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WORK TITLE: Ebola
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BIRTHDATE: 5/14/1945
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Richards_(anthropologist) * http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/R/P/au25073160.html * https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/honorary/p_richards * http://www.ascleiden.nl/content/ASC-community/members/paul-richards * http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/10/19/book-review-ebola-how-a-peoples-science-helped-end-an-epidemic-by-paul-richards/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 85282151
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n85282151
HEADING:
Richards, Paul, 1945 May 14-
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PERSONAL
Born May 14, 1945.
EDUCATION:University of London, Ph.D., 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic and anthropologist. University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, lecturer, 1968-74; School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, London, England, lecturer, 1975-79; University College London, Anthropology Department staff member, 1980-2006, then honorary fellow; Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands, professor of technology and agrarian development, 1993-2010, then emeritus professor. Njala University, adjunct professor, 2012–; has also lectured at Yale University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to academic journals, including African Language Studies, Savanna, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Journal of Arid Environments, African Affairs, IDS Bulletin, Progress in Human Geography, African Studies Review, Discovery and Innovation, Africa, GeoJournal, Cahiers d’Etudes africaines, Politique Africaine, Disasters, Comparative Social Research, Anthropological Quarterly, Review of African Political Economy, Afrika Spectrum, IDS Bulletin, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Plant Genetic Resources, Human Ecology, and Journal of Geography.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Richards is an academic and anthropologist. He worked as part of the Anthropology Department at University College London from 1980 until 2006 and eventually became an emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at the Netherlands’s Wageningen University. Richards’s academic research interests on West Africa include post-war adaptive transitions in farming communities and the Sierra Leonean civil war. On these topics, he has extensively published articles in a number of academic journals.
Fighting for the Rainforest and No Peace, No War
In 1996 Richards published Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone. The account looks at the relationship the jungles played in the civil wars in Sierra Leone, which were widely played out among the country’s youth. Richards imparts that marginalized populations in Sierra Leone acted out against the state patriarchy that they viewed as indifferent to their needs.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Basil Davidson insisted that “with great command of the social background in the rainforest, and considering a balanced spread of evidence, Richards feels able, writing early in 1996, to entertain a cautious hope not easily thinkable before. After some truly dreadful years of uncontrolled killing, there is, he finds, a ‘mood of optimism’ taking hold of Sierra Leone: an end to the conflict may even be in sight.” Davidson posited that “this may prove a fragile optimism, signalling only a momentary exhaustion, but it may also be a consequence of the success of the outside world in restraining its habit of showing ‘them’ that ‘we’ know better. The explanations that Richards offers have a wide validity in Africa. What we are seeing in Rwanda now (and perhaps grimly far ahead) indicates a comparable breakdown of social cohesion resting, again, on the consequences of the actual or expected social exclusion of a large minority, even perhaps a majority, of the population – with all the fissiparous complexities that this entails.”
Richards edited No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts in 2005. The account attempts to view war from a variety of social realities rather than from a security standpoint in explaining the many wars that broke out at the end of the Cold War. Reviewing the book in the African Studies Review, René Lemarchand commented that “Richards offers a brilliant critique of some of the most influential explanations of African conflicts in the introductory chapter to this book. He successfully demolishes Malthusian theories, delivers the coup de grâce to Kaplan’s long moribund ‘new barbarism’ thesis, and goes on to tackle Paul Collier’s ‘greed not grievance’ theory.”
Ebola
In 2016 Richards published Ebola: How a Peoples Science Helped End an Epidemic. Richards looks at the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, pointing to the international community’s response as adding an extra layer of difficulty to the epidemic. However, he notes that these foreign humanitarian efforts were most effective when they adhered to local practices that already existed in dealing with situations of this level of severity.
A contributor writing in the Economist opined that “Richard’s work is in places controversial…. But he offers important insights, especially concerning the central issue of burial practices.” The same critic concluded that, despite the seriousness of the epidemic in Africa, “Richards’s argument is a surprisingly optimistic one. The Ebola epidemic pitted an underfunded and sluggish international public-health infrastructure against supposedly ignorant rural communities. Doomsday did not result.” In a review in Library Journal, Ragan O’Malley suggested that the book is “most appropriate for anthropologists, ethnographers, and epidemiologists, as well as doctors, nurses, and other first responders interested in” acquiring an understanding of Ebola. A contributor to Publishers Weekly also said that “this examination is a scholarly exercise that will appeal to medical and health policy academics.” A contributor to the New African pointed out that “Richards draws on his extensive first-hand experience.” In a review in Foreign Affairs, Nicolas van de Walle found the book to be “provocative.” Writing in the LSE Review of Books, Anita Makri had a few questions lingering in her mind after reading the text, recording that in talking about “co-production, how do you institutionalise it? How do you address the tension between time needed for knowledge to co-evolve and the political pressures of responding quickly? More broadly, how generalisable are Richards’s observations beyond this epidemic? And, from a practical standpoint, how realistic is it to grasp nuanced anthropological understanding in real time? I’m hoping for some ideas and conversation in response to this fascinating book.” Makri reasoned that Ebola is “something of a meandering read – you won’t be guided through the argument very neatly. But the narrative gems and fascinating anthropological insights more than make up for that.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African Studies Review, December 1, 2005, René Lemarchand, review of No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts.
Economist, September 17, 2016, review of Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic, p. 81.
Foreign Affairs, November 1, 2016, Nicolas van de Walle, review of Ebola, p. 193.
Library Journal, September 1, 2016, Ragan O’Malley, review of Ebola, p. 136.
London Review of Books, March 1, 1997, Basil Davidson, review of Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone.
LSE Review of Books, November 1, 2016, review of Ebola.
New African, July 1, 2016, review of Ebola, p. 94.
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2016, review of Ebola, p. 54.
ONLINE
African Studies Centre, Leiden University Web site, http://www.ascleiden.nl/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.
University College, London Web site, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ (April 23, 2017), author profile.*
Paul Richards (anthropologist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Richards
Paul Richards (born 14 May 1945) is an emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and adjunct professor at Njala University in central Sierra Leone. He was formerly a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London for many years, and previously taught anthropology and geography, at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Work on agriculture
3 Work on war
4 Published work
4.1 Books
4.2 Articles and book chapters (incomplete)
5 External links
Background[edit]
Richards is an anthropological commentator and researcher on agricultural technology and African farming systems. Initially trained in human geography, he taught in Ibadan, Nigeria before completing a PhD in human geography and specialising in Sierra Leone. He has worked in Sierra Leone for over forty years, conducting ethnographic studies of Mende village rice farming systems and forest conservation on the Liberian border. After the region became affected by the Sierra Leonean civil war (1992-2002), he turned to analysis of that conflict and has written more widely on the anthropology of armed conflicts, and the Ebola crisis.
Work on agriculture[edit]
Richards argues, following Durkheim, that human technique and skill underpins human action and institutional change. He began by examining everyday livelihood activities like farming. He coined the term "agriculture as performance" based on years of observing the reflexivity of African farmers and their responses to stress and risks, and drawing on his own skills and interest in music and musical performance. His populist faith in African farmers to survive and prosper, despite the magnitude of the risks that faced, was set out in Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (1985), a book that generated fierce debate, since it accused agronomic research and international development organisations of missing the "moving target" of peasant farming and failing to see how innovations took place outside the realm of "formal" science and laboratories. The book's ideas were diametrically opposed to those of more pessimistic observers that lacked detailed field knowledge, that had often accused the same farmers of environmental degradation. Richards has proposed the term "technography" to describe the set of detailed research skills needed by anthropologists, and others, to understand how technology is deployed and used. Technographies have been conducted by teams including several Wageningen University research students and collaborators.
