus con¬ tinue traditional behaviour and attitudes even with prolonged exposure to urban living. Others, in contrast, have elected to leave their enclaves, avail themselves of diversity of contacts and social world and adopt ‘urbanism’ as a way of life.24 Can we describe this phenomenon in American cities as an expres¬ sion of tribalism hidden or overt? As far as I know the word tribalism 183

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

has not been used to describe these situations. So that marriage out¬ side the “tribal” group or inside it is not an affirmation or negation of tribalism. If Africans in urban areas tend to form organizational clusters based on district or language, similar to those which have developed in cities elsewhere, these are neither a prototypical action nor an imitation, but develop because the circumstances are similar to others. The reason for these groupings need not be expressions of some essentialized “trib¬ al” sentiment. Language is a very important factor in people’s lives. One can only communicate in a language that one can speak. This fact is primary for the choice of associates in towns. If one is multilingual one can establish friendships across ethnic lines. And if one speaks only one’s mother tongue, one is limited to one’s group of friendships. This is not as subjective a state of mind as the tribalist would want us to believe: language, not the ideology of tribalism per se, imposes restric¬ tions in the types of groupings people form in urban areas. The study of “urban tribalism” may well have been a response of a colonial society in which the Africans were rapidly becoming urban, but who had to be administered in some way — given the denial of civil rights in the towns in which they lived and worked. Urban tribal courts and tribal elders by which they were administered are sufficient proof of this assertion. Therefore to say that these facades proved the mysterious workings of tribalism under new conditions is to put a stamp of approval on the irrationalities of the colonial means of con¬ trol. Migrant labor which brought most African males to town was a negation of man’s concreteness as a human being, since it no longer considered such an individual as an integral social subject living with¬ in a concrete social context, but merely as a unit of labor power. The study of “urban tribalism” helped to reinforce and perpetuate the ide¬ ological myth about the role of tribalism in shaping the African world view. Besides it gave credence to the notion that no matter how long Africans worked in towns they could always be reintegrated into their tribal communities. The tribe displays an indubitable vitality so long as it does not emerge from the conditions of natural economy. The development of money economy and commodity production undermines communal land tenure which is the economic base of the political structure of the tribe. In Africa the tribe could not survive the destructive influences of migrant labor. Where the facade of tribal organization remained

184

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

standing it was able only to maintain the exterior ritual, but with no interior truth. The growth of new towns and industry in Africa brought into being new social institutions, which are unthinkable in the old tribal stmcture, and which do not purport to reflect, let alone main¬ tain the tribal system.

The political implications of the word “tribalism” The word “tribalism” has a tortured history full of derogatory con¬ notations. In the 19 th century and early part of this century it was used to refer to a primary aggregate of people in what was called a barbarous or primitive condition. But now on the level of theoretical formula¬ tion there has developed, as I have stated, a general psychology that defines the Africans as embodiments of abstract qualities or states of tribalism. Most of the anthropological literature seems to use the word “tribalism” in this sense, so that the term becomes a manipulative instrument in the hands of those who justify every denial of African rights by talking about “tribal areas” and “tribal authorities.” In most of the new independent African states, the colonial regimes, after ruthless destruction of traditional social structures, attempted to restore forms of traditional rule to serve their own ends.25 For those Africans who had moved into towns and who worked in the new industries, these “traditional authorities” had lost their meaning. In South Africa, the efforts of the government to resuscitate these tra¬ ditional structures produced only artificial facades and empty forms, which, instead of serving the forces of life and furthering their growth, only stifled and destroyed. In South Africa, the Pass Laws and Influx Central Laws caused untold sufferings to millions of Africans who were forced out of towns to “tribal areas” because of the myth that was built around tribalism as an exceptionally enduring entity. The description of Africans as tribesmen has been a bane which befogged the various forms of discriminations we have suffered. Quite obviously the use of the word “tribalism” to describe every form of urban African associations is a subtle and insidious form of discrimi¬ nation. On the political level, the word “tribalism” performs a func¬ tion similar to that of a stereotype. It conditions those not versed enough about Africa to accept the 19th century prejudices about Africans: that they still exist in a primitive state. The description of Africans as tribesmen derives very much, of course, from the 19th century usage. It is true that in our own time, 185

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

valiant attempts have been made to pour the old and vinegary wine into new bottles. The shape of the bottle, however, remains very much the same, and the man in the street uses the term very much in the sense in which it was used by his 19th century compeers. When some anthropologists use the concept of tribalism, a whole state of mind is at work; and not merely an error in scientific approach. It is a state of mind which sees world progress in terms of what is called “Western Civilization” as the ultimate state in human development. On this point, Philip Mayor writes: It will be noticed that the adjective ‘urban’ ought properly to have a different connotation in each of the three models which were touched upon at the beginning of this article. In the ‘detribalization’ model urban/tribal antithesis is conceived principally as an antithesis of different human conditions, or ways of life. Urban might then serve as a near-synonym for westernized, or civilised or detribalised. It would seem per¬ missible (in this view) to speak of‘urban African’, meaning one who has reached the end of the road to cultural change, com¬ pletely losing his tribal culture and/or status within the tribe.26 Similarly, one can speak about language, ethnic, provincial and region¬ al conflicts in India, Pakistan and Malaya, but in Africa one speaks sim¬ ply of tribal conflicts and problems of tribalism. In America, one can speak about the Jewish ghetto, the Polish ghetto, the Italian ghetto and the Puerto-Rican ghetto, but in Africa one invariably speaks sim¬ ply of tribal enclaves and even tribal ghettos. Thus Spengler, for instance, writes: Indeed, McKim Marriot anticipates that, in Indian cities, life is likely to continue in keeping with a ‘particularistic-achieve¬ ment’ value pattern. Constraints analogous to those encountered in Asia, though less powerfulare found associated with tribal differences in Africa, with its hundreds of tribes (or culture bar¬ ring units), many in each country, and its 730 distinct languages in use south of the Sahara... Of concern here is the relation between city size and the transformation of the population of African cities into relatively homogeneous cultural and politi¬ cal units. Even in cities in the United States patterns of segre¬ gation developed and persisted in the wake of successive waves of ethnically distinct groups of immigrants, though in time 186

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

these patterns become less distinct in so far as they were not undergirded by irradicable,genetically inherited differentiations. Should tribal ghettos be more likely to develop in relatively large than in relatively small cities, congregation in the latter would be more favourable to the generation of values con¬ ducive to modernization and economic development.27 Greenberg, in his article “Urbanization and Migration in West Africa”, expresses the same sentiments and writes: It is useful to draw a distinction here between tribalism as a political form based on a territory and marked by traditional customs and by political organization in terms of chiefly office, and the wider notion of group identity which, for want of a better term, I will call ‘ethnicity’. Thus the Welsh are an ethnic group but not a tribe. It is entirely possible that traditional trib¬ al groupings of Africa are evolving towards ethnic groups of this kind, although it is clear that traditional tribal organization has, on the whole, shown remarkable resilience and adaptability. The tribe... may, through the medium of associations or trib¬ al unions, recreate itself in urban centers and strengthen and maintain its ties with the rural hinterland.28 Spengler and Greenberg, like Mitchell, exemplify an attitude of mind which sees African reality as intrinsically and qualitatively different from European reality. Thus when confronted with incongruities between pre conceived expectation and new African “reality” there is almost an institutional, “knee-jerk” response to pigeonhole them as representa¬ tions of a familiar paradigm — and thus essentialize the phenomena as distinctively African and separate from other human experiences. It is obvious that the notion of tribalism is critical in studies of urban groupings in Africa. It is a word around which the field revolves, yet it remains elusive — connoting, but never quite denoting, a series of related social, political, economic, psychological, and psychiatric meanings. That is, tribalism implies a certain kind of history, and a cer¬ tain mode of cultural being. Embodied within it is the conception of time, and the conception of progress and development. In fact, we are presented with evolutionism with a vengeance. Tribalism is also something possessed of qualities which are both positive and negative. It ranges itself in mysterious ways, and acts in accordance with laws of its own. During the colonial era, as pointed 187

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

out, the tribe and tribalism become a fetish which held sway over the colonized. “Indirect rule”, “traditional authorities”, “tribal elders”, “Bantu authorities” fetishized the tribe, and its fetishistic character likewise influenced the atmosphere not only of colonial rule, but that of anthropological research. Ethnic conflicts, economic backwardness, underdevelopment constitute the mysterious functioning of tribalism after independence. The passages above reveal one other thing: that the concepts of traditional anthropology have handicapped further development and clarity in African social sciences. Quite obviously, the anthropologists have not found it an easy thing to free themselves from the tradition¬ al manner of comprehending African reality. The framework imposed by traditional anthropology still has a great influence on their think¬ ing. For most social anthropologists, African reality has changed more rapidly than their reflective thinking. The urbanization of the African imposed new social problems of the utmost importance, which demanded new concepts, new assumptions and new methods. But all that we get are attempts to fit these new experiences in the already cur¬ rent anthropological terms. Tribalism is not a mental state of the African, but it was the colonialist’s conceptual formula to freeze and manipulate African societies in archaic molds. Social anthropology paradigms, up until just before independence, were based solidly on the belief that the tribe was an enduring entity. Thus, most of the explanations of African behavior rested on the iden¬ tification of tribal structures even in urban areas. But it also happened that most of the administrative acts and those of the employers of African labor rested on the preservation of tribal structures, and, in fact, District Commissioners were “cut” in the image of the so-called traditional chiefs, and African wages in urban areas were based on false representations of the role of the tribe: that since the African was a per¬ petual member of his tribe with rights to land, his wages must merely supplement his subsistence farming; and secondly, that Africans could take up employment in towns only on a temporal basis because their rightful place was on their “tribal” lands. It is this which inclines us to take a new look at the whole arsenal of facts amassed in the past. It is a hopeless task to attempt to re-define words with such a long¬ standing history of misuse as “tribalism.” As Simpson has said: There... is a sort of Gresham’s Law for words, redefine them as we will, their worst or most extreme meaning is almost cer188

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

tain to remain current and to tend to drive out the meaning we prefer.29 What Simpson says is nowhere better exemplified than in the follow¬ ing passage by Professor A. W. Southall: Tribalism offers benefits of an obvious but less specified kind than kinship. Attachment in terms of common language and culture gives comfort in the midst of highly segmental inter¬ tribal fields. Urban is thus different from rural tribalism, one of its main functions being to classify the multitude of Africans of heterogeneous origin and so provide a basis for the emer¬ gence of new groupings to meet new demands. It takes its place as one of a number of possible classifications, no longer the overwhelmingly poor dominant one, the others being com¬ mon occupation, similar wealth and status, or like leisure inter¬ ests. This form of urban tribalism is a category of interaction within a wider system, not the corporate and largely closed struc¬ ture of social relationships provided by a tribe in its traditional area.30 Quite obviously in urban Africa, as in other urban situations, there are self-conscious, self-identifying groups whose mode of regulating behav¬ ior is based on language, locality, etc. These groups, of course, have identifying names—Ibos, Zulus, Lozis, etc.—but for the anthropolo¬ gists these names do not seem to matter. They would rather describe Zulu ethnicity as an expression of tribalism. “Tribal” seems to have replaced “native”, but both terms take away the right to nationality. The subject is a mere “tribesman” with infantile, if not instinctive attach¬ ment to other tribesmen. This is a totally depersonalized way of being. The salient question is, by what term should urban African associ¬ ations be described? Is the term “tribalism” adequate, given its preju¬ diced historical associations and lack of clear definition? From the examples quoted above of the manner in which tribalism is used, there is no doubt that the term is ambiguous and that it confuses rather than clarifies thinking. The chief objection to the use of the word “tribal¬ ism” is that it takes for granted as solved problems which are far from being so, thus tending to close the mind to problems to which it should always remain open. If, with ritual fidelity one goes on repeating that any association which is formed by Africans who happen to speak the same language and come from the same area is tribal or a manifesta189

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tion of tribalism, one may be convinced that one has understood the problem when one is merely pouring old wine into new bottles. The feeling of belonging together, which is supposed to typify trib¬ al associations, is crucial here. People can have a feeling of belonging together in a variety of ways and at different levels, from the marriage relationship to the crowds at a football match. Can all these feelings be expressions of tribalism? No one can deny that there developed among Europeans a certain way of thinking about Africans which emphasized the gulf dividing them from others; and the constant use of terms like “tribalism” exclu¬ sively for African situations continues this way of thinking. I agree with Mercier, who writes: The mind remains encumbered with ‘classical’ stereotypes about Black Africa. Among them is the notion that Africa is a compartmentalised continent, consisting of closed human groups, and where strangers and neighbors are enemies. This may be true of the theoretical self-image of many ethnic groups, but rarely of reality.31 In dealing with problems which were created by the colonial situation under the concept of tribalism, we immediately circumscribe and delim¬ it ourselves. For the word “tribalism” to most people means some¬ thing primordial which needs no further investigation. For instance, if an investigator describes an African urban associa¬ tion as tribal or a conflict as tribal — what does he really mean? In fact, he is wrong to so describe the urban association, because such associ¬ ations are not tribal in the sense in which anthropologists use this word. These associations may be based on locality or language, but they do not purport to reflect a tribal structure, let alone tribalism, which as I have said means a state of mind or an attitude in a group which ele¬ vates this group consciousness into a primary political reality with sym¬ bols of unity and a desire for autonomous, primary, political reality with symbols of unity and a desire for autonomous territory. As Max Weber has stated: It is decisive for a tribe that it is originally and normally a polit¬ ical association. The tribe either forms an independent associ¬ ation, as is originally always the case, or the association is part of a tribal league, or it may constitute a phyle, that is, part of a political association commissioned with certain political tasks 190

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

and having certain rights: franchise, holding quotas of politi¬ cal offices, and the right to assuming its share or turn of polit¬ ical, fiscal and liturgical obligations.32 Like all people, Africans are aware of their language, district, lineage and other affiliations, but this awareness is not elevated into a demand for political and territorial autonomy, except perhaps in cases of injus¬ tice. When Africans become conscious of themselves as Africans it is often against the attempts by the colonizer to pigeonhole them into his (European) tribal enclaves. The African becomes conscious that all Africans are oppressed and that the potent weapon in this oppression is the policy of “divide and rule.” This consciousness gives rise to broad¬ er nationalism, whose main function is to counteract “tribal” division. Nationalism represents unity in diversity, or diversity in unity. Paul Bohannan reminds us that tribalism as a modern political phe¬ nomenon is the creation of colonial administration and anthropologists: When the colonial regimes slowed down the movement of peo¬ ples of Africa., an illusion of fixedness and stability was creat¬ ed. Colonial administrations — at least the early ones — were under the illusion that African societies tended to be mutual¬ ly exclusive, when in fact many of them ran together and inter¬ mixed. The gesture of interdigitation is the one Africans used to discuss this intermixture of culturally differentiated peoples. Moreover, early scholars as well as early travelers made the assumption, more or less overtly, that boundaries between peo¬ ple either existed or could be created and that the various peo¬ ple of Africa could be put on a map that resembled a map of the nations of Europe. The result has been a long series of trib¬ al maps of all part (or of parts) of Africa... Yet all such maps suffer from the fact that they require the cartographer to draw lines on paper which do not necessarily correspond to natural or social divisions in territorial space.33 Bohannan further states that when the notion of tribe is applied to the African peoples, it refers to something far different than does the same word when it is applied to the North American Indian of the 17th cen¬ tury, or to the Australian aborigines of the 19th century. Some African tribes are what have been described as village states; others are empires of several million people spread over

191

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

hundreds of thousands of square miles. Some African tribes are language groups; some others are congeries of indefinite or indiscriminate groups that have been classified together under a term, usually pejorative, by their neighbours.../ Tribal maps are of very great use if we do not take their boundaries too seri¬ ously. Yet the pressure on administrators and indeed on anthro¬ pologists to get the Africans ‘straightened out’ and ‘classified’ are tremendous. Colonial administrators treat the colony as if it were a cupboard. It is to be kept neat. Then things can be found, justice can be achieved, and ones own life proceed smoothly. This cupboard assumption has often led, as it did in the Belgian Congo and South Africa, to a system of passes in which Africans have to get written permission if they are to move outside their restricted tribal areas. They must carry papers to be presented on demand. Colonies are neatest if everybody can be found in the right place.34 The anthropologist, not to be outdone by the administration, cre¬ ated his own classifications. As a true believer in tribal entities he went out to the urban African location (or ghetto) and said, “Here is a pop¬ ulation, let me see how it fits my criteria of the tribal structure,” and looked for what Gluckman describes as the “persistence of tribalism” instead of saying like Tonnies, “Human wills stand in manifold rela¬ tions to one another,” let me find out how they stand in the African urban context. How does it resemble and how does it differ from tra¬ ditional communities from which its members are recruited? When he had answered these questions, he operationally described what he found, in terms of the data itself, not with reference to the conditions demanded by any pre-existing terms. Administrators and anthropologists assumed that African migrant workers could be auxiliary to European enterprise and yet continue to live within the tribal system. It was this interpretation of the African situation which caused generations of European anthropologists to search for ways to strengthen tribal solidarity in urban areas. The emphasis placed on tribe solidarity has meant that the entry of Africans into the social and economic environment created by colonial enter¬ prise was incidental, impermanent and even unnatural. An illusion was then created that it was possible to protect and preserve a tribal social order which industrialization and urbanization were destroying. But the “preservation” of the tribe was not the aim perse. Behind this inter192

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

est was the desire to depoliticize the masses, to prevent the develop¬ ment of a unifying ideology and to deliberately obfuscate their class or national consciousness.35 The question may now be legitimately asked: Why is the word trib¬ alism in such vogue. We have seen that ordinary endeavor by Africans in the hostile urban environment to associate was reduced to the func¬ tioning of tribalism. When conflicts like that of the Congo in 1960 and that between Nigeria and Biafra are described as tribal they cease to be human conflicts with objective interests, and become a re-enact¬ ment of prototypical actions. These conflicts are reified by implying that Africans have an intrinsic tribal world view. It is not difficult to see how such reification has made for a smoother running of colonial administration, and how now it helps to discredit the African inde¬ pendence movement. Reification minimizes the range of reflection and choices, automatizes conduct in the socially prescribed channels and fixates the taken-for-granted perception of the world. Reification in this way comes close to being a functional imper¬ ative. In its end-result reification converts action into process, which is precisely the core of its social functionality. In as much as this defines action without the actor, or praxis without its author, reified social processes are intrinsically alienating and dehumanizing.36 (Emphasis in the original.) Thus in analyzing conflict situations, it does not clarify the issues even a little bit to describe them as tribal. Tribalism is a trigger word. Once it is mentioned, a whole series of historically conditioned reflexes fol¬ low which make people throw up their arms in an “I told you so” man¬ ner. The description of situations like those in the Congo and Nigeria in terms of tribalism becomes a manipulative and intellectually face¬ saving device. It absolves one from getting to the historical roots of the problem. Such an approach overlooks the fact that humans differ from objects in that he is not predetermined by properties, but creates himself through his own choices and acts. Far from being the product of his qualities, he is what he spontaneously decides to be.37

193

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

HOW THEN TO EXPLAIN PRESENT DAY CONFLICTS? Colonialism in its classic form is dead, but the spirit of its policies and presuppositions lingers on, and infects the present articulation of con¬ flicts. This raises a vital problem: what was the nature of the colonial state, and what are its implications for the future? The question is espe¬ cially important in much of Africa for two reasons. The area within which colonial state authority was deployed often had neither eco¬ nomic nor cultural unity.38 Secondly, in most of the countries of colo¬ nial Africa, political liberation was not the result of autonomous national movements supported by the broad popular action, but rather the reflection, on the one hand, of the general crisis of the colonial sys¬ tem, and, on the other hand, of the colonial power’s efforts to set their domination on a new basis. The outcome has been a sort of a limited formal independence, more octroyee than won, and bearing the mark of compromise from birth.39 In support of these generalizations, one need only be reminded of the prolonged constitutional talks preced¬ ing the independence of Nigeria, Congo, Kenya, and Zambia, and the so-called constitutional “guarantees” extracted by the former colonial power for its interests and minorities. To this add the fact that in the British areas in particular, independence was achieved not through the evolution of the instruments of indirect rule, but by their obliteration and replacement — which makes for an interesting reading of the study From Tribal Rule to Modern Government. African nationalism, which was an all inclusive phenomenon, received its first severe test during negotiations for independence. In the face of colonial oppression and exploitation, internal antagonism between the various regions, ethnic groups and social strata, which had characterized the colonial era, had given way to a common struggle against foreign rule. However, these differences and antagonisms were merely submerged and were bound to re-appear after independence, especially since the traditional elements, which had profited from colo¬ nial rule, had been eclipsed. At independence, it is important to note, the relative social rigidity of the colonial era breaks down, and there results greater interaction and competition for scarce resources between various groups and regions. Not having governed, the most salient aspect of the transforma¬ tion from colonial subjection to independence which confronts the new rulers of the African state is that:

194

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

When a metropolitan power disengages itself politically from the former colony, when ‘independence’ is conferred upon the new nation, what is laid bare is neither a viable and modern political economy, nor a series of self-sufficient primitive cul¬ tures, nor an archaic culture, but an awkward and random blend of all these elements.40 What compounds and worsens this situation is that the economy, the life blood of any country, remains solidly in the hands of internation¬ al monopolies or their local agents — European and Asian expatriates. Thus the struggle for national unity is not only territorial and ethnic, it is economic and social. To the “tribalist” these issues are not important. Africa, at inde¬ pendence, presented an eloquent example of a society that was deformed by the anarchy of capitalism, compounded by the greed and rapacity of imperialism and its acolytes. Everything built on the con¬ tinent by the former colonial powers with exploited African labor (towns, mines, roads, railways, etc.) was — practically speaking — the continuation of the productive forces of the metropolitan countries, and created to induce the most favorable conditions for the growth and development of the economy of the metropolitan countries. The post-colonial regimes of today inherit this one-sided economy togeth¬ er with the sociocultural debris which was the consequence of the dis¬ mantling of African societies, first by the slave trade and later by conquest and imposition of capitalist modes of production. The his¬ torical and structural weaknesses allow new colonist forces to strength¬ en themselves and to manipulate the new state as well. The colonial inheritance for the new nations of Africa could be described by one term: scarcity,41 in every aspect of social life. In most independent states of Africa, for the majority of the people everything was lacking. Scarcity of things: the economies of these states could not produce enough bread to feed their populations, enough shoes to sup¬ ply every inhabitant. Scarcity of personnel: only one-tenth of the pop¬ ulation in most of these states could read and write, there were no technicians, very few had any experience in industrial work. Scarcity of values: there were no durable political institutions, no democratic cul¬ tural traditions or widely diffused social ideals, no full sense of nation¬ al identity. This was the immitigable agony and inhumanity Africans inherited from years of colonial plunder. In the empire of scarcity, humans ineluctably become the enemy of each other; one’s relation195

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ship with ones fellows is mediated through a world of matter, what is a-priori lack for one is luxury for another. The struggle for distribu¬ tion of goods has no humanly livable outcome: it constitutes an inter¬ minable implacable negation of humanity. In these circumstances conflict and terror are resolved in the structure of human coexistence. It is not tribalism that is the root cause of conflict in Africa. It is precisely in backward, inchoate societies, dominated by scarcity and integrated falsely at the state level, that conflicts such as those of the Congo, Nigeria, etc. take place. The traditional societies of Africa, once living and open to future growth, became, during the colonial era, closed and fixed in the colonial status. The ossification that took place led to the mummification of individuals. Some of the conflicts and hatreds are the logical consequences of the colonial situation. The cry against “tribalism” is utterly dishonest — as though it were possible for a human beings to evolve otherwise than within the framework in which they have been left to function. When misery and inequality are the destiny of an entire people, when there is no technical infrastructure, when there is no literacy or common culture, when there is no civic political tradition, when there is no real national identity — then conflicts become inevitable. Conflict is the natural outgrowth of social and economic tension. How it is articulated — i.e., the language in which it is expressed — while impor¬ tant, must not preclude our penetration beneath the verbal surface to grasp the basis of ethnic conflicts. Richard L. Sklar writes: Tribalism is widely supposed to be the most formidable barri¬ er to national unity in Africa. Nearly every African state has at least one serious problem of ethnic or regional separation. It is less frequently recognised that tribal movements may be cre¬ ated and instigated to action by the new men of power in fur¬ therance of their own special interests which are, time and again, the constitutive interests of emerging social classes. Tribalism then becomes a mask for class privilege. To borrow a worn metaphor, there is often a non-traditional wolf under the tribal sheepskin.42 Africa is, of course, not the only area plagued by ethnic conflicts, wit¬ ness: Ireland, Canada, the Middle East, and the United States. But, of course, these are not tribal conflicts; these are perceived as ethnic or national conflicts.

196

Urban Tribalism—Theory and Ideology

Is it not curious that in spite of their population figure of nine mil¬ lion, the Ibo-speaking people have been labeled a tribe, implying that nationhood could only be obtained within the Nigerian Federation? Without going into the tragic situation of Nigeria, what this argument implies is that what the colonial powers built, no man should put asun¬ der. But is this a realistic expectation? What if the entity left behind by the former metropolitan power was built on a faulty foundation? Must it be allowed to continue even if is unequal and invidious? To describe former Biafra’s secession as motivated by tribal senti¬ ments, while Nigeria’s insistence that it should remain within the Federation was because it (the Federal Government) wanted to build up a nation, is to stop at the water’s edge of political analysis. In apprais¬ ing conflicts like that in Nigeria, one must take into account not only the distribution of political power and national income, but also the whole series of objective and subjective factors which lead to ethnic conflicts, and give guidance to Linderstanding particular conflicts. This requires the consideration of the economic system, the nature of the social system, the structure of social consciousness in both the ideo¬ logical and psychological levels. It is also essential to consider the ide¬ ological and socio-psychological orientation and the views of the ruling bureaucratic class and of their individual social groups, the rivalry between the various groupings in the ruling circles and their antago¬ nistic formations, as well as many other movements.43 In the realm of power, diffuse prejudices often are focused, inten¬ sified and sharpened by political processes. In South Africa, for instance, the Nationalist Party ruled for many years because of its appeal to the group prejudices of their constituents. A tradition of prejudice is well established in South Africa and thus the appeal to voters on racial and ethnic grounds is a very potent weapon. When the word “tribalism” is used to describe ethnic conflicts the issues are side-stepped. The simple label ‘tribal’ both oversimplifies and implies, con¬ ceals rather than reveals the complexities of events and situa¬ tions. This is never more true than at times of crisis perhaps for winning and losing participants in the process as well as for external observers. To win support for their case any party to a dispute may choose to call each other names that will arouse sentiments that really have nothing to do with the issue that sparked off the dispute... if the label ‘tribalism’ is not a very 197

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

useful one for sociology and other sciences, it is not any more so for terms of‘development.’44 Worse still, some Africanists do not distinguish between artificially pre¬ served “tribal” structure in the form of “native authorities” in places like South Africa and other colonies in which indirect rule was used for genuine sentiment of ethnicity. It is this form of “tribalism” which has become a sinister plague in the contemporary ex-colonial world. When someone talks about the existence of tribalism in South Africa, and ignores the attempts of all the South African racist governments to maintain these artificial divisions, he can only be described as either dishonest or a charlatan. Most of the studies which talk about tribal¬ ism in urban African situations usually ignore the ‘cupboard mentali¬ ty” of European administrators who wanted to straighten our Africa by pigeon-holing Africans in their so-called tribal straight jackets. In this paper, I was not just quibbling about a word. I was objecting to something more insidious and sinister. I was objecting to a deliberate attempt to discriminate by verbal stereotypes, as practiced by some Africanists.

198

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

The “tribe” of today no longer sets the limits — politically, economically or geographically — on the society of which it constitutes but a part. It has been incorporated, often invol¬ untarily, into states and empires within which it normally occu¬ pies a subordinate position; and its resources in land and labor have, to one degree or another, been affected by and linked in a number of ways to the money economy of the modern state and world market. It is, in short, impinged upon by external forces which are beyond its power to control and which in most cases constitute significant factors in shaping its present struc¬ ture and future development. —D. Barnett, 1973:2 The analytical problem of studying the evolution of the class structure in Africa, given its long history of incorporation into the world sys¬ tem, is indeed immense. And the issue is not made easier by the fact that most of Africa today is independent from formal colonial rule. The recognition of the methodological problems is not new in social anthropology. Redfield (1960:114) asked: How, in describing the little community, are we to include the fact that it is a community within communities, a whole with¬ in other wholes?... What forms of thought are available to us for conceiving and describing a whole that is both enclosed within other wholes and is also in some part permeated by them? But having posed these questions, Redfield did not begin to answer them. Most studies of class and class structure focus on the local area and appear to avoid or be incapable of focusing on the crucial issue of

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

the world system and the consequent structural relations it necessi¬ tates. The problem here is to achieve nothing less than a coherent understanding of the making of the modern world and the unique development of capitalism as a global economic system. Historical incorporation of distinct societies under capitalism pro¬ ceeds by means of conquest, domination, and enslavement of alien peoples, followed by the socioeconomic restructuring of the domi¬ nated society in order to install new forms of production or exploit the former productive activities. The fundamental objective of this restruc¬ turing is to bind the incorporated society into the expansionist world economy as part of its productive system. This is commonly followed by the diffusion of the colonizer’s cultural tradition. By means of what concept is it possible to understand the social relationships noted above? By what concept can we answer the ques¬ tions raised by Redfield? More generally, by means of what concepts is it possible to think of the determination of a subordinate structure by a dominant structure? The concept of “colonial capitalist mode of production” (CCMP) is most useful in the analysis of particular, concrete, historical realities of incorporation. In defining such a productive mode one must define the exact form and content of the articulation and combination of var¬ ious modes of production that are subsumed by capitalism under the special conditions of colonialism. Insofar as the capitalist mode of pro¬ duction dominates the precapitalist modes and subjects their manpow¬ er to its need and the logic of its own mode of functioning, i.e., integrates them more or less in the mechanism of its own reproduction, then we have a class situation. But there are fewer concepts in the social science vocabulary which have been so subject to distortion and dis¬ putation as the concept of class. Central to Marx’s studies of political economy, the concept of class has remained a politically and intellectu¬ ally suspect one. The reasons for this are not hard to find; the concept of class addresses itself to the most fundamental aspects of contempo¬ rary human life — the distribution of resources in society and the power relations which are implied by this distribution. It is thus necessary to show how the concept of class will be used in this paper. In society there are a great many distinctions between individuals; for example, there are differences in terms of nationality, social status, age, sex, occupation, education, and income. All these lead to the social grading of the population and may produce various categories of social

200

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

strata. In contemporary bourgeois sociology, “class” is viewed as a descriptive category of social stratification subject to empirical specifi¬ cation in concrete societies. This accounts for the plethora of criteria used in class analysis, for there are as many points of view concerning the way in which groups should be divided and classified as there are discrete societies and criteria to classify them. In classical sociology, the social scientist understood that class rela¬ tionships could not be studied apart from the study of political econ¬ omy. Today the confusion arises partly because of ideological rejection of the concept of class and also because the economic, sociological, and political dimensions of society are split up and parceled out among the different academic interests devoted to them. Thus one has “class¬ es” in the economic sense, the sociological sense, and the political sense and in the sense of the distribution of status and prestige. This divi¬ sion helps to discourage consideration of the nature of the economic system in any terms other than that of its ideological separateness. Thus, the overall class structure is lost in the absorption with detail. The bour¬ geois sociologists have trivialized class as simply one aspect of a grad¬ ed system of social stratification as understood by individuals. The criteria for differentiation between strata are quantitative, not qualita¬ tive, people at the top having simply more of the valued resources. How does one distinguish between significant and insignificant dis¬ tinctions? In the model that does not investigate the political econo¬ my, the salient aspects of class division — e.g., exploitation, class struggle, and revolution — are excluded. Superficial empiricism sub¬ stitutes for the study of the underlying nonempirical structural reality. This raises the question of the levels of abstraction on which the problem of classes and class structure in Africa is to be studied. We can study the class structure in Africa through the abstract-deductive method. Or we can practice with Marx the method of “successive approximations,” which consists in moving from the more abstract to the more concrete in a step-by-step fashion, removing simplifying assumptions at successive stages of the investigation so that theory may take account of and explain an ever wider range of actual phenomena (Sweezy, 1942:1). Social classes are not a given with which certain societies are blessed and which other, more retarded societies lack. Social classes describe the relations between producers and those in control of the produc¬ tion. The question of whether social classes exist or do not exist (or

201

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

did or did not exist) in Africa can be answered only on the basis of a truly scientific method of studying economic and social development. That is, the determination of fundamental classes in society is not a task of empirical observation, but one for theoretical investigation of the relations of production that are the foundation of society. As Marx put it: The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class? and the reply to this follows naturally from the reply to another question namely: What makes wage laborers, capital¬ ists and landlords constitute three great classes? (quoted in Dos Santos, 1970:172) In other words, the question of whether these or those classes exist turns out to be analysis of the mode of production. We can therefore resolve the contradiction between the general law of class formation and the concrete forms in which it appears. As a theoretical postulate the theory of class involves “the relations or models of relations con¬ ditioning the possibilities of interaction among men, given a determi¬ nate mode of production” (Dos Santos, 1970:181). Cabral (1969:77) agrees with this formulation of the problem and writes: Those who affirm — in our case correctly — that the motive force of history is the class struggle would certainly agree to a revision of this affirmation to make it more precise and give it an even wider field of application if they had a better knowl¬ edge of the essential characteristics of certain colonized peo¬ ples, that is to say peoples dominated by imperialism. In fact in the general evolution of humanity and each of the peoples of which it is composed, classes appear neither as a generalized and simultaneous phenomenon throughout the totality of these groups, nor as a finished, perfect, uniform and sponta¬ neous whole. The definition of classes within one or several human groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of the productive forces and of the characteristics of the wealth produced by the group or usurped from others. That is to say that the socio-economic phenomenon ‘class’ is creat¬ ed and develops as a function of at least two essential and inter¬ dependent variables — the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership of the means of production. [Emphasis added.] 202

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

In the last few years a number of studies have appeared, such as those by Kuper and Smith (1969), which have focused the problem on “new” analysis of African reality. Kuper and Smith attempt to refute the fun¬ damental concepts of Marxist class analysis of postcolonial Africa. They offer in the place of class analysis the notion of social and/or cultural pluralism. Obviously the bourgeois social scientists who have disptited the relevance of class analysis in Africa ignore the colonial political econ¬ omy and the classes it created. The current vogue of cultural and/or social pluralism is a typical way in which prefabricated models are imposed on African reality. Cultural and/or social pluralism by con¬ centrating on cultural differences conveniently blocks out the possi¬ bility of a comprehensive historical inquiry into the actual grounds of why cultural differences assume the importance they have in a colo¬ nial situation. The bourgeois social scientist sought to resolve the contradiction between the general law of class formation and the concrete forms in which it manifested itself not by seeking to find the mediating ele¬ ments, but by directly adopting the concrete to the abstract. Since this did not work, they either denied the law or faced an insoluable con¬ tradiction. If there is a uniquely “bourgeois view” of African society, it is the one that is advanced by van den Berghe (1965) in his essay, “Toward a Sociology of Africa.” He defines the characteristics of African soci¬ eties in terms of their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural cleavages. In typ¬ ical style van den Berghe (pp. 78-79) describes pluralism as: . . . characterized by relative absence of value consensus; the relative rigidity and clarity of group definition; the relative pres¬ sure of conflict, or at least of lack of integration and comple¬ mentarity between various parts of the social system, the segmentary and specific character of relationships and the rel¬ ative existence of sheer institutional duplication... between the various segments of society. The main criticism against the concept of pluralism (social or cultur¬ al) is that it turns the immediate into an absohite, since it cannot show its relations with the modes of being or the conditions that determine it. That is, “empiricist science, by overvaluing the dattim as compared with determination, replaces the totality by the aspects or forms in

203

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

which it appears” (Dos Santos, 1970:180). It tends thereby to con¬ fuse the essence of society with its outward appearance. The criticism offered by Cohen (1972:234) of “cultural pluralism” hits its major weaknesses. He writes: Tendentially and essentially, ... ‘cultural pluralism’ leads to either a simplification or obfuscation of other forms of social conflict, for example ‘class conflict’, which may be linked to, but is also distinct from, ethnic conflict. The cultural deter¬ minism of the pluralist has also led to a distinct uncertainty in the spelling out of the precise conditions under which rela¬ tionships of dominance and disability as between ethnic or racial groups are modified or overturned. To undertake this task a much wider analysis of the relations of production and consumption within a given social matrix must be undertak¬ en. These relations... may exist as coterminous with, as an adjunct of, or in contradiction to the relations between cul¬ tural groups. The lack or avoidance of class analysis has also been raised in a recent article (Kitching, 1972). According to this writer, the situation is not helped by African political leaders who write and speak nostalgically about the communal past that characterized precapitalist and/or tra¬ ditional African societies. It is not the major purpose of this paper to pursue abstractly the argument against the social pluralist or why class analysis is conspicu¬ ous by its avoidance. With no claim to originality I shall, through a few selected societies (as sources of empirical reference), show the development of classes in colonial and post-colonial Africa as part of the world-system (see Wallerstein, 1974). It is my belief that only a profound knowledge of the socioeconomic and political history of indi¬ vidual countries, particularly the level of social development in the pre ¬ colonial and colonial periods, can furnish the researcher with the necessary initial material to make a correct judgment of whether or not the Marxist class analysis is applicable to the present African con¬ ditions. Clearly classes in modern Africa are not determined by the nation¬ state. In this new configuration — following incorporation into the world-economy — certain structural characteristics developed as a reflection of the higher order into which the African societies had been

204

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

incorporated. That is, whatever classes developed after its incorpora¬ tion were not reflective of an autonomous economy, but were auxil¬ iary to the world class structure. Developing within the framework of the colonial capitalist mode of production, the class structure of most African countries today is a distorted and truncated version of the class structure of the ruling center. In this paper I adopt a Marxian framework of the analysis of social classes in colonial and postcolonial Africa. I am assuming the progres¬ sive dominance of the capitalist mode of production throughout the colonial and postcolonial period. This should not be taken as an attempt to ignore the existence of the precapitalist class structures in most of Africa. But as will be discussed below, the experiences of slav¬ ing, conquest, colonialism, and imperialism are the historical reality most relevant to understanding class structure in Africa today. Precapitalist Class Formation and Structure The conditions under which Africans produced and exchanged their means of sustenance have varied from country to country and within each cotmtry from generation to generation. In the traditional village community with its communal ownership of land — which most of modern rural Africa still has in some form or other — a fairly equal distribution of products was a matter of course. The changes in the forms of production and distribution in certain societies gave rise to the division of society into different strata. The communal mode of production is one of the oldest systems of social relations in Africa. Typically, it was characterized by an extremely low level of productive forces and no production of surplus. Under the “primitive” mode of production man was helpless before nature, and this explains the collective forms of labor and communal istic social relations implied in the collective ownership of the land and the egalitarian forms of distribution of products. Primitive and/or communalistic relations of this type were and are still characteristic of cer¬ tain parts of Africa even though the continent was incorporated into the orbit of the evolving capitalist system (see Maquet, 1972:113). The absence of private property in land, which has enamored many African socialists, did not mean that Africa prior to the incorporation into the world capitalist system was an eldorado of egalitarianism. In many societies class division had emerged which expressed itself in the inequality in property relations that arose among peasants; it expressed 205

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

itself in the emergence of a traditional aristocracy that concentrated in its hands large herds. There were already in existence large detach¬ ments of armed men headed by military commanders. Rodney (1972:53) writes: In the period of transition, while African societies retained many features that were undisputably communal, it also accept¬ ed the principle that some families or clans or lineages were destined to rule and others were not. This was true not only of cultivators but of pastoralists as well. In fact, livestock become unevenly distributed much more than land; and those families with the largest herds became socially and politically dominant. It was, however, the common access to land that was the mainstay of African communalism. The African village settlements were based on arrangements in which each family had usufruct of the lands which they cultivated or on which they grazed their animals or on which they hunted or gathered. Particular phases of this or that evolution were the main interest of ethnologists. In the collection of essays, African Political Systems (1940), Fortes and Evans-Pritchard made a distinction between acephalous societies, which did not have duly constituted centralized political authority, and societies with centralized authority structures, that is, primitive “states.” It was shown that in the former, the acephalous or “stateless” soci¬ eties, political power was organized, or rather political functions were discharged, within the framework of segmentary lineage systems, i.e., a plexus of relationships between (and within) corporate kin groups organized at various levels. In such societies all “roles”, including polit¬ ical and economic roles, appeared in the form of kinship roles (see Alavi, 1973:33). But to the extent that social division of labor devel¬ oped and society was divided into classes, the state appeared and its nature was defined. In societies with centralized authority, the primitive ‘states,’ however, another set of‘roles’ overlays the network of kinship organization, viz., kings, administrators and judges. Such soci¬ eties displayed unique distribution of wealth and power. One might, therefore, expect cleavages between groups in such soci¬ eties. (Alavi, 1973:33)

206

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

The concept of “stateless” societies, therefore, describes those people who had no machinery of governmental coercion and no concept of a political unit wider than the family or the village. According to Rodney (1972:56): Generally speaking, one can consider the stateless societies as among the older forms of socio-political organization in Africa, while the large states represented an evolution away from communalism — sometimes to the point of feudalism. The reconstruction of African societies prior to their incorporation into the world capitalist system reveals uneven development. The existing division (classes) were incompletely crystallized, and changes were in most cases very slow. Even the stratified societies exhibited minimal internal mechanisms for radical social transformation. Either conflicts were locally resolved or they led to the hiving-off and creation of par¬ allel entities with little difference from the original society. Certainly Gluckman (1964:31) fails to understand all the dynamics operating when he writes: Rich there were and the poor suffered greater shortages of food; but the main interest of the rich lay in building up bands of followers by giving them land for which they had no other use, and feeding them from surplus stocks of cattle and grain. There are no complicating conflicts arising from clashes of eco¬ nomic interests between classes. To sum up: Prior to the advent of imperialism there were in Africa cer¬ tain societies with no state machinery but there also existed societies that had developed to a point where social classes appeared and where governmental functions were reserved for a minority who exercised power in an exclusive way. There existed class conflicts. It is simply that in Africa, unlike Europe, these could be relieved instead of having to be resolved by qualitative transformation. Feudal and slave-based modes of production existed widely and were taken advantage of and subsumed by the evolving capitalist system.

207

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The Advent of Capitalism in Europe and Its Effect on Africa The incorporation of Africa into the evolving world capitalist mode of production extends beyond the period of formal colonialism. Long before Africa was divided among European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884, African slavery constituted the most important form of trade between Europe and Africa, but this has always been underes¬ timated as a source of finance capital growth (see Williams, 1944). The African slave trade lasted for about three centuries from 1550 to 1850. Its devastation was felt by African societies from the middle of the seventeenth century to after its termination. There have been innumerable arguments about the effects of the slave trade on the African economic development. However, there is no question that it led to direct dismemberment of Africa in the nineteenth century. The striking consequence of the slave trade was on two aspects of African political economy. Africa, it is estimated, lost between 12 and 50 million ablebodied souls. From 1650 to 1900 Europe’s population grew by over 600%, that of Asia by over 300%, and that of Africa by only 20%. Today Africa has but one-twelfth of the world’s population; prior to the slave trade it had about one-fifth the world’s total. The destruction of African political economies and the loss of Africa’s men and women (“who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs”) distorted its political and economic evolution. The pattern of arrested development was accentuated by colonization. Commenting on the development of capitalism in the eighteenth cen¬ tury, Dubois (1965:58) wrote: It was the Negro slave who made the sugar colonies the most precious colonies ever recorded in the annals of imperialism. Experts called them “the fundamental prop and support” of the Empire. The British Empire in the 18th century was a mag¬ nificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation. Throughout the eighteenth and for the first half of the nineteenth cen¬ tury, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be the source for the accumulation of capital that was reinvested in Western Europe and America. The slave trade was thus the first incorporation of Africa’s labor force into the world economy.

208

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

The Advent of Imperialism The third quarter of the nineteenth century saw the superseding of competitive capitalism by monopoly capitalism. The most salient aspects of imperialism were the transformation and the socioeconom¬ ic restructuring of African societies by colonially imposed capitalist development. The export of capital influenced and greatly accelerated the development of capitalism in those countries to which it was export¬ ed. Lenin summed up imperialism as follows (1968:233): Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has estab¬ lished itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pro¬ nounced importance, in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. Lenin goes on to say that, “The thing to be noted... is that imperial¬ ism represents a special stage in the development of capitalism.” This definition of imperialism sees it as a specific organization of capitalist production on a world scale embracing all the salient characteristics including the class structure. In the introduction to Bukharin’s Imperialism and the World Economy (1972:11) Lenin wrote: The typical ruler of the world became finance capital, a power that is peculiarly mobile and flexible, peculiarly intertwined at home and internationally, peculiarly devoid of individuality and divorced from the immediate processes of production, pecu¬ liarly easy to concentrate, a power that has already made pecu¬ liarly large strides on the road of concentration, so that literally several hundred billionaires and millionaires hold in their hands the fate of the whole world. The study of classes and class formation in Africa under imperialistic capitalism is extremely complex and difficult. Worsley (1964:374) points out: Social theory has utterly failed to grapple with the outstand¬ ing feature of the last hundred years — the emergence of a world system of social relations, a new and higher level of devel¬ opment in human organization. The only serious systematic

209

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

intellectual treatment of this change in levels so far has been Lenin’s Imperialism. In studying the evolution of Africa’s class structure under imperialism, one must study the activities and structure of British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, and American finance capital in Africa: the specific forms of the reorganization of African labor power to serve imperialist enter¬ prises; and the development of secondary forms of capitalist enter¬ prises, controlled in some parts of Africa by Asian and Eurasian minorities and in other cases by the indigenous petty bourgeoisie serv¬ ing, after independence, in competition with (as well as agents of) imperialist capital. That is, the study of classes should involve the study of how the bourgeoisie makes the country dependent on the town and those countries lagging in economic development “dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasant on the nations of bourgeois, the East on the West” (Marx, 1968:39). This raises further the methodological question of the level of abstraction on which the problem of classes is to be studied. So com¬ plicated is the subject and so numerous are its empirical variants that a single paper can only offer tentative suggestions. Lenin (1964:33) writes that: Infinitely diverse combinations and elements of this or that type of capitalist evolution are possible and only hopeless pedants could set about solving the peculiar and complex prob¬ lems merely by quoting this or that opinion of Marx about a different historical epoch. The attempt to study the class structure in Africa is a risky undertak¬ ing indeed. These general observations will not be entirely adequate for any particular region or country. Fiowever, they do apply at a gen¬ eral level. The historical specificity of imperialism in Africa lay in the fact that, although it integrates Africa within the world capitalist economy, it did not create in Africa a wholly capitalist social milieu. “Capitalism, and especially imperialism, combined development and underdevelopment, the rapid growth of some nations with the retarded growth of others, not by making all produce under the same capitalist conditions of pro¬ duction, but precisely by maintaining varying degrees of pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist relations of production in most colonial and semi¬ colonial countries” (Mandel, 1972:96). 210

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

The analysis of the distinctive features of Africa’s integration into the world-economy is fundamental for the study and specific features of its class structure. If the capitalist mode of production was to devel¬ op, it was essential for imperialism to do more than deprive the African subsistence producer ol the means of production; those who had lost their livelihood had to be forcibly enrolled in the production process as laborers. The evolution of the Africans’ social structure subjected to total colonial domination profoundly altered the whole class prob¬ lem. Colonial oppression and exploitation impoverished all strata of African society without creating social divisions typical of the mature capitalist countries. We can sum up the expansion of capitalism in its imperialistic phase: it took place (a) through the export of mature capital, (b) by the cre¬ ation of overseas markets, and (c) through the creation of peasantries and proletariats as well as a dependent petty bourgeoisie. In its impe¬ rialistic phase, capitalism brought populations with precapitalist rela¬ tions of production and exchange into productive relationships with international capitalist organizations, but it maintained and strength¬ ened to the utmost the differences between the various societies brought under its ambit. In the study of classes, therefore, our objective is to develop a the¬ oretical understanding of certain definite conditions which do not exist in a pure form or empirically; such a definition is a prerequisite to an explanation of the class reality in Africa. At the highest level of gener¬ ality there is the structural and specific nature of capitalist production: What is the relation between the scientific, logical analysis of capital¬ ism, which creates the capitalist class and the working class, and the real historical process of the origin and development of capitalism in its imperialistic phase in Africa? Is there a structural similarity between the English peasants forced off the land (who then provided a pool of labor for the factories) and African peasants similarly forced temporarily or permanently to labor in mines and plantations? While the move¬ ment of African peasants comes at a later time in history, and while many African peasants have come to play a different version of the pro¬ letarian role, structurally they stand in the same relationship to capital as English workers, then and now (see Friedmann and Wayne, 1967:40). In Africa today there exists a predominant capitalist mode of production which modifies and subordinates to itself the elements of precolonial relations of production.

211

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

It follows therefore that it is impossible to talk about the class struc¬ ture of specific countries without a prior understanding of the work¬ ings of imperialism and monopoly capitalism. In a sense, we must have a theory of the elephant before we can criticize the partial view of the blind men. The introduction of capitalism within the framework of the colonial system of imperialism had a deforming effect on the evolu¬ tion of Africa’s class structure. The exploitation of African raw mate¬ rials by foreign capital and techniques meant that the emergence of social classes was different from, and perhaps more complex than, what existed in Western Europe. The decisiveness of colonialism and imperialism, though short in duration, is seen in the fact that it usurped from the African societies their productive forces. Thus, the most serious blow suffered by the African people under colonial rule was to be removed from history and from their communities. As Cabral puts it (1973:41-42): The principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperi¬ alist domination, is the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free oper¬ ation of the process of development of the productive forces. Now, in any given society, the level of development of the pro¬ ductive forces and the system for social utilization of these forces (the ownership system) determine the mode of produc¬ tion. In our opinion, the mode of production whose contra¬ dictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principal factor in the history of any human group, the level of the productive forces being the tone and permanent driving power in history. How the Africans experienced the negation of their historical process and the distortion of their classes is described by Rodney (1972:246): To be specific, it must be noted that colonialism crushed by force the surviving feudal states of North Africa; that the French wiped out the large Muslim states of the Western Sudan, as well as Dahomey and kingdoms in Madagascar; the British eliminated Egypt, the Mahdist Sudan, Asante, Benin, the Yoruba kingdoms, Swaziland, Matabeleland, the Lozi and the East African Lake kingdoms as great states. It should fur¬ ther be noted that a multiplicity of smaller and growing states were removed from the face of Africa by the Belgian, 212

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

Portuguese, British, French, Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. Finally, those that appeared to survive were nothing but pup¬ pet creations. For instance, the Sultan of Morocco retained nominal existence under colonial rule which started in 1912; and the same applied to the Bey of Tunis; but Morocco and Tunisia were just as much under the power of French colonial administrators as neighbouring Algeria, where the feudal rulers were removed altogether. The colonial situation manifested itself in different dimensions —- polit¬ ical, economic, sociological, and psychological. Politically, colonialism “is a system of rule which assumes the right of one people to impose their will upon another. This situation inevitably leads to a situation of dominance and dependency which... systematically subordinates those governed by it to the imported culture in social, economic and polit¬ ical life” (Brett, 1973:vii). The violent penetration and rupture of traditional precapitalist soci¬ eties and the subjugation of their economic life to the profit impulse of the Western bourgeoisie constitute the fundamental class reality of modern Africa. As a result of the colonial situation, the peoples of Africa found their resources and their land developed and exploited (by their labor power) not for them, but for the capitalist classes of Europe. They found that the effective capacity for political decision making over their own destiny had largely been taken from their hands. They found that the colonial situation had produced vast changes in the net¬ work of their social relationships: there were primary industrialization, the growth of towns, the development of an urbanized and proletarianized population; there was the transformation of subsistence economies to a cash-crop economy; there grew new forms of social differentiation based on education and religious affiliation — that is, there emerged a new system of social stratification. Of course, the colo¬ nial situation affected different African colonies, or even peoples in the same country, differently. But the genesis of colonial capitalism con¬ stitutes the contextural base line from which we must study the cur¬ rent class structure in Africa. The analysis of the class structure of the various regions should be based on the mode of generation of the sur¬ plus from the African workers and the transfer of the surplus to the metropolis and among the various recipients in the colony itself. That is, classes are objectified at the level of concrete analysis of a specific mode of production. Classes are the personification of the central eco213

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

nomic categories of a given system of production. They are the expres¬ sion of the central contradictions of a given mode of production in terms of the structural relations between producers and controllers of production. Samir Amin (1974:76) divides Africa under colonial rule into three macro-regions: the Africa of the colonial economy; the Africa of the concession companies; and the Africa of the labor reserves. He explains that this division is based on the effects of the colonial period on the history of Africa. The definition of the colonial political economy makes it clear how the most fundamental class divisions in Africa were creat¬ ed. It was during the colonial period, for instance, that the inequitable economic relations between certain African countries and white set¬ tler countries began. And in the structure of the colonial political econ¬ omy we find out why the basic means of production in most African countries still belong to foreign capital. The sociological consequences of the colonial capitalist mode of production — or CCMP — were remarkable. An industrial economy based on narrowly limited kinds of economic activity — the extraction of minerals and agricultural products — bypassed the development of an internal market and an articulated commercial economy. As a result, “classes were formed not through an historical process of material and cultural evolution within the society, but were created by decree to serve a distant imperial metropolis.” Expropriations, taxation, corvees, and paternalist control were conscious instruments of policy that cre¬ ated the needed labor force (Murray, 1962:121). The principal classes during the colonial era were those whose inter¬ relations determined the essence of the CCMP. Brett’s discussion (1973:284) ol the crucial differences between the class structure in the metropolitan countries and the class structure in the colonies is very important and should be quoted at length: Capitalism had evolved organically in the areas of origin, but it was injected into the colonial world from the outside and, where necessary, imposed upon unwilling populations there at the point of a gun. The process of organic evolution, for exam¬ ple in Britain, produced an indigenous capitalist class which was securely rooted in the social structure and culture and which, whatever its limits, had necessarily to rely upon inter¬ nal sources ol support to legitimate and defend its claims to social predominance. The dominance of this class in European 214

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

society was subjected to intense opposition both from the old feudal order and from the emergent working class, but its claims to represent at least one significant tendency within the national culture could never be entirely rejected. But external dominance in the Third World meant that the commanding heights of the new economy and administration were occupied by expatriate groups from the beginning; expatriate groups, moreover, with access to resources derived from their metropolitan base which were far in excess of anything which indigenous groups could hope to acquire in the short run. The crucial question for the long-term development of the society as a whole therefore relates to the effect of their dominance upon the emergence of indigenous social formations which might be capable of replacing them and establishing an autonomous base for the exercise of political and economic power. Within the CCMP the main class contradictions were those between the metropolis and the various interest groups within a colony. In Africa, an understanding of the class structure must begin with an inquiry into the degree of exploitation of African resources and labor and must proceed to follow the surplus to its destination outside Africa — into the bank accounts of the world capitalist class who control the majority shares in huge multinational combines (see Rodney, 1972:167). Secondary “classes” emerged related to the economic sec¬ tors that survived or were retained from the previous mode of pro¬ duction or emerged to serve the colonial economy. That is, colonial rule deeply disrupted traditional social stratification and differentia¬ tion, creating not those typical of an indigenous process of capitalist development, but those typical and specific to the colonial situation. The CCMP incorporated or reconstructed traditional power struc¬ tures; it also educated large or smaller groups of professionals and minor employees to carry out functions that were either unattractive to or impossible for the members of the ruling “race” (see Waterman, 1969). Colonial capitalism derived its ability to exploit African societies from the power of the colonial state on the one hand and the inabili¬ ty of members of the indigenous society to compete with the colonial order on the other as a result of the devastation of three hundred years of slavery and conquest. “Echoing the economic order,” writes 215

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Waterman (1969), was “a political structure in which the ruling stra¬ tum was foreign and the [indigenous] inhabitants appeared in a descending order of subservience and dependence.” According to Murray (1963:88): In certain areas, the customary authority of traditional chiefs was supplemented by political, economic and juridical powers conferred on them as instruments of indirect rule (Northern Nigeria, Buganda); elsewhere, as in most of the French African colonies, an administrative ‘chefferie’ was created out of extremely heterogeneous elements (willing chiefs or their kins¬ men where available; otherwise, ex NCO’s, junior clerks, even cooks and chauffeurs). French colonial policy, which, unlike the British, was a system of‘direct administration,’ generally weakened chiefly power except in the more densely populated and politically articulated savannah regions (e.g., Mossi of the Volta, Djerma of the Niger, etc.). Secondly, the advance of African rural capitalism and commerce quickened after World War II in such areas as the southern Ivory Coast, Camerotin and Buganda. Social differentiation was consequently accen¬ tuated, and with it the movement of labour from the savannah to the plantations and forest zones. Finally and most importantly, the greatest impact of the CCMP was on the level of the working class which produced the super profits in the plantations and mines. The colonial capitalist economy was nar¬ rowly focused; a narrow specialization, producing one or two techni¬ cal commodities designed entirely for export, was imposed on each colony. Other colonies, (such as the Portuguese colonies of Mozambiqtie and Angola and the British colonies of Nyasaland, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland) served as labor reservoirs for farms and mines in other areas. The creation of an abundant labor supply for the mines and farms and for construction of the infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, and so on, became critical. The imposition of hut taxes or the intensifica¬ tion of precapitalist forms of exploitation in the countryside made the poor peasants desperate for any additional source of income. This labor was hired through the system of migrant workers. The “temporary” migration of adult male labor to the mines and plantations has been described as unique. According to Jack Woddis (1960:82):

216

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

First, it [was] a migration almost overwhelmingly of adult males, single men, or husbands unaccompanied by their wives and children, who have been left behind in the ruined coun¬ tryside. Secondly, the migrants usually [took] up employment for a strictly limited duration — six months, a year, two years, but seldom longer. Thirdly, the migration [was] repeated again and again in the life of the individual peasant-worker, his career consisting of numerous short terms of employment alternat¬ ing with periods at home in his village or the Reserve. Fourthly, whether he migrate[d] from the countryside to a town or min¬ ing area within the same territory, or whether it [was] a ques¬ tion of ‘alien migration’ across frontiers, it [was] on foot. Fifthly, it [was] frequently connected with various forms of labor recruitment which sometimes tend[ed] to be disguised forms of forced labor. And sixthly, it [was] on such a scale and of such a character that it produce[d] a completely disproportioned pop¬ ulation both in the towns and in the rural areas, aggravate[d] terribly the already acute agrarian crisis, and [led] to a total disharmony of the economy of the African territories most affect¬ ed by it. From the standpoint of labor it [had] three further results; the constant change of personnel in employment which [arose] from this system [made] difficult the acquisition of labor skill, create [d] enormous difficulties for trade-union organiza¬ tion, and tend[ed] to depress wages. [Emphasis in the original.] Never in its history did capitalism rely on such an extensive use of migrant labor. What did it mean for the character of the African work¬ ing class? We think of capitalism as a system of production in which capital implies wage labor, free labor, a labor market, and the sale of labor power. In classical capitalist societies the proletariat effected a complete break from the subsistence economy. In Africa, on the other hand, because of the traditional system of land tenure and because of the extractive nature of colonial capitalism, the integration of African peasants into the world capitalist system was marginal. It led to impov¬ erishment without complete proletarianization (see Amin, 1974:59). The incorporation of African peasant as migrant laborers into the capitalist economy led to some strange results. According to the nature of his labor, his hiring conditions, and mode of life and according to his class consciousness, the colonial worker in mines, cash corp farms, and so on was frequently engaged in “traditional” social relations and 217

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

their limitations. The “dual” character of migrant laborers is described as follows by Basil Davidson (1966:202-203): In the same way that many ‘subsistence peasants’ are found, on looking closer, to be well and truly wedged into a cash econo¬ my, so too are many urban wage earners still reliant to some extent on their family food-production in a more or less distant village. If you journey with African peasants going to town you may well be encumbered and set about with their piles of bag¬ gage; what they are likely to be carrying is not clothing or adorn¬ ment, however, but food of one sort or another. The reason for this carrying of food to town is not a simple love of frugal liv¬ ing. it is rather a dislike of starvation. It arises from the happy colonial custom of calculating the wages of the married urban African as though he were always a bachelor. As the East African Royal Commission of 1955 placidly but usefully explained, wage rates in the past had been set for migrant workers who came to town without their families. ‘Their wages were calculated on the needs of single man,’ and yet, even though many men now had their families with them, ‘this has remained the basis on which wages are paid until the present day.’ These wages, not too surprisingly, the learned Commissioners found to be insuf¬ ficient for African urban workers, ‘not only to feed, house, and clothe their families, but even for their own needs’; and they proceeded to quote from the 1954 report of a Committee on African Wages, in Kenya, which ought to go down in history as a classic statement about the realities of life under colonial ‘trusteeship.’ This Committee found that ‘approximately one half of the urban workers in Private Industry, and approximately one quarter of those in the Public Services, are in receipt of wages insufficient to provide for their basic, essential needs of health, decency, and working efficiency.’ This extraordinary situation was based on a rationalization which assumed that the towns and commerce in these urban areas were for whites only. The dominant vision (especially by the British) was that African development was to be based on subsistence agriculture based on the village. This, it was assumed, would disturb their cultural pat¬ tern the least. The applications of this attitude on the formation and crystallization of the African working class are not hard to imagine.

218

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

The African migrant laborers were not allowed to break away com¬ pletely from the “tribal” social environment. Depending on the uncer¬ tain demand for their labor in the mines and agro-industries, a great many workers were forced to engage in subsistence agriculttire for part of the year and go to find employment in towns, plantations, or mines for another part of the year. The “partial” employment in wage labor hampered the formation of a full-fledged proletariat and caused inten¬ sive pauperization in the labor reserves — the countryside. Thus the term “wage worker” in Africa embraces a large group of various semiproletarian elements. Because the conditions in which the African proletariat was born were determined by the socioeconomic needs of extractive capitalism and because the proletariat maintained in Africa periodical or perma¬ nent connection with the country, class consciousness remained under¬ developed. According to Zarine (1968:49): These ties determine some aspects of its ideology, organiza¬ tional level, and, in the long run now, the trend of the work¬ ers’ movement. The proletariat’s semi-peasant psychology hampers the development of its class-consciousness, the emer¬ gence and growth of its organizations and the dissemination of its ideology. A study of the salient features of the colonial economy leads to the conclusion that the metropolitan bourgeoisie appropriates the labor power of the African peasantry. The mode of acquiring and the size of the surplus value extracted from the peasantry were determined by the manner in which the traditional economy was integrated into the CCMP, as in Latin America (see Frank, 1967). Where the monopo¬ lization of the means of production was “total” — for example, in the white settler regimes of southern Africa — there the proletarianization of the peasants was almost complete. In 1954 the United Nations document, Enlargement of the Exchange Economy in Tropical Africa, identified three groups of African territories in tropical Africa that it distinguished in terms of the rela¬ tive importance of production for a market or of wage employment in the commercialization of their indigenous agricultural economies: First were those territories in which cash-cropping [was] for overseas markets and there [was] little or no export of labor: French West Africa, Gold Coast, Nigeria and Uganda. 219

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

[Secondly, the] territories in which cash-cropping [was] com¬ bined with export of labor: Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa and Tanganyika; [and thirdly, the] territories in which substantial export of labor [was] combined with limited agri¬ cultural production, mainly for internal markets: Kenya, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. (Barnett, 1973:10) The relation of the peasants to the CCMP was thus extremely complex. In each colony alongside the capitalist relations of production there continued to survive old elements of production. The interpenetration of modernity and traditional forms of labor power is the typical way in which the colonial capitalist mode of production commands the labor of the people it subordinates. The class conflict manifests itself as the conflict between those social classes (the colonizers) controlling the “modern” sector through their economic power and those subordinate classes (the colonized) exploited through traditional social relations which frustrate the development of a truly working class consciousness. A correct definition of classes in the CCMP has tremendous sig¬ nificance, for it allows us to draw important practical conclusions regarding the nature of colonial capitalism. At the risk of being tedious, it is important to emphasize the fact that: The productive facilities for export from underdeveloped coun¬ tries, which were so largely a result of foreign investment, never became a part of the internal economic structure of those under¬ developed countries themselves except in the purely geograph¬ ical and physical sense. Economically speaking, they were really an outpost of the economies of more developed investing coun¬ tries. The main secondary multiplier effects, which the text¬ books tell us to expect from investments, took place not where the investment was physically or geographically located but (to the extent that the results of these investments returned direct¬ ly home) where the investment came from. I would suggest that if the proper economic test of investment is the multiplier effect in the form of cumulative additions to income, employment, capital, technical knowledge, and growth of external economies, then a good deal of the investment in underdeveloped coun¬ tries which we used to consider as ‘foreign’ should in fact be considered as domestic investment on the part of the industri¬ alized countries. (Singer, 1950:338-339)

220

The Evolution of the Ciass Structure in Africa

Colonialism was, therefore, not merely a system of exploitation but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the socalled “mother country.” From the African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expropriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped (Rodney, 1972:162). The satellite-metropolitan relationship affects and sets limits to the evolution of social classes in the satellite regions. It ensures that no independent bourgeoisie emerges and that the work¬ ing class will remain as segments within peasant subsistence economies. Poulantzas (1974:148-149) puts it this way: The organization of class relations and State apparatuses in the dominated and dependent formation reproduces within itself the structure of the relation of domination characterizing the class[es] in power in the dominant social formation^]. This domination corresponds to both indirect (through the position of the dominated formation in the imperialist chain) and direct (through direct investments) forms of exploitation of the pop¬ ular masses of the dominated formations by the classes in power in the dominant formations. This exploitation is articulated with the exploitation they suffer at the hands of their own classes in power. Each phase of imperialism is marked by different forms of realisation of this domination and dependence. That is, the structure of the political economy in Africa can only be understood in terms of the relation of various African countries to the international power structure and the social classes this power struc¬ ture reproduced within the dominated formations. The links between African economies and the international markets are shaped by the local ruling classes that defer major decisions to the international rul¬ ing classes. External dependence was transformed at the achievement of independence into internal domination by the inheritors of the colo¬ nial estate. The notion of the world ruling class located in the control of inter¬ national corporations is no longer a fancy; it signifies the control of the world-economy by the rulers of the old capitalist countries. The world ruling class in Zurich, London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere, coordinates the interests of the various capitalist groups (sec Magubane, 1974).

221

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The Development of Classes Since Independence To understand the postcolonial developments, one must understand the nature of the colonial state. What was the social and economic con¬ dition of the state inherited from colonialism? Colonialism left post¬ colonial Africa with social structures which (combined with its new neocolonial status and severe internal problems) condemned these national entities to perpetual dependency and underdevelopment. The class structure of postcolonial Africa was not just a matter of traditional division into bourgeoisie, proletariat, and peasantry, but also a matter of relations between those classes that were inheritors of the colonial state and imperialism. Cutting across the traditional divi¬ sions was the link between those classes in the former colonies who benefited from imperialism and those who suffered from it. The inher¬ itors of the colonial state apparatus derived their power from imperi¬ alism. “More or less consciously,” writes Davidson (1966:206), “the British and the French were eager to hand their power to elites who would keep the African world safe for capitalism above all for their own capitalism.” The achievement of national independence aggravated rather than resolved the class contradictions because some inheritors of the colo¬ nial estate further entrenched the full range of colonial privileges. Moreover, the achievement of independence confronted African gov¬ ernments with the extent of their misery. They were faced with social, economic, and cultural dislocations that had gone in some cases too far for the possibility of quick reintegration. Comparing the evolution of industrial capitalism in Europe and the ravages of the CCMP in Africa, Davidson (1969:277) writes: The first [industrialization] destroyed, but also, after its fash¬ ion, mightily rebuilt afresh; the second, having gone far to ruin what it found, could only leave for Africans the task of making a new society. No such new society came into being during the colonial period. Little was left behind but an utter chaos of ideas and social relationships... When the principal colonizing powers eventually withdrew, everything of basic social mean¬ ing remained to be begun or rebuilt afresh. At independence, the state in Africa lacked everything. The inherited economies could not produce enough grain to feed the population, 222

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

enough shelter to house those who had assembled in urban slums, or enough schools to educate but one out of a hundred of its young pop¬ ulation. The few who had escaped the bottleneck of colonial educa¬ tion enjoyed all the benefits of political independence. In the empire ot scarcity, those who could make it reluctantly became spoiled. In the same essay, Davidson (1969:206) quotes a Nigerian economist who he says attacked “the system that pays a permanent secretary in the civil service £3,000 a year and his messenger boy £9 a month.” In politics, there were no durable political institutions, no demo¬ cratic cultural traditions, no widely diffused social ideals, and no full sense of national identity. In this kingdom of deprivation, neither lib¬ erty, nor equality, nor fraternity were possible. There could be no equal¬ ity where material goods were so scarce that only a fraction of a minority could possess them; there could be no democracy where lack of edu¬ cation created an elite. When deprivation and inequality are the des¬ tiny of an entire people, the development of classes tends to be distorted. The state becomes the sovereign source of social and eco¬ nomic development. According to Murray (1963:85): [AJfter independence, the state became a major economic force in the absence of an entrepreneurial class, occupying a key role in economic development. State functionaries... handle large contracts and negotiate the future of the country with repre¬ sentatives of overseas concerns: corruption and the enjoyment of unrecorded perquisites abound. The administrative services absorb the major part of budgetary allocations (60% in Dahomey) and state employment comes to symbolize all the attractions of the ‘advanced’ sector in an under-developed country: grossly inflated salaries, lavish equipment, the ameni¬ ties of urban, ‘civilized’ living, Mercedes, ‘bardancing,’ alco¬ holism and the ten hour week (Abidjan, Yaounde, Brazzaville, etc.). A new elite... acceded to these privileges, and the exer¬ cise of state functions is increasingly providing an institution¬ al basis for the domination of ‘administrative bourgeoisie.’ Economic differentials are huge: only in the southern Ivory Coast and Cameroun is there a small class of planters capable of emulating the living standards of the new administrative elite. A deputy earns in 6 months (VA of‘work’) the equiva¬ lent of 36 years’ work by the average peasant. In Gabon (pop¬ ulation: 450,000) a parliamentarian has a salary of F2,800 a 223

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

year. Automobiles, ‘presents’, luxury accommodation, seal their status. The role of the state in capital formation was expressive of the fact that the African economies had not led to the development of an indige¬ nous capitalist class capable of striving for hegemony in the state. The foreign capital that controls most of Africa’s resources was already a highly developed form of capital, which had already held a privileged position in the colonizing country. That is, its articulation was to a sys¬ tem of international integration only, not national economic integra¬ tion. The Ghanaian aluminum industry is a case in point (see Green and Seidman, 1968). The dependency on the foreign technology forces most African countries to continue utilizing capital-intensive tech¬ niques which enhance profits but do not develop the African economies. The foreign capital that was invested in Africa was capital with a particular greed for profits and one which was attempting to increase profits by brutal methods of exploitation. The development of one-party states in Africa was thus an histor¬ ical necessity. For some countries it became a means to break the stran¬ glehold of foreign monopolies and to make a real effort to climb out of the vicious circle of underdevelopment; all existing resources had to be vigorously pooled. For other states, the one-party state was sim¬ ply a means to preserve colonial interests undisturbed. The state gave the newly independent African countries power and freedom to maneu¬ ver vis-a-vis imperialist monopolies and opposing interest groups and nascent classes within the new state. Any analysis of the social transformations of the class structure that have followed independence is complicated by the facts that we are dealing with a process at different stages of development in the vari¬ ous countries and we have a scarcity of detailed statistical and socio¬ logical data having a class perspective. Nevertheless, several studies have already been published on various African countries that have filled this lacuna and thus permit the construction of a tentative overall pic¬ ture. Except for Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia, which achieved their independence in the mid-1950s, most of the African countries became independent in 1960 or (in East and Central Africa) at least by 1964. In examining the general trends of class formation and consolidation, one must keep in mind that these countries have, since independence, been following different sociopolitical orienta224

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

tions. Certain states are following a radical anti-imperialist restructur¬ ing of their economies, restricting private capitalist enterprise and insti¬ tuting land reforms and rural development in the interest of the peasantry. Other countries, facing problems of socioeconomic devel¬ opment, have not interfered with the colonial structures or the capi¬ talist mode of production. The researcher who studies the postcolonial class structure of African societies is inevitably faced with a number of key questions: In each case, what is the relationship between the metropolitan (bour¬ geois) classes and the “political elite” that inherited the colonial state? What is the relationship between the political elite and the emerging working class? What is the relationship between town and country? To what extent has the peasantry been differentiated into various strata? To what extent is the process of proletarianization crystallizing a class of wage workers from the previous army of migrant laborers? To what extent is the political elite crystallizing into a class with vested inter¬ ests in the ownership of the means of production? A study of these and other aspects of postcolonial class formation is of primary importance in understanding the nature and the stages, the trends, and the political processes taking place in Africa today. Let me begin with the statistical distribution of African workers in various categories of employment. According to the United Nations’ Survey of Economic Conditions in Africa, 1971, the economically active population of postcolonial Africa is estimated at 135 million. The same report states that the ILO estimated that the number of unemployed exceeded 10 million, that is about 8% of the total labor force. In 23 African countries, persons working for hire accounted for about 19% of the labor force; the rest of the economically active population was self-employed or was unemployed. Of the 15 million persons working in wage labor, 8 million were in the Republic of Egypt and only 7 mil¬ lion in other African countries. Fanon’s theory is that the African proletariat, because its income is stable and generally higher than the peasants and because it is a small minority, enjoys a “privileged” position and therefore constitutes a point of support for the colonial and neocolonial system. The citycountry dichotomy tends to emphasize the privileges enjoyed by the urban workers. President Kaunda of the Republic of Zambia (1969:28) expressed in a confused manner the rural-urban dilemma: Here in Zambia we face the danger of creating two nations 225

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

within one. But not along capitalist patterns. The important division in our society is not that which exists between trade union labor on the one hand and managers or property own¬ ers on the other, but between the urban and rural areas. These are the two nations we are running the danger of creating, these are the two parts of our dualism: Urban and Rural and not so much between Labour and Employer. That is certainly one side of the picture. But what about the people in the city slums? According to Romano Ledda (1967:573): Neo-colonialism builds cities (some of them impressive) that reflect the well-being of the upper classes and tries to make them islands of privilege. But economic stagnation and the agricultural crisis, the imbalance between development and underdevelopment inherent in the new colonial system limit the enjoyment of these privileges to an infinitesimal part of the urban population. The masses as always, are excluded, but with the difference that the contradictions of the system now take place directly under their noses and are thus more easily grasped. The city in colonial and postcolonial Africa is a social form, a way of life predicated on a certain division of labor and a certain hierarchical ordering of activity which is broadly consistent with the class structure of the dominant mode of production. The city functions to stabilize the class structure. Hence, the postcolonial city in Africa has been the focus of the accumulated contradictions of colonial capitalism and its class conflict (see Harvey, 1973:203). The development of colonial capitalism created the separation of the African peasantry into urban and commercial workers and agri¬ cultural workers. This led to the distinction between and opposition of town and country. Historically, the antithesis between town and country was a pivot of class conflict around which the whole economic history of society unfolded. The colonial city in Africa also articulated the points of command in a global economy of great complexity. That economy is hierarchi¬ cally ordered with local centers dominating local hinterlands, more important metropolitan centers dominating lesser centers, and urban points of command being ultimately subordinate to the central metropolitan command areas in North America and Western Europe. 226

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

That is, a given metropolis may be placed in terms of its position in interlocking points of class command: its economic function is associ¬ ated with its hierarchical level. The central analytical question concerns the attitude of the inheritors of the colonial estate to the inherited city. Fanon (1963:32) argues, for example, that the town-country rela¬ tionship within the colonial context exhibited colonial class inequali¬ ty in its most brutal and stark reality. The urban class structure that results according to Fanon does not mask the economic inequalities: The originality of the colonial context is that economic reali¬ ty, inequality and immense difference of ways of life never comes to mask the human reality. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The spatially defined inequality in Africa’s urban areas was thus expres¬ sive of the colonial class structure. Spatial inequalities were brought into being by human action. As in Latin America, the leading towns of Africa — Dakar, Lagos, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Luanda, and so on — were not the creation of capitalist industrialization and inherent technical progress, but were rather the product of an export-directed colonial agriculture and mining, whose rents and profits found an urban outlet in consumption and speculation (see Murray, 1963:19). The picture of the town structure in Portuguese Africa drawn in the following passage by Kamm (1974:73) was typical ol most cities in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Luanda in Angola, Louren^o Marques and Beira in Mozambique are white man’s cities — with downtowns of pleasant, Portuguese-style colonial houses of commerce of the last century, surrounded by the pompous public buildings ol the authoritarian Government of Salazar Portugal and enveloped by the massive, shapeless concrete blocks of today’s men of business. At the edges are housing developments for the “poor whites” and villas on tree-lined streets for those less poor. One wonders how cities so seemingly small can have pop¬ ulation figures as large as the 475,000 given for Luanda, 355,000 for Louren^o Marques and 114,000 for Beira. The answer lies beyond, in endless, warren-like shantytowns ol sur227

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

passing wretchedness. There the African population lives, and there it becomes quite obvious that the population figures are, if anything, understated and, more likely, guesswork. Shack next to shack, of the most disparate bits of wood, tin or anything else that will offer shade and shelter but uniform in their shabby inadequacy, are crowded into the plains of beat¬ en dirt. It must have been savanna country before, with grass, bushes and some trees, but only at the edges do flashes of green relieve the dull barrenness now. The houses are arranged, if the word is not too strong for such unplanned mazes, to resemble the homesteads of families in the bush, with the shacks of the different members facing onto small patches of ground on which children play without toys and often without clothes and women cook over scraps of wood or charcoal. The picture we have drawn so far of the transformation and social dynamics of colonial and postcolonial Africa has not dealt with the character of the African bourgeoisie. The nascent bourgeoisie of the first decade of independence has been well described by Fanon, who distinguished between the dynamic entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of nineteenth century Europe and the corrupt, enfeebled administrative bourgeoisie of postcolonial Africa. Above, I referred to Davidson’s observation that more or less con¬ sciously, the British and the French, when they were forced to relin¬ quish their colonies were eager to hand their power to elites who would keep the African world safe for capitalism. Thus a policy was worked out to manufacture elites modeled for a middle-class solution. These elites were teachers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and whatever rem¬ nants of the traditional elites that managed to salvage their credibility from the colonial phase. As a group, these elites had no autonomy of their own; they had no being without metropolitan backing which dominated the colonial economies That is, their class position did not stem from the classical ownership of the means of production; they were rather class agents or allies of the foreign bourgeoisie. The inheritors of the African political state constitute one of the most peculiar sociological phenomenon; their peculiarity lies in their unusual historical development and the nature of the state they inher¬ ited. Let me first deal with the problems they faced when they inher¬ ited the colonial state. According to Hamza Alavi (1972:60): 228

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

It the colony has a week and underdeveloped indigenous bour¬ geoisie, it will be unable at the moment of independence to subordinate the relatively highly developed colonial State appa¬ ratus through which the Metropolitan power had exercised dominion over it. A fundamental distinction can be made between former colonies which experienced “direct” rule and in which there was a large settler popu¬ lation (for example, Kenya, Zambia, and Rhodesia) and those colonial countries which experienced colonial exploitation under “indirect” rule, (for example, Nigeria and Ghana). In postcolonial states like Zambia and Kenya, the problem of the relationship between the state and the underlying economic structure is extremely complex. The con¬ trol of the resources of the former colonies exercised by the metropoli¬ tan bourgeoisie (such as the control of copper by multinationals in Zambia and the Congo), and the presence of a sizable white settler population shackled and stunted the bourgeoisie which inherited the colonial state. The French economist Francois Perroux (1961:43) stated the dilemma faced by the postcolonial bourgeoisie: “When a large firm sets up a concern in a small country, the concern is dotibtless situated in the so-called ‘national’ territory of the smaller country. In reality, how¬ ever, it belongs to the firm’s own area.” This confiscation of the econ¬ omy condemned the postcolonial bourgeoisie to extreme difficulty. Alavi (1972:61) explains that the “essential problem about the state in postcolonial societies stems from the fact that it is not established by an ascendent native bourgeoisie btit instead by a foreign imperial¬ ist bourgeoisie. At independence, however, the direct command of the latter over the colonial state is ended.” He goes on to say, “But, by the same token, its influence over it is by no means brought to an end. The metropolitan bourgeoisie, now joined by other neo-colonial botirgeoisies, is present in the post colonial society. Together they consti¬ tute the powerful element in its class structure.” Metropolitan capitalism having recruited often in the most cynical manner its local allies — allies which could only serve it and never challenge it because of the metropolitan grip on the postcolonial state’s economy — could then recede from the scene. In postcolonial Africa, the situation was complicated (as we shall see in the case of Ghana and Zambia) by the fact that there did not even exist in these societies a class that could be described as an African 229

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

capitalist class or bourgeoisie. What we had, then, was a weak “mid¬ dle class” which received political power because of its educational experience in colonial institutions. It exercised power with the politi¬ cal and economic help from the former metropolis (joined in most cases by the United States). Because of their comparative weakness, the inheritors of the colonial state in most cases have not been able to settle the underlying crisis of the structure in their own favor. On the contrary, with every effort they have made and continue to make in that direction, the conflict has sharpened (see Davidson, 1966:209) and in most cases led to military takeovers inspired from outside to preserve the imperialist grip on the local state. The postcolonial situation has not been static by any means. Important changes and transformations of the whole economy and society, whose characters are consistent with the externally induced process of capitalist development, have led to the proliferation of new roles played by the African middle class. The Africanization policy of foreign firms and the inherited administrative structures has offered greater possibilities for Africans in professional careers and has also necessitated the extension of educational policies that foster a grow¬ ing middle class. For the first time, Africans in some new categories of employment now command salaries that are relatively high com¬ pared to the salaries of the general population. This is partly because of the shortage of adequately qualified and trained personnel. In the policy of Africanization itself, which replaces expatriates by nation¬ als, salary scales, once adjusted to metropolitan income levels, remain practically unchanged and thus further enhance the privileges of those Africans who have an educational qualification (see Szentes, 1971:273). The social stratum of salaried elites, which is not the owner of the means of production, faces a cruel paradox. It cannot ensure its priv¬ ileged material position so long as it serves foreign monopolies. How then do these privileged elites develop into independent ruling class¬ es in their societies? According to Szentes, they cannot so long as they do not change the mode of production. He writes (1971:274): Social classes cannot exist without the characteristic produc¬ tion relations giving birth to them... The formation of elites is not connected with the change of the character of production relations but only with some modification in them and a few transitory, temporarily effective factors. In the possession of 230

The Evolution of the Cuss Structure in Africa

state power this elite can undoubtedly influence the develop¬ ment of production relations... but the way it does also deter¬ mines its own fate. Since the predominant relations of production in the backward economy inherited from colo¬ nialism are tie facto capitalist relations which make even the sur¬ viving forms of precapitalist relations carry in them the tendency of capitalization, this elite will either fight against these relations or their expansion and further development. In the latter case its fate and role is clear and unambiguous enough: the elite itself will become part of the capitalist class, i.e., instead of an independent class, a source of the formation of the bourgeoisie. The behavior and activities of the political elites in office show a great deal of ambivalence. Realizing the problems they face in competing with or supplanting the foreign monopolies that control the resources, they have opted for “socialistic” solutions. They have realized that the capitalist road has been hopelessly played out. The African political elites, in order to continue their control, have wanted to satisfy the great wave of popular awakening and demand for a different and bet¬ ter life and have embraced varieties of African socialism (see Mohan, 1966). This is the general situation which gave rise to the one-party state and the military takeovers (see below). The political elite cleverly made use of the emasculated theory of socialism (in its various state manifestations), in order to appear as national leaders with a national purpose. In this process very feeble attempts were made to “nationalize” the commanding heights of the enclave economies, but the terms of “nationalization” only helped to stabilize foreign monopolies and frustrate the demands of the work¬ ing class. Indeed, in the program of nationalizing 51% of the foreign monopolies, Kenya, for example, made the political elites loyal part¬ ner in an overall system which consciously or not, directly or indirect¬ ly, deprived the economy of the opportunity for true development, that is, “of any opportunity... for systematic change from one set of structures and relationships to another and more effective one, whether capitalist or not” (Davidson, 1974:10). The political elites, remaining as they do within structures totally subjected to an external system and without prospects of growing into a class capable of creating and operating a system of local capitalism, find themselves unable to hold their ground. The capitalist-oriented 231

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

regimes face popular discontent and upheaval, which often lead to sud¬ den coups d’etat by one or another section of the ruling groups expe¬ riencing internal dissension (see Davidson, 1966:216). The recent military coups must be seen within this framework. A political elite, faced with the prospect of a serious political and eco¬ nomic crisis, is pushed aside by the military, which can act as a shield for the nascent bourgeoisie and foreign interests until the former grows strong enough to impose its political and cultural hegemony. The con¬ clusion is inevitable that military takeovers are a necessary outcome of neocolonialism and petty bourgeois rule in neocolonized countries. It is an inevitable result of the type of economic and social relations of dependency and in terms of this paper, of the compromised position of the local “ruler” classes — classes with the apparatus of political power, but without the economic foundations for true class rule. Some Conclusions We can now attempt some overall observations regarding the evolu¬ tion of the class structure in modern Africa. From what we have said above it is quite obvious that the class structure of modern Africa has to be studied on several interdependent levels of analysis. Africa in the last three hundred years has not existed in isolation. Its peoples have been tied in certain definite and more or less stable relations with the capitalist world. The evolution of the class structure has been deter¬ mined by the character and form of these relations. The historical incorporation of Africa and its precapitalist systems into the evolving capitalist mode of production produced extremely complex systems of class relations. The system was characterized by eco¬ nomic and political structures in which the possessing and ruling stra¬ tum was foreign and the Africans appeared in descending order of subservience and dependence. To study the class structure of modern Africa requires the study of the determinate mode of production — the CCMP. In any given region or country, social classes appear that com¬ plement the colonial relations of production. The empirical study of classes in any country has a definite meaning only when the class struc¬ ture is located within a framework in which the control of the means of production is properly understood. As Szentes (1971:264) puts it: The distortion of the social structure, the extent of the survival of precapitalistic formations and their location, function and

232

The Evolution of the Class Structure in Africa

role in the social structure may vary from one underdeveloped country to another, depending on what historical periods these remnants can be traced back to, i.e., at what level of their his¬ torical development these societies were originally affected by the penetration of foreign capitalism, and, on the other hand, what changes these remnants have undergone as a result of exter¬ nal influences and the adjustment to a changed, heterogeneous environment. Thus it is due also to the original, i.e., the pre¬ colonial, differences in their development that the remnants of the most different periods of primitive, slave and feudal society can be found in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Hence, the analysis of the CCMP will explain “the specific coexistence of foreign monopoly capital and the precapitalistic formations which are of a diametrically opposed nature and [will also explain] the for¬ mation of a distorted, heterogeneous social structure” (Szentes, 1971:264). My purpose in this paper was to discuss in general terms the evo¬ lution of the class structure in Africa and to locate the fundamental determinants of the class structure in the analysis of the CCMP. Some scholars, especially because of the colonial context, have suggested that the concept of class does not describe the reality of modern Africa, but that the concept of social and cultural pluralism is more appropriate for the analysis of the African social structures. Some others have assert¬ ed that more adequate would be the concept of elite in the sense of a group possessing power. Let me resolve the question of elites first. It does not seem that the concept of elite and that of class are mutually exclusive; the former refers to groups exercising power at a particular time and the latter to an economic relationship. I agree with Szentes (1971:274) that a social structure of a composition similar to elites (the so-called middle class and intelligentsia) also exists in the developed (European) class soci¬ eties. “Its social position and rule and its relation to the basic classes... are fairly clear and well defined; its character is determined by the pre¬ vailing class relations. It is merely a supplementary appendix to the basic classes. It may constitute a communication channel between them and even a source of supply for them, but cannot develop into an inde¬ pendent class.” It is obvious, therefore, that in the present conditions of Africa, an elite as a group which is not the owner of the means of production is 233

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

a transitory formation whose hold on the state is extremely tenuous, as the recent military coups have demonstrated. The concept of elite cannot be a substitute for the concept of class. Finally, and even more importantly, the theories of “social and/or cultural pluralism” are intended to obfuscate the role of class relations in colonial and postcolonial Africa. These theories absolutize the nat¬ ural differences existing between people and promote them to an eter¬ nal law of nature.” As a theory of conflict, social and/or cultural pluralism was deliberately proposed to deal with the Marxian theory of class in such a manner as to deny the threatened social change which general acceptance of the Marxian theory would generate (see Harvey, 1973:125). That is; The Marxist theory was clearly dangerous in that it appeared to provide the key to understanding capitalist production from the position of those not in control of the means of produc¬ tion. Consequently, the categories, concepts, relationships and methods which had the potential to form a new paradigm were an enormous threat to the power structure of the capitalist world. (Harvey, 1973:126-127) The theory of class in Africa, whose basic principles and evolution we have been setting out in this essay, should be used with an understanding of the specific conditions of time and place, the level of historical fea¬ tures of development of this or that country in Africa. These conditions are highly diverse because the impact of colonialism was not simulta¬ neous or uniform. Therefore, it is methodologically unsound to look to a theory for cut-and-dried solutions for each individual case. The application of a theory to concrete conditions is a creative process. It requires the use of “sociological imagination.” In contrast to the study of the superficial aspects of social life, the concept of class focuses atten¬ tion on the various planes, contradictions, possibilities of analysis of human exploitation, and the possibility of liberation. The social structure of African society, viewed in detail, presents a fairly complex kaleidoscope. Alongside the interethnic distinctions there have arisen important interclass distinctions. Alongside of mod¬ ern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress the African people, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, frozen in time by capitalism with its inevitable train of social and polit¬ ical anachronisms (see Marx, 1967:9).

