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Chapter 2 - History of poverty in Africa.

2.1 Introduction to a historical account of poverty in Africa[1].

Just as in case of any other continent, the history of Africa is not only one of the great and colourful kingdoms. It is not only a history of the wealthy or, for majority of the world, of the colonisers. It is a history that unites majority of the humanity, a history of suffering. It is a history of struggle against the harshness of nature and against the cruelty of other men. There is something oddly beautiful about this struggle, though probably not for everybody. It is also very likely that this struggle, and with it poverty, will stay with us for a long time. Despite that, there is hardly anybody arguing that it should not be exterminated. Poverty needs to be both understood and if possible eliminated. This chapter presents a historic and anthropological account of poverty in Africa. It is an attempt to understand the specific nature of African poverty, one necessary to give an answer to the questions posed in the introduction of this thesis as well as a possible enhancement of the economic knowledge of poverty. It identifies long-term economic, social and political processes that have influenced and which characterise poverty in Africa. The following part contains a general overview of the chapter, followed by a description of poverty in pre-colonial, colonial and independent African societies. Changes within those societies will be related to issues of economisation, modernisation and globalisation.

Writing a history of poverty in Africa is hence not without any obstructions. There are three major ones to be mentioned (based on Iliffe, 1987). The first impediment is to find a usable definition of poverty. A correct historical and conceptual account or definition of poverty, to be valid forever, is not possible. Poverty has many facets and many Africans have their own varying notions of it. There are various qualities or indicators of poverty to base on. In line with the preliminary definition that has been given in the introduction of this thesis, in this chapter I will base my account on physical want as the major indicator of poverty, again in line with Iliffe (1987). As ‘the poor’, will be defined those who struggle continuously to preserve themselves and others from physical want. As the ‘very poor’ or ‘destitute’, will be defined those who have permanently or temporarily failed in this struggle and have fallen into physical need. The main focus of the chapter will be on the latter. They are much fewer in number, while the first category considers majority of Africans throughout time. Distinction between both groups is the most relevant, as it exists in most of the African languages.

The second obstacle to writing a history of the poor in Africa is related to the inadequacy of the sources. People who write such a history complain about the quality of the written sources. They are small in number, when compared to Europe; and the poor leave a sporadic trace in them. Those accounts are also misleading. The opinions of travellers and of anthropologists are subject to using a categorisation of poverty foreign to the African people. The other major indigenous information sources, oral traditions form a problem as well. They pay much more attention to the history of the wealthy and they are often coloured by ethnic and social stereotypes and by the social conditions existing at the time of their recording.

The last major obstacle to writing a history of poverty in Africa is a widespread belief, held both in academic circles and beyond, that until recently there were no poor in Africa. The economic differentiation was supposed to be slight, resources freely available and the ‘extended family’ was supposed to support all its less fortunate members. Only recently, due to the appearance of colonial rule and the capitalist mode of production, things were supposed to become as bad as they are now. According to Iliffe (1987: 2), this is not correct. Just like in other societies of the world, poverty did exist within the African societies. Well-being differences were large and present on a large scale.

For the purpose of this chapter, a useful definition of poverty cannot concentrate on the physical need only. Poverty needs also to be analysed according to its causes and its timely nature. Major distinction used in this chapter will be between: structural poverty (a long-term one, caused by the social circumstances) and; conjunctural poverty (a temporary one to which generally self-sufficient individuals were thrown in by a natural, economic or military crisis). Other themes to be analysed will be the manners of survival of the poor and the attitudes of the broader society towards poverty.

Long term, structural poverty consisted of those who lacked access to labour needed to exploit land (both their own labour and the labour of others). Those were generally the incapacitated, elderly, the young or those bereft of family or other support. It was common throughout the world and in village societies of Africa it still plays an important role. Generally however, this kind of poverty throughout the world has changed. The land has become scarce and new social structures related to the economisation of life have emerged. The very poor started to include able-bodied who lacked access to land or those who were unable to sell their labour at a price high enough to meet sufficient minimum needs. This kind of poverty appeared first in Europe, in some places already in the Roman Empire, and certainly later in twelfth century. In the nineteenth century it also appeared in Asia. In contemporary times most poverty in those parts of the world is recognised as being due to structural characteristics such as land-shortage, unemployment and low wages. In Africa this kind of poverty started to appear during the twentieth century. Many of the able-bodied become unemployed, landless or received wages too small to meet the physical need of themselves and their families. The family started to play a different role in Africa. In many cases being part of a large family has become a cause of poverty rather than of wealth and pride, as in the old village societies.

Just as structural poverty, poverty due to conjunctural reasons is also one that has existed on all continents of the world. And again just as in the case of structural poverty, its nature has also substantially changed with time, both in Africa and in other societies of the world. In the past, there were the climatic and political insecurity that used to be the major cause of conjunctural poverty. Now, reasons connected to bad government and economic fluctuations of the world market are more in the foreground. Also Africa went through many changes during the twentieth century. Unlike in other regions of the world, however, conjunctural poverty due to the old reasons is still of enormous importance. Next to bad governance and economic shocks, war and disease prevail.

The ways, in which the poor have tried to survive, have also changed, but things remain different than in Europe. In Africa individual charity related to the kinship system formed the main way of support for the poor. This is underlined by the fact that in many African languages the word for ‘poor’ still implies lack of kin and friends. Due to the social changes during the twentieth century, the importance of the extended family has diminished. Just as in Europe, in Africa poverty has increasingly started to become responsibility of individual or of the state and not of the small community someone is part of.

2.2 Poverty in pre-colonial Africa.

Ethiopia

Now to look further into the history of African poverty different societies need to be analysed. The first society to be discussed is Ethiopia, the only country of Sub-Saharan Africa that was not colonised for a longer period of time during its history. Social inequality that existed there was higher and more visible than in other regions of Africa. This is due to the following characteristics of this society, often not common in other parts of Africa (Iliffe, 1987:29):

- Extreme insecurity in some of regions in Ethiopia,

- Bilateral kinship[2] that provided little family support,

- Scale of society that was larger than elsewhere in Africa,

- Institutions, like the royal court and the Ethiopian Eastern Christian Church.

Structural poverty in Ethiopia was still similar to the rest of Africa. It was not the lack of land that has caused poverty. The majority of the poor were the incapacitated. They relied heavily on charity and concentrated themselves around churches that have cherished the principle of charity and around the royal court. Those institutions attracted the poor and made them visible. Due to those institutions, the poor had fewer incentives for individual survival than in other parts of Africa.

There were also the conjunctural poor to be distinguished. They were common since natural disasters, the major reason for poverty in the pre-colonial period, happen regularly in this part of Africa. Drought and cattle plagues were the main reasons for famine, and often occurred on a yearly basis. They caused major famines. In 1889-92 (Iliffe, 1987: 13), people resorted to famine foods, and eventually when the local resources were exhausted they abandoned their homes. Just as the incapacitated, they too turned to the churches, monasteries and houses of the great men, especially to the royal court. The historical accounts show that some rich were indeed trying to help. They did so because they were hoping for a spiritual reward or were trying to secure their influence in the future. On the other hand there is still little evidence that the royal court was experiencing a shortage of food, even in years of greatest famine. Another source of conjunctural poverty has been warfare or invasions. Between 1647 and 1900 there were eleven recorded invasions that caused famine.

Next to the incapacitated, there were others more likely to suffer from temporary poverty than others. They were for example the inhabitants of the dry lowlands. There, famines causing death were a regular phenomenon (Iliffe, 1987). Certain social groups in society suffered more than others as well. Cattle owners whose cattle was not exchangeable for grain and died, those who recently adopted agriculture and were not skilful in it were, as well as those who could not take the road to church or capital to be able to beg, as the aged and the infirm, were most in need. Children have suffered from famines as well. Many were abandoned or sold to the rich.

West Africa and the Hausa.

Another region to be concentrated on is West Africa and particularly the societies of the savannah. Despite the fact that many of the societies of the Savannah region came early under the influence of Islam, poverty in this region was dependant upon several characteristics that are common to the whole of Africa (Iliffe 1987: 30). Among them are:

- Abundant land,

- Political and environmental insecurity,

- Lack of extensive institutionalisation,

- Distinctive family systems; and

- A high degree of personalism in the treatment of poverty.

The major difference between the savannah region of West Africa and the rest of Africa was the role of towns. They existed there on a much larger scale and performed an important role for the poor, according to Iliffe. Another difference was that the societies living there, as the Hausa of Northern Nigeria or the Dagomba of Northern Ghana, were wealthy compared to the rest of Africa. This was due to trade (in later history in slaves) and the fact that parts of the Savannah are among the most fertile in the world. Nevertheless, it has to be underlined that picture of prevailing wealth, common in the oral history, should not be exaggerated and glorified. Many travellers have still reported miserable villages further in the Hausa countryside, for example.

