‘African Peasants and Revolution’ revisited

Abstract

This short essay begins by revisiting John Saul's landmark article in the first issue of the Review of African Political Economy in 1974, which was, inevitably, very much of its historical moment. The author suggests that Saul used an ideal-typical conception of ‘peasants’ combined with a particular view of ‘incomplete’ capitalism established by colonial rule in Africa and continuing since political independence. He then proposes, in highly selective and abbreviated fashion, an alternative approach to understanding the social conditions of existence of African ‘peasants’ and the politics of Africa's agrarian questions. He illustrates his argument with special reference to the current moment of globalisation and neoliberalism. ‘Globalisation’ serves as shorthand for the restructuring of capital on a world scale since the 1970s (and not least ‘financialisation’), while he uses ‘neoliberalism’ to refer to the political and ideological project of promoting the interests of capital in such restructuring at the expense of the interests of labour. He concludes with some broad historical theses about ‘African Peasants and Revolution’.

[L’article « Les paysans africains et la révolution » revisité.] Ce court article commence par revisiter l'article fondateur de représenté, de manière évidente, une grande partie de sa renommée. Je suggère que Saul a utilisé une conception idéale-typique des « paysans » combinée avec une vision particulière d'un capitalisme « incomplet » établi par les règles coloniales en Afrique et continuant depuis l'indépendance politique. Je propose ensuite, d'une manière très sélective et abrégée, une approche alternative à la compréhension des conditions sociales de l'existence des « paysans » africains et à la politique des questions agraires africaines. J'illustre mon argument en faisant référence au moment actuel de mondialisation et de néolibéralisme. La « mondialisation » est utilisée comme abréviation pour la restructuration du capital à une échelle mondiale depuis les années 70 (et en particulier la « financiarisation »), tandis que j'utilise le terme « néolibéralisme » pour désigner le projet politique et idéologique de promotion des intérêts du capital dans une telle restructuration, au détriment des intérêts des travailleurs (Bernstein, 2010a). Je conclus par des thèses historiques larges sur « Les paysans africains et la révolution ».

Keywords:

• capitalist social relations
• classes of labour
• peasants
• revolution

Mots-clés:

• relations sociales capitalistes
• classes de la main-d’œuvre
• paysans
• révolution

Note on contributor

Henry Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, and Adjunct Professor at the College of Humanities and Development, China Agricultural University, Beijing.

Notes

1. This article derives from an unpublished paper (Bernstein 2010b) which further developed some of the main lines of argument presented here. I am grateful to the editors for the opportunity to publish a revised version on the special occasion of the 40th anniversary of ROAPE. In some respects, this short essay is a companion piece to an earlier article in the Review (Bernstein 2003).

2. South Africa is omitted because of the principally urban character of the struggle against apartheid from the 1970s, although the salience of rural social and political dynamics, not least through migrant labour systems and associated constructions of ethnic (especially Zulu) politics, was powerfully restated by Mahmood Mamdani (1996).

3. At that time, analysis of the formation of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie in Tanzania was being pioneered by Issa Shivji (1976).

4. See Saul (2005) for his later reflections on Nyerere and his legacy (Chapter 7), and on the trajectory of Mozambique after liberation, shaped objectively by the ‘pitiless circumstances’ of its external environment and the ‘particularly dependent economy’ it inherited, and subjectively by ‘fetishizing (with Eastern European encouragement) the twin themes of modern technology and “proletarianization”’ (39). Mamdani (1996) groups both Tanzania and Mozambique after independence among ‘radical’ regimes that reproduced the bifurcated colonial political structure of ‘citizen and subject’ through widespread (if often ineffectual) commandism in the countryside, whereas ‘conservative’ regimes incorporated the ‘decentralized despotism’ of tribal/chiefly governance established by colonial indirect rule.

5. Perhaps this topical preoccupation of the 1970s also explains the lack of any reference to Mau Mau in Saul's article? Mau Mau was the emblematic anti-colonial ‘peasant war’ (if not exclusively rural) of sub-Saharan Africa before those of ‘late’ decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s. In surely the most compelling analysis of ‘peasant war’ in the continent, John Lonsdale demonstrated how, in the conditions of settler colonialism in Kenya, Kikuyu ‘had to wrestle with their parochial political culture of wealthy self-mastery, linked to land, and their pressing need for a wider power to shepherd the poor against the threefold slavery of the highlands, the shanties of Nairobi and an arbitrary state’ (1992, 425). The ‘moral challenge of class formation was faced and in part declined, with former [pre-colonial] civic virtues continuing to flourish amid unfinished constructions of new ones' associated with anti-colonial nationalism (302). Mau Mau also took on the character of Kikuyu ‘civil war’ (see below), that is, one shaped by class relations – including those of pre-colonial provenance – but also by the ‘linked arenas’ of tribe, gender and state (292) and how they contributed to structures and experiences of exploitation and oppression. Further, Mau Mau proceeded without anything resembling a Leninist organisation, and without the international links and support that later liberation movements drew on. Maybe Kenya's Land and Freedom Army, defeated by systematically brutal suppression, could have provided the most powerful instance of the limits of ‘spontaneity’? And of the influence of ‘pre-capitalist’ beliefs and practices (much emphasised by colonial propaganda as evidence of rebel atavism)?

