Feeding African Cities by Jane Guyer

Author:Jane Guyer [Guyer, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367000455
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 11 United Republic of Cameroon – administrative boundaries, 1975

However, the apparent constancy with which basic material needs have been met is a misleading indicator of the social and political processes involved. The construction of a food market for Yaoundé has been highly problematic from the outset. Each generation of officials – German, French and Cameroonian – has viewed the food system as unreliable, its organisation anarchic and its dependability suspect. The terminology of official reports is itself recurrent; the system is aléatoire, implying both a lack of predictability which is at odds with the record on actual performance, and a lack of controllability which is much more to the point. Such nervousness reflects less a judgement of the technical capacity of local production than a knowledge that the institutional framework of the market has been too fragile to bear the material, social and political burden expected of it. The crises in the history of the Yaoundé food system are institutional and political crises in the complex process of constructing a controlled, differentiated social system. Two dimensions of this process are of central importance: the formation of social strata, with differential power, occupations, access to resources, and labour values, and the development of politically tangible structures which mediate the relations between strata. The almost complete lack of market institutions and relationships in the Beti indigenous economy meant that the whole system had to be constructed, prices and modes of payment arrived at, processing, transport and trade developed, the position of producers, traders and consumers in the stratification system determined, and the entire process politically and culturally sanctioned. The present history is primarily focused, then, on the construction of the institutions of a food market, its place in state policy, and the shifting position of its various functionaries during the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Examined from this perspective, the history of the food system comprises five phases, each one characterised by a different set of institutions and policies linking producer with consumer. In the early period of colonial rule, under the Germans, the provision of food supplies to the garrison and the porterage crews was a bone of contention, resolved in part by the garrison feeding itself and the crews purchasing along the route. When Yaoundé was named the capital of French Cameroon in 1922, the organisation of urban supplies became far more crucial and was handed over to the chiefs to administer. After 1945, management was ceded to the Provident Society. Direct administrative control was only lifted during the independence period at the end of the 1950s. There ensued almost a decade of ‘free market’ development, followed in the early 1970s by a series of state interventions.

In the view of the Government, none of these has proved entirely satisfactory; each lasted only fifteen to twenty years before requiring fairly radical restructuring. It would be too simplistic to interpret this process as an indication of a persistent antagonism between the state and an intransigently segmentary population. After all, in factual terms a system has been formed and it does function.

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