32. We find considerable correspondence between our purpose here and the project of Laroui, Abdallah in his L'histoire du Maghreb (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar in which he points out that an ideologically decolonized history such as Sahli's, MohamedDécoloniser l'histoire (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar is not the same thing as, nor a sufficient basis for, the production of scientific history. The reason for this is spelled out below.

33. Kay, Gordon, Development and Underdevelopment. A Marxist Analysis (London, 1975), especially Chapters 7 and 8Google Scholar; see also Mandel, E., Late Capitalism (London, 1975).Google Scholar For a critical discussion of Kay's important work, see Bernstein, H. “Underdevelopment and the law of value,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 6(1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. On the concept of ideological and repressive state apparatuses see Althusser, , “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” in his Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971).Google Scholar

35. Curtin, Philip D., African History (Washington, 1964), p. 8.Google Scholar

36. However it is worth pointing out that the large foundations have a long history of funding studies of the Third World, for example, Carnegie's interest in Hailey's, LordAfrican Survey, first published in 1938.Google Scholar

37. On colonial anthropology see Pala, A.O., “A Critique of Colonial Anthropology,” Joliso: East African Journal of Literature and Society, 2(1974), pp. 107–24Google Scholar; S. Feuchtwang, “The Colonial Formation of British Social Anthropology,” and Brown, R., “Anthropology and Colonial Rule: the Case of Godfrey Wilson and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia,” both in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Asad, Talal (London, 1973).Google Scholar On the post-war boom in “area studies” and “development studies” see America's Asia, ed. Friedman, E. and Selden, M. (New York, 1971)Google Scholar and The Trojan Horse, ed. Weissman, S. (San Francisco, 1974).Google Scholar

38. Duchet's, MichèleAnthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar is a very interesting study which shows the dialectical connection between the progressive aspects of the writings of Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, and Diderot, and the emergence of colonial racist ideology.

39. Hobson, J.A., Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902)Google Scholar; Morel, E.D., The British Case in French Congo: The Story of a Great Injustice, its Causes and its Lesson (London, 1903)Google Scholar; idem, Red Rubber (London, 1919); idem, The Black Man's Burden (New York, 1969 reprint); Twain, Mark, King Leopold's Soliloquy (New York, 1971 reprint)Google Scholar; Woolf, L.S., Empire and Commerce in Africa. A Study in Economic Imperialism (London, 1919)Google Scholar; Leys, Norman, Kenya (London, 1926)Google Scholar; also Mille, P., Au Congo Belge (Paris, 1899)Google Scholar, Gide, Andrè, Voyage au Congo (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar and the article by Stengers, Jean, “L'anticolonialisme liberal du 19ème siècle et son influence en Belgique,” Bulletin des Séances, ARSOM (1965).Google Scholar

40. Hodgkin, Thomas, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1957)Google Scholar; Davidson, Basil, African Awakening (London, 1955).Google Scholar

41. Stengers, Notably, Combien le Congo a-t-il coute à la Belgique? (Brussels, 1957)Google Scholar; and in the same vein, Livre Blanc: Rapport scientifique de la Belgique au développement de l'Afrique centrale (3 vols.: Brussels, 1962–1963).Google Scholar

42. One of the favorite topics in the field of the positive contributions of colonial rule is that of health and “modern medicine.” The work of Gelfand, Michael is representative: Proud Record: an Account of the Health Services Provided for Africans in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Salisbury, 1960)Google Scholar, and Tropical Victory: an Account of the Influence of Medicine on the History of Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1923 (Cape Town, 1953).Google Scholar For a more sobering account of colonial “achievements” in the health field, see Ford, John, The Role of the Trypanosomiasis in African Economy. A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (London, 1971).Google Scholar Van Onselen's excellent study Chibaro demonstrates that improvements in health care are a function of the conditions in which it becomes necessary for capital to invest in the quality of labor, and not an expression of any humanitarian or benevolent impulse. On similar lines, see also Suret-Canale, Jean, Afrique noire: l'ère coloniale (Paris, 1964), pp. 490–516Google Scholar; Ferguson, E., “Political Economy of Health and Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika” in Tanganyika under Colonial Rule, ed. Kaniki, M. (forthcoming)Google Scholar; Depelchin, J., “Dr. Schweitzer and the Legend of Colonial Samaritans,” a paper presented to the Western Social Sciences Association Annual Conference, Denver, 1975Google Scholar; van Onselen, C., “Landlords and Rotgut, 1886-1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism,” History Workshop 2(1976), pp. 38–89.Google Scholar See also note 48 below.

