Sept 21
Nature of Africa:
- Kingdoms
- Contact with other parts of the world (trade routes)
- Rural than urban
- Ethnic: Ethnicity was fluid - werent strict identities; malleable
- Religion: Islam, traditional religions
- Gender: women had more political rights; introduction of European patriarchal society
changed that
- Categories: cattle farmers, hunters/gatherers, fishing communities, urban areas
Homelands Act (South Africa) - each ethnicity would get their own homeland
Europeans:
- first contact around 1471 by the Portuguese
- 1502 - Atlantic slave trade - 1807, abolition of slavery
- Slavery replaced by legitimate commerce; more profitable to trade with Africans than
dealing in the slave trade; Enlightenment values
- 1884-1885 - Scramble for Africa/Berlin Conference
Consequences of Colonialism:
- Brought it into the world economy
- Primary products (promotion of primary products; imported manufactured items)
- Subordinate partners, which contributed to underdevelopment
- Subsistence economy
- Export-driven infrastructure; not built out of good will but to help their export driven
economy
- Local entrepreneurial class; absence after colonialism - state takes on the role of
entrepreneur. Needs capital to start up in the first place
- Became a dumping ground market
Dependency Theory -
Political:
- Lack of leadership
- Artificial state (indirect rule)
- Authoritarian state - people imbibing respect for authority
- Patriarchy - women lacking a political and economic role
- Military
- Drew borders
Social: - Tension: social mobility
- Social groups
- Traditional beliefs/religions done away with; introduction of Christianity, baptism
- Psychological impact of colonialism - foreign seen as better
- Language- loss of language = loss of identity; economic standing (poor cant afford to
go through the education system and learn the new language)
Nationalism:
- Promises to soldiers (independence for fighting)
- Broke down racist values as well as ethnic lines
- Psychological barrier broken - took down the view of the invulnerable European
- Soldiers came back and felt they were on equal footing - dying, shed blood just like the
Europeans
- Soldiers learned discipline/organization brought to the struggle for independence
- Social services available to them were poor
- UN formation [peace, diplomacy, right to self-determination]
- Wave of decolonization (India, Sri Lank, throughout Asia); incentive for Africans to
seek self-determination
- Changed global superpowers (US/USSR); knocked out colonial powers
- US Marshall Plan - help Europe reconstruct
- Pan-Africanism/education
- Urbanization - easier to mobilize, facilitate ideas
- Voluntary associations
Sept 28 - Development Theory and African Industrialization
The Development Project in Theory and Practice: A Review of its Shifting Dynamics
- idea of development was invented in the 1940s as part of a geopolitical project to
liberate countries freed from colonialism away from communism
- drawn out by capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America
- development was conceived in conditional terms as relative progress in per capita
economic growth and in structural terms as industrialization and modernization
- Development entails:
- an increase in the rate of savings and investment - the accumulation of physical
and financial capital
- investment of this capital in industry
- in the absence of weakness of an endogenous capitalist class, the state
assumes the basic functions of capital - investment, entrepreneurship and
management
- nationalization of economic enterprises in strategic industries and sectors
- an inward orientation of production, which, together with a secular increase in
wages and salaries, will expand the domestic market - regulation of this and other markets and the protection of the firms that produce
the market, insulating them from the pressures of the world economy
- modernization of the production apparatus, the state and social institutions,
reorienting them towards values and norms that are functional for economic
growth
- This approach assumed that economic growth would be accompanied by
the adoption of Western cultural and institutional practices
The 1970s
- approaches to development identifiable today emerged
- Left believed in radical, systemic change. Marxism/Latin American structuralism to
create dependency theory
- Development/underdevelopment as two sides of the same coin - socioeconomic
conditions were linked to the position that a country happened to occupy in the world
capitalist system
- Development in the metropole was predicated on the underdevelopment of countries
on the periphery - the development of underdevelopment (Frank 1967)
- Reformists: relations of dependency are neither inherently exploitative nor block the
possibility of periphery capitalist development; they just create a situation that favours
a dependent or distorted pattern of capitalist development
- Right criticized state-centered solutions to developmental problems and began to
argue for global free trade as the engine for economic growth
- Development would only address the problems of the poor when it involved the poor,
i.e. local community organizations
- Mainstream development program became liberal reformist (enhanced role of the
state):
- programs that would establish the social conditions of development (education,
health, etc)
- poverty-oriented strategy designed to meet the basic needs of the poor, based
on;
- reforms designed to improve access to societys productive resources (land
reform, etc.)
- redistributive growth with equity policies via taxation designed to redistribute
more equitably market-generated incomes
- an integrated program of rural development that corrected for the urban bias of
government policies as well as the neglect of agriculture
1970s - Growth With Equity model advanced in the context of an extensive/ongoing
debate on the role of inequality in the growth and development process and the relevant
policy option priorities and tradeoffs (i.e. growth with efficiency, equity or equality)
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