In the history of the cooperative movement in anglophone Cameroon, women's cooperatives have played a particularly small role. Although the first cooperatives opened in the anglophone portion of the country in the 1920s and a small-scale women's project was attempted in the 1950s, the currently existing cooperatives for women began only in 1970. Today, in terms of number of members, amount of capitalization, scale of economic transactions, number of viable (or even operating) organizations, or any other measure, the women's cooperatives account for only a small portion of the total cooperative movement.

In early 1970, beginning in the southern, coastal portions of the then West Cameroon state (the anglophone state in the bilingual Federal Republic of Cameroon) several governmental bodies and the women's wing of the Cameroon National Union (WCNU) began to organize women in urban areas in palm oil cooperatives. A number of societies came into being in a short period of time and the idea soon spread from its original site in the Southwest Province to the Northwest Province. Most of the original structures established in the coastal area have failed, but those in the Northwest Province continue to exist, though with a mixed record of success. Although in many respects the experiments in the Southwest and Northwest were similar, there are differences in purpose, governmental involvement, and social situation that may be related to the differences in success. Interviews with Cameroon officials and foreign assistance workers, archival and documentary material, and personal observations during two periods of research in Cameroon (1975-76 and 1980-81) have provided the data upon which to compare and analyze these two experiences.

To state that government policy has been at the heart of the agrarian crisis in Lusophone Africa is not to deny the importance of drought, the depressed state of international commodity markets, and externally-provoked destabilization in contributing to food shortages and declining volumes of agricultural exports. Rather, this essay argues that commercial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies and the response of the majority of rural producers to them were the most important factors determining the conditions of production and trade during the period 1974-1984.

In her review of the literature on the food crisis in Africa, Sara Berry (1983) singles out the secular struggle over access to resources as motivating African governments in their policy-making. The crisis in Lusophone Africa can be viewed as a struggle between state officials and peasants over the amount and disposition of marketable surpluses. In each of the countries, politicians and bureaucrats sought control over the marketing and pricing of agricultural products and over the importation of basic consumer goods more as a means of securing state revenues and personal gain than as an instrument for promoting rural development Resistance to exploitative policies by food and export crop producers has been the main reason for the agricultural decline until at least 1984. This resistance manifested itself in various ways: diminished production, parallel markets, smuggling, emigration and support for anti-government forces.

Such behavior has been described before, notably by Robert Bates in his work Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981). Bates examined how the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast squeezed the incomes of small rural cultivators through taxation, overvalued exchange rates, and monosoponistic marketing boards. Bates explained that governments were attempting to extract revenues and export commodities for financing the state apparatus as well as cheap food and raw materials in the interests of urban industrialists and workers.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

Coleridge

A contradiction hitherto not adequately examined exists between historical research and policy analysis in modern African studies. The more familiar difficulty between policy-makers, who want answers, and historians and social scientists, who find instead complexity and uncertainty, has been much discussed and is not pursued here. Rather, a more subtle tension operates in the work of those policy analysts who use historical research in their work, particularly when these analysts are government advisors in Africa.

History has always had an equivocal role in policy analysis. On one side, an important part of the profession embraces project evaluation and implementation analysis, both of which can involve historical research. In the former, the analyst tries to understand the impact of a project in terms of its past performance, while the latter uses past performance as the basis for improved design of future projects. On the other side, historical research is not considered an essential part of the analyst's graduate training, at least in the United States. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find an American public policy school that required history alongside core courses in statistics, microeconomics, law, and political science. This ambivalence over the role of historical research is best illustrated by the unheeded calls analysts themselves have made and continue to make for more historical research in their own profession. In an essay on policy analysis familiar to many U.S.-trained analysts, the author opines “historical genesis is a much underplayed aspect of the analysis of social programs” and recommends that a more overtly historical perspective should inform policy analysis generally (Nelson, 1977: 152; Chapter 8).

When his Lord said to him, “Surrender,” he said, “I have surrendered me to the Lord of all Being.” Koran, II, 125.

Every verse of the Koran has “an outside and an inside” (Lings, 1977: 29).

The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner of a world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably outweighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from another, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions (Lings, 1977: 14).

