University of New South Whales, Sydney
|First published in African Studies Review & Newsletter vol. XXII, 1 (June 2000), pp.21-26.
Republished here courtesy of the author and editor.
|In a word, I gave up African studies because I found it depressing. But that is hardly an explanation, even if it is an emotionally precise description of what occurred. To explain my giving up African studies I have to say why I came to find the activity depressing. This requires a little history - both personal history, or autobiography, and history of Africa.|
I began to be interested in Africa whilst an undergraduate student of economics and politics at Sheffield university (1965-8) and I began my doctoral work in African politics in Oxford in 1969. That means that I first entered this field of study when the hope and optimism generated by Africa's independence from colonialism was still in the air. My doctoral research was conducted in Tanzania, and that was not accidental of course. As an undergraduate I had been deeply moved and impressed by the writings of Julius Nyerere, and like many young intellectual radicals of that period I was eager to see Nyerere's experiment in a 'Third Way' African socialism at first hand. I undertook doctoral fieldwork in Arusha district, Tanzania between 1969 and 1971, undertook further field research on peasant agriculture and rural stratification in Kenya in 1972-3, and returned to East Africa at intervals between 1973 and 1983. I also conducted shorter research and consultancy visits to Ghana, Senegal and Zambia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My last visit to Africa - to Kenya and Tanzania - occurred in 1983.
This history means that, like many other Africanist scholars of my generation, I lived and worked through the period when optimism and hope in and about Africa were replaced by pessimism and cynicism. A particular memory comes to mind. It is a balmy tropical evening. I am in a bar on the campus of the former Kwame Nkrumah university in Kumasi, Ghana in early 1980. A number of African colleagues are there too, including a lecturer from the university's Department of Law. He has had rather too much to drink. He is watching the mid-evening news on the television above the bar. A news reader announces the declaration of the formal independence of Southern Rhodesia, now to be called Zimbabwe. There is the conventional film footage of these occasions - cheering crowds, brass band, new flag ascending floodlit flag pole. My colleague smiles drunkenly, murmurs "poor sods!" loud enough for all in the bar to hear, and staggers from his bar stool and out of the door. I am shocked. But, significantly perhaps (at least in retrospect) nobody in the bar, African or European, protests. And this is not an isolated occurrence. In Ghana in 1980, in Kenya and Tanzania in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it is not difficult to meet older African people who will tell one - and totally unbidden - that "we were better off when the British were here". I even hear it from middle aged men in the Murang'a district of Kenya's Central Province, men who had been Mau-Mau fighters.
Of course I had a ready-made radical perspective into which I could accommodate and by which I could explain away such uncomfortable experiences and observations - the dependency perspective. What after all was so surprising about all this? Had I not said, in my own book on Kenya, that the country was in the political grip of a dependent African 'petit-bourgeoisie' which, by its very dependent nature, was unlikely to be an effective agent of 'real' economic development in Kenya. And had not a raft of other scholars - European and African - said similar things about a raft of other newly-independent African states. So, in such circumstances, why was it at all surprising that popular disenchantment with such elites within Africa was so widespread - up to, and including a retrospective nostalgia for colonialism?
Yes. But this same perspective had been predicated on the view that these 'dependent' or 'neo-colonial' governing elites were agents of 'imperialism' or of 'trans-national capital' in Africa. And as the 1970s turned into the 1980s and the political fragility and economic involution of so many African states became palpable this notion itself seemed ever more questionable. As I put it in a number of public presentations in the early 1980s - "if the ruling elites of Africa are seen as managers or agents for western capitalism or imperialism, one can only say that the latter should get itself some new agents. For the ones it has seem remarkably inefficient." In other words, the decay of Africa's production structures and economic infrastructure, the continent-wide slump in investment (domestic and foreign), the endemic inflation and balance of payments problems, the sharp absolute falls in real standards of living of the mass of African people and (accompanying all this) the massive levels of governmental corruption and persistent breakdowns in civil peace and order in so many states - all this seemed hard to square with a basically functionalist perspective which had the governing elites of Africa somehow doing the bidding of international capitalism. And it was all the harder to maintain this position when so many of the official spokespeople for that capitalism (the IMF, the World Bank, corporate executives with African investments) far from endorsing the activities of their supposed 'agents' were endemically critical of the failure of African elites to provide domestic environments in which any form of capital investment could be secure and profitable.
