90 Book Reviews
Comparative advantage is an economic term which is used to determine which
commodity or commodities a country, region or individual farm should specialise in.
The concept includes the impact of conditions which affect both supply and demand
and is based on the premise that the efficient allocation of resources is determined
where the prices are the same throughout the largest possible market area, the
differences reflecting only transport costs. Thus die price to both the producers and
consumers will be higher in deficit areas than the price for producers and consumers
in surplus areas but the price ratios between commodities will be the same.
According to the theory of comparative advantage it will pay to specialise in and
exchange that commodity in which there is the least relative disadvantage up to the
point where price differentials reflect only transport costs. The theory proves mat
it will pay both the well and poorly endowed area to specialise and exchange, even
where the one has an absolute advantage in all commodities, provided that there is a
difference in die relative prices.
Although it is not of major significance to this text, die omission is a serious one
and the publishers should be requested to send out a correction to pages 36, 37 and
42. The book is nonetheless a very useful text and the audior is to be congratulated for
his original approach and simple explanations. I would still recommend it as a most
useful text for agricultural economists, anthropologists, geographers, rural planners,
crop and animal scientists working with small farmers, and all those associated with
development generally, including environmentalists and extension agents.
Reviewed by Kay Muir-Leresche, University of Zimbabwe.
Review of the African Poor: a History, by John Illife, African Studies Series 58,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987 (387pp, price not stated).
This is a very sophisticated, and maybe even compelling, apologia for market forces
(alias capitalism) applied to very inappropriate contexts, from Christian Ethiopia to
'the transformation of poverty in Soudiern Africa'. From the monasteries of
Ethiopia in die diirteenth century to resettlement sites in colonial South Africa, the
author has martialled an impressive array of so-called empirical data from a diverse
range of primary and secondary sources.
The methodological section, ie Chapter 1, which grapples with some of the nettles
besetting 'comparative history', does not manage to convince the reader that social
science categories that have been applied to die history of the poor in Europe in the
middle ages can be mechanically transferred to the African continent in the 20di
century. At another level the book is an attempt to offer a sentimental but historicised
justification of 'aid' and other Band-Aid solutions to die pressing problems of
poverty.
There is also a remarkable failure to blend social and economic historiography into
die very graphic descriptions of poor Africans cited in the book — from "palsied,
leprous and scrofolous" beggars in Ediiopia in 1520 to recollections by a widow in
die Ciskei bantustan, that her husband had been "a good, brave man . . . he never
gave in . . . (But) Here in Elukhanyweni he just gave in and stayed in bed die whole
time and then he died. . . . I can understand why my husband died. He died of
shame and sorrow".
A prominent diesis that runs diroughout the book is that the growth of die 'town'
Book Reviews 91
or city has somehow alleviated poverty. There is no attempt to examine the patterns
of economic organisation introduced by European colonialism, and the levels of
economic performance in the traditional societies of Africa, Christian or otherwise,
before they were enmeshed in the international economy created by, first, merchant
and later industrial capitalism, and now, the invisible hands of finance capital.
The strenuous efforts in this book to distinguish between 'structural' and
'conjunctuaT poverty amount to empty scholastic phrasemongering. This is directed
at mystifying the real, as opposed to the relative, basic causes for mass poverty in
colonial and post-colonial Africa. 'Structural poverty' is supposed to be the long term
poverty of individuals due to their personal or social circumstances, and conjunctural
poverty is supposed to be temporary poverty which ordinarily self-sufficient people
may be thrown into by crisis.
Though the author has no knowledge of Ethiopian languages, the chapter on
Christian Ethiopia informs "the broad character of the poor and their means of
survival over some 700 years as a basis for comparison and change in sub-Saharan
Africa as a whole". That Ethiopia is unique in never having been colonised is
conveniently brushed aside. The impact of market forces on family cohesion and
segmentation is not considered. The following edinic bound explanation for mass
poverty and insecurity, which is supposed to apply mutatis mutandis for the 19th
century and 20th century, is only one example of the faulty analytical reasoning in the
book (pl5):
"Insecurity helps to explain why the very poor were numerous in Ethiopia, but it
does not explain why they were more visible than in other African societies which
also suffered insecurity. For this there were perhaps two reasons. One lay in the
family structure of the dominant Amharapeople.They were a bilateral people who
reckoned descent and inheritance from both father and mother. Instead of being
bound into a corporate descent group, each individual dierefore had a range of
social identities and rights from which he could choose the most advantageous.
