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  The youthful generation of nationalist leaders included a number of individuals whose charismatic appeal extended internationally: Nkrumah, Senghor, Houphouët-Boigny, Bourguiba, Sékou Touré, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kenneth Kaunda. In negotiated decolonizations, aspiring rulers were required to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims through electoral processes; although administrative manipulation of balloting was frequently encountered early in the terminal colonial period, the independence elections were fairly conducted. The mood of the time internationally was captured by the high optimism of then UN general secretary Dag Hammarskjöld following an extended tour of Africa in early 1960; enchanted by the energy and enthusiasm of the young African leadership, Hammarskjöld returned convinced that Africa was “a continent launched on the road to cooperative success by new and able young leaders with the help and advice of the UN."22

  But acceptance of decolonization by the key colonizers within an ever-foreshortening time frame was not simply a matter of forward-looking statesmanship; it was driven above all by an incapacity to contain swelling African protest and a growing apprehension that violent struggle would punish procrastination. The astonishing speed with which emergent nationalist leaders mobilized rural populations that still seemed quiescent at the close of World War II contributed to the growing sense of the imperial centers (excepting the two dictatorships, Spain and Portugal) that decolonization was inevitable; timetables shrank from decades in the 1940s to months by the 1960s. Another critical vector driving the process forward was the enormous cost of containing armed challenge or even waves of violent protest; rioting in Gold Coast capital Accra in 1948 and in Malawi in 1959 were detonators of change; urban turbulence in Tunisia and Morocco in 1954 similarly sped independence in 1956, while France concentrated its military resources to confront the Algerian revolution. The bitter Mau Mau uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1958 and the sporadic guerrilla actions of the Union des populations du cameroun (UPC) in Cameroon from 1955 to 1959 compelled official minds to seek accommodation with African leadership, even though the rebellions failed. On the African side, the multifaceted mobilization reinforced a sense of the invincibility of anticolonial nationalism. At the All-African People's Conference convened by Nkrumah in Accra in December 1958, the Kenyan conference chair, Tom Mboya, expressed the intoxication of the times by warning the colonial occupants that “your time is past. Africa must be free. Scram from Africa."23

  The costly failure of France and Netherlands to recapture Southeast Asian colonies seized militarily by Japan during the war was a compelling lesson. Even more instructive was the Algerian war. Though the French army was able to contain the Front de libération nationale (FLN) uprising, the liberation army could never be defeated. The toll of the war was immense: a million Algerian casualties, the dislocation of hundreds of thousands who were regrouped in “protected villages,” the massacre at the end of the war of a large number of the Algerian auxiliaries recruited by the French army (estimates range up to 150,000).24 A half dozen premiers lost their posts, the Fourth Republic collapsed, and French rule in Algeria nearly succumbed to coup plots by military and settler conspiracies in 1960 and 1961. A million French settlers fled, the more extreme of these wreaking havoc in a final paroxysm in 1962.25

  The Algerian war cast a long shadow over the decolonization process; I recollect Algerian leaders in 1960 ruefully noting that all sub-Saharan former French territories painlessly achieved sovereignty while their struggle continued. Belgium was particularly influenced by events in Algeria, acutely conscious that a small and divided nation could not sustain an insurgent war in Congo. The remarkable tenacity of the Algerian liberation struggle was a crucial dimension of the dramaturgy of independence as well: an epic heroic combat pitting revolutionary vision against retrograde colonial exploitation, the future against the past. The triumph against overwhelming odds served as avatar to the dreams of independence.

