Number 15/16 Contents May-December 1979 Editorial 1 Editorial Working Group Underdevelopment in Northern Ghana: Natural Causes or Colonial Capitalism? Chris Allen Manfred Bienefeld Nii-K Plange 4 Lionel Cliffe Contradictions in the Peripheralization Roben Cohen of a Pastoral Society: the Maasai Erica Flegg Mejid Hussein Hans Hedlund 15 Duncan Innes Rural Class Formation and Ecological Peter Lawrence Collapse in Botswana Roger Leys Lionel Cliffe and Richard Moorsom 35 Gavin Williams Editorial Staff Capitalism and Hunger in Northern Nigeria Doris Burgess Judy Mohan Bob Shenton and Mike Watts 5 3 Overseas Editors Dependent Food Policy in Nigeria 1975-1979 Cairo: Shahida El Baz Kampala: Mahmood Mamdani Okello Oculi 63 Maputo: Ruth First Capitalist Organization of Production Stockholm: Bhagavan through non-Capitalist Relations: Toronto: Jonathan Barker, John Saul Women's Role in a Pilot Resettlement Washington: Meredeth Turshen in Upper Volta Zaria: Bjorn Beckman Anna Conti 75 Contributing Editors Basil Davidson Class Formation in the Peasant Sam Geza Economy of Southern Ghana Thomas Hodgkin Emile Vercruijsse 93 Charles Kallu-Kalumiya Peasant Fishermen and Capitalists: Mustafa Khogali Colin Leys Development in Senegal Robert Van Lierop Klaas de Jonge 105 Archie Mafeje Briefings Prexy Nesbitt The Zimbabwe Elections 124 Claude Meillassoux Ken Post Notes on the Workers' Strikes in Subscriptions (3 issues) Mauritius 130 UK & Africa Debates Individual £4.00 Relations of Production, Class Struggle Institutions £8.00 and the State in South Africa in the Elsewhere Individuals £4.50 Inter-war Period 135 Institutions £10.00 Swaziland: Urban Local Government Students £ 3.00 (payable in Subjugation in the Post-Colonial sterling only) State 146 Airmail extra Europe £2.00 In Defence of the MPLA and the Zone A £2.50 Angolan Revolution 148 £3.50 Zone B On Peasantry and the 'Modes of Zone C £4.00 Single copies Production' Debate 154 Individuals £1.50/$4.00 Reviews 162 Institutions £ 3.00/38.00 Current Africana 174 Note: Please add $2 for each non- sterling cheque Giro no. 64 960 4008 Subscription to: Copyright © Review of African Political Review of African Political Economy Economy, July 1980 341 Glossop Road Sheffield S10 2HP ISSN: 0305 6244 England Editorial AGRARIAN CAPITALISM & HUNGER The main articles that have been collected together in this Special Double Issue all deal in some way with one of the two basic processes of change in African agriculture that have been set in motion by the impact of capitalism. The first is the decline in the food producing capability of different societies beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the present. The second is the transforma- tion of rural production relations both in terms of the development of distinct classes and the change in the relations between men and women brought about by a new sexual division of labour. Our first set of cases traces the major trends at work under colonialism in differ- ent types of agrarian society. Nii Plange takes the case of northern Ghana, with its production based entirely on crop husbandry, and demonstrates that its present impoverishment cannot be simply dismissed as an inevitable consequence of 'natural' deficiencies. Shenton and Watts consider areas of northern Nigeria in which livestock as well as crop husbandry were vital, and similarly demonstrate how a variety of constraints on the indigenous system undermined the capacity of people to survive by their own efforts. Botswana is a country perhaps even more dependent on cattle, and Cliffe and Moorsom chart again the long dete- rioration in the society's food producing capabilities as a result of an incorpora- tion into a capitalist regional and world economy in which it was cast as a sup- plier of cheap migrant labour for South Africa and of cheap beef for Europe — to the detriment of the production of basic grains on which the increasing number of poor must rely for food. Similar impoverishment — both in the sense of reduced capability of feeding the community, and of separating out of rich and poor — have, as Hedlund shows in his study of Maasai, also occurred in societies entirely based on pastoral production. The argument that can be drawn from such cases, and from an increasing num- ber of general studies like Helge Kjekshus's important work on the 'ecological collapse' that followed colonialism in Tanzania, would stress that what has affected many societies in Africa is not just some generalised impoverishment or 'underdevelopment', but, specifically, a process whereby the food producing capability of agrarian societies has been reduced. Moreover, that what has occurred amounts to a lesser capability of the society reproducing itself, that the onset of agrarian capitalism has often retarded rather than advanced the 'produc- tive forces', and equally often set in motion a downward spiralling trend reduc- ing the ecological potential of many areas. This is not an argument which simple- 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY mindedly translates the blame for such tendencies