234

Urban Ethnology in Africa Some Theoretical Issues

B. Magubane and A. Mariotti

Colonization and Civilization? In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly mis¬ represents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solu¬ tions provided for them. In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously—and to answer clearly the inno¬ cent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philan¬ thropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rules of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the con¬ sequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antag¬ onistic economies. —Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism Tawney remarks in one of his books (1948) that in ordinary times intel¬ lectual tameness with practical energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not justify, the equanimity of those who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without reopen-

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ing the deal. It leaves the mind free to concentrate undisturbed upon profitable activities, because it is not distracted by a taste for unprof¬ itable speculation. Tawney goes on to say that most generations walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept; the main thing is that they should march. The blinkers, again to summarize Tawney, worn by social scien¬ tists enable them to trot steadily along the beaten road without being disturbed by curiosity about their destination. There are times which are not ordinary, and in such times it is not enough to follow the beat¬ en road. It is necessary to know where it leads, and if it leads nowhere, to follow another. The search for another involves reflection, which is uncongenial to bustling people who describe themselves as practical, because they take things as they are and leave them as they are. One must recognize with Barrington Moore, Jr. (1965:5) that in certain respects the tasks of the applied and the theoretical sciences are mutually contradictory. The applied scientist seeks to create an accu¬ rate map of a small portion of reality. If he is an engineer building a bridge, he wants to know all about the qualities of certain types of steel, the behavior of currents near the banks of the river, the possibility of high winds, and so forth. The social scientist who wishes to explain and ultimately predict the behavior of a particular social group will also want to learn a great deal about the specific economic, political, and other forces that impinge upon the behavior of this group as well as the organizational features of the group, its capacity to resist certain types of strains, and similar matters. He is not necessarily concerned with mining facts for or against some hypothesis. On the other hand, while the theorist endeavors to eliminate as many “perturbations” and “irrelevant” factors and forces as possible in order to reach the high¬ est level of abstraction, he must not ignore the concrete historical real¬ ity. The social scientist who wishes to construct a logically integrated theory of urban life must deliberately and explicitly exclude from con¬ sideration many aspects of human activity in the city that are not rel¬ evant to explaining urban phenomena. Urbanization and the Modern Era The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many determinations, i.e., a unity of diverse elements. (Karl Marx, Die Grundrisse)

236

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

Max Weber (1958:66) and Arnold Toynbee (1970:8) define the city as a settlement, the inhabitants of which engage primarily in nonagricultural productive activities. Such a definition is of some value in that it identifies certain general features that may be found wherever cities exist. Placed in a historical context, however, these features assume a complexity that cannot be explained by means of a rational abstrac¬ tion. For a city is not an entity that can be analyzed apart from its his¬ torical and social context, but rather a historical configuration which reflects the particular class relations that prevail in a particular histor¬ ical epoch. The welter of competing definitions and special theories which fill the literature on cities reflects the attempt to treat the city as a static, suprahistorical entity—to elevate various concrete, histori¬ cal features to abstract universal principles. In contrast to this is Marx’s view (1969;52) that a city is a set of social relations in which the social processes of a class society become focused under particular historical conditions: The existence of the town implies...the necessity of adminis¬ tration, police, taxes, etc., in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became manifest the divi¬ sion of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of pro¬ duction. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capi¬ tal, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the frame¬ work of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him—a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restrict¬ ed country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests, labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist. Superficially, the urbanization that has occurred during different his¬ torical epochs may look identical, it is this superficial identity to which abstract definitions point. However, this identity obtains only on the level of description. Any attempt at explanation must specify the pro-

237

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

cess which generates the observed facts contained in definitions and descriptions. Cities first arise with the emergence of class society (Adams 1966:197) and subsequently develop and wane with the evolution of productive forces and concomitant reorganizations of class relations and shifts in social power. The establishment of capitalism as the dom¬ inant mode of production brings a transfer of productive forces and social power to the towns. With the advent of capitalism, urbanization becomes a worldwide phenomenon reflecting the social change that is induced by economic restructuring. As the focus of productive life under industrial capitalism, the city involves the settlement of large numbers of people in industrial centers. Laborers are drawn or pressed into these centers by job opportunities created by expanding manu¬ facturing and commercial activities. In this way the process of urban¬ ization is set in motion by those classes that control the forces of industrialization. The class structure of society and the interests of the ruling class are crucial determinants of the manifestations of urbanization. The control of the means of production gives capitalists superior power that they wield over the urban workers who have been divorced from any independent means of production of their own. Professor Thompson discusses the development of this relationship in Europe (1959[1928]:792-793): Everywhere the wealthy classes controlled the local town gov¬ ernment and local trade and industry, and passed statutes in support of their interests, like privileges and monopolies, or expressive of their contempt for the masses. Thus, in Bruges in 1241 the law associated counterfeiters, thieves and artisans together. Strikes and riots in the densely populated industrial regions of Europe, as Lombardy, Tuscany, and Flanders, are common from the middle of the thirteenth century onward . . .. This state of things led to a new form of association—name¬ ly leagues of the great guildsmen in all the cities of a province or region—and to attempts on the part of the working classes to form unions in their own midst and even to knit together such combinations in adjacent towns. But all such efforts were abortive in the Middle Ages, except in Florence, and then only successful for a short season.

238

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

In societies in which an indigenous capitalist class develops, the sur¬ plus derived from earlier exploitation is invested to produce further growth. Industrialization proceeds continuously, and urbanization can be contained, more or less, by the widening economic framework. But in societies in which the capitalist mode of production is introduced and controlled by an alien bourgeoisie and develops without connec¬ tion with the requirements of these societies, this process is distorted. Oskar Lange (1963:11-12) suggests: Investment in underdeveloped countries of capital from the highly developed countries acquired a specific character. It went chiefly into the exploitation of natural resources to be utilized as raw materials by the industries of the developed countries and into developing food production to feed the population of the developed capitalist countries... In consequence, the economies of the underdeveloped coun¬ tries became one-sided, raw material and food-exporting economies. The profits which were made by foreign capital in these countries were [not used] for reinvestment in these coun¬ tries where the capital came from... This is the essential reason why the under developed countries were not capable of fol¬ lowing the classical capitalist path of economic development. In short, then, the process of urbanization under capitalism has a his¬ torically specific dynamic. Needless to say, this implies that industrial capitalism must be understood not as a static condition but as a devel¬ oping, expanding process. That is, urbanization that occurs under imperialist expansion possesses a dynamic which by no means repli¬ cates that of the autochthonous process of Western Europe (contra Lerner, 1967:22 and Little, 1971:3), but reflects a negative dialectic of imperialism. The widespread occurrence (both in time and place) of the urban phenomenon should not be allowed to obscure its particular manifes¬ tations. An examination of urbanization must be within definite his¬ torical limits. Also, the concrete peculiarities of the circumstances in which urbanization occurs must be taken into account. Failing to do this, social scientists undertake the fruitless task of establishing univer¬ sal, abstract laws of the urban process. The search for laws which may explain all cities betrays the misconception that urbanization is an inde-

239

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

pendent process in history. Isolated from other social processes, the development and decline of cities appears to be a fortuitous occurrence or a function of such factors as geographic location, population growth and dispersal, or terrain. Attempts to account for the emergence of a city in these terms become exercises in the description and correlation of traits. Trivialities assume a significance equal to necessities; cause, consequence, and coincidence become confused; and underlying social processes remain hidden by the elaboration of appearances. An adequate explanation of urbanization must be based on an investigation of this process in its historical context. Historical speci¬ ficity does not, however, necessitate an eclectic method of investiga¬ tion. It is possible to approach all urban situations by means of a common methodology and yet arrive at formulations which are his¬ torically specific and precise (Driscoll: 1972). Marx regarded abstrac¬ tion as a correct method of inquiry. This method, according to Sweezy (1942:11-12), involves successive approximations. That is, while retain¬ ing the fundamental characteristic of a context (e.g., urbanization), it allows the superficial characteristics to drop out. When moving from a high level of generalization to the concrete, Marx in his studies of the evolution of capitalism removed simplifying assumptions and undertook an analysis of the historical situation in its full complexity. Instead of employing general categories to embrace a changing con¬ tent, the Marxist method requires that generalizations “always have a specific historical element” (Korsch 1963:43). Insofar as the essence and appearance of phenomena are not identical, it is the task of the social scientist to discover the essence beneath its outward appearance. Because bourgeois anthropologists who study urbanization in the socalled developing countries do not understand the method of scien¬ tific abstraction, they confuse appearances with essence in their comparative study of urban phenomena in the developing and devel¬ oped countries. The study of the industrial city and its emergence everywhere must understand the dynamics of the political economy of imperialism. In its classical sense, political economy is the study of eco¬ nomics as shaped by political class struggle.

240

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

The City in Modern Africa The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-room they had asked for. The dis¬ covery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufac¬ tured goods. In India millions of handweavers were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power loom. China was more and more being opened up... This world-market, at first was composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural coun¬ tries grouped around one manufacturing centre—England— which consumed the greater part of this surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder England’s industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled.... And in pro¬ portion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralized. (Frederick Engels, The condition of the working class in England) Urbanization in Africa is a subject of interest to many urban theorists (see Hauser 1965; Reissman 1964; Fava 1968). Some look to urban¬ ization in the developing countries for a recapitulation of the European experience. For instance, Reissman (1964:153) says that urbanization in Africa provides a “rare opportunity to study...cases of historical reit¬ eration.” Hauser (1965:34) expresses the hope that studies of Africa and Asia may “shed light on the antecedents and consequences of urbanization in the West.” When differences in the urbanization of nineteenth-century Europe and that of colonial Africa are observed, there is little attempt to explain them. Rather, the African experience is characterized as a deviation from the Western model (see Lerner 1967). Other theorists concern themselves with problems of definition and categorization. The literature abounds with typologies of cities based on origin, location, function, and so on (see Weber 1958; Simms 1965:5-8). Various indices have been developed to study the optimum location, size, density, and composition of population; the attributes 241

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

of the city as a physical “container”; the quality of social life and the characteristic mentality of urban dwellers (Driscoll 1972). For the most part, such criteria are only descriptive of the empirical reality, yielding little in the way of explanation. An elaboration of indices is a common approach in urban studies; it is a method that takes the city as a given entity and tries to isolate those properties which seem to be common or unique to urban situ¬ ations or to various urban populations. If well conceived, the search for what is distinctively urban may yield useful insights about the ways in which the city differs from rural life or in which the class structure of the city affects different populations differently. It cannot, howev¬ er, explain why urban life is the way it is. This approach can provide at best a familiarity with the superficial aspects of urban phenomena. At worst, its resulting configurations are tautological and distorted, as when it is argued that with urbanization has come “increased freedom of women, changes in reproductive behavior, and late marriages,” and these indices are then taken as “a few of the factors which have brought about direct changes within the indigenous family structure” (Simms 1965:25). Attempts at generalizations reflect the confusion that exists regard¬ ing the nature of urbanization in Africa. One source of error is ideo¬ logically prejudiced formulations. Terms such as detribalization, stabilization, and Westernization have been used to refer to the pro¬ cess of urbanization in Africa. Living in towns is described as “civi¬ lized,” in contrast to living in rural areas, which is “uncivilized” (Pons 1969; Epstein 1967; Mitchell 1956a). Another source of error is the attempt to explain urbanization only in terms of the behavior of Africans in cities. This leads to considerable discussion concerning objective criteria for describing an “urbanized African.” These include number of years of permanent residence in a city, permanent residence of wife in an urban area, and absence of land rights in the countryside (Heilman 1953; Mitchell 1956b). Students of urbanization in Africa give particular attention to Africans who live and work in cities but retain land rights in rural areas. Descriptions of African town dwellers who supplement their wages with agricultural production are a basis for superficial analyses of “dual” or “plural” society in urban and development literatures. Attempts to explain the retention of rural landholdings or extended kin ties, the instability of urban residence or other features of urbanization in Africa,

242

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

pass over the objective structure of colonial society to focus on the “backward” attitudes of Africans or the tenacity of the traditional way ot life. Low wages, the confiscation of unworked land, and the tenu¬ ousness of urban work and residence under labor contracts, work com¬ pounds, and the color bar are less significant in these analyses than are conjectured reasons for the rural-urban shuttling or people’s percep¬ tion and evaluation of that aspect of the colonial system which they directly experience. There is a general failure to recognize that the behavior and atti¬ tudes of Africans are not the cause of the kind of urbanization that Africa has experienced but rather the observable effect of social forces which initiated and shaped the process of urbanization itself. These social forces were not generated by traditional African social structures but by the development and expansion of the capitalist mode of pro¬ duction. In reality, the city in Africa is a clear expression of the nature of underdevelopment: namely, the deprivation of African countries of resources and the cumulative effects which would have resulted if the raw material of these countries had been processed and manufactured locally. The nature of urbanization in Africa requires that the relationship between Africa and certain European countries be sought out and examined. In doing so, it becomes apparent that much of what has been taken to be uniquely African is a consequence of this relation¬ ship. The attempt to study urbanization at a continental level is a risky undertaking indeed. These general observations will not be entirely adequate for any particular region or country. However, they do apply at a general level where the process and conditions in their continen¬ tal manifestations can be examined without denying regional varia¬ tions. Within this perspective the differential impact of colonialism on particular societies can be accounted for with further specification.1 Historically, it was the industrial revolution which occurred with¬ in the developing capitalist relations of production that allowed the more or less peaceful growth of towns as centers of the capitalist pro¬ ductive system in Europe. Once the basis of industrialization and urbanization had been created there, the capitalist productive forces began a steady expansion overseas. This extension was not merely to discover but to create “new worlds” through the exploitation of raw materials needed for the developing capitalist industries. The “mod-

243

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ernizing” force of European contact did not re-create the newly estab¬ lished European social order in Africa. Rather, it set Africa on a course of underdevelopment as an aspect of the further capitalist development of Western Europe and later the United States. The violent penetration and rupture of precapitalist societies and the subjugation of the economic life of the greater part of the world to the profit impulse of the Western bourgeoisie constitute the fun¬ damental reality of the colonial city in Africa. In contrast to European cities, which were an organic part of the economic growth of their respective countries, the town in Africa is a symbol of the social frac¬ tures and estrangement founded upon a multi dimensional polariza¬ tion (economic, political, cultural) of colonizer and colonized (see Murray and Wengraf 1963:29). Administrative, market, and industri¬ al requirements of European countries, and not indigenous develop¬ ment, gave rise to most urban areas in Africa. Three interrelated trends can be identified in an indigenous pro¬ cess of urbanization. These are changes in the composition of the pop¬ ulation, changes in the distribution of skills, and changes in the relation between town and country. At particular times and in various societies these trends stand in differential relation to one another. The tragic but determining fact for African societies is that the industrial devel¬ opment that forms the economic basis of the towns and cities was— and to a large extent still is—foreign.2 This development is reflected in the class structure of the colonial city, in which a transplanted, alien managerial class prevails, whose interest in the development of African resources—both human and natural—is limited to the requirements of the extraction of immediate superprofits. The colonial situation also fosters the development of a tiny, indigenous petty bourgeoisie comprising comprador and low-ech¬ elon bureaucratic elements. This class remains dependent upon for¬ eign exploitation for its existence even after the dismantling of the formal empire, it has no independent role in the development (or rather underdevelopment) of its country. Removed from the process of cap¬ ital accumulation by the export of capital to the metropolis, this class turns to the conspicuous consumption of foreign commodities (see Nwosu 1973:48). The consequences of imperialist penetration are most evident in the underdeveloped proletariat, whose existence was demanded and whose character continues to be determined by the requirements of foreign capital. Thus, the development of technolo-

244

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

gy and skills is not related to the material needs of African social life. African economies operate within a system which was organized to extract raw materials for foreign industries. City growth, including the aberrant relationship with the countryside, expressed the illogic and imbalance of the colonial system as a whole (see Murray and Wengraf 1963:19). The failure of colonialism to complete the task of social transformation it had begun, indeed the pauperizing dynamic of the colonial system, produced the most profoundly distorted and skewed societies. Comparing the European and African experience, Basil Davidson (1974:277) points out that: The first [industrialization] destroyed, but also, after its fash¬ ion, mightily rebuilt afresh; the second, having gone far to ruin what it found, could only leave for Africans the task of making a new society. No such new society came into being during the colonial period. Little was left behind but an utter impover¬ ishment of the old society, a chaos of ideas and social relation¬ ships... When the principal colonializing powers eventually withdrew, everything of basic social meaning remained to be begun or rebuilt afresh. Thus, urbanization in Africa was accompanied by a complex process of dislocations and contradictions that was not a recapitulation of the earlier experience in the development of European capitalism, but the articulation of its final contradictions. The social and historical signif¬ icance of urban dynamics in Africa can be adequately comprehended and appraised only if African cities are studied as aspects of the politi¬ cal and economic systems of the colonizing countries. The structure of the city in Africa reflects a situation in which the economies of African societies were conditioned by the development and needs of the European economies to which they were subjected as producers and processors of raw materials. As Dos Santos (1971:226) explains: The relation of interdependence between two or more economies and between these and world trade, assumes the form of dependence when some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and can be self-starting while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of that expan¬ sion which can have either a positive or negative effect on their immediate development.

245

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The concept of dependence facilitates an examination of the internal situation of African cities as the result not of factors characteristic of traditional African societies but of the exigencies of colonialism. In order to explain the social structures that developed in the African city, the requirements and consequences of capitalism in its imperialist devel¬ opment must be understood. Comparative Urbanization and Industrialization Sixty, eighty years ago England was a country like any other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but pro¬ portionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabi¬ tants; with vast manufacturing cities, with an industry that sup¬ plies the world and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two thirds are employed in trade and com¬ merce, and composed of classes wholly different: forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those days. The industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France and the philosophical revolution for Germany. (Frederick Engels, The condition of the working class in England) The comparative study of urbanization raises questions regarding the relationship between urbanization and industrialization (Breese 1966; Lerner 1967). The concurrence of these two process in the develop¬ ment of Western Europe, in particular England, and of the United States contrasts sharply with the urbanization without industrializa¬ tion that has occurred in Africa (Barber 1967) and elsewhere (Hauser 1965; Myrdal 1968; Ward 1969). The problems of Africa urban life are conceived to be what Daniel Lerner (1967:25) calls the “decou¬ pling” of the twin processes. The solution frequently posed is the pro¬ motion of industrialization and the delaying of urbanization in order to return the two processes to harmonious relations (Ward 1969). The implementations of such a mechanical proposal usually takes the form of population-control programs and “foreign aid” which, according to Mandel (1969:472-481), do not aid the industrial development of the recipient, but facilitate the transfer of social surplus to the donor. Those who try to draw parallels between European and African 246

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

urbanization and industrialization fail to recognize that these process¬ es are aspects of the development of the capitalist mode of production at one point in history for Europe and at another point in history for Africa. Failing to recognize this, social scientists are frequently at a loss to account for the combination of burgeoning urban centers and limp¬ ing industrial development in Africa. One need only examine the rela¬ tion between Europe and the United States, on the one hand, and between Europe and Africa, on the other, to discover why advanced industrial development has taken place in the United States while the basis of industrialization has never been firmly established in Africa. As Singer (1950:338-339) explains: The productive facilities for export from underdeveloped coun¬ tries, which were so largely a result of foreign investment, never became a part of the internal economic structure of those underdeveloped countries themselves except in the purely geo¬ graphical and physical sense. Economically speaking, they were really an outpost of the economies of more developing invest¬ ing countries. The main secondary multiplier effects, which the textbooks tell us to expect from investments, took place not where the investment was physically or geographically located but (to the extent that the results of these investments returned directly home) where the investment came from. I would sug¬ gest that if the proper economic test of investment is the mul¬ tiplier effect in the form of cumulative additions to income, employment, capital, technical knowledge, and growth of external economies, then a good deal of the investment in underdeveloped countries which we used to consider as “for¬ eign” should in fact be considered as domestic investment on the part of the industrialized countries. Africa does not suffer from a mysterious decoupling of urbanization and industrialization but rather from imperialist penetration which cre¬ ates forced shanty urbanization in the colonies and industrial devel¬ opment in the metropolitan countries. The exaggerated influx of masses of people from rural areas into urban centers was precipitated by indiscriminate policies designed to create a surplus labor force as quickly as possible without regard for future consequences. Towns sprang up in mining regions from which raw materials were extracted and shipped to the metropolitan country without material benefit

247

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

accruing to those towns. The raw materials contributed to industrial development and economic growth in Europe, not Africa. As Murray and Wengraf (1963:19) note: The leading towns [in Africa] were not the creation of indus¬ trialization and inherent technical progress, but were rather the product of an export-directed colonial agriculture [and mining], whose rents and profits found an urban outlet in con¬ sumption and speculations. Furthermore, colonial economies were not allowed to develop those sectors which would generate growth and support cumulative indus¬ trialization. In fact, there were few ties between one sector of the econ¬ omy and another so that in any single colony there could be no beneficial interaction between the various sectors and organic devel¬ opment. In his recent book How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney (1972:162) explains that: Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitations but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the socalled ‘mother country.’ From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expropriation of surplus produced by African labour out of African resources. It meant the develop¬ ment of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped. The apparent decoupling of the “twin” process of industrialization and urbanization can only be understood by examining another set of inter¬ related processes: development and underdevelopment. The appro¬ priate context for an examination of these processes is not the geographic area of Africa but the operation of the capitalist mode of production in its imperialist extension. Colonial Urbanization and Migrant Labor No one can long be in this country without sensing strong cur¬ rents of emotion. ‘If only there were some way,’ runs the white man’s dream, ‘of having them here and yet of not having them here’; but they, like the waves of the sea, rise and run and fall upon the white man’s world without remission. (Basil Davidson, A Report on South Africa)

248

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

The concept “urbanization” points to population movement to cities, resulting in a proportional concentration of the total population in these areas. In Africa this occurred as a particular form of labor migra¬ tion. Almost every colonial regime in Africa preferred migrant African labor to labor permanently settled in town. It was not until very late in the history of the use of migrant labor that cautious and tentative moves were made in the former Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia to experiment with “stabilization” of the African labor force by encour¬ aging workers to bring their families with them to work locations. Why were Africans incorporated into the colonial system as migrant labor¬ ers? Elsewhere (Magubane and O’Brien 1972), the political, social, and economic reasons that lay behind the use of migrant labor have been considered. The following is an examination of the nature of the migrant labor system in relation to the colonial city and the require¬ ments of the metropolitan countries. The use of migrant labor and the perfunctory stabilization pro¬ grams were a response to the labor and market requirements of the colonizing powers based on a rational calculus of costs. Karl Marx, in his study of capitalist organization, explains that workers are included in its system not for their own social interest but because they satisfy the aims and interest of the capitalist system itself. The development of the city in Africa during the colonial era illustrates this point. Laws and policies were promulgated and administered in such a way that only those Africans whose labor power was needed in the towns were admitted. Others were uprooted to create a floating work force that could be used to threaten and depress the wages of those employed in colonial industries. The Stallard commission of South Africa spells out unreservedly the status of Africans in the city (1922: paragraph 42): The Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the White man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the White man and should depart from there when he ceases so to minister. This policy was applied in varying degrees throughout the continent. What this meant was simply that the basic interests of Africans as work¬ ers and those of White settlers as representatives of the metropolitan capitalist powers were opposed. In fact, they were antagonistic and irreconcilable. This relation was the source of the various laws and reg¬ ulations specifying the conditions of African entry into the cities as well

249

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

as of work and residence. The city, as the specific form of bourgeois organization coordinating imperialist interest in Africa, introduced a clear notion of labor as commodity. For as Marx (1969:6) says: In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that center in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-posses¬ sors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, the sum of values that possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labourpower, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but repro¬ duces it on a continually extending scale. Laws regulating urban migration and settlement, together with land, tax, and wage policies, were an attempt to create free wage laborers. First, Africans had to be able to dispose of their labor power as their own. Second, they could not have any other commodity for sale. Concretely, this meant that Africans had to be “extricated” from tra¬ ditional kinship and subsistence arrangements and compelled to seek wage labor. In their discussion of Kenya, Donald Barnett and Karari Njama (1966:31-32) explain how Africans were disengaged from indigenous subsistence arrangements through land appropriation: ...in Kenya, as in other territories of east, central and south Africa, African land was appropriated for the exclusive use by immigrant white colonists. That a good deal more land was alienated than could be put to effective use by the settlers is 250

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

explained in large measure by the latter’s need for African labor. Lord Delamere, a leading settler spokesman, made this clear in his appeal to the Labour Commission of 1912. In order to torce Africans into the centers of European enterprise, this renowned settler leader urged that the land reserved for “natives” be cut so as to prevent them from having enough for a self-supporting level of production. How, he pleaded, could Africans be obliged to labor for Europeans if they had enough land to successfully breed livestock and cultivate crops for sale. In the same discussion Barnett and Njama (1966:32) quote an edito¬ rial in a settler newspaper calling for a tax and wage policy that would force Africans to migrate to urban centers in search of wage work: We consider that taxation is the only possible method for com¬ pelling the native to leave his reserve for the purpose of seek¬ ing work. Only in this way can the cost of living be increased for the native...[and]...it is on this that the supply of labour and the price of labour depend. To raise the rate of wages would not increase but would diminish the supply of labour. A rise in the rate of wages should enable the hut and pool tax of a fam¬ ily, sub-tribe or tribe to be earned by fewer external workers. One could go on multiplying these examples from colonial records; but they would tell the same story. Suffice it to say that these policies together with those which imposed restrictions on permanent African residence in towns created a maze in which the African became an indi¬ vidual of “two worlds” as the expression goes. In dealing with the subject of migrant labor, one finds oneself a “dupe in good faith of a collective intellectual hypocrisy that clearly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them” (Cesaire 1972:10). For example, Hanna and Hanna in their report Urban dynamics in black Africa (1969:27) tell us: In contemporary Black Africa, most decisions to migrate to a town or to remain there are spontaneous rather than dictated by a government. The basic spontaneous cause of urban inmigration has been the ‘revolution of values’ brought about by European presence... which introduced a new set of values and established an infrastructure (e.g., modern schools and

251

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

industries) providing Africans with opportunities to obtain what was newly valued (e.g. education and wage-earnings employment). This revolution has not involved a substitution of one value system for another, but only the addition or exchange or modification of a relatively large number of spe¬ cific values... During the first stage of the value revolution, indi¬ viduals were the predominant agents of change...At least until the emergence of nationalist movements, many Africans believed that Europeans were all-powerful and all-knowing demigods with virtually a divine right to rule. This was partly because Europeans were powerful, skilled, and so forth; it was also due in part to some Africans’ transference of defense from their traditional leaders to Europeans. Given these assumptions, labor migration is commonly misconceived by students of African urbanization simply as “mobility” (see Miner 1967:13; Lerner 1967:27, 30-31; Hanna and Hanna 1969:27). That misconception hides the specific dynamic of the process of colonial¬ ism in creating marginally free wage laborers who were only partially integrated into the productive relations of alien capitalism. It also leads to invalid comparisons of the manifestations of colonial labor migra¬ tion and migration under qualitatively different conditions. For exam¬ ple, Hanna and Hanna (1969:27) comment: Migration in Africa is not a new phenomenon. Over the cen¬ turies, entire peoples migrated to more productive areas, and individual sojourns of various duration have been made to visit relatives, attend funerals, and so forth. The basic contrasts between precolonial and contemporary migration are that in the former fewer individuals (as opposed to entire peoples) were probably involved and rural to rural migration was pro¬ portionately greater. Because the colonial situation was taken for granted, the transforma¬ tion of precapitalist social relations to meet the imperialist need for labor leads to a scramble for explanations for the process of urban migration. This yields such “causal” factors as susceptibility to inno¬ vation among young adults (Hanna and Hanna 1969:47); the “glam¬ our of urban life” (Barber 1967:122); the belief that migration is a rite of passage to manhood; and the desire to escape the dull routine of a cattle post (Schapera 1947; Van Velsen 1961). A one-sided focus on 252

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

the “liberation” of individuals from the traditional way of life to the exclusion of examining the new forms of bondage into which they enter is also characteristic of bourgeois studies dealing with the trans¬ formation of precapitalist into industrial urban society, as this passage from Genesis of capital (Marx 1969:7) indicates: The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman to another. To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his com¬ modity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for appren¬ tices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour reg¬ ulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of them¬ selves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Emphasis added.) Another area of confusion concerns the nature of differences in the creation of wage laborers in nineteenth-century England, on the one hand, and in colonial Africa, on the other. This is well illustrated by Epstein’s treatment (1967:279) of this problem: The drift to towns is a universal concomitant of early industri¬ alization, but the way in which it occurs is not everywhere the same. In 19th century England, for example, the expansion of the industrial towns was achieved by the flow of labour into them from the smaller rural towns in their immediate hinter¬ land. In Africa a few instances of progressive migration have been reported,...but in the main urbanization has proceeded, not by a series of stages, but by a sharp leap from small village to distant urban centre, from kisendji, the ancient way of life of the tribe, to kisungu, the ‘civilized’ way of life of the towns...But in Africa the transition to town has been some¬ what sharper, paradoxically, the break with the village has been 253

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

less radical. The new African urban labourer remained bound by social, political and even religious ties to his kinsmen in the rural areas so that, as Mitchell observes,...it is the circulation of the labourer rather than its migration which has become its characteristic feature. (Emphasis added.) Though recognizing the difference in migration patters in a superfi¬ cial manner, Epstein does not seem to understand the nature and dynamics of the process involved and so must resort to an empirical description of its appearance. Instead of examining the relations between European colonizers and colonized Africans, between capi¬ tal and labor, Epstein (as do other social scientists) looks to the char¬ acteristics of Africans to explain urban migration. This approach results in acculturation studies in which the “adjustment problems” of Africans are the central concern (cf. Hanna and Hanna 1969:58-61); and in typologies in which the process of creating free wage laborers is trans¬ formed into static categories, such as town-rooted/country-rooted (Mayer 1971), or kisendji/kisungu. The search for causes of the form of labor migration that occurred in Africa in the attitudes of Africans or in their traditional social struc¬ tures is particularly dismaying when one considers the explicitness with which policies regarding migrant labor have been articulated in com¬ mission and parliamentary reports and newspapers (see Welsh 1971). Yet even when colonial policies are considered, it is merely to describe them and their superficial effects, and not infrequently to offer justi¬ fication (see Barber 1967:100-101; Little 1971). Obfuscation becomes complete when the system of labor migration created by the colonial¬ ist powers is cited as the cause of agricultural deterioration and eco¬ nomic instability (Wilson 1941). Labor migration together with the “native reserve” is the form in which the social transformation required by expanding capitalism was accomplished in Africa. In this way the labor requirements of capital¬ ist agriculture and capitalist extractive and manufacturing industries, as well as the service sector generated by European settlement, were met. However, the migrant labor system was not simply a way of bring¬ ing worker and employer together. It was a way of realizing the imme¬ diate superprofits necessitated by the development of monopoly capital.3 Through land appropriation the precapitalist modes of pro¬ duction were disrupted to the extent that individuals could be sepa¬ rated from the land. The remnants of these productive systems were 254

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

then incorporated into the colonial order by means of “native reserves.” This incorporation subsidized profit-making by compelling Africans to retain a stake in agricultural production. This would maintain the worker’s family, as well as the worker, intermittently, thus allowing the expropriation of additional surplus value. In an attempt to justify the migrant labor system by indicating how it benefitted both European and African, Barber (1967:100) inadvertently describes the extraction of superprofits through the depression of wages: European employers were permitted [by the migratory pat¬ terns] to obtain laborers at low wage rates — and certainly at rates below those they would have been obliged to pay had cir¬ cumstances demanded that the money wage be high enough to cover the minimum requirements of both the African work¬ er and his family. As it was, African labor would usually be obtained in the required volume with wages sufficient to pro¬ vide a ‘single’ worker with his subsistence plus an incentive bonus [sic]. The migrant labor system brought “ready-made” workers (Gorz 1970:29) into urban areas where their labor power could be efficient¬ ly exploited, and it returned them to the native reserve when they were not needed or were no longer useful. Africans were, like implements, units of labor that could be discarded when they ceased to be useful. Moreover, insofar as Africans were “temporary sojourners” in the cities and not permanent residents, they did “need” the infrastructural facil¬ ities that would require an outlay of social capital. In urban areas the minimal requirements of African workers were met to enhance their productivity (Van der Horst 1971) while the burdens of reproducing labor and supporting nonproductive individuals4 were shifted into the so-called traditional African economy. The savings thus realized were a source of additional profits. Both the impoverishment of the coun¬ tryside and the poverty of African urban life were created by the requirements of monopoly capital. Migrant labor and the native reserve were complementary aspects of the strategy by which a high rate of surplus value was realized in Africa.5 Labor migration is also perhaps the clearest expression of capital¬ ist productive relations in which labor power is abstracted from the full potential of humans. In a discussion of labor as commodity, Riihle (1943:327) explains this feature of capitalist relations:

255

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Inasmuch as labour power attaches to man as a quality insep¬ arable from the individual, since it cannot be isolated from him, or utilized apart from him, the man as a whole, having sold his labour power, passes into the possession of the purchaser. Not, of course, with his stomach, his hunger and thirst, his need for rest, his individual wishes and claims, but only in respect to his labour power. For the purchaser, he is not a human being with a soul, feelings, individuality, happiness and unhappiness; he is not God’s image or the crown of creation; he is not even of like kind with the purchaser. For the purchaser, the man who has sold him labour power is nothing but labour power; noth¬ ing but arms, hands, fingers, capable of work; nothing but mus¬ cles, eyes, voice; nothing but capacity for labour, faculty for production. Labor and urban policies together with the colonial ideology of African workers as temporary sojourners served this end. The Europeans did not hesitate to set forth explicitly the condi¬ tion under which Africans could be incorporated into the colonial order: It should be recognized principle of government that natives — men, women and children — should only be permitted within municipal areas in so far as their presence is demanded by the wants of the white population (quoted by Welsh 1971:187). Moreover, the import of the colonial strategy of forcing Africans to exist as pure labor was not lost on Africans themselves. For, as David Welsh (1971:189) explains, “it was apparent to Africans that the whites paradoxically wanted their labour but objected to their presence.” A 1944 report by Africans challenges the rationality of capitalist imperi¬ alism: Why should we now, after helping you Europeans to build your cities and your industries, not be allowed to derive the bene¬ fit of our labour (quoted by Welsh 1971:188-189)? The question remains as to why social scientists have failed to under¬ stand and explain the workings of the migrant labor system and the manner in which it shaped the process of urbanization as a major fea¬ ture of colonial strategy in Africa. The study of migrant labor in Africa 256

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

typifies the managerial and technical thinking of social science: According to the functional requisites of his role the manager is expected to deal with and solve the problems of adapting the behavior of a human being to the structural demands of his institutional setting. It does not matter just what these demands and this setting are (Bauman 1967:403). All social science is concerned with is proving that the individual has attained a nice stabilization of forces and is adjusted. It is not con¬ cerned with whether, perhaps, adjustment and stabilization while good because they reduce pain, are also bad because they cause development toward a higher ideal to cease. In sum, the study of urban anthropology in its present form has irreducible ideological components; the burden of its interests and findings tends to legitimate the current social order by inducing approval or resignation in those who take them seriously. The ideo¬ logical elements are closely related to practical concerns. By their con¬ cepts, methods, and style of work, urban anthropologists become consciously and unconsciously ancillary agents of power. Their con¬ clusions can be used for purposes of domination, exploitations, and manipulation. Urban anthropologists pay too little attention or no attention at all to the imperialist context of African problems of urban¬ ization. Precisely by dwelling exclusively on the facts derived from small-scale studies, urban anthropologists blind themselves to the his¬ torical processes which underlie the empirical data. The crucial ques¬ tions left unasked are not simply troublesome elements; rather, they are part of the consistent set of themes and omissions evident in most studies of African underdevelopment. A careful analysis of the themes selected for study and those left out reveals disturbing tendencies. In a world in which knowledge is utilized for manipulative and adminis¬ trative ends, we should not fail to assess research findings by asking for whom this knowledge is relevant and why some questions have been asked and not others. Conclusions The study of the city and of the social processes unleashed in the form of urbanization raises fundamental questions about the colonial lega¬ cy in Africa. What was the nature of the colonial state? For whose ben¬ efit did commerce and industry invade Africa, and what were the 257

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

implications of this invasion for African industrialization? The trajec¬ tory of colonial development in Africa was extractive capitalism which crated urban complexes exemplified in the Katanga region of the Congo, the copper belt of Zambia, and the Witwatersrand of the Transvaal in South Africa. Portugal, Malawi, Lesotho and Botswana for years made their poli¬ cies subservient to the South African demand for labor in the mines. The copper belt and the Katanga region looked for their laborers in other areas in central and eastern Africa, the various government poli¬ cies in central and southern Africa were coordinated to create condi¬ tions for labor to move from one area to another without let or hindrance. The labor policies applied in the colonial era disrupted the home life of Africans together with their political organizations. In some areas up to 60 percent of the men left home periodically in mass migration to the mining areas and other centers of work in order to raise the poll taxes laid upon them. African urbanization presented an eloquent, if tragic, example of the process which created broken communities. The towns and cities were abstracted from their environment and were more organically and closely related to the metropolitan countries than to their own hin¬ terland. With no steady growth in the secondary and manufacturing sectors of the economy, no expansion of the internal market was pos¬ sible. The position of the urban work force itself was unsteady, with its fortunes dependent on the oscillation in the demand for raw materi¬ als in the world markets. The uncertainties attendant on all raw mate¬ rial-producing countries were reflected in the urban structural instabilities and the unresolved contradictions between town and coun¬ try. The sociopolitical consequences for the African city were remark¬ able. The fall of the price of cocoa in the international market created conditions which led to the fall of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, for instance. Who knows what the repercussions of the fall in the price of copper will mean for Zaire and Zambia? The growth of extractive indtistries did not lead to the development of an internal market or to an articulated commercial sector. The use of the migrant labor system for mining and cash crops led to the most advanced deracination and proletarianization, but without corresponding industrialization to meet the future need for jobs when mineral production became exhausted or unprofitable. These issues have not been confronted or raised by urban anthro-

258

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

pologists, with their focus on problems of acculturation. The simple and almost trivial assumptions of acculturation studies are reflected in such ideological concepts as “Westernization,” “destabilization,” and “Europeanization,” which consciously or unconsciously helped to mask or divert attention from issues of political economy. The normative concepts6 used to describe the urban process in Africa show that the link between science and ideology is not accidental, but is an integral part of social investigations. By its methods and techniques of investi¬ gation (participant observation and depth interviews), urban anthro¬ pology can give insight into the thinking and the mentality of the subject which can be used by those whose interest it is to manipulate and dominate others if the larger process-shaping individual experi¬ ences are not disclosed. The tie between urban anthropology and social engineering is not in doubt. When particular problems are encountered, urban anthro¬ pologists and sociologists often act as experts supplying elements of a decision. Anthropology, then, can function practically at two levels, either through the “rationalization” of human behavior or by supply¬ ing tactics for the “manipulation” of behavior. This can be achieved by identifying the myths or irrational convictions closely related to the practical experiences of the masses.

259

.

•

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

B. Magubane and J. Yrchik

The city is forged upon the hearth of a given mode of pro¬ duction and is shaped with a given set of technological instru¬ ments. In a capitalist society, urbanization and the structure and functioning of cities is rooted in the production, repro¬ duction, circulation and overall organization of the capital accu¬ mulation process. Since the process of capital accumulation unfolds in a spatially structured environment, urbanism may be viewed as the particular geographical form and spatial pat¬ terning of relationships taken by the process of capital accu¬ mulation. —Richard Child Hill, 1976

Theoretical Remarks The intention of this work is not to establish the growth of cities and the particular forms assumed by them as an object of study; rather, it is to demonstrate that the phenomenon of urbanization cannot be understood without reference to the overall structure and functioning of a dominant mode of production (in this case, the capitalist mode of production) as it is articulated in a specific social formation, whose laws and tendencies determine the geographic forms that can be directly apprehended. In order to establish determining factors, it will be nec¬ essary to define theoretically the linkages between the city and the dominant mode of production, i.e., to sketch the city in terms of its substantive social reality. We shall then demonstrate this relationship. To begin to determine the relationship between the dominant

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

mode of production and the city, it is necessary to show the relation¬ ship between the dominant mode of production and the social for¬ mation in which that mode of production is articulated. In this regard, the following observation is pertinent: ...it is not the mode of production (and its development) which ‘reproduces’ the social formation and ‘engenders’ in some man¬ ner its history, but, on the contrary, it is the history of a social formation which reproduces (or not) the mode of production on which it rests, and explains its development and transfor¬ mations (translation by B. Brewster of Althusser and Balibar, 1970,245). In other words, it is the social formation in which a mode of produc¬ tion is articulated that determines the specific way in which the mode of production will express itself in concrete terms. In order not to lapse into a hopeless relativism, however, we must deal with the issue of dominance. A dominant mode of production in a social formation sub¬ ordinates all other forms of production within that social formation to its requirements. This does not mean that forms of production other than the dominant mode of production will appear within the social formation: it simply means that they will be divested of their autono¬ my — they will not exist as modes of production. A dominant mode of production may or may not be determinant (that is, determine the course of development of the social formation) at any one point in time. This depends precisely on the specific historical conjuncture. However, the dominant mode of production must be regarded as determinant in terms of the forms class struggle can assume under it (in this manner, it is determinant in the last instance). Hence, under capitalism the objective conditions exist for strikes (in order to raise the value of labor-power and decrease the rate of exploitation), revo¬ lutionary transformations (in order to abolish private ownership and control ol the means of production and institute communal control and ownership), and offenses by capital (in order to repress worker militancy or decrease the value of labor-power). It is these class strug¬ gles that give the mode of production its dynamic development and/or transformation. However, their specific occurrence, form, and content depend on the social formation itself. Urban areas are centers within which the process of capital accu¬ mulation takes place. The city represents the accumulated fixed capi-

262

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

tal generated through surplus value appropriation in previous processes of capitalist production. The very construction of cities becomes an act of surplus-value appropriation under capitalism. From these state¬ ments we can derive the following propositions: Urban form is struc¬ tured by the quantity and kind of capital accumulation as it exists in a relationship to the circuit of social capital taken as a whole.1 And inso¬ far as the city represents capital, the city is a social relationship. The fact that capital accumulation occurs within urban space nec¬ essarily implies that class struggles occur within urban space. Cities, then, are shaped by the class struggles of a dominant mode of produc¬ tion articulated within a specific social formation. Urban space becomes, in this view, a physical location within which class relations are con¬ tained and in which class antagonisms are expressed — and, one might add, repressed. It has been a fallacy of many writers on urbanization to consider physical space a neutral. Harvey (1973) has this to say: The city and urbanism can therefore function to stabilize a par¬ ticular mode of production (they both help to create the condi¬ tions for the self-perpetuation of that mode). But the city must also be the locus of the accumulated contradictions and there¬ fore the likely birthplace of a new mode of production. Historically, the city appears to have variously functioned as a pivot around which a given mode of production is organized, as a centre of revolution against the established order, and as a cen¬ tre of power and privilege (to be revolted against). (203-204) To speak of a mode of production we must also speak of a division of labor which is predicated on that mode. It is in this context that the city can be seen as a relational construct. The city has a relationship to the country in terms of the functions it performs within the division of labor encompassed by a particular social formation. Raymond Williams (1973) notes: “The division and opposition of city and coun¬ try, industry and agriculture, in their modern forms, are the critical culmination of the division and specialization of labor, which, though it did not begin with capitalism, was developed under it to an extraor¬ dinary and transforming degree” (304). Moreover, the division of labor between the city and the country does not represent a harmonious and well-balanced whole. It becomes the locus of an antithesis among the various fractions of capital repre¬ sented in such a division. As industrial production develops, it subor-

263

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

dinates agricultural production to its specific needs. Agricultural cap¬ ital becomes dependent on industrial capital for its own reproduction. This will become clearer in the discussion that follows. The Background of Urbanization in South Africa The object of this paper is twofold: to explain the growth of towns in South Africa, from the time of the mineral discoveries of the nineteenth century to the present, and to delineate the economic and political forces that created the antagonisms between Africans and white set¬ tlers and thus gave South African cities their distinctive stamp of racial oppression. Our thesis is that both of these phenomena are inextrica¬ bly bound up with the development of capitalism in South Africa and that, contrary to popular conceptualization, the peculiar racial charac¬ ter of South African capitalism does not represent a distorted form of capitalism, but rather a specific articulation of it within a specific social formation. There can be no general theory of capitalist articulation. The first major impetus to urbanization in South Africa came with the mineral discoveries of diamonds in Kimberley (1867) and of gold on the Witwatersrand (1886). In contrast to the earlier period of com¬ mercial capitalism, characterized by a predominance of small-scale, export-oriented agriculture, the development of mining was predicat¬ ed on the development of capital as a social relation, which presup¬ poses the divorce of the laborer from both the object and the instruments of production and makes him labor in the abstract, i.e., social labor. Moreover, it was not competitive capital that penetrated South Africa: it was the highly developed monopoly capital of English imperial expansion. The export of this capital, which uprooted the indigenous economies and brutally forced a new dynamic of develop¬ ment on South Africa, had important consequences for the possibili¬ ties of class struggle. Michael Williams (1975) points out: Policed, voiceless, herded into compounds and without endur¬ ing organizations of their own, the workers had very few oppor¬ tunities to repel imperialist aggression. The rise of the diamond and gold mining industries resulted in the entrenchment of the migratory labor system, the intensification of racism, the shoring up of the so-called ‘tribal’ system, together with a whole range of measures designed to hold back the struggles of the workers by force. (7)

264

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

The penetration of South Africa by monopoly capital produced pro¬ found changes in the countryside, which had as its most obvious man¬ ifestation the townward migration of Africans and rural Afrikaners. The towns spawned by the mines created a home market for agricultural produce, which made possible the transformation of rural production from small-scale farming predicated on tenancy agreements (in cash or kind) to large-scale commercial agriculture predicated on wage labor and labor tenancy.2 This is illustrated in the following diagram. MP Mining capital

M-C-

P-C’-M’ L W MP

Agricultural capital M-C-

P-C’-M’ L

M

Money capital

M’

Money capital with realized surplus value (M+m)

C

Commodity capital (means of production and labor-power)

C’

Commodity capital with embodied surplus value (C+c)

P

Productive capital

MP

Means of production

L

Labor-power

W

Wages

It is the wages received from working in the mines that allows the trans¬ formation of form (from the commodity form to the money form) known as the realization of surplus value to take place. Also, in the sit¬ uation posited above what is crucial is that the expansion of agricul¬ tural capital is made possible by the expansion of industrial capital precisely because the agricultural sector is dependent on the industri¬ al sector for one of the conditions of its own reproduction (surplusvalue realization). Today the agricultural sector depends on many branches of industrial production other than mining. However, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the urban market was not so developed. The implications of the capitalization of the countryside were tremendous: it destroyed the fabric of peasant and communal exis-

265

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tence. The development of capitalism in effect meant that more and more of the means of production constituted capital as opposed to the means of production in a different, autonomous mode of production; and the depopulation of the countryside and the concentration of pop¬ ulation in urban centers signaled the proletarianization of Africans and Afrikaner tenant farmers. According to Lerumo (1971): The rapid development of capitalism in the Union was divid¬ ing the Afrikaners along class lines. The Land Act and other measures to proletarianize the Africans had benefitted a sec¬ tion of the farmers; they produced cash crops for the boom¬ ing urban centres and became rich men. They had no reason for dissatisfaction with the deal which ‘Slim Jannie’ Smuts had struck with imperialism. But the same process destroyed the semi-patriarchal, self-contained economy of Boer agriculture. The successful farmers bought out and squeezed out those less successful. (55) The logic of capital presupposes the absence of not only ownership of land but also of any effective possession that previous tenancy agree¬ ments and combined farming allowed, but it would be a grave mistake to say that the outcome of rural displacement was the same for both African and Afrikaner. Thus, although the concentration of people in urban centers is a universal aspect of the development of capitalism, agricultural and mining capital and white-settler interests constituted a political force strong enough to lead to the differential incorpora¬ tion of both groups into the urban economic life of South Africa. This gave the South African towns their distinctly racial character. Welsh (1971) describes the situation as follows: The townward movement of whites and non-whites was an aspect of a single process, but no Government was ever to rec¬ ognize the parallel. For much of the period under considera¬ tion policy aimed at prising Africans out of reserves to work on white-owned farms and in industry. African reserves were regarded by whites as ‘reservoirs of labor’ and congestion, land¬ lessness, and crop-failure were welcomed as stimulants to the labor supply. But similar phenomenon [sic] among whites were viewed as national calamities. (P. 182) The development of English-dominated mining had created a new

266

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

political climate in South Africa. It shifted the locus of South Africa’s economic activity from Dutch farms to the new urban centers; it pit¬ ted the Afrikaner farmer against the English mineowner in the scram¬ ble for African labor; and it created a new economic and political force, capital, which confronted the African at every turn. Before the con¬ flict between the rural settler economy and English mining interests matured in the Anglo-Boer War (the outcome of which was the destruction of the settler economy and the triumph of urban-based mining capital), the African peasantry was attacked by both groups because of its political powerlessness. Bundy (1972) notes: Simultaneously... the competing needs of old and new employ¬ ers of African labor, the gradual commercialization of agricul¬ ture, and the intensification of white political authority, greatly increased the pressures on the [African] peasantry: an assault was launched upon the peasant’s participation in the cash econ¬ omy on his own terms — i.e., as a seller of produce rather than as a seller of labor. (P. 372) The conflicts between Afrikaner agricultural capital and English min¬ ing capital were resolved through the destruction of African agricul¬ ture. The African peasants, whose labor-power was crucial for capital accumulation in the mines and agriculture, bore the brunt of the con¬ flict between the competing sectors of capital — mining and agricul¬ tural. Whereas in England the process of transforming agriculture was firmly in the hands of the all too present and commercially active landowners (see Williams, 1973, 82), in South Africa it was mining capital that precipitated the rural transformation, and agriculture want¬ ed to restrain the free flow of population to the cities. What was involved here was the differential destruction of Afrikaner and African peasant agriculture. One of the more obvious ways in which African, as opposed to Afrikaner, capital was prevented from accumu¬ lating was the location of the infrastructure (railroads) designed to accommodate and expedite the flow of commodities from the hinter¬ land to the growing towns. Macmillan has noted that “to locate native reserves, it is no bad rule...to look for the areas circumvented or entire¬ ly missed by branch railway lines” (quoted in Bundy, 1972, 387). African farmers forced to transport produce to the cities by ox wagon could not possibly compete with Afrikaner farmers in the market. The consequence of these various class conflicts was the establish-

267

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ment in towns of both Africans and Afrikaners (taking into account, of course, the differential impact on both groups). The city as the loca¬ tion of capitalist enterprises became the focal point for those with noth¬ ing to sell but their labor-power. Ethnic and other barriers to the unification of people break down as the material reasons for their existence disappear. In the city, there¬ fore, there is a tendency' for the divisions based on previous systems to break down as the new form of domination (capitalism) develops. Cardoso (1975) says of capitalist relations that they: ...only occur in social groupings in which tribal, clan, broth¬ erhood, or feudal ties can be broken down by the irresistible force of a new type of economy that equalizes all the owners of the means of production, on the one hand, and all the nonowners on the other. By conferring on all men who meet in the market of the urban commune a common impersonal standing in the face of impositions and privileges that do not originate in the ‘rationality’ of the market, the capitalist econ¬ omy creates specific social ‘extracts’: social classes. These in their usual forms of bourgeoisie and proletariat are the fruits of capitalism. In the marketplace of the city, they find the sub¬ stantiation of the particular kind of exploitation that gives them life. (159) By the first decade of the twentieth century, the beginnings of amal¬ gamation could be observed among Africans from different societies. However, the existence of poor whites in cities in the same position as Africans caused some stir among Afrikaner leaders.4 In the words of the 1907-1909 Natal Native Affairs Commission: “National and trib¬ al disintegration would be quickly followed by racial amalgamation. There was evidence of this process and this result in the towns. Let us stem back and keep off the process of disintegration, both in ours as well as the interests of the natives themselves” (quoted in Welsh, 1971, 186). The essence of this attitude would translate into not only racial segregation but also the policy of exclusion of Africans as “permanent” city-dwellers. Rural displacement and disintegration were seen through the spectacles of pluralism. Insofar as the townward movements of Africans and Afrikaners were not seen as aspects of a single process, Afrikaner leaders consciously attempted to produce different effects with regard to the socially defined racial groups. Natal’s official poli-

268

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

cy (which bore a close resemblance to that of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal), later to be employed by the Union Government, was that Africans should be allowed to develop along their own lines. This, of course, meant territorial segregation, i.e., segregation in space. The city was the abode of the white man, and the reserve was the abode of the African. This did not mean that Africans would not be allowed to participate in the urban economy. It meant that they must be inte¬ grated into it as migrant labor. Legassick and Hemson (1976) explain segregation as follows: Segregation was the means whereby the economic interests of the mining industry were constituted as state policy, in condi¬ tions where other classes and strata had to be allowed some representation of their interests. Segregation was the result of a policy of the state to preserve separate spheres in which the African labour force could continue to engage in household peasant production (in ever declining amounts) which would subsidise its wages, but not able to avoid wage labour nor com¬ pete as peasant producers on the market with aspirant white capitalist farmers. Segregation meant that migrant labour would be preserved and that Africans would be recruited for the mines directly from rural areas by recruiting organizations (the notorious WNLA and NRC) which would fix the wage rates and terms of the contract. Segregation preserved some form of household production in the reserves at the one end of the migrant cycle and perpetuated a compound system at the other. Segregation meant the division of the working class on a racial basis, in which whites would be treated as frilly proletarianised, and Africans not, and in which whites in the min¬ ing industry would be protected in defined jobs. (4) Mining had no objection to this: it was a strong proponent of territo¬ rial segregation. Its labor needs could be filled through a migratory labor system. In fact, the use of the reserves as locations in which laborpower could be reproduced outside the process of capitalist produc¬ tion enabled mineowners to slash wages below subsistence levels in the early years of the twentieth century. Michael Williams (1975) calls this archaic surplus-value extractions’ Shivji (1976) and others have noted that the system of migratory labor makes organization among the workers more difficult to attain. Also, through pass laws (which pro-

269

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

vided white farmers as well as mineowners with African labor inasmuch as it could be directed), the formation of the Native Labor Supply Association (in which collaborating mines made the demand for African labor noncompetitive — they created a monopolistic situation with regard to African labor to make sure that competing demand did not drive up wage levels), and attempts to destroy organizations of African workers, mineowners were able to prevent any effective political resis¬ tance to their brutal policies. Thus, we see that the reserves perform multiple functions within the South African social formation: ideological, economic, and polit¬ ical. The racial aberration embodied in South African cities is the result of specific class struggles. The establishment of the reserves as com¬ munities unequally integrated into South African social and econom¬ ic life was the point of agreement for the most powerful political groups at this time — English mining capitalists, Afrikaner nationalists, and capitalist Afrikaner farmers. Urban Class Struggles:

1910-1977

After the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the need for African labor on the part of both Afrikaner commercial farmers and English mineowners led to their collusion in the passage of the 1913 Land Act. The Land Act concerned 78 percent of the population of South Africa (the Africans), to whom it allotted 13 percent of the avail¬ able land. The alleged intent of the Act was territorial segregation. However, it had the effect of undermining any possibility of African self-sufficiency. Williams (1975) notes that: “As early as 1914...mis¬ sionaries in the Ciskei were reporting that ‘the reserves were utterly dependent on the earnings remitted home by migrant miners and the reserves were, in effect, being turned into mining villages!”’ (31). It is the requirement of any dominant mode of production to deprive those forms of production subordinate to it of any autonomy. Capitalism in South Africa would not develop if production on the reserves were suf¬ ficient to accommodate the needs of the people in them. The 1913 Land Act ensured that the reserve was an appendage of urban-based production, insofar as it ensured an influx of African labor. An obvious result of the Land Act was the proletarianization of large numbers of African tenant farmers (because of the restrictions placed on the spread of tenant relations by the Act) and migrants from the reserves, which could no longer fully support them. The repro270

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

duction of a proletariat takes place within the ensemble of relations of a social formation, as Balibar points out in Cinq Etudes du Materialisme Historique. To the extent that the Land Act attempted to curtail the growth of tenancy agreements (for cash or kind) and to deprive Africans of independent means of production, it created conditions within which a peasantry became a proletariat. The economic necessity for Africans to engage in migrant labor does not mean, however, that they were only partially proletarianized: it means that this was the form a particular segment of the proletariat took within the South African social formation. It would not be an overstatement to say that the intention of the Land Act was a transparent fraud. The real aim of the Act was not seg¬ regation, but unequal integration. “In fact, the Act failed to effect real separation of races but brought about intermingling of the worst kind” (Kibodya, 1968,122). L.P. Mair (quoted by Kibodya) has the follow¬ ing observations with regard to the government’s policy of segregation: ...a South African policy representing the determination (of whites) to have it both ways. The Native is to be segregated from the European sufficiently to prevent his stealing stock but not enough to prevent his coming out to work. He is to be forced to abandon such barbarous practices as the lobola, until someone points out that the need to acquire the lobola is a valuable stimulus to work. The Native is to progress far enough to want to buy European merchandise, but not far enough to have ideas of parliamentary representation. He is to be edu¬ cated enough to be industrious but not to undersell the European. He is to have enough land to save him from desti¬ tution lest he be driven to crime as a means of livelihood but not so much that he has no need for work. (119) The evidence is clear that the Act did not achieve its ostensible aim. After its passage there was no relative increase in the percentage of Africans located on the reserves. In fact, there were large demograph¬ ic movements to the cities of the Rand. The reinvestment of surplus value into fixed capital by commercial farmers resulted in an increased productivity of agriculture and a subsequent displacement of Africans — i.e., the creation of a relative surplus population in the countryside, part of which would function as a reserve army of labor for the urbanbased mining enterprises.

