Part I: Conceptualization

Questions

A standing question for the peoples of the Global South is this: how can we create democratic forms of political economy out of given geographies, inherited forms of insertion into the world economy, fabricated ethnic compositions, copied forms of state, and consciously and unconsciously absorbed ideological discourses that have been manifest since decolonization?

The theme of a recent seminar series on this topic at Cornell University was: how can we get the (developmental?) state in Southern Africa to deliver more effectively such services as security, safety, justice, health, education, transportation, energy and housing? This question is a sign of progress because in the 1980s, soon after the Washington Consensus, the hegemonic question was, how can we get the state out of the way of developmental markets? As was already known by many in the Global South, and bitter experience since has confirmed, markets by themselves are not developmental, not in Europe and not in Africa.

But the reframing of the question implies that the state in Southern Africa is developmental and that its qualification as such derives from its managerial and juridical competencies within established modernization trajectories. In other words, this seems to be an institutionalist framing of the challenge of development. This framing embeds the assumption that better institutional techniques of policy formation, leadership training, and accountability in terms of rights-based and efficiency criteria will lead to development. This is consistent with the revised prescriptions of liberal developmentalism and rights-based approaches familiar in the works of Sen, ul-Haq, Ruggie, Clinton and other liberal feminists, and the World Bank.5

I agree that the competencies recommended from this perspective for the state in the Global South are necessary components of the prescription, but protest that the diagnosis from which they flow is inadequate. More pointedly, this perspective examines the parts of the complex anatomy that show on the surface, namely, the forms of state, abstracting these from their geographical, structural, ethnographic, gendered, ideological, and psychological connections.

Thus, my reframing of the question is this: what produces the forms of state, contents of discourse, approaches to modernity, and styles of leadership that we see in Southern Africa, and what kinds of leadership will it take to reprogram vicious cycles of dialectic into virtuous ones?

Epistemology

My epistemology is decidedly dialectical. I do not ask primarily how Southern African states compare with one another (useful though that question can be) or with an ideal democracy in the Global North as defined in practice or in textbooks. Instead, what are the relationships between those states and other agents within and beyond the region, and how do the capacities—enabled or constrained by geography, infrastructure, technology, modes of production, coercive power, ideology, and critical and creative thinking—that they bring to these concurrent network performances provide or preclude the realization of the human potential involved? This realization is the key indicator of development.6

This epistemology begins with elements of human relationships that I refer to as the DNA of social structure and metamorphosis. Inspired by the metaphor, I elaborate this DNA as Dialectical Network Analysis.7

As humans come together to ensure survival and make a living from nature and their own creativity, they collaborate and conflict in different patterns. Power is usually unequally distributed, but inequality does not always predict conflict involving perpetrators and victims. A lioness with a small animal in her jaws might either be making a meal of a gazelle, against its will to survive, or protecting her cub as it submits in total trust. There is an inequality that violates and another that nurtures towards equality. So, in tracing the dialectics of conflict/collaboration, we must speak in the same breath of power, motives, and patterns of thinking. Relationships are to be judged not only by their structure but also by their purposes and effects on the met or unmet needs of the people involved. Motives and styles/habits of thinking shape how power is deployed, but some are better for conflict and others are better for collaboration. Some styles of conflict are creative and productive (such as a vigorous debate), while some collaborations are invigorating for one party and stifling for the other (such as a charismatic but domineering conductor or political party leader and their orchestra or mass following).

I follow Halpern (2009, 1969) in arguing that there are eight patterns, or styles, of conflict/collaboration reflecting distinct ways of thinking—an octave, if you will, of subconscious possibilities that come with being human. They are willing submission, subjection or forced compliance, mutual avoidance or denial, collaboration through a safe filter (person, pastime, or ritual), bargaining or exacting exchange, mutual watchfulness against encroachment, incoherence or initiatives at cross-purposes, and transformation or mutual nurture or search for best outcomes. To develop these patterns, Halpern borrowed and simplified Jung’s notion of archetypes (Jung 1968). This taxonomy leads to the insight that these eight “genes” manifest themselves in ever-changing recombinations throughout networks of human relationships. These recombinations occur at small levels of articulation, such as in households, and at larger ones, such as in clans, nations, modes of production, countries, regions, and the world economy. They also pervade all matters, from production, trade, and consumption, to creative and artistic expression, to rule-making and ideological discourse.

