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POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Cherry I Walker. Land-Marked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. Abbreviations. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95. Paper. Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins, eds. Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act. Published for the Legal Resources Centre. Cape Town: UCT Press; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xv + 392 pp. DVD. Maps. Abbreviations, Contributors. Notes. Tables. References. Index. $34.95. Paper. These two books are indispensable additions to the core literature on land reform in South Africa. In their different approaches and structures, they both offer a creative mix of academic insights and the entrenched experience of activists, and of local case studies with a wealth of concrete sociological detail alongside broad discourses on modes of analysis on a national and continental scale. They each concentrate on one element of what Cherryl Walker refers to as "the three-legged cooking pot" of land reform policy initiated in 1994: the Restitution Programme and the attempt to reform land tenure in the former Ban tus tans, respectively. Neither covers the third leg of redistribution (the transfer of former white-owned farmland to black occupants), which is the leg that has received most attention and funding - although some of Cherryl Walker's general evaluations do extend to cover it. Indeed, her somewhat skeptical and cautious overall conclusions about the future of land reform apply to both redistribution and restitution plans. Walker's account of restitution provides a look back to the origins of today's problem in previous decades when the injustices of forced removals occurred. Her study is enriched by personal accounts from this period, when she was a "participant observer" working to resist the removals. She supplies a similar insider's account of the first stage of the restitution program, but this time from a position within the new state as the commissioner for land claims in Kwazulu-Natal. Since moving into academia after 2000, her work has continued to benefit from a third perspective, that of academic researcher. The book thus juxtaposes and interrelates the three elements and perspectives: emotive personal memories and indelible images of dispossession; a planner's account of the mechanisms and frustrations of restitution; and the evaluation of the record. The memories from long ago of a litde girl lost in a removal suggest the ways in which such incidents became the currency of a historical narrative at the heart of the rhetoric of national liberation; at the same time, they provide a measure of success or failure and serve to remind us of the complex reality covered up by the national myth. The approach embodied in this fusion of perspectives serves in turn as an explanation of why the restitution program failed. Over and above the occasional lack of political will, the over-bureaucratization and inefficiency, and the mistaken policy formulations (all of which are acknowledged in the account), Walker sees inherent conflicts in the dual goals of reversing injustice and stimulating rural development oriented toward the poor: limits to what can be achieved and how quickly these goals can be achieved via restitution. …

Tom Lodge. Politics in South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. vi + 314 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $19.95. Paper. Gillian Hart. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xi + 385 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $21.95. Paper. It has now been a decade since South Africa emerged from its authoritarian and apartheid past. Inevitably, political scientists pose certain questions: How has South Africa weathered the transition to democratic and free market reform, and where does the "New South Africa" fit into the larger discourse on globalization and neoliberal capitalism? Gillian Hart and Tom Lodge offer two perspectives on these questions, and suggest that South Africa represents an important model for understanding the challenges that face transitional societies seeking to achieve rapid pursuit of free market democracy. Lodge takes a macro approach to analyzing the South African state, focusing on the political forces affecting the national government's leadership as it reshapes the economic and social framework of the country. Hart utilizes a micro analysis that places two communities within the KwaZulu-Natal province under scrutiny to determine why such geographically similar locales developed such different trajectories in their political and economic development. Both authors devote substantial attention to the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) developed in the early 1990s by the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's governing party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The RDP proposes that growth can be combined with development by (1) meeting basic needs, (2) upgrading human resources, (3) strengthening the economy, (4) democratizing the state and society, and (5) reorganizing the state and the public sector. Lodge examines how the RDP quickly came to represent different things to different people inside South Africa, but by any measure there is little dispute that substantial progress has been made in South Africa in the areas of housing, clean water, electrification, primary health care, and public works. In 1996 the South African government formally adopted a package of economic policies known as GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution). While Lodge notes the general success of these policies across South Africa as a whole, Hart shows that these policies affected Ladysmith-Ezakheni and Newcastle-Madadeni in very different and sometimes contradictory ways. Part of the explanation for these differences derives from the personalities resident in these communities. …

