Corruptions of development in the countryside of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1927–57

This paper discusses a topical and influential approach to the study of African environments that criticizes the capacities of 'Western' science and narratives of environmental 'crisis' to comprehend patterns of environmental change and the role in them of African farmers as knowledgeable and skilled managers of the natural resources they use. We argue that this approach contains a symptomatic avoidance of processes of commoditization and differentiation in African farming which undermines its analytical value. The argument is illustrated by consideration of theoretical approaches to commoditization and their application to the results of a recent study of land and water use in 'wetlands in drylands' in four African countries.

Section: Environment and Development In Africa: A Periodizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling Environmental Change Like It Is? Reﬂections on a Study in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Bernstein

Woodhouse

2001

“…The imperial authorities universally perceived this as a problem of ‘de‐tribalization’ that threatened the entire apparatus of colonial domination (Woodhouse et al , 5); but it was also a process that was fast dissolving the bonds that now tied the labour of countless African households to metropolitan and settler capital. Colonial policy consequently converged around the need to buttress communal tenure as a barrier against the full commoditization of African land and labour, while vesting the ultimate ownership of African land in ‘state trusts’ that would inhibit the development of private property in African hands and, with it, the formation of clearly demarcated classes of native capital, landed property and wage‐labour (Lonsdale and Berman ; Cowen and Shenton , ; Grischow ; Chimhowu and Woodhouse ). By the outbreak of the Second World War, state trusteeship of land had combined with the devolution of its local management to customary authorities as the principal means of engineering evolutionary social change within and through the established forms of ‘accumulation without dispossession’.…”

Section: The African Chieftaincy As ‘Tribal‐landed Property’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tribal‐Landed Property: The Value of the Chieftaincy in Contemporary Africa

Capps

2016

This paper develops an explicitly materialist analysis of the 'rentier chieftaincy' by drawing on Marx's theory of modern landed property. It argues that the colonial formation of 'tribal' land relations may be understood in relation to the subjugation of African labour to colonial capital, which in turn unintentionally created a potential barrier against investment on tribal land, and hence the conditions for the chiefly appropriation of ground rent. However, the extent to which chiefs could exercise an effective land monopoly in relation to capital was at the same time conditional upon the extent of their proprietorial control in relation to both the subject population and the central state. The politically conditional nature of this chiefly monopoly is captured in the formulation 'tribal-landed property', which is illustrated and developed through a case study of the changing economic relationship between the Bafokeng chieftaincy and mining capital on the South African platinum belt. It is concluded that this may have wider application in the context of accelerating investment over 'communal' land and intensifying struggles for its exclusive control, since these are potentially also struggles over the distribution of the surplus value produced by land-based capitals.Keywords: chieftaincy, customary land, mining, ground rent, South Africa [D]oes the new assertiveness of chiefly politics register a persistent, and indeed resurgent, manifestation of 'pre-capitalist' social relations and ideology? I think not, but rather that it manifests some of Africa's historically specific forms of commoditization and accumulation, of capitalist class dynamics, in new conditions (Bernstein 2014, 101).Wage-labour and landed property, like capital, are historically specific social forms; one of labour, and the other of the monopolized earth, both in fact being forms corresponding to the same economic formation of society (Marx 1981, 954).

“…In the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, the managing director of the groundnut scheme, launched under the Gonna Development Company (GDC), in 1950, considered an initial wage labour phase for peasants recruited for it to be ‘artificial’. He ‘emphasised that production itself would be done by peasants working on communal farm units for cash crops and individual plots for subsistence crops’, and envisaged that this would entail resettling ‘entire “tribal units” and preserve their organic African character over the course of reclaiming huge marginal tracts of land for agricultural production’ (Grischow 1998, 152–3).…”

Section: A New System Of Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Planning for Africa: The British Labour Party's Colonial Development Policy, 1920–1964

Kelemen

2006

The article examines the formation of the British Labour Party's colonial policy towards Africa. It traces how the early Radical Liberal critique of colonial rule gave way to the influence of Fabianism, which provided the guidelines to the Labour government's post‐war development measures. These sought to incorporate Africans into institutions which would simultaneously provide more productive labour and consolidate colonial rule. The development of the African colonies was believed to reside in restructuring the interface between the state and society. A challenge to the Party's Fabian‐inspired colonial policy emerged in the 1950s. In the midst of the ideological struggle between the party's left and right wings, arguments questioning the African colonies’ economic subordination to metropolitan interests briefly entered into policy debates.