In fact the Hausa society was highly inegalitarian and heavily taxed by its rulers. An example of the viciousness of the rulers and of high taxation is the cattle tax. In 1892, during a cattle plague, the emir raised the cattle tax. It was to prevent his own loss of income (Iliffe, 1987:37). This tax resulted in famine. The Hausa had also a gradation of social ranks. Despite some ambiguity in the use, the Hausa have distinguished: office holders (masu sarauta), commoners (talakawa) and the destitute (matsiyata), still bound together by patronage and charity. The poverty of talakawa was compared with the riches but also with the physical sufficiency of the destitute (Iliffe, 1987: 42). The same unequal conditions, often resulting in starvation deaths among the poor, prevailed in the societies of Central Africa (Kuhanen, 2000) and in Dagbon, of present time Northern Ghana (Oppong, 1972: 19). In the latter the aristocracy derived from warriors who have conquered the territory of Dagbon formed the highest stratum of the society. They owned cattle and horses and usually did not work as farmers. They received tribute from their subjects, ‘the commoners’, in the form of food, free work on their own fields and other products (Oppong, 1972:26). The noble men were also holding political offices and were related to higher levels of wealth. When discussing different societies Christian missionaries have also distinguished other social groups. They differentiated between the slaves as the poorest group of people, the commoners who were all also considered to be poor by missionaries and the aristocracy, which distinguished itself with rich clothing.

When we look at the structural poor, the majority just as elsewhere were the disabled (blind or suffering from leprosy). Other groups of structural poor could have been the outcasts or the slaves, popular in this part of Africa in this time. This does not mean that the slaves were always impoverished. They were often in better situation than the outcasts as they were working in just as many occupations as the freeman, were not necessarily suffering from hunger, and could even expect some degree of improvement in their material condition.

Another group of structurally poor were also the beggars. In many societies of the savannah, especially in the Islamic ones, they were just as numerous as in Ethiopia. There are several reasons for that. Almsgiving was a religious obligation for the Muslims; Savannah societies were highly commercialised; admired generosity; and used a currency of cowrie shells that could be distributed to the poor. Iliffe (1987: 33) notes that the popularity of begging was dependent on the family system of a given society as well. Beggars were more popular in societies with less family care such as the Hausa or the Amhara, because of the bilateral kinship system. Those societies have also produced an exceptional number of unsupported women who were not able to support themselves. Those last two facts underline the importance of the family system in the analysis of African poverty and mark the difference from the European poverty, where the family played a much less important role Iliffe (1987). The family remained to play such a great role also later in the history of Africa.

The structural poverty is not the only one to distinguish. Many people were poor due to reasons of conjunctural nature. Conjuntural poverty, in this case being famine, resulted from ill fortune and was closely connected to the nature of agriculture that was grain-based and dependent upon a short and unreliable wet season. In some parts of Savannah famine was as frequent as in some parts of Ethiopia. It was caused further by political insecurity, cattle disease, and even by flood of the big rivers, such as the Niger. In parts of the Hausaland, localised famines occurred almost yearly. Major famines, occurred further in the 1790s, 1830s, and in 1855 and again the late nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. They often caused a lot of deaths and storms of people towards the larger towns, like Kano, Iliffe (1987: 37).

The ways of survival of the poor in the land of the Hausa were several. They often performed marginal jobs, practised crafts using reeds, grass, wood, dung or other bush products. Their wages in the beginning of the twentieth century were at best half of the skilled craftsmen, and rural migrants often had to do jobs despised even by the slaves. Luckily, however, they had more means of survival, than poor in other parts of Africa, due to a larger number of towns, where they could independently survive.

The Igbo.

Another interesting society, less under the influence of Islam, were the Igbo. They lived mainly in villages, and very small towns in the coastal zone of present time Nigeria. They did not form an integrated state and were less stratified than its neighbours. In this society the missionaries have mentioned much less about poverty than in larger neighbouring societies such as the Yoruba and Hausa. It has even become general knowledge among many anthropologists that societies like the Igbo indeed contained much less people that could be described as poor. According to Iliffe (1987:88), this view is not correct. The fact that the missionaries did not see any poverty was caused by a fallacy of their perception. Indeed they could not see the conjunctural poverty because it was usually not a big problem in this society. Famine was largely unknown in coastal parts of Africa, due both to the uncommonness of drought and to low inter-village violence. Most of poverty, however, has been of a structural nature. The missionaries did not notify any beggars or other poor in the beginning of their interaction with the Igbo because they were hidden. A few institutions, which provided for the poor, were actually designed to camouflage their condition states Iliffe. The Igbo were a society where equal opportunity was a prevailing ideology and where poverty was considered shameful (Iliffe, 1985:89). This was different from Rwanda, where the rulers deliberately emphasised differences of wealth, or from the situation in Ethiopia or Hausaland, where the court or the towns attracted poor into the open and made their numbers visible. Indeed, after some time the missionaries did eventually notice the first poor. First they noticed a number of unwanted babies. Most of them were orphans whose mothers have died during birth. Those children have either been buried with their mothers, or were abandoned by their family due to spiritual reasons. There appeared to be also other groups of outcasts in this society, also quite numerous. There were women who gave birth to the twins (twins themselves were killed at birth, for being considered inhuman creatures) or ones of predominantly old age, who were accused of witchcraft. They were expelled from the villages or towns and lived in small separate communities. Both groups found refuge in catholic missions in later period of time.

Early anthropologists, who came to the land of Igbo after the missionaries, did notify other groups of the poor. They noticed a limited care for the elderly, and especially for those without any children. Another poor outcast group, noticed by them, were the sufferers of leprosy. Most of them were thought to have offended the gods or to have been attacked by sorcery or poison. Just like the other outcasts, they lived in separate communities, away from the regular life of villages and towns. Only some of them, usually the better off, were allowed to stay.

Yet another outcast group, who occupied the lowest possible social rank, were the Osu. They were slaves, and lived especially in central Igboland. They were often offered to local divinities, lived in separate communities, and did not have the right to be properly buried. They were, however, the only ones who could live from charity. Because of this last fact, some of the very poor members of the community or some of the widows, escaping from inheritance by the family of the husband, chose to become an Osu themselves. They did so despite of not being able to come back.

The Igbo were well aware of the existence of poverty. Later anthropologists note the importance of industry and achievement in the Igbo society. It has resulted in shame among those who were not able to achieve as much as others or among those who considered themselves as poor. The distinction between the rich and the poor was also substantially important in the Igbo society. They have distinguished three major social classes: the ‘mbi’ – the poor, the ‘dinkpa – the moderately prosperous and ‘ogarnya’ – the rich. The distinction between the various groups of people as well as the awareness of the existence of it were underlined in many proverbs about wealth and poverty that have existed. Among them are: ‘The only cure for poverty is industry’, ‘If one man walks alone, a fly bites and kills him’, ‘Those who have money are friends of each other’ (Thomas, in Iliffe 1987: 91).

In 1911 a British anthropologist Thomas, carried out a research on poverty in a rich town and a poor village in the Igbo country. As a main category to define wealth and poverty he did not use food but marriage. According to his perception of the local reality the poor were not those who were not able to provide enough food for themselves or their families but those who could not afford a woman. During his research, he noticed existence of men aged even up to 40 or 45 who never did have a woman. They were too poor to buy one. To underline their shameful position, their fellow villagers often called them the male women. In the rich town (Awka), famous for iron working, the group he interviewed there consisted of 33 monogamous men and 103 polygamous men. There were no unmarried men in his survey. However, in a nearby village, he considered poor there were 198 polygamists, 356 monogamists and 258 unmarried male householders.

A poor Igbo had different means of survival than a Hausa. The poorest of the poor men were often been forced to enslave themselves to richer members of the community. Others became an Osu and enjoyed the dubious privilege of receiving charity. The family care was the most common means of survival for those who were in need. The richer, older relatives were most of the time obliged to take care of the younger poorer relatives. As it is known this was not always the case. In the beginning of the colonial era, less desperate members of the community started to search for a paid work. They also started to migrate.

Attitudes towards wealth and poverty in pre-colonial Africa.

An important point in the discussion of poverty in the pre-colonial Africa, but also in the later times, is the stance of the society towards wealth and poverty. It is most usually underlined that the attitudes towards wealth and poverty have been ambiguous in different societies. In the savannah part of the Africa, as recent anthropological studies underline, stances towards the wealthy have been oscillating between bitterness or hostility on one side and readiness to identify with those very classes for the reasons of prestige. The attitudes towards poverty have also been manifold. On one side, the various traditions stressed the values of wealth and generosity and resulted in hospitality so much admired by the foreigners. On the other side, those same traditions bred contempt for poverty. This resulted in teasing of those incapable of taking care of themselves as the handicapped and has brought a shame of being poor. In some cases it led men (but not women) to suicide (Iliffe, 1987 p. 46).

