The debate over the severity of problems associated with rural food production and rural development in Africa has come to dominate much of the current public discussion of the continent. It is an area where Africanists can be legitimately expected to respond. Food shortages should be an anomaly in a continent where more than seventy percent of the population works in the rural sector. At the same time, with all of the reported economic difficulties, the last decade and a half has witnessed a significant acceleration in population growth (Faruquee and Gulhati, 1983:25). There are more mouths to feed at the same time as most studies are reporting that there is a decline in per capita production (Berg et al., 1981, 1984). These studies indicate that population is growing at somewhere between two and three percent or more per annum while the corresponding increase in food production is running between one and two percent or less. Increasing numbers of people each year reach maturity, making greater demands on fragile tropical soil resources and bringing ever-more marginal land into production (Riddell, 1982). It is a situation where dramatic changes, good or bad, will occur.

Several recent studies have cited the tremendous cost involved if African agricultural systems were to be modernized along Euro-American lines (FAO 1978; Berg et al., 1981; Christensen et al., 1981). For example, the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) figures indicate that for twenty-four selected countries, mechanization and fertilizer costs alone would total more than $7.5 billion (US$ of 1975; figures cited in Nair, 1982).

The second crisis of the world market economy in this century affected all countries according to their respective position within the international hierarchy (Rosier, Dockes, 1983: 222ff). The weakest economies, classified as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), were hardest hit because their socio-economic profiles showed severe flaws during the preceding boom (Arnaud, 1984:91-100). They exported agrarian raw materials and, lacking an industrial basis, imported manufactured goods. Consequently, the low level of development limited the internal generation of surplus which made foreign assistance imperative and a major feature of the political economy (Hoogvelt, 1982). The share of African economies among the LDC countries is remarkably high (Sánchez Arnau, 1982:15ff). Those countries, however, which maintained close links with the former colonial metropolis suffered less than Tanzania which tried to establish an autonomous way toward social development.

Indebtedness was a characteristic feature of post-colonial reconstruction during the 1960s and 1970s. Foreign capital inflow was the most adequate means to build and to diversify the economy. Internal surplus generation remained severely restricted because of the colonial legacy. Hence, indebtedness was widely accepted among scholars and policy-makers as an unavoidable prerequisite for development. It was the dramatic shift from indebtedness to insolvency in the early 1980s that created alarm and jeopardized the international monetary system. The former commodity exchange lacked the necessary financial resources and a significant segment of the world economic system was about to be suddenly disaggregated.

The concept of aesthetics is a “red herring” in the study of contemporary art. Often aesthetics is equated with technique (cf. Henri, 1960: 88) or with adherence to the dominant themes of a particular school of art. In the case of “tourist” and “folk” art, the concept of aesthetics is generally salvaged by introducing the notion that artistic preferences are culturally relative and are influenced by the conditions under which the particular art form is produced. Warren d'Azevedo (1973: 7) thus qualifies: “The apparent absence of these factors [i.e., formal aesthetic standards], as well as the lack of clearly explicated concepts equivalent to art or aesthetics in most non-Western cultures, has caused us to suspect that the expression of artistry may be somehow fundamentally different from our own.”

This and similar assertions have led to the development of the approach of “ethnoaesthetics” based upon the internal standards of judgement and criticism generated by the values of the artists and the audience in non-Western cultures. Here I shall argue that neither the conventional notion of aesthetics nor the new concept of “ethnoaesthetics” (cf. Crowley, 1966; Thompson, 1968; Silver, 1979: 289-292) adequately explains the complex relationship between the production and reception of tourist art. Moreover, I shall introduce an analysis of aesthetics which defines tourist art objects as media of communication between the new art producers and their audience. Therefore, it is necessary to begin with a basic definition of tourist art in Africa.

African farmers vary in their access to the basic resources of agricultural production: land, labor, and capital. The availability of these resources affects farmer decisions about choice of crops, crop mixes, and strategies to optimize agricultural production. Understanding the variation in resource availability among farmers and the consequences of that variation for production is one necessary step in understanding the production strategies of contemporary farmers. Understanding their present strategies is a necessary step in transforming African agriculture to better meet the continent's needs.

This paper looks at Malinke farmers in Kita in Western Mali in light of these issues. After some background information on the area and the study, the paper delineates three strata of farmers with different access to basic production resources, the most important of which is labor. The remainder of the paper looks at the consequences of those differing resource availabilities by examining different strategies pursued by affluent, middle, and poor farmers in one crop important in the region, peanuts.

Although Africans are very concerned about food production, it is still important to look at cropping decisions in regard to crops that, like peanuts, are grown primarily for cash. In many places like Kita, these crops are the primary means by which farmers earn money, and they are reluctant to change to crops with unknown earning potential. National governments, too, are hesitant to eliminate export crops totally, for they still need the foreign exchange that they earn.

In his article “Language and the Media in Zambia,” Graham Mytton (1978) points out that: “Radio is the supreme medium of communication in Zambia, and the only one reaching a majority of the population.” The Zambia Broadcasting Services provides two groups of programs, the “Home Service,” in English and the seven national Zambian languages, and the “General Service,” which is mostly in English, with a bit of programming in Bemba, Nyanja, and, until 1980, Shona and Ndebele, the latter two languages being directed at listeners in Zimbabwe. The first station in Central Africa to broadcast programs directed almost exclusively towards African listeners, this Lusaka-based operation was from the beginning embroiled in the controversy over which Zambian languages should be used in programming. Each of the seven national Zambian languages actually represent larger linguistic groupings, often consisting of fifteen or even twenty distinct languages or dialects (depending on the way language is defined in a given context). Nearly each of these subgroups represent ethnic identities, with their own cultures and philosophies. The clamor for greater representation on the airwaves has historically come from such smaller groups who feel passed over, or neglected, by official news and cultural programming. The radio service, as well as government officials, counter such demands by stating the nationalistic and nationalizing goals of unifying, rather than fragmenting, the country's numerous ethnic groups.

In traditional Africa stories belong to everyone. The story-tellers, griot or grandparent, repositories of wisdom, speak to the village. Children are there. Children participate. Furthermore, the art of storytelling is not confined to specialists. Although a griot may study for years to leam long, complicated epics and extensive genealogies, the villagers will know from childhood their tribal legends, and they can follow their own lines in family traditions. They can interact spontaneously with the song, dance, or dramatic recitation of the singer-narrator.

It was natural that when Western literary genres featuring the imposed European languages were integrated with the African oral tradition the narrative took on new form and expression. Some of today's internationally known African writers have created new forms of novels and short stories (not tales). In doing so they have used their own linguistic creations: “Nigerian” or “Ghanaian” English and “Negritude” French. Although Western readers were reluctant to accept such variation, many readers today find excellence in literature from Africa.

Nigeria's anglophone writers led the way in gaining international acclaim for their prose fiction. Chinua Achebe's landmark Things Fall Apart (1958) is still predominant, often the only novel written by a contemporary African novelist familiar to a general readership. Cyprian Ekwensi, a prolific writer of all varieties of prose fiction, got his start with Onitsha market literature. He wrote People of the City in 1954 and it was reissued in Britain in 1963. Hans Zell (Zell, Bundy and Coulon, 1983:383) considers it to be “the first contemporary African novel.”