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
Book Reviews 93
support, but the Somali state was ill-prepared to help. In chapter seven Markakis
describes three futile rebellions, one in the Ogaden in 1963, one in the northern
Kenyan frontier from 1964 to 1967, and one in Bale and Sidamo in Ethiopia from
1963 to 1968. Pastoralists and subsistence farmers could not resist the modern state,
but the conditions that led them to rebel did not disappear.
Chapter eight depicts the seizing of power by radical military regimes in the Sudan
(May 1969) and Somalia (October 1969); it leads on to the rash war with Ethiopia. By
1980 in Somalia, "the promise of the October Revolution had turned into a
nightmare" (p234).
In Markakis's view, a "striking aspect of radical military rule is the espousal of
socialism, an ideology the soldiers try to blend with nationalism in order to shore up
the foundations of the new state" (ibid). Markakis believes socialism in professional
soldiers is the outcome of "idealism, naivety and opportunism" (p235). After a
century of capitalist imperialism the only credible alternative is socialism, and the
soldiers are 'seduced' by the promise of socialist transformation. Socialism rallies the
discontented and gives sole legitimacy to the state as the champion of the masses. The
labour movement comes into conflict with the soldiers, who strive for productivity in
the state sector. The labour movement promptly loses autonomy, "allegedly because
in a socialist society there is no need for autonomous organisations to defend class or
corporate interests" if bid).
The radical soldiers claim that ethnic and regional splits have no basis once class
contradictions are resolved. When such splits persist, wars of suppression result.
The soldiers end up in a struggle for survival like that of their predecessors, and are
capable of complete political somersaults. These, and the changing of foreign
patrons, mark, not autonomy, but the nadir of the state's fortunes, according to
Markakis.
Haile Selassie's fall in 1974, chapter nine tells us, was rather different. The
Dergue's "members shared a mutinous disposition and the desire to hobble the
ruling clique of aristocrats and imperial retainers, but had no idea of how to replace
them" (p237). They proclaimed a specifically Ethiopian socialism, whiph "was hardly
Marxism-Leninism, but was a start". The economy was nationalised, displacing
foreign managers by the Ethiopian intelligentsia; and land ownership was radically
reformed without compensation. This creative phase of the revolution, in Markakis's
opinion, served the social classes which stood to gain from it. However, opposition
from the left pulled the regime in a more radical direction still. The Dergue purged
the opposition and instituted two internal purges of its own. Colonel Mengistu took
power and conducted an official campaign of'Red Terror' (p243). At this Somalia
invaded the Ogaden; the United States cut off assistance; and the Soviet Union
prompty helped the Ethiopians. War disadvantaged the opposition. The people
supported the state in expelling the Somali invaders.
The Ethiopian government then turned to the problem of dissidence in Eritrea,
and after sustained conflict managed to splinter the Eritrean movement into rival
fractions. The Ethiopian state had then also to contend with young radicals in Tigrai
and Oromo. Nevertheless, the Ethiopian government entrenched its rule, and
sustained a vast military effort, despite the famine of the nineteen-eighties.
In 1974 Haile Selasse had been criticised because "drought is natural, famine is
man-made". In 1984 "the Dergue blamed the famine entirely on the drought"
94 Book Reviews
(p269). The tenth anniversary of the revolution was celebrated. "Foreign guests
flocked to Addis Ababa to be feted in grand style, and to applaud the self-praising
rhetoric of the country's rulers who barely mentioned the famine. This, while the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode through the countryside" (p269).
Both the opponents and the supporters of die Ethiopian state embraced socialism,
Markakis tells us, but socialism "defends the state by denying legitimacy to those who
seek its reform" (p270). Moreover, because of its thoroughgoing land reform, the
Ethiopian state was able "to raise peasant armies and fight multiple wars for a
decade" (p27O).
Markakis's concluding chapter is a powerful synthesis. States in Africa have created
nations, rather dian vice-versa. State- and dissident-nationalisms have the common
factor of exclusion from (or access to) power and its perquisites (p273). When they
dash, die one has die power and the other does not. The roots of power in the
post-colonial state lie in die towns, not the countryside. The state is "an institution for
which the traditional pastoralist mode of production has no need. In the Horn,
pastoralists were fighting primarily against the existing states, radier than for die
states of the future envisaged by the dissident nationalists" (p275).
Socialism, in Markakis's view, was used to prop up the state when nationalism
proved too weak by itself. "The choice of socialism was not made arbitrarily by the few
who wielded power. It was dictated by desperate need and popular expectation.
