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Оглавление1 The Nature of African Nationalism
In 1991 the historian Saul Dubow declared that ‘in recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism [in South Africa] has been transformed’ (Dubow, 1991: 1). ‘We now have’, he continues, ‘a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century’ (p. 1). What remained, he suggests, were certain gaps in the historical record. These omissions were a result of a general amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Christian thought. They also reflected, he suggests, the pre-eminence of a Marxist scholarship fearful of ‘idealism’. Marxist scholars were not interested in questions of ideology and culture on their own terms. ‘The ideology of race’, Dubow observes, ‘has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: … the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests’ (p. 1). Dubow had in mind the tradition of radical political economy that announced itself so boldly in the mid-1970s.
In September 1976, just three months after the beginning of a massive student revolt in Soweto, the Review of African Political Economy published a special edition on South Africa. It contained several essays that would partly define the terms of South African studies for at least the next ten years. Of especial importance was an article on the state by Robert Davies, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O’Meara. Applying theoretical developments within French Marxism to a periodisation of the form of the state in South Africa, the authors explored what they called the secondary contradictions of the social formation. They argued that the form of the state was given, in addition to the primary contradiction between workers and capitalists, by struggles for hegemony between different fractions of capital itself (Davies et. al., 1976). Between 1920 and 1948, they argued, the critical division within the capitalist class was between imperialist/foreign capital(s) on the one hand and national capital(s) on the other (p. 29). At stake was whether ‘South Africa was to remain an economic chattel of imperialism or to generate its own national capitalist development’ (p. 29). The ‘unique’ feature of South Africa, they concluded, was the early hegemony that national capital exercised in the state. The displacement of imperial capital from this position after World War II saw the transformation of the economy away from reliance on primary production (mining) towards relatively high levels of industrialisation (p. 29). What is important to notice is how Davies et al. treated phenomena like Afrikaner nationalism. On their terms, political/ideological criteria reflected the latter’s base in different sectors of production (p. 5). ‘[It] is here’, Davies et al. continue, ‘that the English/Afrikaner traditions are to be located’ (original emphasis) (p. 6). English traditions in South Africa reflected the interests of foreign capital; Afrikaner nationalism was an ideological effect of national capital.
These were the terms of analysis that Dubow protested. John Lonsdale too had complained, at about the same time, that ‘Marxists were not much interested in the historical study of … nationalism’ (Lonsdale, 1992: 301). Both noted how, in the hands of such scholars, notions of race, volk1 and nation were reduced to mere effects of class positions. So too was racism. On these terms, there was little place for studies of ideology, politics and culture on their own terms. What Dubow was, in effect, celebrating when he toasted the growth of research on Afrikaner nationalism was the emergence of an environment more conducive to the study of nationalism, race and politics generally.
At least since the early 1980s, in South Africa and Britain, so-called French structuralist historiography was being taken on by a school of historians that claimed sympathy with the Marxist project, often self-identified as radical, and yet refused the idea that history was a process without a subject. Instead of privileging the role of anonymous structural processes, they emphasised the agency of historical actors and the contingency of beliefs and practices. In South Africa, these scholars often rallied behind the banner of social history, citing E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978) in their disputes with those sympathetic to Althusser and Poulantzas. By the early 1990s, this dispute had ostensibly been won: Althusser had disappeared from the academic scene and Poulantzas was dead. Moreover, social history was on the ascendancy.
We might reasonably suppose that in this environment, Dubow looked forward to new studies of nationalism, including African nationalism. He had reason to be optimistic: in 1987 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido had edited a collection of essays that were published together as The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa. In their introduction, Marks and Trapido offered a continuous historical narrative as a first step towards accounting for nationalism and ethnicity in a synthesis of twentieth-century South African history. The book was an invitation to further research.
With the hindsight of more than a decade, we are obliged, unfortunately, to conclude that Dubow’s optimism was nothing more than that. It is true that around about the time of his article a few new studies emerged on Zulu nationalism.2 These were exceptions, however. Apart from a few journal articles, most of them published as part of the Marks and Trapido collection mentioned above, the last major studies of African nationalism in South Africa were published in the 1970s: Black Nationalism in South Africa by Peter Walshe came out in 1973; the most recent edition of Black Power in South Africa by Gail Gerhart was published in 1979; and Eddie Roux’s Time Longer than Rope was even older, first appearing in 1964. Roux’s text is typical of the way that African nationalism has been construed in South Africa, even in the later Marks and Trapido study, and its sub-title is instructive: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. African nationalism has been defined in terms of resistance to colonialism, racial segregation and apartheid. Scholars, moreover, have been ready to accept a person’s or an organisation’s own designation as nationalist on their own terms: if they identified themselves as nationalists, that is what they were taken to be. What, however, was nationalist as such about the form of their resistance? This question has never been addressed in South Africa. It is a question, moreover, to which there are only disparate answers when it comes to African nationalism more generally.
