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The Object of African History: A Materialist Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Henry Bernstein  and
Jacques Depelchin
Henry Bernstein
Affiliation:
University of Dar es Salaam
Jacques Depelchin
Affiliation:
University of Dar es Salaam
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Extract

The establishment of a journal specifically concerned with method in African history is to be welcomed. However, the early issues of History in Africa have demonstrated that the content of the term ‘method’ is itself at stake. The great majority of contributions to date have seized on a narrow and limiting conception of method as the development of techniques of collecting and evaluating data. The necessity of such techniques is not in question, but they are subordinate to, and indeed partially determined by, a broader and more fundamental conception of method as the principles of investigation and explanation in scientific practice. There are historians who do not regard the production of historical knowledge as a scientific enterprise, hence subject to certain theoretical demands, and they would not want to. Accordingly, they need not read on, but we are confident that there are others who are interested in method in the second sense and who may also have noticed its virtual absence in the pages of this journal.

On the other hand, it would be disingenuous to imply that a common interest in method in the broader and more fundamental sense is sufficient ground for agreement. Our argument in what follows derives from an understanding of historical materialism that has nothing in common with the stereotyped views held by it bourgeois critics. Our central concern is with method as the principles of constructing scientific explanations. But what is to be explained? We attempt to show that method necessarily starts with the correct posing of questions, as well as bearing on their investigation.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 5 , 1978 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978

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References

1. We are saying this on the basis Of the first two numbers of History in Africa that were available to us, as well as on the basis of the general trend in the discipline.

2. In the second issue of History in Africa, several of the contributors pay tribute to Vansina's, Jan pioneering work Oral Tradition (London, 1965)Google Scholar, and rightly so. This work still awaits a fully critical treatment, but we may point out that in a number of instances “historical methodology” is treated as a compendium of techniques, a tendency even more manifest in Reconstructing African Culture History ed. Gabel, Creighton and Bennett, Norman (Boston, 1967).Google Scholar In his opening article in the first issue of the journal, David Henige makes a strong plea for “comparative history” which presumably reflects an awareness of the need for some theoretical stiffening in the discipline. However, advocates of ‘comparative history,’ ‘interdisciplinary history’ and other fasionable phrases of the day should be beware of thinking that the problems of a scientific history are solved thereby.

3. For example, Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, Histoire de l'Afrique noire (Paris, 1972), p. 27.Google Scholar

4. This essay derives from and substantially develops several previous papers by the authors. Bernstein, Henry, “Marxism and African History: Endre Sík and his Critics,” Kenya Historical Review 5(1977), pp. 1–21Google Scholar; Depelchin, Jacques, “Toward a Problematic History of Africa,” Tanzania Zamani 18(1976)Google Scholar, reprinted in Journal of Southern African Affairs 2(1977), pp. 5–10Google Scholar; idem, “African History and the Ideological Reproduction of Exploitative Relations of Production,” African Development 2(1977). An earlier version of the paper was presented at a seminar of the History Department, University of Dar es Salaam. The authors have benefited from additional comments and criticisms by Gary Littlejohn, Daniel O'Meara, and Michaela von Freyhold.

5. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology, ed. Arthur, C. (London, 1970), p. 48.Google Scholar

6. Marx, , Grundrisse, ed. Nicolaus, M. (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 85.Google Scholar

7. It is impossible to give anything like a complete bibliography of the course of this debate over the past decade, but see, inter alia, the publications of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes: Sur les sociétés précapitalistes. Textes choisis de Marx, Engels, Lénine (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar, for the long introductory essay by Godelier, M.; Sur le “mode de production asiatique” (Paris, 1974, second edition)Google Scholar; Sur le féodalisme (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar; Balibar, E., “The Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism” in Althusser, Louis and Balibar, E., Reading Capital (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.Q., Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975)Google Scholar, and the discussions by Taylor, J., Critique of Anthropology 4/5(1975) and 6(1976)Google Scholar; by Asad, T. and Wolpe, H. in Economy and Society 5/4(1976)Google Scholar, and J. Banaji, unpublished ms. (1976), as well as the subsequent auto-critique by Hindess, and Hirst, in their Mode of Production and Social Formation (London, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banaji, J., “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History,” Capital and Class 3(1977)Google Scholar; Godelier, M., Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Terray, Emmanuel, Marxism and ‘Primitive’ Societies (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Anderson, P., Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1975)Google Scholar, and the discussion by Hirst, P.Q. in Economy and Society 4(1975)Google Scholar; Rey, P.-P., Les alliances de classes (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar; Kula, W., An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Bailey, A.M. and Llobera, J.B., “The Asiatic Mode of Production: an Annotated Bibliography,” Critique of Anthropology, 2(1974)Google Scholar and 4/5(1975).