43. Duignan, Peter and Gann, Lewis H., Burden of Empire (New York, 1967), p. 7.Google Scholar

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. The locus classicus of the analysis of exploitation effected through the commodity sale of labor power is, of course, Capital and in particular Volume I. Marx, however, provided an excellent summary in his address to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association in 1865 - see “Wages, Price and Profit” in Marx, /Engels, , Selected Works (Moscow, 1962, vol. 2), especially sections 7 to 14.Google Scholar On the domination of petty commodity production by capital, see Brun, O. Le and Gerry, C., “Petty Producers and Capitalism,” Review of African Political Economy, no. 3 (1975)Google Scholar and Bernstein, H., “Capital and Peasantry in the Epoch of Imperialism,” Occasional Paper 77.2, 1977Google Scholar, Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar es Salaam, and contribution to Peasant Production in Tanzania, ed. by M. Mbilinyi and C.K. Omari (in preparation).

47. Duignan, and Gann, , Burden of Empire, p. 7.Google Scholar

48. Morel articulated in humanitarian terms what is in effect a protest against practices that were no longer rational from the viewpoint of capital, that is, practices characteristic of an earlier period of plunder. It is worth quoting him at length: “Now consider the picture of a tropical African dependency -- take British East Africa as typical -- where policy is directed to ensuring that a dozen or so European concessionaires shall earn large dividends. The first call upon the labour of the country is for work on the plantations and estates of these concessionaires. As a result native villages decay. The population is unable to feed itself. The administration has to import foodstuffs at great expense. The people sink immeasurably in the scale of their self-respect. They are reduced to a proletariat with no rights. There is no horizon before them; no honourable ambition to fulfil. Their capacities are arrested. Their condition becomes one of stagnancy. Add to all this all the abuses incidental to labour thus economically forced, with their attendant discontents developing into sporadic outbreaks; the notorious inefficiency of African labour under such circumstances; the decrease in vitality consequent upon the introduction of an unnatural existence; the lowered birth rate; the increase in prostitution and venereal disease. Here is no constructive policy, but a destructive one. Nothing is being built up, except the ephemeral fortunes of a few white men. The future, viewed from the broad standpoint of both European and African interests, is being undermined all the time.

The folly of the conception is palpable. If it be true in an economic sense, as true it is, that the ‘asset’ of a tropical African dependency is primarily the native, a system which enfeebles and impoverishes the native is suicidal, always from the same utilitarian point of view. That is one side of the case. The other side is that in enfeebling and impoverishing the African, you are destroying the major economic interest of Europe in the African. Every penny taken from the national wealth of a European State for the purpose of bolstering up a system of that kind in tropical Africa, is flung into the sea. Every European nation which is a governing State in tropical Africa and which tolerates a system of that kind in its dependencies, is allowing the major national interest to be sacrificed for the temporary enrichment of a restricted number of individuals. And from the point of view of economics, the national interest is also the international interest.” The Black Man's Burden (1969 reprint), pp. 238–39, with emphasis added.Google Scholar

