Blind faith: some personal reflections on Nigerian fieldwork

My own interests in Africa were nurtured in the late 1960s as an undergraduate in London, but they took form in, and were shaped by, the great political, economic and social firmament of the 1970s. With the powers of hindsight one can see what an extraordinary decade it was and how it necessarily framed our research programs, both in Geography and the social sciences more generally. The events of that decade bear repeating: an imperialist war in southeast Asia, a troubled American Fordism feeling the pressures of global competition, deepening class struggles over the future of embedded liberalism, the Nixon dollar devaluation and the turn to global financialization, massive volatility in commodities markets especially food and oil, a robust Third World nationalism and a raft of successful revolutionary movements ultimately hobbled by balance of payments deficits, massive public sector debt and Cold War 'low-intensity conflict' and proxy wars, popular energies unleashed by a global environmental movement, and not least, the first stirrings of what was to become, to quote Perry Anderson (2000), the global neoliberal 'grand slam'. My experience of the continent, in sum, came hot on the heels of the rebellion and turmoil of the 1960s and in the wake of the genuinely revolutionary moment of 1968. The 1970s actually became the high watermark for radical theorizing, enriched by exciting (and not so exciting) political experiments, not the least of which were the various African socialisms in the former Portuguese colonies (GuineaoBissau, Angola, Mozambique), in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tanzania and elsewhere. Some locations--one thinks in particular of Dar es Saalam, Zaria, Dakar, Nairobi--became centers of great intellectual vitality often attracting significant numbers of European and North American scholars, and became central to the global debate over development and underdevelopment. Any assessment of what has changed on the continent, and what it might mean for both knowledge production, field research and scholarly collaboration, must start, of course, from the firmament of the present moment. On its face the parallels between now and then are striking: another imperialist war-making adventure (prosecuted not in the name of anti-communism but of global democracy and anti-terrorism), another round of oil and food volatility (and more Malthusian talk of scarcity), another space-ship earth moment (this time detonated by the spectre of global climate change), seething nationalisms (or proto-nationalisms and communalisms of multifarious stripe) in the global south in reaction to decades of structural adjustment and 'economic realism', an anti-imperialism issuing not from the secular or revolutionary Third Worldist left but in the name of political Islam, and, of course, a deep crisis of capitalism triggered by the wreckless commodification of money and monetized assets. This time around one might say that the crisis is defined by the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist project launched in the late 1970s. Naturally the contrasts between the 1970s and the current conjuncture are as striking as the resemblances or repetitions. Nobody would question the observation that US hegemony, from the vantage point of 2010, looks much more rocky. China now appears as a profound counterweight to the American sense of a Pacific Century. The US militarization of its program of global financialization ('military neoliberalism') exceeds virtually anything encompassed by the military Keynesianism of the 1970s. Whether we believe that the last vestiges of the 1960s have been finally swept away, the fact is that neoliberalism does rule undivided across the globe. In this sense Karl Polanyi's (1947) belief that free-market liberalism was finally dead and gone (he wrote at the end of the Second World War) was horribly wrong. At the very least one can say that Africa itself was radically shaped and reconfigured by this neoliberal revolution--the 'counter-revolution' in development theory as it was called--and the continent, as a consequence, looks very different now. …