Journal of Southern African Studies

'Africa' and Globalisation

Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order by James Ferguson
Review by: Harri Englund
Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 443-445
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25065205 .
Accessed: 25/11/2013 10:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Journal of Southern African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Journal of Southern African Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 41.70.31.194 on Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:02:28 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies,Volume 33,Number 2, June 2007
? Routledge
J & Francis
?s^^ Taylor Group

Book Reviews

'Africa' and Globalisation

James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in theNeoliberal World Order (Durham, NC,
Duke University Press, 2006), x + 257 pp., $21.95 paperback, ISBN 0-8223-3717-7
After thegroundbreaking
monographs TheAnti-PoliticsMachine (1990) andExpectations ofModernity
(1999), James Ferguson deploys the essay format here to explore what globalisation looks like from the

vantage point of recent research on Africa. His argument develops simultaneously on several fronts,

engaging most notably theorists of globalisation and his fellow anthropologists. Globalisation theorists
attract criticism for inserting Africa into their accounts in cursory or negative ways. On the other hand,
Northern anthropologists' inclination to describe Africans as their cultural equals has resulted in

perspectives that accommodate Africa in culturalist narratives of globalisation but fall short of

accounting for economic inequalities. Ferguson sees in the essay format an opportunity to cut across

analytical and scalar levels that are often kept separate in conventional ethnographic accounts. While

providing plenty of acute observation, Global Shadows engages with 'Africa' less as an empirical

territory than as a category through which the world is structured.

This bold agenda is sustained by considerable innovation and renewal in the conceptual arsenal of
scholars who have hitherto remained bystanders in journalistic and policy-oriented conversations on
Africa. The world' is one of Ferguson's preferred concepts, a categorical system within which countries
and geographical regions assume their places. Crucially, 'place' is for Ferguson both a location in space
- a
and a rank in a system of social categories. Hence Africa is a 'place-in-the-world' categorical
'Africa' is an imposed position in the contemporary world with all-too-real political-economic
consequences. Conceptual innovation in these essays derives, in part, from Ferguson's keen eye for the

metaphors that often underlie discussions about globalisation. His misgivings about 'the globe' and 'the

global' are prompted not only by the assumption of an even planetary network of connections but also

by the importance that the metaphor of 'flow' has acquired in these discussions. While it is common to
talk about capital flows in the contemporary world, the metaphor serves to naturalise political and
economic inequalities. Rivers do flow, Ferguson points out, and in the process not only connect one

point to another but also traverse and water the territory that lies between. The category of 'Africa'
enables us to see how 'the global' does not flow to link and irrigate contiguous spaces. Capital is, in
Ferguson's innovative language, globe-hopping rather than globe-covering. Where capital has come to

Africa, it has largely been concentrated in spatially-segregated enclaves. Some countries, such as

Angola, whose record in democratic governance has been dismal, have actually been most successful at

attracting foreign capital investment.

Ferguson notes the contrast between Zambia's socially 'thick'

mining industry, entailing during its boom years a variety of social projects, and Angola's socially 'thin'
oil production, much of it occurring offshore without the oil wealth entering the wider society. He
cautions against seeing Angola as a paradigm for the rest of neoliberal Africa but identifies trends that
extend beyond Angola's extreme example. One trend is what Ferguson calls 'non-governmental states',
states that have largely left the business of governance to transnational organisations and financial
institutions while remaining involved in other sorts of business.
Critics' counter-metaphors, if not properly analysed, may not be more helpful, as Ferguson shows
with regard to the abundance of 'shadows' in the critical literature on Africa and the world. At issue is
not simply theoldmetaphor of theDark Continentbut critics' identification
of doubles in thevarious
spheres of African governance and economies. What 'shadow economies' and 'shadow states' risk

obscuring, Ferguson argues, is that a shadow is not a copy whose authenticity must concern critics and
nationalists. A shadow is an attached twin that implies connection as much as resemblance, likeness

ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/07/020443-22

? 2007 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070701292855

This content downloaded from 41.70.31.194 on Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:02:28 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
444 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

rather than absence and negativity. As African ethnographies have described, a shade is a kind of
relative.
These reflections lead to a thought-provoking discussion of membership as a critical counterpoint to

globe-hopping capital. In the essay entitled 'Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the "New
World Society'", originally published in Cultural Anthropology, Ferguson examines the conundrum of
'an object of alterity who refuses to be other' (p. 157). His empirical referents range from migrants

dressing up in European-style clothes in the colonial Copperbelt to recent desperate attempts by some
young Africans to enter Europe through illegal immigration. Godfrey Wilson's essay from 1941 offers a
notion of the new world
society that enables Ferguson to discern in the 'scandal' of mimicry an assertion
of membership, a plea for moral and political recognition from an imagined global authority. National

independence, Ferguson argues, features much less in these claims than it did for the critics of colonial

inequality such as Franz Fanon. The limits of nationalist perspectives engage Ferguson in other essays,

including one comparing Lesotho and the apartheid-era Transkei. The comparison is between so-called
real and pseudo nation-states and the ways in which poverty has been analysed in each case. Lesotho's
status as an independent nation-state has entailed analysis in which problems are essentially local and
internal to a national economy, despite the country's dependence upon South Africa. The politicised
debate on Transkei and other Bantustans, by contrast, demonstrated how resistance against an imposed
national frame facilitated a more clear-sighted analysis of the systemic roots of poverty in the region.
Without wishing to deny the empowering consequences of national liberation inAfrica, Ferguson wants
to alert his readers to 'the treacherous traps of national sovereignty' (p. 65).
As in his essay on mimicry and membership, Ferguson is able to find African voices that lend

support to his principled objections to the national frame as an analytical and political project. Another
instance is Chrysalis, a Zambian internet magazine of the late 1990s. Its short life-span finds a context in
Zambia's particularly severe experience of neoliberal reform and in the programme of African
Renaissance. The new democratic nationalism that this programme promised in the 1990s was

expressed in the early issues of Chrysalis as spirited discussion about national culture, only to be
crushed by contributions that suggested Zambian inferiority. Ferguson argues that the aspirant upper
middle class who constituted the virtual community of Chrysalis lost their enthusiasm for new economic

policies and attributed significance not only to Zambian inferiority but also to external and structural
constraints. The new world society appears here in a slightly different guise, but some readers may
wonder whether claims to world membership in contemporary Africa are more often religious in
orientation than these essays seem to suggest. Moreover, despite citing forms of collective solidarity that
seem to dispense with the state, Ferguson's rejection of nationalism as a framework for
principled
analysis and intervention does not address recent research on the politics of ethnic and other sub
national belonging. Some instances of these solidarities indicate how ethnic or religious particularity
can itself foster the kind of relational engagement that Ferguson ingeniously calls for.
As Ferguson points out in the essay on 'Decomposing Modernity', anthropologists have been rather

unhelpful in their approach to the uses of particularism. He focuses on an aspect of the scholarship that

insisted, throughout the 1990s, on of alternative

the existence and multiple modernities. While

developmentalist models, epitomised by so-called modernisation theory, lost their appeal in the critical
echelons of Northern academia, narratives of social and economic development proved resilient in

specific places in the world. Confronted with unblinking assertions of the will to become modem,

anthropologists studying Africa felt the need to pluralise the notion of modernity and to interpret these
assertions as expressions of alternative modernities in which Africans creatively appropriated Western
symbols for their own purposes. Whereas, in discussions about East and Southeast Asia, the idea of

multiple modernities could posit a parallel track that was economically analogous to, but culturally
distinctive from, the West, African modernities came to be defined solely in cultural terms, the

possibility of economic convergence dismissed. Against such culturalist interpretations, Ferguson offers
a perspective that highlights modernity as a status and political-economic condition. He decomposes the
notion into its constituent elements of historical time and social location and shows that anthropologists
have been attentive to the former in their rejection of a teleological model of modernisation. At the same

time, however, the removal of temporal sequence has done little to address the other part of the
modernisation narrative, the rank that modernity marks in a global political-economic order. African
desires for modernity represent less culturally particular values and practices than assertions of

This content downloaded from 41.70.31.194 on Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:02:28 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Book Reviews 445

membership. Ferguson's argument achieves an urgency that most theorists of multiple modernities
would not envisage. that neglect questions of rank and membership may prevent us from
Perspectives
seeing how the edges of this transnational status group are actually guarded.