Resource endowments, access to knowledge and tools, infrastructures and weapons, and accepted rule-making statuses can give us skeletal maps of power structures but not insight into how forms of consciousness animate or constrain the uses of power. Dialectical theory seeks to do both in order to explain metamorphoses of society that are sometimes read as modernization (Allen 2006, 2003).

It remains important to understand power, as preoccupation with it across the social sciences indicates. Just as creation and change in the intangible elements of human capacity—motives, creativity, and forms of consciousness—have been the muse of philosophers and psychologists, so the creation and transformation of power in its various forms and contexts have been the preoccupation of political economists in three dominant paradigms: realism/mercantilism, liberalism, and Marxism/structuralism. I am suggesting that a full explanation of change in Southern Africa or elsewhere requires a framework that integrates the physical-geographic, social-structural, discursive, institutional, and macroeconomic realms with the habits of thinking, forms of encounter, and leadership styles manifested in these networks of relationships. The historical factors at any level of articulation, from household to worldwide, are always both conscious and concrete. Cox (1986, 1999) likewise speaks of the need to understand relationships in the context of modes of production, forms of state, discourses, and interstate orders, even though he does not fill in the nuances of the cognitive differences and motivational sources of capacity at work in structurally contextualized relationships.

If we remember that relationships of collaboration/conflict are events rather than fixed objects, our assertion that networks of relationships have structure refers more to patterns of movement, as in a choreographed dance or march. Hence, the projects of security, identity, production and consumption, leisure and creative expression, ideological and scientific paradigms, and religious faiths choreograph the same people in different configurations at different times. All constitute social structure. Established divisions of labor in the academy have led us to emphasize one or the other of these dimensions of performance as the epitome of social structure and the key to history, but all these kinds of networks are intermittent or simultaneous poses in a succession or hybridization of what Marx called modes of production. The mental worlds, including organizing values and key assumptions, of all these networks affect one another because the same people keep switching roles and carrying reflexes or habits of response from one role to the next. This was Gramsci’s insight in explaining the weakness of class struggle in interwar Europe, where the choreography of class exploitation was eclipsed in popular consciousness by that of nationalism and elite culture.8

So, one meaning of development at the personal level is to acquire awareness of one’s own habits of thought and encounters and moving them from willing but uncritical submission or deference, or initiating or accepting forced compliance, towards an equality of mutual nurture, empowerment, or justice. This, in turn, also means that personal development involves critical awareness of one’s own place in physical environments and modernization strategies and their effects on the distribution of power and benefits. When degrees of access to power change, sometimes bargaining or mutual watchfulness is all you can do. At other times, it might be necessary to create incoherence or apply subjection as tactics at smaller scales of action in order to foster transformation in the long term and the big picture.

Applying the insights of Dialectical Network Analysis to structural theories by Galtung (1971), Burton (1968, 1972), or Strange (1988) helps us to see how network configurations generate and reproduce power at some nodes of interaction more than at others and, thus, affect the efficiency of either violence or fulfillment of needs. Specifically, the notions of structural and relational power (Strange), structural violence or peace, and direct violence or peace (Galtung) suggest that archetypes of structure exist, even as Jung/Halpern had suggested that archetypes of thinking and encounters exist. Connecting them links the intrapersonal and subjective with the interpersonal and social-structural realms to give a fuller range of change-inducing factors. This connection also allows a more fluid understanding of the interplay of agency and structure in social change.

