One of the topics covered in the discussion on the pages of the journal, which has been going on since No. 4, 2002, is the problem of the correlation between traditional society and industrial society, which came to the countries of Asia and Africa with the era of colonialism.

Late-type colonialism (XIX-XX centuries), when colonialists invested in their colonies and developed social and industrial infrastructure there, can be considered an attempt at forced modernization. Archaic agricultural civilizations (traditional societies) have always resisted modernization, because it led to the destruction of these civilizations and the triumph of industrial civilization. This is what is happening now in Africa, where agricultural civilization still dominates - up to 85% of the continent's population continues to live in its snares. Resistance to modernization in Africa takes the form of decolonization liberation from the colonial legacy in the broadest sense of the word.

First they had to drive out the haughty white-faced masters who had taught the Africans that man was naturally free and free to control his own destiny. This was done because the European owners themselves prepared to leave. It was expensive to maintain the colonies, but I didn't want to give them away just like that. The national liberation movement helped-it was blamed for the need to leave.

When the Europeans left, they left behind props: wigs, robes, parliaments, juries. The mines, factories, and armies that were specially trained and well-armed were not fake. They set to work. The army began to organize military coups that eliminated colonial (European) institutions such as the parliament, but at the same time, being graduates of European educational institutions, they sought to preserve the European management style based on executive discipline. The military, who "distinguished themselves" in this occupation no less than civilian politicians, whom they overthrew for corruption, could not resist the temptation of corruption. But in one thing, the military was adamant and consistent: they defended the borders of their states established in colonial times, and for this they could wage prolonged bloody wars, as, for example, in Nigeria.

The military wore uniforms received from the colonialists, and this also obliged them, although this factor should not be exaggerated. Bokassa and Mobutu wore European military uniforms, which did not prevent them from being typically African despots. One of them even turned to cannibalism.

Turning to the" miracle-working " Marxism-Leninism and building socialism can also be considered a manifestation of decolonization, since the introduction of a doctrine that the colonialists vigorously denied and condemned was a revolt. In go-

(c) 2003

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Due to the fascination with socialism, the imperfect (but natural) economy of the former colonies was noticeably distorted. The creation of socialist relations was a departure from the colonial model. The destruction of the economy continues today-experts are talking about the deindustrialization of the continent.

A manifestation of decolonization can also be considered the interethnic clashes that have acquired the widest scope on the continent, which the colonialists managed to cope with at one time. The tribes have always been at war with each other, and only in colonial times did the "bounty hunt"decrease. Currently, up to 20% of the African population lives in an area of armed conflict.

As the decades passed, Africa increasingly regained its natural African features. People who had been taught by British, French, or Portuguese teachers who could speak European languages well and had mastered European manners retired or passed away.

The Africanization of various services is the most visible part of the decolonization process. Personnel Africanization, which took place in all countries of the continent, brought moral satisfaction to the citizens of these countries, muted the inferiority complex, but at the same time reduced the effectiveness of the relevant services. Now Africanization is underway in South Africa - a country where all the positions that require qualifications, and therefore well-paid, have traditionally been occupied by whites. It looks, for example, like this: in a certain hospital, the leading surgeon (white) is ordered to replace white nurses with African ones, as required by law. The surgeon obeys, becomes convinced of the low qualification of new assistants and leaves the clinic, as he cannot ensure the normal course of operations and care for his patients. Decolonization, however, continues.

The displacement of whites can be relatively peaceful, as in the case of the South African surgeon, or violent. Some white farmers who settled in Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) are killed there by "veterans of the anti-colonial struggle", while others, without waiting for a terrible fate, leave the country.

The colonialists left behind state structures of a modern type. These are very complex systems that require a lot of money and qualified managers. The modern state in developed countries assumes huge obligations on a large scale. The post-colonial states of Africa are poor in funds and qualified personnel, and therefore function very poorly, do not meet the expectations that citizens place on them, which the latter strongly protest. Postcolonial states are collapsing under the weight of responsibilities and problems. This is a well-established (not yet prevailing) trend.

The most striking example is Somalia, where the state, as a public institution, disappeared as a result of the civil war ten years ago. There were no police, no television, no newspapers, no hospitals, no courts. The industry that was created under the colonialists and developed well in the first post-colonial years, including with the help of the Soviet Union, was destroyed. The country broke up: The northwestern regions separated, taking the colonial name Somaliland, the northern ones remembered the ancient Egyptian name Punt (Punt Country) and declared themselves Puntoland, and the southern provinces (along the Juba River) became Jubaland. The central part has retained the name Somalia. But there is a civil war going on, there is no power, no law. People live by subsistence farming, nomadic cattle breeding, fishing, and robbery. There are rich people who live in luxury villas. Like medieval European feudal lords, they maintain well-armed mini-armies. From time to time, these "barons" fight. The world forgets about Somalia.

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The same path is followed by the Congo, Sierra Leone and some other countries on the continent. African ethnic groups are cramped and uncomfortable in their colonial borders, which they perceive as unnatural. Hundreds of years ago, Europeans knew this state: barbarian kingdoms appeared and disappeared in the expanses of the former Roman Empire; then, however, there was no post-industrial civilization in the world.

