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Paul Clough,
Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa. IndigenousAccumulation in Hausaland
Berghahn, 2015. 442 pp.
This book is the product of research which the author, Paul Clough, carried out over more than 20 years, among the Hausa farmer-traders in Nigeria. The Hausa are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa and, through their amalgamation with the Fulani, have dominated Nigerian politics since the country’s independence.
The study draws on the notion of accumulation with special reference to capital accumulation: the investment of money or a financial asset to generate more money as profit, rent, interest, capital gain, royalties and other returns, enabling wealth to appreciate in value. While gleaning important insights from Karl Marx’s writings around the concept and processes involved, Clough’s study underlines the limits of theories having a Eurocentric bias.
In the words of Canadian sociologist D. W Livingstone, one of the invited speaker to a series of seminars that Clough has been convening over the years (the University of Malta’s Work in Progress in the Social Studies series “Marx, as well as subsequent orthodox Marxists and most critical Western Marxist intellectuals, have operated from a Eurocentric world view which has regarded European civilisation as the dynamic core of global life.”
The same can be said of non-Marxist classical European social theorists, such as Max Weber and a host of other western intellectuals. As the book underlines, one must treat their conceptual tools carefully when applying or reinventing them in different non-Western contexts as is the case with Nigeria.
It is argued, in this book, that accumulation takes on a different form in this African context, where it is not based on the appropriation of surplus value – the added value, in Marx’s sense of the term, that is created by workers, under capitalism, exceeding their own cost of labour and which is appropriated, following the sale of the product, as profit.
Lends credence to those who have highlighted the obvious difficulties encountered when seeking to impose Western-style democracies in similar contexts
The process of accumulation in Hausaland is, as Clough painstakingly shows and argues, not necessarily appropriative when compared to what goes on under capitalism. Hence, his use of the terms ‘non capitalist accumulation’ and ‘indigenous accumulation’.
It is, to the contrary, based on a broad array of social relations which include, following Islam, the notion of extended ties of moral obligation, solidarity and dependency. People give, as well as receive, from this process of accumulation which needs to be seen in the context of tribal affiliation and politics, including religious politics.
Accumulation entails, in this part of Nigeria (Northern Nigeria), not simply re-investment in machinery and other forms of capital but also investment in broadening kin ties.
Under situations permitting polygamy, as is the case in Hausaland, it entails acquisition of more wives and, as a result, more children and, therefore, more hands and dependents. With the onset of Islam, this meant the withdrawal of women from farm work which, however, resulted in more ‘hands’ which they help reproduce.
Polygamy is central to the mode of economic activity in this area. Economics and religious mores are inextricably intertwined, a situation which strikes me as calling for some engagement with another Western sociologist’s views, those expressed by Emile Durkheim in the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, a work which is surprisingly overlooked.
Economic growth involves a continuous circle of relationships. Accumulation, in this context, is necessary for and entails the development of domestic and extra-domestic circles of dependents. All this occurs within the ethical constraint and governing principle of hidima which, the author indicates, is the word used to signify the value of personal responsibility towards others.
In short, what the book presents is a value-driven form of accumulation with social communal security lying at its core. This is at odds with the Western Marxist notion of commodification (turning goods and services into commodities) and rational choice theory (seeking to maximise the difference between benefits and costs).
I would argue that it somehow connects with notions of pre-colonial Africa provided by statesmen such as Julius Nyerere, with their hearkening to a social system described as an ‘extended family’, even though there are African scholars who have disputed this, dismissing it as a romanticised view. The drive for accumulation in Nigeria and, probably other parts of Africa, is inflected by specific systems of moral belief.
This book therefore posits an elective affinity between economic activity and the processes of accumulation this entails, and specific indigenous belief systems. It is a process that consists not simply of relations between capital and labour but, in Clough’s own words, relations between humans among themselves and with the Divine.
What emerges from a reading of this well-researched book, involving both quantitative and qualitative data and an impressive degree of theoretical sophistication, is further realisation of the complexities involved when attempting to analyse economic production in Africa and other non-western contexts from a mainstream, invariably Western, conceptual lens.
The situation as described and analysed by Clough might well explain the difficulties of imposing Western political-economic models on African contexts, whether Marxist or otherwise.
It might also explain why Marxist models often failed in Africa, a continent which is a far cry from one enjoying the concentration of wealth that characterised 19th century Europe when Marx was writing.
It lends credence to those who have highlighted the obvious difficulties encountered when seeking to impose Western-style democracies in similar contexts.