Sub-Saharan Africa in global capitalism

Monthly Review

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 13-30

  Saul, John S ^a   Leys, Colin ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002979057     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/mr-051-03-1999-07_2     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. World Bank, World Development Report 1996 (Washington, 1996).
2. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Economic Report on Africa 1996 (Addis Ababa: ECA, 1996).
3. African Development Bank (ADB), African Development Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 33 and 47-48.
4. Ibid., pp. 51-52.
5. ECA, African Economic Report 1998 (Addis Ababa: ECA, 1998; available at http:// www.un.org/depts/eca [no pagination]).
6. The figure of forty-eight states actually includes a number of island states and statelets which are more or less near Africa and conventionally included in it, but whose history, resource endowment, present economic structures, and cultures distinguish them in various ways from Africa proper. These are Cape Verde (pop. 0.4 m.), Madagascar (pop. 15.8 m.), Mauritius (pop. 1.1 m.), Sao Tome and Principe (pop. less than 100,000), and Seychelles (pop. 100,000). Seychelles and Mauritius have relatively high per capita incomes, based on tourism and also, in the case of Mauritius, on clothing exports.
7. In the eight years leading up to 1997, thirty African countries had per capita income growth of over 1.5 percent, while only twenty-three had less, or declining incomes (ADB, op. cit., p. 3). This was markedly better than the 1980s, but starting from a lower base: many countries had still to get back to the per capita income levels of 1980, and, in any case, counting countries rather than populations distorts the picture since many of the better-performing economies were small.
8. ECA, African Economic Report 1998 (op. cit.).
9. The average rate of return on U.S. FDI in 1997 for all countries was 12.3 percent. The average rate of return on U.S. FDI in Africa for the whole period 1990 to 1997 was 29 percent (United Nations, World Investment Report 1998: Trends and Developments (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 1998).
10. Geoffrey Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis (London: MacMillan, 1975), p. x.
11. In 1997, the whole of Africa (including north Africa) attracted less than 3 percent of all the world's foreign direct investment, and sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa, barely half of that - i.e., 2.7 billion dollars; and slightly over half of this went to the half-dozen oil-exporting countries (United Nations, op. cit.).
12. Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Vol III: End of Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), the section entitled "The dehumanization of Africa," pp. 88-90.
13. As we will see, there was a rough, if misleading, plausibility to all of this. African states were not, by and large, "developmental" in any meaningful sense of the word, but had instead become predatory excrescences, parasitic upon the peasantry certainly and with little residual popular legitimacy. It was therefore that much easier for outside actors to present Africa's problems as being exclusively internal ... and as largely state-inspired.
14. This is the title Bill Freund gives to the last chapter-on Africa's most recent period -of the new edition of his definitive short history of the continent, The Making of Contemporary Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
15. Eboe Hutchful, "From 'Revolution' to Monetarism: The Economics and Politics of the Adjustment Programme in Ghana," in Bonnie Campbell and John Loxley, eds., Structural Adjustment in Africa (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 122-3.
16. John Ravenhill, "A Second Decade of Adjustment: Greater Complexity, Greater Uncertainty" on Thomas Callaghy and John Ravenhill, eds., Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Decline (New York: Columbia, 1993), p. 47.
17. ECA, African Economic Report 1998 (op. cit.).
18. In his book, A future for Africa: Beyond the politics of adjustment (London: Earthscan, 1992), Onimode mounts a powerful case against structural adjustment, capping the point we have quoted here with the observation that, "a generation of Africans has been lost and a second is under serious threat, while the marginalization of Africa has accelerated alarmingly in most spheres" (p. 1).
19. David Plank, "Aid, Debt and the End of Sovereignty: Mozambique and Its Donors," Journal of Modern African Studies 31, 3 (1993), pp. 429-30.
20. A notorious example is Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, pp. 44-76.
21. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 549.
22. Chris Allen, "Understanding African Politics," Review ofAfrican Political Economy 65, pp. 301-20. The account given here draws heavily on Allen's important analysis.
