Abstract
From independence to the beginning of the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa was considered a poor laboratory for those interested in the organization of popular movements and what we might term counterhegemonic resistance. The majority of African countries experimented with a brief spell of open politics at independence, but authoritarianism in various forms was endemic and entrenched in all regions of the subcontinent by the late 1960s.1 Africanist political science turned its attention to the authoritarian African state, focusing especially on its puzzling ability to dominate society despite its weak state capacity.2 In this work, state power was built on the shallow base of neo-patrimonialism and coercion; other forms of state– society linkage were often dismissed as absent, weak or irrelevant.3 Society was passive or estranged from the political realm: Azarya wrote of ‘disengagement’, Kasfir of ‘departicipation’, Hyden of the ‘uncaptured peasantry’ and Bayart of a fractured civil society that can only ‘chip at the state from below’.4 Those interested in societal response to state rule were left with work that emphasized the ‘informalization’ of politics and the various ‘exits’ pursued by individuals.5
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Notes
See Nelson Kasfir, The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics with a Case Study of Uganda ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976 )
Ruth Berins Collier, Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy,1945–1975 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 ).
For example, Thomas Callaghy, The State–society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 )
Crawford Young, ‘The End of the Post-colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics’, African Affairs, 103 (2004), pp. 23–49, esp. 27.
For example, Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Civil Society in Africa’, in Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power, edited by P. Chabal ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 )
Richard Joseph, ‘Class, State and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Studies, 21 (1983), pp. 21–38.
Victor Azarya, ‘Reordering State-society Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement’, in The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa, edited by D. Rothchild and N. Chazan Rothchild ( Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988 )
Nelson Kasfir, ‘Departicipation and Political Development in Black African Politics’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1974), pp. 3–25
Lucan A. Way, ‘Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine’, World Politics, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2005), pp. 231–61; Jean-Francois Bayart, ‘Civil Society in Africa’, p. 119.
Anthropologists, rural sociologists and even historians continued to produce excellent accounts of societal responses to economic and social change. This work, equally skilled at uncovering individual and community strategies vis-à-vis the state, was often implicitly political. See, for instance, Sarah Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 ).
By the early 1990s, partly due to the international donor community’s disillusionment with state-led development, scholars began to criticize this focus on the state and attendant neglect of non-state actors. In one early contribution to the debate, Doornbos underlined the ‘prolonged withering-away of African civil society from academic and policy attention’ and suggested that, since independence, ‘socio-economic relationships and institutions at the “grassroots,” in both rural areas and in urban centers, have received attention mainly in their reaction to interventions from “above”’. See Martin Doornbos, ‘The African State in Academic Debate: Retrospect and Prospect’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1990), pp. 179–98, esp. 190.
Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba eds, African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy ( Dakar: Codesria, 1995 ).
Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiences in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ).
For example, William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States ( Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1998 ).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks ( London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 ).
David Laitin, ‘Hegemony and Religious Conflict: British Imperial Control and Political Cleavages in Yorubaland’, in Bringing the State Back In, edited by P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985), p. 287 (emphasis added)
See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul, ‘Socialism and Economic Development in Tropical Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1968), pp. 141–69
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, first published 1961 ( New York: Grove Press, 1993 ).
Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 ).
Eva Bellin, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labour and the Paradox of State-sponsored Development ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002 ).
Joan Nelson, Access to Power: Politics and the Urban Poor in Developing Nations ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 )
Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles,1870–1980 ( London: Zed Books, 1984 )
Richard Jeffries, ‘Populist Tendencies in the Ghanaian Trade Union Movement’, in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, edited by R. Sandbrook and R. Cohen ( London: Longman Group, 1975 )
John Wiseman, ‘Urban Riots in West Africa, 1977 to 1985’, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1986), pp. 509–18.
Henry Meebelo, African Proletarians and Colonial Capitalism: The Origins, Growth and Struggles of the Zambian Labour Movement to 1964 (Lusaka: Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, 1986), chaps. 3–5
Michael Burawoy, ‘The Hidden Abode of Underdevelopment: Labour Process and the State in Zambia’, Politics and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1982), pp. 123–66.
