This book discusses the social and political consequences of the
economic and financial crisis that befell African economies since the
1980s, using as case study the plantation economy of the Anglophone
region of Cameroon. The focus is thus on recent efforts to liberalize
and privatize an agro-industrial enterprise where overseas capital and
its domestic partners have converged, the consequent modes of production
and labour, and the alternatives proposed and resistance generated. The
study details how the unprecedented crisis caused great commotion in the
region, and presented a serious challenge to existing theories on
plantation production and capital accumulation. The crisis resulted in
the introduction of a number of neoliberal economic reforms, including
the withdrawal of state intervention and the restructuring, liquidation
and privatisation of the major agro-industrial enterprises. These
reforms in turn had severe consequences for several civil-society groups
and their organisations that had a direct stake in the regional
plantation economy, notably the regional elite, chiefs, plantation
workers and contract farmers. On the basis of extensive research in the
Anglophone Cameroon region, Konings shows that these civil-society
groups have never resigned themselves to their fate but have been
actively involved in a variety of formal and informal modes of
resistance.
