B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  This chapter explores these three pillars of identity, Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity. These frames have provided the discursive categories of the state and much of the political process. Yet each of them, closely inspected, contains important ambiguities. As activated modes of consciousness, all three are products of the last two centuries. In terms of the triple helix metaphor, territorial nationalism operates as connecting middle strand, intertwined both with pan-Africanism and ethnicity, though the last two have little direct connection.

  One might suggest that these elements correlate with a threefold constitution of the subject by the colonial state. The colonizer had various labels signifying the racial otherness and presumed inferiority of the subject: African, black, native, indigene (or the delectable Belgian colonial census categorization “homme adulte valide” [able-bodied adult male, or unit of labor]). For other purposes, the colonizing country applied the territorial designation, usually solely to reference the indigenous population. Even within a given colonial domain of contiguous territories, distinct ordinances and administrative provisions operated, evoking a territorial label (Congolese, Nigerian, Senegalese). Further, ruling the subject population required sorting it into legible cultural categories; the master premise of colonial occupation was that Africa was “tribal.” Africans internalized each of these categorizations and transformed them into a discourse of solidarity: pan-Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnic community. This chapter explores each of these axes of identity and their ambiguity.3

  Hovering in the background is a critical question arising from the preceding chapter: what can explain the astonishing persistence of the African territorial map of independence, in the face of widespread state crisis by the 1980s and the proliferation of internal wars in the 1990s and beyond? This puzzle is stated in stark terms by Pierre Englebert in his insightful search for an answer. Most African states, he argues,

  have not brought about or facilitated much economic or human development for their populations since independence. . . . Parasitic or predatory, they suck resources out of their societies. At the same time, weak and dysfunctional, many of them are unable or unwilling to sustainably provide the rule of law, safety, and basic property rights that have, since Hobbes, justified the very existence of states in the modern world. . . . Yet . . . for all their catastrophic failures, weak African states are still around. With the partial exception of Somalia, state collapse has yet to lead to state disintegration on the continent. There have been almost no changes to African boundaries since 1960.4

  This triple helix of identity has played a critical role in defining the political itineraries of African states; thus an inquest into the nature and origins of the three strands is an indispensable component of an overall analysis. Pan-Africanism, whatever its limits, is the essential cement of the African state system. The idea and doctrine of territorial nationalism is the foundation of the survival of African states in the face of periods of decline and crisis. No inquiry into African political dynamics can elide the issue of ethnicity or ignore its central place in the social imaginary.

  PAN-AFRICANISM AS CONTINENTAL UNIFICATION

  Chronologically the first form of ideological expression of African identity evolved into the doctrine of pan-Africanism, briefly treated in chapter 3. Since independence, Africanism has been partially eclipsed by territorial and ethnic forms of consciousness, but despite its capture by the postcolonial state system it remains a force. This ideology of racial solidarity originated in the nineteenth century, mostly in the diaspora. The searing experience of slavery, the sight of the despoiling of the African continent through imperial seizures of land and resources, and the racial scorn and marginalization imposed by the dominant white society on diaspora Africans provided the template for the call to racial solidarity as a means of combating injustice. Its essence was captured in the classic passage from the autobiography of the major leader of the early pan-African movement, W. E. B. Du Bois: “As I face Africa I ask myself: what is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can express? Africa is of course my fatherland. Yet neither my father nor father’s father ever saw Africa or knew of its meaning or cared overmuch for it. . . . But the physical bond is least, and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as a badge; the real essence of the kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and thus heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa.”5 Various heroes of diaspora African resistance to the repression of dominant society became emblematic symbols: Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the successful slave revolt in Haiti, Marcus Garvey, who in the 1920s started the back-to-Africa movement, and later Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among many others.

  With the exception of Liberia and Freetown as locations of return, diaspora pan-Africanism had no territorial attachments. Few in the diaspora had any notion of their actual place of origin; racial solidarity was a generalized sentiment linked only to an abstract Africa: more specifically, that part of it that was the source of the slave trade. The first institutionalization of this idea came through a series of pan-African conferences held from 1900 to 1927, which Du Bois organized. The first five such gatherings denounced racial oppression, excoriated European land seizures, and demanded African rights in colonized territories, but they did not call for independence. In 1935, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia marked a turning point in mobilizing diaspora intellectuals in support of an independent African state.

  However, the rooting of pan-African ideology in the continent and its liberation awaited the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. Though Du Bois was still honored with the chair, a new generation of young African nationalists took the lead, including two future presidents (Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta). From its diasporic antecedents came an ideology of liberation through self-determination, which called for a metamorphosis that initially privileged a continental rather than territorial vision.

  In the years leading up to the surge to independence, pan-Africanism as a cultural ideology continued to engage some diaspora intellectuals, especially centered those around the journal Présence Africaine in Paris. However, its main energies gradually shifted to Africa; some (though far from all) nationalist leaders shared the continental unification dreams of Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah. The 1955 Bandung conference and subsequent assemblies situated the anticolonial solidarity of pan-Africanism in the larger anti-imperial frame of Afro-Asian alignment. But, as I argue in chapter 3, the tactical imperatives of independence struggle drove political leaders to embrace the territorial frame as the primary basis for action.

