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The "Washington consensus" which ushered in neo-liberal policies in Africa is over. It was buried at the G20 meeting in London in early April, 2009. The world capitalist system is in shambles. The champions of capitalism in the global North are rewriting the rules of the game to save it. The crisis creates an opening for the global South, in particular Africa, to refuse to play the capitalist-imperialist game, whatever the rules. It is time to rethink and revisit the development direction and strategies on the continent. This is the central message of this intensely argued book. Issa Shivji demonstrates the need to go back to the basics of radical political economy and ask fundamental questions: who produces the society's surplus product, who appropriates and accumulates it and how is this done. What is the character of accumulation and what is the social agency of change? The book provides an alternative theoretical framework to help African researchers and intellectuals to understand their societies better and contribute towards changing them in the interest of the working people.

One of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence, Issa Shivji shows in two extensive essays in this book that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. As structural adjustment programs were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programs to minimize the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by t

Hitherto the human rights debate in Africa has concentrated on the legal and philosophical. The author, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, here moves the debate to the social and political planes. He attempts to reconceptualise human rights ideology from the standpoint of the working people in Africa. He defines the approach as avoiding the pitfalls of the liberal perspective as being absolutist in viewing human rights as a central question and the rights struggle as the backbone of democratic struggles. The author maintains that such a study cannot be politically neutral or

Hitherto the human rights debate in Africa has concentrated on the legal and philosophical. The author, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, here moves the debate to the social and political planes. He attempts to reconceptualise human rights ideology from the standpoint of the working people in Africa. He defines the approach as avoiding the pitfalls of the liberal perspective as being absolutist in viewing human rights as a central question and the rights struggle as the backbone of democratic struggles. The author maintains that such a study cannot be politically neutral or intellectually uncommitted. Both the critique of dominant discourse and the reconceptualisation are located within the current social science and jurisprudential debates.

This collection of articles focuses on elucidating relations between the state and the working people in post-independence Tanzania. Although varied in details and nuances, the central theme of all contributions is to show the rise of an authoritarian state as an organisation of the compradore ruling class under imperialist hegemony and the simultaneous suppression and cooption of independent organisations of the working people

This essay is a succinct overview of the manner in which the first president of Tanzania attempted to address the peasant question in the country. In the immediate aftermath of independence (1961–1966), Nyerere's government bought into the World Bank's recommendation of village settlement schemes and range development to pull the peasantry and the pastoralist out of the backward, traditional agriculture to modern, more productive agriculture and pastoralism spearheaded by what the WB called progressive farmers. Selected 'progressive farmers' would be resettled in new environment administered by hired management which would teach them modern husbandry under close supervision. Village settlement scheme was established at a great cost. By 1966 it was clear that both these projects were disastrous. With the adoption of the country's socialist blueprint, the government adopted the policy of 'small is beautiful', so to speak. Peasant agriculture would be improved through extension services and collective production in Ujamaa villages. Peasants were not particularly enthusiastic about Ujamaa villages. Very few were established making the party diehards, including Nyerere, exasperated. In 1973 the President ordered that living in villages was compulsory and thus began the forced villagisation from 1971–1974 by which time it was estimated that some five million people were forcefully resettled in the so-called development villages. In hindsight, it can be surmised that this move both discredited the Ujamaa project and Nyerere could have lost his peasant base. Beginning late 1970s and early 1980s the country experienced its worst economic crisis due to a variety of internal and external reasons providing imperialism and internal proto-bourgeoisies an entry point for imposing the notorious structural adjustment programmes. The essay briefly discusses the fate and the fight of the peasant under the subsequent neo-liberal phase predicated on the so-called free market, private property regime and private investment exposing the peasant to the vagaries of capitalism and its crisis. The essay ends with outlining some elements of an alternative discourse to spearhead the peasant struggle for autonomous, sovereign development. JEL Codes: P32, Q15, Q24