PROFIT NOT FOR PROFIT'S SAKE: HISTORY AND BUSINESS CULTURE OF AFRICAN ENTREPRENEURS IN ZIMBABWE. Baobab Books, Harare, 1997. Volker Wild. Distributed exclusively by the African Books Collective, Ltd., Oxford UK. pp. zzv + 324. Paperback: $25.^©

The author also points out how such limited and personalized mode of capitalism with target outcomes lacked both intergenerational as well as corporate horizons. He attempts to substantiate that in present-day Zimbabwe the cultural problem of capitalism is complicated by the process of the formation of post-colonial "protobourgeoisie" consisting of veteran nationalists and middle-class professionals who use the "politics of connections" (p. 278) to get ahead economically. In summary, the author makes the point that in Africa, the business elite is not equipped with capitalist entrepreneurial skills.

The book is filled with valuable reflections, survey results, and illustrative anecdotes on the development of business enterprise among Zimbabweans. The book's merits lie in its exposition of and insight into the process of transformation of a pre-capitalist society into a modern capitalist system, and the particularities of its history strongly influenced by its cultural moorings and exceedingly constrained by a discriminatory colonial regime.

There are some flaws in the book. The first is the author's apparent contradictory position on the role of the colonial regime in Zimbabwe. This flows from the author's untenable position that the colonial system in Zimbabwe helped rather than prevented African enterprise. This unnecessarily flavors his entire work even when he himself admits on a number of occasions how limiting the colonial system was to African enterprise. This includes settler commodification of agriculture and the prevention of Africans from prospering by selling marketable surpluses (Ch. 2), segregation policies preventing Africans from the benefits of education and the diffusion of ideas from the settler population (Ch. 3), preventing African capital formation by denying access to viable land assets and collateral, creation of surplus-labor conditions to exploit migrant labor on settler mines and farms (Ch. 4), and frustrating African business ventures, as in the construction sector where the settler community showed hostility to an African presence in such urban trades.

The second flaw is due perhaps to the seemingly ideographic approach which the author chose to use and the apparent stereotypes that flow from it. The "African" case is treated as a unique form of experience that stems from an African culture norm with implications of a fatalistic mode of enterprise. The African experience is not presented as a stage of development in which most countries, including Europeans, have passed through. One gets the impression that Europeans are born capitalists who make profit for profit's sake and that Africans are incapacitated by their culture to do the same (p. xxiii). There may be an inherent postmodernist bias which gives culture a more deterministic role than is warranted. In the case of Zimbabwe, it is even more difficult to tease out the assumed detrimental effect of "culture" from the pervasive hegemony of colonial management. The author himself states that "many Africans responded to the loss of identity by adopting white values, norms and standards" and that "the whites became the reference group for the urban middle class" (p. 159). Why should business acumen be an exception? Related to this are also some outlandish stereotypes like "the African view of the world was shaped by space rather than time" (p. 198). There is no scientific basis for this stereotype.

The book makes a valuable reading when taken in the context of an ideographic case study with no claims to offer theoretical patterns of transition from a traditional pre-capitalist society to a modern market-elastic society. The case study of Zimbabwe is very interesting and informative. But even here, the role of "culture" as conceptualized by the author, may not be easily isolated from its contextualized manifestations in a pervasive colonial regime. Among some of the most interesting observations by the author are those dealing with the post-colonial development in business. He gives an excellent overview of the manner in which the modern business sector is organized with the inherited European economy on the one hand and the more complex African enterprise on the other. He also highlights the manner in which the post-colonial political and professional elite engage in business, using the "politics of connections" to produce both "clientelistic and market elements" in the economic system. Policy makers, business people, and scholars interested in patterns of market development in Africa should find the book very interesting and useful.

Assefa Mehretu
Department of Geography
Michigan State University