The vast majority of studies of African nationalism date from the period of decolonisation, between the 1950s and 1970s. Among the earliest and still the most important of these texts is Thomas Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa. It first appeared in 1958, and was already in its sixth edition ten years later. When it appeared, readers were familiar with political revolts – Hodgkin (1968: 10) calls them ‘explosions’, to give a sense of their sudden violence – in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (today Ghana), the Sudan, French West Africa (especially the Ivory Coast) and South Africa (presumably, the Defiance Campaign). Even more ‘tranquil’ territories like Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), Nyasaland (Malawi), French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons were in an ‘eruptive state’ (p. 11). Readers had also witnessed new self-governing, if not fully sovereign, states emerge in Africa. In 1956 the Sudan declared its independence, refusing a constitutional link with Egypt. Formerly Italian Eritrea had since 1952 become an autonomous territory within the federal Ethiopian Empire. The Gold Coast was on the verge of independence; so too were parts of Nigeria. The year 1956, Hodgkin wrote, ‘has been noted in the diaries of British West African politicians as the year of decision’ (p. 11). In 1957 the independent state of Ghana came into being. Then, in 1960, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Malagasy, the Congo Republic (Belgian), Somalia (Italian and British), Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Congo Republic (French), Gabon, Nigeria and Mauretania became independent. In total, 17 new countries appeared within months of each other. The following year, Sierra Leone was declared independent, as was Tanganyika. In 1962 Ruanda (Rwanda) and Burundi became independent; so too did Algeria and Uganda. In 1963 Nigeria became a republic and Kenya a sovereign state. Malawi followed in 1964; Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia. And 1964 also saw the emergence of Tanzania from the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar.
In this context, studies of African nationalism usually documented resistance to colonial rule. The term ‘African nationalism’ was used interchangeably with several other expressions: anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, ‘Black Protest’ and ‘National Liberation’. Such studies showed a fundamental preoccupation with struggle; and struggle against colonialism in particular. They read two terms together: nationalism and independence.
‘My own inclination’, writes Hodgkin,
is to use the term ‘nationalist’ in a broad sense, to describe any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society … in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives (emphasis added) (Hodgkin, 1968: 23).
Hodgkin defended his methodology against those who wanted to be more circumspect in their use of the term. There are those, he observes, who ‘describe only those types of organisation which are essentially political, not religious, economic or educational, in character, and which have as their object the realisation of self-government or independence for a recognisable African nation, or nation-to-be’. Yet, he continues, to restrict the use of the term in this way seems to raise two difficulties. Firstly, it tends to conceal the ‘mixed-up’ character of African political movements. ‘In a single African territory’, he continues,
it is possible to find coexisting a diversity of organisations, of different types, with different objectives, operating at different levels, each in its own way expressing opposition to European control and a demand for new liberties; and to discover a network of relationships between these organisations (Hodgkin, 1968: 24).
Some might be political organisations seeking independence for the ‘nation’; others, messianic movements; still others, church groupings; tribal associations; or trade unions. These diverse organisations, Hodgkin insists, were only intelligible in relation to ‘a single historical process, of nationalist awakening, to which they all belonged’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 25). If one did not see them as ‘variations on a single theme’ then one was bound to conclude that nationalism was non-existent in places where ‘nationalist aspirations have not yet begun to express themselves in the language of separatism’ (p. 25). Hodgkin was thinking here of the Belgian Congo, which he describes as being in a state of ‘incipient nationalism’ (p. 25). Two years later, he seems to have been proven right: in June 1960 Patrice Lumumba addressed dignitaries at the ceremony marking the independence of the Congo. He juxtaposed nationalism and independence in the very way that Hodgkin suggested was meaningful:
Your Majesty, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentleman, Congolese men and women, Fighters for independence who today are victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. … The Republic of Congo has been proclaimed, and our beloved country is now in the hands of its own children. … Homage to the Champions of National Sovereignty! Long Live Independent and Sovereign Congo! (cited in Kohn & Sokolsky, 1965: 118–21).