Work on war[edit]
Paul Richards, lecturing in 2014
Fighting for the Rain Forest (1996) showed how the involvement of youth in Sierra Leonean rebel movements had little to do with widely perceived "barbarism" of rebel groups in resource-rich regions. War is, also, part of a "performance" with its origins in history, social orders, and human agency. Paul Richards witnessed some of the fighting during the war, continuing to visit the country. The widely held "New Barbarism" theories of Robert D. Kaplan and others had suggested abundant natural resources, like Sierra Leone's blood diamonds, were a magnet for human greed and civil conflict. Instead, Richards has argued that the involvement of youth in the Revolutionary United Front rebel movement was a form of social resistance to matriarchal rule in Sierra Leone, did not appear to have a strong underlying motive of greed (for the diamond revenues), and was a considered response rather than a spontaneous, 'barbaric' movement. Grievances were partly responsible for the violence that undoubtedly did afflict Sierra Leone during its civil war and for which the Revolutionary United Front was partly responsible. Richards has advised aid and humanitarian agencies on African post-war reconstruction, demobilization and skills-training.
Published work[edit]
Books[edit]
Richards, P. (ed.) 1975. African Environment: Problems and Perspectives. London: International African Institute.
Richards, P. 1985. Indigenous Agricultural Revolution. Ecology and Food Crops in West Africa. Methuen.
Richards, P. 1986. Coping with hunger. Hazard and Experiment in a West African Rice Farming System. London: UCL Press.
Last, M., P. Richards, C. Fyfe. 1987. Sierra Leone, 1787-1987: two centuries of intellectual life. Manchester University Press. [Africa 57(4)]
Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest. War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey.
Richards, P. & Ruivenkamp, G. 1997. Seeds and Survival. Crop Genetic Resources in War and Reconstruction in Africa. Rome: IPGRI.
Richards, P. (ed.) 2005. No Peace, No War. An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts. Oxford: James Currey.
Richards, P. 2016. Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic. London: Zed Books.
Articles and book chapters (incomplete)[edit]
High, C., & P. Richards. 1972. "The random walk drainage simulation model as a teaching exercise", Journal of Geography 71(1), 41-51.
Richards, P. 1972. "A quantitative analysis of the relationship between language tone and melody in a Hausa song". African Language Studies 13, 137-161
High, C., J. Oguntoyinbo and P. Richards. 1973. "Rainfall, drought and food supply in South-Western Nigeria". Savanna, 2(2), 115-120.
Richards, P. 1974. "Kant’s geography and mental maps". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 61, 1-16.
Richards, P. 1975. "‘Alternative’ strategies for the African environment: folk ecology as a basis for community oriented agricultural development". In: P. Richards, Editor, African Environment: Problems and Perspectives, IAI, London.
Filani, M. O. and P. Richards. 1976. "Periodic market systems and rural development: the Ibarapa case study". Savanna 5(2), 149–162.
Oguntoyinbo, J. S., and P. Richards. 1977. "The extent and intensity of the 1969-1973 drought in Nigeria: a provisional analysis". In: D. Dalby, R.J. Harrison Church & F. Bezzaz. Drought in Africa, International African Institute London, pp. 114–126.
Otuntoyinbo, J., and P. Richards. 1978. "Drought and the Nigerian farmer". Journal of Arid Environments 1:165-194.
Richards, P. 1978. "Problem-generating structures in Nigeria's rural development". African Affairs 77(307), 257-259.
Richards, P. 1978. "Environment, settlement and state formation in pre-colonial Nigeria". In: Green, D. R., Haselgrove, C., and M. Spriggs (eds). Social Organisation and Settlement: Contributions from Anthropology, Archaeology and Geography. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford.
Richards, P. 1979. "A Green Revolution in Africa?" African Affairs 78(311), 269-272.
Richards, P. 1979. "Community Environmental Knowledge in African Rural Development". IDS Bulletin, 10 (2).
Richards, P. 1980. "The environmental factor in African studies". Progress in Human Geography. 4(4), 589-60.
Richards, P. 1980. "Community environmental knowledge in African rural development". In Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Development, eds D. W. Brokensha, D. M. Warren, and O. Werner, pp. 183-203. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.
Richards, P. 1981. "Quality and quantity in agricultural work-Sierra Leone rice farming systems". In: G. A. Harrison. Energy and Effort. London : Taylor & Francis.
Richards, P. 1983. "Farming systems and agrarian change in West Africa". Progress in Human Geography 7(1), 1–39.
Richards, P. 1983. "Ecological change and the politics of African land use". African Studies Review 26(2), 1-72.
Richards, P. 1984. "Spatial organization as a theme in African studies". Progress in Human Geography 8, 551-561.
Richards, P. 1985. "Farmers also experiment: a neglected intellectual resource in African science". Discovery and Innovation 1, pp. 19–25.
Richards, P. 1987. "The politics of famine—Some recent literature". African Affairs 86, 111-116.
Richards, P. 1987. "Africa in the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor". Africa 57(4), 566-571
Richards, P. 1987. "Upland and swamp rice farming systems in Sierra Leone: an evolutionary transition?" In: B. L. Turner II and S. B. Brush (eds). Comparative Farming Systems. Guilford Press. pp. 156-187.
Richards, P. 1989. "Doing what comes naturally: ecological inventiveness in African rice farming". In: R. E. Johannes (ed.). Traditional Ecological Knowledge: A Collection of Essays, IUCN, 51-56.
Richards, P. 1989. "Agriculture as a performance". In R. Chambers, A. Pacey and L. Thrupp (eds), Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research. London: Intermediate Technology, pp. 39-42.
Richards, P. 1990. "Local strategies for coping with hunger: central Sierra Leone and northern Nigeria compared". African Affairs 89(355), 265-275.
Richards, P. 1992. "Saving the rainforest? Contested futures in conservation". In: S. Wallman. Contemporary futures: Perspectives from Social Anthropology.
Richards, P. 1992. "Landscapes of dissent: Ikale and Ikaje country, 1870-1950". In: J. F. Aye Ayadi and J. D. Y. Peel. People and Empires in African History: Essays in Memory of Michael Crowder. Longman, London.
Richards, P. 1993. "Cultivation: knowledge or performance?" In Hobart, M. (ed). An Anthropological Critique of Development: the Growth of Ignorance. London, Routledge, 61–78
Richards, P. 1993. "Natural symbols and natural history: Chimpanzees, elephants and experiments in Mende thought". In: K. Milton (ed.). Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. Routledge.
Richards, P. 1995. "Rebellion in Liberia and Sierra Leone: a crisis of youth?" In: O.W. Furley (ed.). Conflict in Africa, I.B. Tauris: London.
Richards, P. 1995. "The versatility of the poor: indigenous wetland management systems in Sierra Leone". GeoJournal 35(2), 197–203.
Richards, P. 1995. "Participatory Rural Appraisal: a quick and dirty critique". PLA Notes. 24, 13-16.
Richards, P., J. Guyer. 1996. "The invention of biodiversity: social perspectives on the management of biological variety in Africa". Africa 66(1).
Richards, P. 1996. "Culture and community values in the selection and maintenance of African rice". In: S. Brush & Doreen Stabinsky, eds, Valuing Local Knowledge: indigenous people and intellectual property rights. Island Press, Washington DC.
Richards, P., & G. Ruivenkamp. 1996. "New tools for conviviality: social shaping of biotechnology". In: P. Descola & G. Palsson, eds. Nature and Society: anthropological perspectives.
Richards, P. 1996. "Agrarian creolization: the ethnobiology, history, culture and politics of West African rice". In: R. Ellen and K. Fukui, eds. Redefining Nature: Ecology, culture and domestication, 291–318.
Richards. P. 1997. "Toward an African Green Revolution?: An Anthropology of Rice Research in Sierra Leone". In E. Nyerges, ed., The Ecology of Practice: Studies of Food Crop Production in Sub-Saharan West Africa. Newark: Gordon & Breach.
Peters, K., & P. Richards. 1998. "Why we fight: Voices of youth combatants in Sierra Leone". Africa 68(2), 183-210.
Peters, K., & P. Richards. 1998. "Jeunes combattants parlant de la guerre et de la paix en Sierra Leone", Cahiers d'Etudes africaines, 150-152, 581-617.
Richards, P. 1999. "New political violence in Africa: secular sectarianism in Sierra Leone". GeoJournal 47, 433-442.
Richards, P. 1999. "Casting seeds to the four winds: a modest proposal for plant genetic diversity management", in Posey, D. A. (ed.), Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, Nairobi & London: UNEP & IT Publications.
Richards, P. 2000. "Chimpanzees as political animals in Sierra Leone". In J. Knight, Natural Enemies: People-wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective. Routledge.
Richards, P. "A Pan-African Composer? Coleridge-Taylor and Africa". Black Music Research Journal 21(),
Archibald, S., & P. Richards. 2002. "Converts to human rights? Popular debate about war and justice in rural central Sierra Leone". Africa 72(3), 339-367.
Richards, P., and C. Vlassenroot. 2002. "Les guerres africaines du type fleuve Mano: pour une analyse sociale". Politique Africaine 88, 13-26.
Richards. P. 2002. "Green Book Millenarians? The Sierra Leone War from the Perspective of an Anthropology of Religion". In Niels Kastfelt, ed., Religion and Civil War in Africa, London: C. Hurst.
Archibald, S., & P. Richards. 2002. "Seeds and rights: new approaches to post-war agricultural rehabilitation in Sierra Leone". Disasters 26(4, 356-67.
Richards, P. 2002. "Militia conscription in Sierra Leone: recruitment of young fighters in an African war". Comparative Social Research 20, 255-276.
Richards, P. 2005. "War as smoke and mirrors: Sierra Leone 1991-2, 1994-5, 1995-6". Anthropological Quarterly 78(2), 377-402.
Richards, P. 2006. "An accidental sect: How war made belief in Sierra Leone". Review of African Political Economy 33(110), 651 - 663.
Richards, P. 2006. "The history and future of African rice. Food security and survival in a West African war zone". Afrika Spectrum 41(1), 77-93.
Richards, P. 2006. "Young men and gender in war and post-war reconstruction: some comparative findings from Liberia and Sierra Leone". In I. Bannon and Maria Correia, eds, The Other Half of Gender: men’s issues in development, Washington: World Bank, pp. 195-218.
Richards, P. 2007. "How does participation work? Deliberation and performance in African food security". IDS Bulletin 38(5), 21-35.
Richards, P. 2007. "The emotions at war: a musicological approach to understanding atrocity in Sierra Leone". In Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire & A. Treacher (eds), Public emotions. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Peters, K., & P. Richards. 2007. "Understanding recent African wars", Africa 77(3), 442-454.
Richards, P. 2007. "Is a right to technology an antidote to war?" In G. Frerks & B. Goldwijk (eds) New Human Security Challenges: alternative discourses. Wageningen: Wageningen University Press.
Richards, P., M. Rizzo, M. L. Weiss, C. Steinerd & S. England. 2010. "Do Peasants Need GM Crops?" (review), Journal of Peasant Studies 37(3): 559-574
Richards, P. 2010. "Ritual dynamics in humanitarian assistance". Disasters 34: 138-146
Richards, P. 2010. A Green Revolution from below? Retirement address, Wageningen University.
Krijn, P., P. Richards. 2011. "Rebellion and Agrarian Tensions in Sierra Leone". Journal of Agrarian Change 11(3):377-395
Cramer, C., and P. Richards. 2011. "Violence and War in Agrarian Perspective". Journal of Agrarian Change 11 (3): 277-297
Mokuwa E., M. Voors, E. Bulte and P. Richards. 2011. "Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone: Judicial serfdom as a driver of conflict". African Affairs 110(440): 339-366.
Nuijten E., & P. Richards. 2011. "Pollen flows within and between rice and millet fields in relation to farmer variety development in The Gambia". Plant Genetic Resources 9 :361-374.
Mokuwa, A., Nuijten, H.A.C.P., Okry, F., Teeken, B.W.E., Maat, H., Richards, P. and Struik, P.C. 2013. Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. PLoS One 8 (2013)3.
Grijspaarde, H., Voors, M., Bulte, E., and Richards, P. 2013. Who believes in witches? Institutional flux in Sierra Leone. African Affairs 112/446: 22-47.
External links[edit]
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/honorary/p_richards
http://www.wur.nl/en/Expertise-Services/Chair-groups/Social-Sciences/KnowledgeTechnology-and-Innovation-Group/People/Emeritus-Staff-1.htm
About the Author
Paul Richards is emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is the author of No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, among other books.
Paul Richards
Paul Richards E-mail: Paul.Richards@wur.nl
Honorary Professor
Paul Richards was a member of the UCL Anthropology Department from 1980 until 2006. Now retired from teaching, he continues research in Sierra Leone and Liberia, especially on post-war adaptive transitions in farming communities. Recent work includes socio-economic baseline studies of communities living around the Gola forest in Liberia and Sierra Leone intended to provide a basis for conservation-oriented livelihoods interventions. He is updating a longitudinal study of two communities in eastern and central Sierra Leone where long-term fieldwork has been conducted for the past 30 years. He also contributes to a large-scale comparative study of farmer seed selection strategies for rice across several West African countries, in cooperation with plant scientists. This work has identified a substantial number of farmer-selected inter-specific rice hybrids and other robust local cultivars relevant to local agricultural adaptation in an era of climate change. Recent publications include:
1. Grijspaarde, H., Voors, M., Bulte, E., and Richards, P., 2013. Who believes in witches? Institutional flux in Sierra Leone, African Affairs 112/446, 22-47
2. Mokuwa, A., Nuijten, E., Teeken, B., Maat, H., Richards, P., and Struik, P., 2013. Robustness and strategies of adaptation within farmer varieties of African rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa., PLoS ONE 8(3): e34801 (doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034801, published online1st March).