Indeed, no other option was considered credible at the time: a telling verdict on the
failure of conventional development strategies" (p275). In this, Markakis is patendy
correct: conventional economics has little to say and no support to show, in the Horn
of Africa. Yet Markakis is too cynical about socialism in general and Marxism in
particular, in die Horn. There was and remains a substantial popular support for
socialism, which goes well beyond any supposed desperation or lack of alternatives.
Markakis understandably seeks to champion die starving peasants and pastoralists.
Collapse of production in this sector has no impact elsewhere, because it has long
since ceased to feed die urban people. "Awareness of famine reaches die towns only
widi die arrival of starving humanity from the countryside" (p275). The lack of
impact on die towns "explains the indifference of die townspeople and the
callousness of rulers" (ibid). The Sudan directed lorries from famine relief, to supply
Khartoum widi sugar for die Ramadan celebrations.
Markakis concludes diat modern military and administrative resources give no
recourse to die peasantry; moreover, die peasant ranks are always ethnically
fragmented. On the other hand, he claims, peasants and pastoralists join dissident
movements diat sometimes transcend edinic divisions (p276). This conclusion is
romantic: there was and remains substantial rural support-for Addis Ababa, as die
peasant armies demonstrate.
Markakis begins by showing diat force was the only means of securing claims to
pasture and water, and was a constant factor in nomad life (p 16). The root of war is die
parsimony of die material base. If the towns now have an alternative base it is not
surprising diat diey are callous and aggressive towards die starving. Amartya Sen's
law holds: diere is food adjacent to every famine, but the starving do not have die
economic or political power to eat it (p xv).
The problem remains: die pastoralist and peasant economic base is long since
Book Reviews 95
destroyed. Their mode of production is invalid. The future has to lie both in
urbanisation,and in rural revival, built on very different productive forms. The Horn
of Africa is in no hurry to discover these new forms. It may well be that in socialism
some of die answers will be found, despite Markakis's doubts. The vast intellectual
and economic powerhouse of die west will undoubtedly play a part too. The solution
will still be African. Until dien, Markakis's description will hold true: die "starving,
homeless multitude were now counted in millions" (p xv).
Reviewed by Renfrew Christie, University of Cape Town.
Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, B E Harrell-Bond, OUP,
Oxford, 1986 (440pp, price not given).
This book is an appraisal of assistance programmes to Ugandan refugees who crossed
into Southern Sudan in 1982. The publication of die book was very timely in view of
die currency of refugee issues in Africa, and die rapid increase in die incidence of
forced migration. The vast majority of refugees and displaced persons in Africa are in
rural areas and had, until recently, escaped die scrutiny of researchers and academics.
This book is one of dlose rare instances of such scrutiny.
Although many voluntary humanitarian aid agencies have rallied to help in
instances of tragic involuntary mass movements of people, the assistance offered in
such cases has rarely been questioned. Usually, questioning such seemingly necessary
aid could be regarded as inhuman, since one would be asked whether one would
rather see death due to hunger than humanitarian aid. What is being questioned in
this book is definitely not the advent of aid itself, but how it is delivered and the extent
to which the recipients are involved in decisions that affect their lives.
The tide of this book is most telling and makes no pretence to neutrality. The
stance taken, right from die start, provokes even the 'converted' to furdier question
die benefits of aid. The perspective adopted is dear and the frankness is humbling.
The book is divided into two parts. The introduction (27 pages) gives a clear and
succinct background to the study and clearly exposes some of the assumptions diat
have hitherto dominated discussion on the behaviour of refugees and responses to
need by aid agencies. The introduction, therefore, puts die reader in a frame of mind
to absorb the remainder of the detail.
Part of the book describes the 'patterns of flight' by Ugandans, the characteristics
Df their settlements and the demographic features of the refugee population. Part two
of the book looks at die reaction of aid agencies and die impact of die delivery
systems. In this book, the author destroys the major assumptions on refugee
behaviour and exposes die subdeties of human need in contrast to the intentions of
aid agencies. The revelations from die study could be quite disturbing to those who
believe strongly in the intentions of humanitarianism and those who have given
selflessly to diis cause.
The book is of practical value not only to researchers (who could find inspiration
in the innovative methodology) but also to practitioners and implementers of aid
agency policies. For die latter group the book may be threatening in that it questions
dieir selflessness. The writer, however, maintains diat diis was not die major
intention of die book. It is stressed in several parts of the book that if cutting back of