271

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

An extremely important consequence of this townward movement was the necessary implications it had for the political struggles of the African people: Whereby in the past, many Africans were bound in the tradi¬ tion, the towns offered platforms of intertribal cooperation. After the Union Act [of] 1910 the Land Act provoked an upsurge of African political organizations. These organizations traded in the general grievances of the African and although the war [World War I] acted as a shock-absorber after it, they grew. Perhaps the seeds of the tradition of Congress in South Africa can be traced to the 1913 Land Act. (Kibodya, 1968, 123) The tendency toward amalgamation in urban areas noted in the pre¬ vious section exists not because particular geographic areas are urban, but because they are capitalist. The city is the concentration in space both of productive forces that confront the laborer as capital and of labor-power that neither owns nor controls them. The development of capitalism breaks the bonds of previous modes of production as it destroys the conditions for their own reproduction and, in doing so, creates a class that stands opposed to it. One may infer that the con¬ centration of the newly proletarianized Africans in the urban space dominated by capital (the monopolization of urban space becomes possible with relations of private property, and the control of such space by capital is a condition for the process of capitalist production) cre¬ ated the necessary conditions for the political struggles that were later to ensue. The development of secondary industry that began during World War I (largely to aid in Great Britain’s war effort) and continued unabated for the rest of the period under consideration provided anoth¬ er impetus for urbanization. The development of secondary industry produced profound changes in the fabric of South African cities, not only in the increasing economic complexity and interlocking of the individual processes of capitalist production but also in the political and ideological changes that it precipitated.7 The changes that began during World War I crystallized in a flur¬ ry of legislation during the decade of the 1920s. The 1923 Urban Areas Act provided for territorial segregation in urban areas. Urban locations had been compulsory areas of residence for Africans in the past (in the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, parts of the Cape Province, and

272

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

Natal). However, the Act extended residential segregation with regard to both the number of towns and the number of Africans affected (Van der Horst, 1971, 270). There is no one cause for Act’s passage. There are many things to be taken into consideration, of which only a few can be touched on here. Mining interests desired controls to keep the legally employed Africans from leaving urban areas and to keep the unemployed Africans from coming in. Another factor, related to the first but far more con¬ sequential, was the political threat posed by the African masses to all of capitalism. Politicians, both black and white, were aware of the revolu¬ tionary possibilities presented by the urban African masses who could be mobilized for action against a social order that denied them equality. The 1920s were the heyday of Clements Kadalie and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. ‘The loca¬ tions in the towns are incubators of unrighteousness, and Kadalie and his myrmidons find the locations the most fruit¬ ful place for their operations.’ (Welsh, 1971, 188) Thus, for the majority of Africans, their position in the towns was made increasingly tenuous by government measures. The Urban Areas Act not only made political resistance more difficult but facilitated the exploitation of the African laborer by capital (a consideration intimately bound up with the fact of political powerlessness). A third factor (to be further discussed below) was that the congregation of the African and the Afrikaner into multiracial slums might break down the colo¬ nial mentality of racial dichotomy; to date no factor has been more important than racism in effectively preventing working-class unity within South Africa. In order to discuss the next two pieces of legislation, the “civilized labor” policy and the Industrial Conciliation Act, and their implica¬ tions for urban society, it will be necessary to digress a bit. The histo¬ ry of the South African wage structure up to this point has been the history of the preferential treatment given by capitalism to the white worker at the expense of the African worker. When English mining capital penetrated South Africa, it brought with it skilled white min¬ ers from English mining areas. The skilled white labor in the mines received three to four times the wages the Africans received. Allowed to organize, white miners sought to maintain their position largely by

273

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

keeping Africans out of the unions, through educational barriers and other measures. By keeping the demand for skilled labor high through a restriction of the supply, white labor could guarantee itself a dispro¬ portionate share of the wage bill of capitalist enterprises. A series of strikes between 1907 and 1922, culminating in the famous Rand revolt, concerned either demands for preferential treatment over blacks or defensive moves against capital for attempting to slash wages. The racist character of the white trade union movement provided a means for the displaced Afrikaner population to earn a livelihood in the cities because they were the color of the dominant group within South Africa (and they were no doubt aided by state support and the massive industrial expansion in subsequent years). What is crucial on this account, however, is that the issue of racism is inextricably bound up with the issue of class. The white working class has never prevented capitalist enterprise from maintaining a high gen¬ eral rate of profit (except, perhaps, for recent years). The reason for this is that owing to the economic and political powerlessness of African labor, capital has simply redistributed the total wages in favor of the whites — the upshot of which is that the rate of surplus-value extrac¬ tion from the African work force has increased with each increase in labor productivity, whereas it has stayed the same or decreased for the white work force. (Given the wages paid to white workers, it is diffi¬ cult to see whether any surplus value is extracted from them all. However, whether they create the value of their labor-power or appro¬ priate surplus value from the African workers through subsidized wages is a question for another paper.) Immanuel (1972) gives some evidence on this account: ...the nominal wages of blacks rose from 2s. a day under President Kruger in 1985 to 2s. 3d. in 1937 and about 5s. in 1962. Allowing for the actual devaluation of the currency between the last two dates, the real wages of blacks hardly changed over these 25 years... ‘Nothing has changed so little in South Africa,’ an eminent South African authoress has writ¬ ten, ‘as the black man’s rate of pay.’ (155) The civilized labor” policy, with its provisions for the industrial color bar (which preserved the high-paying, skilled jobs for whites and left the unskilled jobs for blacks) and the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, which excluded African trade unions from recognition in mat-

274

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

ters of industrial arbitration, benefited the white working class. Both pieces of legislation were ushered in during the Pact government (1924-33), a coalition government of the Nationalist Party, the polit¬ ical party of the rural capitalists, and the Labor Party, the party of the white working class. Through this legislation the white working class was constituted as a labor aristocracy, which helped to reproduce cap¬ italist relations of production. As capitalist production has developed over the years, the white working class has become increasingly involved in activities related to the administration and realization of surplus value. As production employees their proportion decreased from 29 percent in 1924-25, to only 18.5 percent in 1963-64 (Williams, 1975), “And even those white workers who are engaged in the direct process of production are not entirely divorced from supervisory work; there is hardly a white worker on the shop floor who does not keep a vigi¬ lant eye on black workers for his capitalist mentors” (13). The above discussion has important implications for urbanization. It was the enormous quantities of surplus value extracted from Africans that went into the development of fixed assets in urban areas. Because the white working class represented a political threat to the interests of capital, it was in the interests of capital to forge an alliance with it to continue to accumulate capital.8 This alliance has continued to the present, under the policies of apartheid. The efficacy of the Pact gov¬ ernment policies is described eloquently by Horowitz (1967): From 1924 onward, there is a virtual end to serious labor dis¬ putes in the Rand mining industry. In total contract to the pre¬ vious quarter-century of almost continuous turbulence and frequent syndicalist violence on the Rand mine, the forty sub¬ sequent years have been marked by an industrial “peace” unpar¬ alleled in the world’s mining industry. The Chamber of Mines acquiesced in a collective bargaining agreement with the White Trade Unions, that from 1924 onwards recognized the writ¬ ten and unwritten rules of White-Black job demarcation as sim¬ ply not an agenda item. Year after year the presidential address of the Chamber of Mines from 1924 refers to the cordial rela¬ tions with its White organized labor and only after 1937 is there the occasional disturbing reference to the impact of wages and working-conditions emanating from party political intrigue in the White mining trade unions. (9)

275

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The result of the alliance made with capital by the white working class (in which they exchanged their consent to capitalist domination for preferential treatment can be seen in South African cities in the marked contrast between the European or white areas and the areas designat¬ ed for the African migrant work force. From the spacious houses and paved streets of the European section one moves to African areas, where hunger, want, and the violent crimes of poverty are the order of the day, where dwellings bear a closer resemblance to chicken coops than human habitations. When Raymond Williams (1973) discusses the dis¬ parities produced by capitalist development in the English country¬ side, he says: Capitalism has in this sense always been an ambiguous process: increasing real wealth but distributing it unevenly; enabling larger populations to grow and survive, but within them see¬ ing men only as producers and consumers, with no substantial claim on society except in these abstract capacities. There was thus a continuing contrast between the extraordinary improve¬ ment of the land and the social consequences of just this pro¬ cess, in the dispossessed and the vagrants, and the old, the sick, the disabled, the nursing mothers, the children, who, unable to work in these terms, were seen as merely negative, an unwanted burden. To see the paradox of successful produc¬ tion and these human consequences would be to penetrate the inner character of capitalism itself. (82) The paradox Williams points to applies to the urban-based industrial production of South Africa. The cities that the African laborers built under capitalist production became the instrument of domination employed against them by capital, with the acquiescence of the white working class. In spite ol all these discriminatory measures, the African peoples continued to move to the cities during the period of development of secondary industry. Between 1921 and 1936 the urban African pop¬ ulation nearly doubled. In 1937 an advocate of segregation stated: “...the towns constitute the front trenches of our position in South Africa. It is in the towns that siege is being made against our civilized standards” (Welsh, 1971, 188). The Africans were not being drawn to the cities just because of the relatively high wages offered by the developing secondary industries: the

276

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

1930s saw, simultaneously, a crisis in agriculture on the African reserves. The land allotted in 1913 to such a large number of people and the pro¬ vision made for individual tenure had led to overcrowding of land, a decline in productivity, and subsequent malnutrition and starvation9 (Kibodya, 1968,123; Davenport and Hunt, 1974,33). The government of South Africa, unnerved by the flow of labor to secondary industries and the consequent shortage of labor in the mines and farms, empow¬ ered itself by a 1937 amendment to the Urban Areas Act to control African entry into urban areas unless the worker were going to the mines. A third major period of capital accumulation, the industrial boom that began during World War II10 and abated only in recent years, pro¬ vided another stimulus to the inexorable flow of Africans to the towns from the reserves and white-owned farms — a flow based on economic necessity. The development of urban-industrial capitalism during this period would not have been possible without the accelerated incor¬ poration of African labor into the urban economic complexes. Moreover, the movement to towns was becoming an increasingly per¬ manent process. “The 1939-40 Report of the Native Affairs Commission estimated the number of permanently urbanized Africans to be 750,000. The Broome Commission found that in 1946 nearly one quarter of Durban’s African population could be regarded as per¬ manently urbanized” (Welsh, 1971,210). The 1946-48 report of the Fagan Commission stated unequivocally: ...the idea of total segregation is utterly impracticable; secondly, that the movement from country to town has a background of economic necessity — that it may, so one hopes, be guided and regulated, and may perhaps also be limited, but that it cannot be stopped or be turned in the opposite direction; and third¬ ly that in our urban areas there are not only Native migrant laborers, but there is also a settled, permanent Native popula¬ tion. (Welsh, 1971, 190) The increasing permanence of urban residence is an indication that the reserves at this point in time had become increasingly dysfunctional, a consequence of which was the increasing militancy of African labor to improve its meager lot in the cities. From 1941 to 1949, 1,684,915 African man-hours were lost because of strike activity — nearly ten times as many man-hours as in the comparable period 1930-39. To quote Bundy (cited by Magubane, 1974-75):

277

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Strike activity by Africans reached a new peak in the Second World War: 304 strikes involving 58,000 non-Whites took place during 1939-45, even in the teeth of the notorious War Measure 145 of 1942, outlawing all strikes by Africans, and imposing swingering penalties for participation by Blacks in any industrial stoppage. In 1946 black South Africans staged their largest strike: 75,000 gold miners on the Reef came out. They were driven back down the shafts at the ends of clubs and rifles, sustaining some dozen deaths and over 1,200 injuries. Smuts (whose government managed this and other similar exercises in industrial arbitration) introduced a Bill making African trade unionism illegal, and decreeing strikes in certain sectors of the economy a criminal offense. (27) The above passage indicates a crucial feature of the policies of the United Party government. Although it was subject to the castigating attacks of the Nationalist Party because it could not curb the contin¬ ued influx of Africans to the towns, all political parties (hence, all of the different fractions of capital the parties represented) agreed that Africans should be prevented from organizing — i.e., that they should be kept as fractionalized and disunified as possible. In 1948, the United Party lost the election to the Nationalists, who came in under the dubious banner of apartheid. The relaxing of segre¬ gation policies during the 1940s had created stiff opposition from the farmers, who experienced a labor shortage because they could not pos¬ sibly compete with the wages offered to Africans in capitalist enterpris¬ es located in the developing urban complexes. There was also fear on the part of the white working class that the relaxing of segregation would not only create competition for jobs but would ultimate lead to the demise of preferential treatment. Since 1948 the Nationalists have done more to structure and control urban segregation and influx than any other political group in the history of South Africa. We shall go into the details below, but first a brief theoretical digression is necessary. It is a theoretical imperative of any study of urbanization to analyze the relationship of the state to the observable phenomena of urbaniza¬ tion. Within South African the role that legislation has had in fostering specific kinds of urban patterns is immense. However, to begin to dis¬ cuss the role of the state with regard to urbanization it is first necessary to point to the relationship of the state as a superstructural feature of a social formation to the economic base of that social formation. “It [the 278

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

state] operates through apparatuses which maintain the domination of the ruling class, but at the cost of continuously reproducing the class struggle” (Locke, 1976, 14). A slight modification is required here. We cannot assume for our present purposes that the capitalist class is a uni¬ fied whole — although it is the ruling class. Within the capitalist class there are various fractions that can oppose one another, e.g., within South Africa, the competition between white farmers and urban-based industrialists for African labor causes such opposition. The state is the instrument by which one fraction can attempt to increase its econom¬ ic position through political hegemony. State policy therefore depends not only on which fraction is exercising political hegemony but also on the relationship of that fraction to the other fraction(s) in the economic sphere, that is, whether the economic position of the other fraction is so strong that continued disregard of its needs might constitute a threat to the political hegemony of the fraction in question. Thus, the state can also be an organ that neutralizes conflicts among the competing fractions of capital. The Nationalist Party of South Africa, which goes back to the early years of Union, represents the view of rural capitalism — that fraction of capital born under imperialism but opposed to imperialism.11 Afrikaner capital did not have either an independent financial base or a sufficient electoral base of its own; consequently, it had to devise a strategy by which it could use the state as a source of capital accumulation, and for this it allied itself with white workers both during the Pact government in 1924 and in 1948 to continue its political hegemony. Poulantzas (1973) points out that economic domination and political hegemony cannot be identified in a necessary and mechanical fashion: “It is possi¬ ble for a fraction of the bourgeoisie to have the dominant role in the economy without thereby having political hegemony” (44). From 1948 to the present the political hegemony of South Africa has been held by this fraction of capital. Urban controls over the influx of African labor and the ferocity with which any attempts at African organization have been dealt with (during the 1920s the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union began to make inroads among rural workers) are beneficial for its functioning, and the preferential treat¬ ment given to whites in the labor force does not affect it, for it does not employ white labor. However, in South Africa the urban-based enterprises of Afrikaner industrialist and imperialists alike are the locus of South Africa’s econ-

279

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

omy. Yet, the simple fact that the latter group does not exercise polit¬ ical hegemony has important consequences for urban-industrial devel¬ opment, as we shall see. Immediately after the Nationalist Party came to power, it passed a number of legislative measures that were to leave an indelible stamp on urbanization in subsequent years. These included the Population Registration Act (1949); the Native Abolition of Passes and Coord¬ ination of Documents Act (1952), in which inefficient pass laws were repealed and mandatory possession of reference books by Africans was instituted (in these books was to be included all the information pre¬ viously included in separate documents) — i.e., a streamlining of pre¬ vious pass laws; and the establishment of labor bureaus directing African workers to posts where they were required by white employers. Two other pieces of legislation require special attention. A 1952 amend¬ ment to the Urban Areas Act brought all urban areas within its scope, thus making all urban areas subject to influx controls. Significantly, limited provision was made in the Act (under Section 10) for some permanent African residents in urban locations — those who were born in the towns, who had worked for an employer for ten years or more, and who had lived lawfully in a town for fifteen years or more — to accommodate the needs of the growing industries that could not sub¬ sist on a steady diet of migrant labor. This represented a concession by agricultural and mining capital to urban industry. By far the most important law, however, was the 1950 Group Areas Act. This Act was an intensification of the residential segregation previously in effect under the Urban Areas Act. Provision was made for the zoning of all urban areas into sections designating the exclusive preserve of partic¬ ular groups. Under this Act not only Africans but also Indians and Coloreds were subject to segregationist practices. The Act created mas¬ sive disturbances within the urban areas as large numbers of people were uprooted and “rezoned.” There are two basic aspects of the policy of apartheid. First, most of the legislation passed by the Nationalist Party government deals with control of the movement of African labor. The government is empow¬ ered to control the movement of labor, effectively assigning it to who¬ ever most requires it. Because mining and agriculture still use labor recruitment rather than the market, restriction of entry into urban areas ensures that these two branches of capitalist production will have suf¬ ficient labor to meet their needs. A.H. Voslos, Deputy Minister of 280

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

Bantu Development, made the following remarks in 1968 (Centre Against Apartheid, 1976): “...As far as the interests of agriculture are concerned, it has been the policy, since the inception of labour bureaux in 1952, to identify Bantu farm labour, and to divorce it from urban labor which is inclined towards the industrial and commercial sectors” (44). As if to emphasize the point, when opening an agricultural exhib¬ it in Middelberg, Transvaal, the same year, he declared: A record of every registered Bantu farm labourer is kept in a central register at Pretoria, and the position is that the labour¬ er cannot be employed in the urban areas because as soon as his service contract must be registered, it will be established that he is a farm labourer and then he cannot legally be taken into service. The whole control of Bantu farm labourers revolves therefore around the single cog of registration of each labourer in your service at your local Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s office. However, to restrict entry into urban areas to an inordinate extent would precipitate conflicts among the various sectors of capital. Thus, government must seek to neutralize possible conflicts. The antithesis between town and country in this context means specifically a fight over the control of African labor — the indispensable condition for capital accumulation — between the rural and urban-based sectors of capital. Second, apartheid is a system of repression. The vicious policies leveled against the black population of South Africa for the benefit of the white working class and, above all, a specific segment of capital have done much to unmask the exploitative character of capitalism. The system as it is articulated in South Africa cannot depend on the primacy of ideology to maintain it: it must, of necessity, be maintained by force and by the prevention of political unity among Africans, Coloreds, and Indians. In 1954 the government tried to institute ethnic grouping within urban areas, attempting compulsory residential segregation by lan¬ guage group. On the face of it, this measure does not seem so divisive. When we consider, however, that it is through residential proximity that the languages of other peoples are generally acquired (since lan¬ guage is, of course, a means of communication), this measure does much to prevent the realization of one of the conditions — a common

281

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

language(s) — on which political unity must be built. Considering also the urban dislocation this measure must have caused, we can under¬ stand why it was shown to be a major cause of a 1957 Soweto riot. The urban policies of apartheid have made the position of Africans and other nonwhites in urban areas extremely unstable. The campaign of repression also resulted in the banning, in 1960, of the ANC and the PAC, two African nationalist organizations. Yet, in spite of all the government controls and the liberal use of force, political activity in the towns has continued to grow. The banned orga¬ nizations, allied with unrecognized African trade unions, have contin¬ ued to work clandestinely. The widespread strikes of 1973 and the 1976 uprisings in black townships are testimony to this. We can see the truth in Locke’s statement that the state apparatuses reproduce class struggle. Nowhere is this more obvious than in South Africa. The massive repression required for the maintenance of apartheid threat¬ ens to undermine capitalist production in toto by the tremendous polit¬ ical resistance it provokes. Godelier12 has said that domination must be based on consent of the dominated to their domination, and must therefore appear in the form of an exchange. Although this holds for white workers, to Africans, Indians, and Coloreds, the relations of dom¬ ination are quite transparent. The almost total reliance on force places the regime of apartheid in increasingly precarious straits. The forms of government repression extend beyond such blatant measures, however. In the 1950s, the government went so far as to change the geography of capitalist accumulation through the border industries scheme, two intentions of which were to decentralize pos¬ sibilities for political resistance and to minimize conflict from indus¬ trial capital, which would otherwise be forced to pay inflated wages to white workers. (But because the city represents fixed capital, industries there have a certain permanency and cannot be picked up and moved at will. As a result, it is doubtful that the border industries scheme con¬ tributed to any significant degree to the minimization of conflict between industrial and agricultural capital.) The innovatory aspect of the new phase of labour repression consists in the creation of industrial centres — the border industries — to which capital and labour will be directed from older centres. Most border industries are located in areas where long established Afrikaner communities exist and where African labour is close at hand (English-speaking east London is an 282

The Political Economy of the City in South Africa

exception). The most prominent border industries are located near Pretoria, Brintz, Pietersburg in the northern Transvaal, and in the Ladysmith-Newcastle vicinity in northern Natal. These activities will ensure that Afrikaner areas acquire an increased share of the national income. Their effect upon the African worker will be to depress wages. Private capital, some of it redirected from the older industrial areas, estimated to be R.314 million, was invested in the border areas in the years 1965-1968. The Industrial Development Corporation has increased its contribution to the border areas from R.21 mil¬ lion to R.65 million in the years 1965-1968, while wage deter¬ minations for African workers in the border areas are lower than those in the older industrial centers. Work which Africans are usually precluded from doing is permitted in the border indus¬ tries at wage scales customary for Africans. (Trapido, 1970-71, 59-60. Emphasis added.) The Nationalist Party government considers the border industries scheme to be in keeping with it policy of territorial segregation, but it is merely a modern form of the unequal integration of African com¬ munities. The “homelands” attached to the urban locations of the bor¬ der industries are mere appendages, which depend on industrial employment in white areas for their very survival. It is the union of the “homeland,” with its correspondent white community, that represents the true boundary of the South African version of the urban system. Nor has the border industries scheme been sufficient to prevent conflict among the competing sectors of capital. A government plan in 1966 proposing to reduce the number of African laborers in urbanindustrial complexes by 5 percent per year was bitterly opposed by industrialists concerned about the possibilities for expansion. Successive amendments to the Urban Areas Act have made it increasingly diffi¬ cult for Africans to obtain permanent town residence (Welsh, 1971, 194, 199). The consequence of these and other measures has been increasing reliance on white labor in the older urban economic com¬ plexes and, understandably, a decline in the general rate of profit for South African enterprise, not only for indigenous and state capital but for imperial capital as well. The average rate of return on U.S. direct investment has declined as follows (Williams, 1975, 15):

283

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Investments overseas

South Africa World

1962

1972

19.9 11.3

9.8 13.1

Overseas investment in manufacturing

South Africa World

1962

1972

24.6 9.9

7.1 12.7

The rate of return on foreign investment in South Africa is now below the world average. So long as the miserable policies of apartheid guaranteed a high rate of return on industrial investment by the exploitation of African and other nonwhite labor, they went unquestioned. It now appears, however, that because of their limited focus, they are the greatest obsta¬ cle to the further development of capitalism. The political hegemony of the Afrikaner farmer and his beneficiaries, the white worker and the English mine-owner, is being questioned. And the opposition centers on the urban policy of apartheid. No longer does the opposition include merely the nonwhite working class: it encompasses the high¬ ly developed urban-industrial complex itself.13 It is extremely difficult to predict the outcome of the urban-centered conflict that is taking shape. One thing, however, is certain. The urban policies of apartheid are under siege, from both the recent reces¬ sion and the upsurge of working-class militancy in the township, com¬ plemented by external threats from the exile movement.

284

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

Other historians relate facts to inform us of facts. You relate them to excite in our hearts an intense hatred of lying, igno¬ rance, hypocrisy, superstition, fanaticism, tyranny; and the anger remains even after the memory of the facts has disappeared. —Diderot, Letter to Voltaire1 My apology for undertaking this seemingly impossible project — to review so many books on such a variety of subjects — is that it pro¬ vides me with an opportunity to assess the overall contribution of the University of California Press series, “Perspectives on Southern Africa,” to our understanding of the basic issues in Southern Africa. When the first book of the series appeared in 1971, Southern Africa stood upon the threshold of a decisive period of her history. The guer¬ rilla wars in the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola that had been simmering for almost a decade were entering their critical phase, which would end in 1974 with the toppling of the Portuguese dictatorship itself. In Namibia, the Ovambo migrant strike had shaken the South African regime, and the United Nations; demands for South Africa’s withdrawal from its illegal occu¬ pation of the territory were becoming stronger. In the Caprivi Strip, the guerrillas of the South West Africa Peoples Organization (S.W.A.P.O.) were becoming increasingly effective. And in Zimbabwe (“Rhodesia”) the Africans had just massively rejected the Pearce Commission Proposal for the settlement of the constitutional dispute between the white minority regime and Britain. In South Africa itself, the regimen of silence imposed on the African people since 1963 was

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

being broken: signs of ferment and agitation were everywhere, the Black Consciousness movement was growing, and workers were strik¬ ing throughout the urban areas. South Africa launched its diplomatic offensive, its proposed detente, in an effort to counter and neutralize the expanding liberation movements. At home it quickened the pace of its program to “Bantustanize” the reserves. The Americans, for their part, had already begun to reassess the situation in Southern Africa and the policy positions they could assume; this was signalled by the Nixon administration’s commissioning of the now famous “NSSM-39,” with its “Tar Baby” option two. What is the contribution of the California series to our under¬ standing of the current epoch and its ongoing transformations? What can we learn from it about the complex course of events in Southern Africa in the 1970’s and about the underlying polarizing developmental processes? Contemporary development, let it be said at the outset, is not a field of study for those who see no need for comprehensive the¬ ory of social change, for an understanding of the laws of motion that define the epoch and the social formation under examination. For in examining the present as history, it is absolutely indispensable to be able to distinguish rigorously between events that have long-term roots and implications and those that are ephemeral. One must depict with clarity and a sure hand the real processes at work in their totality and interconnections; seldom will anything less do. Fragmentary descrip¬ tions, however voluminous and detailed, provide no substitute what¬ soever for sustained reasoned theoretical argument. Georg Lukacs, in one of his more provocative comments, observed that “The un- or anti-historical core of bourgeois thought appears in its most glaring form when we consider the problem of the present as an historical problem.”2 In the study of Southern Africa, the common curse among academics is to participate in the tacit intellectual con¬ sensus to avoid seeing the present problems as historical problems; to eschew the needed holistic view; and to fail, as a result, to comprehend the real matters at issue either singularly or, more importantly, in their interrelations. Indeed, should a basic issue unavoidably have to be faced in a study, it may be acknowledged, but only in passing and often with the demurrer that unfortunately its analysis lies outside the purview and competence of the author. Instead, reality from the start is frag¬ mented into the domains of the various disciplinary specialists, and the developing whole never comes into view. Once again, the detailed

286

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

examination of trees eliminates the forest from sight. The underlying dialectic is obliterated, leaving only disparate figures to find their momentary, ungrounded way into the analyst’s perforce subjective vision. Marx once pointed out, in commenting on his Hegelian con¬ temporaries, that “not only in their answers but in their very questions there was mystification.”3 Much the same can be said of this California series. After reading and re-reading the eighteen volumes published thus far, I can find very little to commend them as a whole (although there is merit in one or another particular study). The great majority of them contribute little or nothing to our understanding of the cur¬ rent era in Southern Africa. Indeed they do worse than merely fail. Together they manage to obfuscate the complexities of the social move¬ ment in Souther Africa and to deny in their premises its historical orig¬ inality. Not a single one of the issues critical to an informed understanding of the unfolding reality of the region comes into focus in these volumes in a manner admitting of the issue’s practical com¬ prehension and resolution. Nor can it, given the largely tacit frame¬ work for analysis with which, or rather, within which, most authors of the series have worked. What is this framework? The rest of this review-essay represents an effort to answer this query. What follows, accordingly, is not a detailed discussion of each and every one of the studies but instead an attempt to elucidate the unstated conceptual, methodological, and theoretical framework informing the collection of studies as a whole and thus, in varying degrees, each of the volumes in turn. For as Mukherjee has pointedly observed in examining studies of an unfolding reality, what most demands critical appraisal is the authors’ conceptualization of their subject matter and the method of inquiry they consequently must employ.4 Still, two general observations about the series merit mention at the outset. First, the volumes under review — lam referring specifi¬ cally here to those relating to the history, sociology, economics, and politics of the region — use, with but one or two exceptions, the mono¬ graphic method. Consequently, no attempt is made within any of them, nor within any special volume, to fuse the disparate disciplinary and specialist approaches into a totalizing method. However, such a method is both necessary for, and appropriate to, the disciplined study of Southern Africa in formation, simultaneously as an historical totality in its own right and as a segment or subsystem of the larger englob-

287

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ing world economy. Moreover, it being characteristic of monographs that they are largely if not entirely descriptive, and so provide little in the way of theoretical insight, the authors take refuge, as it were, in specialist accumulations of data within narrow (arbitrarily demarcat¬ ed) spheres. Their compilations often show great industry and tech¬ nical talent but seldom any theoretical insight or sophistication. One moves painfully and archly, if at all, from their monographic descrip¬ tions to any inferences whatsoever about the laws of social develop¬ ment that are reflected in the complex of trends and events in Southern Africa today and are indispensable for their interpretation. It has been said of the monograph that it is “much ado about very little.”5 If I take issue with this method, or rather approach, as I do, it is because, like many another intellectual approach to social reality, it has largely unexamined premises and implications, and an inquiry into its scope and character, in the study of Southern Africa, may throw more gen¬ eral light on the practice the method serves and supports. Secondly, one of the more striking aspects of the series as a whole is that the subjects covered form an extraordinarily broad array: there is a little of everything — literature and history, economics and auto¬ biography, politics and poetry, etc. At the same time, no organizing principles are made apparent; there is not even a contribution that undertakes to sketch how the various studies do or do not relate to one another. Eclecticism, however, reflects an intellectual condition, not a “perspective,” and an eclectic collection is far from a coherent set of “perspectives.” Indeed, it is the direct antithesis of the ordered array of angles of vision needed in the disciplined study of social wholes. Nothing thus binds the volumes together into a real series, not even the pervasive, if uncertain, bias toward empiricist, anti-Marxist work. For even this bias takes many unrelated forms throughout the volumes, and in any case such a bias can no longer serve in today’s intellectual world as a sufficient source for the kind of thematic coherence a series proper requires. The collection as a whole, then, shares as manifest common threads nothing more than a geographical locus, a chrono¬ logical ordering of publication, and the imprint of the same publish¬ er. Each contribution remains imprisoned within its own narrow boundaries, and the set of volumes as a whole stands as one more mon¬ ument to the blocked intellectual development of established social science, showing as it does, with embarrassing clarity, the growing irrel¬ evance of its theories and the parallel poverty of its concept.

288

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

It is symptomatic that the series begins with The Autobiography of an Unknown South African by Naboth Mokgatle, who uses the tech¬ niques of the autobiography to trace South Africa’s social and politi¬ cal history. One may sympathize with and admire his sensitivity and eloquence, as I do, but his story does no more than evoke our pity, it does not and cannot serve as a lesson to advance the struggles of the oppressed. In fact, the lone-ranger political activist that Mokgatle sym¬ bolizes, however gifted, can never be effective. Only the one who understands the importance of organization and concerted mass strug¬ gle will transcend our pity. Mokgatle, after working with the South African Communist Party, became disillusioned and gave up the fight. This is the message that comes through in The Autobiography— hope¬ lessness and defeatism. Mokgatle’s story contrasts sharply with the experience of Moses Kotane, whose biography has just been published in London and who never allowed temporary hardships and disillu¬ sionment to force him into inactivity. One wonders whether the University of California Press would have published Kotane’s biogra¬ phy in this series. The nature of South Africa’s racism and the prospect for revolu¬ tionary change has been central to the study of Southern Africa. Heribert Adam’s book, Modernizing Racial Discrimination, which was the second in the series, focuses on the theoretical issues. Apartheid is conceptualized as a “systematic attempt to reverse economic inte¬ gration as much as possible by legislating social barriers in order to channel the inevitable political consequences of African economic advancement in the interests of the privileged whites.” (p. 8) Adam asserts: “Class or status structures within each group [white, African, Coloured, and Indian] seem to be a secondary importance, since the ascriptive criteria of race determined overall life.” (p. 9) The central question Adam poses is: “What, apart from naked coercion, enables a society ridden with such deep-seated conflicts to continue to func¬ tion?” (p. 15) A number of organizing concepts are considered and rejected — cultural pluralism, colonial imperialism, totalitarianism, fas¬ cism — before Adam proposes his own candidate, “pragmatic oli¬ garchy,” whose virtue, he says, is that besides being descriptively appropriate, it suggests theoretical grounds for anticipating the direc¬ tion in which settler colonialism is likely to develop (p. 17). Not unre¬ lated is his concern to “show that revolutionary change in South Africa — with mutual use of force exceeding the degree of coercion implic-

289

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

it in repressive laws — is unlikely to occur in the near future.” (p. 15) a conclusion he draws from both what he calls “actual developments” (p. 15) in the economic sphere and what he believes will be their effect, namely, enough Afrikaner acceptance of African advancement to stem the growth of unity and strength among revolutionary forces (p. 182). But then he adds, “South Africa’s political dynamics dialectically strengthen the antagonists of white domination by the very process of their separation and exclusion until the subordinates themselves have accumulated sufficient power for their own liberation” (p. 183). Since he has earlier dismissed as ineffectual both the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (P.A.C.), through what real processes among what real people engaged in what real strug¬ gle is this “dialectical” accumulation of power in the hands of the oppressed supposed to take place? Adam has no answer; indeed, he does not even ask the question. Instead he “grounds” his epilogic claim on nothing firmer than the vague and airy hope that, somehow, the Bantustans “could provide a rallying point and organizational platform [sic!] in Azania,” (p. 183) thereby dispensing with argument altogether in favor of mere assertion. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Adam is both able and well-intentioned. That his book fails so pro¬ foundly reflects all the more clearly the current condition of “main¬ stream” social science. The analysis bears no relation to living reality; it betrays no concern with practice; and throughout it begs the cen¬ tral question, the nature of racism as historical process in capitalist development. Of necessity, then, its “conclusions” amount to no more than a set of magic formulae. A vague hope that right will prevail (but without anyone’s being hurt!) organizes the discussions and under¬ pins the putative results; nothing more. That disciplined scientific inquiry should provide serious assessments of a changing reality total¬ ly escapes Adam, as does the sad result that his utopian faith in the Bantustans as agencies of change becomes only yet another apology for separate development. He knows better, and we deserve better. His “science” fails us both. But the lesson is larger. Bourgeois sociology — I use the adjective deliberately lacks the concept to study racism because its epistemological premises preclude its producing one. At the same time, its incapacity to conceive racism is matched by its inability to escape the question of racism. And so we have had a regular parade of notions passing before the reviewing stand, each receiving much applause in

290

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

its short-lived moment of glory, each fading away as the next-in-line comes into view. With respect just to South Africa it’s been a “pigmentocracy,” a “herrenvolk democracy,” a “caste society” — and now it is said to be a society with a “pragmatic obligarchy.” What will it take to end this parade — the collapse of the reviewing stand? Let me return to Adam. He claims his concept not only helps explain what has gone before but helps forecast what is to come as well. We are assured of the overwhelming strength of the government and of the corresponding weakness of the opposition forces both inside and outside the country. And we are warned not to be misled by the A.N.C.’s empty revolutionary rhetoric which, we are given to under¬ stand, frequently misrepresents as movement what in reality, he reminds us, are only symbolic and inconsequential actions by a few brave souls. It is a tidy picture, a still-life, which leaves a little blank space in which movement might occur, but only in the up-country corners, in the Bantustans. And so there is simply no lace in his picturing of past and future patterns for the series of strikes that has wracked South African cities since the early 1970’s, nor for the student revolt that (publicly) began in 1976, nor for the recent sharp increase in organized unity among the regime’s growing array of opponents, and so on. Moreover, Adam fails to understand that the armed struggle initiated by the var¬ ious movements opposing white supremacy in the early 1960’s did not constitute a once-and-for-all confrontation. The fundamental aim of the various liberation movements was to chip away at, and eventually fracture, the weaker links of the structure of white power. Such a strug¬ gle has its moments of success and its moments of reversal, over a long, protracted, deepening crisis. And this is precisely what empiricism can¬ not even grasp, let alone assess. Its assumptions are bound to what is, and its conclusions to existing categories, and therefore to existing con¬ ditions. Processes which are not immediately perceived, but which nonetheless exist and are working to undermine and to transform the basic structures of the society under review, are excluded from the ana¬ lyst’s purview. In the world of monographs, such fundamental errors of conception, analysis, and assessment as may be found in Modernizing Racial Domination at worst only sends the author back to the type¬ writer. In the real world, they send liberation forces to defeat. Adam, this time in the company of several others, continues his respect for the South African government and its ability to contain rev¬ olutionary change in the collection of conference papers edited by

291

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Leonard Thompson and Jeffrey Butler and entitled Change in Contemporary South Africa, number seventeen in the series. Taken as a whole the book is an even more spectacular case of the failure of the empiricist orthodoxy that characterizes Western academic scholarship in general and the volumes in this series in particular. The first half of the present decade, 1970-75, saw the beginnings of a decisive phase in the struggle against white superiority regimes in Southern Africa. And it was precisely in this period that there began a sharp debate over the future of the liberation movements. The “established” theoreti¬ cians of Southern African affairs remained firmly within their empiri¬ cist framework and construed the new elements in the development e.g., South Africa’s outward strategy, America’s overtures to white regimes as negating the revolutionary process and thus as confirm¬ ing (yet again...) the correctness of their presumptions. (Some even drew “conclusions” from their interpretations that, at best, showed a deep prejudice against the liberation movements and a virtual endorse¬ ment of the positions advanced by the propagandists for the status quo.) Others, however, opposed these theoreticians, as I did, essen¬ tially on the ground that they completely misconstrued the meaning and significance of the new elements in the process of Southern Africa’s liberation. But from the papers in this volume one would never even know of that debate. Perhaps it is just as well, for the failure of ortho¬ doxy, to which the collection is monument, stands out all the more clearly. Exactly a fortnight after the conclusion of the conference where these papers were first presented, the collapse of the Portuguese dic¬ tatorship occurred. In the light of the ongoing train of events of which that collapse forms a part, the direction in which most conference par¬ ticipants believed events to be moving stands today like the unclothed emperor, as a slightly comic spectacle testifying to the ethos of fanta¬ sy with which the participants provided themselves. If we were to be kind, we could excuse the volume as one more demonstration of human fallibility and proceed to another book in the series, but as the only participant in the conference whose contribution was not pub¬ is ed in the volume, I cannot be that magnanimous.6 Owing to the thoughtlessness of the Portuguese in timing the collapse of the dictatorshtp when they did, the papers had, according to the editors, to be radically revised” and in some cases virtually rewritten from scratch. I am sure that is true. Unfortunately, the extra work made very little

292

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

difference. Mere rewriting cannot eliminate such fundamental weak¬ nesses as empiricism, subjectivism (in evaluating events), and eclecti¬ cism entail, especially in the analysis of contemporary history. Change in Contemporary South Africa looks at developments in South Africa in complete isolation from the contemporary epoch — an era not only of socialist and national revolution but one of a deep¬ ening general crisis of the capitalist mode of production as a whole. To one who fails to understand the character of the current epoch on a world-scale, the prospect of revolutionary change in South Africa, even after the collapse of the Portuguese regime, might well seem remote. Besides, South Africa in 1974 seemed to many strong and invulnerable, and most of the participants in the conference saw it that way. For Adam, Butler, Thompson, et al., the African in South Africa was condemned to decades of white misrule and agony. The authors spelled out the weaknesses of the liberation movement in bold relief. If change were to come, therefore, it would have to come, they argued, either from the further development of the capitalist economy or from benevolence and concessions made by the graces of the white settler states. For those so blind to the historical character of the modern epoch, the independence of Mozambique and Angola was not less fan¬ tastic than, say, a landing of Martians in Mississippi would be. (It was, however, anticipated by a few participants — Gervasi, Nolutshungu, Sachs — who were not blind to the larger environment in which the events in South Africa unfolded.) Though the editors included the “controversial” contributions of these three, Thompson in his conclusion saw to it that the GervasiNolutshungu thesis was singled out for special denunciation as a con¬ spiratorial theory concerning the role of what he called politely the external factor. Thompson and Butler are professional men attached to the English wing of the South African establishment. They show mild indignation at the oppression of the African by the Afrikaner but are rabid at the prospect of majority rule in South Africa. If the Africans wish to “participate” in a white-dominated government they may be acceptable; if they seek to overthrow the current socio-economic and political system, then they are irresponsible, and their voice need not even be entertained. The epistemological error here corresponds to what Whitehead many years ago called, “the fallacy of simple loca¬ tion.”7 Its effect in this instance is to preclude the indispensable basis for analyses of the surf contained in Change in Contemporary South

293

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Africa, namely, a serious study of Southern Africa as a peripheral cap¬ italist formation dominated by imperialism. The study of the economic laws of motion of such a formation would have thrown light on the principal contradictions in the region. Indeed, on the verge of the last quarter of the twentieth century, world capitalism finds itself in the grip of a crisis unparalleled in its scope and depth. And South Africa, the citadel of racial capitalism in Africa, has in turn been gripped by a series of crises unprecedented in force and sharpness. And with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and the escalating strug¬ gles in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa itself, the ruling circles in South Africa and their international backers and apologists are being forced to confront the growing failure not only of their foreign poli¬ cy but of their domestic policy as well. The study of nationalism poses formidable theoretical problems. Peter Walshe’s monograph, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-1952, number three in the series, addresses none of them. The unearthing of every fact is admirable but, in the nature of the case, cannot provide an explana¬ tory narrative. Nor is it enough to recount events and statements by the leaders of particular movements, whose attitudes to nationalism are circumscribed by their class positions. Nor is nationalism as a cur¬ rent of the contemporary world ever adequately reflected in, or effec¬ tively studies through, the social thought of individuals alone. Nor is nationalism immutable. Its content and direction change as new social forces develop, as new classes emerge and form. Accordingly, it can¬ not be understood apart from its primary relational setting, namely, the relation between class consciousness and nationale consciousness. The growth of the African working class during World War I and the formation of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (I.C.U.) set in motion an interrelated set of national, economic, political and ideological struggles that would influence the African National Congress throughout its prolonged efforts to articulate and realize African aspirations. Nor can one come to terms with “the rise of African nationalism in South Africa except by understanding and appraising thoroughly the real relations that developed among the A.N.C., the I.C.U., the Communist Party (S.A.C.P.), the South African Indian Congress and the Coloured Peoples’ Organisation. Though each one of these organizations had a specific national audience, each at the same time sought for common ground with the others. By organizing his

294

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

monograph on the A.N.C. essentially in terms of ideas that inspired its leaders, Walshe was of course unable to handle the complex rela¬ tions over time among the organizations of the oppressed in South Africa. More generally he was unable, in virtue of his focus and method, to anchor his “intellectual history” in anything of material importance — the developing social relations of production, the developing social consciousness, the developing organization of the oppressed. The “nationalism” whose “rise” he depicts floats above the real historical movement like wisps of smoke above the fire producing them. What constituted a major area of common interest and conver¬ gence among the various movements? In the evolution of the A.N.C., particularly in the 1920’s and continuing to the present, the class char¬ acter of the membership has played an increasingly determining role and today makes its imprint on all organizations of the oppressed including the nationally oriented ones. The S.A.C.P., too often with¬ out success, has struggled to forge the unity of the different organi¬ zations by emphasizing the centrality of the class struggle: in relation to the owners of capital, all workers — Africans, Coloured, Indian, and white — were in the same class situation, and the S.A.C.P. has con¬ tinuously aimed to weld the various fractions of the working class together in a single movement, and in that way transform it, as it grows, from developing as a class in itself to developing as a class for itself. The relations between the A.N.C. and the S.A.C.P. thus form an area of great ideological debate and controversy. Unfortunately, instead of enlightening, Walshe obscures. His bias against the S.A.C.P. leads him to oversimplify throughout the complexities of the developing rela¬ tionship between the A.N.C. and the S.A.C.P., and thus he provides a seriously distorted account. Very seldom have writers attempted to treat Black involvement in the Communist Party as an organic out¬ growth of the African class situation and of their understanding of their oppression, not only at the level of superstructure but at the level of the economy as well. Far more often the involvement of the Africans with the S.A.C.P. has been conceived as a betrayal of the principles of nationalism, and the Africans who participated both in the N.A.C. and S.A.C.P. were portrayed as being either duped or, at best, misguided. Thus Walshe writes: It was therefore with some justification that the great majori¬ ty of congressmen looked upon their communist colleagues not only as dogmatic harbingers of a foreign and revolution295

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ary credo, but as a divisive influence, working at the dictates of a predominantly European Central Executive and seeking to take over the leadership of the African struggle. (362) Did the majority of these congressmen who objected to their Communist comrades think that Christianity and Cape liberalism were indigenous ideologies? If so, by what logic? Contrasting sharply with Walshe’s monograph is Allen Isaacman’s study, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique. Here we find the insights and perspectives, conceptual framework, and scholarly fairness lacking in Walshe’s book. Isaacman is a committed intellectual who applies a rigorous analysis with the result that his study is very good academically while at the same time it enables those struggling against colonial rule to develop further their perspectives and to realize more fully how firmly based their struggle is in earlier resistance. The observation made by J.J. Rousseau in his Julie is useful here: I think it is foolish to try to study society as a mere bystander. The man that wants only to observe observes nothing, as he is useless in business and a dead weight in amusements, he is not drawn into anything. We see others’ actions only to the extent that we act ourselves. In the school of the world, as in love’s school, we have to start by practicing what we want to learn.8 This proposition extends as well to efforts to study African resistance to colonial rule. For Walshe, African nationalism is the by-product of the Cape tradition. The origins of African political consciousness go back in his view to the Christian missionaries of the nineteenth centu¬ ry and to Cape liberalism. This is unacceptable. The source of African nationalism is the tradition of resistance to conquest. If that would be learned, it has to be practiced. The sterile descriptive method adopt¬ ed by Walshe fails to bring order to the “facts” depicted, to analyze and to synthesize them. The Isaacman book, in contrast, though giv^ great deal of descriptive detail, shows sound analysis throughout and so provides a coherent, explanatory narrative account. The task of a truly scientific analysis of nationalism can never be simply a description of this or that statement by this or that leader. It consists instead in getting straight the essential features of the bewil¬ dering, changing complex that characterizes the growth of social phe¬ nomenon of nationalism. The Rise of Afrikanerdom by T. Dunbar and Afrikaner Politics in South Africa by Newell Stultz, numbers eleven 296

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

and thirteen, respectively, in the series, are great disappointments. Both monographs reflect the pernicious influence of what C. Wright Mills called “mindless empiricism.”9 Neither has an organizing theory of South African society and of the place of the Afrikaner in it, with the result that the beliefs and politics of the Afrikaner that they depict are reified, that is, made into substantial things having real effects with¬ out the processes giving them their attributed substance, and produc¬ ing their alleged effects, playing any part in the analysis whatsoever. If an organizing theory is too much to ask for, we might at least expect some effort to arrive at a theoretical understanding, some attempt to provide structural explanations at selected points. None is made. The influence of the Afrikaner brand of religion on their social pol¬ icy is the focus of Moodie’s book. As he puts it, he analyzes “the pol¬ icy of separate development as an attempt of sincere ChristianNationalist Afrikaners to impose ethnic non-racial pluralism on black African and white voters alike;” (x) We are also told that “class inter¬ est alone does not account for the extent to which the principle of sep¬ arate development is rooted in the Afrikaner’s own struggle for ethnic apartheid from the English in South Africa: (xi). And we are told: “In the Afrikaner civil religion, God imbues all history with ultimate mean¬ ing” (1). At the level of ideology these might be useful starting points. But this is Moodie the analyst speaking, not an Afrikaner leader. Given the accumulation and centralization of capital by the leaders of the nationalist movement, it should be obvious to anyone that the Afrikaner society can hardly be reduced to a religious community and depicted through the religious beliefs of its members or the ideas its members may develop about it. First and foremost are the material realities and social relations that define the place of the Afrikaner in South African society and the structure of Afrikaner relationships with Africans and other groups. The social relations between Afrikaners and Africans are thoroughly exploitative in the extreme and have nothing at all to do with ethnic non-racial pluralism. Politics and ideology may seem to rule, to the Moodies of this world, but it has been the imper¬ atives of capitalist development that have throughout played the deter¬ mining role in shaping the evolution of Afrikanerdom. Afrikaner Politics by Stultz is another example in the genre of ster¬ ile descriptive endeavors which explain nothing. The guiding concept for Stultz is political integration in what he calls a “culturally bifur¬ cated electorate” (3). Integration is supposed to refer to “the process

297

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

by which society develops the strong social cohesiveness that allows its member to take effective action to promote common goals and mutu¬ al interests; where that collective action is political in nature — that is, where it involves the governing institutions and sanctions of the state — we can say that political integration has occurred” (1). The politi¬ cal theory implicit here is questionable. But even more so is Stultz’s conception of political strategy, which he anchors in nothing more solid than his assessment of political and ideological circumstances. Politics, Lenin once observed, is the concentrated expression of eco¬ nomics10 — which is especially true of African and, in particular, of Afrikaner politics. The Nationalist Party’s political strategy since the early 1930’s has been a set of economic demands around which its political struggles have been organized. Stultz shows no serious under¬ standing of this absolutely central feature of “Afrikaner politics,” and the political arena he constructs in the book simply collapses in the course of the account for lack of anything to hold it up. Two other contributions in this series deal with the South African legal system: A.S. Mathews’ book, Law, Order and Liberty in South Africa, and Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa, numbers seven and twelve, respectively, in the series. The former takes off from the for¬ mulations of Dicey produced in 1885. This creates problems for Mathews because Dicey’s principles express nineteenth-century English (not even British) reality and can be made to seem to apply to South Africa only with much verbal juggling and contortion. The result is a book lacking not only a proper historical perspective but, as well, an appropriate sociological context. For Sachs, on the other hand, law is an instrument of class rule. His discussion of justice in South Africa is not an academic issue: he knows the workings of the South African laws from the wrong side of the prison bars. While Mathews is silent about the transformation of the South African judiciary system under successive nationalist government, which have appointed to the bench men more reliable for their political allegiance than for their devotion to abstract standards of jurisprudence, Sachs documents how the rule of law has been enforced to uphold the interests of the whites through¬ out the 300-odd years of domination and repression. From its begin¬ nings until the present time, the South African legal system has been the instrument of class and race rule. Without that fundamental fact as the point of departure and return, all the rest remains abstract, hol¬ low and unconvincing. In South Africa, as Sachs points out:

298

The Poverty- of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

The actual effects of the legal system and the interests pro¬ moted or suppressed by it should be as much a matter for enquiry as its formal elegance or procedural equity. The enhancement of techniques to serve ends which are unjust pro¬ motes rather than reduces injustice. In this connection it should be noted that the courts give a sense of orderliness and regu¬ larity to domination. (261) What does become especially clear from Mathews’ book is that an attempt to depict the horrors and abominations of apartheid, howev¬ er faithfully, is no substitute for a sustained theoretical analysis of the nature of peripheral capitalist society and its institutions. The volume, no doubt, may be a major source of reference on security legislation and judicial betrayal. It shows how the government has, by acts of omission and acts of commission, allowed the deprivation of rights and the torture of the opponents of apartheid. Professor Mathews urges the establishment of the “Rule of Law” in South Africa as a condition for the creation of a democratic society. This it seems to me is an idle call, short of such a change coming about in the course of revolutionary transformation. Mathews concedes the abandonment of the rule of law in South Africa, but he does not call into question the nature of the system requiring such misrule. But white settler rule and its cru¬ elties in Southern Africa cannot be understood without the sustained study of the system that makes such cruelties profitable. The indict¬ ment of the apartheid regime may arouse our indignation, but it does not enhance one iota our ability to destroy it. The rest of the books in this series deal with the areas on the South African periphery: Lesotho, Swaziland, South West Africa/Namibia, Zambia, and Mozambique. How does one best make sense of the com¬ plexity of Southern Africa? Kenneth Grundy, in his book. Confrontation and Accommodation in Southern Africa: The Limits of Independence, undertakes to clarify the relations between the various

states in Southern Africa. For this purpose, Grundy uses the systems approach, which he says has become popular among political analysts. Grundy writes that “international relations in Southern Africa can be most fruitfully surveyed if we view the states involved collectively as a regional system. The term regional sub-system is preferred here for several reasons. We are dealing with states that are geographically con¬ tiguous and that are, relatively speaking, removed from the general center of international political activity” (304-305). 299

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The systems approach is by definition ahistorical. And a deep the¬ oretical aversion to the study of imperialism as an historical force that shaped Southern Africa marks the trajectory of Grundy’s study of the regional relationships among states. Thus Grundy discusses at length the subject of boundaries in Southern Africa but is silent on imperial¬ ist hegemony in the region. We are told: In a relative sense, the Southern African regional sub-system operates in a vacuum. It may not be as isolated as the Americas in the nineteenth century, but Southern Africa is removed from direct great power confrontation to an unusual degree in the second half of the twentieth century (xvii). In light of recent developments, this reads like an incongruous anachro¬ nism. Grundy not only fails to understand the real historical process¬ es that have shaped the specific political and economic physiognomy of Southern Africa, but he also substantially distorts the real regional relations through his systems approach. Anyone relying on Grundy’s book for an understanding of Southern Africa will be disappointed. He will have no idea of how this monstrous patchwork of states and stateless came into existence and persists, nor of the alternatives before it. The contribution by John S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter, is just as unsatisfactory. Galbraith has seen no need to rethink the rule of Rhodes and his British South Africa Company. His primary concern is with the most immediate reasons for certain things happening when or as they did, which leads, naturally, to lengthy descriptions of how particular policies were arrived at and of the seeming motives of par¬ ticular policymakers. Like Grundy, Galbraith shies away from any dis¬ cussion of imperialism. Thus we are told that “Rhodes realized himself through empire. Sir Alfred Milner perceptively noted that ‘men are ruled by their foibles,’ and Rhodes’ foible is size.” We are also told that Rhodes succeeded in deluding himself, as he did others, into believ¬ ing that his cause was Britain when in fact his cause was that of Rhodes. (21) Elsewhere Galbraith says that Britain did not acquire these terri¬ tories (of Southern Africa) with any plan or philosophy of administra¬ tion (14). This is strange since even the most conservative and empirically rooted British historians of empire accept that Rhodes was an arch-imperialist. The scope of Galbraith’s study of Crown and Charter is limited and his treatment of Rhodes gets us nowhere.

300

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

Indeed, Galbraith’s book is inferior to the level achieved in previous contributions on the same subject. As for the kind of work it should have been, the reader, and Galbraith, should consult Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Companyd1 Zambia, once part of the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, achieved its political independence from Britain in 1964, and since then has played a pivotal role in the struggle for liberation in Southern Africa. Almost all liberation movements from the white dominated states have had offices in Lusaka, the Zambian capital. Moreover, it is, more than almost any other independent African coun¬ try, a “mining state”, specifically a copper-mining state. Quite obvi¬ ously, then, Zambia’s politics and capitalist development should interest social scientists and activist students of African political economy alike. So far two books in the California series have been devoted to Zambia: Politics in Zambia edited by William Tordoff, and Corporate Power in an African State by Richard Sklar. Neither succeeds, for either audi¬ ence. The contributions in Politics in Zambia cover various topics, such as the struggle for independence, conflict in Zambian politics, gov¬ ernment, administration, Zambia’s response to the unilateral declara¬ tion of independence by Rhodesia, and so on. There is no effort to locate Zambia’s place in the modern world-system and, in Zambia’s case, in particular, in the imperialist scheme of things. Even more sur¬ prising, there is no chapter dealing with the political economy of the copper mining industry, so central to Zambia’s political economy as a whole. Of course, occasional references are made to the industry, but there is no systematic analysis of it, an omission which leaves the col¬ lection seriously flawed. The cleavages and conflicts that define poli¬ tics in Zambia are discussed strictly in terms of the then salient ethnic divisions, never in terms of class. Indeed, it is as if class — the rela¬ tional place of various groups in Zambia’s political economy — had nothing to do with Zambian politics. A curious view! Moreover, devel¬ opments since 1974 make obviously questionable many of the explic¬ it, as well as the implicit, assumptions underlying the collection. All in all, it was a volume of little value when it was published and is of even less value today. The problem of the multinational corporations and their influence on the states in which they are located is a serious challenge to politi¬ cal theory and to basic conceptions in the study of international rela-

301

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tions. In the summer of 1972, at the 53rd Session of the United nations Economic and Social Council, the representative of Chile’s Popular Unity Government proposed that the multinationals be investigated. (This was a result of the subversive activities of I.T.T., and of other U.S. multinationals, against the progressive government of Salvador Allende.) In 1974 a report prepared by an Indian politician and schol¬ ar, J.K. Jha, was presented to the Economic and Social Council, and then to the General Assembly.12 This report, which recommended strict limits on the activities of the multinational corporations, described among other things two of their characteristics: multinationals have vast financial and technical resources which could be appropriated for development purposes; and their activities, generally, not only do not accord with development purposes but, in fact, pose a growing threat to national sovereignty. Among scholars as well, the multinationals, as the dominant unit of capital in the period of state monopoly capital¬ ism, are attracting an increasing amount of attention. Global Reach by Richard Barnett and R.E. Muller1 ^ and The New Sovereigns: Multinational Corporations as World Powers edited by A.A. Said and L.R. Simmons,14 just to mention two, evidence this growing interest. Richard Sklar’s monograph, Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia, would appear to do so too. Sklar’s focus is on what he calls the changing relation of the Zambian people to the mining industry, which has dominated the country’s economy for two generations. In the preface we are told that, although the author looks to the insights of political economy in his study and is convinced of the importance of its “interdisciplinary” char¬ acter, he nevertheless limits himself to a strictly political-science anal¬ ysis of business corporations. Specifically, he asserts: “The present study attempts to assess the political viability of [the multinational corpora¬ tion] as an agent of economic and social development in a hostile ideo¬ logical environment” (viii) [Emphasis added: BM]. It also attempts to assess the capability of transnational business groups to alter the ide¬ ological configuration of newly developing countries in accordance with such groups’ long-term interests and, in the course of the work, to demonstrate the efficacy of class analysis as an approach to the study of multinational corporate expansion.” Sklar’s theoretical men¬ tors, however, are neither Marx and Lenin nor their more contempo¬ rary followers, e.g., Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank, but analysts

302

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

like H.H. Wilson, A.A. Berle and others in the liberal tradition instead. Thus, we are told Zambia has been dominated for two generations by multinationals; but nowhere is the nature of peripheral capitalist devel¬ opment and, in particular, its long-range effects on post-independence Zambia explored. Perfunctory reference is made to Zambia’s economic dependence upon white-ruled states of Southern Africa, and also to such “intractable” problems as the division between what Sklar calls “a comparatively prosperous commercial/industrial sector and a retard¬ ed rural sector” (p. 27). But on the nature of the world capitalist sys¬ tem in general, and of imperialism in Southern Africa in particular, which would account for these conditions, Sklar remains silent. Capitalism has always been world-scale — “international” —- in form. The states that have recently emerged from long years of colo¬ nial rule are thus confronted with deciding on what basis, and within what limits, capital through the agency of the multinationals is to be allowed to continue to exploit the labor (people) and resources (nature) within the boundaries of the now formally independent countries. Zambia began to confront this question when it passed the Mines and Minerals Act in 1969 which invested all rights of ownership in miner¬ als to the state. Then, in December of the same year, Roan Selection Trust and Anglo-American Corporation signed an agreement which gave the Zambian government the controlling package of shares (51 percent) in return for an estimated $292 million over a period of years and important concessions and privileges for the copper companies having to do with the payment of taxes, the uses of profit, and the con¬ trol of strikes by the government. It was an agreement the companies could live with. (For its part, the Zambian government intended to use its proceeds from copper mining to advance the agricultural sec¬ tor, two-thirds of whose commodity output were then produced by white settler farmers and whose total estimated contribution to nation¬ al income was only about 10 percent.) To continue to survive, how¬ ever, the multinational corporations obviously had to work for an internal evolution in Zambia that would be favorable to their interests. Under the circumstances, the obvious strategy was to form an alliance with the government and in that setting to encourage the formation of a class of petty bourgeois likely to prove loyal to corporate interests. The specific features of Zambianization, for example, the appointment of Zambians of selected managerial-level posts in the mining compa¬ ny, were not exactly designed to counter such a strategy. True, the

303

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

state’s position in this key branch of Zambia’s economy was being strengthened (although one could say, as well, that the state was being infiltrated), and this may have inconvenienced the multinationals to some extent. But as long as the government created stability and the profits were not substantially affected, the two had found a modus vivendi. The relationship, between state and multinationals, is quite differ¬ ent in a former colonial or neo-colonial country in which the govern¬ ment is determined to transform the economy in the direction of a socialist mode of production, as was the case in Chile during the Allende government. No development of this kind can take place except by eliminating the resistance of the multinationals. What is crit¬ ical here, and the point seems completely to elude Sklar, is that the bourgeoisie in control of the multinationals will allow, if not actively encourage, “nationalization”, as long as what is done in its name extends the framework of monopoly capitalism and thus contributes not to the curtailment but to the further development of capital. The aim of Zambia of “nationalizing” copper mining and “Zambianizing” its management was not to alter the capitalist mode of production but only to adjust the distribution of surplus-value (“earnings”) it pro¬ duced. Specifically it made the Zambian state and Zambian nationals recipients of a part of these earnings, and in that way brought the orga¬ nizational structure of economic control into line with the new (“nationally independent”) basis of the political superstructure. What Sklar does do is describe in detail the adjustments in mining compa¬ nies made as the program of Zambianization proceeded. The politics of Zambianization, and even the conflicts between Zambia and Rhodesia which led to the closure of their common bor¬ der, can hardly be described, however, as presenting the mining cor¬ porations with a “hostile” ideological climate. Such “hostility” as there was was not against the structure of capitalist relations of production, not against the existence of the position of exploiter, but only at most against the existing occupants of this position. Zambian development since the Mulingushi declaration have increasingly taken the form of neo-colonial exploitation, of peripheral capitalist development. Even the voices of populist opposition have been muted. Within the neo¬ colonial framework, the Zambian bourgeoisie — weak, vacillating, dependent have increasingly become an instrument of imperial maneuvers to destroy the liberation movements, as the 1975 events in

304

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

Angola and Zambia’s role in them eloquently, if suddenly, indicated. Sklar’s use of the term “class” deserves brief comment. He sets international capitalism against international communism in order to provide the setting for “class analysts.” Having set matters up in this truncated and wrongheaded fashion, he has no difficulty in producing a puerile notion of a managerial bourgeoisie. This is conceptual acro¬ batics at its worst. It mystifies rather than clarifies. The Zambian state in the present conjuncture of that country’s development, the rela¬ tions between the Zambian state and imperialism — these are serious subjects — deserve serious analysis, not games with words. The mono¬ graph by SkJar falls so far short of its promise, and his own, that one wonders: whom is it supposed to help? whom is he afraid of offend¬ ing? The conversion of traditional forms of rule into instruments of colonialism has been a major characteristic of British rule in Africa. Christian Potholm’s book, Swaziland: The Dynamics of Political Modernization, and B.M. Khaketla’s, Lesotho 1970: An African Coup Under the Microscope, deal with two former British protectorates still ruled by “traditional” kings. Both these states have historically played the role of labor reservoirs for South Africa, although Swaziland at least is well endowed both with agricultural lands and iron ore deposits. Unequal exchange between each state on the one hand and both South Africa and the metropolitan center on the other has been developed and perpetuated, however, and traditional rulers have been instru¬ mental in advancing South African and overseas interests. A proper and exhaustive study of these two enclaves, which, under British protec¬ tion, became South Africa’s backyards, is an urgent necessity. What is the role of the new strata which Western education produced and which have gradually emerged as distinctively separate elites, apart from tra¬ ditional groups? What is the future of the monarchies in Swaziland and Lesotho? What contradictory patterns of social economy have been developed in recent years? And which direction, under whose aegis, can further development be expected to take? Such questions are not even addressed by Potholm and Khaketla, let alone provisionally answered. Potholm’s book is a dissertation-type study of modernization describing the political “success” which Ngwenyama Sobhuza II achieved with the backing of white settlers and South Africa. The pol¬ itics of Swaziland can only be understood in the context of the changes 305

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

imposed on the country by foreign economic dominance and exploita¬ tion under the patronage of a conservative traditional ruler, but no attention is paid to the incorporation of the region as a labor-reserve enclave of the South African economy. The future of Swaziland is dis¬ cussed, and Potholm reaches this comfortable conclusion: “If there is a potentially explosive area in Africa south of the Zambezi, the odds seem overwhelming that it is not in Swaziland” (p. 156). After what has since begun to happen in Ethiopia, I would not bet on it. The inde¬ pendence of Mozambique has created an entirely new situation. Dissatisfaction with traditional rule is no longer merely an anticonversative disposition among a few, but a sharply progressive force. Workers already showed their muscle prior to independence, and can be expected to do so increasingly, repression notwithstanding. With the monarch s retirement or death will come the turning point in Swaziland politics; that much no serious observer doubts. But Potholm’s vision has no room for such an eventuality. He sees no fur¬ ther than the end of his nose, which, fortunately for Swaziland, is not where it’s at. Chalk up one more score for the side in favor of super¬ ficial, misleading accounts of Swaziland’s political economy. The dispute between the United Nations and South Africa over the status of Namibia (South West Africa) has dragged on for a long time. John Dugard, in The South West African/Namibia Dispute, pro¬ vides selected documents and writings on the subject. It is a useful col¬ lection for those who already know their way. But it is misleading for the newcomers, which is unfortunate, since the issue of Namibia seems to be coming to a head, both at the U.N. and in the battlefields, where S.W.A.P.O. is waging successful guerrilla struggle.

Final Comments This is a partisan and eclectic collection. It does not cover the salient aspects that have formed and continue to influence developments in Southern Africa. It is a collection that, on the whole, seems to be unaware that there are other approaches and outlooks on the study of events and developments in Southern Africa. Almost invariably we are left with description rather than analysis. Instead of a coherent, orga¬ nizing view of developments in Southern Africa, we have ad hoc themes conceived, it seems, on the spur of the moment. The often hasty conceptual improvisations are as devoid of analytic value as thev are of historical significance. 306

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

Reading this collection one is reminded of the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes penned to a British friend, Sir Frederick Pollock: “...the philosophers were hired by the comfortable class to prove that everything is alright.”15 The foundation sponsored social research seems to play the role once assigned to philosophers. The bourgeois social scientist formulates concepts, categories, and uses methods which not only rationalize the existing social order but numb our minds to injustices. Unfortunately for the status quo-oriented stud¬ ies, anomalies soon emerge between what they purport to explain and the actual train of events. To overcome this pragmatic approach to reality, we require cate¬ gories and concepts formulated through the application of materialist, dialectical reasoning to the study of historical change as it occurs, here and now, through events and actions. Such a methodology is increas¬ ingly being used by many whose interest is the overthrow of the unjust status quo. Here I refer to works of, among others, Basil Davidson, John Saul, Giovanni Arrighi, Martin Legassick and others associated with the Review of African Political Economy— too many to mention. What is required in the study of Southern Africa is not merely an “inter¬ disciplinary” approach but the method of political economy. This approach is not history in the usual sense, nor political science, nor sociology, nor economics, nor economic history. Nor is it a mechani¬ cal adding together of the “perspectives” of each. One can never get a view of the whole in that way. To bring the whole into view one has to take it as the subject matter at the outset and proceed by tracing out all its essential interconnections, the processes reproducing and altering them, and the interrelations among the processes over histor¬ ical time. And one must do this not abstractly and in theory, but in the actual study of reality as evolving historical totalities. Focussing on particular topics and concrete states, as if they were self-enclosed systems, leads to serious misunderstandings of the com¬ plex structure that makes up South Africa. Imperialism long ago inte¬ grated these areas, within themselves, one with another, and each with the world-economy, as a whole. This is a commonplace, that seems, nonetheless, to have escaped the attention of all but one or two of our learned authors. Ever since the decolonization process began in the sixties, Southern Africa has been divided into liberated zones, partial¬ ly liberated zones, and zones that are still occupied by forces hostile to social development. The struggle for the full freedom and devel-

307

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

opment of the region has now entered its most critical phase. Alas, this University of California series is no help to those who would change the Southern African world. It is not even a help to those who, at this juncture, are merely seeking to understand the historical movement there that is transforming that world. Revolutionary situations move by means of polarization, deepen¬ ing the conflict, expanding its scope. Participants and observers, mak¬ ers and victims cannot escape either the movement or the polarization. Disinterested analysis and commentary become thereby epistemolog¬ ically excluded. Disinterested knowledge of the Southern African rev¬ olutionary struggle is no more possible now than disinterested knowledge of the religious wars of sixteenth-century Europe was pos¬ sible to contemporaries. There are no bystanders, no sidelines, no refuges now. In particular, there is no press box from which to describe the play on the field, and no spectators to whom to describe the play. All are combatants, on one side or the other. This series seeks to speak from the situationally-eliminated press box to the historically-eliminated spectators. Its descriptions are per¬ force superficial, its analyses mere listings of facts, its conclusions mere assertions, contained in the implicit premises of its ill-concealed parti¬ san “perspectives.”

308

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

This is a critical time for the social sciences, not a time for courtesies. —Robert Lynd

Introduction This chapter questions the conventional wisdom of studying African urbanization in terms of acculturation models. It attempts to analyze African urbanization in the light of the evolution of urbanism in the metropolitan countries, making a clear distinction between urbanism and industrialism. To do this requires a theoretical comprehension of the manifestations of urbanism in different parts of the world and an assessment of its meaning and social implications. A true comparative analysis should attempt to ascertain the underlying principles and major impacts of contemporary urban development. There are many approaches to the comparative study of urbanism. An obvious one is to compare cities in different societies, that is, crosscultural comparisons. A second approach is to compare cities within a given society. A third approach is to compare cities of one period with those of another historical epoch. The comparative method is a pur¬ poseful and rigorous study of similarities and differences among a wide variety of cities that are assumed to share at least some fundamental characteristics. The aim is to explain the causal relationships and inter¬ relationships underlying such alleged regularities. It is thus important that the units being compared be clearly defined in terms of their crit-

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ical characteristics. Comparative studies are usually most useful if they are well grounded in a theory of society. Theoretical clarity becomes even more essential in view of the rapid growth of cities all over the world, the changing forces behind this growth, and the opportunities created by such change. But to seize upon these opportunities, as Harvey put it, We have to confront the forces that create cities as alien envi¬ ronments, that push urbanization in directions alien to our individual or collective purpose. To confront these forces we have first to understand them. The old structure of industrial capi¬ talism once such a force for revolutionary change in society, now appears as a stumbling block. The growing concentration of fixed capital investment, the creation of new needs and effec¬ tive demands, and a pattern of circulation of surplus value are changing but they have not altered the fact that cities. . . are founded upon the exploitation of the many by the few. An urbanism founded upon exploitation is a legacy of history. A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to be brought into being. It remains for a revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appro¬ priate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation} (emphasis added)

Urbanization and the Modern Era Max Weber and Arnold Toynbee defined the city as a settlement in which the inhabitants engage primarily in nonagricultural productive activities.2 Such a definition is of some value in that it identifies cer¬ tain general features that may be found wherever cities exist. Placed in an historical context, however, these features assume a complexity which cannot be explained by means of a rational abstraction. For a city is not an entity that can be analyzed apart from its historical and social context but rather an historical configuration reflecting the par¬ ticular political economy and prevailing class relations in an historical epoch. The welter of competing definitions and special theories that fill the literature on cities reflects the attempt to treat the city as a stat¬ ic, superhistorical entity—to elevate various concrete, historical fea¬ tures to abstract universal principles. There is a failure to recognize 310

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

that “between the cities of ancient and medieval times and the mod¬ ern metropolis or conurbation there is a connection of name and in part of function, but nothing like identity.”3 In contrast, Karl Marx views the city as a set of social relations in which the social processes of the division of labor through exchange become focused between spheres of production. For Marx, the whole economic history of society is summed up in the antithesis between town and country. That is, the division and opposition of city and coun¬ try, industry and agricultural, in their modern forms, are the critical culmination of the division and specialization of labor which, though it did not begin with capitalism, was developed under it to an extraor¬ dinary and transforming degree. Here first become manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isola¬ tion and separation. The antagonism between town and coun¬ try can only exist within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individu¬ al under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him—a subjection which makes one man into a restrict¬ ed town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist.4 The city is, therefore, not merely a demographic agglomeration of pop¬ ulation and growth. It is above all a social and economic process which profoundly affects traditional modes of socioeceonomic organization; it provides the context within which new forms of the division of labor appear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the times. . . has created enormous cities. . . has made barbarian and semi-barbarian counties dependent on the civilized ones.” It is the familiar history of capitalism and imperialism. Engels further postulated that “socialism would abolish the contrast between town and country, which had been brought to its extreme point by present-day capitalist society.” Thus,

311

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the Marxist tradition contains interesting clues to the opposition not only between town and country but between developed and under¬ developed areas.5 Urbanization processes in different historical epochs under vari¬ ous modes of production superficially may seem identical. It is this superficial identity that has occupied social scientists who have attempt¬ ed to formulate abstract definitions of the city. However, the identi¬ ties obtain only on the level of description. Any attempt at explanation must specify the dominant mode of production and the nature of the town-country dichotomy. It must also specify that classes dominated the mode of production. Perry Anderson’s summary of urban-rural relations in Greco-Roman antiquity provides a point of departure that needs to be grasped. What he says is so important that he deserves to be quoted at some length: Graeco-Roman Antiquity had always constituted a universe centered on cities. The splendour and confidence of the early Hellenic polis and the later Roman Republic, which dazzled so many subsequent epochs, represented a meridian of urban poli¬ ty and culture that was never to be equalled for another mil¬ lennium. . . . Yet at the same time this frieze of city civilization always had something of the effect of a trompe Voeil facade, on its posterity. For behind this urban culture and polity lay no urban economy in any way commensurate with it; on the con¬ trary, the material wealth which sustained its intellectual and civic vitality was drawn overwhelmingly from the countryside. The classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions. Agriculture represented throughout its history the absolutely dominant domain of production, invariably furnishing the main fortunes of the cities themselves. The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly com¬ munities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners. Every municipal order from democratic Athens to oligarchic Sparta or senatorial Rome, was essentially dominated by agrarian pro¬ prietors. Their income derived from corn, oil and wine—the three great staples of the Ancient World, produced on estates and farms outside the perimeter of the physical city itself. Within it, manufacturers remained few and rudimentary: the

312

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

range of normal urban commodities never extended much beyond textiles, pottery, furniture and glassware. Technique was simple, demand was limited and transport was exorbitantly expensive. The result was that manufactures in Antiquity char¬ acteristically developed not by increasing concentration, as in later epochs, but by decontraction and dispersal, since distance dictated relative costs of production rather than the division of labour. A graphic idea of the comparative weight of the rural and urban economies in the classical world is provided by the respective fiscal revenues yielded by each in the Roman Empire of the 4th century A.D., when city trade was finally subjected to an imperial levy for the first time by Constantine’s collatio lustralis: income from this duty in the towns never amounted to more than 5 percent of the land-tax.6 The country and the city are thus changing historical realities, and it is clear from the above passage that an idea derived from the past can¬ not explain the nominal continuity between ancient cities and the pro¬ cess of urban growth in the twentieth century. Marx saw this difference very clearly; Ancient classical history is the history of cities, but cities based on landownership and agriculture: Asian history is a kind of undifferentiated unity of town and country (the large city, properly speaking, must be regarded merely as a princely camp, superimposed on the real economic structure); The Middle Ages (germanic period) starts with the countryside as the locus of history, whose further development then proceeds through the opposition of town and country; modern history is the urbanization of the countryside, not, as among the ancients, the ruralization of the city.7 The subsequent decline of the Greco-Roman city and the rise of the feudal city were bound up with changes in the modes of production of ancient society and the rise of feudal society which also implied shifts in social power. “With the gradual ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire in the West and the dissolution of its armies and state institutions, the cities as administrative centers almost ceased to exist.” When the trade routes in the Mediterranean vanished, with the Islamic invasions of the ninth century, and “Europe declined into Feudal Provincialism,” according

313

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

to Ernest Harsch, the ruling class abandoned the cities as economic centers and moved back onto their country estates or demesnes, leav¬ ing behind empty hulks that now served only as religious centers or as the fortresses of the various princes who used them only in time of war.”8 The emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of production, however, brought about an extraordinary transformation of the urbanrural dimension that embraced the whole world. Thus, the model of city and country in economic and political relationships has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and is seen and challenged as a model of the world. Looking back on English history and its “cul¬ mination in imperialism,” for example, Raymond Williams asserts, I can see in this process of the altering relations of country and city the driving force of a mode of production which has indeed transformed the world. I am then very willing to see the city as a capitalism, as so many now do, if I can say also that this mode of production began, specifically, in the English rural economy, and produced, there, many of the characteristic effects—increase of production, physical reordering of a total¬ ly available world, displacement of customary settlements, a human remnant and force which became a proletariat—which have since been seen, in many extending forms, in cities and colonies and in an international system as a whole.9 Cities today play an indisputably dominant role in modern life. As the focus of capital accumulation and productive life the city attracts large numbers of people from the hinterlands. Laborers are drawn or pressed into these centers by job opportunities created by expanding manu¬ facturing and commercial activities. The configuration of urban space is determined by those classes which control the forces of production. “The exploitation of man and nature, which takes place in the coun¬ try, is realized and concentrated in the city.”10 The dominant classes used laws to protect their own interests as early as the thirteenth cen¬ tury, as Thompson indicates. “Everywhere the wealthy classes con¬ trolled the local town government and local trade and industry, and passed statutes in support of their interests, like privileges and monop¬ olies, or expressive of their contempt for the masses.” This led to riots and strikes, in the heavily settled industrial regions of Europe and to attempts on the part of the working classes to form unions in their own

314

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

midst and even to knot together such combinations in adjacent towns. But all such efforts were abortive in the Middle Ages, except in Florence, and then only successful for a short season.”11 The rise of the capitalist city was accompanied by the destructive invasion of the countryside. In England the enclosure laws displaced thousands of families from the country, who were forced to settle in the emerging industrial towns. At the same time this massive depop¬ ulation of the country condemned the rural population to what Frederick Engels described as thousands of years of degradation.12 The antagonism between town and country destroyed the basis of the intel¬ lectual development of those who settled in the urban slums and the physical development of the rural population.