Harri Englund

University of Cambridge

Trends inAfrican Urban Development

Deborah Fahy Bryceson and Deborah Potts (eds), African Urban Economies: Viability,
Vitality or Vitiation? (Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), xii +352
pp., ?65 hardback, ISBN 1-4039-9947-3

In the past, development literature on Africa overwhelmingly focused on rural subjects. The shift to the
cities is a marked feature in the very recent literature as collections with an urban setting rapidly succeed
one another. This particular collection has been organised and edited by two British-based geographers
with formidable experience in studies of rural life and the relationship of town and countryside in
Africa. Its scope is limited to southern and eastern Africa, an arc between Mogadishu and Johannesburg
-
in effect, and its real strength lies in the authors' knowledge of the core the former British East and
Central African territories where what the editors call the 'apex cities' of the collection are located.
There is a distinct difference in emphasis between the two editors. In her three chapters of this volume,

Bryceson, has been writing on the decline of the African peasantry and what she has called de
who

agrarianisation, places the burden of her analysis on the fragility and dysfunctionality of big African cities.
These are cities which emerged in response to the exigencies of colonial rule, by and large, but they have
swollen in size without any corresponding demand for workers or participants in the largely commercial
cum-administrative economy. Instead it is disaster emergencies, the lure of better social services
and facilities (increasingly though, more costly to the poor) and the general decline of African

peasant economies which have their As a result, these cities

spurred growth. experience huge problems:
inequalities, lack of infrastmcture, irrelevant planning structures and dependence on a growing
yawning
survivalist informal sector which contains little potential for developing the economy. These are cities that
'
[lack] the dynamism, specialization, diversity and economies of scale normally associated with urban life'

(p. 324). Bryceson can see in the abstract the potential for further growth and initiates comparison with non
industrial trading cities of an earlier age. On the whole, however, readers will be struck by the negativism of
her analysis.
Potts's long chapter is intended to amplify some of her other recent research which has been
concerned with qualifying and moderating the often exaggerated figures for urban growth in the region. In
general, cities in southern and eastern Africa have been growing considerably more slowly in recent years
than previously. The extreme case of the Zambian Copperbelt, whose smaller cities are declining in

population, is examined here. In most countries of the region, the overall proportion of the population

living in cities is not growing much; urban growth depends very largely on natural increase rather than
migration from the countryside. This is not to say that Africa's urban problems are becoming more

controllable; natural increase in the citiesis often rapid because, in the urban setting, people are generally
healthier and children more likely to survive. Both Potts and Bryceson concur that rural-urban linkages
are becoming are
far less important and large numbers of urbanit?s growing up with no links to the
more pressure on purely urban livelihood
countryside whatsoever, placing strategies. And the poverty is
all too stark.With her sensitivity to urban poverty, Potts in particular rounds on theWorld Bank's foolish

ideology of urban bias, dominant a decade ago yet still influential, even if less frequently aired.
The editors' writing covers somewhat more than a third of this tome. However, the book also takes in
some ten contributions by others, filling in the geographic spread defined by Bryceson and Potts. Inevitably,

many interpret 'urban economies' as coping strategies focusing on how themass of urban poor get by. There
is probably too little on how to relate this kind of narrative to a broader meta-narrative on the overall

trajectories of urban activity and development in the city, although Roland Marchai, coming from a French
does trytodo thisimpressionistically
political science tradition, forMogadishu.

This content downloaded from 41.70.31.194 on Mon, 25 Nov 2013 10:02:28 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions