The second decade of the 2000s saw massive concern about ‘land-grabbing’ across the media and academia, intimated to be primarily the work of China and the Gulf states. The dawn of the 2020s sees colloquia linked to the National Endowment for Democracy, a US para-governmental subversion organisation, raising the spectre of the ‘China question’, including the country’s relationship to Africa. How might we, in the current argot, decolonise such inquiries and their relationship to past and future colonial-imperialist scrambles for Africa? Can we sidestep aconceptual inquiries about Chinese imperialism, and ask whether a China partially incorporated into the capitalist world-system may yet open world-systemic space in a US-dominated world?
One way to start would be the edited collection from the tragically killed noted scholar of rural Africa, Sam Moyo, alongside Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros, Reclaiming Africa, linked to the burgeoning Agrarian South Network.1 The book includes 12 chapters, divided into four sections. The first is a framing chapter. Then there is a section on new competitors for African resources. The third section is on national experiences across Africa. And the fourth treats paths to escape from the current crisis.
The introduction, by Moyo, Jha, and Yeros, sets the stage for making sense of the current ‘scramble’, wherein foreign financial and state actors try to engorge communal and privatised lands in the context of global commodity price increases or super-cycles, and struggles between monopolies and states over African resources. This chapter sets the pace for the remainder of the book. In order to speak about land-grabbing, it carries out the all-important preliminary investigation. It notes that the USA, the UK, Italy, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), alongside South Africa and India, dominate land purchases, especially of lands linked to potential water sources. On the one hand, such statistics establish the primacy of the imperialist core in a new iteration of long-standing continental primitive accumulation. On the other, they set the stage for a serious discussion of the semi-periphery’s role in this scramble (one would have liked more on the role of the UAE, given its tight integration into imperialist capitalist circuits).
Land acquisition by the rising semi-peripheries structures the book’s second section: on China (Valéria Lopes Ribeiro), South Africa (William G. Martin), India (Jha, Archana Prasad, Santosh Verma and Nilachala Acharya) and Brazil (Yeros, Vitor E. Schincariol and Thiago Lima da Silva). Contra the prevailing mainstream sinophobia which often seeps into the scholarship of radicals, Ribeiro cautiously catalogues Chinese investments, contrasting their long-run orientation towards stable commodity flows for physically building up the Chinese physical plant as against US investments oriented more towards short-term accumulation. This dynamic may partially stabilise commodity demand and thus national development policies which rest on the stability of demand and prices. She warns, though, that China is acting still on its own interests. Martin charts the slow shift of South Africa from Western-linked semi-peripheral accumulation to Chinese-linked semi-peripheral accumulation, ‘slowly eclips[ing]’ traditional imperial circuits, situated alongside non-compliance with Western geopolitical agendas in Africa (67). The chapter on India shows how Indian investments are accelerating land dispossession and intensifying African semi-proletarianisation. The chapter on Brazil shows how Brazilian investments have been marked by exporting the domestic social contradictions of Brazilian semi-peripheral accumulation: maintenance of white settler agrarian structures domestically, contested agricultural modernisation cooperation agreements, and support for Zimbabwe’s massive national-populist challenge to racist settler agrarian structures through its agrarian reform. A conscientious approach to mounding empirical material marks this section. The authors marshal such facts to challenge regime-change theories of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) ‘sub-imperialism’ (which uniformly sidestep the work of the man who coined the concept, Roy Mauro Marini), while veering from facile characterisations of China as a potentially anti-capitalist actor on the world stage. Multi-polarity foretells the fall of a Eurocentric world-system, with potentially more space for anti-systemic struggle. But no guarantees.
The third section turns to national experiences in South, East, and West Africa. The chapter on Mali by Mamadou Goïta maps the contours of dispossession, land fragmentation, and foreign or domestic land-grabbing, and shows how the neo-colonial state is the primary agent for accelerating rural pauperisation. Abdourahmane Ndiaye writes on Senegal, showing the centrality of farming to rural and to a lesser extent urban social reproduction, alongside ongoing agrarian differentiation. Again, foreign land-grabbers acting alongside or through the medium of domestic accomplices are a significant vector of mounting agrarian inequality, amid policies which threaten to engulf huge portions of Senegal’s most arable and irrigated land. Godfrey Eliseus Massay and Telemu Kassile write on land deals in Tanzania. They discuss shifting investment protocols to ensure a steady stream of investments for those who lease out their land – a case wherein the enclosure of smallholder resources by investors is a bit jarringly seen as something to be managed and ameliorated through reforms rather than stopped by grassroots mobilisation in the service of a popular-nationalist agrarian development model. Giuliano Martiniello writes on Uganda, focusing on enclosures and fightback during the neoliberal era, and raising the gendered nature of dispossession. Horman Chitonge writes on Zambia, showing how changing to leasehold tenure is leading to shrinking access to land among smallholders and growing access to land of a new elite, interested in the opportunities for profit available within the country. Finally, the chapter on Zimbabwe, by Moyo, Yeros, and Walter Chambati discusses the country as a countervailing example, vilified for daring to take by force what was taken by force, and to distribute land to the smallholders and landless of the countryside, alongside some middle-class farmers, while also shifting Zimbabwe’s geo-economic orientation from its long-standing colonial-capitalist alignment with Western capital to China. Still, exploitative labour relations continue, including in the countryside.
On the whole, this third section unites on the systemic deterioration in African livelihoods. The chapters chart the switch from export-oriented colonial commodity crop production to nationalisation of land and attempts to lock in value during the post-national liberation/Bandung period, while drawing out the lights and shadows alike of the Bandung-era industrialisation in African developmentalist states.2 They also trace the accelerating commodification of land via the legal change of customary land title and opening up the countryside to ‘development’ via enclosure through direct ownership or long-term leases during the neoliberal period. Zimbabwe, uniquely, has swum against the tide, and is a case study on attempts at more nationally centred development during a moment of pervasive ‘opening up’ to foreign value extraction. While the contributions are overall uneven, all are valuable, especially when read against one another. One critique must be that North Africa is absent from the country studies listed here, although the littoral’s settler-colonial agrarian dynamics and value drains were part and parcel of the colonial depredation of the continent. One hopes that future volumes from the Agrarian South team fill this gap, as work on North African agrarian issues is slowly proliferating after a period of quiescence.
Part IV of the book, Conclusion, by Issa Shivji, turns to Africa’s future. Shivji offers a sympathetic critique of past and present attempts at national accumulation linked – but not subservient – to the North, from Bandung to BRICS, and identifies several salient weak points: they failed to categorically break with the pressures of the global law of value (what he, following Samir Amin, calls delinking) and their inability to build their projects on a truly national-democratic as opposed to national-bourgeois basis. He insists that a new pan-Africanism is on the table, highlighting anti-imperialism and conditionally mobilising social emancipation as a central banner. Whether such a project can carry the day in the 21st century remains to be seen.