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Richard Joseph (and others) have argued that much of the outcome of the democracy wave of 1990 in Africa was a product of an intense quest for external presentability.85 In retrospect, a comparable conclusion is applicable to the transitional independence representative institutions and constitutional arrangements. For the withdrawing colonizer, departure with dignity necessitated leaving behind an institutional frame reproducing the formal arrangements and political values of the metropole. For the nationalist successors, the ostensibly democratic terminal colonial arrangements assured initial international respectability, especially in the Western world, from which aid expectations were at that juncture highest. Further, as argued earlier, the dominant political party, and its leader, needed the voice of a duly elected parliament to push forward and take the final steps to independence. The blessing of sovereignty could thus be feted in mutual celebration.
Several institutional aspects of the bargained independence settlements merit note. With rare exceptions, there was a strongly unitarian cast to the constitutions. Partly this mirrored the institutional heritage of the three negotiating decolonizers, Britain, France, and Belgium. The United Kingdom until the devolution to Scotland and Wales had been a well centralized polity; the Jacobin tradition of the one and indivisible republic was even more pronounced in France. Belgium, although federalized after decolonization, was still a unitary state in 1960. The colonial apparatus was strongly centralized at the territorial levels that became the successor states. Nigeria, where the north had a largely separate administration, and southern Sudan, whose colonial establishment from the 1920s on was insulated from the Arab-speaking north, were the main exceptions.86
The unitary preferences ran deep for the dominant political movements everywhere but in Nigeria. Calls for federalism were heard but were audible in only two instances: in the case of regional or ethnic minorities marginal to the ascendant parties and in the case of regions having distinctive interests. The main examples are Sudan, Congo-Kinshasa, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and anglophone Cameroon.
In Sudan, decolonization was shaped by the Egyptian interface originating in the pretense that Britain ruled in “condominium” with Egypt. The driving factor was British determination to avoid a power transfer that would meet Cairo hopes for a “unity of the Nile valley,” a unity that could be secured by the restoration of Sudan's sovereignty, which Egypt enjoyed at the moment of British occupation in 1882 and vigorously reasserted in 1936 and 1951.87 British orchestration of terminal colonial politics thus backed those parts of the Khartoum political universe that shared London's antipathy to unification with Egypt, especially the Umma Party descended from the Mahdist movement of the 1880s that originally drove out the Egyptians in 1885.88 The crucial 1946 conference on constitutional development ignored warnings from administrators in the south, and the protests of the small emergent southern intelligentsia, against accepting a unitary, northern-dominated framework; Sir James Robertson, governor at the time, claimed that any other policy “would be received with great disappointment in the Northern Sudan and would incline many of those who are now supporters of the Sudan Government [colonial administration] to go into opposition and drift across to the Egyptian side."89 When the radical regime of the Free Officers seized power in Cairo in 1952, and especially after Nasser became ruler in 1954, Britain swiftly conceded the virtually immediate independence demanded by the northern Sudanese political universe, overriding southern fears of marginalization. Thus the stage was set for a southern insurrection that flamed until 1972, then reignited in 1983 and continued until 2005; the first episodes unfolded just before the January 1956 independence, with the mutiny of the southern Equatoria Corps against their northern officers. The consequences have haunted postcolonial Sudan to this day, the country finally breaking up in 2011.90
In Congo-Kinshasa, federalist demands came from the two ends of the country, the Kongo ethnic zone in the west and the Katanga region in the southeast. The Kongo, long dominant in the capital, perceived their leading role to be threatened by the unitarist nationalism incarnated by the Lumumbist parties.91 In southern Katanga, resentment against immigrants from other areas, the lure of monopolizing mining rents, and the complicity of European settler and corporate interests fueled a federalist party that led a secession lasting from eleven days after independence until January 1963.92 Following the November 1965 creation of the highly centralized regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, federalism was banished from official vocabulary, to partially return only in the 2005 constitution after the decomposition of the state and the brutal civil wars of the 1990s.
In Uganda and Zambia, the demands for federal autonomy came from the well-organized kingdoms of Buganda and Barotseland on which Britain had conferred special treaty recognition and status. In contrast to the settlement negotiated in Sudan and Congo-Kinshasa, some acknowledgment of special standing was part of the agreement, extended in Uganda to three other kingdoms. Postcolonial unitary norms soon overrode these transitional concessions, as well as in anglophone Cameroon. In a few places elsewhere federalist murmurs appeared reflecting apprehensions of postcolonial marginalization, notably from smaller “minority” ethnic groups in Kenya, fearful of the numerical weight of the Kikuyu and Luo, and in Ghana, from Ashanti suspicious of the centralizing intentions of Nkrumah. In the end colonial authorities accepted majoritarian claims for unitary rule. The only example beyond Nigeria of an enduring postcolonial federation was Libya from 1952 till 1963. The exception proves the rule; rather than a mechanism for decentralization responding to internal demands, the federal formula was a device imported by the UN-led external architects to stitch together the disparate parts of Cyreneica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan: a “putting-together federalism” in the terms of Alfred Stepan.93 As soon as this fragile entity had sufficient revenue flow and central institutions, federalism gave way to the continental unitary currents.