This traditional contempt for poverty and positive attitudes towards wealth existed uneasily with Christianity and Islam, introduced to larger parts of Africa in nineteenth century. Contrary to traditions, those new religions propagated taking care even of the poor even if they were not members of extended families. They also propagated self-abnegation. The latter, underlining that people were supposed to work hard but not search for material profits, was in largest conflict with the traditional ways of life faced largest opposition (Meyer, 1999:169). Meyer describes this conflict with an example of newly converted members of the Christian communities among the Ewe in the late nineteenth century Gold Cost (present time Ghana). Those communities were separated from the rest of the Ewe society and their members had to live according to the western, Christian way of life. Polygamy was abolished and the new Christians started to live in the nuclear families. They broke kinship relations with those outside of the community and ceased taking care of them. They also started to earn money in the new professions, which had arrived together with Christian missions. What was striking about those new Christians, according to the missionaries, was that they did not want to follow the Christian way of life in all of its dimensions. Personal well-being remained to be very important to them. It represented itself in consumption of exclusive clothes (the exclusive European ones were easily distinguished from the cheaper ones, Meyer, 1999:169), eating of imported and expensive food (the traditional food was often despised), as well as in prayers (the prayers to God consisted mainly of request for material welfare). Meyer (1999:166) states that people who chose to live in the missions did actually so for material reasons, the Christian world promising them prosperity and they being keen to acquire it. With those development came changes in the attitude towards traditional village life. Some of the new Christians tended to look down upon those who remained in the villages and started to consider them as poor. The new Christians have eventually become members of the new social elite, challenging the traditional structure of the society. It must be added here that Meyer is not able to state which social group of the traditional society chose to live in the missions. It is unlikely that they were the outcasts as in the case of Igbo. They were rather those who did spend some time in the coastal areas of the Gold Coast, and saw the wealth of people living there. The same problems were encountered in the savannah in the nineteenth century, when Islam started to infiltrate and eventually dominate the religious landscape. It also coexisted uneasily with the hedonistic traditions and commercial materialism of savannah towns (Iliffe, 1987). People, who according to Islam, were supposed to be taken care of by others, like the mallams, often chose to take care of themselves. They did not want to be dependent on the alms and be a heavy bearing on the community they lived in. Therefore, majority of them chose to work or cultivate land.

2.3 Poverty in colonial Africa

Introduction.

The life of the people of Africa was never entirely separated from the rest of the world. Throughout history many foreign influences have played a role in their lives. As it has been mentioned there was a trade with the Arabs and Europeans, trade of gold, slaves and ivory. There were also some religious missionaries operating in Africa. With those interactions foreign lifestyles have started to spread. However, those early interactions and changes were nothing when compared with the changes and interactions of the colonial era. Africa came under the rule of the European superpowers, like Great Britain, France, Portugal and Germany and was divided between them at the conference of Berlin in 1884-‘85. New African countries were created. The borders were drawn at random and various tribes and nations were divided between different countries. Together with those developments, the number of European administrators, soldiers and traders rose immensely. New laws, a new education system and a new system of economic relations were installed. All regions of Africa started to be exploited for their natural resources and cheap labour. The colonisers made enormous profits. Those developments put enormous pressure upon the traditional ways of life of millions of people.

All those great changes had an impact on poverty. It is difficult to draw an overall conclusion on those changes and their nature. Iliffe (1987:143) underlines, however, three possible main generalisations about them:

- Conjunctural poverty changed to the highest extent. With some exceptions, great famines, which killed large proportions of Africans, ceased in the middle of colonial period, and were replaced by problems of nutrition and demography. Warfare also diminished.

- Changes of structural poverty were less dramatic and but still very complex. Only a few of the old structural poor did manage to escape from poverty.

- New categories of poor also emerged due to colonial rule and economic change.

Structural poverty.

According to Iliffe (1987:143) much of the old structural poverty remained unchanged. There were still striking transformations. A first major shift was the fact that the slaves were officially given freedom from their masters by the new central governments. They could do whatever they wanted. This does not mean that the wealth of this social group had automatically increased and their future started to look brighter than before. The discrimination against them prevailed and could only diminish with time. In some regions it happened faster than in others. It was very rapid in most of the non-Islamic societies of western Africa. In the newly emerging cities of the forest zone, like Kumasi, the former slaves intermingled quite fast with the rest of the population. On the other side the Osu, of the discussed Igbo, faced further problems. In the 1930s, more than forty years after their liberation, they were still separated from the rest of the society, even though some had gained much wealth and held posts in the colonial government. Still in 1956, when the government abolished the special status of the Osu, there was much opposition against this anti-discriminatory measure. In general, not all of the ‘freedmen’ could find work, both in the cities and villages. They remained facing restrictions in the access to land; their salaries were much lower than of other social groups. They often remained connected to their former masters in some way.

The abolition of slavery and slave trade also had a big impact on the societies largely dependent upon the slave trade. This is another change of the structural poverty on a larger scale. The societies that used to profit from such practices have deteriorated in a very short period of time. Their main sources of income had disappeared. Such societies were for example the Tuareg, but also the Dagomba of Northern Ghana, which experienced an enormous decline of wealth in the late nineteenth century, due to abolition of the slave trade (Oppong, 1972:15, and personal interviews).

The change in the geographical pattern of structural poverty was not only due to the new laws, imposed by the colonial governments. The new transportation systems, which were put in place, also changed the geographical pattern of wealth and poverty in Africa. Railways from Lagos to Kano and from Dakar to Bamako helped, for example, to destroy the trans-Saharan trade route. Societies living from this trade experienced a degradation of their economic well-being. New technologies and transportation systems also helped to shift the wealth from the rural areas to the towns and especially to the capital cities of the colonies. In the Gold Coast the increase in wealth, which was one of the characteristics of the early colonial times, mostly benefited those living close to the capital city or in the South of the country. The same happened in the region of Hausa in Nigeria, where most of the wealth of the nineteenth century countryside the oral tradition speaks of was concentrated in the few cities, leaving those in the countryside neglected.

There were also other new forms of structural poverty, previously unseen in Africa. One resulted from the alienation of land to European settlers in parts of southern and eastern Africa. Many people lost access to fertile land. Often only the rich of the traditional societies were still able to hold much land and continue to work on it. Many poor never regained their original access to land. Wage employment provided the only future means of survival. The alienation of land, however, was not the only reason for the emergence of poor people without land. Due to a rapid increase in the population size and its density in many areas land has started to become scarce. This phenomenon emerged especially in the end of the colonial period.

The migrant workers were also an example of the new poor, but only in perspective of where they came to. They left their villages, often from areas relatively wealthy in the pre-colonial times, to work on plantations for much lower wages than people already living in the area. It is difficult to judge who were most likely to migrate from the traditional societies. In most cases they were the poor, landless or cattleless. Sometimes, when a larger percentage of the population left, not the rich but the poor were those who had to stay. It is difficult to account for migration. Marxist anthropologists, as for example Rey (van Binsbergen and Meilink 1978:11), relate migration to the emergence of capitalist mode of production. Due to entrance into the economic mode of production dependent on money, more and more people had to earn it and the only possibility to do so was migrant labour. Rey underlines also that the change in the mode of production was not the only reason for migration. Conflict within the village, related to the pre-capitalist mode of production, was a reason for an extensive migration from some societies. Especially the young have migrated, mainly due to exploitation by the village elders (Gerold-Scheepers & van Binsbergen, 1978:24). Those that have remained in the villages were yet another group of the poor. Actually they have been more exploited by the new capitalist mode of production that the ones migrating away, states Meillasoux (Gerold-Scheepers, & van Binsbergen, 1978:26). This issue will be discussed more thoroughly below.

The unskilled workers of the new cities formed yet another example of the new poor. According to Iliffe, this is because they often worked in especially ill-paid occupations and often suffered from unemployment. The jobs were not always easy to find in the cities of the colonial time. This was caused by the growing flux of the employment-seeking individuals, stimulated even more later in the 1950s by the mechanisation of the agriculture, and by a rapid growth of primary schooling. Those who did not enjoy it had much more trouble to find a work in the urban sector. Other reasons for poverty of unskilled workers could be the large families they had to support; this was unlike in the countryside, where larger families helped with the farm and caused a greater wealth of the total family. The unskilled workers were also vulnerable to reasons of conjunctural nature. They often fell into poverty in the periods when general wages were especially low.

Children living in the cities are another new category of the structural poor. They were living on the streets, searching for minor jobs, or working in the petty trade. However, that they became recognisable as a separate category of the poor is due to the fact that, starting in the 1940s, the welfare officers, inspired by the changed European views about childhood, were encouraged to look for them. As with the example of the contemporary Indonesian ‘street children’, Nieuwenhuys (1999), it should be remembered that the children were always responsible for minor jobs in African societies and when in the cities they were doing what was always expected from them in the past Oppong (1972:48). Looking at them as individuals and not as part of the family made it possible to identify them as very poor. The number of children on the streets indeed did rise in colonial period of time, and not only due to an absolute rise of their number in the cities. First, there were many orphans, or very young migrating from the countryside. Secondly, the breakdown of the ways Africans looked after their children can be another reason for the rise of this new group of poor. Child labour fitted very well into the West African tradition of fostering the children to the relatives. They were supposed to teach them several skills. Due to the changes in the family relationships the fostered children were not learning new skills but were exploited by the family members living in the cities as they were forced to perform some small jobs on the markets or in the streets. This situation prevails up to the present. During the interviews in northern Ghana the author met a girl that has been fostered by her relatives in the South. She has been exploited there by her relatives, and had to work as a girl selling the popular and cheap ice-water on the market, instead of going to school. Her parents back home could easily afford education, since she was from a relatively wealthy family. They, however, chose to send her to relatives according to the prevailing custom. After some years her father, a local agricultural officer in the town of Tolon in Northern Region and cooperating with many international NGO’s, has eventually decided to bring her back. The girl was lucky, since many of the fostered children never made it back to the countryside.

Yet another group of the new poor could be some of the women. Due to changes in social customs they fell into poverty. Reasons were for example not being able to remarry after divorce or exclusion from some of the trade activities performed in pre-colonial times. This was especially the case in Central and Southern Africa, where men, who usually were responsible for warfare or other representational activities, took over commercial responsibilities. They took away major source of income for those women who were engaged in trade[3]. Even in West Africa, where women used to be in charge of all the trade, men had dominated one with the Europeans. The old Dagomba still speak of times of trade with the Europeans at the distant market places. At the present time men still dominate the trade with the outside world. Some of the women, as the senior wives[4], usually are trading on the local markets only. Situation of women in colonial times did not only deteriorate. Actually there were also a lot of improvements in their social situation. Women were allowed to perform other, more independent social roles than before. A small proportion of women had become teachers, nurses or had started to work in the colonial administration.