6. Links between kinship, ethnicity and subsistence farming were given a very different twist by another political scientist at the University of Dar es Salaam. Goran Hyden's (1980, 1983) central notions of an ‘economy of affection’ and African peasantries ‘uncaptured’ by colonial capitalism were trenchantly criticised on the left, for example, by Mahmood Mamdani (1985).

7. On the systematic neglect of rural labour markets in African ‘peasant’ farming, see Oya (2013), who also emphasises their gendered character, as does Bridget O'Laughlin (1996) in an outstanding analysis of Mozambique.

8. Bernstein (2004) interrogates various versions of ‘blocked’ or incomplete capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa.

9. On the formation and dynamics of classes of labour in other guises than that of the ‘classic’ industrial proletariat, see the illuminating studies and arguments of Marcel van der Linden (2008) and Jairus Banaji (2010).

10. On conceptions of ‘resistance’, see Bernstein (2014, 9, 19–20). How ‘resistance’ might entail embracing some forms of commodification rather than others is explained and illustrated by O'Laughlin (2002).

11. And which was profoundly shaped by the outstanding work of Eric Wolf (1966, 1969); Bernstein and Byres (2001) provide a systematic review of ‘peasant studies’ from the 1960s to 1990s.

12. This last point is remarked by Saul (2005, 142). Land reform in Zimbabwe since 2000 provides a distinctive opportunity to examine the deeper social contradictions of the land question without reducing it to the nature of the Mugabe regime and its actions. Mamdani's attempt to explore this opportunity, first published in the London Review of Books (2008), generated a wave of hostile responses from liberal critics (in the letters column of the London Review) and from many on the left (Jacobs and Mundy 2009). Both kinds of critics typically proceeded on the mistaken assumption that the purpose and/or effect of Mamdani's intervention was to ‘defend’ Mugabe. The same kind of misconception has attached to Scoones et al. (2010), on which see Scoones (2014).

13. Noted, for example, by Aninka Claassens, a leading critic of South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act, through which ‘Traditional leaders will derive their power not from the freely given support of their people, but from their control over people's land’ (Cape Times, 10 February 2004). In the past century or so in sub-Saharan Africa, class formation (including the emergence of a class of effectively landless labour; see Iliffe 1987, 162–163), changes in political structures and processes, and demographic growth (from the 1920s), has led, however unevenly and implicitly, to the commodification of control over land, even in the absence of formal private property rights and pervasive idioms of the ‘customary’ deployed by all those seeking to control, claim and obtain access to land from positions of relative strength and weakness. On ‘vernacular land markets’, see Chimhowu and Woodhouse (2007); and for a typology of rights in land comprising the ‘neocustomary’ in ‘a continuum from decentralised (family) to centralised (e.g. chieftancy) authority structures’ and various forms of ‘statist land tenure’ regimes, see Boone (2014, 65, 67, and passim), whose principal interest is to identify and explain the kinds and scales of political conflicts generated by different land tenure regimes.

14. For example, on Ghana (Amanor 2005; Grischow 2008), on Sahelian West Africa (Ribot 2000; an account influenced by Mamdani 1996), on Botswana (Peters 1994) and on South Africa the debate generated by the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004 (Cousins 2007). Whitehead and Tsikata (2003) consider the ‘implications of the re-turn to the customary’ for women's rights to land. Not surprisingly, ‘traditional authorities’ in South Africa, organised politically in CONTRALESA, have been vehement opponents of some of the specific legislation proposed to implement the commitment of the constitution to gender equality, for example concerning ‘African customary marriages’ and domestic violence (Lodge 2002, 174, 214).

15. See Gavin Capps’ (2010) original and powerful concept of ‘tribal landed property’ as a capitalist category, whose emergence and mutations in Bafokeng he explores over a long period of South African history.

16. Including the greater development of the productive forces (and means of communication) in Asia, emphasised by Jack Goody in his remarkable comparative sociology of the historic formations of sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. The most accessible introduction to Goody's work, its preoccupations and inspirations, is his interview with Pallares-Burke (2002).

17. It is striking that of Wolf's six case studies of ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ (1969), only two concerned situations of direct colonial rule, namely Vietnam and Algeria, the others being Mexico, Russia, China and Cuba.

18. Different, indeed conflicting, versions of such arguments can be found in Bernstein (2003), McMichael (2006) and Moyo, Jha, and Yeros (2013).

19. http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu-27/sustainable-peasants-agriculture-mainmenu-42/1493-building-a-peasant-revolution-in-africa, accessed February 9, 2014.

20. See the illuminating survey focused mostly on the colonial period by Allen Isaacman (1990), which retains considerable value 25 years later; also the excellent survey of conflicts over land by Pauline Peters (2004).