Alfred B. Zack-Williams

Globalisation From Below: Conceptualising the Role of the African Diasporas in Africa's Development

In the past both African Studies and Development Studies have ignored questions of the African Diaspora. This point was made by Zack‐Williams back in 1995 but since then there has not been much work attempting to rectify this matter. In this article we put forward a framework for examining the role of diaspora in development. This centres on recognising that the formation of the African Diaspora has been intimately linked to the evolution of a globalised and racialised capitalism. While the linkages between capitalism, imperialism and displacement are dynamic we should avoid a simplistic determinism that sees the movements of African people as some inevitable response to the mechanisms of broader structures. The complexity of displacement is such that human agency plays an essential role and avoids the unhelpful conclusion of seeing Africans as victims. It is this interplay of structural forces and human agency that gives diasporas their shifting, convoluted and overlapping geometry. Having established that we examine the implications of a diasporic perspective for understanding the development potential of both Africans in diaspora and those who remain on the continent. We argue that both politically and economically the diaspora has an important part to play in contemporary social processes operating at an increasingly global scale. The key issues we address are embedded social networks in the diaspora, remittances and return, development organisations, religious networks, cultural dynamics, and political institutions. We conclude by suggesting where diasporic concerns will take us in the next few years.

Child Soldiers in the Civil War in Sierra Leone

This article examines the factors which have brought children into social movements challenging those wielding political power in Sierra Leone. It reviews the manner of their recruitment and the roles they have played in the civil war. The analysis is premised on the notion that peripheral capitalism has transformed the form of the family, loosening controls over children. With ongoing crises in both the economic and political realms undermining kinship structures and leaving children with little security, some have turned to surrogate families for protection, either on the street or in the ranks of combatants. Although some of the children who have participated in the war have been volunteers, thousands more have been abducted and socialised via brute violence by both sides.

No democracy, no development: reflections on democracy & development in Africa

This article is a contribution to the debate on the state, democracy and economic development in Africa. It examines the process of the decline of political pluralism in Africa not long after independence, to be replaced by the omnipotent one‐party state, and the rationale for this transition. It examines recent moves towards democratisation in Africa pointing to the implications for development and argues that democracy, defined as the ability of a people to control decision‐making, is a sine qua non for development. Given the divide between owners of the major means of production (the ruling class who shape the destiny of the social formation) and the governing class (who are only in formal control of the state apparatus), it is argued that contrary to the neo‐liberal dictate of destatization, the role of the state in economic transformation is crucial. Far from rolling back the state, state capacity needs to be strengthened and this would have to be at the expense of the proliferation of unaccountable non‐governmental organisations.

Sierra Leone: crisis and despair

This article examines the recent performance of the Sierra Leone economy; looks at the nature of the crisis facing the country; the Governments policy response; and explores the responses of individuals to coping with the crisis. The author argues that the economic crisis is very much tied up with the wider political question concerning the need for democratic accountability.

Development and diaspora: separate concerns?

The article considers recent work on the nature of the black diaspora in the West and its relationship with Africa and African development. It condemns the disciplinary gulf between development studies, which has almost completely ignored questions of race and cultural identity, on the one hand, and diaspora studies which tend to focus on cultural and racial links with Africa to the exclusion of questions of political economy. The review is critical of perspectives which ignore the heterogeneity and variety of African cultures and experience, whether for purposes of creating a caricatured colonial subject or for asserting an undifferentiated unity between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. It argues for an understanding of both the uniqueness and the commonality of African experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness by P. Gilroy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993; In My Fathers House by K. A. Appiah, New York, 1992; Black Femin...

Merchant capital and underdevelopment in Sierra Leone

This article follows up the theoretical work of Kay on the relationship between merchant capital and underdevelopment with an empirical study. Merchant capital in the form of trading enterprises came to Sierra Leone to extract raw materials and sell manufactured goods. Zack‐Williams details this process and briefly examines its effects on the social formation. He notes the failure of merchant capital to transform the social formation and as a corrollary to make the transition to industrial capital through investment in manufacturing. Only the United Africa Company shows signs of making this transition and that only recently.