3. Teeken, B., Nuijten, E., Padrao Temudo, M., Mokuwa, A., Struik, P. C., and Richards, P. 2012, Maintaining or abandoning African rice: lessons for understadning processes of seed innovation, Human Ecology 40(6), 879-892, (DOI 10.1007/s10745-012-9528-x)
4. Cramer, C. and Richards P. 2011, Violence and war in agrarian perspective, Journal of Agrarian Change 11(3), 277-297 5. Mokuwa, E., Voors, M., Bulte, E. and Richards, P., 2011, Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone: judicial serfdom as a driver of conflict, African Affairs,110/440, 339-366, doi: 10.1093/afraf/adr019
Previous Publications
1. PAUL RICHARDS ed. 2005 No peace, no war: an anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts, Oxford: James Currey
2. PAUL RICHARDS 2005, ‘La terre ou le fusil? Les racines agraires des conflicts de la region du fleuve Mano’, Afrique Contemporaine, No. 214, 2005, 37-57
3. PAUL RICHARDS, 2006, “The history and future of African Rice: food security and survival in a West African war zone”, Afrika Spectrum 41(1), 77-93, 2006
4. PAUL RICHARDS, 2006, “An accidental sect: how war made belief in Sierra Leone ”, Review of African Political Economy, v. 33, No. 110, 2006, 651-663, 2006
5. PAUL RICHARDS, 2006, “Young men and gender in war and post-war reconstruction: some comparative findings from Liberia and Sierra Leone ”, In I. Bannon and Maria Correia, eds., The other half of gender: men’s issues in development, Washington : World Bank, pp. 195-218.
6. PAUL RICHARDS 2007 “The emotions at war: a musicological approach to understanding atrocity in Sierra Leone ”, In Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire & A. Treacher, eds., Public emotions, Basingstoke : Palgrave
7. PAUL RICHARDS 2007 “Is a right to technology an antidote to war?” In G. Frerks and B. Goldwijk, eds., New human security challenges: alternative discourses, Wageningen: Wageningen University Press
Paul Richards
Born in 1945. Studied at London University (QMC and SOAS) 1963-67. External London PhD, 1977. Lectured in University of Ibadan 1968-1974, University of London SOAS (1975-79), University of London UCL (1980-2006). Professor of Anthropology 1992-1999. Honorary Professor of Anthropology (to date). Professor of Technology and Agrarian Development Wageningen University (1993-2010). Visiting Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 2011. Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies, Njala University (from 2012). Fieldwork in western Nigeria (1968-1975) and southern and eastern Sierra Leone, and western Liberia, at various times from 1977 to present.
Main research interests: peasant farmer experimentation, farmer selection pressure on African rice, forest-edge livelihood strategies, youth and rural insurgency in Liberia and Sierra Leone, ritual amplifiers and regulators of violent conflict, local adaptation to Ebola virus disease in Upper West Africa, technology as human instrumentality.
Honorary fellow
paul.richards@wur.nl
Wageningen University
Publications:
PDF icon publications_richards.pdf
Expertise on:
Sierra Leone
Liberia
4/12/17, 1(41 PM
Print Marked Items
Best practice; Ebola
The Economist.
420.9007 (Sept. 17, 2016): p81(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Dispelling myths about the spread of a deadly disease
Ebola: How a Peoples Science Helped End an Epidemic. By Paul Richards. Zed Books; 180 pages.
AS THE Ebola virus galloped across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone two years ago causing mounting panic in Europe and America, familiar tropes about west Africa began to reassert themselves. "Many locals seem unwilling to break with age-old customs," fretted an exasperated foreign doctor who was evacuated from Sierra Leone to Germany in December 2014. West Africans, it seemed to some, were stuck in the fatal grip of irrational superstition. Dogged fealty to immutable traditions, above all funeral practices that insisted upon the ritual washing of the dead, had condemned the region to an epidemic of potentially biblical proportions.
But as the West became more fretful, west Africans were quietly doing the opposite. And it was this calm, considered and deeply rational response to the disease among affected populations that meant that the doom-laden predictions-- the hundreds of thousands of cases prophesied by some epidemiologists at the height of the crisis in late 2014--in the end failed to materialise. This is the argument of Paul Richards, a British anthropologist specialising in the Mano River region where Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia intersect and the 2014-15 Ebola epidemic first appeared. The most important lesson, he argues in his new book, "Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic", is that money and technology--from vaccines and drugs to robot nurses--ultimately mattered much less than indigenous know-how.
This is not an entirely new argument, since many at the time noted the chiefs' central role in leading the fight against the disease. It is also well-known that Sierra Leone's rural south-east saw Ebola decline much earlier than the north- west, despite receiving less aid and technical assistance. This is, however, the first book-length ethnographic study of the epidemic, and represents the first serious attempt to grapple with some of the practical as well as epistemological questions posed by the local response to the outbreak.
Mr Richards's work is in places controversial. His suggestion that better-functioning health systems might have made the epidemic worse in its early stages is questionable. His criticism of the public-health propaganda put out by the World Health Organisation (WHO) is perhaps unduly harsh. And his conviction that "local ideas changed independently of the loudhailers" is supported by too little hard evidence.
But he offers important insights, especially concerning the central issue of burial practices, one of the epidemic's main routes of infection. Tradition, it turned out, was mutable. Villagers on the front line quickly came to see the risks, and rituals were adapted accordingly. The problem was that the "safe burials" ordered by the WHO--with its understandable yet singular fixation on biosafety--were insensitive to the sacred dimensions of funeral custom. Burial teams were made up of outsiders, with no social connection to the dead that they buried; religious respect was an
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afterthought. Friction with central governments--Sierra Leone's government, for example, made washing corpses a criminal offence--was the predictable result.
In the final analysis, though, Mr Richards's argument is a surprisingly optimistic one. The Ebola epidemic pitted an underfunded and sluggish international public-health infrastructure against supposedly ignorant rural communities. Doomsday did not result.
Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic. By Paul Richards.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Best practice; Ebola." The Economist, 17 Sept. 2016, p. 81(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463558054&it=r&asid=313287d56a2b1541ed0620bdfe8138c1. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463558054
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Richards, Paul. Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
Ragan O'Malley
Library Journal.
141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p136. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Richards, Paul. Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic. Zed. Oct. 2016.300p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781783608591. $95; pap. ISBN 9781783608584. $24.95. SCI
In this scholarly approach to a relatively under-researched aspect of the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, Richards (professor emeritus of technology & agrarian development, Wageningen Univ., the Netherlands; No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts) premises that the spread of the virus was halted by changes in how responders (primarily family and community members) handled the sick and dead, not by the top- down, high-tech approach of the international community led by the World Health Organization. The author argues that without an understanding of cultural rituals (such as burial practices), the information that the international community disseminated and some of the actions they took were ineffectual. His fascinating, in-depth examination of burial practices within several villages in Sierra Leone explains that it was only when the cultural significance of those methods was recognized and communities were allowed to act with more agency that rates of infection decreased. The rapid increase of local learning that took place during the yearlong outbreak should be factored into any future thinking about epidemic control. VERDICT Most appropriate for anthropologists, ethnographers, and epidemiologists, as well as doctors, nurses, and other first responders interested in understanding the disease.--Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's Sch., Brooklyn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
O'Malley, Ragan. "Richards, Paul. Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic." Library Journal,
1 Sept. 2016, p. 136. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462044982&it=r&asid=20a457997e0b363fa01b5a6a566d4a8b. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462044982
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Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p54. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic
Paul Richards. Zed, $24.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-78360-858-4
Richards (No Peace, No War), emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, adopts an anthropological approach to analyzing Upper West Africa's deadly Ebola virus outbreak in 2014 and the success in containing its spread. He concentrates on local efforts that understood customs and culture-- suggesting, albeit controversially, that "better-functioning health systems" in that region "might only have made the epidemic worse." Here, Richards finds that the initial response by international experts to an outbreak in 2013 in Guinea erred by focusing on bush meat when it later became clear that one of the drivers of the epidemic's spread was , "participation in large funerals," a regional custom that involved secret societies. Disease containment succeeded because of "people's science," which Richards describes as the shared knowledge and cooperation of local communities and international medical responders. And what the outbreak in Upper West Africa revealed was "an unexpected capacity for communities and responders rapidly to figure out jointly the nature of the infection threat, and then to respond practically." This examination is a scholarly exercise that will appeal to medical and health policy academics, but Richards convincingly argues the broader lesson for containing future epidemics should always be a response embracing "common sense, improvisation, distributed practical knowledge, and collective action." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 54. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900397&it=r&asid=50e1ad65229b74eb3ea75af4c961d966. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900397
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Ebola
New African.
