The fall or even the death
of a theory is stipulated when it is at bar with reality. Such is
the fate of development theories, which, according to Colin Leys,
have now reached an impasse. That is, the ground upon which
development theories emerged some thirty years ago
‘concurrent with the independence of ex-colonies, with the
political division of the world into three camps, and with the formalisation, through the Bretton Woods institutions, of
nationally regulated systems ‘is over. Thus, following the
end of the Cold War, the ‘third world’ has fragmented
while an internationally ‘regulated’ trade and finance
regimes have curtailed the scope for state economic intervention.
Now the challenge for development theory is the problem of how to
re-subordinate ‘the market to a new system of international
and national regulation’. (p.vi)
In this book (a collection
of essays, most of which were written at different times in the
past and a few new), Colin Leys ‘a researcher on development
issues and an observer of developments, or lack of them, in
Africa ‘ventures into what he says a ‘stock-taking
exercise’ by going back to the past in a ‘self-critical
and open minded spirit’. With this spirit, he sets on to
look into political commitments, the rationales and assumptions,
which underpinned development theories in their informative
years.
The book is divided into
two parts with nine chapters. The first part deals with competing
perspectives on development. The introduction to theories of
development traces their historical roots to Hegelian and Marxist
ideas instead of confining them to the last thirty years. The
discussion of recent theories, selectively yet lucidly attempted,
involves underdevelopment and dependency (chap. 2), modernisation
and its politics in Samuel Huntington (chap. 3) and the new
political economy (rational choice) popularised by Robert Bates
(chap. 4). The second part has five chapters and it deals mainly
with theories and their influence in Africa. Chapter 5 thus
serves as an introduction to the theory and practice of
development in Africa. The author singles out, in chapter 6, the
simple commodity production as ‘a general cause of the
crisis’ in Africa whereby economic crisis is accompanied and
aggravated by ‘a general social and political crises’
(pp.135,137). Chapter 7 is informed by the ‘Kenyan
debate’ initiated by the author in the seventies. Chapter 8
discusses African capitalists and development.
The concluding chapter (9)
is partly based on the article entitled: The African Tragedy,
published in 1994 in the New Left Review. When it comes to future
predictions, the author is less sanguine about the prospects for
African capitalist development. For that matter, the African
tragedy is linked to the global market forces and the fall of
development theory (ies). In response, Colin Leys argues that
development theory needs urgent revival ‘as a field of
critical inquiry ... with imperative policy implications for the
survival of civilised and decent life, and not just in the
ex-colonial countries’. (p.43) He also calls for a ‘New
World order’ and politically more explicit and historically
based efforts now that the point is, quite rightly so, to
understand the world before contemplating to change it.
In this process of
understanding, and indeed in contemplation, one important problem
of development theories (development economics, per se), at least
as far Africa is concerned, has been that they were rarely
grounded on African realities. They were superimposed, as it
were, be it the leftist paradigms of class analysis (Marxism,
dependency or underdevelopment) or neo-liberal economics
paradigms of the right. For instance, Andre Gunder Frank, an
American-German ‘exiled’ to Chile in protest against
the dominance, in American social sciences, of ahistorical
modernisation theory ‘attacked modernisation theory while
basing his analysis mainly in the context of Latin America, a
continent that had been formally independent for pretty long time
compared to Africa.
Similarly, Samuel
Huntington agenda of political development and Rostow’s
non-communist stages were securely ensconced in the American
economic and political sciences with their manifest influence on
the US foreign policy. Moreover, these theories were
‘contaminated’, as Colin Leys says, by the politics of
the Cold War. As such, their approach to Africa is equally remote
‘yet effective ‘and often based on strategic national
interests. Neither is Leys’ book free from the problems of
grounding. Initiator of the ‘Kenyan debate’ and
critical observer, he argues, once more, for what he calls
‘African capitalists’. But who could they, feasibly and
conceivably, be? Are they the ‘business elite’ who are
compradors to foreign capital and who are nothing but lumpen-bourgeoisie promoting lumpen-development, to borrow
Franks’s lamentation? Or are they part of the ruling
entourage, as often is the case in Africa, who, as a class of
their own, are alienated from the majority of the population?
Most of the latter lead the ‘idiocy of rural life’
living off the land for its reproduction.
