From the Energy of Despair to the Anger of Despair: The Transition from Social Circulation to Political Consciousness among the Urban Poor in Africa

Gutkind, Peter C. W.

doi:10.2307/483538

Cited by 4 publications

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“…In this context, note the following findings from Nigeria. In 1971, Gutkind (1971) reinterviewed forty unemployed men who had initially been interviewed in 1966. He found that their social and political consciousness had increased dramatically over the five-year period.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

Evans¹

1977

African Studies Review

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On a continent where military coups, civil wars, and other forms of violent disorder have been commonplace, Kenya has appeared an anomaly. The regime of President Jomo Kenyatta has maintained uninterrupted and relatively peaceful civilian rule since the country's independence in 1963. Until recently, Kenya's postindependence body politic had shown few outward signs of social or political stress. Kenya's era of stability may now be nearing an end, however. In early 1975 the country began experiencing a series of crises and disorders that constitute the worst violence since the 1950s nationalist revolt that brought Kenya's present elite to power. Some observers are beginning to question the Kenyatta regime's ability to contain a variety of mounting tensions and pressures (see Africa Report, 1975a: 29, 48-49; 1975b: 28; 1975c: 23-24). In the pages that follow, I present an analysis that predicts a continually escalating state of social and political unrest in Kenya. In the first section, I argue the inherent long-term instability of the Kenyatta regime in terms of the regime's failure to adapt to the aspirations and demands of significant portions of Kenya's newly independent citizenry. In the second and third sections, I present, as a case study of the kinds of underlying social and political processes contributing to instability in Kenya, an examination of the mechanisms through which it appears that members of a growing body of unemployed school leavers are being inexorably drawn toward points of social and political rebellion.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

Evans¹

1977

African Studies Review

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“…In Third World contexts, scholars portrayed the informal economy as an individualistic, inchoate mass that expressed its interests through political and economic disengagement rather than through organized political action. At best, the tactics of informal actors were analysed in terms of Scott's 'weapons of the weak', based on evasion and non-compliance (MacGaffey 1994); at worst, informal sector discontent brought with it the threat of spontaneous mob violence (Gutkind 1973;Bayat 1997a). Theirs was a politics of 'exit' and brute protest rather than one of articulate political expression.…”

Section: Kate Meaghermentioning

confidence: 99%

Africa’s informal workers

2010

127

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This PDF is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Licence. Further details regarding permitted usage can be found at http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Print and ebook editions of this work are available to purchase from Zed Books (www.zedbooks.co.uk). A fricaNowAfrica Now is an exciting new series, published by Zed Books in association with the internationally respected Nordic Africa Institute. Featuring high-quality, cutting-edge research from leading academics, the series addresses the big issues confronting Africa today. Accessible but in-depth, and wide-ranging in its scope, Africa Now engages with the critical political, economic, socio logical and development debates affecting the continent, shedding new light on pressing concerns. NordicAfricaInstituteThe Nordic Africa Institute (Nordiska Afrikainstitutet) is a centre for research, documentation and information on modern Africa. Based in Uppsala, Sweden, the Institute is dedicated to providing timely, crit ical and alternative research and analysis of Africa and to cooperating with African researchers. As a hub and a meeting place for a growing field of research and analysis, the Institute strives to put knowledge of African issues within reach for scholars, policy-makers, politicians, the media, students and the general public. The Institute is financed jointly by the Nordic countries

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“…Alavi (1975b) suggested that articulation of peasants' mode of production with a dominant mode of production can help explain why factional and clientpatron politics blocked the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Others such as Worsley (1972) or Gutkind (1973) argued that the lumpenproletariat, not the peasantry, is the revolutionary class in Africa.…”

Section: B) the Articulation Of Modes Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The question of "class formation as the key factor shaping economic change" left on African studies its indelible mark. (Austen, 1982: 559) From the 1960s, certain political scientists and a few anthropologists and sociologists undertook, despite numerous obstacles the analysis of post-colonial society in terms of class (Sandbrook and Cohen, 1975;Sandbrook, 1975Sandbrook, , 1977Sandbrook and Am, 1977;Arrighi and Saul, 1973;Gutkind et al 1979;Gutkind and Waterman, 1977;Gutkind 1967Gutkind , 1968Gutkind , 1974aMarkovitz, 1977;Gutkind, Cohen, Copans, 1978;Freund, 1984Freund, , 1988First, 1970;Shivji, 1973Shivji, , 1975aGrundy, 1964;Amin, 1964, Rodney, 1975. The analyses were certainly highly over simpified and ethnocentric, often searching in Africa for a reproduction of the Western model of two antagonistic classes.…”

Section: Social Classes In Africa: Observations About Peasantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

African Historical Studies Academic Knowledge as 'Usable Past' and Radical Scholarship

Jewsiewicki¹

1989

African Studies Review

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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): We grew less interested in analyzing specific works than in understanding the interrelations between the trajectory of a scholarly specialty and developments in the changing social milieu and in the profession at large . … Thus, this volume is not a standard historiography, but an examination of several topics that illuminate the rise and the transformation of black history as a research field.

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From the Energy of Despair to the Anger of Despair: The Transition from Social Circulation to Political Consciousness among the Urban Poor in Africa

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

Sources of Socio-Political Instability in an African State: The Case of Kenya's Educated Unemployed

Africa’s informal workers

African Historical Studies Academic Knowledge as 'Usable Past' and Radical Scholarship

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