The rapid expansion of electorates during the elections immediately preceding independence was important to the ethnic dimension of politics in another way: it introduced numerical strength as an ingredient of power calculus. In the colonial era, communities with early access to missions, schools, urban employment, or other mechanisms of social promotion—Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, Ganda in Uganda, Chagga in Tanzania, Kikuyu in Kenya, Luba and Kongo in Congo-Kinshasa, the four old communes in Senegal, the numerically tiny Freetown creole community in Sierra Leone—enjoyed a large advantage in gaining elite representation. Such groups were thus heavily overrepresented in late colonial professional and bureaucratic ranks. The swift introduction of universal suffrage in the decolonization era brought major adjustments in regional voice; in Nigeria, for example, the once “backward” northern region suddenly emerged as a key player, propelled by its demographic strength. Buganda was accustomed to playing a hegemonic role in Uganda from the beginning of colonial rule, but since it only had 20% of the population, universal suffrage and territorial politics ensured its subordination to long-scorned regions. Regional grievances regarding purported neglect by the colonizer added another volatile item to the agenda of rule and supplied another reason to assert the necessity of single-party leadership.
Political ethnicity as an active ingredient in national politics was a novel factor; the difficulty of calculating its impact made it a wild card in decolonization politics, another vector of uncertainty for the new leaders. Jan Vansina recounts his experience as anthropologist-historian at Lovanium University (now University of Kinshasa) at the time of the first Congo national elections; a parade of political organizers sought authoritative information from him as to the exact dimensions and boundaries of their potential ethnic appeal and the nature of affinities that might attract neighboring groups.9 The electoral patterns often provided early evidence that ethnicity was less fixed and primordial than previously assumed; its parameters proved more fluid and adaptable to instrumental interest and circumstance than conventional wisdom allowed. But it was no less troublesome for that as viewed from the presidential palaces.
In short, assumption of power was surrounded by a host of new uncertainties, perhaps greatest in countries such as Congo-Kinshasa where independence came very suddenly and only recently was even imaginable. Nearly everywhere, no one could be certain what the morrow might bring; a vague sense of lurking danger hovered in the background. A Ghana government white paper concerning an alleged conspiracy in 1961 conveyed a sentiment broadly shared at the time: “The strains experienced by an emergent country immediately after independence are certainly as great as, if not greater than, the strains expressed by a developed country in war time.”10
DEMARCATING THE INDEPENDENT STATE
Thus the legitimation imperative weighed heavily on the new leaders. Beyond the single- party reflex, one common response was the effort on several fronts to demarcate the new state from its colonial predecessor. In the realm of symbols, new flags, banknotes and postage stamps provided visual actualization of new statehood. So did the immediate assertion of an international presence that countries made by joining the UN, by welcoming a flood of embassies to the capital, and by sending their president on overseas tours, especially beyond the imperial capital. The distinctiveness of the new state could also find expression through vocal expression in support of ending colonialism and liberating southern Africa, as well as through participation in “third world” forums and pan-African organizations such as the OAU. The colonial stranglehold on the economy was contested by launching parastatal enterprises and—a few years later—by the nationalization efforts chronicled in chapters 1 and 2. The broad frontal assault on African culture permeating the colonial system found a riposte in the ideological promotion of doctrines celebrating its richness: négritude, African personality, authenticity.
An obvious avenue for demarcation was to accelerate Africanization of the visible face of the state through reducing or eliminating the European presence in the bureaucracy and military officer ranks. Vigorous Africanization had the supplementary advantage of enabling the state to reward political clientele. However, there were consequential costs to the speed of Africanization. The large numbers of inexperienced and perhaps underqualified persons catapulted to leading positions took a toll on the administrative capacities of the state in the early years, given that in most countries the pool of university graduates remained small. Moreover, as a general rule the Africanization of the civil service ranks that had once been filled by expatriates was accompanied by retention of the generous perquisites of salary, free housing, and utilities, designed to allow compensation to satisfy presumed requirements for a European lifestyle. These provisions added to the financial burden of a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and soon became a heavy charge on state budgets. A further liability to rapid Africanization was the widespread popular perception that its benefits extended only to a narrow elite.
KEEPING THE PROMISES OF INDEPENDENCE
Fulfilling the promissory notes of the independence movement was another daunting challenge. At the level of the broad public, the demand for social amenities stood foremost. Schools ranked high on the list; the direct link between educational credentials and social ascent was by now apparent to all. Rural health facilities were likewise in high demand; the efficacy of basic modern medicines—pills and inoculations—was highly valued, even if they might be supplemented by customary medicinal practices. Well drilling near settlements spared women the burdensome daily chore of fetching water from stream courses. Rural roads opened farms to commercial outlets for their produce. The terminal colonial state had made major public investments in social infrastructure in its last years; the postindependence successor could suffer by comparison if it failed to keep up the pace of improvement.
Regimes naturally turned to rhetorical devices to complement actual social provisioning. The ubiquitous five-year plan advanced visions of a better prospective future through its listing of an attractive package of projects to be completed during the period. For the most part, such ventures began to lose credibility by the time the second round of plans became due, by which point the large shortfalls in the implementation of the original charters was becoming evident. Huge development spectaculars—above all giant hydroelectric projects and steel mills—had special allure for their high visibility; though a number of the dams, such as Akasombo on the Volta in Ghana and Kainji on the Niger in Nigeria, were effectively completed, steel mills as industrial symbols rarely succeeded; the fiascos of Ajaokuta in Nigeria and Maluku in Congo-Kinshasa are cases in point to which I return in chapter 5.
More urgent pressures for the fruits of independence came from the large clienteles fostered by party mobilization and electoral campaigns in the independence elections. The party cadres and regional notables who had toiled in the party-building efforts were much less interested in regime policies than personal rewards for their investment of time and resources. The party apparatus offered only limited means by which to absorb these claimants; revenue from member dues was meager, and alternative ways of diverting flows from the state treasury were not yet available. Only the political superstructure of the state, and its multiplying parastatal auxiliary enterprises, offered a pool of assets with which to satisfy these demands. Over time, as the emergent political class acquired mercantile resources and interests, it became possible to grant other lucrative favors: government contracts, import licenses, urban property grants. The green shoots of what blossomed into neopatrimonial politics soon appeared, though not initially on a scale dominating the landscape.
For the younger generation, especially those with at least secondary school credentials, accelerating Africanization provided abundant opportunity for entry into the middle ranks of the administration and rapid promotion thereafter. The first couple of independence decades witnessed an extraordinary dynamic of state expansion. During the 1960s, in sub-Saharan Africa bureaucracies grew by 7% annually; by 1
970 60% of wage earners were government employees, and up to 80% of the operating budgets were devoted to public sector salaries.11
A pair of resulting sociological patterns merit note in passing. First, at the time access to state employment was the key if not the sole path to social promotion for new generations. State agents during this period enjoyed higher remuneration and social respect than their private sector counterparts. Class formation followed the same hierarchy; at the summit appeared an emergent politico-administrative bourgeoisie. The old landed, mercantile, and professional classes established in the Arab tier of states in the north were absent to the south, where the colonial interests, European settlers, or immigrant South Asian or Mediterranean mercantiles stood in the path of African economic accumulation or social ascent, especially outside of West Africa. Access to the state through employment or favor became the primary avenue for economic as well as social ascent. Thus an elective affinity between the dominant postcolonial African class and state expansion took hold.
Second, by the later 1970s this pattern was no longer sustainable, and mechanisms of social closure sprang into place. The life more abundant promised on the decolonization campaign trail accrued above all to that part of a postwar generation positioned by education to seize the sudden opportunities. When fiscal crisis and external debt closed the gates of state expansion, future prospects for an ambitious, young postcolonial generation became far more circumscribed. Further, public service became less attractive as inflation or salary arrearages corroded the value of state employment, transforming civil servants in many lands by the later 1970s into the respectable poor. The political class might still prosper through neopatrimonial channels, but its ranks were subject to turnover with each military coup, and its activities, often on the boundaries of the law if not beyond, carried much more risk than state employment had in the early days of independence. The magnitude of the change finds full measure in the evolving age patterns of the top leadership; whereas at the moment of independence, as chapter 1 noted, new rulers were in their thirties or early forties, by 2010 a number of incumbents were over seventy and some over eighty (Wade in Senegal, Mubarak in Egypt, Mugabe in Zimbabwe). The independence era was an extraordinary moment of high hope for the young, a moment that stands in stunning contrast to the dismal prospects faced by most of their counterparts today that produces the visible social anger of the contemporary youth generation and results in their often desperate efforts to emigrate.
INTERNATIONAL LINKAGES
The new role of independent states as full members of an international system provided opportunities and perils. The nature of the engagement at the end of the day supported the consolidation of single-party rule and accepted without qualms the installation of military regimes. The code of sovereignty required that external powers channel their aid and other attentions through the duly recognized postcolonial regimes. The context of global politics in 1960 ensured that new African states would have eager suitors and that the emergent single-party regimes could draw on external resources to facilitate consolidation of power.
The colonial state largely succeeded in isolating its subject territories from external influences. But the confluence of African independence with the peak of the cold war and the Sino-Soviet split meant that the eager African quest for an international presence intersected a vigorous competition for influence and clienteles. The weapons of the great powers were economic aid, security assistance, and ideological cultivation. The motivations were partly preemptive: the United States sought to block “Communist penetration” or Soviet alignment, and the Soviet Union aimed to prevent alliance with the “camp of imperialism.” Maximally, the goals were reliable votes in the UN and other international bodies, security cooperation, and economic management consistent with the competing great-power ideologies.