.563 (July 2016): p94. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 IC Publications Ltd. http://www.africasia.com/icpubs
Full Text:
EBOL A
HOW A PEOPLE'S SCIENCE HELPED END AN EPIDEMIC BY PAUL RICHARDS
12.99 [pounds sterling] AFRICAN ARGUMENTS
ISBN: 978-1-78360-838-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 2013, the largest Ebola outbreak in history swept across much of West Africa, claiming thousands of lives in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. By the middle of the following year, the international community was gripped by hysteria.
Experts grimly predicted that millions would be infected within months, and a huge international control effort was mounted to tackle the virus.
Yet, paradoxically, the disease was already going into decline in Africa itself. So why did outside observers get it so wrong?
Author Paul Richards draws on his extensive first-hand experience to argue that the international community's panicky response failed to take into account local expertise and common sense. Crucially, Richards shows that the humanitarian response to the disease was most effective in those parts where it supported these initiatives and actually hampered recovery when it ignored or disregarded local knowledge.
Published in association with the International African Institute, as part of a series of concise, engaging books that address key issues currently facing Africa (edited by Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa Society; Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation; and Alcinda Honwana of the Open University), Ebola describes how local agents and international responders, working together, discovered something not known hitherto--how to end an Ebola epidemic. As the introduction states: "The rest of the world ought to ponder their courage."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"Ebola." New African, July 2016, p. 94. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459723028&it=r&asid=50840708b8ece804a7cb0e5a548fbacc. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459723028
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Africa
Nicolas van de Walle
Foreign Affairs.
95.6 (November-December 2016): p193. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
Morning in South Africa
BY JOHN CAMPBELL. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 244 pp.
In the process of making the contrarian argument that South Africa's prospects are promising despite the country's current difficulties, Campbell has also written an excellent introduction to the South African political economy. After a concise history of the recent past, Campbell ably surveys such policy areas as economic development, health care, and education. He repeatedly concedes that South Africa's performance since the end of apartheid has been mediocre at best, but he also sees reasons for measured optimism. Inequality is rising, but some poverty alleviation has taken place. The quality of educational opportunities for black South Africans remains low, but there has been a notable increase in their overall access to education. Corruption is increasing and the ruling African National Congress shows signs of an authoritarian drift, but the judiciary remains professional and largely apolitical. Campbell's optimism stems from his belief that the country's democratic institutions are strong and resilient and that its people have already completed much of the hard work of building a "nonracial" democracy. Whether or not one finds that persuasive, the book's reasonable tone and fact-based review of the record represent a useful antidote to more common alarmist accounts. Also welcome is Campbell's call for more active and ambitious U.S. engagement with South Africa.
Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic BY PAUL RICHARDS. Zed Books, 2016, 300 pp.
In 2013, when the Ebola epidemic broke out in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, many issued grim predictions about its likely impact, as it was widely believed that these desperately poor countries lacked the health-care infrastructure necessary to contain the highly infectious virus. Thankfully, the worst fears were not realized, as a large international effort helped to eventually halt the spread of the disease, although not before more than 11,000 people had died. In this provocative book, Richards argues that the international response may actually have extended the epidemic's duration, as it offered no medical solution (no cure or vaccine is yet available) and slowed the ability of the affected populations to develop the cultural and behavioral adaptations that were ultimately the key to defeating the virus--for example, changes to practices around care for the ill and burial of the dead. Too often, the well-intentioned international response was shaped by a top-down logic that sought to impose novel practices on people rather than work
with them to adapt their existing customs to the new reality. Women and Power in Postconflict Africa
BY AILI MARI TRIPP. Cambridge University Press, 2015, 300 pp.
The country with the world's largest proportion of female legislators is Rwanda, where, following national elections in 2013, 64 percent of the seats in Parliament were held by women. In this regard, Rwanda--which barely more than two decades ago was mired in a genocidal civil war--is exceptional but not quite an exception in sub-Saharan Africa. As Tripp's book convincingly demonstrates, countries in the region that have suffered civil wars have empowered women to a significantly greater extent than countries that have not. Based on data-rich case studies of Angola, Liberia, and Uganda, Tripp argues that since the 1990s, protracted periods of civil conflict have led to changes in the nature of
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gender relations. Peace agreements have contained measures, including constitutional reforms, that have mandated greater gender equality. Tripp argues that the main factors behind such steps are domestic in nature but also acknowledges the influence of the international institutions and foreign donors that have more systematically supported gender equality in the last quarter century. This is an optimistic but not misty-eyed book, and Tripp concedes that much work remains to be done in securing rights and opportunities for African women.
Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria BY BRANDON KENDHAMMER. University of Chicago Press, 2016, 312 pp.
Since the mid-1990s, several states in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north have sought to institutionalize Islamic law (sharia). Kendhammer combines deft ethnographic research with a deep knowledge of Nigerian history and culture to examine this trend, its implications for democracy and liberalism, and the reasons why many Muslim Nigerians have welcomed it. He finds that although some northern politicians have cynically exploited Muslim fears of being attacked and marginalized in an increasingly secular society in order to promote sharia, many ordinary Muslim Nigerians required little convincing: they sincerely believe that implementing Islamic law will improve the performance of woefully deficient state administrations and legal systems, encourage economic development, and lead to a more responsive democracy. In practice, Kendhammer finds that sharia has served to strengthen the state's regulatory apparatus over religion, and that it has also harmed the interests of non-Muslim minorities. Meanwhile, sharia's effects on good governance and growth have been inconsistent and partial.
The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics
EDITED BY KWASI KONADU AND CLIFFORD C. CAMPBELL. Duke University Press, 2016, 496 pp.
