Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker 0798302860, 9780798302869, 9780798303354

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Archie Mafeje Scholar, Activist and Thinker Dani W Nabudere

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Archie Mafeje Scholar, Activist and Thinker First published in 2011 by the Africa Institute of South Africa PO Box 630 Pretoria 0001 South Africa ISBN-13: 978-0-7983-0286-9 © Copyright Africa Institute of South Africa 2011. No part of this paper may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright owner. To copy any part of this publication, you may contact DALRO for information and copyright clearance. Any unauthorised copying could lead to civil liability and/or criminal sanctions.

Telephone: 086 12 DALRO (from within South Africa); +27 (0)11 712-8000 Telefax: +27 (0)11 403-9094 Postal Address: P O Box 31627, Braamfontein, 2017, South Africa www.dalro.co.za Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at in all occasional papers are those of the authors and should not necessarily be attributed to the Africa Institute of South Africa. Project Manager: Nonjabulo Mabuza Design and Layout by Future pre-press, Pretoria. Cover design by Future pre-press, Pretoria. Copy-editor: Alison Ziki Proofreader: Christine de Nobrega The Africa Institute of South Africa is a think tank and research organisation, focusing on political, socio-economic, international and development issues in contemporary Africa. The Institute conducts research, publishes books, monographs and a quarterly journal, and holds regular seminars on issues of topical interest. It is also home to one of the best library and documentation centres world-wide, with materials on every African country. For more information, contact the Africa Institute at PO Box 630, Pretoria 0001, South Africa; email ai@ ai.org.za; or visit our website at http://www.ai.org.za

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Professor Dani W Nabudere Executive Director/Principal, Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute now being constituted into the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University, Mbale, Uganda.

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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Who is Archie Mafeje? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Mafeje’s ideological and philosophical orientations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The critique of anthropology and alterity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 The study of rural African society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Culture as the ‘missing link’ in African development . . . . . . . . . . . 30 The issue of ‘social formations’ of African society . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Mafeje’s attempts to endogenise and deconstruct knowledge production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 The African post-colonial states and the African political elite . . . 57 Mafeje and African philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 The Interlacustrine Kingdoms as ‘social formations’ . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Mafeje – The South African radical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Cosmology, epistemology and academic disciplines . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

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Introduction In many ways, Archie Mafeje was one of the African intellectual pathfinders. He contributed immensely to the African peoples’ search for self-understanding, self-determination and political emancipation as they struggled against alienation and misrepresentation. He did this through his role as an African scholar, intellectual, thinker and academic. In this role, Mafeje did an excellent job and left a heritage which future young scholars and thinkers will have to complete. His attempts in this direction were not single-handed. He was one among many intellectuals who defended Africa’s ‘civilisational’ achievements and succeeded in asserting and defending the African identity and Africanity. The defender of the African role as the original occupiers of the Cradle of Humankind, and hence the originators of civilisation, was the great African scholar and researcher Professor Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal. He made his defence in his various books, especially in African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality, which he published in 1974. The other outstanding scholars included Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo of Burkina-Faso, whose research in African history became part of the UNESCO research project on the ‘General History of Africa’. He was one of the authors, and he edited the first volume. The European enslavement and colonisation of Africa was about the control of knowledge about Africa. Africa became the battleground for the production of knowledge regarding Africa and the rest of the world, for it became apparent that the determination by imperialist powers to gain control over African human and natural resources was, at grassroots level, a struggle for political power and control over the human minds they tried to colonise. It was a struggle by the imperialist ‘self’ to dominate the colonised ‘other’, the ‘other’ in this case being the Africans and other oppressed peoples of the world. The Palestinian academic, Edward Said, once observed that when the British ruling class tried to assume political power over Egypt, it did so by first establishing British ‘knowledge of Egypt’. He argued that initially the British were not principally concerned with military or economic power but rather with ‘their knowledge of the Orients’, including Egypt, because this was conceived to be a form of power. Their objective was to have sufficient knowledge about the ‘distant other’ in order to be able ‘to

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dominate it and (exert) authority over it’. This, in effect, meant denying autonomy of knowledge over the object of domination since to do so would have recognised the existence of knowledge of the object over itself. The object’s existence could only be recognised, in the words of the colonial representatives, ‘in as much as we know it’. Therefore, in recognising the academic and intellectual contribution of Archie Mafeje and his political role in trying to change that perception of ‘the other’, we also celebrate the African peoples’ struggle for their identity, self-knowledge, self-control and self-emancipation, without which the struggles of Africa’s intellectuals would have been in vain. This struggle in the field of knowledge will continue until Africa and humanity as a whole are fully emancipated from the remnants of Euro-centricity and Western intellectual dominance against which Mafeje fought so hard. Therefore, this monograph will identify key issues affecting the theoretical and practical state of the social sciences and the humanities as Mafeje perceived them, both at the level of academia and the level of political activism. In other words, to understand Mafeje and his academic and intellectual contributions, a blueprint of his academic accomplishments must be combined with his political thought and his activism, both in academia and in the political field. In short, his roles as a thinker and as an activist are examined. This is essential if one is to highlight the importance of social science research within the socio-political transformation of Africa. Indeed, it is here that we begin the journey of understanding Mafeje’s contribution to the African academic and political struggles. In doing this, we will find that although Mafeje was born in South Africa, he came to see himself more as a Pan-African and was more at home in Egypt than in South Africa. Kwesi Prah, who knew Mafeje for over two decades, has described him as a cosmopolitan with a vibrant and sublime cosmopolitanism ‘that was rare’, and at the same time someone with ‘almost effortless worldliness’.1 His academic record seems to prove that.

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Who is Archie Mafeje? Archibald Monwabisi Mafeje (or ‘Archie’ as he was fondly referred to) was born in the Eastern Cape, South Africa on 30 March 1936. He died in Pretoria two days before his 71st birthday on 28 March 2007. At the time of his death, Mafeje’s academic accomplishments had been recognised by CODESRIA, when in 2003 he was honoured as a life member of this continental social research organisation. He had served as its president and in 2001 had been made a member of its Scientific Committee. He remained on this committee until his death. In a special issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin, to which Mafeje had contributed many articles during his lifetime, he was praised by many contributors who paid homage to him as a ‘giant’ that had passed on. The special issue was entitled ‘Archie Mafeje: A Giant Has Moved On’. Kwesi Prah of the Centre for Advanced African Studies in Cape Town referred to him as a ‘Vignette’ and a ‘vibrant ... citizen of the world’;2 Katherine Salahi of Oxford University, who had met Mafeje in Cambridge during 1964, described him as a ‘Renaissance man’;3 the editorial written by Adebayo Olukoshi, the executive director of CODESRIA and Francis Nyamnjoh, the head of publications of CODESRIA, described Mafeje as ‘the quintessential personality of science’.4 Issa Shivji called him ‘a man of intellectual rigour and integrity’.5 This demonstrates the high regard of Mafeje held by those who knew him and had worked with him. Mafeje was also known as someone who kept his word. As the editors of the special issue described him, quoting John Sharp who knew him very well: ‘Archie was a scholar who spoke the truth, unfailingly, to power; and who over the years carefully worked out how best to support his political convictions by means of the research he did.’6 In ‘speaking truth to power’, Mafeje developed the counter-power of mastering the art of hard and uncompromising intellectual argument, ‘without resort to the personal animosity or the denial of respect for those with whom he came to argue’.7 All these facts emerge from this study, which shows Mafeje as a dedicated scholar and a convinced Pan-Africanist who came to defend his convictions without falling prey to the opportunism that afflicted many an African scholar in their search for prestige, which Mafeje dismissed as ‘petit-bourgeois’ opportunism.

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Mafeje received his undergraduate education in Cape Town, where he obtained a BSc degree in Biology from the University of Cape Town (UCT). He followed this with a BA degree in Anthropology, with majors in Social Anthropology and Psychology. He later obtained a Masters degree in the same discipline, Anthropology, under the supervision of Professor Monica Wilson. He was appointed senior lecturer at UCT, but when his appointment was reversed at the insistence of the then apartheid regime, he left the country for Cambridge University in England where he completed his PhD in Anthropology and later became an assistant lecturer at that university. Mafeje’s first academic years and political activism have to be examined within this period of growth. Mafeje joined Professor Wilson who, as early as 1961, had embarked on a field research project involving the Langa Township, which was aimed at studying the lives of its inhabitants. Wilson considered himself an ‘insider’ since he spoke Xhosa as his mother tongue, but also because he was politically involved within the township. According to John Sharp, Mafeje supplied materials on these issues in abundance, as shown by the letters he exchanged with Professor Wilson and the relevant parts of the book they eventually edited together. His fieldwork provided Wilson with ‘much more ethnographic detail with which to work than his predecessor had managed’.8 This fieldwork turned out to have contributed to his political awakening and activism. This conclusion by John Sharp reinforces the fact that Mafeje’s field research in the Langa Township was very much connected to his developing a consistent political view of the consequences of the research and its political implications for South Africa and, indeed, the entire African continent. At an academic level, Mafeje indicated to Wilson that social anthropology was his ‘calling’ and ‘chosen field’ and wrote to Wilson that ‘there is nothing I enjoy more than working on the Langa study’.9 This view of Mafeje seems to have continued to the very end. He was twentyfour years old when he wrote this and almost fifty years later, he seems to have stuck to this statement despite the struggle against colonial functional anthropology that he had fought so hard against. He remained an anthropologist in the self-created epistemology of ethnography that he ended with in his major work in 1991, which will be examined later. In summary, Mafeje’s study of the ‘home boys’ and the middle class in the Langa Township led him to clearly understand the class character of the South African society. Later, with other studies he completed on the Transkei mission station, he reached the conclusion that the ‘Red Pagan’ boys at the mission station, much like the ‘home boys’ in the Langa

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Township, were conscious and proud of their paganism and identity, and were therefore able to resist succumbing to the self-alienation of colonial capitalism. This was not the case with the self-alienation he saw among the Christian middle class in these two locations. Mafeje also observed that these two groups of youths in the Langa Township and the Transkei stood out in sharp contrast to the ‘defensive’ pagans of the outlying settlements he had studied, who in the absence of an ‘in-their-faces antagonist’ were merely waiting disconsolately for the tidal wave of ‘Western’ civilisation to ‘break over them’.10 In a later chapter that he wrote in contribution to the appreciation of Monica Wilson’s work, Mafeje, according to Sharp, ‘succeeded in introducing many of the principles of his political activism into his re-consideration of the Langa field material’: By 1975 he had clearly worked out how to formulate academic questions that were firmly grounded in his political convictions, and he did this by showing that some of the people in Langa, and indeed also (and perhaps particularly) in the Transkei, came close to sharing his understanding that a social order grounded on racial capitalism – not simply ‘white domination’– constituted the major problem facing black South Africans.11

This self-reflection enabled Mafeje to raise some fundamental questions concerning the alienated African: ‘Does “social change” or “being civilised” mean, unambiguously, being assimilated into the white middle-class cosmic view? What will it take for that view to transcend itself?’12 Those questions remained fundamental to Mafeje’s political and academic activism, and later came to haunt him as he himself failed to transcend the epistemological foundations of this ontology. Sharp, therefore, regarded 1975 as marking Mafeje’s maturation from the Langa and Transkei studies into his own selfconsciousness as to the way forward. Sharp attributed Mafeje’s contribution to the book Religion and Social Change (1975) as making that break that led him to a critical self-reflection, which made it possible for him to ‘speak truth to power effectively’. This level required ‘hard and uncompromising intellectual argument’, which did not require personal animosity towards, or denial of respect for those with whom one was arguing. The third lesson Sharp drew was that the act of ‘speaking truth to power’ was most effective, in the case of the anthropologist, ‘when it is grounded in a sophisticated understanding of one’s own ethnography’.

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This, according to Sharp, explained why Mafeje always insisted on ethnographic inquiries, ‘even when, in later years, he explicitly turned his back on the notion that he was an anthropologist’. Sharp argued that what Mafeje objected to about anthropology was not its method of research or the evidence that could be produced by careful participant observation: Even at his most critical level he took care to endorse the value of this form of inquiry relative to others. In this respect, one may say, he remained faithful to Wilson’s injunction that any attempt into understanding the circumstances of people in Africa required first-hand inquiry into what they made of these circumstances themselves.13

What Mafeje objected to, added Sharp, was an anthropology in which particular epistemological assumptions, which he characterised as Western, ‘were allowed to overwhelm whatever it was that people on the ground had to say about the conditions in which they found themselves’.14 In short, he objected to Western orthodoxy and to anthropology insofar as it represented that orthodoxy, but he seemed to have decided that as long as one stuck to the facts discovered, one could still explore the use of anthropology for one’s own purposes.

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Mafeje’s ideological and philosophical orientations As previously noted, Archie Mafeje was a very independent Pan-Africanist and cosmopolitan individual who sought to understand the world at a global level in order to locate Africa within that tapestry. Kwesi Prah observed that Mafeje’s cosmopolitanism was matched by a fervent Africanism and an outstandingly critical view of ‘political double-speak and other shortcomings of the African political elite’. However, he added, this did not endear him to many of the African National Congress (ANC) leadership.15 As pointed out earlier, Mafeje’s original political attraction was towards the Unity Movement in Cape Town. It was here that he built up his political activism and acceptance of Marxist ideas. Sharp quoted Kayser and Adhikari when he pointed out that already by the 1950s, Mafeje was associated with the Society of Young Africans (SOYA), a young organisation affiliated to the All African Convention (AAC). The AAC had been formed in the 1930s to mobilise popular opposition to Hertzog’s segregationist bills. The ACC had joined forces with the other movements in the 1940s to form the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), which positioned itself to the left of the ANC at the time, ‘insofar as it took an avowedly non-racial stance from the outset, and envisaged struggle for freedom that would necessarily involve a socialist revolution in the wake of the national liberation’.16 These two authors noted that the Cape Peninsula branch of SOYA had grown to at least 100 members by the end of the 1950s, drawn from working youth in the city’s townships and students at tertiary institutions such as the UCT. It is therefore likely that Mafeje was known to some of Langa’s younger residents in this capacity, although ‘he may have sought not to draw too much attention to his link with SOYA when dealing with the relatively large number of middle-class … in the township, who were more likely … to have aligned with the ANC’.17 At the same time, this link with SOYA stood him in good stead with the migrant workers or ‘the home boys’ who resided in the ‘barracks’ of the township and would have given him a better ‘insider’ status than Wilson had imagined. In fact, it is these political developments that became part of

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the Sharpeville shootings and the Langa Township uprisings, which resulted in the march of some 30 000 people on Cape Town in March, 1960. The NEM decided to launch another political organisation namely African Peoples’ Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), which was formed at a secret meeting in the Cape Peninsula in January, 1961. Although not related to Mafeje’s field research as such, these activities provided the political environment in which Mafeje worked. The APDUSA was intended to realise NEUM’s objective of a non-racial struggle to overthrow white supremacy and achieve national liberation as a prelude to the socialist revolution. APDUSA, therefore, set out to forge an alliance between the urban proletariat and the rural ‘peasantry’ to achieve this end, and thereby made the issue of land redistribution in the countryside central to the programme. This political background formed the political alliances that Mafeje was to pursue during his student days and it reveals a certain political consistence in his political life. Nevertheless, Sharp emphasised that Mafeje could not, even if he had wanted to do so, discuss the finer points of the APDUSA programme in his reports to Wilson, because it had not been elaborated until after the National Conference held in 1962.18 Yet, according to Sharp the general thrust of the programme, and in particular its focus on the migrant workers as the bridge between the proletariat and the peasantry, ‘seem evident in the interest Mafeje took in the circumstances of the residents of the Langa barracks, and the detailed case histories of the “home boys” groupings he passed to Wilson’.19 What emerges from these early episodes is that Mafeje was fully committed to the African cause. When he eventually contributed to the writing of the final book manuscript of the Langa study, Mafeje objected seriously to his mentors’ and supervisors’ reference to Noni Jabavu’s book Drawn in Colour (1960) about Uganda as ‘admirable’. He wanted to know from Wilson what was so admirable about the book, especially when the book had, in a condescending manner, referred to the Uganda people as docile. He regarded Jabavu’s book as riddled with ‘sentimentalism’ and its condescending attitude as ‘simply nauseating’. Wilson dropped the remark and placed her reference to the book in a footnote. This demonstrated that Wilson understood and respected Mafeje’s political sensitivities. This may also indicate that Mafeje had himself graduated in spirit from being a ‘cadre’ of the Unity Movement to becoming an Africanist intellectual. Deirdre Levinson, in his homage to Mafeje, pointed out that in 1957, when he was fresh from university in the UK, he proceeded to Cape Town ‘to join the struggle there’, and she found Mafeje deep in Unity Movement politics

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from wherein she got acquainted with him. She says that Mafeje, then in his twenties, was already a ‘seasoned Unity cadre’ who also believed in a ‘Socialist Africa’ and who could not be ‘shaken from his stand’.20 Mafeje himself, in different articles, referred to the work of the Unity Movement and at one point regarded its cadres as having for years ‘boasted of being the best theoretically trained within the Black liberation movement’. At the same time, Mafeje observed that since its formation the New Unity Movement, which had replaced the earlier Unity Movement, had failed to ‘come up with new theoretical insights or forms of organisation which are improvements on the status ante’.21 All this suggests that Mafeje was frustrated with the political line of the Unity Movement, as well as with that of the New Unity Movement, and had decided to concentrate on his academic activism as an Africanist. Indeed, he was very defensive whenever he was referred to as having ‘Trotskyite tendencies’. In an article written in Harare, Zimbabwe, where he was resident in exile, he referred to Trotsky’s attitude towards the peasantry as a potentially revolutionary class in countries which were under imperialist domination. This, Mafeje pointed out, reflected a Euro-centric view point, proletarianism and a one-sided view of the role of the peasantry in the revolution. He argued that ‘I could not be accused even by my worst detractors of having Trotskyite inclinations’. He continued: ‘If anything, I could accuse those who spoke so of imposing on me European stereotypes‘, and he called them ‘Stalinist’.22 Indeed, the author remembers a day in 1992 when he had invited Mafeje for lunch and had picked up a conversation in which he politely referred to Mafeje’s alleged support for Trotskyism. Mafeje quickly reacted by calling him ‘cantankerous’! ‘I realised I had made a mistake since he was my guest and quickly backed off from the conversation,’ he said. In his two articles in CODESRIA on Africanity, Mafeje refers to Africanity as being a ‘Combative Ontology’.23 He pointed out that his article was inspired by a book edited by William Martin and Michael West entitled Out of One, Many Africans (1999), in which the concept of Afro-centricity and Africanity were distinguished. Mafeje took advantage of this exposition on the topic to draw a line between the ontologies of the Africans on the African continent and the people of African descent in the Diaspora. In his book, Michael West had predicted the ‘demise’ of Africanity and the emergence of Afro-centricity in its place. Mafeje reacted that Afro-centricity could not replace Africanity because Africanity was the basis of African ontology, and since people cannot exist outside of their history Africanity

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was soundly based in the African ontological condition. In Mafeje’s view, ‘it is the historical juncture which defines us socially and intellectually’ and therefore at this point African scholars had to clarify their situation ‘so as to indicate what might be the underpinnings of the eagerly awaited African renaissance’.24 Mafeje went on to claim that Afro-centricity could be regarded as a methodological requirement for decolonising knowledge in Africa or as an antidote to Euro-centricity through which knowledge about Africa could be filtered. It was nothing more than a demand that African scholars should study their society from the inside and cease to be purveyors of alienated intellectual discourse. But Mafeje went further to say that unlike Afrocentricity, Africanity ‘has an emotive force’ whose connotations were ontological and, therefore, exclusivist. This was to be expected because ‘its ontology is determined by prior existing exclusivist ontologies, such as white racist categorisations and supremacist European self-identities in particular’. These claims insinuated that ‘blacks’ were inherently inferior and hence ‘blacks’ in the New World, especially, felt the need to prove themselves and thus produced a ‘vindicationalist’ intellectual tradition.25 But this historical background would not ‘suffice’ for ordinary Africans who were not vindicationalists ‘but firmly believe that they, as a people, are endowed with greater human qualities than the whites’. In Bantu languages, the collective abstract noun for describing this is Ubuntu, which cannot be effectively translated into English (carelessly translated it comes out as ‘humanity’ which is a generic term with no social-cultural connotations). He went on: Highest among these qualities are human sympathy, willingness to share, and forgiveness. It is interesting that during his African tour His Holiness, the Pope John Paul II, acknowledged the same revelation (probably with South Africa in mind) for which he specifically commended and blessed the Africans.26

Mafeje went further to try to link this human quality to the African ontology by pointing out that the quality was a ‘reflexive dialogue’, which made it easy for ordinary Africans to make a distinction between themselves and others ‘without feeling the need to develop it into a discourse’. However, in the hands of modern black intellectuals, Africanity, which has Ubuntu at its basis, ‘has been developed into something much bigger than simply a state of social and spiritual being’. It has become a ‘pervasive ontology that straddles space and time’. Instead of being limited to the continental

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Africans, it extends ‘to all blacks of African descent in the Diaspora, especially African-Americans’.27 As a result, Africanity had acquired racial overtones ‘precisely because it is a counter to white racism and domination, especially in America’. However, its intellectual project was wider than this: Among other things, it aims to gain respectability and recognition for Africans by establishing the true identity of the historical and cultural African. This has necessitated excursion into the past, going as far as the beginnings of the Egyptian civilisation in the Nile Valley, and the deciphering of African cosmologies and myths of origin.28

Although Mafeje conceded that this movement included the ‘vindicationalist’ tradition in the US, he observed that African-American scholars had been joined by a younger generation of African scholars and hence certain discontinuities had begun to appear from what one could discern. He observed that the idea of Africanity as perceived by African scholars, such as Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Kwesi Prah, Paulin Hountondji and Valentin Mudimbe, in terms of what they considered to be ‘the essence’ of Africa ‘as opposed to distorted images imposed on the continent by others’, had as its point of reference the history and cultural underpinnings of the contemporary African societies. From this position, it was ‘hoped that a genuine understanding of this heritage will enable African scholars to develop theories and paradigms that will help Africans to combat foreign domination and to forge an independent African identity’. In other words, the emphasis on Africanity by these scholars implied continued struggles for a ‘second independence’ in Africa or an African renaissance. It had ‘more to do with meta-nationalism than race and colour’.29 From this it could be surmised that Mafeje was therefore beginning to move in the direction of Africanity as a rallying ‘combative ontology’ that could unite Africans politically. At the same time, he had begun to draw a distinction between Africans and African-Americans, West Indians and/or Caribbeans and, perhaps, in that sense also African-Brazilians and others outside the contemporary African cultural context: Africanity is an assertion of an identity that had been denied; it is a Pan-Africanist revulsion against external imposition or refusal to be dictated to by others. In this sense, it is a political and ideological reflex which is meant to inaugurate an African renaissance. In our view, this should not be confused with black solidarity in the original Pan-African sense which included blacks of African descent in the

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Diaspora. This is still valid and desirable. But socially and conceptually, it is at odds with reality. Culturally, historically the African-Americans and the West Indians have long ceased to be Africans unless we are talking biology, which itself is highly hybridised. African-Americans are first and foremost Americans and secondly ‘what else they choose’, like all Americans. This also applies to West Indians or Caribbeans.30

This line of reasoning was quite new in African scholarship at the time, until it became an important political issue due to other factors. For instance, in Pan-African circles, scholars such as Kwesi Prah were questioning the ‘continentalist’ character of the Organisation of African Unity and later the African Union. They argued against the ‘continentalist’ approach, which laid emphasis on ‘continental’ issues and ignored Diasporan ‘Africans’ whom they wanted to be part and parcel of the organisation. Later, this concern was addressed when the African Union took on the issue by creating the ‘sixth region’ of the Union in addition to the existing regional economic regions. But for Mafeje this contrived unity did not make sense. In taking up the issue of Afro-centricity, which was raised in Michael West’s book, Mafeje pointed out that Afro-centricity was made in America and was, therefore, a ‘contradiction in terms’. This was because AfricanAmericans, however well-intentioned, ‘cannot make indigenous knowledge for Africans in American’, nor could continental Africans do the same for any length of time in America. He argued: While individual African-Americans can become ‘experts’ on Africa, they cannot in the name of Africanity speak for Africans. This is because Africanity as perceived by these African scholars insisted that Africans think, speak, and do other things for themselves in the first place. This did not imply unwillingness to learn from others, but rather a refusal to be homogenised by others, irrespective of colour or race.31 Therefore, in the same way as Afro-centricity cannot be imported from the Americas to Africa, Africanity cannot be nurtured outside Africa.

