Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order

West, Harry G.
Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 1, Winter 2006, pp. 153-157 (Review)
Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research DOI: 10.1353/anq.2006.0014

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Harry G. West School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, April 2006.

n the fifth essay in James Fergusons forthcoming collection entitled Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, the author gives account of a short-lived Zambian Internet Magazine called Chrysalis. Produced by a cohort of young, foreign-educated Zambians, Chrysalis first appeared in September 1998. Echoing then South African deputy president Thabo Mbekis call for an African Renaissance, the editors of Chrysalis proclaimed the magazine to be the voice of a new generation of Zambians: confident, proud of their heritage and possessing the collective will and capacity to build [their] country to take its rightful place in the pantheon of sovereign nations. Also following Mbekis lead, Chrysalis contributors turned a critical eye upon Zambia and Zambians, calling for their compatriots to take responsibility for the future of the nation rather than blaming their troubles on external factors, including the legacy of colonialism. In the space of a year, however, the tone of critique within the magazine changed dramatically from what Ferguson describes as earnest idealism to ironic dark humor, as the magazine became a forum for reflecting on what was understood as a continuing national failure. In the words of one of the contributors, the expectant dream is as we speak turning into a nightmare.
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The unfulfilled hopes revealed in the essay, entitled Chrysalis: The Life and Death of the African Renaissance in a Zambian Internet Magazine, index broader phenomena on the African continent, Ferguson tells us in this collection of eight essays, five of which have been previously published, and three of which, along with the introduction, were written for the volume. Notwithstanding the liberalization of African polities and economies in the post-Cold War era, Africa remains marginal to the global economy. Growth rates have fallen to record lowsin some cases, negativein recent years. Whereas celebrants of globalization boast that capital flows into and covers open spaces, Ferguson suggests that capital hops around the globe, from point to point, skipping over most of what lies in between. Much of Africa, according to Ferguson, in fact lies in between the points of the contemporary global economy, fomenting evergreater frustration and resentment on the continent. Conventional development discourse, Ferguson reminds us in an essay entitled Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development, has long cast Africans as being not merely at the bottom, but also at the beginning of a developmental process that would, one day, allow them to rise. For those at the bottom of the global hierarchy, Ferguson writes, the message was clear: Wait, have patience; your turn will come. But for the editors of Chrysalis, like many Africans today, the developmental narrative is no longer persuasive. According to Ferguson, the telos of modernity has, for most, given way to a hierarchy of statuses that are, in Fergusons words, divided by exclusionary walls rather than developmental stairways. He writes, As understandings of modernity have shifted in this way, the vast majority of Africans denied the status of modernity increasingly come to be seen, and may evencome to see themselves, not as less developed but simply as less. This is not to say that Africa has been untouched by global forces in recent years; indeed Africain so far as one can generalize about this vast continent of disparate nationshas been transformed, Ferguson argues. In an essay entitled Paradoxes of Sovereignty and Independence: Real and Pseudo- Nation-States and the Depoliticization of Poverty,wherein he suggests that Lesotho (the tiny nation surrounded on all sides by South Africa, whose independence from Britain was granted in 1966) was scarcely more autonomous in the apartheid-era than the Transkei bantustan (whose autonomy was dismissed as farce by virtually all but apartheid politicians)Ferguson suggests that none of the impoverished nations of the world are truly sovereign or independent, and nowhere do we find a true national economy. To suggest otherwise, Ferguson tells us, is to obscure the operative dynamics of the glob154