Yet Hodgkin himself gave reason to be more discerning about what was and what was not a nationalist movement. Nationalism in Colonial Africa is, in part, a study of new forms of urban association. Part II of the books considers the ‘new towns’ of Africa – ‘great, amorphous, squalid agglomération urbaine’ (Hodgkin, 1968: 64) – where, Hodgkin tells us, a new ‘indigenous civilisation’ is being created (p. 83). It is there that he locates the rise of African nationalism, in some of the ‘characteristic institutions of this new civilisation’ (p. 83). What is novel about this civilisation, according to Hodgkin, is its peculiar urban form: ‘By mixing men from a variety of social backgrounds’, he explains,
[the new towns] make possible the discovery of new points of contact and interest. Around these interests there develops a network of new associations, through which for the first time men come to think of their problems as social rather than personal; as capable of solution by human action rather than part of the natural order (p. 63; emphasis added).
Hence, he argues,
African towns have this two-fold aspect: seen from one standpoint, they lead to a degradation of African civilisation and ethic; seen from another, they contain the germs of a new, more interesting and diversified civilisation, with the possibilities of greater liberty (p. 63).
African nationalism, according to this account, intends a new African civilisation, one that transcends kinship and ethnicity, where freedom heralds social mixing and ethnic diversity. Its culture is urban and secular, permitting a view of the world unmediated by supernatural cosmologies. African nationalism construed in this way fits uncomfortably with a definition that reduces it to the search for independence. It is not indifferent to the form of society after independence. Indeed, in this account, nationalist movements become so when they struggle for a particular version of the postcolony.
This ambivalence regarding the definition of African nationalism produces very different appraisals of historical phenomena. Take, for example, the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. According to the first definition of African nationalism (whereby nationalism = anti-colonialism), it is easily construed as an African nationalist movement. This is how, for example, Bruce Berman characterised it. It was not an atavistic Kikuyu tribal rebellion, he said, but a modern national movement against colonial rule (Berman, 1991). Kofi Opoku, in a similar way, suggests that Mau Mau attained ‘national consciousness’ and ‘cultural awareness’ because it struggled for independence (Opoku, 1986). More circumspect, however, is John Lonsdale’s analysis in a book he jointly edited with Bruce Berman: even if Mau Mau was a nationalist movement, it mobilised on the basis of Kikuyu tribalism. Lonsdale is interested in the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity and concludes with the notion of ethnic nationalism: Mau Mau was an ethnic nationalist revolt, he suggests (Lonsdale, 1992: 268). He introduces this qualification – ethnic nationalism – because he knows that the history of Mau Mau sits uncomfortably with the implicit normative register of most views of nationalism (Lonsdale, 1992: 275). Firstly, it organised on tribal (ethnic) lines. It was not multiracial, nor did it imagine the time after colonialism as the time of black Kenyans. It appealed to a quasi-mysticism. It was not urban-based, nor did it attach special value to technological and economic progress. Hodgkin himself thought that there were more constructive methods of channelling African political energies than Mau Mau, which represented for him an example of a blighted ambition ‘wasted in messianic and puritanical religious movements, or … attracted to terrorism as a violent means of breaking the bonds of the plural society’ (Hodgkin cited in Lonsdale, 1992: 282). The ‘undecidability’ of the phenomenon qua nationalist centres precisely on this question of definition. At stake, ostensibly, is a historiographical problem: What facts counted as proof of national phenomena?
The temptation to treat African nationalism as the name for resistance to colonialism is, nonetheless, widespread. So pervasive has been its influence, writes Anthony Smith in the early 1980s, ‘that to this day one of the most popular views on nationalism in the “Third World” regards itself as a movement for national liberation and a reaction to European colonialism’ (Smith, 1983: 37). Smith worries, in effect, that if African nationalism were construed simply in terms of what it opposed, the impact of territorial division and bureaucratic homogenisation, key to the force and shape of nationalism, would be overlooked. Such an appraisal was also mute about the cultural features of nationalism: ‘But this is to miss much of the point behind a nationalist movement,’ he objects, ‘its ability to attract diverse groups, to renew itself after attaining independence, and to provide a basis and rationale for new social and political units and institutions’ (p. 38). In response, Smith proposes a typology and a periodisation of African nationalism. There was a phase of ‘primary resistance’ to European incursion, a period of ‘millennial protest’, a phase of ‘gestation’ and ‘adaptation’, a period of nationalist agitation for self-rule and, finally, the adoption of social programmes (p. 39).
Smith is certainly correct about the dangers of construing nationalism simply in terms of resistance. Yet we must sometimes distinguish between what the literature says it is doing and what it does in fact do. Literature from this period often goes in two directions simultaneously. It discusses African nationalism in relation to struggle, yet it also discusses it as a particular form of struggle. However, it is the view of the present book that it is better characterised in terms of an ambivalence about nationalism’s form.