Mafeje pointed out: As an ontology, it is inseparable from the projected African renaissance. It is a necessary condition for the mooted African renaissance, the second independence of African meta-nationalists.32

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Mafeje realised that he was ‘treading on hallowed ground’, which was bound to incur the anger of ‘black essentialists’ and ‘black intellectual careerists alike’. But Mafeje insisted that that was no reason why black intellectuals with any integrity should bury their heads in the sand: ‘The truth is staring them in their faces, despite any grand illusions about a universal African culture immune in time and space.’ He concluded: Africanity is an antithesis of this, and like all social revolutions, its terms of reference are exclusive of its negations. It is an attempt to put to an end the domination and self-alienation at the collective level, but anchored in this denied, hot piece of land, full of strange venomous creatures.33

Therefore Africanity, according to Mafeje, spelled doom to ‘African Studies’ because this new paradigm of African Studies ‘was also made in America’. To study themselves, Africans did not need ‘African Studies’ as a separate intellectual or political endeavour. What was required was the emergence of new institutions on the African continent, such as CODESRIA, OSSREA, AAPS, CASAS, CAAS and new African universities through which Africa could tell the African story. Therefore, we cannot talk of the African democratic revolution being aborted. It is a project in progress. This is the enthusiasm that is born of a new intellectual and ideological Mafeje who, under Africanity, saw himself as part of a new band of African scholars who were seeking to rediscover Africa in promoting an African renaissance.

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The critique of anthropology and alterity In examining Mafeje’s contribution to the critique of Anthropology, one must understand his growing sense of identity as an African. One also needs to understand the central concern he had against the particular use of academic disciplines as an external attempt to exclude the Africans from knowing themselves as subjects, and not objects to be studied by others. It’s already apparent that he struggled to find ways in which the Africans could look at and express themselves internally. As viewed by Mafeje, the problem of Anthropology lay in the fact that unlike the other social sciences and humanities, Anthropology was created specifically for the colonised ‘others’ who were not permitted to understand themselves except through the eye of the coloniser. This was the essence of the assertion by the British that in order to exercise power over Egypt, they had first and foremost to ‘know Egypt’ and the oriental ‘other’ in order to exercise political control. The concept of race had to be created in order to accommodate the external power over the natives. Therefore properly defined, Anthropology was the colonisers ‘political power over the natives’, whatever their race. That is why, according to Adesina, Mafeje regarded the alterity associated with Anthropology as ‘immanent’ rather than accidental or temporal34. Mafeje’s early contribution as a young anthropologist was a groundbreaking article he wrote in 1971 for the Journal of Modern African Studies entitled ‘The Ideology of Tribalism’, which stimulated wide-ranging debate challenging the anthropological concept of ‘a dual economy’ and the alleged static nature of African society that the concepts of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribalism’ implied. It was a self-conscious critique of the continued use of concepts of ‘tribes’ and ‘tribalism’, despite the fact that the African society was no longer isolated but part of the emergent ‘modern’ system, which was nevertheless dominated and colonised. It has been pointed out that Mafeje was not the first to critique tribalism, since other African scholars such as Magubane (1968) and Onoge (1971) had criticised the use of these concepts already. Sally Falk Moore, in her

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debates with Mafeje, also challenged Mafeje that there were other Western anthropologists who had begun to question the use of these concepts for at least a decade before Mafeje wrote his article. These scholars, Moore contended, included academics such as Joan Vincent who stated that by 1968, ‘the political anthropology’s stance was almost wholly revisionists’ and that ‘the politics of ethnicity had emerged and begun to replace what was previously called tribalism’.35 Moore also referred to the book edited by Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith, entitled ‘Pluralism in Africa’, which Moore suggests demonstrated that anthropologists were already engaged with politics of colonialism and ethnicity by the sixties ‘without the benefit of instruction from Mafeje’s very brief 1971 article’. Eric Masinde Asoka and Godwin Rapando Murunga (2008:99–101) dismissed Moore’s argument as being ‘short-handed’. They point out that other scholars may have talked (and written) about these distortions, but not with the experiential thoroughness ‘evident in the articles of Mafeje of 1971 and Magubane in the same year’ – one from an anthropological angle and the other from the angle of sociology: In their view, Anthropology was misplaced in Africa given its lack of appreciation of change in Africa. Anthropology, they argued, was a curse of African studies.36

If then Anthropology, according to Raymond Firth (1972), was a ‘child of the Enlightenment’, it is because the Enlightenment in its own search for the new European identity of the ‘individual self’ also needed the ‘other’ (opposite) as a mirror through which that new identity could contrast itself by as the subject ‘self’. The Enlightenment was not just the emergence of European modern identity as such, without its ‘opposite’. Without this ‘other’ inferior opposite, it could not justify and legitimise its plunder and colonisation of the resources of the regions it sought to rule and control. Structural functional anthropology had to be invented precisely to justify the process of dehumanisation and domination. This dehumanisation, through race, enabled the European ‘self’ to command the use of the colony human labour by designating it as ‘slave’ or a ‘commodity’ that could be appropriated freely or bought at a low price, or paid a low wage to produce new products for the ‘mother’ industries and markets. In China, this struggle for control over the Chinese labour power and Chinese natural resources came out clearly in the form of the British ‘Opium War’ against the Chinese (1839-1842) for resisting the consumption of opium in the name of ‘free trade’.

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Therefore, the colonial structural functional anthropologists who studied Africans from the ‘outside’ had no alternative but to define the African ‘other’ as inferior and sub-human, because to have not done so would have been tantamount to the colonisers committing suicide. It would have been suicide because it would have meant a loss of control over the natives who would have had the opportunity to occupy the power vacuum ‘to know’ themselves and to re-assert control of knowledge over their territories, which would have starved the colonisers. The precision of using the ‘Field Research Method’ considered specific to Anthropology was defined by this externality of the ‘Anthro’ researcher. What could a European anthropologist in those circumstances of a colonial intellectual be expected to do other than operate as ‘external selves’ in unfriendly colonial hinterland and enclaves? However ‘good’ and ‘proAfrican’ such anthropologists were, they had to be external agents in the ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ of Africans. This demand for external knowledge over the native and the implied ‘alterity’ had to apply to all ‘field researchers’ in African communities, regardless of whether they were ‘white’ colonisers or ‘black colonised’ assistants. It was, therefore, an ‘objective’ and supposedly ‘neutral scientific’ role to which the colonised researcher was compelled to relate either as a ‘student’ or as a ‘researcher’ in the way Mafeje and others like him found themselves engaged. Despite this, the alterity was expressed against them as when Mafeje was denied appointment to the University of Cape Town although he was qualified in his ‘field’. The exercise of such a power over Mafeje affected him deeply to the extent that he became even more determined to expose the discipline. He realised that however well ‘educated’ you were in the knowledge of the enemy, you still remained a native who would be discriminated against. Mafeje found that his protests against this domination were of no consequence. As he became more and more conscious of the political implications of his academic discipline in the service of colonial capitalism, he realised that he had to develop a counter-theory and counter-discipline to combat the system so that Africans could be freed from it. He realised that this ‘political power of domination over Africans and natives had to be brought to an end’. As he came to this realisation, breaking that rope around the necks of the colonised was not an easy job. It required commitment and determination all round on his part and the part of all Africans. Adesina points out that Mafeje’s search for ‘endogeneity’ was not a mere academic rebellion but a political ‘affirmation’. This requires further

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interrogation if one is to understand the contexts and circumstances under which this ‘affirmation’ was made. According to Adesina, Mafeje saw the idea of endogeneity as concerned with knowledge and scholarship ‘derived from within and that is not simply a matter of ethnography’. He gave an example of Mafeje’s interpretation of the imbongi character referred to as a ‘praise singer’ by the colonial anthropologist to be ‘a bard’ on the same lines of the Celtic bards. Adesina regards this as Mafeje’s ‘immediate extirpation of alterity’. This, in Adesina’s view, was the beginning of Mafeje attempting to distance himself from the enemies’ ‘epistemology’ and ‘academic disciplines’. Adesina, however, was not happy with Mafeje’s attempt to repudiate the social science ‘disciplines’ and the underlying ‘epistemology’ – for to do that would be to confuse issues of pedagogy with those of research. This reproach by Adesina demonstrated the difficulties of the colonised scholar trying to overcome the power of the coloniser’s keg-power. In fact, what Mafeje was trying to do was to establish a basis for Africanity overcoming the coloniser’s power over the colonised. But as will be revealed later, he did not fully achieve this objective because to have succeeded he would have not only have rejected the enemies’ academic ‘disciplines’ and Western epistemologies, but more fundamentally the enemies’ cosmologies and world-views in general. This monograph later shows that Mafeje tried to overcome these disciplines but still stuck to the ethnography as a paradigm. In short, although Adesina implored Mafeje to seek endogeneity, he still appealed to him not to abandon the enemies ‘disciplines’ because these were necessary for ‘research’. It will also become clear that he blamed Mafeje for not integrating himself endogenously with the oppressed object! This is a dilemma faced not only by Adesina, but Mafeje and many others as well. In fact, Mafeje faltered and stagnated in his attempt for it appears that there was not a single alterity that the Enlightenment and colonialism had imposed on humanity. There were three-in-one impositions. The first ‘othering’ was a cosmological world-view in which the ‘scientific’ epistemology was grounded. This world-view alienated all individuals from the collective existence into an atomistic individualistic insistence in which it was the ‘thinking’ individual who appeared in the second stage as the creator of knowledge but which knowledge was actually owned by the collective of capitalist entrepreneurs who became colonisers. It is within this epistemology based in this world-view that the disciplines were in turn grounded as the third stage of the evolution of the modern knowledge systems.

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This was the Cartesian ‘scientific’ epistemology that was assumed to be an ‘objective, scientific research method’ crafted in a mathematico-logical language and imitated by the social sciences and the humanities. Structural functional Anthropology was a product of this ‘scientific imitation’ of the natural sciences. Therefore, the first layer in this structure of knowledge system was the cosmology in which the individual as a ‘thinker’ and ‘knower’ situated him or herself. The second layer in this structure was the Cartesian ‘scientific research method’, which laid down the rules for creating categories and concepts for analysing the objects of research. The third layer was the academic discipline itself, such as Anthropology, which was created from time to time to deal with a particular ‘knowledge area’ which other disciplines could not handle. A struggle against Euro-centric knowledge systems should be able to deal with all these layers of knowledge, which emerged with the Enlightenment. This will be reverted to in a later section.

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The study of rural African society Mafeje viewed the issue of rural development as the key to understanding social relations in the countryside and, hence, of developing a basis for understanding the categories and concepts that could be used for analysing the situation. For this and other reasons, Mafeje undertook a number of field studies to try to understand these specific processes under way in the African situation and how they related to capitalist relations. Beginning with his article on tribalism in the ‘Journal of Modern African Studies’ in 1971, Mafeje questioned ‘dualism’ in analysing economic and political relations between the modern colonial capitalism and the traditional and rural agriculture. In this particular case, he took up the issue of the dichotomisation of African agriculture into ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ or ‘subsistence’ sectors. He took up other ‘dualisms,’ which he also attacked. In this sense, Mafeje’s article against the concept of ‘tribe’ can be said to have been one of the first attempts to understand economic relations between colonial capitalism and the dominated countries. In 1966, while acting as a research fellow at the African Studies Centre, Cambridge, he was sent with a fellow scholar to undertake field research in Uganda. He used the material from this fieldwork to write his PhD dissertation at Cambridge in 1968 entitled ‘Social and Economic Mobilisation in a Peasant Society’. He selected Uganda because he regarded it as having more sizeable agricultural enterprises. The purpose of his field research was to find out to what extent new forms of farming had emerged in the Buganda countryside since its colonisation. The research was inter-disciplinary, involving an economist and a sociologist. According to Mafeje, the purpose of the field research was ‘to investigate factors facilitating or inhibiting (the) emergence of large-scale farming in Uganda’.37 The economist was expected to investigate the accumulation of capital and its utilisation, choice of crops, suitability of climate, the use of labour, transport and communications, markets, outlets for investment and ‘loss of opportunities by farmers’.38 The sociologist, who ostensibly was Mafeje himself, was to investigate such issues as systems

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of land tenure, the distribution of land, composition of the family and households, leadership patterns and ‘reference categories’ in the community, and social differentiation and stratification among the farmers. The field investigation found that, after colonisation, land in Buganda had been divided by the British government among chiefs and other ‘notables’ who had helped the British to establish their rule in Buganda. The chiefs were allocated mailo land as freehold while the farmers were dispossesed of their traditional holdings. The report noted that there had, nevertheless, been a fragmentation of these estates through sale and purchase over the past thirty years with the result that it had become easier to purchase and accumulate mailo interests beyond the original owners. Whereas before 1940, only 50 per cent of the recorded mailo possessions had been purchased, by the 1960s about 80 per cent of the interests had been acquired by others through purchase. This had led to increased fragmentation of land in Buganda, which had also influenced the distribution of sizes of farmlands between ‘the big farmers’ and the smaller ‘commercial farmers’, as well as among the peasant farmers who were the majority. The researchers also noted that with the growth of sales and purchases of land by the landowners, inheritance of land had declined. The report noted that in order to cultivate these sizeable farms, a process of importing labour from the south-west had emerged, with large numbers of migrant labourers being recruited from Burundi and Rwanda. It noted that family labour in Buganda was not significant in the production of crops for sale as the family members were engaged in family chores. As a result, different systems of wage labour in the form of katala (task jobs), lejjalejja (casual labour) and okuska (simple and short tasks) were used in the employment of labour. The report noted that mechanical cultivation was rare because it was considered not to be economical from the farmers’ point of view, ‘unless there was a shortage of labour relative to land and capital’.39 With other factors affecting labour in the countryside and the neighbouring countries, Mafeje and his colleague had concluded that even ‘big farmers’ who owned 20 acres or more, were not ‘big’ enough for mechanisation due to the availability of cheap labour and the shortage of capital. The report noted that of the 110 farmers investigated in the field study, less than 15 per cent had 40 acres under cultivation and they found mechanisation costly. The researchers found that ‘it was not surprising that despite exhortation by government officers, farmers have been disinclined to mechanise their operations’.40

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From other studies done in other parts of Africa such as Ghana, Mafeje made the observation that ‘scale of operations’ seemed to be a ‘limiting factor’ as a general problem in ‘most of sub-Saharan Africa’. In Ghana, what were regarded as ‘capitalist farmers’ had land holdings of not more than 20 acres, while in Tanzania, farmers who owned about 15 acres were regarded as ‘big landowners’. He added: ‘Even more extreme, the median cocoa farm in Nigeria is only 2.5 acres.’41 Quoting other researchers such as Clayton, Arthur Lewis and Malcom Hall, Mafeje seems to have accepted that investment in Africa in agriculture should aim at improving methods of agriculture rather than ‘promoting spectacular forms of development such as large-scale farming, mechanisation and the like’. Mafeje observed: Such warnings indicate that mechanisation pre-supposes the existence of certain conditions which will make it profitable. In areas where the level of real capital is still low, it is best to utilise the existing resources to their maximum capacity before launching into ambitious schemes. Such procedure is not only educative, but also ensures maximum mobilisation of the peasant population and the strengthening of the agricultural economy as a whole. The farmers in Buganda have shown themselves to be capable of steady development even on this modest scale. Even more striking is the fact that they seem to be more aware of their limitations than some government technocrats.42

This field research in Buganda was instrumental in Mafeje’s further enquiries into other African countries, which enabled him to agree with Samir Amin about the way African development should be analysed outside the metaphoric theorising of the ‘dualists’. He blamed some of the narrowness in understanding Africa on two main trends that existed amongst the colonial scholars. These trends were, first, the empiricists who were mainly British, and second, the French Marxist historians and sociologists. On the one hand, the British empiricists, especially the social anthropologists, regarded ‘Africa’ as that part of the continent where they had done their fieldwork and to which they patronisingly referred to as ‘tribes’ and also as ‘my people’. On the other hand, the agricultural economists in the British and French empirical tradition saw Africa in terms of regions, so that when they talked of ‘their Africa’ they were referring to the regions which they had studied, such as west, east or central Africa. They were guilty of generalisation and extrapolation, although they also believed in the comparative method, which was ‘supposed to be an antidote to personal or individual bias’.43

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Although such comparative methods might have guarded against ‘over generalisation,’ it did not, however, lead to theoretical generalisations. Instead, these methods gave rise to taxonomic categorisations which became static the tighter they were used to describe entities such as ‘tribes’, which were supposed to remain in their pristine state despite the pervasive impact of colonial capitalism. This argument was used by Mafeje throughout his broader analyses to point out that the dichotomisation that was used by the anthropological empiricists was based on such static analysis. Likewise, liberal agricultural economists got obsessed with ‘communal’ land tenure systems when land ownership, as the Buganda study had revealed, had undergone dynamic changes because of the colonial capitalist impact. Mafeje regarded these two examples as significant because these classifications were the outcome of an implicit comparison with the European model of individual land tenure and class society, which African societies were assumed to have become. As regards the French Marxist sociologists such as Suret-Canale, George Balandier and Coquery-Vidrovitch, in their search for thematic issues which could be amenable to theorisation, they were on their part inclined to use the history of West Africa and Congo ‘to explain the historical development of the whole of Black Africa’. They used this experience to generalise the presence of long-distance trade in the West African region to explain the historical emergence of African kingdoms, when the same factors did not apply to the interlacustrine kingdoms or those in southern Africa. However, Mafeje excluded French-educated scholars such as Samir Amin, whom he regarded as having developed a differentiated view of Africa when he divided Black Africa into four socio-economic zones: Africa of ‘colonial economy’, Africa of ‘concessionaires’, Africa of ‘labour reserves’ and Africa of ‘pseudo-feudal systems’.44 This understanding with Samir Amin created a relationship in academic analysis in which the two came to agree on common concepts such as ‘social formations’ and ‘modes of production’. French anthropologists such as Claude Meillassoux were accused of engaging in ‘undigested textbook knowledge’, especially in agrarian studies where ‘classical’ concepts such as ‘feudalism’, ‘tribalism’, ‘capitalism’, Prussian path’, ‘peasants’, ‘communal land tenure’, etc. were ‘used uncritically’. Mafeje focused on this ‘agrarian question’ because it was ‘the least studied’. He regarded this as an area where African social scientists could make a contribution, and hence his focus on it.

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Mafeje blamed the lack of serious study of the ‘agrarian question’ on the ‘preoccupation’ among African scholars and policy-makers with the ‘modern sector’. He argued that it was this preoccupation that had led to the food crisis and food insecurity on the continent. As a result of the crisis, attention had now begun to turn away from the ‘modern sector’ to the ‘small producers’ who were the foundation of ‘African social formations’. Hence African scholars were now under pressure to justify themselves, which they could not do without going back to the roots. He pointed out: For their enterprise to succeed, the African scholars will have to evolve a general perspective which is informed by the specificity of an African local history. Arguments about universalism versus particularism are of little relevance here. What is at issue is authenticity or self-knowledge. ‘Local’ need not be equated with parochialism. Boundaries between societies are a matter of history and cultural evolution. Nowhere in modern Africa do they coincide with political entities called states. Therefore, the mapping out of certain groups bound together by a common history and culture will be part of the exercise.45

With this background, Mafeje now felt justified to dig deeper into the issue of African agriculture in general. He pointed out that the colonial imposition of the dichotomy between ‘export crops’ and ‘subsistence crops’ had two long-term implications. The first was that African economies were re-structured to serve the interests of the metropolitan colonial powers through the supply of primary products for use in industries, which had the implication that the subsistence needs of the African people were relegated to the background, although this development was construed in monetary terms so that the ‘cash export crops’, which were needed for industrial development, were contrasted with ‘subsistence crops.’ According to Mafeje, ‘the distinction was inconsequential because all crops in a monetised economy are potentially cash crops’.46 Therefore, even ‘subsistence crops’ were ‘cash crops’. Functionally and structurally, therefore, the important differences between the two crops lay between export and staple crops or between the ‘so-called’ modern and traditional sectors. These were not things apart but rather ‘dialectical processes of appropriation and subversion or underdevelopment’. In this process, the modern sector appropriated the best soils, the best labour and received the best technical inputs, services and scientific support from the colonial governments at the expense of the traditional

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sector. Therefore, the modern sector had benefited by under-developing the subsistence sector, which was ‘mined’ by colonial capitalism. This entailed the systematic loss of value, and hence the traditional sector could not reproduce itself progressively and transform the agricultural economy ‘into its own image’. This, according to Mafeje, explained why in African countries (other than southern Africa), the farmers who were enumerated as ‘commercial’, ‘progressive’ or ‘big’ had since the 1960s remained at around 5 per cent (or less) of the agricultural producers. Consequently, their share in the total volume of agricultural production rarely exceeded 30 per cent, not in terms of the GNP (which was usually much higher), but in absolute terms. This lopsided development had been inherited by post-independence governments, but unlike their colonisers, the African petit-bourgeoisie ‘lacked self-discipline and a sense of organisation’. Above all, they were eager to accumulate material wealth before they had learnt how to produce it capitalistically. Their petit-bourgeois greed or crass materialism meant not only wanton waste of resources but also super-exploitation of the direct producers. This was bound to be because, unlike the bourgeoisie of Europe, ‘they had neither alternative sources of wealth nor viable economic and political projects’. Theirs became a pathetic example of ‘fishing by emptying the pond’.47 Mafeje added: After the initial flush of enthusiasm at independence in the 1960s, the peasants got thoroughly disillusioned and withdrew unto themselves. This was made even worse by the collapse of international markets for agricultural commodities from the 1970s onwards. The ensuing incessant struggles among the petit-bourgeois elite, culminating in a series of coups and mounting repression, signalled both the political and the economic bankruptcy of the African petit-bourgeois elite. From this point of view, it is yet to be proved that the reasons for the collapse were both technical and physical and that this was the major difference between the 1960s and the 1970s or 1980s.48

This situation in this part of Africa, depicted as it was in the above terms, compelled Mafeje, following Samir Amin, to examine other ‘social formations’ on the continent in order to comprehend the total picture. Mafeje pointed out that West Africa, and to some extent East Africa, did not have white settlement, whereas southern Africa, Central Africa and Kenya had white settlement and therefore were not plagued by the contradiction between the modern and the traditional sectors. In the rest of Africa, the

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indigenous populations were always in effective occupation of their land, but in the white settler areas, which coincided with what Samir Amin had called ‘labour reserves’, the alienation of land to the white settlers was ‘on a scale unknown to the rest of black Africa’, which meant the creation of a more than average demand for black labour in colonial Africa. In southern Africa, the white farmers chose the best lands on a grand scale which was justified by neither their numbers nor their needs, which explained why 87 per cent of the land in South Africa, 47 per cent in Swaziland and 45 per cent in former Rhodesia was taken by a small minority of white settlers. Mafeje thought that ‘judged by capitalist standards, this was irrational’, but considering that this was the surest way of making the black Africans available to capital as cheap labour on these large farms, ‘the move was logical’.49 Be that as it may, the economy in the ‘labour reserve’ social formation was such that ‘capital organised land distribution according to its own laws’, namely individual land tenure. What was left to the indigenous people was turned into ‘reserve dormitories’ under ‘customary tenure’ but under the tutelage of lineages and the guardianship of chiefs. Even then, it turned out that ‘capital’ did not organise production and distribution on the basis of its ‘laws’ even in land distribution, for Mafeje later woke up to the fact that the social relationships adopted between the white settlers and their ‘labour reserves’ were ‘feudal’ in character. This was because under the South African Master and Servant Act of 1845 and the Tangatha system in Malawi, workers recruited on white settler farms had no right to withdraw from the labour contract or to negotiate to modify it. The labourers were in effect ‘bonded’ captive workers. This captive, large-scale supply of ‘reserve labour’ also turned out to be the reason why production had ‘slowed down technological progress in agriculture’ in the region in the same way mechanisation had not proved cost-effective in the rest of Africa. This was the case even on the ‘big’ farms of a much smaller size compared to southern Africa. Here, just as the rest of Africa, agriculture had remained backward until the 1930s, when the government forced re-organisation due to the appearance of ‘poor whites’ after the Great Depression. In Malawi, according to Mafeje, agriculture remained ‘backward’ until the 1960s when the Malawian President Banda threatened the white settlers ‘with eviction’. In Swaziland, 70 per cent of white settler-held land remained idle. The exception was the then Rhodesia, the Western Province and some parts of

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the then Natal where a fair number of farmers – but not all of them – were ‘imbued with the capitalist spirit and used resources more productively’.50 Mafeje demonstrated that despite these policies of dispossession in southern Africa, African (black) farmers had proved very innovative, demonstrating that Africans had not by nature practised only ‘subsistence agriculture’. According to Mafeje, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, Africans all over southern Africa showed themselves to be as responsive to innovation in arable agriculture as the white farmers. In 1840, they had adopted the European plough and were growing maize as a staple. These farmers used a minimum of phosphate fertilisers and relied on manure for fertilising the soils. According to Mafeje, this was what made African farmers attractive to white landlords as labour tenants or as sharecroppers, ‘especially in the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Northern Natal’. Thus between 1860 and 1900, the Africans, with the exception of the Western Province’s sheep and fruit farmers, as well as sugar plantations in Natal, ‘were the most dynamic agricultural farmers in South Africa’ as documented by Bundy, Trapido and Denoon in the book The Rise and Fall of the African Peasantry. This was the case until the Land Act of 1913, which stifled any further development of the share-cropping system and labour-tenancies, ‘otherwise both land-hungry blacks and work-shy whites found it convenient’.51 It would appear then that the ‘Social Formation’ categories might obscure certain commonalities in agriculture in Africa, namely that African peasant agriculture – even under the conditions of colonial repression – were productive even when compared to the systems of production of white-settler production whether in East, Central or southern Africa. In his study of Buganda, Mafeje had come to the conclusion that, even where there were developed ‘big’ farmers, these were no more than 5 per cent of the agricultural producers – accounting for less than 30 per cent of the production in absolute terms despite their holding large farms. This also appeared to have been the general trend in the rest of Africa. Although Mafeje did not analyse the totality of the Ugandan situation, earlier colonial records had revealed that even the white colonial agricultural producers in Kenya could not maintain their farms without cross-subsidisation from small Ugandan farmers.52 Even in the case of southern Africa, the ‘productivity’ of white settler farms was the result of enforced privilege of ‘feudal’ production and not the result of capitalist productivity. Mafeje argued that it was the policies of the post-colonial governments that made the peasants to get thoroughly

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disillusioned and to withdraw to themselves. In the study of Buganda, he also concluded that the farmers in Buganda had earlier shown themselves to be capable of steady development even on this modest scale, and that the small farmers were more aware of their limitations than some government technocrats. Therefore, it is not surprising that from his own analysis and despite the distinctions made between the different ‘social formations’ on the continent, Mafeje still found the continued existence and ‘resilience’ of the lineage principle in Africa ‘even under what is supposed to be capitalist organisation’. In countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, where some large-scale African farmers had shown a tendency to abandon agriculture and join industrial-commercial enterprises, Mafeje still observed that ‘our guess is that (their lands) will revert to the lineages of the former owners, just as all land even in southern Africa would one day also revert to the African lineage small holders as is already happening in Zimbabwe’. This confidence in the resilience of the African ‘lineage systems’ was reflected in his five proposals for what he called a ‘genuine agrarian transformation’ in Africa. These proposals were summarised by Mafeje as follows: First, the ‘traditional system’ should be maintained ‘in order to maintain equity with development’ so that production and appropriation of ‘value’ can be organised on a broader basis than individual households or families. But in that case, according to Mafeje, this would no longer be capitalist production but some kind of cooperative organisation, which appeared to be implicitly proposed. Second, the strategy of reverting to the traditional system would involve the rehabilitation of the African households, which had been seriously undermined by colonial capitalism through the system of migrant labour and reservations: ‘This amounts to a call for the equitable distribution of all available land in countries such as South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Malawi as well as the cessation of the system of migrant labour.’ Third, for the households to reproduce themselves consistently and to feel fully committed to territorial-based units of production in the form of village cooperatives or ‘communes’, the households would have to be freed from control of the lineage chiefs. This appeared to be contradictory but then Mafeje hastened to add that ‘this can be done not by declaring war on the lineages but by transferring the administration of landed resources from lineage elders or chiefs to the productive units themselves and by creating therein greater security for the households than has been the case hitherto’.

