Product Description

This first history of the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa begins in the monasteries of thirteenth-century Ethiopia and ends in the South African resettlement sites of the 1980s. Its thesis, derived from histories of poverty in Europe, is that most very poor Africans have been individuals incapacitated for labour, bereft of support, and unable to fend for themselves in a land-rich economy. Only recently has there emerged the new poverty of those excluded from access to productive resources. Natural disaster brought widespread destitution, but as a cause of mass mortality it was almost eliminated in the colonial era, to return recently in those areas where drought has been compounded by administrative breakdown. Professor Iliffe investigates what it was like to be poor, how the poor sought to help themselves, how their counterparts in other continents. The poor live as people, rather than merely parading as statistics. Recent famines have alerted the world to African poverty, but the problem itself is ancient. Its current forms will not be understood until those of earlier periods are revealed and trends of change are identified. This is a book for all concerned with the future of Africa, as well as for students of poverty elsewhere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #888956 in Books
• Published on: 1987-12-25
• Released on: 2008-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
‘This is history which is in empathy with Africa which seeks, and finds, the positive elements in the suffering of the poor.’ The Times Higher Educational Supplement

‘This pioneering book is both comprehensive and also eminently fair: whether in dealing with pre-colonial, colonial, or contemporary conditions, Iliffe presents a splendidly balanced and unprejudiced view always meticulously supported by the factual evidence.’ American Anthropologist

Customer Reviews

A fresh look at absolute poverty
It is really decades ago that I read this book- but it made such a powerful impression on me and I learnt so much from it that I wanted to reread it. It contained a vast amount of good factual inofrmation but it also has an attractive, illuminating cultural, one may even say, spiritual dimension.

It has an almost biblical quality, and it is refreshing because it looks at absolute poverty, that poverty, those poor that will always be with us: the weak of mind and/or body, the elderly, the widows, the orphans, and the place they got in society.

Fascinating was it to read that Africans have subsidised missionary societies in Europe in the past. Fascinating to read about the most miserable of all throughout history: those affected with Hansen disease or leprosy.

The bottomline of Iliffe is that what the real poor have in common is that they have no access to labour, nor to money to buy that labour. They are "incapcitated" in one way or another. So they may have land, but without labour to work the land there is still hunger and misery. After the endless stream of books defining and redefining poverty as a relative concept I found it very useful to return to the basics of poverty, its causes and consequences.

The book was moving and beautiful, quite a change from the dry stuff I usually have to plough through to keep learning about the great sociological issues of poverty and development.