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al economy. Africas present-day marginalization, he asserts, is indeed the product of specific kinds of economic and political relations forged across national boundaries. Principal among these have been relations between, on the one hand, international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and, on the other hand, African elites. Under the rubric of Structural Adjustment Programs, African governments have acceded to austerity measures purportedly designed to create attractive environments for foreign investment. The irony in this, Ferguson points out, is that neoliberal reformand the African Renaissance that celebrated its libratory possibilitiespromoted the idea of African responsibility at the very moment most Africans were losing a great deal of control over their individual and collective lives. Shrinking state budgets implied the collapse of social services such as health care and education, and even the abandonment of the project of governance in vast areas of the continent which have come to be administered, to all intents and purposes, by foreign donors, international institutions, non-governmental organizations, and/or relief agencies. Such trends have made impossible the meaningful exercise of democracy. Whereas in some contexts, structural adjustment has hollowed out the state, in others it has contributed to state collapse. This, of course, has limited investment in the continent. However, Ferguson notes in the essay entitled Governing Extraction: New Spatializations of Order and Disorder in Neoliberal Africa that what investment has been made in post-structural adjustment Africa has generally been captured by corrupt state officials and/or warlords who have asserted predominance over, or within, compromised states and thrived in the absence of law and order. Following Reno, Ferguson suggests in the essay entitled Globalizing Africa?: Observations from an Inconvenient Continent that as a result of such phenomena, Africa today is divided into spaces that elites and investors together consider to be either usable/useful or unusable/useless. Whereas the latter remain marginal to the global economy, the extractive enclaves that constitute the former may, in Fergusons view, constitute a frightening model for capital investment elsewhere in the world. With all of this as backdrop, Ferguson expresses concern that Africa today, as in the past, is generally described by its lacks and absences, failings and problems, plagues and catastrophes. He tells us in the Introduction, Global Shadows: Africa and the World, that even within the social science literature, African realities are depicted in dark terms, often as shadows of something else. Where states are described as shadow states, and economies as shadow economies, little wonder Africans feel they have been denied the real thing.
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The attendant crisis of confidence is treated throughout the essays, but nowhere more poignantly than in the essay entitled Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the New World Society, which relates the story of two Guinean boys found dead in the landing gear of a plane arriving in Brussels, bearing a letter to the members and officials of Europe, pleading for assistance to study to become like you. Whereas anthropologists in the colonial era contributed substantially to the invention of Africa, Ferguson tells us, they have fallen silent in the moment of Africas crisis, reticent to generalize beyond ethnographic specificities. When they have commented on African expressions of desire for modernity, they havefollowing Jean Rouchoften cast forms of mimesis as ironic critique of, or resistance to, Westernization, and celebrated the existence of alternative modernities or Africa modernities. Silence, Ferguson asserts, has left the invention of Africa to others of troublesome intent, while celebration of African modernities has undermined earnest African demands for equal status in our contemporary world. By contrast, Ferguson offers his views on Africa as critical engagement with other perspectives that he considers both forceful and problematic. For example, in the essay entitled De-moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment, Ferguson examines how the failure of African political and economic reform has at times been blamed upon corruption and mismanagement without recognition of the ways in which neoliberal policiesfoist upon African states by the IMF, World Bank, and Western donorshave in fact created and/or exacerbated mismanagement and corruption through downgrading government offices and officials. Revealingly, the discourse of corruption has served to justify the very policies that partially produce corruption through suggesting that international donors and non-governmental organizations should work around, not through, bankrupt African governments. Ferguson suggests that whereas African socialist states often articulated a moral agenda that resonated with broadly shared convictions about the responsibility of the state to its citizenry (even if these governments often failed to realize, or even genuinely pursue, such agendas), neoliberal regimes have for the most part articulated their aims in a purely technocratic language that Ferguson labels de-moralizing. While neoliberal reformers have advocated good government, Ferguson suggests, Africans have persistently demanded government that is gooda demand whose meaning anthropologists might productively explore. In the essay entitled Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond the State and Civil Society in the Study of African Politics, Ferguson suggests
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that whereas policy-makers previously conceived of African society as a constellation of problems to be resolved by a developmental state, advocates of a neoliberal agenda today conceive of the African state as a distinctive problem, and (a more Western-looking) civil society as the answer to it. This simple inversion, according to Ferguson, preserves a broader analytical framework comprising three levels, including local, national, and international, that Ferguson finds deeply problematic. By Fergusons conception, African states and African civil society, not to mention international institutions and organizations, today operate within a profoundly transnationalized global context. They areat least potentiallyall, at once, local, national, and international entities. Indigenous peoples organizations form networks that span the globe, while states and international institutions create GONGOs (Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations) and BONGOs ([World] Bank Organized Non-Governmental Organizations). Ferguson concludes not only that social scientists must ask probing and persistent questions about how spatial domains of various dimensions are created and inhabited by a host of actors, but also that this ever more complex landscape of power affords those who learn to read it new opportunities to forge creative alliances and occupy new spaces. In the final issue of Chrysalis, an anonymous contributor wrote, God save Zambia. P.S. Will the last guy out of this place turn out the lights? Disturbing as such words may be, Ferguson does well to report them to us, and to inform us that they emanate not from a timeless African darkness but, rather, from a darkness of global, neoliberal production. Amongst the shadows, he reminds us, live real people who impatient await the light they deserve.

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