23. Catherine Boone, "States and ruling classes in post-colonial Africa: the enduring contradictions of power," in Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 108-40.
24. Catherine Boone, "'Empirical Statehood' and Reconfigurations of Political Order," in Leonardo A. Villalon and Philip A. Huxtable, eds., The African State at a Critical Juncture (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp. 129-141.
25. Dale Grant, "Canadians cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war," Toronto Star, March 9, 1999.
26. Ankie Hoogevelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 180-81.
27. Allen, op. cit., sub-section entitled "Guerilla War and Socialist States," pp. 315-6.
28. Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, "The Stakes in South Africa", Monthly Review, vol. 37, no. 11 (April 1986).
29. On the taming of the South African transition see, inter alia, John S. Saul, "Liberal Democracy vs. Popular Democracy in Southern Africa," Review of African Political Economy 72 (June 1997).
30. Castells, op. cit., the sub-section entitled "Africa's hope? The South African connection," p. 122.
31. See Hein Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (London: Zed Books, 1998).
32. Castells, op. cit., p. 127.
33. "Even after successfully implementing most of the broad elements of this [the World Bank's] agenda ... the incidence of poverty will still rise in both absolute and relative terms. Dependence on foreign assistance will continue unabated. There should be no illusions," writes Israt Husain in his contribution, "Structural Adjustment and the Long-term Development of Sub-Saharan Africa," to R. Van der Hoeven and Fred Van der Kraaij, eds., Structural Adjustment and Beyond in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Hague/London: Ministry of Foreign Affairs/James Currey, 1994), p. 170. For other critical, and heterodox, reflections from within the Bank, see R. Agarwala and P. Schwanz, "Sub-Saharan Africa: A Long-Term Perspective Study" (internal document, May 1994).
34. "Even after successfully implementing most of the broad elements of this [the World Bank's] agenda ... the incidence of poverty will still rise in both absolute and relative terms. Dependence on foreign assistance will continue unabated. There should be no illusions," writes Israt Husain in his contribution, "Structural Adjustment and the Long-term Development of Sub-Saharan Africa," to R. Van der Hoeven and Fred Van der Kraaij, eds., Structural Adjustment and Beyond in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Hague/London: Ministry of Foreign Affairs/James Currey, 1994), p. 170. For other critical, and heterodox, reflections from within the Bank, see R. Agarwala and P. Schwanz, "Sub-Saharan Africa: A Long-Term Perspective Study" (internal document, May 1994).
35. For an analysis of such initiatives in the 1980s, see Onimode, op. cit.
36. Jonathan Barker, "Debating Globalization: Critique of Colin Leys," Southern Africa Report, vol. 12, no. 4 (September 1997), p. 21; see, however, Leys' response to Barker ("Colin Leys Replies") in the same issue of SAR which emphasizes the parallel need for "nation-wide movements and/or parties" through which such local groups and initiatives can ultimately "unite to confront the political and economic power of the transnational and the states that back them" (p. 22-3).
37. Stephen P. Riley and Trevor W. Parfitt, "Economic Adjustment and Democratization in Africa," in John Walton and David Seddon, eds., Free Markets and Food Riots (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 167.
38. Célestin Monga, The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1996).
39. Riley and Parfitt, ibid., p. 170; they, in turn, are quoting P. H. Smith, "Crisis and Democracy in Latin America," World Politics, vol. 43, no. 4 (1991).
40. Riley and Parfitt, ibid., p. 170; they, in turn, are quoting P. H. Smith, "Crisis and Democracy in Latin America," World Politics, vol. 43, no. 4 (1991).
41. Patrick Bond, "Post-nationalist politics for Zimbabwe?" Red Pepper (April 1999).
42. On the importance of the distinction between "liberal democracy" and "popular democracy" in Africa see John S. Saul, "'For Fear of Being Condemned as Old Fashioned': Liberal Democracy vs. Popular Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa" in Kidane Mengisteab and Cyril Daddieh, eds., State Building and Democratization in Africa (Westport: Praeger, 1999).
43. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
44. See, for example, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and M. C. Diop, "Report of Codesria Eighth General Assembly," Codesria Bulletin 4 (1995).
45. Quoted from an unpublished paper by Bundy entitled "Problems and Prospects for South African Socialists" and presented to the Political Science Seminar, York University, October 1991.