Africa is the second largest continent in the world. Partitioned into what is now fiftyone or more territorial units at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the continent presently has the largest number of states represented at the United Nations. This numerical strength has advantages and disadvantages for Africans. It is advantageous because it gives Africa greater visibility in the international voting process. It is disadvantageous because it turns this vast continent into a highly fragmented sector of the international community. Yet Africa's size and fragmentation have great significance for Africanists because together these factors make the continent a major laboratory for research on human society. Africa's numerous political and socio-economic units provide many examples of political and social engineering for students of underdeveloped world societies.

My presidential address tonight deals with Africa and its role and position in world history between two ages. The two ages addressed are the ancient/medieval and the modern/contemporary. As a historian, I see ancient African history as going back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens whose origins are now conclusively identified with East Africa. In tracing the historical past of Africa, I do not wish to travel so far back as to link up with those early Homo Sapiens, rather I wish to go only as far back on the world continuum as ancient Egypt to show in time how this magnificent civilization served as the birthplace of many cultural ideas that later travelled in all directions from the Nile Valley.

Is there more to Chad than the murderous idiosyncrasies of an improbable state which shares with its neighbors the vicissitudes of drought, famine, and environmental bankruptcy? The question is not merely rhetorical. In order to bring the present conflicts and confusions within the realm of comparative discourse, the uniqueness of the Chadian crisis must be assessed against its generic traits. To those of us who once debated whether Zaire was a unique or an extreme case, the issue has a familiar ring, and it carries intimations of inconclusiveness that may well apply to other states, including Chad.

All states are, in one way or another, unique and Chad in more ways than one. Its uniqueness goes far beyond its sudden emergence as a strategic pawn in a desert war among proxies. With its national territory semi-partitioned, its northern half under Libyan occupation and its southern flank threatened by rebel activity; with a government in exile comprising no less than eleven factions at the latest count, some in open warfare with others, some appealing to Libya for continued military support, and others perpetually casting about to form an anti-Libyan coalition; with a central government overwhelmingly dependent on outside donors for military, economic, and financial aid but, nonetheless, highly sensitive to attempts at external manipulation; with a capital city in shambles, an infrastructure thoroughly inadequate for the tasks of rehabilitation and national reconstruction, and anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 refugees living in neighboring states—what other state can make as many claims to being unique in coping with, or surrendering to, the blows of adversity?

Wole Soyinka's controversial stature as an African writer and intellectual derives from certain contradictions inherent in both his stance on important socio-political questions as well as in his artistic mediation of contemporary African experience. At the level of social action and thought, Soyinka could conveniently be regarded as a progressive idealist in the sense that his involvements in and utterances on specific social problems indicate a fervent preoccupation with social justice and an aversion to oppressive institutions. As a literary artist, however, much of his significant writing displays an unrelenting obsession with myth and its complex reenactments through ritual. Consequently, while his consciousness is ultimately historical, his imagination and idiom of creative expression derive from a fundamentally mythic source and a religious sentiment Says Stanley Macebuh (1976:79):

Biodun Jeyifo (1984:4) puts the matter even more devastatingly: “Soyinka has a deep, abiding penchant for mythology, metaphysics and mysticism.” Soyinka has complicated this ambiguity in his reputation by striving, in his earlier works at least, to proffer mythic “explanations” and resolutions for social problems which ordinarily belong in the realm of historical reality and empirical human experience. An important evidence of this feature of his art is the tendency to create human characters whose actions are circumscribed by the cosmic attributes of specific Yoruba deities.

Most contemporary historians of the colonial period in Kenya emphasize the importance of the state. The colonial state, it is argued, ensures the conditions of settler capitalism, provides the infrastructure of transport, credit, marketing and agricultural research, creates by administrative action a supply of African labor, and generally ensures the interests of settler capital against those of an emerging African class of landed capital (Brett, 1973; Leys, 1975; Swainson, 1980). Equally, the theme of tension between the colonial and metropolitan states is a classic one in colonial history, and one which in much of the Kenya debate is seen as refracting tensions and conflicts between the interests of settler capital and the interests of international capital (Swainson, 1980; Cowen, 1982). Yet, despite this emphasis on the colonial state, very little discussion of its distinctive political features has occurred. The economic functions of the colonial state are stressed to the exclusion of questions about the basis of its legitimacy, of its citizenship principles and of its authority. Gavin Kitching (1985) recently pointed out that we have no really adequate theory of the post-colonial state. We are constrained instead to making negative statements to the effect that it is not simply the agency of one particular class force in Kenya, nor is it a unified force but die site of contending and fractured forces. The argument could well be extended to the colonial state.