Other structural theories explain the evolution of capitalism from mercantile, to industrial, to multinational/Fordist, to globalized/post-Fordist in terms of action and reaction between agents in competing and expanding centers of accumulation, invention, and militarism, on one hand, and agents in penetrated, marginalized, and fragmented peripheries, on the other (Williams 1949; Rodney 1972; Amin 1976; Chase-Dunn 2003). These critiques basically tell us that capitalism disarticulates countries or national societies while having the effect of modernizing technology and accumulating capital for corporate elites and their sponsoring states. As corporations strive for efficiency and market share, they create and improve technology, become more integrated, and expand geographically and in wealth. As they dominate international trade and investment flows, they become vital to employment, public revenues within territorial states, and therefore to public discourses about growth and modernization strategies. Even where public-policy debates are housed within democratic forms of state, peoples must choose between national or regional integration, in one tendency, and growth through willing submission or tense cooperation with corporate globalization, as the other broad trajectory. Thus, although the dependency/world economy discourse tends towards structural determinism, its proponents raise the vital question of viable social wholes.

What is the level of network complexity at which humans in the era of modernization seek to reproduce material and intellectual culture and meet their needs for safety, nurture, and creative fulfillment? Is it families; primordial nations; constructed communities within territorial states; transnational networks of production, trade, financial transactions, and discourse; or the world economy itself? Where is the locus of reproductive power, or what are the entities that can develop? Must there be lower-level disarticulation for there to be higher-level integrity, or can development as integrated self-reproduction at one level produce development at another? How do the challenges of nature, such as scarcity, depletion, pollution, and uneven distribution of resources, determine the necessary scale of social wholes? What happens when the imperatives of nature crosscut the outlines of settlement and identity? How do discourses—shared narratives of identity, nationalism, free trade, capital mobility, consumerism, human rights, democracy—and habits of thinking constrain or enable the creation of viable social wholes for the sustainable reproduction of material culture?9

In the case of Southern Africa, the maps of natural resources are at odds with those of settlement and identity and with the boundaries of territorial states. Moreover, the forms of state and modernization discourse are quite entrenched even as they differ from one another.

So, although an outline of empirical trends is offered below, the main goal of this paper is to suggest an approach for interpreting them that offers specific advantages.

One advantage is a diagnostic tool. This could be helpful because the major discourses on modernization and development make very different diagnoses of the causes of poverty and underdevelopment in different parts of the world economy, including Southern Africa. How can we know when the problem is a weak hand dealt by nature, such as poor soil, little rainfall, and so forth (Diamond 1997); artificial ethnic structures enclosed by force within one territorial state (Mazrui 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013); modernization strategies based upon the ways in which a territory’s resources were brought into the world economy (Amin 1972); weak and corrupt administrative institutions (Attiyeh 2005); unrepresentative and unresponsive political parties and parliaments (Salih and Nordlund 2007); or poorly calibrated macroeconomic policies (Ajayi 2001)? Very often the debates over the impacts of these factors do not expose the real culprits because they do not align similar factors for comparison across countries. As C. Wright Mills would have put it, this is a failure of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959).

The second advantage is that this approach helps to integrate the insights from different academic and professional fields concerned with modernization and development, within a coherent framework that avoids reductionist diagnostics. While the approach is housed within a clear epistemology and powered by paradigmatic concepts, there are sockets into which to plug theoretical tools for solving specific puzzles.

Third, this approach helps to identify possible switching points and social wholes at which state or nonstate agents may intervene to deploy forces of production and instruments of modernization towards development. To the extent that such agents recognize the need to create or retain alternate modes of production besides global capitalism, what are the possible avenues in which public institutions or civic bodies may create and reproduce structural power in production, trade, nurture, discourses and rules as they compete with or resist the structural power of global enterprise networks and the multilateral institutions that back them?

Development, then, is the sustainable reproduction of production that meets human needs for safety, nurture, belonging, and creative fulfillment. Modernization is the improvement of tools, technologies, infrastructures, and institutional forms according to rational criteria of efficiency.