Surely, Ley’s
capitalist class cannot be a malevolent, personal despots who
stash billions of the state’s wealth in remote secret
accounts while ‘their’ people turn into
‘supernumeraries’ of the human race and
‘their’ non-nation states survive on the margins of
decay with a heavy burden of debt easier ‘excused’ than
paid. Surely, it is not for those to whom the concepts like
nation and nationalism signify nothing but nominal attachment to
a scrap of land made unliveable by scorched earth policies, and
who, upon forced termination of their reign, unceremoniously
resign to apartment blocks in the metropolis facing the river
banks, and of course, not far away from their bank accounts.
Eventually it is not for those to whom a state is nothing but a
personal property whose assets are up for a jumble sale during
the fashionable ‘privatisation’ schemes. Or, on the
contrary, are there, some kind of benevolent, world-class
capitalists regulated by equally benevolent world government run
by thinking political animals? No one tells for sure. Neither
does the author for he admits that ‘there are not going to
be any general, or any, simple answers’ (p.38). Had it been
that he settles for benevolent world government, it is sheer
idealism which defies imaginable reality.
The idea of ‘gentle
recolonisation’ too seems desperation of the last resort;
and it is far removed from rendering any viable solution. For it
is never clear how, if a contemporary African state from the
Sahara desert fails the well-being of a Timbuktu villager, why a
faceless programmer from Silicon Valley should be hoped, against
any hope, to do the job any better. For the time being, at least,
there is ample evidence that development, change, progress (or
whatever), grounded as it is on national setting, could only
occur by promoting the roots and not by pulling the branches
‘a lesson an ‘international development
community’, if it ever existed, ought to heed.
It is no wonder that the
author, heavily informed by, and often critical of, dependency
perspective and basing himself along Marxist lines, urges for
more capitalism and more capitalist development. For capitalism,
a system which is not an end but a transition to another form of
human organisation, is nonetheless ‘progressive’, then
the suffering it engenders is worth enduring. For this, it seems,
the author stakes his hopes in the African capitalist: i.e.,
‘understanding Africa’s capitalist will remain
important for understanding whatever happens next’ (p.187).
This goes well with the Marxist tradition on economic determinism
and irrevocable place of classes. Yet, the African realities, to
which Marx’s works offer only limited help (p.167), call our
attention to other set of entities. These entities include
ethnicity (Marxists fail to understand and dub it as ‘false
consciousness’; yet it is one of the resilient and important
realities particularly in the face of absence or weaknesses of
classes, rigidly defined, as they had been envisaged in the
nineteenth century Europe), institutional setting and policy
environment.
Neither there is a probing
discussion into the nature of Africa’s post-colonial state.
The whole paraphernalia of simple commodity production as a
general cause of Africa’s crisis, misleading as it is,
absolves the main protagonist from the crisis a good deal of
which is its own making. (It is notable that the whole chapter
dealing with the state per se, [chap. 6], is only 7 pages and of
these only a couple of paragraphs deal with the state. This
imbalance cannot be justified since the preponderant discussion
about development has been about state regulation of, or
intervention, in the economy). These aspects should, of
necessity, be covered in any informed debate as far as African
experience is concerned to which the present book lends either
little aspiration or understanding.
Worse still, the book
hardly indicates how the political agendas could be reformed. In
a continent where the primacy accorded to political kingdom has,
in effect, relegated other considerations including development
to the bottom pile, the book offers scanty analysis of the
inherent nature of post colonial African state and whether it is
socially and politically equipped to function in ways similar to
what and how the East Asian states are said to have operated in
the recent past. Even if comparisons are going to be made, there
is a subtle danger of drawing cases from experience of specific,
historical and social settings - that could not warrant general
conclusions - to African states. Any attempt to generalise poses
a problem of comparing an elephant with a table ‘for both
have four legs - and without even caring to examine the
background upon which the legs stand.
The rest assured,
well-researched, well-referenced, critical and at times
controversial, the book remains an important source of
information for development theories and their relevance, mainly
but not exclusively, to Africa. For one, the author paraphrases
Marx’s warning to German working classes that ‘[i]f ...
the [British and American] reader pharisaically shrugs his
shoulders at the condition of the [African populations], or
optimistically comforts himself with the thought that in [Britain
or the USA] things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell
him: De te fabula narratur! "The story is about you."'
(See The African Tragedy, p.47)
For all its criticism, its
insights, and sometimes its chilling accounts punctuated by
unavoidable pessimism, the book remains a timely, if not
brilliant, contribution to the relevance, barbarism, human waste
and pains associated with the development of capitalism and to
the post-colonial Africa both of which, I readily admit, are
‘in deep trouble’.
- Seyoum Hameso
- December 1997