  The high expectations for independence were also a product of the exceptional prosperity of the postwar years, particularly the 1950s. The final colonial decade was the only period since the occupation had begun when there was a substantial increase in real wages. The commodity demand of the World War II years and then the Korean War brought soaring prices for African exports. The imperial centers, for the first time on any scale, put metropolitan public capital to work in support of an invigorated discourse of developmentalism and colonial welfare. A rapid expansion of the social and other infrastructure was enabled by extraordinary expansion in state revenue: Belgian Congo expenditures increased elevenfold from 1939 to 1950, then tripled in the final colonial decade; in the same period in Ghana, state expenditures multiplied by ten; in Nigeria, public revenues were a mere £7 million in 1937, but £71 million in 1957.26 In French West and Equatorial Africa, the obligatory fiscal self-sufficiency of prewar years was replaced by a bountiful flow of funds from Paris: from 1946 to 1958, some 30% of operating costs and 70% of the investment budget.27

  The independence leadership assumed power convinced that progress was much too slow and was critical of the cautious management of the public purse. The successor elite was acutely aware as well of the soaring expectations aroused by promises made on the electoral circuit. The dilemma had only one remedy: forceful state action, through comprehensive planning, large-scale public investment, and united effort. “At the present stage of Ghana's economic development, the whole community must act in the national interest,” wrote Kwame Nkrumah at the time. “In fact most of our development had to be carried out by the government itself. There is no other way out."28 Few then questioned the capacity of the new states to take on this expanded role.

  The emergent discipline of development economics provided important support for these perspectives.29 To slay the dragon of underdevelopment, the sword of industrialization was indispensable. This in turn required a “big push” in mobilizing capital and marshaling resources, with the state as central actor. Import substitution was the key to a self-reliant, domestically focused industrial expansion. The role of the agricultural sector was to generate a surplus that through state planning and management could provide the requisite investment resources. With varying degree of nuance, the founding generation of development economists—W. W. Rostow, Albert Hirschman, Albert Waterston, Andrew Kamarck, Arthur Lewis, among others—provided intellectual support for the thesis of state-led and directed development as the necessary choice.30

  The crucial new institutional vehicle for fulfilling the hopes vested in independence was the nationalist political party. Even at the moment of decolonization, in many countries the upper ranks of the civil service remained well populated with expatriate personnel; Congo-Kinshasa was an extreme case, with only 3 Congolese among the 4,636 serving in the top three grades as independence approached.31 Access to the senior grades of the bureaucracy normally required a university degree, a credential still found among only a modest number of Africans in many countries by 1960. Parties, by definition, were African, and had no formal qualifications beyond a gift for politics and mastery of the colonial language. The first wave of academic studies of African politics found an elective affinity for political parties, the first domain of political action to be Africanized. The striking rapidity with which in the last colonial years parties mobilized a national following, once the arsenal of repressive regulations was relaxed, captured the analytical imagination. Hodgkin, Morgenthau, and others developed an influential distinction between mass movements, which sought an unmediated popular mobilization, and patron parties, organized as a coalition of local notables or organizations.32 Key monographs of the time validated the reality of a mass base in several key cases: Guinea, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Mali, Tanzania, parts of Congo-Kinshasa.33 In the Tanzania case, Hyden in 1965 found in rural Bukoba a high degree of political penetration by the Tanganyika African National Union (subsequently renamed Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or Revolutionary Party); the party then enjoyed a capacity for sustained mobilization of a rural following and had
built “a strong political organization that made a difference” with respect to “both political awareness and orientation."34

  The blessings of new sovereignty included access to international financial institutions and external assistance from sources other than the imperial treasuries. Inspired by the novelty of African independence, the dominant mood of optimism, and the global competition for favor and influence in this newly opened arena, the world at large at first offered aid that stood as a generous supplement to the pledges of postcolonial succor from the withdrawing colonizers. American aid, for example, reached an early peak in the Kennedy years that was not surpassed for decades.35 The international markets for African commodities, less favorable than in the 1950s, were nonetheless reasonably remunerative.

  Thus the new leaders initially had resources to respond to popular expectations. They could hardly fully meet them; the pledges on the campaign trail were often lavish, and ordinary voters had not yet learned to discount the promissory notes issued on the hustings. In the first postindependence years, across the continent major investments were made in basic social infrastructure—schools, clinics, roads, water supply—which constituted the core of popular expectations.