Review of: Hoad, N., 2007. 'African intimacies: race, homosexuality, and globalization'. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Ian Scoones, Nelson M a ron g we, Biasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Crispen Sukume. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey; Harare: Weaver Press; Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2010. xv + 288 pp. Bibliography. Index, f 16.99, $29.95, R1 75.00. Paper. One of the clear aims of this interesting and controversial book by Scoones et al. is to challenge five somewhat overstated myths that have dominated representations of Zimbabwe's post-2000 land reform. These are (1) that the land reform has been a total failure; (2) that the beneficiaries of this reform have been largely political "cronies" of the former ruling party, Zanu PF; (3) that there has been no investment in the new resetdement areas; (4) that agriculture in general is in complete ruins and has created chronic food insecurity; and (5) that the rural economy has collapsed. Challenges are made on the basis of detailed empirical research conducted over the past decade on "what has happened in the new resettiements" in Zimbabwe since 2000, and specifically in Masvingo Province in the country's dry southeast. The book's overall emphasis is explicidy on the "changing livelihoods of people who gained land" (31) - notably, not on those who didn't - and according to the authors, their data represent the "ground-level, field realities" that most others have failed to examine or acknowledge. These realities (in the Masvingo area, which differs markedly from many other parts of the country) are revealed through a combination of thematic lenses and linked sets of empirically oriented questions addressed in nine of the book's eleven chapters. (The other two are an introductory chapter that discusses debates on land reform and agrarian paths more generally, and a concluding chapter that revisits the five myths and explores "lessons" and policy priorities for supporting developments in the new resetdements.) Among other things, our attention is drawn to the varied origins and motivations of new setders and forms of land occupation across different sites, and the fragmented nature of the newly emerging agrarian structures (chapter 2). We learn of significant differentiation among households, substantial mobility on and off the schemes, including cross-border migration, and multiple livelihood strategies, which together have resulted in both "successes" and "failures" (chapters 3 and 8). Claims are made of unexpected if uneven levels of investment in plots, some production successes, the emergence of various agriculture-related enterprises, and new dynamics of "accumulation from below" (chapters 4, 5, and 10). This is despite a climate of sustained economic crisis and what is referred to as a "vacuum in policy thinking" (235) - here, the authors carefully side-step naming a highly party-politicized if not militarized policy sphere since 2000. In addition, we learn about the "highly complex rural labour market" (139) in the new resetdements (chapter 6), which the authors argue counters an over-emphasis by others on displacement and job losses. We also discover how land reform has altered the way in which "real markets" operate (chapter 7), with new commodity chains "opening opportunities for some and closing options for others" (149). Finally, the research reveals the complex struggles over territory, structure, and authority occurring in the new resetdements, and the surfacing of "hybrid" forms of governance that pose key challenges for state-making as well as for agricultural development (chapter 9). …

RELIGION Peter Paris, ed. Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2009. xxiv + 360 pp. Notes. Contributors. Index. $89.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. According to the foreword by Jacob Olupona, this book represents a culmination of several Ford Foundation-sponsored seminars, lectures, and discussions held over the course of four years in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States, where various academics of religion and society interrogated issues related to the causes of poverty and the intersection between poverty and religion among African peoples, with an attendant focus on "poverty alleviation." As suggested, too, in Esther Mombo's chapter, "Religion and Materiality: The Case of Poverty Alleviation," the inference is that "poverty eradication" is viewed as a distant ideal, and that food aid and other philanthropic antihunger organizations are forced to accept poverty alleviation as the only feasible goal, given the widening chasm under globalization and neocolonialism between the haves and have-nots in the world, particularly in Africa and the African diaspora. One does wonder, though, how, if organizations like the World Bank and the IMF advance antipoor policies like Structural Adjustment that in fact exacerbate poverty, the same organizations could be expected to alleviate poverty in "partnership with religious organizations, particularly churches" (xvii). A further question is "Why do religious traditions not demand the outright eradication of poverty as a sine qua non for ethical existence of their various adherents in the world?" Perhaps writers like Kossi Ayedze in the chapter "Poverty among African People and the Ambiguous Role