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The Material Roots of the Suspended African State: Arguments from Somalia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Abdi Samatar  and
A. I. Samatar
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Extract

In this historical conjuncture of profound socio-economic disorders, the condition of the peoples of the so-called periphery is as desperate as it has ever been. Understanding the making and nature of their predicament is certainly one of the most basic conundrums in development studies in general, and the study of Africa in particular. A useful way of looking at the continent's dilemma is to focus on two broad factors: structural constraints and subjective conditions. The first speaks to the complex of historical circumstances, habits, and rules bequeathed by the past – ‘the grid of inheritance’, to borrow from E. P. Thompson – and the overbearing logic of the contemporary global systems of production, exchange, and information. The second signifies political choices that are made as the battle with the past, the present, and for the future continues.

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Articles
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The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 669 - 690
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

Page 669 note 1 Crises of habitation at the global level are the subject of many incisive and moving works. These range from concerns with economic recession to militarism and ecological destruction. For a sample of this vast literature, see Kaldor, Mary, ‘The Global Political Economy’ in Alternatives (Guildford), 11, 4, 10 1986, pp. 431–60;Google ScholarJolly, Richard and Cornea, Giovanni Andrea (eds.), ‘The Impact of World Recession on Children’, special issue of World Development (Oxford), 12, 3, 03 1984;Google ScholarFurtado, Celso, No to Recession and Unemployment (Reading, 1984);Google ScholarHarris, Nigel, Bread and Guns: the world economy in crisis (Harmondsworth, 1983);Google ScholarBriviniv, Mayra, Lycette, Margaret A., and Greevy, William P. (eds.), Women and Poverty in the Third World (Baltimore, 1983);Google ScholarSivard, Ruth L., World Military and Social Expenditures (Washington, D.C., 1986);Google Scholar and Radclift, Michael, Development and the Environment Crisis (London, 1984).Google Scholar In the case of Africa, see Lawrence, Peter (ed.), Food Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa (London, 1987);Google ScholarNyong'o, Peter Anyang' (ed.), Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa (London, 1987);Google ScholarGaku, M. L., The Crisis in African Agriculture (London, 1987);Google ScholarBrooke, James, ‘“Financial Famine” in Seen for Africa’, in New York Times, 21 June 1987, p. A7;Google ScholarGreen, Reginald H., ‘Sub-Saharan Africa: towards oblivion or reconstruction?’, special issue of Journal of Development Planning (New York), 15, 1985;Google ScholarBeckman, Björn and Andrae, Gunilla, The Wheat Trap: bread and underdevelopment in Nigeria (London, 1985);Google ScholarHutchful, Eboe, ‘Militarization and Society: trends in Africa’, in Alternatives, 10, 1, 03 1985, pp. 115–37;Google ScholarTimberlake, Lloyd, Africa in Crisis: the causes, the cures of environmental bankruptcy (London, 1985);Google Scholar and Forje, John, ‘The Misuse, Destruction, and Exhaustion of Natural Resources in Africa’, in Alternatives, 10, 3, 09 1984, pp. 565–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 670 note 1 This type of scholarship is also voluminous. Some of the pioneering works include, Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C., 1981 edn.);Google ScholarNzula, A. T., Potekhin, I. I., and Zusmanovish, A. Z., Forced Labour in Colonial Africa (London, 1979);Google ScholarAke, Claude, A Political Economy of Africa (London, 1981);Google ScholarWallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The Three Stages of African Involvement in the World Economy’, in Gutkind, Peter C. and Wallerstein, (eds.), The Political Economy of Contemporary Africa (Beverly Hills, 1978), pp. 30–57;Google Scholar and Amin, Samir, ‘Under-development and Dependence in Black Africa: origins and contemporary forms’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 6, 4, 12 1972, pp. 503–24.Google Scholar

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Page 676 note 1 This phenomenon is creatively treated by Lonsdale, John and Berman, Bruce, ‘Coping with the Contradictions: the development of the colonial state in Kenya, 1895–1914’, in Journal of African History (Cambridge), 20, 1979, pp. 487–505.Google Scholar

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Page 678 note 1 This understanding was facilitated by the ‘good offices’ of the British East India Company.