For example, Ndabaningi Sithole’s 1959 history of the subject under discussion, entitled African Nationalism, documents how the ‘spirit of independence’ after World War II spread to Africa. It discusses African nationalism largely in the terms that Hodgkin defined, as ‘a move against European domination which tends to devalue the African people’ (Sithole, 1959: 24). Sithole’s text is clearly addressed to European readers, and is at pains to assure them that African nationalism is not anti-white (nor Communist), but that it merely represents the ‘fierce hunger’ of African peoples to be ‘recognized by the people of the world as their fellows and equals’ (p. 50). ‘[A]n African nationalist movement’, he states, ‘is an honest effort on the part of the African people to reassert their human dignity which the foreign powers have denied them. It is an honest effort to overthrow foreign rule that relegates them to an inferior position’ (p. 136). Yet Sithole’s text cannot be reduced to this anti-colonialism standpoint. In his account, African nationalism does not bear a simply negative relation to colonialism; it also represents the soul of a ‘new African’. Whereas it is true that the majority of Africans have not emerged from a ‘primitive state’ (p. 162), he explains, the
modern African lives in an environment in many instances totally different from that in which his forefathers lived. He is not only conscious of the country in which he lives, but also of Africa as a whole, and of the whole world …. Unlike his forefathers’ environment that hummed with bees, and that was livened with singing birds, disturbed by wild animals, and moved at nature’s pace, the modern African now lives in an environment where the mechanical bird has superseded the bird, where automobiles, trains, and tractors have pushed the ox, the donkey, and the horse into the background. … If the African forefathers should come back to life and behold their descendants on the modern scene, it is not far-fetched to say they would mistake their own children for the gods (p. 159).
Here African nationalism does not simply resist foreign domination: it is the harbinger of modernity. Even more than that, it constitutes those in Africa as African subjects per se.
The content of African nationalism became a major preoccupation, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Amilcar Cabral, founder of the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde, which sought independence from Portuguese rule in Guinea, during his address to the first Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966, worried about the ‘ideological deficiency’ if not the ‘total lack of ideology’ in the national liberation movements (Cabral, 1969: 75). Without such theory, he stated, national liberation movements would not correctly appraise the ‘foundations and objectives of national liberation in relation to the social structure’ (Cabral, 1969: 75). Cabral wanted such movements to pay greater attention to the form of society after independence – independence per se was not liberation. African nationalists needed to be able to distinguish between genuine national liberation and what he called neo-colonialism: ‘To retain the power which national liberation puts into its hands,’ he argued, ‘the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois … that is to negate the revolution and necessarily ally itself with imperialist capital’ (Cabral, 1969: 89). Such a situation, Cabral continued, was a neo-colonial one (Cabral, 1969: 89).
Hence, a genuine African nationalism was one that allied with the working class to overcome imperial capitalism. At stake was the prospect of industrialised African societies not beholden to foreigners or a parasitic comprador class. Cabral was echoing concerns raised by Kwame Nkrumah the year before, in particular, that new African nations were vulnerable to the ‘extended tentacles of the Wall Street octopus’ (Nkrumah, 1965: 240). Trepidation about the form of society after independence, and hence the character of the movements calling themselves nationalist, reflected a temporal change. The task of African nationalism was no longer simply to resist and overcome colonialism. As the discourse of new governments and state officials, African nationalism looked to to a new horizon, the future, and was asking some important questions: What was a nation? How did a society become one? What was the path to national sovereignty?
Cabral posited an African nation as a socialist, industrial society, reflecting the growing Marxist-Leninist influence on African nationalism. What mattered, for him and many like him, was the particular class character of the new society and the appropriate path to development: socialism or capitalism? Hans Kohn and Wallace Sokolsky describe the situation in 1965:
In the minds of African leaders, [nationalism] is no longer thought of in anti-imperialist terms, its original motivation. Nationalism is now conceived of as the necessary framework for and propelling force behind catapulting Africa into a complex, industrial world (Kohn & Sokolsky, 1965: 9).
This is how the term was used in Robert Rotberg and Ali Mazrui’s collection, Protest and Power in Black Africa, which appeared in 1970. The title of the book was already significant. It substituted ‘protest’ for ‘nationalism’ as the generic name of African resistance, implying that nationalism was only one form of protest. Typically, James Fernandez, a contributor to the Rotberg and Mazrui collection, wanted the adjective ‘nationalist’ only to apply to a movement if it contributed to what he called ‘modernisation’. For this reason, he reserved judgement about the nationalist credentials of the Bwiti movement in central and northern Gabon (Fernandez, 1970). (As an aside, we can note that he worried about the correctness of its application to Mau Mau fighters too [Fernandez, 1970: 454].)
