Abstract
In the previous chapter we discussed the social, political and, more extensively, the economic degeneration of all those societies everywhere in the world which were brought into the orbit of the advancing capitalist Western system. Regenerating forces, however, worked alongside destructive ones, and transformed into a Western mould such aspects of the social order of indigenous societies as would mediate and cement the newly established economic relationship between the Western metropolis and the conquered peripheries.
Now those who were destined one day to possess this country have entered into possession; and they are ruling there, but they do not follow the right path.
They put down the men of worth and exalt the worthless; and if even our lords tremble before them, what of the poor peasants?
They have risen up against God’s holy religion; they will not prosper.
(Fulani poem, French Guinea, composed between 1900 and 19101)
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Notes and References
R. Delavignette, Freedom and Authority in French West Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1968) p. 102.
J. Boeke, Economics and Economic Policy of Dual Societies (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1953) p. 103.
J. Nyerere, ‘The Arusha Declaration’, in Freedom and Socialism: Uhuru na Ujamaa (Oxford University Press, 1968) pp. 242–3, reprinted under the title ‘Those who pay the bill’, in Peasants and Peasant Societies, ed. T. Shanin ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 ) pp. 375–6.
W. McCord, ‘Portrait of Transitional Man’, in The New Sociology, ed. I. L. Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Cf. J. Turner, ‘Barriers and Channels for Housing development in Modernising Countries’, in Peasants in Cities, ed. W. Mangin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
A. and E. Leeds, ‘Brasil and the Myth of Urban Rurality, Urban Experience, Work and Values in Squatments in Rio de Janeiro and Lima’, in City and Country in the Third World, ed. A. J. Field (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1970).
F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) p. 103.
E. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966) especially pp. 50–5.
P. Baran, ‘On the Political Economy of Backwardness’, in Imperialism and Underdevelopment, ed. R. I. Rhodes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970) pp. 285–301, this quote p. 286.
Cf. R. Anstey, King Leopold’s Legacy (Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 208.
Sir Andrew Cohen, British Rule in Changing Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959) p. 23, where he observes that for this purpose colonial governments often employed anthropologists.
Cf. K. Turner, ‘The Overseas Chinese of South East Asia, National Integration and Alien Minorities’, in The Politics of New States, ed. R. Scott, Ian Grosart et al. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970) pp. 84–111.
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© 1978 Ankie M. M. Hoogvelt
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Hoogvelt, A.M.M. (1978). The Transformation of Indigenous Social Structures under Colonialism. In: The Sociology of Developing Societies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04190-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04190-9_6
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