Page 678 note 2 A detailed exposition of this gruesome process is documented by Hess, op. cit. and Pankhurst, Sylvia E., Ex-Italian Somaliland (London, 1951).Google Scholar

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Page 680 note 1 Mehmet, Ozay, ‘Effectiveness of Foreign Aid: the case of Somalia’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 9, 2, 05 1971, pp. 31–47;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Samatar, Abdi, ‘The State and Rural Transformation in Northwest Somalia’, University of Iowa, 1985.Google Scholar

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Page 681 note 1 The deleterious effects of advice given by some foreign experts on African development are insightfully exposed in Richard, Paul, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (London, 1985).Google Scholar

Page 682 note 1 Our conception of ‘personal’ or ‘neo-patrimonial’ rule is not the same, since we think that individualistic politics have a social base and are, therefore, a from of class rule. We hasten to add, however, that this should not be construed as an a priori eciction of the subject from history. Rather, our proposition focuses first on the historical river-bed within which actors are obliged to operate. There are two variants to the ‘personal rule’ orientation: one that is unabashingly Machiavellian and idiosyncratic; and a second that explores further afield but, in the end, retreats into the same grooves. An example of the first is the learned work of Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G., Personal Rule in Black Africa: prince, autocrat, prophet, tyrant (Berkeley, 1982);Google Scholar for the latter, see the knowledgeable analysis of Sandbrook, Richard with Judith Barker, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation (Cambridge, 1985). In the broad paradigmatic classification of our article, both contributions belong to the modernisation genre — albeit with some modifications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 682 note 2 Samatar, Abdi, ‘The State, Peasants, and Pastoralists: agrarian change and rural development in northern Somalia, 1884–1984’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1985, pp. 184–95.Google Scholar

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Page 683 note 1 Estimates of the cost of these elections were put around U.S.$8 million. As a result, ‘considering that about 879,000 votes were cast, the cost per vote comes to nearly $9 (U.S.), roughly 18 percent of the per capita annual income, while the total is more than 15 percent of the country's budget, and about 10 percent of the balance of payment.’ Rayne, E. A., ‘Somalia's Myths are Tested’, in American Universities Fieldstaff Reports: Northeast Africa Series (New York), 16, 1, 10 1969, p. 7.Google Scholar

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Page 684 note 2 Contemporary Somalia is one of four countries in sub-Saharan Africa which, together, receive about 50 per cent of the U.S. aid to the region.

Page 684 note 3 Samatar, A. I., ‘Somali Impasse: state power and dissent politics’, in Third World Quarterly (London), 9, 3, 1987, pp. 871–90, and Abdi Samatar, ‘Merchant Capital, International Livestock Trade, and Pastoral Development in Somalia’, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, 28 October–2 November 1986, Madison, Wisconsin.Google Scholar

Page 685 note 1 Source: World Bank, World Development Report, 1986 (London, 1986). p. 220.Google Scholar

Page 685 note 2 According to Ministry of Planning, Somali Development Plans (Mogadishu), 1974–1978 and 1982–1986, the share of foreign contributions to development funds were estimated at around 68 and 80 per cent, respectively, A more debilitating liability is the weight of the total national debt, estimated at hearly $2,000 million, more than the entire annual G.N.P. According to Richard Roda, U.S. A.I.D. Officer, Mogadishu, in a public lecture at the University of Iowa, July 1987, the annual service payment on this debt is around $90 million, greater than all the exports and income repatriation form Somalis working overseas.Google Scholar

Page 687 note 1 Our research in progress strongly suggests that the livestock trade is concentrated in the hands of a few merchants. For example, data for 1980–1986 show that 22 merchants (less than 3 per cent) of the total of 853 accounted for 60 per cent of the livestock exports. Abdi Samatar, ‘Social Structure and the Politics of Livestock Trade in Somalia’, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, 19–22 November 1987, Denver, Colorado.

Page 686 note 1 Source: U.S. A.I.D., ‘Country Development Strategy Statmemet for 1987’, Washington, D.C., 1985, pp. iii–10.Google Scholar

Page 686 note 2 Somalia Agricultural Sector Survey Task Force, No. 2: livestock, forestry, and range report (Mogadishu, 1985).Google Scholar

Page 687 note 1 Our research in progress strongly suggests that the livestock trade is concentrated in the hands of a few merchants. For example, data for 1980–6 show that 22 merchants (less than 3 per cent) of the total of 853 accounted for 60 per cent of the livestock exports. Abdi Samatar, ‘Social Structure and the Politics of Livestock Trade in Somalia’, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, 19–22 November 1987, Denver, Colorado.

Page 688 note 1 Bardhan, Pranab, The Political Economy of Development in India (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar

Page 689 note 1 Ibid. p. 61.

Page 689 note 2 Ibid. p. 71.

Page 690 note 1 Janvry's, Alain de masterful admonition re such a strategy is elucidated in his tour de force, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore, 1981).Google Scholar