Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T06:26:57.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Micro-Democracy? The Merger of Farmer Unions in Zimbabwe*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Michael Bratton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Political analysts, both liberal and historicist, point to the quality of associational life in civil society as an important factor affecting the installation and consolidation of democratic regimes. For de Tocqueville (1966), democracy hinges on the creation of voluntary associations through which citizens learn to act politically and to demand accountability from the state. For Gramsci, organizations in civil society—such as schools, churches, unions, and interest groups—can help to legitimate the prevailing political regime by either reinforcing or challenging the way power is exercised (Femia 1981). People therefore apparently get the governments they deserve: where they associate readily, govern themselves democratically, and assert independent opinions, they can contribute to the construction of sustainable democratic institutions, even at the macro-political level; where people eschew self-organization in favor of establishing personal ties to powerful patrons and by deferring to entrenched authority, they help to reproduce at all levels of the polity the patterns of rule that already prevail within the state and the broader society.

Africanists cannot comment definitively on the character of associational life in Africa because the contemporary literature is thin in several respects. We currently lack a theoretical framework to account adequately for the development and status of voluntary associations and the relationships of such groups to the state. The available conceptual models of group formation and interest representation—such as pluralism, neo-Marxism or corporatism—were designed to account for politics in parts of the world distant from Africa. When Africanists borrow these models, we too often do so unselectively and uncritically, failing to recognize that “the goal is not to recycle theory but to reinterpret it” (Bianchi 1989, 10).

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , April 1994 , pp. 9 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This paper is part of a research project on Farmer Organizations and Agricultural Policy in Africa made possible by grants from the Ford Foundation and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award. Additional resources were provided by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. The author acknowledges with thanks the collaboration of John Makumbe, the research assistance of Jacqueline Rugayo, and the helpful comments on an earlier draft by Robert Bates, Nicolas van de Walle, and referees for the African Studies Review.

References

Abdelrahman, Abdel Rahman. 1989. “The Political Economy of IMF-Supported Stabilization Programs in the Sudan 1966-1984.” Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University,Google Scholar
Barkan, Joel. n.d. “Resurrecting Modernization Theory and the Emergence of Civil Society in Kenya and Nigeria.” Prepared for Festschrift in Honor of James S. Coleman, edited by Apter, David E. and Rosberg, Carl R. (untitled).Google Scholar
Barnett, Tony. 1975. “The Gezira Scheme: Production of Cotton and the Reproduction of Underdevelopment.” In Beyond the Sociology of Development, edited by Oxaal, Ivor et al, 183–207. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Bayart, Jean-François. 1989. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longman 1993.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Robert. 1989. Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt. New York, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bratton, Michael. 1987. “The Comrades and the Countryside: The Politics of Agricultural Policy in Zimbabwe.” World Politic, 39/2:174–202.Google Scholar
Bratton, Michael 1989. “Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa.” World Politics 41/3:407–30.Google Scholar
Bratton, Michael. 1990. “Enabling the Voluntary Sector in Africa: The Policy Context.” In African Governance in the 1990s, edited by Joseph, Richard, 104–13. Atlanta GA: The Carter Center.Google Scholar
Bratton, Michael. forthcoming 1994. “Peasant-State Relations in Post-Colonial Africa: Patterns of Engagement and Disengagement.” In State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation, edited by Kohli, Atui, Shue, Vivien and Migdal, Joel. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Callaghy, Thomas. 1984. The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Chazan, Naomi, Mortimer, John, Ravenhill, John, and Rothchild, Donald eds. 1988. Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.Google Scholar
Clapham, Christopher. 1982. “Clientelism and the State.” In Private Patronage and Public Power, edited by Clapham, Christopher, 1–36. London: Francis Pinter.Google Scholar
Collier, David and Collier, Ruth Berins. 1977. “Who Does What, To Whom, and How: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Latin American Corporatism.” In Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America, edited by Malloy, James M., 489–512. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Diamond, Larry. 1988. “Introduction.” In Democracy in Developing Countries: Africa, edited by Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan and Lipset, Seymour Martin, 1–32. Boulder CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers.Google Scholar
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1972. Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Femia, Joseph V. 1981. Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Grant, Wyn. 1985. “Introduction.” In The Political Economy of Corporatism, edited by Grant, Wyn. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herbst, Jeffrey. 1990. State Politics in Zimbabwe. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hodgkin, Thomas. 1956. Nationalism in Colonial Africa. London: Frederick Muller.Google Scholar
Hyden, Goran. 1980. Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G.. 1982. Personal Rule in Black Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, Richard. 1987. Democracy and Prebendai Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leys, Colin. 1975. Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neocolonialism. London: Heinneman.Google Scholar
Maithai, J. K. 1974. Coffee in the Kenyan Economy: An Economic Analysis. Nairobi: East Africa Literature Bureau.Google Scholar
Maliyamkono, T. L. 1990. The Second Economy in Tanzania. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Ng'ethe, Njuguna and Odero, Kenneth. 1991. “Farmers' Organizations in Kenya: Interest Groups or State Agents?.” Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi, mimeo.Google Scholar
McGaffey, Janet. 1987. Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nyang'oro, Julius. 1989. “The State of Politics in Africa: The Corporatist Factor.” Studies in Comparative International Development 24/1 (Spring): 5–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyang'oro, Julius and Shaw, Timothy M.. 1989. Corporatism in Africa: Comparative Analysis and Practice. Boulder CO: Westview Special Studies on Africa.Google Scholar
Rogowski, Ronald and Wasserspring, Lois. 1971. Does Political Development Exist? Corporatism in Old and New Societies. Beverley Hills: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Ronen, Dov ed. 1986. Democracy and Pluralism in Africa. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.Google Scholar
Rukuni, Mandivamba and Eicher, Carl. forthcoming 1994. Behind Zimbabwe's Agricultural Revolution. Harare, Zimbabwe: University of Zimbabwe Press.Google Scholar
Sandbrook, Richard. 1986. The Politics of African Economic Stagnation. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schmitter, Phillippe C. 1974. “Still the Century of Corporatism?” In Pike, Frederick P. and Strich, Thomas eds, The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Shaw, Timothy M. 1982. “Beyond Neocolonialism: Varieties of Corporatism in Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 20:239–61.Google Scholar
Sklar, Richard. 1979. “The Nature of Class Domination in Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 17/4: 531–52.Google Scholar
Smith, R. Cherer. 1979. The Maize Story and the Farmers' Co-op. Salisbury: Mardon Printers.Google Scholar
Stepan, Alfred. 1978. State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Swainson, Nicola. 1980. The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya 1918-1977. Berkeley, University of California Press.Google Scholar
de, Tocqueville Alexis. 1966. Democracy in America, edited by Mayer, J.P. and Lerner, Max. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1964. “Voluntary Associations.” In Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa, edited by Coleman, James and Rosberg, Carl G., 318–39. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Widner, Jennifer A. 1992. “Constructing a Civil Society: Farmers and Political Life in Cote D'Ivoire.” Paper presented at a conference on Civil Society on Africa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Google Scholar
Wiseman, John A. 1990. Democracy in Black Africa: Survival and Revival. New York: Paragon House.Google Scholar