Capitalism and Colonial Dependency The destructiveness of capitalism reached appalling proportions in the colonies. Nearly all the cumulative benefits of the growth of urban culture that eventually accrued to the metropolis were lacking in the colonial towns. In the slums and shanty towns that grew on the periph¬ ery of colonial towns, a moral blight with its rampant debasement of family life, human solidarity, and dignity became the way of life because the capital invested in the colonies only served limited objec¬ tives of developing those primary industries that complemented the metropolitan economy. The festering slums that characterized the colonial and post colonial towns reflected the conscious irresponsi¬ bility of the colonial bourgeoisie toward the living conditions of the colonial proletariat.13 Even when viewed against this background, a qualitative differ¬ ence exists between the development of cities in the metropolis and in the colonies. In societies in which an indigenous capitalist class devel¬ oped, cities were formed through the geographic concentration of accumulated social surplus product which the process of transforming the rural economy with a capitalist form had generated and concen¬ trated into the hands of commercially active landowners. The surplus derived from earlier accumulation and exploitation was invested in urban ventures to produce further growth. Elerein lies the crucial rela¬ tionship between urbanism and the mode of economic integration under capitalism. Industrialization proceeds continuously and urban¬ ization can be contained, more or less, by the widening economic framework. But in societies in which the capitalist mode of production 315

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

was introduced and controlled by an alien bourgeoisie and developed without connection with the requirements of these societies, this pro¬ cess was distorted. Walter Rodney writes, Colonialism provided Africa with no real growth points. For instance, a colonial town in Africa was essentially a centre of administration rather than industry. Towns did attract large numbers of Africans, but only to offer them a very unstable life based on unskilled and irregular employment. European towns had slums, but the squalor of towns in underdeveloped coun¬ tries is a special phenomenon. It was a consequence of the inability of those towns to play the role of expanding the pro¬ ductive base. Fortunately, Africa was never as badly off in this respect as Asia and Latin America. Instead of speeding up growth, colonial activities such as min¬ ing and cash-crop farming speeded up the decay of “tradi¬ tional” African life. In many parts of the continent, vital aspects of culture were adversely affected, nothing better was substi¬ tuted, and only a lifeless shell was left. The capitalist forces behind colonialism were interested in little more than the exploitation of labour. Even areas that were not directly involved in the money economy exported labour.14 The concept of dependent urbanization facilitates an examination of the internal situation of African cities as the result not of factors char¬ acteristic of traditional African societies but of the exigencies of colo¬ nial capitalism. To account for the social structures that developed in the African city requires that the consequences of capitalism in its impe¬ rialist development be understood. During the colonial era in Africa, imperialism built cities (some of them impressive) that reflected the well-being of the while settler classes, which tried to make them islands of privilege. After independence, economic stagnation and the agri¬ cultural crisis worsened the imbalance between city development and rural underdevelopment that had been inherent in the colonial system. Today the enjoyment of urban privileges are still limited to an infinites¬ imal part of the urban population. The masses, as always, are exclud¬ ed. There is, however, a difference today because the contradictions of the system now continue directly under the noses of the masses who easily grasped their political meaning. Fanon recognized that the colonial city is highly segregated resi316

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

dentially and that it exhibited colonial inequality in its most brutal and stark reality. The settlers’ town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town that belongs to the colonised people, or at least the native town, the negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spacious¬ ness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs.15 The spatial system and land-use patterns, according to Fanon, closely confirm social and economic inequalities. “The originality of the colo¬ nial context is that economic reality, inequality and immense differ¬ ence of ways of life never come to mask the human reality.” A close examination of the colonial context shows that “what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” The spatially defined inequality in Africa’s urban areas was thus expressive of the colonial class structure. “In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”16 The economic antagonism between town and country were, in colonial Africa, replaced by “the antagonism which exists between the Native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account.”17 The leading towns of Africa—Dakar, Lagos, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Luanda, Louren^o Marques, and so on—displayed splen317

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

did mansions on streets lined with lawns and trees in which the rich white folks lived. In dirty, smoky houses, squalid and rickety shacks on joyless streets, lived the African workers, the source of the tremendous colonial wealth. The picture of the town structure in Portuguese Africa drawn in the following passage by Kamm was typical of pre- and postcolonial Africa: Luanda in Angola, Louren?o Marques and Beira in Mozambique are white man’s cities—with downtowns of pleas¬ ant, Portuguese-style colonial houses of commerce of the last century, surrounded by the pompous public buildings of the authoritarian Government of Salazar Portugal and enveloped by the massive, shapeless concrete blocks of today’s men of business. At the edges are housing developments for the “poor whites” and villas on tree-lined streets for those less poor. One wonders how cities so seemingly small can have population fig¬ ures as large as the 475,000 given for Luanda, 355,000 for Louren^o Marques and 114,000 for Beira. The answer lies beyond, in endless, warrenlike shantytowns of surpassing wretchedness. There the African population lives, and there it becomes quite obvious that the population figures are, if any¬ thing, understated and, more likely, guesswork. Shack next to shack, of the most disparate bits of wood, tin or anything else that will offer shade and shelter but uniform in their shabby inadequacy, are crowded into the plains of beat¬ en dirt. It must have been savanna country, before, with grass, bushes and some trees, but only at the edges do flashes of green relieve the dun barrenness now. The houses are arranged, if the work is not too strong for unplanned mazes, to resemble the homesteads of families in the bush, with the shacks of the dif¬ ferent members facing onto small patches of ground on which children play without toys and often without clothes and women cook over scraps of wood or charcoal.18 To account for this urban dichotomy in terms of cultural differences is to conceal the fact that this state of affairs is a fundamental social condition or, more precisely, an inherent condition of bourgeois urban social life. The picture drawn of Africa’s urban areas is very much sim¬ ilar to the picture drawn by Engels of living conditions of the 290,000 318

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

working people in Manchester who, as he observed, . . . live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the controller. In a word, one must confess that in the working-men’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable at home.19

The Nature of Capitalist Urbanization The approach adopted by Engels in 1844 was, and still is, far more consistent with the hard economic and social realities of capitalist urbanization than is the essentially cultural approach of urban anthro¬ pologists such as Voldo Pons (1969), Epstein (1967), Clyde Mitchell (1956, 1967), and Philip Mayer (1961). In fact, if one deleted Manchester and made other obvious modifications, Engel’s descrip¬ tion could easily be made to fit the conditions of Africans in colonial and current cities. For Engels, the despicable conditions and the “moral” depravity of urban workers were an inevitable result of an evil and avaricious capitalist system. Thus are the workers cast out and ignored by the class in power, morally as well as physically and mentally. The only provisions made for them is the law, which fastens upon them when they become obnoxious to the bourgeoisie. Like the dullest of the brutes, they are treated to but one form of education, the whip, in the shape of force, not convincing but intimidating. There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their con¬ sciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power/u The industrial city, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, is a social form, a way of life predicated on a certain division of labor and a cer¬ tain hierarchical ordering of the urban space which is consistent with the class structure of the dominant mode of production. The city func319

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tions to stabilize the class structure. Hence the city, both in colonial Africa and the metropolis, became the focus for the accumulated con¬ tradictions of industrial capitalism and its class conflict. The urban shanties in Africa present a stark resemblance to what the slums were in Europe. Every great city has one or more slums, where the workingclass is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hid¬ den alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it. Where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. . . . The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.21 The picture of the slums drawn by Fanon and Kamm for Africa and that by Engels for Britain reveals the essence of the capitalist econo¬ my: in order to grow it must, besides providing employment, create a large industrial reserve army of labor. It is this reserve army that brings into a sharper focus a series of imbalances between supply and demand in the area of housing and urban services that constitute itself into urban slums, shantytowns, and favelas. The capitalist development has been an ambiguous process; it forced larger and larger populations to abandon the rural economy for the industrial areas and disclaimed any responsibility for the social consequences thus produced. The slums, shantytowns, and favelas are thus the obverse side of the extraordinary process of capital accumulation. The phenomenon of urban slum or shanty is an abiding problem of capitalist cities and is very important in explaining the urban decay. It was no part of a capitalist economy to provide urban quarters for the working class except in terms that would furnish a handsome prof¬ it, that is, by overcrowding, skimping, niggardly provisions, even for light and air, a general worsening of the whole urban environment.22 The contradictory growth of capitalism as a process of develop¬ ment is displayed most starkly in the built-up environment of the city. For a vivid insight into this ambiguity let us look at Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, which has grown within living memory from what Rasheed Gbadamosi has called “a rather serene small town” of 100,000 people to a teaming shambles of over 1.5 million, a “rambling, ill-defined piece of urban landscape in which you can expect to spend hours of a

320

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

working day for a journey that would take you no more than ten min¬ utes on a Sunday, and which might take no more than 35 minutes if you were walking down the streets, as you were able to do twenty-five years ago, unmolested by traffic.”23 What caused this change? According to Gbadamosi, ‘The colonial administration cared far more about commerce than the people, and closed their eyes to the human drama and turbulence of the growing city.’ It is the consequences of that neglect which are now being felt. The narrow roads, ‘built for convenience, to move the police when the natives were creat¬ ing trouble,’ now carry huge oil trucks. The sewer project of the 1920’s devised at a projected cost of $20 million, and rejected as too expensive, would now, it is estimated, run to $3.3 billion for the first phase alone. The postcolonial gov¬ ernment has built no underground drainage, sewerage or storm drains, so that the stench has to be smelled to be believed.24 Capitalism is preeminently an exploitative economic system, and the growth of urban slums was the byproduct of economic exploitation. Almost accidentally does industry respond to the material requirements of those forced to work in factories. While the development of colo¬ nial capitalism led to the penetration of commodity-monetary rela¬ tionships into every aspect of African life, the relatively small size of the modern industrial sector proved quite incapable of providing work for the whole considerable mass of workers seeking it. Unemployment and underemployment often reach high levels. In many African urban slums there is an excessive swelling of the semiproletarian strata and those groups of the working class connected with the primary sector of the capitalist production, for example, miners recruited for a spe¬ cific period. To see this contradiction and its human consequences is to pene¬ trate the mode of economic growth that produced the process of urbanization characteristic of Africa today. David Harvey quotes Castells who, for example, differentiated between the metropolitan forms of urbanism in North America and Western Europe and the dependent urban forms of much of the rest of the world. According to Castells, dependent urbanism arises in situations where the urban form exists as a channel for the extraction of quantities of surplus from a rural and resource hinterland for purposes of shipment to the major

321

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

metropolitan centers.25 The widespread (both in time and place) occur¬ rence of the urban phenomenon should not be allowed to obscure its particular manifestations in the so-called Third World. An examina¬ tion of urbanization must be related to the study of the mode of pro¬ duction on which urban forms grow. Insofar as the essence and the dynamics of the bourgeois urban form are not identical to those of the cities of antiquity or medieval times, it is because the factory transforms the bourgeois city into a commercial and industrial unit. The modern city develops according to the laws of the capitalist market. That is, “Production for the sake of production, translated into urban terms, means the growth of the city for its own sake—without any intrinsic urban or human criteria to arrest that growth.”26 The study of the colonial city and the absence there of modern industry must be understood in terms of the dynam¬ ics of the political economy of capitalism in its imperialistic phase. The bourgeois historical experience of industrialization is not to be separated from that of urbanization. Engels in his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 drew the conclu¬ sion of a broader import and described the main tendencies of capi¬ talist urban growth. He examined the capitalist mode of production and showed how the world trade enhanced and benefited the English towns. For Engels, Manchester was a representative instance; it devel¬ oped as an essential part of a global economy and more particularly as the center of that vast formal or informal “empire” on which its for¬ tunes so largely rested from the seventeenth century. Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery, reached the same conclusion: No growth of Manchester was intimately associated with the growth of Liverpool, its outlet to the sea and world market. The capital accumulated by Liverpool from the slum trade poured into the hinterland to fertilize the energies of Manchester; Manchester goods for Africa were taken to the coast in the Liverpool Steam vessels.27 Besides Liverpool and Manchester, Lancashire was converted from an obscure, ill-cultivated swamp into a very lively region, multiplying its population tenfold in 80 years. Giant cities, such as Bolton, Oldham, and Preston, also sprang up as if by magic. 28 They became elements in a complex system of national and overseas economy and society 322

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

which was not in any simple way physically apparent. From that time on, . . . what was happening in the “city,” the “metropolitan” economy, determined and was determined by what was made to happen in the “country,” first the local hinterland and then the vast regions beyond it, in other people’s lands. What hap¬ pened in England has since been happening ever more wide¬ ly, in new dependent relationships between all the industrialized nations and all other “underdeveloped” but economically important lands. Thus one of the last models of “city and coun¬ try” is the system we now know as imperialism.29

The City in Modern Africa The colonial city in Africa is therefore a reflection of the world econ¬ omy and its priorities. Yet most social scientists only studied the ideo¬ logical aspect of urbanism rather than the material aspects. Following the lead of the Chicago school, especially Park’s formulation in the article “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” urbanism and urbanization became the focus of interest as an independent variable. Thus the development of new forms of social relations among peasants recently settled in the new towns became of tremendous interest to the social scientists (e.g., Hauser 1965, Reissman 1964, Fava 1969). They looked to urbaniza¬ tion in the developing countries for a recapitulation of the European experience. For instance, Leonard Reissman says that urbanization in Africa provides a “rare opportunity to study . . .cases of historical reit¬ eration.”30 And Phillip Hauser expresses the hope that studies of Africa and Asia may “shed light on the antecedents and consequences of urbanization in the West.”31 When differences in the urbanization of nineteenth-century Europe and that of colonial Africa are observed, there is little attempt to explain them. Rather, the African experience is characterized as a deviation from the Western model.32 Other theorists concern themselves with problems of definition and categorization, the literature abounds with typologies of cities based on origin, location, and function, among others.33 Various index¬ es have been developed to study optimum location, size, density, and composition of population; attributes of the city as a physical “con¬ tainer”; the quality of social life and characteristic mentality of urban dwellers. For the most part these criteria are only descriptive of the 323

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

empirical reality, yielding little in the way of explanation. An elaboration of indexes is a common approach in urban studies; it is a method which takes the city as a given entity and tries to isolate those properties that seem to be common or unique to urban situa¬ tions or to various urban populations. If well conceived, the search for what is distinctively urban may yield useful insights into the ways in which city life differs from rural life or the ways in which the class struc¬ ture of the city affects different populations. It cannot, however, explain why urban life is the way it is. This approach can provide at best a famil¬ iarity with the superficial aspects of urban phenomena. At worst, its resulting configurations are tautological and distorted, as when it is argued that with urbanization has come “increased freedom of women, changes in reproductive behavior, and late marriages.” These indexes are then taken as “a few of the factors which have brought about direct changes within the indigenous family structure.”34 It is held by some that urbanization is equivalent to moderniza¬ tion, and to a certain extent this is true. But it has also been a source not only of error but of ideologically prejudiced formulations. Cultural change in urban areas was studied as a process of acculturation, and terms such as “detribalization,” “stabilization,” and “westernization” have been used to refer to the process of urbanization in Africa. Living in towns is described as “civilized” in contract to living in rural areas which is “uncivilized.”35 Another source of error is the attempt to explain urbanization only in terms of the behavior of Africans in cities. This leads to considerable discussion concerning objective criteria for describing an “urbanized African.” These include number of years of permanent residence in a city, permanent residence of wife in an urban area, and absence of land rights in the countryside.36 Until recently, students of urbanization in Africa paid particular attention to Africans who lived and worked in cities but retained land rights in rural areas. Descriptions of African town dwellers who sup¬ plemented their wages with agricultural production were a basis for superficial analysis of a “dual” or “plural” society in urban and devel¬ opment literature. Attempts to explain the retention of rural land-hold¬ ings or extended kin ties, the instability of urban residence, or other features of urbanization in Africa pass over the objective structure of colonial urbanization to focus on the ‘backward” attitudes of Africans or the tenacity of the traditional way of life. Low wages, confiscation of unworked land, the tenuousness of urban work and residence under

324

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

labor contracts, work compounds, and racial prejudice are less signif¬ icant in these analyses than conjectured reasons for the rural-urban shuttling of people’s perception and evaluation of that aspect of the colonial system that they directly experience. There is a general failure to recognize that the behavior and atti¬ tudes of Africans are not the cause of the kind of urbanization that Africa has experienced but rather the observable effect of the social forces that initiated and shaped the process of urbanization itself. These social forces were not generated by traditional African social attitudes but by the development and expansion of the colonial capitalist mode of production. In reality, the city in Africa was a clear expression of the nature of underdevelopment; namely, the exploitation of African raw materials by unskilled labor and the cumulative effects which this pro¬ cess brought about. The nature of urbanization in Africa requires that the relation between Africa and certain European countries and of white settlers be sought out and examined. In doing so, it becomes apparent that much of what has been taken to be uniquely African is a consequence of this relationship. Laws and policies were promulgated and admin¬ istered in such a way that only those Africans whose labor power was needed in the towns were admitted. Others were uprooted to create a floating work force that could be used to undermine and depress the wages of those employed in colonial industries. The Stallard Commission of South Africa spelled out unreservedly the status of Africans in the city and was used as a model by various colonial gov¬ ernments in one way or another. Among other things it stated, “The Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essen¬ tially the White man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and minis¬ ter to the needs of the White man and should depart from there when he ceases so to minister.”37 In 1935, the Colonial Government of North Rhodesia produced a booklet entitled Lusaka. This booklet was for private circulation only and contained the plans of the new capital city that was being planned. The writers of this booklet proposed, The miscellaneous African population of the Capital has, for purposes of accomodation, been divided into two classes, per¬ sonal servants and others, and these classes have been provid¬ ed with separate compounds. It has been considered wise to discontinue the practice of providing each house with its own 325

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Native Compound. Quarters are only provided for one unmar¬ ried boy on each plot. The other servants with their families live at a distance in the Personal Servant’s Compound. Thus, the residential areas are freed from picaninns and other mani¬ festations of domestic untidiness.38 In East Africa, the British colonial administrators considered town life unsuitable for Africans whose natural habitat, it was argued, was the rural area. According to the east African Royal Commission, The theory of indirect rule as well as the personal inclinations of many administrators led to a concentration on the development of rural tribal societies rather than the training of an educated urban elite, and also to the view that the town was not a suitable habitat for a per¬ manent African society: there has, indeed, been a tendency to look on the westernized African with suspicion. The towns have, therefore, been regarded rather as bases for administrative and commercial activ¬ ities than as centres of civilizing influence, still less of permanent African population.39 The urban form that developed as a consequence of these policies is described by V. S. Naipaul; It was like another Sunday in the capital, which. . . in spite of deportations, remained an English . . . creation in the African wilderness. Not far from the capital were bush villages, half¬ day excursions for tourists. But in the capital Africa showed only in the semi-tropical suburban gardens, in the tourist shop displays of carvings and leather goods and souvenir drums and spears, and in the awkward liveried boys in the new tourist hotels, where the white or Israeli supervisors were never far away. Africa here was a decor. Glamour for the white visitor and expatriate; glamour too for the African, the man flushed out from the bush to whom, in the city ... civilization appeared to have been granted complete. It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home.40 The urban theorists who formulated principles of African urbanization in terms of African cultural attitudes about the city or in terms of the so-called tribal obligations were potently wrong. Phillip Mayer described a pattern of African urbanization in which some Africans accepted willingly to incorporate with urban life while others refused. The latter group was said to be subject to kinship patterns that pulled 326

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

them back to the rural areas. For example, The triumph of incapsulation is that through its institutions the home agents of morality have been enabled to extend their grasp over distance and over time from rural homestead into the heart of the East London slums. The long arms of the par¬ ents, the long arms of the ancestors are constantly pulling the Red migrants back out of reach of the ‘perils’ of urbanization.41 In this formulation “tribalism” is said to be responsible for the migrant labor system and acts as a pull back to the reserves of all those Africans who might stray and accept the values and culture of the cities. This is an ideological formulation of the process of urban development justi¬ fying the evil system of migrant labor. The colonial city of the twentieth century in Africa and elsewhere was the creation of imperialism. It was the result of foreign capital. But when capitalism expanded overseas, it did not merely discover but cre¬ ated “new worlds” through the exploitation of raw materials needed for the developing capitalist industries. The “modern” city in Africa was created by the colonizer as commercial, administrative, or mining center. The African migrant and a handful of ‘proletarians” were engaged most in either the production of primary goods or in build¬ ing railways and roads for the shipment across the ocean of these raw materials. This dynamic set Africa on a course of urban development as an aspect of the further capitalist development of Western Europe and later the United States. As David Harvey puts it, ‘Contemporary metropolitanism’ is embedded in a global economy of great complexity. That economy is hierarchically ordered with local centres dominating local hinterlands, more important metropolitan centres dominating lesser centres, and all centres outside of the communist nations by being ulti¬ mately subordinate to the central metropolitan areas in North America and Western Europe. This economic structure, elab¬ orated theoretically and empirically most perceptively in the works of Losch (1954) has been interpreted in terms of sur¬ plus appropriation and extraction.42 Harvey’s position is supported by Portes who writes “The cities, espe¬ cially the major ones [in the colonies] were not centres for advancement but, by and large, centres for exploitation of a subordinate periphery.”43

327

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

One effect of imperialist dominance in Africa was the initiation, within the dominated societies, of processes which then followed inter¬ nally the lines of alien development. Because the city in Africa con¬ fronts the African peasant with the global capitalist economy, the internal history of country and city occurs, often very dramatically, within the colonial and neocolonial societies. This is strikingly reflect¬ ed in the intensely overcramped cities which developed as a direct result of the imposed economic order and its consequences.44 Thus, in spite of almost general decolonization, the process of arti¬ ficial urbanization which started in colonial times and was character¬ ized by industrialization based on capital, equipment, and technicians from abroad and an export trade arising partly from this industrializa¬ tion (including mining) and partly from the introduction and gener¬ alization of cash crops is by no means at an end in most of independent Africa. Development goals begun during the colonial ere were carried forward into the independent period. Despite import substitution, industrialization in Africa has not kept pace with the growth of the labor force. This situation has been aggravated by the importation of advanced technology which permits high output worker ratios. As a consequence, those lucky enough to find employment are absorbed mainly in small-scale enterprises and service occupations. Today the African continent provides less than 5 percent of the world industrial output. The employment of migrants was perhaps the clearest expression of the difference of capitalist development in Europe and Africa. The primary industries for which African migrants were recruited required an entirely different set of assumptions about African labor. Among the most basic was that which held that the African was a target work¬ er. When migrants come to town it has been said that they have a definite sum in view, and that they hope to earn that amount and then go home again. The sooner that can be done, there¬ fore, the quicker the worker’s return to his village. . . . This accounts for the statement frequently made that the offer of a higher wage means less work and not more 45 A sociological interpretation of this assumption is that the labor power of Africans was abstracted from the full potential of its carriers as humans. The Africans simply became a piece of machinery which was

328

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

discarded to the reservations when no longer of use. Most studies of urban migration never studied how government policies together with the colonial ideology of African workers as temporary sojourners served to justify this end. Three interrelated trends can be identified in an indigenous and integrated process of urbanization. First, there is growth of primary production, agriculture, forestry, and mining. Second, there is the expansion of secondary production, manufacturing and communica¬ tion. Third, there is proportionally greater expansion of tertiary pro¬ duction trade, transportation, services, and communication. At particular times and in various societies these trends stand in differen¬ tial relation to each other. The tragic but determining fact for African societies is that the industrial development that forms the economic basis of the towns and cities was—and to a large extent still is—based on primary production and processing of raw materials. This development was reflected in the class structure of the colo¬ nial city in which prevails a transplanted, alien managerial class whose interests in the development of African resources—both human and natural—are limited to the requirements of the extraction of immedi¬ ate superprofits. The colonial situation also fostered the development of a tiny, indigenous petty bourgeoisie comprised of comprador and low echelon bureaucratic elements. This class remains dependent upon foreign exploitation for its existence even after the dismantling of the formal empire. They have no independent role in the development (or underdevelopment) of their country. Removed from the process of capital accumulation the export of capital to the metropolis, this class turns to the conspicuous consumption of foreign commodities.46 The consequences of imperialist penetration is most evident in the under¬ developed proletariat who reside in the urban slums and whose exis¬ tence was demanded and whose character continues to be determined by the requirements of foreign capital. Thus, the development of tech¬ nology and skills was not related to the material needs of African polit¬ ical economy in these cities. Even more significant for the long-run development, in Africa, industrialization was never undertaken, because it would have led to the local accumulation of capital, which might in turn have produced a real increase in the salaries and rights of African laborers. Local indus¬ trialization would have challenged the colonial monopolies.47 African urban economies operate within a system which was organized to

329

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

extract raw materials for foreign industries. City growth, including the aberrant relationship between the country and the city, expressed the illogic and imbalance of the colonial economy as a whole.48 The fail¬ ure of colonialism to complete the task of social transformation it had begun, indeed the pauperizing dynamic of the colonial system, pro¬ duced the most profoundly distorted and skewed urban societies. Comparing the European and African experience, Basil Davidson points out, The first [industrialization] destroyed, but also after its fash¬ ion, mightily rebuilt afresh, the second, having gone far to ruin what if found, could only leave for Africans the task of making a new society. No such new society came into being during the colonial period. Little was left behind but an utter impover¬ ishment of the old society, a chaos of ideas and social relation¬ ships. . . . When the principal colonizing powers eventually withdrew, everything of basic social meaning remained to be begun or rebuilt afresh.49 Though the early development of the bourgeois city was, in many respects, comparable to the destructive invasion of the colonial world, urbanization in Africa was not a recapitulation of the earlier experience in the development of European capitalism. It was, on the contrary, the articulation of its final contradictions. The structure of the city in Africa reflects the fact that these societies’ economies were conditioned by the development and needs of the European economies to which they were subjected as producers and processers of raw materials. Their industrialization increases their dependence upon the industrialized nation; it does not contribute to strengthening the internal market in the country in which it takes place and, because of modern, capitalintensive technologies, it hardly contributes to an expansion of the industrial labor force. Thus industrialization based on alien technolo¬ gy undoubtedly figures among the most important processes that alter traditional class structures and provoke the development of new social classes, but it does so within the general framework of dependent and underdeveloped capitalism.50

330

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

Conclusion The comparative study of urbanization raises questions regarding the relationship between urbanization and industrialization. The co-occur¬ rence of these two processes in the development of Western Europe, in particular in England, and in the United States, contrasts sharply with the urbanization that has occurred without industrialization in Africa and elsewhere. The problems of African urban life are conceived to be what Daniel Lerner calls the “decoupling” of the twin process¬ es.51 The solution frequently posed is the promotion of industrializa¬ tion and the delaying of urbanization in order to return the two processes to harmonious relation. The implementation of such a mechanical proposal usually takes the form of population control pro¬ grams and “foreign aid” which aids not the industrial development of the recipient but the transfer of social surplus to the donor. Those who try to draw parallels between the urbanization and industrialization of Europe and that of Africa fail to recognize that these processes are aspects of the development of the capitalist mode of production at a given point in history for Africa. Failing to recog¬ nize this, social scientists are frequently at a loss to account for the combination of burgeoning urban centers and limping industrial devel¬ opment in Africa. One need only examine the relation between Europe and the United States on the one hand and Africa on the other to dis¬ cover why advanced industrial development has taken place in the for¬ mer countries while the basis of industrialization has never been firmly established in Africa. Africa does not suffer from a mysterious decoupling of urbaniza¬ tion and industrialization but rather from imperialist penetration which creates forced, shanty urbanization in the colonies and industrial devel¬ opment in the metropolitan countries. The exaggerated influx of mass¬ es of people from rural areas into urban centers was precipitated by indiscriminate policies designed to create a surplus labor force as quick¬ ly as possible without regard for future consequences. Towns sprung up in mining regions from which raw materials were extracted and shipped to the metropolitan country without material benefit accru¬ ing to these towns. These raw materials contributed to industrial devel¬ opment and growth in Europe, not Africa. Murray and Wengraf note, “The leading towns [in Africa] were not the creation of industrializa¬ tion and inherent technical progress, but rather the product of an export-directed colonial agriculture [and mining], whose rents and 331

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

profits found an urban outlet in consumption and speculations.”52 In Africa the urbanization of the population was not accompanied by diversification of the urban economy and alteration in urban-rural economic relations. In fact, there were few ties between one sector of the economy and another so that in any single colony there could be no beneficial interaction between the various sectors let along organ¬ ic development. Foreign investment is incapable of solving Africa’s underdevelop¬ ment and skewed urbanization. The high level of contemporary tech¬ nology means that foreign companies will continue to use labor-saving machinery rather than labor-intensive methods. It should be quite obvi¬ ous by now that intensely overcrowded cities in Africa are a direct result of anarchic and unplanned economic development and its internal con¬ sequences. Having begun as centers of colonial trade and administra¬ tion, . . . these cities have drawn in, the surplus people and the uprooted labourers of the rural areas. This is a long-term and continuing process, intensified by rapid rises in general popu¬ lation. Familiar problems of the chaotically expanding city recur, across the world, in many of the poorest countries. People who speak of the crisis of cities with London or New York or Los Angeles in mind ought to think also of the deep¬ er crises of Calcutta or Manila or a hundred other cities across Asia and Africa and Latin America. A displaced and formerly rural population is moving and drifting towards the centres of a money economy which is directed by interests very far from their own. The last image of the city, in the ex-colonial and neo-colonial world, is the political capital or the trading port surrounded by the shantytowns, the barriadas, which often grow at incredible speed. In Peru, ... a few acres of desert have become, in a fortnight, a ‘city’ of thirty thousand people, and this is only a particular example, in the long interaction between altered and broken rural communities and a process of capitalist agriculture and industrialization sometimes inter¬ nally, more often externally directed.53 The study of the city and the social processes unleashed in the form of urbanization raises fundamental questions about the colonial legacy in Africa and elsewhere. What was the nature of the colonial economy?

332

The City in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues

For whose benefit did commerce and industry invade Africa, and what were its implications for industrialization? The trajectory of urban development in Africa was based on extractive capitalism which creat¬ ed urban complexes exemplified in the Katanga region of the Congo, the copper belt of Zambia, and Witwatersrand of the Transvaal in South Africa. Each one of these urban complexes was contingent on the demands of the dominant system. It was John Stuart Mill who said that the trade between England and the West Indies in the eighteenth century was like trade between town and country. In present-day Africa, the links are even closer, and it is “more marked that the town (Europe) is living off the country¬ side (Africa).”54 And the towns in Africa are simply the nodal points in the chain of urban-rural interconnections and the world division of labor. African urbanization presented an eloquent, if tragic, example of the process that created abstracted urban centers and broken com¬ munities. The towns and cities were abstracted from their environment and more organically and closely related to the metropolitan countries than their own hinterland, With no steady growth in the secondary and manufacturing sector of the economy, no expansion of the inter¬ nal market was possible. The position of the urban work force itself was unsteady with its fortunes dependent on the oscillation in the demand for raw materials in the world markets. The uncertainties atten¬ dant on all raw material-producing countries were reflected in the urban structural instabilities and the unresolved contradictions between town and country.

333

■

■

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

I. The Geopolitics of the Class Struggle The national and class struggle in South Africa cannot be understood unless the South African political economy is placed in its global and regional context. Today in South Africa the liberation movement faces a situation in which imperialism has, since the last quarter of the 19th century, been progressively inserted into every sector of the economy; and capital headquartered in South Africa has penetrated and domi¬ nated South Africa’s peripheral regions. The labor power used to extract the enormous mineral resources of the country was recruited from as far north as the 22nd parallel. We can no longer view Southern Africa as a collection of discrete nations. The interdependence of all the countries of Southern Africa is a reality of our age, the product of almost 100 years of capitalist integration and development. South Africa as a white settler state became imperialism’s chosen instrument for the domination of the subcontinent. Today South Africa exerts great influence over the economics of its neighbors because of the manner in which British and Portuguese imperialism developed the transportation system, mining, and other resources of the region. The former High Commission Territories of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, Zambia and Zaire, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe today are dependent on South Africa for vital trade, transportation, and access to the ocean ports. It is clear that the struggle for liberation here can be understood only as a single movement and not as artificially sepa¬ rated struggles. If the liberation movement in South Africa were to tri¬ umph, the economic strength of the country, instead of being used to

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

deepen the dependence of the neighboring states, could be used to transform these weak economies and create a strong interdependent regional economy and aid in socialist construction. Presently South Africa uses its economic supremacy to undermine socialist construc¬ tion and any attempt to build independent economies. In 1980 lead¬ ers of the nine Southern African states held a summit in Lusaka and produced a “Declaration Toward Economic Liberation” which called attention to the dependency of their countries on the white minority regime of South Africa, built over many decades. The declaration point¬ ed out that “The development of national economies [of Southern African states] as balanced units, let alone the welfare of the people of Southern Africa, played no part in the economic integration strategy” (Declaration, 1980: 12). Lenin’s greatest contribution during and after World War I was to an understanding of the problems of imperialism, the rise and politi¬ cal significance of the labor aristocracy, the world revolutionary pro¬ cesses, and the national and colonial questions. With this contribution he shifted Marxism from a national to an international frame of refer¬ ence, from a focus on European economies to the global capitalist economy. Accordingly, revolutionary possibilities no longer depend¬ ed upon conditions of a particular advanced civil society or state, but upon the confrontation of bourgeois and proletarian forces in the world arena that is, at the weakest link in the international arena. Revolution in any one point was, of necessity, international. “It is per¬ fectly clear that in the impending decisive battles in the world revolu¬ tion, the movement of the population of the globe, initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperial¬ ism and will perhaps play a much more revolutionary part than we expect” (Collected Works, Vol. 32: 481-82). The collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in 1975 and the signal victory by MPLA against South Africa’s expeditionary forces resulted in important shifts in the balance of class forces in Southern Africa. There is no question that these developments facilitated as well the struggle and ultimate victory of the Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe over Ian Smith and his cohorts. Angola’s and Mozambique’s decision in 1979 to base their development strategy on scientific socialist prin¬ ciples and the failure of the imperialists’ neocolonialist plans in Zimbabwe have produced a crisis for the white minority regime in South Africa and Namibia (cf. Magubane, 1982).

336

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

The developments north of the Limpopo also created a new and powerful impetus to the class and liberation struggles of the people of South Africa and Namibia. The outcome of the development strategy chosen by Angola and Mozambique and the developments now unfolding in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa itself will undoubt¬ edly greatly affect not only the fortunes of Africa but those of the world economy in general. Today Southern Africa is at the cutting edge of the world revolutionary process. In fact, Southern Africa, which yes¬ terday was the bastion of imperialism, has now become, because of its racist policies, the weakest link in the imperialist chain. Following World War II, South Africa, with the help of the capi¬ talist world powers, was built into an impregnable fortress of white capitalist power. Many of the transnationals that dominate the economies of Africa have their regional offices in South Africa. The struggle in Namibia (which is illegally administered and exploited by South Africa) and in South Africa itself raises two questions: What class or combination of classes in the world today stands for human progress and determines the main content of the revolutionary process in Southern Africa? What combination of classes stands for racism and human oppression? (cf. Magubane, 1981: 313).

II. The Matrix of Class Formation: From Slavery to Proletarianization The landing of the employees of the Dutch East India Company on the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 signaled the incorporation of South Africa into the emerging world capitalist economy. It also represented the formation of classes to complement merchant capital. Initially the occupants of the station were expected to trade peacefully with the Khoisan and San peoples for supplies. But the Dutch colonists soon found the method of barter too slow and unprofitable, and they decid¬ ed to acquire the supplies by force. On December 13, 1692, we find the following entry in the diary of Jan Van Riebeeck: “Today the Hottentots came with thousands of cattle and sheep close to our fort... We had opportunity today to deprive them of 10,000 herd which can be done at anytime” (Van Riebeeck, 1952: 112). This attitude is not surprising: The Dutch colonists were expressing the logic of mercantile capitalist development in the era of primitive accu¬ mulation. In Volume I of Capital (1967: 762), Marx wrote of this stage:

337

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

“The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infa¬ mous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.” Given the dictates of primitive accumulation, it is not surprising that wars of conquest and dispossession soon broke out between the Dutch settlers and the indigenous population. The defeated Khoi and the San populations were reduced to being slaves. The Khoisan work¬ ers, however, were susceptible to the white man’s smallpox, which killed them in large numbers during the epidemics of 1665 and 1713. Thus smitten, they died out or drifted as laborers into the towns and the colonists’ farms. DeKiewiet writes that: “Economically ‘the Khoisan’ had a place in the field and kitchen; socially and politically they stood outside the circle of the rights and privileges of the white man; even legally they existed in an ambiguous region between law and arbitrary will of their masters” (DeKiewiet, 1966: 20). The heavy toll suffered by the Khoisan and the San populations necessitated the importation of slaves. At the very beginning of Dutch colonization were thus woven the double strands of South African his¬ tory, the servile worker and free colonist. For 150 years until 1807, when the slave trade to the British possessions was terminated, slaves were continually imported into the Cape Colony from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and the East Indies. In 1708 there were 1,147 slaves, and in 1795 the number had risen to 18,000 (ibid.). The slaves were principally owned by the Company and the wealth¬ ier burghers; they were employed in the homesteads and vineyards, and on the cornlands in the vicinity of Capetown, Stellenbosch, and the Berg River Valley. In the western districts they were the porters, field-laborers, masons, herdsmen, wagon-drivers, and domestic ser¬ vants. Under the Company’s rule, the practice of making the children of male slaves and Khoisan women serve an involuntary “apprentice¬ ship” was widely practiced (cf. Van De Horst, 1971: 5). In 1795 began the first period of British control of the Cape of Good Hope. However, it was in 1806 that the second and final British occupation occurred. In 1820, some 5,000 British families came to settle in the eastern Cape. As a consequence South Africa experienced extensive penetration by the commodity market, carried by traders and missionaries. The introduction of British settlers and the extension of econom¬ ic exchange relationships were intimately linked, though by no means

338

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

identical. British settler colonialism introduced particular forms of con¬ trol, established through the implementation of an alien state struc¬ ture with its military and administrative apparatus; the state was an extension of metropolitan authority. The colonial state played a cen¬ tral role in the organization of colonial society as an appendage of metropolitan capitalism. The thrust of its policy was to subordinate colonial production to the accumulation needs of metropolitan capi¬ tal. The first question following the arrival of settlers in 1820 then were: What should South Africa produce? What role should its people play in the international capitalist division of labor? An important event took place after this 1820 arrival. The legal emancipation of slaves in the Cape was enacted in Westminster in 1834. This act transformed an already existing labor force into proletarians. Though the buying and selling of servants, as well as the total restraints on slave mobility, were ended, many features of the master/slave rela¬ tionship continued to be reproduced in the system of “free” labor that succeeded it. The Masters and Servants Laws were passed. Under these laws, especially on the farms, relations between employer and employ¬ ee resembled in important aspects owner/slave relations: “The pay¬ ment of workers at subsistence level, the degree of physical discipline administered by the farmer and farm-worker, living on and off the same land, jointly experiencing, in tragically opposite ways, the ties of dom¬ inance and bondage” (cf. Bundy, 1979: 373-74). Thus when slave labor was replaced by cheap labor, there began a process of transforming independent subsistence producers into lowpaid agricultural, construction, and later, mine workers. The process was quickened by war, dispossession, rents, and taxes. The integration of peasants into the capitalist economy was facilitated by the intro¬ duction of consumer goods as well. That is, the process of proletari¬ anization in South Africa following the abolition of slavery was largely determined by the fact that the country was now within the orbit of Britain and under the powerful influence of its socioeconomic devel¬ opment. If this factor is forgotten or overlooked, much will seem inex¬ plicable in the emergence of the working class in the capitalist structure of South Africa in the first half of the 19th century and the first quar¬ ter of the 20th century. Whereas in England the essence of “primary accumulation” was the deprivation of the direct producers of the means of production, in South Africa this process was distinctive in that the colonists sought through conquest to create a sufficient pool of labor

339

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and to push the rest into reservations, where they would continue to eke out some subsistence besides wage labor. The process of expropriation and proletarianization in South Africa in the 19th century is written in letters of blood and fire, to paraphrase Marx. It includes a variety of strategies and tactics depending on the purpose for which this labor was to be employed. It was conquest, however, that was ultimately necessary to wrest the land from African communities and to establish the private property in land essential to capitalist development. In Natal, where Africans had not yet been sub¬ jugated by force, capital would not wait indefinitely for the natural appearance of the working population, and therefore indentured Indian labor was imported to work in the Natal plantations. The captives from the “Kaffir Wars” (as the wars of dispossession were called by the English) on the eastern frontier during the late 18th century and first half of the 19th were forced to work in road con¬ struction, public works, and also for private farmers under the appren¬ ticeship system. This system reached its peak in 1857, when, following the Cattle Killing episode, 33,000 Africans were apprenticed to farm¬ ers in the eastern Cape. These apprentices were the first rural prole¬ tariat in South Africa. When the Boer farmers who had left the Cape for the interior employed Africans on the farms, they also utilized this practice of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship had nothing to do with providing tech¬ nical instructions for the apprentice, but had everything to do with providing the farmer and road builders with cheap labor. As a system of employing and exploiting labor, it was not an invention of the colonists, since the practice of child slavery goes far back in English history. Parish apprenticed’ children, often of very tender years, had long been farmed out to employers by the overseers of the poor in English parishes from the foundlings, orphans and pauper children in their charge a practice which only died out in the nineteenth cen¬ tury and similar practices were known throughout the continent of Europe” (quoted in Robertson, 1935: 408). “In 1878, the Cape Colony arranged for the apprenticeship of six-year-old African chil¬ dren in order to secure lasting and permanent good in the adoption of civilized habits and the acquisition of knowledge of useful trades, as well as the knowledge of the principles and practice of improved methods of agriculture, and also with a view to check the roving habits of the natives” (ibid.).

340

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

It is unnecessary at this point to indicate the various forms of African resistance against the imposition of the capitalist system. There is no question that the history of capitalist development is marked by tough struggle and resistance. They were struggles full of heroism and great sacrifices. Unfortunately, not every event in this resistance has been studied in any detail. The little we know suggests that Africans learned quickly. Though at first they gave their cattle and labor without know¬ ing their value, a little experience opened their eyes about the nature of the economic system they were involved in, and “altercations between (Africans) and the farmers were a necessary consequence. These con¬ tentions grew into enmities; and in the year 1792, the Caffres (sic) fell unexpectedly upon the colonists, of whom many were murdered and plundered by them.” Meynier, the landrost of Graaff-Reine, blamed the farmers for their conflict, particularly “their trading methods, and their treatment of those they engaged as servants, especially as regards non-payment of promised wages. There was as yet no rule of law reg¬ ulating contract of service. If the native felt aggrieved, he would usual¬ ly run away, and identify himself by stealing cattle. If the employer was dissatisfied with his servant’s conduct, he would whip him; but the usual consequence of this was that the servant deserted” (ibid.: 406). The main point is that the working men and women who emerged from this process were the forebears of the modern proletariat.

III.

The Discovery of Diamonds and Gold

The rise of the diamond (1866) and gold mining (1884) industries had significant consequences for the process of proletarianization and for the rise of the working class in south Africa: It qualitatively increased the need for a class of permanent wage earners — specifically, for some skilled labor, but large numbers of cheap and unskilled labor. The con¬ tinued existence of independent African chiefdoms and kingdoms con¬ fronted the mining industry with difficult problems, and only their destruction would release enough labor for the mines, farms, and other industries that were developing. Railway construction first began in earnest after the mineral discoveries. Up to 1874, there were only 69 miles of railway in South Africa. By 1879, there were some 850, and more than 3,000 additional miles had been laid by the end of the cen¬ tury. The arrival of the railway was a significant development indicat¬ ing the forging of the whole country into a single economy linked to the world economy. 341

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The first true proletariat in South Africa is associated with railway construction and diamond diggings; by 1874 a labor force of 10,000 Africans was to be found in Kimberly. By 1914, according to the dominion’s Royal Commission, De Beers employed an average of 14,018 Africans apart from 1,353 convicts. The exploitation of the gold industry in the 1880s led to an even greater need for “free” pro¬ letarians (Robertson, ibid.). Faced with the constant cry for labor from farmers and those who were constructing roads and railways and the recently opened diamond mines, the British government launched a series of wars against African chiefdoms and kingdoms. The years 1870-1902 will be forever mem¬ orable in the history of capitalist development in South Africa. In those years Africans were conquered and dispossessed of their means of liveli¬ hood and reduced to a vast pool of labor from which capital would recruit all the labor power it required. For Africans, the discovery of diamonds and gold produced qual¬ itative changes in their lives and in their relations with settler colonists. From that time onwards, they felt the thrust of the demands for their labor not as an episodal occurrence but as a permanent feature of their existence. Within 40 years, 1870-1910, all the remaining independent African territories were forcibly brought under imperial control. “In the new era, there was no room for independent African kingdoms; they were, in Sir Bartte Frere’s words, an ‘anachronism’” (Atmore and Marks, 1982: 112). The process which created the black working class in the diamond and gold mines was more brutal than anywhere else in the world. Following conquest, administrative devices were instituted to reduce the black proletariat to a state of abject helplessness — the most exploit¬ ed proletariat in the world. Gold mine owners colluded with local authorities for unobstructed exploitation of black labor. By the cen¬ tury s end Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and arch-imperialist, could remark with satisfaction in the Cape Colony’s Legislative5 Assembly: There is, I think, a general feeling that the natives are a distinct source of trouble and loss to the country. Now I take a differ¬ ent view. When I see the labour troubles that are occurring in the United States, and when I see the troubles that are going to occur with the English people in their own country on the social question and the labour question, I feel rather glad that 342

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

the labour question here is connected with the native question, for... we do not have here what has lately occurred in Chicago, where... the whole of these labour quarrels have broken out, and the city has been practically wrecked. This is what is going on in the older countries on account of the masses as against the classes getting what they term their rights, or... those who have not, trying to take from those who have... I do not feel that the fact of our having to live with the natives in this coun¬ try is a reason for serious anxiety. In fact, I think the natives should be a source of great assistance to most of us. At any rate, if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall all be thankful that we have the natives with us in their proper position. We shall be thank¬ ful that we have escaped those difficulties which are going on amongst all the old nations of the world (quoted in Atmore and Marks, 1982: 112).

IV.

Imperialism and the White Working Class

Capitalist development in South Africa was racist from its inception. As we have seen, in the mercantile period the colonists not only exploit¬ ed imported slave labor, but also exploited the indigenous Khoisan laborers as indentured servants following the robbery and pillage of their livestock. Following the abolition of slavery, the colonists insti¬ tuted various forms of forced labor ranging from apprenticeship of children to the importation of indentured “Cooley” labor for the Natal sugar cane plantations. The legal bases for these methods of forced labor were the Masters and Servants Act (abolished in 1974) and the pass systems. To the extent that black workers were subjected to these non-economic restrictions and worked under what were almost slave¬ like conditions, white workers saw no future in any alliance with black workers and acquiesced in the holding down of other races in the belief that they (white workers) benefitted from such an arrangement. The differential incorporation of black and white workers and the different burdens they bore vis-a-vis capital diluted and distorted class con¬ sciousness among white workers who found common racial ground with the capitalists that ultimately were their chief antagonists. Contributing to this situation was the fact that, like capitalism, the trade union movement in South Africa was imported from Britain and Australia. Immigrant miners transferred their craft unionism to South

343

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Africa. The poor, unskilled Afrikaner workers were not admitted to the trade union movement until 1911, following the bitter class battles of the previous years. Add to this fact that Africans were treated as mem¬ bers of the subjected and conquered race. No more inauspicious cli¬ mate could be found for any attempt to forge a class-conscious trade union movement, i.e., a wider workers’ and people’s unity. Marx’s observation that labor in the white skin can never be free as long as members in the black skin are branded held a great deal of relevance. In South Africa the general economic processes of capitalist trans¬ formation, proletarianization, and class formation were mediated and determined by non-economic features of South Africa first as a settler colony and then after 1910 as a British dominion within the British Empire. The different fates of black and white workers are partly to be explained by this fact. Even more important, South Africa was con¬ quered and subjugated to British imperialism in the era of the trans¬ formation of capitalism to the monopoly phase. Monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, is the highest and most ruthless stage of capitalism. One of the main economic features of imperialism is the export of cap¬ ital in search of usurious profits. In 1886 — the year in which the Witwatersrand (Rand) gold fields were first declared to be public dig¬ ging — the Transvaal Colony where the gold fields are located in South Africa became an area of great importance to British imperialism. In 1890, the par value of capital invested in the Rand Mining stood at 22 million pounds ($5.00 = one pound); by 1899 the figure had reached 75 million. By 1914 it had climbed to a staggering 128 million pounds (Frankel, 1938, Table 14, 95). And between 60 and 80% of the for¬ eign capital invested in the Rand was British. To obtain high monopoly profits, the mine owners combined two forms of labor, white skilled (from Britain) and black unskilled (mosdy African). The latter was plundered through the use of feudal forms of exploitation. That is, imperialism created class stratification within the working class through the process of differential incorporation. At the economic level this meant the capitalist could not and did not immedi¬ ately seek to destroy the pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and oppres¬ sion, but instead incorporated them into a wide system of exchange dominated by capitalist production. Thus reservations were created where traditional structures were retained and workers were recruited to the mines for specific periods. The migrant laborer was superexploited because, it was asserted, part of his subsistence would be from the land.

344

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

Whenever monopoly capital enters into relations with pre-capitalist modes of production, it subjects these to itself, exploiting labor that it deliberately confines in a pre-capitalist milieu. In this way the precapi¬ talist sector in fact comes to subsidize not only the superprofits of monopoly capital, but also the wages of the “labor aristocracy.” The mechanisms of primitive accumulation do not, therefore, belong only to the pre-history of capitalism; they are contemporary forms by which monopoly capitalism exploits labor power in the colonies. The political economy of South Africa represents the primordial and quintessential from of monopoly capitalism in the context of a white, racist settler state. The white working class is a peculiar creation of imperialism, and enjoys the fruits of compromise between monopoly capitalism and the Afrikaner petty bourgeois nationalism as it evolved after 1910. That is, imperialism created the material conditions for the emergence of a hegemonic alliance between labor and white capital; this hegemony had already been recognized by the founders of Marxism as the nec¬ essary class basis for imperialism. When Lenin studied the essence of monopoly capitalism, what interested him were the concrete world economic situation and the class alignments that complemented it: in other words, how the concentration of capital affected the changes within the class stratification of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, viz., the appearance of purely parasitic rentier bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy. The circumstances and the character of the white working class are described as follows by Simons and Simons (1969: 32): The newcomers included men with habits and attitudes appro¬ priate to an industrialized society. Some were staunch trade unionists and ardent socialists. They grafted their beliefs and patterns of organization on the colonial stock. White working men, set in authority over African peasants, despised them and also feared them as potential competitors. Employers, con¬ cerned mainly to maximize profits, exploited the weak bar¬ gaining position of the peasants and substituted them, when this was expedient, for the better paid whites. Immigrant jour¬ neymen joined forces with local artisans to erect their tradi¬ tional defences against undercutting. Early in the 19th century, branches of British trade unions had been established in Cape Town and other coastal cities. The era of diamond

345

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and gold mining, i.e., of the advent of finance capital, greatly increased the number of white workers in the interior of the country. South Africa’s white population rose from 260,000 in 1865 to 634,000 in 1891; it grew threefold in the Transvaal, from 40,000 in 1875 to 119,000 in 1890. The mining industry became the arena of fierce class struggles where finance capitalism confronted the tens of thousands of immigrant workers in the town of Kimberly — owned and run by De Beers — and in the turbulent “mining-camp” atmosphere of the Witwatersrand (cf. Lerumo, 1971: 33). The politics of British imperialists after the discovery of gold in 1884 were shaped by three considerations. First, they found them¬ selves in a situation of economic and political conflict and change of great complexity. How would they control the social process of class formation and conflict? The need to exploit black and white labor could not be avoided. The question then became what concessions could be made to white workers without threatening the profitability of the mines in the first place and the rule of imperialism in the new domin¬ ion. Imperialists were fortunate to be able to make the choices they made under circumstances which permitted them considerable room for maneuver and scope to manipulate and direct the process of pro¬ letarianization of the various population groups. Though virtually free to control the course of events, they could not avoid the contest between capital and labor. That is, privileges were not handed to the white working class on a platter; they had to fight for these every inch of the way. The political freedom and power of white labor were decisively determined by the course and outcome of their struggle with imperial monopoly capital. It is true, of course, that the terrain on which these battles were fought was determined by the peculiar compromise between monopoly capitalism and the Afrikaner petty bourgeoisie, or the alliance between what Trapido calls “gold and maize.” Within this compromise, whites of all classes had the vote, which they manipulated to achieve their aims. When, on several occa¬ sions, monopoly capital wanted to reduce white miners’ wages or to replace white miners with lower-paid Chinese or black workers, through the threat of using their vote, white workers successfully defended their privileges. In 1907, for instance, white skilled miners went on strike to protest the reorganization of the rock drilling process. Prior to that, rock drilling was an exclusive preserve of skilled workers. But when the pro-

346

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Workinc Class

cess was de skilled, skilled miners became vulnerable, because now they could be replaced by unskilled, scab labor paid at lower rates. The man¬ ner in which white skilled laborers resisted the threat to their job secu¬ rity reveals the nature of racism among white workers. They demanded that a range of jobs in the mining industry be reserved exclusively for whites. Johnstone (1970), in his classic study of the gold mining indus¬ try, says that the job color-bar demanded by white labor was not some kind of irrational racial discrimination, but was based on the same prin¬ ciple as that of the employers who wanted to play black against white labor to the detriment of both. The white workers had been assigned a privileged position in the settler-imperial economy of South Africa and they wanted to keep things that way. As was said by Sir Alfred Milner himself, British High Commissioner for South Africa and the Governor of the Cape and Transvaal (1897-1905): “We do not want a white proletariat in this country. The position of the whites among the vastly more numerous black population requires that even their lowest ranks should be able to maintain a standard of living far above that of the poorest section of the population of a purely white coun¬ try” (quoted by Marks and Trapido, 1979: 66). Even as Milner expressed this sentiment of creating a white labor aristocracy, monopoly capital dominating the mining industry sought to reduce white wages by using cheaper black labor, through a process of loosening the stranglehold that skilled white labor exerted on the labor market. An article in the Mining World in 1899 stated: White wages have not been reduced in the past because the Outlanders desired to work together for political salvation, and any attack on the White labourers’ pay would have caused a split in the ranks. However, when new conditions prevail, White wages must come down (quoted by Katz, 1976: 28). This attitude unleashed a period of unparalleled class struggles between monopoly capital and white labor in the form of strikes in 1907, 1913, and 1914, which culminated in the Witwatersrand revolt of 1922 — the so-called Rand Revolt. At the height of both the general strikes of 1913 and 1922, the army was called in to suppress the strikes, caus¬ ing many casualties. Johnstone (1979: 308) sums up the political mean¬ ing of the 1913 and 1922 strikes as follows: “White labor held a revolver to the head of capital, the state and the capitalist world sys¬ tem, and gave its message: You may have incorporated Blacks as super-

347

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

exploitable workers in a super-exploitative system, but you’re going to have to make a deal with us. We’re going to force you to, because we can.” During these strikes, hatred of the monopoly bourgeoisie that owned the mines was extremely strong. According the DeKiewiet (1966: 268): “During such strikes men spat at the name Chamber of Mines, and spoke of the building, the Corner House, as if it were a seat of the worst capitalistic tyranny and financial greed. Schoolboys who heard the language of their fathers learned to look up at its unfash¬ ionable exterior as if it might be a South African Bastille.” The alliance between capital and white labor was not a given. Only after strikes, rebellion, and loss of life did white miners win the right to organize and then entrench their class privileges. Monopoly capital has, in the privileges it granted white miners, created a Frankenstein. Insofar as the subservience of the cheap black workers was the condi¬ tion for its opposite — the privileges of white miners and superprofits for the mine owners — step by step, white labor became an emascu¬ lated adjunct of the ruling class, exchanging its independence for wage and job concessions. The post-World War I economic crisis hit the British and South African monopoly bourgeoisie where they were most sensitive — the gold mining profits. In 1919 the gold market price was 130 shillings per five ounces. In November, 1921, the price fell to 104 shillings and in December to 95 shillings. This raised once again the question of the privileges granted to white workers. The Chamber of Mines, in search¬ ing for a way to avoid closing the low-grade mines which the higher price had made profitable to work, faced a dilemma. How was it to lower labor costs? It was impossible to reduce further the already mis¬ erable wages paid to African miners, who were already working at rates far below subsistence. On the other hand, white workers were paid twice as much as black workers, even though numerically they were only a fraction ol black workers. The 1921 figures were: Number Employed

Annual Wages

Whites

21,455

10,640,521

Africans

179,987

5,964,528

Chamber ofMines: 32nd Annual Report, pp. 219-21 (quoted by Lerumo, 1971: 50).

348

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Cuss

The Chamber of Mines — proving once again that in the final analy¬ sis there is no love lost between capital and labor, white or black — decided to cut the cost of white labor by reducing the proportion of white to black workers, transferring some semi-skilled jobs to Africans at lower rates of pay. The opportunism of white labor was catching up with it. It was forced to fight on two fronts — against capital and against unskilled and politically disfranchised black labor. The ferocity of white response to this threat of being displaced by black workers was unprecedented. It was tantamount to the declara¬ tion of class warfare, stemming from the fact that the newly proletarianized Afrikaner workers in particular had very few options. According to Johnstone (1979: 369), “Unlike the English workers who, already proletarianized and already skilled, had moved from one situation of industrial wage labor in Europe (or elsewhere) to another situation of industrial wage labor in Africa, those Afrikaner workers underwent the much more traumatic transition from having some independence and skills on the land to complete dependence on industrial wage labor in precisely the least secure and most contested (and most unpleasant) job levels of semi-skilled and unskilled work.” The class conflict which built up with the 1922 Rand Revolt orig¬ inated, according to Johnstone, in the intense fear and intense anger of the newly proletarianized semi-skilled Afrikaner workers. That is, to understand the defiance of white labor vis-a-vis capital on the one hand and black labor on the other, “we have to look at the ‘normal’ work¬ ing class problems of completely proletarianized workers under capi¬ talism; as intensified by insecurities, stemming from employer preference for superexploitable black workers” (ibid: 308). The eco¬ nomic and political significance of “complete proletarianization of whites, especially in the context of a forced labor economy and a split labor market structured along racial lines, gave a decided impetus to the forcefulness of white labor resistance” (ibid.: 309). What happened during the 1922 white miners’ strikes is well known. The strike which started in the coal-mines of the Transvaal on 2 January 1922 spread immediately to the near-by gold mines. Violent men raised their voices. That they were heeded was seen in the drilling of commandos in open places. The word “republic” was heard, and the cry for a White South Africa was loud, so that men wondered whether violence would be used 349

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

against the natives or against the form of government itself. On 6 March, amid scenes of mob violence, a general strike of all Union industry was called. Although the strike was not unanimous, law and order on the Witwatersrand broke down completely. On 10 March fighting became general. Martial law was declared. Cannons roared in the streets of Johannesburg; Lewis guns spat from aeroplanes; soldiers and special police charged against barricaded strikers. The end of bloody fight¬ ing was the end of the strike. The demands of the mining com¬ panies prevailed (DeKiewiet, 1966: 171-72). The Martial Law Commission of Enquiry reported that 153 had been killed (including 43 soldiers and 29 policemen) and 687 injured (including 176 soldiers and 115 police). The white trade unionists (in the “Story of Crime,” issued by the Transvaal Strike Legal Defense Committee in 1924) later estimated the losses as over 250 dead and thousands wounded. Over 1,000 strikers and their leaders were arrest¬ ed. Four were sentenced to death for alleged murders committed dur¬ ing the strike. Those who were executed marched to the gallows singing “The Red Flag” (cf. Lerumo, 1971: 50). The white working class fought typical class struggles despite all of the weaknesses from which it suffered as a result of accepting the assumptions of a colonial society. Even its privileges were not enough to prevent it from waging the class struggle. The fallout from the white miners’ strike of 1922 was immense. White workers won some important concessions, and in return made some serious political concessions to the mining industry. If the first two decades of the 20th century were the high-water mark of the white working class in South Africa, they also marked its greatest betrayal of black workers, which led to its eventual defeat as a force independent of the bourgeoisie. From 1922 onwards the purely “white” labor movement in South Africa was transformed step by step into an emas¬ culated racist adjunct of the Nationalist Party, exchanging the class interests of all workers for privileges of a white supremacist capitalists state. Joe Slovo (1976: 159) sums up the results of the 1922 strike as follows: The victory of the alliance between the white South African Labour Party and the Nationalist Party at the polls in 1924 was the real culmination of the strivings of the privilege-seeking

350

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Cuss

white workers. The basic aims of the 1922 strike were given statutory recognition. The new government made vaste con¬ cessions, and the process of making the white workers appendages of the ruling group in every sphere of life — eco¬ nomic, political and social — began in earnest. Laws were passed effectively making skilled work a right of white work¬ ers alone. A so-called “civilized labour policy” was imple¬ mented to maintain Africans as unskilled cheap labour and to prevent the emergence of an organized African working class. Africans (i.e., all who were obliged to carry passes) were exclud¬ ed from the definition of “employee” in the new industrial leg¬ islation. This deprived them of the legal right to strike (in any industrial dispute) or to form their own registered trade unions. The white miners’ strike of March, 1922, was also a watershed. The long premiership of General Smuts and the still longer reign of the South African Party, which since the formation of the Union in 1910 had represented the interests of imperialism and the monopoly bour¬ geoisie, came to an end, brought about by the “Pact” government made up of the Nationalist Party and the Labour Parties. Labor’s turn to the right facilitated the penetration of the white working class by the virus of Afrikaner nationalism and speeded up the process that led to the Labour Party’s extinction. The faith in the revolutionary poten¬ tial of the white working class soon began to fade within the Communist movement. From now on the party’s strategy changed emphasis and began to stress the concept of African liberation. By 1928, of the 1,750 members of the Communist Party, 1,600 were African (ibid.). The policy of the “Pact” government was not only to provide jobs but also to protect white workers from black “competition.” In 1924 when a Department of Labour was created, one of its leading func¬ tions was to establish areas of employment in which poor whites were protected against black competition. Municipalities and other public bodies were encouraged to employ more Europeans at “civilized” rates of pay. The preferential employment of European unskilled laborers had begun on the state railway system as early as 1907. In 1921 there were 4,705 white laborers in railway employment. By 1928 the num¬ ber of unskilled white laborers had steeply grown to 15,878, employed at “civilized” wages of 3 to 5 shillings per day with free housing or an equivalent allowance (cf. DeKiewiet, 1966: 224). 351

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The implications of this policy were incalculable. In addition to all its “labor aristocracy” aspects, the policy meant a degree of actual “deproletarianization” of the white workers and their socialization into the middle class with all of its prejudices. The manufacturing sector which began to grow in earnest after the strike of 1922 was to be the exclusive preserve of white labor. In 1916-17 the number of whites engaged in manufacturing was 46,100 and the number of Africans, coloureds, and Indians 77,742, giving a ratio of 1 to 1.65. In 193435 the number was 111,971 white workers, who received 74% of the wages and salaries paid, and 149,877 blacks, etc., giving a ratio of 1 to 1.3. This should be compared with the ratio of approximately 1 to 9 in the mining industry (ibid: 264). As a result of these preferential employment policies, the “poor white problem” had largely disap¬ peared by 1940 (see Report of Department of Labour, 1440, U.G./1941, paragraphs 67-73; quoted by O’Meara, 1975: 150). The white labour aristocracy initiated by the Nationalist/ Labour Party ‘Pact’ government of 1924-29 was largely com¬ pleted, and white class opposition and pressure on the gov¬ ernment substantially relieved. The much feared threat of Afrikaner nationalism posed by potential class mobilization was largely removed, freeing a future nationalist government to consolidate Afrikaner capitalism provided it defended the posi¬ tion of privilege it had created for white labour (ibid.). Today over half the white workers (700,000 out of 1.27 million in 1970) occupy nonproductive roles in the tertiary sector (civil service, finance, professions, wholesale and retail trade, etc.), and where they are more directly engaged in production of commodities, it is increas¬ ingly in the role of overseers (cf. Slovo, 1976: 121). Given these material benefits, white labor developed a vested inter¬ est in the status quo. As more benefits accrued, white laborers’ mate¬ rial stakes in racial capitalism became entrenched. Most studies of white workers, in particular their actions and attitudes toward black labor, have treated them as the product of irrational and primordial emo¬ tions. Though there is an irrational component in white workers’ racial attitudes, the actions of white workers with regard to their black coun¬ terparts have not been due to primordial hatreds. In their totality they have been deliberately and carefully nurtured and manipulated by the ruling class, which based its policies on carefully thought out strate-

352

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

gies intended to assure the presence and the exploitability of a large labor force, primarily in the mines and in agriculture, whose wages could be commanded at subsistence wages. Changes in the gold indus¬ try that increased or diminished the need for a cheap labor force have been the principal determinants of racial labor policies. Monopoly capital from the moment it got involved in the exploita¬ tion of the gold mines embarked on a strategy to divide black and white workers, the better to control both; it unhesitatingly used black work¬ ers to undermine the position of white workers and to remind them of their precarious position. That racial discrimination, sponsored by governments and employers, “encouraged the emerging demonology of white labor, which tended to blame its troubles not on the system or on white capital but on black workers, who were victims of white capital, white labor, and the system. By paying white workers in the coin of racism, which gave them a false sense of self-esteem, and by reserving for whites, when economic conditions permitted and social peace dictated, privileged white sanctuaries, white capital cemented white labor into the system and channeled hatred of the system into hostility and violence against black scapegoats” (Bennett, Jr., 1975: 238). In the period 1886-1925, the consciousness of the white working class reflected as well the projection of stratification of past social rela¬ tions on a new system of stratification (that is, the projection of rural stratification on urban stratification). This is a very common problem in the psychology of transitional or recently constituted classes. One must understand that in South Africa at this period the dominant val¬ ues of the white workers were produced by the specific nature of a colonial situation. That is, we cannot speak as yet of class conscious¬ ness (that is, the conditions and possible modes of expression of class interests) but of what Lukacs has called class psychology. “By this is meant the forms of thought and feelings of historically situated social classes. On this level important problems arise concerning contradic¬ tions between the class interests of a class and its historical origins; between its mentality as conditioned by existing structure, the values of social stratification, race relations, etc., and the class interests that are the condition of its possibilities for class action” (Dos Santos, 1970: 179).

353

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

V. The Black Industrial Proletariat The African experience of colonial domination is unique not only in duration (three centuries) and in depth of economic, social, and polit¬ ical penetrations, but also in the variety of its institutional expansions, especially during the era of British colonialism. The fate of the black workers in South Africa was to be conquered, colonized, and exploit¬ ed by two colonialists — the undynamic Dutch colonists and the dynamic British colonists. The evolution of South Africa in the 19th and early part of the 20th century illustrates the making of those insti¬ tutions and concepts of society, of race and religion, of status and priv¬ ilege, and right and might, which took root in South Africa as Dutch and English colonists incorporated Africans, coloured, and Indians into a vertical spectrum from white at the top to black at the bottom; from omnipotent to utterly powerless. The black working class emerged and was shaped to conform to this socioeconomic heritage. The black working class, like its European counterparts, began to flex its muscle quite early. Black labor unrest occurred in the gold mines in 1901-02 and the diamond mines in 1907, when African workers, still organized exclusively on a linguistic basis, embarked on a series of sporadic strikes and mass desertions from work (cf. Warwick, 1978; Moreney, 1978). However, the first really large and sustained black workers’ strike occurred in 1913 at the Sogerefontein Diamond Mine, where casualties resulted. A new stage in the process of proletarianization of the African sub¬ sistence producers took place in 1913, when the newly constituted white settler state — the Union of South Africa — passed the 1913 Land Act. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as we have stated above, white colonists had relied on extra-economic coercion to secure cheap labor. Thus, in the Cape, measures such as the Caledon Code of 1809 and later the Masters and Servants Laws (first introduced by the colo¬ nial government in 1855) had restricted the contractual rights of black workers, while from the beginning the mines had depended upon the importation of semi-slave labor from the territories outside South Africa (notably from China and the Portuguese colonies). Imported labor could not satisfy the labor needs of the new state. The last decade of the 19th and the first of the 20th century saw a gathering legislative assault similar to the Enclosure Acts in England to produce labor within the borders of the Union. The 1913 Land Act was the basis for the unique process of African proletarianization. The 354

Imperialism and the Makinc of the South African Working Cuss

act had three related aims: 1) the limitation of black land ownership to the Native Reserves which were designed not only as labor reser¬ voirs, but also as areas where families of migrant laborers could con¬ tinue to eke out a subsistence; 2) the creation of measures to induce and regulate a flow of African labor; and 3) the restrictions upon the permanent settlement of the African proletariat working either in the mines or white farms. The rise and fall of the African peasants has been documented by Bundy (1979). By 1920, the once large peasant sur¬ pluses had vanished as the productive capacity and the ability of the reserves to supply increasing populations rapidly declined. Restriction of African land ownership, impoverishment, and landlessness acceler¬ ated the process of proletarianization. If the principal objective of the 1913 Land Act was to induce pro¬ letarianization and to increase the supply of African labor, the neces¬ sary complement of this law was a series of measures directly coercive of the African work force. That is, the Cape Masters and Servants Laws that restricted the rights of black workers were modernized to regu¬ late the formation, duration, and the termination of contracts. Their breach (through desertion, disturbance, insubordination, etc.) consti¬ tuted a criminal offense, making the offender liable to imprisonment. In 1911, the Native Labor Regulation Act (NLRA) extended these criminal sanctions to workers in the mines, who were also expressly denied the right to strike. The NLRA extended the Pass Laws which, like the Masters and Servants Ordinances, had been introduced into British colonies in the 19th century and had been consolidated over the years. Under these regulations, the movement of black laborers was direcdy restricted, and they were denied the freedom to move from their place of residence or to take up other employment elsewhere with¬ out first obtaining a pass, on which was registered a host of other per¬ sonal data. These Pass Laws, taken together with the establishment of monopsonistic recruiting agencies by mine employers, consequent wage fixing at less than subsistence, and the virtual incarceration of workers into prison-like compounds, caused the recently proletarianized African peasants to be nothing but a coerced labor force (for details see Wilson, 1972: 128, Doxey, 1961: 128-29). The lopsided economic and social burdens imposed on black work¬ ers by the state could only frighten white workers and force them to defend their narrow privileges. The lack of political rights put black workers in a humiliating and unequal position vis-a-vis both their

355

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

employers and white workers. They were not legally free to sell their labor power. In these circumstances it is not surprising that a preda¬ tory attitude toward black labor was characteristic especially in the mines. Even though the mines were until World War II the largest employ¬ er of black labor, the growth of the secondary sector brought large numbers to the cities. In 1914, the urban black proletariat numbered 243,509; in 1915 it had grown to 260,495; and in 1918 it numbered 268,412. The impetus given to secondary industries during the War per¬ sisted in the boom that followed. Of the 6,000 factories record¬ ed under the Factories Act, 4,300, with a working force of 30,000 white and 74,000 other persons, were registered in 1919-20. The number employed in the manufacturing estab¬ lishment topped the 180,000 mark at the end of 1920. Trade unionism made a corresponding advance. There were ninety unions with 132,000 recorded members in 1920, compared to 10,500 trade unionists in 1915 (Simons and Simons, 1969220). In spite of its handicaps, the emerging black proletariat began to resist. During and after the War the main weapon of struggle was the strike. For instance, a few weeks before the election of 1920, white mine work¬ ers came out on strike and three days later, after this strike was settled, 30,000 to 40,000 African mine workers followed their example, but with less success in securing increased wages (cf. Horwitz, 1967: 217). The 1920 black miners’ strike climaxed a period of unrest going back to 1913, and given other forms of urban agitation among the black working class, the strike forced far-reaching changes in the class alliances that underpinned the state (cf. Bonner, 1979: 274). The postwar years also saw the emergence of the most powerful black quasi-trade-union movement in 1919 — the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) — followed in 1921 by the for¬ mation of the Communist Party of South Africa (SACP). The ICU was founded as a national organization at a conference of African trade unions held at Bloemfontein in 1920, with the support of the African National Congress. Soon after its birth, the ICU found itself at cen¬ ter stage. In August, 1920, the Cape Town branch won a wage increase for black dock workers through the mere threat of a strike. Two months

356

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

later, the Port Elizabeth workers struck for higher pay. The significance of the birth of the ICU cannot be overestimated. The ICU was a kind of a prologue to the later history of the nation¬ al/working class alliance movement, a prologue in which there was much of what would unfold in the subsequent national/class battles. The black labor movement did not have the advantage of democratic politics and could not use voting rights to advance its interests. In fact, labor and other laws were heavily weighed against black workers. Under the banner of the ICU, African and coloured workers and farm laborers made spectacular advances. The ICU more than once faced violence from the police and white hooligans. In 1925 at Bloemfontein there were 5 deaths among 60 casualties in one such clash. The leaders of the ICU frequently faced imprisonment and deportation. “Nevertheless, the ICU grew into a massive force in a very short period of time, spreading from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London to Natal, inland to the Free State and Transvaal and even beyond the Union’s borders to Namibia, Rhodesia, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. Hardly a town or dorp but had its ICU branch” (Lerumo, 1971: 52-53). The ICU owed much of its popularity to the fact that it never con¬ fined itself to immediate economic questions facing the workers of a given industry or region, but boldly tackled the burning political prob¬ lems agitating the minds of the oppressed people as a whole. The preamble to the ICU constitution evidenced its class conscious and socialist inspiration: Whereas the interests of the workers and those of the employ¬ ers are opposed to each other, the former living by selling their labour, receiving for it only part of the wealth they produce; and the latter living by exploiting the labour of the workers; depriv¬ ing the workers of a part of the product of their labour in the form of profit, no peace can be between the two classes, a strug¬ gle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour until the workers through their industrial orga¬ nizations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all, instead of for the profit of a few. Under such a system he who does not work, neither shall he eat. The basis of remuneration shall be the principle: from every man according to his abilities, to every man according to his needs (quoted, ibid.: 53). 357

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The ICU reached out to the rural masses, taking up their demand for land and recruiting tens of thousand of peasants, including a number of chiefs. It made progress because it was free from any petty bour¬ geois hang-ups. In the postwar years, the black proletariat under the banner of the ICU constituted an important — and the most restive — section of the indigent urban lower classes. The ICU, with its experiences and activities, was a primary school of its own kind, in which the black workers learned to identify their class enemy — the bourgeoisie — and became increasingly aware of the need for a systematic and organized struggle against it. Unfortunately, black and white workers waged their class struggle within their ethnic boundaries, to the detriment of all. For all that, the universal laws of the proletarian movement, which was increasingly active, became manifest at this period. In the following passage Simons and Simons (1969: 270) capture not only the com¬ plicated situation capitalist development had created in South Africa, but also the tragic, grotesque, and comical aspects of human existence and consciousness: Capitalism and white domination... rested on the four pillars of racialism, nationalism, jingoism and reformism. White workers joined with their masters in keeping the black worker subject, and were themselves divided into warring camps. British work¬ men wearing war medals paraded behind the Union Jack when on strike and voted for the financiers and industrialists in the SAP-Unionist coalition; Afrikaner workers joined trade unions and voted for Hertzog’s Nationalist Party. Coloured voters pre¬ ferred Abdurahman to Harrison; Africans followed the ANC rather than the CP. Communist faith in the eventual triumph of class consciousness over false ideologies never wavered, how¬ ever. These were momentary aberrations, symptoms of a van¬ ishing order. Industrialization would free Africans and Afrikaners from their rural backwardness. Capitalism would reduce white workers to the African’s standard and force them to recognize their class interests. Inter-racial solidarity would grow out of the class struggle. Armed with this theory, the com¬ munists anticipated and welcomed the great upheaval of 1922. They believed that it was the start of a revolution which would unseat the ruling class and usher in the ideal commonwealth.

358

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

The Period 1924-1950 This period witnessed very rapid growth in the South African econo¬ my and important changes in the composition of the black proletari¬ at. It is important here to do more than concentrate on those events which highlight the new phase of African proletarianization and to indicate how both the national movement and the working class forces grappled, sometimes uncertainly, with the new tasks posed by the changed and continually changing situation. The African urban population trebled in this period. By 1946 almost one in four Africans lived in urban-industrial areas. A signifi¬ cant development to the permanent urbanization and proletarianiza¬ tion of the black workers was the rapid increase in the ratio of African women to men in cities, from 1:5 in 1921 to 1:3 in 1946, while the national ratio remained constant (O’Meara, 1975: 150). Between 1933 and 1939 an additional 240,000 Africans entered industrial employ¬ ment. Although corresponding figures for trade and commerce are not available, it has been estimated that, if they are taken into account, the increase in urban African employment during this period was over 400,000, almost doubling the size of the urban African labor force (Houghton, 1971: 34). In 1940-46 a further 115,000 Africans joined the industrial work force. A striking feature of this huge influx of labor is the changing ratio of those employed in mining to manufacturing, construction, and electricity, from 316:87 in 1932, 348:198 in 1939, to 328:321 in 1946. While the immigrant percentage of the industri¬ al work force in 1946 is not known, it is widely accepted that it was both small and decreasing. By this period a substantial African prole¬ tariat (in the classic sense of those with nothing but their labor power to sell) had developed. Those who worked in the mines still contin¬ ued as migrant laborers (O’Meara, 1975: 150). The increasing urbanization and proletarianization of Africans was the obverse side of what was happening in the Reserves. The Fagan Commission (1948) identified three broad classes of Africans in the Reserves: owners or occupiers of land, the landless who owned cattle, and the landless whose cattle were grazed on common ground. In the Ciskei Reserve it found that 30% of families were landless, and over 60% owned five or less cattle, with 20% owning nothing. This broad pattern held true for the rest of the Reserves. An earlier report had stressed not only this acute problem of landlessness in the Reserves but also that the vast majority of recruits to the mines came from the land-

359

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

less in the Reserves, and for these migrant workers, “Reserve produc¬ tion is but a myth” (ibid: 151). In the period under review, the African labor force in the mines increased 135,000 or 50%. Unlike in the earlier period, this growing army of immigrant work¬ ers were becoming “free” in Marx’s sense of their being completely separated from any independent means of subsistence, which com¬ pelled them to rely for a greater part of their livelihood on the sale of their labor to the capitalist market. Thus despite stringent laws con¬ trolling the influx to cities and the enforcement of the poor laws, large numbers of Africans from the Reserves entered the cities. The slums which grew on the outskirts of major cities were testimony to this. Between 1921 and 1946, the African urban population grew from 587,000 to an estimated 1,794,212 (The Fagan Report, UG.28-1948, paragraphs 7 and 13). Following the collapse of the ICU in 1928, the 1930s saw a steady growth of African trade unionism and its mushrooming during the war years. By 1945 the Council of Non-European Trade Unions claimed 119 trade unions affiliated with a combined membership of 158,000 (Horrell, 1969: 48-162). The 1940s — the years of World War II and its aftermath — were years of deep restructuring of the African prole¬ tariat and of increased militancy. The number of Africans employed in manufacturing rose by 57%, from 156,500 in 1939 to 245,500 in 1945; and their share of the total so employed rose from 48.6% to 54.6%. At the end of 1948 they accounted for 80.8% of unskilled employees, 34.2% of the semi-skilled and 5.8% of the skilled in occu¬ pations regulated by wage determinations (Simons and Simons, 1969: 554). A new generation of African leaders freed from the traumas of conquest and emerged with the formation of the ANC Youth League in 1943. A new relationship developed between the national move¬ ments of the Africans (ANC), the coloureds (CPO), the Indians (SAIC), and the Communist Party (SACP). The new stage manifest¬ ed itself in the vast upsurge in the national and class struggle of the wartime and postwar years. As Bundy put it (1973: 328): Strike activity by Africans reached a new peak in the Second World War: 304 strikes involving 58,000 non-whites took place during 1939-45, even in the teeth of the notorious War Measure 145 of 1942, outlawing all strikes by Africans, and imposing severe penalties for participation by blacks in any industrial stoppage. In 1946 black South Africans staged their 360

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

largest strike: 75,000 gold miners on the Reef came out. They were driven back down the shafts at the ends of clubs and rifles, sustaining some dozen deaths and over 1,200 injuries. Smuts (whose government managed this and other similar exercises in industrial arbitration) introduced a bill making African trade unionism illegal and decreeing strikes in certain sectors of the economy a criminal offense. During the strike, black miners evinced great fortitude, determination, and the best fighting spirit in the face of vicious attacks. Never before had the South African gold industry witnessed a strike of the dimen¬ sions of the Rand Strike in 1946. It is true that the African Mine Workers Union never revived from the defeat, and the workers received only a small raise three years later. But the sheer size of the strike and especially its ability to paralyze the key industry of the country showed for the first time the power the African proletariat could wield as it matured. In 1946, white miners stood by “as inert props of the reac¬ tionary mine-owners and the government” to use Slovo’s phrases. Gold mining is crucial to the well-being of the South African polit¬ ical economy. The class struggle affecting it reverberates throughout the structure of society and upsets the delicate balance between the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. The mines that were struck suf¬ fered serious loss of revenue. The strike had as well a profound effect on the future course of organized black political opposition, pushing it even more in the direc¬ tion of mass action. Reform died, never to raise its head again. The coalescing of the forces made up of the ANC, the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), the Coloured Peoples Organization (CPO) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), prepared the way for the substantial waging of the struggle. Makabeni, addressing delegates to the Non-European Trade Union Congress Conference in November, 1942, had indicated a new awareness of the nature of African oppres¬ sion: “Let us realize that we are oppressed, firstly as a race and sec¬ ondly as workers. If this were not the case we would not have to put up so bitter a struggle for recognition of our Trade Unions” (quoted by Simons and Simons, 1969: 556). Space does not permit a full discussion of the aftermath of the strike. Suffice to say it was the largest strike in South African history (in terms of participants though not in terms of work days lost).

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Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Even more significant, it was undertaken by migrant workers. Those very workers on whose backs the edifice of the cheap labour system rested, those supposedly still peasant migrants, whose action in the industrial sector spotlighted their prole¬ tarian role, delivered a challenge to the system far stronger than any hitherto offered by the political organs of the African petty bourgeoisie. The structurally generated conflict of the period 1930-45 culminated in the strike which threw the problem of control into sharp relief, accentuating the growing debate over the future pattern of control. The violence of the state’s response not only indicated the degree to which it felt threat¬ ened, but foreshadowed the extreme repression after 1948 (O’Meara, 1978: 161-62). Why, it might be asked, was the 1946 black miners’ strike so poten¬ tially dangerous and damaging? According to Simons and Simons (1969: 575), for almost 60 years a large army of peasant workers had sacrificed health and life in the bowels of the earth: On the owners’ own showing, the miner’s wage was not suf¬ ficient to keep himself and his family alive. The mines were being subsidized by peasant families throughout the sub-con¬ tinent, who produced from forty-five to sixty percent of their household income and depended for the rest on money earned by the working miner. The owners, shareholders, industrial¬ ists, merchants and farmers of South Africa owed much of their wealth to this gross exploitation. For it was a proud claim of the mining interests that gold made a major contribution to the country’s economic growth and prosperity. The African miners had not shared in the prosperity. When they struck for a living wage, they were forced back to work by police and compound officials who drove them out of their rooms, beat them with clubs and rifles, and fired on them when they gath¬ ered outside the compounds or marched in procession to claim their passes with a view to returning home. Their leaders were arrested and charged with breach of contract, or public violence, or violation of the Riotous Assemblies Act or War Measure 145. The strike demonstrated the miners’ will and capacity to orga¬ nize and the importance of their role in the industry. In 1922, 362

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

when all white miners stopped work, the mines maintained a measure of production. The Africans’ strike in contrast brought twelve mines, where the stoppage was complete, to a standstill and partially paralyzed nine others. The Simons go on to point to the parallels between the 1922 white miners’ strike and the 1946 black miners’ strike. On both occasions communists were in the vanguard; both strikes had repercussions that tended to deflect currents of class struggle into channels of national¬ ism. The strike of 1922 led to an alliance between white labor and Afrikaner nationalism, that of 1946 to an alliance between commu¬ nists and African nationalism. By means of political power, the white miners achieved their aims of sheltered employment behind statutory color bars under the Nationalist-Labour “Pact” government (cf. Simons and Simons, 1969: 578). This development confirmed Lenin’s observation that strikes expressed “the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo” (Collected Works, Vol. 5: 375). That is, the white strik¬ ers did not display an awareness of the socioeconomic antagonism between the interests of the workers and those of employers. The 1946 strike of black miners undoubtedly marked a new phase of struggle. Though defeated by police brutality, the strike served to reopen the understanding of the masses of the nature of their oppres¬ sion and the necessity to intensify the struggle for national liberation and racial justice. Its result was the radicalization of black nationalism and a fusion with the working class in the Congress Alliance — an alliance of the African National Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, the Indian Congress, the Congress of Freed Unions, and the Congress of Democrats. This development set the scene for the rousing mass struggles of the 1950s, and these struggles in turn set the scene for the complete 1961 break with the period in which resis¬ tance politics stopped short of violent revolution (cf. Slovo, 1976: 165). In response to the 1946 strike, the ruling class took a number of steps. Among the measures introduced to deal with the militancy of the black proletariat was a bill introduced in 1947 seeking to make trade unionism illegal and a criminal offense for Africans in mining, farming, railways, government, and domestic service. Further, the bill proposed to outlaw all strikes by Africans, to isolate them from segre¬ gated registered unions, to prohibit them from forming unregistered unions, and to prevent any non-African or African alien from holding 363

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

office without the Minister’s consent (cf. Simons and Simons, 1969: 566). The bill never became law. When the Nationalist Party took office in 1948, it appointed an industrial legislation commission. The result of this commission was the Native (Settlement of Disputes) Act of 1953, which reproduced the worst features of the 1947 bill and deprived the black unions of any recognized role. B.J. Schoeman, the Minister of Labour in the Nationalist Party government, said he would leave the unions to die a natural death (ibid., 1969: 560). The reason for this Neanderthal attitude toward the black unions was the fear that if allowed to secure parity and bargaining power with whites, black workers “could not be restricted indefinitely to unskilled or even semi-skilled work, but would get an increasing hold on skilled occupations.” Nothing less than white supremacy was at stake, or so the commission argued. For, the commission said, the “logical result” of the proposal to include black workers in the definition of employ¬ ee was “solidarity of labor irrespective of race” and in the long run the “complete social and political equality of all races” (ibid., 1969: 561).

VI.

Mass Insurgency —1950-1960

The defeat of the black proletarian in 1946 led to the triumph of reac¬ tion in South Africa. The Nationalist Party that was elected in 1948 wanted total oppression of the black masses. The events of the 1950s and early 1960s made it quite obvious that the triumph of reaction was not a matter of a temporary alliance between Afrikaner nationalism and the white workers. There was now a general acceptance of Afrikaner hegemony even by the English bourgeoisie and its international allies. The bourgeoisie’s fear of the black proletariat and black nationalism proved so great that it was prepared to sacrifice some of its own free¬ doms so as to keep the black masses in their place and superexploitable. In the 1950s, the strikes which in the previous period were spon¬ taneous and mostly a form of economic struggle by the workers grad¬ ually became connected with the general political struggles waged by the ANC, SAIC, the Coloured People’s Congress (CPC), and the Congress of Democrats (COD). That was to be expected. The ANC and its allies and the working class had rid themselves of their petty bourgeois illusions and had emerged into a class alliance articulating a radical nationalist ideology. The alliance with the national movement took the form of active involvement of the masses in the struggle waged by the ANC following the adoption of the Programme of Action in 364

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

1949. The Programme was implemented in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, timed to coincide with the tercentenary celebrations of white settlement. This campaign, in which 8,577 volunteers (Africans, Indians, coloured, and white democrats) offered themselves for arrest, sharply increased ANC membership, which rose from 4,000 in 1949 to 7,000 just before the Defiance Campaign (DC) and then rocketed to nearly 100,000, with many times that number of politically aware supporters (cf. O’Meara, 1975: 169). It was precisely the struggle for full political freedom that became the starting point of a broad national class alliance which formed the Congress Alliance. During the DC, the ANC became deeply rooted in the mass consciousness of the African population. From now on the content of the various struggles, inasmuch as they acquired an increas¬ ingly massive and systematic character, became a serious challenge to the status quo. The various struggles waged by the Alliance against Bantu eduction laws, the Group Areas Act, urban removal and the pass system, etc., all became national and were seen by the regime as a chal¬ lenge to its rule.