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According to Mafeje, the diminution of the power of the lineage elders would mean greater autonomy for the juniors, but not necessarily for the women, as each elder or junior is the head of his own family or household. Therefore, special measures would have to be taken to ensure equality between men and women. This was because even colonial cooperatives had been dominated by men in Africa.53 This point by Mafeje needed to be pursued further because the scheme he presented had the potential to be the basis of a future re-organised productive household on the continent. Fourth, Mafeje proposed that in view of the experiences the African farmers have had with governments, both colonial and post-colonial, it will not be desirable that the state held land as a custodian on behalf of the people. In the past, colonial and post-colonial governments had tended to dispossess the peasants in favour of the ruling elite and urban dwellers, which led to great disaffections of the producers and consequent decline in production. Equally, attempts by governments to set up state farms as an independent base of accumulation could not work because state farms in Africa have acted as direct competitors with the small producers for the allocation of limited resources for agricultural production, without showing any surpluses but, instead, continual deficits. At a political level, such an approach has reinforced the bureaucratic approach to development. Fifth, scientific research and technological development had to be geared towards the fulfilment of the above objectives. This was because, in the past, governments had promoted the importation of technologies which favoured export agriculture in the ‘modern’ sector. The strategy for the importation of technology had also led to the introduction of crop monocultures, which proved ruinous to the soils. Traditional crops were found to be suited to African soils, despite their light yields, but these were abandoned by the colonial system in preference for ‘exotic cash crops’. Therefore, in Mafeje’s view, ‘every attempt should be made to reinstate and upgrade traditional crops through scientific research, which takes advantage of the existing stock of information (and knowledge) among ordinary producers’. Naturally, the development of indigenous technologies was, in Mafeje’s view, contingent on the re-orientation of the educational system in general because the few agricultural colleges in Africa still taught European agriculture in the tropics.54 Mafeje concluded that the above five proposals ‘would provide a basis for a self-reliant agricultural economy in Africa’. But he pointed out that not all countries could be self-sufficient in agricultural production. Therefore, in trying to overcome the problem of food security, ‘a regional approach should

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be adopted’. In his view, a myopic nationalism was antithetical to collective self-reliance which should be a guiding principle amongst people. Likewise, self-sufficiency and food security at national levels should not be confused to be the same at the level of the people’ (Ibid.:122). This analysis reveals that Mafeje had developed great faith in the ordinary people of Africa to provide for themselves by relying on their traditional systems despite capitalist infiltration. The analysis also reveals that Mafeje had an organic conception of Pan-Africanism, as we shall see in a later section, because in formulating proposals for the re-organisation of the rural society Mafeje understood it in terms of household security across national and regional borders. This is why one finds some of his analyses, especially on culture, somewhat disorienting because, as is discussed later, his analysis of the Interlacustrine kingdoms fell short of the recognition of culture as an important factor for understanding African ‘social formations’.

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Culture as the ‘missing link’ in African development Despite this criticism, Archie Mafeje, like Kwesi Prah, at another level regarded culture as the ‘missing link’ in African development. Culture, argued Mafeje, ‘distinguishes man from brutes’. Culture, he argued, characterises the human species and simultaneously divides it over time and space. The history of Western civilisation testifies to this, except that Western civilisation is the first to try to homogenise culture, which Mafeje regarded as ‘impoverishing, culturally-speaking’. Mafeje also regarded this homogenisation as ‘inimical to development’ insofar as it denied so many other unexpected possibilities. But he did not concede these ‘other possibilities’ and the affirmation of their claims ‘without negotiation’.55 But the demand for ‘negotiation’ turned out to be an assertion that since culture is subject to mutations and transformations, it encompassed in itself complexities. Instead of moving to a more nuanced concept of culture, Mafeje stuck by the old ‘celebrated’ definition of culture by Tylor, who was described by William Adams as the founder of British Anthropology.56 But Mafeje argued that we cannot know in advance ‘what elements’ of culture are possessed with a potential for further development. ‘This is a sensitive and intricate problem which cannot be deciphered through received theory or contrived universalism’, he noted. But he did not attempt to deal with the matter from an African approach since the different languages’ meanings of culture are contested just as meanings of words in languages are subject to interrogations and reconciliations. Here Mafeje began to falter and threw the whole understanding of African culture to the wolves as if he did not belong to one of these cultures himself. He argued that it required an ‘intimate knowledge of the dynamics of African culture in a contemporary setting’ to attempt to do that: “This has to be so because there is no way in which modern Africans can relive their pre-colonial past.” But this contradicted what Mafeje was saying because he acknowledged culture to be changeable and dynamic. He even went on to assert that what he was saying here did not ‘detract from any calls for authenticity’.57 This was because Mafeje recognised that there had

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been ‘calls’ from Third World intellectuals to indigenise the social sciences. But this, he cautioned, ‘presupposes a rejection of received theory and an awareness and knowledge of indigenous modes of thought and doing’,58 although he himself had decided to accept ‘received theory’ in preferring to use Tylor’s definition of culture: Africa is the worst victim of intellectual and cultural imperialism and, consequently, is in the grip of the worst development crisis ever. And yet, no clear views have emerged from African intellectuals as to how the situation could be remedied. This could be a measure of the social alienation of most African intellectuals. For instance, when views are solicited on the problem of rural and agricultural development, ‘experts’ from the former imperial countries have more to say than the indigenous scholars. The reason is that the latter suffer illusions of grandeur. They imagine they can reach the summit, without having established a foundation – the foundation in Africa culturally, and practically-speaking in the agrarian sector. If anything unique is to be discovered on the continent, it is most likely embedded there. 59

But this is jumping and avoiding the issue of a proper definition and understanding of culture as a basis for his argument, especially as it concerns his questioning of functional Anthropology. If we are to reject functional Anthropology because it imposes a foreign understanding of the native by foreigners, then it cannot be understood why at this stage Mafeje should be telling us that the African intellectuals are the worst victims of this imposition without giving us an indication of how we can overcome this alienation and begin to understand our people’s culture autonomously without impositions from outside. He also doesn’t also give us an idea as to how to deal the crisis. Although in this article Mafeje was analysing ‘Africa and Development: The missing link’,60 he was nevertheless as Mafeje, the anti-alterity scholar, required to discuss how we could bridge that ‘missing link’ instead of agonising about the alienation. We did not require old British anthropological definitions of culture to achieve this if at the same time, we are required to deconstruct it. If Mafeje did not take culture seriously, he cannot provide us with a way out of the quagmire of the African crisis. In fact, he cannot even declare it to be ‘the missing link’ and then stop at that point to tell us how culture is ‘complex’. It was his task as a leading scholar to solve this complexity.

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The fact that the colonialist structural functional anthropologists had ‘misused’ culture for the anthropological studies does not mean that Africans should be ambivalent about their culture! In fact, as a leader in this critique of functional anthropology it is expected that Mafeje would provide the lead in how intellectuals could explore new development paradigms within our African cultures and escape from the alienation. Can it then be said that in ‘alienating’ intellectuals, Western imperialist culture had fully integrated them in their culture to the point where they could not even understand what culture meant in the African context? This issue shall be re-examined when Mafeje’s study of the Great Lakes interlacustrine kingdoms are analysed in a later section. But it can be pointed out that Mafeje’s ambivalence on African culture here makes his later attempts to transgress the social science disciplines even more difficult. To be sure, contrary to what Mafeje was implying here, it is now widely accepted that culture is an important component of language and that language is not only ‘expressive’ but is in fact ‘constitutive’ of a people. No people can understand themselves and others except through their language and culture, of which it is part. In short, there can be no meaning except through a peoples’ language. Mafeje’s confusion about culture seems to originate within the European bourgeois understanding of culture. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some European sociologists and anthropologists dismissed the concept of culture because of its ‘vagueness’ and ‘polysemy’. Instead, they favoured other terms such as ideology, discourse, hegemony, meaning, interpretation, subjectivity, identity, and the unconscious to express the same thing. But in fact all these concepts were themselves an expression of a peoples’ culture, hence its relevance in understanding different situations. The Germany ‘romantic’ understanding of culture was more ‘relativistic’, contrary to the universalistic mainstream French school of the Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern German cultural relativism, in which cultures existed in the plural. Herder attacked the mainstream Enlightenment abstraction as arising from the arrogant Euro-centric historical teleology. For this reason, Herder argued for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasised embeddedness, horizon and the usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of development led him to critique cosmopolitanism and, particularly, colonialism as an imposition on colonised people’s cultures.

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This understanding was similar but a little different from the understanding of culture from a group of the main Enlightenment point of view of figures like natural historian Buffon (1708–1788) who shared similar anthropological assumptions, which held that human beings are characterised by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Thus although Herder’s definition of culture was much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilisation than is frequently suggested, it was nevertheless criticised for its relativism. This re-assessment of Herder’s place in Enlightenment’s Anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernisation and globalisation on the other. In more recent times, among the most quoted Anglo-American definitions of culture was that of Clifford Geertz who defined culture as ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about, and attitudes to, life’.61 This was one of several definitions of culture accepted by anthropologists in the 1960s, some of whom acknowledged that culture was not static but subject to change as a result of contact between cultural groups and forces within a group, such as technological innovation that created new challenges and problems. Furthermore, culture was seen as being a product of social life and the concern of anthropologists was with the behaviour of social aggregates rather than individuals. Adaptations in a particular culture were transmitted and maintained from generation to generation by the group rather than by individuals acting as independent or discrete agents. Moreover, the group existed alongside other groups, and this is what enabled adaptation of cultures to take place. This is why in this modernist usage a British literal sociologist, Raymond Williams, defined culture as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.62 Another scholar discovered that there were more than 300 anthropological definitions of culture, referring to various aspects of human life, thus demonstrating its multi-faceted reliance on different kinds of social life. In post-colonial discourse, culture came to be seen as a crucial element to economic development. But even here culture and development were regarded as a uni-linear progression: growth, advancement, increase of income and an improvement in the quality of life as a consequence of one’s achievements.

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The more contemporary social science discourse has become sensitive to particularities of culture. For instance, in the post-colonial ‘cultural studies’, culture began to be looked upon as replacing ‘society’ and a general object of inquiry ‘among progressives’. Inglis63 argues, rather cautiously, that the history of the human sciences in the epoch 1918 to 1989 has led to a change in the understanding of culture. He argues that culture designates ‘a whole way of life, circumscribed, recognisable and inclusive’, which assumes a ‘multiplicity of ways of life in the world’. He quotes Max Horkheimer as saying that ‘culture can be made to include pretty well everything that is thought and made by human beings’, but Inglis puts ‘value’ and ‘power relations’ at the hub of the concept. Thus, while the term ‘culture’ is said to be notoriously vague and complex in post-modern literature, it is now generally acknowledged that culture is a social process whereby people communicate meanings, make sense of their world, construct their identities, and define their beliefs and values. From this understanding, it can now be seen that culture is the entire field and process of symbol interaction, communication and technologies through which people define and express themselves. Thus culture is broad and includes our understanding of how we interact with other entities – be they human or non-human. Hence, contrary to modern Western epistemology, African culture interacts with nature on which humans depend, and land is one such property of nature. Mafeje, at some point, pointed out that the attack from the South by the Dependencia School by Gunder Frank and Sunkel had emphasised a ‘structural relationship’ between development and under-development, which afflicted most of the non-Western societies. This conclusion tended to undermine the role of culture in development since Dependencia scholars had emphasised ‘structure’ rather than culture as the problem in their critique. But Mafeje observed that from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge, it was not without significance that ‘the most effective critique of the theories which attributed lack of development to cultural differences came from Latin-America’.64 Mafeje’s concept of culture, however, was more influenced by the Marxist dialectical epistemology than by any other epistemological orientations. For this reason, he believed that in Marxist theory the concept of ‘culture’ was hardly elaborated, except in the general sense of ‘civilisation’ or development of the arts: ‘The only occasion in which “culture” received a positive treatment in Marxist theory is in relation to the question of self-

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determination or definition of nations, as such. Even then it remains a subjective category.’65 Mafeje added in some kind of bafflement that: This is notwithstanding the fact that Marxists have had some difficulties with language and family, both of which straddle the supra- and infrastructure. Kinship relations can denote both culture and production relations. Language can be symbolic/expressive as well as instrumental at the level of cognition and conceptualisation as in the development of science.66

Although it later becomes clear that Mafeje seemed to suffer from the same dualism about culture when he came to analysing ‘social formations’ and development, he nevertheless believed this Marxist ambivalence about ‘culture’ was ‘a disease’ derived from the Enlightenment, for he stated: What all this points to is the fact that Marxism is a child of European rationalism and is (therefore) ill-equipped to deal with what is perceived as subjective aspects of social existence. However, it must be admitted that its emphasis on material factors at the expense of non-material factors was a reaction against Hegelian idealism. The question, then, is whether Marx’s followers the world over should forever be haunted by Hegel’s ghost.67

But Mafeje insisted that culture had to be more nuanced than that. In his writings while he worked with the Southern Africa Political Economy Series-SAPES, Mafeje dealt with the issue of culture extensively and related it to the way African intellectuals fit into it. In one of the pamphlets he wrote about African philosophy (to be discussed later), Mafeje had raised the question as to what culture was. He stated that while the word ‘African culture’ was bandied about, he stated ‘most emphatically’ that the struggle of the contemporary, radical, nationalist African intellectuals ‘is structural and not cultural’.68 He insisted: Culture is not made at will by willing individuals. It is the slow cumulative process made by free and autonomous peoples. If the autonomy be lacking because of structural domination, then the culture of any people cannot be defended. The dialectic of culture is one of the most misunderstood phenomena even by anthropologists and sociologists. It is important to note that, while culture distinguishes between different people, it does not in itself and by itself engender hierarchy or structural divisions among peoples, nor does it guarantee harmony amongst those who are structurally divided but share a common culture.69

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Mafeje expanded on this line of argument by pointing out that the vast majority of cultures in the world stand in a non-hierarchical relationship with one another and that, historically, cultures have borrowed from one another, without undermining one another. As an example, he gives the experience of the early European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who were full of praise for the cultures they encountered in their travels. It was only the latter-day European colonialists and imperialists ‘who used cultural differences as a justification for domination and exploitation’ based on the idea of superiority and inferiority.70 Therefore, Africans should not be defensive about their culture: ‘it will come to its own and regain dynamic, if the requisite structural space is created.’71 But Mafeje pointed out that cultural affinity is no guarantee for structural harmony between peoples within communities. He referred to the examples of politically divided China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, or the ideologically opposed Arab countries. In both these cases, those who were structurally threatening were lumped together as enemies or as the incarnation of the devil. This occurred within national cultures as well. African intellectuals, especially the radical ones, have already had a ‘foretaste’ of this from their fellow Africans. These differences had first been ignored by the bourgeois nationalist leaders for ideological reasons.72 For the same reasons, when radical African nationalists in search for authenticity insist on using their own languages, they should bear in mind that even languages are ‘structurally loaded’. Mafeje pointed out that: The language of the rulers is not the same as that of the ruled. In-so-far as this is true, every language has its own vernacular, including European languages. The only difference is that the colonised were initiated only into that part of European languages which had universalistic pretentions ... This means that even African languages have to be approached critically as they also are bound to play a special role in the ideological reproduction of their culturally determined hierarchies such as elders and juniors, men and women, slave and master clans, royal and commoner clans, etc. (he should have added ‘classes’). Therefore, it is clear that every language has its positive and negative aspects: ‘if it is used chauvinistically’, it could destroy what it seeks to preserve, or promote.73

Thus Mafeje, while correct in the way he nuanced the concept of culture, still does not tell us how these differences in the use of language are resolved in practice. It is clear that these differences existed even before the European imposed colonialism, but were resolved within the languages. There were

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different kinds of stratification within the African traditional societies, which were nevertheless managed within those cultures. Therefore, there are differences in the use of languages in almost all the cultures. But there are cultural ways of handling and managing them through a hermeneutic interfacing that creates space for interrogation and dialogue. Therefore, part of these nuances of culture must include a description of how these different uses of words and language are understood by those on the opposite side and how the meanings are negotiated. In dealing with the issue of why culture is a ‘missing link’ in development, we did not get much light from him other than posing questions and problems connected with culture. The most significant point Mafeje made in this connection was that the struggle of the contemporary, radical, nationalist African intellectuals was ‘structural and not cultural’. What Mafeje implied here was that we must adopt a ‘progressivist’ or ‘revolutionary’ approach to structural transformation, if Africa is to ‘develop’. But this also would seem to contradict his five proposals for African rural transformation, which as we saw above, suggested that traditional systems of land management take an upper hand. How can this transformation take place without a clearly defined role for culture in such transformation? In responding to this issue, Mafeje had argued that in talking about the issue of ‘culture and development’ the ‘underlying thesis is that, without relying on their own culture, Africans cannot hope to develop’. However, cultural nationalism, he argued, can be ‘progressive’ in the sense of authentic representations, or ‘can be retrograde in the sense of revivalism’ in the sense, say, of Islamic fundamentalism and ‘various forms of regional chauvinism’. He continued: Therefore in relation to development, which implies revolutionary transformation of existing economic and political structures, its particular relevance has to be determined without any romanticism. Culture, like all forms of social existence, is subject to radical ruptures, modifications, and obsolescence.74

Mafeje then came to the crux of the matter with regards to this question. In ‘confronting’ the question of social and cultural transformation in Africa, Mafeje suggested that we are faced with two ‘theoretical problems’. The first is that we have to decide whether or not the diverse cultures of Africa can be treated as a ‘generic’ category. The second theoretical problem is that we have to ‘verify’ whether in the wake of globalisation processes such diversity

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is immaterial and that ultimately all African cultures will be homogenised. The opposite of this, he added, would be to raise the question whether or not globalisation ‘necessarily means homogenisation’. If not, then culture might not be the issue.75 Mafeje at this point digressed into a theoretical discussion about the ‘socio-cultural’ concept, which implied ‘a direct relationship between organisational and expressive forms of social behaviour’. This line of discussion pushed him to consider the concept of culture and cultural criticism, which emerged as a discipline among the post-modernists, and is irrelevant to the discussion about culture and development in Africa.