The increased interest of African intellectuals in the local folklore, traditions, customs and beliefs of their peoples, their pre - colonial history, as well as in the events of the national liberation struggle can be considered a manifestation of decolonization. In the works of African authors, the pre-colonial past is often idealized.

Hybrid societies of Africa, consisting of mechanically combined representatives of different civilizations, exist in constant tension, which leads to the accumulation of fatigue and confusion. In this sense, a poem by the Ghanaian poet M. Day-Anang is characteristic:

.. Africa, you have set sail.
But where is your way?
Forward ... to the stars,
To the inhuman mill of factories,
So that in a never-ending shift
Grind your years?..
or back?
Back to the ancient origins,
When man was a brother to man,
And worshipped the deity
A pure soul, who knew no shackles?

Forward or backward? Factories are elements of the industrial age, which is yesterday for developed countries. It is easier to go back, especially since there is a precedent - Somalia.

Sensing the internal division and confusion of African societies, some politicians (Gaddafi, for example) offer a radical solution: to completely abandon Western values, Western customs and even forget the languages of the former colonialists, i.e. resolutely move back.

Militant Islamic fundamentalism is also a sign of decolonization: backward and as far away from today as possible. You can keep the "infidels" out of your holy land, you can deprive the faithful of information about the outside world and thus get out of the state of competition with it, abandon the incredibly difficult modernization. Terrorism, especially on such a large scale as the September 11, 2001 attack in America, is a desperate attempt to destroy an alien civilization that is far ahead of the traditional world in competition.

* * *

Africa is not unique in its rejection of modernization, and the same thing happened in Europe. I will allow myself an excursion into the history of two countries: England and Russia. At the end of the 15th century, the process of destroying the archaic agricultural civilization based on the subsistence economy of a peasant family began in England. Peasant land, including communal land, passed into the hands of rich yeomen (farmers) and non-peasant class elements ( gentry, townspeople, clerics), who sought to turn the land into a source of rental income (by giving it to sub-holders) or commercial profit (using hired labor). The new owners of the land had in mind to conduct a commodity economy on it, which is not typical of an archaic civilization.

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The most effective tool for destroying the traditional peasant world was the so-called enclosure of rural communal land and the conversion of arable land into pasture for sheep ^.2 As a result, the peasants were driven off the land, they turned into paupers, who became either farmhands or vagabonds. The number of the latter grew rapidly, and the villages were empty. A cry was heard over the country: "Sheep are devouring people!" Publicists and preachers of that time (Thomas More among them) wrote and said: "Where forty people had the means of living, there now one man and his shepherd have everything." This led to the gradual demise of peasant holdings and their consolidation into large (capitalist) farms, including sheep farms: the wool of English sheep was especially valued, as it was suitable for the production of fine cloth. Venetian, and later English merchants, carried high-quality English cloth far beyond the seas, including to exotic Muscovy. And Henry VIII hung tramps along the roads.

The development of the commodity economy and the increase in the number of manufactories contributed to the growth of national wealth, the transformation of the country from a poor to a richer one. Such a change was necessary to feed the growing population of England, but at the same time the archaic civilization disappeared, the way of life of its representatives was destroyed. In the course of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the peasant himself disappeared as a type, becoming either a tenant farmer, a yeoman, a farmhand, or a city worker, forever cut off from the land.

Over time, the key figures in rural areas became entrepreneurs of the capitalist type-yeomen and squires (rural gentlemen), and the latter, along with agriculture, were engaged in cloth production and overseas trade. The Yeoman and Squire became the pillars of the emerging industrial (urban) civilization, which was replacing the agricultural (peasant) civilization. During the 17th and 18th centuries, a new type of farmer was celebrated in the literature. In the 16th century, almost all polemicists were on the side of peasant communities and community members, against fencing, but already in the 17th and 18th centuries, the tone of writing on agrarian topics changed: rural communities began to be called "a bunch of thieves and lazy people", whose sheep looked "pathetic, mangy, covered with ragged wool".

But what about the traditional peasantry? At first, it resisted, raised uprisings. So, in 1549, a rebellion broke out in Norfolk. As a sign of protest against landlords who kept an exorbitant number of their sheep on communal lands, the rebels slaughtered 20 thousand sheep. Peasant revolts broke out in various parts of the island, but they were unable to stop the advance of a new industrial (later urban) civilization. Ruined and landless peasants sailed across the ocean and settled on the uninhabited shores of America. During the years 1630-1643, 200 thousand pounds sterling were spent on transporting 20 thousand men, women and children to New England on two hundred ships; during the same period, more than 40 thousand emigrants were transported to Virginia and other colonies. The process of destroying agricultural civilization in England lasted for three and a half centuries. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was over, and English society had become industrial and predominantly urban.

In Russia, the process of the death of an archaic civilization was more fleeting, and therefore more dramatic, sometimes tragic. It began to develop rapidly after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 (in England it had already ended). The peasant reform was carried out poorly - the peasants were actually left without land. The average post-reform peasant allotment was four dessiatines per audit soul, while one member of the landowner's family sometimes accounted for several thousand dessiatines of land.

