From the slave trade to ‘free’ trade. How trade undermines democracy and justice in Africa
Edited by P. Burnett & F. Maji. Nairobi & Oxford: Fahamu, 2007; pp.169. £11.95. ISBN 9780954563714. Reviewed by Graham Harrison, University of Sheffield. ©Graham Harrison, 2008.
Almost all readers of ROAPE will be regular visitors to the Pambazuka News website. This book – one of a series -takes articles from that web resource (and a few from other places) and organises them around trade‐related issues. Consequently, the book reads as a series of short essays in the intellectual tradition of Pambazuka: anti‐imperialist and supportive of social movement politics in Africa.
First, a comment on the contributions. These are highly variable in their originality, quality, and focus. Some are general critiques of neo‐liberalism which do not add a great deal. Thus, arguments about imposed liberalisation, the limits of primary commodity exporting, neglect of small‐scale trade, and the predations of transnationals are all expressed in this book. But, a good deal of these arguments are made in brief and generalised terms, rendering some chapters as rehearsals of familiar points. This is especially the case on the section on Women and Trade.
The stronger chapters are based on some fresh empirical material, all of which highlights the deleterious nature of Africa's trading relations in the present‐day – what Henning Melber rightly calls ‘predatory capitalism’ in his engaging chapter. Patrick Bond presents us with an account of the ‘ghost on the coast’, the Coega industrial zone in South Africa (a neo‐liberal white elephant in the making?) which should depress even readers most cynical of the New South Africa. There are large and important issues behind Bond's account (and reflected in other chapters) which desperately need more expansive treatment, most obviously the near‐complete subordination of (parts of) African states to private business, and the bullish way in which the transnational corporate class asserts the conditions under which it is prepared to invest. In a world where violence against organised labour is increasing and labour action is seen as in some sense ‘old fashioned’, it is important to remember how threats of ‘capital strike’ (disinvestment, withdrawal of investment, the running down of capital) are part of the mainstream politics of ‘economic openness’.
But, of course, investment is not trade -although both are increasingly controlled by a small number of transnationals that are ever more adept at investing and trading within their own structures. My point here is that the contributions tend to bleed into other areas in ways that lead the reader to lose the focus on trade, and why trade matters especially in the context of new forms of regulation, liberalisation, and commercial norm setting. If there is a certain amount of conceptual fuzziness, one might balance this against the book's desire to bring the issues to a broad readership in accessible ways. This the book does, but then the website does it far better and at less cost for the reader.
Which brings me to an important question: who is the book for? There is some scope for it to be adopted in development and African politics courses. Some chapters offer short focussed critiques of, say, Firestone's disgraceful treatment of workers in Liberia, but it is not an ‘academic’ book.
The title of the book is striking, suggesting an association between the Atlantic slave trade and contemporary trading relations in Africa. Clearly, the intellectual traditions of the Left have relied on analogies of slavery for various anti‐imperialism campaigns: the various Jubilee organisations have spoken about debt bondage and made explicit comparisons with the anti‐debt and anti‐slavery campaigns (in Britain based on a curious mix of internationalism and national esteem). But, beyond the rhetorical power of slavery analogies, what are the associations that one can make?
One is that, since the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade, Africa has been locked into and subordinated by a capitalist global political economy dominated by the states and capitals of the West. Quite right, and worth repeating despite its self‐evident truth until this state of affairs is no longer with us. But, contemporary capitalism bears little relationship to the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century. So, what resonance does slavery have in the contemporary world?
Although outside the remit of this book, it is vital to note that slavery has hardly gone away; far from it. More complex forms of slavery – very often based in trafficking, domestic labour, and violence against women – are at the heart of the highly ideologised phenomenon that is called ‘globalisation’. Like primitive accumulation, the ‘freedom’ that Marx used ironically to explain proletarianisation is a tendency within capitalist social relations rather than a stage or enabling event and therefore bonded and enslaved labour are likely to persist for as long as capitalism itself. But, it is important to maintain a distinction between the social relations of slavery and wage labour. The chapter by Robtel Pailey, titled ‘Slavery Ain't Dead’, describes the conditions of work in the now‐infamous Liberia Firestone rubber plantation. What he goes on to describe, though, is the violence and exploitation of the waged workers who buckle under extreme collection quotas and live in squalor. Dubbing this slavery is normatively attractive, but politically misleading. These predations are intrinsic to wage‐labour capitalism; calling them slavery serves to distract us from a real facet or tendency within capitalism – the ever‐present possibility of working people more or less rapidly to death where socio‐economic conditions allow. This happened during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, it is present in the sweatshops that are contracted to produce cheap goods in minimal time to meet the 24‐hour quotas and demands of international trading transnationals, and it can be found in Liberia and doubtless many other places in Africa.
The point of this short aside is simply that it is not clear in the book what the history of the Atlantic slave trade teaches us apart from the apparent historical continuities of deleterious Western interventions in Africa. What we have is a vague sense of Western responsibility for poverty and exploitation in Africa and some very general references to justice and reparations. On the issue of justice, there is surprisingly little in the book on movements for social justice in Africa in relation to trade, and not even a sketching of alternative and progressive trading relations. Charles Abugre's characteristically sharp introduction does set out an agenda for Africa's social movements – it would have been fantastic if these had been handed out to contributors as part of their remit in contributing to the book.