of Christian Thought," who proposes a materially oriented Christian gospel that caters to both souls and bodies (208), make us realize that Christian theologians still struggle with the injunction of Jesus to surrender everything to the poor and live a materially and spiritually selfless life. But the question still remains: Why does poverty exist in the world and Africa in particular, to the point that the modest United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 is now viewed as unrealistic and unattainable? Religion and Poverty is a broad-based text that charts the historical roots of poverty in Africa and the diaspora through genocidal processes like the trade in enslaved Africans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (see Katie Cannon's chapter, "An Ethical Mapping of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," and Barbara Bailey's instructive discussion of the subjugation particularly of women, "Feminization of Poverty Across Pan African Societies: The Church's Response - Alleviative or Emancipatory?"). The book highlights the challenges of economic globalization, which champions the transnational spread of corporate capitalism at the expense of informal entrepreneurs, especially women, who foster the survival of millions of families, youth, and children in the underdeveloped world (see 'The Informal Economy and the Religion of Global Capital" by the South African theologian Takatso Mofokeng), and it also investigates the contradictions between such imported notions and indigenous African religiocultural understandings - as, for example, in Maasai practice - that decry poverty and require collective access to land that cannot be owned (see Elizabeth Amoah's "African Traditional Religion and the Concept of Poverty"). …

Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds. Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy. Blooming to n: Indiana University Press, 2007. 240 pp. Photographs. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $65,00, Cloth. $24.95. Paper. In their introduction to these case studies of change in generational relations and the new transnational economy, Cole and Durham remind us that World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs (SAPs) contributed to globalization. In Africa and elsewhere, the conditions attached to IMF loans had a deleterious effect on social programs that previously provided incentives and a safety net, particularly for a country's youngest and oldest generations. Likewise, globalization deepened the chasm between beneficiaries of the new market-driven economy and the many who found themselves further marginalized. The outcome was plummeting incomes and increased class divisions with "consumer driven enclaves" of wealthy elites surrounded by others for whom elite lifestyles and Western goods "were mostly out of reach" (4). Two demographic factors intersect with globalization: changing demographic balances from lowered infant mortality rates and extended life expectancy, and increased transnational migration as young people from the global South seek improved economic opportunities or safe havens from war in more affluent regions. Such demographic alterations challenge existing policies, both in Africa and elsewhere. Three of the seven cases in this volume illustrate how the state's role in providing a social safety net is under siege. China confronts lingering vestiges of state socialism as it faces new demands for "quality" (sushi) education from its growing urban, middle-class population (Woronov, ch. 1). Education that privileges individual achievement and prepares youth for roles in the new, highly competitive global economy is the goal of quality education in China. Madagascar struggles to define the gendered role of youth as its government moves from socialism to a liberalized global economy that has spawned new generational and gender relations (Cole, ch. 3). In the North, Western European nations work to shed their welfare state apparatuses in favor of a European Union model that champions individual responsibility, achievement of knowledge, and economic competitiveness, all in a socially integrated global economy that includes youth, middle-age wage earners, "third-age" (55-74 years) physically able workers, and "fourth-age" elders needing care (Greenberg & Muehlebach, ch. 6). Of the contributions, four investigate changing concepts of youth and work. Magazine and Sanchez (ch. 2) focus on transnational migration between Tlalcuapan, Mexico, and California, demonstrating how generational expectations of ayuda (reciprocal family work) have changed over time as global capitalism has opened opportunities for transformation and adaptation between and within generations. The new global market and "fresh contacts" with global players from abroad also affect cycles of intergenerational exchange in Madagascar (Cole, ch. 3), where youth negotiate older networks of patronage and exchange, creating novel opportunities for upward social mobility. …