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The issue of ‘social formations’ of African society Mafeje provided another picture of African society, which was based on his understanding of the impact of colonial capitalism on African peoples. He argued that ‘anthropologically, one could talk of an African society’ although such a society was no longer self-sustaining. This was because colonialism had ‘burst asunder’ such entities by intrusive global processes of social reproduction and production such as capitalist development, labour migrations, urbanisation, de-colonisation, the emergence of new states and their integration into transnational organisations, which had destroyed ‘ideal kinship-based societies’.76 This had created a social milieu on the continent which could not be comprehended in terms of single societies. But this assertion by Mafeje is partially untrue because he has already drawn our attention to the ‘resilience’ of the traditional ‘lineage systems’ which he has made the basis of a future African economy. But Mafeje used this understanding of a destroyed African society to argue about ‘destruction by penetration’ in order to make the point that this destruction had rendered any analysis of capitalism difficult, so that European systems could not be used as replicas for analysing the African situation. He argued that the use of metaphorical and analogical methods in understanding Africa by drawing from European experiences were used by bourgeois economists ‘to telescope time’ by treating modern under-development of the Third World to be ‘derivative’ of earlier European capitalist societies. These economists saw any manifest differences between the two systems as vestigial and, therefore, amenable to treatment within the same bourgeois theory of economic growth. Such an approach, he argued, was ‘understandable defensive opportunism’.77 This statement became the basis of Mafeje’s further questioning of the dualism that was inherent in the analysis of Western scholars in regard to African under-development. In doing this, Mafeje was consistent with the paradigms he began to advance in his 1971 article against the concept of ‘tribe’. In this new attempt, he also used the same occasion to question the paradigms of the Western neo-Marxist scholars as well as the Latin-

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American ‘under-development’ theorists on their understanding of certain basic concepts such as imperialism and under-development. He argued that the new period had ushered in ‘an age wherein transgression of [academic] disciplinary boundaries’ had become ‘ethically propitious’, making it easier to enter the ‘ideological battle’ between Marxist scholars in those matters of the interpretation of imperialism and under-development. By confronting the ‘confusion’ that had been generated in the controversy, a search ‘for reliable historical and logical principles to distinguish between different situations’ had become more pressing. Repeating his earlier thesis regarding rural agricultural development, Mafeje reiterated that there was empirical evidence that could justify a dichotomous distinction between what was imagined to be a ‘changeresistant traditional sector’ and ‘modern sector’, given the existence of certain specific forms of interaction and exchange between the two. This was especially so when it was realised that dual theories were ‘a rationalisation for a capitalist ideology and imperialism’.78 Therefore, he chose to analyse these controversies about imperialism and under-development from a European, a Latin-American, an African and a liberal perspective. From a European perspective, the question posed was what underdevelopment was all about: “What are the conceptual, theoretical and practical requisites for its liquidation?” Mafeje asked. He tackled these questions by examining two Marxist schools of thought, which were in actual fact European and American in origin. These two groupings were the school of Maurice Dobb (a British Marxist economist) and Paul Sweezy (a US Marxist economist) during the debate conducted ‘in the fifties’ in the magazine Science and Society. Here the argument, according to Mafeje, tended to express itself as a confrontation between ‘production relations’ as a determinant of the capitalist mode of production, and ‘market relations.’ In Mafeje’s view, this debate was ‘co-joined’ by a similar concern between the protagonists and opponents of the processes of transformation of the European society from feudalism to capitalism. It is from here that the debate, according to Mafeje, ‘extended to undeveloped countries largely as an analogy, if not tangentially’.79 This mode of analogous analysis was, according to Mafeje, understandable and ‘consistent’, given the fact that it was European capitalism that was expanding to other continents in search of markets and raw materials. But even then, Mafeje was wrong in this supposition because even if this was the case, the dualism that he was contesting in this debate would still not have expressed the differences in the development of capitalism in Europe

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and the rest of the world to which it was exported, given the different historical, cultural and environmental differences between the regions to which capitalism was exported. But this aside, the remark was ‘consistent’ with his argument that it was a change in the historical evolution of capitalism from infant to ‘mature capitalism’ (meaning from free-trade capitalism to monopoly capitalism and imperialism) which was at issue. It was the coming into focus of under-developed countries after World War II that the debate between the two schools ‘was bound to acquire a dialectic of its own’.80 Mafeje then launched into a detailed and obscure dialectical analysis that was extremely abstract, but to very little effect because the issues involved in the debate were very clear. The debate and disagreements between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy were really about the nature of capitalism; whether it is ‘relations of production’ in which wage-labour was a determinant, or whether it was the ‘growth of trade’ that was determinant in the emergence of capitalism. The first argument was advanced by Maurice Dobb and the second by Paul Sweezy. Sweezy argued that it was the ‘growth in trade’ that had been the decisive factor in bringing about the decline of western European feudalism and the emergence of capitalism, whereas Dobb argued that it was the ‘relations of production’ as determined by wage-labour that had propelled capitalism in its development. Mafeje observed that Dobb’s approach was one of ‘definition’ and ‘sequence’, while that of Sweezy was one of the ‘sequel’ of trade relations in Europe during an earlier phase. Mafeje ‘sounded’ a warning that ‘what determines what in the last instance can quickly degenerate into reductionism, if not dialectically perceived’.81 Mafeje pointed out that the discussions between both Dobb and Sweezy ‘were facing towards Europe’, with Dobb facing towards ‘classical Europe’ and Sweezy’s eye ‘cast at the ever-widening concentric circles of European trade, reaching out to the foreign lands’, and creating a world of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.82 But these worlds of Dobb and Sweezy of generalised capitalist production and market relations between the developed and under-developed world based on European analogies required a ‘full statement on the social formations of the different societies at different times’.83 It is here that Mafeje introduced the issue of ‘social formations’ as the basis on which the debates can be understood: All social systems, whether international, national, regional or local, have special social configurations which overlie specific modes of production. Above all, it is the particular interaction between such social forms and extant modes of production which tells us about the actual motion of a

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particular given society. It is our belief that, despite their political economy pretensions, Dobb and Sweezy display an economistic bias in their work. As a result, they scarcely pay enough attention to social formations.84 Thus understood, the two scholars are further accused of constituting ‘two feuding lineages’: the Dobb-Laclau and Sweezy-Frank ‘lineages’. This is because the two Latin-American scholars (Laclau and Frank) take sides to defend positions in the under-developed world according to the European models advocated by Dobb and Sweezy. Thus fully enthralled by an African ‘social formation’ gaze, Mafeje now created a duality of his own in which the African world explains the European development in reverse ‘by analogy’! This arose because Gunder Frank, who first questioned the duality of understanding of European systems in his work ‘The Development of Under-development’, was also accused by Mafeje of substituting ‘market relations’ for ‘production relations’ as ‘fundamental relations in capitalist development’, and hence ‘echoing Dobb’s pearls of wisdom’. Gunder Frank, drawing on the experiences of the Latin-American countries, in his analysis of the ‘development of under-development’ had questioned the dualism implicit in most bourgeois economists in which they asserted that each of the two parts (the developed and the under-developed) have a history of their own, a structure, and a contemporary dynamic largely independent of the other.85 Frank rejected this proposition and stated that he believed, to the contrary, the entire ‘dual’ society thesis to be false and that policy recommendations to which such propositions led were bound, if acted upon, to serve only to intensify and perpetuate ‘the very conditions of under-development they were supposedly designed to remedy’. Frank had insisted that no such dual society existed in the world today and all attempts to find one ‘are attempts to justify and/or cover up imperialism and revision’.86 His basic thesis was that contemporary underdevelopment ‘is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between satellite under-developed and the now developed metropolitan countries’, and that consequently ‘these countries are an essential part of the structure and development of the capitalist system on a world scale as a whole’.87 But part of this position of Gunder Frank was in turn critiqued by a Latin-American scholar, Ernesto Laclau, who pointed out that Gunder Frank, instead of dealing with the real situation on the ground reflected in the ‘production relations of capitalism’, had substituted these ‘production relations’ for ‘market relations.’ He further took Frank to task for confusing ‘participation’ in a capitalist system with ‘being part’ of the capitalist mode

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of production itself.88 These differences based on the debates between Dobb and Sweezy had in Mafeje’s view created a ‘lineage’ between Laclau and Dobb, and Frank and Sweezy, whom, in contrast to Dobb, had put a ‘mode of production’ theses. Mafeje summarised the controversy in terms of ‘lineages’ as follows: Intellectual lineages, like real lineages, represent both continuity and change. The similarity in thought categories notwithstanding, certain important shifts have occurred in the current controversy. First, the shift of terrain from Europe to LatinAmerica is significant, so is the change in social and historical background of the protagonists. Could this have affected the terms of reference, even imperceptibly? Or may it be that confirmation by empirical reality of either point of view has necessitated a revision of the terms of reference?89

From this summarisation, Mafeje concluded that the ‘dramatisation’ by Gunder Frank of the role of ‘market relations’ in the Latin-American situation ‘was a necessary historical corrective’, but the response by Laclau was an ‘internally justified attempt to close the circle’. Mafeje, therefore, accused them both of taking ‘either-or’ case scenarios. This is because Mafeje thought that both Frank and Laclau were reverting to European ‘thought-categories’ in their disagreements. He asked them the question: ‘Is it because of their universal applicability or is it a question of the selfperpetuating dialectic between “development” and “under-development” at the intellectual level?’ He went on to ask: ‘What does it take for a critical intellect to transcend its time and social horizon?’ This question was well raised by Mafeje, because it will become clear that when it comes to his own study and analysis of the interlacustrine kingdoms, Mafeje himself fails to transcend these ‘thought-categories’. But this is a good point which will be examined now on how Mafeje dealt with this ‘historical-specific-totality’ of the African situation in relation to the Frank-Laclau ‘development and under-development’ debate of Latin-America and how this debate related to Africa. According to Mafeje, ‘for one reason or another’, Latin-America ‘seems to throw into relief some of the problems emerging in Africa, which the French economist Renee Dumont, in his book ‘False Start in Africa’, had referred to as the ‘Latin-Americanisation of Africa’. He also referred to Paulo Freire, ‘in an animated optimism’ as having also referred to African countries as ‘like Latin-America a hundred years ago’. From this Mafeje drew the conclusion that ‘even in scholarship Africa is far behind Latin-America,

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perhaps, another instance of uneven development’.90 Perhaps because of this slow development, Mafeje observed that Gunder Frank’s thesis about Latin-America did not gain currency in Africa until 1970 when Samir Amin published his book ‘Accumulation of Capital on World Scale’. He also referred to Walter Rodney’s book ‘How Europe Under-developed Africa’ in 1972 as evidence of this. His discussion of this topic is important because it sheds more light on the intellectual affinity he developed with Samir Amin on their conception of the African ‘social formations’ as ‘historical-specifictotalities’. But at this point, the real reasons for using the term the ‘LatinAmericanisation of Africa’ not only by Renee Dumont but also by ‘disaffected’ African social scientists was because the ‘modernisation’ paradigm that had been pushed in Africa in the early 1960s had been exhausted. Mafeje, elsewhere in his writings, pointed out that this was because by the late 1960s and early 1970s, there had occurred what he called ‘a crisis of accumulation’ on the continent. He noted: By the end of the 1960s, all African economies were beginning to stagnate and by the end of the 1970s, most showed negative growth. The extent of the crisis of accumulation can be judged by the fact that by this time African countries owed more than 50 billion US dollars – a debt which they were utterly unable to service. The deteriorating situation, which was marked by a deepening agricultural and food crisis, made most African countries easy targets for the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and the World Bank as from the beginnings of the 1980s onwards.91

This crisis, according to Mafeje, ‘coincided’ with the introduction of Gunder Frank’s theory of the Development of Under-development in LatinAmerica and hence the attempt by African social scientists to talk about the ‘Latin-Americanisation’ of Africa. Mafeje argued: This was a godsend for the African social scientists who up to then were overwhelmingly followers of the ‘modernisation’ school, in theory and in practice, and yet were now under pressure to explain what had gone wrong, in their moment of disillusionment. The Dependencia theory also helped to bridge the gap between the various social sciences. Starting from Social Anthropology, all the way to History and Law, which up to now had an honorary status among the social sciences, everybody began to talk of the ‘political economy’ of this and the other. Perhaps, unnoticed by most, this also helped to bridge the gap between Marxists

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and the non-Marxists. Even Catholics could sound Marxist, without experiencing any internal contradiction. Likewise, Marxists also ceased to be looked upon as the black sheep of the academic community. A new chapter had opened in African social sciences and was marked by great intellectual debates, such as what came to be known as the ‘Dar-es-Salaam’, the ‘Nigerian’, the ‘Zambian’, the ‘Kenyan‘ and others. This also led to the formation of social science associations in the 1970s, of which the African Association of Political Science is probably their best incarnation in the 1980s.92

But with the collapse of the Dependencia school, a shift again occurred – this time in a different direction – in African scholarship. This was in the late 1970s, which manifested the worst political and economic crisis in Africa that the continent had never experienced before. Whereas during the Dependencia influence on African discourse in the social sciences the focus had been on the metropolitan–satellite relationships and terms of reference largely universalistic, the new trend was a significant shift towards internal structures ‘even in those countries which had been thought to have escaped the scourge of neo-colonialism’.93 Mafeje added: There seemed to be a self-imposing imperative among African social scientists and similarly oriented scholars to find out what had gone wrong on the ground. This meant not only a denunciation of the neo-colonial state in Africa, which was fast getting discredited, but also a great deal of soulsearching among African intellectuals. Who were they and in what direction were they facing? The Socratic injunction, ‘Know thyself’ was once again in play.94 This ‘soul-searching’ led to a ‘self-reflection’ and at times a ‘self-criticism’ within the intellectual quarters. First, questions began to be asked whether the foreign intellectual domination of Africa by foreign researchers and in development policy formulation was right, and this begun to be seen as a sign of the failure on the part of the African intellectuals and scientists ‘to stake their claim and develop endogenous theoretical perspectives, and thus put themselves in a position where they could provide solutions to African problems’. Second, there begun to appear a ‘nagging question’ as to whether they as African intellectuals ‘were the authentic interlocutors’. Were they representatives of the African masses, or were they conceiving reality ‘under other skies’, as Fanon had observed? At this point in the mid-1980s, there occurred an awakening which raised the need for African intellectuals ‘to dig deeper into African society’ and to ‘find out the real facts in the villages themselves’.95 This stimulated

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a ‘back-to-the-roots movement’ which necessitated the revision of both the intellectual and political ‘terms of reference’. Perhaps this demand for a shift in the ‘terms of reference’ in Africa explains why the debate in Africa, unlike that of Latin-America, began to take a different turn, which Mafeje had raised in regard to the Frank-Laclau differences. Indeed, Mafeje argues that the debate in Africa at this point begun to take a different turn in that instead of dwelling on the issue of ‘development and under-development,’ as was the case in Latin-America, scholars in Africa became more concerned with the issue of ‘class analysis’ and the State. This was because in order to explain how the ‘crisis of accumulation’ had occurred, one needed to understand the class forces that were at work ‘on the ground’.96 Therefore, Mafeje insisted that there should be a ‘historical-specific-totality’ in conceptual terms in the analysis of Africa and the African situation. It was at this stage that Mafeje and Samir Amin began to focus on the concept of ‘social formation’ in order to understand better the ‘specific social formations’ under study. Mafeje referred to Giovanni Arrighi’s research on class formation in Rhodesia and John Saul’s ‘African studies’ in East Africa. But even then, Mafeje was of the opinion that their class categories were ‘too stark’ in that they were ‘unable to deal with certain processes of mediation, such as migrant labour and continued property in land in the reserves (especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa)’.97 The crucial issue Mafeje was raising was that he was not criticising the two scholars, but pointing out that in both Latin-America and Africa, the important thing was ‘to know how does radical scholarship overcome the inertia of received thought-categories (of the dominant ideologies)’. So the real question was: To what extent did Mafeje and Samir Amin’s identification of African ‘social formations’ help in overcoming these ‘thought-categories’? Did they, through this new discovery of the analytical tool, themselves overcome this ‘inertia’? Our understanding of Mafeje and Amin on this question leads us to the conclusion that both of them were operating within the Cartesian ‘scientific’ epistemology, albeit of a ‘leftist’ kind, and that in this epistemology the ‘thought-categories’ were delinked from the ‘object’ that the ‘method’ they used was supposed to represent. In the end, differences began to emerge between them, as will be later described, about how the African reality should be analysed. This was why Mafeje regarded Amin as being among ‘the few [African scholars] who have shown the desired level of intellectual consciousness and who had been able to capture the essence of the Latin-American

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dialogues’, which Mafeje himself had ‘captured’ and was able to use as an experience to judge other African scholars as ‘lacking intellectual rigour’. In understanding Frank and Laclau and agreeing and rejecting some of their conclusions, Mafeje thought that Amin was able to place emphasis on ‘the specific forms of labour and resources mobilisation in different regions of Africa’.98 Therefore, unlike Laclau, Amin was able to ‘contend with the problem of mediation by making a distinction, analytically, between ‘modes of production’ and ‘social formations’. This was done, according to the understanding of Mafeje of Amin’s ‘analytical’ distinction, ‘in the belief that societies are not reducible to, but derive their existence from, modes of production, dominant or otherwise’. Mafeje observed that ‘as a parting shot’, Amin had added that: ‘Modes of production ..., do not actually constitute historical categories, in the sense of occurring in a necessary sequence of time. On the other hand, social formations have a define age, reckoned on the basis of the level of development of the productive forces.’ Samir Amin, on his part, recognised Mafeje’s analytical method as coming nearer to his own. In paying his homage to Mafeje after his death in the special issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin,99 Amin cited two works of Mafeje – the one on the interlacustrine kingdoms and the other on agrarian questions (2005, 2004) as being ‘quite exceptional in terms of quality of information provided and the rigour of their analysis’.100 According to Amin, these two contributions ‘provide a passionate reading, and I believe it is essential they be known by whoever is seriously interested in understanding the region surveyed [the Great Lakes], in particular and rural and subAfrican Africa in general’.101 Amin stated that he appreciated Mafeje’s use of the ‘tributary mode of production’ theory that he had proposed ‘to understand the (interlacustrine) region he surveyed and learnt a lot from it’. Both of them, he noted, had followed ‘parallel paths’. He commented: ‘As a result, our dialogue, both oral and written, has always been fruitful. Our divergences, if any, have always incited me to deepen my reflection, and I believe the same applied to Mafeje.’102 Amin, however, indicated that there were differences of opinion with Mafeje on the issue of the ‘articulation of modes of production’ theory. Even then, he tried to put this disagreement in ‘perspective’ by suggesting that Mafeje’s definition of ‘social formations’ as a ‘block covering the economic and political realms’ was on the whole correct. Perhaps in deference to Mafeje, Amin pointed out that this understanding did not ‘fully and

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necessarily substitute for the re-structuring of specific and different modes of production’ and clarified the issue by pointing out three areas where Mafeje had limited the significance of the modes of production concept.103 Amin pointed out that he and Mafeje had agreed that there was no possibility for a bourgeois revolution in Africa and that they had ‘always advocated a socialist approach to development as the only way to pull African peoples out of destitution’. He added: We both share the view that integration into global capitalism does not necessarily require the adoption, in the dominated peripheries, of capitalist organisational forms of production.’104 That was the view they held all along, but then Amin posed the question: ‘But what does the situation look like today, after the death of Mafeje?’ He answers this question in a way which suggests that perhaps Mafeje may have changed his understanding of the crisis on the continent. Amin now proposes a ‘theory’ to the effect that ‘in the prospect of the expansion of contemporary imperialistic capitalism the question about land privatisation has now to be raised’. He notes that a fraction of the African peasantry is ‘playing this game’ although he observed that this was a minority group which was ‘powerful’. The author’s opinion is that Amin was referring to what Mafeje had called ‘big’ or ‘commercial farmers’ as well as the petit-bourgeois elite in the state. However, Amin noted that the majority of the peasants ‘were resisting’, adding that Mafeje’s contribution, which had put the focus on these forms of resistance, had made a useful contribution. Amin points out that his own analysis of resistances in Latin-America and Asia had taken a different turn in that land in Latin-America had been privatised whereas in Asia with socialist revolutions the states had taken control of the land with no privatisation taking place. Therefore it was now necessary, Amin surmises, ‘to discuss alternative strategies for pulling out of the dead-end reached by globalised capitalism’.105 In this connection, it should be noted that Mafeje had already come to the conclusion, as indicated above, that the way forward for Africa was the resistance of small farmers to capitalist dispossessions and, therefore, argued for reinstatement and upgrading of traditional crops through scientific research, which would take advantage of the existing stock of information (and knowledge) among ordinary producers. He had also argued that the development of indigenous technologies was contingent on the re-orientation of the educational system to recognise these technologies and work for their advancement through scientific research.

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In his article on the ‘Agrarian Question and the Food Crisis in Southern Africa’ in 1988, Mafeje had defended the ‘resilience’ of the lineage principle in Africa ‘even under what is supposed to be capitalist organisation’, and made it the basis of a programme of the ‘genuine’ transformation. But in the earlier 1973 article in which he re-visited the ‘dual economy fallacy’, he had ‘concurred’ with Samir Amin that the traditional society in Africa ‘was distorted to the point of being unrecognisable’ because it had lost its ‘autonomy’.106 From this change of analysis, it can be seen that Mafeje had come to recognise that the African traditional system based on lineage systems and its property owning and production systems had survived capitalist domination to the point where it was able to regain the lands that had been appropriated from them for capitalist agriculture. In his monographs written while he was in Zimbabwe in 1992 and 1993, Mafeje became clearer about the differences he had developed with Amin’s understanding of the ‘social formations’ in Africa, although he never came out to say so in so many words. In his monograph on African philosophical projections and the prospects for the indigenisation of the African intellectual discourse, Mafeje indirectly accused Amin of having ‘absolutised’ the link between lack of technological advance in black Africa and the failure of development of ‘capitalist property’. Mafeje pointed out that this was based on the belief that capitalism is a necessary stage for the intensification of technological factors. This is because Amin generalised the view that the development of economic forces ‘occurs through the transition from human energy to animal energy’.107 Mafeje summarised this conclusion of Amin by suggesting that his pronouncements could mean either of two things. The first was that capitalism was the necessary condition for the development of industrial civilisation; or second, that capitalism was a historical necessity which need not be realised by all societies. The second ‘pronouncement’ would be the result of the pre-emption of Africa’s development by European antecedence and intervention. Mafeje continued with the criticism: But then, if it prevents its full realisation among the late-comers in Africa and elsewhere, how could it be a necessary condition for Africans and others to develop further. Has not, in fact, the elimination of capitalist domination become a necessary condition for the further development in the Third World? Or is it the case that the uncivilised could beat the civilised in their own game? If so, how

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do we, logically and historically, affirm socialist transformation as a necessary condition for overcoming the negotiations of capitalism in Africa and elsewhere? But then if we fight, in our supposition, how do we begin, without the necessary material conditions, the technical and intellectual tributes which made capitalist revolutions possible?108

Posing this question is important because it enables us to understand the difficulty Mafeje had over the petit-bourgeois political classes playing such a leading role in the transformation and their management of such a transition. This question also explained Mafeje’s view of the role he attributed to the small farmers and other labouring classes in Africa in this transformation. At this stage, all we can say with confidence is that Mafeje had begun to see the African traditional lineage system as a ‘mode of production’ and not simply as a ‘social formation’, even if he did not say so directly. If this is the case, what ‘thought categories’ could he have put forward as appropriate for comprehending this ‘mode of production’ where the ‘lineage’ land ownership system is based not so much on ‘private ownership’ but on a metaphysical concept of land possession? These ‘thought categories’ are cosmological, metaphysical, epistemological and ontological; all in one. These ‘thought categories’ hold that land does not belong to an individual but to a ‘community’ of ‘beings’, which includes the spirits of the dead. Included were three ‘beings’: the living, the dead (or living dead) and the unborn. We shall see that Mafeje never came to confront this issue because his understanding of ‘being’ in a culture and in society remained ambivalent and incomplete.

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Mafeje’s attempts to endogenise and deconstruct knowledge production In relation to the above ‘problematic’, which continued to afflict and evade Mafeje’s search for Africanity and endogeneity, let’s explore how Mafeje proposed Africans could get out of the alienation that Western imperialistic ‘othering’ had imposed on them, so as to recover their African-ness. In the article that he wrote in 1971 on ‘tribalism’, Mafeje and Magubane, a sociologist – had critiqued anthropology for its continued use of ‘dualistic’ concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘tribalism’, despite the fact that the African society was no longer isolated but part of the emergent ‘modern’ system, which was nevertheless dominated and colonised. In this critique, both Magubane and Mafeje had noted a change in the tone and direction of Anthropology, when the social anthropologists of the Manchester School, such as Mitchell, Epstein and Gluckman, began to write about the ‘social change’ that was occurring, especially in towns and mining areas of Central Africa. They were also writing about ‘unrecognised history’, which mainly came from urban settings. Mafeje noted that in order to set the stage for a possible African debate and research on questions of culture and development, it was necessary to indentify the relevant Western schools of thought on the matter, within which he identified the ‘social change’ school. The first of the four schools Mafeje identified was the modernisation theorists led by Talcot Parsons, which included a mixture of sociologists and institutional economists who relied on Parsons ‘pattern variables’, as expounded in his The Social System (1948), to inaugurate a new paradigm based on two polar ends or binary opposites of modernity and traditionalism. In this ‘system’, social change was supposed to occur only when there were ‘significant shifts from the traditional end of the spectrum towards the modern spectrum’. This was a departure from Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’ to Parsonian ‘real types’, for under Parson’s ‘pattern variables’ it was possible to measure along a progressive scale of modernity to reveal

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how countries moved towards the modern capitalist society as it existed in the US, which was seen as the ‘terminus of development’. This model dispensed with cultural relativity and replaced it with an absolute ethnocentric standard, the universal modern bourgeois society, from which the standard of traditional was ‘othered’, just as the old functionalist anthropologists had done with ‘primitive’ society. Mafeje called the second school cultural anthropologists, who, according to him, were ‘infected’ with the Parsonian paradigm, especially the Chicago School, which adopted this new sub-discipline of Anthropology to analyse culture of ‘primitive society’. In their case, the traditional-primitive dichotomy was explicitly associated with the ‘low culture and little tradition’ of the traditional society against the ‘high culture’ and ‘great tradition’ of modern industrial society. With this liberal romanticism, the primitive or traditional societies were destined to be swept away by modern civilisation. This was supposed to occur in the way traditional societies were increasingly penetrated by metropolitan mores and values in the remote parts of the world. The model found expression in the so-called ‘ruralurban continuum’, which was associated with the Chicago School. Unlike the Parsonian modernisation theorists, the cultural anthropologists did not think of this development as either desirable or necessary ‘but inevitable’. In this respect, their view was more akin to that of Max Weber than that to that of Talcot Parsons. The third school, according to Mafeje, was the technological evolutionists, also referred to as the Columbia School, which also included anthropologists and some economists who derived some of their ideas from the instrumentalist theories of Professor C. E. Ayres. Their basic thesis was that social values of any society could be divided into two main categories: the ceremonial and the instrumental. Traditional societies were, according to this schema, characterised by the predominance of ‘ceremonial values’, which ‘militate against experimentation’, whereas ‘modern societies’ were said to be characterised by ‘instrumental values’, which encouraged experimentation and reward for techno-logical innovation. This was reminiscent of Talcot Parsons’ ‘effective’ versus ‘affective’ values and ‘achievement’ versus ‘prescriptive’ values. According to Mafeje, both schools ascribed social change to individual achievement: The only difference is that Parsonian technological progress is endemic in modern societies and this is how the ‘social system’ regulates itself in such a way that it maintains its equilibrium indefinitely. In contrast, the techno-logical evolutionists

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saw technology as not only a prime mover but also a liberating force from retrograde ‘ceremonial’ values.109

Finally, the fourth school was Marxism, which Mafeje suggested was opposed to the Western epistemological traditions. But he observed that if it was not for its epistemology of ‘superstructure’ and ‘infrastructure’ as dialectical distinctions, it would have ‘come closest to the school of the technological evolution’. He pointed out the Marxist dialectical distinction between ‘superstructure’ and ‘infrastructure’, under which ‘superstructure’ represented philosophical and legal rationalisations, social ideologies and cultural forms and beliefs, and the ‘infrastructure’, which represented material and productive forces. These were the angles from which ‘social change’ was analysed in Marxist epistemology. It should be pointed out here that Mafeje’s blueprint of these different anthropological-sociological schools with their ‘dualistic’ distinctions between Western and non-Western social systems and the attempt to externalise their knowledge and power relations was part of his efforts in straddling the epistemologies of these disciplines in order to create a more combined epistemology to overcome them and endogenise them. Mafeje continued to analyse how these schools had begun to decline since the midsixties, which according to him was due to the general ‘disillusionment’ with functionalist Anthropology. But Mafeje was quick to add that it was more specifically the ‘nationalist revulsion’ from the Third World social scientists that enabled an attack to be launched against the ‘modernisation theorists’ from the Dependencia School in Latin-America. When it came to Anthropology, Mafeje pointed to the sources of the weakening of the discipline which ultimately resulted in its deconstruction and attempted reconstruction from within the discipline. He saw three phases in this decline. First, underlying the collapse was the rise of nationalism, which associated colonialism with Anthropology ‘because of its object and epistemology of alterity’. The second cause was the emergent student ferment in Europe in the mid-1960s and its global spread. This student unrest in Europe, Japan, and later the US, was an expression of anger about the traditional forms of knowledge and their organisation, ‘something that threatened an epistemological break, especially in the social sciences’. The third was intense debate within Anthropology, which produced the ‘deconstructionist literature’ of the period, which includes Asad’s book on ‘Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter’ (1973), as well as ‘Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology’ (1974).