African Diaspora Conditioning: The Case of Liverpool

In the summer of 1994, Liverpool made national headlines as newspapers carried articles that chronicled the convictions for sex work (prostitution) of the deputy mayor, Petrona Lashley (Alderson, 1994), who was due to succeed as Mayor of this old seaport on the northwest corner of England. Lashley, who was the only Black councillor in the city, had represented Granby ward (with the largest concentration of Black people in the entire city) since 1991, having succeeded another Black woman, the first Black councillor in Liverpool, elected in 1986. The Petrona Lashley Affair split public opinion in Liverpool. Many felt that these convictions were conclusive proof of her unworthiness to become Liverpools first citizen. For the already deprived, politically and economically marginalized Black population, this was yet another attempt by the local paparazzi to thwart their ambition of representation at the centre. Whilst this article is not concerned with the Petrona Lashley Affair, the affair is used to point to the precarious position of Black people within Liverpool economy and society, despite years of the Black presence in this city. The article looks at the socioeconomic and political position of people of African descent in Liverpool. To contextualise the current situation, I argue that it is imperative to look at the historical development of the Black community from its embryonic form in the dock area to its current location on the south-central side of the

Neo-imperialism and African development

As this issue was being planned, news came of ‘Operation Serval’, by which French forces intervened in Mali in order to expel Al-Qaeda sympathisers, who had brought widespread violence, destruction and fear to the northern half of the country. As we shall see presently, military intervention is only one feature of imperialist strategy in Africa. Indeed, direct military intervention is not the main modus operandi of imperialist strategy in Africa. Imperialist subjugation of the continent in the post-colonial era has been less overt, occurring through the sphere of market subjugation, transfer pricing, profits repatriation and asymmetrical economic partnership agreements leading to deep integration, which may become too restrictive for African government. Nkrumah has referred to these forms of capital and surplus labour transfer as ‘neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism’ (Nkrumah 1965). In a recent article, Jeremy Keenan (2013) has argued that both the Bush and Bouteflika (in Algeria) administrations ‘needed “a little more terrorism” in the region’; in the case of Algeria, this was to satisfy the need for modern weaponry. In the case of the Bush administration, Keenan has suggested that such terrorism may act as ‘justification for launching a new Saharan front in the Global War on Terror’. Furthermore, Keenan maintains that a ‘second front’ would legitimise America’s increased militarisation of Africa, in order to better secure the continent’s natural resources, in particular oil, a concern, which in 2008 led to the setting up of AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command. Imperialist military intervention has taken several forms in Africa, including: raids to release hostages (Israel in Uganda), invasion to remove leaders who would not serve the demands of imperialism (Patrice Lumumba in the current Democratic Republic of Congo), and intervention designed to protect protégés, such as various French forays into Zaire to protect a kleptocratic ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1978, there was a joint Franco-Moroccan expedition to save Mobutu from his people. There are three main epochs of Imperialist intrusion in Africa. First, the period Harvey has referred to as ‘the rise of bourgeois imperialism’, 1875–1945 (2005, 42). This was characterised by monopoly capital and the outflow of capital from the capitalist centres to open up the interior of Africa to trade, through the construction of railways, harbours, roads and mines for manufacturing interests at the imperialist centre. Kemp observes that trade at this time was characterised by plunder and the use of force in order to subordinate pre-capitalist formations ‘into the circuit of exchange dominated by merchant capital’ (1967, 19). This period was also marked by formal control of African territories, in order to minimise inter-imperialist rivalry. The end of World War II ushered in a new dawn (Harvey 2005), with rising African nationalism and a shift of the imperialist centre from Britain to the US, leading to the phenomenon of ‘imperialism without colonies’ (Magdof 1972). This new epoch lasted until the triumph of neoliberalism in late 1980s and the institutionalisation of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in virtually all African economies in the 1980s and 1990s. This period was one of continuity in change, with the essential features of the previous epoch intensified as capital increasingly became globalised with the proliferation of

