Reformism, Revisionism, and Redicalism in African Political Economy During the 1990s

Abstract

African states and studies are in a profound period of revisionism as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s yields to the ‘adjustment reforms’ of the 1990s. The relative optimism and expansion of the initial years of independence have long since been superseded by pessimism and contraction as successive energy, drought, debt, and devaluation shocks have resulted in impoverishment and inequalities. The former has affected ‘vulnerable groups’ in particular – women, children, elderly and peripheral communities1 – while the latter has occurred both within and between states. A few classes and countries have thrived despite or because of the continental crisis – more bourgeois fractions and more informal sectors on the one hand and, on the other, Botswana, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe. Africa at the end of the 1990s will likely be more marginal, vulnerable, and unequal than ever, as indicated in the final section, hardly the revolutionary, nationalist scenario anticipated after World War II, but more realistic and realisable none the less.2