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  3. The African Poor
  • Cited by 304
      • John Iliffe, University of Cambridge and St John's College, Cambridge
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      October 2009
      December 1987
      ISBN:
      9780511584121
      9780521348775
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511584121
      Dimensions:
      Weight & Pages:
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.61kg, 400 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Area Studies, African Studies, History, Regional History after 1500, African History
      Series:
      African Studies (58)
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Subjects:
    Area Studies, African Studies, History, Regional History after 1500, African History
    Series:
    African Studies (58)
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    Book description

    This 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. There has emerged the distinct 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 to 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 live. The poor live as people, rather than merely parading as statistics. Famines have alerted the world to African poverty, but the problem itself is ancient. Its prevailing 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.

    Reviews

    ‘This is history which is in empathy with Africa which seeks, and finds, the positive elements in the suffering of the poor.’

    Source: The Times Higher Education 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.’

    Source: American Anthropologist

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