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It is from these three deconstructions aimed at reconstruction that arose the three phases of anthropological demise. The first was the attack ‘mounted by a younger generation’ of ‘radical upstarts’ who, as graduate students whom Mafeje knew when he was in Cambridge, had undergone some kind of ‘spiritual transformation’ on the colonial and historical structural functional Anthropology. Their attacks also came to influence what Mafeje referred to as the ‘intermediate phase’ of anthropologists that included scholars such as Goody and Mary Douglas who, in seminars and informal discussion groups, began to ‘listen with interest’ to the ‘noises’ of these young generation and addressed their concerns indirectly ‘lest they be accused of encouraging rebellion by the old guard’. These anthropologists whom Mafeje regarded as the intermediate phases were liberated by the young ‘upstart’ generation who later became an extended family. Ahistoricism was for the British structuralfunctionalists a choice they made consciously because Anthropology as they conceived it was a science, which established causal connections from direct observations, whereas History, which they excluded, belonged to the humanities, which could not belong to Anthropology as a discipline. For them the ‘time dimension’ was essential but not in terms of historical time, but more in terms of making time a theoretical-construct in the discipline. Even for them the time dimension inserted in the analysis was not intended to become historical, and if it did, it was in the form of social history,110 which had ‘deconstructionist’ implications. This attempt was what the old guard structural-functionalists anthropologists could not countenance ‘without radically transforming the discipline itself’.111 It was within this development in the ‘intermediate phase’ that social Anthropology in urban settings began to focus on ‘social change’ by resorting to ‘diachronic method’. Mafeje cites two monographs in this direction: G and M Wilson’s monograph ‘Analysis and Social Change’ (1954) and Ben Magubane’s 1971 monograph ‘A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Africa’ (1971), which critiqued some of the work of the Manchester School. This School had introduced the ‘situational analysis’ method and ‘extended-case method’ to help move away from the ‘closed method’ of functional Anthropology. Mafeje pointed out that, although ‘situational analysis’ was more dynamic and exciting ‘like drama’, it did not lead anywhere but only confirmed functional equilibrium through ordered or ritualised conflict inspired by Max Gluckman’s books. Despite these attempted departures of Gluckman through this analysis, Gluckman, according to Mafeje, ‘never

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abandoned the idea of structural reconciliation or respite by affirming community solidarity through ritual performance under which the school managed to maintain dynamic equilibrium under changing economic conditions’.112 He pointed out: This means that, far from transcending the tribal framework, situational analysis succeeded only in recognising rhapsodic explosions with the same methodical lines as in medieval motets.113

Thus the Manchester School diversion through ‘social change’ as ‘unrecognised history’ only led to new ‘dualistic’ concepts such as ‘detribalisation’ and ‘re-tribalisation’, without understanding the deep material conditions that Mafeje tried to discover in his field research in Langa Township and the Transkei Mission Station studies. Mafeje could in this respect be said to have constituted one of the pillars of the third phase deconstructionism, which went beyond the Social Anthropology of ‘social change’ paradigm to ethnography of a new type and under which Africanity was invoked as a basis for a new epistemology. As seen above, Mafeje had pointed out how in the case of Latin-America, the dependistas, especially Sunkel (1980), had denied that under-development was due to traditional values and culture, insisting that it was the structural factors that had given rise to the dependence of the South on the North. But while the Dependencia theorists anticipated anti-imperialist struggles, they did not anticipate cultural revival, which broke out in Iran and Afghanistan. Mafeje observed: Notwithstanding the ambiguity of the political results thus far, it is clear that revulsions against Western domination have issued an increasing and general emphasis on local culture and traditions. This is the fountain from which the nationalist movement drew sustenance. However, such quest for authenticity and independent identity has not necessarily linked directly to what in the current jargon is called ‘development’.114

Mafeje experienced some difficulty with this conclusion because he observed that African nationalists seemed to be attracted to Western capitalism, which raised the question: If a genuine case were to be made, where would the African intellectuals begin? Mafeje answered that they would be obliged to accept industrial capitalism and bourgeois culture. But clearly, this was not what Mafeje recommended for the African intellectuals

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because here he reverted to his ambivalence and concluded that this is a ‘terra nova which should be approached with some reverence’.115 This ambivalence had serious epistemological implications, which we shall revert to in the next section. But what can be observed here is that despite Mafeje’s struggle against alterity and his demand for endogeneity and Africanity, he increasingly found himself inarticulate with regard to how we can get there.

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The African post-colonial state and the African elite If we interrogated Mafeje further as to how we can endogenise African knowledge production and who would be the agents of such a change, Mafeje would explain that he had a very low opinion of the African postcolonial states and the African petit-bourgeoisie class. Mafeje had traced the weakness of the post-colonial state and its modern petit-bourgeois class to its character in the global economic and political system. In an article written for the ‘Special Issue on Africa and the Future’ in the ‘African Development Review’ of the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Mafeje posed the question: ‘What is so peculiar about Africa?’ His answer was that Africa was the ‘weakest link in the global capitalist system’ and therefore, ‘like the HI-virus, strains in the global systems easily get amplified in Africa in proportion to the level of resistance of the global system’s affected parts’. But he added that ‘contrary to Ali Mazrui’s assertion, Africa has always been at the bottom of the international ladder since its incorporation into the global system and is not by nature weak’. Mafeje instead preferred to explain Africa’s weak position from five angles. First, the fact that Africa was at the centre of the global system as the biggest source of slaves in modern history; second, the fact of it ‘having been so bled’ in the process and emerged from colonialism as the last frontier consisting of weak and fragmented social formations; third, the fact that being a direct product not simply of colonialism but of pervasive global capitalism, African economies (with the exception of South Africa), unlike any other regions of the world, had suffered total vertical integration into the global system; fourth, despite their weaknesses, the African elite had adopted the Western consumerism as a norm; and finally, as a concomitant of their conception of a nation state with fixed boundaries, they ipso facto accepted strong military establishments as a necessary aspect of the postcolonial states. However interpreted, he further argued, these were the underlying causes of the African states’ extreme vulnerability in the global system.116 Alluding to these five factors, Mafeje added:

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In their combination they pre-dispose the continent towards more acute manifestations of the same crisis or phenomena which are otherwise worldwide than those regions which are higher up on the international hierarchy. This is a logical imperative whose determinate effects are note attributable immediately to what Africans did or did not do in the past 30 years. Of course, as contemporary history is being made, Africans will progressively get caught up in circular causation where distinction between cause and effect loses its practical significance.117

Mafeje explained that whereas between 1966 and 1976, the Dependencia paradigm seemed to provide an adequate conceptual framework for locating the root causes of under-development, in the 1980s ‘it became necessary to look for new conceptual frameworks which could explain why what had been diagnosed could not be cured’. Why were the causes of underdevelopment ‘not eradicated or at least mitigated’? In his view, these were the reasons why there was a shift in academic analysis by African scholars from ‘an over-emphasis’ on external factors to their opposite, namely, ‘the prevailing conditions in African countries and the existing strategies for development’. This is what inclined most African scholars to neo-Marxist theories.118 The emphasis was now on internal structures and class analysis, and the role of the state occupied the foreground. The nature of the African state ‘became a major preoccupation’. The emphasis was on the social classes that wielded state power, which explained why certain development policies were adopted and why others were not. In the process class categories such as ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, ‘compradorial bourgeoisie’, ‘state petitbourgeois’, ‘or simply kleptocracy’ were deployed. Earlier in his collection of essays in search of alternatives, Mafeje had gone into the reasons why the African petit-bourgeoisie had encountered problems in this period. He pointed out that, unlike the ascending bourgeoisie of Europe, which transformed all political and economic institutions into its own image and became socially hegemonic, the petitbourgeoisie in Africa ‘has no criteria of its own’. It merely inherited colonial institutions with which the mass of the people did not identify, as is evidenced by the struggle for independence.119 He continued: Therefore, the state it represents, unlike the bourgeois state, is not entrenched in the society as a whole. It is already a bureaucratic connivance. This is to be expected because the petit- bourgeoisie, as a class, has no social property of its

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own. It can only hope to service the social property of other classes, for example capital and labour, as represented by the bourgeoisie and the direct producers, namely, the workers and the peasants.120

Mafeje added that due to the ‘monopoly of education and technical skills’, the petit bourgeoisie were heir to state power. This put them in a position where they could manipulate state power for their own benefit. This gave them opportunities to loot state resources unabated, which was not peculiar to Africa but the fact that in the case of the petit- bourgeoisie the use of the state ‘not as a means for promoting capitalist accumulation’ but as an instrument for personal accumulation, i.e. ‘accumulation which is geared towards personal consumption’, had been the main factor.121 Mafeje was convinced that it was the competition for access to these types of resources, ‘which propels African governments towards a one-party state’ and the denial of democracy to the people. This is what produced factions trying to keep other factions from access to state power. The inability to ‘convert revenues into productive capital, which is one of the most intriguing aspects of petit-bourgeois rule in Africa, created an even greater structural pre-disposition towards factional rule’. In this way the ruling ‘party’ is reduced to the president and the political circle immediately around it, as seen in Malawi and Kenya, or mainly to those who come from his province or district.122 This completely marginalises the opposition. At first the one-party state is legitimised on the ground that it resembles the traditional African systems and that it is a guarantee for political unity and nation-building. Later, when the state petit-bourgeois adopts a ‘socialist’ approach in the name of ‘African socialism’, it is again claimed that the African traditional system was always ‘communal’. In fact, there is no necessary link between socialism and one-party rule. It is merely a matter of historical and social exigencies. Hence the African countries under the leadership of the petit-bourgeois leadership were characterised by three things: the first was the crisis of accumulation, the second was the emergence of one-party dictatorships, and the third was the lack of democracy for the population. As already seen, Mafeje explained that the ‘crisis of accumulation’ in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s was caused by lack of socio-economic development and the accumulation of debt which they could not service. This had led to a deteriorating situation, which was marked by a deepening agricultural and food crisis, which made most African countries easy

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targets for the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and the World Bank as from the beginnings of the 1980s onwards.123

It is this crisis which explained why there was a shift in academic analysis by African scholars from ‘an over-emphasis on external factors’ to their opposite, namely the prevailing conditions in African countries and the existing strategies for development. This is also what inclined most African scholars to neo-Marxist theories. But there were also scholars who had maintained their faith in these governments and, to that extent, were prepared to serve them or join them. This was quite normal because in every state there are those intellectuals who speak for the establishment and others who are against the status quo. ‘Sociologically both could be viewed as agents of the ideological reproduction of contending social forces in society’, Mafeje argued. ‘However, intellectual discipline demands that this be done in such a way that it is amenable to critical evaluation.’ At this stage, Mafeje extended his disagreements with Professor Mazrui, because he felt that Mazrui’s scholarship was directed at a ‘pessimistic representation about the future of Africa’, which was ‘in contrast to those scholars who operate within the research networks of African organisations such as CODESRIA, AAPS and OSSREA and who are fairly optimistic about the future of their continent’.124 In short, Mafeje was accusing Mazrui of not being ‘patriotic’ enough and in the debate that blew up between them in the CODESRIA Newsletter, Mafeje expanded his attacks on Mazrui by further accusing him of lack of serious analysis of the continent’s problems and opportunities. For this reason, many African scholars were, according to Mafeje, ‘saddled with an image of a pathological Africa which desperately needs therapeutic treatment from outside’.125 In the lengthy debate in the CODESRIA Newsletter, Mafeje called Mazrui’s ‘re-colonisation’ and ‘self-colonisation’ theses to be ‘reactionary’. Mazrui had in a series of speeches at public gatherings referred to Africa’s failed states as calling for a ‘re-colonisation’ as a ‘humanitarian’ response to the crisis and a possible ‘self-colonisation’ by stronger African states, bringing under their control the crises in the smaller chaotic states. Mafeje called the first ‘solution’ a reactionary thesis because it went against the African peoples’ struggles for liberation from colonialism. He also referred to the idea of ‘self-colonisation’ as a ‘contradiction in terms’ because the colonised could not ‘colonise’ themselves, which would merely compound the crisis of colonisation.126

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Mafeje questioned Mazrui’s honesty in his analyses, especially when he referred to Nyerere’s union arrangement with Zanzibar as being a form of ‘self-colonisation’, pointing out that in the case of Zanzibar what happened was that Nyerere and Karume had signed the Articles of Union for their ‘mutual interests’, and that the arrangement was on the whole beneficial to Zanzibar. Mazrui had equated this agreement to the British empirebuilders who used African chiefs to affirm the 1900 Uganda Agreement. Mafeje called such analogy ‘outrageous’ and the characterisation of the agreement as ‘a good illustration of Mazrui’s superficiality and journalistic pre-dispositions’.127 Mafeje also dismissed Mazrui’s characterisation of Tanzania’s war with Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1978–1979 as preposterous since Tanzania had responded to Uganda’s illegal invasion of the Kagera River as a provocation which Tanzania was entitled to repel under international law. Such an action could not by any measure of imagination be referred to as ‘selfcolonisation’, as Mazrui wanted people to believe. In summing up the debate with Mazrui, Mafeje called on Mazrui to stop ‘prevaricating and come to terms with himself’. He argued that Mazrui’s intellectual representations betrayed his African claims.128 In this questioning of Mazrui and his commitment to the African cause, Mafeje’s main point was that ‘leading’ African scholars can ill-afford to ‘fudge issues that arise out of their intellectual praxis’. He felt that Mazrui was avoiding answering issues that were of vital importance to Africa’s emancipation. For this reason, if African scholars had a ‘divided house’, it was in the interest of the community that ‘this be known’. He concluded that it was in this context that he had decide to ‘cross swords’ with Ali Mazrui and ‘if in the process real blood was drawn, it might be an overdue sacrifice to the African gods, or an invitation to young African warriors’.129 This debate demonstrated Mafeje’s commitment to African liberation. Earlier in his article on the land issue, he had pointed out that, while ‘anthropologically’ one could speak of an ‘African society’ as an ethnographic abstraction, ‘sociologically’ this would be greatly misleading because the existing states no longer reflect the original African states. Mafeje pointed out that Meillassour’s ‘self-sustainable African societies’ was an anthropological illusion, ‘which admirably served their purpose in elucidating the processes of social reproduction and production in ideal kinship-based societies’. These former boundaries, however, had now ‘been burst asunder’ by intrusive global processes of capitalism.

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This is why their reappearances had taken the form of ‘tribes’ in the eyes of Westerners. This had raised the question as to whether it is possible for ethnographic texts, or identities derived from the past, to retain their substantive meanings irrespective of historical context. In his view this was impossible, because history was not reversible. This would explain why despite the fact that Mafeje had come to see traditional structures as a basis for the ‘genuine transformation’ of the continent, he still proposed a change to the ‘lineage systems’ so that the lineage chiefs would no longer wield power over land. Yet, at the same time, he regarded the traditional system to be the basis of transformation. These contemporary realities enabled Mafeje to explain a number of ‘apparent anomalies’ in contemporary history, such as European societies being reluctant to countenance a reversion to tribalism although many communities in Europe still retained their tribal names and secessionist tendencies. These, however, are treated metaphorically because they are not a true characterisation of modern and post-modern European societies. But they do not use the same arguments when it comes to Africa and hence the charges of racism being made against them. Despite their weaknesses, however, Africans in general were committed to the historical changes that had taken place on their continent. That is why, like all social agents, in doing so, they had used their own terms of reference metaphorically, such as invocation of their ‘tribal’ names and mobilisation of their ethnic identities. Thus, under the metaphor of ‘nation-building’, they had rigidly adhered to a unitary nation state as a model of the modern African states with fixed boundaries. That is why for development purposes they had adopted wholesale the neo-classical models of economic transformation, which were unworkable. Having fought colonialism on a broad front, after independence they adopted a narrow and chauvinistic idea of nationalism, in which they treated the Western consumerism as a norm and concomitant with their conception of a nation state with fixed boundaries, they ipso facto accepted strong military establishments as necessary, as seen above. However, any indictment without the possibility of redemption was necessarily negative and, likewise, a diagnosis which limits itself to immediate causes such as crass materialism, venality and parasitism among the ‘ruling’ African elites was of little value. This is a statement of the reasons why he had disagreed with Mazrui and other Afro-pessimists. African elites are guided by their own class interests, but this cannot be accepted because the alternative would be to accept the capitalist ‘natural theology’ about personal greed and avarice as being the driving force

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behind all human behaviour: ‘This would pre-suppose that there is only one anthropology of humankind and would belie any claim regarding the historicity of human behaviour.’130 Thus the African leaders, by adopting a unitary state model, were not only making a mistake but were denying their historical experiences because the anti-colonial struggle encompassed many other social forces with different aspirations. Mafeje took this statement to argue that this fact ipso facto implied some form of federalism ‘not as a political value but as a structural predetermination’. Indeed, the independence movement ‘was itself a federal movement in embryo’. The adoption of the unitary structure was an abortion of this demand and had led to the political dispossession of the weaker groups within the original political alliance. Hence, what the detractors of the continent are happy to call ‘tribalism’ is ‘a fight for political space within the straightjacket of a unitary state’. After independence, it was inevitable that for economic reconstruction, the African leaders would adopt the capitalist model. It was not just a heritage from the colonial powers on which they became heavily dependent ‘but also, unlike federalism which was implicit in their independence movement, there was not the vaguest hint in their anti-colonial struggle which suggested something different’.131 But the African situation had no bourgeois class to boast of, hence ‘in the absence of such an organic social class, the most we can concede is that the independence movement was bourgeois only in character and not in substance’.132 Out of necessity many of the African nationalist leaders had advocated ‘African socialism’ but without substance, and with no clear conception of state capitalism, with the result that ‘confusion reigned’ regarding the issue. It was only at the level of fiscal policy where ‘some inconsequential differences appeared’. It is here that international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank came to deny any regulatory authority to the African states over their national economies. Because the African states are still major players in the national and international arena, it is still possible to conduct a systematic and objective analysis of the role of the state in development in Africa. But it also meant that the African elite had failed to convert their ‘ill-gotten revenues under incipient state capitalism into productive capital, which had grievous consequences for the African economies’.133 Turning to the other classes such as the commercial farmers, Mafeje came to the conclusion, as we have seen, that their contribution was minimal. The urban poor had resorted to ‘survival’ activities called ‘informal sectors’ to keep alive.

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But Mafeje persisted in his argument about the African post-colonial state, and whether it could survive separatist and secessionists tendencies, which are leading to de-centralisation or ‘regional autonomy’ demands in a number of countries, and which are made within the concept of unitary states. These tendencies imply the demand for federalism, which is being conceded by a number of states such as South Africa, which had at first been firm about introducing a unitary state but later conceded a ‘semi-federal’ system ‘when it came to the crunch’.134 Although this step was motivated by ‘political expediency’, Mafeje still pointed out that South Africa was not be the last example in Africa on this matter. This was because he regarded all schemes of ‘regional economic integration’ as also arising out of expediency, but they theoretically ‘expand the scope of social and cultural action’. Mafeje, therefore, regarded the slow disintegration of African postcolonial states as being a ‘corrective’ measure because it is a reaction against the one-party states in Africa, which had degenerated into ‘unbelievable parochialism and ethnic chauvinism’. It is a serious perversion of the PanAfricanist vision of the original founders of African nationalism, which has gone to prove that effective economic and political activities ‘are not subject to national boundaries or parochial interests’. Mafeje seemed to have drawn deep ethnographic conclusions from this situation by pointing out that: The African people recognise one another across colonial boundaries. For instance, most of the inter-state trade in Africa is carried out by ordinary people who are officially referred to as ‘smugglers’. Greater distribution of food and labour has been effected the same way rather than through governments. Likewise, in times of civil strife ‘refugees’ are accommodated by their neighbours without being stigmatised as such or isolated from the host communities. These are interesting ethnographic details which the new generation of Pan-Africanists have to study very carefully, instead of limiting themselves to their ‘own countries’ as did the earlier generation of Pan-Africanists ... The basic question is: the earlier attempts having floundered, what indigenous principles is the new generation of African nationalists going to rely on in order to give Pan-Africanism a substantive meaning at this critical historical stage? 135

The question Mafeje raised here was important because from it he reverted to the issue of ‘African culture’, and now argued that having come that far, every care should be taken ‘not to trivialise this question’. Some intellectuals were doing this by ‘taking refuge in soft concepts such as ‘African culture’. He emphasised:

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Intellectuals are not making culture; people are doing that all the time but their texts are often ignored. The same could be said regarding African languages. African people speak virtually all the languages in their sub-regions. It is the intellectuals or the educated elite who tend to be monolingual. Therefore, the ‘language question’, properly understood, is not a technical question but rather a sociological one. Who has problems communicating with whom? If monolingualism is the problem of the African nation state, then the federalism is destined to liberate it.136

Mafeje now took this issue of ‘African culture’ seen in this context of language as a ‘key’ to the governance of the African people through their languages and as a key to their self-knowledge. He gave examples of the Swahili language in East Africa as a cross-border language and Hausa in West Africa as playing the same role: ‘These are historical developments which await the attention of the new Pan-Africanists.’ He then observed that African societies, like any other, ‘are variable culturally and linguistically but seem to have certain underlying organisational principles which have persisted through time’. He argued further that this did not mean that they were unchanging: ‘It is their decodification and re-codification, telling us the grounds of collective existence, implicit knowledge about processes which impinge on it, and about everyday practices‘, which he now called ‘African ethnography’.137 Without a good sense of this, he added: ‘It is unimaginable that anyone can discern the processes of adaptation and transformation of African societies.’ But ‘for the time being’, Mafeje concluded that African societies ‘certainly have strong traditional elements’ which are neither pre-capitalist nor are they capitalist: ‘The indications are that they will participate in capitalist production and the market system through familial forms of organisation for the foreseeable future.’ Therefore, he called on African intellectuals to ‘re-formulate classical questions, bearing in mind that indigenous discourse is only possible within the contexts shaped and constrained by historical, cultural and prevailing power relations’. Epistemologically, he argued that ‘positive science’ (meaning the disciplines) today ‘survives’ in a degraded state precisely because it abandoned the ethnographic context, which created and sustained it. In the modern rhetoric, it purports ‘to be its own justification and seeks to give absolute autonomy to its own discourse’. Mafeje concludes that, epistemologically, this is no longer acceptable and all regions are free to

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experiment with new styles of thinking and knowledge production, and so is Africa.138 This conclusion by Mafeje suggests that he had come to accept that the African traditional systems could adapt and survive within their cultural context. He was also now suggesting that these systems, through their languages, could produce knowledge that could be used to transform their continent. He had already, in expressing differences with Samir Amin, argued that Amin had ‘absolutised’ the conditions of transition in capitalist development to depend on technological change. Mafeje pointed out that if Amin persisted in that argument, then how do we begin even to affirm a socialist transformation as a necessary condition for overcoming the blockage that capitalism puts in our way? Mafeje came to the conclusion that ‘self-reliance’ might be the only answer to the problem. However, this strategy was not just for governments but it also applied to scholars as well. If this were not the case, then ‘who was to lead the way and how’? Although conventionally social and philosophical revolutions are contingent on scientific revolutions, this is not independent of historical conjecture. African scholars should promote African-specific activity, and what was needed was freedom of action. This was especially so when it was remembered that scientific concepts and intellectual ideas do not develop in vacuo; they develop in relation to particular kinds of social formations: Therefore, to achieve the so-called indigenisation of the arts and sciences in Africa, African researchers and intellectuals must find a base within their societies and the region in general-something which some African organisations are seriously attempting. This is what self-reliance in practice requires of them.139

Mafeje added that for this to happen, African intellectuals had to develop a commitment, which although it has grown, has not been tested. A beginning has been made but only a few paradigms have emerged. Some explorations have been made, which at times ‘mistake structural determined phenomena for self-imposing manifestations such as culture and skin and colour’ that are ‘not in themselves historical categories’.140 This conclusion, again, although it clarifies Mafeje’s position on the need for Africa to recognise its traditional structures for the transformation of the continent, nevertheless leaves an ambivalence of Mafeje’s conception of the central role of culture in transformation. For it is clear that although Mafeje talks of ‘Africa-specific’ knowledge production and proposes that this be done ‘in

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relation to particular kinds of social formations’, his own ‘social formation’ concept had boiled down to the acceptance of ‘lineage systems’ as the basis. But culture is basic to the working of lineages and, therefore, this leaves us with a major gap in Mafeje’s thought about the way Africans could endogenise their knowledge systems to be the basis of transformation.

