B009THJ1WI EBOK Page 2

  On a more personal note, my first engagement with Africa came in 1956 with the opportunity to observe a national congress of the Union générale des étudiants tunisiens in Tunis. Subsequently, a study year in Paris in 1956–57 brought me into close connection with the Union générale des étudiants musulmans algériens. The exposure I gained through my association with the Mahgreb student movements to the two faces of anticolonial nationalist action throughout Africa left enduring memories of mass mobilization around the political party led by the charismatic combattant suprême Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, the fierce military discipline and moral determination of an armed liberation movement in Algeria.

  Still, the continental ambition is not without its problems. Although in the first postindependence decades there were close similarities in the political patterns north and south of the Sahara, in more recent times the North African states have been less afflicted by the state decline that overtook most of sub-Saharan Africa by the 1980s. The Mediterranean orientation, the Middle East connections, and the depth of the Arab-Islamic cultural heritage are other distinguishing features.

  South Africa is another outlier until the 1990s. The British decision to transfer unrestricted power in 1910 to a white minority that never constituted more than a quarter of the population reflected the deeply embedded presumptions of white racial supremacy of the day; indeed, Britain basked in the approval of liberal opinion of the time for permitting white Afrikaners to share power with British settlers. Rather than a colonial state, what endured was an exclusionary settler state with a surface layer of liberal constitutional structures fastened atop an apparatus of systematic subordination and exploitation ruling the African majority. Thus the patterns of politics predominant elsewhere in the first three decades of African independence could not emerge in South Africa until the dissolution of the racial state, which occurred between 1990 and 1994.

  Notwithstanding these limitations, I believe that Africa as a whole, more than any other world region save possibly Latin America, lends itself to a broadly comparative approach, owing to similarities among the countries on numerous fronts. There are large similarities in cultural patterns, similarities that underpin the regular invocation of an “African society” as a generic entity by leaders and analysts. Historians find an elaborated tradition constructed over broad areas.5 African philosophers postulate a distinctively African view of the world and its causative mainsprings.6 The premise of a common African culture was a staple of nationalist discourse, from Julius Nyerere to Léopold Senghor.7 Michael Schatzberg shows that the similarities of distinctive African notions of power, leadership, and authority across what he terms “Middle Africa,” situated in a widely shared cultural realm, constitute a common “moral matrix of legitimacy."8 An engagement with Africa as a whole characterizes the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its successor body, the Africa Union (AU), as well as an array of continental and regional organizations from finance to football.

  A second crucial commonality is the defining impact of the colonial occupation. In my earlier book on the African colonial state, intended as a forerunner to the present volume, I argued that, despite some variation in ideology and practice of rule, the seven colonial powers (Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Spain) were driven by the imperatives of hegemony, revenue, and security into broadly similar patterns of rule.9 Critical in the African instance was the time frame: colonial occupation both began and ended significantly later than in Asia or the Americas. The technologies of conquest and rule—weaponry, transportation, communication—were far more potent than in earlier centuries.10 The intensely competitive “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century led to the invocation of the doctrine of “effective occupation” as a means of confirming international recognition of proprietary title, requiring rapid establishment of a skeletal network of military garrisons and administrative outposts. Metropolitan treasuries demanded that the new territorial domains be self-financing: in most areas, sustenance for the colonial occupation could only be generated from the newly subjugated African through taxation, obligatory labor for the state, or muscular recruitment to work European mines and plantations. This in turn necessitated the construction of a frugal but brutal command state, with a thin layer of European agents operating through a denser network composed of chiefly intermediaries and indigenous armed auxiliaries. The establishment of the colonial state coincided with the historical zenith of virulent racism, which permeated government policy reason with a premise of African inferiority. “African culture,” I wrote, for the colonizer “had no redeeming value; only a wholly new African might be worthy of the colonial order, tailored from imported cloth."11

  At the end of colonial rule, rapidly rising postwar revenues and a new ideology of developmentalism gave momentum to a state expansion that was to endure. Even Ethiopia and Liberia, the two polities that escaped full colonial subjugation (save for the ephemeral 1935–41 Italian occupation in Ethiopia), drew on the African colonial state for its metaphors and practices of rule. The mentalities, routines, and quotidian modes of operation were inevitably embedded in the postcolonial successor states, lodged within a legacy of autocratic practice.

  A third shared feature is that most African countries decolonized at the same time. Once the dam broke, decolonization was quite rapid; thirty-five of the fifty-three states achieved independence during the decade between 1956 and 1966.12 Their crucial early policy choices were deeply influenced by the ascendant developmental thinking and ideological discourse of the day. Planned development, socialism in different forms, and the imagery of “take-offs” and “big pushes” were in the air. In 1957, the Soviet Union for many African intellectuals was not the derelict corpse it became by 1991 but an inspiring example of successful state-led development. The Chinese “Great Leap Forward” was not the catastrophic famine that took thirty million lives as the world came to learn much later but a shining path of peasant mobilization for revolutionary transformation. The Nyerere catechism—"We must run while they may walk"—found an echo in the confident summons to “bruler les étapes” (leap over the stages) to rapid development, an expression I recollect being used in many conversations with young African intellectuals at the time.