South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) The formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) in 1955 especially broadened the movement. From the 1945 high of 158,000 black members of unions, by 1950 regression had reduced membership to 38,000. As we have seen, under the various laws passed after the 1946 strike, African trade union could not regis¬ ter and could not use the official machinery of industrial conciliation. Though the unions were not illegal, the complex of restrictions and persecution of individual members made survival difficult. In 1953, penalties for African strikes were made even harsher than before, and the regime expected black trade unions, as we have seen, to die a nat¬ ural death. Anyone urging equality of treatment of workers was regard¬ ed as a communist, and 50 of the ablest union leaders had been forced to resign. It was in this difficult situation that SACTU was born, marking a significant development. It consisted of eight African unions, three coloured unions, and a small union of white laundry workers. By the end of 1955 it had gained more African and coloured support, with a membership of 30,000. Its officers included white and coloured com¬ munists, and it proved proficient in pursuing its union goals, as well 365

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

as being politically committed. It became a member of the Congress Alliance. SACTU’s participation in that democratic alliance rapidly proved it to be by far the most advanced movement ever produced by South African workers. Rejecting the slogan “No politics in the trade unions,” it boldly tackled the main issues — the industrial color-bar, the pass laws, the absence of political and civil rights for the mass of workers, as well as demands for better wages and conditions (cf. Lerumo, 1971: 45). The mass labor and nationalist movement in the 1950s waged many political campaigns, combining different forms of struggle: pas¬ sive resistance, demonstrations, boycotts, mass rallies, etc., all indicat¬ ing the maturity of the Alliance and increasing class consciousness of the leading contingents. Spontaneous local actions invariably changed over to systematic, stubborn resistance, coordinated on a broad front. To back its demands, SACTU urged workers on a number of occa¬ sions to “stay at home.” From 1956 to 1960, when the ANC was banned, “the national general political strike made its appearance. Time and again the great industrial complexes of the Witwatersrand, the Eastern Cape, Natal and elsewhere were brought to a standstill, as hun¬ dreds of thousands of African and other workers answered the Congress call, and stayed at home. They struck for basic political demands, despite lack of organized trade unions, loss of pay, police intimidation — and despite repeated scabbing appeals by most of the people who now lead the PAC” (Dubula, 1966: 41). As the decade of the 1950s wound down, the class and national struggles waged by the Congress Alliance widened and deepened as women and peasants rose to asset their interests. At the same time, these developments increased the awareness in all of the Alliance’s com¬ ponents of their common interests. The appearance of the Alliance in the early 1950s, which broadened when SACTU joined it, was a cru¬ cially important stage in the development of the struggle for libera¬ tion. It meant a step forward in the transition from purely national to class struggle; from separate struggles of various ethnic organizations to joint actions; from spontaneous and disunited actions to organized resistance; from dispersion to unity of forces for a more staunch and effective resistance to the capitalist state. The pound-a-day campaign launched by SACTU in 1957 addressed itself to the practical, day-today, and vital interests of the workers against hunger, poverty, exploita¬ tion, and humiliation. The Congress Alliance became the bulwark,

366

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

preventing victimization of the workers. The growth ofSACTU was phenomenal: By 1961, SACTU had 46 affiliated unions, representing 53,323 members, of whom 38,791 were Africans. Many of the unions were small, but in industries and occupations that had previously not been organized. SACTU, for instance, was the only body to attempt to organize farm workers. Its Agricultural Workers Union fought for a national minimum wage, for land rights and for protection for farm workers under industrial laws. The national organizer of the union was forbidden by author¬ ities to remain in any municipal area anywhere in South Africa for longer than 72 hours, which meant he was perpetually on the run (Davis, 1978: 33). The high levels of organizational support provided SACTU by the Congress Alliance created great fear in the ruling circles and led to even harsher repressive measures by the state organs against work stop¬ pages of all kinds. Levy (1961: 39) writes that strikes resembled “smallscale civil wars.” Strikes by black workers met with “lorry loads of police armed with batons, sten-guns and tear-gas bombs, great pick-up vans arrived and all the strikers were arrested.” After the banning of the ANC in 1960, great handicaps confront¬ ed SACTU. The application of the full force of the Suppression of Communism Act and other anti-labor laws decimated the leadership. Between 1960 and 1966 over 160 SACTU officeholders were banned from taking part in SACTU or any other trade-union activity. As a result, in the 1960s, the level of strike action by black workers fell con¬ siderably. Hemson (1978: 19) sums up the decade 1960-70 as follows: These years were a period of setback for the political resistance, marked by drawn-out political trials and long prison sentences for the leadership. Many working class militants left the coun¬ try and joined the military wing of the African National Congress, and intense repression drove the SACTU unions underground. These developments were accompanied by a hes¬ itant organizational program by reformist trade unions which met with state opposition and was finally suspended in 1969. These years were also marked by the state policy of Bantustans: the consolidation of reserves into regional political units on an ethnic basis, designed to divide the African people by offering 367

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

some advantages to the African petty bourgeoisie and consol¬ idating controls over the African working class. A new phase in resistance to apartheid was marked by the development of black consciousness, and ideology of black awareness and psy¬ chological liberation from the categories of racism, and the opening of armed struggles by ANC guerillas in Zimbabwe.

VII. The Class Struggle Deepens — 1970-1982 In the 1960s, the South African economy underwent deep-seated structural changes as foreign investments increased and as the local sec¬ tor changed into a system of state monopoly capitalism. These devel¬ opments had a growing impact on the life of the oppressed peoples — their exploitation intensified and the contradictions between the mass¬ es and capital were exacerbated. The working class grew rapidly, the increase amounting to some 370,000, of whom 34,000 were white workers. This meant that more and more Africans were becoming involved in the process of production and thus experiencing the full weight of the exploitative system. The social hardships of the African workers reached unbearable proportions in the early 1970s. Various reports on multinationals with plants in South Africa showed that they paid black workers less than starvation wages. Wages received, for example, by the African miners had remained at the 1911 level up until 1973. Their working condi¬ tions had deteriorated in the meantime. Between 1964 and 1974, there were 5,000 deaths in mining accidents. One miner dies every 16 hours in South Africa (see Wilson, 1972: 20-21). Kwashiorkor, a vitamin deficiency disease, was on the increase, and work-related diseases swept the country: 25% of the miners examined in the Transkei Bantustan proved to be suffering from TB. Notwithstanding the boom that South Africa was experiencing, the position of the black population was worsening. Unemployment was climbing to record levels (brought about by loss of employment oppor¬ tunities in urban areas as factories were moved to the borders of the Bantustans, where black labor was even cheaper), while real incomes, already pitifully low, were rapidly declining because of inflation. Against this background of ruthless oppression and exploitation, the early 1970s saw mass actions by African workers. Already in 1971, the national executive meeting of the ANC hoped that working close¬ ly with SACTU would ensure “the mobilization of the vast army of

368

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Cuss

black workers who constitute a most powerful and major revolution¬ ary base” (Benson, 1980: 164). The sharp exacerbation of political and national contradictions resulted in serious working class explosions, and black workers in occupied Namibia went on strike in 1972. Among other things, they demanded the withdrawal of South Africa’s occu¬ pation forces and its administration, repeal of the system of labor recruitment contracts and the ensuring of freedom of movement and the right of workers to seek work. The strikers openly proclaimed the slogans of the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which leads the liberation struggle. The first major strike in South Africa occurred in Natal Province, where hundreds of thousands of African, coloured, and Indian work¬ ers joined work stoppages that were particularly enduring. At the height of the labor troubles — January-February, 1973 — the entire Durban industrial area was paralyzed by a general strike, which later spread to other areas. The businessmen’s organ, The Johannesburg Financial Mail, stated in February that 100,000 workers employed in 125 enter¬ prises were on strike in January in Durban alone. The major strikes were the following: • October: 2,000 longshoremen in Durban and the same number in Cape Town went on strike (that lasted for 31 days, having almost completely paralyzed port activity). • January: The struggle was joined by 1,500 African work¬ ers employed at Coronation Brick and Tile Co. (Durban), 7,000 textile workers at Frame Group Textiles (Natal), some 3,000 workers at Ropes and Mattings (Durban), and 2,000 textile workers at Consolidated Textile Mills (Jacobs). • February: Another 16,000 municipal workers in Durban and 7,000 workers at Hammarsdale Border Industries Complex joined the strikers. The strikers confirmed that despite repression, the spirit of resistance and struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa could not be extinguished. Though the demands concerned higher wages and bet¬ ter working conditions, deep down the strikes were political actions of the African proletariat against minority rule and the system of apartheid. The regime was conscious of this, and Labour Minister M.

369

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Viljoen said that the strikes in Natal had taken on forms which made absolutely clear that the strikers were not for “bread alone.” The French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (October, 1973) agreed with the Minister’s conclusion and said that it had become absolutely clear to the capitalist class that cheap labor might cost them dearly. A series of pay raises began in South Africa in April, 1973. Even those African workers who did not participate in the strikes got from 12 to 50% wage increases. Indeed, South Africa was in the throes of a profound and pervasive crisis. A new force had emerged on the scene which could not be forced to retreat. A powerful tide of national lib¬ eration imbued with a national class consciousness was surging for¬ ward. It combined worker militancy, popular protest, and political actions; and the upsurge of armed struggle waged by Umkhanto Wesizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, was soon to begin to make its presence felt. The mass strikes and the explosion of working class energy exposed the impotence of the authorities. Hemson (1978: 20) writes that: Faced with this unprecedented upsurge and the defiance of apartheid legislation prohibiting strikes and maintaining black workers in subordination, the ruling class was placed in a quandary. Was it possible to make mass arrests of strikers? Would not this inflame the workers to new heights of class activity and deepen the political content of the strikes? Given the mass character of the strike movement the police were reduced to dispersing marches through the centre of Durban and using teargas on strikers in Hammarsdale and Richards Bay. In the face of united mass action the police were reduced to saying: ‘The police have nothing whatsoever against people demanding higher wages — provided they do not break the law,’ a statement which amounted to a surrender to proletari¬ an action (HE, 1974: 20). Black workers were losing the fear of police retaliation in acting illegally. Flemson goes on to say that: Of the 98,029 black strikers in the whole of 1973 relatively few were prosecuted for striking: 207 or 0.2 percent of the total. These figures can be compared to the 822 out of 3,462 workers prosecuted for striking in 1959,24 percent of the total. Partly this can be explained by the impotence of the police 370

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

when faced with mass proletarian action centering on the fac¬ tories, and by the changes which had taken place in the com¬ position of capital in the 1960s toward more capital-intensive industry in which wages formed a smaller component of total costs. A more capital-intensive industry in conditions of rea¬ sonable profitability could afford to increase wages and not be as dependent on police repression as labour-intensive industry, for instance, the stevedoring industry. Wages could be raised immediately within certain limits, the total wage bill could be held constant by insisting on higher productivity and firing less productive workers (sic, ibid.). The revolutionary ground swell among black workers energized other sectors of the black community, including students who became rad¬ icalized. The ANC in exile welcomed these developments, noting in 1972 that they were “creating a flurry of public interest, not seen since the heyday of the Congress campaigns in the decade before the ANC was banned in 1960” (Sechaba, October, 1972). The impact of the South African Students Organization (SASO) had been dramatic, while the Black People’s Convention (BPC) aimed to unite Africans, Indians, and coloureds as “blacks,” “with a view to liberating and emancipat¬ ing them from both psychological and physical oppression” (Benson, 1980: 163-64). The spirit of resistance persisted in 1974 as strikes continued: 10,000 textile workers employed at Frame Group Textiles in Durban went on strike again; 10,000 miners from Western Deep Level Mines near Carltonville struck for several weeks; the police killed 11 black miners during a demonstration. In Durban, 8,000 hotel workers demanded a pay raise. Thousands of miners from Malawi and Lesotho took part in strikes. Strikes continued in 1975 and 1976 — all signi¬ fying the intensification of class struggle. The struggles gained a further impulse from the collapse of the 500-year-old Portuguese rule in Mozambique and Angola in 1975, after almost 15 years of armed struggle. In an effort to break the wave of popular protest, the racist regime committed an abominable crime, wounding and killing 1,600 school children in Soweto in June, 1976. The absolute callousness of the regime was displayed in the events that followed the Soweto massacre. Following the brutal massacre, some 250,000 workers went on strike in Johannesburg. Thus was launched a new stage in revolution371

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ary upsurge in South Africa against the background of considerable successes scored by the national revolutionary movements in Mozambique and Angola and the crisis of the white minority regime in Zimbabwe. In Namibia, which South Africa rules illegally, there was an unprecedented upswing in the struggle led by SWAPO. The strikes in Johannesburg not only demonstrated the workers’ increased power and potential, they were a vivid manifestation of the working class and the national liberation movement. The year 1980-81 and the first half of 1982 saw the unprecedent¬ ed growth of the black unions, even as the repression worsened. Union membership increased by more than 50% to 150,000 workers. Although exact figures are difficult to obtain, this means that the black unions have probably organized 10% of the black production workers and 3% of the black workers in other sectors. Politically, black unions have demonstrated considerable strength in the major industrial cen¬ ters like Cape Town, Durban, East London, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Port Elizabeth. The Johannesburg municipal workers’ strike in July, 1980, like the earlier Durban strike of 1973, brought home the potential power of black unions. When 10,000 city workers struck for union recognition and higher pay, city services ground to a halt and garbage piled up in the street. The power of the black unions is further illustrated by the dramatic yearly increases in the number of strikes and work stoppages and the number of workers involved. Strikes by black workers cost employers 67,000 work days in 1979, 175,000 work days in 1980, and 222,500 work days in 1981, and the rate of strikes escalated dramatically in the first half of 1982. The strikes are a concentrated expression of the acute social contradictions which currently characterize South Africa. Because of these developments, the Business Environmental Risk Information (BERI) says in its recent issue that “political risk in South Africa is prohibitive.” The report explains that it does not recommend long-term investment in South Africa because “risk levels are increas¬ ing and profit potential diminishing.” Among the major factors it list¬ ed an increase in labor militancy” as a reason for its assessment. All these facts serve to confirm that the developments in present-day South Africa have deepened the antagonism between labor and capital, an antagonism which is being exacerbated by the intensification ofthe armed national liberation struggle. At the same time, the front of anti¬ minority rule has been enlarged dramatically. The combined forces of

372

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

worker militancy, popular protest, political actions, and the upsurge of armed struggle have reached unprecedented levels. The ANC declared 1980 the “year of the worker,” and the title was apt as we have seen. The captains of South African industry will not remember 1980 for the economic boom in the country, nor for the tax cuts and gold revenue that helped it along. They will remem¬ ber it as the year 100,000 black workers put down their tools to demand a share of the wealth they produced. With the massive upsurge of political and guerrilla activity throughout the country, workers in the thousands are standing up to resist the power of the capitalist class and the state.

VIII. Conclusions The developments of the 1970s and early 1980s in South Africa point to profound and far-reaching changes in the alignment of forces in the country. A materialist theory of history teaches that only during a peri¬ od of impending revolution does the class struggle follow the lines dic¬ tated by the relations of production. As in the case of the individual life, sickness subjects the patient to the vital rhythms of the body, so in a revolutionary situation, with the constant use of strikes by work¬ ers, factors governing production clearly assume significance and become specifically decisive. The increased resistance of the black working class indicates that a revolutionary situation is maturing in South Africa, directed at the heart of the exploitative racist system. Given the fact that South Africa was subjugated by force and that its exploitative system is preserved with a great deal of force and brutality, it stands to reason that every trade-union action is a political struggle — not just against the employ¬ er but against the apartheid state as well. The Congress Alliance has over the years been able to direct resistance to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression no matter where it appeared, no matter what stratum or class of people it affected, because as a national class alliance it was able to generalize the grievances of all groups and to produce a united strategy to counter minority power. “If the proletariat wants to win this struggle,” wrote Lukacs (1970: 29-30), “it must encourage and support every tendency which contributes to the breakup of bour¬ geois society, and do its utmost to enlist every upsurge — no matter how instinctive or confused — into the revolutionary process as a whole.” 373

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

As the general crisis of racial capitalism deepens, contradictions between narrow racial policies and the economic interests of the cap¬ italist class widen, while at the same time the genuine interests of the majority of the people and requirements of social progress become more apparent and acute. Furthermore, the longer the crisis contin¬ ues, the more unsettled the conditions become; the more completely the “normal” working of the system ceases to function; and the more its socioeconomic balance is shaken — in other words, the more rev¬ olutionary the situation becomes. The spontaneous-explosive and consciously led class actions of recent years are playing a decisive role in creating a crisis. Facing recur¬ rent economic and political difficulties, the regime talks of reform while it intensifies racial oppression by shifting the burdens onto the shoul¬ ders of the black working class and other sections of working people. The national and class struggle is assuming diverse forms of resistance: the Bantustans into which the unemployable are discarded have become areas of explosive potential because of the poverty the people face. Amidst the worsening economic crisis, the momentum of the armed struggle stretches financial and military resources of the regime to the breaking point. Thus the principal feature of the struggle against apartheid today is the growing magnitude, diversity, and flexibility of the ways and means of resistance. In sum, however much white minority rule ultimately rests on force, no class can maintain itself for long by force alone. Recently the minority regime has been casting all over for allies within the black community. The President’s Council which will have token coloured and Indian representation is one such effort. “It is possible,” as Tolerant once said, “to do many things with a bayonet, but one cannot sit on me.” Racial capitalism cannot be reformed either by Bantustans or by such palpably token gestures. All these schemes are intended in the final analysis to ensure bourgeois domination over the intermediate strata. Oliver Tambo, president of the ANC, recently stated that the strug¬ gle against racial oppression is merging with the class struggle of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation. Unlike other African states, where capitalist development has been limited, South Africa has always had the largest, the most active and organized working class. Over the years, the national liberation movement evolved dialectically until the premier role of the working class was asserted. In its document Forward

374

Imperialism and the Making of the South African Working Class

to Freedom, the ANC states that real democracy and freedom in South Africa are possible because there is a working class whose members are growing in strength and consciousness. Its political organizations and trade unions have played a fundamental role in shaping and advancing the revolutionary line of the national movement. That is, the existence within the national liberation movement of a working class capable of meshing working class aspirations with the national movement as a whole deepens its revolutionary potential, and constitutes a decisive and qualitative stage in the development of the liberation movement. The ANC, by providing an organizational structure for the workers, has harnessed the most ruthlessly oppressed and exploited section of society; as a result, it has also been able to survive, grow, and wage a long, stubborn fight against the twin evils that afflict the African — class exploitation and national oppression.

375

V

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

The Sociology of People’s War: The Legacy of Cabral At the same time as the strengthening of the socialist camp, another essential characteristic of our time, came the awaken¬ ing of the dependent peoples for the liberation struggle and the final phase of the elimination of imperialism had thus begun. While the final resolution of this new conflict may take a shorter or a longer time, there can be no doubt that, even more than the class struggle in the capitalist countries and the antagonism between these countries and the socialist world, the liberation struggle of the colonial peoples is the essential characteristic, and we would say the prime motive force, of the advance of history in our times: and it is to this struggle, to this conflict on three continents that our national liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism is linked —Amilcar Cabral “The Algerian Revolution,” Fanon wrote, “by proposing the libera¬ tion of the national territory, was aimed both at the death of the colo¬ nial configuration and at the creation of a new society.” He went on to state, “The independence of Algeria was not only the end of colo¬ nialism, but the disappearance in this part of the world, of a gangrene germ and of a source of epidemic.”1 That is, the liberation of the Algerian national territory was a defeat for human exploitation and racism and an inauguration of the unconditional reign of justice. The struggles for national liberation in Guinea-Bissau and Cape

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Verde and other PortLiguese territories were epic struggles to end colo¬ nialism and to launch these societies on the road of social progress. Amilcar Cabral is a giant in a generation of great liberation leaders of the modern era. Grounded not only in the hearts of his people but the hearts of friends of struggling humanity everywhere, he received inspi¬ ration from great revolutionaries and from the history of revolution¬ ary struggles. He studied Marx, Engels, Lenin, Fanon, and Nkrumah. He studied judiciously Western bourgeois thought, and examined care¬ fully the revolutionary experiences from Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, extracting appropriate lessons. He admired Lumumba, but learned from his mistakes. He adjusted to the environment of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde revolutionary lessons from other parts of the world. He sought a synthesis and found it in the conception of humanity as a totality, in the concept and constructive expression of revolutionary humanism, factoring out class and race with revolu¬ tionary nationalism and expanding beyond his original base to engage directly in the historical process of the universal and continuing trans¬ formation of humanity. Indeed there was in Cabral that dual vis his¬ torical the revolutionary’s desire to make history and the theoretician’s impulse to describe and theorize its meaning. The people of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, under the leader¬ ship of Cabral and the PAIGC [Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde], lost fear of the Portuguese and endured the vicious brutalities of the genocidal dictatorship for almost 15 years. For they absorbed and understood Cabral’s profound statement that “the dialectic of colonial repression has proved that today no colonial aggressor can overcome peoples who are determined to win their free¬ dom.” In the course of struggle, the people of Guinea-Bissau began to expose Portuguese colonialists’ bravado for what it was — an unpop¬ ular dictatorship. They isolated the rulers of Portugal as enemies of human freedom, and through struggle began to humanize the Portuguese people. In the process, they placed themselves back in the mainstream of human history once more. It is no wonder that PIDE, the ruthless political police of the Portuguese and their imperialist allies, sought to silence forever this audacious example of African and Third World revolutionary spirit, this outstanding hero. The aim of this article is to review, during this tenth year since Cabral’s death, his lasting contribution to Africa’s struggle against colo¬ nial and imperial rule. Cabral was one of the foremost and most cre-

378

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

ative representatives of African revolutionaries of the “new breed” who led the anticolonial struggle in the 1960s, and early 1970s, a struggle that changed the balance of class forces in Africa in favor of the pro¬ gressive forces. Cabral and others who led the struggles against Portuguese colonialism, against one of the world’s most backward empires, resorted to armed struggle, from which they learned many lessons. Those lessons led them to understand the need to work for socialism. They also learned a lot from the experience of the African states that gained independence in the 1960s, and did not want to repeat their mistakes. The conclusions drawn by Cabral from the expe¬ rience of PAIGC and from the study of the limitations of political inde¬ pendence of the majority of African states in the 1960s represent insight of tremendous importance for the African struggle against neocolo¬ nialism. These conclusions informed his practice and constituted his true legacy. They are certainly worth close study and generalization. What then are the projects of a revolutionary movement? What are the requirements of revolutionary change? Modern anticolonial move¬ ments have been revolts against the political system of foreign domi¬ nation and exploitation, in which the national question was posed and resolved by political independence. Cabral saw the limitation of pure¬ ly political independence without economic independence and rede¬ fined the situation in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde as one of the struggle against both foreign domination and foreign exploitation. Within that struggle the national question could only be resolved by structural change which implies profound mutation in the productive forces created by colonialism. This is how Cabral defines the project of national liberation: “A people’s national liberation is the regenera¬ tion of that people’s historical individuality, the restoration of its his¬ tory through the destruction of domination” (139).2 To redefine the situation, Cabral did original research and used the Marxist dialectical method. To do this he had to understand the nature of society.

THE NATURE OF SOCIETY Every society is rooted in the physical world. It represents the collective way in which historically-formed groups interact with their environment to produce and reproduce themselves with¬ in limits and resources of their circumstances. Humans act in the world and are in turn acted upon by the physical environ379

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

ment. In the process social systems develop reflecting the man¬ ner in which a group has come to “peace” with its environ¬ ment. The human capacity to work and the instruments they fashion to accomplish their tasks constitute the principal defin¬ ing feature of all human development. But human action is also purposive action; it has goals. Therefore the economic structure of society is reflected in the superstructure — ideas, institutions and customs which serve to express, explain, rationalize and legitimate the material con¬ ditions of social existence.3 Despite 400 years of Portuguese presence, most of the people of Guinea-Bissau continue to be subsistence producers. (I use the word “subsistence producer” rather than “tribal” because it embodies the notion of mode of production and historical meanings, while the word “tribal” emphasizes elements of barbarism.) The essential aspect of the dialectical method as developed by Marx is an analysis of reality with¬ out isolating it either from its process of formation or from the gen¬ eral context of the macro-structure within which it is inserted. Using the historical materialist method, Cabral was able to throw light on such questions as economic and social development, the growth of classes and class conflict, and on such elements of the “superstructure” as religion, ethnicity, and authority systems (particularly the state) in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. This enabled him to know what kind of contradictions the party had to resolve before launching the armed struggle. Cabral’s anthropological method differs from that of nonMarxists. He understood the Guinean social reality not as a static equi¬ librium so dear to bourgeois anthropologists but as an entity with possibilities for revolutionary transformation. Cabral’s theoretical formulations were developed in the midst of the struggle for national liberation against what has been called ultra¬ colonialism — the most primitive, the most defective, and the most savagely exploitative booty-colonialism even by the standards of colo¬ nialism in Africa.4 The PAIGC struggle against this decadent system was the most successful. The questions that readily come to mind are why and how? As Worsely has pointed out, it is not easy to turn men and women, especially illiterate peasants, into revolutionary fighters.5 The readiness to take up arms is something that the revolutionary organization has

380

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

to create, for human beings are scared when confronted with over¬ whelming and brutal power. Secondly, an illiterate person, as Lenin pointed out, “is outside politics, he must first be taught the alphabet. Without that there can be no politics. Without that, there are only rumors, gossip, fables and prejudices, but not politics.”6 What then are the requirements of revolutionary change? That is what must a revolutionary movement do to create a revolutionary sit¬ uation? Part of the answers is good theoretical analysis effectively grounded in social reality. The rulers in most circumstances do not believe in change, except that of assimilation, where individuals from the lower classes move up the status hierarchy to join the ranks of the ruling class. This is what sociologists call “upward mobility.” As late as 1973 the Portuguese rulers could not conceive of basic change, let alone African sovereignty, as possible in their colonies. Having unilat¬ erally declared the African the “inferior race,” what else was left? Consequently when General Kaulza de Arriaga had declared that “of all the peoples in the world (the Africans) are the least intelligent” and that “the tribal state of the black population is favorable to Portuguese strategy,” he revealed in all its cruelty the principal objective of Portuguese colonial policy: its desire to freeze African society in the colonial status quo to eternity. The colonial enterprise was based on a well-calculated ideological premise which presented the white man as superior. The African could only aspire to a European status and no more. For the Portuguese colonial rulers, the danger to their empire lay in the increase of what they called the “evolutionized blacks,” and they had a well-thoughtout solution to that problem. Cabral, in a speech, “Fruits of Struggle,” quotes Kaulza de Arriaga, who said among other things: We are not capable of maintaining white domination, a nation¬ al objective, unless the white population achieves a rhythm that matches and outnumbers, however slightly, the production of evolutionized blacks (sic). On the contrary, if the whites are outnumbered by the production of evolutionized blacks, then one of two things is bound to occur: either we install apartheid, which would be terrible and in which we would be unsuccess¬ ful, or we will have black governments with all the conse¬ quences that this implies (destruction of the overseas provinces, etc.).7

381

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The racist boss then explained the tactic required to avoid such a calamity: The white population does not contemplate the equilibrium of the black demographic potential, it contemplates the equi¬ librium of evolutionized blacks... and thank God, since it is possible, almost certain, that we will be able to situate there in Africa enough whites to balance the blacks who will become evolutionized.8 The PAIGC had to disabuse the Portuguese rulers of this attitude and destroy their smug sense of security. Yet, with a few exceptions, and given their situation, the peasants do not believe in the necessity, or even the possibility, of revolution aimed at undermining the whole sys¬ tem. But they suffer everyday in a thousand ways from the operation of the colonial system. It was the responsibility of the PAIGC leader¬ ship to help bridge their dysfunction, to demonstrate to the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde that colonialism was not to be their fate forever and that the Portuguese were not gods. How to discharge this responsibility was Cabral’s task. The success of PAIGC, therefore, is particularly explained not only by Cabral’s own acute sense of history, but also by his empirical research on the social structure of Guinean peoples and the party, which revealed to him the possibilities to revolutionize the society. In the study of Guinean society, Cabral sought out those elements which make a soci¬ ety dynamic. However, in a society whose fundamental nature has been distorted by imperialism, this is a difficult task indeed. It thus became obvious to him that neither the type of colonial system nor the course of decolonization could be understood without the direct analysis of the specific economy and society that has experienced colonial implantation.

The National Question The interrelation of class and the national liberation struggle is not new to the 20th century. The concept of national self-determination is historical; it was one of the motivating principles that ushered in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the 18th century and was most systematically articulated in the French Revolution of 1789. The rise of the bourgeois nation-state over feudalism gave rise to the idea of popular sovereignty — a concept that inspired movements of nation¬ alism in the 19th century. 382

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

The principle of self-determination became the guiding doctrine of the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century. It was one of Cabral’s cardinal achievements to understand that nationalism was an essentially 19th-century political ideology, and that for the people sub¬ jected to capitalistic imperialism, bourgeois nationalism as an ideolo¬ gy could become reactionary in the process of decolonization. Imperialism had transformed the character of the bourgeois epoch, and pioneer capitalist countries spurred their own development by dominating and exploiting other nations. Originally, the progressive historical mission of the bourgeoisie was the dissolution of feudal particularism, the formation of national markets and constitution of civil society, and the devel¬ opment of social forces of production through capital accu¬ mulation. But capital accumulation gave rise to monopoly capitalism, and its international manifestation: imperialism. Under the conditions imperialism, capitalism in the periphery has developed in structural relation with capitalism in the impe¬ rial centres, fettering peripheral capitalist development and pre¬ empting development of progressive national bourgeois classes in the Third World. Accordingly, in the context of imperialist domination, the progressive mantle of national self-determi¬ nation has shifted to the socialist forces under the banner of ‘national liberation.’9 Thus, the colonies being incorporated as they are in the world econ¬ omy, the democratic principle of self-determination requires reformu¬ lation. And this is exactly what Amilcar Cabral did. For him: “national liberation is the phenomenon in which a give socio-economic whole rejects the negation ofits historical process.” That is, “the national lib¬ eration of a people from colonialism is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruc¬ tion of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected” (p. 83). For Cabral imperialism was the “violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the domi¬ nated socio-economic whole.” Freedom alone can guarantee the nor¬ mal development of the historical process of a people. From this there is only one conclusion, viz., “national liberation exists only when the national productive forces have been completely freed from every kind of foreign domination” (p. 83).

383

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

What Cabral means by the above formulation becomes clear when he presents the historical-strategic options by distinguishing between the “colonial” and “neocolonial” solutions to the problems of nation¬ al self-determination. The former calls upon the native petty bour¬ geoisie to seek a “nationalist solution” to colonial domination. This results in simply substituting neocolonial domination for colonialism. That is, neocolonialism marks an era in the economics of imperialism in which ex-colonies are further assimilated into the capitalist arena, a process which deepens and worsens underdevelopment and the impov¬ erishment of the masses. The parvenu bourgeoisie’s structural inca¬ pacity to act as a revolutionary national force in the context of a world economy dominated by metropolitan capital is revealed for all to see. Neocolonialism as a stage of imperialist domination quite obviously demands a revolutionary socialist transformation.10 Cabral’s comprehension of the history of the development of cap¬ italism as a whole, as well as in the separate parts of the world, was crit¬ ical: it enabled him to distinguish the different sociopolitical goals of contemporary “national struggles” from those of the bourgeoisie in the pioneer countries in the 19th century. The linking of the national liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde with the strug¬ gle for socialism is in its essence the direct product of Cabral’s recog¬ nition that, on the one hand, given the nature of the world economy, an independent capitalist development was impossible in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. On the other hand, the class antagonism between the comprador bourgeoisie and wage workers existing in neocolonies of today is not resolved by political independence alone. The ready accom¬ modation of the petty bourgeoisie with imperialism was all too obvi¬ ous for Cabral and his associates. The “political emancipation” from colonial fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be only for the small coterie that made up the petty bourgeoisie. For the rest of the people the exploitative class relations of production remained intact as the petty bourgeoisie muscled itself into the state sector vacated by the departing colonial administration. Political independence under conditions of neocolonialism deepened the poverty and misery of the masses of working people and generated new class contradictions which could only be resolved by a socialist revolution.

384

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

Theory as a Weapon There are several features of Cabral’s sociological analysis which make it unique. Most African leaders claim to be “socialist,” and they arrived at this position in a pragmatic fashion, so to say. For example, the late Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda, all of whom are leaders involved in the restructuring of the socioeconomic realities inherited from impe¬ rialism, arrived at “socialist” solutions because they rejected capitalism on both ethical and empirical grounds. The pressure of the events necessitated the need to “revolutionize” society from above. Many other African leaders have not even made any attempt at restructuring their societies. They have been satisfied with the inherited colonial structures. Independence for these leaders has been described scorn¬ fully as meaning merely a “ceremony of the Changing of the Guards.” Cabral as both an active combatant and a theoretician, realized that social transformation could not be effected by only changing the con¬ sciousness of people, by a theoretical critique of obsolete colonial rela¬ tions. The ultimate, determining force is the revolutionary remaking of social life from the bottom based on sound theory. Why? Because: The ideological limitations, if not to say the total absence of ideology, of national liberation movements, due to our igno¬ rance of the reality we set out to change is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, weaknesses of our anti-imperialist struggle

(P-75). Knowing the deficiencies of some of his contemporaries, Cabral arrived at socialist solutions to the problems of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde through a theoretic critique of the phenomenon of neocolonialism. The party he led, PAIGC, became a revolutionary party based on rev¬ olutionary principles and a materialist analysis of social reality. Basil Davidson asks a very relevant question: What other revolutionary movement of the last 40 years ever declared itself to be any different? He answers by pointing out that Cabral’s Marxism was a living reali¬ ty based on the concrete analysis of social structures in Guinea-Bissau.11 Cabral’s theory, ...particularly in its strategic and organizational aspects is active in relation to its social base. It actively opposes the evolution of the existing state of things and poses revolutionary alterna-

385

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

tives, and thus has a necessary autonomous and voluntarist aspect which permits it to articulate the strategy essential for the transition from the present to the desired state of affairs. Types of political practice are premised on revolutionary the¬ ory and evaluated in its terms.12 Cabral proved in his sociological text (if proof were needed), that the basic categories of social analysis cannot be externally imposed, they must arise from a concrete context in order to inform praxis. It is not only anti-Marxist, but dogmatic and undialectical to hold any previ¬ ously reached conclusion as valid independently of a concrete analysis of objective conditions of particular situations. For Cabral — as Engels wrote and Lenin constantly stressed — Marxism is not a dogma, but a method, a worldview and a guide to action; it is a source of initiative and energy, and given a proper grasp of the situation, it can open up the widest perspective for revolutionaries. No wonder that he did not want to be called a Marxist. His Marxism was his practice, i.e., the taste of the pudding is in the eating. In their presentation of the law of motion of society, Marx and Engels had stressed the role of classes and class struggle as a motive force. What about pre-class societies? Did they have to wait for the emergence ot classes? Appealing to Marxism for support, various ver¬ sions of opportunism argue that Marxism is not applicable to the anal¬ ysis of African society. As against this, Cabral developed from the Marxist view of history, “demands for mass consciousness in theoret¬ ical as well as in political and organizational work,” and this he said does not require the rejection of Marxism. This creative attitude and independent analysis was always found¬ ed on practice; it enabled Cabral to arrive at the most refreshing anal¬ ysis of class as a motive force of history. In Cabral, the concept of class and class analysis is directly related to his notion of ownership of the productive forces in a colonial situation. I begin an elaboration of Cabral’s views on class with the most quoted passage from “The Weapon of Theory”: Those who affirm — in our case correctly — that the motive force of history is the class struggle would certainly agree to a revision of this affirmation to make more precise and give it an even wider field of application if they had a better knowledge of the essential characteristics of certain colonized peoples, that

386

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

is to say peoples dominated by imperialism. In fact, in the gen¬ eral evolution of humanity and each of the peoples of which it is composed, classes appear neither as a generalized and simul¬ taneous phenomenon throughout the totality of these groups, nor as a finished, perfect, uniform and spontaneous, whole. The definition of classes within one or several human groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of the productive forces and of the characteristics of the wealth produced by the group or usurped from others, that is to say that the socio-economic phenomenon ‘class’ is created and develops as a function of at least two essential and inter-depen¬ dent variables — the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership of the means of production (pp. 76-77). (Emphasis added.) There are many works that trace the development of humankind from earliest times to the present. But where will the inquirer find a reliable analysis of the evolution of the precapitalist, so-called “stateless” for¬ mations of Africa, which can shed light upon the puzzling questions of whether they have a history or not, and where they belong in the evolution of humanity through the ages? The paucity of data on a sub¬ ject of utmost concern to many Africans should not come as a surprise. Anthropology, the subject that should have enlightened us, until recently was written primarily from the standpoint of imperialist needs — to rationalize its exploitation and oppression of African peoples. It thus turned its early and promising beginning away from scientific inquiry of human evolution to a static classification as evidenced by such notions as simple and complex; Western and non-Western; civi¬ lized and barbarian dichotomies, etc. It treated precapitalist societies as basically outside of any historical tendency. It thus virtually aban¬ doned the idea of progress and historic process. It will be remembered that Marx and Engels, the exponents of dialectical materialism, were influenced and inspired in their social the¬ ory by the works of both Darwin and Morgan. In fact Engels later was to take up the key question that Darwin had posed, but could not answer. Just how did our progenitors among the higher apes pass over into the earliest humans? In his essay, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man,” Engels explained that it was because of their systematic labor activities that the anthropoid became the humanoid. In this outline form, Engels was the first to present what 387

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

can properly be called the “labor theory of human origins.” And as we shall see, this has a very important bearing on the historical position of Africa’s precapitalist formations in Cabral’s work.13 Anthropology, as the handmaiden of imperialism, looked upon Africa’s precapitalist societies as indicative of some hypothetical point that the “truly” human races of humankind had passed long ago. And in most anthropological works of the late 19th and early 20th cen¬ turies, African societies were studied as if they existed in a timeless limbo. Social anthropology in its relatively ceased to be a science of social evolution and progress and became a mere descriptive catalog of a “variety” of cultures. This vulgar relativism left the African out¬ side history14 and a stepson of the human race without a past or a future. He was not fit only to provide raw muscles for the comforts of the “real” human races — the European bourgeoisie Cabral, in the process of revolutionary struggle, posed crucial ques¬ tions which have always been an embarrassment to Africans and ammu¬ nition to their enemies. Was it true that African folk social formations had no history? Was it true that history began with the appearance of the phenomenon of “class”? Was it true that “colonialism” was to usher the Africans into the “modern age”? What did imperialism mean, in short, to the evolution of Africa societies? What path was open to African societies to cope with the problems of the present age? Cabral says that to reply to the first two questions in the affirma¬ tive would be to place outside history the whole period of human groups, from the discovery of hunting and later, of nomadic and seden¬ tary agriculture, to the organization of herds and the private appro¬ priation of land. It would also be to consider — and this we refuse to accept — that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to con¬ sider that peoples of our countries, such as the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola and the Macondes of Mozambique, are still living today, if we abstract the slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected_ outside history or that they have no history (77). Cabral s point of departure is based on the notion of productive forces and their ownership, which is based on concrete knowledge of the

388

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

socioeconomic reality of Guinea-Bissau and Africa’s precapitalist social formations as incorporated within the world economy. The dialectical materialistic approach of class formation led him to his conclusions: ...if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so only in specific historical periods.... It therefore seems correct to con¬ clude that the level of productive forces, the essential deter¬ mining element in the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force of history (p. 77). In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx described the French peasantry as similar to potatoes in a sack. That is, they lacked a social conscious¬ ness. This did not mean they were outside history. By the use of the notion of productive forces, Cabral solves many burning questions and shatters many prevailing myths and prejudices about the lack of revolutionary consciousness among peasants. Many an African nationalist, given this prejudice, had thrown up his hands waiting for the triumph of capitalism in his country. The ideas associ¬ ated with African socialism, African personality, and the Negritude were attempts by black intellectuals to solve this problem by idealistic notions of an African essence and exceptionalism. Cabral with his materialistic approach did not give up. He explained the position of classless soci¬ eties in the evolutionary schema as follows: Because, if on the one hand we can see that the existence of histo¬ ry before the class struggle is guaranteed, and this avoids for some human groups in our countries — and perhaps in our continent — the sad position of being peoples without any history, then on the other hand we can see that history has continuity, even after the disappearance of class struggle or classes themselves (p. 77). Cabral has thus given a sharp twist to the wheel of history. The African who belonged to what are sometimes called the “stateless societies” has been reintegrated into the mainstream of history. Cabral’s anthro¬ pology is based on the “totality” of the human stock and its progress in different socioeconomic formations. Eternity is not of this world, but man will outlive classes and will continue to produce and make history, since he can not free himself from the burden of his needs, both of mind and body, which are the basis of the development of the forces of production (p. 78). 389

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Only the theory of the class struggle provides the needed point of ref¬ erence to understand the necessity of the transition from colonialism to socialism. Cabral creatively developed the fundamental propositions of historical materialism on the vital issue of the necessity of socialism as a precondition of genuine independence. The twist given by Cabral to class analysis has important implications for sociological analysis. Because of the incorporation of the African countries into the world economy, the class struggle could not longer be divorced from the analysis of international relationships, its success being contingent upon the national movement being an anti-imperialist force.17 Successful revolutions of the modern times: the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1948, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Vietnamese struggle which culminated with the ignomin¬ ious humiliation of United States imperialism in 1974, and the strug¬ gle against Portuguese colonialism by the people of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique all proved that there can be no rev¬ olution without a proper theoretical assessment of historical reality. Lenin’s seminal work: The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Mao’s study: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, and Cabral’s seminal work: Brief Analysis of the Social Structure in Guinea all testify to this simple fact. A revolution may be made if one interprets correctly historical reality, and if one uses correctly the dynamic forces at work in each situation. It is clear from the failure of counterrevolutionary writings that knowledge of theory simplifies the task and prevents us from falling into dangerous errors. The cardinal feature of counterrevolutionary writings is that their theory does not correspond to reality. In fact counterrevolutionary theories are based on deliberate distortion of reality and history.

The Colonial Impact Cabral thought his materialist approach and class analysis has revealed to the African people themselves that their natural process of histori¬ cal development had been frustrated by the continuing stagnation of colonial domination. He has in fact told them that, “There is no new entity born of colonialism.”16 The impact of colonialism can be summed up with Davidson as follows: African peoples in particular and other peoples who were once colonized need a renewal of their civi¬ lization.

390

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

Whatever colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, may or may not have achieved, one thing is certain about them. They utterly failed to raise those structures — whether social or moral, polit¬ ical or economic — upon which the deprived peoples, the abused peoples, the “underdeveloped” peoples, can carry themselves into a new civilization capable of standing and evolving on its own foundations.15 The failure of imperialism is not because it was malicious; it stems from its inherent quality, which is defined by Cabral as a worldwide expres¬ sion of the search for profits and the ever-increasing accumulation of surplus value by monopoly financial capital, centered in two parts of the world; first in Europe, and then in North America. And if we wish to place the fact of imperialism within the gen¬ eral trajectory of the evolution of the transcendental factor which has changed the face of the world, namely capital and in the process of its accumulation, we can say that imperialism is piracy transplanted from the seas to the dry land, piracy reor¬ ganized, consolidated and adopted to the aim of exploiting the natural and human resources of our peoples (p. 80). And proceeding further from his analysis of contemporary imperial¬ ism as the international manifestation of monopoly capitalism, Cabral does not deny its “progressive” characteristics. After noting that impe¬ rialism produces paralysis, stagnation, and even regression on the his¬ torical process of dominated peoples, he goes on to say: However this paralysis is not complete. In one sector or anoth¬ er of the socio-economic whole in question, noticeable trans¬ formations can be expected, caused by the permanent action of some internal (local) factors or by the action of new factors introduced by the colonial domination, such as the introduc¬ tion of money and the development of urban centres. Among these transformations we should particularly note, in certain cases, the progressive loss of prestige of the ruling native class¬ es or sectors, the forced or voluntary exodus of part of the peas¬ ant population to the urban centres, with the consequent development of new social strata; salaried workers, clerks, employees in commerce and the liberal professions, and an instable stratum of unemployed. In the countryside there devel-

391

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ops, with very varied intensity and always linked to the urban milieu, a stratum made up of small landowners. In the case of neocolonialism, whether the majority of the colonized popu¬ lation is of native or foreign origin, the imperialist action takes the form of creating a local bourgeoisie or pseudo-bourgeoisie, controlled by the ruling class of the dominating country (p.

82). These developments according to Cabral open up new perspectives in the social dynamics: there is the emergence, for instance, of the urban working class, the introduction of private property in land and the pro¬ gressive appearance of an agricultural proletariat. The industrial pro¬ letariat and the landless rural proletariat constitute the core of the groups oppressed by colonialism and it is these groups which consti¬ tute the revolutionary constituency for socialist transformation—“the class base for building socialism.”18 Thus, both the intelligibility of contemporary social forms and the construction of a dialectical theory of the social structure in the colony depend on the analytical clarification of its class structure. Dos Santos suggests, in a seminal paper on Marx’s concept of class, that the ques¬ tion of class determination must be posed on several levels, both struc¬ tural and historical.19 For instance, Marx in Capital studied class mediation on many levels. Cabral’s strategy and tactics in the Guinean revolution were based on the understanding of the colonial impact and on the strict applica¬ tion of a materialist, dialectical method, while he was well aware of the various levels of class modulations. His method is: Materialist, in the sense that it is not founded on a subjective conception but on an objective study of classes and their rela¬ tions, scientifically defined by Marx’s economic theses. Dialectical, in the sense that they take into account the total¬ ity of the various classes and their reciprocal interactions in a given society; also that they take into account the degree of development of each of the social forces at each moment; and, finally, that they take account of the relations between each society and other societies in the world (for example, in such phenomena as international cartels).20 Thanks to the creative application of historical materialism, Cabral was able to scientifically organize the class struggle of Guinean proletariat 392

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

by “opening up the close-up and the distant perspectives by analyzing at each objective moment the relationship of forces; and by determin¬ ing the strategy and tactics — establishing at each moment, in terms of these perspectives and in relation to these forces, the direction from which the principal blows would emanate; to determine what alliances were possible, what reserve forces were available and, finally, to define objectives and methods of work when the movement itself was in a period of advance or setback.”21 The tactics and strategy of armed struggle were differentiated in accordance with the level of economic and social development of the various classes. In the light of this analysis, Cabral came to understand that peasants do not fight for ideals, for the things in one’s head. “They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better, and in peace....” This realization would explain Cabral’s awareness that a true revolu¬ tion is a process of structural change which overcomes not only direct colonial subjection but also, and still more decisively, indirect or “neo¬ colonial” subjection as well. To the extent that Cabral wants to bring about a concrete society in which men can harmoniously develop, he is a socialist. Socialism will be the only true defense of the African as a human person when independence is eventually won. A society that socialist reconstruction envisages is the society of live and true men and women, i.e., of live and self-conscious human labor. It enriches itself on alienated power—what C. Wright Mills called cheerful robots. Nyerere writes on the same theme: . . . humanity’s progress must be measured by the extent of which man is freed from the domination of the need to pro¬ duce. When the demands of‘efficiency’ and ‘production’ over¬ ride man’s need for a full and good life, the society is no longer serving man, it is using him.22 Even though Cabral recognizes the “progressive” nature of capitalism and that imperialism and colonialism were part of this system, he is not interested in drawing a balance sheet of the pros and cons of imperi¬ alism. He points out that in situations of classical colonialism, what¬ ever else happens is an unnatural human condition for any people to be compelled to endure. It dehumanizes both the colonizer and the colonized. Whether under colonialism or neocolonialism the development of the national productive forces is frustrated. Colonial and neocolonial

393

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

societies are societies without the means to maintain themselves, let alone having the ability for self-sustained growth. The pseudo-bour¬ geoisie, however strongly nationalist it may be, cannot effectively ful¬ fill its historical function; it cannot freely direct the development of the productive forces, because it is subject to manipulation from outside; in brief, the pseudo-bourgeoisie cannot be a national bourgeoisie.

The Faults of National Independence Fanon discussed the fault of national consciousness, and Cabral has given these faults a sociological explanation. The limits of bourgeois nationalism are essentially defined not just by its underlying loyalty to the institutional structures inherited from colonialism, but also by the belief of colonial elites that capitalism remains valid despite the state of their underdeveloped and impoverished societies. The African pseu¬ do-bourgeoisie, according to Fanon, is unlike the European bour¬ geoisie. The latter was transformatory, productive, and parasitical. The parvenu bourgeoisie is simply parasitical. This social fact receives in Cabral its historical and sociological explanation. On the internation¬ al level many factors are unfavorable to national liberation, amongst which is the neocolonial situation of a great number of states. In these states the pseudo-bourgeoisie is necessarily dependent on the interna¬ tional bourgeoisie, which obstructs the path of revolution. Under the rule of the native pseudo-bourgeoisie, the productive forces, the life blood that nourishes national growth, are still manipulated by neo¬ colonialism. Cabral interprets the dialectics of present-day “independent” coun¬ tries in the framework of the global appreciation of the era of world imperialism. Thus the failure of national emancipation is predicated on the historical conjuncture of imperialism, which has locked together folk societies with the capitalist forms of economic activity implanted in their midst by imperialism. Though imperialism united a world econ¬ omy into a single world market, it has not united the world society into a homogeneous capitalist milieu. In has in fact accentuated to the utmost the differences between these societies.23 During the struggle for emancipation the economic structure of the colonial situation was such that the main contradiction was between what Cabral calls the nation class, i.e., the population as a whole, and colonialism. The repressive forces of the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country produced the spirit of nationalism. 394

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

The petty bourgeois leadership of the nationalist movement fash¬ ioned the slogan of national unity to eject the colonial power. This demand for unity temporarily blurred the internal class contradictions and created the mood of nostalgia “that there were no class divisions in Africa, and that the communalism and egalitarianism of traditional society made any notion of the class struggle out of the question.”24 According to Cabral, the nationalist solution (national indepen¬ dence) leads to partial independence: The nation gains its independence and theoretically adopts the economic structure which best suits it. (But) The neo-colonial situation (in which the working classes and their allies strug¬ gle simultaneously against the imperialist bourgeoisie and the native ruling class) is not resolved by a nationalist solution; it demands the destruction of the capitalist structure implanted in the national territory by imperialism, and correctly postu¬ lates a socialist solution (p. 86). It is this recognition of class-premised internal antagonistic contradic¬ tion in the neocolonial state, as well as the bold unmasking of the petty bourgeoisie as the internal enemy, that makes Cabral’s analysis so refreshing.25 The neocolonial situation in fact plants the seeds of future conflict in the uneasy coexistence between a form of capitalism based upon local labor and alien capitalism within a single polity, whose expansion was hamstrung by not owning its own productive forces. National independence did not represent a triumph of pseudo-bourgeoisie and international imperialism. Where independence has been described as the Changing of the Guard, the pseudo-bourgeoisie defined its own nature and position within the context of a neocolonial society. During the colonial era the petty bourgeoisie emerged as an arti¬ ficial status group with no real, independent economic base. By its very nature it was parasitic, unproductive, and totally confined to getting salaries or fees, i.e. money for services rendered, and neocolonialism gives that a-plenty. However, for the mass of the people — peasants and workers — on the other hand, independence was expected to give rise to a society freed from neocolonial exploitation. In its immediacy therefore, and its pure objectivity, the unemployed and underemployed proletariat as it appears in the shantytowns of Africa represents the most faithful expression of neocolonial reality. That is,

395

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Imperialism is thus not some external enemy against which the entire nation may be mobilized through consensus-building movements with slogans of African cultural authenticity. Imperialism is here in the innards of the nation through its bourgeois couriers. Therefore, further advance of the nation¬ al liberation struggle against imperialism now requires that the African masses ‘settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’ as well.26 Of note in Cabral’s analysis of the weakness of the pseudo-bourgeoisie is the fact that none of the defects are blamed on psychological weak¬ nesses, on vices of the instinct, or lack of character. These are strictly social defects of historical and structural origin. The “corruption,” “bribery,” exploitation of ethnic or “tribal” sentiments (defects rel¬ ished by bourgeois sociologists), etc., are all due to arrested develop¬ ment, which itself is the result of the fact that the productive forces of the neocolonial society are externally controlled. Thus any reforms attempted by the petty bourgeoisie must also be confined with the lim¬ its imposed by imperialism. A neocolonial system needs a pseudo-bourgeoisie with relatively high incomes and with aspirations and tastes which can be satisfied only by the importation of goods from the former metropolis. “Tribalism,” according to Cabral, together with other contradictions, is of lesser importance. The existence of “tribes” manifests itself as an important contradiction only as a function of opportunistic attitudes, generally on the part of “detribalized” individuals and groups. The irony of the petty bourgeois in Africa lies in the fact that although imperialism can exert leverage on them (the petty bour¬ geoisie), it cannot do without their mediation. Even if the bargains are unequal, imperialism has to recognize their mutual interests, even if at times their interests are contradictory. Neocolonialism necessitates that the petty bourgeoisie be given enough cards to play, their authority with their own people being dependent on it. In moments of crisis, however, imperialism has to choose between losing its interests to the popular masses or intervening to defend these interests directly — hence the emergence of the man with the gun to resolve, even if tem¬ porarily, the internal contradictions of a neocolonial state.

396

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

The Role of Violence Mass forced labour: de facto post laws: omnipresent foreign capital: an inciduary white lumpen proletariat: a superstructure of magic: an economic and social machine turning in a void, driven by pure terror.27 This according to Anderson was the system of Portuguese imperialism at the opening of 1961. Like the Belgians in the Congo, the Portuguese in their colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique ruled by using pure and unadulterated brute force. The colonial status quo can¬ not be understood without the ever-ready hand of the colonizer to use torture, violence, and occasional massacres. “Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship.” Why? because “Colonialism is not a type of individual relation but the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people: that is all. It is not a certain type of human behavior or a pattern of relations between indi¬ viduals.”28 This is the only way by which imperialism can hope to abro¬ gate the history of its victims. In 1947, the Inspector General of the colonies, Henrique Galval, told Prime Minister Salazar, in a report which was carefully suppressed, that, ...in some ways the situation in Angola is worse than simple slavery. Under slavery, after all, the native is bought as an ani¬ mal: his owner prefers him to remain as fit as a horse or an ox. Yet here the native is not bought — he is lured from the state, although he is called a free man. And his employers care little if he sickens or dies, once he is working, because when he sick¬ ens or dies his employer will simply ask for another.29 Given this colonial reality, the issue which faced Cabral and the PAIGC was to decide which forms of violence should be used by the nation¬ alists in order to win true independence. The facts make it unnecessary for us to prove that the essen¬ tial instrument of imperialist domination is violence. If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see that there is not, and cannot be national liberation without the use

397

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist dom¬ ination implies a state of permanent violence against the nation¬ alist forces (p. 87). The use of armed revolutionary struggle by people striving for inde¬ pendence, for freedom from tyranny, or for national liberation has been an important part of historical development. The privileged, history has taught, never surrender power, unless compelled by revolutionary violence. The collapse of 400 years of Portuguese rule in Africa testi¬ fies to this. At no time in the history of anti-imperialist struggles has armed struggle been the first option of the oppressed. The colonial people have invariably preferred negotiation as means for correcting economic and political inequities. Only when the possibility of using peaceful methods has been exhausted have they taken up arms with reluctance, usually after a massacre by the forces of reaction. Thus if revolutionary violence has become an accepted political tactic in the transition from colonialism to independence and from neocolonialism to socialism, as the case may be, its origin should not be sought in armed partisans, but should be related to the institu¬ tionalization of violence first by the colonial state and later the neo¬ colonial state. The colonial bureaucracy and the parvenu bureaucratic bourgeoisie which control the neocolonial states are ever-ready to attribute their difficulties to the manipulation of popular discontent by external communist subversion rather than to their own short¬ comings. Minguel D’Estefano summed up the politics of armed struggle in these words, and what he says is so important that it warrants quoting at some length: The people’s war is the art of fighting the big with the small, winning with little, knowing how to limit the enemy’s strong points and develop one’s forces, always from offensive posi¬ tions; it is to attack with decision, without stopping, in all aspects, it is to use ordinary equipment to win out against the enemy’s most modern weapons; to create good combat meth¬ ods always taking the initiative in the attack, leaving a strong position in order to annihilate him. In the people’s war one

398

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

takes advantage of all arms, modern and rudimentary, and new forms of highly efficient struggle are created to conquer the aggressors who always have a greater number of strong points in equipment and technique, but have fundamental political, moral and even military weaknesses. Thus the patriots convert enemy attacks into favorable occasions for their own offensive, imbued with the dynamic spirit of annihilation of constantly larger units, capturing miliary personnel, seizing arms and tak¬ ing over the battlefield with the least possible loss. The patri¬ ots, in their struggle, are guided by the principle of annihilating the enemy in order to defend themselves and preserve their forces, fighting firmly to defend and extend the rear guard, assaulting the enemy rear guard ad converting it into their own rear guard.30 Cabral’s organizational, theoretical, and military leadership of the PAIGC was based on this conception of the politics of armed strug¬ gle. He and other leaders of the anti-Portuguese wars of liberation understood that the more frenetically the enemy attacked, the sharp¬ er the hatred and the will to win became, and that all the victories achieved were due to a correct revolutionary and military line. Armed struggle, therefore, must be seen as part of a larger politi¬ cal struggle. Its choice depends on the conditions and methods of rule by the colonial or neocolonial state and on the reactions and organi¬ zation of the people. Marx was well aware of the folly of relying on rigid, prescribed methods of struggle: A class in which the revolutionary interests of society are con¬ centrated, so soon as it has risen up, finds directly in its own situation, the content and material of its revolutionary activi¬ ty: foes to be laid low, measures dictated by the needs of the struggle, to be taken; the consequences of its own deeds drive it on.31 The PAIGC as the concentrated expression of the class aspirations of the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde was guided by the theo¬ ry of class struggle, which provided a needed point of reference for the movement to make its way through the apparent labyrinth created by the colonial situation. Cabral often emphasized the many-sided nature of colonial rule: its economic, political, cultural, and psychic violence. Under colonial 399

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

rule the folk society exists in a timeless limbo: it exists in perpetual agony with its culture mummified so that it can testify against its mem¬ bers. Only liberating violence can offer meaningful emancipation. Racism was inherent in every action of the colonizer, and therefore the struggle against colonialism was also for removal of economic and polit¬ ical institutions of the colonial situation with their underlying racism. Accordingly, only through the crucible of revolutionary struggle can the individuals purge themselves of the dead weight of past prejudices and irrationalities. The aim in a revolutionary struggle is to change society, so as to renew society within its own reconquered history. Warfare for national liberation gives our people the conviction that they can triumph over their enemy. Its dynamic creates the most favorable conditions for the resolving of tribal and social antagonisms. By aiming at the total destruction of colo¬ nial structures, it accelerates the emergence of those revolu¬ tionary forces which will irreversibly influence the conquest of this nationalist phase.32 Lenin often said that “serious politics can only be promoted by the masses.”33 But in the colonies, mass politics are proscribed. Only armed struggle mobilizes the masses and introduces serious politics. The life of Cabral in itself is a study in the politics of decolonization, includ¬ ing practically all the categories of colonial experience: from the peas¬ antry to the assimilated petty bourgeoisie to a revolutionary who returned to the village life as a freedom fighter. He could only fill the role of leader and freedom fighter by re-integrating himself into the culture of which he was the prodigal son. Thus by his life he gave a potent example, emancipating himself from the temptations of com¬ promising with neocolonial interests (which is what acceptance of assimilation means). Through revolutionary struggle, he has become one with his people, and thus they also pay him their tribute, they fol¬ low him and guide him in the liberation struggle.

Conclusion Basil Davidson tells us in his book The Liberation of Guine: Aspects of an African Revolution, that has informed this article that: “Much sep¬ arates it (Guine) from its neighbors and gives it an interest ofits own.” But he goes on, “there are also certain ways in which Guine may be more than interesting in itself, may be microcosmic in meaning, a 400

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

paradigm of the African situation in the late 1960’s: a place not only worth observing for itself but also worth learning from.”34 In this article I have attempted to abstract from an intricate argu¬ ment those ideas which I think made the revolution in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the success that it was. The dialectics of the struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde facilitated the emergence of those forces that were most likely to be receptive to revolutionary change. In their analysis of the pioneer capitalist society, Engels and Marx emphasized the organic relationship between the historical subject, the proletariat, and the political subject, the revolutionary party. It is important to note that in the analysis presented by Marx, the revolutionaries — those who understand history and strive to guide it — had a special role to play in forging the course of history. In England, the pioneer capitalist country, the objective conditions coincided with the level of development of the class struggle of the proletariat, the subjective conditions.35 When capitalism matured and became imperialistic, the growth of the productive forces in the imperialized countries was conditioned by the demand first of commercial capital and later of financial capital in the imperialist countries. The local correlation of forces ceased to be the only factor mediating between labor and capital; rather, it was now the entire imperialist world, acting in concert, which mediated togeth¬ er with the internal level of capitalist development. Cabral understood this development when he said: Portugal has been no more than the envious guardian of the human and material resources of our countries, at the service of world imperialism. That is the real reason for the survival of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and for the possible pro¬ longing of our struggle. Thus to a greater extent than the pres¬ ence of other powers in Africa, the presence of Portugal has been, and still is dependent on the presence of other coloniz¬ ing powers, mainly England (p. 13). Because of the way Portuguese imperialism developed in its African colonies, Cabral as the theoretician of the struggle began by asking and answering the key question. It was necessary both in theory and in practice to define precisely the enemy and his capacity to resist a determined people’s struggle. Secondly, it was necessary to know the conditions which would undermine the effectiveness of the colonial system. It became obvious to Cabral that a revolution has both eco-

401

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

nomic and political dimensions and that one should not confuse the laws that shape the transformation of the economic sphere with those that shape the transformation of the political. By the same token the objective class situation should not be confused with the conjunctural class positions. Of course, the riper the objective conditions (the socio-economic reality), the easier it is for actions in terms of the subjective conditions (the socio-political reality) to lead into action. Conversely, the more immature the objective conditions, the greater the importance of the subjective conditions in unleashing the revolutionary process; a backward economic reality must be compensated for by an advanced level of political organization.36 Faced with the specific conditions of Portuguese primitive colonial¬ ism, Cabral, like Lenin, did not hesitate in his analysis and practice to integrate the peasantry into an active role in the historical project of the revolution. In Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, imperialized soci¬ eties as they were, the level of productive forces had not produced a mature proletariat. The future of the proletarian project became incor¬ porated to the project of national liberation.37 This was the only way which would guarantee the complete victory of the cause of national liberation, and the uninterrupted progress of the peoples hitherto kept in backwardness by imperialist and colonialist rule. Cabral based the anticolonial struggle on the axiom that all soci¬ eties are part of the human “totality,” and that the task of national lib¬ eration movements is to look beyond the present reality of neocolonialism to the real social world and context. The true success of national liberation would of necessity mean the integration of par¬ tial developments introduced under imperialism into the totality of the world, of which colonial societies are an integral part. This involves not only the necessity of socialism. A true revolution cannot draw its model from the past and present, but only from the future, because its content goes beyond the present social reality. Beyond the limits of the present, there is space, both physical and mental, for the building of the realm of freedom which is not that of the present: the liberation also from the liberties of exploitative order — a liberation which must precede the con¬ struction of a free society, one which necessitates an historical break with the past and present.38 402

Toward a Sociology of National Liberation from Colonialism: Cabral’s Legacy

Cabral has taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of con¬ temporary reality epitomized by neocolonial situations and has placed it in its authentic dimension: that of socialist liberation and recon¬ struction. Writing about the Philippines, Renato Constantino made this pro¬ found observation: “Historical struggles provide the people with lessons in their upward march and give form and strength to the con¬ stantly changing society.”39 In studying these struggles, a true peo¬ ple’s history discovers the laws of social development, delineates the continuities and discontinuities in a moving society, records the behav¬ ior of classes, uncovers the myths that have distorted thought and brings out the innate heroism and wisdom of the masses. Such a his¬ tory, therefore, constitutes both a guide and a weapon in the unremit¬ ting struggle for greater freedom and the attainment of a better life. Since the mass of humanity is still in a state of poverty and igno¬ rance, since a few nations have attained advancement and devel¬ opment at the cost of consigning others to underdevelopment, what has hitherto been regarded as history is predominantly a conscious record of the rich and the powerful, but by no means the just and correct.40 The struggle of the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde not only served to defeat the imperialist enemy, the Portuguese fascist dicta¬ torship on the battlefields; not only did it serve to impel forward the construction of the new society; the struggle against Portuguese impe¬ rialism demonstrated the tremendous creative power of the common people. Where colonialism only served to foster hatred and misun¬ derstanding, the struggle against colonialism converted hate into cre¬ ative activity. Today between the people of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mozambique conditions exist to build humane rela¬ tionships. And even more, reciprocity is being established between the people of Portugal and the people of Africa unencumbered by the arro¬ gance that is born of colonialism. This is the legacy of Amilcar Cabral which inspires the African National Congress in its struggle against apartheid!

403

.

.

The Political Economy of the Black World— Origins of the Present Crisis

Each generation must write its own world history. And in what period has that been more necessary than in the present: —Goethe The Black world is in the throes of a profound, pervasive crisis. So much everyone agrees. But what kind of crisis? How can it be explained? And how can it be solved? To consider the economic state of the Black world today is at the same time to confront a baffling para¬ dox. The Black world is supposedly free politically. In the United States Black political representation at the local, state, and national level is at an all-time high, and a number of major cities boast Black mayors. In Africa and the Caribbean, Black governments are in power. The Black community in the United States is potentially powerful economically and politically, if only this power can be mobilized, and the situation is similar for Blacks in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Africa is already a major producer of minerals, accounting for 80 percent of the world’s annual gold production, 75 percent of the diamonds, and 30 percent of the vanadium, the antimony, the chrome, and man¬ ganese, as well as significant quantities of copper, uranium, and petroleum. The continent also has vast unexploited deposits of iron ore, bauxite, phosphates, uranium, platinum, copper, nickel, tin, and fluorspar. In addition, it has a vast agricultural potential. The Caribbean, though fragmented geographically, is not without eco¬ nomic potential, if only a proper political framework can be found. Yet despite these possibilities, the economic situation of the Black world

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

is bleak. Poverty, malnutrition, and disease are taking a heavy toll of the present generation and threaten the next generations. Is Africa and the rest of the Black world condemned to eternal suf¬ fering and poverty? Condemned by whom? Is God or Nature to blame? Is it the oppressive climate, racial inferiority? Religion, customs? Or may not its plight be a product of history, made by human beings, and so capable of being changed by human beings? What does a glance back to the past teach us about our predicament? History has differ¬ ent meanings depending on one’s position in the modern world. At the risk of being called a brooder, let me see what the history of the last four hundred years has meant for the Black world and how its lessons can be used to explain our present dilemma. History’s great tradition, writes William Appleman Williams (1973: 8), is to help us understand ourselves and our world so that each of us, individually and in conjunction with our fellow men and women, can formulate relevant and reasoned alternatives and become mean¬ ingful actors in making history. He goes on to say that the historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back. Rather, it is one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our for¬ mer outlook. “We return with a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armed with a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices. In this manner it is possible to loosen the clutch of the dead hand of the past and transform it into a living tool for the pre¬ sent and the future.” Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967: 508) concurs about the purpose of studying history when he writes: “But if the men of the future are ever to break the chains of the present, they will have to understand the forces that forged them.” In a classic study with a frightening title—Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent—Eduardo Galeano, a Peruvian writer, tells us about the attitude toward the past among those to whom the current world order gives great privileges. He writes that veneration for the past always seemed reactionary to him. “The right chooses to talk about the past because it prefers dead people: a quiet world, a quiet time. The powerful who legitimize their privileges by heredity cultivate nostalgia. History is studied as if we were visiting a museum, but this collection of mummies is a swindle. They lie to us about the past as they lie to us about the present: they mask the face of reality. They force the oppressed victims to absorb an alien, dessi-

406

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

cated, sterile mummy fabricated by the oppressor as if it were the only one possible” (1973: 288). These remarks by Williams, Moore, and Galeano are apposite to the theme of this paper. Black people cannot be nostalgic about the past nor can they look at the past as if it were composed of dead mum¬ mies. Indeed, our past cannot be frozen into dead images. What hap¬ pened to our forebears constitutes a living reality that, if forgotten, can only deepen our present tragedy. The theme of this seminar is “Consolidating Africana Studies: Bonding African Linkages.” What does this theme mean in terms of the political economy of the Black world today? One of the distinctive facts about the Black world and its problem is that it is part of contemporary history. Black people were not always poor or backward. Black poverty, I would like to suggest, cannot be understood unless we are prepared to adopt a worldwide perspective, that is, not merely to brood about what happened to us in the past, but to see how the cumulative development of the past continues to influence the present situation. For most white peoples the past four hundred years are an era of pride, its excesses perhaps to be regretted but its achievements far sur¬ passing them. It brought prosperity to the largest numbers of Europeans and their descendants wherever they happened to settle in the modern world. Thus, for the white world the recent past has been a story of victory and power. For the Black world, however, the colo¬ nial and imperial era is a cause for shame, the source of all the prob¬ lems we face in the modern world. It is an era that distorted human relations, assailed and devastated our humanity. In short, the past has been a record of defeats and humiliation. The economic plight of the Black world is historically rooted in the exploitation that resulted from the expansion of the world capi¬ talist system. The African slave trade not only integrated the Black world into the world capitalist economy, but was also the major source of primitive accumulation for European and American capitalists. The ideological consequences of slavery, that is, the association of a black skin and genetic inferiority, persist in the modern world. Thus, any dis¬ cussion of the current economic plight of the Black world must rec¬ ognize the fact that Black economic distress is not a fact of nature, but a consequence of our integration in the world capitalist economy in the last four hundred years.

407

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

In the middle of the nineteenth century, studying the development of the capitalist mode of production, Karl Marx already understood the important role that the exploitation of Blacks played in the devel¬ opment of the world capitalist economy. In a letter to P. V. Annenkov (1846) he explained that: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-con¬ dition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic cat¬ egory of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of coun¬ tries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. (Marx, 1971, 94-95) In chapter 32 of the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx again returned to the role of Africa and the slave trade as a source of primitive accu¬ mulation. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a Warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. (1977: 915) The forced integration of the Black world into the capitalist world economy has proved both durable and continuous. Indeed, the pros¬ perity ofWestern civilization has grown through the continuous nega-

408

The Political Economy of the Black World—Oricins of the Present Crisis

tion of the Black world in both Africa and the Diaspora. Every step forward in modern history has been at the same time a step backward in the position of the oppressed and exploited Black majority. Whatever benefits a few enjoyed have necessitated suffering for the many. Indeed, when we look at the constellation of factors that currently contributes to Black poverty and suffering, we in fact are witnessing the cumula¬ tive impact of the fundamental moments in the growth of the capital¬ ist world economy and its impact on the Black world. As a result of capitalist development, Africa and its peoples suffered first the agony of slavery and second, as a consequence of this, the horror of colo¬ nization. The cumulative impact of these interlocked experiences needs to be examined very thoroughly, for there is no way to understand the nature of our predicament except by confronting Black experience in the various stages of the evolution of the capitalist world economy. The African people, unlike any other people, were scattered across the developing capitalist world as involuntary servants, forced to work for nothing. This international dispersion made the African the first true international proletariat, and in a sense made the fortunes of cap¬ italism inseparable from the misfortune of Blacks. Marx could have been thinking about Black experience when he spoke of “a class with radical claims, a class in civil society that was not a class of civil soci¬ ety, a class which was the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which had a universal character because of its universal suffering and which claimed no particular right because no particular wrong but sim¬ ply general wrong was perpetrated on it, which could no longer invoke a historical but only a human title, which did not one-sidedly oppose the consequences but totally opposed the premises of [world capital¬ ist economy]—a sphere, finally, which could not emancipate itself with¬ out emancipating all other spheres of society, a sphere, in short, that was the complete loss of humanity and could redeem itself only through the complete redemption of society. This dissolution of society as a particular class was the proletariat” (1956: 70). The capitalist world used Africa and its peoples for all the benefits of which the human mind can conceive. In time a belief took root that Africa and its people were forever destined for exploitation by the cap¬ italist world.

409

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The Impact of Slavery Defined Let us start with the first Black experience under capitalism: the slave trade and its legacy for the Black experience in the capitalist world. The capture and enslavement of black labor for the enrichment of European and American capitalists has been dealt with by many Black writers, including W. E. B. DuBois, Eric Williams, and Walter Rodney. They have shown in a way that cannot be disputed how the traffic in human cargo provided opportunities for European and American capitalists to accumulate the primitive capital that in time led to the prodigious wealth of Western Europe and North America. This is not to say that Black people were the only source of primitive accumulation under capitalism or that their experience was unique. On the contrary, we were one part of the vast humanity that was despoiled by capitalism. Even as we talk about Black experience, then, we should never lose sight of our commonality with what DuBois (1964: 15-16) called “that dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—[we] share a common destiny; [we] are despised and rejected by race and color, paid a wage below the level of decent living.” Yet the Black experience, though sharing much with that of other colonized peoples, was at the same time unique, and that uniqueness is a fundamental issue. The Black experience under capitalism has been but one tragic experience after another. Indeed, it is the sheer cruelty of that experience which made Black people, in the words of one anthropologist, the outcast from human evolution itself. And when¬ ever the capitalist world experienced a crisis of accumulation, the bur¬ den was shifted to the shoulders of black labor and African resources were used to rescue Europe from its difficulty. Through all that has been and will yet be written about the vari¬ ous aspects of the African slave trade, one fact remains indisputable— the slave trade has been inseparable from the underdevelopment and impoverishment of the Black world. Since the era of what Marx called the “rosy dawn,” Africa and the African, whether at home or abroad, have been held hostages to capitalist accumulation. For the develop¬ ing capitalist world economy, the captive African was the proverbial goose who lays the golden egg. For the slave trader, the African was an ideal commodity and source of wealth; for the planter, the slave was 410

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

not only an instrument of production, but also capital par excellence. As Marx (III) put it, “the price paid for a slave is nothing but the antic¬ ipated and capitalized surplus-value or profit to be wrung out of the slave” (1962: 788). The African, either as a commodity for the trader or as a slave forced to work for the planter, became the original stock of capital which, if not a necessary, was a sufficient condition for the primitive accumulation of capital. Africa and its people are thus the most durable source of primitive accumulation that the capitalist world ever created. Lest I be accused of exaggeration, look at who is respon¬ sible not only for maintaining, but also for benefiting from the hor¬ rors of apartheid in South Africa. Thus slavery was crucial to Black experience under capitalism and it has determined the whole of our subsequent history in the modern world. Slavery shattered the fabric of African society. The immediate effect was a dramatic quickening of Africa’s decline and subsequent pene¬ tration by foreign elements. In a sense, as has been pointed out, the slave trade was the beginning of the underdevelopment of Africa, and the African slave was the first proletarian to suffer the full weight of capitalist exploitation and dehumanization. In the words of DuBois: The sinister traffic, on which the British Empire and the American Republic were largely built, cost black Africa no less than 100 mil¬ lion souls, the wreckage of its political and social life, and left the continent in precisely that state of helplessness which invites aggres¬ sion and exploitation. “Color” became, in the world’s thought, synonymous with inferiority. “Negro” lost its capitalization, and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism. [ 1978: 17] The most enduring legacy of slavery is of course the racist ideology, which was called into existence and is still sustained by the exploita¬ tive policies of the capitalist classes in Europe and North America. The seemingly autonomous development of contemporary racism should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this need to exploit and dehu¬ manize black labor remains the dominant stimulus in the development of the new forms of racism espoused by, among others, William Shockley and Arthur Jensen. Until our view of the economic plight of the Black world is grounded in an understanding of its past, we will lack the basis for any clear understanding both of our present predica¬ ment and of the contradictory possibilities that can yield a strategy for overcoming both our exploitation and racism.