Some other new poor groups were also extended borrowers. They increased in numbers with the emergence of the new economic system, which had introduced money as a common exchange tool. The new economy allowed for extended borrowing on much larger scale than it used to be in pre-colonial Africa and people, without understanding of the new rules of borrowing were much more likely to fall into extensive debts they could never pay back again.

Conjunctural poverty.

The new economic system had also big impact on the nature of conjunctural poverty. Since African economies have become integrated with the world economy, the instabilities of the international markets have been highly influencing the lives of many Africans. The prices of raw materials, on which many colonies entirely depended, tended to vary and negatively influence the vulnerable economies. They were more dangerous for poor than for richer countries. Farmers selling cocoa could be ruined in one year, after the global prices of raw materials fell down. This mainly due to dependence on a small number of produced goods. The international business cycles caused the wages to vary as well, causing much insecurity among the working Africans. Wages were relatively the highest in the beginning of the colonial period, when people still had the alternatives of cultivating their own land, and declined after the First World War. Since then, they kept fluctuating along with the international economic cycles.

Marxist Anthropology

There are several issues playing a major role in the discussion of integration of African societies to the world economic system. They can also shed a light on recent developments, concerning globalisation. On first sight it might seem as if this process was natural, obvious and voluntary. It seems as if the people of Africa automatically saw the profits and positive aspects of trade with Europeans and that this trade was a fair process profitable for both sides. In the past, many economic anthropologists underlined also that capitalism had naturally followed and surpassed the previous economic relations in Africa. It is worth underlining here that this is not a view shared by all anthropologists. The Marxist anthropologists like Meillassoux or Ray have designed new theoretical frameworks, based on the works of Marx, to analyse the economic changes that have been transforming colonial and post-colonial Africa.

They first of all deny the fact that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production did demolish the previous modes of production and exchange, and that it naturally surpassed it. The process of shifting to the capitalist mode of productions did not always happen voluntarily and has occurred in stages. The old modes of production remain to play a role up till now and capitalism in Africa was and still is heavily dependent upon them. Only due to the lingering existence of the old production communities it has reached dominance. Previous modes of production have been ‘used’ for the further expansion of capitalism. This continuing existence has also allowed a form of capitalist exploitation to become possible. Meillassoux (and Raatgever 1985: 5) states that the wages in the capitalist sector of African societies could and still can remain relatively low only due to existence of the village communities, which do not produce for the market, but which are engaged in self-subsistence economy. Those village communities produce new employees at their own costs (the wives and children often stay in the village and work on the farm), feed them, also while they are working in the city, and eventually take care of them when they are older, already useless for the capitalists. The capitalists do not have to cover all those expenses, while paying for the labour[5]. A village labourer can hence be cheaper than the city based employee, forced to feed himself and his family from wage labour only. Meillassoux speaks here of ‘over-exploitation’. An entrepreneur not only directly profits from labour of a migrant worker but also from the domestic community, which has raised and partially supports his employee (Geschiere and Raatgever 1985: 5).

Marxist anthropologists speak also of exploitation in case of agriculture. The prices of market crops can be held low by a similar process. Village communities produce food-crops for their own use and hence are not dependent on the market crops only. This naturally allows for the prices to be lower. From this argument it becomes clear why it has been profitable for the colonial governments and European entrepreneurs to have as many people as possible engaged both in the traditional and in the new capitalistic mode of exchange.

The second issue underlined by Marxist anthropology that need to be realised, is that the process of having people engaged in the capitalistic mode of production was not an automatic one. Actually, this expansion had to be facilitated by the colonial governments, often with use of violent measures. This was the case especially in the areas where the European traders could not become allies with the ruling classes and together with them exploit the old forms of tribute or traditional trading networks (Geschiere, 1985: 97 following the argument of Rey). In those difficult cases experiments and often very peculiar measures became necessary. To enforce the trade, as well as to organise cheap labour force for plantations or projects like building of transportation network the colonial state appeared to be necessary. The individual European entrepreneurs were not able to ‘break open’ the old village communities and organise sufficient measures to raise the number of labourers or traders, which were necessary for keeping the prices of labour and products down (Geschiere, 1985: 98). Drastic interventions were organised.

Maka, of central Cameroon forms a good example for most of the African peoples of the interior who have faced such measures (Geschiere, 1985: 98). Just like most of the people living further into the interior of Africa, they came into contact with Europeans only during the military conquest in the end of the nineteenth century. It Some of Maka’s villagers were forced to produce rubber, cocoa and coffee for the trade with the Europeans, others were forced to work on the distant plantations of the coastal area. It had to be done since the villagers were unwilling to change. To force the villagers to produce for the market, French or German colonial administrators used several measures. They set money taxes on the villagers so that they had to sell market crops to be able to pay those taxes; they tried to organise their work time in 8 hours a day; or oblige every village to produce some amount of market crops. Enforcement of police was often necessary and those who did not produce enough were severely punished (Geschiere, 1985: 116). The exploitation was shown when workers or peasants, who produced enough for the colonial administration, were paid in tax tickets. Those freed them from paying money taxes later only. It was not money they have received. Others were also forced to work for wages since their ground had been confiscated for plantations.

Those severe measures did not always meet with large successes and provoked resistance. Many people decided to leave the areas that were put under more severe restrictions from the colonial administration and went further into the ‘bush’. They did not want to work for the tax money, or change their ways of living. Neither were they willing to work on plantations, often placed in the distant areas. However, eventually the policies have reached what they had intended to. Both trade and work started. The money economy infiltrated the village economy and villagers became dependent on the market goods. The plundering of villagers by the colonial administration began to cease already in the 1920s. It became more profitable to live from stable village communities, already connected to the market. In the case of the Maka, after 1945, it was no longer necessary to force the farmers to produce market crops. They did so themselves. Many writers have attributed this change to higher prices of those products and a better infrastructure. According to Geschiere (1985:122), however, it certainly is connected to the process of ‘economisation’ of life of Africans. The traditional obligations and exchanges within the village were since then to be paid in money as in the case of such a crucial Maka social institution as bride-wealth. The prices of the brides increased and a young man had to find money on the market to be able to pay for his wife. Only in that way could he live a respectable life in his village. Capitalism, hence, began to take root in the old relations.

It does not mean that the role of the government has disappeared. It still continued to play a crucial role in enforcement of capitalism, also after the independence. This is because the penetration of capitalism in Africa did not go as far as in Europe, (Ray in Geschiere, 1985:128). The land remained abundant and the possibility for the villagers to retreat to self-subsistence production was great. This is because the land had no price in Africa yet. Hence, there were still several schemes designed to achieve a continuous production of international market crops, for example, the market boards. Governments remained the main organs realising the contact between the villages and the international market. They could profit from it. This trade has become a major source of profit for the new African elites. Just like the Europeans in the colonial times, the new elites concentrated in the capital cities were profiting from the villagers[6] (Geschiere, 1985:130).

Conjunctural poverty due to other reasons.

Conjunctural poverty related to the emergence of the modern state and capitalist mode of production was still not as severe as conjunctural poverty that was known from the past. Despite the fact that it was certainly diminishing, just as in the pre-colonial times, the beginning of colonial period there was famine. The end of the nineteenth century brought drought, locusts, and cattle plagues again. Between 1911 and 1927 there was not a single year without major famine somewhere in Africa. For example in 1913-14 hundreds of thousands died of famine in all of West Africa. Some administrators estimated it to be between 25 and 50 percent of the total population (Iliffe, 1987: 157). Those famines on a lesser scale repeated in West Africa again in early 1920s.

However, those events ceased later in the colonial period. The famines of 1920’s were the last to kill so many people in African history. Famines occurred again only in the more remote regions, but also only seldom. Reasons for the improvement of the situation were:

- The broad increase in wealth,

- Diversified sources of income, hence, also wage employment, allowing purchase of imported food,

- More effective government,

- Better transport,

- Wider markets and,

- Improved hygiene and medicine.

These are certainly positive developments. However, not everybody benefited from them on equal scale. When in the pre-colonial societies even the wealthy were experiencing hardships during bad harvest years, after the changes of the colonial times situation changed. Now, not the environmental reasons, like drought, but the lack of access to money or other exchangeable resources became the reasons for the occurrence of hunger. Just like in India (Sen, 1982, used in Sen: 1987), those without access to money for buying food, poor due to new reasons, were suffering. The wealthy ceased to suffer at all, while the poor continued to do so both during the good and bad periods (Iliffe, 1987). The wealthy, contrary to the poor, had the money to buy food from other regions during drought and were also able to sell their foodstuffs when the prices were high enough to make profit. The poor had to sell their products just after the harvest, unfortunately at the lowest possible prices, just to be able to buy some necessary goods or to pay back the debts. It has resulted in hunger and the wealth differences between different households have become more visible (Iliffe, 1987:162). This situation prevails up till the present day for example in Northern Ghana. Now those who have access to money are certain of wealthy existence. They are able to buy fertiliser and in that manner are sure of sufficient harvest from a decreasingly productive soil. Those who do not have money, which is most of the villagers (in case of Palingung), are forced to suffer from temporary hardships, in periods preceding following harvests. They are also unable to secure their existence for the future, since they lack money to buy fertiliser for the following years. The inability to buy enough fertiliser has become a new possible indicator of poverty in Northern Ghana.