  The mood of the independence moment was partly framed by the larger global context. Conquest of sovereignty coincided with a period of peak intensity in the cold war and the American obsession with the threat of Communist expansion. Insurgent movements of Communist inspiration were active across Southeast Asia, prompting exaggerated apprehensions of African vulnerability. At the same time, the mystique of Soviet and Chinese success in transforming backward societies enhanced the seduction of the five-year plan for many African leaders. They were keenly aware that Africa would become a terrain for cold war rivalry, and some hoped that at least nominal non-alignment would serve as a shield; others briefly perceived an opportunity to benefit from playing one side off against the other, a difficult course to sustain in the face of the disparities of power and resources.

  PHASE 2: SINGLE PARTIES, MILITARY RULE

  The first phase of postcolonial politics began to end not long after independence, and with it the mood of unreal euphoria that attended African sovereignty evaporated. The first symptom was the shift to political closure that set in quickly. Ghana was a pacesetter in this respect. The leading chronicler of Ghanaian independence, David Apter, notes that a mere year into sovereignty there was “a flaunting of authority in the face of opposition groups” by the ruling party, and party leaders who “reveled in their power and made it clear” that they had “ no intention of relinquishing it."36 That same year, Ghana adopted a preventive detention act, and a new constitution in 1960 empowered Nkrumah to rule by decree. By 1964, Ghana became officially a one-party state.37 A similar sequence of democratic erasure took place in much of Africa. The arsenal of repressive colonial legislation was dusted off and enhanced with further restrictions on opposition; the prison cells that had once housed nationalist organizers now began to fill with outspoken critics of postcolonial rulers. For many, the less perilous path of co-optation into the dominant party or prudent retreat into exile was more inviting than the risks of determined opposition.

  The single-party system initially had a number of influential defenders.38 Partisans of single-party rule pointed to the clear tendency of political party divisions in terminal colonial elections to reflect ethnic and regional cleavages that threatened a fragile national unity. African leaders argued that the deep class divisions that shaped party divisions in European democracies were absent in Africa; thus there was no social need for more than one party. Further, African societies were by nature communal, operating by consensus, and thus adversarial institutions were inappropriate. A more meaningful democracy could emerge within the nurturing frame of the single party, once the threat of formal opposition was removed. Moreover, the single party unconstrained by partisan warfare could pursue a process of political education of an unschooled populace new to the ways of self-government.

  The most elaborate and elegant brief for the single party as instrument of democracy was the 1965 Tanzania Presidential Commission on the Establishment of a Democratic One-Party State. The document endorsed a range of basic freedoms, though resisted codifying them as a bill of rights. Processes of candidate selection and internal party procedures were designed to ensure full and free debate. Party membership was open to all without ideological screening; “any citizen of good will can participate in the process of Government,” the document claimed. The party was grounded in “the principle of democracy as understood in traditional African society."39

  However, even as this well-reasoned and persuasive document was being published, the actual practice of single-party rule was steadily eviscerating the initial democratic impulse. Rulers perceived the party to be a core agency for imposing at center and periphery the developmental vision of the leaders. Party and state flowed together into an exclusionary political monopoly, well characterized by Aristide Zolberg as a “party-state,” raising questions about whether the mass mobilization had been partly illusory.40 Reproducing incumbent rule and preserving power were the overriding imperatives, eclipsing the political rights of the citizen. Immanuel Wallerstein had perceived the mass single party as a potent instrument of liberation and development in 1960 but by 1969 was dismissing single parties as merely “the politics of inanition” in really no-party states.41 The “routinization of charisma” identified as a core dynamic for newly independent Ghana in Apter's classic study had become the crystallization of authoritarian practice in the major monograph by Dennis Austin that followed Apter's book. “Patriotism,” asserted Nkrumah in a 1962 address to the Winneba party ideological institute, is founded in discipline: “The whole nation from the President downwards will form one regiment of disciplined citizens."42