411

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The Legacy of Colonial Imperialism The abolition of slavery in the early nineteenth century led to the col¬ onization of Africa, thus continuing the process of primitive capitalist accumulation at the expense of Africa and the African wherever he was. Whereas the African slave was transported across the ocean to provide labor power in the distant plantation economies of the Caribbean and North America, the indigenous populations of colonized Africa not only saw their land conquered and subdivided among European pow¬ ers, but were themselves made an organic accessory of those lands, thus becoming one of the conditions of production in the plantations and mines that European capital exploited. Thus, while the advent of mer¬ cantile capitalism in the fifteenth century saw the exploitation of African labor power outside Africa, the advent of colonial imperialism saw the exploitation of African resources with African labor—again for the ben¬ efit of Europe’s ruling classes. From the nineteenth century, Africa’s resources and its people became one of the foundation stones for fur¬ ther capitalist accumulation. W. E. B. DuBois, who lived at the height of Euro-American hegemony and witnessed first hand Africa’s parti¬ tion among the European powers, wrote in 1915: Most persons have accepted the tacit but clear modern philos¬ ophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race, will either be content to serve the interests of whites or die out before the all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the African slave trade and the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth century. (1970: 139-140) In examining the record of the part played by Black labor in the evo¬ lution of the capitalist world economy, one is stuck, by the extent to which the attitudes of European and American capitalists influenced the fortunes of Afro-Americans in the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. In America, assumptions about black infe¬ riority almost always stemmed from the tendency to associate the Black with the backwardness of Africa, whose people were not supposed to have evolved to the level of Europeans. A tenuous logic held that Blacks in America had inherited certain genetic defects. The African’s own lack of independence—the direct result of colonization—was translat¬ ed into the denigration of Black folks and their exclusion from the U.S. constitutional process even after the Civil War had supposedly freed 412

The Political Economy of the Buck World—Origins of the Present Crisis

them. As they were reduced to so many units of labor power in the plantations and ghettos of America, the Blacks became all but invisi¬ ble. In the second half of the last century and the first half of the pre¬ sent, the capitalist world, viewing all things from an imperialist perspective, could not acknowledge the humanity of the Black world. How could they? Even today the master-race syndrome leads many white people in Europe and America to identify with the status quo in South Africa and to regard an African revolution there as an ultimate horror. With the rise of colonial imperialism, the European bourgeoisie proposed (or hoped to create) a system of exploitation applying to all Blacks, wherever they might be. As long as white capitalist hegemony was a fact of life in Africa and elsewhere, the equality of black and white in America was a contradiction that imperialism could not accept. Indeed, the political exclusion of Blacks and their reduction to secondclass citizenship after the war of emancipation can be explained only as an accommodation by U.S. ruling circles to the demands inherent in the general phenomenon of white hegemony over the so-called non¬ white world. In 1919 DuBois (1920, 1969: 50) observed that instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the pos¬ sibility of human brotherhood, America had taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yel¬ low peoples were concerned (1920, 1969: 50). The legacy of slavery and imperialism divided humanity into two races: the superior and the inferior. The latter toiled for the superior and the superior were real human beings; the inferior were either half¬ human or less. True, among what DuBois called the white lords of cre¬ ation, there were lower classes, whose existence in many respects resembled that of Blacks. Where possible, the loyalty of the poor whites was bought by giving them preferential treatment at the expense of Blacks. In this world of white capitalist hegemony, equality between black and white was unthinkable; the very thought was a crime against the laws of nature. By an almost common consent, the white capital¬ ist world was determined to hold Blacks everywhere in a servile status. DuBois, whose perceptive commentary on this period has already been referred to, remarked that the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries were: ... epitomized in one word—Empire, the domination of White Europe over Black Africa and Yellow Asia, through political 413

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

power built on the economic control of labor, income and ideas. The echo of this industrial imperialism in America was the expulsion of the Black men from the American democra¬ cy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery. (DuBois, 1964: 10) Colonialism has been defined as a system of rule which assumes the right of one people to impose its will upon another. This situation leads inevitably to a situation of dominance and dependency. Once African societies lost their national autonomy, Africans everywhere became objects rather than subjects of history. In America, the Blacks became simply the negro problem, and in Africa the African became a native problem. Once so designated, Blacks everywhere were banished from the history of humanity. Jean-Paul Sartre writes that ... everyone has felt the contempt implicit in the term “native” used to designate the inhabitants of a colonized country. The banker, the manufacturer, even the professor in the home coun¬ try, are not natives of any country; they are not natives at all. The oppressed person, on the other hand, feels himself to be a native; each single event in his life repeats to him that he has not the right to exist. (1968: 215) With a few modifications what Sartre says about native applies to any¬ body called a negro in the United States and elsewhere. We can see, then, that the major impact of imperialism was on the historical place of Black people: throughout the Black world colonial imperialism pro¬ duced doubt, paralysis, stagnation, and in some cases, regression. At the Berlin Congress in 1885, the European powers divided Africa and its resources among themselves; in that single act Africa’s independent historical development was abrogated. The violent usurpation and incorporation of Africa’s productive forces into the world capitalist economy meant that the African had been denied the sole means of independent development. Amilcar Cabral writes that “both in colonialism and in neo-colonialism, the essential characteris¬ tic of imperialist domination remains the same: the negation of the his¬ torical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces” (1969: 82). The monopolization of Africa’s means of subsistence neg¬ atively affected Blacks all over the world. Indeed, as long as colonialization predominated, the history of Africa and its peoples was in 414

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

serious danger of sinking into oblivion. Even before the formal insti¬ tutionalization of colonialism, those who controlled information sought to justify slavery through the continual assertion that history was a European monopoly. The impact of slavery on European thought is nowhere better exemplified than in Hegel’s introduction to the Philosophy of History:

The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the real¬ ization of any substantial objective existence—as for example, God, or Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinc¬ tion between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained; so that the Knowledge of an absolute Being, and Other and a Higher than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro...exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him; there is noth¬ ing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of char¬ acter. The copious and circumstantial accounts of Missionaries completely confirm this, and Mohammedanism appears to be the only thing which in any way brings the Negroes within the range of culture. (1956: 93) Having thus maligned the African, Hegel concluded that: Another characteristic fact in reference to the Negroes is Slavery. Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists, for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value. Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent. (1956: 96)

415

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

As a consequence of such deliberate distortions, Africans, whether at home or in the Diaspora, could not escape a humiliation and impov¬ erishment that was not only economic but also spiritual and cultural. Though they worked and created the wealth on which modern capi¬ talist society was built, they were not integrated into the societies that held them captive. Divested of authority over their own history, wealth, and culture, the Africans found themselves plunged into distorted and spurious forms of existence. As Frantz Fanon put it: Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-sim¬ plify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the culture life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banish¬ ment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslavement of men and women. (1963: 190) In the period from 1875 to 1950, the capitalist world not only exploit¬ ed Africa and its peoples; it made a huge intellectual and emotional investment in racism. Working from racist assumptions, philosophy, lit¬ erature, sociology, biology, psychology, and so on all joined in an effort to degrade the Black to a mere caricature of the human. The aim was not only to justify black exploitation, but also to convince the oppressed themselves that their condition was the unfortunate result of their nat¬ ural inferiority. It was believed that the constant repetition of this mes¬ sage would break the Black’s power of resistance. Thus the world came to believe that everything good and honorable was “white” and that everything bad and dishonorable—including the devil—was “black.” It is a tragic paradox of the Black situation today that racist ideas and assumptions are on the ascendancy once again. It thus seems that recent efforts by Blacks to emancipate themselves have turned into nothing. The Black petite bourgeoisie have become accessory to the enslavement of their own masses by accepting the economic status quo as legitimate. The emancipation of the black world and the rest of the oppressed is inconceivable without breaking and melting down the chains of economic bondage and our reified historical consciousness. An adequate form of historical consciousness, in place of a mystifying false consciousness, is vital to any radical demystification of the pre¬ vailing structures of domination. For us, the task of developing an ade-

416

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

quate historical consciousness should be a major tool for both eco¬ nomic and cultural decolonization. As we have seen, the various justifications for our subjugation emanated from an adroit manipulation of our past to serve the inter¬ ests of the exploitative world capitalist order. Understandably, there¬ fore, there is a profound need to study the political economy of capitalism and its role in the crisis that has confronted the Black world and the other peoples capitalism has victimized. A proper historical consciousness will be an integral part in the struggle for genuine eman¬ cipation. The importance of books such as The World and Africa by W. E. B. DuBois, Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams, The Black Jacobins, by C. L. R. James, Discourse on Colonialism, by Aime Cesaire, The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney, and The Shaping of Black America, by Lerone Bennett, Jr., to mention just a few, cannot be overemphasized. After reading these books, one can no longer give a respectful hearing to those whose activities perpetuate our plight. Familiarity with such writings makes it extremely difficult to defend Blacks who equate the interests of Blacks with those of capitalism, as some Black spokesmen have recently tried to do. Whether we like it or not, the Black world is still caught up in the capitalist world economy and its exploitative structures. Our greatest problem at the moment is that the concepts that shape and guide our struggles are distorted by a lack of clarity about the nature and source of our poverty. During and after World War I, the Black masses began slowly to diagnose the historical nature of their condemnation to pover¬ ty. Leaders and organizations emerged in various parts of the Black world which began to mobilize politically to fight for equality and emancipation. The spread of the Pan-African movement and the Garvey movement throughout the Black world expressed, among other things, the fact that Black people were first and foremost an interna¬ tional proletariat. The leaders of these movements recognized that Black poverty was not our fault but our misfortune, resulting from Africa’s loss of self-determination. In the interwar years, the Black world learned many painful but necessary lessons about the nature of western civilization and the world capitalist economy. Hitler and Mussolini may not have been the crown¬ ing jewels of western civilization, but their rise to power was itself a great lesson to the people who were told that they were discriminat-

417

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ed against because they were backward and ignorant. The Great Depression also proved to all that economic difficulties and racial dis¬ crimination were inextricably intertwined. Racism was used to make some white people rich and all black folks poor. This same period saw the gradual disappearance of the faith, still cherished by some Black intellectuals, that progress was possible in a world dominated by white capital. This agonizing disillusionment necessitated a major reevaluation of the role of the Black world in mod¬ ern society. The Black world and its organizations were never able to formulate what it would take to achieve true Black emancipation, how¬ ever. A moral critique of white domination—a critique dissociated from revolutionary struggle—proved hopelessly inadequate. Today, we seem not to have learned anything from the lessons of the past. The Black world, though oppressed, exploited, and discriminated against, wholeheartedly supported the struggle against fascism, hop¬ ing that after the war the position of blacks in the United States would be improved and that European colonies would be freed. As far as the Black world is concerned, World War II marked the transition to the beginning of a new, qualitatively higher historical phase. The war destroyed once and for all the myth of white supremacy. It also spelled the end of the concession-begging tendencies that hitherto had dom¬ inated the politics of the Black world. The war registered fundamen¬ tal changes in the development of the Black struggle for liberation. The defeat of fascist imperialism in World War II created a situa¬ tion that enhanced anticolonial and antifascist struggles. Thanks in part to the strengthening of the world socialist system, the imperialist pow¬ ers’ attempt to regain their lost ground was thwarted, as was the attempt to put the so-called nigger back in his place. The Fifth PanAfrican Congress that was held in Manchester in 1945 strengthened the bond between the national liberation movement in Africa and the Afro-American struggle for equality. From 1945 to the present, racists and imperialists have found themselves on the defensive. The thirty-five years since the end of World War II have seen impor¬ tant changes in the political situation of the Black world. The limited and imperfect political independence achieved in Africa since the late 1950s and the achievements of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement have created conditions in which the masses of the Black world are better able to understand the nature of their economic situation. For this rea¬ son alone, we should not underestimate the significance of political

418

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

sovereignty and the achievement of legal equality by Black folks in the United States; both are essential if the Black world is to advance toward the ultimate goal of complete emancipation. Looking back at the situation of the Black world from the vantage point of the early 1980s, it is increasingly evident that the predomi¬ nate issues oi our epoch, which are the consequences of colonialism and imperialism, are coming to a head. The question that occupies the center of the world state today is that of the so-called Have and HaveNot peoples. Among the Have-Nots, the Blacks are the worst off. what does it mean Not to Have or to be described as a Have-Not? According to Marx, Not to Have is not a mere category; it is a most disconsolate reality; today the man who has nothing is nothing, for he is cut from existence in general and still more from a human exis¬ tence; for the condition of having nothing is the condition of complete separation of man from his objectivity. Not to Have is the most desperate spiritualism, a complete unreality of the human, a complete reality of the dehumanized, a very positive to have, a having of hunger, of cold, of disease, of crime, of debasement, of all inhumanity and monstrosity. (1956: 59)

Conclusions It would be hard to deny that political emancipation was a major break¬ through for all the colonized people of the world. But it also would be hard to deny that in the recent years since the heady days of civilrights marches and independence celebrations the majority of Black people have been disappointed in the workings of their governments. In the United States, as well as in Africa, and the Caribbean, Black folks have a theoretical right to elect legislatures at the various levels of government, yet the governments that rule them seem to lack the authority to make the decisions that would improve the quality of their lives. The economic emancipation of the Black world seems to be as far off today as it was fifty years ago. The question that now faces us all is: why after the achievement of political emancipation is the situation of the majority of our people so bad? Today, as in the days when imperialism flourished, the Black world remains in the grip of poverty, illiteracy, disease, and hunger. Even though they are no longer subjected to the humiliation of institutional racism and colonial rule, little has changed for the Black masses. 419

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Frustrated by the unfulfilled promises of political emancipation, the Black world yearns for a new era. This condition of the majority of Black folks demands that we reexamine the last thirty years in an attempt to explain the current malaise. First and foremost among the reasons for this malaise is that those who led the struggle for political emancipation in the post-World War II era had no vision of the power structure that rules the modern world or lacked a clear idea of what constitutes true emancipation. As Cabral explained, “the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ide¬ ology—constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle—if not the greatest weakness” (1969: 92-93). Mesmerized by electoral politics, the Black leadership failed to realize that substituting Black officeholders and leaving the structure of the world economy intact was doomed from the outset. Quite early in his life, DuBois (1969: 290) had understood that “the solution of letting a few of our capi¬ talists share with whites in the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our problem, but the forging of eternal chains.” Black elected officials have been unable to realize the radical social transformations that are needed to fulfill the economic aspirations of the masses of the Black world. Their failure has two sources. Objectively, Black elected officials are circumscribed and neutralized by the immense aggregate power preserved by those who control and direct the world economy. Subjectively, and this factor is far more important, those who claim to speak for the Black masses have been contained ideologically; that is, they are committed to the economic status quo as defined by the capitalist mode of production. By accept¬ ing the status quo as the limiting framework for reforms, these spokespeople for the Black world have relinquished the will to transform society and find themselves unable to articulate a vision of a new world order. Elected Black officials have thus gained not real power, but the permission to operate the status quo on behalf of their narrow, petitbourgeois interests. They remain tied to the apron strings of the colo¬ nial heritage and as a result, dependency is the ever-present reality, curing even their own limited aspirations. Genuine independence for Black masses means nothing if it does not bring with it the negation of the historical forces that were origi¬ nally responsible for the process we call underdevelopment. Again Cabral (ibid., 83) is informative when he writes, “The national liber¬ ation of people is the regaining of the historical personality of that peo-

420

The Political Economy of the Black World—Origins of the Present Crisis

pie, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it is subjected.” The violent usurpation of the Black world’s productive forces and its freedom of development constituted the principal and permanent characteristics of our domination and quite obviously, genuine free¬ dom can come about only when the productive forces of the Black world have been completely freed from every kind of foreign domi¬ nation. In short, recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is simultaneously the recovery of our destiny. Today, there is a painful recognition that, like formal equality before the law, formal political independence cannot by itself solve the Black world’s acute social and economic problems. For centuries the Black world has been deprived of the responsi¬ bilities of its own destiny. The slave was aware that this total depriva¬ tion was unmediated, and the same was true during the colonial and imperial era: the colonizer ruled and the colonized obeyed. Formal independence was granted under neocolonialism, but our people were made to accept rulers and politicians who would defer major economic decisions to the exploiters of yesterday. Today, Blacks everywhere con¬ tinue to abdicate control over basic areas of their national life, and are unwilling to come to grips with the reality of Black impoverishment. We are ruled by a camprador bourgeoisie that voluntarily chooses cap¬ italist solutions to problems of poverty—partly because it is intellec¬ tually conditioned to believe in such solutions and partly because of personal expediency, for any other solutions would mean mass involve¬ ment—a situation that these leaders have come to fear. The objective poverty of the masses of the Black world stares us in the face but we either ignore it or gloss over it. As a result Black politics have become a way of life which is completely divorced from reality.

421

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Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and The Housing Question (1872) Revisited: Their Relevance for Urban Anthropology

THE GHETTO It is well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street; There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread; There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead; There the smoldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, And the crowded couch on incest, in the warrens of the poor. —Tennyson The fundamental causes of this apparent paradox are indeed very difficult to decide. Basically, the poverty and suffering which reached a critical level after 1815 were the consequence

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

of the establishment of a capitalist order in farming: that long transformation which was already decisively established by the mid-eighteenth century. We have had enough experience, since, of the economics of capitalism to know that it is no para¬ dox, within its terms and its order, to have rising production coexistent with wide-spread unemployment and substantial pauperization. For in subjecting an economy to the disciplines of wage-labour and the market, it exposes men to new kinds of hazard, as its crises of credit and of prices work through. (Raymond Williams) The Condition Of The Working Class In England, (CWC) written in 18441 and The Housing Questions (HQ) written in 1872-73 as a series of articles, are generally argued to be “classics.” This article re-exam¬ ines the two works not only to demonstrate their historical importance for urban anthropology, but also to re-establish their historic impor¬ tance for current urban studies and the understanding of the poor and working class in capitalist society in the modern world. Engels was the first and for a long time the only person to provide a dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the evolution of the bourgeois city and its endemic crisis. Engels’ methodology and theo¬ ry remains a shining example of the superiority of the dialectical mate¬ rialist analysis. In the mid 1840’s, he already understood the role economic factors play in the development of society. He examined the capitalist mode of production, showing how it spawned the industri¬ al urban forces with its contradictions. He showed how the bourgeois affluence was the dialectical opposite of the poverty of the masses of the people who languished in the urban slums.

A Socialist Classic Marx and Lenin held both the CWC and the HQ in the highest esteem. In these books Engels not only surveyed the origin and history of the Industrial Revolution, but even more he asked the crucial question in scientific discourse: “How did this state of affairs arise?” and “How will it end?” By studying the character of English society prior to the Industrial Revolution, Engels was able to show how the situation that he was describing and analyzing was the inevitable outcome of a mode of production whose dynamic deprived the immediate producers of their means of livelihood and reduced them to a situation where their

424

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

only option was either death through starvation or the sale of their labor to the capitalist. The monopolization of all means of subsistence by a capitalist class was the source of the injustice and distress of the working class in the atrocious slums in English cities during the Industrial Revolution. In 1883, in an introduction to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Engels wrote that even before 1845 he had been approaching the materialist conception of history. “My book on The Condition Of The Working Class In England, shows how far I had trav¬ elled along the road by myself.” In 1867 Marx declared that “the full¬ ness of Engels’ insight into the nature of the capitalist method of production has been shown by the factory reports, the reports on mines, etc. that have appeared since the publication of his book.”2 Lenin expressed the view that: “The book (The Condition Of The Working Class In England) was a terrible indictment of capitalism and the middle classes...It made a profound impression upon the minds of all who read it. Everywhere Engels’ study came to be regarded as the best available contemporary account of the condition of the proletari¬ at. And indeed neither before nor after 1845 had the depressed con¬ ditions of the workers been so sharply and accurately delineated.”3 Frantz Mehring said that “The most admirable and at the same time the most noteworthy historical feature of the book is the thorough¬ ness with which the twenty-four year old author [Engels] understood the spirit of the capitalist mode of production and succeeded in explain¬ ing it from not only the rise, but also the decline of the bourgeoisie, not only the misery of the proletariat but also its salvation. The aim of the book was to show how large-scale industry created the modern working class, as a dehumanized, physically shattered race, degraded intellectually and morally to the point of bestiality...”4 Are these fulsome praises of Engels’ work deserved? What can urban anthropologists learn from it? For Hobsbawm the CWC deserves a number of accolades first as a sociological investigation. Firstly, it was, as Engels himself justly claimed, the first book in Britain or any other country which dealt with the working class as a whole and not merely with particular sections and industries. Secondly, and more important, it was not merely a survey of working-class conditions, but a general analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism, of the social impact of industrialization and its political and social consequences — including the rights of the labor movement. “In fact it was the first

425

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

large-scale attempt to apply the Marxist method to the concrete study of society.”5 With the cities everywhere facing crises, the study of Engels’ works is more than a fascinating diversion. The possibilities and limitations of urban anthropology and sociology are revealed in Engels’ work. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, urbanologists have remained indiffer¬ ent to the questions Engels raised. What Engels achieved almost a hun¬ dred and fifty years ago was to suggest a way to understand the urban crises and slum formation in capitalist society based upon a close study of empirical material informed by the newly emerging materialist per¬ spective. In that sense the CWC provides the guidelines for a future Marxist interpretation of the process of urbanization.

“Country” and “City” in History “Country” and “City,” Raymond Williams6 tells us, are powerful words, and anthropologists and sociologists often contrast them in terms of their meaning and implication for human existence. Among the social scien¬ tists who have attempted to define urban society and contrasted it with rural community Toennies, Weber, Durkheim, Cooley, Redfield, etc. The “Country” and “City” are often seen as ideal types or poles and societies are ranged along the two poles according to their complexity and development. Toennies distinguished Gemeinschaft from Gesellschcift type societies, Weber called his two poles Wesemville and Kiirwille, Durkheim distinguished mechanical from organic solidarity; Cooley dis¬ tinguished between societies with primary and those with secondary rela¬ tions and Redfield between folk and urban society. Currendy, for some, North America and Europe represent “the City” and Africa, Asia and Latin America “the Country.” These formal distinctions are however ahistorical abstractions and do not tell us how change itself came about from one pole of existence to the other. In point of fact, these dichotomies tend to shift our attention away from real historical pro¬ cesses and have become an element of a very powerful myth of urban sociology and anthropology in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen (depending on one’s ideological predisposition) either as a movement from backwardness to modernity or as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of social and moral decay. For Engels, scientific analysis of industrial capitalism had to begin with what Therborn calls the historico-material and concrete experi-

426

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

ence, i.e., the study of social reality as motion and process.7 There took place in England a series of interlocking and mutually enhancing changes and developments in the seventeenth century that culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century. The consequences oi the technologies and innovations of the middle of the eighteenth century were an unprecedented magnitude, for they ushered in a rev¬ olution that “transformed the entire structure of civil society.” Bourgeois social scientists never tire of accusing Marx and Engels of arriving at these conclusions a priori, and of ignor¬ ing empirical facts. The CWC shows that this charge is unten¬ able. Long before the appearance of‘empirical sociology and anthropology’ Engels engaged in concrete social research and based his theoretical conclusions on the analysis and summingup of facts which bourgeois sociologists usually ignored.8 In his historical survey of pre-industrial Britain, Engels focused on the unique economic transformations that occurred from the fifteenth cen¬ tury and its social consequences not only for rural England but for the entire part of the world that was brought within the orbit of British influence. He found that an increasingly capitalist form of agriculture had in effect become the pacesetter for the capitalist development of England and the world. Since England was the classical ground of the Industrial Revolution and where the gigantic thrust of concentration and polarization took place, Engels used it as a case to study in all its fullness and develop¬ ment of its principal result, the proletariat. The industrial revolution was thus more than a revolution in machinery, its most important result was the creation of the revolutionary proletariat. “It was this emer¬ gence, this production, this creation of a new human being and the new class of social beings that was the explicit object of the CWC.”9 Although it was not Engels’ aim to write the history of the Industrial Revolution, he believed it necessary to establish some con¬ ception of the pre-historic state of English rural society and of the gen¬ eral conditions before the great transformation. The kind of life he describes is a familiar one to sociologists and anthropologists; it was a small-scale farming and domestic industry. The basic form of proper¬ ty was land, and competition of the peasant producers among them¬ selves did not exist because of rural dispersion of their homes and the economy that supported them. The peasant lives were comfortable,

427

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

peaceful and uneventful; they were pious and honest men; and their material condition was better by far than that of their successors. Their hours of work were not excessive; they had time for traditional recre¬ ation, and their health and that of their children were good. Socially their world was laid out for them: it was prescriptive and patriarchal.10 This is how Engels described it: They regarded their squire, the greatest landholder of the region, as their natural superior; they asked for advice from him, laid their small disputes before him for settlement, and gave him all honor, as this patriarchal relation involved. They were ‘respectable’ people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity and because the host, at whose Inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took pride in good order, good beer and early hours (p. 37). The development of the capitalist urban-industrial order disrupted this mode of existence: in many ways the destruction was comparable in terms of its impact to the invasion of the colonial world by capitalism. The enclosure movement dislodged thousands of families from the country and they had no alternative but to flock to the towns. For Engels the most important result of these developments was the sep¬ aration of the direct producers from the land and their settlement in urban centers as proletarians where they were ranged against the cap¬ italist owners of the factories where they worked. The rapid extension of manufacturing demanded hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural dis¬ tricts to the towns. Population multiplied enormously, nearly all the increase took place in the proletariat. Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small shop-keepers, and very few handicraftsmen (pp. 49-50). Engels did not bemoan the passing away of “traditional” society. He characterized the mode of human existence in pre-industrial Britain as follows:

428

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

They [the rural dwellers] were comfortable in their silent veg¬ etation, and but for the Industrial Revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cozily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings. In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who guided history down to that time. The Industrial Revolution has simply carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men (pp. 37-38). Having characterized the social structure of pre-industrial England, Engels then proceeded to logically summarize the early history of the Industrial Revolution. The aim of this resume was to show the impact of the new industrial technology. The first group of technological inno¬ vations set in motion a series of elaborate differentiations. For exam¬ ple, the invention of the spinning and the power-loom not only altered the relations between weaving and spinning, and weavers and spinners; it affected the division of labor in the family as well, and therefore had consequences in the structure of the household, and its internal bal¬ ance of force. Other developments that followed were the assembly of large numbers of power driven machines in the factories. These machines required large numbers of workers to man them. As a result shifts took place, population increased, conditions of employment altered and the nature of wealth changed as well.11 Even though Engels focused on the growth of the cotton indus¬ try — the primer mover of industrial development — he did not neglect parallel developments in other branches of textile manufacture; in metal work, minerals and mining, in agriculture, and in transport — roads, canals, and railways — nor did he fail to mention developments in com¬ merce and the expansion of overseas and colonial markets. All these developments were connected in the sense that they formed part of a large complex and continually changing coherent whole now called industrial society.12 The history of the Industrial Revolution was thus cumulative and was produced by a process of conquest of the country by the urbanbased bourgeoisie. Williams13 says that before and during the Industrial Revolution rural England was characterized by an increasing penetra¬ tion by capitalist social relations and dominance of the market, because 429

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

these had been powerfully evolving within its own structure for a long time. By the late eighteenth century there existed in England an orga¬ nized capitalist society, in which what happened to the market, any¬ where, whether in industrial or agricultural production, worked its way through to the town and country alike, as parts of a single crisis. Engels’ investigation of the evolution of capitalism in England brought into silent relief the role of technology in the industrial rev¬ olution and its implication for a basic industry — cotton. With the increased mechanization of the spinning process, the work of spinning was further rationalized by the machines driven by mechanical rather than human power. Water power, a source of mechanical energy, brought men together in large numbers in cities like Manchester. These immense cotton spinning factories or mills of the late eighteenth century were something new in the world. After 1815 weaving was increasingly brought into factories as well, and within a short time cotton became the first industry in which production was wholly mechanized. The next step was to adopt the men, women, and children who worked at the machines to the unvarying requirements of those instruments, and this too was achieved, although the adopters ran into some resistance of the part of adoptees.14 The historical experience of industrialization according to Engels was not to be separated from that of urbanization. The two in the case of England happened together and reinforced one another; the recipro¬ cating effects of each upon the other being further intensified by the demographic escalation. To form some idea of how the capitalist city shaped human life, it is important to study the dialectic of the com¬ modity relationship and the mode of urban existence it yields: The industrial disciplines, the conditions of work, of employ¬ ment, continual insecurity and continual competition, are not to be segregated, in their effects as formative experience, from the conditions of living in the new industrial towns, from the housing, sanitary, provisions — or lack of them — institutions of relief or welfare or lack of them — from all the new densi¬ ties and stresses of existence in these unparalleled circumstances. The working men and women who came out at the end of their process were the first to go through what we now understand 430

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

as a world historical experience. As a group they bear the marks of survivors. They bear those marks to this very day.15 The internal dynamic of economic transformation in England became linked as well to the colonialization movement. Within the develop¬ ing territorial division of labor, the towns and cities of England had unlimited elbow room to grow as “workshops of the world.” Elaborating on the historical impact of the Industrial Revolution for England Engels wrote: Sixty, eighty years ago England was a country like every other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but pro¬ portionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabi¬ tants; with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that sup¬ plies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different; form¬ ing, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from England of those days. The industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolu¬ tion for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and the difference between England in 1769 and in 1844 is at least as great as that between France, under the ancient regime and during the revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial transformation is the English proletariat (p. 49). Engels goes on to discuss the centralizing tendency of manufacture;which brought together “those vast masses who now fill the whole of British Empire, whose condition forces itself every day more and more upon the attention of the civilized world. The condition of the working class in the condition of the vast majority of English people” (p. 51). The nexus of the city was large-scale mechanized industry which required growing capital investment, and its division of labor required the accumulation of masses of proletarians. Such large units of production, even when built in the countryside attract communi¬ ties around them, which will produce a surplus labor force.16 The industrial city became the focus of mobilized abstract labor, of labor power as a commodity placed in the service of commerce as well as production.17 As Engels put it: 431

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Population becomes centralized just as capital does; and, very naturally, since the human being, the worker, is regarded in manufacture simply as a piece of capital for the use of which the manufacturer pays interest under the name of wages. A manufacturing establishment requires many workers employed together in a single building, living near each and forming a village of themselves in the vicinity of a good-sized factory. They have needs for satisfying which other people are neces¬ sary; handicraftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, carpenters, stonemakers, settle at hand. The inhabitants of the village, espe¬ cially the younger generation, accustom themselves to factory work, grow skillful in it, and when the first mill can no longer employ them all, wages fall and the immigration of fresh man¬ ufacturers is the consequence. So the village grows into a small town, and the small town into a large one. The greater the town, the greater its advantages. It offers roads, railroads, canals; the choice of skilled labour increases constantly, new establishments can be built more cheaply because of the com¬ petition among builders and machinists who are at hand, than in remote country districts, whether timber, machinery, builders, and operatives must be brought; it offers a market to which buyers crowd and direct communication with the mar¬ kets supplying raw material or demanding finished goods. Hence the marvelously rapid growth of the great manufactur¬ ing town (pp. 54-55). The urbanization bound up with the industrial revolution, and accom¬ panying the development of the capitalist mode of production is thus a process of organizing space based on two fundamental facts: the development of capitalism in the countryside and the consequent immi¬ gration of the population to urban areas; the destruction of a domes¬ tic economy of direct commodity producers, which forced them at the same time to move into cities where they were confined into the ranks of the proletariat which in time becomes a definite class in the popu¬ lation, whereas it had only been a transitional stage toward entering the middle class.^ What the slums of Manchester actually indicated was the true condition and development of the surplus labor force. If the slums are seen as a monstrous or a diseased growth, this had log¬ ically to be traced to the whole social order that produced such cities the capitalist mode of production. 432

Engels: The Condition of the Working Cuss in England in 1844

As a study of industrialization and urbanization, the CWC was pri¬ marily a study of the development of social patterns (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), of modes of production and class relations characterized by conflict. Engels examined the changes from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in its concrete historical development rather than abstract¬ ly. To speak of Gemeinschaft and/or Gesellschaft, then, is to speak of social arrangements determined in the last instance by the specific com¬ bination of forces and relations of production shaped by the capitalist mode of production.

Methods of Investigation Participant Observation To get an intimate acquaintance with Manchester, Engels used vari¬ ous strategies which have since become the common stock of anthro¬ pologists. In a dedication to “The Working Class Of Great Britain” which he wrote in English and prefixed to the original German edi¬ tion of 1845, Engels wrote that during his stay in England he pur¬ posefully “forsook the company and dinner parties, the portwine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.” He wanted, he says, “to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your every-day life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressor.” That is, Engels’ study was based on the study of living people and their living conditions. And because he had acted consciously upon that desire, he “was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life” (pp. 336-337). Engels also gained the intimacy of Manchester by taking to the streets; at all hours of the day and night, on weekends and holidays. He took to the network of pathways along which the city moves and that constitutes the principal means for observing and understanding it. Engels did not venture into the nooks and by-ways of Manchester alone. He was accompanied on his expeditions into the inner recesses of the city by Mary Burns (cum informants) and it was she who induct¬ ed Engels into certain working class circles and into the domestic lives of the Manchester proletariat. Thus Engels learned how to read a city in the company or through the mediation of an illiterate Irish factory woman. He learned to read the life of the city with his eyes, ears, nose 433

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and feet. He learned to read it with his senses, the chief inlets of mind in the present age.19 Libra rt Resea r ch

In addition to his personal impressions Engels drew on literary author¬ ities (the words of Peter Gaskell, Jon Wade, George Richard, Richardson Porter, Edward Baines, Andrew Ure, the brothers Archibald and William Pulteney Alison, Thomas Carlyle, and others were consulted), and he also used official records, parliamentary com¬ missions, factory inspectors’ reports, and official statistics. Engels also read many newspapers including the Chartist North Star, which pub¬ lished workers letters and articles. “I am buried up to my neck in English newspapers and books,” he wrote to Marx on November 19, 1844, “from which I am compiling my book on the condition of the English proletariat.” The CWC thus abounds in facts, collected from a variety of sources using a variety of research strategies which have become the stock in trade for modern scholars. Engels’ analytical procedure in writing the CWC is that which Sweezy20 has termed the method of “successive approximation.” This consists in moving from the abstract to the more concrete in a step by step fashion. Engels method, was not however, simply one of abstrac¬ tion; the logical stages in this successive approximation correspond to the historical stages in the development of capitalism — the CWC is based on a vast array of facts gathered by a variety of methods. The Great Towns In his study of the development of capitalism, Engels begins with the Great Towns and especially London, the capital of Britain. In a mem¬ orable message Engels recorded his first impressions of London from Autumn of 1844. He speaks of the enormity of this metropolis ... where a man may wander for hours together without reach¬ ing the beginning or the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open coun¬ try within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings, at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundred fold; has raised London to the com¬ mercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assem-

434

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

bled the thousand vessels that continLially cover the Thames...all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England’s greatness before he sets forth upon the English soil (p. 56). It was not long before Engels understood the price the Londoners had to pay for living in such a dense metropolis. In one of the great pas¬ sages on the meaning of size, density, and heterogeneity which for Wirth summed up what he called “urbanism as a way of life,” Engels drew important theoretical conclusions. The passage is so significant that it deserves quoting at some length. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropo¬ lis, one realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed so that a few might be developed more fully and multiply though union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repul¬ sive, something against which human nature rebels. The hun¬ dred of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? and have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had noth¬ ing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isola¬ tion of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded togeth¬ er, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-see¬ ing is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly bare-faced so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of

435

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mankind into nomads, of which each one has a separate prin¬ ciple and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here car¬ ried out to its utmost extreme. Hence, it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared... [PJeople regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains. What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indif¬ ference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social welfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the pro¬ tection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the concernings of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together (pp. 57-59).21 This passage reveals Engels’ great insight into the impact of the capi¬ talist industrial city on the life of its occupants. His analytic descriptive thrust located urban alienation in the historical evolution of the capi¬ talist mode of production — a society that is dominated by the pro¬ duction of commodities and thus stifles the fulfillment of human potentialities for those from whom capitalists extract surplus value. In such a society, respect for the individual and human dignity cannot be implemented, it only remains in the realm of ideas and philosophic pronouncements about human dignity and the sanctity of life. This passage, I believe, was also the first expression of what has since become a dominant experience in the city. Blake saw a common condition of “weakness and woe.” Wordsworth saw strangeness, a loss of connection, not at first social but in perceptual ways, a failure of identity in the crowd of others which worked back to a loss of identi¬ ty in the self, and then, in these ways, a loss of society itself, its over¬ crowding and replacement by a procession of images: the “dance of colours lights and forms” “face after face” and “there are no other laws.”22 George Simmel, in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 436

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

undertook to analyze and explain the characteristic mental attitude of modern city dwellers towards one another. For Simmel the attitude of the metropolitan toward others tends to be one of reserve and for¬ mality. The inner aspect of this reserve is not only indifference but a slight aversion or at least mutual strangeness and repulsiveness.23 The London Slums

What kind of living quarters does capital provide for those it exploits? Having discussed the mass anonymity of London, Engels proceeds to make a “more detailed examination of the conditions in which the social war created by capitalism has placed the propertyless class.” The picture Engels paints is one of indifference and utter disregard of the welfare of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. He regarded the plight of the proletariat as a law-governed result of the domination of private property and capital. Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of sub¬ sistence and production, is the weapon with which the social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor. For him no man has the slight¬ est concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if the bourgeoisie does him the favor to enrich itself by means of him, wages await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet an inoffensive manner (p. 58). Engels then described the English slums in a general way, such as those of the most bitter poverty that are to be found “nearby to the splen¬ did mansions of the wealthy” and “within the most respectable dis¬ tricts of town.” About the condition of human existence in the slums he cites from his substantial collection of reports, documents and news¬ paper clippings which provided shocking statistics about rent and den¬ sities including quotes from coroners’ inquests on persons who had died of starvation and in circumstances of utter destitution. He also has something to say about the homeless. He had visited a number of infamous cheap lodging houses, and writes a heart-rending paragraph about what he saw. Then there were the literally unhoused and unac¬ commodated, those who slept in passages and arcades or who found

437

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

shelter in parks or on the embankment.24 Urban slums were not simply an aberration, they were the physi cal expression of the class structure of the cities in the era of industri al capitalism: Every great city has one or more slums, where the workingclass is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hid¬ den alleys close to the palaces of the rich, but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can. These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one or two-stories cottages in long rows, per¬ haps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and kitchen form, throughout England some parts of London excepted, the gen¬ eral dwellings of the working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and many human beings here live crowded into small space, the atmo¬ sphere that prevails in these working-men’s quarters may read¬ ily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with wet clothing (p.59).25

Manchester

All the above is preliminary to a discussion in detail of Manchester, the classic ground on which English industry has wrought its master¬ piece.” What sort of masterpiece was Manchester? In the description and analyses of the workers’ living conditions Engels makes his semi¬ nal contribution to the sociology of the urban condition — the impact of capitalist industrialization and urbanization which in many respects rings true today as it did when it was written. Everything which here aroused horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of hundred of houses, which belong to old Manchester, have long 438

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

since been abandoned by their original inhabitants; the indus¬ trial epoch alone has crammed into them the swarms of work¬ ers which they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between their old houses to win a new covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the agricul¬ ture districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enabled the owners of the cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the work¬ ers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone it has become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feu¬ dal servitude could be used as mere material, a mere chattle; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to go utterly to ruin (p. 87). Capitalism “pitchforked” the new proletariat, often composed of immi¬ grants from preindustrial backgrounds, into a social hell in which they were ground down, despised, underpaid (if they had a job) or starved, left to rot in the slums.26 The description of this offers insight into the class structure of the city that has endured and still characterizes mod¬ ern urban areas. Manchester contained then about four hundred thou¬ sand inhabitants. The town itself was peculiarly built “so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with working-people’s quarters or even with workers,” that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks: This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agree¬ ment, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the working-people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sec¬ tions of the city reserved for the middle-class; or, if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity (p.78). The description of the spatial structure of Manchester by Engels antic¬ ipated by some eighty years what has come to be known as the con¬ centric zone theory of the city, as formulated by Park and Burgess. Manchester contains, as its heart, a rather extended commer¬ cial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and

439

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. This district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant shops. In these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and there, is a good deal of life upon them until late at night. With the exception of this commercial district, all Manchester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a great part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single stretches of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people’s quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth, around the commercial district. Outside, beyond this girdle, the upper and middle bourgeoisie live in regularly laid out streets in the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and lower lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, whole¬ some country air, in fine, comfortable homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibus going into the city. And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy mis¬ ery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bour¬ geoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and clean¬ ly external appearance and can care for it. True, these shops bear some relation to the district which lie between them, and are more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide grimy working-men’s dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth (p. 79). Engels then proceeds to a concrete demonstration and conducts the reader along a number of the main streets, showing how the changes in the character of the buildings that front the streets indicates what 440

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in Encland in 1844

is to be found behind them. “He is in fact charting one series of con¬ nected and stratified variables within the social topography of the city.”27 Engels concluded this spatial analysis of Manchester with the observation (p. 110) that: [A]ny one who knows Manchester can infer the adjoining dis¬ trict, from the appearance of the thoroughfare, but one is sel¬ dom in a position to catch from the street a glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know, too, that the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good buildings than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is greater near them than in remote districts; but at the same time I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eyes and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. Such are the physical arrangements of Manchester. The general laws that define the history of urban development and their links to the dynamics of capitalist wealth accumulation and distribution are basic to the science of the city. David Harvey28 points out that this approach followed by Engels in 1844 was and still is far more consistent with the hard economic and social realities than is the culturalist approach adopted by urbanologists who write on the ghetto and urban pover¬ ty. “In fact with certain obvious modifications, Engels’ description could easily be made to fit the contemporary American city.”29 In Manchester, like in modern bourgeois cities, the slum, poverty and other urban disorders were a permanent feature of this city, embed¬ ded in its class relations. The separation of the rich and the poor had been built into the very spatial structure of the city, by insuring that dif¬ ferential access to scarce resources perpetuated the inequalities that formed capitalism. The imperatives of capitalist logic — land specula¬ tion, income concentration, political power — combine to exclude the poor and certain sections of the working class from the benefits of cap¬ italist economic growth. Worse still, the working-class district is always liable for demolition because of built-in obsolescence of its housing. The “contractors, usually carpenters and builders, of manufacturers, spend little or nothing in repairs partly to avoid diminishing their rent

441

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

receipts, and partly in view of the approaching surrender of the improve¬ ment to the land owners; while in consequence of commercial crises and loss of work that follows them, whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling rapidly into ruin and uninhabitableness” (p. 92). Since Engels wrote the CWC, the city has enormously expanded as an organization of production and a concentrated center of power and wealth, it has also deteriorated as a place in which to conduct other human and civilized activities. “As the wealthier population have fled the center, they have leap-frogged over the vast working-class and left them there massed, as it were, about that alternatively dense and hol¬ low core, in an immense unbroken belt in which they work and live.”30 Other spatial aspects of urban growth dealt with by Engels concern the physical separation between the place of work and the place of res¬ idence.

The Social Life of the Working Class What kind of existence does the working class lead? That is, what are the conditions of life and existence like for the working class in gen¬ eral and for workers in particular? Engels gives a shocking picture of the plight of the English workers. Life in the urban slums for the low paid and unemployed was characterized by demoralization and alien¬ ation, by the most profound social and personal distress. It approxi¬ mated the Hobbesian “war of each against all.” Engels begins by tracing the results of competition of single work¬ ers with one another. “Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all which rules modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle for life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place” (p. 110). The mode of conflict Engels is describing is spawned in the inter¬ stices of the jungle capitalist; its values and relations are reflected in human behavior. In the struggle for existence; the proletariat is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence...; what the proletariat needs he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which can

442

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but only for an “equivalent” for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority (p. 110). Engels spends many pages setting down in detail what can only be called conditions of social hell under which the workers and the poor lived. In the great towns disease of every kind flourished. Lung dis¬ ease and various grades of fever were common. He also gives a sum¬ mary of diseases connected both directly and in a secondary way with diet deficiency, such as scrofula, rickets and a variety of alimentary trou¬ bles.31 Engels was the first to discuss what urban anthropologists call the Culture of Poverty — a group of circumstances and kinds of behavior patterns which when acting in concern create a vicious circle for the poor, the unemployed and the unemployable. First there was unem¬ ployment which produced helplessness and drunkenness; which as symptoms of this state, are an effort on the part of the poor to gain temporary release from their life, and a further auxiliary cause in its worsening. The cause of poverty, contrary to liberal assumptions, is created by capitalism and should not be explained by the weakness and shiftlessness of individuals. Capitalism as a mode of production creates a class structure of the employed and the unemployable. The latter class is put in a situation where it cannot help but acquire and devel¬ op certain attitudes. Then these acquired attitudes are taken to be their nature and to determine their roles in society. So dirty, temporary and seasonal jobs are assigned to this class and when their services are no longer needed, they are then blamed for being shiftless and not deserv¬ ing. What is called culture of poverty, is thus a “life-style” that is more the result of poverty than its cause. For instance, on top of everything else the working class suffered from a complete absence of almost all facilities for sociability and recre¬ ation. As Engels puts it; The failing of the workers in general may be traced to an unbri¬ dled thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibil¬ ity in fitting into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment to a remote advantage. But is that to be wondered at? When a class can purchase few

443

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

and only the most sensual pleasures by wearing toil, must it not give itself over blindly and madly to those pleasures? A class about whose education no one troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life — what incentives has such a class to providence, to “respectabil¬ ity,” to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpet¬ ually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile aspects — who can demand that such a class respect this social order? Verily that is asking much! But the working man cannot escape the present arrange¬ ment of society so long as it exists, and when the individual worker resists it, the greatest injury falls upon himself (p. 162). In the English cities there was thus a striking contrast between the extraordinary affluence of the middle classes and the poverty of the unemployed and unemployable; in the dispossessed and vagrants, the old, the sick and the disabled, who, because they were unable to work in the towns created by the capitalist, were seen merely as negative and unwanted burdens. In analyzing the position of the Irish, Engels made a point basic to the understanding of the poor in cities under capital¬ ism — the need of the capitalist for a reserve army of labor. “The rapid expansion of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command...There are in London 20,000; in Manchester 40,000; in Liverpool 34,000 poor Irish people.” (p.124) The surplus population serves definite functions under capitalism: it can be drawn upon during the periodic cycles of prosperity and let go during the inevitable downturn. The slums are the physical expression that the reserve army is a permanently essential part of capitalism. The reserve army was composed partly of proletarians, partly of potential proletarians — countrymen, Irish immigrants, people from the eco¬ nomically dynamic areas and less dynamic occupations.32 The important institutional casuality of urban capitalist develop¬ ment was to be none other than the working-class family. The demand capitalism made on the various members of the working-class family made family life almost impossible for the workers. As Engels (p. 162) put it: 444

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly good enough for mere nightly shelter, ill-furnished, often neither rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filing rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder chil¬ dren, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is pos¬ sible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is not too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralizing influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeois makes upon the working-man! On top of all these problems, the working-man, who was lucky enough to have a job was no better off— the work he did was not of a selffulfilling kind. It was work imposed on the working class as a necessi¬ ty. Engels states that the machine-tending work of a spinning operative was guaranteed, if nothing else, to break the spirit. It prevented the worker from occupying his mind with anything else. The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative’s thinking, yet it is a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things...this work affords the muscles no opportunity for phys¬ ical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedi¬ um, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment’s rest; the engine moves increasingly, the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears with¬ out a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines. This condem¬ nation to be burned alive in the mill, to give constant atten¬ tion to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the

445

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operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest degree (p.211). Since Engels wrote CWC, factory work has become worse. It has been reduced to a series of operations that are even more deadening to the senses. The machine tending in the textile mills, copy typist work, key¬ punch operators and computer programmers, bank clerks — the watch¬ ers and tenders of new electronic technology — all confront a working life whose quality is to say the least unappetizing.33 Bookchin makes the point that the aim of capital is to reduce human labor into an aggre¬ gate of muscular and mental energy and to make it lose its identity as an expression of human powers.34 Though the development of capitalist science and technology pro¬ vides the material prerequisites for the emancipation of labor, by reduc¬ ing necessary labor time and immensely increasing productivity, the actual consequences are not liberating but enslaving. The individual worker is no longer identifiably productive; established skills are erod¬ ed and displaced; the worker is subordinated to the machine; wages are depressed; both the intensity and the length of the working day are increased. Marx summed up the consequences of factory work as follows: Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bod¬ ily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital’s process of valorization, has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automation, the instrument of labour confronts the work¬ er during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The sepa¬ ration of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties

446

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erect¬ ed on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’.35 What does this tell us? That the process that has produced vast mate¬ rial wealth is simultaneously reproduced as absolute alienation, that it has produced this wealth on the backs of workers who had been reduced to what C. Wright Mills called “cheerful robots.” In the lan¬ guage of the factory, workers are “hands” and “operatives”; and indi¬ viduality in work is reduced to a numerical expression. The fragmentation of the work process is to ensure that capital through its hired managers had the greatest possible degree of control over the living labor it employs.36 In the bourgeois city the very bases of human association have been distorted and reduced into harsh commodity relations; everyone becomes an enemy of everyone else. In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is more advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all dif¬ ferences are settled by threats, violence, or in a court of law. In short, everyone sees in his neighbor an enemy to be got out of the way, or at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal table shows, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. The enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps — the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other. This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition (pp. 165-166). Engels also discussed such currently pertinent problems of capitalism as depression and trade cycles, the question of the “reserve army of 447

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

labor,” the theoretical problems of surplus labor, and the actual exis¬ tence of surplus laborers, largely in the form of an immense pool of casual laborers in the cities and beneath them of an almost as large group of unemployed and unemployable members of the proletariat.37

The Class Struggle Engels understood the progressive role of cities in history as centers of economic-cultural development and incubators of the modern rev¬ olutionary working class. In the industrial towns, the working men and women were faced with many difficult problems. Millions of hitherto independent producers had been “pitchforked” from the “natural” economy and rendered destitute. Those who found work consumed today what they made yesterday. The men and women who by their toil created the greatness of England were living on the margins of poverty; receiving less and less of the surplus value they produced. The working class soon realized that their situation was not temporary: they came to understand that they were an integral and permanent part of the property-less urban population. It dawned on them that their chil¬ dren would be born to toil, would have no other prospect than remain¬ ing toilers all their lives. To defend themselves the workers formed themselves into trade unions. The industrial urban milieu forced them to learn the meaning of their situation and by concentrating them in the urban space, made them learn the power of collective action. The great cities are the birthplaces of labour movements; in them the workers first began to reflect upon their own condi¬ tion, and to struggle against it; in them the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie first made itself manifest; from them proceeded the Trade Unions, Chartism, and Socialism. The great cities have transformed the disease of the social body, which appears in chronic form in the country, into an acute one, and so made manifest its real nature and the means of cur¬ ing it. Without the great cities and their forcing influence upon population intelligence, the working-class would be far less advanced than it is. Moreover, they have destroyed the last rem¬ nant of patriarchal relation between working-men and employ¬ ers, a result to which manufacture on a large scale has contributed by multiplying the employees dependent upon a single employer (p. 153).

448

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

A great part of the CWC is devoted to the working-class movement, its forms and methods of struggle. It is thus no accident that some of the most profound and enduring insights about working conscious¬ ness derived from the CWC. For Engels the working class movement was a necessary expression of the antagonistic contradictions of the main classes of capitalist society. Working-class consciousness and struggle under capitalism has gone through many phases. The earliest and crudest form of struggle was that of crime and was induced by want, distress or necessity. “The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were bet¬ ter off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these con¬ ditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole...crime increased with the extension of manu¬ facture,... the yearly number of arrests bore a constant relation to the number of bales of cotton annually consumed” (p. 248). Soon the workers realized that crime did not help their cause. That is to say, the structure of crime reproduces the structure of the exist¬ ing social injustice as much as it protested against them. The criminal could protest against the existing order of soci¬ ety only simply, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-men however much they might approve of it in silence. As a class, they first manifested opposition to the bour¬ geoisie when they resisted the introduction of machinery at the very beginning of the industrial period (p. 249). The political significance of crime for Engels showed a lack of politi¬ cal consciousness on the part of the urban proletariat. The next stage in the development of political awareness among the newly proletarianized workers was the revolt against the machinery in the cause of which factories were demolished. This form of opposition was too nar¬ rowly focused and, like crime, self-defeating: “When the monetary end was attained, the whole might of social power fell upon the unpro¬ tected evil doers and punished them to its heart’s content, while the machinery was introduced none the less” (p. 259).

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

The third stage reached by the working class was the political form of struggle. The reform bill of 1824 opened the way for this phase in working-class political development. The reform bill gave the work¬ ing class a right previously restricted to the aristocracy and the bour¬ geoisie, the right of free association. The hitherto secret organizations of the workers could now be organized openly. “In all branches of industry Trade Unions were formed with the outspoken intention of protecting the single working-men against the tyranny and neglect of the bourgeoisie. The objects were: to fix wages and to deal en masse, as a power, with the employers; to regulate the rate of wages accord¬ ing to the profit of its latter, to raise it when opportunity offered, and to keep it uniform in each trade throughout the country” (p. 250). Although the proletarianization of the peasants had been a uni¬ versal negation, with the growth of the labor movement the workers began to discover their power and their humanity as well. In the trade union movement the working-men discovered a new state of con¬ sciousness and the beginnings of a new kind of solidarity. The great urban centers, the house of modern industry, by concentrating further both the increase of middle-class wealth and power on the one hand and working-class poverty and helplessness on the other was the main source of working-class movement and class consciousness. That is, urban development was a gigantic process of class segregation, which put the new laboring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centers of government and business and the newly specialized resi¬ dential area ol the bourgeoisie. The almost universal European divi¬ sion into a “good” west end and “poor” east end of large cities could not help but produce this solidarity.38 The labor movement of the first half of the nineteenth century was not either in composition or in its ideology and program a strictly “pro¬ letarian movement, i.e., one ol industrial and factory workers or even one confined to wage earners. It was rather a common front of all forces and tendencies representing the (mainly urban) laboring-poor39. Its importance lay not in its effectiveness, but in the lessons of soli¬ darity and class consciousness which it taught. Engels examined in detail the life experiences and struggles in spe¬ cific production processes and production relations to reveal the forms of existence in these branches: the spinners and weavers, workers in knitting and embroidery, tailors and dressmakers, glassblowers, metal workers, miners, and farm laborers. He shows the workers’ tribulations

450

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and struggles against impossible odds. The misery had impelled the workers to grapple with their condition. Engels found that the work¬ ers in industry were more conscious of their class interest than others. Under capitalism, the proletarians’ human dignity is expressed only in struggle against the existing conditions. Hence the importance of trade unions and economic strikes as instruments for advancing the inter¬ ests of the workers, and as a means of uniting the workers and gener¬ ating militancy. These strikes, at first skirmishes, sometimes resulted in weighty struggles; they decide nothing, it is true, but true they are the strongest proof that the decisive battle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is approaching. They are the military school of the working-men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided; they are the pronunciamentos of single branches of industry that these too have joined the labour movement...and as a school of war, the unions are unexcelled (p. 260). Engels illustrated the political consciousness of the miners by describ¬ ing the coal miners’ efforts to form a trade union and to organize a strike which they launched in March 1844. The miners had collected a strike fund large enough to assure each miners’ family of strike pay of half a crown a week for several months. The miners nineteen-week experience was a great triumph; workers unity struck fear in the hearts of the bourgeoisie. The great five months’ battle of the coal miners against mine owners, a battle fought on the part of the oppressed with an endurance, courage, intelligence, and coolness demands the highest admiration. What a degree of true human venture, of enthusiasm and strength of character, such a battle implies on the part of men who... were described as late as 1840, as being thoroughly brutal and wanting in moral sense (p. 204). What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They imply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, is based whol¬ ly upon the competition of the workers themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct 451

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dan¬ gerous to this social order. The working-men cannot attack the bourgeoisie, and with it the whole existing order of society, at any sorer point than this. If the competition of the workers among themselves is destroyed, if all determine not to be fur¬ ther exploited by the bourgeoisie, the rule of property is at an end (pp. 218-219). The industrial capitalist city by its very nature creates a new con¬ sciousness among workers and a will to resist the injustices of capital¬ ism. It functions as an organizing container; the source of Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.” That is, it is a focus of all connections — social, political and economic. The workers “saw plenty of wealth around them, and the law protecting its gross inequities. They want¬ ed enough to live on, “and by fair means or foul we will have it.”40 For Engels the working-class movement was an imperative and an expression of the antagonism of capital. Fie saw the Chartist move¬ ment as having the potential of becoming a proletarian and a socialist movement. Why? Because “Chartism is the compact form of the oppo¬ sition to the bourgeoisie” (p. 263). Prior to that “opposition always remained isolated. It was single working men or sections who fought a single bourgeois. If the fight became general, this was scarcely by intention of the working men or when it did happen intentionally, Chartism was at the bottom of it. But in Chartism it is the whole work¬ ing-class which arises against the bourgeoisie, and attacks, first of all the political power, the legislative rampart with which the bourgeoisie has surrounded itself.” But in England of the 1840s, socialism was still unconnected to the working-class movement and those who advocated socialism did not advocate an implacable class struggle. “English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great con¬ sideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustices toward the pro¬ letariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletari¬ at. The socialist are thoroughly tame and peaceable, accept our exist¬ ing order, bad as it is, so far as to reject all other methods but that of winning public opinion” (pp. 272-273). How was Chartism to overcome its limitations? It has to be puri¬ fied of its bourgeois elements and merge with the working class. This 452

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

process had already begun and many Chardst leaders had embraced socialism. Capitalist development was producing proletarian socialism, whose historical necessity was determined by the antagonistic charac¬ ter of capitalism and the advance of philosophical and sociological thought. Through the study of the objective conditions Engels was able to demonstrate how the progress of capitalist production induced the proletarians to unite in a single powerful army which was increas¬ ingly conscious of the fact that its interests were incompatible with those of the capitalist. “The war of the poor against the rich now car¬ ried on in detail and indirectly will become direct and universal. It is too late for peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes become concentrated in more impor¬ tant battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion” (P. 335).

The Middle Classes In analyzing the poverty of the working class, Engels knew that he was dealing with a society where poverty and affluence are inseparably joined; where the production of wealth takes place on condition of the social or absolute impoverishment of the producers. The poverty of the working class had thus always to be compared with the affluence of the middle classes. As Bentham put it: In the highest stage of social prosperity, the great mass of the citizens will most probably possess few other resources than their daily labour, and consequently will always be near to indigence.

41

Engels had nothing but contempt and scorn for the middle classes. The bourgeoisie as a class neglected its workers and regarded them as objects and not as human like itself. “Among the middle classes the cultivation of the reasoning power has most significantly developed their self-seeking predisposition. It has made selfishness the ruling pas¬ sion. It has concentrated all the power of feeling upon the sole con¬ cern of greed for money.”42 Engels was quite cognizant of the fact that this distortion of energy was the requisite accompaniment to the hero¬ ic phase of the middle class’s economic and social transformation of the modern world; but for such acquisitive instinct the bourgeois world could never have been born. But he now argues that the heroic phase 453

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

of the age of this class has passed. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal order had by the early nineteenth century been com¬ pletely distorted. Whatever claim the bourgeoisie made to human progress, it seemed to Engels like a survival of a dead age, the ghost that would haunt the bourgeoisie in its attempt to compete with the new forces of development. He summed up his attitude towards the English bourgeoisie as follows: I have never seen a class so deeply demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, espe¬ cially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save the losing of gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeoisie are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeoisie; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifog¬ ging merchants, but how does this help matter? Ultimately it is self-interest, and money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeoisie, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-people’s quarters and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man lis¬ tened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we part¬ ed: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir’. It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeoisie whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money (pp. 313-314). To justify its inhuman treatment of the urban poor and the unem¬ ployed, the bourgeoisie evolved pseudo-social theories like the Malthusian population theory and imposed on the victims of the sys¬ tem of capitalist development the Malthusian “New Poor Law” of 1834. For Engels both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are victimized

454

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

by the same capitalist relations of production in which they find them¬ selves. The demoralization that Engels ascribes to the middle classes is the structural counterpart of that suffered by the working classes. In Manchester the anatomy of the city revealed to Engels that the isolat¬ ed and denied classes were in fact parts of a total whole. The middle class too was estranged; they too had lost their real human existence and could recognize it only in “objectified” entities; the middle class had undertaken to appropriate a world through means which rendered it permanently alien to them as well.43 The bourgeoisie and the proletariat were thus the bearers of the same exploitative mode of production. The two classes of such a mode of production presuppose and precondition each other and their rela¬ tionship is not just logical, but material — between exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed. Their relations are moderated only by the cash nexus. For the bourgeoisie, as Engels put it: All the conditions of life are measured by money, what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh...The rela¬ tion of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it, it is purely economic. The manufacturer is Capital, the operative Labour. And if the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not Labour but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attributes of labourforce, if he takes it into his hands that he need not allow him¬ self to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity “Labour”, the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill (p. 34).44 In the bourgeois city the commodity, like a mysterious external force, rises above humanity and alters its destiny according to the commod¬ ity’s suprahuman and autonomous laws. That is, the imperative of class (i.e., uneven distribution of the social product) translates itself into urban spatial relations. The bourgeoisie realizes itself through its neigh¬ borhood enclaves that are defined by property values. Into these walled enclaves the bourgeoisie and its assets retreat in order to enjoy the fruits derived from exploiting the working class, that is left to sink or swim in the inner city core. But class antagonism, despite the effort to “cage” the working class in old run down neighborhoods has a way of defying the bourgeois and reasserting itself in the form of struggle for inner city real estate. The characteristic urban conflict is due to what Harvey calls the “compulsive power of fixed capital,” that remains in

455

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

the downturn core when the bourgeoisie leap-frogs poor neighbor¬ hoods to settle in suburbia. The banks, museums, the art galleries and various accumulated treasures of human achievement cannot be moved to the suburbs, so the working-class districts in the inner city must be bulldozed to make room for office glass towers celebrating the power of corporate wealth. The bourgeoisie, which sees everything in terms of “how much,” will seek to undermine and dismantle working-class communal patterns which impede their economic ends, and will seek to create new inner city forms more in keeping with the needs for accu¬ mulation. The bourgeoisie, by reducing land into a commodity, moves all aesthetic restraints that held the growth of earlier cities in check. The concept of social responsibility, once intuitive to precapi¬ talist communities, is replaced by a single goal; plunder. Every (entity and human capacity is conceived as a resource for the acquisition of profit: the land, forests, seas, rivers, the labour of others, and ultimately all the varieties of social life from...the family to the community itself. The new industrial and com¬ mercial classes fall upon the social body like ravenous wolves on a helpless prey, and what remains of a once vital social organ¬ ism are the torn fragments and indigestible sinews that linger more in the memory of humanity that in the realities of social intercourse. The American urban lot with its rusted cans, bro¬ ken glass, and debris strewn chaotically among weeds and scrub reflects, in the minuscule, the ravaged remains of forests; waters, shorelines, and communities.45 Capitalism is thus an economic system which feeds callousness. The unex¬ ampled inhumanities suffered by the working class and the urban poor were not the work of weak or consciously malign men. “Their gigantic horror is in considerable measure precisely found in the circumstances that those who can be held historically responsible for the perpetuation of the unforgivable things are generally virtuous, hardworking, law abid¬ ing and upright men of character and strength of purpose.”46 Given its vested interest in this status quo, it was unrealistic to expect the bourgeoisie to abolish slums and poverty. Socialism was incompatible with the interests of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, enslaved by social conditions and the prejudices involved in them, trem¬ bles, blesses and crosses himself before everything which really paves the way for progress; the proletariat has open eyes for it, and studies

456

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

it with pleasure and success (p. 296). The bourgeois answer to work¬ ing class poverty is charity. But the bourgeoisie required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. And Engels was scathing in his criticism of such charities. The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: ‘If I spend much upon the benevolent institutions, I hereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by expos¬ ing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my sub¬ scription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!’ (p.316).47 Such are the basic ideas of Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. It is not free of imprecise and incorrect propositions, which were mainly due to youthful bravado and to the fact that Marxist eco¬ nomic and political theory was still embryonic. Engels assumed that capitalism had already worked out its potentialities as the cyclical crises of overproduction seemed to indicate, while the growing impoverish¬ ment of the proletariat was a certain sign that the bourgeoisie was los¬ ing its footing.48 Whereas The Condition of the Working Class In England in 1844 gives a detailed description of housing conditions in English cities, The Housing Question 1872-73, contains the essential proposition of a Marxist approach to the housing and urban systems. Written as a crit¬ ical response to reform proposals that appeared in the Volkestaat, the organ of the German Social Democratic Party, it criticized Mulberger, a Proudhonist who had claimed that home ownership was the solu¬ tion to the housing question, and Dr. Emil Sax, who saw legal reforms, philanthropy and moral appeals as the answer to the housing shortage. Mulberger, like modern urban reformers, had bewailed the lot of the population caught in the modern cities. He was deeply distressed by the shortage of housing. To eliminate the gross injustice of the people who lived “below the savages” he wished to turn society into a “totali¬ ty of free and independent owners of dwellings” (p. 31) through the gradual payment of the cost of his house by the tenant to the original house-owner. The aim was to make the worker an owner of property. That the condition of the workers had in general worsened mate-

457

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

rially since the introduction of capitalist production on a large scale was not in doubt for Engels. But he asked if that necessitated looking back to the past longingly and mourning the passing of rural smallscale industry? The housing shortage, though but one of the evils of capitalism, had a silver lining. “Only the proletariat created by mod¬ ern large-scale industry, liberated from all inherited fetters, including those which chained it to the land, and driven its herds into big towns, is in a position to accomplish the great social transformation which will put an end to all class exploitation and class rule. The old rural hand weaver with hearth and home would never have been able to conceive such an idea, much less able to desire to carry it out: (p. 24). Engels used the concrete example of Dr. Emil Sax, The Conditions Of The Working Class And Their Reform, published in 1869, because it had attempted to summarize as far as possible the bourgeois litera¬ ture on the subject. And Sax claimed to have discovered a new science — social economy — which hoped to devise ways of preserving capi¬ talism by turning all wage workers into capitalists. While Mulberger claimed that once workers owned their dwellings, capitalism would cease to exist, Sax held that by acquiring his own little house the “so called propertyless classes” were to be raised “to propertied classes...all wage workers can be turned into capitalists without ceasing to be wage workers” (p. 45). This kind of reasoning, Engels argued, was really the ideological prop of the status quo, i.e., the bourgeois order of things. It wanted to eliminate the evils of bourgeois society, yet intended to preserve the economic basis of their evils. He then asked rhetorically: “Whence then comes the housing shortage? How did it arise?” He reminded Dr. Sax that the housing shortage was a necessary product of the bourgeois social order; that it could not fail to be present in a society in which the great masses of the workers were exclusively dependent upon wages; [T]hat is to say, on the sum of foodstuffs necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the existing machinery continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial vacillations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed work¬ ers, and on the other hand drive large masses in the big towns, at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them 458

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

under existing conditions; in which, therefore there must always be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in which finally the house owner in his capacity as a capitalist has not only the right, but in view of the competition, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in large rents as he possibly can. In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and it can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is funda¬ mentally refashioned (pp. 46-47). Thus, for Engels, the housing question was of a secondary nature — the essence of the problem was the capitalist mode of production itself. That is, the evils that arise around the housing shortage and in the slums of the major cities are a built-in feature of the capitalist mode of production. The argument that by acquiring his own little house the wage worker would “become a capitalist” and capitalism would change from an evil into an ideal society revealed the limits of bourgeois “socialism.” To solve the problem that is caused by capitalism, the workers must have more of the disease! The answer for Engels lay in an attack on the capitalist system at its vital point; only in that way could the evils that arose from it, like the hous¬ ing shortage and slums, be eliminated. However these were questions that the bourgeois socialists a la Proudhonist chose not to countenance. It does not explain the housing shortage from the existing con¬ ditions...whoever declares that the capitalist mode of produc¬ tion, the ‘iron laws’ of present-day bourgeois society, are inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant consequences, has no other resource but to deliv¬ er moral sermons to the capitalist, moral sermons whose emo¬ tional effects immediately evaporate under the influences of private interests and, if necessary of competition (pp. 46-47).

Contemporary Relevance Can the concepts developed by Engels in any way help us understand the contemporary urban form and the conditions that exist in the slums? Though similar in some striking ways to the conditions

459

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

described by Engels in the 1840s, a case can be made that today’s cri¬ sis is the result of the cyclical dynamics of capitalism and the fact that the crisis of recent years coincides with the movement into the “innercity” areas of black and other Third World immigrants. Therefore the phenomenon of decay, poverty, unemployment and crime, although it has a precedent in the past, is the result also of failure of the immi¬ grants to adjust to the urban phenomenon. A number of scholars, e.g., Harvey (1973), Tabb and Sawyers (1978), Paris (1978), Phizacklea and Miles (1980), among others, have also pointed to the importance of acquaintance with Engels’ writing.49 Specifically, Marxist writers argue that the logic of the current urban crisis, like that of the 1840s, is derivative from the logic and the work¬ ings of the wider capitalist social formation, which leads persistently to the recurrence of slums and the social problems which the bourgeoisie can only solve in one way — distribution of the working-class districts. That is, industrial and urban development is structured by the demands of capital: in the early phase of industrialization capital demanded a concentration of labor in the core of expanding towns but refused to supply housing for the workers. New capitalist development has leap¬ frogged the working-class district to the outskirts of the cities with devastating results for the working class it had previously assembled in the inner city. One of the main contributions of Engels is that the urban phe¬ nomenon is comprehensible only in the context of some prior analy¬ sis of the production and reproduction of relations of capitalism. In short, urbanization and its recurrent problems is comprehensible only as a mediated outcome of the social dynamics and imperatives of the capitalist mode of production in specific conjunctural circumstances. This is not to deny that the urban crisis of the 1970s is different in cer¬ tain respects from the decay in the 1840s, but simply to suggest that both can only be explained by reference to the operation of the capi¬ talist mode of production. The two books by Engels are therefore important because they describe a state of things which is reproduced at the present moment in the major cities of all capitalist countries and the underdevelopment countries whose economies are capitalist in character. Engels’ analysis of urban decay and his incisive criticism of liberal reforms are not only applicable in light of today’s conditions, they are still the most coher¬ ent statement of the materialist approach to the urban problems.

460

Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

Though the ethnic composition of the slums has changed, the slums and the housing shortage go back to the very origin of capitalism. On the English slums Engels has this to say: The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting those Celtic faces which one recognizes at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing aspirate brogue which the Irishman never loses (p. 123).50 That is, the slums of the 1840s were populated not only by the indige¬ nous and recendy proletarianized groups, but also the worst areas of these slums were assigned to Irish immigrants who were distinguished from the former both by physical and cultural characteristics. Urbanologists and students of poverty have written a great deal of descriptive material about the changing ethnic composition of the ghetto population. But these students fail to see that the modern city is a social and physical con¬ sequence of capitalism: built and living in its modes. Whereas the English cities in the nineteenth century confined the undesirable Irish in the urban slums, today the dominant economic class, through the manipulation of race and racism, has confined the undesirable “Negro” and immigrants who are equally necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy to the ghettos of remarkable poverty and destitution. The living conditions in these ghettos are no better than those described by Engels in the ghettos of Manchester and other cities. The houses have imperfect sewage and drainage, defec¬ tive wiring, and lack proper heating, which in the winter causes suf¬ fering and death by hypothermia. To make things worse, business buildings drive the poor to other parts of the city, saturating and degrading the city neighborhood by neighborhood. The roots of the urban crisis, Engels emphasized over and over again, lie deep in the capitalist mode of production.51 There is no lack of “explanation” from the liberal point of view of the current crisis faced by the urban centers of the metropolitan and underdeveloped areas of the world. Typically ahistoric, pragmatic and descriptive, it is concerned mainly with how cities adjust the behavior of individuals and groups formed by the rural areas with the urban mass. Liberal urbanologists view conflict and slum conditions a la Dr.

461

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Sax and Mulberger as unfortunate evils which can be eliminated with¬ out fundamental structural changes of capitalism. There is very little light shed on why the ghetto and urban poverty are such persistent features of the capitalist city. The next important contribution of Engels’ two books is that in them he laid the fundamental hypothesis for the historical materialist approach to the study of urbanization. According to historical mate¬ rialism, the economic instant determined the social structure, while the political relations between classes explain and organize each con¬ jecture for social practice as a whole. One of the first tasks that Engels faced was to demonstrate how the process of primitive accumulation, or more correctly the initial phase of capitalist accumulation in England, involved a massive removal of both resources and human labor power from the countryside in order to centralize them in the cities. “In industrial societies, through¬ out the nineteenth century at least, the map of social relationships of production clearly showed the increasing imbalance between town and countryside due to the fact that rapidly developing industrial produc¬ tion utilized the resources of the countryside in ever-growing quanti¬ ties, removing labor and the agricultural products needed to feed a continuously increasing urban population, as well as the agricultural raw materials needed for the growth of industry.”52 The analytic and empirical stance followed by Engels, is holistic; he first established how the various aspects of the capitalist mode of production historically related to form a totality. In his detailed study of Manchester, Engels elucidated not only the determination of the various parts of the urban system by the whole, but also, and above all, the mutual determination of the different parts by the whole. The affluence of the middle classes and the poverty of the working class exposed, according to Engels, the unity of opposites. Therborn puts the nature of materialist analysis thus: The pattern of social determination discovered by historical materialism is characterized precisely by a unity and conflict of opposites. To speak of contradiction in society is to acknowl¬ edge a basic unity between the parts of fundamental structural incongruities. Contradiction in this sense constitutes the rela¬ tionship between social classes....53

462

Engels: The Condition op the Working Class in England in 1844

The bourgeoisie and the working class, for a materialistic analysis, reflect two sides of the same coin. Again Therborn: The classes are the two necessary poles of a common specific mode of exploitation and oppression. Their interrelationship and their struggle are therefore determined by the develop¬ ment of their mode of production, a development which occurs in and through the struggle between classes...An exploitative mode of production, then, is contradictory in the sense that it is at the same time both a specific unity of opposing classes, of immediate producers and appropriators of surplus labor and conflict and struggle of these opposing classes.54 The contradictions of a given social totality cannot be eliminated with¬ out abolishing a particular mode of production. Engels, in his discus¬ sion of the housing question, points out that the bourgeois method of dealing with the housing shortage pointed to the dilemma it faced as well” In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion — that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the ques¬ tion anew. This method is called ‘Haussmann.’ By the term ‘Haussmann’ I do not mean merely the specifi¬ cally Bonapartist manner of the Parisian Haussmann — break¬ ing long straight and broad streets through the closely-built workers’ quarter and erecting big luxurious buildings on both sides of them, the intention thereby, apart from the strategic aim of making barricade fighting more difficult, being also to develop a specifically Bonapartist building trades’ proletariat dependent on the government and to turn the city into a pure luxury city. By ‘Haussmann’ I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quar¬ ters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are cen¬ trally situated business premises, or owning to traffic requirements, such as laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reason may be, the result is every¬ where the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accomplishment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again

463

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neigh¬ borhood (pp. 74-75). Finally, the real value of Engels’ books on the city lies less in the descrip¬ tions it gives of the misery of the working class and the poor which developed in England as a result of the capitalist mode of production, for in this respect Engels had numerous predecessors. And it is not even in the burning indignation against a social system which subject¬ ed the working masses to such terrible suffering, or the moving the graphic description of those suffering and the deep and heartfelt sym¬ pathy with the victims, which give Engels’ work its special character. The most noteworthy historical features of Engels’ work are summed up by Marcus as follows: It is not a question of any easy fashionable radicalism, of a moral superiority that is its own end or that is justified by the distance it establishes between itself and the objects of its contempt and indignation; it is a question of bearing one’s witness in social and historical circumstances that are intolerable to almost everything one has learned about the decent possibilities of human life. And it is not a question of having a blueprint for the future all worked out; it is quite enough to know that means do exist for the amelioration of present injustices and suffering, that one is not protesting against laws of nature or deal¬ ing with the preindustrial economy with no margins for sizable alternatives. If the history ot all subsequent legislative encroach¬ ments and limitations of the practices of industry proves noth¬ ing else, it provides this. And even in 1845 the employment of children was a flagrant human abuse. The best way of con¬ vincing oneself of the soundness of this assertion is to read the defenses and justifications offered at the time for the continu¬ ation of such practices. They still make one blush for the spir¬ itual condition of the very souls of those who honestly held such beliefs.55 Above all Engels’ method as a fieldworker and as a revolutionary the¬ oretician calls us back to this work again and again, in a world where locales and people have shifted, but the processes remain the same.

464

Race and Class Revisited: The Case of North America and South Africa

Listen to the Winds, O God the Reader, that wail across the whip-cords stretched taut on broken human hearts, listen to the bones, the bare bleached bones of slaves, that line the lanes of Seven Seas and beat eternal tom-toms in the forests of the laboring deep; listen to the Blood, the cold thick blood that spills its filth across the fields and flowers of the Free; listen to the Souls that wing and thrill and weep and scream and sob and sing above it all. What shall these things mean, O God the Reader? —W.E.B. Du Bois The Gift of Black Folk.

Preliminary Remarks Race and class, or class and race. These are central questions in the modern world. According to Sweezy (1964:241) “The class system of society is no part of the natural order of things, it is the product of past social developments, and it will change in the course of future devel¬ opments.” On the other hand, races are part of the natural order of things. At what historical point then do race and class become issues, and/or at what historical point does class and race develop in associ¬ ation? W.E.B. Du Bois in the passages quoted above describes “the anguished existence” of African slaves “in the face of soul destroying labors on the plantations of European immigrants in North America” (Abraham 1982:21). That is, the economic exploitation of Africans (a

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

class act) is rooted in the growth and expansion of the world capital¬ ist system beginning in the fifteenth century. The most race-conscious societies have descended from the early outposts settled by Europeans in the era that Marx described as the rosy dawn of capitalism: North America and the Republic of South Africa, it is in these societies that race and class and class or race are primary issues of sociological, philo¬ sophical and political discourse. This is not to suggest that other soci¬ eties have not experienced race and racism or class and classism but that North America and South Africa have experienced this particular problem in its most pathological form. Many recent writings compare the development of the two soci¬ eties, among them Stanley B. Greenberg Race and State Capitalist Development in Comparative Perspective; George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History; Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared; John Cell, The Highest State of White Supremacy: the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and American South. Eric Williams (1962) wrote an earlier path¬ breaking study: Capitalism and Slavery, which was followed by Oliver Cox’s Cast, Class and Race. Cox, like Williams, pointed to close par¬ allels between the development of capitalism and racism. What then is the significance of race and class in North America and South Africa? Are race and class mutually exclusive categories or do race relations underline class relations? These are important ques¬ tions, which need be resolved in any serious theoretical formulation. In the study ol any phenomenon, we should be careful never to lose sight of the character of the epoch that produced it. Thus, our first task should be to define the character of the epoch that gave rise to race and class. Then we must ascertain the substance and direction of the modern world’s development, and establish what class or class¬ es were a dominant force in the emergence of race and racism as social facts. Only by taking account of both historical and contemporary ele¬ ments and not disparate episodes in individual countries—can we grasp the thrust and the basic features of race and class. This, in turn, can serve as the foundation for understanding the features that define the role of race or class.

Race and Class defined What is racism? class? A UNESCO conference of biologists and social scientists in 1947 published the biologists’ conclusion that: 466

Race and Class Revisited

.. . race is a toxonomic concept of limited usefulness as a means of classifying human beings, but probably less useful than the more general concept of populations. The former term is used to refer to ‘groups of mankind showing well developed and primarily heritable physical difference from other groups.’ The latter refers to a ‘group whose members marry other members of the group more frequently than people outside the group’ and hence have a relatively limited and distinctive range of genetic characteristics. In any case, however, whether we use the concept of race or population, the experts agree that human population groups constitute a continuum, and that the genet¬ ic diversity within groups is probably as great as that between groups. (Hiernaux 1965; quoted, Rex 1970: 3-45) The concept of race, then, as used by biologists has no relevance for political and class differences among population groups. And because the whole notion of race and racism is inextricably intertwined with political and class differences, what does the nature of situations that are described as racial actually imply? Before I proceed any further, a definition of classes is appropriate. With the caveat that definitions tend to oversimplify, Lenin’s defini¬ tion of classes will suffice. Classes are large groups of people which differ from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and for¬ mulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimen¬ sions and mode of acquiring the share of social wealth of which they dispose. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. (Collected Works 29:421). Lenin’s definition emphasizes the relations of exploitation, and also, that the relations may be enforced by law. Discriminatory laws are keys to enforcing inequality between “races.” That is, so-called race-rela¬ tion situations are first and foremost relations of exploitation, domi¬ nance, and violence. The real context of the race and class dialectic is the consequence of what are known as the voyages of discovery. If the plantation society, the mining compound, and the urban slums and 467

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ghettos are looked upon as due to race prejudice (a term that is hyp¬ ocritical rather than technical) the elements that define the essence of the race relations situations are left unconsidered. As used by Marx, exploitation means the appropriation of part of the product of the labor of others in a commodity-purchasing society—the so-called surplus value. Lenin’s definition of classes used with Marx’s analysis of the work¬ ings of capitalism solves major problems that have plagued discussions of race and class and/or class and race situations. Class essentially denotes a relationship of domination and exploitation which is sup¬ ported by laws. In bourgeois sociology, the effects of domination and exploitation, i.e., the right exercised by the bourgeois class over the labor of the so-called inferior races, are explained as the consequence of race and racism. Indeed, as Guillamin (1980:54) explains: The modern idea of race derives not from observation in the field of natural sciences but from the instigation of society and politics. Political and social theories, not only those of profes¬ sional thinkers, but also popular areas of which the latter have taken advantage, raised questions to which the natural sciences sought to find answers, in the form of roots and traces, during the years that followed. The racial theories of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, those of Spencer, of the social Darwinist school—and those of Hitler —preceded intense activity on the part of the biologists dur¬ ing the thirties and great efforts by physical anthropologists in Europe obsessed with race.

