Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (review)

The story of "Africa in decline"-of a continent in deep economic and political crisis, where the modernization project has not only failed but also reversed itself-has become all-too-familiar these days. As narrated in the popular press, it is typically told as a blame-the-victim tale of nepotism, corruption, blind ethnic attachment, and timeless tradition. In the scholarly literature, it often becomes a narrative of Africa's victimization-by colonialism and neocolonialism, disease and the environment. Whatever one's script of the causes, the issues seem depressingly intractable and the "Afro-pessimists"-on both right and left-keep growing in number.

James Ferguson's new book wades into this unsettling terrain with an analysis of the rise and fall of the Zambian Copperbelt, and-a Ferguson trademark-a brilliant critique of the scholarly/anthropological literature that accompanied its rise. Trumpeted during the 1950s and 60s as an African success story-an "African Birmingham"-the Copperbelt produced much of the world's copper and dramatically raised local standards of living. Here, observers suggested, was Africa's future, a future in which the profits of a booming industrial sector could support a rapidly modernizing urban population. Just as precipitously, however, and along with much of the rest of the continent, the Copperbelt slid into recession during the 1980s. Falling copper prices and increasing external debt led into the familiar downward cycle of high unemployment, the suspension of government services, and the neglect of infrastructure. Today, the Copperbelt lies in ruins, as Ferguson puts it, "history seems to be running in reverse." De-industrialization has replaced industrialization, workers are leaving the city to return to the land, and the mines are being sold back to the private company-the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa-that owned them during the colonial period.

It is not so much with the causes of collapse that Ferguson is here concerned, as with mapping its social and cultural effects. Thus, he describes the desperation of unemployed workers laid off by the mines, of retirees who can no longer count on their pensions, of urban migrants unwillingly forced back to the villages, of rural-urban tensions made manifest in sordid tales of neglect, jealousy, and witch-craft. Resurrecting an old anthropological device, Ferguson deploys the case study method to useful effect in following unemployed and retired workers who have left the cities of the Copperbelt and returned to the land. These stories of humiliation and betrayal are poignant testaments to modernity's failure in this Africa at the Millenium.

Ingeniously folding this story of economic crisis and collapse into a parallel story about the epistemological crisis in anthropology, Ferguson argues that Copperbelt anthropology of the 1950s and 60s-conducted by members of the famed Rhodes Livingstone Institute-unwittingly relied on and reified modernist categories. Thus, he suggests that despite these ethnographers' sympathetic portraits of Copperbelt migrants, their ethnographies were nevertheless informed by a dualist (rural/urban) teleological metanarrative (not unlike that of modernization theory) and that their work failed to challenge the larger structures of the colonial order within which they worked. They were thus less the radicals they (and subsequent generations) saw themselves as, and more colonial liberals working within, and supporting, a racist settler state.

In place of the linearities and certainties of the modernist anthropological project, Ferguson aims to develop an "anti-teleological" set of theoretical and methodological tools to deal with the counter-linearities and uncertainties of the present. He thus documents the enormous variation in the way different people migrated to and inhabited the city (variation he describes as "bush-like" rather than "ladder-," "tree-," or "root-like"). He sees the urban as a disorderly space where meanings are partial and fleeting, where miscommunication and improvisation are the norm, and where the analyst's (modernist) desire to "get to the bottom" of things will remain forever frustrated. There is an interesting discussion here about urban styles-about the cultivation...