Economic and Political Reform in Africa: Anthropological Perspectives

Preface

Preface this book took much too long to complete! it perennially was on the backburner , always precluded by more urgent commitments. it has hung around in partially completed form for several years and confronted lots of false starts and stops along the way. an important change in the project’s pace came in 2007–2008 when i was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed me to commit fulltime attention to the book for nine months. a research leave from the University of Kentucky in fall 2007 and a sabbatical from Emory University in spring 2011 helped me to finish the bulk of the research and writing. The lengthy gestation of this project means that i am indebted to many colleagues, institutions, and collaborations , which i will acknowledge in the rest of this preface. to begin, the topical and geographic breadth of the project—case studies in six african countries (Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, mozambique, and somalia)—required an arsenal of partnerships, collaborations, and methods unusual for an anthropologist. it draws on key research and collaborative opportunities and partnerships that were afforded me during the past twenty-plus years. in many respects, the book represents a synthesis of my work since 1990. Within a five-year period in the early 1990s i was involved in two comparative research programs that greatly expanded my geographic and topical interests. Both were interdisciplinary, multisited projects. The first was a comparative study of contract farming in africa codirected with michael Watts of the University of californiaBerkeley , to whom i am deeply indebted for many of the ideas reflected in chapter 1. This project allowed fieldwork back in Baringo district, Kenya, the location of my dissertation research, as well as research in The Gambia, West africa, where i had not previously worked. in the late 1980s contract farming, a form of capitalist production that vertically links small farmers with the operations of agribusiness firms and processors, was just being introduced in various african countries and increasingly associated with the production of so-called nontraditional commodities. contract farming (cf) came to symbolize the pro-business agendas so prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, and provided a very convenient window into the intricate connections between global trade and transnational firms, on the one hand, and local politics and labor relations, on the other. field research for the chapter (1) on cf of nontraditional commodities was conducted in the export horticultural zones near Banjul, The Gambia, and accra, Ghana, during 1993–1994 and partly supported by another comparative research project focused on peri-urban economies (described below). for the cf research a ix x | Preface range of actors, including farmers, business owners, exporters, and policy makers, were interviewed at multiple sites, including farms, offices, and marketplaces. in Ghana field interviews were conducted with 83 of the approximately 500 farmers growing pineapples under contract at the time, and with key informants, such as traders, large-farm owners and managers, government officials, and chiefs. This fieldwork was supervised by cyril daddieh, currently of Providence University, and based on research modules that had been jointly developed by the two of us. i am grateful to cyril for his hard work and intellectual inputs to the study. for the Gambian research, data collection focused on four related components: (1) horticultural traders; (2) communal vegetable gardens; (3) household (or “backyard”) producers; and (4) large export farms and firms. overall 93 small-scale farmers, 167 horticultural traders, and 12 owners or managers of large-scale export farms were interviewed in the Banjul peri-urban area during January–october 1993. most of this fieldwork was supervised by catherine dolan, currently of oxford University but at the time a Phd student at the state University of new yorkBinghamton , and isatou Jack, now a senior associate of international Relief and development (iRd) based in Washington, d.c., but an independent consultant in The Gambia at the time. The study was based on a research module, interview guides, and questionnaires that i developed in consultation with catherine and isatou. i conducted the in-depth interviews with 12 owners or managers of export farms, in some cases with the assistance of a translator. i am equally indebted to both catherine and isatou for their assistance in the fieldwork and subsequent analyses of the Gambian data. i updated both the Ghanaian and Gambian materials through interviews in 2008 with researchers and policy makers and reviews of recent reports, statistical data, and literature. a second interdisciplinary research program was on “Peri...