– ‘the highest point of European colonialism’.18 The European civilising mission was not a noble endeavour. In the main, its rationale was ‘economic plunder, political imposition and other inhumane practices’. While these practices took extreme forms in the colonies, they had in fact started in Europe and were an expansion of European capitalism. Magubane argues that the first colony of England was Ireland, where the English first tested colonialism and put it into effect. For Fanon: ‘The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.’19
The European expansionism about which Mafeje speaks served as a source of inspiration for European scholars of the Enlightenment. This, then, is the substratum that served as a basis for the philosophies and ideologies of European expansionism from which metropolitan bourgeois social sciences cannot be separated and it is important at all times to connect it with anthropological writing in Africa. Having laid this foundation, Mafeje reasons that functionalism, which is a particular paradigm within the social sciences, is the natural starting point. Although functionalism had been discussed, few anthropologists had analysed its ideological status in the age of European expansionism. Those who attempted to do so fell into the trap of associating functionalism only with the discipline of anthropology and with the historical epoch of colonialism. Yet, as Mafeje says: ‘In the same way that capitalism, as a specific mode of accumulation, had to exist before imperialism could manifest itself, likewise functionalism, as a theoretical rationalisation of the epoch, had to exist in the metropolitan countries before it could be used in the colonies.’20 Moreover, ‘in its paradigmatic form functionalism is a product of nineteenth century Western European bourgeois society, and was never limited to a single discipline called “anthropology”. On the contrary, it straddled all the life sciences.’ In the nineteenth century, functionalism relied mainly on analogies derived from physical and biological sciences to account for complex social phenomena. The other version of functionalism, rationalist-utilitarian, ‘was a reflection of the logic of the industrial revolution in England and France’ and the two pioneers of modern functionalism, August Comte and Herbert Spencer, came from France and England respectively. For them, rationality, utility and functional value, order and progress were foundational to a bourgeois European society. These principles affirmed its achievements and justified its continued existence. Such theories in the works of Spencer and Comte served as an inspiration for Émile Durkheim, who synthesised them and came up with structural-functionalism. If it were not for the synthesis of Spencer and Comte in Durkheim’s work, structural-functionalism ‘would not have emerged in anthropology in quite the same way that it did’.21
The Spencer-Durkheim theoretical nexus laid the foundation for the works of British anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who both owed their greatest intellectual debt to Durkheim primarily and to Spencer and Comte secondarily. For Malinowski, the premium was on the psychological and biological needs of the individual, so that social and cultural institutions were merely a response to the said needs – a Spencerian understanding of society. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, following Durkheim, stressed the autonomy of social institutions and sought to understand how disparate social elements and institutions were instrumental in maintaining the social whole. But Radcliffe-Brown remained faithful to Spencer’s use of biological analogies, as did Malinowski. Malinowski’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s writings greatly influenced American functionalist sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, George Homans and Robert K. Merton.
The foregoing description does not, in my opinion, complete the picture. For one thing, sociologists have also been influenced by Max Weber, Durkheim’s contemporary, whose work reminds them that not all positivist sociology is functionalist. Weber rejected the use of biological or natural science analogies in explaining social phenomena. He appealed to individual subjective meanings by using ‘ideal types’ and ‘normal types’ as suitable methods of sociological analysis. Mafeje says: ‘For him, unlike Talcott Parsons, adaptive behaviour on the part of individuals was no measure of the “functionality” of the system. Rather, systems functioned because they had an internal logic, whether it was good or bad individuals – a question which Weber treated as a purely subjective matter.’22 Mafeje believed that ideas and social forms are shaped by particular nations and bourgeois classes at any particular time. Positivism and functionalism are examples of such ideas. It is not clear, therefore, whether bourgeois writers such as Spencer could espouse neutrality and ‘positive science’ and still be faithful to their class interests. For Mafeje, this was an attempt on their part to gloss over social contradictions that were manifest in Europe, where there was inequality, exploitation and unmitigated sociological individualism – the upshot of capitalism.
Having discussed the link between the Enlightenment and functionalism, I now turn to how the latter found expression in the colonies through anthropology. It should be remembered that, for Mafeje, anthropology was in the colonies what other social sciences were in the metropolitan countries – and to single out anthropology and leave out the other social sciences is a form of mystification. Moreover, functionalism was the prevailing paradigm in both the metropole and the colonies. That anthropologists lent their support to colonial governments was not Mafeje’s main contention; the issue, for him, was the ontology upon which the intellectual efforts of anthropologists are premised. Equally, it is beside the point whether any anthropologists were opposed to colonialism. In the final analysis, the contours of anthropology are as much colonially determined as they are informed by functionalism; the oppositional anthropologist and the colonial anthropologist are in unison with regard to the utility of social research institutes in Africa. Mafeje saw that it was significant that their units of analysis were the same: tribe, kinships and religious systems. On both sides of the purported divide, therefore, the anthropological enterprise was bourgeois ab initio.
For Mafeje, assessing the works of the older generation or the colonial anthropologists was not simply a reflection of a generation gap. It was a negation of negations. Just as functionalism is a negation of speculative history in the Enlightenment, it is also an affirmation of bourgeois capitalist utilitarianism that oppresses the people of the global South and reproduces itself by producing native objects of study, who would later be identical to the ‘knowing’ subjects through the process of bourgeois conversion. In this regard, Mafeje said that he, along with Magubane, were products of colonial anthropology. The crimes of colonial anthropology were not merely based on descriptive and superficial writings about modernising Africans who sought European status. The crimes lay in its ahistoricity, which failed to retrace the problems confronting African people to colonialism. Mafeje believed that he and Magubane had to be part of bourgeois functionalism in order to be its negation. Analogously, African revolutionaries had to be part of colonialism in order to experience its frustrations. To ignore these factors, said Mafeje, was to fall victim to undialectical presumptuousness. Although anthropologists were among the first social scientists to arrive in the colonies, they should not be singled out as the only functionalists and academic imperialists. Functionalism and positivism were not unique to anthropology, but characterised all the social sciences. Mafeje’s point is well taken. Yet it raises more questions than it answers. If the crime of social science lies in its being functionalist and positivistic, what would Mafeje have had to say about the social sciences that are not functionalist or positivistic in their epistemology? What would be said of the social sciences grounded in Marxist dialectical materialism – as Mafeje’s analysis clearly is? In a sense, it appears that what Mafeje criticised was bourgeois social science, rather than social sciences as such.
Against this background, Mafeje was able to criticise anthropology without turning it into the ‘black sheep’ of the social sciences. Anthropology was the first to arrive in the colonies because the bourgeois metropole needed it in order to conquer the natives, about whom they were least informed. That it coincided with colonialism is hardly surprising since anthropology provided knowledge and access to hitherto unknown societies. Thus, to fixate on anthropology to the exemption of other social sciences – which were equally bourgeois and imperialist – is to engage in petty reformism, which does not take seriously history and the totalising critique.
Mafeje therefore advocates a holistic approach that transcends disciplines. Such an alternative is to be found, he suggests, in Marxism. He argues that there could be