Africa's Place-in-the-World
Boulder, Colorado
Where does Africa fit in the neoliberal global order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War? That is the broad question that these four books address. The liberal paradigm, often referred to as globalization, has affected the continent both politically and economically. Although it is frequently asserted that globalization has marginalized Africans, the obvious fact remains that Africa is fully part of the globalizing world. Kofi Annan observed in his 1998 report on Africa to the Security Council that there are winners and losers in the globalization process. But just how has Africa been faring on this new global playing field, both in its political experiments and its economic prospects? As James Ferguson asks, what is "Africa's contemporary place-in-the-world"?
As an anthropologist, Ferguson begins by apologizing for writing about the unit of Africa—"a vast, complicated heterogeneous region"—as a "meaningful object of scholarship" (5). He justifies the risks of such an enterprise by arguing that the continent is in fact a real category in the global economy—one that is, however, "nearly synonymous with failure and poverty" (5). While embracing continental-scale analysis in order to address the issue of poverty, Ferguson not surprisingly incorporates his local fieldwork [End Page 203] in Lesotho, Transkei, Zambia, and elsewhere into the discussion.
Moreover, Global Shadows is in fact a montage of five previously published articles and four new essays, the first of which constitutes an introduction to the theme of Africa's place in the neoliberal world order. That place, he observes, is a decidedly subordinate position. His fundamental purpose then is to put the "question of the unequal relation between Africa and the West back on the table in a radical way" (23). Ferguson is passionate about the issue of inequality, about issues of social justice on a global scale. This passion infuses the work with a strong moral tone. Globalization, he contends, is less about the transnational flows featured in the standard discourse than about matters of transnational global accountability.
Ferguson begins by critiquing the common understanding of flows of capital in a chapter entitled "Globalizing Africa? Observations from an Inconvenient Continent," a formulation that evokes Al Gore's "inconvenient truth." The inconvenient truth about international capital is that it has not "flowed" seamlessly into Africa's broad development needs, but has rather "hopped" into mineral-extraction enclaves. Capital, Ferguson observes, "is globe-hopping, not globe-covering" (38, his italics). Although these foreign investments do connect the continent to the global economy, they do not really integrate Africans into higher forms of production that generate a broad range of goods and services. Rather this extractive neoliberalism has produced an inconvenient form of globalization "that divides the planet as much as it unites it" (49).
In the following chapters, Ferguson argues that poverty has been depoliticized (by those who construe it in technical terms) and that economics has been "de-moralized" by ignoring "African traditions of moral discourse on questions of economic process" (82). Wealth has long been understood by Africans, he writes, as a matter of relations among people, and this insight is as valid for the global economy as for a...
