From African Socialism to Scientific Capitalism: Reflections on the Legitimation Crisis in IMF-ruled Africa

Abstract

In the summer of 1989, I travelled across a Zambia reeling from the effects of a newly imposed IMF structural adjustment regime .⁴ Prices of essential goods were skyrocketing, employment declining, and real incomes rapidly shrinking. Many wondered how they would manage to make ends meet. Many, indeed, were failing to make ends meet: with high food prices, many went hungry; with free medical care abolished, many sick could not receive treatment. For my part, I was trying to buy some blankets for a trip to the countryside; but everywhere I went, blankets were either unavailable or selling for preposterously high prices. Finally, after days of looking in the major centers of Lusaka and Kitwe, we found abundant, cheap blankets at a shop in the provincial town of Mansa. I wondered how it was that this merchant had in such abundance what was in short supply throughout the country. My research assistant, a young, educated Zambian man, had the answer: this merchant was widely known as a powerful sorcerer. He obtained his supplies by making potent medicines from the organs of human beings whom he murdered. It was the hearts, in particular, that he was after; this was what gave him his special supply lines, and had enabled him to grow very rich.

Give us rain. Give us bananas. Give us sugar cane. Give us plantains. Give us meat. Give us food. You are our king, but if you do not feed us properly we will get rid of you. The country is yours; the people must have their stomachs filled. Give us rain. Give us food…

(Ritual greeting of late 19th C. Shambaai commoners to their newly installed king.¹)

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

(Lawrence Summers, Chief Economist, World Bank²)

The exploiters of Zimbabwe

were cannibals drinking the masses’ blood, Sucking and sapping their energy.

The gun stopped all this.

Grandmother Nehanda

You prophesied.

(From a song by the ZANU-PF Ideological Choir, broadcast on ZBC radio on the occasion of Zimbabwe’s independence (17 April 1980).³)