49. For example, the exchange between Wylie, Kenneth and Duignan, /Gann, in African Studies Review 14(1971), pp. 129-36, 345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. We cannot afford a digression into the so-called neo-Marxist “underdevelopment” theories represented in the work of André Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, et al. These have considerably influenced the work of Walter Rodney. See also Alpers, E.A., “Re-thinking African Economic History,” Kenya Historical Review 1(1973), pp. 163–88.Google Scholar The comments of Kay in his introduction to evelopment and Underdevelopment are apposite, and for a fuller discussion see Leys, C., “Underdevelopment and Dependency: Critical Notes,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 7(1977), pp. 92ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Phillips, A., “The Concept of Development, Review of African Political Economy, no. 8(1977)Google Scholar; Bernstein, H., “Sociology of Underdevelopment vs. Sociology of Development,” in Bernstein, H., O'Brien, D. Cruise and Nafziger, W., Development Theory. Three Critical Essays, (forthcoming).Google Scholar

51. Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, 1972).Google Scholar

52. Sík, , History of Black Africa, p. 19.Google Scholar

53. Necessary also in the face of the denial by other historians that such a thing as African history exists, e.g., Trevor-Roper, H., The Rise of Christian Europe (London, 1965)Google Scholar, and other references given in Ki-Zerbo, , History, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

54. And the terms of reference or criteria of cultural achievement are derived from European history. This is manifest in Davidson, Basil, The Lost Cities of Africa (Boston, 1955)Google Scholar, and traces of this tendency appear in Rodney's work, as pointed out by G.T. Mishambi, “The Mystification of African History: A Critique of Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” forthcoming in Utafiti.

55. Duignan, and Gann, , Burden of Empire, p. 132.Google Scholar

56. That is, yet another variation on empiricism which sees the production of knowledge as the relation between a subject and an object (the field of facts). Science then denotes a loyalty to the facts, “ideology” a bad faith in dealing with facts. For a useful discussion of the subject/object conception, see Hindess, B., “Models and Masks: Empiricist Conceptions of the Conditions of Scientific Knowledges,” Economy and Society 2(1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. On early resistance and the nationalist movements, see M. Tsomondo, “Shona Reaction and Resistance to the European Colonization of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), 1890-1898: a Case Against Colonial and Revisionist Historiography,” mimeographed paper, Department of Afro-American Studies, State University of New York, Buffalo, and Depelchin, “Towards a Problematic History”; more generally the excellent paper by Swai, B., “Local Initiative in African History, a Critique,” History Department Seminar, University of Dar es Salaam (1977)Google Scholar, to appear as a pamphlet published by the Historical Association of Tanzania. We are indebted to Swai for the use of the term “counter-factualization.”

58. (Madison, 1968), p. 37.

59. (New York, 1967), p. 17, with emphasis added.

60. In a similar vein of “intellectual history,” see Wauthier, Claude, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Africa Remembered, ed. Curtin, Philip D. (Madison, 1968)Google Scholar; Kesteloot, Lilyan, Intellectual Origins of the African Revolution (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

61. Isaacman, Allen F., Mozambique (Madison, 1972), p. xiv.Google Scholar The same message appears in his recent study The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique (London, 1976), p. xxiv.Google Scholar

62. This remains a contentious question in Marxist debate. The ‘strong’ case is put by Althusser in his essay “Marxism is not a Humanism,” in For Marx. Althusser is criticized on this issue by Geras, “Marx,” pp. 290–91.Google Scholar

63. For an excellent review of Engerman's and Fogel's Time on the Cross and their critics, see Haskell's, Thomas L. “The True and Tragical History of Time on the Cross,” The New York Review of Books (October 2, 1975).Google Scholar

64. See Meillassoux's, Claude review of Curtin in the JAH 18(1977), pp. 449–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also J. Depelchin's review article for African Review (forthcoming).