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The reforms of the 60s and 70s of the 19th century opened the way for the rapid development of industrial civilization (capitalism). High-commodity farming was started by the landlords themselves (though not all of them), or by rich peasants who bought the land (kulaks, i.e. farmers). The main mass of the traditional peasantry, leading a subsistence economy, was ruined: the peasants turned into paupers, tenants, farmhands, went to work in the city, settled there as hired workers. At the same time, Russia experienced a demographic boom during the post-reform period, primarily due to the growth of the rural population. In 45 years, i.e. by 1905, the population of Russia has grown by one and a half times.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the way of life of the traditional Russian peasant was preserved. Having once visited an ordinary Russian village, Emperor Nicholas II was shocked by its squalor. The traditional peasant was archaic, and the attitude of the authorities towards him was also archaic: only in 1904, corporal punishment for peasants was abolished.

The first serious attempt to modernize the archaic agrarian sphere, and therefore begin the destruction of agricultural civilization, was made by P. A. Stolypin in 1906-1911. Traditional society responded with outrage. Significant agrarian unrest, however, has occurred before. The peasants protested against private ownership of land, large-scale capitalist farms, the right of peasants to leave the rural community, state interference in communal affairs, etc. The peasants burned and destroyed the landlords 'and farmers' (Kulak) estates, houses and buildings of farmers, i.e. recently left the community of community members, and the" defenders " of peasant interests - the Social Revolutionaries-killed government representatives. The authorities responded with repressions. The large-scale physical extermination of the bearers of the ideals of agricultural civilization began in 1914. The Russian army consisted almost entirely of peasants, so its millions of losses in the First World War are the losses of the peasantry.

In 1917, due to the incredible weakness of the government, a peasant revolution took place in Russia, which was "ridden" by the Bolsheviks. The Russian peasants, in principle, were neither for the Reds nor for the whites, who equally oppressed them with various requisitions, conscripts in the army and other duties. The peasants fought against any government that interfered in their lives, despite such interference in 1918-1920. they responded with armed mutinies. The archaic agricultural civilization is self-sufficient, it practically does not need the products of the industrial civilization, which the Russian peasants tried to prove when they created their "peasant republics", their armies, and dismantled the railway tracks leading to the city during the civil war. The authorities responded with poison gases and artillery fire.

The best years for the peasant world were the years of NEP. Rural production was restored, large-scale capitalist farms were liquidated, although kulaks remained.

By 1929, it became clear that the traditional peasant society with its subsistence economy could not feed the city, since it ate up almost everything it produced. This year begins a new, monstrous Stalinist modernization (collectivization, industrialization), which led to the destruction of agricultural civilization.

The poor part of the peasantry sympathized with the collectivization plan, as it corresponded to the community's ideas about the world order and made it possible to seize the property of a more affluent neighbor. But soon the peasants discovered that they had become serfs of the state: without a passport, with empty workdays. In addition, collectivization was carried out super-hard: in the course of it, three million peasant farms were destroyed, as a result of which in 1930-1933 a famine began, which killed

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millions of peasant lives. People fled from the village to the city: industrialization became a powerful pump that sucked the villagers into the cities, and during the war of 1941-1945, the vast majority of the dead were peasants.

In 1926, the share of urban residents on the territory of today's Russia was 21.3%, in 1979-74.4%, i.e. increased 3.5 times. Now this share is more than 80%. Russia has become an urban society; industrial civilization has triumphed; fragments of an archaic civilization are living out their days under the rotten roofs of abandoned villages. Russia now has no choice - to enter the post-industrial world and with all its energy.

But what about Africa? Is her fate so brutally determined? Can it follow in the footsteps of England and Russia and eliminate its archaic nature? This requires either a lot of time or a dedicated modernizer. In China, for example, the Communist Party has become such a modernizer. India is being modernized, but its peoples are united by the unity of religion and culture, there is a caste system (hierarchy) that disciplines society, and the state language is common to all states. There is none of this in Africa.

Africa has the opportunity to create its own world, similar to the one about which the Ghanaian poet wrote too enthusiastically ("When man was a brother to man..."). It is not known how happy a person will be in it, but such an isolated world can exist: no one from the outside will encroach on it, because the time of imperialism has passed. Moreover, "the more primitive a society is, the more stable it is. Primitiveness is now no longer perceived as a pure disadvantage, it is often considered as something with positive features. Positive traits are integrity and sustainability " ³ .

notes

¹ There was no such word in the lexicon of Soviet science. In 1929, the Comintern rejected decolonization as a form of evolutionary development of colonial countries and branded it "Nonsense, absurdity, devoid of foundation", which distract the oppressed masses from the revolutionary struggle.

² In Europe, wool prices have risen sharply.

^{Pomerantsev G. S.} 3 Kontsert natsional'nykh kul'tury Evropy - budushche mirovoi civilizatsii [Concert of National Cultures of Europe-the future of World civilization]. Moscow, 2002, p. 252.

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