It pains me to see that three and a half years after Independence there is not a single Zambian-owned business in Cairo Road. There is not even a resident expatriate business or a foreign controlled business or any business for that matter with a Zambian manager in Cairo Road. (Kaunda, 1968: 30)

Few African countries have much effective control of their economies. Foreign and alien minority interests are still dominant. Many have proclaimed policies to remedy this situation, usually including some mixture of prohibition of aliens in business, aid to indigenous businessmen, and seizure or establishment of businesses by the government or government-controlled agencies. Countries as diverse as Ghana, Kenya, Zaire, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia have such policies, aimed at increasing indigenous control of the economy. Such policies and programs are seen as assertions of “economic independence.” Indeed, “indigenization,” the replacement of aliens with locals, is certainly a prerequisite to economic independence, if not independence itself (Ghai, 1973: 21-42).

This paper will examine the new policies designed to indigenize the Zambian economy and their actual impact on private indigenous business. Two questions must be answered. How successful have the policies been, as proclaimed and implemented by the government and ruling party? And, what factors have contributed to this result? Many proclaimed or hoped for consequences have not occurred. The growth of private African enterprises has been to some degree stymied by these new policies, called “economic reforms,” while foreign or alien-owned businesses continue growing, though at a slower rate.

Few would dispute that the Africanization of the civil service was one of the more emotional and divisive issues in the Gold Coast during the inter-war years. While it is true that the attainment of equal status with the Europeans might not have been a subject of mass concern and popular regret, nevertheless it did animate the vocal and articulate elite who resented the unfair distinctions perpetuated by the colonial authorities. Thus repeatedly in debates of the Legislative Council, in sessions of the Provincial Councils, in newspaper editorials, and in petitions carried to Whitehall, protests were lodged against the pattern of discrimination in high-level government appointments. The extent to which this matter influenced the political dialogue of the colony and in time became an “important nationalist grievance,” has been noted by a number of scholars (Kimble, 1963; Crowder, 1968; Wight, 1947). My intention therefore is not to detail every disagreement nor to summarize every report but rather to view individual cases which shed light on the debate and to focus upon the prejudices and perspectives of the participants in the dialogue.

Following a period of time during which Africans had largely been excluded from the senior, or European, appointments in the civil service, Governor Frederick Gordon Guggisberg (1921-1927) charted a new course in February 22, 1926. He remarked that the policy of employing Africans in responsible positions commended itself to the Government for two reasons:

Leadership succession and regime change lie at the center of two perennial problems of governance: (1) how to ensure the political continuity of any regime without endangering the political stability of the political community; (2) how to protect both the regime and the political community against the natural disposition of those in power to manipulate their office so that they could extend their terms of office or succeed themselves against the provisions of written or unwritten rules of managing political power and succession rights. There can be little doubt, then, that the political acts that surround leadership succession and regime change constitute a most serious aspect of political life in any society. In all political systems in general, and in African politics in particular, such acts constitute an important index of the development or deterioration of politics.

The renewed focus on Africa since the middle 1950s as a subject of political inquiry and theorizing has contributed greatly to the existing body of literature on political development, modernization and related subfields of Comparative Politics. Unfortunately, this rather extensive body of literature has not provided us with a definitive knowledge of the dynamics of social and political change. In this regard, major events in African politics have continued to cast doubts on the validity of many an earlier theoretical formulation and expectation.

Missionary domination of African education is a dying phenomenon. Today's church-affiliated institutions in Africa, while still mindful of their proselytizing duties, subordinate their religious messages to the rigors of academic preparation. The realities of contemporary African nation-building preclude any other course. Just as increasing nationalistic impulses and socio-economic considerations during the 19th century forced European politicians to recognize that education of their youth was too important to be left to the various confessions, so increasingly are African leaders coming to a similar conclusion. The shift from denominational to state control of the educational system is well advanced in many nations.

