Why Can't the North Understand Africa?
Mahieu, Francois Regis
The Africa whose ambiguity 1 discovered demonstrated to me the everpresent ambiguity of the social sciences. By a reverse movement, Africa began to force me to see my own society differently;...
...Based on a heterogeneity of structures, underdevelopment is built upon permanent change...
...Very soon, historical concepts of the center are used to plaster over peripheral social formations: societies organized around chiefs become feudal systems...
...It is these situations, and especially those involving a lack of rights, that must change...
...Structural indexes can always be found, such as the inequality of earnings, the deterioration of exchange terms, growth rates, or dependency indexes...
...A certain paternalism can thus lead one to believe in the peculiar cultural fragility of Africa, which, because it lacks a written culture, would be the ideal target of Western cultural aggression...
...Here once more, the North has a long way to go to understand that it cannot preach development without taking the preferences and the rationality of the underdeveloped into account...
...In this scenario, Africa is also negated—but this time it is its very tie to a universal humankind that is denied...
...Geza Roheim...
...Membership in the community is traditionally governed by an ensemble of potential rights and obligations that are not codified in clear standards or norms...
...Looking at structuralism, we find that the principal economist of this persuasion to have worked on Africa is Samir Amin, who had a decisive influence on his African colleagues in the 1970's...
...Translated by JOHN ANZALONE 334 • DISSENT...
...This is the case, for example, of the "thirty-year-olds," who must discharge their obligation to the elders without being able to claim significant privileges over the younger...
...But this type of explanation has its limits: such social repression does not imply the impossibility of individual rationality, even in a society of illiterates...
...Should it then be done away with...
...Indeed, contemporary economic theory tends to posit a social being as preoccupied by an intergenerational calculus...
...In this fashion the community expands the shape and number of its rules, and so becomes increasingly oppressive and inefficient...
...from a development standpoint, it is highly disabling...
...An optimal situation of rights and obligations does exist, and in certain cases an "optimal poverty" that macroeconomic policy cannot destroy in the name of global growth...
...The economic agent in Africa is a human before being African...
...In fact, this economics derives directly from the theses of Marxist structuralism in 1969 and particularly from Louis Althusser's notion of the determination "in the last instance" of a society by the relations of production...
...The failure of African varieties of socialism, just like the failure of an authentic industrial capitalism, emphasizes the necessity for understanding the resistance to and the blocking out of imported values—in other words, the particularities of African society...
...Samir Amin himself emphasizes the "handicap experienced by the rural primitive structures of black Africa" when compared to Eastern or South American societies...
...the answer is always "So-so, so-so" or again, "Too many prob332 • DISSENT African "Otherness" lems...
...The Africa described by economists is the object of standard models that deny its specialness...
...One thus searches desperately for some societal particularity for Black Africa...
...This imbalance is further aggravated by the community perception of sociofamilial status: a "big brother" crushed by his obligations will not recover his stakes, even with a grandiose funeral...
...Thus, the functional community (one expressed by its deeds) is the result of individual choices...
...Accordingly, various economic behavioral phenomena of overreaction, rigidity or distortion are overlooked, and their denial facilitates, in the end, the SUMMER • 1992 • 333 African "Odtentess" transformation of an economic adjustment into a political one...
...Between studies of primitive society—even those of the structuralists—and historical paste-up jobs of all kinds about the future of Africa, an immense void has resulted from the non-comprehension of the economic mechanisms of contemporary African society...
...Unfortunately, this structural dynamic is too global...
...In this way, Africa realizes the prophecy of the Sermon on the Mount (Blessed be the poor), or yet again, the dream of equitable redistribution (Rawls...
...This void is not diminished but rather expanded by theories of acculturation...
...Mimesis The African's imitation of the Westerner is a centerpiece of third-worldist arguments...
...but will that science allow its own ambiguities to be revealed...
...But tired of practicing Afro-pessimism, the North soothes its conscience by abandoning the problem to the international development agencies: Africa should just conform to the standard patterns of development and stop affirming its otherness...
...Such are the pessimistic dynamics that C8te d'Ivoire economist Mamadou Koulibaly describes in reference to the effects of "structural adjustment...
...From a social perspective the African community system is highly protective...
...African societal obligations draw their strength not simply from a clear system of punishments but from a community uncertainty about the consequences of one's actions...
...It is impossible to escape this context without braving an uncertain realm of sanctions...
...Nevertheless, Africa continues to stir interest, not by its abjection, but by its pure otherness, its folklore, its ethnicities: the African, it is asserted, is not like anyone else, and this difference must be proclaimed unequivocally, so as not to be contaminated by Western rationales...
...Thus the modalities of their transition from capitalism to socialism ("[f] or a transition from capitalism to socialism is what is clearly involved," says Amin) remain a matter of speculation...
...it acknowledges the "difference" of underdeveloped socioeconomic formations, but does not analyze it...
...Too often, such theses, found in popularly acclaimed books (Rene Dumont, Jacques Giri) about the block Africa suffers, betray the dream of an infantile Africa, experiencing its cultural underdevelopment as a relationship to the father (cf...
...G...
...and therein lies its complexity...
...How is this possible...
...The more problems accumulate, the more the demand for protection from the community network grows, and the more the calculation becomes complex...
