Gift Wasambo Kayira contributes to the debate on the state and development in Africa. He also engages with the debates on: (i) the land question, and (ii) power in (post)colonial contexts. In six core chapters and drawing data from oral, archival, and secondary sources (4–5), Kayira argues that although the colonial and postcolonial Malawian state was committed to enhancing the standards of living of rural Africans, it was unsuccessful in performing its responsibility between the 1930s and 1983 (3). Aside from historicizing development in Africa, the text takes the quest for rural development in Malawi during colonial and early postcolonial periods as its entry point to engage with broader socioeconomic, historical, and political questions. One core question with which Kayira is preoccupied is: what are the alternatives to the Marxist analysis of colonial political economies that might illuminate British colonial legacies in Malawi anew? Beyond Malawi, the text can be situated in politics and political economy disciplines. Kayira thus makes methodological and empirical contributions to scholarship on the state and development. Though not explicitly declared by the author, the book is a neoclassical economic reading of the colonial and postcolonial contexts—for which reason, it is largely a technical analysis of how rural development unfolded in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. The text, for example, uncharacteristically valorizes the capitalist and (neo)liberal institutions as having attempted to cater to the economic interests of society in the colonies.

By attributing the current economic, political, and social conditions to the divergent interests of bureaucrats and development planners, international actors, and the colonized society, the text fails to consider that the development project, in itself, has for decades had awful implications for the majority of people around the globe. Kayira questions the Marxist political economy tendency to see the Malawian colonial state as having been exploitative to the peasantry. Moreover, aside from assuming that the rural development project is a technical and therefore apolitical process, he also presupposes that the colonial state’s motives and aspirations were benevolent. Both assumptions could not be more flawed. He, for instance, shows that the World Bank banned the Viphya pulp mill project because, despite the promise of this mill project to raise the industrial status of Malawi, it would exclusively help to meet the interests of foreign investors, instead of the economic necessities of the country (202). This implies that to Kayira, the agency of local and international actors, beyond the state, crippled the Malawian state’s benign fight against poverty. It is also hard to miss his silence about the antagonism that characterized relations of capitalist agriculture with the peasantry in the Malawian colonial and later, postcolonial neoliberal contexts, for capitalist accumulation ends in the name of rural development. Simply stated, Kayira exonerates the colonial capitalist project.

To Kayira, the colonial authorities in Malawi encountered difficulties during their pursuit of protecting the interests of Africans in the tung oil industry that flourished between the 1930s and 1954 (90), as various groups competed for the state’s attention, in ways that largely suffocated the war on poverty (92). Kayira insists thus:

In other words, the Malawian colonial state’s hands were tied as its quest to fulfil its mandate of guardianship of the development process was compromised by the diverging interest groups. The claim that the colonial state has ever promoted the interests of the colonized, typifies blindness to the domination and accumulation logic of the colonial political and economic project. Needless to mention, such a claim is a mockery of what colonialism and the modern state represent. One is left wondering why Kayira would take such a colonial apologist stance.

Finally, Kayira shows that whereas the 1970s state policy was largely exploitative to several smallholder farmers, this conduct was more about early postcolonial developments involving contradictory and competing interfaces of the Malawian state, the World Bank and Britain’s Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM), whose result compelled the state to adopt exploitative policies it had not intended to. He thus challenges the tendency to conflate development with politics or reduce development debates to stories of exploitation of the 1960s and after, for obscuring the reality that personal ambitions of state bureaucrats were central (7). Instead of presenting development projects as tools of control, Kayira demonstrates the constantly varying ways in which power played out, with experts usually accommodating the demands of local people (10). Certainly, the local and international actors were active agents in shaping the different pursuits of the Malawian state. Nevertheless, it is inconceivable that their agency could protractedly contradict and undermine the interests of the state, without significant levels of complicity or counter-responses on the part of the state. Kayira’s analysis thus exaggerates the power of the local and international actors against the aspirations of the Malawian state. Instead, seeing how the motives and actions of the state and international political economy institutions coordinate(d) in their domination and exploitation of colonized Malawi’s politics, society, and economy would otherwise afford us a more productive analysis. By ignoring the enormous, though not exclusive, power wielded by the modern state since its founding, Kayira depoliticizes and dehistoricizes the discourse and practice of rural development in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Overall, the text’s interdisciplinary character makes it relevant to students of society, politics, political economy, and history of Africa. Hence, I would recommend it to such students.