This is not to deny, of course, that there were powerful factors beyond the activities of Africa's governing classes which also pushed Africa into political instability and economic decline from the mid-1970s onwards - everything from the oil shocks which brought an end to the post-war long boom in the world economy and led to at least the onset of Africa's debt problem, through the Cold War flooding of the continent with arms and various forms of military subversion, to the global arms trade and traders. But it is to say that such factors did not seem to account, either individually or even in conjunction, for the particularity of the African situation. For all these factors had impacted on other parts of the South or Third World too without effects as catastrophic as those to be observed in Africa. I came up with a hackneyed but useful analogy. The African ship of state was ploughing through heavy international seas, yes. But that only strengthened the need for an excellent captain and navigator at the helm and a well disciplined crew. But as it was, the captain and all his officers seemed to be drunk or absent from the bridge and the crew engaged in various forms of mutiny. No wonder the ship had run aground.
So, and leaving aside hackneyed analogies, I was returned again and again to an overwhelming question, which can be phrased in various forms, but always remains essentially the same question. Why are some governing elites economically progressive and others not? Why are some ruling classes exploitative, selfish and corrupt but also genuine agents for national economic and social improvement, while others are just exploitative, selfish and corrupt? Why are some states 'developmental' and others not? Of course these issues have come to the forefront of African studies since I gave it up, even if they are dealt with in vocabularies remote from dependency theory (which was declining rapidly in popularity as I left the field). So now we hear a lot more about African 'cleptocracy' or 'modern patrimonialism', about 'rent seeking behaviour' and 'moral hazard' among state elites and about 'state failure' generally in Africa and the need for market-led 'structural adjustment'. But though the question may be posed in new forms and though helpful new descriptions of African state functioning (mainly derived from the public choice paradigm) have emerged, I see no significant progress made in answering the question 'why?' Why have African governing elites been particularly prone to behaving in ways which are both economically destructive of the welfare of the people for whom they are supposedly responsible and which have led - at the extreme - to forms of state fision, (civil war etc.) collapse or breakdown?
At this point I must make a confession. After over thirty years of studying this question (including the last ten years in Australia giving far greater attention to the 'developmental states' of SE Asia) my first and predominant answer to it is still that I do not really know (or not in any hard or definite sense of 'know'). I have some suspicions about where an answer might lie. The lack of economic or social 'depth' of the colonial experience over most of sub-Saharan Africa; the fragile and inexperienced stratum of educated African people which that 'shallow' experience left behind; the chronic lack of 'fit' between Africa's indigenous structures of ethnicity and the so-called 'nation-state' structures which colonialism bequeathed and which the first generation of nationalist leaders (probably very unwisely) opted to retain; the inability (probably derived from the above) of Africa's governing elites to identify themselves with, or as part of, an 'imagined community' of the nation states which they nominally superintend; their consequent failure to manifest any sense of loyalty or of a duty of care or responsibility to the people who make up these entities; their tendency to restrict such a sense of moral duty only to some particular ethnic or other sub-group of their citizens (thus increasing both economic and social polarities among citizens and the likelihood of the political fision of the state, especially in economically desperate times). I could add further suspicions to the list if asked. But none of them are certainties or anything like certainties, and again it is comparative study which muddies the water. Because, of course, you could have said all of the same things about the post-colonial elites of Indonesia or Malaysia and some of the same things about the elites of Thailand, South Korea or Taiwan. This reflection only leads me - and rather flatly - to the conclusion that it must be the concatination of these domestic elite characteristics with the particularly weak global economic situation of sub-Saharan Africa which was the fatal two-sided recipe for developmental failure. And that may be true, but, as I say, I still have no certainty that it is or about how precisely to weight the relative importance of the list of usual suspects above.
But why did all this lead me to give up African studies? Well it compounded the depression. I was depressed, that is to say, both by what was happening to African people and by my inability even to explain it adequately, let alone do anything about it. And also, I was depressed by the polarization, within the world of African studies as it was in the early 1980s, between those advocating what were called 'internalist' explanations of Africa's problems and those who continued to favour 'externalist' explanations. I was depressed because advocates of the latter view often charged advocates of the former with "blaming African people" for Africa's parlous state, a charge which seemed at once incoherent, even in its own terms (was colonialism in Africa an 'internal' or 'external' factor, for example?) and, above all, enormously hurtful. For of course the vast majority of African people are the victims, often the horrific victims, of Africa's plight, not its perpetrators in any sense, and I, at least, would never wish to deny that. But I would also wish to assert that, though the political elites of Africa change their social composition (often quite significantly and rapidly) their economically and politically destructive behaviour mostly does not change with their personnel. And that certainly suggests - at least to me - that there are broader social/cultural factors (in the mass milieu from which such elites are recruited) continually making for, and reinforcing, this behaviour. So, we do have to ask what it is about the history and culture of sub-Saharan Africa that has led (at any rate in part) to its disastrous present. But that can only to be construed as "blaming African people" or, more broadly as "blaming the victim", if a guilt-ridden confusion is made between context and agency. That is, it may be in the broadest historical and cultural context of African society that we find the clue to destructive political elite behaviour. But that does not make that context an agent of that destruction. Nor (therefore) does it prevent political and moral responsibility for their actions being sheeted home to narrow and privileged sub-groups or classes of African people (and not 'African people' as a whole); classes which have been the agents - even if not the sole agents - of that destruction.