Attitudes towards poverty.

Attitudes towards poverty did not change much in the colonial period. People were used to it, both in cities and in rural areas. According to Iliffe, there was a broad belief that the rich did deserve their richness and that they acquired it through hard work or spiritual protection (Iliffe, 179). The extreme social mobility of the colonial period encouraged this view. By those who have become successful within the colonial society, poverty became actually even more despised than in the past. The poor accepted inequality also because the residential areas of African towns were not separated by wealth yet in colonial period of time. Enormous wealth differences could then exist between direct neighbours, even if most likely they looked quite similar for the visitors. This opinion is most likely was valid for the cities. There the social mobility indeed was high. Many villages did not change so much. While some societies were characterised by a display of wealth, others were characterised by exactly the opposite. In society of Dagomba, as it existed and still exists in the villages, people are actually unwilling to display their wealth, for fear of jealousy and witchcraft from neighbours or relatives, a situation likely to have existed before the colonial times. Neither did the acceptance of the differences in wealth come for free. Both in such cities and villages a belief should be prevailing among less fortunate members of the society that the ‘rich’ had acquired their wealth by means open to others and that they had been distributing it generously. Otherwise, there is a lot of pressure for redistribution.

It should be concluded that poverty in the colonial period had its new forms in the countryside and in the cities, different from the ones of the old. ‘Old’ poverty consisted of beggars and handicapped, undernourished children, unsupported old men and women. ‘New’ poverty was especially visible in the fast growing cities. Unemployed youth, waiting on the corners of the streets to unload the lorry, those unable to buy enough food for the large family from the small salary, or those who only once in a while find some minor job, were the ones to be considered the new poor.

2.4 Poverty and its growth in independent Africa.

Introduction.

Self-awareness as well as consciousness of exploitation by colonial powers had risen in the sub-Saharan African countries throughout the years of colonialism. During the 1950’s movements for independence arose over the continent. People, or more accurately, the modern educated elites, demanded freedom and an improvement of social and economic situation in their countries. In the 1950s, after an agreement with the colonisers, or after bloody warfare, the first countries became independent. Those years brought a lot of dreams. Under the African rule, everything was supposed to improve. Exploitation was to stop, higher standards of living were envisaged and a pan-African movement was to unite the whole continent. Unfortunately for most Africans, those dreams did not come true. Power concentrated in hands of few European administrators shifted to new elites; the first democratic governments were replaced by new authoritarian regimes. The latter supported only a small part of the population. This resulted in domestic wars and violence. Despite those horrific events, some significant changes in line with the envisaged development of modern states have taken place. The level of western education has risen, as new governments chose to spend substantial amounts of money on new schools and universities. The level of western medicine, resulting in the improvement of health conditions, improved while new hospitals have been built. In many cases investments in infrastructure have been made as well. Still those policies have tended to benefit only some parts of the countries.

Despite independence, the former colonial powers did not entirely abandon the former colonies. They often continued to influence local politics. To a certain degree, African countries remained dependent upon the European metropoles. It has become mainly an economic dependence, one of possible access to the European and American markets, on development money and loans from international organisations, as well as on investments from the multinational companies. The envisaged freedom has partially been a deception. During the Cold War colonial powers have tried to keep African governments on their side, and have often supported many of the regimes. The multinational companies, even if they have provided the badly needed work, have also misused the corrupted governments. The international development organisations did not always concentrate on the poor but often on the promotion of integrating African indigenous societies with the global economy. Structural Adjustment Programmes of World Bank and IMF in the 1980s form an example of such dubious policies. They will be described below.

Economic picture of poverty.

What have been the consequences of independence for poverty? To answer this question it is possible to concentrate on several issues. First I will concentrate on the picture of poverty according to the indicators used by the science of economics. Decisions based upon those indicators are possible because they increasingly represent the reality of the African people. Africans have increasingly started to share ideals of modernity, and become proud of the new schools, health posts and the growing infrastructure. They also started to seek for new consumption possibilities. Poverty in Europe and Africa has started to converge. Economic indicators[7] show that changes after the independence have been just as ambiguous as in the colonial period. There were positive and negative developments.

GDP is the first main economic statistic to look at when describing the changes according to development organisations. According to the statistics, the 1950s and 1960s were a period of relative prosperity, as the per capita national GDP of all African countries was rising. In the years 1965-73 it rose with 1.75 %, in 1973-80 with 0.75 %. From the mid- 1970s most African countries have gone through a period of economic crisis, and per capita GDP has started to decline; in 1980-90 it with 1% and 1990-1997 with 0.75%. According to the World Bank (2001 and 2000), this bad economic performance has caused a rise of poverty (expressed in consumption possibilities). Naturally different countries have shared a different experience. Ghana went through a crisis in the years between 1965 and 1984, undergoing a decline of their national income by 1.9 a year. After 1984, under the new Structural Adjustment Program, it saw an increase in its real incomes per capita of 2%[8] again. While Ghana was in crisis, average incomes in Botswana, on the other hand, rose with 8.4 per cent a year. In general, in terms of income, there was some improvement over the years despite the recent economic crisis.

When we look at the picture of inequality in the post-colonial times, it can be stated that it has increased. Absolute numbers of the very poor, defined as consuming below 1-dollar PPP a day (World Bank, 2001: XV), have highly increased during the independence period. Between 1987 and 1998, the number of people living below the poverty line has increased from 217 to 291 million, a proportionally larger rise than in other regions of the world. The income distribution has also become less equal as well. For example in Zambia, in the 1960s, the share of income enjoyed by the poorest 20 per cent of the households fell by 50 per cent. The same happened in Nigeria between 1986 and 1993. Between 1992 and 1996 the headcount rose from 42 to 65%[9]. The picture was positive only in some periods of time in some countries. Inequality has, for example, decreased in Ghana between 1988-92 when the income share of the poorest twenty percent risen by twenty percent (Fields, 2000: 57). Inequality tended to rise more heavily in the wealthier countries or countries exporting minerals like Nigeria or Zambia (Iliffe, 1987).

To analyse the extent of poverty economic indicators like income is not the best measure. Social indicators of poverty can also be discussed, and might provide more interesting information. According to them, the situation has improved in absolute terms (it has worsened in relative terms, when compared to the improvements in the rest of the world). The life expectancy at birth in all African countries, increased from 42 in 1965 to 49 in 1984 and 52 in 1997. This increase was largely caused by the decline of the infant mortality from 155 to 115 in 1980 and eventually to 91 in 1997 per thousand of births[10]. In another poor region of the world, South Asia, infant mortality decreased with 55% between the years 1980 – 1997, from 115 to 77 deaths per thousand live births[11], while this percentage amounted to 26% in Africa, the lowest number in all developing regions. This decrease is likely to be even less, due to the 1990s AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa.

Also the levels of education have shown a worse situation than in other regions of the world. While again in South Asia, not being the fastest developing region of the world, the (net) primary enrolment rose from 73 to 100 in years 1980-1997, in Africa they stayed at the same level of around 77 in the same period of time[12]. It might decrease in the future as a consequence of Structural Adjustment Programs that introduced fees for education[13]. According to those statistics, the gap between Africa and the rest of the world has widened. In some cases there was deterioration in absolute terms as well.

There were and still are substantial regional and national differences connected to poverty. African countries are divided into richer and poorer areas, and the differences between them are growing. According to the study of the World Bank (2001:7), it is related to the remoteness of some of them. This is especially visible in Ghana. There, although at present the average infant mortality rate amounts to only 75, compared to Nigeria’s 91, infants in the Northern region face a higher probability of premature death (rate of 114) than infants in any of the regions of Nigeria[14]. Nigeria is hence more egalitarian in this respect than Ghana. There were and also are large social and gender differences. For example, nutrition studies of Gambia show that while men have a sufficient calorie intake in both towns and villages, women and children, especially in the rural areas, have sometimes the intake as low as 50 per cent of the required minimum[15].

Causes of poverty during independence.

Even though non-economic indicators show some improvements in absolute terms, the gap between the world and Africa has widened in last forty years. It is obvious that it remains an enormous problem. Although, this chapter studies the history of poverty in Africa, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss the main reasons for such a high degree of poverty. The views of international organisations and other economists should be presented.

According to the World Bank (2001:XVII), the most important reason for poverty in Africa is economic stagnation (lack of economic growth). Low growth rates of African economies have caused the growth of poverty levels, especially in the recent twenty years. Therefore reasons for a low growth are, accordingly, the main reasons for the growth of poverty, according to the official position of the World Bank. Africa has not been capable of benefiting from booming international trade, which is causing high growth rates in other regions of the world. Political instability, lack of investment in ‘infrastructure’, both human and physical, lack of export diversification, lack of private investment on significant scale are the main reasons, according to the World Bank’s orthodoxy, for the low trade, the decline of the economic growth rates and a subsequent increase of poverty. Another reasons for rise of poverty are the rise of income inequality, as well as:

- The growth of the population size - started in the 1930s, in 1980s reached 3 per cent a year, and 2.5 % in 1997. It was the highest one in the world. It put pressure on the supply of food and on the per capita investments into the economy and public services.