Ideally, modernization should serve development. But in practice in most countries of the world, the deployment of the latest technologies or institutional forms does not necessarily lead to development and may indeed lead to deformity. Deformity is the simultaneous reproduction of wealth and poverty, health and disease, environmental distress, and institutional dysfunction in spite of democratic constitutions and frequent elections. This occurs because the efficiencies of modernity are enjoyed by some at the expense of or to the exclusion of others. These efficiencies entrench structural power even where they enable incremental bargains in relational power (popularly called “empowerment” these days). The associated cascade of benefits from small concessions in unequal bargains may temporarily buy legitimacy for the established order, but the contradictions of the strategies themselves mean that they cannot deliver the jobs, housing, health services, and education that meet needs sustainably. The gap between the promises of modernity and delivery in practice often leads to incoherence in discourse and institutional politics. This incoherence expresses itself between rioting unemployed workers and repressive states, between apathetic and individualistic voters and political parties whose rhetoric fails to resonate with their realities, or between opposing party elites whose attempts at public-policy debates do not recognize the absence of shared values or assumptions.

This describes, in a nutshell, every country in Southern Africa; thus, to focus on the efficient delivery of services by states in the region without a critique of political economy is to miss the point.

Brief History and Geography

The settlement of the Southern African region is a story of overlapping migrations and conquests permitted in both east-west and north-south movements by vast plains and valleys and canalized by mountain ranges and rivers. Superior weapons and military organization supported by pastoral and agricultural productivity enabled such peoples now called Zulus and Ndebeles to move north and west, to the disadvantage of other language groups, by the nineteenth century. High mountains and extreme temperatures enabled some, such as the Sotho, to preserve their autonomy. National consolidation, expansion, resistance, and interculturation were already features of the African political economy before the arrival of Europeans, and the concept of territory was as fluid as the migrations and conquests had been (Omer-Cooper 1989).

This changed as the inward encroachment of Europeans from their initial coastal trading enclaves became farm settlements, then slave plantations, then commercial farming concessions, then mining enclaves. Whatever the Europeans occupied they owned, as private property at the level of households, and collectively as parts of their respective empires centered in Portugal, Britain, and Germany. The Dutch-speaking settlers claimed land in their own name since they were refugees from hardship and intolerance in Europe and not dependent on nor loyal to a metropolitan state. But like other Europeans, their advantages in technology and weapons allowed them to win wars of expansion and claim new territory at the expense of Africans. Among Europeans, too, there were clashing agendas of occupation, production, and trade, resulting in reconfigurations of territory, as at the end of the “Boer Wars” and the First World War. Both African and European histories had similar motifs among themselves and in relation to each other.

When the formal borders were settled yet again in the 1940s, after the second interimperial war, the regional pulses of exploitation, production, trade, settlement, and migration did not cease. But they were constrained and channeled by political borders in much the same way that rivers, forests, and mountains had constrained them for centuries. As African majorities regained formal political control within these set boundaries after protracted wars of liberation, the inherited state system required them to regard the lands, resources and people within them as discrete economies to be developed as such. This was so even though European economies themselves appeared to have developed only because of the transregional access they had enjoyed for centuries to raw materials, slave or indentured labor, and markets (Williams 1944; Halperin 2013).

Embedded development was expected within these territorial states, despite their different sizes and resource endowments and the fact that imperial lines had been set according to military and resource-extraction considerations and not to ethnic composition or the viability of indigenous communities. As a result, most did not begin as nation-states. About half are landlocked. The presence of arable land and fresh water varies from the verdant northeast to the arid southwest. These factors, together with mountainous or desert landscapes, placed constraints, for example, on the possibilities and costs of food production and transportation and, by extension, on intrastate and intraregional trade and economies of scale. Add to these factors differences in customs, legal doctrines, and administrative practices according to modes of production or imperial legacy, and the stage was set for major dysfunction rather than development.

The Vicious Dialectic

The peoples of Southern Africa began their odysseys of modernization as export monocultures. They were inserted into the world economy by way of a mainstay such as commercial farming (tobacco in Zimbabwe and Malawi, orchard fruits and vineyards in the Western Cape), mineral extraction (copper in Zambia; oil in Angola; diamonds in Angola, Botswana, and South Africa; and gold in South Africa), or as labor reserves (Eastern Cape, Lesotho). Most of what the state needed for the administration of law and order, laying down infrastructure, or providing health and education services had to be imported. This was also true of most inputs for plantations and mines; most consumer goods used by the urban and elite classes created by the state and the monoculture; and much of the tools, lamps, and vessels that rural indigenous farming households used to produce subsistence or cash crops. Because the state was not in control of the prices of imported goods or of the terms and prices of commodity exports, economies were at the mercy of external factors if they were to achieve growth. Such economies grow when commodity prices are high, but struggle more when they are low or when there is inflation in the countries from which their imports come.