65. The Historical Study of African Religion, eds. Kimambo, Isaria and Rnager, Terence (London, 1972), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar Emphasis in original. It can become monotonous hearing about the ahistorical character of anthropology when some excellent historical studies are being produced by Marxist anthropologists, for example, L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale, ed. Meillassoux, C. (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar

66. For a theoretical discussion and an example drawn from late Imperial China see Feuchtwang, S., “Investigating Religion” in Bloch, , Marxist Analyses.Google Scholar

67. Agulhon, M., “Un problème d'ethnologie historique: les chambrées en Basse-Provence au 19ème siècle” in Ethnologie et Histoire (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar Note also the way in which anthropology is being rediscovered by historians of the European Middle Ages, e.g. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar

68. Henige, David, “On Method: An Apologia and a Plea,” History in Africa, 1(1974), p. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69. In fact, bureaucracy is one of the most explicitly comparative concepts in the sociology of Weber, who himself applied it to a number of cases in antiquity as well as employing it (as the organizational embodiment of “rationality”) in his theory of “modern” (i.e. capitalist) society. For a critical review of Wilks Asante in the Nineteenth Century see Depelchin, J. “The Rule of Bureaucracy in Ghanaian history from Osei Tutu to Nkrumah,” Africa Development, forthcoming.Google Scholar

70. Vansina, J., “The Power of Systematic Doubt in Historical Enquiry,” History in Africa, 1(1974), p. 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A similar point of view was expressed in his Oral Tradition, Chapter VII.

71. Ibid, p. 184. “In addition, the historian adds something of his own to these facts, namely, his own particular flair, which is something more akin to art than to science.” Sociologists are also prone to this form of mystification of self and others in a line that runs from the “sociological imagination” of C. Wright Mills to the “reflexive consciousness” of Alvin Gouldner and the radical phenomenology of John O'Neill.

72. On the dangers of “adaptations” from bourgeois thought see, however, Castells, M. and de Ipola, E., “Epistemological Practice and the Social Sciences,” Economy and Society 5(1976), esp. pp. 140–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73. “Modes of production.” It is perhaps not surprising that the “histoire totalisante” of the Annales school should attract Marxists. See also Jones, G. Stedman, “History: the Poverty of Empiricism” in Blackburn, Ideology in Social Science.Google Scholar However, the looseness of certain categories and principles of explanation of the Annales historians (e.g. Lucien Febvre's “interrelations” and “interdependence,” and also the Conclusion in Braudel, FernandCapitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 (London, 1973)Google Scholar present difficulties to the enterprise of Marxist history.

74. Meillassoux, , “From Reproduction to Production,” Economy and Society 1(1972), pp. 94–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There are a number of works of bourgeois materialism which command respect (albeit critical) from Marxists; for example, Goody, Jack, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (London, 1971)Google Scholar, and Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (London, 1971).Google Scholar For Marxist discussions of these works see Terray, E. in Critique of Anthropology, no. 3(1975)Google Scholar, and Hirst, P.Q., Journal of Peasant Studies 2(1974).Google Scholar

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76. Miller, Joseph C., Kings and Kinsmen (London, 1976), p. 281.Google Scholar

77. Ibid, p. 282. It is regretable that in his review of studies of state formation, Miller omits one of the best recent analyses, Rennie, J.K., “The Precolonial Kingdom of Rwanda: a Reinterpretation,” Transafrican Journal of History 2(1972), pp. 11–54.Google Scholar

78. Maire, Alain, “Rapports de parenté et rapports de production dan les sociétés lignagères” in L'anthropologie économique, ed. Pouillon, François, (Paris, 1976).Google Scholar

79. Cited in ibid, p. 89.

80. Ibid, p. 91.

81. Miller, , “Slaves, Slavers and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Kasanje,” in Social Change in Angola, ed. Heimer, F.W., (Munich, 1973).Google Scholar It is appropriate to reiterate at this point that we are not claiming to have provided a critical discussion adequate to their seriousness of recent works like Miller's Kings and Kinsmen, and Feierman's, StevenThe Shambaa Kingdom (Madison, 1974)Google Scholar which is of a similar caliber.

82. Rey, “L'esclavage lignager chez les tsangui, les punu et les kuni du Congo-Brazzaville; sa place dans le système d'ensemble des rapports de production”; and Bonnafé, P., “Les formes d'asservissement chez les Kukuya d'Afrique centrale,” both in Meillassoux, , L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale.Google Scholar

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