But in the colonial endgame African liberation needed no Dienbienphu. By avoiding complete defeat and sustaining a costly, protracted stalemate, the guerrilla armies could sap colonial will. By 1960, the French had contained the Algerian forces in the country but could not cope with the sanctuary provided to large guerrilla reserves in Tunisia and Morocco; the struggle could thus continue, if at a reduced level, indefinitely. Similarly, at the time of the 1974 Portuguese military coup aimed at ending the colonial wars, the Angolan liberation movement was split into three and all but paralyzed. The more effectively united Mozambique movement, the Frente da libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), was mostly confined in its operations to northern areas, and, Malyn Newitt notes, “only in the final phases of the war, and far too late to make any difference in the outcome, was any attempt made to develop political support among educated Africans in the cities."58 In Zimbabwe, though the first guerrilla actions took place in 1966, following the 1964 banning of the two main nationalist parties, actual military successes were few. Although their action was widespread enough to convince many that they could not be defeated, most armed bands contained agents reporting their movements to the settler regime, and the head of Rhodesian intelligence later boasted that penetration of the guerrilla movements was complete.59 In Namibia, though the South-West African People's Organization launched an armed struggle in 1966, guerrilla action never went beyond the northern Ovambo zone, nor could the military threat seriously challenge the South African Defense Force and its auxiliaries.60 In South Africa, the odds were even greater against the guerrilla dimension of liberation struggle; though its genesis dates to 1961 and despite eventual substantial external support, its military impact was limited. But as an adjunct to the domestic mobilization intensifying during the 1980s through labor unions and the multiplicity of civic organizations organized under the banner of the United Democratic Front (UDF), its psychological impact was no less tangible. Thus in sum armed liberation struggle was at once marginal in purely military terms, except in Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea and Algeria, and yet a decisive vector in the dynamic of decolonization as a whole. It also had enduring impacts.
The inspiring character of these struggles, and the heroic image of the parties that led them, gave rise to a hope, even expectation, that the most successful in guerrilla groups—the FLN in Algeria, the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, the FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the EPLF in Eritrea—would have developed the discipline, mobilizing skills, and unifying ideology to fashion a new state, energetically developmental even if not attracted to liberal democracy. Though these visions of the mobilization polity persisted for a bit after the conquest of independence, over time the habits of rigid military discipline, rigorous hierarchy, and leader monopolization of power so valuable in liberation war proved detrimental to postcolonial state operation.
Although the leaders of guerrilla independence movements were invariably political rather than military figures, the militarization of politics became part of the legacy of colonial occupation, most visibly in Algeria and Eritrea. The heroism of the struggle became central to postcolonial texts of legitimation and a demonstrated liberation role long remained a qualification for leadership. The nature of guerrilla warfare had divisive as well as unifying impacts, especially in the regions where violence was centered. The ideological appeal of independence struggle did not by itself guarantee support; intimidation was part of the picture. Colonial regimes often had allies, especially among the indigenous chiefly intermediaries and others in favorable niches. Large numbers had served in the colonial armies; in Algeria in particular, many paid with their lives or were forced to emigrate. Former guerrilla fighters made extravagant claims on the postcolonial state, even decades later in Zimbabwe. The iron discipline that guerrilla warfare involved led to harsh imprisonment inflicted on those suspected of disloyalty; atrocities toward internees during the struggle years cast a shadow even after the transition to independence on the parties linked to insurgent action in Namibia and South Africa.
The impact of the armed liberation movements in accelerating decolonization reflects the importance of interaction effects. What happened in one territory had important spillover consequences in neighboring countries and even entire regions. The retreating colonial powers had dwindling capacity to insulate one territory from advances toward independence nearby. Decolonization in Africa was far more than a series of disconnected episodes; in a very meaningful sense, it was a continental process. The entangled dialectic found reinforcement in the disposition of the imperial centers to perceive in their African holdings a single policy challenge.