8. Marx, , Capital, (2 vols.: New York, 1967)Google Scholar, 1:chs. 14 and 15.

9. In particular Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital; Althusser, , For Marx (London, 1969)Google Scholar; idem, Essays in Self-Criticism (London, 1976).

10. E.G., Hrbek, I., “Towards a Periodisation of African History” in Emerging Themes of African History, ed. Ranger, T. (Nairobi, 1968)Google Scholar, and the further comments in Bernstein, , “Marxism and African History,” p. 16.Google Scholar

11. On the fetishism of commodities, see Capital'1, Ch. 1, section 4, also Rubin, I.I., Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Detroit, 1972, first published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s)Google Scholar, and Geras, N., “Marx and the Critique of Political Economy” in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Blackburn, R. (London, 1972).Google Scholar On the theory of the bourgeois state see Poulantzas, N., Political Power and Social Classes (London, 1973)Google Scholar, which contains an elaborate discussion of the relative autonomy of the political in the capitalist mode of production: for further discussion of this fundamental point (the conceptualization of different levels of social relations) and its application to pre-capitalist modes of production see a number of the references cited in note 7; also several of the contributors to Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology, ed. Bloch, Maurice (London, 1975).Google Scholar

12. Marx, , Letter to the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski (November, 1877) in Marx, /Engels, , Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1975), p. 293.Google Scholar

13. The capitalist mode of production is an exception to this statement, as to most general statements. This is because of its ‘world-historical’ nature (Marx), that is, its relentless drive to accumulate, which leads to its expanded reproduction on a world scale, thereby characterizing an entire epoch of world history. However, while it is possible to construct the framework of a history of capitalism in this sense, such a framework must include concepts which can produce a periodization of the global development of capital, and the specificity of particular capitalist formations (both advanced and backward) within each period.

14. Glossary in Althusser, For Marx.

15. Althusser elaborates a principle of analysis specific to the concept of conjuncture, namely that of ‘overdetermination’; cf. his essay “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx.

16. Quoted in Terray, , Marxism and “Primitive” Societies, p. 39.Google Scholar

17. See “The Method of Political Economy” in Marx, , Grundrisse, pp. 100–08.Google Scholar

18. Poulantzas, , Political Power, p. 16.Google Scholar

19. Grundrisse, p. 127.

20. For an excellent recent analysis of the Weberian problematic see Hirst, P.Q., Social Evolution and Sociological Categories (London, 1976), Chs. 3-6.Google Scholar Hirst characterizes Weber's problematic as a specific combination of the conception of the object of historical and social knowledge derived from the neo-Kantian Geisteswissenschaften, and a positivist conception of the nature and methods of empirical knowledge.

21. See Hindess, B., The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology (London, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar This is a short and extremely incisive work of far wider epistemological and methodological significance than its title suggests.

22. Lüthy, H., “What is the Point of History?” Journal of Contemporary History, 3/2(April, 1968), p. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Reading Capital, p. 143.

