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Land, Labour Migration and Politics in Southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland byD. KowetReview by: Roger LeysReview of African Political Economy, No. 12, Mining (May - Aug., 1978), pp. 122-124Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3998035 .
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122 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY
Perhaps the most valuable new theoretical perspective brought by Jeffries to the study of African workers is to be found in his extensive analysis of the railway workers' political culture. Recognizing the use of this concept by conservative political scientists, the author prefers to adopt an approach similar to that used by E.P. Thompson in his classic study, The Making of the English Working Class. Iike Thompson, Jeffries shows that political consciousness is embodied in traditions, values, ideas and institutions. Political action is therefore informed by past experiences and the mythology of those experiences, as well as by contemporary circumstances. The railway workers' 'sense of history' ensures that the victories and defeats of yesterday are remembered by those participating in the conflicts of today.
Readers who come to this book expecting the author to herald the working class revolution in Ghana will be disappointed, for Jeffries' position is almost un- compromisingly incrementalist. Ghana's workers can hope to limit the worst excesses of exploitation and authoritarianism, and to contribute towards the creation of democratic and accountable political structures. Only if such hopes are completely frustrated might reformism give way to 'a more explicitly revolu- tionary orientation' (p.208). While this realistic perspective is preferable to unthinking proletarian messianism, it also underestimates the political flexibility of capital and the post-colonial state. Hitherto African regimes have, as Jeffries suggests, attempted to suppress mass political expression. However, the historical experience of working class struggle in other areas of the world suggests that in the future trade unions might actually be encouraged to adopt the reformist position advocated by Jeffries as a means of averting conflict over the funda- mentals of the post-colonial political economy.
This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political expression of class formation and conflict in Africa. For students of Ghanaian politics it represents an overdue shift of focus away from the essentially elitist and institutional perspective of the existing standard works. One can only hope that a cheaper, paperback edition of the book will give it the wide circulation it deserves.
Jeff Crisp
D. Kowet, Land, Labour Migration and Politics in Southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1978).
In assessing this work, its context within the Department of Political Science of the University of Uppsala to which Kowet submitted this dissertation has to be considered. Within the department a struggle is taking place, as elsewhere and as always, as to the scientific status of critical enquiry. More specifically, a group of students under the general direction of Dr Lars Rudebeck* has sought to contribute to the universal quest for a better theoretical and methodological
*Lars Rudebeck and the Akut group have been closely involved with this Review since it began. Two of his many published works have appeared in English: Guinea Bissau, A Study of Political Modernisation, (Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1974) and Party and People. A Study of Political Change in Tunisia, (Hirst, London, 1969).
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REVIEWS 123
understanding of the third world. This group, to which Kowet has not been formally linked, has been heavily attacked and the criticism has focused on the scientific validity of the work of a Marxist like Lars Rudebeck. While Rudebeck's work is certainly not above criticism much of the attack has been polemical and, as always, ignores the question of class struggle within the University milieu. More specifically, the whole debate about the scientific capability of Lars Rudebeck has ignored the question of whether such studies as are undertaken by the 'Akut' group to which he belongs are capable of undertaking and carrying out field studies and other forms of empirical research to which the general paradigm of critical and Marxist enquiry can be tested. The attempt to 'defeat' critical enquiry by ignoring what Englishmen would call the proof of the pudding is not confined to the Political Science Department of the University of Uppsala.
This context becomes relevant when we examine the approach adopted by Kowet for the study of politics in three small southern African states - Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (BLS). Kowet's approach is guided by Samir Amin's typology of three types of colonial penetration in sub-Saharan Africa in which the BLS states are characterised as 'labour reserves'. In so doing, and in contrast to the hegemonic paradigm of political development in the fifties and sixties, Kowet draws attention to: The importance of analysing the BLS states in terms of their international context, to which Rudebeck drew attention in his book Utveckling och Politik (Development & Politics) in 1970. The existence of a set of centre-periphery relationships vis-a'-vis Britain, South Africa and the BLS states. The primary economic function of these territories of providing cheap labour to white capital located in the Republic of South Africa.
In sum, this book is, for better or worse, the product of a more general quest for a paradigm for understanding third world politics and this general quest ought to be, but seldom is, attacked by asking a very simple question: does it work?
The specific theoretical framework of this study is that the BLS states became and were sustained as labour reserves of white capital by a process of appro- priation and control over the principal productive resource, land. In analysing the process of colonial penetration in southern Africa in terms of appropriation and control over land, Kowet's work is not original and indeed might have been strengthened by reference to a number of southern African studies which have focused on this process (including that of his colleague Dr Gabriele Winai Strom's Development and Dependence in Lesotho: the enclave of South Africa, Scan- dinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1978). What is original and provocative in this study is the claim that access to land continued to determine the basis of the labour reserve economy in the post-colonial situation.
Kowet further argues that the maintenance of the labour reserve economy necessitated: 1. the fragmentation of political power within the labour reserve, 2. the obstruction of a 'Pan-African' politics.
These functions were performed and made possible by a series of alliances between chiefs, colonial authorities and European capital in South Africa and, in the case of Botswana and Swaziland, within the BLS states.
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124 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY
For those engaged on substantial research work on southern Africa there is little doubt that the study has succeeded in its primary objective. Kowet indicates how control over access to land can, as a tool of scientific enquiry, be used to make a series of historical comparisons of the BLS states. In doing this Kowet has a firm grasp of traditional and neo-traditional usufruct rights to land and of the methods by which traditional chiefs accumulated control over land and hence access to political power. And this task is carried out without collapsing particular historical experience into predetermined categories. Given the relatively wide scope of the study - of three states over a period of approximately 100 years - this is a singular achievement.
The problems cannot, however, be ignored. This is particularly evident in the question of the links between the BLS states and the Republic of South Africa which receives superficial treatment and rests on certain interpretations of the detailed basis of the political arena of Lesotho where Kowet has chosen to attack Strom.
Initially, the importance of the context of this study was emphasized. These contextual comments are vital as much in the assessment of this work as any- where else. The 'silent class struggle' is fought not only at the University of Dar es Salaam!
Roger Leys.
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