Noteworthy is the rarity of durable constitutional frames in the independence constitutions. Of the forty cases of negotiated decolonizations, only two such examples can be identified: Botswana and Mauritius. Even more striking is the coincident fact that these two states by unanimous judgment currently rank at the top of the continental roster of effective Weberian states: they have had a stable and continuous democracy and a competent administration, and they have shown impressive and sustained economic growth. I return to these two cases in chapter 9.
COLD WAR CONTEXT
A final dimension of the decolonization process requiring note is the larger cold war context. Britain and Belgium especially were keen to marginalize African political leaders or groups suspected of Communist attachments or those who fell in the broader category of “extremists.” Colonial security services, greatly expanded in the postwar period, had some capacity to carry out such an aim. In this goal they reflected, and were pushed by, the anti-Communist obsessions of the United States. The battle took place not just in Africa but in the various international organizational forums where competing Western-aligned and Soviet-bloc affiliated movements vied for the participation of young African leaders—labor, youth, and students especially. The Soviet-inspired organizations—the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students—offered a far more forceful condemnation of imperialism and colonialism, as well as some travel and scholarship opportunities.
Moreover, the Soviet Union and China—in intense rivalry by 1959—were willing to supply arms to liberation movements in return for alignment. But their ability to shape the independence settlements was limited; their primary accomplishment was to instill small currents of Communist orientation among coteries of intellectuals. Especially in the 1970s, African versions of Marxism-Leninism became an important regime option, but the menace perceived in some Western quarters of “Communist penetration” in decolonizations was vastly exaggerated.
BEYOND INDEPENDENCE: COLONIAL LEGACY
Only in Congo-Kinshasa and Equatorial Guinea did the in
dependence settlement instantly unravel; elsewhere the first moments of postcolonial life passed peacefully. On the surface, the youthful contingent of new leaders seemed self-assured. But beneath the surface, darker premonitions lurked. Were the formal institutions of constitutional democracy sufficient to meet the urgent challenges of rapid transformation? Could the ethnic cleavages that electoral competition had frequently politicized be contained within a parliamentary framework? Could the extravagant promises of a life more abundant be translated into tangible improvement in well-being of the ordinary citizen? More immediately, how could the aggressive claims of the political allies assembled for the electoral path to high office be satisfied?
In the event, the most prominent trend of the immediate postcolonial period was the consolidation of power by the independence leaders and their effort to manage politics by constructing political monopolies. Legislatures were marginalized, and the executive inner core of the colonial state under new management returned to its role as the central locus of politics. A clear trend to single-party rule set in quickly, choking off vantage points from which regimes could be challenged. In these processes, one sees the enduring impact of the legacy of the colonial state, whose mentalities, habits, quotidian practices, and operational norms became reproduced in its successor. The immediate postcolonial polity was a hybrid creature in which the deeply rooted heritage of colonial autocracy joined to the shallow constitutional democratic structures of independence. In retrospect, there is little cause for surprise that the former soon triumphed over the latter.
The visible agents of state power—the district officers—continued to wear military-style garments while itinerant or when making public appearances. The shelves of government offices held the statutes bequeathed by the colonial state, including a reservoir of repressive legislation. The new rulers, wrote Jacob Ajayi, “staked their claims to leadership on their superior knowledge” of state management and development pathways; they “took for granted the masses’ and the traditional elites’s willingness to accept their leadership.”94 In my conclusion to the African colonial state volume, I suggest that “confrontation of the colonial state with a catalogue of its iniquities had earned the right to succession; the elite’s rule was justified by a schooled vision denied to the unlettered masses. The schoolroom, however, was the colonial state.”95 I recollect Jean Colin, at that time the Sengalese minister of the interior, telling a colloquium of senior bureaucrats in 1988 that the colonial regime was a “command” state, while its postcolonial successor was based on “encadrement.” For the subject, this was a distinction without a difference: in both cases, the task of the administrator was to secure compliance with state instructions in pursuit of its developmental mission.
The imprint of the colonial state was also visible in the organization of government. Government departments became ministries. The basic organizational practices and administrative deontology were transmitted intact. The same remark holds for the military organization and judicial structures. The army, essentially an internal security force, tended to retain its recruitment patterns and distinct institutional culture; housed in barracks and quarters separated from the population, the military was of insular orientation. The judiciary, which had many expatriate judges in its ranks at independence, internalized in significant ways a culture of the law. Another colonial inheritance was legal pluralism—statutory codes inherited from the imperial center were operative in the cities and modern sector, while customary law was operative in rural areas and shari’a was in effect in Muslim zones.