Most discussions of African women as rural producers have either underscored African women's traditional roles in production, focused on female exclusion from the development process and the need for female inclusion, or they have documented the failure of agricultural development projects because of oversight of the female dimension (Hafkin and Bay, 1976; Etienne and Leacock, 1980; Bay, 1982; Burfisher and Horenstein, 1985). Observation of the intense involvement of Ghanaian women in both cocoa and food production, as well as their plight during the more recent crises in the Ghanaian economy, leads one to new insights into African economic relationships. This case raises some interesting questions about the exploitation of women in agricultural production, the relationship between declining cash crop and food production and the national economy, as well as the national consequences which flow from the failure to give women a proper role in the rural economy.

The present analysis uses historical, ethnographic case-study, survey, statistical, and political data from cocoa farming areas of Ghana (especially the Sunyani area) to examine the changing relationship of rural women to economic and national stability. It is argued that in the recent difficult political and economic climate in some African countries, pressures exerted on rural areas have contributed to a heavy reliance upon female producers. Over time these pressures further contribute to an unstable rural economy, because this exploitation of the female labor force, while itself a reaction to socioeconomic trauma, further discourages male involvement in agricultural production.

The debate over the severity of problems associated with rural food production and rural development in Africa has come to dominate much of the current public discussion of the continent. It is an area where Africanists can be legitimately expected to respond. Food shortages should be an anomaly in a continent where more than seventy percent of the population works in the rural sector. At the same time, with all of the reported economic difficulties, the last decade and a half has witnessed a significant acceleration in population growth (Faruquee and Gulhati, 1983:25). There are more mouths to feed at the same time as most studies are reporting that there is a decline in per capita production (Berg et al., 1981, 1984). These studies indicate that population is growing at somewhere between two and three percent or more per annum while the corresponding increase in food production is running between one and two percent or less. Increasing numbers of people each year reach maturity, making greater demands on fragile tropical soil resources and bringing ever-more marginal land into production (Riddell, 1982). It is a situation where dramatic changes, good or bad, will occur.

Several recent studies have cited the tremendous cost involved if African agricultural systems were to be modernized along Euro-American lines (FAO 1978; Berg et al., 1981; Christensen et al., 1981). For example, the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) figures indicate that for twenty-four selected countries, mechanization and fertilizer costs alone would total more than $7.5 billion (US$ of 1975; figures cited in Nair, 1982).

African farmers vary in their access to the basic resources of agricultural production: land, labor, and capital. The availability of these resources affects farmer decisions about choice of crops, crop mixes, and strategies to optimize agricultural production. Understanding the variation in resource availability among farmers and the consequences of that variation for production is one necessary step in understanding the production strategies of contemporary farmers. Understanding their present strategies is a necessary step in transforming African agriculture to better meet the continent's needs.

This paper looks at Malinke farmers in Kita in Western Mali in light of these issues. After some background information on the area and the study, the paper delineates three strata of farmers with different access to basic production resources, the most important of which is labor. The remainder of the paper looks at the consequences of those differing resource availabilities by examining different strategies pursued by affluent, middle, and poor farmers in one crop important in the region, peanuts.

Although Africans are very concerned about food production, it is still important to look at cropping decisions in regard to crops that, like peanuts, are grown primarily for cash. In many places like Kita, these crops are the primary means by which farmers earn money, and they are reluctant to change to crops with unknown earning potential. National governments, too, are hesitant to eliminate export crops totally, for they still need the foreign exchange that they earn.

In traditional Africa stories belong to everyone. The story-tellers, griot or grandparent, repositories of wisdom, speak to the village. Children are there. Children participate. Furthermore, the art of storytelling is not confined to specialists. Although a griot may study for years to leam long, complicated epics and extensive genealogies, the villagers will know from childhood their tribal legends, and they can follow their own lines in family traditions. They can interact spontaneously with the song, dance, or dramatic recitation of the singer-narrator.

It was natural that when Western literary genres featuring the imposed European languages were integrated with the African oral tradition the narrative took on new form and expression. Some of today's internationally known African writers have created new forms of novels and short stories (not tales). In doing so they have used their own linguistic creations: “Nigerian” or “Ghanaian” English and “Negritude” French. Although Western readers were reluctant to accept such variation, many readers today find excellence in literature from Africa.

Nigeria's anglophone writers led the way in gaining international acclaim for their prose fiction. Chinua Achebe's landmark Things Fall Apart (1958) is still predominant, often the only novel written by a contemporary African novelist familiar to a general readership. Cyprian Ekwensi, a prolific writer of all varieties of prose fiction, got his start with Onitsha market literature. He wrote People of the City in 1954 and it was reissued in Britain in 1963. Hans Zell (Zell, Bundy and Coulon, 1983:383) considers it to be “the first contemporary African novel.”