  A fourth common element is the similarity of regime structures at the point of departure. Aside from the handful of transitions that were directly determined by liberation wars (Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Eritrea), the decolonization process grafted onto the robust trunk of colonial autocracy weakly implanted constitutional frames modeled on the imperial centers. The schooled elites that emerged as leaders of independence movements were almost all young, nearly all less than fifty.13 Their success grew from a capacity to master simultaneously two disparate discourses: an idiom of anticolonial protest blended with enticing images of the life more abundant that independence would bring, on the one hand, and a language of developmental rationality and postcolonial comity directed toward reassuring the withdrawing powers. The impossible task of reconciling the institutional frame of the decolonization settlements—what Bertrand Badie and others have labeled the “imported state"—and the urgent need to meet the aroused expectations of the campaign for independence shaped the early stages of postcolonial politics.14

  Finally, a major factor in the similarity in trajectories until the 1990s was the high degree of political diffusion in the African arena. Ideological debates bounced from one end of the continent to another. Reciprocal interaction was strong, particularly among neighboring states. Through multiple forums, intercommunication among leaders and intelligentsias was extensive; one might speak of a continental epistemic community. In the most recent period, negative contagion has been critical; protracted civil conflict in a given country has inevitably drawn in its neighbors, through refugee flows, militia cross-border sanctuaries, or military support by nearby states for embattled governments or sometimes insurgent forces.

  The core ambition of this work i
s thus comparative. The aim is to capture the unfolding dynamic of African politics across five decades, situating evolving tendencies within their temporal frame of reference. Retrospectively one can easily identify some huge miscalculations in policy choice; however, the paths taken at different stages were often not obviously misguided at the time of decision. For each phase of political evolution save the most recent, I suggest the dominant patterns of rule. From the independence moment until the early 1990s, the similarities in the trajectories are particularly striking. Only since then have the itineraries diverged sharply, from moderately successful political and economic liberalization to state failure and collapse.

  Finally, I consider the haunting question of why African developmental performance has fallen well short of other world regions. To cite but a couple of dispiriting statistics, Ghana in 1957 was more prosperous than South Korea; by 2000, Korean gross national product (GNP) per capita was over twenty times that of Ghana. Though Nigeria has received more than $600 billion in oil revenues since production began at the beginning of the 1960s, a 2004 study found that 54.2% of Nigerians lived on well under a dollar a day; some suggest that as much as $400 billion has disappeared.15

  There is no ambition to cover all dimensions of African politics or to provide an encyclopedic political history. My focus follows from the dimensions of African politics on which I have specialized: the state, ethnicity and nationalism, ideology, democratization, and civil conflict. I walk in the footsteps of several other Africanist political scientists of the first generation who have contributed valuable recent works that serve as summary statements of a lifetime: Goran Hyden, William Tordoff, Victor Le Vine, René Lemarchand, Patrick Chabal.16 The book draws on, adapts, and amends the framework for grasping the state as a conceptual variable set forth in my earlier work, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. Although my primary analytical mode is qualitative, I benefit from the proliferating quantitative measures of state performance by diverse organisms (Freedom House, Transparency International, Mo Ibrahim Index, among others) and use these to reflect on the range of outcomes. I begin by proposing an analytical narrative intended to frame the portion of the book that explores the itineraries of the postcolonial state in Africa over its first half century.

  PERIODIZATION: SIX MOMENTS, THREE CYCLES

  Six distinctive though overlapping moments of the postcolonial trajectories can be identified, which will serve as a means of periodizing. The first, decolonization and the independence settlement, extended from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. A second phase opened in the early 1960s and becomes visible with the wave of military coups in 1965–66 and the hardening of regimes into single party monopolies. A third period marked by a quest for state expansion began at the end of the 1960s: in politics, it took the form of a pervasive presidentialism, often textured by personality cults, and in economics the form of a wave of nationalizations, bringing a comprehensive parastatalization of production processes. At the outer limits of this phase, regimes appeared on the verge of a comprehensive hegemony, realizing a vision of what some termed an “integral state."17 In a fourth phase, stretching from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, most African states were in a downward spiral on all fronts, and a widespread sense of profound state crisis took hold. During the fifth moment, bridging the late 1980s and the early 1990s, an astonishing wave of democratization swept the continent; only Libya, Sudan, and Swaziland stood completely outside the surge of pressure from an awakening civil society below and an international community suddenly hostile to patrimonial autocracy as an entrenched mode of rule. The first five periods exhibited remarkably parallel patterns across the continent.

  Only the sixth, most recent, from the early 1990s to the present, displays a striking divergence in the pathways. On the one hand, a number of countries that had sunk into dilapidated condition have recovered dramatically (Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania). But elsewhere large zones of interpenetrated civil conflict have appeared, and “state failure” has emerged as a conceivable outcome (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa for extended periods, and Somalia throughout this phase).

