Volume 12 1985 Issue 34

Editorial Two of the main articles in this issue, those by Clough and Vaughan, present material from case studies in northern Nigeria and southern Malawi. Case studies such as these are able to explore the complex ramifications of rural social and economic relations and to question the abstract generalisations regarding middlemen, households and gender relations advanced by studies with a more macro-societal focus. 'Peasant' studies have tended to base their analyses on the 'household', conceived as a unit of production and consumption. Clough and Vaughan show the importance of situating the study of agricultural production in the context of exchange relations and of examining the changing relations of household members, female and male, to others within and without the households (natal and marital) to which they are affiliated. The articles by Williams and Clough are concerned with crop marketing in Nigeria. The internal food markets, studied by Clough, have largely been developed by African traders. The markets for the main export crops, considered by Williams, were dominated by European firms and, since the second world war, by state marketing boards. Williams locates the origins of marketing boards in the crises of colonial political economy in the 1930s and the need to shore up the British economy in the 1940s. He emphasises that their original justification was to regulate the internal marketing of export crops to defend 'peasants' from 'middlemen'. The result has been to create an instrument for taxing peasants, leading to the collapse of agricultural exports and conferring privileged access to funds and trading opportunities to clients of governments and of governing parties. Clough's study of the social relations of inter-rural grain traders shows that access to trading opportunities depends on the development of credit, information and personal contacts through the reciprocal if asymmetrical, relations of patrons and clients and through lateral friendship networks. Neo-classical models of market competition, however, ignore the social foundations of market transactions. Equally, Marxist models of the subordination of peasant to monopolistic middlemen and usurers fail to recognise the alternatives open to producers and traders, to debtors and creditors and to clients as well as to patrons. In the absence of state regulation, markets are certainly competitive but imperfectly so. The inter-rural marketing networks are more effective in distributing commodities at lower cost than are marketing boards for export crops in Nigeria, as in other West African countries or, it could be argued, than the food marketing parastatals in Tanzania and the Sahelian countries. The possible exceptions may be in countries where marketing boards were set up to support settler capitalists: South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya. Today, paranoia against middlemen and, significantly, middlewomen, tends to be 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY used to explain away high prices and shortages of commodities, and to justify government intervention in markets and the creation of costly parastatals and marketing cooperatives. These extend government patronage but do nothing to solve the problems of improving returns to producers or making commodities available to consumers. Socialists, in Williams' view are unduly susceptible to appeals for state intervention in the market. He argues that, in the contemporary Nigerian context, socialists should reject 'statism' and support 'free trade'. Sceptics might wonder whether, in an established capitalist economy like that of Nigeria, such and appeal to laissez-faire principles is likely to find favour among policy makers in the absence of a revolutionary transformation of its entire political economy. Vaughan's article uses material from two extended case studies to explore the transformation of gender relations in the household in the process of the development of peasant commodity production in southern Malawi. She argues that the concept of the peasant household as a unit of production and consumption, its members jointly controlling access to resources, is misleading. Inter-household relations between kin and non-kin are equally important for understanding strategies of resource management and the consequences of the development of commodity production. So too are the interventions of the colonial state in the structuring of relations of production under capital. Her comparison of cotton production by the Mang'anga of the Lower Shire Valley and of tenant tobacco production on the privately owned Bruce Estates in the Shire Highlands illustrates the processes through which women's access to key resources has been transformed. Three of the Debates pieces also focus on the transformation of agrarian economies and on agrarian policy. Heald and Hay comment on the article by Buch-Hansen and Marcussen, published in ROAPE 23, on contract farming and the peasantry in Kenya. They question the grounds on which Buch-Hansen and Marcussen argued that there had been no immiseration of the peasantry and the criteria they used to determine the existence of class divisions within the peasantry. Abdelkarim's contribution refers to O'Brien's article, published in ROAPE 26, on the formation of a national agricultural labour market in Sudan. Abdelkarim introduces empirical evidence to argue that no such national labour market has yet emerged. Simon elaborates further on the problems of land reform policy in Zimbabwe raised by Bush and Cliffe in ROAPE 29. Two other Debates pieces offer interpretations of politics and class struggle over the last few years in Nigeria and in Ghana. Olukoshi and Abdulraheem provide a brief post mortem on the short-lived Buhari regime. Initially welcomed by the public, it proved to be the most oppressive regime since Nigeria's independence, allowing free rein to the Nigerian Security Organisation. It combined an economic offensive against workers with the imprisonment of its critics, draconian laws and the patriotic moralising of the 'war against indiscipline'. Its sectional biases provided new opportunities for the self-appointed guardians of regional and ethnic interests. It exemplified the narrowest of military visions of society's problems and their solutions. Yao Graham makes a further contribution to the understanding of the 'process' in Ghana since Rawlings returned to power. His interpretation differs markedly from that of Zaya Yeebo whose contribution was published in ROAPE 32. Graham argues that the 1981 coup introduced a progressive rather than a revolutionary government and the 'process' has to be understood in these terms. He describes the two broad areas of class struggle which have exemplified the 'process' over the last EDITORIAL 3 three years — against internal reactionaries and imperialism and amongst the classes represented by the coalition leadership. In our final Debates piece, Wellings and Sutcliffe challenge two views advanced by 'friends of South Africa' to justify the continuation of foreign investment. The first is that 'blacks themselves do not want disinvestment'. They argue that Schlemmer's survey of black male production workers does not establish the points it wishes to make on this issue, let alone the wider claims made for it by politicians in Britain and the USA. The second is that disinvestment or divestment would reduce employment for black South Africans, as Mrs Thatcher recently argued — ironically in the face of her government's record in Britain; Wellings and Sutcliffe point out that it is not self-evident that the sale of foreign assets will increase unemployment by itself. A different lesson, however, may be drawn from the collapse of the rand and South Africa's inability to meet its debt commitments in the past year. South Africa is extremely vulnerable to falls in the prices of its mineral and agricultural exports which have to pay, amongst other things, for its rising military and security budgets. Hence it is heavily dependent on access to foreign public and private bank credit and on the need to secure a new inflow of foreign investment. It is not black workers but the South African government which is most vulnerable to the effects of a successful disinvestment campaign. The campaign by opponents of South Africa abroad to support the struggles of South Africans is important. Two Briefings in this Issue, however, describe the intensity of those struggles against the brutality of the South African regime. The regime thought that by signing the Nkomati agreement (which Mozambique has adhered to even though South Africa has not) and by carrying their campaign of terror into neighbouring countries, they could suppress internal resistance and external opposition to apartheid. Since Nkomati, the people of South Africa have sustained and intensified their resistance in the face of a campaign of murder and imprisonment by the South African security forces. Brutal attacks on collaborators, real and suspected, have undermined the regime's hopes of co- opting supporters from among the subject people. Thus far, conflicts have tended to concentrate in black areas and the victims on both sides have usually been black. Recently, the wages of riots and demonstrations have spilt over into the central areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town. They are still a long way from threatening the regime's control of state power. On the other hand, it is clear that Botha has been unable to formulate the programme of reform which his friends and supporters hope for, so that they

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