This attention to the relationship between nation and modernisation was accompanied by interest in another couplet: tribe and nation. In From Tribe to Nation in Africa, published in 1970, Ronald Cohen and John Middleton sought to debunk the notion of tribe. They call it a ‘clear-cut racist stereotype’, preferring the term ‘ethnicity’ (Cohen & Middleton, 1970: 2). The notion of ‘tribe’, over and above its growing pejorative connotations, exaggerated the fixity of African social groups, their clear-cut demarcation as separate social units, and the stability of their cultures and customs (Cohen & Middleton, 1970: 2–3). Cohen and Middleton suspected that profound social changes were happening in Africa, but the problem was that they could not be described in the existing academic and popular lexicon. This was especially true of the notion of ‘detribalisation’. The term only made sense, they suggest, ‘[i]f there is a clear-cut, empirically real and, therefore, identifiable entity called a tribe or if there is a real person whom we can label the “tribal” African.’ ‘[T]hen of course’, they continue, ‘there must be a sharp change or loss when the African man or woman does not manifest tribal qualities – hence “detribalization” became a problem for research in social policy’ (Cohen & Middleton, 1970: 2). Yet such characters were more products of colonial fiction than of serious observation of Africans and African societies. Cohen and Middleton witness and also welcome a new form of society in Africa. They call it ‘plural’, and seek a new analytical vocabulary to describe it, which they find in the notion of ‘incorporation’. At stake was the emergence of ‘plural’ societies ‘in which people from differing ethnic backgrounds are interacting to a greater or lesser degree’ (Cohen & Middleton, 1970: 9). ‘The more each group changes toward reduction of boundary maintenance with respect to the other,’ they explain, ‘the greater is the degree of incorporation’ (Cohen & Middleton, 1970: 9). The collection considers this process among the Tonga in Zambia, the Lugbara in Uganda, the Alur in southern Sudan and the non-Nyamwezi in Tanzania. It investigates marriage policy and incorporation in Ghana; in Bornu, among the Mossi; in Rwanda; in the former Transkei; and in Nigeria. What was of especial importance is the effect of independence on the incorporation process (Maquet, 1970: 201), and in particular, the phenomenon of urbanisation. On these terms, ‘a nation’ referred to a plural society.
There are two noteworthy features of this literature. In the first place, it posited the African nation as a particular type of society. Secondly, African nationalism was not treated as a question of identity: it did not matter if its members identified with state institutions or state symbols. This is a recent concern, about which more will be said shortly.
The degree to which a society was plural or industrialised was not a question of subjectivity or opinion. Note, for example, D. F. Malherbe’s Stamregister van die Suid-Afrikaanse Volk (Genealogical Register of the South African People), published in South Africa in 1966. Like the anthropologies of incorporation described above, it researched the limits of the South African nation in terms of intermarriage and genealogy. There are two things to observe. Firstly, it draws a white limit, a racial boundary, despite the apparently all-inclusive term ‘South African people’. There is palpable relief in South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s preface to the book: ‘That the people remained white’, he marvels, ‘in spite of exceptional circumstances, is … remarkable’ (Verwoerd, 1966: v).3 In the second place, the book defines a family limit: it is a chronicle of marriages and intermarriages, of forebears and descendants that sketches the lines of common descent of white South Africans. Therein lies its importance: it is a family tree that establishes the ancestral origins of the people. To Malherbe, membership of the South African nation is not a question of identification; it is one of genealogy. Nor was this a peculiarity of Afrikaner nationalism: if we cast our view wider than Africa, we will hear the nation discussed in similar terms.
Note this extract from the utopian history of Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. Partha Chatterjee discusses it in the context of an Indian nationalism that defined ‘the people’ as Hindu:
Although India is the true motherland only of those who belong to the Hindu jãti and although only they have been born from her womb, the Musalmans [sic] are not unrelated to her any longer. She has held them at her breast and reared them. Musalmans are therefore her adopted children. Can there be no bonds of fraternity between two children of the same mother, one a natural child and the other adopted? There certainly can, the laws of every religion admit this. There has now been born a bond of brotherhood between Hindus and Musalmans living in India (Chatterjee, 1993: 111 & 222).4
What mattered was the limit of the polis. Yet the metaphor above does not only speak of those whom the nation excludes; more importantly, it describes the character of those whom it takes in as well: they are all family, bonded by relations of fraternal love.