Class and Race in the United States and South Africa Comparison of the manifestation of racial and class oppression in North America and South Africa must of necessity be qualified. Although the histories of two societies differ in substantial ways, their underlying kinship is real. Both are settler societies that were established by the middle of the seventeenth century. Although some of the settlers came as indentured servants and were exploited, the truly colonized and exploited peoples were the Indians and black slaves in North America and the Malaysian and black slaves in South Africa. For some Indian tribes in North America and for the San and Khoikhoi in South Africa, colonialization accelerated their extermination. The American

468

Race and Class Revisited

Revolution of 1776, which freed American colonies from British colo¬ nial rule and the independence granted to South Africa in 1910, far from procuring self-determination for the slaves and minority groups, tightened their chains of exploitation. The social heritage of settler colonialism in North America and South Africa, was not merely a rigid class structure with an elite of wealth, status and power at the apex and, at the bottom of a pyramid, a mass of poverty-stricken, marginal, powerless, and subordinate peo¬ ple. Such class structures have flourished elsewhere. The tragedy of settler colonialism was a class structure further stratified by color and physiognomy—by what anthropologists call phenotype; an elite of whites or near whites and a mass of people of color. Ruling classes in North America and South Africa learned quite early that they would perpetuate social inequalities far more effectively when exploitation and the maldistribution of the fruits of exploitation are buttressed by racism (Stein and Stein 1970:57). The class structure defining white settlement in North America, South Africa, and other such colonies is the result of what has been called “the fact of conquest.” The wars against the indigenous peoples took the forms of genocide, theft, and swindles. The relation of racism to conquest is explained by Hilferding: Since the subordination of foreign nations proceeds by force, that is to say in a very natural way, it appears to the dominant nation that it owes its mastery to its special natural qualities, in other words to its racial characteristics. Thus in racial ideol¬ ogy there emerges a scientifically-cloaked foundation for the power lust of financial capital, which in this way demonstrates the cause and necessity of its operations. In place of the demo¬ cratic ideal of equality there steps the oligarchical ideal of mas¬ tery (quoted, Sweezy 1964:310). Indeed, there is, in both North America and South Africa, a dialectic of victor and vanquished whereby, in Hegelian terms, the essential nature of the vanquished is aufyehoben—negated, preserved, tran¬ scended—by the victor. Blacks in Southern states of North America, both during slavery and after emancipation, and blacks in South Africa became, in the words of Adorno, a “totally administered” group. The denial of self-determination to blacks presaged the emergence of the totalitarian state. The settlers, in spite of disagreements over policy questions, were

469

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

partners (in the case of North America) of English mercantile imperi¬ alism, and (in the case of South Africa) of Dutch mercantile imperial¬ ism, not its victims. They were not part of what Fanon called the damned of the earth; instead, they were what W.I. Kiernan called the lords of creation. The settlers enjoyed the fruits of mercantile capital¬ ism at the expense of slaves and indigenous communities, and when they had accumulated enough capital in their own right fought for their independence from the mother country. Thus, in the political economies of North America and South Africa, racism and capitalism are inseparable aspects of one and the same reality. This is not to imply that the capitalist mode of production is inherently racist but that his¬ tory made North America and South Africa’s brand of capitalism racist, and that settler societies are inherently racist. This is the only rationale by which they could legitimately settle alien lands. In North America racism became a driving force of the system of white supremacy in the context of the uneasy coexistence of a form of capitalism based upon “free labor” in the Northern Colonies and upon slavery in the Southern Colonies. The stirring up of racial antagonisms was a convenient method to direct attention away from the negation of the bourgeois notions of equality, fraternity and freedom. Engels noted the bourgeois hypocrisy in proclaiming inalienable human rights while practicing slavery. It is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of human rights that the American constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the colored races existing in America; class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctioned (Engels 3rd edition1 939:177). Franz Oppenheimer (1975:26) aptly described political democracy under capitalism as “the bastard offspring of slavery and freedom.” In South Africa, Dutch settlers not only committed genocide and con¬ quered the indigenous peoples but the remnants were absorbed as “unfree labor” to coexist with imported slaves. Thus both in North America and in South Africa, settlers went out of their way to use slav¬ ery on an unprecedented scale and to create a new system of servile labor based on race and totally at variance with bourgeois notions of human rights. To institute and maintain the system of white supremacy and black oppression and exploitation, given the ideology of the Enlightenment,

470

Race and Class Revisited

required that rationalization be clothed in scientific garb and be given out as deduction from scientific facts. Only then, would racism and the doctrine of white supremacy emerge to make sense of the contra¬ dictions inherent in the simultaneous advance of “free” labor and chat¬ tel slavery within the single process of capitalist development. Given the fact that the conquerors and slave-masters belonged to the white race, in “scientific” treaties, the rationalization of white over¬ lordship assumed the form of a theory that argued that there are not only radical differences between the “races” of humanity, but also human races can be ranked into “superior” and “inferior.” Furthermore, the argument went, only the white race fully possessed those qualities of character and mind that would guarantee orderly government and the development of the world resources. Blacks by nature not only lacked the qualities to participate in social and political life, but also lacked the ability on their own to manage wisely their economic affairs. Therefore, to justify their existence, they had to work under the tute¬ lage of white masters. Their slave status was not only profitable but was the only means by which they themselves can be elevated from their uselessness, idle and indolent and often sinful life. Slavery, the only condition worthy of such people, was a beneficial status for them. Indeed, what was being proposed was a principle of dividing human¬ ity into masters and enslaved nations. The southern states of North America and the settlers of South Africa, were not the first societies based on conquest and slavery. Therefore the theory expanded by the beneficiary of slavery in those societies was not new in its essentials. The ancient Greeks justified their rule over slaves on the grounds that the bulk of slaves were people of a different breed. This is what Aristotle for example said. He divided people into two categories: those destined by nature to rule over the others, whom fate had destined to be slaves. Influenced by ideas of the Greek and Roman philosophers and the nostalgia for the social sys¬ tems and ideas of the Greeks and Romans, educated opinion in mod¬ ern Europe determined to reformulate those ideas to fit the new world order which capitalism was creating.

The Evolution of Capitalism as a System: A Synopsis Capitalism as a dominant mode of economic organization has gone through three distinct stages: the era of primitive accumulation, dom¬ inated by merchant capital; the era of industrial capital; and the era of 471

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

monopoly capital, brought about by the merger of industrial and finance capital that resulted in imperialism. In each stage in the North America and in South Africa black labor was articulated as a key but subordinate component in capital accumulation in certain sectors of the economies of the two countries, which explains the evolution of the culture of racism in these countries and that of the Western world in general. Because in North America and in South Africa black and white live the same territorial space, race oppression and class exploita¬ tion are interwoven into their social systems in one historical process. That is, class relations were transmuted into “race relations.” The African slave was not only ready-made capital but also laborpower for the production of Europe’s first commodities in agricultur¬ al labor camps of the New World. The relation between slaves and masters was a peculiar class relation. Peculiar because, whereas under capitalism workers own their own labor-power, which is sold as a com¬ modity to the capitalist, slave owners owned the labor-power of slaves. “The slaveholder,” wrote Marx (1974:776), “considers a Negro, whom he has purchased as his property, not because the institution of slavery as such entitles him to that Negro, but because he has acquired him like any other commodity through sale and purchase.” Furthermore, both the slave trade itself and the extraction of com¬ modities so produced, were funded by the mercantile capital and cir¬ culated within the global circuits of capital (cf. Hall 1980:320). Beechey (quoted, ibid.: 320) argues, Slaveholders were both merchants, dealing with the purchase and sale of commodities on the world market, and slavehold¬ ers exploiting their slaves within the plantation system which emerged as a specialized agricultural region, a kind of internal colony within the expanded world market. It seems to me, then, that the object of inquiry in the study of the artic¬ ulation of race and class must be to understand capitalism as a world system that exploited black labor, and to understand how race and class articulate at a concrete level. As Hall (1974:320) put it: “Slave planta¬ tion owners participated in a general movement of world capitalist sys¬ tem; but on the bases of an internal mode of production—slavery in its modern, plantation form—not itself‘capitalist’ in character.” It needs to be understood further that race and class are not givens from the beginning of time but products of historical development and

472

Race and Class Revisited

also the motive forces of that development. The settlers who enslaved Africans were not innocent adventurers. I have already noted some of the ideas that offered a back-drop to racism. It now remains to remind ourselves that some of the social institutions that were transported to settler colonies came out of long years of conquest and looting. FoxGenovese and Genovese (1983:.2-.3) write that European Models of forcible seizure of the wealth of others: . . . can be found in such precocious undertakings as the Albigensian Crusade, the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusading states, and the Reconquista. These projects, like the somewhat later but even more porten¬ tous English conquest of Ireland, underscored the extent to which the overseas expansion derived from the values, habits of warfare, and territorial ambitions of feudal nobilities and their monarchs. The mercantile models, such as the plantation economies founded by the Italian merchants, afforded instruc¬ tion in the appropriate forms of profit and the methods by which it could be secured, but centuries would pass before these mod¬ els would triumph over the rapacious, short-term lust for gold, spices, and Christian converts before the value of staple crops would be understood by the most powerful monarchs. If the history of racism has any dialectic at all, it is one that links antiSemitic racism and modern forms of white supremacy and racial exclu¬ siveness. The separation of Jews from Gentiles in European countries created a heritage that made racism not such an aberration after all. It is not necessary to dwell at length on the genesis and growth of antiSemitism in Europe, for many authors have dealt with the subject. It is sufficient to recall the first crusades, the first vectors of Western expan¬ sion. The prejudice and forms of discrimination that would be used against the African were first used against the “accursed” Jew, who, until the eighteenth century at least, was to play a central role in shaping the destiny of Christian Europe (cf. Rozat and Bartra 1980:289). Europeans who colonized North America and South Africa can be said, paraphrasing Marx, to have made history but not just as they pleased. They did not make it under circumstances they chose but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted. The social and ideological traditions of the recent feudal past weighed like a nightmare on the brain and practices of these settlers. No wonder,

473

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

then, that one is confronted by a strange spectacle in the behavior of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing the colonial structures to create a society such as never existed, the doctrine of race supremacy became part of the American heritage. By denying the humanity of black or, let me say, by undervaluing the humanity of the black slaves, they conjured the spirit of the past to their service. Likewise, in the late nineteenth century, the British, in spite of their liberalism, unashamedly created white supremist state in South Africa. How do we explain such con¬ tradictions? One need not be a cynic to marvel at the ability of North American and British statesmen to speak of human equality while simultaneous¬ ly practicing racial politics. The charades are just too glaring examples of the organic hypocrisy of bourgeois civilization. The irony did not escape W.E.B. DuBois (1935:3) who wrote of the United States: From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the gov¬ erned. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation. The enslavement of Africans, like the colonization of Africa, was a bru¬ talizing economic relationship based on the denial of indisputable human rights. It could not help but distort human relationships, pro¬ ducing by fiat the superior and inferior races. The commitment of the bourgeoisie of North America and South Africa to the racial and political domination of blacks have no parallel in history. As the two settler societies became addicted to the use of black labor their best minds set about not only to produce a store of knowledge to counter nature but also to find “scientific” justification for subjugation and exploitation. As DuBois (1969,43) explained: The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new inven¬ tion of modern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe proposed [in the case of Blacks] on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing—the heaven, defying and audacity—makes it modern newness...

474

Race and Class Revisited

The intellectual effort that was invested searching for scientific proof that black and white constituted inferior and superior races produced some strange results. One irony of attempts to prove “scientifically” the inferiority of blacks further substantiates Marx’s assertion that ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Europeans of all backgrounds would be taught to be conscious of being members of the dominant white race. Indeed, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the white settlers everywhere regarded the idea of equality between the races as blasphemy to be fought against with all the brutality they could master. Recall the lynching experi¬ enced by blacks following emancipation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many political economists acknowledged the prime importance of the African slave trade for prosperity of England and its Western Indian colonies and America. An anonymous pamphlet of 1749 set forth a long settled British view. The most approved Judges of the Commercial interests of these Kingdoms have ever been of the opinion that our West India and African Trades are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. It is also allowed on all Hands, that the trade to Africa is the Branch which renders our American Colonies and Plantations so advantageous to Great Britain: that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant supply of Negro Servants for the Culture of their Lands. The Negro-Trade, therefore, and its natural consequences resulting from it, may be justly esteemed an inexhaustible Fund of Wealth and Naval Power to this Nation, (quoted by Calder 1981:112). Karl Marx, whose work provides a brilliant insight into the origin and development of capitalism and its reliance on African slave labor was thus not indulging in flamboyant rhetoric when he described the cen¬ trality of slavery in the development of capitalism in these words: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton: without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-con¬ dition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is of the greatest importance. 475

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Without slavery North America, the most progressive coun¬ try, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civi¬ lization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations (Marx n.d.:94-5). While the cotton industry introduced child slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World, (n.d.: Ibid). The importance of slave trade saw the hardening of racial attitudes. In the sixteenth century there had been little attempt to distinguish between sorts of humanity on anatomical, physiological or culture grounds. As long as all men were considered brethren in the family of God, as long as no efforts were made to classify some men among the beasts, as long as no political or economic interest called for a theoretical imputation of debasement with respect to any group of dependent people, neither skin color nor the natural anxiety caused by conflict with enemies such as the Muslim or the Tartars led to anything like what we now know as racial “tension” (quoted, Calder: 112). The above quotations draw attention to the class relations between European owners of capital and black slaves or workers, and their extreme exploitation which generated a need to ideologically reduce them to “the lesser breeds without the law.” The enslavement of blacks and the harshness of imperialism in the nineteenth century made the institutionalization of racism inevitable not only economically but socially, politically and indeed ideologically. In a fundamental sense, a theory of class-race articulation must come to grips with Marx’s notion that “direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery and credits.” Hall (1979:166) correctly pointed out that “it was in the crucible period of slavery that the absolute identification between race and class was first established. The dominant white plantation society viewed slaves 476

Race and Class Revisited

as “unfree” chattels and goods not people, black, African and power¬ less. The whole idiomatic framework of racism and normative degra¬ dation were cast by the syntax of slave society. Thus, to oppose race and class, to make race a defining criterion of North America and South Africa apart from class, virtually all that remains is self-pity and flagel¬ lation by liberals. The articulation of class and race made the anguished existence ot blacks acceptable as natural, immutable, and indeed deserved. As Fanon (quoted Abraham 1982:26) put it: We say once again that racism is not an accidental discovery. It is not a hidden, dissimulated element. No superhuman efforts are needed to bring it out. Racism stares one in the face for it so happens that it belongs in a characteristic whole; that of the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another which has reached a higher stage of technical development. This is why military and economic oppression generally precedes, makes possible, and legitimizes racism. In both South Africa and North America slavery was preceded by the indenturing of European indigents. U.B. Philips, who according to Bennett Jr., was wrong about many things in the discussion of the Southern regime, was at least right when he wrote: “In significant num¬ bers, the Africans were latecomers fitted into a system already devel¬ oped.” (quoted, Bennett Jr. 1975:41). Not only were indentured white servants one of the bases of wealth of early colonies, the conditions under which they lived were tantamount to slavery. The system of indentured service in its social effects, differed but little, if at all, from the system of slavery. It really accentu¬ ated the social divisions among the whites more distinctly than the presence of the institution of slavery did...It gave purely class distinctions a recognized standing in the colonial courts of law. It was not until the end of the century that Negro bondsmen became numerous on the plantations, and yet in social spirit the seventeenth century in Virginia did not differ from the eighteenth. The ever-increasing multitude of African slaves after 1700 simply confirmed the social tendencies which had previously been fostered by the presence of the indentured whites, (quoted, Bennett, Jr. 1975:56-57)

477

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

These historical notes point up that the rise of capitalism and the rise of racism were contemporaneous. A number of scholars have suggest¬ ed not only that African slaves inherited their chains from white inden¬ tured servants but that class and race relations are two sides of the same coin. Under slavery race and class were identical, and race relations expressed the class relations. Racism, however, did more: it was the reinforcing agent of class exploitation and it also was the lightning rod redirecting the antagonism of poor white workers and those who labored under class oppression (cf. Sales, Jr. 1978:23). In time a sub¬ tle, dangerous, and enduring association of ideas was established: cer¬ tain forms of hard dirty work, e.g., plantation agriculture, could be done only by black slaves. Slaves were also denied rights that lowerstatus white groups may have had. Laboring on plantations and in the vineyards of the Cape of Good Hope came to embody the worst fea¬ tures of ancient slavery reinforced by the cash nexus (cf. Baron 1971:4). As capitalism evolved in the United States of North America and in South Africa in particular and in other Western countries in general, racism and classism became institutionalized. According to the dual char¬ acter of their exploitation, blacks have constituted a “race” and a class group at the same time. Blacks became the Other onto whom econom¬ ically powerless white groups and strata could displace their own frus¬ trations and resentments. The black struggle against exploitation was simultaneously a struggle against racial oppression. The institutional¬ ization of inequality through legalized racism remains a deadly enemy of all blacks (cf. Abraham 1982:22). There were and still are marginal exceptions in the coupling of the two factors: the small black petty bour¬ geoisie is mostly a victim of racism rather than class oppression.

The Advent of Industry The transition from plantation and mining capitalism to industrial cap¬ italism inevitably brought about the deployment of black labor in fac¬ tories which necessitated their movement into the urban centers. The color-line became distorted, requiring ad hoc adjustments in the ide¬ ology of racism. “Vulgar racism in its biological form,” which, accord¬ ing to Fanon (1964,35), corresponds to exploitation of arms and legs, gave way to “scientific racism,” that is, “the perfecting of the means of production which inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence the forms of racism.” 478

Race and Class Revisited

Instead ol a vertical color-line that defined the institution of slav¬ ery and separated blacks from whites, industrial capitalism required segregation and Jim Crow laws to allocate more systematically the bur¬ dens of exploitation among white and black workers. Segregation pro¬ vided a ceiling that moved up and down depending on economic circumstances. “Last hired, first fired” is an expression of how racism apportions and distributes the burdens of capitalism unequally between black and white workers. The exclusion of blacks from labor unions created among white workers a sense of security and anticipatory socialization with the dom¬ inant classes. At the same time, Jim Crow laws created and maintained a surplus black force ready to be dipped into and to serve the needs of capitalism as it went from the manufacturing to the industrial stage. Even during the period of primitive accumulation, as we have seen, capitalism had already created two forms of slave labor; white inden¬ tured servitude and black permanent slavery. Developments in the nineteenth century tell us that racism was no chance occurrence but it is a process shaped by the purposeful actions of powerful classes. Nothing but lack of an understanding of history can explain the attempt by bourgeois social scientists to pose the issue of race and class as mutually exclusive. Political developments in North America following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery show the articulation of race and class under specific circumstances. There is a strong connection between the failures of Reconstruction and the post-Civil War rise of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. In South Africa, too, abandonment of what is called the “Cape Liberal Spirit,” whereby certain classes of Africans were given a qualified fran¬ chise, cannot be explained except in the context of the rise of imperi¬ alism and its need for a powerless black proletariat to work in the gold mines. The Jim Crow laws in the United States of North America and the segregation laws in South Africa passed in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century were linked to an offensive by the capitalist class against blacks in general and the black working class in particular. The laws are characteristic of the emergence of urban industrial capitalism as a social order. Whatever else the laws did, they incorporated the priorities of the capitalist class. Thus, DuBois (1969:630) wrote of the Tilden/Hayes compromise of 1876: The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the federal government ceased to sustain the right to 479

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

vote of half of the laboring population of the South (i.e. black workers) and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of that there has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor unpar¬ alleled in modern times... There began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor. Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to be united in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown, and black labor in less¬ er lands and ‘breeds without the law’... Sons of ditch diggers aspired to be spawn of bastard kings and thieving aristocrats rather than of rough-handed children of dirt and toil. The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enable a guild of millionaires to engage the great¬ est engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have enough surplus to make more thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America but in Asia and Africa. What DuBois said about the U.S.A. in 1876, can be said, with only minor modifications, about South Africa after its own “Civil War,” the Anglo-Boer War of 1900-02. Colonial Britain bargained away African political rights, as the Federal government had done in North America, creating a political system that gave the settlers undue political clout. In South Africa, as in the North America, there began after 1910 “a new capitalism” based on the enslavement of African labor. Lord Milner, high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Cape and Transvaal (1897-1905), agreed just prior to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1900 that the welfare of white setders depend¬ ed upon increasing the white population in South Africa “but not at the expense of its quality.” He put it: We do not want a white proletariat in this country. The posi¬ tion of the whites among the vastly more numerous black pop¬ ulation requires that even their lowest ranks should be able to maintain a standard of living far above that of the poorest sec480

Race and Class Revisited

tion on the population of a purely white country... However you look at the matter, you always come back to the same root principle — the urgency of that development which alone can make this a white man’s country in the only sense in which South Africa can become one, and that is, not a country full of poor whites, but one in which a largely increased white pop¬ ulation can live in decency and comfort. That development requires capital, but it also requires a large amount of rough labour. And that labour cannot to any extent, be white, if only because, pending development and the subsequent reduction in the cost of living, white labour is much too dear, (quoted, Trapido and Marks, 1979:66) One conclusion is inevitable, race and racism are not simply an expres¬ sion of, nor a means for, guaranteeing the bourgeoisie’s political dom¬ inance; in North America and South Africa discrimination has always had the full sanction of the monopolistic bourgeoisie. Jobs and invest¬ ment opportunities could be denied to blacks, wages could be depressed below prevailing levels, and the white workers could enjoy substantial material rewards. The aim of racism was to justify the very unequal incomes of classes cum races, to convince blacks that their wages reflected of their inferiority to whites and vice-versa. The stirring of racial antagonism that has characterized the U.S.A. and South Africa since the middle of seventeenth century makes it dif¬ ficult not to conclude that capitalism as it developed in the two soci¬ eties needed a subaltern class that would be especially exploited and brutalized to divert attention from class struggle—which the possess¬ ing classes perceive to be more dangerous than racial antagonism. Through force and legal machination, social systems were built in both societies that denied the elementary humanity of all those who sup¬ plied most of the manual content of the total social work output. Second-class citizenship became the ultimate expression to legitimate and ascribe class position according to race, and this was sanctioned by law. The system was based on the hope that it would petrify into custom, as had caste in India. The dynamism of capitalism has not allowed racial stratification to harden. Racial stratification has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance, it has had to undergo the changes experienced by the cultural whole that informed it. Consequently, racism in North America which after passage of the Civil rights Act in 1964 was gen481

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

erally thought to be in its last days, is being revived as a new “scien¬ tific” discovery. The last three decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century witnessed capitalism develop in breadth and depth. It was precisely this period that also witnessed final shaping of North America and South Africa as “white” nations with unequal black and white sectors. In 1900 W.E.B. DuBois asserted that racism had become overdetermined and made his now-famous prophesy that the “problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the colour¬ line.” Why had racism become overdetermined? DuBois understood that the abolition of formal slavery meant not the end of black exploitation but its extension to the whole world. In 1936 he wrote: (1936:48) The abolition of American slavery started the transportation of capital from white to black countries where slavery prevailed, with the same tremendous and awful consequences upon the laboring classes of the world which we see about us today. When raw material could not be raised in a country like the United States, it could be raised in the tropics and semi-trop¬ ics under a dictatorship of industry, commerce and manufac¬ ture and with no free farming class. The use of blacks on plantations of the southern United States and on white farms and in the gold mines of South Africa illustrates the effects of uneven development (over the longterm) upon “racial modalities.” As is well known the North American cotton and tobacco economy and the South African farms and gold mines developed an early depen¬ dence upon unfree black laborers, which once generalized, became an obstacle to the use of modern technology and to democracy. The black community in each country was circumscribed by a legal mechanism that set it apart economically, socially and politically in the interest of fractions of capital. In North America black efforts to migrate into northern industry were throttled through collaborationist policies of northern industrialists and southern planters; in South Africa blacks efforts to go to the cities were blocked by farm and mine owners who did not want to lose cheap black labor. Southern cotton and South Africa’s gold were both destined for export to Britain. Industrialization in North America and in South Africa offered fur¬ ther proof that capitalism in both countries was based on the extor-

482

Race and Class Revisited

tion of high profits from the labor of politically powerless blacks. Far from allowing social integration and equal rights, power holders made segregation rigorous in social practice and encouraged lawlessness and racism. In both societies capital accumulation progressed through the expansion of capitalist relations (capital - wage labor), and through what has been called permanent primitive accumulation of black labor —its expropriation through noncapitalist relations of productions cir¬ culated into capitalist expansion (cf. Binford 1982). In February 1913 Lenin wrote, in “Russians and Negroes,” that the scandalous treatment of the descendants of former slaves was due to the fact that capitalism had no “room” for them other than legal emancipation—and even emancipation it curtailed in every possible way. Commenting on the high (44.5%) illiteracy rate among blacks in North America in 1900 Lenin said: Such a scandalously high percentage of illiterates is a disgrace to a civilized, advanced country like the North American Republic; especially if one took account of the fact that among whites in America the proportion of illiterates was not more than 6 percent (LCW Vol. 18:543-544). Illiteracy, of course, is a mark of slavery and of enforced ignorance to facilitate exploitation. Depending on the tasks to be assigned to vari¬ ous categories of labor, the ruling class also decides on the education to be given the various other classes. Education is a social product and the manner of its distribution is likely to influence and shape social mobility and hence class consciousness. The generation of surplus value among “ignorant” groups calls for (indeed, depends upon) more intense forms of exploitation and more coercion in the productive pro¬ cess itself than are required among educated, skilled, or semi-skilled workers. Unequal access to education—a social product—became an inducement to class-collaboration by white workers as a class at the expense of black workers. In 1915, in New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Agriculture, Lenin returned to the subject of blacks in the United States, criticizing a Mr. Himmer, who had argued that the country had never known feudalism: “This is the very opposite of the truth, for the economic survivals of slavery are not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning South of the United States of America these survivals are still very powerful” (LCW Vol.

483

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

22:24) In a further discussion of black illiteracy rate, (roughly seven times greater than the white rate), Lenin stated: “One can easily imag¬ ine the complex of legal and social relationships that corresponds to this disgraceful fact from the sphere of popular literacy.” (Lenin 1964:25) Lenin then spelled out the economic basis that produced and continued to support what he called “this fine superstructure”: “semi-feudal or—which is the same thing in economic terms—semi¬ slave share-croppers”(ibid: 25). In 1910, free, republican-democratic America had 1,500,000 share-croppers, of whom more than 1,000,000 were Negroes. And the proportion of share-croppers to the total number of farmers is not decreasing, but is, on the contrary steadily and rather rapidly increasing. In 1880, 17.5% of the farmers in the U.S.A. were share-croppers; in 1890, 18.4%; in 1900, 22.2%; and in 1910, 24%...the share-cropping area, both in America and in Russia, is the most stagnant area, where the masses are subjected to the greatest degradation and oppression. Immigrants to America, who have such an outstanding role to play in the country’s economy and all its social life, shun the South. Lenin s analysis of the U.S.A. South would also apply to South Africa’s agriculture. There, farm workers were faced with ever far worse restric¬ tions: they could not legally abandon the slave-like employment on white farms without an employer’s written permission. It is only when we understand the immediate economic and social stake in cheap black labor of fractions ol white capitalists that we can understand the enduring realities of racism. Racism became a social force because it had a class base: the need for cheap labor of capitalist farmers and mine owners, who would resort to various political mech¬ anisms to ensure its adequate supply. In short, racism is explicable only as a mediated outcome of the social dynamics and imperative of capi¬ talism in specific circumstances. In 1920, W.E.B. DuBois (1969:4142) noted: The European world is using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolv¬ ing the theory that “darkies” are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting argu484

Race and Class Revisited

ments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peo¬ ples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent, of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxisms; they have no feelings, aspi¬ rations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots,—‘half-devil and half-child.’ Such degrading left its mark, and cannot be ignored in any discourse about race and class and/or lack of unity between black and white workers. Lenin (LCW vol. 23:55-56) asked and answered the question that is often ignored by those adopting an essentialist view of class: the problem relating to relations between workers of the dominant and subordinate groups. That is the nature of the race/class dialectic in social formations, which are “structured in dominance.” Is the actual condition of the workers in the oppressor and in the oppressed nations the same, from the stand point of the national question? No, it is not the same. 1.

2.

3.

Economically, the difference is that sections of the working class in the poorest of nations receive the crumbs from the super profits the bourgeoisie of these nations obtained by extra exploitation of the workers of the oppressed nations. Besides, the economic statistics show that here a larger per¬ centage of the workers become ‘straw bosses’ than is the case in the oppressed nations, a larger percentage rise to the labour aristocracy. This is a fact. To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations. Politically, the difference is that, compared with the work¬ ers of the oppressed nations, they occupy a priviledge posi¬ tion in many spheres of political life. Ideologically, or spiritually, the difference is that they are taught, at school and in life, disdain and contempt of all the workers of the oppressed nations... Thus all along the line there are dif¬ ferences in the objective world that is independent of the will and consciousness of individuals (emphases added).

485

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

There is the rub—subtle: white workers are bribed, effectively. With great sorrow and regret DuBois (1969:47) wrote: “Were they not lord¬ ly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the United States and England might be skillfully manipulated results of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia.” The rise of imperialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth cen¬ tury was critical not only for the future of the working class but also for black-white relations. The elevation of sections of the white work¬ ing class into a labor aristocracy required a concomitant systematic reproduction of the low and ascribed status of black labor, as a specif¬ ic fraction of the “free laboring” classes of industrial capitalism; hence the necessity of explicit segregatory laws and discriminatory practices (cf. Hall: 339). In the era of imperialism a further elaboration of a cul¬ ture of white supremacy was even more systematic: North America and South Africa became the bearers of the “White man’s burden.” The usefulness of this ideology cannot be overestimated. It turned con¬ quest and genocide into a “humanitarian” justification of Anglo-Saxon world domination (cf. Sweezy 1964:311). Writing of the developments of Jim Crowism in the United States, Oliver Cox (1948:381-82) concluded that: What segregation really amounts to is a sort of perennial impris¬ onment of the colored people by the capital. Moreover, this imprisonment provides the proper milieu for the planned cul¬ tural retardation of the colored people. Here they may mill and fester in social degeneracy with relatively minimal opportuni¬ ty for even the most ambitious of them to extricate themselves. The Jim Crow laws enacted during the second half of the nineteenth century vividly bring to life the race-class dialectic. The essence of the laws was to circumscribe class relations and advance domination of black workers in the interest of capitalist super-exploitation while fos¬ tering a “superiority” complex among whites that would be support¬ ive of the policies that kept blacks out of remunerative jobs. The survival of capitalism required economic and political relations that prevented the development of a working-class consciousness that cuts across the color-line. Only in that way would capitalism be able to control the class struggles inimical to its survival. To the extent that black and white workers were treated as equals, to that extent was the power of capital to exploit race prejudice limited.

486

Race and Class Revisited

Political intervention and manipulation of “racial” divisions with¬ in the working class were both consistent and planned, and proved decisive in channeling working-class politics. White workers, as a result of preferential treatment, in time came to identify their economic, social, and psychological interests with the subordination of black work¬ ers—who in certain cases had already been used to threaten white job security. In due course, blacks’ “inferiority” and their subordination to whites came to be regarded as part of the natural order of things, and was backed up by an elaboration of the culture of white suprema¬ cy. Racism thus penetrated the social, economic, political, and ideo¬ logical structure of bourgeois society, even as capitalist development created a complex division of labor and huge urban agglomerations. As a political strategy, Jim Crow laws must be accurately ascribed: they were an official policy of the ruling class, not only to manage the class struggle, but to shift the disadvantages of capitalism to the shoul¬ ders of blacks. Hall (ibid:339) wrote that: Race differentiates between the different fractions of the work¬ ing classes with respect to capital, creating specific forms of fracturing and fractioning which are as important for the way in which they intersect class relations (and divide the class strug¬ gle internally) as they are mere ‘expressions’ of some general form of class struggle. Politically and culturally, these combined and uneven relations between class and race are historically more pertinent then than simple correspondence. There was, thus, no “paradox” in the U.S. and South Africa when polit¬ ical democracy was extended to white men and women and the denial at the same time of the vote for black men and black women. Having denied blacks the vote, capital could exploit black labor without being inconvenienced by the black vote. The granting of franchise to whites was based on a well-thought-out strategy: the free operation of capi¬ talism would not in and of itself reduce inequalities and redistribute income. On the contrary, democratic politics—in which the whites had the vote even though they did not have economic power—was seen as essential to prevent the kind of widening saps between white classes that would be incompatible with a “healthy” social and imperial order. Politics would redress, at least for the white working class the inequal¬ ities generated by a “free”-market capitalism. As a result, in both the U.S. and South Africa the white working class won for itself an increas-

487

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ing share of the national income and increasingly acceptable working conditions. W.E.B. DuBois (1969:509) with his characteristic insight wrote: In modern industrial civilization a disfranchised working class is worse than helpless; it will be disease, it will be criminal, it will be ignorant, it will be the plaything of mobs, and it will be insulted by caste restrictions. Capitalism alone may not have worked to increase equality but the white workers’ possession of the vote did result in substantial improve¬ ments for them. And the white workers’ vote made them responsible together with the ruling class for the laws that oppressed the black workers. The reality for black workers worsened. They could be sub¬ jected to a high degree of control and coercion imposed with the acqui¬ escence of white votes. Instead of the exemplars of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood, the U.S. and S.A. demonstrate their pitfalls and failures so far as blacks were con¬ cerned (cf. DuBois 1969:50). Democratic politics for only whites in a multiethnic society leadsto a racially stratified working class. The politicians make paramount the interests of the section of the working class that has the vote. If universal suffrage produces a welfare state under capitalism, whitesonly suffrage gives rise to a capitalism that distributes the class con¬ tradiction unevenly on one section of the working class (cf. Simons and Simons 1969:623). The bourgeoisie, the most political class, never had an abstract attachment to democracy; it would extend democracy only as long as democracy would stabilize the rule of the bourgeoisie. There are many other ways in which capitalism in North America and South Africa endeavored to keep the pressure on itself from becom¬ ing too much. One of which was the institutionalization of what J.M. Cairnes called the “dual labor” markets, of noncompeting labor groups, has been documented and studied by economists. The majority of white workers until recently have been employed in the primary labor market, which offers relatively high-paying and stable employment, good working conditions, chance of advancement, and equitable administration of work rules. Blacks work primarily in the secondary market of low-paying, dirty, and insecure jobs. Black labor thus con¬ stitutes the bulk of what Marx characterized as a surplus labor—that indispensable force so crucial for capital accumulation.

488

Race and Class Revisited

Marx (1967, 632) wrote that: If a surplus laboring population is... the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production, it forms a disposable industrial reserve army that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost... It creates for the changing needs ot the self-expansion of capital a mass of human material always ready for exploitation... The greater the social wealth, the func¬ tioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and there¬ fore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat reserve army... This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Capitalism, then not only needs but reproduces surplus labor in the course of its contradictory development. But in the U.S. and S.A. this structural and inherent feature of capitalism is theorized as being repro¬ duced by certain cultural and genetic peculiarities of blacks and other minorities. Thus, to be unemployed or, if lucky, to have a job at the bottom rung, was seen as a natural condition of black workers (i.e., a consequence of their inferiority) rather than an inherent consequence of capitalism. Racism made it appear normal that blacks would be cho¬ sen to play the role of surplus labor in highly disproportionate num¬ bers due to their “inferiority”—and it matters little whether this “inferiority” is attributed to nature or nurture or to the structural and sociological conditions. DuBois (1969, 231) explained how the dual labor market is created: White and Negro labor must, so far as possible, be taken out of active competition, by segregation in work: to the whites the bulk of well-paid skilled labor and management; to the Negro, farm labor, unskilled labor in industry and domestic service. Exceptions to this general pattern would occur espe¬ cially in some sorts of skills like building and repairs; but in general the “white” and “Negro” job would be kept separate and superimposed. That black people suffer unemployment at well over two times the rate of whites is well known. But even this quantifiable reflection of racism does not capture the full force of the coincidence of race and class on the entire working class and the industrial reserve army. Marx identified three forms of the industrial reserve, differentiat-

489

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ed by their role in capitalist production as well as their conditions of reproduction. First, there is the “floating” sector which may be said to consist of those who fall into unemployment “normally,” that is through the general functioning of the business cycle, the perennial shifts of production caused by the vagaries of the market-place and technological development. Second, there is the “latent” sector relat¬ ed mainly to agrarian “overpopulation.” The growth in the organic composition of capital in agriculture brings about an absolute contra¬ diction in the demand for labor power. Simultaneously, small-scale farmers are austed by large-scale capitalist agri-industry. These pro¬ cesses constantly generate agrarian overpopulation. It is latent because a larger part of surplus agricultural populations fail to find anything to do in the towns. Today, housewives might be included in the catego¬ ry of surplus labor. Third, there is the “stagnant” sector, those who are habitually unemployed and whose life circumstances are signifi¬ cantly lower than those of the rest of the working class. Capitalism also has partial unemployment, which springs from the less than full employment of a large number of workers in view of the chronic under¬ loading or production capacities. A new structural feature of the unem¬ ployed today is that the percentage of the redundant people has increased markedly. In the U.S. and S.A. the constitution of these sec¬ tors as classes and the class relations ascribed to them function as race relations. In both countries, blacks make up a disproportionate percentage of the industrial reserve army relative to their numbers in society. The Lumpen-proletariat which constitutes the lowest sediment of the unemployed consists of three categories: a) persons able to work but remaining without work for a long time, and living on charity; b) orphans and pauper children, the poor without any income or means of subsistence; and c) the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, the aged. This sediment “is the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.” Marx (1967, 1:643) further explains that: ...the relative surplus population—furnishes to capital an inex¬ haustible reservoir of disposable labor power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class.. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-per¬ petuating element of the working class.

490

Race and Class Revisited

The conditions of life of this “lowest” sediment of the stagnant sector are characterized as follows by Marx (ibid.): Pauperism is the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve with the surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth (ibid.). The industrial reserve army is kept in being because of the periodic cycle of prosperity and crisis. In a perverse way racism not only acknowl¬ edges that a reserve army is a permanently essential part of capitalism but goes on to argue that it is proof of the natural inequality of the races. It is the ascription of the race label and the articulation of racism in the U.S. and South African capitalist formations that ensures that depression-level unemployment among blacks is simply shrugged off as one of the facts of life, this is not the place to show in detail why and how this is so, but there is enough evidence that governments, individual politicians, neo-fascist political organizations, the mass media, employees, institutions of the labor movement, and sections of the white working class all act and articulate racist beliefs, that race becomes the modality in which class is “lived,” the form in which white workers fight to escape the injustices of the system. Hall’s (1980, 341) comment on the articulation of race and class is so salient that it is worth quoting at some length: Racism is, thus, not only a problem for blacks who are obliged to suffer it. Nor is it a problem only for those sections of the white working class and those organizations infected by its stain. Nor can it be overcome, as a general virus in the social body, by a heavy dose of liberal inoculation. Capital reproduces the class, including its internal contradictions, as a whole— structured by race. It dominates the divided class in part, through those internal divisions which have racism as one of its effects. It contains and disables representative class institu¬ tions, by neutralizing them—confining them to strategies and struggles which are race-specific, which do not surmount its limits, its barrier. Through racism, it is able to defeat the attempts to construct alternative means of representation which could more adequately represent the class as a whole, or which are capable of effecting the unity of the class as a result; that is, those alternatives which would adequately represent the class 491

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

as a whole—against capitalism, against racism. The sectional struggles, articulated through race, instead, continue to appear as the necessary defensive strategies of a class divided against itself, face-to-face with capital. They are, therefore, also the site of capital’s continuing hegemony over it. This is certainly not to treat racism as, in any simple sense, the product of an ideo¬ logical trick. It cannot be stressed sufficiently that when race and class or class and race coincide, the social consequences become lethal. Although every¬ body, at least today, concedes that blacks are full human beings in every sense of the word—in the case of U.S. blacks, the Constitution confers full citizenship as well; (Africans in South Africa are expected to become citizens of their own areas)—some Americans, intellectuals and ordi¬ nary people, continue to debate an undebatable issue. In its simplest form the issue has always been are blacks poor because of nature or nur¬ ture? Do they have the same abilities as whites? An article in the OP¬ ED page of the New York Times(20 September 1983) typifies the nature and futility of the debate. John H. Bunzel, former president of San Jose State University and senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Peace and Revolution, at Stanford University after criticizing the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for emphasizing discrimination in explaining the current black plight wrote: The basic challenge is for those committed to equal opportu¬ nity for all to develop fresh perspective with which to confront, for example, the special ills that still trap millions of blacks in poverty and failure, an important beginning would be for the full civil rights community to acknowledge that overt racism is significantly declining—this is not to say it no longer exists— and that new efforts should be directed toward repairing the damage of past racism. The commission can play an important role. But if it is to expand its influence, it must strive for greater credibility by, among other things, providing a genuine forum for more diverse ideas. Specifically, it should give special attention to the views of those who share civil rights groups’ objectives but who regard some of the means advocated or used as mistaken and counterproductive. The commission should be fully open to various remedies, and it should offer specific proposals to pro492

Race and Class Revisited

mote minority advancement in a less politicized and adversar¬ ial manner. It will also have to treat research differently. Many of its reports take the line that any disparity in earnings or employment between minorities and non-minorities result from discrimination. Considerable energy has been devoted to analyzing and measur¬ ing these disparities, but no sustained research has been under¬ taken—certainly no rigorous empirical testing—to justify the initial assumption. Discrimination has been used as a “sponge” to absorb and explain almost everything, thus avoiding exami¬ nation of many major factors (length and quality of education, family background, attitudes toward work, etc.) that could con¬ tribute to a deeper understanding of existing disparities. After a brief mention of the problems threatening the stability of the black family, especially what Bunzel describes as the alarming increase in early, unplanned births among teenage girls, he concludes: The commission could usefully investigate the sensitive but important questions of why blacks generally do not perform well on so many different kinds of written examinations. But it should not undertake such a project with any preconception that the exams are invariably discriminatory. It would be of great use to have more information about why some minori¬ ties do so well - the Chinese and Japanese, among other. Over a period of time it would be valuable to study newer immigrant groups, such as the Cuban, Vietnamese, Koreans and Filipinos. Bunzel argues first that the causes of black poverty may be the blacks themselves. Second, he seems to suggest that Black poverty is a dis¬ tinct condition to be studied, and perhaps remedied, without refer¬ ence to the larger organization of the economy and society. Focusing attention on blacks and their supposed defects is not only easier but also in many respects politically safer. What “ails” blacks can be cho¬ sen arbitrarily. One addresses what appears to accord with the politi¬ co- ideological current popular at the time and ignores those issues that are inimical to the status quo. It is not necessary to be versed in the history of conservative doctrines about “races” and their “abili¬ ties” to recognize that the arguments of the modern foes of equality are no more than the shopworn ideas circulated by apologists of slav-

493

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

ery and other systems of human oppression. The principle of equal opportunity in an unequally structured society is at best hypocritical, at worst an illusion. Lenin (31:145) wrote: An abstract or formal posing of the problem of equality in gen¬ eral and national equality in particular is in the very nature of bourgeois democracy. Under the guise of the equality of the individual in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the for¬ mal or legal equality of the property—owner and the prole¬ tarian, the exploiter and the exploited, thereby grossly deceiving the oppressed classes. On the plea that all mean are absolutely equal, the bourgeoisie is transforming the idea of equality, which is itself a reflection of relations in commodity production, into a weapon in its struggle against the abolition of classes. The real meaning of the demand for equality con¬ sists in its being a demand for the abolition of classes. Bourgeois social science has worked hard in the past two hundred years to build an armanentarium of arguments in favor of class and racial inequality. In recent years the arguments, especially in the case of the demands for economic equality, have become extremely ingenious. Calling for equal opportunity and deliberately ignoring the interven¬ ing conditions of blacks is indeed cynical. It is typical of conservatives to freeze social reality at some arbitrary point and by statistical corre¬ lations to universalize the result of their samples—as if the samples reflect historical or current realities. Silence on the responsibility of racism for depriving blacks of the use of their abilities and talents is the greatest indictment against neo-conservatives. Where there is no equal¬ ity in fact, there can be no equality of opportunity. BunzePs arguments not only disregard history but also turn facts and past policies of the federal government on their heads. Thus, the materially deprived condition of blacks, a consequence of the theft of their labor, becomes the proof of their inferiority. In a strange way this twisted argument affirms that capitalism is based on social inequality and that the inequality cannot be reduced without changing the entire society. Equal opportunity in a class based system can only mean one thing; it enriches the upper classes, vulgarizes the middle classes, and brutalizes the lower classes (cf. Arnold quoted in Abraham 1982:234). The intellectuals who continue to peddle the notion that there is some¬ thing wrong about Blacks and this something is responsible for their

494

Race and Class Revisited

being at the bottom prove once more Marx’s assertion that “In the domain of political economy free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons, as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private inrest” (Marx 1967:10). The dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the 1960s, far from mitigating or abolishing the fun¬ damental contradiction of capitalism, poses the contradiction in a purer and more dramatic manner. What defines capitalist society is its property system and the classes that it spawns. The elimination of legal racism and the worsening plight not only of blacks but of other sections of the working class show con¬ cretely that capitalism cannot eliminate poverty. The recent pastoral let¬ ter by the Catholic bishops is a sign of the times. It acknowledges, as did Martin Luther’s poor peoples movement, that a radical transformation of the existing relations of capital and labor is on the agenda.

Conclusion A few conclusions seem to stand out from the varied considerations that have been presented. In the last five hundred years the lot of blacks in the United States and South Africa has been dictated by the inter¬ ests of white capital. Their will has been bludgeoned and coerced under some of the most vicious forms of exploitation ever inflicted upon one people by another. Their desperate attempts to liberate themselves and to survive have few parallels in history. Their own material poverty has been a vivid reminder of its opposite: the extraordinary wealth that their labor produced and that has been stolen from them throughout the ages (cf. Hogan 1984:5). Class and race derive their quality in the United States and South Africa from particular patterns of the distributions of the poverty and agony of capitalist exploitation and oppression. We have seen that as capitalism changes, the correlation between class and race evolves. Race is a biological category that only under certain circumstances becomes articulated with class. Class, on the other hand, refers to the enduring social relations that emerge from the way in which the means of pro¬ duction are distributed. The study of the origin of capitalism in South Africa and the United States reveals that the ruling class does not merely create classes (in the strict sense) and races (in the social sense), but polarizes them. That 495

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

is, the ruling class creates situations that enable it to distribute the inequities of the capitalist system among classes (cum races) in a vari¬ ety of ways. Although initially conjectural, the differential experiences of the injustices of the system may over time take on structural aspects. Racism trains black and white working classes to acquire and develop certain capabilities at the expense of other capabilities. Skilled work for a long time was an exclusive preserve of whites; unskilled, dirty work was done by blacks. In time, the acquired abilities were taken to be expressive of the racial abilities, and they governed the relations between black and white workers. The work and the wages became social determinants of each group’s social power, the social power rela¬ tions of the “races,” then, particularized forms of class relations. The power relations within the working class weaken it in the struggle against the capitalist class. The white section of the working class indi¬ rectly rules the black section, and through this division capital is able to impose its will on the entire working class. Although there was nothing intrinsic in capitalism that required it to utilize slave labor, the massive historical fact of its having done so influenced tremendously the articulation of race and class. The United States and South African settler societies, in particular, rested psycho¬ logically on racism—a mutually conditioning and reinforcing ideolo¬ gy that justified not only slavery and the slave trade but the ravages and the genocide carried out by both societies. The African in South Africa and the Afro-American in the United States although predominantly members of the proletariat, are also black, and cannot disown or remove their color. Racism forces them to remain as built-in scapegoats onto whom the burdens and contradic¬ tions of capitalism can be shifted. The division of the working class by race is no longer a purely superstructural phenomenon but something that strongly influences class interests. Racism, therefore cannot be eliminated without eliminating the reinforcing political economy. In the United States and South Africa blacks of all classes face two evils, class exploitation and racial oppression. Indeed, exploitation for economic reasons and social oppression for political reasons became indistinguishable. For whereas the class question was at the founda¬ tion of black enslavement, which made exploitation central, it was racism which became a reinforcing agent. The white working class, though exploited by capital does not consider itself socially oppressed. Thus, the prejudices of white workers have often meant that black

496

Race and Class Revisited

workers have had little choice—if they were to organize at all—but to organize separately from whites. But they have always had to fight against the separation because it weakened the struggle of the work¬ ing class as a whole and made it easier for the ruling class to maintain itself. C.L.R. James (1963:283) put the problem of class and race most succinctly. “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in pol¬ itics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.” What James says requires, therefore, a modified class analysis of history of capitalism and its classes in the United States and South Africa. If human history is a record of the class struggle, we are inevitably forced to ask about both countries, can racial oppression be eradicated without challenging its roots in class society? The answer is obvious: there are two struggles facing humanity today, one against classism and the other against racism. But, unless we mystify racism, we can see it has a material basis; an economic and social system that fosters racist attitudes, ideas, and institutions. The bourgeoisie profits economically and politically from the division of people whose unity could write its epitaph.

497

>

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

B. Magubane and J. Faris

There is a certain position of the Western ratio that was con¬ stituted in its history and provides a foundation for the rela¬ tion it can have with all other societies, even the society in which it historically appeared....so ethnology can assume its proper dimensions only within the historical sovereignty... Anthropology....is disintegrating before our eyes, since we are beginning to recognize and denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a forgetfulness of the opening that made it possible and a stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an immi¬ nent new form of thought. —Michel Foucault The last half of the twentieth century is a fundamental watershed; those described recently by Wolf as the people without history,1 after cen¬ turies of degradation and exploitation, are finally becoming a fully fledged part of acknowledged historical and political humanity. The peoples of Africa, Asia, and the islands of the seas, for almost 500 years were thought of not only as passive subjects of Western history, but even as likely to disappear from the face of the earth. They were hard¬ ly expected to emerge as their own subjects of history. In the last twenty years anthropologists have been going through a remarkable soul-searching concerning this legacy. There has been a more or less general recognition that anthropology was born of Western imperialism to bring to the West information and artifacts as a consequence (and sometimes in support of) imperialist exploitation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The knowledge guar-

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

anteed by anthropology would confirm the racist assumptions of impe¬ rialism, even as it pacified the humanitarian conscience — and pro¬ vided, along with other substantial goals — amusement stories and movies for the children of the bourgeoisie.^ Now, through struggles for emancipation from colonial rule, the people without a history are engaging in creative social development, which could yet provide a guide for humanity, out of the cul-de-sac that capitalist economic and ideological hegemony had created. As a result of their struggles, a new concept of human equality, free of evo¬ lutionism, as an attainable political goal, is spreading throughout the world and gaining increasing acceptance. However, even as the initia¬ tive of the peoples hitherto thought of only as subjects of history is being recognized, the socio-economic reality of the modern world is such that the continued hegemony of much of the world by imperial¬ ism is continually jeopardizing the realization of that human equality. Wolf states rightly that the problems confronting the people in the Third World cannot be understood out of the study of single “cul¬ tures” or nations, a single culture area or even as a single continent at one period in time. Human populations, he further states, construct their cultures in interaction with one another, and not in isolation.3 Wolf introduces another caveat, arguing that older anthropologists had little to say about the major forces driving the interaction of cul¬ tures since 1492 — the forces, in particular that drove Europe into commercial expansion and industrial capitalism. “Yet the cultural con¬ nections that these anthropologists sought to delineate can be ren¬ dered intelligible only when they are set in their political and economic context — the insight of anthropology therefore has to be rethought in the light of new historically-oriented political economy.”4 In this article, while in partial agreement with Wold, we want to raise the crucial question: Can even the “rethought” anthropology in tact undertake the task that Wolf hopes it can? Levi-Strauss tried to confront the dilemma of anthropology by pos¬ ing rather facetiously whether anthropological research could be a twoway street: If I may be permitted a formula which, coming from an anthro¬ pologist, can have no derogatory connotation even as pure sci¬ entific observation, I would say that Westerners will never (except in make-believe) be able to act the role of savages opposite those whom they once dominated. For when we Westerners cast them 500

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

in this role they existed for us only as objects—whether for sci¬ entific study or political and economic domination.5 These words point to the crux of our thesis: social anthropologists con¬ stituted the Others as objects. Hence, whatever a European anthro¬ pologist might say, no matter whether they are friends or foes, their enterprise remains part of what people in the Third World consider sus¬ pect — as an invention of their enemy. If anthropologists are so dis¬ trusted, is it not time that questions were raised, not about what individual anthropologists did or did not do, but about the nature of the discipline as a recognized subject matter? That is, we need a decon¬ struction of anthropology as a field of inquiry, as a discursive enter¬ prise of rather specific temporal and spatial heritage. Taking an African example, Depelchin6 raises certain important critiques of what he calls the anthropological problematic — for exam¬ ple, its tendency to always present the African as exotic. As he puts it: “If the exoticism was not present, it had to be recreated and indeed was through the introduction of the more than ambiguous concept of the historical present: that is to pretend that the Africans had not changed despite the intense oppression and exploitation which they had experienced for centuries starting from the time when millions were shipped across the Atlantic.”7 In the first volume (1981) of the eight volume General History of Africa, Amadour-Mahtar M’Bow stressed the importance of recreat¬ ing a “genuine” history of Africa. He pointed out how the racist men¬ tal stereotypes which grew out of the slave trade and colonization had reduced the history of Africa to “ethno-history.”8 Many chapters of the first volume are sharply critical of anthropologists for whom African history was ethno-history — with an inevitable derogatory connota¬ tion as a consequence of its very prefix, much less its subject and con¬ tent. The practitioners of anthropology had divided humanity into irreconcilable categories and had linked race and culture into an evo¬ lutionary hierarchy in which the darker-skinned represented some gap between the ape and white men, or some other “ratio” by which the West was sanctioned.

II Although we in no way intend this essay to represent a finished state¬ ment — indeed, it is far more provocative than conclusive — we offer some considerations, even readings, of the body of practice known as

501

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

anthropology. They are particularistic and explicitly political. Though this may offend some, for us it is the only reason to undertake the pro¬ ject. A few observations make it clear to us why such a task is appro¬ priate at this time. First, there is a worldwide decline in anthropology as a profession, particularly in the advanced capitalist nations of the West. Secondly, there are the seldom-discussed, even embarrassing facts of the hostility toward the discipline from many of those areas tradi¬ tionally important to its subject matter — from its objects.9 Many new nations deliberately eschew anthropology departments in their uni¬ versities, and anthropologists are commonly the subjects of jokes by critical local intellectuals.10 Indeed, anthropology finds its most elab¬ orate, rewarded, and sanctioned development in Africa, for example, in the universities of South Africa. Could it be that most new nations simply now refuse to be Others, and regard sponsoring the examina¬ tion of themselves in such terms anachronistic and degrading? Could it be that with the heady arrogance of independence they somehow assume they are indeed equal in essential terms to the West? And third, despite the plethora of recent “Marxist” texts on the discipline,11 none seriously query the practice as a specific discourse or set of discourses — they principally critique its instrumental activity and trace incorporation of liberal sentiment and evolutionism into the discipline. As we will argue, this is indeed part of the problem. If these developments are seen in tandem with certain historical events and philosophical notions of the last century, we think it is pos¬ sible to suggest a reading which assigns anthropology’s historic par¬ ticularity, its temporality, the specificity of its knowledge, and to that extent, something of its eulogy.

The Rationalist Tradition and Liberalism In the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of battles were waged which we associate with the triumph or rationalism, reason, and laissez faire or liberal tolerance. The year 1859 saw the publication of both Capital and The Origin of Species. And the abolition of slavery and the American Civil War all suggested that immutable attitudes and the religiously-fixed character of nature were in retreat. The ordina¬ tion of some human populations to divine servile status was no longer theoretically secure with new liberal theories of evolution. Rationality

502

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

now dominated scientific thinking: laws and motions and labels for the world — there to be discovered with the proper techniques — were not situated by epistemologies. This extremely powerful triumph — the emancipation of human history and its varied beliefs from the stric¬ tures of religious dogma — was accompanied by an era of liberal tol¬ eration. There was established a confidence in the techniques and methods of “scientific” scrutiny, which lent itself to an ambiance of liberality as rationality would eventually sort out “correct” knowledge (from the “ideology” of disproved knowledges) by objective test of alternatives. It was now to be an age of reason with the potentiality of a secular truth, with no need of artificial measures to insure the hege¬ mony of any particular position. These two moments —the rise of rationalism (elevated to reason) and the subsequent insertion of evolutionary theory — were essential to an anthropology. But the dominating rationalist tradition, the lib¬ eral motion of the age of reason, while ostensibly admitting all notions and all ideas to test and to scientific scrutiny, could only advance such claims from a secure power base and a very firm series of political rela¬ tions. Darwin and his champions were not a fringe — they were very powerful men. Marx, on the other hand, who indeed did for human history, as Engels noted in his eulogy at Marx’s graveside, what Darwin did for nature, was not so powerfully placed, was consistently ridiculed, impoverished, and his ideas and the movements he encouraged were met with derision from the paragons and champions of reason, even though he espoused theoretically similar ideas.12 Liberalism is always an attitude of a comfortable elite confident of its position — it admits other notions only if it is not threatened. Of course, we are not hereby defending intolerance, nor complaining about genuine advances, but only wish to recognize that like all human knowledges those of the rationalist victory in the nineteenth and twen¬ tieth centuries occurred in a political milieu and cannot be compre¬ hended outside the power relations in which they were politically situated. However, this triumph of evolutionary rationalism over the cari¬ cature of earlier creationist sentiments is complexly problematic for our subject, for very many of the implications are, in the judgement here, unfortunate. The entire “Darwinism” project requires decon¬ struction, for the precise character of the rationalist tradition in evo¬ lution might have been different had it stemmed from other sources.13

503

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

“By the middle of the nineteenth century, a rough sort of hierar¬ chy of human races.” Stocking14 tells us, “had become an accepted conventional anthropological wisdom.” Darwin, whose contribution to evolutionary theory represents the finest in bourgeois thought in the nineteenth century, thrust the “inferior” races of humanity into the fossil gap. The “great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies” depended “merely on the number of related forms which had become extinct.” At some future period, not very distant as measured by cen¬ turies, the civilised races of man will almost certainly extermi¬ nate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in some more civilised state....than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.15 This liberal tradition — this motion against entrenched religious dogma and the fixity of theological definition — effectively substituted a teleology. Humans were now positioned by science not by church, and our “souls” ceased to matter. This new positioning was critical to an anthropological project, and humans came to be arranged along new axes, new objectifications, requiring new data about divisions within and arrangements along the species. This teleological rendering had an ulterior significance. Not only did the black, yellow and brown humans require a new distancing from Europeans, but their knowl¬ edges required a “measure” as well, and “explanatory” traditions such as functionalism were born, as irrationality was given foundation (it was their beliefs on their terms — anthropology made such belief “rational” only by reinterpreting them on its own terms). Liberal rationalist hegemony, in the same gesture, at once granted a subjecthood (that is, they too were human) and then opened it to scrutiny (that is, their beliefs weren’t correct). Our resistance to this is no longer to defend a theology, but certainly to object to a teleology. Rationalism admitted a secular universe, all existence ostensibly opened to scrutiny, with an analytical method, empiricism, that pro¬ vided a mirror of nature by its focus on appearances. This methodol¬ ogy, inherently reactionary by such a focus, also provided a crutch for a physical anthropology whose new discriminations — souls were no

504

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

longer significant — were also premised in appearances: effectively, skin color and physiognomy. The ocular metaphor, maturing since Plato,16 now became the foundation for an epistemology based in evo¬ lutionary theory. And thus it is today, that in at least two nations (Israel and South Africa),17 biological (and not ultimately geographical) cir¬ cumstances of birth are yet criteria for structural assignment. Gobineau, in precocious candor, stated the racial philosophy of history as follows: “The ethnic question dominates all other problems in history and is the key to history. The inequality of races suffices to explain the whole sequence of events in the destinies of peoples.”18 The racist assumption of Gobineau explicitly or implicitly acted as a backdrop for ethnographic studies and theoretical assumptions about non-capitalist social forms that were being ruthlessly incorporated by imperialism. “One of their main themes, that of acculturation, was not of academic interest alone, for it directly served the interest of colo¬ nial penetration. This utilitarian aspect of applied social sciences remained valid both in the ‘direct rule’ states, i.e., military conquest and colonization, and that of‘indirect rule.’19 In its most primitive guise, ethnology reduced all groups for study, and thus reduced them to zoological specimens. Research into the shape and dimensions of the skulls of “primitive” man and theorizing about the relationship between these features and the absence of cul¬ tural achievements were normal practices indulged in by anthropolo¬ gists in the heyday of imperialism. “Indeed, faith in the revelation of head form,” writes Stocking,20 “was so firm that one investigator felt it worth his while to take 5,000 measurements on a single skull.”21 Nor was it just the exterior of the heads — in the 1920s, a num¬ ber of anthropologists engaged in research into the psychology of Others. W.H.R. Rivers, in his expedition to Torres Strait Islands (1898), carried out experiments into the visual perception of the Islanders (he later carried out similar work among the Toda of India). Rivers’ principal interest in psychiatry lay not in the psychology of “primitive” peoples per se, but rather in the application of such research to the understanding of the ancient cultures upon which European civilization was supposed to be founded. When the struggle for national liberation began to threaten impe¬ rial hegemony, the services of ethnologists and “ethno”-psychiatrists were again called into action. C.J. Carothers’ studies (1954) were devoted to the peasant revolt in Kenya (which earned the derogatory 505

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

name Mau Mau), to suggest such revolt as the work of irrational minds. Although Carothers did not acknowledge familiarity with the work of Porot, he arrived at the same conclusions as The School of Algiers. Carothers dismissed the relevance of Kikuyu demands for land rights as the cause of the peasant rebellion. While acknowledging that the insecurity felt by the Kikuyu had its “origin” in the period of the major European settlement, he argued that the rebellion was essentially a protest against the crisis of transition from a traditional to a modern culture and/or acculturation. Faced with the need to adapt to change and robbed of any sense of security, the Kikuyu turned to violence. Furthermore, the Kikuyu displayed a “forest psychology,” living as they did on the edge of forbidding jungle. To the Kikuyu the forest, accord¬ ing to Carothers, represented a foreboding force, which was both pro¬ tective and threatening. This mentality, like other aspects of Kikuyu personality, fostered a propensity for extreme and violent behavior.22 Carothers’ studies had one aim: [It] suggested that since the source of Africans’ primitivism lay in a genetic inheritance, his lack of cultural achievement had to be accepted as fate.23 Having characterized the Kikuyu struggle for rights as the work of irra¬ tional minds, the British army brutally suppressed them, and we have elsewhere noted the interest of Nadel in the psychology (and “pathol¬ ogy” of resistance) of the Nuba of Sudan 24 Is a political critique more impertinent than the inevitability of an evolutionary scheme? Are objections to some of the social forms of humans more arrogant than their objectification by an anthropolo¬ gy? This positioning of the Other had a significance we will attempt to deconstruct. Because it is a critique premised in political objection to social relations of dominance, we have little doubt that it will be dismissed as preposterous, as self-delusion, and certainly because it is political. But as noted, our objections to rationalist teleology in substitu¬ tion for religious dogma is certainly not to embrace again the latter, but to reject the determination of the former.23 Determination (cen¬ tral to all teleological projects) is objectionable to us for several rea¬ sons, not the least of which are the political implications. We think people can, have, ought to, determine their own futures. Anthropology, under rationalism, sought to establish an essential-

506

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

ist “man.” So established, to then objectify the Other cannot but have teleological consequences. And humans — all humans, but particu¬ larly the Other — acquired a natural dimension, teleologically-ren¬ dered object, fixed in a motion that is simultaneously objective and inevitable. It provided the sanction, the reason, the intellectual means by which black, yellow, and brown have ulterior epistemological sig¬ nificance — to be Other, the Rest. Geography and evolutionism pro¬ vided the space and time parameters, expansionist capitalism the stimulus. Where it was not instrumentalist and politically contingent (which, of course, it often was,)26 it constituted in rationalist (and sex¬ ist) arrogance, “man.” Its teleology made ethnography a theoretical possibility as the heritage in imperialism made it a geographical possi¬ bility. Anthropology, as it developed, has no alternative practice — there is no discursive space left. If it is non-empiricist, non-determinist, anthropology dissolves, and if the Other is deconstituted, anthropol¬ ogy has no obvious practice. If this rationalist fix of the Other were to become obsolete, the black, yellow, and brown would no longer bear representation — at least not in anthropological terms. It should be apparent by now that our criticism of rationalist forms of determination (teleological constructions such as evolution) is because we feel such reasoning conceptually constrains the insertion of other agencies — political transformation, wholly calculated change, and specific action. Indeed, the point is not to name or describe the world (even if it were possible in the rationalist myth), the point is to change it.

The Beliefs of Others: Irrationality and Anthropology Being the rationalist discourse of the other (that is, they are by its prac¬ tice constituted) and on the other (that is, so constituted, they are then subject to scrutiny), anthropology was situated with the relevant power. But the world, however, was nevertheless obliviously populated by human social forms with many different ideas and knowledges. These facts confronted rationalism rather as does history — that is, which ideas and which knowledges (in space and time) of the plethora occur¬ ring are most appropriate to the way the world is, the correct appre¬ hension of the motions by which rationalism thought it might be

507

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

controlled, changed, transformed? Which ideas are right, correct, and which are wrong, false? Which are by definition, irrational? The object “defining” anthropology provided such a multitude of beliefs and knowledges to profoundly different from those of anthropologists that such issues constantly arose. Rationalism forced it, there is a true knowl¬ edge, and alternatives are disproved, incorrect, wrong. However, such social forms with such other knowledges (“ideologies”) did exist, and their ideas obviously worked at some level, for rationalist notions of adaptation and survival and evolution required it. This discomfort (that their “ideologies” must work if they are still surviving, and yet be so dramatically different) was met with essentially three discriminating positions, sometimes found in mixed variations in anthropological practice. These are: (1) the notion of relativism — a patronizing position at best since practitioners do not believe the knowledges of others, a bogus agnosticism; (2) romanic partisanship — a position equally impossible to consistently uphold, and for essen¬ tially the same reasons: and (3) a simple admission (never explicitly, of course, admitted) that “their” knowledge (“ideology”) was inadequate, and since the social form persisted and survived, a statement about what the knowledge (“ideology”) really did was required and thus were born the various stock theoretical postures — functionalism, struc¬ turalism, and the like. Thus, anthropology most commonly found solutions — to belief systems it did not hold — with the sad paralysis and the awesome con¬ tradiction of disbelief of relativism, on the one hand (the “soft” solu¬ tion), and the arrogant assumption of rationalism (teleology/ evolution) on the other (the “hard” solution). But these notions have only been in force since the rise of rationalism meshed with the bitter facts of European capitalist expansion. Had the black, yellow, and brown equal power, anthropology might well join alchemy and eugenics as sinister discarded enterprises or discredited power relations of the past. As anthropologists were also part of the liberal ambiance that ratio¬ nalism as the triumph-of-reason brought about, this has generally been used as a defense of the discipline against its critics — especially those who argue (correctly, in our view) its irrelevance today. But expand¬ ing on our comments of the power relations which situate liberal sen¬ timent (not to be conflated with toleration), it is worth remembering Sekula’s observation that “The celebration of abstracts humanity, becomes, in any given political situation, the celebration of the digni-

508

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

ty of the passive victim.”27 Liberal sentiment constitutes victims in per¬ petuity — anthropologists then facilitate “understanding,” “object” for them, help them, speak for them. Anthropologists deny them their own subjecthood, then constitute them with anthropology’s version of dignity. Rather than examine the oppression and oppressors, anthro¬ pology examines the oppressed. This, then, is an exercise in the signification of anthropology, on what might be argued to be its pertinence, its truths. We have argued that it is to replace the object (the Other) with objection, for it is our view that subjecthood is not assigned by epistemologies, but is achieved on its own terms. Anthropology must be read as contextual, as parochial, like other knowledges. It has had an effectivity, even certain logics, appropriate to its time, What is, in our view, less defensible, is that it continues in its current mature form (represented, say, by the leading introductory texts of 1984) to situate humans in nature, and their knowledges in its rationality. The demise of anthropology is not, of course, the demise of cul¬ ture (the knowledges of communities), but perhaps only the tyranny enjoyed by some of them — their unquestioned authority and the paral¬ ysis of their dictates is less commanding with deconstruction of the anthropological project. With such deconstruction, we may then be able to explore certain contents (knowledges) free of their forms (social relations), to make political decisions about our lives.

Ill The central assertion of this article is that though humanity constitutes a unity in diversity (and vice versa) in our political view, as forms divid¬ ed into classes and other antagonistic divisions, this totality was disas¬ sembled by intellectuals into parts whose only consequence was exploitation. The notion of unity, indeed, was left to an impotent humanism — undertheorized, politically vacuous, and dismissed. Our purpose is not to rescue humanism, but to politically argue specific positions. The negation of a possible unity in the future (even if, in jettison¬ ing evolution, it has no past) is deeply imbedded in the internal con¬ tradictions of class forms. That is, when those who are objects in human history decide to be subjects and struggle to change this condition, they negate their assigned status as the Other. In The Poverty of

509

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Philosophy, Marx (rather deterministically evolutionary, but appropri¬ ately political) formulates the problem: The very moment civilization begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and final¬ ly on the antagonism of accumulated labor and immediate labor. No antagonism, no progress, this is the law that civi¬ lization has followed up to our day. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonism.28 Indeed capitalism, even as it created the Other (most recently in the form of the universal proletariat), represented a type of “progression” over previous economic forms. To be sure, at first glance the regime of capital seemed merely to abolish the old feudal ties to land and lord, only to build new forms of economic bondage. But capitalism also achieved a prodigious development of productive wants, it laid the basis for a “rich individuality.”29 While capital fostered a competitive individualism, pitting human against human, the very differentiation of individuals thus isolated (objectified) compelled them to enter into relations with one another as individuals, as isolates. In the market¬ place and before bourgeois law, capitalism affirmed in principle the abstract equality of all subjects and thus their freedom. But humans were thus alienated, if not from any essence, then from real possibili¬ ties for another form of life one that might dissolve and overcome the objectification as the Other. If the bourgeoisie in its home-base created and objectified the pro¬ letariat as the Other, in its expansion overseas it achieved “progress” by objectifying whole nations (commonly, of course, labelled according to physiological criteria). In the five hundred odd years that capi¬ talism has been on the scene, it has created a gulf between the economic, political, and cultural development of the nations of human¬ ity. Colonialism led to the stagnation of whole continents, and it inflict¬ ed horrible poverty on the enslaved humanity, leading in some cases to the complete extinction of some of those anthropological subjects. Even as the majority of humanity was being destroyed and underde¬ veloped, bourgeois philosophy and social science continued to uphold the equality of abstract humans. Indeed, the proposition that the lofti¬ est ideas are built on “base” material economic relations, however shocking it may have appeared to emotionally tender bourgeois intel-

510

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

lectuals, is confirmed not only by the condition of the proletariat in the capitalist countries themselves, but even more by the conditions of what many writers have come to recognize as Europe’s true prole¬ tariat; those in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Perhaps more than the crimes of genocide, bourgeois classes in their quest for maximum profits subjected the people they colonized and exploited to the noxious ideology of racism: the division (and opposition) of humans into Others (“superior” and “inferior”) and their modern forms, today the culmination of the division and spe¬ cialization of labor. The African who had experienced enslavement by Europeans became the stereotyped object of the Other — i.e., an inferior being. Perhaps Africans, because of the extreme historical experience, are in a position to understand oppression and objectification by capitalism more poignantly than most. Thus, their struggle for liberation becomes the struggle for liberation of all. When Marx talked about the prole¬ tariat as a universal class whose liberation would bring about human liberation, he could have been thinking of a class whose experiences are similar to that of Africans and those of the diaspora. Sartre, for example, posited white supremacy as a thesis, negritude as negation, and synthesis as humanity devoid of racism. In particular, the black “race.” having been constituted as some¬ where between the human and the non-human species, became the object “of such violent and inhuman treatment that its condition henceforth typified the most thoroughgoing and brutal form of [nega¬ tion], with all its repercussions as regards the breaking up of the struc¬ tures of the continent’s economic and human geography, the destruction of culture with the rupture of the dynamic processes of history and civilization.”30 The study of African society, given its distortion and deformation by imperialism, poses serious ethical problems to social scientists. The world imperialist system encompassed countries of Africa at various levels of political and socii-economic development, within the frame¬ work of individual colonies, imperial rule combined capitalist forms with pre-capitalist production. Imperialist oppression was deepened via the preservation of vestiges of tribalism and feudalism, absolution and other manner of decadent forms. We see today in South Africa fur¬ ther “preservation” of these deformed structures with anthropologists playing their assigned role through various ethnographic studies that

511

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

prove the tenacity among Africans of the primordial loyalties.

IV The most specific contribution of anthropology to the colonial enter¬ prise is ethnography31. The micro-investigation of cultural entities to emphasize their uniqueness provided a vital basis for the policies of divided and rule. The study of these cultural entities was incapable of grasping the diverse processes of cultural and historical development as nothing more than expressing the unity in diversity of the human species as a whole and a grotesque evolutionism. In fact, the problem of the relationship between culture and civilization had become since the nineteenth century of no interest to anthropologists, even as they paid a lip-service to anthropology as the study of humanity in its diver¬ sity. Malinowski, who studied plantation workers as “relatively isolat¬ ed cultures of the Pacific Islands, drew the conclusion that it was wrong to classify cultures as being higher or lower; that each culture was unique and that once adapted to it humans cannot painlessly move into other cultural systems. This seems to suggest that the concept of development and change was inapplicable to the concept of culture, and that the proper approach to take in the study of culture was not historical but structural-functional. In South Africa, where Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown studied “social change” brought about by what they called the contact” situation, they sought to find ways in which the “natives” could be best helped to improve and adjust to their (infe¬ rior) status. Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski generally sought to preserve as far as possible, the “nature culture” (their own term) from what they felt were the corroding and destructive effects of contact with the mod¬ ern city and industry. In their discourse words like ‘oppression’ and ‘exploitation’ were emotional and unscientific. Instead they spoke about acculturation, westernization, etc. In the seemingly secure world of the anthropologist there was no place for ugly revelations. But that secure world is gone, and exploitation and oppression is now widely acknowledged. y The unique cultures of the peoples of the world, which introduce diversity into the historical record, were studies in a nihilistic fashion by the structural-functionalist methodology. It turned the various human cultures into static, disconnected entities, resulting in a denial of the unity of humanity let alone the possibility of growth. Through 512

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

the use of ahistorical concepts, societies were frozen in the colonial sta¬ tus quo.32 And Wolf33 asked: “Why, if there are connections every¬ where, did anthropologists persist in turning dynamic interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things?” Not only did structuralfunctionalist methodology ignore the power relations by which anthro¬ pology knew them, btit its method denied the culture of the Other any validity on its own terms, and only in terms of Western rationality. It is small wonder that Mau Mau was interpreted as irrational! The consequences of this anthropology for the humanity of Africans, for example, was indeed damaging. The hostility that Africans (and all others) show toward anthropologists is based on an under¬ standing of the rationale not only for their oppression, but for their exclusion from human history and a denial of their won knowledges. When one is referred to as a “tribesman” and actions against oppres¬ sive conditions are conceived as due to “tribalism,” the African is being defined as an individual, who, for practical purposes (i.e., suppression), is an irrational savage. For it is only in terms of the objectification by anthropologists that nations became tribes (and vice versa), and king¬ doms and states became chiefdoms (and vice versa).34 Those who do not want to be studied by anthropologists and refuse acquiescence in such sadistic and self-denying objectification now understand that anthropology gained respectability and reputation on the basis of their unfortunate circumstance — when through fire and sword they were rendered subjects of a discipline whose very existence was problemat¬ ic without conquest, and whose relevance disappeared once they entered history on their own terms. As we have said, anthropology reduced Africans to artifacts of bio¬ logical evolution and then reintroduced the knowledges as mistaken, albeit functional. It is clear from those who studied the struggle for national liberation that an artifact could never, save humorously, aspire to a humane existence. It is for this reason that without a history that goes beyond the colonial interlude, the African is a Pinnochio at least, a Frankenstein at worst, and bereft of legitimate claim to humane treat¬ ment. (S)he was, in a word, a figment of the anthropologists’ imagi¬ nation and a living monument of his guile. The title of dais article implies a question: Has anthropology been politically relevant? The answer, from what we have said above, is yes. That it might rt*7/have political relevance is problematic. For the archi¬ tects of imperialism it provided if not ideological rationalizations for

513

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

their brutal actions, certainly analyses of the consequences that masked oppression. The professional anthropologist who reads this article is likely to accuse us of selecting caricatures and the worst representatives of the field, and is likely to point to anthropologists who devoted their time and energy to fighting prejudice and to raising and exposing the acts of genocide against the indigenous peoples. We also recognize these individuals and wish there were more of them. But whether there were “good” and “bad” anthropologists is beside the point. The issue for us is the parochial narrowness and dis¬ cursive quality of the perspective characteristic of academic anthropo¬ logical studies. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, a kind of focus emerged that was no longer interested in presenting a unified image of human history, but rather in isolating and mutilating human¬ ity in concern with imperialism and exploitation. The result has been a theoretical fragmentation following on the reality of domination. These pulverized entitles became an occasion for endless academic debates. Each anthropologist had his/her “tribe,” and turned it over and over as he/she lived “like a native,” striving to penetrate its inner being, with a marvelous indifference to and ignorance of everything else. It was sufficient to become part of an indigenous kin system — the son, daughter, brother, or sister to an Other, thus initiated and credentialed. The decolonization movement that followed World War II made this type of anthropological exercise difficult, and now a new form, calling itself ethology and/or sociobiology has emerged. This new anthropology — disguised as disinterested inquiry into innate behav¬ ior patterns of animals, including humans — reveals the deepening cri¬ sis of bourgeois thought. It, indeed, is now the only academic anthropology with a clear political relevance — a sinister relevance. These dispiriting and pessimistic theories can be described as the pro¬ duction of a system in crisis. Capitalism not only contained many of the injustices of past systems of production, it multiplied them many times over as it built its prosperity on the exploitation of its own peo¬ ple, and people throughout the world. The universality of capitalism posed such a pointed social question that most of the speculative works dealing with it either avoided the subject altogether, or turned to blame the victims for their condition. Sociobiology focuses particularly on social relations of power, as if contemporary capitalist relations stemmed from primordial ooze.

514

On the Political Relevance of Anthropology

It was not our aim to trace again all the twists and turns anthro¬ pologists have engaged in, nor to try to follow the intricate theories which have attended them. Instead, we have highlighted an aspect of academic anthropology that has not received enough attention. Above, we referred to Levi-Strauss and the general problem he raised about the impossibility of Western anthropologists playing the role of native. This raises a general problem — a problem of theory of social forms, which is also a problem of politics. We need to understand that anthropology implies and constitutes a mental framework which people in the capitalist world must carry about concerning other peoples and cultures. It is a framework with a language, concepts, categories and systems of representation of oth¬ ers — which the West deploys in order to make sense of, define and figure out and render intelligible how a world ordered by European capitalism works. That world currently is in a state of crisis which reflects itself as a crisis of anthropology and other bourgeois disciplines. We do not think that academic anthropology can be salvaged from this crisis without eliminating the conditions which make it impossible for the Western anthropologist to play the role of native — without the demise of such a political necessity as “natives.” Marx already had offered a different vision of human development as the absolute opposite of capitalist wealth and alienated labor as well as to pre-capitalist social forms. Marx held out an idealistic Promethean vision of the future. After comparing the ancient conceptions, in which humans always appear (in however narrowly national, religious or polit¬ ical a definition) as the aim of production and the modern world in which production is the aim of humans, Marx then asked: [W]hen the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoy¬ ments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in uni¬ versal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own n ature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any precondi¬ tions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution — i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yard¬ stick — an end in itself What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but 515

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain some¬ thing formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elab¬ oration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sac¬ rifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancient appears to be superior; and this is so, in so far as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancient’s provide a nar¬ row satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatis¬ fied, or, where it appears to be satisfied with itself is vulgar znd mean,35 This conception, however dated in its expression, nevertheless pro¬ vides both the rationale for anthropology’s romantic attraction, and a very timely statement of its contemporary political irrelevance. To us, its only future is to focus political objection — but then, does it not cease to be the anthropology we know?

