Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline

Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill, editors

New York

Columbia University Press

1993

Bibliographic Data

 

Preface and Acknowledgments

This volume is a collaborative outgrowth of John Ravenhill's 1986 edited volume Africa in Economic Crisis. It is meant to assess the record of responses in the 1980s and early 1990s to Africa's economic decline and to examine the prospects for the rest of the decade.

Thomas Callaghy is grateful to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations for funding the research that constitutes the comparative background for his contributions to this volume. He is also appreciative of the support provided by the Research Foundation and the Public Policy Initiative Fund, both of the University of Pennsylvania. We would both like to extend special thanks to Kate Wittenberg and her fine staff at Columbioa University Press, to the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, and to James Hentze, Wambui Mwangi, Srirupa Roy, and John Callaghy.

Carl Rosenberg has been a teacher, colleague or friend of a number of contributors to this volume. Some of us have been privileged to know him in all three capacities. We take great pleasure in dedicating this volume to him.

Carl Rosenberg has been a pioneer in the study of African politics in the United States and has greatly influenced the careers of many who came later. After completing his D.Phil. at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, Carl took up an assistant professorship in government at Boston University in 1955 and was a research associate in its new African Studies Program. In 1958 he moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he remained until his retirement in 1991. Among his many achievements at Berkeley was to build an African Studies Program. Not only was he chair of the Committee on African Studies in 1959-63 and 1966-67, but he also took a particular interest in the program during the long period (1973-89) that he was Director of the Institute of International studies. Carl also served as Chairman of the Department of Political Science at Berkeley in 1969-74, guiding the department through a particularly difficult period.

Carl shouldered heavy administrative responsibilities for virtually all of his years at Berkeley. His ability to continue to publish throughout this period is testimony to his energy and to his enthusiasm for African politics. He traveled frequently to Africa; he had periods as Visiting Professor at Makerere University, the University of Nairobi, and the University of Dar es Salaam (where he was Head of the Department of Political Science for two years).

Carl's first book, The Kenyatta Election: Kenya 1960-61 (1961), coauthored with George Bennet, examined the preindependence election in Kenya that moved it toward majority rule. But far better known is Carl's other major work on Kenya in the 1960's--The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya (1966), coauthored with John Nottingham. The Myth of "Mau Mau" was an exploration of the roots of Kenyan nationalism. By showing how Mau Mau was an integral part of an ongoing, rationally conceived nationalist movement, the book destroyed the credibility of the argument of while supremacists in Kenya that Mau Mau was an atavistic escape from modernity.

The decade of the 1960s was a particularly exciting time to be involved in the study of African politics. Countries were coming to independence; political parties were in transition; and there was considerable optimism about the prospects for regional integration. Some of the dynamism and energy of this period is captured in the book that Carl edited with his good friend, James S. Coleman, on Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (1964). This book became a standard authority for students in the field for many years. Many of the young scholars who contributed to the book subsequently went on to consolidate reputations as leading figures in the field of comparative politics.

In the same year that Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa  was published, Carl also edited the first of two volumes that he was to publish on socialism in Africa. African Socialism, coedited with William Friedland, became a standard work on the subject and, like The Myth of "Mau Mau", it played an important role in demolishing myths--on this occasion about the "socialist" nature of Africa's parties. This statement applies a fortiori to the second volume on this topic, Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Assessment (1979), coedited with Thomas M. Callaghy fifteen years after the publication of the first. With Africa experiencing the rise of a new wave of "socialist" parties in the former Portuguese colonies, this volume brought a timely reassessment of the meaning of socialism in Africa.

Carl has had a long-standing interest in the politics of South Africa and in encouraging a peaceful transition to black majority rule. A series of conferences was held under the auspices of the Institute of International Studies. Together with one of his former students and colleague in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley, Robert M. Price, Carl edited a volume on The Apartheid Regime: Political Power and Racial Domination in 1980.

As Africa's economic decline became clear in the late 1970s and early 1980s, political scientists sought an understanding of economic failure through an examination of the weaknesses of African political Institutions. It would be no exaggeration to say that Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (1982), coauthored with another of Carl's former students, Robert H. Jackson, was one of the most influential books in causing students of African politics to rethink the role and nature of government in African countries. A spinoff of this project was a 1982 article in World Politics on "Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood"--a piece that was praised not only by students of Africa but by many international relations theorists as well.

Carl's willingness to collaborate in publishing with his students is indicative of his general concern for their careers and welfare. Many students of Africa, and many African students, owed their survival to Berkeley at least in part to research assistantships and other forms of support that Carl arranged. Carl's concern with the welfare of those he taught was regarded as eccentric by some of his colleagues. Carl devoted an enormous number of hours to seeking scholarships for African students, and helping them personally if they encountered problems with visas or with university or other authorities. Overseas students were invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with Carl and Elizabeth. Carl's door was always open to students and colleagues during the long hours that he spent in the office. His concern for people is the principal reason why so many people associated with him at Berkeley regard him as a friend as well as a colleague.

Thomas M. Callaghy, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania John Ravenhill, Canberra, Australia March 1993