  A broader mood of skepticism, even deep pessimism, began to supplant the earlier euphoria in influential works. French agronomist René Dumont entered an early jarring note in 1962, already suggesting Africa was off to a bad start; more far-reaching pessimism followed from Albert Meister in 1966, suggesting a more permanent blockage to development.43 Martin Kilson offered an early and prescient critique of the single-party system, noting its tendency to descend into authoritarianism.44 Perhaps the most pungent dissection of the brief for the single party came from renowned West Indian economist Arthur Lewis, who had observed its performance from the privileged vantage point of economic advisor to Nkrumah: “The single-party thus fails in all its claims. It cannot represent all the people; or maintain free discussion; or give stable government; or above all, reconcile the differences between various regional groups. It is not natural to West African culture, except in the sense in which cancer is natural to man."45 Lewis adds a telling jab at the first-generation political science literature: “To be a Minister is to have a lifetime's chance to make a fortune. It is necessary to remember all this when we read in the political science books about the ‘charisma’ of the great men now engaged in modernizing backward societies. Almost any charming rogue can get himself written up in the political journals of the western world."46

  The first harbinger of looming problems was the crisis that engulfed Congo-Kinshasa five days after its 30 June 1960 independence, when its army mutinied against the still entirely Belgian officer corps. Over the following week, the administration lost most of its top cadres when a panic flight of Belgians ensued, and the richest province (Katanga) declared its secession, leaving the new government of Patrice Lumumba bereft of its bureaucratic and security instruments and much of its revenue. The crisis quickly took on global dimensions, with the UN hastily assembling a peacekeeping force to hold the ring. Within a year, Lumumba had been assassinated with the complicity of the Belgians and the Americans, and UN general secretary Hammarsjköld perished in a plane crash while on a futile negotiating mission.47 The Congo crisis, and its instant translation into the central front in the global cold war, gave dramatic illustration to the vulnerabil
ity of the new African states. Though as a living politician Lumumba was a controversial figure, the circumstances of his murder transformed his memory into pan-African icon of an unequal combat against predatory imperialism.

  Above all, the deflation of the sanguine expectations concerning independence came with the wave of military coups in the mid-1960s that swept away some of Africa's pacesetter regimes of the anticolonial struggle. Military intervention had occurred earlier in Egypt in 1952, leading to the ouster of a corrupt monarch and a discredited liberal order; in 1958, the Sudan army was virtually invited to take power by civilian leaders at political impasse. Short-lived military interventions took place in 1960 in Congo-Kinshasa and Togo in 1963, but power was returned to civilians. More portentous was the 1963 military power seizure in Congo-Brazzaville, introducing nearly three decades of uninterrupted army rule. But these military actions seemed isolated incidents attributable to specific local circumstances and were not contagious. Most African armies at independence were small, were often still commanded by European officers, had played no role in anticolonial liberation, and had slender social prestige. Thus most observers in 1960 discounted armies as future political actors, even though military coups were already endemic in Latin America and Asia.

  But then within the space of a few months in late 1965 and 1966, a wave of successful military power seizures occurred in Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, Ghana, and Nigeria. Not only was there no resistance, but the new army rulers were greeted with exuberant popular demonstrations of welcome. The shock wave of the overthrow of independence hero Nkrumah, which was celebrated by dancing in the Accra streets, reverberated through the continent. The wave of coups took down regimes in three of Africa's largest and most important countries (Algeria, Congo-Kinshasa, and Nigeria).48 A fundamental reconfiguration of political institutions had occurred. From the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s, at any given point almost 40% of African regimes were of military origin; some reversions to civilian rule occurred, but until 1990 the army always remained the primary alternative to incumbent rulers. In the process, confidence in the viability of the carefully negotiated independence constitutional settlements evaporated.