Most of the rural population has been engaged in settled agriculture, cattle rearing, or fishing (in coastal areas of Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique), and pockets of hunter-gathering remain (Botswana). Subsistence agriculture and hunter-gathering are self-articulated modes of production in that the agents involved produce what they consume but at generally low levels of technology and monetization. Cash-crop agriculture, both small scale and commercial, depends on external markets in cities of the same country or abroad, the terms of international trade and state monetary policies, and the roads and other modern infrastructure laid down by either the state or transnational companies involved in export monocultures. The penetration of a modernizing worldview through schooling and mass media into rural areas has meant that aspirations to social mobility and consumption have generally grown faster than productivity in rural areas. This has resulted in migration to cities, especially of younger adults, beyond that which was already driven by deliberate tax policies of colonial or Apartheid states throughout the region in previous years in order to gain access to traditional African lands or to create labor forces for commercial agriculture and mining.

The resulting urbanization throughout most of Southern Africa consists of the classes created by state activity, export mining, or commercial agriculture and the supporting activities of banking, litigation, transportation, and commerce. These classes are surrounded by underemployed people, who live in informal settlements without adequate legal entitlements or supporting services. Much of their scant bargaining power depends upon their right to vote and their agency in giving or withholding political loyalties in exchange for benefits from the state and/or party leaders. This creates incentives for political entrepreneurs to foster loyalties at the lowest cost to themselves, even if it means the mystification of identities rather than bargaining between competing visions of modernization and development.

Thus, the disarticulated structures of production, trade, and consumption and the dysfunctional discourses reinforce each other in coexisting modes of production. A nationalist but externally dependent mode of capitalism penetrates and flushes people from subsistence modes of production in rural areas and attracts them to cities, to form both a working class at the bottom of capitalist formations and an informal mode of production. All of this can occur while GDP grows.

The peoples and territories defined as the “economies” of Southern Africa are really disarticulated networks of production and exchange. They do not hold together and reproduce on their own terms. The performances that create overlapping networks do not all begin and end in one country. So, for example, the main structural power in finance and technology lies outside the jurisdiction of the states. But in terms of the self-organizing reproduction of production, they are not whole entities. Success, if any, has meant having a trade surplus, receiving net inflows of foreign investment, social stability, maintenance of law and order, and upkeep of physical infrastructures.

By these limited measures, Botswana has been a success. As discussed below, this is largely because of the qualities of its leadership over the years. South Africa is another success by limited measures. It has an emerging technological culture comprising the institutional habits and rules, technology, and some of the capital necessary for engendering the reproduction of production. But to the extent that it partners with, competes with, and is subordinated to global centers of capital, South African capital must behave in similar ways at home and in the Southern African region in order to be competitive with global capital. Thus, what looks like South African success in terms of growth comes at the expense of poor income distribution nationally and regionally.

However, for most countries, if commodity prices fell, the deficit had to be made up by borrowing from banks and multilateral institutions, foreign aid from former colonizing powers and “development agencies,” or both. It is true that in recent years, China has become an additional source of capital for states in the region. Commodity prices have been buoyed by rapid industrialization in China, and firms or public entities from that country have also invested heavily in the infrastructures necessary for extracting those commodities (French 2014). But in general, success in terms of trade volumes and GDP has been just as fragile as during the growth decade of the 1960s. This has been Zambia’s experience and Malawi’s as well. If the costs of government were high because of the need to spend on the police and the army to suppress conflict or the need to appease key power brokers in commerce, industry, political parties, or the bureaucracy in order to win and maintain loyalty to the state, then government would be a net cost to the economy. This cost would have to be made up either with better commodity prices and higher volumes of sales or subsidized through deeper indebtedness and aid dependence. This has been true in Angola, where the civil war drained huge resources despite oil-export surpluses; Mozambique, where oil did not play the same role but war had similar effects as in Angola; and Zimbabwe, where commercial tobacco and mineral exports were not enough to offset the costs of internal conflicts as well as involvement in the Congolese war of 1998–2003. If the state and party elite grew faster than the leadership of productive enterprises in commodity exports, supporting services, or indigenous (food) production, then the state would become the main site for personal ambitions and fortunes.