516

The Round Table Movement: Its Influence on the Historiography of Imperialism

It is to such men as Rhodes that England is indebted for Imperial Greatness. —Joseph Chamberlain No great country was ever saved by its good men, because good men will not go the lengths that are necessary. —John Buchan in A Lodge in the Wilderness “Europe is a poor cold place” said Peter “not worth fighting for. There is only one white man’s land, and that is South Africa.” At the time I heartily agree with him. —John Buchan in Grenmantle The Round Table Movement (RTM)1 had its incarnation in South Africa as Lord Milner’s Kindergarten, and was made up of a circle of‘bright’ young men, products mainly of New College and All Souls Oxford, that Milner had gathered around him to assist in the reconstruction and unification of South Africa after the Boer War. Under Milner’s patronage and largesse from the Rhodes Trust, they founded the RTM, and published a quarterly by the same name. They studied the prob¬ lems of the British Commonwealth, and later they were instrumental in the formation of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, whose influence between the two World Wars was very important. The RTM had branches in each of the white Dominions. In this short account it is only possible to name a few members of

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

that band of brothers known in South Africa as the Oxford Kindergarten. From Milner’s own college, Balliol, there came Patrick Duncan, who had served under him at Somerset House when Milner was Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Duncan reorganised the Transvaal finances and after making South Africa his home, he became the ‘first Union National’ chosen by H.M. the King to repre¬ sent him in the Union of South Africa in the high office of Governor General. Then there was John Buchan, private secretary to Milner, who having made a great name as a writer of fiction, biography and history, as Lord Tweedmuir became Governor General of Canada, where he died in Office in 1940. Geoffrey Robinson, who having assumed the name of Dawson, was for 25 years editor of the Times of London, the most famous of all newspapers. R. Feetham, like Duncan, remained in South Africa, became a judge of the Supreme Court, and presided over the Irish Boundaries Commission and the Shanghai Municipal Commission. Most of the Kindergarten had been at New College: e.g. Lionel Curtis, the first Town Clerk of Johannesburg, later became Professor of colonial History at Oxford and the author of Civitas Dei (The Commonwealth of God); the Hon. Robert Brand, the Secretary of the Transvaal delegation at the National Convention, became a prominent banker; Lionel Hichens, who was killed in an air raid on London in 1940, was then the head of a great steel, engineering and shipbuild¬ ing combine; Edward Grigg, who came to South Africa later than most of the others, became Governor of Kenya from 1925 to 1931; Sir Douglas Malcolm, another late arrival, was influential as private sec¬ retary to Lord Selborne, Milner’s successor; Philip Kerr, who in 1930 succeeded his cousin at 11th Marques of Lothian, was joint editor with Edward Grigg of the Round Table, then was private secretary to Lloyd George, the British Premier during the second part of World War I. He was also Secretary to the Rhodes Trust, Under-Secretary of State for India for a short time and finally British Ambassador to the USA, where he died in Washington in December, 1940. Others who became famous and were associated with the group were Sir Herbert Baker, the Great architect, and L.S. Amery, who was the chief correspondent of The Times during the Boer War and became a cabinet minister in several British Governments. Several of the Kindergarten at one time or another were Fellows of All Soul s College at Oxford, a college that has no students, but

518

The Round Table Movement

only members who serve as professors for periods of seven years, so that there is a succession of outstanding young jurists, historians and students of political science in residence. It would be difficult to under¬ estimate the importance of these men in shaping the affairs of the British Empire, yet how many of us know anything about them or their ideas? The RTM was formed at a critical time in the history of the British Empire. The Boer War had demonstrated how expensive the empire could be in blood and money and the atrocities and concentration camps had created in the British public disenchantment with the empire. The anti-imperialist sentiment that the Boer had evoked is described as follows by John Buchan in A Lodge in the Wilderness (ALW, 1906: 10): It will be remembered that some little while ago the creed which is commonly called Imperialism was tossed down into the arena of politics to be wrangled over by parties and gross¬ ly mauled in the quarrel. With the fall of the Government which had sanctioned such tactics there came one of those waves of reaction which now and then break in upon our national stead¬ fastness. The name of‘Empire’ stank in the nostrils of the elec¬ torate. Those who used it fell like ninepins; in the huge majority which the new ministry acquired there were many who open¬ ly blasphemed it; and the few who still cherished the faith thought it wise to don temporarily the garb of indifference. Carey viewed the change with philosophic calm. And elsewhere Buchan says. Every vulgar feeling in the whole treasury of our national vul¬ garity has been enlisted in its support. Small wonder that England is a little sick of the very name of Empire (ibid). Besides working for imperial unification, the RTM had a daunting task of launching an ideological offensive to white wash, if I may be allowed to be blunt, the crimes of imperialism, and to infuse once again the British public with a sense of imperial mission and patriotism. For the fanatical devotees of empire in the RTM, H.G. Wells writes, it had become a question of “My Empire right or wrong” (1934:554). The young Imperialist found it impossible “to distinguish between mate¬ rial energy and patriotic narrowness.” (ibid: 553).

519

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Let me, at once make a confession. When I was writing my first book, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa, I was embarrassed about how ignorant I was, not only about the history of our people but even more about the history of our conquest and col¬ onization. My education had failed me completely. In order to edu¬ cate myself, I decided to spend many hours in the library paging through whatever book I could find dealing with the so-called dis¬ covery of diamonds and gold and the impact of these events on the life of our people. My interest in the diamond and gold industry was the result of the stories that my grandmother used to tell about my grandfather (who had died before I was born) as a result of working in the Kimberley mines and later in the Witwatersrand gold mines. She had told us about how my grandfather, in order to earn money to pay the poll tax, would divide his time between the Kimberley mines and working for a Boer farmer on whose “land” we were squatters. I often wondered how we had lost title to the land. I would of course later learn that we lost it after the Zulu War of 1879. In school the name of Rhodes had been mentioned, especially his belief in what was called ‘equality between all civilized people’. We were also told about the wealth he had been able to accumulate in a short span of time and how because of this wealth he had become a great philanthropist. The phrase “equal rights to all civilised men” by my generation had assumed a life of its own, and was taught as defin¬ ing British “liberalism” in contrast to Boer policies that spoke of “no equality between black and white in church or state.” To this day English liberals in South Africa identify themselves with this slogan and with Rhodes. The circumstances under which Rhodes made the state¬ ment are of course quite different. In fact, he did not talk of “civilized men,” but of “white men.” Later by substituting the word “civilised” for “white” a whole mythology was created about a man who had utter contempt for black people whom he liked to call “a subject race” that should be ruled with an iron hand. Indeed for the mission-educated African he had a particular hatred. He said of them: There are Kaffir persons everywhere — these institutions are turning them by the dozen. They are turning out a dangerous class (Vindex, 1900:382). One day I was browsing at a used book store and had come across a small booklet, written by Mark Twain: The Soliloquy of Kins Leopold

520

The Round Table Movement

with pictures showing Congolese whose ears, arms and other parts of the body had been mutilated because they had failed to meet their quarter of rubber. Next to it was another book again by Mark Twain: Following the Equator2 and there in the index was Cecil Rhodes’ name. I decided to read what Twain said about him. The great American writ¬ er regarded Rhodes as an enigma. This intrigued me and I wondered if anyone in South Africa had ever written a work which dealt with this man and explained how a man who came to South Africa at the age of seventeen with a weak chest could amass such a fortune. To my dis¬ appointment, whilst most of the books talked about what they called ‘his flawed’ character, they never really dealt with the brutal way in which he exploited the African migrant worker to amass wealth for himself. After finishing my studies at UCLA in 1967 I had taken a job at the University of Zambia. There I met Jack Simon and his wife Ray and their son. I do not remember exactly how long I had been there when we decided to form a study group and to meet every Sunday at Jack’s place. Besides Jack and myself, others who were interested in the group were Benedict Mtshali who was teaching political science and Robert Molteno. I can never say how much we all learned from Jack, and indeed I think it was from him that for the first time I under¬ stood what imperialism was about and what an evil and megalomani¬ ac man Cecil Rhodes was. And that his megalomania was reflected in having two countries, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia (as Zambia and Zimbabwe were then called) named after him. When Jack and Ray’s book: Race and Class in South Africa 1850-1950, eventual¬ ly came out in 1969, I read it from cover to cover and it was great inspiration to me. Yet when the Oxford History of South Africa edited jointly by Monica Wilson, an anthropologist, and Leonard Thompson, an his¬ torian, came out, Jack was not among those invited to contribute. In the debate that ensued between the contributors to the Oxford History and a group of young white South African social scientists, who were studying in England in the early 1970s and has just finished their degrees, I was surprised that Jack and the things he had written only deserved a footnote here and there. And then I came across Prof. Z.K. Methews’ autobiography and learned that the way South African his¬ tory was written and taught was nothing but a travesty. In a review of the Oxford History, Anthony Atmore and Nancy

521

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Westlake quoted Nosipho Majeke who had written the little booklet: The Role of the Missionary in Conquest. I remembered that I had read the book as an undergraduate and how it had opened my eyes. What Majeke had said was confirmed for me when I was in the USA. In read¬ ing for my PhD I was introduced to the debate or shall I say ‘war’ of words between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about whether industrial education was better than liberal arts education. Colonial educators, missionaries and philanthropic organisations, who had been “casting around for a solution to what was variously described as the problem of the educated African,” had thrown their lot behind Washington. Many colonial educators in the Cape Colony and Natal, like Evans and Loram had gone to Tuskegee to study the compromise education that Washington had developed. What King (1971:10) calls “Tuskegeeism for the white man’s country,” was designed to prevent the political growth of Africans while increasing their value to the econ¬ omy. So obviously what we Africans were taught and how we were taught had to be compromised for the sake of maintaining us in sub¬ jection. The truth of what Majeke says in this passage was vindicated. For a people engaged in a liberation struggle, it is necessary to rewrite the history ot the past. It is part of the very process of liberation to expose the distortions of history which are pre¬ sented by the herron-volk as truth....If a ruling minority can enslave the minds of the people, control their ideas and their whole way of thinking, they have found an even more efficient weapon for subjugating them than the use of force....For then the people themselves assist in their own enslavement....Now we have to ask ourselves why the herrenvolk, calling in the assis¬ tance of its handmaiden, the Church, have always controlled education....They must have a mighty fear of the power of ideas....and will stir the enslaved mind to see its own condi¬ tions and question how it came to pass. Anything that con¬ tributes to such self-knowledge is of value to him. It is part of the liberating process itself (Atmore and Westlake, 1978:40). Saunders (1986:74) in a review article of “Mnguni” and Three Hundred Tears Revisited, says that the appearance of “Mnguni’s” book caused great consternation among liberal historians. Indeed the ques¬ tion of who “Mnguni” was, perplexed scholars and many people in the Western Cape. The leading liberal historian Leonard Thompson, hav-

522

The Round Table Movement

ing first suggested an African authorship, later wrote “I’m privately informed that ‘Mnguni’ is not an African but a white South African.” Saunders goes on to say that liberals like Thompson saw Jaffe’s book, Three Hundred Tears, A History of South Africa, as a threat to their ver¬ sion of South African history because Jaffe catalogued “three hundred years of struggle between oppressor and oppressed,” and the “oppres¬ sion it chronicled was not that of Britain against Afrikaners, but whites in general against people of color. It was a story of conquest, slavery, dispossession, and what the ‘volume’ called colonial fascism” (ibid,). Jaffe’s book was also very critical of all South African histories as currently written, except The Role of the Missionary in Conquest by Nosipho Majeke. Liberal historians in particular failed “to see that the roots of the South African system of racial capitalism lay not in the recent past, but in the nineteenth century and were associated with the British rather than with the Afrikaners. Liberal historians in particular were blamed for being apologists for British imperialism and racial cap¬ italism, but even communist and nationalist historians were accused of laying too much blame for racism on the Afrikaners” (ibid: 77-78). “Mnguni” like “Majeke” did not write with an academic audience in mind; their histories, Saunders reminds us, were quite explicitly designed to further the “liberatory struggle.” Yet when “Majeke” and “Mnguni’s” histories appeared, a number of white liberals were appalled by them, in particular because of the way these histories linked liberalism to colonialism and capitalism, and because both writers saw liberals as part of “the system.” Thus, “When Leonard Thompson, then Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cape Town, read Jaffe’s work, he told the pioneer liberal Historian W.M. McMillan, Director of Colonial Studies at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland of‘what purports to be a history of South Africa which a Cape Town group of non-whites have recently published surreptitiously: a large proportion of the work is devoted to convincing the reader that the white liberal has always ‘ratted,’ and has been, indeed, used by the main body of whites to bluff the non-whites and soothe them. Throughout the work the hero of the story is the native or Indian or Coloured man who resisted the blandishments of liberals; the others are collaborators, “fascists,” “quislings.” Ten years later....Thompson referred to “Mnguni” and “Majeke” as vehemently anti-white; antiBritish as well as anti-Afrikaner, anti-missionary as well as “anti-set¬ tler” (Ibid.).

523

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Thompson’s pathological dislike of‘Mnguni’ and ‘Majeke’ result from the fact that their histories were an inspiration on the Cape Flats and in Soweto. “Both tracts for the time, they presented interpreta¬ tions of the past that was in some respect radical and in others Africanist” (Ibid; 79). I have summarized Saunders’s article at such length because it reminds us that the historical enterprise is not a neutral exercise, but is ideologically charged. Let me refer to another incident. One day I was again looking through the shelves in the library and I came across a book by John Flint entitled Cecil Rhodes, and from that book I learned that he had edited and published in 1974 the full text of Rhodes’ Confession of Faith. Previously, only a sanitized extract had been published. I tried to find a copy of the Confessions at the University of Connecticut library and it was not there. I asked the inter-library loan service to see if they could get it for me. It literally took three months before they could find a library that was willing to loan it out. I read the document and I didn’t believe what I read. I began to wonder, why such an impor¬ tant document had not been discussed by South African historians. It seemed to me that if one wanted to understand what informed British imperialism in Southern Africa from the discovery of diamond to the present, what Rhodes said and did was absolutely critical. Flint gives a clue regarding the silence of scholars on Rhodes and his doing. He says that Rhodes’ biographers were afraid that the publication of his Will would “disturb from the accepted image that had been sys¬ tematically cultivated about Rhodes.” He goes on to say that anyone who published the Will “would fear to lose his audience” because of publishing this document of “low intellectual content and even less literary merits.” Another of Rhodes’ biographers, Basil Williams, one time member of Milner’s so-called kindergarten, describes Rhodes’ political testament as a “boyish document,” that “curious mixture of child and prophet so often found in great men.” In the Confession of Faith, one finds, perhaps as in no other docu¬ ment revealed in the most frank terms the spirit of the age of imperi¬ alism and the Anglo-Saxon spirit of racial chauvinism. That is, Rhodes was a greater empire builder who counted among his friends, Queen Victoria who is said to have asked Rhodes: “What have you been doing since I last saw you Mr. Rhodes.” To which he replied: “I have added two Provinces to your Majesty’s dominions.” (quoted Marlowe, 1972: 524

The Round Table Movement

105). The Queen is supposed to have returned the complement say¬ ing: “Rhodes is a very remarkable man, and I wish all my ministers were more like him.” Then there was Lord Rothschild, who was not only close to Rhodes, but acted as an advisor to the Rhodes Trust; Kaiser Wilheim II, was a great admirer of Rhodes and Oswald Spengler, the Author of the Decline of West considered Rhodes as the epitome of future statesmen, who would save Europe. Therefore the dismissal of Rhodes’ Will or Confession of Faith as youthful nonsense, with no literary merit is premature. I, at least, was not concerned about its “literary merits” but what it told me about “the spirit” of imperialism. Indeed, the career of Rhodes almost exact¬ ly coincides with the thirty-odd years of the development of imperial¬ ist doctrine. More importantly, the development of his thought and activity mirrors and is mirrored by the development of imperialist thought and activity during these years (cf. Marlowe, 1972: xiv). There is no real dispute about the fact that his bequest endowed the Rhodes Trust and that he endowed a scholarship programme whose beneficiaries have played a major role in the affairs of the world, and in particular of the British Empire as scholars, diplomats, businessmen and even as church leaders. Let me say something about the Round Table Journal; it offers any¬ one who has time and is interested in having a glimpse into some of the thinking and happenings in the British Empire and the world in the first half of the twentieth century, interesting information. One realizes what Kathryn Tidrick (1990: 231) means when she says that: There was indeed a wild ambition about the Round Table’s scheme and dreams which belied the unvarying reasonableness of their purpose.... Like their mentor Lord Milner, the Round Tablers were British race patriots dedicated to the maintenance, through Empire, of the world-wide ascendancy of the AngloSaxons. History was an inspiration and not a lesson for them. The men who composed the Round Table group were a relatively small, self-selecting and secretive organization centered in London with branches in those parts of the empire that were designated dominions by the years 1900-1914. The articles in The Round Table aired informed opinion and analysis of those devoted to promoting notions of imperial federation. A cursory reading of the articles in The Round Table leaves one

525

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

with the feeling that during the heyday of imperialism, the scholars of The Round Table tradition not only helped to construct a conceptual framework within which the colonial ideology could be defended and propagated, but also selected problems that had policy implications. Invariably, these were areas that were critical to the smooth running of the imperial enterprise. In the pages of The Round Table quarterly readers could participate in a dialogue of experts who shared infor¬ mation and set up moral standards of what was “just’ and “unjust” in the treatment of the “lesser breeds,” and see how they resolved prob¬ lems that they perceived to be common and which could prove unset¬ tling to the empire. Almost every troublesome question in South Africa, Rhodesia, and other white Commonwealth countries, was discussed in the pages of the journal by experts who wrote anonymously so that they could deal with the issues as honestly as they could. I have literally spent hours reading through the issues of this journal that are available in our library; unfortunately there are gaps. When I went to South Africa for six weeks each in 1990, 1991 and 1992, I spent whatever spare time I had going through those issues which we do not have at the University of Connecticut Library. What surprised me was that at UTC, Natal and Wits University, the journal seemed not to have been used very much at all. I say that because most of the issues were covered with dust and did not show any sign of having been opened. I have already referred to John Buchan ALW. In the preface to the 1916 edition he says that some of the ideas had been advanced by many of his influential friends of the Round Table (RT) far beyond the stage reached at Masuru; a fictional place, where a political symposium was held to discuss how the white dominion could be confederated into an Anglo-Saxon state, that would enable Britain to hold its own in a world where great states had emerged onto the scene. In the book, John Buchan and his World (1979), Janet Adam Smith says that Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister in the Conservative Government Party that lost the election in 1906 because of the Boer War, thought highly ot ALW. The ALW was re-issued many times. On the re-issue of the 1917 cheap edition Buchan says it had been asked for in many quarters, especially in the overseas Dominions. It is interesting that in ALW, Cecil Rhodes appears in the charac¬ ter of Mr. Francis Carey, a “virtuous millionaire bachelor,” who in London lived in a four-roomed modest chamber on Half-Moon Street.

526

The Round Table Movement

Elsewhere in the Empire Carey owned lordly mansions as no one else in the world. As a result: The feudal manors of impoverished English squires, the cas¬ tles of impecunious Highland chief, held for him no charms. It was his business to show the world excellent days (pg. 12). To the world, however, Carey, Buchan goes on, remained a mystery. Every paper placarded his achievements; his arrivals and departures were chronicled like those of Royalty, his speeches in the City and his rare appearances on public platforms drew crowds which were denied to eminent statesmen, but the man himself remained obscure. His influence was so well recognised and yet to inexplicable that many peo¬ ple were heard to call it sinister. And a few complained of his doing. He spent his great income generously and prudently on pub¬ lic needs. A vast scheme of education, inaugurated by him, tied the schools of the Colonies to the older institutions of England. One ancient university owed the renewal of her fortunes to his gifts. In the slums his dwellings for workmen had made his name a household word, and at his own cost he yearly relieved the congestion of great cities by planting settlements (10). Cecil Rhodes died in the sea side College at Mulzenberg in April 1902. In death according to Flint (1976:227) he set himself a final task, not merely to achieve immortality in the minds of men, but through the image of his life and achievement, and through money and institutions he left behind the pursuit of his great imperial idea. About his Will, L.S. Amery (1953: 181), another fanatical devo¬ tee of empire, tells us that between making a fortune on the diamond fields, Rhodes studied at Oxford, where he gained a life long inspira¬ tion from two sources — one, the famous inaugural lecture given by Ruskin in which he appealed to his young listeners to rise to the great¬ ness of England’s world-wide destiny as an expanding and colonising power. The other was Oxford itself, its humanist classical education with the background of architectural beauty, its quiet quadrangles, its stimulating personal intimacies. Amery goes on to say that Rhodes has often been described as an Elizabethan; the suggestion behind the adjective being that with his patriotism and his vision there was some¬ thing of the love of gain for the sake of power and a lack of scruple in methods adopted by the men of that age.

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Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

Rhodes then is a figure of great importance; he was an arch-impe¬ rialist. But because the word, “empire” following the Anglo-Boer War had become synonymous with greed and brutality; Amery says his friends of the Round Table and General Smuts brought into vogue the fine but somewhat clumsy old world Commonwealth which would give the idea that empire was a voluntary association in which Britain was the selected senior member and a guiding force. The Will provided funds for the creation and maintenance of a secret society, modelled on the Order of Jesuits, “a church for the extension of the British Empire.”3 Its scope included the British col¬ onization of Africa, the near East, South America, the Islands and coasts of the Pacific and ultimately reunion with the United States. The unification of South Africa was one of Rhodes’ main preoc¬ cupations and to achieve this he felt that the best of the young white men of South Africa should be provided a place to live together in a teaching university where “this great question of union could safely be left in their hands.” “The germ of this scholarship idea had come to Rhodes in the year 1891.” In that year, as he told a Bond Congress, he saw at Bloemfontein the immense feeling of friendship that all the members had for the Grey College where they had been edu¬ cated and from which they had gone out to the world....I said to myself: it we could get a teaching university founded in the Cape Colony, taking the people from Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Natal....the young men who will attend it will make the Union of South Africa in the future. Nothing will overcome the association and the aspirations they will form under the shadow of Table Mountain (Millin, 1969:330-31). In 1893, in his sixth Will the scholarship plan was first outlined and was finalized in the last version of his Will in 1899. Since then thou¬ sands of Rhodes scholars have gone out to fulfil his dream. According to Amery (op cit: 183) they became better Canadians, Australians, Americans or South Africans. Amery says further that his connection with the Rhodes Trust dated from 1919. However he can claim to have made a small contribution to its purpose from the start. Not long after my return from South Africa I realised that when the first Rhodes Scholars arrived they would find practically no provision at Oxford for the teaching of the history of the British 528

The Round Table Movement

empire, or even anything like an adequate supply of books on the subject. A casual telephone message in June 1904 from Leverton Harris asking me to come to a small men’s dinner and mentioning that Alfred Beit would be one of the party gave me my chance. I said I would cut another engagement and come if he would put me next to Beit, whom I had not met, but knew to be not only a trustee, but deeply inspired by Rhodes’s ideas. To Beit I launched out at once on the absurd situation the Rhodes Scholars would find if they thought they could learn anything, at the heart of the Empire, of that Empire’s history. As a practical man he asked me what was needed to meet the deficiency. Happily I had thought it out and replied at once: “A professor of Colonial History at £900 a year; an assistant or reader at £300, £50 a year for special books, another £50 for a prize essay; say £1,300 in all.” Beit reflected a moment and then said: “Yes, I’ll do it.” It was all fixed up before we had finished soup. I took the next train to Oxford and All Souls and, with Warden Anson’s help set all the official wheels going without delay. Beit subsequently endowed the Chair to the tune of some £40,000. I have often been a sturdy beggar for good causes, but never secured so much for so good a cause in so short a time. This then is the background to the Rhodes Trust and the Round Table Movement.

The Rhodes Trust and the Politics of History In 1492, Columbus “discovered” the Americas and Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of storms so the story goes. And from that time up until today Africa experienced the agony of the slave trade and the pain of racism born of this nefarious trade. In the course of the next five hundred years according to Fryer (1993:9) European Imperialists would appropriate everything in Africa they could lay their hands on, including the entire tangible cultural heritage of the Edo of Benin, now scattered in European museums and private collections. For Marx, this was the process he called primitive accumulation. Marx would remind us that “capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore with blood and dirt.” And in the same chapter, in a sub-section entitled “Genesis of Industrial Capitalist,” he would

529

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

write of the “turning of Africa into a warren for commercial hunting of black-skins,” adding: “Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation....The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed for its pedestal, slavery pure and sim¬ ple in the new world.” (Ibid, 12). These are brutal words, that raise anybody’s heart beat. If you look around Harare or anywhere around Africa especially if you compare the condition of the African people with that of the white people, you begin to understand the salience of what Marx said. How then do you justify the actions of Europeans in Africa and elsewhere in the last five hundred years? Can one really be objective in the study of colonialism and imperialism? Why are social scientists and historians who study African social and economic backwardness almost silent about ‘how Europe underdeveloped Africa’ as Walter Rodney put it? The British imperial government that imposed white minority rule on the African people had enormous power at its disposal. But, as C.L.R. James points out, political power never rests entirely on naked force. By the time it has reached that stage, it is already doomed. Therefore, political power presents itself to the world within a certain framework of ideas, and in any estimate of social forces in political action, it is fatal to ignore this. Modern critics of literature and the dabblers of psychology lay great stress on the creation of myths and the great role that myths have played in the lives of early peoples, particularly the ancient Greeks. It is not sufficiently recognized that this cre¬ ation of myths, universal throughout the ages, has never been more prevalent than at the present time. One of the greatest modern myths has been the myth justifying and even ennobling “colonialism” or, as it used to be called, the “white man’s bur¬ den” (James 1977:28). One of the problems that faced the architects of the imperialism in Africa was: could its history of brutality, slavery, capitalism, oppression, and an endless list of intrigues and inhuman crimes ever be wished away? Would it not be a labour of Sisyphus for politicians, let alone social scientists, even if their research was sponsored by funds derived from imperial exploitation, to attempt to whitewash the evils of colo¬ nialism? Would it not be wiser policy to enjoy the fruits of plunder, while the going was good, and keep silent about the whole evil enter¬ prise?

530

The Round Table Movement

Everyone knew the crimes of colonialism and imperialism: pro¬ pelled by an insatiable greed for profit; European capitalists had dev¬ astated Africa, imposed slavery on millions, and, in the era of imperialism, had divided the continent and forced millions more into back-breaking labour in the mines and plantations. Indescribable cru¬ elties were inflicted by the colonists in what were called “pacification” campaigns. Hunger and epidemics, claiming an enormous toll on the victims, is a memorial to colonialism ever since the sixteenth century, and underdevelopment and poverty are still its visage and legacy today. Yet, as Brewer (1980:2) points out, some historians seek to deny what they call economic motive of imperialism. This, of course, begs the question because those who created trad¬ ing companies like the East India Company, the Spanish Conquistadors, the investors in South African mines, and those who engaged in the nefarious slave trade knew very well what they wanted. They wanted to be rich. Colonial empires were exploited ruth¬ lessly for economic gain as sources of cheap raw materials and cheap labour, and as monopolised markets. The romantic image of empire (flags fluttering over distant outposts, etc.) may be appealing, but a serious study must concentrate on more fundamental economic issues (Ibid). I need not remind you that in recognition of the important trade between the Guinea Coast which we now call West African Coast, the coin “Guinea” would be the popular name for the new gold coin struck in 1663 by a slave-trading company called the Royal Adventure into Africa (cf. Fryer 1993:4). Similarly the most active section of the London Stock Exchange following the discovery of gold would be called the Kaffir Circus in recognition of the wealth made in the sell¬ ing of gold shares. One of Rhodes’ purposes I will show below for establishing the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes scholarships was to ensure, among other things, that the history of greed and imperial brutality was written in a patriot¬ ic manner. Rhodes understood very well, as Orwell said “Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.” In other words, those who dominate our society also see to it that they dominate the writing of our past. That is why the telling of the story of the Rhodes Trust and the way those who benefitted from it wrote the history of colonialism and imperialism is so important.

531

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

LaFontaine was quite right that “those who enjoy power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny an appearance of justice” (quoted Winks, 1963:1). One of the chief preoccupations of The Round Table intellectuals was to cast the British imperial enterprise in the best possible light. In this endeavour the writing of the history of colonialism was consid¬ ered key. John Buchan (1940: 120) says that his vision and dream of Empire was of a world wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the services of peace. In this brotherhood Britain would enrich the rest out of her culture and tra¬ ditions and the Dominions would act like a strong wind freshing the stuffiness of the old lands. He says further that he saw the Empire as a means of giving to the congested masses in England open country instead of a blind alley; “here hope for new afflatus in art and litera¬ ture and thought would be realised.” In Buchan’s scheme of things the white man’s burden involved a new philosophy and an ethical stan¬ dard which was serious and surely not ignoble. These are themes those of us who went to college in the 1950s were taught. To those who administered and believed in Europe’s colo¬ nial responsibilities and civilising mission, “the theory of economic imperialism appeared to be more than a straw man. It was a hulking Frankenstein’s monster which moved and breathed and could break up empires, such men generally knew little of the great quarrels which divided communist, socialist, and liberal critics of empire” (Etherington 1984: 204). Let me make a second confession. In my Political Economy of Race and Class, I quoted Leonard Thompson approvingly when he criti¬ cised the British government saying: Any final assessment of the achievement of an imperial power must depend largely upon the sort of society it left behind when it withdrew. In withdrawing from South Africa, Great Britain left behind a caste-like society, dominated by its white minor¬ ity. The price of unity and concilliation was the institutionali¬ sation of white supremacy (Wilson and Thompson, 1969, vol 2:364). “Achievement,” “the price of unity,” “conciliation”: Surely anyone who has read Froude, Trollope, Carnarvon, Rhodes, Milner, Chamberlain, Buchan, etc. knows that the creation of a “caste-like”

532

The Round Table Movement

racial oligarchy was specifically their aim, and they made no apologies for it. Indeed in the House of Commons Debate, Colonel Seely reminded the House of Commons that all the Acts that discriminated against the House of Commons that all the Acts that discriminated against the Africans in Natal, Orange Free State and the Transvaal colonies had been approved by the British Parliament. And when Lord Carnorvon pressed for the federation of all the European colonies in South Africa, it was so that they could formulate a common native pol¬ icy. If South Africa was to be a ‘white man’s country,’ the ‘native prob¬ lem’ had to be dealt with at a national level, by a federal body representative of all the settler colonies. The social and economic ques¬ tion, because of the discovery of diamonds and gold, had grown in complexity, and the framers of the Union realised the dangers of dif¬ ferent settler colonies following their own social and economic poli¬ cies. The visit of Chamberlain to South Africa in 1902, is summed up as follows by L.S. Amery (1953: 186). From the administrative point of view it was of immense help to Milner in securing the prompt settlement of many pressing and troublesome questions, but it was also a great act of coura¬ geous statesmanship. In his own person he brought home to our conquered enemies that conception of an empire of free and equal co-operation which he had done so much to strengthen at the Imperial Conference over which he had just presided. His speeches brought home to them that they were not looked upon as subjects to be held down by force, but as fellow citizens, potentially equal partners, to be won over by fair argument. The note of finality with which he met all attempts to reopen the issues settled by the way, only added to the impression created by his eloquent and sympathetic expo¬ sition of South Africa’s future destiny. His visit was not a mere interlude, but a powerful factor in South Africa’s subsequent political development. Milner emphasised over and over again his commitment to the thesis of “white equality throughout South Africa.” To return to the Rhodes Trust: The ancient University of Oxford set itself the task of explaining away imperialism. It produced histori¬ cal scholarships which acted as a bulwark against what it though were

533

Towards a Critical African Sociolocy: Selected Essays

subversive theories of imperialism. In this endeavour, Etherington (ibid: 205) tells us they were helped in no small part by an extraordi¬ nary academic and intellectual legacy left by the empire builders of South Africa: From Cecil Rhodes himself came the Rhodes Trust which looked after scholars drawn to Oxford from all over the English-speaking world and which financed other, less well known, schemes for strengthening ‘Empire sentiment.’ From Alfred Beit, Rhodes’s old partner in diamond and gold min¬ ing, came endowments for South African universities and pro¬ fessorships of history in British universities. Among the trustees of Rhodes’s will was Lord Milner, prime mover of British pol¬ icy in South Africa before and after the Boer War. Milner’s ‘kindergarten’ contributed bright young imperial patriots who formed the nucleus of the Round Table Movement, an orga¬ nization dedicated to promoting closer ties between the vari¬ ous parts of the Empire (Ibid). Among the beneficiaries of Rhodes’s largesse was the historian W. D. Hancock, Professor of History at Adelaide and later Birmingham University and editor of J. C. Smuts’s papers. South Africa’s benefi¬ ciaries included historians, Eric Walker and W. M. McMillan, Thompson, etc. Etherington (Ibid; 206) says: These men were more than great historians. Like ideal Rhodes Scholars, many of them were also practical men with first-hand knowledge of government. Curtis moved from Oxford to the Colonial Office as Permanent Under Secretary for Irish Affairs in 1921; George Louis Beer attended the Versailles Peace Conference as the American expert on colonial affairs and later became a member of the Mandates Commission. Massey rose to become Governor General of Canada; Hancock would one day write constitutions for East Africa. And behind the practi¬ cally-minded historians stood real statesmen and financiers. Lord Milner and L. S. Amery remained in close contact with the movement they had helped to launch. The Rhodes Trust gave financial support; so did a bevy of peers of the realm and Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, head of the South African conglom¬ erate which succeeded to Rhodes’s mining interests.

534

The Round Table Movement

As historians and managers of empire, it became their mission to wage a yeoman’s ideological struggle against any historical analysis which associated the rise of colonialism and imperialism with the economic imperative of capitalism. This was the only way in which they could explain away the exploitative essence of imperialism. Therefore, accord¬ ing to Etherington: The word imperialism seldom appears in The Round Table. Since 1905 at least it had apparently stunk in the nostrils of British and colonial voters. It was associated with greed and grab and the debacle of the Boer War. The programme for which the movement stood — an imperial customs union, mil¬ itary strength and the orderly development of Britain’s colonies — had therefore to go under another name. Commonwealth, a robust Elizabethan word with overtones of democracy and shared riches, had the right sort of ring to it and soon became the standard shorthand for Round Table goals. The editor wrote in 1912 that ‘there can be no doubt that Imperialism in its latest form’ (strengthening the Empire to meet the hostile threats posed by ‘foreign fleets or hostile combinations’) ‘cor¬ responds to a dominant....instinct in the self-governing peo¬ ples of the British Empire’ (ibid: 207). Let me give some example of the attempt to expunge the word impe¬ rialism from writing of imperial history. An anonymous reviewer of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher’s book Africa and the Victorians (The Sunday Times Literary Supplement, August 11, 1961:494), is a case in point. The anonymous reviewer wrote that “imperialism is a word so charged with hostile meaning as to be almost useless.” Why? Because its most obvious version is a compound of greed and racial arrogance, the determination to make money and to force others espe¬ cially the backward people to assist. Those who used the word were described as political propagandists Marxist ideological economists. Because of this the word imperialism is not of much value to histori¬ ans, least of all to those who study what Professor Langer long since styled “the diplomacy of imperialism.” I will return later to the thesis of Robinson and Gallagher’s book. In eschewing the word imperialism, we should not forget that in Capital, Marx, as stated above, had presented a picture of capitalist “progress” which involved dragging individuals and peoples through

535

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

blood and dirt, through misery and degradation. But in the rosy pic¬ ture of The Round Table Movement, it was not economic necessity which had propelled the British to extend dominion all over the world. Britain is presented as a reluctant imperialist, making a virtue of neces¬ sity. Indeed, the Round Table intellectual frequently misled uninformed readers by seizing on historical and other analogies that distorted the realities of modern imperialism. The following passage by Etherington summarises how for the Round Table historians, British imperial history became a long series of at best apologetics, at worst glorification of British imperial con¬ quest. In the Round table version of history, the foundations of the overseas empire were laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬ turies when ‘England found that she could keep her freedom only by a long series of desperate struggles against the threat¬ ening might, first of Spain, and later of France....To protect herself from subjection to the great continental powers England had to keep command of the sea, and it was her sea power which, by enabling her citizens to conduct their enter¬ prises safely all over the world, led to the acquisition of terri¬ tory in Canada, Australia, South Africa and India.’ From those foundations ‘the Empire expanded almost of its own accord.’ ‘Every student of history knows how reluctant British min¬ istries have been to extend the Empire they had to defend.’ The reluctant imperialists agreed to Eirther extensions for three recurring reasons. One reason was endemically turbulent fron¬ tiers: ‘rapine and disorder on the frontier were inconsistent with peace and progress within British territory’; the govern¬ ment invariably found that it could prevent the recurrence of anarchy only by annexation.’ Another reason was the need to protect strategic lines of communication: ‘the only way of pre¬ venting hostile powers from occupying strategic positions threatening vital parts of the Empire was to annex them to the British crown.’ The third reason was that private citizens, set¬ tlers, missionaries and traders who had pushed into new terri¬ tories, ‘found themselves engulfed by the anarchy or tyranny of native states appealed to the might of England to protect them from injustice and oppression.’ The ‘British Government found that if law and order were to be established it had no 536

The Round Table Movement

option but to step in.’ The Empire was not maintained because of profit: ‘from the purely material point of view the Empire is a burden rather than a source of gain.’ Far from serving as ‘a system of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ as James Mill and Hobson had charged, ‘the few civil service posts, reserved for men who are willing to pass their lives in savage and unhealthy parts’ were ‘not compensation for the enormous financial strain and the constant risk of war for which the duty of preserving a world Empire entails’ (Ibid: 208-09). In his study of Kipling, Conrad and Buchan, Anderson (1967:195) repeats this saying that: The late nineteenth century imperial idea had no innate dynam¬ ic or character of its own: no one sat down in White Hall and said ‘Lets have an empire’: It was found to exist as the physi¬ cal product of one defensive political decision after another, as the country’s statesmen interpreted the influential situation, and a product moreover, which, until Chamberlain’s era at least was considered to have little but extrinsic value. All too often posthoc has been confused with propter hoc and men’s reactions to the fact of empire assumed to be its cause. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. But the passages tell us even more about the Round Table historians and the myths they created. They made adaptations, discarded some elements of the myths and added others. Here is another myth that the Round Table ideol¬ ogists created. It is the myth that imperialism fulfilled a mission in the twentieth century — a mission summed up in the three words: liber¬ ty, trusteeship, and commonwealth. The more one examines the suc¬ cessive theories of British colonialism, the more it is seen for the genuine myth making that it was: Again I quote Etherington: Autocratic rule today was but a prelude to self-government tomorrow or the day after. As ‘backward’ populations demon¬ strated progress and the capacity to manage their own affairs, they would be directed along the path of liberty which AngloSaxons had trod before them. In the meantime Britain held their countries as ‘trust’ for the benefit of all mankind. It would be irresponsible to give self-government to the Pacific island ‘home of primitive barbarism’, or to West Africa where ‘over-

537

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

indulgence in sexual thought....stops the full development of the brain4, or central Africa where ‘the intervention of civilized states’ prevented the natives ‘from being exploited by rampant capitalism, exploitation and aggression’, or India where ‘Gandhi and Mohamedan extremists are seducing or terroris¬ ing those who stand for constitutional progress’. All those countries were ‘in training to govern themselves’ as some indef¬ inite time in the future (Ibid: 210). The publication of Dr. Norman Leys’ book, Kenya in 1924 and Lord Olivier’s Anatomy of African Misery (1926), became an occasion for a long reflective review article in the Round Table journal, entitled The New Problems of Africa. Both books constituted a more stringent cri¬ tique and expose of white exploitation to appear in the inter-war years. This overview, given the number of pages it occupied, was more than just a review. It can be taken as a considered opinion by the inner cir¬ cles of the RT Movements on empire in the inter-war years. Therefore it requires some extended consideration. The exact quotes from the article illustrate better the thinking of the writer(s) than any attempt at paraphrasing. Following a discussion of the geography of Africa and the areas that were already colonized by white settlers from South Africa up to the Abyssinian border, the review raises the key question: if these areas were going to be new dominions: “What attitude ought the outside world take toward this tremendous experiment of settling whites in Africa?” It should be remembered that Rhodes had first mooted the idea of a great white belt of settlement extending from South Africa to Kenya in East Africa. In this area settlers from South Africa would play a dominant part and possession would be “nine points of the law.” This idea had been given the strongest backing in the writings of Buchan, Maurice Evans and members of the RTM, among others. The review was therefore not just a critique of Leys and Olivier, than an outline of the political futures that were opened to Africans in the two Rhodesias and Kenya. Indeed, successive British Governments had pledged themselves “to reserve the Highlands of East Africa exclusively for European settlers.” The article warns settlers in these colonies not to make the mistakes of South Africa. That is, in the review, policy proposals are mixed with analyses of administrative problems that resulted from economic development and urbanization. The article then discusses at length what it called the two 538

The Round Table Movement

views on the future of “natives” in areas suitable for white settlement. The first argued that the white man’s presence in Africa was necessary to organize stable governments and to import such elements of European knowledge and civilization as may be useful for the African. This view also urged that Europeans should be temporary visitors as they were in the tropical lowlands of Asia and should gradually with¬ draw as and when the native peoples were able to dispense with their services and manage a civilized black Africa for themselves. This argu¬ ment, they say, is strengthened by “the recollection of the appalling suffering which the white man has inflicted on the African in the past, by the slave trade which decimated Africa to secure Negro slaves for the West Indies and the United States, and later by excessive appro¬ priation of land in the South and the exploitation of natural resources by economic methods and practices suited to Europe and America, but for which the African was not ready” (Anon., 1935-6: 451-52). The second view argued that: Left alone the native is incapable of progress because for thou¬ sands of years he has never been able lift himself out of a prim¬ itive tribalism, which combined constant war with a mere scratching of the soil, and that the economic development of Africa and the moulding of its natural inhabitants into a civi¬ lized and progressive and prosperous community can best be accomplished by permanent white colonists, who must there¬ fore control the country, using the native in the first instance mainly as an unskilled labourer (ibid: 452). This school of thought admits that the process involves great disloca¬ tion of native habits and customs and complete alteration of their sta¬ tus. “But that is inevitable. As in the United States, what matters most is the growth of a civilised society and the development of resources of the country.” Indeed, these “iron-rodders” believed that in the long run the “native will benefit because contact with and work for the white man is the most effective and educational transforming force, while if he is left to himself he will, in fact remain in chaos and stagnation” (ibid). Disclaiming any intention to judge between these points of view, the article says that the future will not be settled by either theory or sentiment, but by certain inexorable facts which no policy and no gov¬ ernment can remove and alter. These inexorable facts are then eluci¬ dated as follows:

539

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

First, the Congo basin and tropical West Africa, because of climatic factors and the density of the population, were most likely to perma¬ nently prevent white colonization, and, if the native developed rapid¬ ly enough, it might prove possible to transfer control over the destiny of their country to substantial native authority. But the fate of the high¬ lands was going to be different. So far as the highlands as a whole are concerned, whether we think that what may be called the West African policy is a good or a bad one in theory, it is no longer a possible one in practice. The white colonist is already there on the spot. The country is very thinly populated by natives. The natural resources are enor¬ mous, and are already in the process of development. It is not possible to stop white immigration even into the northern high¬ lands, still less to turn out the 63,000 whites who now dwell in them. It is not possible to say that the vast copper, zinc and lead deposits of the Rhodesias, or the coffee and sisal and tobacco lands of Kenya and Tanganyika shall not be developed, for mil¬ lions of capital are already sunk in these enterprises and in the railways which transport these products to the coast for export. For good or evil, the white man has taken his enterprise, his capital, and his family into these territories, and has made his home there. Whatever the far future may unfold, the white man, for any period we need now consider, is going to mine, culti¬ vate the soil, trade and conduct transportation as a colonist and not as a temporary visitor throughout the length and breadth of the African highlands from Cape Town to Kenya. In some parts he will be thick, in other parts he will be on thin ground. In some parts white immigration will be fast, in others it will be slow. But from one end to the other of this vast area he will steadily increase in numbers and for a long time to come he will be the dominant factor thereon (ibid: 453). The second obvious fact is that: The native is not going to be driven out of his old country as the Red Indians and the Australian black fellows have been, to dwin¬ dle in numbers until he has to be provided for in relatively neg¬ ligible reserves as an interesting historic survival. The Bantu as we know him may be a primitive barbarian, but he is one of the most virile and persistent of racial stocks in the world. He 540

The Round Table Movement

has withstood transplantation to America, he has withstood the slave trade in Africa, he has withstood internecine wars, he has withstood the impact of Western civilisation and complete subordination to the political and economic system of the mod¬ ern world, and he shows no sign of decline as the bushmen or the Hottentots have done. On the contrary, slowly and per¬ plexedly he is gradually beginning to understand the magic of the white man’s ways, to acquire education and skill, and to demand a more equal status and something like a voice in the higher direction of the land in which only a few decades ago he lived alone (ibid: 456, emphasis added). The proverbial “virility” of the native so called was first noted by Trollope in his book South Africa, after witnessing African mine work¬ ers, whom he called “ants” hard at work in the Kimberley mine. And Wilmont and Evans, and even Lord Balfour would remark on it as well. This virility became an explanation for the failure of the Darwinian logic in Africa, a failure which caused the “intractable native problem.” For the reviewer, the key problem which confronts the highlands of Africa was therefore neither the future of the native races nor that of the white races, but involves finding a basis upon which black and white, with a number of Asiatics and coloured people, could live together in a country in the course of rapid economic and social devel¬ opment. This was the most difficult problem, and in the Union of South Africa it had already reached an acute stage. The crisis in the Union manifested itself in what the article called the “revolution of 1922” which had necessitated the passage of the Colour Bar Law of 1925. These events of 1922 marked the parting of the ways in Southern Africa. The class warfare of 1922 made the author(s) pessimistic and they warn that “[i]f the wrong road is fol¬ lowed [in the highlands] there will gradually develop a form of racial strife, on colour lines, both in economics and politics, compared to which the Anglo-Boer contention of the past would be child’s play, which will go far to ruin South Africa, and which will eventually ram¬ ify all over Africa, and even Asia” (ibid: 457). The root of the crisis in South Africa was not difficult to understand. In a country which is suitable for white colonisation, in which the native population is sparse and extremely primitive in its civilisation, it is inevitable that the white man should make the

541

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

laws, construct the economic organisation, and conduct the government. It is no less inevitable, so long as these conditions exist, that the native should be the servant and unskilled labour¬ er, and be separated from the white race by impassable barriers. Where the difference in colour and physiognomy and civilisa¬ tion is at its maximum, as in the case of Briton and Dutch on the one side, and Bantu on the other, the social, economic, and political gulf between the native and the white man is also at its maximum. At first the autocracy of the white man and the relation of a dependent black proletariat to a white aris¬ tocracy does not work badly. There is plenty of room for both; the white man finds his life as an aristocratic owner or proper¬ ty or a supervisor of native labour comfortable and easy; the native finds his contact with the white man interesting and exciting, and that service for wages gives him wealth such as he had never dreamt of before, while he can always go back to his kraal where he keeps his wife and children, when he is dis¬ satisfied. But this pleasant state of affairs does not last (ibid;. This “comfortable” situation did not last forever because the devel¬ opment of mining and modern industry in South Africa had created not only landlessness among whites but it had pushed Africans from their crowded reserves to the cities, where they accumulated as an unskilled urbanized proletariat in the towns or became permanent squatters or labourers on white men’s farms. This fact was already noted by the Economic Commission of 1926 which estimated that the urban¬ ized native population numbered 300,000, and another estimate put the number of what are called “detribalised” natives at 600,000, of whom an ever-rising number were fully capable of doing as skilled work as the white man, and demanded skilled work and skilled workers’ wages as the only condition upon which they could live decent and respectable lives once they were cut off from the reserves. As a result of these developments, . . . the simple, patriarchal economic pyramid, which had a white apex and a black base, which arose so naturally in the early days, begins to disappear. The whites are continually falling off the apex into the squalor of poor white existence, and the urbanised blacks are trying to clamber up the pyramid into the skilled zone previously reserved for whites alone. Both

542

The Round Table Movement

white and black become marooned in the low quarters of the towns, with no land to go to and with little or no chance of obtaining a decent living at unskilled work, because of the com¬ petition of natives from the kraal (ibid: 459). This was the position when the PACT government passed the Colour Bar laws which gave only short-term relief. The Colour Bar laws did not eliminate the poor whites or create the needed outlet for the eman¬ cipated native. “In the long run it must create a revolution, for it is clearly impossible to keep the native perpetually in the position of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for a white aristocracy, if at the same time he is not given enough land for his own use and if he is debarred from the effective exercise of his political rights” (ibid: 460). In other words: The...Union has reached the point where the old sharp dis¬ tinction between black and white on which its economy has been founded hitherto is beginning to break down. Education, economic forces, contact with civilisation are creating an ever increasing number of natives who are no longer simple-mind¬ ed muscular machines, but people fit to take their place in a modern organic community. Economic forces are equally developing a class of whites who are in no sense aristocratic, because they are only fit for unskilled work. The central prob¬ lem in the Union to-day is to initiate the readjustment which is necessary, and the four Bills introduced by General Hertzog and the controversy which is now arising about them show that the process of readjustment has begun. These developments in South Africa must be studied by whites who were settling in the highlands north of the Zambezi, so as to avoid the Union’s mistakes. While these details will vary according to local conditions, the fundamentals for the northern highlands seem to be clear. In the first place it is essential that, while there is yet time, ample land should be reserved for the natives under conditions which will make it impossible for them to alienate it to white purchasers. The land of Africa does not “belong” to the native for it is as absurd to think that because some 25,000,000 primitive natives were in occupation of a territory two-thirds the size of Europe it “belongs” to them, as it is to think that it “belongs” to the European by right of conquest. It must be used by both.

543

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

But it is vital that enough should be reserved for the native’s use both under tribal and individual tenure, taking into account, too, the requirements of future generations (ibid: 461, emphasis added). Finally, the article comes to Lord Olivier’s and Dr. Leys’ books. It acknowledges that the books will leave a mark on the history of Africa which will not soon be effaced, because “they expose nakedly and ruth¬ lessly for all to see what is the fundamental issue at stake, and because their authors have had the courage to state their convictions without palliation or reserve” (ibid: 462). Be that as it may, the influence of these books for good is “immensely lessened by the bitter spirit in which they are written and one of them attributes to malignant design on the part of individuals or to the ogre called ‘capitalism’ what in the main was the natural outcome of the facts” (ibid). What are these facts? Here we have for the first time what during the era of apartheid would assume the validity of a self-evident truth: ...that Southern Africa was very thinly peopled, that it had great resources which the native had no idea of developing, and that modern civilisation, with all its good and bad features, swept over the country as naturally and inevitably as it swept over America in the seventeenth century. Nothing could have pre¬ vented it. Nor could anything have prevented the social and economic gulf between black and white which ensued, for it was based on the fact that black and white were at opposite ends of the social, political, and economic scale. The truth that the native has an unlimited capacity for development and many fine and attractive traits of character does not alter in the least the other truth that when the European arrived he was a bar¬ barian of not too refined habits, who regarded the white man as a wizard and the wages he paid as a short cut to heaven, and who therefore naturally and inevitably fell into a position approximating to medieval serfdom (ibid: 463). This, for the author(s) explains the type of society the white man cre¬ ated and in which he acquires a vested right to ascendancy. But to suggest that the problems of Africa are due to any spe¬ cial malignancy on the part of the British or Dutch who live there is to introduce into the problem of race relations in Africa

544

The Round Table Movement

the terrible hatred and class war which the disciples of Karl Marx have managed to introduce into the problem of indus¬ trial relations in Europe. The solution of the African problem requires plain speaking and courageous defence of what is right. But it will never be found along the lines of dividing black and white into sheep and goats. Both are suffering — though much less than our authors would have us believe — from the inex¬ orable facts of their environment and their past (ibid,). This essay is interesting at least to me, for many reasons. For British imperialism the discovery of gold and diamonds, respectively, in 1867 and 1884, was a moment of concentrated emotions. It would see a determination on the part of England to annex the whole of Southern Africa as a British colony or colonies. The rash annexation of the Transvaal in 1887 and its precipitate abandonment in 1881, and then its further usurpation after two years of bloody war left everyone in England and South Africa with a sour taste in the mouth about the imperial enterprise. In England, where Empire had meant either selfgovernment of kindred communities, or a benign autocracy of the “superior races,” this new African venture created awkward feelings and misgivings. This feeling, according to Young (1964: 183) was due to the fact that among those associated with the war were too many Jewish financiers. Beit, Joel, Barney Barnato etc. were too conspicuous: Serious men were apt at times to wonder whether more was not at stake than suzerainty of the queen, whether if the safe¬ ty of the Empire required the extinction of the Republics, the integrity of the English character was not bound up with the resistance they might offer to the tactics of the company pro¬ moter and the morals of the mining Camp. A stain was left in the year of Jubilee; a discord had made itself heard, growing louder through the characters and inaptitudes of the South African War, till it merged into the triumph song of liberalism reunited and victorious, but with a small, vigorous and dis¬ concerting auxiliary operating on its left flank. The Imperialism of the nineties had brought itself out in Mafeking bonfires, and the Convertive overthrow of 1905 — recalled, on its grounds and its magnitude the defeat of 1880 (ibid,). Historical facts, Gibbon once opined, in his Essay on the Study of Literature, are of three kinds, those which prove nothing beyond them545

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

selves, those which illustrate a character or explain a motive, and those which dominate the system and move its spring. The so-called facts reviewed in the RTM article about African high¬ lands not only echo Rhodes’s imperial plan to paint the African map red from Cape to Cairo. More than that, it also reveals a commitment to make African Highlands “white man’s country,” while relegating the “natives” to the low lands infested with malaria and other tropical diseases. This commitment caused the author(s) to glide over unwhole¬ some facts and to ignore others. It is this commitment and rigid devo¬ tion to imperialism that led the author(s) to fabricate “the savagery” oi the Africans and to “cook” the population figures of the African Highlands and to be threatened by the exposure in Leys’ and Olivier’s books. The manner in which the African is caricatured in the review makes it difficult to distinguish the dividing line between fact and fiction. White settlement whether in South Africa, the Rhodesias or Kenya had been imposed with extreme brutality, and white rule in these countries would mean chronic poverty, virtually hundred percent illiteracy, dis¬ ease, racism, slum housing, and when Africans protested, brutal repres¬ sion and tyranny. To establish, maintain, and justify their rule, and exploitation of black labour, Britain’s rulers needed an ideology which told them and the British people — workers and children, that their imperial rule was in the best interest of their subjects. Obviously the author(s) understood that the more you reiterate a falsehood, the more it will become believable. What then was the vision of the Milner Kindergarten and/or the RTM for the so-called “non-white” members of the British Empire in general and the Africans in particular? The idea of “white dominion” was unashamedly based on the concept of racial superiority, derived and popularised by Social Darwinism and accepted almost without qualms by the members of the RTM. Kendle (1975: 303) asks and responds to the following question: Did the Round Table members really believe in, have faith in, the African s and Indian s capacity for self rule? The evidence is certainly not clear-cut, but it would suggest that doubts may have lingered in the subconscious if not the conscious mind of many members. By 1914 the majority of the London group seems to have accepted that Indians were capable of self-gov¬ ernment, providing the education had been obtained. Their 546

The Round Table Movement

attitude toward the other ‘backward peoples’ was not as clear. In the main they believed the lack of political development was due to environmental and sociological reasons, not biological differences, and they did argue that self-government would eventually be given all the ‘backward peoples’. However, there remained a lingering doubt that ‘the lower races’ could ever rise high in the scale of civilisation. This is apparent from their correspondence, from Curtis’s writings on India, and from the activities of men like Grigg and Malcolm in Africa. This of course is an understatement. The fact of the matter is that: “The idea of self-government for the ‘natives’ was regarded with deri¬ sion, and the concept of ‘trusteeship’ was being evolved to meet the objections of Gladstonian Liberals to the forcible subjugation of peo¬ ple ‘rightly’ struggling to be free” (Marlowe, 1976: 6). The indentured and other forms of “non-white” contract labour, brought into the white dominions as a convenience to the settlers, became an issue of great political consequence when Chinese inden¬ tured labour was brought to the South African gold mines. Apartheid can be traced to the ideas first articulated more systematically by the members of the RTM. For instance the RTM was unequivocal that they did not want to see Indians or Africans become permanent mem¬ bers of the ‘white dominions’. Kendle says they would have preferred to see the world divided between black and white areas, one in the temperate zone and the other in the tropical zone. This attitude, Kendle notes, was one the Milner Kindergarten had carried with them to South Africa, “and it was never really eradicated despite their wealth of experience and their moderated stance toward India. As late as 1952 Curtis was still advocating the creation of a black dominion to the north of South Africa to which all South African ‘natives’ could be moved” (ibid: 304). That is, apartheid’s fundamental idea that blacks and whites differ fundamental, and therefore cannot coexist in the same political space was not an Afrikaner Nationalist invention but an inven¬ tion of Milner’s so-called kindergarten. From the historical point of view, segregation, and later apartheid, have their origin in the policies first articulated in a systematic manner in the policies of Sir Theophelus Shepstone. Yet in the Liberal histo¬ riography of South Africa, with a few exceptions, we are often told that apartheid is either a consequence of the harsh frontier which the Boers confronted after they left the Cape in the 1830s or the result of the 547

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

fact that most of the ancestors of the Boers left Europe before the rise of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The influence of the Round Table Movement in the writing of imperial history is demonstrated in the 1961 book by R. Robinson and J. Gallagher: Africa and the Victorians. This book continues the tra¬ dition of refuting the Leninist concept of the history of colonial poli¬ cy of imperialism. They argue that all British colonial annexations in the 1880s were primarily for the defence of her old colonies, especial¬ ly India. Claiming that theories of economic imperialism explain noth¬ ing, Robinson and Gallagher argue that in Africa, British governments were not responding to a popular demand that they should preempt new sources of wealth. For these authors, the partitioning of Africa was touched off by events in Egypt and South Africa. At these strate¬ gic points an established system of control through influence alone which the late Victorians would have been as glad as their fathers to uphold had broken down. Egypt and South Africa were strategically important because of their position on routes to the east. Therefore the late Victorians were drawn into Africa in an increasingly desperate attempt to shore up old positions which seemed to be threatened. With the utmost reluctance — at least until Chamberlain’s day — Robinson and Gallagher argue, the British were driven to acquire the new empire to protect the old. In Egypt, Robinson and Gallagher’s thesis runs, the British were confronted with the collapse of the Khedivate regime which they feared would lead into bankruptcy and anarchy. The dilem¬ ma worsened as a result of the same threats in Turkey where, before the building of the Suez Canal, opposition to Russia by support of Turkey had been a standard British policy. After the Suez Canal was built, influence in Cairo was added to influence in Constantinople as necessary for the protection of the route to the east. As influence in Constantinople weakened, influence in Cairo became both more important and more difficult to maintain until finally the British entered Egypt in 1882. This argument, if nothing else, borders on fiction. If one studies British imperialism from 1866, when Disraeli made his famous speech in which he acknowledges imperial greatness as a worthy object_ British self-aggrandisement through imperial expansion would be per¬ suaded with great dedication from the 1990s onwards. With the RTM this dedication to expansion had assumed a religious fervour. In his Credo, Milner wrote:

548

The Round Table Movement

I am also an Imperialist; it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and its long supremacy at sea, has been to strike fresh roots in distant parts of the world. My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial limits. I am an imperialist not a Little Englander because I am a British race patriot...Great Britain is no longer the power in the world which it once was or, an isolation, capable of remaining a power at all. It is no longer even self-supporting. But the British Dominions as a whole are not only self-supporting; they are more nearly self-sufficient than any other political entity in the world...if they can be kept an entity (quoted Marlowe, 1976: 364). Of course, because Robinson and Gallagher exclude such evidence they can argue with a “straight face” that Britain did not enter on new impe¬ rial activity until the 1880s when external events forced her to do so (Cf. Harcourt 1980: 108). Hancock, in his Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, devotes many pages to the colonization of Southern Africa. His arguments and explanations anticipate later imperial histories, arguing that the British often reacted to events in the Cape over which it exercised minimal control. At a time when scholars had become used to thinking of nations as what lay within relatively fixed borders, Hancock introduced the moving frontiers. There were the frontiers of the traders and merchants, of the missionaries, of the planters and white settlers, of the colonial administrators on the spot, of the mil¬ itary strategists. The imperial bureaucracy and the British gov¬ ernment found itself drawn into southern Africa at times against its own will. The frontiers sometimes moved in step, some¬ times raced ahead of each other, sometimes blocked each other’s paths. (Tsokhas, 1990: 271). In this scenario the proverbial right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Needless to say, in South Africa, after the defeat of the Zulus at Ulundi (1879) and Majuba (1881), the British government found itself unable to resist the demands of expansive settlers. Their object was to wean the Boers of the colonies away from the leadership of those in the Transvaal and their chosen instrument was Cecil Rhodes. If expan549

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

sion did not take place under the aegis of the “benevolent” British colonies, it would take place under the brutal Boer republic, and if a strong, independent Boer state with access to the sea were set up, it would threaten the security of the Cape Colony and also of the longer, but more fundamentally important, route to India. Increasingly des¬ perate attempts to hold the settlers loyal to an imperial design creat¬ ed, as in Egypt, local strains; the whole design seemed at the point of collapse when the Transvaal gained new strength from the discovery of gold. British policy in West and East Africa was essentially a response to British needs in Egypt to make us believe that the discovery of dia¬ monds (1867) and gold (1886) had nothing to do with the wars of dispossession that culminated in the Boer War. Indeed this argument confirms that you don’t have to “lie” in the writing of history; all that you need to do is to leave out unwholesome facts. The use of the Boers as scape goats for British imperial adventures reminds one that: II by mischance you happen to become bespattered with mud on your way to a party, arriving dirty among a crowd of immac¬ ulate guests, it is a trifle embarrassing. If, however, another, or preferably many, ol the guests have suffered a similar mishap, you feel fine — which only goes to prove that appearances are relative. So it is in politics. You may be a dirty dog; but if some¬ one else can be shown up as a dirtier dog, you can shine with virtue, particularly in those papers supporting you party. The astute politician must, therefore, not only tart up his own pol¬ icy to make it look attractive, he must at the same time deni¬ grate all opposing policies, defaming, blackening the characters of their sponsors, casting doubt and more on their sanity, until the public regard him as the one man who is indispensable because he stands firm between them and a dangerous, mali¬ cious bunch of half-wits — a sort of parliamentary St. George on Rolls-Royce back, horses being so out of date (Culwick 1963:45). Colin Webb’s essay (1969: 302-03), “Great Britain and the Zulu People, 1879-1887,” is also typical — it echoes the theoretical for¬ mulation of the Round Table tradition. Following Hancock he writes that: Mono-causal theories ol imperialism no longer command the 550

The Round Table Movement

respect which once they did, for too many exceptions have been found, by far, to prove any general rule. While some empires were a source of pride and joy, others were reluctantly acquired; and in many cases, though not in all, the desire for land, raw materials and markets played little part in calculations of the statesmen who pegged out colonial claims. British policy in Zululand during the year 1879-87 was an expression of such a reluctance to expand. If one asked the historians of the Round Table tradition which factor or factors in Britain’s imperial history predominated or exercised a major influence, one will find in their historical narratives sufficient support for any opinion on the subject. Maybe nothing exercised any influence over anything else, each “factor” following the Golden Rule: live and let live! Robinson, Gallagher, and Webb, of course, beg the question. No one according to Brewer (1980: 2) ever argues, ....nor has any sane Marxist ever argued, that every incident in the history of empire can be explained in directly economic terms. Economic interests are filtered through a political pro¬ cess, policies are implemented by a complex state apparatus, and the whole system generates its own momentum. Much of the history of the British empire, for example, pivots on the need to safeguard the route to India. British policy in, say, the Mediterranean should not be explained in terms of the eco¬ nomic gains to be made in that area alone, but in terms of the maintenance of the empire as a whole. The overall drive to imperial expansion must be explained as one element in the whole process of capitalist development. Equally, the creation of formal empires, under a single flag and a single political authority, is only a part of the story, and perhaps not the most important part. Formal political independence, with a flag, an airline and a seat at the UN, does not guarantee real equality, though it may be a necessary precondition for real indepen¬ dence and development. Some countries have never been for¬ mally annexed, and most Latin American states have been formally independent for a century and a half, but they have been drawn into a system of inequality, exploitation and dom¬ inance almost as deeply as have areas subjected to direct colo-

551

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

nial rule. Underdeveloped countries still participate on very unequal terms in a world system of trade and investment. The picture, therefore, of Britain forced to acquire an empire reluc tantly proves how well the Round Table Movement continues to influ ence historical scholarship of the empire. With the rise of their school of historiography the state was set for a misconceived debate on imperialism to be carried on all around the world. On one side of the debate stood the straw man called the theory of economic imperialism (or sometimes the economic theory of imperialism)....On the other side of the debate stood a much smaller, more select band of critics. Within the British Commonwealth they were mostly academ¬ ic historians, many of whom had early contacts with the Round Table movement....Their studies basically confirmed the pic¬ ture drawn before the academic study of the British Empire had begun, a picture of empire spreading for a variety of rea¬ sons. They objected to what they understood to be the theo¬ ry of economic imperialism for two reasons. First, they quite genuinely believed it to be wildly at variance with known facts. Second, they knew it to be propagated by ideologues opposed to the liberal values they themselves espoused. Belonging to an empirical tradition in historiography, they instinctively dis¬ trusted explicit theory and ideology. For this very reason they avoided the close study of development of theories of imperi¬ alism in the twentieth century which would have revealed to them that they had entered into a misconceived debate. Moreover, it is doubtful whether they would have welcomed that discovery (Etherington, 1984: 223-25). In the apologetic historiography of the Round Table type which ignores the economic dimension of British imperialism, there is no place for the savage exploitation of African labour and the ruthless plunder of their land that goes back to the slave trade, let alone the discussion of racism and ideology which emerged to justify the exploita¬ tion and oppression of African people. It is rather striking that in the recent debates between liberals and neo-Marxists, except for the essay on Lord Milner by Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (“Lord Milner and the South African State,” 1979), there is almost total silence on personalities like Rhodes, Chamberlain, 552

The Round Table Movement

Buchan, Lord Selborne, Smuts and the like. In 1975 John E. Kendle’s The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union was published, and in 1986 Leonie Foster’s High Hopes: The Men and Motives of the Round Table about the Australian group came out. As yet, there is no South African study of the Round Table Movement, even though the move¬ ment was born in South Africa and it was Rhodes’s patronage that made the movement possible. Nimocks (1968: vii) underlines this fact about Lord Milner’s Kindergarten: Drawn to South Africa during and after the Boer War to serve under Milner in the reconstruction of the two former Boer republics, they remained after the restoration of self-govern¬ ment in 1906 to work for Milner’s goal of a united South Africa loyal to the British Empire. With the creation of the Union in 1909 the members of the group turned their attention to a much greater goal. Using methods perfected in the drive to unify South Africa and funds provided by friends of their patron Lord Milner, they organised a movement to achieve a similar sort of organic unity for the whole Empire. This movement — the round table movement — sought to establish an imperial government responsible to all the Dominions as well as to Great Britain, a government having control over matters of common interest to the otherwise independent member nations. The importance of the RTM in the developments in Southern Africa before and after the creation of the Union of South Africa cannot be doubted: They had their regular Moots. They formed Closer Union Societies throughout white South Africa and an Association of Closer Union Societies, which met periodically. In December 1908 Kerr and Curtis started a monthly review called The State, financed by Abe Bailey and printed in English and Dutch, for circulation through South Africa, putting the case for unity. During the sittings of the Convention, Brand and Duncan worked closely with Smuts hammering out the details of the draft Constitution. This was important from the Imperial point of view, since it was the details, and particularly the franchise conditions, which would determine whether or not the door was left open for eventual anglicisation. Smuts was ‘ the prin¬ cipal architect of the South African Constitution’ and it was 553

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

important for the Kindergarten to build bridges to him. This they appear to have done, and it was mainly due to Smuts, in alliance with the Transvaal Progressives, that amendments to the draft Constitution put forward by the Cape Colony, which would have had the effect of gossly over-weighting the rural vote were defeated. The passing of the South Africa Act in August 1909 meant that the Kindergarten had achieved their immediate political objec¬ tive. It also meant that most of those who were still in Government service had worked themselves out of jobs (Marlowe, 1976: 208). I have already discussed above how in order to fulfill the duty to the Anglo-Saxon race, Rhodes felt that it was necessary first to form an organization prepared to shoulder the burden of empire. After recall¬ ing how the Roman Church utilizes enthusiasm, he suggested the for¬ mation of a kind of secular Church for the extension of the British Empire which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea only. May be the fact that the members of this fraternity were placed at “our” universities and “our” schools to watch the English youth passing through their hands succeeded beyond Rhodes’ expectation in South Africa. The premise from which Rhodes starts out was that the AngloSaxons “are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.” “Just fancy” he said “those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable spec¬ imens of human beings, what an alteration there would be if they were brought under the Anglo-Saxon influence.” “Just fancy, too,” he went on, “what a difference it would have made to America to have remained an English colony: great as they have become, how infinitely greater they would have been with the softening and elating influence of English rules.” But he consoles himself with the thought that there remains awaiting benign Anglo-Saxon attention the rest of the world. “We know the size of the world,” he wrote “we know the total extend. Africa is still lying ready for us. It is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best, the most human, most hon¬ ourable race the world possesses” (Tidrick, 1990: 49).

554

The Round Table Movement

Fanciful as the idea might sound today at the time and especially in the hands of such advisers as Lord Rothschild, the secret society which was the heart of the will, transformed itself into the Rhodes scholarship scheme. Since the scholarship became a reality, there has never been a shortage of men to avail themselves of it. Even more the mission was to be carried by “a society composed of men of strong convictions and of great wealth, which would do for the unity of the English-speaking race what the society of Jesus did for the Catholic Church immediately after the Reformation” (ibid: 63). H. G. Wells (1934: 650) says that he regrets that he never met Mr. Rhodes. He would have liked to have known more about the opera¬ tions of his cerebral hemispheres, as they rolled about South Africa: “Much the same ideas that were running through my brain round about 1900, of a great English-speaking English-thinking synthesis, leading mankind by sheer force of numbers, wealth, equipment and scope, to a progressive unity, must have been running through his brain also.” He was certainly no narrow worshipper of the Union Jack, no object devotee of the dear Queen Empress. The institution of the Rhodes scholarships which transcended any existing political boundaries and aimed plainly at a sort of common understanding and co-operation between all the ‘Nordic’ peoples — he was at just about the level of ethno¬ logical understanding to believe in ‘Nordic’ superiority — indi¬ cates a real greatness of intention, though warped by prejudices and uncritical assumptions (ibid). Rhodes was not the only one who espoused the ideas of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic supremacy. Chamberlain also believed that .’’...the char¬ acter, the main character of the Teutonic race differs very slightly from the character of the Anglo-Saxon...and if the union between England and America is a powerful factor in the course of world peace, a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, will be a still more potent influence in the future of the world.” (quoted Garvin 1934: 508). The Round Table Movement, founded in 1909 was, therefore the closest parallel to Rhodes’s wishes. It was built with funds he generat¬ ed, as he put it with his customary lack of hypocrisy, “out of the Kaffir’s stomach.” All this is simply to say that if there is anybody whose vision and

555

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

actions shaped Southern Africa, it was Rhodes and Milner’s Kindergarten. The policies they pursued and put into practice had farreaching consequences. Yet in recent South African historiography there is a conspiracy of silence on the men and their policies. Why? we may ask. Is it because the current generation of scholars are embar¬ rassed by what their benefactors stood for?

Conclusions In rethinking the history of imperialism and its architects like Rhodes and the RTM, a beneficiary of his largeness, I am not just looking at their past doings, but I am trying to understand the present. I am try¬ ing to understand their legacy from the standpoint of suffering of our people who were simply considered the “subject races” and therefore only fit to labor and create wealth for the settlers. In the process they were left out of the “benefits” of so-called Western civilisation. The legacy of imperialism is an important challenge for all of us who live in societies that are characterised by the extraordinary affluence of the white settlers and abysmal poverty of our people. How do we redress the economic imbalances? It is my belief that there can be no meaningful understanding of our condition outside the context of those social policies which impe¬ rialism implemented to shape our sub-continent. The structures which Rhodes, Milner and other imperialists put into place continue to shape the destiny of the economies of our region. The control of the Highlands by white settlers who relegated our people to the lowlands is still a social and economic reality of great consequence. Nature does not create “rich and poor” nor does it create “superi¬ or and inferior” races. All these institutionalised categories are created by human action. We need to know, how or what kind of a culture can honour men who created such havoc in the world with royal titles and have their names associated with scholastic excellence. We need to know that, as we prepare for the next century — if we want the twenty first century to be different, if we want it to be a century not made of “supe¬ rior” and “subject races,” of “rich and poor,” “developed and under¬ developed, superior males and inferior females” — that is, if we want a century where the human race can be truly human; we need to redress the imbalances that were deliberately created by imperialism.

556

Notes

Foreword 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Pixley ka Isaka Seme, “The Regeneration of Africa”, Royal African Society (London) 5 (1905-6): 404-8 [my emphasis]. The essay was in effect calling for the creation and invention of African modernities. Seme’s essay was sub¬ sequently reprinted in a book of essays — The Black Man: The Father of Civilization, James Morris Webb, ed. (Seattle, 1910) — published in the memory of Paul Laurence Dunbar, that included W. E. B. DuBois’ “Education and Civilization”, Bishop H. M. Turner’s “The Black Man” and Prof. W. S. Scarborough’s “Race Integrity.” A. M. Lembede, “An African Academy of Art and Science”, Inkundela ya Bantu 31 (July 1947). This call was governed by the realization on his part that without epistemological institutions the construction of African moder¬ nities would be incomplete. Editorial [Jordan K. Ngubane], “African Academy of Arts”, ibid. X [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Academy of Arts and Research”, llanga lase Natal, 10 September 1949. cf., The Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo (1903-56): South Africa in the Modern World (forthcoming, 1998), with a Foreword by Lewis Nkosi, and an Afterword by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Benedict Wallet Vilakazi held the essays of H. I. E. Dhlomo in high reverence: “Among contemporary Nguni writers Dhlomo is the only one who has achieved success himself as a literary critic, and his essays published in the llanga lase Natal show maturity of treat¬ ment...I have selected Dhlomo for special comment, because he belongs to pure literature as distinguished from applied literature, to which all other Nguni writers who employ English belong”. (The Oral and Written Literature in Nguni, doctoral dissertation, University ofWitwatersrand, 1946, p. 279, Vilakazi’s emphasis). East African Journal, December 1968. This author still remembers reading this breakthrough and electrifying essay, while in Eligh School in Kenya near¬ ly thirty years ago on the same month of its appearance. Upon conveying this

Towards a Critical African Sociology: Selected Essays

impression in a private conversation with Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane while he was attending the 1995 American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, Magubane indicated that the inspiration behind it was the first mil¬ itary encounter in 1967 between Umkhonto We Sizwe, the military force of the ANC and the military wing of ZAPU on the one side, and the combined South African and Rhodesian military forces in Wankie, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). 7.

Magubane’s books. The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa (1979), Proletarianization and Class Struggle in Africa (edited together with Nzongola-Ntalaja, 1983), The Ties that Bind Afro-Americans and Africa (1987), Whither South Africa? (edited with Ibbo Mandaza, 1988), From Soweto to Uitenhage (1989), and The Making Of A Racist State (1996) will be considered in detail elsewhere.

8.

Editor [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Bantu Culture and Expression”, Ilanga lase Natal, July 24, 1948; “Personal and Cultural Achievement”, Ilanga lase Natal, 14 August 1948.

9.

It is clear from the nature of referencing in the voluminous writings of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane that Frantz Fanon within the context of the Algerian Revolution and Amilcar Cabral within the Guinean Revolution were the founders of African Marxism. For some inexplicable reasons Belinda Bozzoli has argued that African Marxism was founded by white radical South African scholars working in British Universities [“Intellectuals, Audiences and Histories: South African Experiences, 1978-1988”, Radical History Review, 46/7 (January 1990): 237-263], This was the Special Issue of the journal called: “History from South Africa”. Although the essay was somewhat mod¬ ified on the occasion of the publication of the Special Issue in a book form, the incorrect thesis itself was retained: History From South Africa, Joshua Brown, Patrick Manning, Karin Shapiro, Jon Weiner, Belinda Bozzoli, Peter Delius, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 10. One of the first intellectual appreciations of the work of Cabral was written by Bernard Magubane: “Amilcar Cabral: The Evolution of a Revolutionary Thought: A Review”, Ufahamu. 11. Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, The Oral and Writteti literature in Nauni op cit 283-5. 12. Magubane beginning with “Crisis in African Sociology” (1968); and Ngugi wa Thiong’o starting with “Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People” (1966), In Homecoming (London: Heinemann, 1972). 13. In a long essay we examine, among other things, how the New African intel¬ lectuals have theorized the nature of the modernist city: “The TransAtlantic Connections of the New African Movement”, in United States and South Africa: A Discourse on Modernity, Ntongela Masilela, ed., forthcoming, Africa World Press, 1998. 14. Mazasi Kunene, “Feet of Men”, Zulu Poems, (New York: African Publishing Corporation, 1970), 46. 15. Albert T. Nzula, “The Struggles of the Negro Toilers in South Africa”, The Negro Worker, vol. 5, no. 2-3, (1935) pp. 4, 5, 6, 10.

558

Notes

16. Govan Mbeki, “The Transkei Tragedy: A Study in the Bantu Authorities Act”, Liberation, no. 21 (September), no. 22 (November 1956), no. 23 (February), no. 24 (April 1957). The importance of this essay is indicated by the fact that it was the longest published ever, in the decade long history of this extraordinary political review. The essay and Nelson Mandela’s were arguably the most important documents published by Liberation: “American Imperialism: A New Menace in Africa”, no. 30 (March 1958). 17. Govan Mbeki, ibid. 18. In a grotesque formulation, which in effect propagates white supremacist ideas, the Swedish Marxist, Goran Therborn, in a Marxist journal, seriously argues that it was white South Africans in the ANC during the exile period who formulated the strategy that liberated South Africa: “Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism”, New Left Review, 215 (January-February 1996), p. 78. On sec¬ ond thought, here is the whole paragraph of outrageous claims, which is a distortion and orientalizing of contemporary African intellectual history: Black African culture, very distant from the Marxian dialectic of modernity has not (yet) been able to sustain any significant Marxist intelligentsia. The most important Marxist intellectuals of Africa tend to be non-blacks, like Samir Amin, and Egyptian Dakar-based development economist of world fame; the two East African class analysts of politics and law of Indian descent, Mahmood Mamdani and Issa Shivji; and the core leadership of the politically sophisti¬ cated South African Communist Party—the think tank of the ANC—who are mainly white. The qualifiers cannot possibly mitigate the disaster of such words. The Editorial Board of New Left Review (consisting, among others, of Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Mike Davis, Mike Sprinkler) should not have allowed such ignorant and racist ideas to appear on the pages of this great journal. Perhaps this is a loss of nerve since 1989. Limiting myself only to South Africa: There have been/and there are many “significant [African] Marxist intelligentsia”: Albert Nzula who died in his early thirties and was buried in Moscow in the 1930s; L. B. Tabata, was a leader of the Trotskyist movement, Non-European Unity Movement; A.C. Jordan, a great African novelist and literary scholar who wrote a great Xhosa novel, In