When I retired as chair of the economics departments of the University of Zambia, then later of Zimbabwe, tradition required that, like all expatriate department heads, I give an inaugural address. Both times, I wondered why. After all, I was leaving not only the university but the country. I could no longer inaugurate anything. Tonight, however, as I leave the presidency of the African Studies Association, the job is just beginning. Opening the decade of the 1990s, this ASA Annual meeting will complete the first phase of the work of the Task Force the ASA Board set up in Atlanta a year ago. On this foundation, together with our African colleagues, we hope to inaugurate increasingly collaborative efforts to support the attainment of sustainable development in Africa.

As Africanists, we have always understood Africa's close historical ties to our own country, its rich contributions to our own cultural and artistic heritage. At the same time, our work has brought home to us more than to many Americans, the impact of the deepening economic, social and political crisis that has seemingly engulfed all aspects of African life. We all know the economic features of that crisis: worsening terms of trade, growing national and international debt, devaluation and austerity programs which have undermined the real incomes of most Africans. Many of us have helped document the social impact of drastic reductions in programs for education, health and environment, especially on women and children.

It gives me particular pleasure to be here. I think that I am the first Canadian citizen to be honored by the presidency of what has increasingly become an international organization. And yet, I am very much one of you. I was born and raised in the United States. I served in its army and represented it abroad as a Fulbright professor before becoming a Canadian. Passionate as my commitment to my adopted country is, my roots remain here, no place more than in this community of scholars.

Like many of my generation, my career has been marked by a tension between thought and action. As a historian, I wanted to understand the world in which I lived. As an activist, I wanted to change that world, to make it a more just, more tolerant and more egalitarian place. If you had asked me 25 years ago why I chose Africa, I would have stressed my scholarly objectives. I would have mentioned the problems that interested me and the questions I wanted to answer. In retrospect, the appeal of Africa for myself and many of my generation of Africanists was very much the excitement of watching the destruction of an oppressive colonial order and being involved in the creation of a new one. Furthermore, the quest for justice and self-determination abroad was linked, sometimes unconsciously, to the quest for equality and social justice at home. For myself, as for many of my peers, the conflict between thought and action often cut deep, and we sometimes paid a price.

A central debate in the literature on the state has focused on the state's relative strength and weakness in relation to society (Skocpol 1979; Nordlinger 1981, 1987; Evans, et al., 1985; Carnoy 1984). While this debate initially examined developed states and, more recently, semi-industrialized states in Latin America, increasing attention has shifted to African states. It is here where a paradox has emerged that has generated further questions about state power and state-society relations. Africa is plagued with political instability, coup d'etats, deteriorating economic conditions, and ineffective policy implementation (Sandbrook 1985). The current difficulties in meeting scheduled debt repayment deadlines and the pressure to make significant economic adjustments further illustrate the precarious financial status of many African states. Yet, African societies are well known for their heavily centralized bureaucratic apparatus that consumes a substantial portion of expenditures and capital investments. One indicator of state influence is the steady growth of parastatals in African countries. As they have expanded in number and in function, state power over these firms also has grown. And, in response to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, many African states have enacted widescale debt management controls on foreign investment, public borrowing, and public sector investment. Scholars, whether conceptualizing this influential social group as an “organizational bourgeoisie” or a “managerial bourgeoisie,” consider African state bureaucracies to have their own power capabilities and defined interests (Markowitz 1977; Sklar 1979).

This paper addresses the subject of working class redefinition within the context of production and profit in the iron-ore mines. Sierra Leonean miners, especially laborers, struggled to redefine themselves as a group with similar interests against efforts by state and capital to maximize profit and increase productivity. The maximization of profit and the minimization of labor costs were crucial to, and dependent on, the survival and profitability of the iron-ore mines with its labor intensive system of production.

The central proposition on which the argument hinges relates to the struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere. By social reproduction is meant “the activities and attitudes, behaviours and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Among other things, it includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption” (Brenner and Laslett 1976, 117). Between 1935 and 1938, laborers struck twice, demanding better working conditions, increased wages, and an end to draconian discipline. The laborers also organized (without a formal union) and resisted attempts to control time, workplace situation, and leisure. Their protests ranged from refusal to reside in mining compounds to absenteeism from work. The laborers' struggle for social reproduction in the economic sphere constitutes the most significant variable in the development of the miners' consciousness and their transformation into a working class.

In the mid-1970s the Nigerian state embarked on an ambitious program to accelerate the commercialization of peasant food production systems, employing as the main institutional vehicle Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs) which are designed, partially funded and managed by the World Bank. The core components of ADPs are their Crop Development Programs which are directed at increasing crop yields and farm incomes through the dissemination of heavily subsidized Green Revolution-type technologies: crop production packages that are comprised of improved seed varieties, fertilizer, pesticides and tractor services. With this objective, a number of infrastructural supports (the most important of which are the expansion and maintenance of rural roads, networks of Farm Service Centers for input delivery, intensified extension services and soil conservation measures) are undertaken by the projects. Commencing with three pilot projects in Bauchi, Kaduna and Sokoto states, the program was extended to the Middle Belts states of Benue, Niger and Plateau in 1977. Declaring ADPs the cornerstone of the national Green Revolution in 1980, the federal government decided to establish projects in all states. The nationwide program was expected to encompass over three million farm families by the mid-1980s (Nigeria 1982).

Inquiries conducted within neo-Marxian political economy frameworks concerning the direction of agrarian transition which the Nigerian state seeks to foster through ADPs have revolved around a well-founded suspicion of their purported smallholder focus. Their design is premised on a division of rural communities into large, progressive and traditional farmers.