AFRICAN NATIONALISM AS DECOLONIZATION DRIVER
A powerful connective skein in the decolonization process was the anticolonial nationalism that animated the drive for independence across Africa; though there were regional variations, the commonalities stand out. The demiurge of nationalism, the ultimate motor driving the decolonization process, merits further exploration. Without the popular mobilization inspired by the ideology of nationalism, independence would never have come. Above all, anti-colonial nationalism was an organizational weapon. The political party was its primary instrument; the charismatic leader its personification. The manifold vexations, humiliations, and grievances that colonial occupation engendered were woven into a tapestry of protest. Independence, which took on millennial qualities, was the solution. The intellectual elites framed its content; political organizers, often drawn from less lettered milieux, took the simple yet potent message of a possible future beyond colonial subjugation to the four corners of the territory. Persuading a peasantry made risk averse by bitter experience was no easy task. Yet although the colonial state projected an image of strength at its high point, its actual capacity for coercive response to a politically mobilized countryside was circumscribed, except in densely securitized settings such as Algeria or South Africa; in territories such as Nigeria or Uganda, colonial security forces numbered no more than ten thousand.61 Thus, at a given tipping point, colonial authorities had to come to terms with an incapacity to contain nationalist challenge without costly dispatch of metropolitan reinforcements, as in Kenya faced with Mau Mau or Cameroon confronted with the Union des populations du cameroun (UPC) uprising in the 1950s.62
In retrospect, the relative absence of explicit territorial focus stands out in African nationalist semantics, save in countries such as Egypt or Morocco with a powerful historical narrative or countries like South Africa with a unique background. In this respect, anticolonial nationalism contrasts sharply with its contemporary descendant, a point to which I return in chapter 8. Nationalism in colonial Africa was most frequently labeled simply “African"; its geographic referent was a generalized “Africa.” Here one may detect an adoption through inversion of a colonial category; the imperial subject was most commonly constituted in colonial discourse as a racial or indigenous other: African, black, native, indigene. The subliminal negativity linked to the categorization in the colonial mind was transformed via ideological metamorphosis into an affirmative image of solidarity. As Ali Mazrui has remarked, “It remains one of the great ironies of modern African history that it took European colonialism to remind Africans that they were Africans."63 Thus Lord Hailey, an authoritative colonial source, characterized the phenomenon as simply “Africanism” in reaction “against the dominance of Europeans in political and economic affairs,” suffused with a call for self-rule.64 Thomas Hodgkin, in an especially influential monograph at the time, offered an action-oriented definition, terming nationalism “any organization or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society."65 James Coleman as well, in an early seminal article, defined nationalism in African and organizational terms, incarnated by any political organization seeking self-government for recognizable African nations-to-be.66 In contrast to the idea of nationalism in its European cradle, African nationalism in its anticolonial phase was above all forged in political mobilization rather than intellectual
history. The Hodgkin classic, for example, cites only a dozen texts in its exegesis of anticolonial nationalism, half of which were really ethnic charters.67 At this stage, African nationalism had none of the stigma associated with the bestial elements of older nationalisms, contaminated by racism, fascism, militarism, chauvinism, and aggression. Rupert Emerson, in the most comprehensive study of African and Asian self-assertion at the time, insists on the contrast between European forms as a “disastrous corruption poisoning the political life” and Afro-Asian nationalism that “intrudes itself not only with an aura of inevitability but also as the bearer of positive goods."68
Thus framed in the first instance as “African” nationalism, the quest to give content to and historicize the idea turned naturally to older doctrines of pan-Africanism, initially a product of diaspora intellectuals as part of a broader response to racial oppression in the Western world. In its original form, the ideal of pan-Africanism combined a global creed of racial solidarity, a shared purpose in freeing all of Africa from colonial or white minority rule, and ultimately, for most, visionary continental unification. Following the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945, a new generation of African intellectuals assumed leadership, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.
Several influential African and Caribbean scholars, poets, and statesmen fashioned a refutation of the condescending and scornful colonial views of the African cultural heritage. Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal inverted the conventional European understanding of classical history, marshaling linguistic evidence to support a claim that a black Egypt was the fount of civilization, whose sources came from deep in Africa. Though disputed in Europe, the Diop theory had an enduring resonance in Africa.69 A pair of poet-politicians, Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, discovered within African culture a common tapestry of nonmaterialist, naturalist values, which stood in positive contrast to the materialism and hedonism that pervaded European culture and belied its self-proclaimed superiority. This shared worldview, summarized as négritude, provided a natural basis for African solidarity.70 The thesis of an intrinsic commonality in African culture was translated to the religious realm by the influential text of a Belgian Franciscan missionary, Father Placide Tempels. In his exegesis of the indigenous cosmology he encountered in his Katanga Luba (Congo-Kinshasa) mission station, he proposed an intellectually sophisticated system of religious belief he termed “Bantu philosophy."71 Two decades after its original publication, a leading Congolese intellectual, Mabika Kalanda, argued its continuing cogency, noting that “educated Africans who .. . have read this book recognize in it their own philosophy[,]... the dreamed-of occasion to exalt their négritude, the possibility of transcending . . . inferiority inflicted” by colonial racial arrogance.72
The profound impact, both individual and collective, of colonial oppression was a common theme in nationalist texts, nowhere more eloquently expressed than in the works of West Indian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.73 His medical work during the Algerian war gave unique insight into the trauma experienced by the colonized. His mastery of polemics translated psychoanalysis into populist nationalist text, which included some prescient warnings of possible postcolonial betrayal of liberation struggle by the successor elite.
Also noteworthy for their subtlety and empirical grounding were the liberation texts of Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau. Building on Marxism as intellectual source but not as obligatory epistemology, Cabral drew a careful portrait of the class and ethnic composition of the society for which revolutionary struggle was charted. Though Cabral himself apparently saw no special originality in his thought, its influence extended far beyond the modest dimensions of his country.74
Anticolonial nationalism needed more than negation; a vision of a future of shared abundance was indispensable. Freedom could not be its own reward; the energies summoned to combat colonialism would be redeployed to conquer ignorance, poverty, and disease. In a decade, Nkrumah claimed, Ghana could become a paradise.75 Liberation platforms were long on transformative vocabulary, evoking revolutionary change and often socialist construction, but short on particulars.
