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The African Studies Workshop at Harvard continues this year with a new and exciting schedule of presenters. The presenters' papers explore Africa’s changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. We shall also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere across the globe; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory and analysis about current conditions worldwide. At each workshop, a scholar presents a paper on one facet of the rapidly changing position of Africa in the global political economy and the impact of that change on global distributions of wealth, well-being, and power. Then a discussant provides commentary followed by an open discussion, in which students are given the floor first, followed by anyone else in attendance. Workshop presenters are scholars of high international repute as well as up and coming Africanist intellectuals.
Presenting: Coffee Root Rot: Debt and Development in Depression-Era Kenya with Paul Ocobock.
Abstract: Colonial Kenya’s settler economy depended on coffee, its most profitable export. Just as the industry seemed to prosper in the interwar years, the Great Depression sent prices plummeting, erasing planters’ meager savings and the sources of credit on which they so desperately relied. As settler colonialism in Kenya teetered on the brink, the Colonial Office in London and government in Kenya intervened with several financial institutions to bail out white settlers. Using the coffee industry as a case study, this paper examines the debt crisis at the heart of settler colonialism in Kenya and explores the ways these state-sponsored financial interventions disciplined inept planters, stabilized the coffee industry, and eventually diversified the settler agriculture. Ultimately, the bailout exposed the failure of white settler agriculture, setting the colonial state on a path toward opening coffee production up to African smallholders.
Paul Ocobock is a historian of twentieth-century Africa and the British Empire focusing on histories of capitalism as well as gender and sexuality. His first book, An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya (Ohio University Press, 2017) won the 2018 Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association. His current project is a history of Kenyan coffee and its production, sale, and consumption over the course of the twentieth century. He received an M.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and his Ph.D. in History from Princeton. He is currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.
Learn more and register: https://africa.harvard.edu/african-studies-workshop-0