In 1942, 97% of Nigeria's student population was enrolled in missionary schools; today missionary education has been banned in the East Central State of Nigeria—the heartland of the highly Christianized Ibos—and is steadily declining with the strengthening of the Local Education Authorities in other areas of Nigeria (Coleman, 1958: 113). As recently as 1950, missionary schools accounted for 97% of the total enrollment in Ghanaian schools; twelve years later the government assumed the responsibility tor the payment of salaries of all teachers, irrespective of the type of school in which they taught (Anim, 1966: 189). In an attempt to remove the school issue from the arena of sectarian politics the government of Uganda abolished the posts of mission school supervisors in 1963, placing their functions in the hands of secular authorities (Hindmarsh, 1966: 145). In 1945 there were 5,360 mission-run schools for Africans in South Africa and only 230 state-sponsored schools;

Traditions about the foundations of the military kingdom of Dahomey, over which King Gezo reigned from 1818-1858, are well known. Suffice it to say here that this warlike kingdom was founded in the first half of the seventeenth century, probably around 1620, by one Dogbagri Genu (otherwise known as Dako), a fugitive prince from Allada, who had been ousted from the throne of his father by his brother, Te-Agbanlin (Akinjogbin, 1967: 22; Page, 1961: 93). Under its fourth monarch, Agaja Trudo, the nascent kingdom of Dahomey reached the height of its power in the eighteenth century. The glorious reign of Agaja Trudo (1708-1740) saw the expansion of Dahomey in all directions, particularly to the south. An inland West African kingdom, Dahomey, like the nineteenth century Egba state in southwestern Nigeria, needed a direct route to the coast, partly in order to participate in the West African trade with European traders and partly to have free access to gunpowder and arms, a sine qua non for any state that wished to acquire and sustain its greatness. Hence, in 1724, Agaja Trudo attacked Allada and included it in his rapidly growing empire. Three years later, Whydah was forced to become part of the kingdom of Dahomey. The basis of a future powerful state seems to have been laid by Agaja Trudo when Tegbesu, who came to the throne in 1740, pushed the state's frontier still farther, the intermittent incursions of Oyo notwithstanding.

In the Sierra Leone Provinces, customary land law dictates that if an individual from another chiefdom or country wishes to rent land in a certain locality, he visits a landholder or head of an extended family and expresses a desire to be the landlord's stranger. If the landlord accepts the individual as his stranger, he becomes liable for any damages caused by the stranger to other natives' properties. This study applies some recent advances in welfare economics (see, for example, Coase, 1960; Demsetz, 1964, 1968) to pursue some interesting aspects of the landlord-stranger relationship. In particular, it is argued that within traditional society putting the liability for strangers' damages on the landlords' shoulders was efficient in a value-theoretic sense because landlords were more efficient than the government or the damaged parties in collecting damages from strangers and, therefore, that the magnitude of the collection cost would have been greater if the liability had been placed directly on the strangers. The paper also shows rigorously how and why it was that the higher the cost of collecting damages from tenants, the lower was the real income produced by the land. Therefore, if the government of the damaged parties should become lower-cost collectors, putting the liability directly on the strangers for any damage they cause would become the pareto-optimal arrangement.

The development of survey research is seen by many as one of the most important methodological breakthroughs in the social sciences. It has become the most widely used tool of empirical investigation in sociology and has found extensive and increasing use in disciplines ranging from anthropology to economics. For our purposes we will define a survey to mean systematic, comparable data on individuals obtained by means of one or more verbal methods of data collection, such as interviews or self-completed questionnaires. The popularity of this method lies in its ability to efficiently gather theoretically relevant data for enough cases (usually samples of larger universes) and in quantifiable forms so that statistical analysis can be carried out.

In the last decade, the use of surveys in social research in Africa has expanded considerably. During the colonial epoch, aside from an occasional cost-of-living study, an anthropological exploration into tribal life, or the often irregular census enumerations, surveys were relatively rare. The growth of universities with social science departments, the visits of foreign investigators, the studies required by outside lending agencies such as the World Bank, and the expansion of planning functions within government ministries have all increased the demand for surveys of various kinds. Researchers, supported by agencies like the United Nations, the Nordic Council and the Ford Foundation, have conducted investigations in collaboration with various governments as well as on their own. Their objectives have ranged from research into fairly abstract social phenomena, such as linguistic etymology, to measuring critical parameters that form the basic assumptions in planning operations, such as aspirations of school leavers.