This collection of essays, scholarly articles, newspaper reports, poems, and song lyrics provides a wonderful introduction to Ghana and its people, stretching all the way back to prehistoric times. Opening the book to virtually any page yields a judiciously selected text that reveals something about Ghana: Konadu's reflections on the origins of Akan ethnic identity; a poem by Abena Busia about a famous private school in Accra that sits in what was once a dense forest with spiritual significance for locals; a lovely essay by Esi Sutherland-Addy about the funeral of a traditional king in eastern Ghana. The book ends with the poet Kwesi Brew's laud of Ghana's resilience:
Love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping has cast us in this mould: that while we take the blow and seem unhurt, speechless, we also watch and wait.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
van de Walle, Nicolas. "Africa." Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2016, p. 193+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477460859&it=r&asid=55bccd8e17f92183279d1316e2c61d17. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477460859
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Book Review: Ebola: How A People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic by Paul Richards
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In Ebola: How A People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic, Paul Richards draws on his firsthand experience in Sierra Leone of the recent Ebola outbreak to outline the vital role played by a ‘people’s science’ grounded in the co-production of knowledge between responders and communities. Despite an occasionally meandering narrative, this book is filled with fascinating insights and rich in practical examples that should inspire deep reflection on how to better respond to future crises, writes Anita Makri.
This review was originally posted on the From Poverty to Power blog, authored by LSE Professor in Practice, Duncan Green.
Ebola: How A People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic. Paul Richards. Zed Books. 2016.
Find this book: amazon-logo
ebola-coverI’m sure that to readers the Ebola epidemic that devastated West Africa a couple of years ago needs no introduction (just in case, here’s a nice summary by the Guardian’s health editor). So I’ll cut to the chase, and to a narrative that at the time was bubbling underneath more familiar debates about responding to health crises – you know, things like imperfect governance, fragile health systems, drug shortages.
All of them important, but this narrative was new. It was about fear, communication and cooperation – the human and social side of the crisis (explored in a SciDev.Net collection I commissioned at the time). There was also an unsettling undercurrent to it – one that conveyed ‘otherness’ and ignorance on the part of West Africans, fuelled by reports of violence against health workers and of communities resisting expert advice against risky funeral rites.
But if you listened closely, you could just about make out the voices of anthropologists trying to dispel notions that these reactions were about exotic or traditional cultures. Paul Richards was one of those voices, and luckily he’s put together a rare account of evidence, theory and experience in a book that should trigger real reflection on how we can do better in handling similar crises (hint: more listening).
Ebola: How A People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic tells the story of the epidemic through the eyes of someone with intimate knowledge of the region and the rules that influence human interactions – very much an anthropologist’s perspective, not an epidemiologist’s. The book turns the mainstream discourse on its head, putting what Richards calls ‘people’s science’ on an equal footing with the more orthodox science behind the international response. It captures how people and experts adapted to each other, falling into a process of knowledge co-production.
ebola-image-1Image Credit: Freetown, Sierra Leone (DFID CC by 2.0)
It’s something of a meandering read – you won’t be guided through the argument very neatly. But the narrative gems and fascinating anthropological insights more than make up for that. Chapter Four had me at the first sentence: ‘This chapter offers an empirical analysis of the Ebola epidemic from the perspective of techniques of the body.’ You’ll get a metaphor involving ‘necromantic joyriding’ in the chapter on burial technique, plus the occasional random observation (‘the smartphone without contacts is not a phone’).
The structure comes in broad brushstrokes. After an introduction to the epidemic that leads to discussion of social knowledge, the book comes into its own as Richards begins to delve into culture, body washing techniques and the ritual of burial. He takes us through the sociocultural backstreets of the epidemic – different meanings of culture, how ethnic-linguistic affiliation relates to burial practices, the gap between social and medical norms and the empirical evidence behind his main argument for local understanding and for co-production of knowledge between responders and communities.
The evidence he cites comes from focus groups, conversations, studies and journalistic and other articles. It’s a book rich in practical examples from extensive knowledge of the region, with theory to underpin observation.
It documents self-directed changes in people’s behaviour – using rehydration and improvising by using plastic bags when caring for sick relatives at home, for instance, changing burial rituals or restricting movement in affected areas. Richards shows how communities understood the disease in practical terms not communicated by official channels. One example is evidence that people grasped the risk involved in carrying vomiting patients for miles in a hammock – a common mode of transport in the region’s remote areas.
Towards the end he recounts how a chiefdom in Sierra Leone put together a task force to do epidemiological work like tracing the contacts of sick people. This, he says, reduced the number of disease cases before the international response was ramped up. Examples like this are key to his argument, though a bit short on the detail about what communities actually did and how.
At Chapter Six it all crystallises into Richards’ main thesis: that local people learned about Ebola quickly based on their own empirical evidence (not the same as cultural knowledge, he says – a distinction that needs more explanation); and that the changes they devised managed to change the course of the epidemic.
Another message: that the international response suffered from limitations and flawed perceptions. Here’s a good line on that: ‘a contradiction between home nursing and no home nursing exists only in the straight-line space of a bullet-pointed official release’. And an example: models of how Ebola moves just don’t capture the network-like features of social relationships, like extended family – their main variable is residential proximity.
All leading to the point that Ebola epidemiology isn’t an exact science or only a medical science; it is also a social science. And this, to me, begs a conversation about how to adapt the response system so it can make better use of knowledge beyond traditional epidemiology, including what NGOs can bring to the table.
Ultimately the two sides of the response converged, Richards argues, with villagers thinking like epidemiologists and responders thinking like villagers – for instance, offering simple messages around practicalities of home care, like using coconut water where rehydration fluid wasn’t available. This ‘merged understanding’ was crucial to controlling the epidemic, he concludes. Co-production of knowledge and co-evolution of response should be supported through institutional mechanisms.
And that’s where Richards leaves it – the floor is ours. There are a few questions in the air. On the point of co-production, how do you institutionalise it? How do you address the tension between time needed for knowledge to co-evolve and the political pressures of responding quickly? More broadly, how generalisable are Richards’s observations beyond this epidemic? And, from a practical standpoint, how realistic is it to grasp nuanced anthropological understanding in real time?
I’m hoping for some ideas and conversation in response to this fascinating book.
Anita Makri is an editor, writer and producer currently with SciDev.Net. She tweets @anita_makri.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
René Lemarchand
Paul Richards, ed. No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts. Athens: Ohio University Press/Oxford: James Currey, 2005. x + 214 pp. Appendix. References. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper.
In one of the rare photo-ops from the Ituri war zone, a couple of militias crouch before the camera. In front of them on the ground are the heads of their enemies. One man has placed his left hand on one of the heads to make it face the camera, while the right one is holding a severed arm by the hand, as if moved to offer a last handshake to his victim. Next to him is another militia man holding a gun in one hand and in the other a forearm hacked off at the elbow. He holds it close to his nose, as if the tangle of blood-stained ligaments, tendons, and pieces of flesh are a bunch of flowers. In another scene four human heads are neatly aligned on the ground. Huddled over these trophies are other militias, all holding AK47s, except one, whose hands are holding to his mouth a large chunk of freshly cut human flesh, ready to be eaten.
Are such chilling scenes to be treated as evidence of Robert D. Kaplan's "new barbarism"? Or the sinister incarnation of "Malthus with a gun"? Or do they reflect the perverse effects of the "greed versus creed" dialectic? None of the above, suggests Paul Richards in the opening chapter of this rich collection of case studies. War, he tells us, must be seen as "a social process," and "if we are to understand war and peace in processual terms we must first comprehend the practices of war and peace: how people mobilize and organize for war, and the role played by ideational factors in such mobilization and organization." The emphasis, therefore, must not be [End Page 164] on "what triggered war" but "on exploring how people make war and peace" (13). The Ituri photos, in a word, need to be "contextualized."
