When I retired as chair of the economics departments of the University of Zambia, then later of Zimbabwe, tradition required that, like all expatriate department heads, I give an inaugural address. Both times, I wondered why. After all, I was leaving not only the university but the country. I could no longer inaugurate anything. Tonight, however, as I leave the presidency of the African Studies Association, the job is just beginning. Opening the decade of the 1990s, this ASA Annual meeting will complete the first phase of the work of the Task Force the ASA Board set up in Atlanta a year ago. On this foundation, together with our African colleagues, we hope to inaugurate increasingly collaborative efforts to support the attainment of sustainable development in Africa.

As Africanists, we have always understood Africa's close historical ties to our own country, its rich contributions to our own cultural and artistic heritage. At the same time, our work has brought home to us more than to many Americans, the impact of the deepening economic, social and political crisis that has seemingly engulfed all aspects of African life. We all know the economic features of that crisis: worsening terms of trade, growing national and international debt, devaluation and austerity programs which have undermined the real incomes of most Africans. Many of us have helped document the social impact of drastic reductions in programs for education, health and environment, especially on women and children.

In the mid-1970s the Nigerian state embarked on an ambitious program to accelerate the commercialization of peasant food production systems, employing as the main institutional vehicle Agricultural Development Projects (ADPs) which are designed, partially funded and managed by the World Bank. The core components of ADPs are their Crop Development Programs which are directed at increasing crop yields and farm incomes through the dissemination of heavily subsidized Green Revolution-type technologies: crop production packages that are comprised of improved seed varieties, fertilizer, pesticides and tractor services. With this objective, a number of infrastructural supports (the most important of which are the expansion and maintenance of rural roads, networks of Farm Service Centers for input delivery, intensified extension services and soil conservation measures) are undertaken by the projects. Commencing with three pilot projects in Bauchi, Kaduna and Sokoto states, the program was extended to the Middle Belts states of Benue, Niger and Plateau in 1977. Declaring ADPs the cornerstone of the national Green Revolution in 1980, the federal government decided to establish projects in all states. The nationwide program was expected to encompass over three million farm families by the mid-1980s (Nigeria 1982).

Inquiries conducted within neo-Marxian political economy frameworks concerning the direction of agrarian transition which the Nigerian state seeks to foster through ADPs have revolved around a well-founded suspicion of their purported smallholder focus. Their design is premised on a division of rural communities into large, progressive and traditional farmers.

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.

This article traces the impact of state formation and class formation on the emergence and development of competitive ethnopolitical identities in Sierra Leone. The politicization of Creole, Mende, Temne and Limba identity deserves scrutiny on account of the dominant role these identities have played in shaping political processes in postcolonial Sierra Leone. Not only is Sierra Leone a culturally plural and intensely stratified society, its postcolonial political history attests to, and offers interesting insights about, the intimate connections between class, ethnicity and state formation. From the end of the nineteenth century until independence, the most divisive ethnoregional conflict in Sierra Leone pitted colony Creole elites against protectorate African elites. The Creoles, separatist in their political attitudes and aspirations, rejected political equality with protectorate Africans and the latter resented both the assertions of superiority by Creoles and their relative dominance in Sierra Leone politics prior to decolonization. This polarization persists even today, but its political significance has paled in comparison to both the rift between the Mendes of the south and the Temnes of the north and the contemporary dominance of Limba cultural entrepreneurs and politicians. Fissures in protectorate elite solidarity coincided with the emergence of political organizations founded and led by competing petty bourgeois elements. One such organization, the All Peoples Congress (APC) party, was formed as an alternative to the Mende-dominated Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP).

Recent scholarship on pastoral societies in Africa indicates that qualitative changes are taking place in their economies (Picard 1980; Galaty and Salzman 1981; Swift 1982; Toulmin 1984; Sutter, 1987; Behnke 1984; Little 1985; Rigby 1985; Kelley 1987; Munei 1987). Although this literature shows that these changes are largely induced by urban groups, such as merchants and state bureaucrats who invade the pastoral range, it nevertheless fails to theorize systematically the nature of the transformation. As recent contributions of Berry (1989), Okoth-Ogendo (1989), and Blaikie (1989) indicate, changes in land tenure in rural Africa are part and parcel of larger social and economic processes operating in African economies, which lead to the reorganization of property relations and the restructuring of rights of access to resources. In spite of the warnings by these authors, even the more theoretically informed literature does not follow through with the implications of conceptual insights regarding the nature of pastoral transformation. Fundamentally, the contours of pastoral transformation very much depend on the structure and internal coherence of the pastoral sector and the type and the tendency of the capital impinging on it. This article is a contribution to the debate over the nature of African pastoral transformation and the social forces operating in that process.