Gift Wasambo Kayira contributes to the debate on the state and development in Africa.He also engages with the debates on: (i) the land question, and (ii) power in (post)colonial contexts.In six core chapters and drawing data from oral, archival, and secondary sources (4-5), Kayira argues that although the colonial and postcolonial Malawian state was committed to enhancing the standards of living of rural Africans, it was unsuccessful in performing its responsibility between the 1930s and 1983 (3).Aside from historicizing development in Africa, the text takes the quest for rural development in Malawi during colonial and early postcolonial periods as its entry point to engage with broader socioeconomic, historical, and political questions.One core question with which Kayira is preoccupied is: what are the alternatives to the Marxist analysis of colonial political economies that might illuminate British colonial legacies in Malawi anew?Beyond Malawi, the text can be situated in politics and political economy disciplines.Kayira thus makes methodological and empirical contributions to scholarship on the state and development.Though not explicitly declared by the author, the book is a neoclassical economic reading of the colonial and postcolonial contexts-for which reason, it is largely a technical analysis of how rural development unfolded in colonial and postcolonial Malawi.The text, for example, uncharacteristically valorizes the capitalist and (neo)liberal institutions as having attempted to cater to the economic interests of society in the colonies.By attributing the current economic, political, and social conditions to the divergent interests of bureaucrats and development planners, international actors, and the colonized society, the text fails to consider that the development project, in itself, has for decades had awful implications for the majority of people around the globe.Kayira questions the Marxist political economy tendency to see the Malawian colonial state as having been exploitative to the peasantry.Moreover, aside from assuming that the rural development project is a technical and therefore apolitical process, he also presupposes that the colonial state's motives and aspirations were benevolent.Both assumptions could not be more flawed.He, for instance, shows that the World Bank banned the Viphya pulp mill project because, despite the promise of this mill project to raise the industrial status of Malawi, it would exclusively help to meet the interests of foreign investors, instead of the economic necessities of the country (202).This implies that to Kayira, the agency of local and international actors, beyond the state, crippled the Malawian state's benign fight against poverty.It is also hard to
Samuel Nyende (Mon,) studied this question.