Africa's involvement in the changing world economy has been a long one, and its effects on the lives of Africans have been profound. Samir Amin and W. W. Rostow, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and Samora Machel, would hardly dispute such a statement. But the question of whether this involvement has led Africans along a road toward material and social progress or into a dead end is very much in dispute.

The title of this paper is the same as that of the introductory section of S. Herbert Frankel's classic study of 1938, Capital Investment in Africa. Becoming part of the world economy, for Frankel (1938: 1-3, 7), entailed the diffusion of Europe's capital, technology, ideas, and “civilized” form of government to closed, static, and undifferentiated economies. Now, writers such as André Gunder Frank (1967), Samir Amin (1974a, 1976), Walter Rodney (1972), and Immanuel Wallerstein (1979) stress instead the inexorable logic of a capitalist world system, whose effects on Africa are stifling instead of liberating. Both views share a unitary conception of the world economy, the first through a smug assumption that existing economic structures are part of civilization, and the second through an argument that sees change in Africa as a reflection of the growth of capitalism in Europe. The first conception of a world economy defined Africa's role as little more than holding back progress on a predetermined road; the second implied that Africa's influence on the world economy was not nearly so great.

In the 1960s, scholars of Africa reversed such biases for a time. Especially among historians, an Africanist perspective emphasized “African activity, African adaptations, African choice, African initiative” (Ranger, 1968: xxi).

Issues relating to household and community are of central importance in social scientific research on contemporary Africa and the experience of its peoples in the twentieth century. Early anthropological theory categorized African social organization, for comparative purposes, with that of indigenous America, New Guinea, and other classless and early state systems. Most of these other peoples are now minority populations in colonized states, politically and economically marginal. Only in Africa have advancing capitalism and non-peasant, relatively weakly stratified, highly flexible forms of social organization been forced into a long-term working relationship with one another over such a vast area and such a wide variety of conditions. Most recent scholarship—and the scholarship I will limit myself to in this paper—is not only concerned with substantive questions of what has happened as a result of this confrontation, but also with the methodological problems of describing and explaining it in a comparative framework.

Over the last twenty years, this has resulted in two major shifts of approach, which cut across all the divisions amongst the classic theoretical schools of thought. They are, first, a shift from explanation of local forms in terms of local social and ecological conditions to consideration of their position in regional, national, and international structures; and, second, a shift from classification of local forms in typological schema, either synchronic or evolutionary, to understanding in terms of processes of change which are to some degree indeterminate.

Taking the first issue, the increasing use of terms like “household” and “community” constitutes a relatively new departure. They are classic analytical concepts in the study of peasant societies and carry with them the implications of a local social structure and tradition of life within a wider stratified political and economic system under a state form of government.

This survey can only be one historian's view of a large and controversial matter. African states are contested objects of study on two grounds, the one particular to the changing preoccupations of Africanists, the other common to the humanities in general. European colonialism was a living denial of the ability of Africans to organize their own sovereignties. African studies emerged out of colonialism's decay, in part a sort of recantation, in part a dimension of informal empire. The analysis of past and present African states could not fail to act as a lightning conductor of warring emotions, ideologies, and theories, categories which have often not been very distinct. The first African histories after the colonial era tended to be, as the first studies in political science were necessarily, studies in state-formation as achievement. In more recent years, it has been objected that these were really chronicles of injury, not, as was thought, of pride; for states were and are engines of oppression, not civilization (for early protests, see Soyinka, 1967; Wrigley, 1971; Chanock, 1972b; and later, Markovitz, 1977: 25-55). Moreover, most Africans did not actually live in states until colonial rule fastened Leviathan's yoke upon them. Indeed, the most distinctively African contribution to human history could be said to have been precisely the civilized art of living fairly peaceably together not in states.

The dispute was really over the evolutionist assumption that it is in some sense “better” to live in states, a premise so deeply rooted in most of us that it can seem almost an insult to explore analytically “the notion of statelessness, long abandoned by historians of Africa” (Uzoigwe, 1980: 115).

This paper surveys the state of research on ideology and belief in Africa, a subject made up of two often separated notions but significant as a conjunction in current African history and in need of theoretical elaboration. Although there have been writings on this subject in numerous disciplines, this essay will concentrate on the anthropological perspective of the relationship of ideology and belief, as stimulated by anthropologists' confrontations with African developments

The paper presents three major arguments or themes. First, it contends that the distinction between ideology and belief is invidious and should be transcended. Second, it documents that the study of these phenomena in Africa, whether labeled cultural superstructure or labeled ideology and belief, has become increasingly a historical rather than a mythological science. This trend should be hastened. The argument applies to the study of belief principles similar to those that Professor Ajayi (1967:274) invoked in a well known essay for the study of history. It was time, Ajayi said, to replace the mythical Africa of colonial thought with knowledge of what real men did in real situations. The third theme of this essay is that although the models of society constructed by its members and the models constructed by outside observers are, as Lévi-Strauss says (1967:274), phenomena of the same order, the models belong to different cultures, meet different requirements, cannot be reconciled, and should not be confused, although they often have been in the past, in African studies in particular.