The book is a testament to the quality of the research done at the Department of Cultural Anthropology of the University of Uppsala, until recently under the guidance of the late Bernhard Helander, to whose memory this volume is dedicated. Seven of the ten contributors are either Uppsala Ph.D.s or on the faculty of the same department. The case studies cover a wide gamut: six are from Africa (Burkina Faso, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Zimbabwe), two from Asia (Cambodia and Tibet), one from Latin America (Guatemala), and another from Europe (Bosnia). For bringing such diverse cases into a coherent theoretical frame the editor deserves full credit.
Best known for his classic work on Sierra Leone, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone (1996), Paul Richards offers a brilliant critique of some of the most influential explanations of African conflicts in the introductory chapter to this book. He successfully demolishes Malthusian theories, delivers the coup de grâce to Kaplan's long moribund "new barbarism" thesis, and goes on to tackle Paul Collier's "greed not grievance" theory. The nub of his critique is as straightforward as it is convincing: "[Collier's] analysis shows that internal wars are more likely where mineral wealth combines with poverty, and where there is high unemployment among young men with limited education, but (perversely) he considers neither circumstance grounds for valid grievance." As he goes on to note: "This seems very odd to anyone with on-the-ground knowledge of youth activism against oil companies in the Niger Delta or rebels facing mercenary-backed kimberlite concession holders in Sierra Leone. Why it is 'greedy' to want a basic education or a job Collier does not explain" (10).
Richards makes no effort to offer an alternative etiology of warfare. His aim is to sketch the outlines of what he calls "the ethnographic perspective." Drawing from B. M. Knauft's discussion of Melanesian warfare, he rejects single-factor explanations, while emphasizing the fact that "war belongs within society" and must therefore be seen as an aspect of a social process where the boundary between peace...
The Cruel Hoax of Development
Basil Davidson
BUYFighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone by Paul Richards
James Currey/Heinemann, 182 pp, £35.00, November 1996, ISBN 0 85255 397 8
BUYA Claim to Land by the River: A Household in Senegal 1720-1994 by Adrian Adams and Jaabe So
Oxford, 300 pp, £50.00, October 1996, ISBN 0 19 820191 5
Those who wander in the great forests of the African tropics do not always manage, like Conrad’s storyteller, to make it home again, and the likelihood of their ending in terminal disaster has become greater than it used to be. Whether threatened populations in these forests and their neighbouring savannahs can still be sheltered from destruction, or even self-destruction, is pretty much an open question. Against this now customary pessimism, optimists, such as the authors of these books, argue that the long process of imperialist dispossession has begun to give way to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves.
Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards sets himself to explain why teenage ‘rebels’, and some who are even younger than that, have turned their guns and matchets against the very persons on whose survival their welfare depends, regardless of ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’. Is this the reversion to a ‘new barbarism’, as some safely cloistered academics have claimed, or a dark, Victorian intimation of ‘old Africa reverting to type’?
Richards argues that in Sierra Leone this chaos and self-destruction is ‘best understood as a drama of social exclusion’ enacted by all those ‘in the forest’ who have come to feel themselves deprived of access to ruling networks of ‘patrimonial’ support. The ancient system of patron and client was hugely revised and reinforced by the colonial transfer of power, which replaced one authoritarian and bureaucratic leadership with another. Since when President Y has succeeded President X in his state-supplied capital city surrounded by his bureaucratic and commercial beneficiaries, while the excluded, out there ‘in the bush’, have been left to devise their own means of self-defence. They become desperate with frustration or impotence, and their despair leads them to hatred. ‘Society at large,’ Richards translates, ‘must be made to feel the destructive anger’ of those for whom the system does not work and cannot work. They can beat the system only by joining it; but joining it seems impossible and the result, all too often, has been limitless mayhem. Yet to see this as ‘mindless violence’ is to abandon good sense. On the contrary: the actual practice and teaching of the ‘rebels’ – for example, in the most important of their groupings, the Revolutionary United Front, led by Foday Sankoh – is consistent with a vision of general ‘participation and empowerment’.
Surrendered captives report a movement that redistributes food, drugs, clothes and shoes ‘liberated’ from government sources. Sankoh seeks medical supplies for a popular health programme as part of hostage or peace negotiations. Neatly planned lines of huts in [rebel] camps speak of a desire to supply model housing for all. The movement attempts mass literacy training with whatever scraps of books and paper it can obtain. Girls as well as boys are trained as RUF fighters. The RUF, seemingly, has no truck with tribalism. In regard to religion it is vigorously ecumenical.
My own experience has lain entirely outside these tightly corralled forest enclaves, but an extension of this report to the no less dense forests of Guinea-Bissau, during its own struggle against the now defunct Portuguese colonial empire and its armies, would suggest many parallels. There the outcome, years later, has been broadly one of peaceable settlement even if the ‘system’, always liable to throw things off course, still has the upper hand. With great command of the social background in the rainforest, and considering a balanced spread of evidence, Richards feels able, writing early in 1996, to entertain a cautious hope not easily thinkable before. After some truly dreadful years of uncontrolled killing, there is, he finds, a ‘mood of optimism’ taking hold of Sierra Leone: an end to the conflict may even be in sight. Confirming this forecast, a peace accord was signed on 30 December last year between the President of the country and the RUF leader, and the five-year-old war was ended. If this accord continues to hold, as at present, it will be because ‘the system’ of utterly corrupt ‘clientage’, or ‘patrimonialism’ in Richards’s preferred usage, will have ceased to wield an all-compelling power and will have given way to some effective spreading of benefits among the excluded.
This may prove a fragile optimism, signalling only a momentary exhaustion, but it may also be a consequence of the success of the outside world in restraining its habit of showing ‘them’ that ‘we’ know better. The explanations that Richards offers have a wide validity in Africa. What we are seeing in Rwanda now (and perhaps grimly far ahead) indicates a comparable breakdown of social cohesion resting, again, on the consequences of the actual or expected social exclusion of a large minority, even perhaps a majority, of the population – with all the fissiparous complexities that this entails. No one who knows anything of Rwanda, or of its sister-case Burundi, can explain the so-called ‘tribal’ hatreds between a Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority on some kind of ‘ethnic’ basis; and what in any case can ‘tribal’ mean here, where the Tutsi have long since lost their own language and speak the language of the Hutu? It is much more that the colonial and para-colonial dispossession of a people’s sense of safety and self-value have been relayed from one phase of alienation to another – rather worse – one.
What the outside world can do is to stand by with abundant humanitarian aid while strongly repressing any thought that ‘we’ can show ‘them’ how to join the human race and be saved. The useful thing now will be to step back and allow ‘them’ to get on with the job of saving themselves, even if the process will take longer than we would like. This points to the lesson to be learnt from the very unusual book by Jaabe So and Adrian Adams, not by any means an easy work to digest but powerful in its conclusions. Jaabe. So is the veteran leader of well-settled farming families and communities living along the south bank of the great river which divides Senegal from the neighbouring and far more arid grasslands of Mauritania, and, in ‘ethnic’ terms, parts the local Soninke, whose ancestors ruled the ancient empire of Ghana (nothing to do with the Ghana of today) from their ‘Moorish’ neighbours to the north. Adrian Adams is his wife and companion of some twenty years and was, in an earlier time, a distinguished teacher at the Sorbonne and the University of Aberdeen. She is, furthermore, a fluent speaker of Soninke, and this book was initially composed in that language.