The essay by Hopkins and Mitchell (“The Viability of Survey Research in Africa: Some Propositions”) appears to have multiple objectives which may benefit from further examination. First, it is an apologia for survey research in Africa which is intended to counter “doubts” and “attacks” which arise from some quarters. However, the criticisms of survey research in Africa need to be more fully identified along with evidence or arguments to discount them. In particular, the major criticisms cited in footnote 4 are not dealt with explicitly in the subsequent set of “propositions.” Thus the objective of defending survey research in Africa (or elsewhere) remains largely unfulfilled.

Second, Hopkins and Mitchell offer a catalog of “assorted conventional and not-so-conventional wisdom” on the design, execution, and evaluation of survey research in Africa. However, there are several potential problems with the propositions which should be noted: problems of coverage, generality and distinctiveness.

Coverage. As it now stands, the review is not sufficiently comprehensive in scope nor detailed in treatment to serve as more than a general guide for survey researchers. It is a useful beginning but merits considerable elaboration and systemization. Moreover, some of the propositions (e.g., 1, 4, 5, 16) appear to have little to do with survey methods perse but rather apply to social research in general.

Professors Hopkins and Mitchell have asked me to comment upon the issues raised in their paper as they appear from the vantage of the discipline of anthropology. I should like to state at the outset that my own views are hardly orthodox. Like many others whose graduate education occurred in the 1960s, I took great liberties in ignoring disciplinary boundaries both in my education and in my research. I was, and still am, more interested in the processes of social and cultural change, of “modernization” and “development,” than I am in remaining an anthropological purist. The number of researchers interested in the study of social change continues to increase, and many of us find that a focus on these processes often orients us away from the traditional approaches of our disciplines and toward whatever methods and techniques prove to be useful for gathering information relevant to our studies.

I found in the course of my research in rural Tanzania in the late 1960s that extensive survey techniques complemented the intensive anthropological techniques of long-term participant observation and reliance on a small number of key informants. A growing number of scholars who identify themselves as anthropologists, or would be so identified by others—though not all of them—agree with such a position. Yet most would probably go so far as to say that while research based solely on in-depth, intensive techniques qualifies as anthropology, any research which is based only on survey techniques has lost many of the qualities which anthropologists and others recognize as characteristic of the discipline.

If survey research is research that consists of interviewing large samples of persons, or asking them to complete a standardized questionnaire—and I agree that's what a survey is—then surely the social sciences would have long ago broken through to far more sophisticated methodologies for addressing theoretically relevant hypotheses. Interview and questionnaire studies are rather primitive data-collection techniques, however sophisticated the concomitant sampling techniques or data-analytic techniques might be.

Therefore, I find it a bit ironic that we are, in this symposium, finding so much to debate, and so many propositions to consider about survey research. What, after all, is there to say about survey research that hasn't already been said? Aha! you say, we're not talking about survey research per se, but survey research in Africa. Well, that is indeed so, but some of the most important things that must be said about survey research apply to survey research wherever it is done, in Dar es Salaam or Swarthmore or Syracuse. And before turning to some issues raised by the authors of the core paper in this symposium, which issues pertain particularly, if not uniquely, to survey research in Africa, let me make some general observations.

First, survey data are empirical data, and that's good, because empirical data are better than guesses, or deductions, or intuition, or even (I think) divine revelation. But survey data reveal only what people say in response to what the survey research asks.

I claim authority to provide an economist's view because (1) I am an economist and (2) I recently returned from Nairobi where I conducted an interview-survey of about 1500 African households, the data from which I am now processing with the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In the remaining five sections of this paper, I will discuss the value to Africans of survey research in Africa by expatriates, the value to expatriate scholars of such survey research, twenty-five survey-based studies in Nairobi, the Hopkins-Mitchell manual of survey research in Africa, and my conclusions.

In their paper, Hopkins and Mitchell state their purposes to be (1) to address the doubts raised by “many scholars and African officials about the value and appropriateness of surveys in Africa” and (2) “to stimulate discussion that will be of interest to prospective expatriate (mainly American) researchers in Africa.” The authors devote practically all of their discussion to advocating high quality survey research and to offering suggestions on how that research should be conducted. They barely address the other issue, namely, the value and appropriateness of surveys in Africa, and their brief treatment of it is clearly inadequate. After a brief but stimulating digression, I will return to discuss their argument.