The total ‘emoluments’ paid to Africans increased from £2,116,251 in 1950 to £4,589,840, while the number of African employees increased from 34,814 to 37,193. Northern Rhodesian Chamber of Mines figures, reported in B. Vander Plaetse, G. Hlatiwayo, L. Van Eygen, B. Meessen and B. Criel, ‘Costs and Revenue of Health Care in a Rural Zimbabwean District’, Health Policy and Planning, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2005), pp. 243–51, 96n7.
M. R. Mwendapole, A History of the Trade Union Movement in Zambia up to 1968 ( Lusaka: University of Zambia, Institute for African Studies, 1977 ).
Labour Department figures, cited in Cherry Gertzel, ‘Industrial Relations in Zambia to 1975’, in Industrial Relations in Africa, edited by U. G. Damachi and H. D. Seibel ( New York: Macmillan Press, 1979 ), pp. 319–20.
Oliver Saasa and Jerker Carlsson, The Aid Relationship in Zambia: A Conflict Scenario ( Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996 ), p. 35.
Darlington Amos Banda, The Trade Union Situation in Zambia: An Overview of the Law, Practice and the Way Forward ( Lusaka: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1997 ), p. 18.
Peter Harries-Jones, Freedom and Labour: Mobilization and Political Control on the Zambian Copperbelt ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975 ), pp. 166–70
Robert Bates, Unions, Parties and Political Development: A Study of Mineworkers in Zambia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), especially Chapter 5.
Lise Rakner, Trade Unions in Processes of Democratisation: A Study of Party Labour Relations in Zambia ( Bergen, Norway: Chr. Michelson Institute, 1994 ), pp. 77–82.
Anirudha Gupta, ‘Trade Unionism and Politics on the Copperbelt’, in Politics in Zambia, edited by William Tordoff and R.V. Molteno ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974 ), p. 308.
Quoted in Neo Simutanyi, ‘Political Economy of Workers’ Participation: The Role of Trade Unions in Promoting Industrial Democracy in Zambia’, M.A. Thesis in Development Studies, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1987, p. 33.
Quoted in Miles Larmer, ‘Unrealistic Expectations? Zambia’s Mineworkers from Independence to the One-party State, 1964–1972’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2005), pp. 318–52, esp. 332.
Michael Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972 ), p. 78.
Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-century Egypt ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 ).
Television interview with Frank Mutubila, Zambian National Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast 4 February 1976. Quoted in Bernice Liatto, ‘Organised Labour and the State in Zambia’, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Politics, University of Leeds, 1989, p. 213.
This account is derived from statements by the Ministers of Labour and Social Services and of Home Affairs, Zambia Parliamentary Debates, 18 April 1980.
For more on these reforms and their consequences, see Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiences in Africa, and Robert Bates and Paul Collier, ‘The Politics and Economics of Policy Reform in Zambia’, in Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform: Evidence from Eight Countries, edited by R. Bates and A. Kreuger ( Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1993 ).
See, for instance, Neo Simutanyi, ‘Organised Labour, Economic Crisis, and Structural Adjustment in Africa: The Case of Zambia’, in Democracy in Zambia: Challenges for the Third Republic, edited by B. Chikulo and O. Sichone ( Harare: SAPES Trust, 1996 ).
Chiluba, ‘Workers’ Challenge’, statement to the June 1990 Garden House Conference, reprinted in Akashambatwa Mbikusita-Lewanika and Derrick Chitala, eds, The Hour Has Come! Proceedings of the National Conference on Multiparty Options ( Lusaka: Zambia Research Foundation, 1990 ), pp. 95–106.
For a more detailed analysis of the 1991 elections, see Carolyn Baylies and Morris Szeftel, ‘Democratisation and the 1991 Elections in Zambia’, in Voting for Democracy: Watershed Elections in Contemporary Anglophone Africa, edited by J. Daniel, R. Southall and M. Szeftel ( Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999 ).
T. Z. Tembo, The Road to Multiparty Democracy in Zambia and Its Consequences ( Livingstone, Zambia: Sanisani Chemis, 1996 ), pp. 1–2.
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© 2007 Adrienne LeBas
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LeBas, A. (2007). The Politics of Institutional Subversion: Organized Labour and Resistance in Zambia. In: Chalcraft, J., Noorani, Y. (eds) Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592162_11
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