from 'natural causes' to 'capitalism', as though it were some abstract evil spirit. Rather it seeks to explain the widespread hunger in Africa, increased dependence of agricultural countries on food imports, and the rapid growth of the rural poor, in terms of a complex and interrelated array of forces that have changed both the social system — the mode of production and the whole superstructure built on it: property rights, the division of labour, patterns of kinship — and ecosystem, the inter- relationship between society and environment. The consequences add up to a reduced ability of societies, still mistakenly thought of as 'subsistance producers', to produce their basic requirements and thus to reproduce themselves. Some of these studies, those on Botswana and on the Maasai, go on to show how post-colonial developments, even those that are designed to alleviate such prob- lems or in some way promote 'development' often accelerate these trends rather than reverse them. Oculi's examination of recent food policy in Nigeria shows how Utopian are the proclaimed intentions to make the country self-reliant in food. The country is becoming more rather than less dependent by the many expensive agricultural schemes of recent years. Another of our case studies which explores such recent large 'schemes', Anna Conti's study of an Upper Volta project, stresses one other important dimen- sion of social life that is affected. She shows how the actual organisation of such schemes is designed to guarantee the best returns to the financial capital that has invested in the scheme and the 'merchant capital' that buys up the product. In this case, this means a crucial redifinition work on cash crops, on food crops and in the various household tasks. Indeed the whole scheme is premissed upon a 'nuclear family structure' and the indirect exploitation of women's labour which that structure generates and the scheme requires. In addition to providing examples of disturbing agrarian trends in the contem- porary period, Conti directs our attention not just to the potential many large scale agricultural schemes have for taking land away from peasants and in other ways undermining the balance between the community and its ecology. She also points to the need to relate such trends to upheaval that goes on within such a community. Processes of changes in property rights are but one dimension of complex forces generating class differences; changes in women's productive role but one part of the whole complex of social relations of production and of reproduction that relate to gender. Both trends imply that changing social structures place different people in different poistions, some better placed to get access to new opportunities, others confined to new or increased forms of exploitation, or of total separation from the means of production, and some to a new social status of the 'dispossessed', the poor who are quite literally denied the opportunity to survive. Our Botswana study, for instance, shows how the migration of males to South Africa leaves women not only to do the farm labour that makes such migration possible but more and more of them on their own and without access to land, to ploughing oxen or other livestock: a dispropor- tionate percentage of the poor peasants. Others of our studies remind us that we can usefully identify two distinct forms which agrarian capitalism can take as it develops. Two classical paths to capital- ism in agriculture are often demarcated: the emergence of kulaks (rich peasants) and then of independent capitalist farmers, or the transformation of landlord's estates and their serfs into large commercial farms with a large gang of labourers EDITORIAL 3 (what Lenin distinguished as the 'American', and the 'Prussian' or 'Junker' paths). In Africa's colonial past, these different paths took the form of settler and plantation agriculture on the one hand, and peasant cash cropping on the other. In post colonial Africa, the two trajectories have taken forms that con- verged somewhat, with peasant commerical production being more subject to increasing if indirect domination by large scale, finance and merchant capital, and large scale capitalist production being now more characterised by 'schemes' in which labour is not always, as Conti brings out, 'free' wage-paid, labour- power. But still the two patterns are distinct and have different implications for the social and political forces that emerge. Moreover, while no one should mistake either trend in any form (e.g. a land re- distribution, or 'government-run schemes' or state farms) as in any sense 'social- ist', which path of capitalist development is an issue which should matter to socialists. The large-scale path is likely to involve much more profound disrup- tion and impoverishment of the peasantry, and also to the generation of much more powerful and entrenched class forces: rich peasants and individual com- mercial farmers may also be property-conscious and individualistic but not such formidable opponents of social transformation as capitalist landlords.