What counts is the character of the state. Three broad themes emerged in this regard. Anthony Smith calls them territorialism, democracy and Pan-Africanism. He means by territorialism a concern, not so much with the limits of the nation’s territory as with who controlled the state (Smith, 1983: 54). European colonisers, he argues, were highly successful in imposing the territorial aspect of the Western state on the African demographic and political map. They were able, not only to map the African political and economic reality, but also to imprint these boundaries in the ‘psychic identity and cultural vision of the new elites’ (p. 54). As a result, the ‘shape’ and ‘face’ of the state, its bureaucratic-territorial form, was already given by the time of independence. On these terms, the African nation is discussed in relation to the form of the state as a bureaucratic-institutional constellation and the particular character of its politics (clientelist, centralised-bureaucratic, ‘spoils politics’5). Smith himself defends this state-centric approach against others. As much as Pan-Africanism (and/or Negritude) informed the nationalist imaginary, furnishing it with the metaphors and images for a vision of the postcolony, giving to it a specific culture, African nationalism was, argues Smith, ‘more firmly grounded’ and ‘prosaic’, lacking the florid poetic fancy of, say, Eastern European nationalisms (p. 57). Over and above their distinctive culture or the specific content of their programmes, African nationalisms, continues Smith, were firstly and foremostly ‘territorial nationalisms’ (p. 55). He states:
It was the colonial state that became the mould as well as the target of African nationalisms, and on them it stamped its special character and aims. It has been the special features of the colonial State – gubernatorial, territorial, bureaucratic, paternalist-educational, caste-like – that have given them its peculiar impetus and shape (p. 56).
The form of the African state has been a subject of continuous interest. The nation is considered an effect of the state itself. The state in Africa or the African state, to recall Bayart’s (1993) own ambivalence, remains one of the key prisms through which Africa is apprehended.6 It has given rise to an extensive literature on the African political economy, exemplified by journals such as the Review of African Political Economy. What matters for this literature today is the relationship between the form of the state (failed, weak, in crisis) and the features of post-independence politics: limited sovereignty; corruption; and ethnic competition for state resources, governance, and so on (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001).7 Exemplary in this regard is the widely cited article by Chris Allen, to which we shall return shortly. For the moment, we can note that in his article ‘Understanding African politics’, Allen seeks to relate the variability of politics in Africa to several ‘entwined and sequential patterns of political development’ (Allen, 1995: 316). More recently, we can note the report by the Commission for Africa, which was chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The report was issued in 2005 to coincide with the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in Scotland, where leaders of the world’s wealthiest countries planned to discuss increasing aid and debt relief to African countries. In a section on the ‘lost decades’, the report outlines Africa’s predicament by comparing the state of the continent with that of another, Asia. ‘For 30 years’, it observes,
the average income in sub-Saharan Africa was twice that of both South and East Asia. In the intervening decades an astonishing turn-around has taken place. The average income in Africa is now well below half of that in East Asia. The story is similar in South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating (Commission for Africa, 2005: 16).
‘Why has Africa fallen so behind?’ the commissioners ask. The answer comes shortly afterwards: ‘One thing underlies all the difficulties caused by the interactions of Africa’s history over the past 40 years. It is the weakness of governance and the absence of an effective state’ (Commission for Africa, 2005: 23–24).
Jean and John Comaroff periodise this discourse as characteristic of what they call the first of ‘two epochal phases’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632). They associate it with the period of decolonisation, though its terms, as witnessed above, are still pervasive. Here ‘postcoloniality’ is thought of in terms of ‘the international order of sovereign nations within the industrial capitalist world system’ (p. 632). According to this narrative, ‘Africa found the promise of autonomy and growth sundered by the realities of neocolonialism, which freighted [African countries] with an impossible toll of debt and dependency’ (p. 632). Under such conditions, African regimes became more and more authoritarian, evidencing deteriorating standards of governance and respect for human rights.
The Comaroffs observe a ‘second epoch’, beginning in 1989, in the genealogy of independent African states. Associated with the coming of age of ‘neoliberal global capitalism’, sub-Saharan African countries began to experience unprecedented demands for democracy (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632–33). Yet this movement has seen a lot more than democratisation. According to this discourse, it has
metamorphosed the old international order into a more fluid, market-driven, electronically articulated universe: a universe in which supranational institutions burgeon; … in which transnational identities, diasporic connections, ecological disasters, and the mobility of human populations challenge both the nature of sovereignty and the sovereignty of ‘nature’; in which … liberty is distilled to its postmodern essence, the right to choose subjectivities, commodities, sexualities, localities, identities, and other forms of collective representation (p. 633).
In Africa, the coming of post-modernity, however, is said to bring with it growing appeals to difference and diversity. The very existence of society itself is called into question. The state is said to be in perpetual crisis, its power chaotically dispersed (pp. 633–34).
The difference between these two moments, pre- or post-1989, on the Comaroffs’ terms, hinges on the characterisation of the state: singular and unified, as opposed to polymorphous and pluralistic. Even if, according to the Comaroffs, the sense of crisis evoked by these discourses is exaggerated, they nonetheless speak to a real condition: the predicament of the African nation state (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632). At stake is the increasingly hyphenated relationship between state and nation: the former is unable to fulfil its task as progenitor of the latter.
