On Reason and Afro-Pessimism

The publication of Richard Werbner’s Reasonable Radicals offers an opportunity to revisit the issue of Afro-pessimism – a charge levelled at much Africanist scholarship in the last decade. But first I want to set the scene within which the argument has raged in the past few years. The recent emphasis on agency in Africa is part of a reaction by many Africanist scholars against what they perceive as the unduly negative image of the continent. They, and others, have come to the view that the spate of hard-hitting books that have been published in the last decade on the manifest failure of African states to set Africa on a course of development has now come to vitiate our very ability to understand what is happening there. Whilst not denying the depth of what might be called the African ‘crisis’, they insist that there is much going on that is positive – thus providing evidence that Africans are capable of surmounting the difficult predicament in which they find themselves.

There is little doubt that concentrating on agency forces us to reconsider the main questions Africanists have been asking since independence. Instead of raising the issue of why Africa has not developed, we are directed to consider the extraordinary ways in which Africans have adapted to a rapidly changing world order. From a context in the 1960s when the Cold War was at its height and the former colonial powers still had strong influence in their former territories to the present globalized world in which financial, communication and trade flows have accelerated, Africa’s situation has evolved massively. A focus on the adjustments Africans have had to make to these global influences brings out the ability of both rulers and peoples to grasp the opportunities available to them and deploy them to purposeful effect – as a few examples make plain.

The agility demonstrated by African governments in maximizing resource transfers within the radically different environments of the Cold War, structural adjustment and, today, rapid globalization is truly impressive. Equally, the speed at which Africans have deployed the discourse and instruments of democracy to force greater accountability on their governors is remarkable. On another register, the ease with which Africans have adapted to the spread of the mobile phone and the Internet to facilitate commerce and migration is nothing short of astonishing. By the same token, the so-called informal economies have thrived in and beyond Africa. Finally, the rapid development of local NGOs as well as the increasingly organized and vocal intervention of civil society organizations (CSOs) demonstrates the potential for ‘grassroots’ organizations to influence politics.

Concentrating attention on what has contributed to major political, social and economic changes in the last decade forces analysts to think again about the instruments they use to explain these events and processes. This can be illustrated by looking at three areas in which a different research focus has changed our understanding: (1) there is now a new analytical framework that accounts for the very important patterns and consequences of intra-Africa migration, which goes beyond the common assumption that Africans seek primarily to leave the continent; (2) asking how democratization has worked in practice has brought out the need to study much more carefully what might be called ‘traditional’ forms of political accountability; (3) studying how communities in Africa have faced up to the issues of violence and justice points to the variegated forms of the so-called ‘traditional’ methods, which have in practice proved worthwhile.

These advances in our understanding of African social and political agency are important. They force us to revise any overall notion of causality we may have taken for granted by dint of the theoretical or conceptual frameworks we’ve been prone to use over the years. There is certainly no doubt that any preconceived analytical scheme that does not allow for the study of the myriad instances of...