The dominant forms of Islam which have penetrated sub-Saharan Africa in the last few centuries when Islam has taken hold of what are now predominantly Muslim regions (like the Eastern Sudan and West Africa) have been Sufi. Trimingham's (1959: 92) disparaging assessment that “(t)he orders in West Africa became ordinary non-esoteric religious associations… [which] rarely have anything to do with mysticism…,” and that “the ordinary member knows nothing of the mysticism upon which his order is based,” finds its echo in Lewis' (1980: 18) view that “their esoteric content is generally not strongly developed.” Nonetheless, the literary effusions of certain prominent African Muslim authors, like Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Tayeb Salih, seem to find inspiration in a well-defined, long-standing mystical tradition—one which has generated literary forms in addition to having supplied the ideological framework utilized by these authors. This framework varies somewhat less than do the forms adopted by the authors: Laye's and Kane's fictionalized autobiographical accounts seem to be worlds apart from the folktale or Romance which share certain qualities with Salih's Wedding of Zein and Laye's Le Regard du roi, although the two models meet, curiously enough, in Lave's Dramouss and in Salih's Season of Migration to the North.

The African Studies Association in 1984 gave Paulin Hountondji a share in the Melville Herskovits award for the most significant Africanist publication for the previous year. The selection of Hountondji's book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), suggests, logically, that the Association believes the book to be a significant contribution to African Studies. One might go even a step further and conclude that it indicates the Association's concurrence with the main premises and the general philosophical orientation of the author's arguments. This paper outlines some serious questions Hountondji and his fellow philosophers raise about what one's attitude to the African past should be and what criteria should dictate the course of development on the African continent.

Hountondji is perhaps the best known of the “professional philosophers.” As one would expect, each of the philosophers perceives the issues that will be raised in this discussion from a different perspective, even when they agree broadly on the critique of ethnophilosophy; Hountondji has nevertheless emerged as the most articulate and representative in this regard, to the extent that his book has earned the title, “the ‘bible’ of anti—ethnophilosophers” (Mudimbe, 1985: 199). The focus of this essay will accordingly be on this important work, with occasional references, of course, to those of others, in particular the Ghanaian Kwasi Wiredu. This strategy has the attraction of straddling the divide between Anglophone and Francophone manifestations of the new philosophical attitudes.

To best understand what grounds there might be for objections to certain of the philosophers' positions, it is expedient that one isolate the several targets of their disparagement. Chief of these is ethnophilosophy, which Hountondji (1983: 34) defines as “an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions.” This includes the works of all those who like Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame, John Mbiti, and other ethnologists have attempted to articulate African philosophies or systems of thought. Another target is African cultures or traditions themselves, as distinct from whatever the ethnophilosophers or ethnologists might correctly or mistakenly have made of them.

Kwasi Wiredu, a prominent African philosopher from Ghana, recently published an essay entitled “How Not To Compare African Thought to Western Thought” (1984) in which he criticized the prevalent method of comparing what is regarded as African philosophy with Western philosophy. Wiredu begins the essay with the assertion that all cultures are characterized by two levels of thought, namely, the traditional non-scientific and the theoretical or scientific thought (p. 149-50). He also notes, although without examples, that some contemporary philosophers both in Africa and the West are in the habit of comparing the traditional non-scientific thought of the African people with the highly theoretical and scientific thought of the Western world. He sees this type of comparison as improper and argues that since there is traditional folk thought in Africa as well as in the West, if there is to be any comparison at all, it must be with folk thought to folk thought and scientific thought to scientific thought (p. 157).

Wiredu's essay is an excellent academic treatise in its own right, but as an African who is attempting to reflect philosophically and possibly attempting to provide leadership for the thrust of African philosophical search, there are some pitfalls in the essay which need to be pointed out. The purpose of this commentary is to highlight and hopefully clarify some of the misleading innuendoes in contemporary literature about African philosophy and the role of an African philosopher within the world of philosophy.

The first problem in Wiredu's essay is that it is sympathetic to the misconceived view that Africans have no thought process except the non-scientific. Assertions like “African Societies are among the closest approximations in modern world to societies in the pre-scientific stage of intellectual development,” betray Wiredu's presupposition. This position creates a problem for Wiredu's project. If, as he has stated, the West is basically scientific in its thought process and Africans are basically folk-like in their thinking, then there is no basis for comparison. His argument that it is wrong to compare African folk thought to Western scientific thought is the arbitrator.