The sense of crisis – hyphenation – of the relationship between state and nation in Africa has been associated with renewed interest in the (dis)organisation of African societies. As the African state haemorrhages into a multiplicity of fragmented organisations and authorities, as it loses its ability to manage urbanisation, poverty relief, service delivery or economic growth, what new powers have occupied this space? How are they organised? What is the form of society that emerges in and through their activities? These are the questions that are increasingly being taken up by Africanist scholars. Abdou-Maliq Simone, for example, situates Johannesburg in a larger African context of what he terms ‘ruined urbanization’ (Simone, 2004: 407). ‘[T]he truncated process of economic modernization at work in African cities’, he argues, ‘has never fully consolidated apparatuses of definition capable of enforcing specific and consistent territorial organizations of the city’ (p. 409). By this he means that state administrations and civil institutions have been unable to order and control activities taking place in the city (buying, selling, residing, etc.) (p. 409).
This renewed interest in the state of African society (or societies in Africa), its cultural practices and its cosmological organisation (witchcraft, religion, etc.) is not simply a corrective to at least 20 years of attention to the state as a political-institutional configuration. The current interest in the inscrutability of the African scene and the elusive8 and elliptical character of African societies follows from the sense that Africa has witnessed 50 years of ruined modernism. At stake is the supposedly hyphenated relation between state and nation in the continent. We can summarise the conclusions of this scholarship as such: African nationalism has not given rise to African nations. There is now a substantial literature, both journalistic and academic, dealing with this apparent failure. It seeks its reasons on a continuum from avaricious African elites (Meredith, 2005), bad governance (European Union, 2005; Commission for Africa, 2005), the position of Africa in the world capitalist system (Wallerstein, 1991) to the form of the African state (Bayart, 1993; Mamdani, 1996).
In his new book on the state of Africa 50 years after independence, Martin Meredith, for example, asks ‘why, after the euphoria of the independence era, so many hopes and ambitions faded and why the future of Africa came to be spoken of only in pessimistic terms’ (Meredith, 2005: 13–14). What is striking, he suggests, is that despite the variability and diversity of African states, they have all ‘suffered so many of the same misfortunes’ (p. 14). ‘Time and time again’, he concludes, ‘[Africa’s] potential for economic development has been disrupted by the predatory politics of ruling elites seeking personal gain, often precipitating violence for their own ends’ (p. 14). ‘The problem is not so much that development has failed,’ he states, citing the Nigerian academic Claude Ake, ‘as that it was never really on the agenda in the first place’ (p. 688). At stake is an African state used for purposes other than nation-building. If Meredith et al., including the Commission for Africa publication mentioned earlier, lay the blame for the state of contemporary African states at the door of African leadership (but it is also where they find reason for hope), more academically oriented scholarship stresses the form of the African state.
A case in point is Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996), which relates the corrupt and authoritarian character of contemporary African regimes to the form of the colonial state that preceded them. His argument, somewhat telescoped, is that the colonial state was a double-sided affair. In the cities it governed directly through civic institutions that, though they refused citizenship to Africans, nonetheless established a public domain constituted on the basis of individuated rights and contract. In the rural areas, however, the colonial state ruled indirectly through tribal authorities. These fused in the authority of the chief, judicial, legislative, executive and administrative powers, interpolating those under its ‘clenched fist’ as tribal subjects. Post-colonial regimes usually set out to ‘deracialise’ civil society, neglecting to ‘detribalise’ the ‘Native Authority’. As a result, argues Mamdani, ‘the unreformed Native Authority came to contaminate civil society, so that the more civil society was deracialized, the more it took on a tribalized form’ (Mamdani, 1996: 21). In his terms, clientism, ethnic mobilisation and corruption are all effects of the ‘bifurcated’ form of the African state. What is important to note is the consequence of this argument. We might infer that the failure of such states to realise the nation in Africa had less to do with the ad hominem qualities of their elites than with the very form of the state itself. The ‘bifurcated state’ was an inappropriate instrument for nation-building.