Fantu Cheru. African Renaissance: Roadmaps to the Challenge of Globalization. London: Zed Books/Cape Town: David Phillip, 2002. Distributed by Palgrave USA. xv + 253 pp. References. Index. $25.00. Paper. In this interesting and easy-to-read book, Fantu Cheru argues that globalization, with its contradictory tendencies, is a complex, irreversible process and that "any vision of an 'African Renaissance' must, at the very least, provide a coherent strategy on how to navigate" it successfully (xiii). Motivated by what he refers to as the negative climate surrounding views on Africa, Cheru decided to provide a response to this pessimism. Ironically, however, some parts of his book unwittingly reinforce the very pessimism he set out to address. From the outset, Cheru argues that there are no simple solutions to Africa's economic problems, and he recommends commonsense approaches. In his view, the lackluster performance of the IMF/World Bank-engineered reforms stems mostly from the fact that neoliberal reform programs lack historical context. Paradoxically, Cheru's own analysis of the sources of Africa's crisis also lacks such a context. He underscores the hurdles that need to be overcome to realize an African renaissance, hurdles whose core elements can be summed up as dirigisme, rationalism, and preemption. His solutions include democracy and good governance, investment in education, poverty reduction, agricultural development, strong regional integration, managed urbanization and strengthening the urban-rural interface, and maintaining peace and preventing conflict. Notably, the list fails to mention macroeconomic management. Correctly, in my view, Cheru prescribes what he calls a "guided embrace of globalization with a commitment through pre-emptive national or regional development strategy and economic policy coordination" (xv). Undeniably, he is right to assert that blind surrender or adherence to globalization by African states will not necessarily advance their interests, especially from an equity point of view. Nevertheless, since Cheru aims to address the causes of Africa's economic and social crisis, he should have begun by identifying what he means by this crisis. Had he done so, he would have been able to make a distinction between symptoms and causes. For example, many of the factors he lists as causes of Africa's economic, social, and political crisis are, in and of themselves, symptoms of the crisis. A case in point is the agricultural decline which, whatever its eventual consequences, resulted from policy failures and environmental adversities; it is not a cause of the crisis. …

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Ambreena Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa: From Communal Tenure to Free Markets. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006. vii + 149 pp. Notes. Index. £50.00. Cloth. £16.99. Paper. Ambreena Manji's book is an insightful analysis of the logic and agencies governing land reform in Africa in the age of neoliberal globalization. Building on World Bank reports and the new laws African governments are adopting to change land relations, the book examines the shift from a redistributive statist model, dominant until the 1970s, to one stressing the formalization of tenurial property, with the introduction of titling and registration, as the thrust of land reform on the continent. A legal scholar, Manji is interested in understanding why the law has come to play a central role in the definition of land reform. She argues that this innovation is consistent with a neoliberal project wherein the law acts as an instrument for the globalization of capitalist relations and the transfer of power from the local to the global, in this case removing the control over land policy from the nation-state and local communities to international "donors" and financial institutions, beginning with the World Bank. She also suggests that the formalization of land relations is an attempt to contain the struggles of rural people's movements which, faced with land grabbing by states, private companies, and local chiefs, and with the state's failure to address the historic injustices that are the legacy of colonialism, are demanding more secure access to land and opting for direct action through land occupations. In her view this pressure from below accounts for the populist language by which land reform is promoted, portraying it as a strategy for "poverty reduction." Manji points to the influence on the World Bank's land policy of Hernando De Soto's theory, according to which Third World rural populations are mired in poverty and economic stagnation because of the continuing existence of communal land tenure regimes which make for uncertain property relations, dampening incentives for investment and rural innovation. Hence the promise that titling and the expansion of land markets will open a new era of development and prosperity for African peasants, if only they could learn that land as such is a "dead asset" that becomes alive only when "brought to the bank" as collateral for the acquisition of rural credit and the financing of rural business. …

Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, ed. Themes in West Africa's History. Athens: Ohio University Press/Oxford: James Currey/Accra: Woeli Publishing Services, 2006. xii + 323 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. This edited volume is an exciting new West African history textbook that could be used effectively at both undergraduate and graduate levels. As its editor makes clear in the introduction, however, Themes in West Africa's History is not intended to be a substitute for a conventional historical textbook: it does not provide a narrative history of events. Nor is it organized, like Boahen's classic (though now out of date) Topics in West African History (Longman 1986 [1966]), around major episodes in West African history such as the trans-Saharan trade, Islamization, the slave trade, and colonialism. Rather, the chapters in this volume focus on themes-poverty, social inequality, environment and disease, religious transformation-that are particularly relevant to current conditions in the region; indeed, the authors of this volume share an interest in contributing to a "history of development" that speaks to Africa's contemporary problems and challenges. Thus while Themes does not solve the