Social Change in Africa

Abstract

W X rHATEVER judgments may be passed on the aims and methods of colonial rule in Africa, the historical fact is that it set in motion processes of change which African leaders themselves now wish to carry farther. The techniques of production evolved in the industrial revolution were extended to Africa by what has been through the greater part of history the principal method of disseminating superior techniques, the extension of political control. Of course most of the people who were concerned in the process were not primarily interested in the benefits which would accrue to Africans, though a few were. One could argue for ever, and for ever inconclusively, such questions as who got undue advantage out of it, whether economic development 'really makes people happier', and so forth. The wider the field over which such questions are asked, the more impossible it becomes to strike a balance. The fact which is relevant to the situation today is that Africans, in rejecting their European rulers, have not sought to reject the techniques of production and of government which those rulers brought to Africa, but, on the contrary, to assert African control over them. Negritude emphatically does not mean a return to the mode of life of a century ago. To a superficial observer changes in mode of life are measured by what can immediately be seen-Western dress, bicycles, lorries and Jaguar cars, school books, newspapers, the queue at the polling station, the judge on the bench, the legislator making his speech in a European language and the clerk recording it. Such an observer might be tempted to measure the extent of changes in African society by the number of these items. But it is the kind of change in social relationships of which these are the signs that interests the student of society. The process through which Africa is passing can be summarized as a process of change from small-scale to large-scale organization, economic and political. It would be difficult to characterize in a few words all the indigenous economic and political systems of Africa. African societies range from the wandering Bushman band of perhaps a hundred people to the Emirate of Kano with its population of three million. Nomads like the Bushmen and transhumants like the peoples of the southern Sudan and northern Kenya and Uganda are in the minority. Most Africans are settled cultivators, though in parts of Central Africa it is the custom-against which Governments set their faces-for whole villages to move when their land is exhausted. One cannot generalize about African political systems either. cc 447