The six articles in this issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) address the complex and contradictory relationship between markets, identities and economic change in contemporary Africa, with a specific focus on Nigeria and South Africa. Together, they explore how economic processes of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation and subordination are shaped by the mobilisation and resistance of racial and cultural identities. And, while focusing on the interplay of economic processes and identity, they trace the role of the state in mobilising, marginalising or capturing identity-based forms of organisation, with varied political and economic effects. These are themes – and countries – which have been central to the work of Gavin Williams, one of the founding editors of ROAPE, whose recent retirement from the University of Oxford was marked by a conference celebrating his career. This special issue of ROAPE, Honouring Gavin Williams, represents the proceedings of that conference and is co-edited by one of the conference organisers. The collection is offered as a tribute to Gavin's radical scholarship, political activism and long association with ROAPE.
The five papers making up the collection are all inspired, albeit in different ways, by Gavin and his work. Three consider the role of racial or cultural identities in solving or exacerbating tensions between capital and labour in the face of contemporary processes of globalisation and privatisation, and highlight the role of the state in making capitalism work by managing the tensions between legitimacy and livelihoods unleashed by Africa's integration into global capitalism. Two others explore the role of identity-based organisation in resisting heavy-handed processes of subordination, with contradictory outcomes – liberation and workplace reforms, in one case, and political capture and the embedding of violence, in the other. A tribute by Lionel Cliffe, another of ROAPE's founding editors, opens the collection, situating these papers within the context of reminiscences of, and reflections on, Gavin's life, times and work.
Although not formally part of the Williams collection, the sixth and final article of Issue 132 echoes many of Gavin's (and ROAPE's) preoccupations with the structuring of African political economies of dependence through capital, class conflict and labour relations. Here, Gavin Capps deploys Marx's notion of ‘Ricardian reform’ as conceptual underpinning and analytical approach in providing a historical materialist analysis of the evolution of African National Congress (ANC) mining and minerals policy, focusing on the evolution of the Minerals Development Bill (MDB) in its transition to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) and its material and ideological impact on the platinum industry, currently the largest component of the South African mining sector.
Capps shows how, in pursuit of the ANC's goal of ‘an internationally competitive, non-racial and socially stabilised South African capitalism’, the MDB proposed both the nationalisation of mineral rights and the structural and racial transformation of mines ownership, thereby embodying ‘key contradictions of South Africa's democratic transition in the era of neoliberalism’. His explanation of the nature and dynamics of the struggle, conducted across a variety of terrains, over the ‘final form and benefits of the new minerals dispensation’, is compelling. Significantly, he observes, albeit en passant, that the settlement eventually reached between the state and mining capital was at the cost of the extent and pace of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), on the one hand, and future state royalty receipts, on the other. This is arguably predictable (but no less dispiriting for that), given its resonance with insights deriving, for instance, from Gavin Williams' earlier work on deracialisation, economic restructuring and BEE in both the wine-making and gold mining industries (see the contributions by Phakathi and Ewert in the Williams collection).
Equally thought-provoking is Carol Thompson's Briefing on AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), which argues that the practices associated with AGRA amount to a major new form of exploitation of Africa, comparable in importance to the slave trade and the plundering of minerals. She stresses the importance of free seed sharing among African farmers as providing an ongoing source of genetic diversity necessary to sustain the long-term viability of food crops. This appreciation of the importance of indigenous practices as a contribution to general human well-being is reminiscent of the remarks by the astronomer and biologist Carl Sagan on the importance of the ‘ethnopharmacopeia’ in developing improved forms of health care.
The replacement of such free seed sharing by patented seeds, requiring a package of inputs, reproduces the problems of the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s, which are well documented, but with an additional feature: AGRA sponsored seeds are most often privatised by the corporate seed breeder. The practices of the multinational corporations engaged in such activity can be considered as a form of ‘theft’. Thompson details four aspects of AGRA-supported ‘biopiracy’, that is, the taking of genetic wealth without benefit sharing. Furthermore, the corporations are disregarding the provisions of the relevant international treaty, which the USA refuses to sign.
The result of this corporate activity, now publicly supported by AGRA, which in turn is supported by the US government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is that four corporations now control 58% of the global seed market. Three well-known AGRA interventions in African food systems, namely research and marketing of new seed technologies, opening up African food markets, and coordination of food policies within regions of Africa, are already debated. What Thompson adds in this searing criticism is a focus on what she considers to be the core goal of AGRA: accessing African genetic wealth.
Some problems with genetically modified crops are already well-known from areas as far apart as Latin America and the Himalayas. The issue of genetic pollution noted some time ago in Mexico is now being reproduced in southern Africa. While this genetic wealth is being appropriated, creating the danger that food producers without access to unpolluted seeds can easily be cut out of the market, with a resultant risk of mass famine, one should not forget that genetically varied seed banks are being created in the global North. Various countries have their own national seed banks, including one at Kew in the UK, but the most well-known one, funded by some well-known companies, is in Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, to the north of mainland Norway. So while the global North has genetic insurance, the rest of the world is left with increased risk, having progressively lost control over its own food crop genetic inheritance.
The editors of this Special Issue hope that the contents demonstrate ROAPE's continuing commitment to the broadly materialist analysis of inequality and oppression, as well as struggles against such exploitation.