...These elliptical responses betray communal concerns: a weekend funeral, the calls for funds for a benefits group, self-interested visits, a village's grievances...
...An adjustment program in the agricultural sector that does not take into account community constraints or the return on school investments will be doomed...
...This repressive force comprises one of the principal traits of the "community uncertainty principle" one hears about in so many passing conversations...
...younger children become the proletariat of the firstborn...
...To do so, the North would have to continue to take an interest in Africa, in its permanent economic crisis, its ethnic massacres, and its dictators...
...Herskovits's theory of acculturation (1952), it enjoys particular success in the critical analyses of African development...
...His theory is thus composed of oppositions, of the exploitative relationships between the developed center and SUMMER • 1992 • 331 African "Otherness" the underdeveloped periphery...
...This rationale is unknown in the bureaucracy of international agencies for development...
...a salary increase will be anticipated as an increased burden on community taxes, and can be rejected...
...Certain critical generations are more burdened than others...
...The thesis of cultural imperialism differs from third-worldist structuralism by its critique of the importance granted economic exploitation (transfers of value, for example) in the relationship of center to periphery...
...The economic anthropology of Marshall Sahlins or Maurice Godelier, for example, has until now used specific behavioral patterns as a weapon against the universality of economic theory...
...The development of underdevelopment occurs with the deterioration of the terms of exchange, the dislocation of the economies involved, the accrued forms of commercial or financial dependency, among the many dynamic phenomena that are particularly difficult to determine within the framework of pure economic theory...
...and then only if the nationals of the underdeveloped countries have clearly expressed their preferences in this regard...
...The constant sidetracking experienced by development at the end of the seventies, a decade of budgetary sovereignty before the brakes of the IMF's "structural adjustment" programs were applied, must still be explained in African cultural terms...
...It has often been denied for the sake of a rejection of tribalism or to conform to a standard vision of development...
...More generally, the deflationary measures imposed under international supervision can be anticipated by the community...
...But these systems are most frequently abandoned, so strong remains the belief in a utilitarian ethic...
...A loss of jobs or the withdrawal of a grant will be underwritten by the community...
...This system is at once intergenerational (active adults support elders and the young) and intragenerational (among individuals of different social standing...
...Such a person, such a social calculator, is far more readily integrated into a society as complex as African society than the "homo oeconomicus" of the nineteenth century...
...From this point of view, third-worldism and traditional liberalism have the same global vision...
...So it is that the North encounters several obstacles to understanding Africa, by at once denying it in its particulars and in its universality...
...Somewhat curiously, third-worldist conceptions do not integrate specifically African "differences" into their framework...
...But the northerner rarely notices such anthropological clues, and if he does take them into account, it is the better to particularize Africa...
...Community anticipation is then an inevitability in the classic outlook of political economics...
...Several factors contribute to this omission: • "Differences" refer exclusively to specific behavioral patterns, whereas the structural problems of development are standard to the economies involved...
...His success stems from the idea that a developing society is fertile ground for sociohistoric dialectic...
...In Africa there are signs that cannot be misunderstood...
...Africa became its revealer...
...Economists, on the other hand, and especially the new masters of the international agencies (IMF, World Bank), conceptualize African economy without the slightest contribution from anthropology...
...rather, membership is expressed in concrete terms by the transfer of money, time, goods, or courtesies...
...The system of rights and obligations and the lexicographical priority of the community reckoning over any business calculations exist for any society...
...But economic and cultural dependency do not explain Africa's underdevelopment...
...The community phenomenon is no more than the result of individual strategies undertaken to meet certain social situations...
...and • Development as a process of acculturation has succeeded so well that cultural particularities are no longer perceived...
...To do so would be to forget that even when it is coercive, the community expresses a useful function and results from the strategies of its individual members...
...Recognizing Differences In the African cultural system, communal life is a central value...
...But African altruism is the result, in a difficult context, of clever strategic calculations...
...This typically ethnocentric procedure is characteristic of a certain "economistic" anthropology...
...Balandier, Ambiguous Africa) ow are we to understand Africa...
...Via universal models or by cataloguing its particularities...
...The stronger its social determination, the more complex its range of individual rights and obligations becomes...
...To the eternal question, "How are things going...
...And yet, in an ultimate irony, it would seem that the complexity of African society deserves the most sophisticated theories and techniques of the "universal" science...
...It is founded on a multidisciplinarity in opposition to "neoclassical" theory...
...These are the kinds of pressures that never let up on the spirit...
...Nearly twenty years after the dawning of structuralism, questions about the lessons of history must still be asked...
...Yet, according to anthropological studies, the village community is the first political entity in Sub-Saharan Africa, an entity reinforced by the fact that land disposition is not governed by a private property system but rather by ancestral users' rights that the community authority validates...
...African acculturation is seen as the consequence of "the growing, unifying force of capitalism on a world scale" and of an inevitable process of Westernization...
...But the structure of these peripheral social formations actually remains unknown...
...If an African society does exist with its own distortions, these must not be exaggerated...
...Rooted in M.J...
...Structural analysis and liberal analysis do not account for differences in Africa...
...The most pressing danger amounts to a guilt reaction, and a taboo against the use of rationality when dealing with Africa, for example, by seeing in the "community uncertainty principle" the sole cause of the African community taxes...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