In short, and to conclude, I left African studies because what was happening to a continent and a people I had grown to love left me appalled and confused. But I also left it because I felt that the emotionaly stressed and guilt-ridden debate which arose within the African studies community about the causes of Africa's decline was itself a powerful testimony to a fact even more depressing in its implications than anything that was happening in and to Africa. This fact is, to put it simply, that the most damaging legacy of colonialism and imperialism in the world has not been the global economic structures and relations it has left behind nor the patterns of modern 'neo-imperialist' economic and cultural relations of which it was the undoubted historical forerunner. Rather its most damaging legacy has been the psychological Siamese twins of endemic guilt on the European side and endemic psychological dependence on the African side, legacies which make truth telling hard and the adult taking of responsibility even harder. Imperialism fucked up the heads of so many people whom it touched - both colonialists and colonized (Frantz Fanon was absolutely and deeply right about that) and until that - ultimately depressing - legacy of its existence is finally killed, neither Africa nor African studies will be able to make real progress. It was that conclusion which led me - very sadly - to leave both behind.
An issue which arises from all this is what part the African Studies
profession, and in particular the profession in Australasia, might play now,
given all this gloomy but unchangeable history, to help Africa (and, by
extension, itself) find a future markedly better than its immediate past. Oddly
enough, this may be an apposite moment to raise this question. Recent events in
Sierra Leone, the appearance of British ground troops on African soil for the
first time in nearly 40 years, the focusing of UN and international attention
on the continent through these events (and through recent events in Zimbabwe,
Ethiopia, Congo, Rwanda etc.) has led to at least a ripple of western press and
media concentration on precisely the same question addressed in this short
article - viz., why so much of the continent finds itself in such dire
straits. In reading some of these editorials and lead articles or listening to
radio and TV discussions however, one cannot fail to notice the low level of
factual and historical knowledge of the continent and its problems which they
so often display. And this is true even when the press or media journalists in
question are obviously trying, at least, to grapple in some serious and
thoughtful way with the issues. (This is yet another index, I think, of the
almost total fall of the continent from the attention of even educated
Westerners in the era of supposed 'globalisation'). On the face of it
therefore, there does seem to be a vital potential role that the Africanist
profession could play in raising the level and quality of public debate about
this issue in the West generally and in Australasia in particular
We should not delude ourselves however. The welfare of Africa and its people is a matter of remote concern for the governments of Australia and New Zealand and probably always will be. But despite this, Australasian Africanists, through the aegis of AFSAAP, could perhaps use this moment when the iron is, if not actually hot, at least moderately warm, to consider sponsoring - along with a number of sympathetic organisations and public figures (Ausaid, CARE, CAA, etc.) - a major, high profile Round Table on (say) 'The Crisis of Africa' .This could be held in Canberra and involve invited major figures from the African continent, UN agencies and senior Australasian Foreign Affairs politicians, as well as local Africanists and members of the Australasian African community. At the very least such a round table -which should of course seek the highest possible level of media coverage - might begin to shift Australian aid priorities a little. At best it might play its part in a wider international effort to get Western governments in general - including governments which are for more significant to Africa than the governments of Australasia - to rethink their policies and strategies toward Africa beyond the familiar neo-liberal homilies around 'structural adjustment'. The aim of such an international mobilisation of public opinion must be to try and produce a set of Western policies toward Africa which at least do not actively hinder (even if they do not positively help) Africa's own efforts at creating a better future for itself. For needless to say of course, it is the latter variable which is the absolutely crucial one. The prime responsibility for making a decent future for Africa's people lies, has lain for at least 30 years, and from now on always will lie, on the shoulders of the continent's own governing elites. Simply to say that, to keep saying it, and to keep saying why it is true to any and all African people who will listen, this must be the predominant political objective of the Africanist profession at this historical juncture.
Professor Gavin Kitching is Associate Professor in the School of Politics & International Relations at the University of New South Wales (Prof Kitching's home page). His research areas include post-communist agrarian reform in Russia, globalization and Third World development, and Wittgensteinian philosophy and social theory. He is currently engaged in editing an anthology, Wittgenstein and Marxism: Language, Science and Morality, for the Boston series in the History of Science. He is also writing a textbook on Globalization and Uneven Development for Routledge. His book Class and Economic Change in Kenya won the Herskovitz Award of the U.S. African Studies Association in 1981 and another, Rethinking Socialism, was one of The New Statesman's Books of the Year in 1983. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at SUNY Binghamton and at Cornell University. In 1995, he obtained a Soros Foundation Research Award (US$25,000) for field research on agrarian reform in post-Communist Russia, the results of which are now being published.