Rural development projects involve the application of bureaucratic systems of consciousness to traditional areas where there have never been such normative systems applied before. This means that the values, norms, and ideals of bureaucratic institutions are implicit to how traditionally oriented rural villages are approached by outside development agencies and also how relationships develop between them.

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.

In the years following World War I, the black population in Britain's port cities increased as a result of an influx of West Indian and African seamen who had been discharged from His Majesty's Service. Many of these new arrivals, along with long-term residents, suffered as post-World War I economic conditions worsened, causing hostility from the host communities to increase. Blacks in cities such as Liverpool not only had to endure overt racial attacks, but they were also victims of hidden racism.

There was no legal segregation in Liverpool, and just as many whites as blacks lived within Toxteth, an area in the city's south end near the docks. Blacks and whites mixed freely in the area's numerous pubs, and black men often married white women. Despite the city's historical relationship with the slave trade and slavery, many of those who lived in Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s accepted the pervasive myth of racial harmony in the city. However, some blacks who were more observant recognized that they were being denied adequate economic and social opportunities. Indeed, the city was not free of racial prejudice. In reality, the legacy of the slave trade and slavery and the negative stereotypes of blacks which had been developed over many years were so ingrained in the minds, hearts, attitudes and actions of many Liverpudlians that, wittingly and unwittingly, racism adversely affected the quality of life for black people in the city.

Modern African literature has gained recognition worldwide with such classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Weep Not Child, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. This recognition was reinforced by Soyinka's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Modern African literature is written in indigenous African languages and in European languages used in Africa. Written African literature is very new compared to the indigenous oral tradition of literature which has been there and is still very much alive. While there are literary works in Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu and Sotho, among others, this literature in African indigenous languages is hardly known outside its specific linguistic frontiers. Writers such as Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo and the late Okot p'Bitek first wrote some of their works in African languages before translating them into English. Most African writers, however, write in English, French, and Portuguese. There is the Eurocentric temptation to see modern African literature written in these European languages as an extension of European literature. However, after modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the sole definer of a people's literature.

The concept of civil society has gained currency in African studies. It is used in a variety of different ways, but usually refers to the emergence of new patterns of political participation outside of formal state structures and one-party systems (Bratton 1989, 407). In the absence of capable state institutions, the literature on Africa has started to shift attention away from the state and governing elites, and towards social actors who are devising various strategies to survive the nested crises of state action, economic development, and political legitimacy (Doornbos 1990). As an alternative conceptualization of possibilities of economic and social development, civil society is becoming an all encompassing term that refers to social phenomena putatively beyond formal state structures—but not necessarily free of all contact with the state.

Virtually no theoretical work, however, has been done on the concept as it relates to an African environment, with the exception of Bayart (1986) and, more recently, Bratton (1989). This essay explores in a more theoretical manner than has hitherto been the case what such a notion means within an African context by asking whether the growing use of the term contributes substantively to our understanding of new forms of participation and associational activity in Africa. The answer is affirmative, provided that this concept is elaborated and specified in ways which take into account the complex interaction between normative, economic, and organizational dimensions of civil society.

An increasing number of studies highlight the important role played by Christian missionaries in the processes of change that occurred in African countries before independence. Fifteen years ago a bibliography listed no fewer than 2,859 publications on Christianity in Tropical Africa and their number has grown even more considerably in recent years (Ofori 1977). Both historians and social scientists have taken a keen interest in this issue (see Etherington 1983). But it has not always been so.

This article traces the impact of state formation and class formation on the emergence and development of competitive ethnopolitical identities in Sierra Leone. The politicization of Creole, Mende, Temne and Limba identity deserves scrutiny on account of the dominant role these identities have played in shaping political processes in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Not only is Sierra Leone a culturally plural and intensely stratified society, its postcolonial political history attests to, and offers interesting insights about, the intimate connections between class, ethnicity and state formation. From the end of the nineteenth century until independence, the most divisive ethnoregional conflict in Sierra Leone pitted colony Creole elites against protectorate African elites. The Creoles, separatist in their political attitudes and aspirations, rejected political equality with protectorate Africans and the latter resented both the assertions of superiority by Creoles and their relative dominance in Sierra Leone politics prior to decolonization. This polarization persists even today, but its political significance has paled in comparison to both the rift between the Mendes of the south and the Temnes of the north and the contemporary dominance of Limba cultural entrepreneurs and politicians. Fissures in protectorate elite solidarity coincided with the emergence of political organizations founded and led by competing petty bourgeois elements. One such organization, the All Peoples Congress (APC) party, was formed as an alternative to the Mende-dominated Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP).

Recent scholarship on pastoral societies in Africa indicates that qualitative changes are taking place in their economies (Picard 1980; Galaty and Salzman 1981; Swift 1982; Toulmin 1984; Sutter, 1987; Behnke 1984; Little 1985; Rigby 1985; Kelley 1987; Munei 1987). Although this literature shows that these changes are largely induced by urban groups, such as merchants and state bureaucrats who invade the pastoral range, it nevertheless fails to theorize systematically the nature of the transformation. As recent contributions of Berry (1989), Okoth-Ogendo (1989), and Blaikie (1989) indicate, changes in land tenure in rural Africa are part and parcel of larger social and economic processes operating in African economies, which lead to the reorganization of property relations and the restructuring of rights of access to resources. In spite of the warnings by these authors, even the more theoretically informed literature does not follow through with the implications of conceptual insights regarding the nature of pastoral transformation. Fundamentally, the contours of pastoral transformation very much depend on the structure and internal coherence of the pastoral sector and the type and the tendency of the capital impinging on it. This article is a contribution to the debate over the nature of African pastoral transformation and the social forces operating in that process.