In this paper, I am less interested in the differences between the main competing schools, than in their similarities. The differences were often artificially emphasized at the expense of basic common assumptions. All approaches we have used in African studies are deeply rooted in 19th-century epistemology since the neo-Marxist epistemological break never materialized (Jewsiewicki, 1987). Notwithstanding the fundamental importance of Marxist approaches to the transformation of academic knowledge about societies in Africa, there was no intellectual revolution.

The modern world system approach that belongs to the radical paradigm partially accounts for this failure. As knowledge is socially produced and strongly related to the power relationships, one cannot expect a radical epistemological break to occur in a society that is a historical product of 19th-century economic and social systems. In radical paradigm terms, how can one expect a capitalist mode of production to produce an epistemology and a theory that would be a “Copernican revolution” (Sahli quoted in Jewsiewicki, 1986: 5) in knowledge?

As Martha Gephart (1986: iii) stated recently, “An overview paper is a fortuitous marriage of an important topic and… individual.” Such is the case of this paper initially commissioned as an evaluation of Marxist African studies. The final result mediates my personal history as an African scholar and my perception of the growing difficulties of African studies with ‘Africa,’ their invented object. (Mudimbe, 1988)

In many respects the ambitions of this paper are similar to the goals of Meier and Rudwick (1986: xi):

A quarter of a century after independence, few would dispute that African industry is in crisis. In a recent survey of 343 factories in over 16 African countries, spanning sectors as diverse as beverages, textiles, pulp and paper, flour milling, sugar refining and cement, fully 23 percent of the companies were found to have ceased production by mid-1980 and a further 57 percent were functioning at less than 70 percent of nominal capacity—well below their break-even point (Inst. de l'Entreprise, 1985: 16). No African country has been spared, including those that, like the Ivory Coast, had been regarded as economic miracles in the first two post-independence decades.

From both the left and the right have thus come serious questions about the net contribution that industry has made to development in sub-Saharan Africa. The architects of Africa's industrialization process—multinational firms, states and foreign aid agencies— have also come under attack. But if the critiques have been rich, they have generated surprisingly little new data and few innovative prescriptions. Policy initiatives thus flow mainly from a single source, the international lending community, and within it, from the IMF and the World Bank, which have become its guiding spirits.

Two features are common to their proposals (Bernstein, 1986; Loxley, 1984; Marsden and Belot, 1987; World Bank, 1981, 1984, 1987). One is an implicit movement away from industry and towards agriculture through the implementation of policies to liberalize tariffs, reduce the role of the state, “get prices right,” and encourage exports. The other is an explicit move towards the rehabilitation of African industry within existing structures, thus tacitly accepting the particular paradigm that has given to African industry its current form and fragility.