2025: Rural transformation and the nation: a social, labour and "development" history of late and postcolonial Africa, 1950-1990

Workshop program

10h Introduction : Céline Belina, María José Pont Chafer, Andreas Zeman, Alexander Keese

10h30 Kara Moskowitz (AV短视频 of Missouri at Saint-Louis), Pineapple Republic: Reforming Kenya’s Mixed Agricultural Economy

11h30 Break

11h45 Between cooperatives and rural transformation

Franziska Rüedi (Universität Zürich), Rural Co-operatives, Decolonisation and the Circulation of Knowledge: Case Studies from Zimbabwe and Tanzania
Andreas Zeman (Université de Genève), A thousand plans, few people: Zambia's long struggle to bring people back to the land

13h30 Lunch Break

15h00 Impulse conference: Carving out the extremes: High-ranking officials and day labourers in the building of a new Sierra Leone, 1940s–2000s

16h00 Coffee Break

16h45 Postcolonial regimes, social history, and the modernisation paradigm on the ground

Didier Peclard (Université de Genève), (Dis-)Integrating the Rural Margins: Angola and the Paradoxes of (Post)Colonial Modernity
Bryson Nkhoma (Mzuzu AV短视频), Agricultural Subsidies and Extension Services in Contemporary Malawi: Experiences on Empowering Resource Poor Farmers in Liberalised Economies, 1992–2024

20h00 Dinner

09h30 Rural change, identity/identification and decolonisation in West Africa

Céline Belina (Université de Genève), From Plantations to Nationhood? Labour, Migration, and Identity in 1945 Côte d’Ivoire
Omar Gueye (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar), Rurality and politics in Senegal: from secondship to Presidency

11h15 Coffee break

11h30 The parastatal solution and it social and labour history experience (1)

Giovanni Tonolo (Università di Firenze), Triangulating between the parastatal, the state and the peasantry: the case of SONADER in Dahomey (1961–1975)
Felix Yao Amenorhu (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), State Interventions and the Composition of Hired Labour on Commercial Rice Farms in Northern Ghana

13h00 Lunch Break

14h30 – 16h15 The parastatal solution and it social and labour history experience (2)

Hedvig Lagercrantz (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Linking Farmers and Workers’ Grievances with Agricultural Development in Post-independent Ghana
Alexander Keese (Université de Genève), Resisting in a Boom Period: SODEPALM, Agrarian Mobilisation, and the (More than Heavy-Handed) Postcolonial State in Côte d’Ivoire

16h15 Coffee Break

16h45 From rural transformation to wider societal change as social history

Hyden Munene (Copperbelt AV短视频), Political Economy of De-industrialisation in Africa: the Zambian Experience, 1991–2004
Alice Wiemers (Davidson College), Revolution, Neoliberalism, and Improvising the State in 1970s and 1980s Ghana

18h45 Final open discussion

20h00 Dinner