- Fluctuations on the world market, causing a lot of instability. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the decline of the prices of the raw products caused a major decline of incomes[16].

- Low growth of agricultural productivity, important especially for the rural areas, causing problems with the feeding of extremely quickly rising populations of some of the regions of Africa[17].

Yet another reason for the rise of poverty, underlined in the non-World Bank literature, was the inadequacy of the national policies and of the development theories (Heyden, 1983, Mehmet, 1999). The concentration on heavy industrialisation and the policies of ‘agriculture based growth’ of the 1950s and 1960s, did not succeed and did not benefit everybody. The countryside was drained of money necessary for investment and the villagers were impoverished. They had to pay more and more for the artefacts made in the city or abroad. To develop their countries governments of the African states have also borrowed enormous amounts of money from international banks and rich countries as well. Eventually, the African countries were left with an extremely high debt, causing problems for the present and coming generations. Both Mehmet (1999) and Heyden (1983) underline as well that those policies of development lacked any sophisticated connection with the traditional communities and their ways of life.

Another example of dubious policy measures, that had an enormous impact on poverty, was the Structural Adjustment Programmes, SAP, adopted in the 1980s. These programmes were designed and propagated by the World Bank and IMF. Their goal was to restore African economies with the help of liberal economic measures. There exists an extensive debate on the possible outcomes of those policies on poverty. According to the World Bank, recently retreating from its initial policies, the results with respect to poverty have indeed been mixed. On one side reaching of macro-economic stability certainly can help the poor in the long run. Strict macro-economic policies, causing low inflation and generating economic growth, when supported by redistribution measures, can benefit the poor. Unfortunately, redistribution was not an intrinsic characteristic of those policies, as now even the writers of the World Bank (2001: XIX) admit. The free markets as well as the states have thus failed the poor, as the safety nets did not work. Recently withdrawing from the SAPs, the authors of the World Bank advise now (World Bank 2001) a different set of policies, with a more active role for the government. The government should now support the poor both with adequate social provision and political support.

A good example of the degree of change caused by the SAP in relation to poverty is Ghana, showcase for IMF and World Bank during the 1990s. The increase in economic performance did not automatically benefit the poor there, states Konadu-Agyemang (1999:131). He mentions some changes, related to those programs. Among the positive ones were:

- GDP grew at average with 5-6% between 1984 and 1991 and later with 3%. This is compared with negative growth in preceding decade, and 2.1% in Sub-Saharan Africa in same period).

- Structural Imbalances caused by mismanagement of previous decades stopped to a certain degree and the economic bankruptcy was reversed.

- Real income grew on average by 2%.

- Goods Production tripled between 1986 and 1996, with gold as leading export.

- Inflation dropped from 123% to 18% on average.

- Industrial capacity was better utilised (a rise from 25% to 40%).

The negative changes, that have deteriorated human conditions in Ghana, and that were caused by liberal policies of the IMF were (Konadu-Agyemang, 1999:133):

- Excessive currency devaluation of 64,000 % between 1983 and 1997. Even if currency was overvalued before, it was not so much. The trade deficit did not improve as much as it was supposed to due to the devaluation.

- A rise in or rather a continuation of high poverty levels in terms of income.

- Reduced access to health care services. Fees for healthcare resulted in an enormous drop in use of the rural healthcare centres. During the first 8 months following the imposition of the fees, attendants to local health centres dropped 4 times. The poor were unable to pay for them. Infant mortality rate stopped decreasing and, as already noted above, has prevailed to be high in the poorer areas of Ghana, as the Northern region.

- Reduced access to education. Fees for education, especially on the secondary level, have caused a decrease in attendance to schools, especially in rural, traditionally poor areas.

- Fall in real wages. The increase in cost of living overrated the increase in wages. When transferred to dollars, the minimum wage dropped from 4.4 in 1982 to 1 in 1997.

- Massive retrenchment. The job cuts, especially in the public sector, were enormous. It is estimated that 200,000 people lost their jobs.

- Emphasis on exportable items at the expense of domestic food production.

- Increasing housing costs in the cities. Income-housing ratio in Accra has become one of the lowest in the world.

- External debt increase. Total debt increased from $1398 to $44590 million in 1993.

- Environmental destruction. New measures resulted in over-exploitation of timber and minerals. This resulted in large deforestation, in some regions leading to climatic changes and soil erosion as well as pollution of the drinking water of 60 % of Ghanaians, with heavy metals and cyanides discharged by the mining companies.

Who were the poor? – structural poverty.

Economic picture of poverty of the independent times has been presented above. To analyse changes in the pattern of poverty in relation to pre- and colonial times, it again has to be investigated who were the poor and whether their numbers increased or decreased? It can be stated that structural poverty qualitatively did change only within certain limits as compared to the colonial times. The stigmatised groups often remained stigmatised. The incapacitated, the aged, unsupported woman, and the young were still among the major groups of the poor (Iliffe, 1987: 230). The patterns of change characteristic of the shift from pre-colonial to colonial times has also remained. ‘New’ poverty again included those living in the neglected regions, the unemployed, the ill-paid, those who were shut out from resources due to population growth or careless use of power and wealth. The newest group of the by now structural poor are the victims of the AIDS epidemic. Out of this group, it have been the children of the sick, the orphans that have been most hit[18].

An example of a major qualitative and quantitative change among the structural poor is the rise of a new group, the refugees. The enormous number of wars and ethnic conflicts has caused many to run away from their villages and towns and start their lives somewhere else. In mid-1990s 4 percent of Africa’s population were displaced persons. The refugees formed and still do form the poorest strata of the countries they have migrated to. They often do not have access to land, and have problems in finding any work. The local population often discriminates against them. The only work, they are often forced to perform, due to severity of their state, are the dirtiest jobs, like for example cleaning of the public toilets (van Dijk, 1994).

Another group of structurally poor are the inhabitants of the remote areas. Their situation has remained as bad as it was also during the independence. They still had few possibilities of benefiting from the new economic environment. People without access to the transportation network or to public services still had no chance to sell some of their crops on the distant markets. This is especially problematic since they were increasingly dependent upon money and the industrial products. Without the possibility of buying those products, many, especially the young, migrated to the distant cities. Their numbers have been higher than in the colonial times. In the villages in the Northern Ghana, there are now at least one or two members of each compound, permanently or temporarily living and working in the cities of the South. These have become the new poor of the cities. The Kayokayo girls form an example of them. They carry the heaviest loads, on the markets of cities like Kumasi or Accra in Ghana and they usually come from the northern part of the country. Conversations with those girls show that many of them go to the southern cities only for a period of one or two years. Unfortunately not all of those girls do find good work and some are forced to work as prostitutes. In the cities the girls are hence the new poor. From the perspective of the villages this is not entirely the case. Most of the money they earn is often spent on themselves. With the items they buy, like new pots, dishes, closets or clothes they try to raise their personal prestige and status as junior or senior wives[19] in the villages in the north of Ghana. When they come back they can cease being perceived as materially poor members of the village. Actually, they possess prestige goods that allow them to be perceived as relatively wealthy. Some of the migrants, who decide to stay in a town, also do also make a chance to raise their personal prestige there, as various authors (a/o van Binsbergen, 1999b: 179, 200) underline. The goods they buy are entirely different from those bought by those going back to villages. Their status rises with the new furniture, electric or gas heaters, or even with the rent of a decent place to stay, by city standards. People from more distant areas are also most likely to succeed since they do not have to share their income with their extended families (van Dijk, 1994 en van Binsbergen, 1999b: 191[20]). The rise in the number of such migrants to the cities has caused a major shift of poverty from the rural areas to the city. Numbers of the poor in the cities have increased and the poor have formed an increasingly higher percentage of the population. City like Lagos grew from one million in 1967 to five in the beginning of the 1980s and about 15 in the 1990s. The overall rate of growth of the cities in Africa between 1975 and 1980 was 5.9 percent and was the highest in areas with rural violence or wars. Majority of the new population can be described as poor. Together with rise of the population size the living conditions in the cities have generally declined, the costs of living have increased and basic services started to fail.

Conjunctural poverty.

The population living in the cities has also been more vulnerable. Many have fallen to poverty due to conjunctural reasons. Unlike the villagers, most of whom are still self-subsistent, the poor of the cities often faced difficulties when macro-economic conditions were deteriorating. This was the case, for example, in the 1970’s when many of those having some employment came back to poverty after a period of relative abundance. People living in the cities have also been heavily dependent upon the policies of the government. When the food subsidies were abolished in Ghana in 1979, many workers lost half their real income. In 1983 the minimum wage was worth only 13 percent of its value in 1975 (Iliffe, 1987:242). Also in the period of already described Structural Adjustments Programs, many fell into poverty. Under the influence of IMF and WB, Ghanaian government has introduced high school fees and payment for medical care. Many poor Ghanaians were not capable to pay for them anymore.