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Mafeje and African philosophy Mafeje approached the issue of African philosophy from a ‘combative’ ontology that Africanity had begun to assume in his analysis of the African situation. Mafeje, like the other African scholars engaged in this discipline, had raised the question that had long been raised by those who did not accept the Africans’ humanity: Did Africa have a ‘philosophy’? For Mafeje the question was emotive and even racist. He conceded that while ‘philosophy’ could not be conceived in ‘pre-literate societies’, it was ‘hard’ to imagine a people without some conception of, or ideas about, the meaning of existence, notions of being and its imperatives/logic, as well as the purposes of mankind in the universe. He added that whether these conceptions could be referred to as ‘philosophy’, ‘metaphysics’, ‘cosmologies’, ‘superstition’ or ‘mythologies’ was not of importance but that the question had become part of the problem of our times, nor was it peculiar to philosophical discourse. Hence it was futile to make sharp distinctions between subjects and objects in the process of knowledge creation: ‘All subjects are created in contradiction i.e. we assert ourselves against something and for something.’141 Therefore, Mafeje begun to entangle this question by trying to understand the different philosophical projects that existed among African philosophers and came to the conclusion that there had been two main tendencies in the discourse. One tendency accepted that Africans did not ‘yet’ have a philosophy. This tendency, Mafeje pointed out, referred to ‘philosophy’ as a formal academic discipline ‘with distinctive set of universally agreed upon rules’. But there were enough dissenting voices to this argument to warrant the distinguishing of a second tendency or indeed a ‘movement’ against it. This movement was spearheaded by people of African descent formerly called the ‘Negroes’ in the Diaspora, especially in the New World. It was essentially an expression of a hurt pride by those who had suffered the crushing agony of slavery and the bitter racial humiliation. They were the products, not of African culture, but of Western education. Among these individuals were

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Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and Edward Blyden. This group was later joined by African students from the continent who studied in the USA and Europe, such as Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Cheick Anta Diop, and Leopold Sedar Senghor. This group asserted not only the existence of philosophy in Africa, but its origin in Africa. According to Mafeje, it was out of these two tendencies that four schools of philosophy emerged in contemporary Africa. The first was composed of university trained philosophers, such as Kwasi Wiredu and others, whom Mafeje said had been able after independence to establish a discipline in philosophy in Black Africa. He quoted Wiredu as saying: ‘An African may learn philosophy in a Western institution of higher learning abroad or at home and become extremely adroit in philosophical disputation; he may even be able to make original contributions in some branches of philosophy. The fact remains that he would be engaged in Western, not Africa, philosophy ... As far as the main branches of philosophy are concerned, African philosophical ideas might just as well be non-existent. This trend, I suggest, ought to be reversed.’142

Mafeje points out that there was a group of people, including Father Placide Temples who wrote on Bantu Philosophy and Alexis Kagame who wrote a book on the Bantu Philosophy of Rwanda, who were intent on reversing this trend. These writers set a trend that came to be known as ‘ethno-philosophy’, which became the second school of African philosophy but which was contested by the first group of philosophers, namely the Western- trained African philosophers who had been contending with three ‘vexed questions’ relating to the issue of the place of African philosophy, vis-a-vis the Western philosophy. These ‘vexed questions’ were: (a) the philosophic status of ethno-philosophy or folk philosophy; (b) the universality of the Western criteria for judging whether or not a given discourse was philosophy; and (c) whether there could be an equivalence between European and African philosophical concepts, i.e. between concepts that are products of different cultures or cosmologies. Mafeje observed regarding the first point, there appeared to be a ‘prevailing ambiguity’ in that whereas most African academic philosophers welcomed the recognition of unwritten African philosophical ideas, they, at the same time, objected strongly to ethno-philosophy per se. They also accused Western theologians such as Father Tempels for daring to pass

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African ethno-philosophy or folk philosophy as philosophy qua philosophy on a paternalistic basis. However, Mafeje pointed out that although these African academic philosophers criticised ethno-philosophers, these academic philosophers themselves, such as Wiredu, still found it necessary to refer to their ethnic ideas in their philosophical discourse. In this case, Wiredu had referred to ‘Akan thought’ of Ghana in confirmation of certain philosophical ideas he was examining. Another philosopher, Sodipo, also chose to illustrate his philosophical thesis about oral philosophy by examples of the traditional culture of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. They had argued that in order for African philosophy to ‘qualify’ to be referred to as philosophy, the African philosophical ideas must be ‘both reflective and critical’.143 Thus this group of philosophers exhibited an ambivalent attitude towards African philosophy in that, while they were committed to a modern, written African philosophy, ‘some philosophers’, whom he named, insisted that this did not imply lack of truly philosophical ideas in traditional African societies.144 This ambivalent impulse led to philosophers like the Kenya philosopher Oruka creating a school of his own, which he called the ‘Sage philosophy’, by researching the thoughts of Kenyan sages and elders to discover the ‘philosophic’ content of their reflections on a number of philosophical ideas. This became a third school of African contemporary philosophy. Sodipo also invoked Yoruba’s cosmological ideas, which he believed stood the test of critical, philosophical reflection. References were also made to Marcel Griaule’s ‘conversations’ with the Dogon sage, Ogotemmei, whose reflections revealed a deep philosophic knowledge despite the fact that he was illiterate and had little contact with Western thought. Mafeje finally observed: There is, therefore, a pervasive belief among African philosophers that there were uncoded philosophical texts in traditional African society. The only snag, according to Wiredu, is that the study of such texts by Africans, ‘has not been conceptually illuminating nor has it been eminently critical and reconstructive’.145

Mafeje also detected in this ‘critical reconstructive affirmation’ of Wiredu a number of ‘philosophical paradoxes’ through which these philosophers hoped to blaze a trail. This is because in dealing with the problem of ethnophilosophy, ‘they are careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater’. However, consistent with their nationalist sentiment and their professional desire to establish modern and respectable African philosophy, they are

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violently opposed to the colonial legacy which, ‘wittingly or unwittingly, identifies African philosophy with traditional African philosophy’.146 Mafeje goes on to give several reasons for their objections: the first was that their acceptance of ethno-philosophy as an African philosophy would imply that Africans are only capable of producing mythical and religious beliefs, and other mystical notions, and that in the same vein it would also deny ab initio the existence of true philosophy in traditional Africa and foreclose a priori the possibility of developing from the African roots a true modern philosophy. The second reason was that the acceptance of this colonially inspired caricature and depiction of African traditional philosophy would give the impression that African philosophy was a monolithic thought system and, therefore, not susceptible to critique and reflection. The third reason was that the acceptance of ethno-philosophy would logically lead to the incongruity of the existence of philosophy in Africa without philosophers giving the impression that reflection in Africa was ‘communal’, instead of being ‘personal or individual’.147 On the basis of these objections, ‘a total war’ was declared, not only on European ethnophilosophers such as Tempels, but also on their African counterparts such as Kagame, Vincent Mulago, John Mbiti and Kofi Busia. Mafeje added that what emerged from this review was that the ethnophilosophical approach, which was associated with an earlier generation of missionary philosophers and their African counterparts, was now discredited not only by the younger secular African philosophers but also by the young generation of European theologian-philosophers who headed a number of Philosophy departments in African universities. Although one might be tempted to see a certain convergence in their ideas, which was dictated by the new political and social conditions in Africa, Mafeje added that there was an Africanist under-current which made it possible to indict Father Tempels, the European, and his African counterparts and excommunicate them. He argues that there was still an ambiguity regarding the criteria for diagnosis and orientation in modern African philosophy. This was what led Mafeje to look at the fourth African philosophical school from the political discourse. He pointed out that despite the anguish and scruples of ‘pure philosophers’, one cannot learn philosophy by ‘simply learning to philosophise’. This, he argued, was what took place in the political discourse in Africa when at first it emerged with the protagonists of ‘African Personality’ and ‘Negritude’, leading to the advocates of ‘African socialism’. These political ideologues were what Mafeje called ‘self-appointed

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African philosopher-kings’, whom the Kenyan sage philosopher referred to as the ‘nationalist and ideological philosophers’.148 At the centre of these political theories, Mafeje pointed out, were the fundamental questions of liberation of the black man, his identity and the meaning of ‘being-black-in-the-world’. It was a philosophical and moral justification for action as well as rebellion, which gave rise to African nationalism and the demand for political and economic independence. It was an unprecedented collective fulfilment of national liberation. That is why African leaders had elevated ‘blackness’, ‘African-ness’ or ‘Negritude’ to a philosophical principle. These included leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop and Julius Nyerere. Although aimed at the same objective, Mafeje observed, Nkrumah’s ‘African Personality’ and Senghor’s ‘Negritude’ were distinguishable philosophically. While the former had a definite socio-cultural referent to which were attributed those social characteristics and cultural reflexes that distinguished Africans from whites, ‘Negritude’ was different. In Mafeje’s view, ‘Negritude’ had ‘certain metaphysical connotations, over and above what ‘African Personality’ stood for. These metaphysical connotations included concepts such as ‘Black soul’, ‘emotion is Negro’, ‘communion of souls’, and ‘reason that is seized’. Cheikh Anta Diop went further to claim the Egyptian ancestry for most African cultures, and vice versa. Diop had also raised the issue of the black nature of Egyptian culture. Not only this, he ‘laid claim to Egyptian civilisation and postulated affinities between the Pharaonic languages and modern African languages’.149 But there were certain connotations about Senghor’s ‘Negritude’ that could not be sustained. First, there was a ‘deliberate attempt’ to portray blacks as ‘antithetical to whites in every sense of the word’, rejecting all they stood for. Second, there was an attempt to glorify and/or idealise blacks, which was a veiled way of seeking respectability by those who had been humiliated and despised by colonialism. Third, there was a yearning for the African traditional past. This was a sign of alienation on the part of the educated black elite who, nevertheless, ‘never retreated from the entrepots of European civilisation before and after independence’. These antinomies presented the modern, critical African with philosophical or theoretical problems. But no African intellectual would accept Senghor’s idea that Africans were by nature irrational, intuitive and emotional. As a result of these philosophical concerns about ‘Negritude’, a consultative meeting of African philosophers was held in Nairobi, Kenya. The philosophers at this meeting came to the conclusion that ‘Negritude’s

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characterisation of the reasoning of Africans was not acceptable’. It also noted that ‘Negritude’ was not scientific because it suggested falsely that the Negro was incapable of conceptualisation and gave privileged position to intuition ‘that is the identification of the knowing subject with the object’.150 Mafeje observed: For lack of critical or ratiocinative function, Negritude was accordingly rejected as no philosophy. Secondly, despite its political importance, there was some uneasiness about its implicit racism. But Senghor himself had described Negritude as an ‘anti-racism racism’ – something which even African philosophers are not able to avoid entirely in their aversion to foreign (European) influences and in their attempt to say what is peculiarly African about the discourse. The strictures against Negritude could have been, and were, made against the concept of ‘African Personality’. But the difference is that, being largely pragmatic, it was quickly extended to ‘Pan-Africanism’ in the hands of Nkrumah. Pan-Africanism, unlike Negritude, was, or it seemed so, a set of practical principles and ideas and had no transcendental connotations. If it failed, it did so as a political programme or vision, if somewhat illusory.151

But associated with ‘Blackness’ in the hands of the earlier generations of African political leaders such as Nkrumah, Senghor, Kenyatta, Nyerere, Sekou Toure and Kaunda was the idea of the ‘communal spirit’, which was exemplified by the way of life in traditional African villages. In their projections, these leaders construed this notion as a natural disposition towards socialism among Africans. Mafeje here quoted Nkrumah as summarising this point of view from his later book Consciencism as follows: … the traditional face of Africa, included an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestations, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as a primary spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity, integrity and value. This idea of the original value of man imposes duties of a socialist kind upon him. Herein lies the basis of African communalism.152 Other African leaders adopted concepts which accorded with this principle as ‘Ujaama’, ‘Harambee’, ‘Humanism’ etc.152

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Mafeje added that these concepts represented African nationalism in its pre- and immediate post-independence phases. These phases, he added, were ‘essentially an anti-colonialist or an anti-white domination movement’. According to Mafeje: Symbolically, it glorified the African past and extolled its human virtues. It embraced all Africans and blacks as brothers (and sisters) and asserted their equality to the whites. Insofar as it was anti-colonial, it was liberating and, insofar as it encouraged and enjoyed popular participation, it was democratic. Insofar as it played down social inequalities, injustice and class divisions in traditional African societies and in the emerging ne-colonial social formation, it was fraudulent. This is particularly so in that it was the same leaders who, after independence, constituted an exploitative and repressive elite who, far from treating with solicitude African rural communities, adopted and turned African capital cities into Western El Dorados and centres of conspicuous consumption. Insofar as this was their version of socialism in practice and insofar as they got compromised with the former colonial countries and imperialism in general, they became reactionary.153

Mafeje, as noted earlier, saw these issues as constituting a new period of challenges for African intellectuals from the 1970s onwards. The new challenges called for a re-evaluation of the earlier political theories as well as post-independence programmes for social and economic development – marking a break with the old nationalist tradition. He pointed out: ‘Whether this had led, or will lead, to new ideological, epistemological and philosophical projections, is something which, perhaps, will become more apparent in our review of intellectual discourse among African scholars, especially.’154 It is at this point that Mafeje turned to cultural revivalism or relativity as a possible response, but with an ambivalence of his own. Here Mafeje began to raise the issue of epistemology by asking whether existing epistemologies are products of particular cosmologies or of art. He observed that there was no doubt that ‘all thinking occurs in cultural and socio-cultural contexts’. It would then appear that ‘moral values’ are ‘tackled directly in literature as in philosophy, if in abstract terms’. The difference between this kind of discourse and ideology is that in the latter ‘the subject is identified with the object, i.e. it is unashamedly partisan, narrow and uncritical’. While it is moralistic, Mafeje argued that it was a poor medium for expressing cultural values ‘in the broad sense’. Thus while earlier African leaders frequently

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referred to ‘African culture’, they probably contributed nothing to the subject with the exception of Senghor who as a poet might have made some contribution. However, the same could not be said of African literary or visual artists. This is because art ‘manipulates largely cultural symbols and in doing so it is not restricted to any particular codes or technical language’. He observed further that in fact, ‘it thrives on elaborating or extending symbolic meanings and, thus, widens the cultural horizons of a society’.155 Mafeje added that unlike the technical fields, art can be experienced more directly and immediately by ordinary members of the society. This is further enhanced by the fact that artists come from all walks of life and can reflect it more spontaneously than those who are subject to restricted codes or epistemologies. In this direction, Mafeje referred particularly to the literary works of Sembene and Ngugi, whom he believed had entered Fanon’s third phase of a ‘revolutionary and combative’ evolutionary schema of alienation of African writers: ‘While these works are rooted in the African society, ... they are underlined by a totalising critique which cuts across both the traditional and neo-colonial African society.’ He added that in these literary works: The powerless, especially the peasants, are subtly encouraged to assert themselves against both their traditional and neo-colonial oppressors. Most importantly, the message is carried to them in their language.156

The latter literary expression, Mafeje pointed out, is an unmistakable attempt ‘to re-establish the lost organic links between the artist and his audience’. To achieve this, not only must the artist command the local language(s), but must be conversant with the details of local culture. Implicit in this is a process of ‘cultural revival of the self and the community which has been undermined from both ends, with the intention of bringing about a revolutionary transformation’.157 He went on to observe that also implicit in this cultural revivalism was a rejection of foreign domination and the alienating and degrading dynamic of the neo-colonial state in Africa for which certain classes among the blacks are responsible. Thus these writers are still operating within the realm of the national question in Africa. Insofar as they have in their perspective transcended the limitations of the petit-bourgeois nationalism of the fifties and sixties, ‘they can justifiably be referred to as progressive nationalists’.158 In this respect, after soul-searching exploration, one of the African philosophers, Paulin Hountondji, had come to the conclusion that in order

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to replace the present vertical dialogue among themselves with horizontal exchange, African researchers ‘will be forced to enlarge their theoretical horizon beyond that of Africanist obsession’. But Mafeje still drew attention to the fact that cultural revivalism in African literature had been used in two diametrically opposed ways. One tendency lamented and idealised cultural values, which gave rise to a backward-looking critique that took for granted African traditional democracy and communion as well as liberal bourgeois democracy. It was a moral indictment which offered no solution for the structural transformation of either traditional values or local languages precisely to make apparent the iniquities of both traditional hierarchies and neo-colonial structures.159 But insofar as cultural revivalism follows the second trend of being forward-looking and is committed to a ‘totalising critique’, it is progressive and lays a basis for a new national integration. This is more of a structural than cultural question, added Mafeje. But then if this be the case such a structural change can only be accomplished within a cultural context. Therefore, while Mafeje emphasised that cultural revivalism or relativity can be used for conservative and progressive ends, he himself had to come to a conclusion as to how culture can be used as an empowering tool in this transformation. While on this issue, Mafeje, quoting Hountondji, asked the question: ‘How can we avoid the pitfalls of conservatism and the reactionary attitude inherent in all cultural nationalism (read chauvinism), without succumbing to the excesses of an uncharted (Western) universalism?’ This then set the stage for Mafeje to raise the challenges of intellectual discourse in its ‘combative’ aspect. In this respect, as we have seen in a previous section, Mafeje argued that intellectual discourse was not limited only to the academic disciplines or academia as such. A great variety of ordinary people who engage in intellectual work have to be included if we are to move towards an authentic indigenisation of discourse in Africa in which the intellectual plays the part of enhancing and promoting structural transformation of the continent. Here we can remark that if this had to happen, it would follow that we have to re-define who the intellectual is and how African languages and knowledge created within these languages can be brought to the fore and ‘mainstreamed’ for the transformation of the continent – a fact that Mafeje did not go into and which needs a new interrogation beyond Mafeje. But it becomes apparent in the next section that Mafeje himself faltered and did not provide any meaningful direction beyond logico-deductive analyses.

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The Interlacustrine Kingdoms as ‘social formations’ One of the fundamental reasons why Mafeje agreed with the social anthropologists was that Africa was not a static society but a dynamic one. In the study of the Langa Township, he had observed that the social and economic changes that had been brought about by colonial capitalism had affected the basis of African societies. Throughout this early period, Mafeje argued that African society was now composed of social classes just like any other society. Therefore, functionalist Anthropology did not fully understand traditional African societies. At the eighth General Conference of CODESRIA held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1996, he even declared Anthropology a ‘dead’ discipline in Africa. He had written a monograph, which CODESRIA published as Monograph Series 4/96 entitled ‘Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide or End of an Era?’160 in which he made good his claims and where he asked fellow African anthropologists to ‘disabuse’ him.161 Mafeje went further to demonstrate that the ultimate concern for writing his essay was to interrogate Anthropology as a discipline and challenge its credentials for claiming to study ‘the other’ as a ‘thing of the past’. He also interrogated its claim to deal with the present ‘without making invidious distinctions between the Third World subjects and those of the imperialist countries’.162 The problematic he set for himself in the essay was to explore the deconstruction of Anthropology ‘with reference to the ex-colonial world’ and as it had emanated from the North and placed the deconstruction debate within the African context. This enabled him to commit himself ‘irrevocably’ to adopting a different paradigm in the application of ‘ethnography’ in Africa. This was accomplished with the writing of his book ‘The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations: The Case of Interlacustrine Kingdoms’ which he wrote in 1986 but which was published in 1991 and ‘not mentioned until then’. Indeed, this book can be taken as Mafeje’s magnum opus in that it laid out the research approach that he recommended for studying Africa on a new basis and, therefore, his contribution in the study and use of Anthropology and Sociology had to be judged from here.

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In the introductory chapters of the book, Mafeje explained that he used the interlacustrine ‘social formations’ both as a synthesis of his previous theoretical and ideological explorations and as a testing ground for his deconstructionist ideas, first by moving away from the concepts ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as analytical categories. He argued that the concept of ‘culture’ had ‘no boundaries’ because it was ‘widely diffused in space’, especially in conditions of improved communication. For this reason, the concept could not be used as designating category in social analysis. In the same way, Mafeje dispensed with the use of the concept ‘society’, given the fact that according to common usage, ‘there are societies within societies and societies among societies’, as for instance the ‘Nigerian society’, the ‘Yoruba society’ (within Nigeria) and the ‘West African society’ (in which Nigerian society exists). Therefore how could its definitional limits be determined? We can only accept it as a vague term of reference used for convenience. Analytically speaking, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are counterparts of the same thing and are themselves cultural denotations.163

He added that these ‘assertions’ about culture and society were ‘unanthropological’ but ‘scientifically sound’.164 Armed with these assertions and analyses, Mafeje felt comfortable and well-qualified to interrogate the concept of ‘social formations’ in regard to the interlacustrine kingdoms of the Great Lakes region. In many ways, therefore, it can be said that Mafeje made a real break with the anthropological past in writing this book, for it enabled him to problematise both anthropological and Marxist concepts in developing what he considered to be a new understanding of analysing dynamic changes in African ‘social formations’. In fact, what he attempted to do in this study was to offer a theory of Ethnography in relation to ‘African social formations’ using interlacustrine case studies as a basis. In doing this, he adopted what he called a ‘discursive method’ that built on local histories with a ‘strong interpretive force’, emanating from the ‘local peoples’ epistemologies’ and ‘hidden knowledge’. Based on this theory, he argued that the pastoralists in the ten kingdoms of the interlacustrine region, which had both segmented and centralising tendencies, challenged the notion that these kingdoms were ‘invaded’ by the empire building Hamitic pastoralists from the pre-dynastic Egypt. Instead, he reconstructed a history of their ‘social formation’ that built on local processes of political

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action based on a detailed ethnography in which both the pastoralists and sedentary communities converged.165 From this, Mafeje was able to challenge the whole notion of a particular pastoral community that came down from the north with longhorn cattle, associated with the Hima/Tutsi people as a racial group, with special political characteristics to introduce a new political system. His research proved that such cattle could be found in Sierra Leone, and along the river Niger as far south as Namibia. He pointed out that the indigenous Bantu agriculturalists and the Nilotic Babiito peoples had a pastoral history and, therefore, the process of state formation in the Bunyoro Empire could only be understood in terms of local dialectical social relations and interactions, which evolved between the ‘two modes of production and existence’. He pointed out: The Bairu provided the agricultural base and services, and the pastoralists, relieved of any onerous duties but in control of prestige goods, indulged themselves and turned the latter into a mechanism for political control and ritual mystification. This phenomenon, involving the same social categories, got repeated in five other kingdoms in the interlacustrine regions of Ankore, Burundi, Rwanda, Buhaya and Buzinza.166

A British anthropologist called Beattie had argued that when the Babiito dynasty took over from the Chwezi dynasty in the Bunyoro Kitara empire, these new rulers ‘appeared strange and uncouth to the inhabitants’, and had to be instructed in the manners appropriate of rulers of cattle-keeping and milk-drinking people. From the ethnographical evidence he collected from the people, Mafeje found that the Babiito were by tradition pastoralists and could not have been ‘ignorant of cattle-keeping’, although it was likely that they were ignorant of the kingship institutions, which in Bunyoro centred on sacred herds and a milk diet for the kings.167 Mafeje’s analysis and that of Peter Rigby who investigated the Maasai of Tanzania using a phenomenological Marxist methodology demonstrated that the organic relationship between people of different modes of existence and culture must inform any analysis of society as a dialectical process of social and economic relationships. The ‘social formation’ that arises historically must be demonstrated to arise out of these organic social relations and political actions. This can only be arrived at by use of a detailed ethnographic investigation instead of hypothetical a priori constructions based on one’s ideological convictions.