The central farming problem in these largely tree-less grasslands seems not in itself very hard to solve, and Soninke farmers have long since shown that they can solve it. Erratic and often poor rainfall needs to be supplemented, if possible, by irrigated water fed by rivers, in this case by the Senegal itself, especially if great reliance is to be placed on rice cultivation. Colonial rule tried to raise dams along the Niger River to the east, but this was largely a failure, for various reasons linked to colonial indifference to ecological research. Vast sums of money were wasted, and ambitious farming schemes had to be abandoned. Many years later, no longer in colonial times, the same approach was applied to the Senegal River. Local objections on the same ecological grounds that had applied to the Niger dam schemes were thrust aside, but the après-barrage outcome has not been promising so far, and seems unlikely to improve. Nothing new in this either. ‘All the big schemes for helping Africa’s pastoralist peoples,’ the ecologist P.W.T. Baxter has recently said, ‘have turned into expensive failures.’ But, while Jaabe So and his associates have shown that useful success can be achieved with modest schemes of irrigation, the Senegalese administration, true to form, has wished to think and act big. The result is discouraging and, in the circumstances, amazingly wasteful.
Summarising the documentary evidence in 1994, Adams reports that the total funding of these big schemes on the Senegal between 1974 and 1990, money provided largely by the US Agency for International Development, amounted to the equivalent of $151/2 million, a whopping sum for the area and population involved. But ‘its only visible traces in 1993 were the irrigation pumps along the river, most of them ten years old or more, and the almost empty [administrative] buildings just outside Bakel, stripped of the panels for the solar pump that never worked.’ The new local irrigation systems built by the imported administrative staff had been ‘substandard from the outset, were by then largely unusable, or required considerable work and expense to operate’. By the early Nineties, some of the imported equipment had been abandoned and some had been sold off. ‘The rest of the money had been spent on salaries and working expenses for local officials, for US hired personnel, for US consultants; or remained unused, meant for irrigation systems that were never built.’
If you think of the comparable administrative ‘failures’ and wastages elsewhere in Africa you begin to see why ‘development’ has been so hard to come by and why so few African farmers now believe in its promises. So describes the scheme on the Senegal as ‘administrative development’ rather than ‘peasant-based development’, meaning that local farming experience and knowledge were thrust aside in favour of expert opinion and the political preferences of largely urban-based politicians. As so often up and down Africa ‘since independence’, the solutions adopted were ‘neo-colonial’, in the jargon now commonly used. As Adrian Adams reminds us, the outcome of this post-colonial dispossession was accurately defined by the memorably abrasive René Dumont as early as 1972 in his Paysannerie aux abois. The reasons for peasant opposition to official schemes of development, he argued to a then sceptical audience, were that the schemes represent a form of ‘progress’ which makes farmers ‘ever more dependent, lowers their standard of living, and compromises their very dignity’. These schemes continued to be put forward because, with independence from colonial rule, ‘privileged black urban minorities have in part taken the place of the white coloniser. Through their plundering of funds, their disregard for the common interest and their alliance with neo-colonialism, they constitute for the most part a parasitic class which deserves to fall.’
In the case described by Jaabe So, the administration, chiefly from Dakar, moved in intending to take over effective responsibility. The foreign development experts duly fell into line, there being nothing else they could do save go home, while the local farmers tried to defend the validity of their judgments. Being long accustomed to seasonal labour in France or, in Jaabe So’s case, seaman’s work on the Messageries Maritimes, they argued their case in good French – unlike many of the development experts – and they also had the polyglot and highly educated Adrian Adams to help them. This of course tended to infuriate the administration and its experts. When urban condescension failed to discourage, other arguments were found. Adams says that in early November 1982 she was ‘summoned to Kidira, sixty kilometres from Bakel, by the Commissioner of the sûreté Nationale. I was questioned there for four hours: first about my background, my presence in the country, my everyday life, then about my interest in the farmers’ Federation affairs’ – her husband was the Federation’s founder – ‘and my opinion of [administrative] plans for River development. I was not told why I was being questioned.’ When this didn’t work, they tried again: ‘In June 1983 four gendarmes called on me’ with a copy of a letter to the provincial governor. Handwritten and misspelt, ‘this accused me of bringing matériel de guerre into the country,’ as well as meeting ‘Libyan agents’; the letter said ‘il faut l’a surveillé’ [sic]. When invited to search the premises of her house in Koungani, ‘the gendarmes demurred. I made a statement formally denying the allegations contained in the letter.’ The gendarmes, who clearly had a lot more sense than those who wandwe had sent them, then left without another word, and Adams proceeded to lodge a suit for defamation of character against persons unknown. End of story-one familiar to anyone who ever suffered such treatment during the Cold War and its colonial-style equivalent. I can remember receiving treatment of this kind in the Fifties.
It makes one tired, and then it makes one angry. It made Jaabe So angry, but he admirably kept his temper. The general conclusion could only be, as the farmers had long understood, that ‘developmental’ success in such situations must depend on local initiative and control. When these are usurped by foreign experts, no matter how well qualified they may seem, the outcome is likely to be failure. The Niger schemes had amply shown this; now the Senegal schemes looked set to underline it. Towards the end of the book, Jaabe So’s feelings at last break through. ‘As it is,’ he notes early in 1996, ‘we are like hungry dogs, fighting over what little the tubab’ – white man, in this context – ‘throws us. It has gone on for thirty years’, since formal colonialism came to an end, but in 1996 ‘there is a colonialism ahead worse than any other, because now they can say: do this, or we won’t give you anything.’ But, in this case, as Adams concludes,
we do not know how the story will end, and that in itself is a victory; for we know how it should have ended. A thousand books have shown that development is a cruel hoax. This story has not been told to make it a thousand and one; but for its own sake, and to give our experience of what it is like to live through, why it continues, how it might be made to cease.
This may still prove another fragile optimism: but perhaps its difficult lesson is beginning to be learnt. Recent comments on the mess and misery of Rwanda, following donkey’s years of confident ‘guidance’ from the ‘developed’, claim that no quick fix can be assured by sending in the troops or simply throwing money at the ‘problem’. It seems no longer to be taken for granted that Euro-American wisdom can provide the answers for Africa that African foolishness and incompetence are said to have failed to discover. It may after all be better if we can manage to steel ourselves to allow the natives to settle their own disputes. No new colonialism, no matter what its motivation, can do any good. The nation-state can be made stable and progressive, and therefore liable to be able to keep the peace, only in the measure that it can win for itself the sense of legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently possessed.
A hundred years ago, in what was then the British Gold Coast, the prophet of post-imperialist liberation, Casely Hayford, fell to arguing the urgent need to understand where the abiding crime of colonial dispossession really lay. It was, he said, that colonialism had thrust aside or crushed ‘local institutions’ as the useless constructs of a savage people. It had then replaced these indigenous controls, not with effective modernisation, but, simply and blindly, by forms of alien dictatorship.
What may still be done to rescue Africa’s future, and even perhaps make its present less painful, has long been the subject of a vast clamour of voices of every kind. Yet nearly always, listening as well as one may, there is a missing voice. Here for once, with Jaabe So and Adrian Adams, that missing voice is heard to speak for itself.
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