VAD e.V.

New perspectives on rural Africa – 50 years after

Convenors: Wolfram Laube Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. (Bonn), Achim von Oppen Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. (Bayreuth)

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, when most African nations achieved political independence, rural studies have been very much in the focus of social science research and debates on Africa. Village and peasant studies, social and ecological aspects of agricultural change, the effects of development intervention, the rise and fall of rural resistance movements, the “articulation” of subsistence and the market, the building of local institutions, identities and arenas – all these have engaged successive generations of anthropologists and sociologists, historians and political scientists. For a considerable period, rural Africa appeared to be the key site of society and its transformation on the continent. Since the 1990s, however, this focus on rural Africa has subsided considerably in social science as well as in development discourse. It gave way to a greater emphasis on studies in towns and cities where current processes of globalization, mobility, or popular culture seem to be more marked and more easily observable. Implicitly, the rural areas once again come to appear as the comparatively marginal and more conservative pole of African society.

Nevertheless, the majority of Africans continues to live in the countryside. Peasants as well as states continue to depend on some form of rural production for their livelihoods. While efforts towards planned “rural development” by agencies and governments have clearly been reduced in the past two decades, rural Africa is more than ever connected to the world at large. Environmental change, new forms of production and employment, translocal flows of people, goods and ideas across global, regional, and rural-urban divides, all continue to take place in and transform the rural areas. The demise and reform of postcolonial governments, the liberalization of markets and institutions, decentralisation and democratisation have certainly not bypassed the African countryside – their male and female inhabitants have engaged with them in a variety of ways. The emergence of new social and religious movements provides but one particularly interesting mirror here.

A return to the rural perspective, reflecting its own history, therefore promises broader insights into processes of the last 50 years as well as a more dynamic picture of the present. This panel calls for contributions presenting either case or comparative studies that deal with the various strands of rural transformation or continuity outlined so far. Of particular interest are contributions transcending established domains of knowledge, highlighting how economic adaptation, social change, political interaction and cultural constructions of meaning have been intertwined. Consequently, the panel invites contributions from a broad variety of disciplines, ranging from historical and social sciences to agricultural and cultural studies. Proposals can be presented in German or English.