Political economies of the everyday

This is a general issue which covers a wide range of topics falling under the general heading of ‘the political economies of the everyday’. It covers such topics as debt (Carolyn Bassett), neoliberalism and gender in Egypt (Karim Malak and Sara Salem), extrajudicial executions and civil society in Kenya (Peris Jones, Kavita Ramakrishnan and Wangui Kimari), reform and counter reform in Kenya’s land governance (Jacqueline Klopp and Odenda Lumumba), the politics of the Kenyan sex workers’ movement (Eglė Česnulytė), military corruption among Zimbabwean troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Godfrey Maringira) and state building and educational expansion in the Congo (Cyril Brandt). In her article on Africa’s next debt crisis, Carolyn Bassett poses a discerning question: ‘Could we be seeing the beginnings of a new African debt crisis a short decade after debt forgiveness reduced Africa’s mountain of debt?’ Her concern is premised on the growing number of commodity exporters who are now beginning to experience debt servicing difficulties. She warns that the debt recovery system that is now being instituted by the international financial institutions (IFIs) is simply a return to the bad old days of the 1980s, which impeded African growth, and in its wake left ‘the “precarious” component of [heavily indebted poor countries] which is causing African governments to pay out large sums up-front and reducing funds for the [Millennium Development Goals]’ (Commission for Africa 2005, 367). For Bassett, the major source of this growing indebtedness is that African governments have increased their borrowing from several lenders, old and new, particularly from Africa’s international sovereign bonds, the focus of her article. She draws attention to the devastating sway of neoliberal thinking impelling African governments ‘down a dangerous path of higher levels of indebtedness... into global financial markets without proper regulatory mechanism in place’. She points to the need to strengthen the regulatory regime in order to pre-empt an impending crisis. Furthermore, while international sovereign bonds account for only a small proportion (5.8%) of sub-Saharan African’s debt, nonetheless, they have been steadily growing in absolute terms and as a percentage of total debt. She identifies four converging reasons why many African governments have been able to attract international bond investors since 2008. First, many African countries since 2008 have had their debts cancelled; second, there is a lack of attractive bond offerings elsewhere; third, after 2000, African economies experienced rapid growth fuelled by rising demand for raw materials; and finally, there are growing economic ties with emerging economies such as China and Brazil. Bassett addresses the question of the viability of international sovereign bonds in Africa’s development. In her view the downturn in the global economy puts Africa’s exports in danger and poses a major threat to the ability of African states to service their debt. The situation is aggravated by the fact that: ‘Most African international sovereign bonds were denominated in US dollars, whose value had risen relative to the currencies of most commodity exporters, [thus] increasing service costs.’ For Bassett, it is the duty of radical scholars ‘to raise questions about the wisdom of Africa’s international sovereign bonds and their prevailing neoliberal regulatory framework’. She draws attention to some of these problems: in particular, the absence of a financial architecture to regulate the flows of financial capital; and the risk for African governments to finance infrastructural and other development projects through

Natural resources, economic rents and social justice in contemporary Africa

The first two articles in this general issue of ROAPE address issues of natural resource trap, economic rent, transfer pricing, and resource curse in relations to the diamond mining industries in Namibia and South Africa; in particular, they raise questions about the role of multinationals in African mining industries and how they impact on the African state. The idea of a resource curse and of the differential impact of resources on different parts of the world has been summarised by a number of writers including Collier (2007) and Beattie (2009), who provides a useful summary by posing the question: ‘why are oil and diamonds more trouble than they are worth?’ (102). In Beattie’s view, it is simply uncanny that such prized commodities should enervate their locator (the land containing the resources). In looking at this problem, Beattie warns that national economies progress because they ‘provide goods and services, not because they own a source of basic commodities’ (103), however important these might be for industrial transformation. He notes that however advanced the economy may be, ‘the amount of income generated by mineral resources remains low.’ He goes on to argue that the contribution of natural resources to an economy is not measured solely in terms of jobs and income from initial extraction, since more value can be added as the initial product is reprocessed, thus adding value through the production chain. He gives the example of diamonds exported from West Africa, which ‘have for centuries been cut not in Africa but in Antwerp or Amsterdam, where the factors of technical skills and reliability outweighed the higher costs’, with the result ‘that the continent has struggled to capture anything but the most basic stages of production’ (Beattie 2009, 104). Beattie considers the reasons why minerals have failed to unleash Africa’s developmental energy. First, he argues that it is in the nature of mining activities to incorporate only a few workers. Second, ‘most of the countries that have very rapidly reduced poverty did so with labour-intensive mass-production industries providing a large number of low-paying or medium-paying jobs’ (Ibid., 141). Indeed, this has been the path to development of the East Asian ‘tiger’ economies: Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, as well as China, Vietnam and Malaysia. For Beattie, the fact that these countries initially concentrated on garment production, with its emphasis on labour-intensive technology, is a major marker for the economic transition, as opposed to African countries that privileged extractive industries, which, as Beattie observes,