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In arriving at this method of conceptualisation, Mafeje tried to discard old anthropological concepts while polishing up Marxist concepts by choosing ‘social formation’ as his unit of analysis and discarding the concepts ‘culture’ and ‘society’, as we have seen. By problematising the use of the concept ‘ethnography’ by the Camaroffs,168 Mafeje adopted his own notion of ‘ethnography’ as a ‘key concept’ in writing his book. In doing this, he also departed from Balibar and Samir Amin in their use of the concept ‘social formation’ as meaning an ‘articulation of modes of production’. Instead, he preferred the use of ‘social formation’ as meaning the articulation of the ‘economic instance’, and the ‘instance of power’. The counter argument for this departure was that one could not use an articulation of an abstract concept such as ‘mode of production’ to designate ‘the same concrete social reality they are meant to explain’. The other counter argument was that Balibar’s and Amin’s use of the concept ‘mode of production’ had an organisational referent in which economics and politics were determinant, which could be subsumed under the concept of ‘power’. Therefore, in order to ‘balance’ the Marxist concept of ‘economic instance’ and the ‘incidence of power’, Mafeje claimed: ‘I invented what would have been “power instance” but this proved to be too awkward linguistically.’ Therefore, Mafeje settled for the ‘instance of power’ which was actually inconsistent with the Marxist demarcation between ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’, which he tried to combine in one ‘instance’. Having made up his mind, he adopted ‘social formation’ as his unit of analysis ‘par excellence’. This is how the study of the interlacustrine kingdoms became a series of ‘social formations-in-the-making’ which ‘interbred’ with each other in such a way that, according to the study and the ‘discursive method, these independent kingdoms would have become ‘one social formation or state’ had it not been for the colonial intervention. This discovery proved that ‘social formations’ had ‘extendable instances’ depending on the nature of the intervening social and political forces whether internal or external. Mafeje then turned to his theory and ethnography of African social formations by clarifying that, as units of analysis, his ‘social formations’ were not defined according to their ethnography but according to their ‘modes of organisation’ so it did not matter which people belonged to a particular social formation but rather ‘what they were actually doing in their attempts to assert themselves’. He continued: It struck me that in the ensuing social struggles people try to justify themselves and not so much their causes, which remain hidden. They do this by authoring

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particular texts which give them and others certain identities which in turn become the grammar of the same texts, the rules of the game, or, if you like, the modus operandi, in a social discourse in which individuals by virtue of their ascribed identities are assigned categorical statuses and roles.169

Having clarified ‘ethnography’ as his second ‘key concept’, Mafeje declared it to be ‘radically different from that of the Northern theorists or conventional anthropologists’. He argued that he did not write ethnography nor did he have room for the term ‘ethnology’, which is a biological analogy dating back to the time of Westermarck, ‘whose main interest was to develop a taxonomy of human societies according to their basic characteristics’. This use of the term had created a predisposition towards associating human types with particular ethnological types ‘in the same way that in biology it is presumed that ontogeny breads phylogeny’ so that in the case of human societies, ‘not only does this imply fixed and closed systems but also has racist overtones’ (Ibid.: 34). However, Mafeje admitted that ‘all ontological categorisations produce essentialist systems of classification’, which become impossible to transcend in thought, such as ‘ethnicity’, which is used in a parameter within which to site anthropological research. The same applied to ethnography. Therefore, Mafeje argued that the alternative would be to use ‘historical categories’ which are ‘interpretative’, but at the same time are not in the monopoly of the observer. This leads to a question of how ethnographical texts are authored. Mafeje argued that the way he had conceived the concept ethnography was ‘an end product of social texts authored by the people themselves’. He elaborated on his ‘discursive method’ and added: All I do is to study the texts so that I can decode them, make their meaning apparent or understandable to me as an interlocutor or the ‘other’. What I convey to my fellow-social scientists is studied and systemised interpretations of existing hidden knowledge. In my view, this marked a definite break with the European epistemology of subject/object. Nor did it depend on my ideological or libertarian instincts. It was simply recognition of the other not as a partner in knowledgemaking, but as a knowledge-maker in her/his own right. Whether I discover this through conversations as Griaule and Dumont did, through interviews, recordings, participant observations, oral traditions, artistic expressions, or written accounts, it is immaterial because all these are so many different ways of reaching the same objective, namely understanding the other.170

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Armed with this renewed confidence, Mafeje referred thus to the results of his investigation of the interlacustrine kingdoms: It is these texts that I refer to as ethnography. They are socially and historically determined; that is, they can be authored and altered by the same people over time or similar ones could be authored by people with the a different cultural background under similar conditions. Therefore, ‘context’ is most critical for their codification.171

If Mafeje is, therefore, to be credited or discredited with the claim of having made a leap from the discipline of Anthropology as a ‘hand maiden of colonialism’, to ‘ethnography’ as defined by him above, it is in the attempt he made in developing a thesis based on these ‘texts’ as an approach that was suitable for explaining African conditions. Mafeje summarised this attempt when he concluded: The final methodological lesson that can be drawn from the study is that detailed ethnographic knowledge helps us to avoid mechanistic interpretations. Far from opening the way to relativism or particularism, it enables us to decode what might strike us at first sight as so many different things and, thus, puts us in a position where we can discover hidden unities. For instance, we discovered that ‘tribal’ names were used, not to identify tribes, but to designate status-categories in nontribal formations, for example, ‘Bairu’ and ‘Batutsi’. Furthermore, ethnographic detail showed that contrary to stereotypes that pastoralists were the founders of the kingdoms in the interlacustrine region, neither the pastoralists nor the agriculturalists can take credit for this. Likewise, ethnographic detail forbids us to treat pastoralism and cultivation as things apart. The kingdoms were a result of a dynamic synthesis of social elements that were drawn from both traditions, and the prevailing modes of existence within them served as politically-controlled alternatives. These discoveries enable us to generate more objective codes and to put into proper perspective the historical and ethnographic intricacies of African societies.172

Mafeje’s claim here is epistemic, if indeed it is true, for it destroys the way colonial functional Anthropology and imperial ethnology were used to classify human societies according to their basic physical and cultural characteristics. These approaches denied the colonised ‘objects’ knowledge of themselves since they were regarded as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’. However, ‘ethnography’, as used by Mafeje here, was an end product of social texts

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that were authored by the people themselves as knowledge-makers. In this approach, all that a scholar does is to study the peoples’ texts so that he or she can decode them and make them understandable to the other scholars as systemised interpretations of existing but ‘hidden knowledge’. According to Mafeje, it has been evident that his approach ‘marked a definite break with the European epistemology of subject/object’. So Mafeje would like us to believe that with this ‘discursive method’, and ‘interpretative’ skills derived from the ‘other’, we have achieved an epistemological break with the epistemology of fragmented dualistic ‘dialectical opposites’ inherent in colonial Anthropology. Instead of the ‘subject/object’ epistemology of the coloniser ‘us’ and ‘them,’ we have a ‘synthesis’ or a ‘convergence’ of social elements that are drawn, in the case of the interlacustrine kingdoms, from both traditions of the pastoralists and agriculturalists into an inter-related whole expressed in the existence of the kingdoms. If this was true, it would mean that Mafeje had discovered a new epistemology which can reveal the ‘hidden knowledge’ which he was able to retrieve through the ‘ethnological’ approach or what he called ‘ethnological knowledge’ of the colonial ‘object’, who now becomes the subject. Nevertheless, Mafeje said that he also operated as a neutral researcher, thinker and scholar outside his newly discovered approach because he informed the reader that in discarding the old concepts and approaches of analysis, he had also adopted a ‘discursive method’ which was not predicated on any epistemology, but was ‘reflective of a certain style of thinking’. It is with this ‘style of thinking’ that he was able to study the peoples’ texts in order to decode them and make them understandable. But in such a case how different was he from the colonial scholar who claims also to be ‘neutral’ and ‘a participant’ and ‘objective thinker’? But Mafeje here insisted that at the ‘level of methods and techniques or vocabulary’, there are ‘no essential differences’ with the other scholars: ‘It is at the level of interpretation that significant divergences emerge and hence the existence of different schools of thought even within the same discipline.’ Mafeje continues: What our approach implies is that all formalised knowledge is underlined not simply by particular ethnographic context but also by unacknowledged or denied ethnographic texts. The latter inevitably leads to social alienation, whether in the immediate or global sense. Therefore, sound ethnographic knowledge is a necessary condition for meaning ful social scientific and humanistic propositions. This might mean the expropriation of Anthropology as a discipline founded on the

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concept ‘ethnography’ by Europeans. This was not the intention but if it follows as a logical consequence, then there should be no regrets but great jubilation for the contribution to the other social sciences.173

So it would appear that Mafeje, in creating the new concept called ‘ethnography’ and in using it to interpret the meanings of the ‘hidden knowledge’ of the ‘other’, was convinced that it didn’t matter whether such an approach was a re-appropriation of Anthropology as conceived by the colonial Europeans. Indeed, he demanded that we should all ‘jubilate’ with him and congratulate him for doing so. For this reason, the author agrees with Professor Helmi Sharawy174 when he states that while Mafeje made a major contribution in the understanding of interlacustrine kingdoms in his book, he nevertheless ‘does not uphold the idea of the End of Anthropology in order to liquidate an epistemological order’. He adds that Mafeje only succeeds in putting in place ‘a more appropriate alternative’ to the concept, which, in his opinion, ‘leads to Anthropology theorising of another kind’.175 Jimi Adesina also agrees that in his analysis in the book, Mafeje still ‘maintains distance’ from the object of study. He declares that he had initially found an irritation in Mafeje’s style of writing; that is to say, the tendency to use ‘third-person pronouns as if he was separate from the process of history that he was discussing’. Adesina added: ‘It is a style that is quite evident in his last works on Anthropology’ and refers specifically to the following works: 1997b, 1998, 2001.176 This ‘distance’ which Adesina observes in Mafeje is in fact a commitment to an individualistic scholarly approach, which places him in a privileged position as ‘the knower’ who creates ‘appropriate methods’ through which he can study the distant ‘other’. This is a reflection of his acceptance of the cosmology of the atomistic individual who in the Cartesian Enlightenment epistemology is the agent of knowledge through their ‘thinking’ and ‘investigation’ of the object of research. Such an individual reflects: ‘I am, therefore, I think.’ In fact, Mafeje develops his ‘discursive method’ to enable him to ‘think as himself’ and ‘interpret’ to us the products of his thoughts, which he derives from the ‘other’. But in that case, how could Mafeje claim that he, through this new ‘epistemology’ or ‘methodology’, was able to discover ‘hidden knowledge’ of the people he investigated in the interlacustrine kingdoms, and how could he demonstrate to have overcome the structural functional anthropologist who operated as a ‘participant observer’, which in this case Mafeje did through a different ‘method’ – a discursive method? We should remember

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the African ontology which holds that ‘I am, because we are’, and the consequent epistemology: ‘I know, because we know.’ This is a completely different epistemology emanating from a different cosmology that defends and upholds the existence of collective knowledge, which is created through our languages as the ‘living word’. Mafeje needed to leave us with that last African achievement of how we can re-affirm the epistemology that works within the collective where all Africans are joint creators and self-interpreters of their knowledge. For Mafeje to succeed in deconstructing functional Anthropology and bring an end to his colonially imposed alienation, he must abandon the Cartesian epistemology and ‘join the crowd’ of all African thinkers and makers of knowledge whom he acknowledges but then refuses to join. This is unfortunately missing and we still remain slaves to the ‘othering’ epistemologies of the Western world, to which Mafeje remained a victim. On this charge, Mafeje seemed to ‘plead guilty’. But then we must find a way out of this enslavement, and perhaps the only way we can do this is through a collective endeavour in the course of our struggles to emancipate ourselves politically and economically, and not through ‘thinking’ scholars and intellectuals. But Mafeje in the same breath argued that, although he may still have reverted to ethnography as a methodology, he had nevertheless managed to transcend a number of academic disciplines beyond Anthropology. This is because he pointed out that in writing the interlacustrine book he could have used any discipline, apart from Anthropology, such as Social History, Sociology ‘in the classical sense’, ‘Political Economy’, or a ‘political science with Marxist orientation’. This is true, and in fact, he could also have done so from other disciplines including natural sciences since, as we have seen above, he was quite comfortable with philosophy. But he is wrong even then when he tries to wriggle out of this unclarity when he states: ‘All these (disciplinary) divisions did not matter so long as I was able to use social science concept consciously and consistently.’ To justify this line of thinking, Mafeje continues: This meant discarding some (divisions) such as those found in the colonial Anthropology, revising some such as those found in classical Marxism, and inventing new ones such as ethnography in my sense, ‘mode of organisation’, as against ‘mode of production’, ‘instance of power’ as against ‘economic instance’, ‘categorical’ as against ‘ethnic’ relations. Use of new concepts or using old concepts anew guards against charges of eclecticism. This is facilitated by the use of a discursive method which

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is not predicated on any epistemology but is reflective of a certain style of thinking, for example, radical left or post-modern deconstructionist style. Deconstruction must imply reconstruction. Therefore, in deconstructing colonial anthropology and in doing other things instead, my intention is to contribute the emergence of a post-anthropological era, and by extension, an era of deconstruction of all dominating forms of knowledge, including other bourgeois social sciences.177

This is fine, as long as the transcending of these disciplines is integrated around a holistic and integrated moral and ethical system that is cosmologically based in an African worldview. But Mafeje justified this new approach by arguing that ethnography, as defined by him, is extraepistemological because his ‘discursive method’ is not predicated on any epistemology. But straddling all the social sciences and even using some of the natural sciences does not mean that one is abolishing epistemology in general because all knowledge systems must have an epistemological system that conforms to their ontology. That particular epistemology, based on the dualistic Cartesian scientific methods, is an epistemology of a particular period and is applicable to particular and specific ‘modes of production’. But it does not follow that other cultures and forms of knowledge do not require an epistemology. To deny this is to mystify the concept of epistemology. That is why the author came to the conclusion that, although Mafeje made a definite contribution in his scholarly endeavours in adding some substance to the social sciences by discarding colonial Anthropology, he failed to transgress anthropology as a discipline, and merely succeeded in re-formulating and re-asserting the same in a different way, as in fact he does in the study of the interlacustrine kingdoms. If he had consciously tried to dump Anthropology as a social science discipline, he would have found it easier to move not only into inter-disciplinary mode, which he in fact did, but would have, like Cheikh Anta Diop and Ki-Zerbo, been among the few African scholars who would have shown the way to an authentic African epistemology. He would have confirmed that he had succeeded in moving towards Afro-centricity which, according to him: ... is nothing more than a legitimate demand that African scholars study their society from inside and cease to be purveyors of an alienated intellectual discourse. When Africans speak for themselves and about themselves, the world will hear the authentic voice, and will be forced to come to terms with it in the long-run. … If

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we are adequately Afro-centric, the international implications will not be lost on the others.178

Unfortunately, Mafeje stopped short of being ‘adequately Afro-centric’ and left a heritage that needs to be completed. In fact, even here, he had, as we have seen, disclaimed Afro-centricity as a product of African-Americans who could not claim to be Africans ontologically. To succeed in creating something really new and African, he needed to be part of a history that was based on African people’s culture, for he had already recognised that all knowledge is created through cultures. To transgress Cartesian academic disciplines which created ontological and epistemological hierarchies implies moving towards a holistic and integrated ontology and epistemology. Such an approach requires the disowning of the dualistic cosmological worldviews on which Cartesian epistemology is based. It means moving towards a trans-disciplinary epistemology that is in accord with an Afrikology of knowledge that relies on a peoples’ transmitted knowledge through their languages and cultures. This is a cosmology that has its roots in the Cradle of Humanity located in the Nile valley and which has perpetually been recreated through African languages and the ‘living word’ ever since. We shall try to present briefly below how this could have been achieved as a basis for further interrogation. But before we do that, let us look at Mafeje as a radical thinker and activist in the South African setting.

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Mafeje – The South African radical We have seen that, in his research in Langa Township and the mission stations in the Transkei, Mafeje had detected a certain class transformation in the South African social landscape. He had observed that ‘Red pagan’ boys at the mission station, like the ‘home boys’ in Langa Township, were conscious and proud of their paganism and African identity, and therefore were able to refuse to succumb to the self-alienation of colonial capitalism. However, he noted, this was not the case with the self-alienation he saw among the Christian middle-class in the township and mission. He also noted that social order grounded on racial capitalism – not simply ‘white domination’ – constituted the major problem facing black South Africans. This self-reflection had enabled Mafeje to raise some fundamental questions concerning the alienated Africans. He had posed the questions: ‘Does “social change” or “being civilised” mean, unambiguously, being assimilated into the white middle-class cosmic view?’ This became the line of analysis of the South African scene in which he increasingly found himself radicalised and distrusted by the mainstream political classes in the African National Congress. As we have also seen, he increasingly became critical of the Unity Movement and the New Unity Movement, with which he had at first been associated politically. His radicalised political position was more propelled by his understanding of the class forces at work in the political organisations that came to dominate the opposition against white capitalist domination. In a number of articles, mainly from Zimbabwe, he analysed the class character of the struggles in South Africa and southern Africa in general. He understood the formation of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in 1943 and its weaknesses, and noted the rise of the Congress Alliance, which later came to be dominated by the African National Congress, and the basis of its relative success as a federated organisation in which the constituent parts retained their autonomy. But gradually, especially in exile, these constituent parts lost their identity and became subsumed under the ANC as a national democratic movement, despite a number of splits that occurred from time to

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time along the way. These minority groups became identified with the black majority. The position of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in this arrangement remained ambivalent but consistent, in wanting to control the working class movement and, through it, to control the national democratic movement as a whole. This happened from about 1928 when the party recognised the strategic importance of being associated with the black mass movement. Being originally dominated by white communists, the SACP, unlike other minority groups, decided to maintain its identity with the aim of controlling or having influence over the movement. But it was the dominant position of the ANC, which came to accommodate all groups that gave it the appearance of being a multi-racial organisation. The ANC Youth League (ANCYL), however, from its inception in 1946–1949, espoused mainly an Africanist stance. The Unity Movement marginalised itself by adopting an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist political programme in an era that was mainly dominated by petit-bourgeois majority. The PanAfrican Congress, which split from the ANC in 1959, also seemed to take a similar path with its 1975 policy document: The New Road of Revolution, which adopted the Maoist New Democracy approach. Therefore, in Mafeje’s view, what came to characterise the South African anti-apartheid political scene was the dominance of the ANC, which in its Morogoro policy position outlined in the Strategy and Tactics of the ANC of 1969, projected itself as ‘the national movement of South Africa’. Mafeje believed that this policy document laid out the class character of the movement in stressing the national question and the strategy and tactics to achieve it when it states that: ‘In the last resort it is only the success of the national democratic movement which ... will bring with it the correction of historical injustices perpetrated against the indigenous majority and thus lay the basis for a new ... approach.’ On this policy statement, Mafeje observed that one cannot help noticing here the influence of the SACP’s ‘two stages theory’.179 Mafeje added: It may then be concluded that for the ANC, anti-imperialism and the leading role of the workers and peasants are not a necessary condition for national liberation but a sequel to it.180 But, he continued: This had already been achieved in the rest of Africa and therefore the ANC was adding very little to the programmes since these national democratic movements had not ‘corrected the injustices perpetrated against the indigenous majority’ in those countries. With this understanding, Mafeje posed the question: ‘Then, what

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are its grounds for supposing that things will be different in South Africa? Is the ANC on the basis of those grounds, prepared to settle for another Lancaster House Agreement?’181

From this perspective, Mafeje drew a distinction between the nationalist and socialist conceptions of the national democratic revolution. He pointed out that this was necessary in view of the fact that many national liberation movements, many of them petit-bourgeois in character, and those professing a workers’ programme, all proclaim the national democratic revolution to be their objective. In his view, the nationalist conception of the national democratic revolution is ‘perforce capitalist or bourgeois and, therefore, not incompatible with imperialism’. Yet a socialist conception is ‘of necessity anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist’. Therefore, Mafeje observed that it was ironical that the former position has been advocated by the ANC, the only black organisation in South Africa that has been associated with the SACP – a supposedly workers’ party. The Unity Movement and the PAC have from time to time advocated a socialist conception of the New Democracy. Interestingly, both of them had less popular appeal than the ANC, which by all accounts, was the major national liberation movement in the country. The question was, therefore, why the ANC had greater appeal than the other two black organisations.182 In trying to answer this question, Mafeje argued that issues such as liberal press support, international support, better propaganda machinery, better funding, etc. must be set aside. In his view ultimately the answer must be found in the difference between the politics of Black Nationalism and the politics of the New Democracy and the constituencies to which they are addressed. He pointed out: As far as I can see, the constituency of Black Nationalism is essentially petitbourgeois; and by this we mean the African aspirant middle-class which comprises senior bureaucrats, higher and lower professionals, traders, commercial farmers and kulaks. The workers who are numerically weak in most African countries and peasants who are the silent majority come in as adjuncts to the petit-bourgeoisie. This is more or less acknowledged in the Strategy and Tactics of the ANC [which states] ‘the double-oppressed [sic] and double-exploited working-class constitutes a distinct and reinforcing layer of our liberation and socialism and do not stand in conflict with the national interest.183

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Mafeje analysed this to mean that despite the insertion of the term ‘national interest’, it was ‘obvious’ that, according to the view expressed in the Strategy, the position of the workers was secondary and subject to ‘national interest’, which meant in this context petit-bourgeois interest in view of the absence of a bourgeoisie in Africa, although in the case of South Africa the term could refer to the white bourgeoisie, unless the ‘national interest’ is racially defined. In contrast, the constituency of the New Democracy is in the interest of the workers and peasants, who all over the continent are under-developed relative to that of the petit-bourgeoisie, which dominates the national liberation movements. Therefore, Mafeje further argued that those who propose to base their national revolutions on them ‘start from a disadvantage’ because ‘not only is their constituency weak, initially, but also they are soon faced with resistance from the contending classes’. In addition, internationally they are met with suspicion, if not hostility. Of necessity, their programmes have nothing to offer in the short term, only in the long term. This has been the reason for the ‘two-stage’ strategy of the SACP, and to some extent of the Unity Movement. In view of the African experience where neither national liberation nor emancipation has occurred, but instead external dependence has increased, and in the absence of an organised working class and peasantry, ‘there is nothing to fall back upon, except bullets and bayonets at the bidding of the colonels’. This conclusion brought back the fundamental question of whether a bourgeois or for that matter, a petit-bourgeois democratic revolution ‘is realisable in under-developed countries in the imperialist epoch’. Mafeje concluded that judging by the current crisis of democracy and of accumulation in Africa, it seems that ‘a long march awaits all’. This being the view of Mafeje in understanding the African situation, what were then his views on the transitions in South Africa at the stage he was writing in 1992–1993? As far as can be seen from the literature to which I have access, Mafeje regarded the strategy of the ANC, which was leading to the ‘negotiated settlement’ approach in that country, as having been flawed. First, he saw the 25 years of ‘guerrillaism’ as a petit-bourgeois tactic intended ‘to frightening the whites’ and which sacrificed workers for very low returns, especially when it was aimed at ‘selective sabotage of government installations and the avoidance of loss of life’. He wondered ‘whose lives’ these were. Therefore, ‘given the zig-zags’ of the South African revolution, Mafeje asked the question of how we can safeguard against defeat or betrayal: ‘This is bearing in mind that regionally and

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internationally socialism seems to be on the retreat and that in South Africa in particular, grounds for a big compromise are being assiduously prepared.’ This was in 1992. At this point, Mafeje saw that the only ‘choice’ was between a ‘negotiated settlement’ and a ‘revolutionary confrontation’. Given the experience of African independence and the position of the Frontline States, the second choice was unlikely. This meant that if the freedom fighters decided on mounting an insurrection, they would have to do it inside the country in view of the position of the Frontline States who had adopted the position of ‘mutual protection’ to safeguard their independence through negotiation. In that case, any ‘armed struggle’ would acquire a new significance in that it would cease to be a matter of sporadic, non-combat incursions into South Africa by special guerrillas but perforce a peoples’ war: The latter presupposes a high level of political mobilisation of the mass of the people under a unified command. The former condition is in the making in the form of sustained but spontaneous popular uprisings. What is still missing is a programme of radical demands and a unified, revolutionary leadership.184 Mafeje noted the emergence of new revolutionary forces in South Africa in the form of the workers’ organisation and the radical youth. He pointed out that by their existence they were ‘posing the question of political succession’. A point would be reached sooner or later when the old guard would no longer be calling the shots. Mafeje has perhaps been proved right with the recent confrontations between the ANC leadership under President Zuma on the one hand, and the COSATU leadership and ANCYL, with their leader Julius Malema, on the other, with their demands for nationalisation of the mines. Could this be an indication of the rising revolutionary movement in South Africa demanding a voice? Be that as it may, at this stage Mafeje insisted that the workers and the youth should insist on a participatory democracy both in the party and the government. If the ‘negotiated settlement’ strategy of ‘sharing power’ is adopted there will be a ‘shunting off’ of these forces as has happened in the rest of Africa. This is why it is important that the new democracy must include the question of ‘appropriation of value’. In the case of the Youth Movement, since 1973 the movement has insisted that major political initiatives should not be taken only by the old guard. Decisions on critical national issues are no longer the monopoly of the top leadership. Moreover, formal organisation is now treated with complete disdain. A new constituency is emerging since the days of the United Democratic

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Front (UDF). There are two tendencies, therefore, that are emerging: a petitbourgeois constituency and the worker/peasant constituency. The only way the people of South Africa can realise Article 3 of the Freedom Charter, which states that the people shall share in the country’s wealth, is for the new constituencies to re-organise in order to realise a socialist future for the country. The ANC cannot expect support from the masses and at the same time condone exploitation. Second, faced with this crisis, the ANC petit-bourgeois elite cannot afford to appear to be a selfseeking class. Therefore, one cannot help but reach the conclusion that a socialist transformation is still on the agenda in South Africa. This will entail a dispassionate review of existing organisations and programmes ‘so as to reveal what has been missing so far and why this has been the case’. This has to be done because the emerging generation of revolutionaries cannot operate under the presumption that their particular enterprise will succeed because they are who they are. They should brace themselves for a long and hard struggle, even against fellow Africans.185 The strategy, Mafeje postulated, was aimed at a minimal programme that is justified in principle and sustainable in practice. The programme should revolve around the basic question of how in the new society that will be fought for those who produce value are to appropriate it, and how they can participate in its allocation in such a way that the prospects for being exploited by other classes are nullified over time. This demand is of strategic value in the sense that it is morally and politically binding. Therefore, on the new organisers rests the onus to demonstrate that they have not or are not going to sell out.186 This then was Mafeje, the South African radical, who may not have been popular with those who took power in a ‘negotiated settlement’ for South Africa, but who stood for the rights of the exploited masses as a scholar and thinker and for which he worked out a strategy for future struggles.