Within the overarching commonalities of African nationalist discourse, there were some regional variations. In the northern tier of states in the north, an African attachment was diluted by competing or overlapping Arab identity, and an affirmation of membership in the larger Islamic umma. In the cases of Morocco and Algeria, however, the presence of large Berber-speaking minorities (35 and 22% respectively) limited the centrality of Arabhood in Mahgreb anticolonial nationalism.76 Although Islam was a dimension of identity reference, in the decolonization era there was a clearly secular thrust to any religious framing. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was subject to fierce repression, and currents of religious orientation were marginalized in Tunisia and Algeria by the dominant nationalist movements. The multiple faces of liberation ideology were well captured by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the celebrated summation of Egypt's location at the center of three circles: Arab, Islamic, and African.77 The racial dimension of the pan-African idea was subdued as well in the North African domains.
South Africa was an important though also distinctive center of African nationalist liberation ideology. Here one encounters a complex intertwining of the Africanism of the Pan-African Congress and the “black consciousness” movement of the 1970s and the nonracialism of the ANC 1955 Freedom Charter and subsequent doctrine.78 The interplay of race and class was particularly sharp; overlying this dialectic was the Herrenvolk Afrikaner nationalism ascendant politically from 1948 till 1991.
Nationalist intelligentsias often had spent formative years in the imperial centers, particularly in the universities. Paris, London, Lisbon, and Brussels each had distinctive intellectual traditions. Political dialogue, especially with sympathetic leftist milieux, left their mark upon the fermentation of nationalist discourse, reflecting the respective ideological lineages of the different metropoles.
In the final analysis, however, the crucial attribute of African nationalism in its anticolonial moment was its service as driving force for decolonization. Its most essential concept was liberation itself, famously encapsulated in the 1957 Nkrumah aphorism: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else will be added unto you.” The political kingdom was indeed conquered, but Africa still awaits fulfillment of the second passage. The cultural content that sustained nationalism as an ideology elsewhere was present only in generalized, abstracted form, with its ethnic elements excised. Vague invocations of medieval African kingdoms could not match the voyage of cultural self-discovery of Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru in his lyrical The Discovery of India.79 Further, there was a disconcerting disposition to personalize African nationalism as the incarnation of its key leader as founding father and his political discourse: Bourguibism, Nkrumahism, Nasserism, and the like. Nkrumah chose to entitle his autobiography Ghana, implying a total fusion of anticolonial nationalism and its political leader. In its more extreme form, such celebration of the heroes of independence fused as well with ancestral cults, verging on deification. Nkrumah assumed the title of “osegyefo” ("redeemer"), a praise name linked to precolonial Ashanti kings. Wale Adebanwi shows how an Awolowo cult in Nigeria elevated “Awo” into at once nationalist avatar and pan-Yoruba ancestral deity.80 Such conflations ran the risk that any tarnishing of the ruler could swiftly undermine the legitimating doctrine of the new state.
In a review essay on African nationalism in 1986,I concluded that “nationalism as direct orienting focus for ideological discourse or academic analysis is in relative eclipse. The widespread mood of demoralization characteristic of contemporary Africa denies to nationalism the audience to supply it with driving energies.” I have since revised this view; nationalism has discovered new roots. Fortunately, I left myself an escape clause: “The possibility of a future confluence of catalyzing circumstance resurrecting nationalism cannot be excluded."81I return to the topic of nationalism in chapter 8, examining it
s place in the key identities driving African politics.
INSTITUTIONAL FRAMES
When the decolonization process reached its final stages in the negotiated transition pathway, there was a natural consensus on the appropriate institutional framework. The metropolitan model served as obligatory reference point: parliamentary for Britain and Belgium, semipresidential in Gaullist France. The compressed transition timetables meant that in most countries there were only one or at most two national elections in which universal suffrage applied and all restrictions on political organization were lifted.82 But the anointment of a successor regime with at least one fully majoritarian election was critical to both the departing colonizer and the prospective independent government. For the most part, the integrity of the electoral process in the independence elections was assured, and opposition movements were able to challenge the dominant parties that already existed in most countries. Territories in the French orbit had held a number of elections since 1946, though with restricted franchise until 1956; Ruth Collier suggests this facilitated the consolidation of a dominant party. She also finds that, in the British case, the period of multiracialism as decolonization strategy fostered the rise of strongly ascendant African nationalist parties in opposition, especially in Malawi, Zambia, and Tanganyika.83 Still, by my count in twenty-five (or well over half) of the forty countries whose transition followed the terms of the code of decolonization significant opposition existed at the moment of independence.84
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