| | The Hausa areas of the Sudanic belt of West Africa certainly experienced food shortages, due mainly to weather or pestilence, but had a variety of social mechanisms to reduce their impact on any one family. Many of these mechanisms were undermined in the various transitions that resulted from colonialism without other measures to replace them. From this experience the meaning of 'crisis' in peripheral capitalist societies is explored as some combination of the 'economic' crisis of overproduction of commodities in advanced capitalism with the crisis of underproduction of use values characteristic of pre-capitalist society. |