Bilateral societies are characteristically individualistic and mobile, both socially
and geographically."
We are at loss to see how the bilateral family could have led to insecurity.
The author could have done a better job had he not restricted himself to 'official
documents' and secondary academic ephemera on poverty, and integrated some
literary sources for the experience of poverty. As the book stands it lacks an overall
synthesis of the problem. A good starting point might have been the consideration of
the antonym of poverty — development. That would have provided a better basis for
a comparative perspective between Europe and Africa. Raymond Williams
(1975:340-341) has noted, concerning the entire concept of'aid', which is supposed
to lead to development that
"it is ideologically overlaid by the abstract idea of'development': a poor country is
'on its way' to being a rich one, just as in industrial Britain, in the nineteenth
century, a poor man could be seen as someone who given the right ideas and effort
was 'on his way' to being a rich man, but was for the time being at a lower stage of
this development".
Reviewed by T D Mashanda-Shopo, Division of History and Politics, Zimbabwe.
Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS), Harare.
92 Book Reviews
References
Williams R 1975 The Country and the City, Paladin, London.
National and Class Conflict in the Horn of Africa, John Markakis, African Studies
Series 55, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987 (314pp, price not stated).
This may become the standard work on die Horn of Africa. It demonstrates painstaking
scholarship and mature thought. John Markakis surveys the nations and classes
of Ethiopia, the Sudan, Somalia and surrounding areas. He shows how colonialism
radically tipped the rural-urban balance in favour of the towns. Imperial rule gave
way to nationalist control of the state; radical soldiers took over from the nationalists;
the soldiers turned to socialism; rural and other dissident nationalists rebelled
unsuccessfully. War and famine were the result of national and class struggle in
unforgiving terrain.
Chapter one surveys the material base and the institutions humans built upon it.
The natural endowment was parsimonious. "Conflict was the inevitable comcomitant
of scarcity and mobility, with land and water as its primary objects" (p24). Chapter
two treats the brief but shattering colonial period. Agriculture was transformed, and
the towns became supreme over the countryside. Pastoralism was economically,
socially and politically marginalised. Subsistence cultivation was irreversibly
debased. Nevertheless, there was some indigenous rural support for the resulting
post-colonial state.
Chapter three argues that anticolonial nationalism was not a mass crusade. It
mobilised the group's spawned by the new economy and state. Colonial denial of
access to the state was the mainspring of nationalism. The victorious nationalists
therefore preserved the colonial economic and state structures once they had
achieved access. Chapter four treats in fine detail the attacks on the state in postcolonial
times. Uneven development exacerbated material and social disparities.
Disadvantaged groups fought for access; the nationalist rulers fell back on the armies;
eventually the military took control.
The fifth chapter is the longest.and chronicles 'the Eritrean revolution'. Temporal
considerations lay beneath religious mobilisation. Some muslims, lacking access
under the ancien regime, opposed Ethiopian rule of Eritrea. Other Muslim notables
hoped to regain lost fortunes, and supported Ethiopian rule. Initial Christian
support in Eritrea for Ethiopian rule dwindled when federation gave way to a
provincial system with control held in Addis Ababa. Christian support for Eritrean
nationalism grew; but that nationalism was riven by fractional splits. Each fraction
wanted preferential access to the nascent Eritrean state. Some fractions sought Arab
support; others did not. Eritrean identity became primarily a site of struggle between
fractions.
By contrast, as chapter six explains, dissidence in the southern Sudan seemed less
nationalist. The goal seemed merely regional recognition. Nevertheless, Markakis
argues, the dissidents wanted control of the state in the southern Sudan, and were
thus the same as any other nationalist movement in the Horn. Again, the dissident
movement was highly fractionalised.
Somalia at independence lacked three regions which it coveted: the Ogaden, the
northern Kenyan frontier, and Djibouti. Uprisings in these regions sought Somali