Kevin Donovan’s ambitious book disentangles the relations between political and monetary sovereignty across East Africa from independence to the economic crises of the 1970s. Taking a regional instead of a national focus and embedding questions of political and economic sovereignty in a larger framework focusing on competing systems of economic, ethical and social production and valuation of goods, people, money and the state, the book, described by the author as a ‘historical ethnography of economic action and its inevitable entanglement with political struggle, social life, and ethical ideas’ (10), links conceptual innovation and empirical detail while acknowledging contradictions and complex social dynamics.
Understanding money as ‘an instrument of governing people and commanding commodities’ that ‘helped to define what was valuable and influenced how that value would be distributed’ (2), Donovan takes as a starting point the assumption that political and economic independence are interconnected. The new nation-states of East Africa – Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya – attempted to create ‘a monopoly on valuation through which economic and social worth was legitimately defined and apportioned’ (3), examples being the centrally determined prices for export goods and the establishment of nationally governed central banks. Donovan’s acknowledgement of ethnographic detail prevents him from telling his story solely from the governments’ perspective. In contrast, he acknowledges both the existence and continuation of non-governmental ‘transactional territories’ (26) possessing their own rules and ‘regimes of valuation’ (9) as well as the agency of economic actors to subvert and change the system of valuation through ‘illegal but not always illicit’ acts (8), such as smuggling, which were often enabled by the state’s very own attempts to maintain its monopoly of valuation.
The structure of the book mirrors the dialectical nature between the state’s attempts to create and maintain a monopoly on valuation and citizens’ multifaceted ways of countering, pragmatically inserting themselves in, or criticising the state’s actions. After the insightful introduction and chapter 1 The moneychanger state: money after the end of empire which concentrates on how central banks created national currencies as ‘an instrument of state power’ with which postcolonial governments could ‘influence market activity, raise revenue and meet many of their own costs’ (91) while requiring ‘ongoing policing and regulation of money, its movement and its conversion’ (89), chapters 2 and 3 focus on the state’s attempt to create a monopoly on valuation. Chapter 2 A monopoly on valuation: economic sovereignty and citizenship in Uganda focuses on ‘credible citizenship’, that is attempts by citizens to insert themselves into monetary and financial practices and institutions that the states branded as integral to postcolonial nation-building. Donovan highlights how this relation between citizens and states differs from a sacrificial one by aligning economic self-interest with the goals of the nation through saving or buying government bonds. This, however, creates new forms of exclusion, such as the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. Chapter 3 Restricted value: bank nationalisation and the price of decolonisation in Tanzania zooms in on the fascinating details of the negotiations between British corporate banks and the Tanzanian government during the process of nationalisation. It shows how ‘the shifting and competing interests and techniques for assigning worth’ (178) made agreement a complicated affair. Subsequently, chapters 4 and 5 focus on the effects of the multiple economic crises of the 1970s and how these created a situation where ‘[L]iving a decent life, fulfilling moral obligations, and achieving one’s ambitions’ became less and ‘less compatible with the legal circuits of value’ (49). Chapter 4 Crimes against economy: the economy of accusation in 1970s Uganda describes how, during widespread shortage of ‘essential commodities’ (239), the state grappled with penalising Ugandans for committing ‘crimes against economy’ – for example, hoarding or overpricing goods – practices that citizens also increasingly accused each other of. Chapter 5 Magendo: arbitrage and ambiguity on an East African frontier focuses on smuggling of coffee across the Kenya-Uganda border in the 1970s which, by exploiting price differences, ‘ushered in previously foreclosed opportunities of wealth, respectability and privilege’ (264) that restructured local moralities, transformed pathways to prestige and reordered ‘gendered and generational hierarchies’ (286).
The book can be recommended to anyone interested in East Africa’s economic history. While it claims to cover the whole region, an honest review cannot fail to mention that the three countries receive a markedly different level of scrutiny. While Uganda is the most discussed, Kenya receives by far the least attention. This, however, should not deter anyone with an interest in postcolonial economic history from reading the book because its conceptual offerings and historical discussions can illuminate issues of monetary sovereignty in other postcolonial contexts across Africa as well.