Moreover, if public investments in education were not coordinated with a long-term modernization strategy, then the graduates of secondary and tertiary institutions would either have to work for an inflated bureaucracy, emigrate, or be the festering nucleus of rebellion. Power in public institutions would become property over which to fight, and staying in power would be at least as important to leaders as modernizing—never mind developing—their countries.

If political survival were tied to established modernization strategies of commodity and aid dependence, then it would take extraordinary leaders with sufficient power, credibility, and self-awareness (transformation) to break the mold. But for the most part, ethnic rivalries over public-sector jobs, contracts, and benefits that carried over from colonial administrations have caused political parties, at least in the early years, to be vehicles of this rivalry more than of contending class positions in the modern political economy. Only in South Africa has the politics of class and institutional boundaries become more distinct than the echoes of ethnicity, even though the politics of race still closely coincides with class inequalities. Zimbabwe is perhaps at a point of balance between the two kinds of politics, since after the Matabele suppression and the one-party phase, multiethnic coalitions exist on both sides of the question of the Mugabe administration’s legitimacy. It seems initially, then, that class politics overtakes ethnic politics when there is more industrialization and modern infrastructure.

Industrialization in Southern Africa has followed the logic of import substitution, particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and in the case of South Africa has adopted features of export orientation since the 1990s.

Sanctions against the Ian Smith government of Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe) were an important stimulant to import substitution, even after the breakup of the Central African Federation (Stoneman 1990). Several of the imports needed for commercial farming, transportation, and general household requirements could feasibly be made in the country, even if from imported components, given the high costs of finished goods under sanctions. The same was true on a larger scale in South Africa during the sanctions against the Apartheid state.

In both cases, even before sanctions, the wealth earned from commercial farming and mining exports was largely retained at home and reinvested in commercial, financial, residential, educational, and medical infrastructures for the comfort and convenience of the settler elite. This was in contrast to the movements of capital in other African countries, most of which were used as territories of extraction under the colonial system. In those places, capital went “home” to Europe and was not reinvested in institutions or infrastructures beyond what was necessary for further extraction and social control. Yet, in both contexts the dynamic was essentially the same, except that in much of Southern Africa the climate and topography had been sufficiently inviting to European settlers to induce them to set down roots, literally and emotionally, to cultivate, modernize, and defend those territories as “home.” In addition, deep-pit mining of coal, diamonds, and gold demanded industrial-scale infrastructures, which in turn demanded a similar scale of institutional formation, financial intermediation, labor mobilization, legal standardization, and ideological justification.

Thus, geography has been important to historical trajectories. As in Kenya and other settler colonies, climate was an important inducement to the replication of European culture on African soil. Minerals, soil types, flora, and fauna constrained and enabled distinct forms of exploitation of resources. Distinct European traditions of government, social hierarchy, and ideological outlook informed strategies such as cultural pluralism and indirect rule in British territories or assimilation in Portuguese areas.10 In turn, the scale and logistics of exploitation and social control reshaped settlement patterns, migration, class structure, and institutional possibilities.

In summary, the material and discourse networks of economy, society, and polity have been evolving together in Southern Africa according to a basic theme of movement from commodity exports with subsistence agriculture, to import substitution, towards export orientation in manufacturing and services. Movement has not been inevitable or linear, and mixed strategies are evident in different countries. However, in spite of variations in geography and climate, ethnic composition, degrees of urbanization, forms of state, contents of discourse, macroeconomic management and leadership qualities, all these activities reenact the vicious cycle of modernization without development.

The sections below trace variations in the respective factors across a sample of five countries in the region to investigate whether or how these variations coincide with success or failure of state delivery of services, fiscal prudence, export surpluses, and other indicators of modernization. The countries are Angola, Botswana, Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.