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Cosmology, epistemology and academic disciplines As we have just seen, Mafeje tried to overcome the limitations of colonial functional Anthropology in order to endogenise knowledge production. Despite his having failed to take up the issue of epistemology seriously, he had still raised the issue of epistemology by asking whether existing (universalistic) epistemologies were products of particular cosmologies/ world-views or were products of art. He had acknowledged that ‘all thinking occurs in cultural and socio-cultural contexts’, and all moral values are tackled directly through literature, as in philosophy, although this is done in abstract terms. He had gone further to observe that the difference between this kind of discourse and ideology was that in the latter case the subject was identified with the object, and that in that aspect ideology was ‘unashamedly partisan, narrow and uncritical’. While it was moralistic, Mafeje argued that ideology was a poor medium for expressing cultural values in their broad sense. Later in the same article he had come to accept that the intellectual and, especially, the artist should strive to re-establish the lost organic links between them and the ordinary Africans. He had argued that, in order to achieve this, not only must the artist (or intellectual) command the local languages of the people with whom he works, but must be conversant with the details of local cultures as well. Implicit in this argument was the call for a ‘cultural revival of the self and the community’, which had been undermined ‘from both ends’, and that this must be done with the intention of bringing about a ‘revolutionary transformation’. Mafeje went on to observe further that implicit in this cultural revivalism is a rejection of foreign domination and the alienating and degrading dynamic of the neo-colonial state in Africa for which certain classes among the black people are responsible, but which must be eliminated by restoring the dignity of every African. We can only do this by eliminating the degrading aspects of Western impositions on Africans and this must begin with getting rid of the Western world-views that dominate African

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thinking so that Africans can think through their languages and cultures, as Mafeje advised. In reflecting on how Mafeje had studied the interlacustrine kingdoms, we discovered that Mafeje had stuck in the same degrading disciplines by creating his own epistemology that did not emanate from African culture and languages. In doing this, Mafeje had placed himself above the people and their culture in order to free himself and ‘think’ and ‘analyse’ issues for them. That means he was still stuck within the universalistic and dualistic Cartesian epistemology on which all Western academic disciplines are based. This is not merely an epistemological issue or one of the academic disciplines with which Mafeje tried to work with, but at bottom a cosmological world-view issue, which Mafeje acknowledged but does not address in practice. What is cosmology or world-views of a people within which they construct their ontologies, epistemologies, cultures, meanings and ‘ways’ of thinking and doing things? A dictionary meaning of the word ‘cosmology’ would reveal that when people think and act, they do so on the basis of their world-views that enable them to look at the world and environment in which they exist in a manner that is satisfying. Robert Plant Armstrong in his book ‘Wellspring: On the Myth and Source of culture’ (1975), has called this as springing from the ‘mythoform’ that brings consciousness ‘leaping into life’. He regards this principle as ‘whole, total and without discreet content’ because it makes both perception and cognition possible.187 Armstrong argued that if Western epistemology has produced disciplines such as Anthropology, which have failed to lead to any human understanding, the study of that spectrum of human experience must be looked at as an art rather than a science, in the same way Mafeje argued the point but restricted himself to Western-trained artists. But unlike Mafeje, Armstrong adds that Anthropology must move beyond concerns with mere phenomenalism and structures, towards a deeper understanding of ‘meaning’, which can only be found in a people’s cosmology. This is what he thinks should be the concern of a ‘humanistic Anthropology’, which he argues should deal with varieties and qualities through which the nature and the value of human experience can be understood. This is an art and not a science, he adds. An art, unlike a science, is dedicated to the illumination of experience and not a definition of some item of ‘re-verifiable knowledge’. He points out:

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That proposition which most easily and most simply accounts for the broadest range of experience will provide the deepest satisfaction and hence will also enjoy the widest validity.188

Armstrong goes further to argue that it is through the study of particular cultures as a means towards their understandings that we can appreciate the differences in human knowledge as a whole. In drawing attention to African ancient knowledge as manifested in different African cultures, Armstrong refers to William Hagg’s recognition of the relationship between dynamism and art in Yoruba culture (which Armstrong refers to as ‘affecting works’). He regards this relationship as the ‘informing principle’ that grants the necessary immediacy between feeling and form in the ‘affecting presence’, which wholly informs the work of art. He draws a conclusion from this by pointing to the Yoruba cosmology within which the Yoruba construct the epistemology of their knowing, which forms the basis of their being (ontology) in contrast to the Western world-view: Whereas (Western) civilisation sees the material world as consisting of static matter which can move or be moved in response to appropriate stimuli, (Yoruba) cultures tend to conceive things as four-dimensional objects in which the fourth or time dimension is dominant and in which matter is only the vehicle, or the outward and visible expression of energy or life force. Thus it is energy and not matter, dynamic and not static being, which is the true nature of the things… By itself it might be of academic rather than practical importance in the study of tribal culture and art, but its corollary that this force or energy is open to influence by man through ritual means – and is the very basis of all tribal belief and observance.189

The point emerging here is that the African traditional and cultural conception of the universe as a four-dimensional reality is trans-disciplinary, not in the sense of its methodological correctness, but that this knowledge is nearer to a trans-disciplinary vision of inter-connectedness, which modern quantum physics was able to discover only through the recognition of the crisis of classical Greek physics. In short, the results of quantum physics came to the realisation of a holistic ‘tribal’ world-view that was nearer to the multi-level and multi-dimensional reality, while the universe that classical physics theorised about had proved inadequate to complex inter-relationships. This complexity could not be explained or analysed by classical physics until the quantum discovery opened the way for looking at

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society differently from the much idealised Greek classical expressive model to a holistic and integrated African world-view, which recognises the interconnectedness of all phenomena. The discarding of this Greco-Judaic-Christian world-view is the basis on which Africans can re-instate their own world-view that is holistic and integrated. This means African languages must be brought to the centre of knowledge creation and as Cabral rightly pointed out, language is at the centre of articulating a people’s culture. Cabral points out that the African revolution would have been impossible without the African people resorting to their cultures to resist domination. In this regard, it is important to note that it is because language and culture have remained ‘unresolved issues’ in Africa’s development programmes that present-day education has remained an alien elite system to the bulk of the African population. As Franz Fanon points out, to speak a language ‘is to assume its world and carry the weight of its civilisation’.190 Professor Kwesi Prah has argued consistently over many years that the absence of African languages has been the ‘key missing link’ in African development.191 The African university must transform itself to this reality if Africa is to move forward. Thus the search for the African intellectuals, the search for the production of knowledge that has its roots in African languages and cultures, implies that an African university must have an ‘African Identity’, which is the same search for a fraternity of knowledge and cognitive justice. For Anthony Holiday, the idea of ‘an African university’ must be rooted in the spiritual roots of Africans. He equates the idea of the African university to the European university of the time in which John Henry Newman’s ‘idea of a university’ demanded a theological underpinning to the university. For this reason, he draws attention to the African idea of a university, which is rooted in an African spirituality, which according to him, will harmonise with the African peoples’ Africanness: If the conviction remains largely unspoken, this has much to do with the global climate of scientism and secularism in which humanity’s aspirations – religious and educational – must seek expression.192

Holiday insists that the ideology of Africanism or Pan-Africanism must not be confused with the concept of Africanness. While the one is an ideology of a particular period, in this case Pan-Africanism being an aspect of the idea of nationalism inspired from Europe, the idea of Africanness is

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rooted in the character of the African people. Therefore, for him, when we are talking of innovations, institutions and systems ‘our historicity entails unavoidable interaction between semantic change and continuity’. He adds that it is a feature of the logic of our language ‘that tradition must be taken into account when definitions and revised definitions are in question’ and that, far from acquiring new meanings, words simply ‘lose what meaning they have when traditions, which inform our use of them, are lost to sight’.193 Therefore, while Africanism and Pan-Africanism are secular complex notions wedded to particular secular objectives, it cannot be intrinsic to the logical form of a character of a people, and thus cannot be anything but external to the logic of the language we use when we speak of an African university. What should be important is to grapple with the understanding of a character of the African people, ‘as distinct from trying, in a scientific spirit, to explain a social phenomenon’. Indeed, without this identification of the African character and its spiritual basis, the kind of crisis in the form of ‘mercenary teaching’ which ‘neo-liberal reform’ of universities has generated in African societies can never be confronted. The dilemma posed here is whether there is an African intellectual force that is able to overcome the dualistic Cartesian hold on the African intellectual mind to enable African scholars to promote a university based on an African character and spirituality. In this respect, Professor Catherine Odora of the University of South Africa refers to our inability as African scholars to develop an ‘organic intellectual infrastructure to adapt, translate and re-tool borrowed knowledge’. She does not blame a particular government posture of any post-colonial government or the lack of resources for this, but attributes it to the Cartesian ‘tight architectonic’ university structure, woven together by the confluence of the ideologies of science, development and modernity and which had, overtime, created a cognitive prison wall into which were cast the academic and policy communities.194 A start must be made to break this Euro-centric epistemological hold and imprisonment. This is why in the process of the struggle for the transformation of the academy we advocate the mainstreaming of the epistemology of Afrikology under the programmes of the Marcus-Garvey Pan-Afrikan University, located at Mbale in eastern Uganda, as a part of the demand to transform the academy. Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University is an attempt to locate the university on two pillars, with one pillar being located at the campus and the other pillar being located at the Community Sites of Knowledge, where knowledge is produced, analysed

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and disseminated co-jointly. The campus itself then becomes a ‘site of knowledge’ along the Community Sites of Knowledge, except that the latter acts as a collecting centre for purposes of publication and dissemination as well as teaching, in which the community experts take part. The research and some aspects of teaching and training are also done at the Community Sites of Knowledge. Afrikology, therefore, promotes a cumulative and continuous process of knowledge creation, validation and dissemination - continuing the tradition from the Cradle of Humanity that has throughout the ages been going on through African languages, which reproduce themselves continuously. In that sense, Afrikology is a universal epistemology because it builds on the base of the knowledge as first propounded in the Cradle of Humanity and as updated from time to time by the African and other oral traditions over centuries through the living word. Afrikology also recognises other sources of knowledge with which it enters into dialogue in order to develop a ‘fusion of horizons’ with other traditions. Thus the oral word and speech based on African languages and others is the means through which knowledge has been validated and disseminated throughout the continent and the world.195 Transformation of the academy in this sense means the integration of academic life into the community not just in the physical space of the universities, but as the cultural spiritual out-growth of the institutions of learning within communities.

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Conclusion The author was tasked by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) to write a paper to launch a Mafeje Memorial Lecture Series in order to commemorate his academic and intellectual contribution, especially in his struggle to debunk colonial structural functional Anthropology as a discipline for understanding ‘the other’ amongst whom the African was prominent. The brief was to deal with the relevant issues affecting the practical and theoretical state of the social sciences in Africa and highlight the importance of social science research in the socio-political transformation in South Africa and the rest of the African continent. Later a larger monograph was commissioned, detailing Mafeje’s academic work and its contributions to African scholarship. As requested, the author has demonstrated that indeed Mafeje was a great scholar, thinker and political activist – not for the purposes of acquiring power but for the aim of ‘speaking truth to power’. His research and political activism ever since the ‘Langa days’ have been directed at discovering what he believed to be the truth even when he was utilising the very tools of alienation that he was questioning. He continued his ‘speaking truth to power’ throughout his career, never accepting what was popular but investigating that which made what was popular ‘to be popular’. We can see this philosophical orientation on the issue of culture. Although he accepted culture as a basis for creating knowledge, he nevertheless also put it aside and tried to interrogate it and discover the ‘key issue’ within it, which he then focused on. For instance, we have seen that although Mafeje talked of ‘cultural revivalism’, he nevertheless warned of its negative and positive sides. He was always trying to find what was the key element in that ‘dialectic’ which was the most ‘forward looking’. This is why when it came to his own country, South Africa, he could not accept what was considered the most ‘popular’ national movement – the African National Congress – but instead worked for some time with the Unity Movement, which he judged to be more critical in developing a national democratic programme for South Africa. Even then, he seemed to have stepped aside from it to pursue a more ‘Africanist’ research and political agenda, with which he appeared to have closed his life project.

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Conclusion

Mafeje was exceptional in that right from the 1960s, when he was refused the position of lecturer at the University of Cape Town, he did not bend his knees and accept the indignity that had been imposed on him. He continued to work with energy and commitment to his project as an independent researcher and thinker. His political activism was linked to his intellectual work, and he never joined populist organisations just for their sake. This included his role in the academic and professional bodies to which he belonged from time to time in order to promote his ideas. In these endeavours he exhibited a commitment to scholarship, and was against shoddy work. Whatever he did, he handled it with rigour and academic thoroughness, always criticising those scholars he met if they did not take issues seriously. In his last days, Mafeje seemed to be frustrated by the attitude shown to him when he returned to his country. The mainstream political actors in South Africa regarded him as having been a divisive figure, and having avoided ‘unity’ in the furtherance of the struggle against apartheid. He also felt that his work was under-estimated by these powers, and even when they came to recognise the indignity that he suffered in Cape Town in the 1960s and tried to mend fences, he refused to accept the apology until after his death when his family accepted it on his behalf. This may also explain why Mafeje had not been convinced that the earlier invitations for him to return to South Africa and work at the universities and research institutes were genuine. He also felt insufficiently challenged and engaged when he finally accepted to come and work in these institutions – dying a very frustrated man. He found himself extremely lonely in the last years of his life, as he found no intellectual engagement that could have activated him to be a meaningful contributor to the practical side of South Africa’s socio-economic transformation. Perhaps this is the sad side to Mafeje’s life story, but the image that he leaves us with, as an academic and intellectual community, is that of an intellectual giant -– despite the weaknesses pointed out in his academic work. It is clear, therefore, that Mafeje was one of the leading African social scientists who tried to deconstruct structural functional Anthropology and attempted to construct a new research methodology that was free from these colonially inspired disciplines, within the wide social science discourses. In this, he succeeded in the critique and deconstruction. On the other hand, as we have demonstrated, he failed to construct a completely new epistemology that would have moved us a step nearer to understanding the African situation in an authentic manner.

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Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

On the political side, there is no doubt that Mafeje was a committed Pan-Africanist who was dedicated to African liberation and emancipation, a great teacher, thinker and crusader for African political, intellectual and cultural freedom. His achievements in questioning Anthropology as a discipline were important, and they remain great landmarks upon which young African scholars can build to establish that new approach that Mafeje and his generation fought to set in motion in African knowledge production, intellectual freedom and social responsibility.

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NOTES 1.

Prah, K (2008) ‘Archibald Monwabisa Mafeje: A Vignette’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, p. 6, Dakar.

2.

Ibid., p. 6.

3.

Ibid., p. 55.

4.

Ibid., p. 1.

5.

Ibid., p. 5–6.

6.

Ibid., p. 4.

7.

Ibid., p. 4.

8.

Sharp, J (2008) ‘Mafeje and Langa: The Start of an Intellectual’s Journey’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, p. 31, Dakar.

9.

Ibid., p. 32.

10.

Mafeje, A (1975) ‘Religion, Class and Ideology in South Africa’, in Wilson, M & West, M (ed) (1975) Anthropology Essays in Honour of Monica Wilson, pp. 177–184, David Philip & Rex Collig, Cape Town.

11.

Sharp, p. 34.

12.

Mafeje, A (1975), op cit., p. 184.

13.

Sharp, p. 34.

14.

Ibid.

15.

Prah, p. 7.

16.

Kaatser, R & Adikhari, M (2004) ‘Peasants and Proletarian: A History of the African Peoples’ Democratic Movement of South Africa’, Klei, 36, pp. 5–17, Cape Town.

17.

Ibid., p. 9.

18.

Ibid., p. 9.

19.

Sharp, p. 32.

20.

Levison, D (2005)

21.

Mafeje, A (1992B) In Search of Alternatives: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory, p. 82, SAPES, Harare.

22.

Ibid., p. 66.

23.

Mafeje, A (2000) ‘Africanity: A Combative Ontology’, CODESRIA Bulletin, No. 1 & 4, pp. 66– 71.

24.

Ibid., pp. 66–71.

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Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker 25.

Ibid., p. 67.

26.

Ibid.

27.

Ibid.

28.

Ibid., p. 68.

29.

Ibid.

30.

Ibid., p. 69.

31.

Ibid., p. 70.

32.

Ibid.

33.

Ibid.

34.

Marx, K (1976) Capital, Vol. 1, p. 317, Moscow Publishing House, Moscow.

35.

Moore, SF (2008)

36.

Masinde, E & Murunga, GR (2008) ‘Some Comments on Mafeje-Moore Debate’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, p. 101, Dakar.

37.

Mafeje, A (1969) ‘Large-Scale Farming in Buganda’, Society for Applied Anthropology, Anthropology of Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 23, University Press, Kentucky.

38.

Ibid. p. 23.

39.

Ibid., p. 29.

40.

Ibid.

41.

Ibid.

42.

Ibid., p. 30.

43.

Mafeje, A (1988B) ‘The Agrarian Question and Food Production in Southern Africa’, in Prah, K (1988) Food Security Issues in Southern Africa, p. 92, Institute of Southern African Studies, The National University of Lesotho, Southern African Studies Series No. 4.

44.

Ibid., p. 93.

45.

Ibid., p. 94.

46.

Ibid., p. 95.

47.

Ibid., pp. 96–97.

48.

Ibid., p. 97.

49.

Ibid., p. 98.

50.

Ibid., p. 99.

51.

Ibid., p. 100.

52.

Nabudere, DW (2008) ‘Archie Mafeje and the Social Sciences in Africa’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, Dakar.

53.

Ibid., p. 120.

54.

Ibid., p. 121.

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Notes 55.

Mafeje, A (1998) The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations: The Case of Interlacustrine Kingdoms, p. 60, CODESRIA Book Series, London.

56.

Adams, WY (1998) The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology, p. 351, CSLI Publications, Stanford.

57.

Mafeje, A (1998) p. 61.

58.

Ibid.

59.

Ibid.

60.

Mafeje, A (1996A) Anthropology and Independent Africans: Suicide or End of an Era? CODESRIA Monograph Series 4/96, Dakar, Senegal.

61.

Geertz, C (ed) (1963) Old Societies and New States, p. 89, New York, Free Press.

62.

Williams, R (1983)

63.

Inglis (1993)

64.

Ibid., p. 60.

65.

Mafeje, A (1998) The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations: The Case of Interlacustrine Kingdoms, p. 60, CODESRIA Book Series, London.

66.

Ibid., p. 80.

67.

Ibid., p. 60.

68.

Mafeje, A (1992B In Search of Alternatives: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory, p. 22, SAPES, Harare.

69.

Ibid., p. 22.

70.

Ibid.

71.

Ibid.

72.

Ibid.

73.

Ibid., p. 23.

74.

Ibid., p. 165.

75.

Ibid.

76.

Mafeje, A (1995) ‘African Socio-Cultural Formations in the 21st Century’, African Development Review, Vol. 7 no. 2, p. 158, African Development Bank, Abidjan.

77.

Mafeje, A (1973) ‘The Fallacy of Dual Economies Revisited’, Institute for Development Research, Dualism and Rural Development in East Africa, p. 27, Copenhagen, Denmark

78.

Ibid., p. 28.

79.

Ibid.

80.

Ibid.

81.

Ibid., p. 29.

82.

Ibid., p. 30.

83.

Ibid.

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Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker 84.

Ibid.

85.

Frank, G (1969) The Development of Under-development.

86.

Ibid., p. 5.

87.

Ibid., p. 4.

88.

Laclau, E (1967)

89.

Mafeje, A (1973) Ibid., p. 89.

90.

Ibid., p. 34.

91.

Mafeje, A (1992B) p. 35.

92.

Ibid., pp. 18–19.

93.

Ibid.

94.

Ibid.

95.

Ibid., p. 20.

96.

Ibid., p.20.

97.

Ibid., p. 35.

98.

Ibid.

99.

CODESRIA, (2008) CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, pp. 12–14, Dakar.

100. Amin, S (2008) ‘Homage to Archie Mafeje’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, p. 12, Dakar. 101. Ibid., p. 13. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Mafeje, A (1973) ‘The Fallacy of Dual Economies Revisited’, Institute for Development Research, Dualism and Rural Development in East Africa, p. 44, Copenhagen, Denmark. 107. Mafeje, A (1992A) African Philosophical Projections and Prospects for the Indigenisation of Political and Intellectual Discourse, p. 25, SAPES Trust, Seminar Series No. 7, Harare. 108. Ibid., p. 23. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., p. 91. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid.

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Notes 115. Ibid., p. 61. 116. Mafeje, A (1995) p. 157. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. Mafeje, A (1992B) p. 31. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., p. 35. 124. Mafeje, A (1995) p. 158. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., pp. 16–19. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., p. 160. 131. Ibid., p. 161. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., p. 167. 135. Ibid., p. 168. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., p. 169. 138. Ibid., p. 170. 139. Ibid., pp. 26–27. 140. Ibid. 141. Mafeje, A (1992A) p. 1. 142. Ibid., p. 3. 143. Ibid., p. 6. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., p. 7. 148. Ibid., p. 9.

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Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker 149. Ibid., p. 10. 150. Ibid., p. 11. 151. Ibid. 152. Nkrumah, K (1964) Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution. London: Heinemann 153. Mafeje, A (1992A), p. 13. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid., p. 16. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid., p. 17. 159. Ibid. 160. Mafeje, A (1996B) ‘Who are the Makers and Objects of Anthropology: A Critical Comment on Sally Moore’s Anthropology and Africa’, African Sociological Review, Vol. 1 no. 1, pp. 1–5. 161. Ibid. 162. Ibid. 163. Ibid., p. 33. 164. Ibid. 165. Mafeje, A (1998) p. 20. 166. Ibid., p. 22. 167. Ibid. 168. Comaroff, John & Jean (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, p. 22, Boulder, Westview Press. 169. Mafeje, A (1998) p. 34. 170. Ibid., p. 35. 171. Mafeje, A (1996B) p. 34. 172. Ibid., pp. 128–129. 173. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 174. Sharawy, H (2008) ‘The End of Anthropology: The African Debate on Universality of Social Research and its Indigenisation: A Study Dedicated to Mafeje’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, pp 15–21, Dakar. 175. Ibid. 176. Adesina, J (2008) ‘Against Alterity – The Pursuit of Endogeneity: Breaking Bread with Archie Mafeje’, CODESRIA Bulletin, ‘A Giant Has Moved On: Archie Mafeje (1936–2007)’, Vol. 3–4, Dakar. 177. Mafeje, A (1996B), pp. 36–37.

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Notes 178. Mafeje, A (2000), pp. 66–67. 179. Mafeje, A (1992B), p. 50. 180. Ibid. 181. Ibid. 182. Ibid., p. 51. 183. Ibid. 184. Ibid., p. 64. 185. Ibid., p. 70. 186. Ibid., p. 71. 187. Armstrong, RP (1975) Wellspring – On the Myth and Source of Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California. 188. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 189. Ibid., p. 28. 190. Mugo, M (2002). 191. Prah, K (2008). 192. Holiday, A (2001). 193. Ibid., p. 5. 194. Odora, C. 195. Nabudere, DW (2005).

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