problem of out-of-print or out-of-date textbooks, it does potentially serve as a useful substitute, eliminating the need for a supplementary readings that, given copyright laws, can be costly. The volume comprises an introduction and thirteen essays-including contributions from linguists, political scientists, economists, and anthropologists, as well as historians-organized into three parts. The essays are well-written, reflect up-to-date scholarship, and conclude with useful recommended reading lists. Part 1 provides an excellent introduction to the most significant methodological approaches in the reconstruction of African history. Susan McIntosh summarizes the archaeological and climatological evidence for the prehistory of West Africa from roughly 10,000 BP; underlining the indigenous sources of food production, urbanism, and occupational specialization, she puts to rest earlier theories attributing West African social innovation and complexity to external stimulus. James Webb's chapter on ecology and culture complements Mcintosh's discussion, focusing on human adaptations to the environment through the period of increased external contact brought on by the trans-Saharan and Atlantic trades, colonialism, and postcolonial globalization. M. E. Kropp Dakubu provides a particularly lucid and accessible overview of historical and comparative linguistics, contact studies, and the importance of language studies for historians. And David Conrad suggests how the content and form of Manding oral traditions reveal important cultural values, as well as a sense of history at odds with the European historiographical tradition; his chapter might be productively assigned alongside The Epic of Sunjata, a staple of West African history courses. …

James Ferguson. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. x + 257 pp. Map. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $74.95. Cloth. $21.95. Paper. Tanya Lyons and Geralyn Pye, eds. Africa on A Global Stage. Trenton, N.J. and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2006. vii + 215 pp. Notes. References. Index. $24.95. Paper. Anne-Cecile Robert. L'Afrique au secours de l'Occident. Paris: Les Editions de l'Atelier/Les Editions Ouvrieres, 2006. 208 pp. euro9.00. Paper. Leonardo A. Villalon and Peter VonDoepp, eds. The Fate of Africa's Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. viii + 324 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Where does Africa fit in the neoliberal global order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War? That is the broad question that these four books address. The liberal paradigm, often referred to as globalization, has affected the continent both politically and economically. Although it is frequently asserted that globalization has marginalized Africans, the obvious fact remains that Africa is fully part of the globalizing world. Kofi Annan observed in his 1998 report on Africa to the Security Council that there are winners and losers in the globalization process. But just how has Africa been faring on this new global playing field, both in its political experiments and its economic prospects? As James Ferguson asks, what is "Africa's contemporary place-in-the-world"? As an anthropologist, Ferguson begins by apologizing for writing about the unit of Africa-"a vast, complicated heterogeneous region"-as a "meaningful object of scholarship" (5). He justifies the risks of such an enterprise by arguing that the continent is in fact a real category in the global economy-one that is, however, "nearly synonymous with failure and poverty" (5). While embracing continental-scale analysis in order to address the issue of poverty, Ferguson not surprisingly incorporates his local fieldwork in Lesotho, Transkei, Zambia, and elsewhere into the discussion. Moreover, Global Shadows is in fact a montage of five previously published articles and four new essays, the first of which constitutes an introduction to the theme of Africa's place in the neoliberal world order. That place, he observes, is a decidedly subordinate position. His fundamental purpose then is to put the "question of the unequal relation between Africa and the West back on the table in a radical way" (23). Ferguson is passionate about the issue of inequality, about issues of social justice on a global scale. This passion infuses the work with a strong moral tone. Globalization, he contends, is less about the transnational flows featured in the standard discourse than about matters of transnational global accountability. Ferguson begins by critiquing the common understanding of flows of capital in a chapter entitled "Globalizing Africa? Observations from an Inconvenient Continent," a formulation that evokes Al Gore's "inconvenient truth." The inconvenient truth about international capital is that it has not "flowed" seamlessly into Africa's broad development needs, but has rather "hopped" into mineral-extraction enclaves. Capital, Ferguson observes, "is globe-hopping, not globe-covering" (38, his italics). Although these foreign investments do connect the continent to the global economy, they do not really integrate Africans into higher forms of production that generate a broad range of goods and services. Rather this extractive neoliberalism has produced an inconvenient form of globalization "that divides the planet as much as it unites it" (49). In the following chapters, Ferguson argues that poverty has been depoliticized (by those who construe it in technical terms) and that economics has been "de-moralized" by ignoring "African traditions of moral discourse on questions of economic process" (82). …