The new leaders absorbed a vision of the future well characterized by James Scott as “high modernity.”96 As chapter 1 argues, the apparent effectiveness of centrally planned economies in achieving such a goal held a magnetic charm. The democratic strictures of the independence constitutions gave way to interpretations, in the words of Mamadou Diouf, that “served to guarantee the authority of the state and the uncontrollable and uncontrolled exercise of power by the occupants of the state apparatus.”97
CLOSING REFLECTIONS
Still, when decolonization had run its course with the final liquidation of the apartheid regime in South Africa, a momentous transformation had occurred. This last act in the drama (and trauma) of European occupation of Africa brought to an end an era whose first moments date to 1415, when the Portuguese seized a pair of outposts on the Moroccan coast. Ironically, these enclaves—Ceuta and Melilla, still under Spanish rule—remain the sole remaining traces of direct colonial presence in Africa. The heart of the colonial moment, however, was the eighty-five years between the launch of the partition around 1875 until the zenith of decolonization in 1960.
The varying forms taken by the dialectic of decolonization shaped the independence settlements, the point of departure for postindependence Africa. The divergent pathways, from negotiation to armed liberation struggle, defined the nature of the successor elite. Small states—Belgium and Portugal (as well as Netherlands in Indonesia)—proved especially lacking in decolonization statecraft, which had major postcolonial consequences. Although at the outset of the process, the colonial state held the trump cards, increasingly the growing effectiveness of nationalist mobilization shifted the initiative to the African side. So also did the changing global context, as both great powers backed decolonization, even if for different reasons. The UN became an increasingly important source of pressure, directly through the trust territory system and indirectly as a forum for the expression of anticolonial sentiment. For the majority of cases, the power transfer pact reflected what I have termed the code of decolonization, which in turn embedded a set of internationalized norms reflected in UN resolutions. Of enduring significance was the sacrosanct status of territorial integrity and sovereignty. The fragile constitutional formulas adopted for independence mostly eroded quickly; they were nonetheless the starting point for postcolonial politics.
The weight of the colonial legacy hung heavily over the African political realm for at least the first three independence decades. Everyday semantics acknowledged this reality in the everyday designation of the African independent state as “postcolonial;” only briefly was the “postindependence” descriptor in vogue. In comparative terms, one may remark that such a label is rarely encountered with respect to Asian or other third world states, an unspoken tribute to the capacity of the African colonial state to reproduce itself in the its independent successor.98 The bureaucratic authoritarian essence of the colonial state long remained a defining quality of African states, increasingly modified by neopatrimonialism, and perhaps beginning to fade somewhat into the background following the wave of democratization and state remaking beginning in the 1990s.99
4
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The Road to Autocracy
Breakdown of the Decolonization Settlements
FADING EUPHORIA
The moment of enthusiasm that accompanied the rituals of independence faded quickly. The first decade of African independence saw a rapid transformation of the political landscape, from governance under the fragile democratic constitutions required by the withdrawing imperial powers as a condition of independence to predominantly autocratic rule, whether under single party or military auspices. Three of the largest countries experienced debilitating civil wars—Nigeria, Sudan, and Congo-Kinshasa. Almost everywhere, by the end of the 1960s military intervention appeared the main alternative to single-party monopolies.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the main trends of African politics during what chapter 1 suggested was the first cycle of hope and disappointment, largely situated in the 1960s. In my view, the crucial trends were the failure of most of the decolonization constitutional dispensations to endure, the disappearance of autonomous sites of dialogue and debate, the consolidation of single parties fused with the state, and the emergence of military coups as the primary form of regime change. The consequence of these changes was the rise of autocracy as mode of governance. These patterns at first found ideological
justification by the rulers and theoretical support from academic observers. By the end of the 1960s, however, the credibility of the single party and military rule was challenged, and the first symptoms of what later became “Afropessimism” were apparent.
Harbingers of what lay in store appeared in the form of three unwelcome developments by 1960, the miraculous year of African independence: the evident drift to autocracy in the two most widely heralded avatars of sovereignty, Ghana and Guinea and the instant postindependence crisis in Congo-Kinshasa. In the Ghana case, after the forceful confrontations of colonial authority in 1948 and 1951 by emergent nationalists, a mostly cooperative and well-crafted transition to independence followed. Though Ghana was not the first African state to gain sovereignty, its celebrated 1957 independence was the key landmark in the decolonization dynamic. But by 1960, a new constitution empowered President Kwame Nkrumah to rule by decree, preventive detention legislation had been adopted, and opposition leader J. B. Danquah was soon headed for prison.
The huge stimulus to African nationalism attending Ghanaian independence was matched by that greeting the abrupt 1958 Guinea independence that followed the epic defiance of France by the radical nationalist leader Sékou Touré. His summons to a “no” vote on the de Gaulle constitutional proposals, offering only autonomy to the African territories, won overwhelming support. This spectacular audacity enjoyed wide admiration in Africa; the Guinea victimization by an immediate and punitive rupture by the colonizer, including withdrawal of all personnel and cessation of aid, evoked a reflex of solidarity. The dominant party, the Parti démocratique de Guinée, earned high esteem for its capacities for mass mobilization, persuasively chronicled by Ruth Schachter Morgenthau among others.1 But by 1960 there were clear signs that the political monopoly was hardening and that opposition was not being tolerated, and soon dissidents began flowing into exile.