Writing about modern rural Africa: An essay around a review

Abstract

This essay, an earlier and shorter version of which appeared in PLEC News and Views NS 8 (2005), began as an attempt to write a simple review of a book, which I found difficult. Beyond Territory and Scarcity arose out of an international seminar held in Copenhagen in 2002, with the object of seeking to move beyond Malthusian, neo-Malthusian and Boserupian discussion of people, agriculture and the environment. All the authors are European, with a bias toward the Nordic countries. All are specialists in the anthropology or geography of Africa. All nine chapters but one, on modern change in Lesotho, draw on experience, some of it long experience, in inter-tropical Africa. The themes are discussed by the editors in their introduction; however, the contributed essays deviate from them substantially. Although the book is therefore not a closely integrated volume, it contains a wealth of information and ideas, which impinge on other modern themes in writing about African farming and pastoralism, and about the African experience of modern development generally. It is because several distinct themes are involved that I decided to review it in the context of a larger and wider literature.