Deborah Fahy Bryceson, ed. How Africa Works: Occupational Change, Identity and Morality. Bourton on Dunsmore, U.K.: Practical Action Publishing, 2010. v+ 299 pp. Bibliography by Chapter. Index. $39.95. Paper. Ilda Lindell, ed. Africa's Informal Workers: Collective Agency, Alliances and Transnational Organizing in Urban Africa. London: Zed Books & Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2010. viii +238 pp. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Paper. These two collections address the travails of working people in Africa, and both depict die difficult circumstances in which work is conducted - especially the corrupt, uninformed, indifferent, or destructive effects of neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and the activities of individual states. As Deborah Bryceson states, "households necessitate, communities motivate, markets incentivize and states regulate occupational pursuits of individuals" (22), and her compilation considers issues of work from a number of points of view and in several country settings. Lindell 's collection is much more focused, and is integrated by its center of attention upon the organization of workers in die informal economy of African cities. My reading of the two books led to somewhat different assessments. I reacted to Bryceson's collection with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the case studies included are all first-rate; with one or two exceptions, they are thoughtful and thorough. At the same time, I felt as if I were in a "time warp," in that the chapters related to a period over a decade in die past. It's as if they had been on a shelf gathering dust for ten years. In many ways the economic devastation, the neoliberal programs of the IFIs (though now with a new and soothing vocabulary), and the largely corrupt states continue. However, conditions affecting the case studies from Nigeria, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, Tanzania, South Africa, DRC, and the continent in general have altered. For example, China has entered the scene, neoliberalism has advanced, globalization is growing, urbanward migration is mounting, and so on; the datedness matters, because the surrounding context has changed. Bryceson has produced numerous vital publications, but this, unfortunately, is not one of them. There is very litde that is novel here in the discussions of SAPs, migration to African cities, economic difficulty, and interfering governments. The empirical investigations are set in the 1990s, and the references (with very few exceptions) are to publications up to the same period. The underlying theme is that work relates to social identity, empathy, and trust. As Bryceson writes, "people seek self-esteem and a sense of social worth through work" (5). Yes, but that's not innovative, it's well known. Even the conceptual basis for the organization of the studies into tiiree groups is not explained, nor is it evident to this reader. However, several individual studies, though dated, are worthy ventures. In chapter 8 Ilda Lindell queries the linkages among work, social networks, and identity formation among die disadvantaged workers in the informal economy of Bissau (the capital of Guinea-Bissau). She concludes that "urban informal workers invest in a variety of social networks and make use of multiple identities in order to survive in the contemporary work environment" (161). In a study that is neady contextualized within the literature on unions in Africa and the history of plantation labor in Ndu, Piet Konings (chapter 12) considers trade union identity among plantation workers in Cameroon and the effects of structural adjustment at a subnational level. The corporation running the plantation eventually became bankrupt, aided by the weak national economy, cheap imports, and massive embezzlement. In "Sweet and Sour" (chapter 9), Marjorie Mbilinyi investigates how women have gained in economic power through increased labor force participation and innovative earning ventures. …

Africa's involvement in the changing world economy has been a long one, and its effects on the lives of Africans have been profound. Samir Amin and W. W. Rostow, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Samora Machel, would hardly dispute such a statement. But the question of whether this involvement has led Africans along a road toward material and social progress or into a dead end is very much in dispute. The title of this paper is the same as that of the introductory section of S. Herbert Frankel's classic study of 1938, Capital Investment in Africa. Becoming part of the world economy, for Frankel (1938: 1-3, 7), entailed the diffusion of Europe's capital, technology, ideas, and “civilized” form of government to closed, static, and undifferentiated economies. Now, writers such as Andre Gunder Frank (1967), Samir Amin (1974a, 1976), Walter Rodney (1972), and Immanuel Wallerstein (1979) stress instead the inexorable logic of a capitalist world system, whose effects on Africa are stifling instead of liberating. Both views share a unitary conception of the world economy, the first through a smug assumption that existing economic structures are part of civilization, and the second through an argument that sees change in Africa as a reflection of the growth of capitalism in Europe. The first conception of a world economy defined Africa's role as little more than holding back progress on a predetermined road; the second implied that Africa's influence on the world economy was not nearly so great. In the 1960s, scholars of Africa reversed such biases for a time. Especially among historians, an Africanist perspective emphasized “African activity, African adaptations, African choice, African initiative” (Ranger, 1968: xxi).