  One may compare this periodization with that proposed by Hyden, who divides the same historical period into three phases of state evolution: the first period, from 1958 to 1968, was dominated by a party-state aimed at instituting order, the second, from 1969 to 1981, by a developmental state whose goal was progress, and the third, from 1982 to the present, by a contracting state seeking better control.18 The dimension that I wish to add, through doubling the number of distinct phases, is the dramatic mood shift in analytical perspectives over the course of the postcolonial half century. The half dozen periods form three cycles, which fluctuate between high optimism, even euphoria, followed by disappointment, even a despairing “Afropessimism,” in the first two and a mingling of hope, even audacious, and skeptical uncertainty in the current stage, reflecting the sharply divergent itineraries. In the remainder of this chapter, I offer an initial analytical summary of these oscillations, by way of introduction to the overall themes of the volume. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 pursue the analytical narrative of the half century of African independence in greater detail.

  Superimposing a periodization on the ongoing flow of events does not imply that the transitions were clearly demarcated. The wave of democratization marking the sixth phase was relatively abrupt and sweeping; the transition from the second moment of dispiriting authoritarian drift into ambitious state expansion at the beginning of the 1970s was more gradual, unfolding on varying timetables in different polities and evident mainly in retrospect. Deploying periodization as analytical device does not imply that there were no underlying continuities in political culture, social differentiation, or economic process; the chronological template is primarily an organizational convenience.

  PHASE 1: THE EUPHORIA OF INDEPENDENCE

  The dawn of independence seemed full of promise. The euphoria I encountered in Tunisia in 1956 was widely shared across the continent. In the context of the times, there were solid grounds for expecting better days ahead. For the most part, decolonization was a bargained process, whose consummation was an independence mostly celebrated in a mutually reciprocated goodwill between former colony and former colonizer. This stood in stark contrast to the turbulence of power transfer in Asia—the million fatalities and twelve million refugees resulting from the partition of India, the protracted liberation wars in Indochina and Indonesia, the violent collapse of the Palestine mandate in 1948, the failed Dutch wars of reconquest in Indonesia from 1946 to 1949. The two most important departing colonizers, Britain and France (accounting for thirty-eight of the fifty-three African territories) developed, if partly by accident, pathways to independence that permitted mainly peaceful power transfer. This stood in stark contrast to the perils of sudden and unscripted sovereignty illustrated by the instant disaster that overwhelmed the former Belgian Congo in 1960. British rule had begun initially in the “old dominions,” or settler colonies, and then extended in the 1930s to Sri Lanka and India, a pattern involving gradual extension of “representative government” through elected majorities in legislatures to “responsible government” when executives were indigenized and made subject to legislative majorities. Beginning in West Africa, faced with rapidly expanding nationalist mobilization, Britain abandoned gradualism for an abridged version of the preceding model. In East and Central Africa, the presence of settlers and introduction of a jarring new principle of “racial partnership” delayed—for a decade in Central Africa—the political evolution toward full self-government based on universal suffrage. By 1960, however, the notion that the small immigrant minorities, European and Asian, could claim equal footing with the huge African majorities had been abandoned.19

  TABLE 1.1. Six Phases of Postcolonial Evolution

  Phase Mood Time period Main attributes

  1 Optimism 1956–60s Decolonization, independence

  2 Pessimism Early 1960s–70s Authoritarian drift, singl
e parties, military coups

  3 Optimism 1970s Civil wars end, state expansion, nationalizations, radicalization

  4 Pessimism 1980s Economic decline, political decay, state crisis

  5 Optimism early 1990s Democratization

  6 Mixed 1990s– Varying itineraries: consolidating democracy, semidemocracy, civil war, state collapse

  In the French case, there was no initial postwar disposition to decolonize; the lapidary 1944 Brazzaville declaration on the future of the African territories was categorical: “The eventual formation, even in the distant future, of self-government in the colonies must be excluded."20 But the 1946 constitution provided for African representation in the French parliament, and later, ministerial chairs in Paris even opened for Africans; the 1956 Guy Mollet government had four African cabinet members, including future heads of state Modibo Keita and Félix Houphouët-Boigny. The 1956 loi-cadre (framework law) created elected territorial assemblies with African executives, which by 1958 were self-governing. Although in a constitutional referendum in that year all French-ruled territories but Guinea voted by large margins for a quasi-federal French Community, with important functions reserved for Paris (defense, finance, justice, foreign affairs), by 1960 the already functioning and autonomous territorial governments quietly assumed full sovereignty.21

  Thus, in most of these cases independence was celebrated in a mood of optimism and of anticipated postcolonial partnership. The British Commonwealth, to which all but Egypt and Sudan acceded, was redolent with the imagery of a postcolonial family, whose historic kinship softened the sharp edges of new sovereignty. Less formalized but more intimate ties were maintained between the former sub-Saharan French territories and Paris, lubricated by budget subsidies, security guarantees, and close personal ties of most new rulers with the inner elite circles of the French state. The harsh treatment of Guinea, unceremoniously cut off from all French assistance after its defiant “no” vote in the 1958 Fifth Republic constitution referendum, was a solitary exception.