Actually, not only the growth of structural poverty and the increase of vulnerability to the conjunctural economic shocks were so striking after the independence. What is more striking is that famine mortality was experienced again. Famines were caused by two main reasons. The first one was military conflict. The number of wars was high. The casualties counted for millions. In the Nigerian Civil War of the 1970s nearly one million people died, in Rwanda in the 1990s more than half a million. They died during the wars either by being directly killed or due to hunger and diseases. Many fled to their places of birth. They become the refugees. Conflict in Zaire, in 1966, has caused 500,000 to flee their homes. The Sudanese war of the 1960s caused 165,200 to seek refuge in other countries. In 1972, 415,800 refugees from Angola, 81,000 from Portuguese Guinea, and 51,000 from Mozambique and in the whole Africa about one million were driven out of their lands by warfare. Those numbers have increased even more after 1970. In 1979 there were 4 million refugees, and now in 2001 this number is estimated to be 20 million. New conflicts in Somalia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, in 1990s have contributed to this rise. Refugees fled to camps or other countries. They can certainly be described as the new poor. They struggled in the camps and outside of them. In the new societies they arrived at they have become the poorest individuals.

The second reason of famine was drought. According to Iliffe (1987:252), the droughts between 1968 and 85 were probably the worst in the whole history of Africa. In West Africa rain failed in 1968, 1972, 1973 and in the early 1980s’, especially hard hit Mauritania, Mali and Chad. Also Ethiopia and Sudan suffered heavily under drought. Millions of people were affected by famine, in Ethiopia in 1985 even 8 million. Yet other reasons for famine were the declining agricultural production in several regions and floods as the most recent one in Mozambique in 1999.

Due to the improvements mentioned above for the colonial period, the number of the famine-deaths was still much lower then in the pre-colonial times. If there were high number of deaths again, as in famines of Biafra, Ethiopia, Mozambique and northern Uganda, bad government, as well as lack of transportation and of money, again exacerbated them Iliffe (1987:253). Most striking once mere were deaths due to the lack of money. In Nigeria, many refugees died only due to fact that they had no resources to buy the available food from farmers of the regions they fled into.

A very striking and tragic recent development concerning conjunctural poverty in Africa that needs to be mentioned is the AIDS epidemic. Africa has been hit by it unlike any other region of the world. 60 percent of the 17 million HIV-positives worldwide live in Africa (Castells 1997:118 citing WHO). It is estimated that by 2010 either (very optimistically) 8 or (negatively) 27 percent of the population will be infected by HIV. In countries like Uganda, Rwanda and Zambia, between 17 and 24 percent of the urban population were infected already by 1987. AIDS has eventually become the leading cause of death throughout Africa. This epidemic has been especially severe for the poor, as well as for women. They were less likely to visit hospitals for care and after being infected do develop AIDS in a shorter period of time (Castells, 1997:121). Given this epidemic, the social indicators in all of the African countries are very unlikely to improve. There is also a growing group of child orphans. They became a new group of structurally poor. It is estimated that 10 million of uninfected children have become orphans before 2000 (Castells, 1997:120), putting an enormous pressure on the extended family system.

Care for the poor.

It is important to know in what way the care for the poor has changed during the independence. This has only been within the narrow limits. The new states, just like the colonial states, have not organised an extensive social system. The reason, unlike in the colonial times, was not the unwillingness to do so, but the financial problems of the new states. Still, there are some examples of care organised by the state. Some orphanages came into being and although they were considered inhumane (relatives should take care of the children), they have become overcrowded. Some degree of state provision for the elder and the handicapped was also organised. On a small scale, Kwame Nkrumah for example organised Ghana Cripples’ Aid Society. An increasing number of international organisations started to take care of the African poor as well. Non-governmental organisations have started to help them by supporting their functioning within the modern society, by giving away cheap credits, by education, etc. Help against conjunctural poverty has also been organised. International organisations have been able to help some of the refugees, by organising and feeding people within special camps. Self-organisation of the poor has also begun. Lending money from each other and other support during problem times (for example: a funeral one has to organise) from a group one is part of, came from the ground (van Binsbergen, 1999b:193 and own observations[21]). Those developments, however, stayed being small-scale initiatives. Family has certainly remained the first source of defence, both in the villages and in the cities. Begging, so frequently seen on the streets of African cities and towns, has also remained another major way to survive.

Has poverty become hereditary in Africa?

Another very important issue to discuss in the case of poverty is the question whether in Africa, like on other continents, it has become hereditary. In the case of Africa the view is dubious, and depends upon the perspective from which the situation is perceived. The inner village studies, for example, of savannah societies, Hill (1986), deny the existence of such development. There are several reasons for the lack of perpetuation of poverty or in other case wealth in the savannah societies. They are:

- The wealth of the rich had still to be distributed among many, since the number of children is usually high,

- Personal enterprises are vital to a sudden success,

- The insecurity of the savannah environment and the risk of disease are often determining somebody’s fortune.

The element of chance in the unstable lives of inhabitants of Savannah is thus of importance. Good luck can be a reason for enormous yields and profits. This is naturally the case as long as somebody has enough access to fertile land. In the villages of Northern Ghana it is possible for anybody to move away from the village and to cultivate on a more fertile but also insecure and distant ground. There he can easily make profit and come back to the village as a successful person. Almost every compound has or had somebody working on the larger distance from the village, ‘somewhere in the bush’. This kind of migration from the village is connected to the decreasing fertility of the soil around the village. On the other side these enterprises run the risk of destruction of the yield by animals like monkeys or a loss during transportation, as was the case with one of the interviewed persons.

The fact that poverty is not perceived as hereditary is underlined by the proverbs often used in the villages of Northern Ghana. They underline the shame of poverty but also the chance of becoming rich or poor within an instant[22]. This can be achieved either by hard work or by ancestral help. In interviews undertaken by the author, all people include ‘mysterious’ reasons as the major cause of poverty. This can be ancestral help, to be influenced by paying them a tribute. It is believed that those who fall into poverty insulted their ancestors or other gods.

If poverty is viewed from a different angle, it can be underlined that it is hereditary. In the past the Dagomba chiefs and the royal class were placed upon the commoners and received a tribute from them. Wealth was hereditary within their social class. The same situation prevails now also in Gonja, the neighbours of Dagomba. Higher placed chiefs, are still much more likely to be wealthier than the rest of the society. They are, for example, able to support much more wives, and they indeed do so. The last major Dagomba chief was able to support more than hundred wives. Ray, D.I (1987:16-18) emphasises also that those who have to pay tribute to the chiefs are also the ones suffering from hunger in relatively worse periods, since the tribute has anyhow to be paid. Recently, however, more and more conflicts are arising, since the commoners want now to sell on the market what they used to give for the tribute. They are not so eager to feed the royals anymore. That the situation of the aristocracy is nevertheless deteriorating is also clear from the fact that many chiefs in the Northern Region of Ghana cannot maintain symbols of their chieftaincy and wealth, as in the case of Dagomba, horses[23].

Yet another view of the situation, regarding the inheritance of poverty, emerges when the conflict of the old, traditional and new modern ways of life, a conflict between the city and the village is a point of focus. According to such a point of view, represented by Munywoki (1994), within the post-colonial society, poverty has become hereditary on a larger scale. Munywoki, a person who has grown up in a village, but who has enjoyed university education and is currently working in a Kenyan University, regards those who have stayed in the villages as poor. They lack money, work and have problems in dealing with the modern way of life. Most of the villagers are trapped in what is called in sociology the ‘culture of poverty’, which makes it impossible to leave poverty. Munywoki identifies some of the characteristics of this ‘culture of poverty’. They are:

- Old way of life, traditional values favouring for example many children and early marriage; they result in enormous population growth,

- Inability to support and feed families due to their growth; children are not going to school and are continuously malnourished,

- Lack of adaptation to the new economic and political situation, resulting in economic exclusion,

- Lack of activity due to disbelief in own capabilities; this results in an extensive reliance on the more successful extended family, what, according to Munywoki, hampers development of those successful,

- Fatalism and disbelief in the influence upon one’s own future; leads to poor planning, or a complete lack of it,

- Cultural conservatism, especially among the old; it results in unwillingness to listen to the advice of the educated part of the society (in the article it is Munywoki himself), despite the fact that many of the elderly do encourage western education.

- Culture of poverty is also characterised or leads to laziness.

According to the point of view of Munywoki, the situation in the African countryside is disastrous. It is filled with individuals that are either unwilling or not capable of playing a successful role in the modern African society and will stay in poverty due to this fact. Children born in such situation are also likely to perpetuate the ‘mistakes’ of their parents, he says. The traces of this culture are to be found even among the students at the universities. Girls want to marry rich men, and enforce it by becoming pregnant. The ‘culture of poverty’ is also leading to corruption. People who have experienced it want to make quick profits. They are not able to think of the future and postpone their profits. According to Munywoki, unlimited richness, gained as fast as possible, seems to be the only way to heal the wounds of the past. This explains the corruption of the state-officials in Africa, according to him. Family planning, good education, learning to participate in the modern economy and society as well as drop of the old ways of life seem to be his remedies to the situation. Remedies not all people are willing accept.

This example is enlightening about the way some of the African intellectuals actually perceive poverty and the situation of their own countries. It is an opinion totally different to the views of those who view African countryside in a more romantic way, as a place where people live peacefully and wealthy and do not profit or do not need to profit from the contacts with the modern society. Such a romantic view is partially adhered by Heyden (1983) or Mehemt (1999). Such a relativistic criticism can underline that the villagers live in a different conceptual world than Munywoki does. Forcing them to cooperate with modern society does not recognise the traditional way of life as distinctive and as good in itself. The fact that Munywoki perceives the villagers as poor expresses his own system of values rather than one of the villagers. In villages a successful life is not necessarily defined as participation in a modern way of life. Having many children and following the old traditions passed on from the ancestors might be more important to them than the changes in their ways of behaviour. According to Heyden (1983), if Africa is to develop, the growth needs to be based on those traditional ways of life.

