Mafeje on Development and Democracy

HE crossed rivers, trekked deserts, navigated oceans and climbed mountains like the conqueror of past.

This man, however, was not a conqueror. He was simply exploring the frontiers, boundaries of knowledge. But perhaps there are no boundaries or frontiers of knowledge or, at best, they keep shifting like the sand dunes of the Namib.So, when Archie Mafeje died peacefully in his Pretoria apartment two years back, he stopped his journey of exploring and thinking. We just don’t live long enough to complete what we set out to do. Remember that even Marx didn’t live to complete his most monumental work ‘Capital’, Engels had to sift through a mountain of manuscripts to finish it. So every generation has to take off from where the other ended.In any case, it was on that day (March 28, 2007) that the scholarly community and Pan-Africanists across Africa and beyond lost one of their quintessential men of the social sciences. Paying tribute to Mafeje last year, Professor Adebayo Olukoshi at Codesria in Senegal, said ‘the giant has moved on’ and Issa Shivji at Dar es Salaam University said ‘he who couldn’t be shaken from his ground.’He was a towering figure indeed. But many people, especially the young generation of scholars, don’t know Mafeje’s work. Thus we should heed Columbia University Professor, Mahmood Mamdami’s call for the memorialisation of Mafeje’s life and work to make it accessible to those who didn’t know him. This writer sat at the feet of this great scholar at the American University in Cairo.Now Mafeje’s academic and intellectual reach was vast and broad and his work penetrating, thus one doesn’t know where to start or end in this space. But one of his academic interests was the impact of the social sciences on development. In a paper presented in 2001, he argued that: ‘I’m convinced that neither the social sciences nor their research outputs have an impact on ‘development’, as is positively conceived’. Mafeje was walking a tight rope here – bur he is not saying that social science insights are irrelevant. He meant unlike the physical sciences, social science insights are not reducible to operative technologies.And he singled out economists for a systematic attack.Just when you thought that economists have the answers on issues of development, Mafeje said that’s not so. For him real economics is made by the producers and economists only rationalise and systematise what is already done and cite many of the development plans that have failed to bring about development in Africa.At the time of Ghana’s independence, for example, Nkrumah had the services of some of the world’s best economists – Dudley Seers, Nicholas Kaldor, Arthur Lewis, Albert Hirschman and Tony Killick but no development happened in Ghana.Currently Africa is awash with highly qualified economic advisors from the West but there is no ‘development’ in sight. And he would argue that those who believe that agriculture is the backbone of African economies are at a loss as to what the best solution is. Economists are not any wiser and have nothing significant to say about the prospects for agrarian transformation, he argued.As if he was foreseeing the current economic crisis, Mafeje said that ‘at the moment the global economy is threatened by a recession. And yet, the new neo-classical economists with their supposed technology, linear programming, all they can do is to wait and see like most of us.If the foregoing was not enough to make his point, Mafeje also contrasted the cases of China and India. He said India was endowed with some of the best economists in the world yet its economic development has been tardy while China which doesn’t boast of any internationally recognised economists has made spectacular economic development to address poverty.On democracy in Africa, Mafeje maintained that it can only refer to two things: first, the extent to which the people’s will enters decisions which will affect their life chances (perhaps echoing C.B. Macpherson here) and second, the extent to which their means of livelihood are guaranteed.In political terms the first demand doesn’t suggest capture of ‘state power’ by the people but it does imply ascendancy to state power by a national democratic alliance in which the popular classes hold the balance of power.The second demand implies equitable distribution of resources. Now, neither liberal democracy, imposed ‘multi-partyism’ nor ‘market forces’ can guarantee these two conditions.It transpired, therefore, that the issue is neither liberal nor ‘compradorial’ democracy but social democracy, Mafeje would insist.A radical and critic, Mafeje is best remembered for his oft-quoted article on ‘The Ideology of Tribalism’.