24. Certainly the view of Marx and Lenin; see also Althusser, , Essays, p. 193.Google Scholar

25. Important discussions in recent years of the formation of Marx's problematic with specific reference to the writing of Capital include Althusser, et al, Lire le Capital (2d ed., Paris, 1968)Google Scholar; Rosdolsky, R., The Making of Marx's Capital (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Mandel, E., The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (London, 1971)Google Scholar; M. Nicolaus in his introduction to the Grundrisse. The foremost examples of this process of reconstructing Marx's problematic in order to apply it in theoretical and political practice are to be found in the work of Lenin, who devoted a number of years to the exhaustive study of Capital and other major works. See Trotsky, L., The Young Lenin (Harmondsworth, 1974)Google Scholar, which is a highly illuminating and beautifully written account. At the level of economic theory, for example, Lenin fought to re-establish Marx's concepts and method against the Narodniks (e.g. The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Ch. 1), and later against Kautsky in the Second International debate on imperialism; in terms of political theory, see Lenin's The State and Revolution, the first part of which is devoted to drawing out the elements of a theory of the state from various works by Marx and Engels.

26. On the Marxism of the Second International see Colletti, L., From Rousseau to Lenin (London, 1972)Google Scholar, and on the USSR the comments in Banaji, “Modes of production.” This is not to say that all Soviet historiography is subject to these deformations; see, for example, the work of Lublinskaya, A.D., French Absolutism: the Crucial Phase 1620-1629 (London, 1968)Google Scholar, “The contemporary bourgeois conception of absolute monarchy,” Economy and Society, 1(1972)Google Scholar; “Popular Masses and the Social Relations of the Epoch of Absolutism: Methodology or Research,” Economy and Society, 2(1973).Google Scholar The first article is introduced by an appreciation of Lublinskaya's work by G. Littlejohn.

27. Sík, , The History of Black Africa (Budapest, 1966), 1: p. 19Google Scholar, with emphasis added. For “theses” read “laws” -- the content of any term or word is given by the way it functions conceptually in a particular problematic. On the nature of Sík's “Marxist” history of Africa see further Bernstein, “Marxism and African History.”

28. “Althusser's chief achievement is to produce a version of the dialectic according to which history is determined, not pre-determined.” Callinicos, A., Althusser's Marxism (London, 1976), p. 71.Google Scholar

29. Vilar, P., “Marxist History -- a History in the Making,” New Left Review, 80(1973), p. 67.Google Scholar

30. For the French literature see the annotated bibliography in Meillassoux, Claude, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris, 1975).Google Scholar Works by the other writers cited include the essays on Rhodesia by Arrighi in Arrighi, G. and Saul, J.S., Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Van Onselen, Chibaro; Mamdani, M., Politics and Class Formation in Uganda (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Shivji, I.G., Class Struggles in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, 1975)Google Scholar; Hussein, M., Class Conflict in Egypt, 1945-1970 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Trapido, S., “South Africa in a Comparative Study of Industrialization,” Journal of Development Studies, 7(1971), pp. 309–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Legassick, M., “South Africa: Capital Accumulation and Violence,” Economy and Society, 3(1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Liberal Thought, Racial Discrimination and the Industrialization of South Africa (forthcoming); Morris, M., “The Development of Capitalism in South African Agriculture: Class Struggle in the Countryside,” Economy and Society, 5(1975).Google Scholar We would also like to acknowledge the work of Suret-Canale, Jean whose Afrique Noire, vol. 1, (3d ed., Paris, 1968)Google Scholar was for a long time the only serious study by a Marxist of pre-capitalist formations. While there has sometimes been a somewhat mechanical quality about the work of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes -- for example Suret-Canale's pursuit of the so-called Asiatic mode of production in African history -- a number of original and creative studies have been produced, including Suret-Canale, “Essai sur la signification sociale et historique des hégémonies Peules (XIIème-XIXème siècles), Les Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes (special issue, Paris, 1964)Google Scholar; also Boiteau, P., “Les droits sur la terre dans la société Malgache pré-coloniale,” La Pensée, no. 117(1964), pp. 43–69Google Scholar, which anticipated a number of questions concerning the articulation of modes of production which are usually associated with the work of Pierre-Philippe Rey. For further literature on South Africa see the special issue of Review of African Political Economy, no. 7(1976).

31. Rey, , Colonialisme, néo-colonialisme et transition au capitalisme (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar; idem, Les alliances de classes (Paris, 1973); idem, ed., Capitalisme négrier (Paris, 1976).