Attitudes towards poverty.

Attitudes towards poverty did not undergo any substantial changes when compared to the colonial period. There was a rise of consciousness about poverty but the extreme rejection and contempt have remained, often undermining the several attempts to take care of the poor in new independent times. Contempt or shame of poverty still exists in Northern Ghana. Among the Dagomba, where it is still a common phenomenon, many people are not keen of speaking about themselves as poor, especially when compared to their neighbours. This is so even if it is certain that they are the worse off in a particular village. It is believed that poverty can lead to envy as well. Therefore, the wealthier individuals are not keen of speaking about their properties and general level of wealth, Oppong (1972:19). The rich often hide their cattle and let it graze with cattle of others, so that nobody knows the exact owner. They fear that by speaking and unnecessarily display of their possessions, they could loose their luck or be subjected to sorcery from vicious and jealous relatives or other members of community. In current Southern Ghana, the attitudes towards poverty are only slightly different. Van Dijk (1999), investigating the contemporary Christian Pentecostal churches, also notes the importance of wealth and contempt of poverty, which is despised by many of the church’s members or is even regarded as a sin. Poor people are not described as good Christians, contrary to the doctrines of European Christianity. The reason for that might be the traditional religious background of the members of those churches, who perceive richness as a gift from God, and nobody should be ashamed of it. This attitude differs largely from one of the Dagomba.

Change of perceptions of poverty.

To underline some of the changes in the pattern of perception of poverty even more, it is interesting to compare the manner in which people living in the villages and those living in the cities look towards it. In Ghana, the indicators and causes of poverty they underline are displaying the different worlds they live in. While defining poverty, ‘urban dwellers focus around issues like unemployment, availability and adequacy of social services, housing, skills training and capital’. On the other hand ’The rural people are more concentrated with basic but critical issues like food security, inability to educate children, orphanage, widowhood, inability to have children, disability (like blindness, cripple), and owning property, including children and wives’ (Kunfaa, 1999: 69). It is clear that people living in the more urbanised communities use terms related to the monetary economy in their definitions, while rural communities put greater emphasis on agricultural and environmental factors. This is related to the penetration of this kind of economy into the different communities. Indeed, rural communities are still based on self-subsistence, as they produce their own food and are dependant on the natural environment to do so. Their participation in the modern economy is only realised through a partial production for the national and global markets.

The causes of poverty, underlined both in the village and urbanised societies underline the differences between both worlds even more. In the villages the main causes include: bad luck [this is connected to the reasons of spiritual or religious nature – lack of support from the ancestors P.S.], the infertility of the soil, drought, weather failure, animal diseases, ill-health/sickness, old age, alcoholism, being an outcast or branded as a witch, or a small family size[24]. Those reasons are connected to what has been called the old poverty. These are not the only causes of poverty, underlined by the villagers. Others are: unemployment, lack of education, lack of capital (for example to buy fertiliser), or in some cases a too large family size[25]. These are related to an increasing participation in the modern African society. In the urban communities, they are of major importance. What can be called old poverty is only a minor issue. The most popular causes of poverty there are: unemployment, illiteracy, illness/sickness, and too many children or unplanned birth (Kunfaa, 1999:26 and own interviews). Lack of money for formally or informally educating children is experienced especially severely. It is recognised as the main strategy to cope with poverty, since it provides a wider range of choices upon employment. It indicates that large families are difficult to support and that almost the only possibility to earn a living is a wage employment.

It further needs to be underlined that the poor should not be perceived as one category. There are various groups of poor, mentioning various causes of poverty and expressing various needs. Those various groups are: Men, women, the young, the elderly, the educated, the uneducated, the formally employed, the unemployed, the handicapped, and others. Women are, for example, concentrating on welfare of the family and development of the community, while men focus on factors that ensure high production and productivity, secular property, development of the community, security, power and personal grandeur (Kunfaa, 1999:68).

2.5 Finishing remarks.

This chapter has analysed the different dimensions and changes in pattern of poverty in Africa in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. Changes have been related to the emergence of modern states, and to the process of engagement in the capitalist mode of production and globalisation. Global tendencies and values started to characterise the modern African societies. The enforced integration into the world markets and its impact on poverty has been shown. It was also underlined that the African societies did not change entirely. The small-scale village communities and the old poverty are still there. They form one of the dimensions of poverty that are in place.

This hence shows a mixed evidence for the question posed in the introduction. African poverty is converging with the global standards. This might be evidence supporting the use of economic poverty research, one that has its theoretical and moral basis in the North-Atlantic hemisphere. It is not as strange on African continent as one would think. To a certain degree such a research could provide correct judgements about poverty in Africa. It is still not clear, however, whether this is sufficient. African poverty has a lot of specific characteristics. To be able to display all those different dimensions and causes more thorough studies of the African societies have to be made. This chapter had also been intended to provide such information. It has displayed underlying historical processes that help to identify the poor together with the causes of their situation. ‘Old’ poverty has been displayed and not only the ‘new’, as in economic research. It has hopefully given a much more dynamic view of poverty, something economists might be searching for. The specific methodology of economic poverty research and changes allowing for a more correct representation of local realities is going to be displayed in chapter four. The following chapter discusses the issues of power inequalities and the problems related to the discoursive colonisation of Africa. Those issues are of major importance in discussing of the possible Euro-centric nature of economic poverty research.

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[1] This chapter is based on a book of John Iliffe ‘The African Poor – a history’, on several other articles concerning the history of African societies, as well as on the qualitative research undertaken in Northern Ghana by the author. This research included a number of interviews, following the methodology of the ‘Conversation with the poor’ of the World Bank during one-month stay in village Palingung in Northern Ghana, as well as other unstructured discussions with the villagers, and NGO workers of a nearby town. Other sources of information have been discussions with the students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, during the author’s 4-month stay at this university.

[2] Under Bilateral kinship responsibility of support lays both in hands of the maternal as well as paternal relatives.

[3] Information for Southern Africa is based on conversations with prof. Wim van Binsbergen.

⁴ These are wives who already have children and who have returned to their husbands from a parental break (Warner et al, 1997: 147).

[5] It must be added here that the view of Meillassoux is partially opposite to the view of economic science that underlines that level of wages comes to existence on the market for work. The wages remain low not because the capitalists do not have to pay for other expenses of the employees but because the supply of labour force is much higher than the demand for employees.

[6] The prices received by the villagers were often as low as 30 % of the international prices.

^[7] It must be realised that economic statistics are not always reliable. This will be further explored in chapter 4.

[8] Source: Konadu-Agyemang (1999: 131)

[9] Source World Bank 2001

[10] Source World Bank (2001) and Iliffe (1987).

[11] Source: World Bank (2001)

[12] Source: World Bank (2001: XIV).

[13] Source: World Bank (2001:XIX)

[14] Source: World Bank (2001:XVI) table 5

[15] Source: Iliffe (1987)

[16] Most striking is the case of Zambia, where during the years 1974 – 1980 the GNP fell with 52 per cent, mainly due to a sharp fall of the prices of copper on the global market (Iliffe, 1987).

[17] In Northern Ghana, rise of population size has put pressure on the natural resources. The fertility of land has decreased resulting in too low yields to feed the whole population of many villages. Lack of money to invest in modern agriculture is not helping to increase those yields. The following figures describe the severity of the situation. Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest amount of irrigated land (10% of what South Asia has meaning 3.8% of cropland), fertiliser consumption (less then 50% of SA, meaning 576 kg. per arable ha. compared to 1370 in SA), and cereal yield (50% of SA, meaning 1050 kg. per ha. compared to 2197). Food production index did rise, but much less than in other ‘developing’ region.

[18] AIDS epidemic is described in the next section.

[19] The girls I have spoken to or I have heard about are often married and enjoy the status of the junior wives. They go during their maternity leave.

[20] In the example of ‘Mary’s room’, she is increasingly retreating from the contact with her family in the countryside. She spends decreasing amounts of money on them and in that way is able to retain wealth to spend on prestige goods – goods that matter in the city and not in the village.

[21] This is a very common phenomenon in Africa. Van Binsbergen describes the example of motshelo – a rotating credit agreement, shared by young woman in Francis town, Botswana. The author of this thesis has observed such a self-organisation among the young in the city of Tolon, Northern Ghana.

[22] Proverbs on poverty I have heard are for example ‘if the ant grows wings it will fly’, ‘if a fowl with feathers insults another one, without them, teasing him that he does not have any, he commits a great mistake. The teased one can soon grow feathers, even faster than the first one and will be able to fly sooner’, ‘you know today, do you know tomorrow’.

[23] Based on interviews in village Palingung in Northern Ghana.

[24] The last one indicates that there are not enough men in a household to secure a satisfying yield. Larger families produce more food and therefore are wealthier in a village situation. They can sell part of the yield and buy other products. Larger family would also be able to take care of the older individuals as well as to provide a more spectacular funeral (a reason of enormous spiritual importance)

[25] Family size becomes problematic when one wants to participate in the modern society. He is than not able to educate, feed, and pay for western health services for all the children. It is an attitude more common in more urbanised villages (as Tolon in Northern Ghana) or among the educated, in the villages (in Palingung they form a minority of the population). Small family is of increasing importance due to an increasing land shortage and decreasing fertility of the soil.