Response to John CampbellAuthor(s): Claire RobertsonSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.19, No. 2 (1985), pp. 431-432Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/484836 .

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Response to John Campbell

Claire ROBERTSON

I am happy to respond to John Campbell's article, "Ideology and Politics in the Markets of Ghana," which attempts a theoretical explanation for the scapegoating of market women described in "The Death of Makola and Other Tragedies." My article was not intended to present a theoretical formulation, but I am glad that it provoked some thought along those lines. However, the particular theoretical viewpoint advanced by Campbell does not get us much further. His main point is that we need to classify most of the traders as petty commodity producers who are among the "labouring poor" (as per Sandbrook and Arn, 1977), thereby clarifying the issue. I disagree, politely. What is needed here is notjust a Marxian refinement of analysis, but a Marxist feminist analysis. How do we explain, if we classify the bulk of the market women as part of the "labouring poor" (a formulation that in itself is rather vague - similar to problems with the use of the term "informal sector"), why the labouring poor turned upon itself in mob actions? If lumping all market women together in an undifferentiated mass is not useful, as Campbell and I agree, neither is lumping together all the "labouring poor" in my opinion.

The original subtitle of my article, which should have been retained, was "Male Strategies Against a Female-Dominated System." In a longer work with which I hope Campbell has now familiarized himself, Sharing the Same Bowl, A Socioeconomic

History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (1984), I make a complex theoretical argument about differential class formation by gender in exploring more thoroughly the position of Ga market women during the twentieth century. My article purposefully dealt mainly with Ga market women, who have noticeably withdrawn from productive functions during the twentieth century because of loss of control over supply sources, perceived advantages, and reduction of pooling of capital. To explain further the attack on Makola, I would have to relate it to a long-term loss of economic control and political power connected both to colonialism and post-independence politics in which, as Campbell points out, grass roots input has withered. This, in turn, applies particularly to women, who, in many countries where they perform prominent retailing functions, have been scapegoated for current economic problems. Women are, in effect, becoming a sub-proletariat, who suffer particular disabilities connected to their ascribed status that are being translated into further repression. An analysis that does not account for gender does not help us a lot.

Another point made by Campbell is not essential to his argument but is important to consider both because of current conditions and because it plugs back into the issue of accounting for gender in a different way. Campbell states that "nearly everyone" understood that a major determinant of restricted food supplies was the failure to increase rural production. I beg to differ. The complex set of reasons for the present famine in Africa includes not just climatic conditions but also the fact that governments routinely have placed priority on urban developmental inputs. Pillaging the rural

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economy to do so, they have used such extractive mechanisms as marketing boards which remove incentives from farmers to increase production. Central in this also is the removal of male labor from agriculture and the migration to towns, leaving women to do a rising proportion of the agricultural work (African women do approximately seventy percent of the total), while men spend a disproportionate share of cash crop profits on urban investment and luxuries. Women farmers meanwhile receive far less help than men in terms of loans or other capital inputs, agricultural extension availability, and education. Successive Ghanaian governments have led the way down this path, keeping urban luxury food prices low to pacify potential elite opposition and sacrificing farmers, to the great damage of the economy which now includes a rampant black market and pervasive smuggling. It has been suggested that Togo presently exports more Ghanaian cocoa than Ghana. Meanwhile, with food deficits rising yearly in the face of a growing population, the Ghanaian and other governments resolutely keep the balance of benefits in urban areas and follow pronatalist policies. It is not clear, then, that "nearly everyone" understood or understands that priority must go to increasing rural production; certainly, the government did not promote that awareness through sufficiently positive rural policies, neither encouraging rural political participation nor economic initiatives, especially for women.

Campbell points out that Koforidua market women organized a successful market boycott, thus showing that the threat of political action by market women is real. The boycott example still indicates, however, that (1) it is potential or real economic action regarding food supplies that makes people feel threatened by market women, (2) those women may have better connections to supply sources than Ga women, and (3) it was temporary and had no long-term impact in giving women political power. The second point above shows that it is important to consider particular cases -- I find no problem with being an empiricist if that means sticking to facts. The third point does not contravene my view about the basic political powerlessness of market women, but I will allow that different situations may exist locally, and Koforidua may be different from Accra. Continuing the empirical line, I do not find Campbell's concluding analysis of post-1981 PNDC (Rawlings' government) actions useful for explaining a 1978-81 phenomenon, if that was the intention. In fact, given the even worse economic conditions in Ghana until recently, I would like to have an explanation for the diminution rather than intensification of attacks under the second Rawlings governments. This would seem to suggest that the government played a stronger role in drumming up mob action than Campbell's "populism," which he detects beginning under Nkrumah.

Lastly, I agree completely with Campbell about the market women being transformed into a symbol, but then that was what my article was all about. Perhaps it is time to stop belabouring the point and work instead on refining notions of the relationship of gender to class formation. Vague ideas of the "labouring poor" and "populism" will not get us much further in this endeavor because they are neither specific nor general enough to explain a reality including women and their class position which has not been adequately analyzed by much current Marxist theory.

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