New African states were invariably attracted to economic aid; the days of the petrostate were well in the future, and none had revenue flows sufficient to fund their ambitions. At first economic assistance was readily available; aid soon became a significant part of most African budgets.12 Western aid resources vastly exceeded those available from the Soviet bloc, and visible Soviet alignment, especially in the security domain, might threaten assistance flows from the United States in particular. In 1956, this found dramatic illustration when U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles abruptly withdrew a commitment to Egypt to help fund the Aswan high dam as punishment for the purchase of arms from Czechoslovakia and other overtures to the Soviets. Conversely, security collaboration with the United States brought aid rewards; through the 1960s Morocco and Libya were generously compensated for hosting major U.S. air bases. Ethiopia was until the 1974 revolution a major recipient of American assistance, military and economic, and had received critical UN backing for its incorporation of Eritrea in 1952 and subsequent annexation in return for housing an important U.S. military base near Asmara.
Initially, many African leaders believed that their states could benefit from cold war competition by playing the two sides against one another and maneuvering between them under the shield of nonalignment. Though the doctrine of equidistance between the global blocs was appealing, its application proved difficult. For the francophonic states of sub-Saharan Africa, the entanglement with France was extensive; the former colonizer guaranteed the interterritorial currency, the CFA franc, and was the only donor to provide direct budgetary support. Many of the first-generation rulers had served in French parliament or even cabinets; their ties with the Paris political world were intimate and multiplex, extending even to influence within French parties. Some, such as Leon Mba of Gabon, sought full incorporation in the French Republic as a department until 1960.13 Guinea and Mali, which initially rejected the French community ties, paid a high price in aid access, by no means offset by Soviet bloc assistance. For others, the legacy connections of the West through higher education, mission-related associations, and the greater presence on the ground of Western personnel meant closer natural ties.
Still, the need for demarcation and the importance of radical, often Marxist-tinctured ideological currents among the emergent intelligentsia made the label of American client state in particular an important liability. Thus at least nominal nonalignment and links to broader currents of pan-African diplomacy remained official policy; for the more radical states of the time, an active engagement in broader third-world movements and the fight for African liberation were key elements in the quest for legitimation. Indeed, Egypt in 1956, Ghana in the early 1960s, and later Libya all became active sanctuaries for radical opposition and even insurgent movements from other states deemed too subservient to Western interests.
One more crucial aspect to the international environment at the moment of the continental shift to single-party systems requires mention. Not only did new rulers have but a shallow commitment to democracy as a mode of governance but the erection of single-party monopolies met with no resistance from Western democracies. Some leading academic analysts of the day—Thomas Hodgkin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, among others—entered a brief in support of the single-party system, provided that it was based on mass mobilization, that many (including myself ) found persuasive in the first moments of independence.14 Democracy promotion did not have high ranking among American policy goals at the time; former colonizers were far more concerned about stability and the postcolonial preservation of their interests. The emergence of an active international human rights movement was still many years away; critical evaluations of African state performance by such bodies as Freedom House and Transparency International were beyond imagination. Indeed, the view took hold in policy circles and academic communities that autocracy was a necessary stage for developing countries; this thesis received elegant and influential exposition by Samuel Huntington in 1969.15
CONSOLIDATION OF SINGLE-PARTY RULE
The claims by the new leaders that single parties were indispensable instruments for rapid development thus fell o
n receptive ears internationally. Internally, opposition movements naturally contested the single-party trend, but they were nearly always soon marginalized or eliminated. A number of mechanisms were employed to achieve this end.
Electoral systems could be easily altered. A favorite scheme in francophone Africa was to transform the entire country, or at least large regions, into a single electoral district, with party list voting; thus even a small majority translated into winning all the seats. This manipulative procedure was pioneered in Ivory Coast and Guinea and spread to Mali, Senegal, Benin, Togo and others. Alternatively, opposition ranks could be whittled away by defections brought about by inducements, intimidation, prosecution, or even forced exile. When sufficient majorities were in hand, constitutional provisions could be changed to ban opposition parties, which were at the time legitimated by plebiscites that invariably received overwhelming votes. By the end of the 1960s, one-party rule had juridical standing in most states not yet under military rule.
Another widely employed device to institutionalize single-party supremacy was the forcing of key civil society organizations into the party structure as ancillary organizations. Trade unions, youth, and students, often reservoirs of dissidence, were special targets for such incorporation. Reorganized as agencies of party control, they became instruments of discipline and manipulation rather than vehicles for voice.
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