Achille Mbembe too locates the form of the contemporary African state in the character of colonial sovereignty. Yet unlike others before him, Mbembe is not content to analyse corruption and violence as symptoms of failure or crisis. Rather, the gothic form of power in Africa – corruption, vulgarity and violence – speaks both to the specificity of sovereignty in Africa and its creativity. The peculiarity of colonial sovereignty, Mbembe suggests, is that relations between the coloniser and the colonised are homologous to those between the master and the slave (Mbembe, 2001: 31). Here Mbembe is drawing on Hegel to define a form of authority ‘where power [is] reduced to the right to demand, to force, to ban, to compel, to authorize, to punish, to reward, to be obeyed, in short, to enjoin and direct’ (Mbembe, 2001: 32). Instead of subverting this form of power, decolonisation reproduced it, substituting for the colonial master a new potentate. What gives to the postcolony its particular character – its monstrousness and its vulgarity – is the way that this form of sovereignty is reproduced under new conditions – chiefly that of International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed strictures. The ‘regimentation of privileges and immunities,’ (Mbembe, 2001:29) the disregard for the common law and the arbitrary granting of concessions to individuals and corporations are legitimised through a logic of ‘conviviality’ (Mbembe, 2001: 110). The argument is well summarised by Adeleke Adeeko:
The official parades, the cultural festivals, the shining plaques and medals of honor, the crimson language of official newspapers, the festival style execution of armed robbers, the public humiliation of those who deviate from the glaringly arbitrary official path, and other official and non-official absurd rituals of everyday life, together institutionalise the potentate as ‘a fetish to which the subject is bound’ (Adeeko, 2002: 7).
Everyone wallows in the obscene vulgarity of the ruler – his arbitrariness, his buffoonery, his self-importance. In the absence of real state power, sovereignty is reproduced through vulgar performance.
It is necessary to draw attention to the epistemological underpinnings of these arguments, especially as they pertain to the state–nation relationship. What counts is a certain conception of the relationship coloniality–post-coloniality. It is especially evident in the work of Mbembe (2001)9. On the Postcolony pays almost no attention to the form of colonial resistance, the social and political character of the parties that came to power after independence or the avowed aims of the new administrations. This is a very full absence. By omitting these factors from the analysis, Mbembe implies that the form of the postcolony is unmarked by their enterprise. Despite his plea for a mode of writing that acknowledges or respects African agency, rather surprisingly, such agency dissolves before the terms of colonial power. New regimes and leaders can only mimic colonial sovereignty. They are unable to transform the very form of this power itself. Independence thus marks a point of both absolute rupture and continuity. From the perspective of anti-colonial resistance, it marks a moment of radical breach: the very identity of the resistance is erased, and its attributes and form dissolved in the character of colonial power. From the perspective of the state there is continuity in its form, though not necessarily of its empirical existence. Even if, under the strictures of IMF structural adjustment, the post-colonial state is individualised and privatised into a myriad of agencies and organisations, and it therefore lacks coherence in a hierarchical unity. Like the colonial state, it nonetheless produces homologous relations of power, those between master and slave.
We saw at the beginning of this chapter that these were precisely the terms that Dubow suggested obscured the study of nationalism. Marxist essentialism reduces nationalism to a mere epiphenomenon of economic class interests, thereby devaluing studies of nationalism in Africa on their own terms. Post-colonial essentialism treats the postcolony as a mere phenomenon of colonial power. Crawford Young examined the latter point in an address to the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2001. The purpose of his intervention was to consider the merit of such a view, both on analytical and political grounds. He concluded that it lacked any, because despite the fact that
the lexical habit of post-colonial usage to label the African political world persists, … in many countries little remains of the hegemonic apparatus which African rulers inherited and initially sought to reinforce and expand as an instrument of rapid development (Young, 2004: 24).
From the perspective of such studies, however, the colonial state is treated as a Sadeian corpse. It remains immaculate and pristine, even when it is ostensibly overthrown, toppled or when its power is dispersed and privatised. Is this not the form of a simple essence? Colonial power is deemed determinant, but is never itself overdetermined. The social totality (in this case the postcolony) is the development of a simple unity, of a simple principle (the colonial state); so strictly speaking, it is the phenomenon, the self-manifestation of this simple principle, that persists in all its manifestations.10 On these terms, nationalist politics qua nationalist politics is deemed irrelevant to the form of the independent state. What becomes invisible – indeed, unthinkable – on these terms is that African nationalism has, indeed, transformed the colonial state. At stake is the emergence of African nations.
The emergence of nations in Africa, furthermore, is doubly obscured by a sometimes uncritical reflection on the claims of African nationalists themselves. Scholars take the nationalist vision of the postcolony on its own terms, and then judge African nationalism lacking when independent states do not resemble the imaginary. Again, what is at fault is a certain epistemology. We saw that for the Comaroffs, the problem was the hyphenated relation between state and nation. Yet such an appraisal assumes that the state is the subject and the nation is its object. The object remains elusive because the agent is not up to the task. Yet the measure of the nation is not the degree to which the state realises the nation, but the degree to which the nation controls the state.
