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International Socialism, Winter 1967/68

 

Andrew Miller

Africa in Social Change

 

From International Socialism (1st series), No.31, Winter 1967/68, p.38.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Africa in Social Change
P.C. Lloyd
Penguin, 7s 6d

To specialists familiar with the rapidly growing body of literature dealing with aspects of social change in Africa Dr Lloyd’s book, while saying little that it new, serves as a useful synthesis of work relating to the pressures and processes of modernisation. For the majority of IS readers this recent addition to Penguin’s excellent African Library Series provides an intensely readable introduction to present day West Africa. (The title is somewhat misleading, in that discussion is limited almost entirely to the new states of West Africa.)

One of the author’s main themes is, naturally, the growth of educated, Western elites and the developing relationships between these various groups on the one hand, and between them and traditional society on the other. Although a far more searching discussion of the relevance and applicability of categories such as ‘class,’ ‘elites,’ ‘ruling groups,’ etc., is to be found in the collection of papers edited by Lloyd which appeared last year (The New Elites of Tropical Africa), this book does discuss in general terms the extent to which Western patterns of social stratification are being reproduced in West Africa. There is not room in the space of this review to go into the question, but while neolithic or Eurocentric Marxists will no doubt reject much of what Lloyd has to say, others will recognise the difficulties of sustaining an ‘orthodox’ model of class conflict in a context within which the majority of the elite are salary-earning government functionaries, urban wage-earners constitute a favoured minority of the population, and the peasant masses are corporate owners of the land – still overwhelmingly the most important means of production in present-day Africa.

However, even if Chairman Mao was somewhat premature when he pronounced Africa to be me storm centre of world revolution, social change is producing an increasing polarisation of incomes, status and power between the burgeoning elites and the great mass of the populations of the new states. While it is not the conclusion of Dr Lloyd, the one that Marxists will draw from this book it that if socialists in Africa are to influence the direction of change on the continent one of their main tasks must be an analysis of the constellation of social forces in their societies and the development of strategies and methods of struggle relevant to their situation.

 
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