  But even as territory shaped political organization, nationalist discourse had a robust African content (except in North Africa). The first major studies of emergent nationalism in Africa invariably characterized it as “African nationalism.”6 The primary rhetorical other for the anticolonial activist was not just the specific territorial administration but the colonial power and European rule more broadly and those immigrating in its baggage trains: white settlers and the South Asian and Mediterranean mercantiles who usually dominated commerce. After independence, the African focus on the idea of nationalism shifted, “nation-building” imperatives intervening, bit by bit to territory. This new focus fundamentally reshaped the parameters of pan-African doctrine. The swelling ranks of sovereign states now stood between the populace and the intellectual dream of a continental imagined community. Pan-Africanism in the process was captured by the new African state system, unified and sustained by the imperative of liberating southern Africa. In this metamorphosis, its racial and cultural content faded, though the idea lived on for a time in such sites as the periodic pan-African festivals. Another enduring legacy was the monumental eight-volume history of Africa, undertaken by UNESCO in the 1970s and mostly published in the 1980s that was explicitly committed to an Africa-centered focus red
olent of pan-African doctrine. But overall its inspirational force clearly diminished.

  A project of continental unification as a federation of states took the place of pan-Africanism. Its first forerunner was the abortive 1959 Ghana-Guinea Union, which Mali briefly joined in 1960, intended as a platform of broader African unification. Though Nkrumah’s ambitions for a brief moment seemed like they might realized when Congo-Kinshasa prime minister Patrice Lumumba signed a secret accord in August 1960 joining the Guinea-Ghana Union, the fleeting agreement was never published and vanished into the maelstrom of the Congo crisis.7 The union evaporated not long after, giving way to plans for what became the OAU in 1963, which was in turn supplanted by the AU four decades later. But these frameworks for continental collaboration by independent African states never came close to achieving the dream of a pan-African federation absorbing the sovereignty of participating nations.

  As pan-Africanist ideology migrated from its diasporic roots back to Africa, communities of African descent elsewhere became absorbed in other agendas. The incomplete but important battles fought by the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere diminished the intensity of racial oppression as a global signifier. The Afro-Caribbean, whose intelligentsia had contributed so much to pan-African cultural expression and thought, for the most part also achieved independence and became engrossed in postcolonial politics. A large and articulate new generation of African emigrants joined the diaspora in America and Western Europe, but now they came equipped with territorial attachments and orientations. An active cultural discourse continued in the enlarged and transformed diaspora, but pan-Africanism was no longer a salient trope.

  As pan-Africanism was assimilated into the institutional frame of continental interstate cooperation, the idea of a natural community defined by racial solidarity faded in favor of a more diffusely geographic sense of affinity. The transformation of South Africa by 1995 from an exclusionary white oligarchy to a government defined by a multiracial “rainbow” form of African identity and its sudden mutation from primary target of pan-African solidarity to major player in continental affairs put into question the continued pertinence of racial affinity as basis for shared purpose. So also did the ambiguities of Arab state identification with the original themes of pan-African solidarity. As Ali Mazrui points out, the British never referred to their Egyptian subjects as “Africans” or natives. They were merely Egyptians.8

  In his 1953 political testament, The Philosophy of the Revolution, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser does include Africa as one of his three circles of transnational identification englobing his nation. However, he links the affinity to shared geography and to Egypt’s paternal obligation as guardian and bearer of uplift: “We cannot under any condition, even if we wanted to, stand aloof from the terrible and terrifying battle now raging in the heart of that continent between five million whites and two hundred million Africans. We cannot stand aloof for one important and obvious reason—we ourselves are in Africa. Surely the people of Africa will continue to look to us—we who are the guardians of the continent’s northern gate, we who constitute the connecting link between the continent and the outer world. We certainly cannot, under any condition, relinquish our responsibility to help to our utmost in spreading the light of knowledge and civilisation up to the very depth of the virgin jungles of the continent.”9 Nasser places the African circle on the same plane with the Arab and Islamic ones, but the affinity is geographic rather than grounded in identity; proximity dictates the obligation to bring uplift to the “virgin jungles”; the emotive resonance of shared Arabhood or Islam is an entirely separate form of connection not shared by those in the heart of darkness.

  However, from the outset of the continental quest for pan-African institutions, Arab states, initially especially Tunisia and Egypt, were active participants. During their experience as colonized populations, the Arab tier of northern African states experienced a degree of racialization as a less civilized “other,” yet as heirs to the classical civilization of the Mediterranean and the golden age of Islamic flourishing, the Maghrib or Egyptian indigene did not suffer the full indignity of cultural dismissal as mere savages. Nor was the consciousness of difference from the colonizer refracted through a prism of color. Though Senegalese intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop among others invoked a mythical black Egypt as a reference point for a celebration of the African cultural heritage, the reverse was never true. On the contrary, the history of Arab connections with the sub-Saharan lands was burdened by the long-standing precolonial trans-Saharan and Nile valley slave trade, whose memories are still sharp in Sudan. Thus the vision of an eventual continental federation of African states of necessity came to rest on ideological foundations other than the original doctrines of a solidarity of the black world in the face of racial oppression.

  By the turn of the twenty-first century, the OAU faced a growing barrage of criticism within Africa for its limited effectiveness. The end of the era of anticolonial liberation marked by the South African transition to majority rule removed its most important unifying cause. For much of the African public, the OAU had long appeared a mere self-protective cartel of heads of state rather than an emanation of the popular will. The majority of states were delinquent in their dues, and the secretariat struggled with limited finances. Less well funded than the other two major continental institutions, UNECA and the African Development Bank (ADB), the OAU had a weak staff and limited institutional capabilities. UNECA and ADB were vehicles to a degree for African economic nationalism, but they were not incarnations of pan-Africanist doctrine.

  The disappointments with the OAU engendered a revived effort to achieve a continental polity, beginning with a 1999 summit conference summoned by the quixotic Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafy. His earlier dreams were of pan-Arab unity, but a series of abortive schemes with Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco demonstrated the unfeasibility of that idea, prompting a turn to pan-Africanism. William Zartman well captures the essence of the Qadhafyled campaign for a renovated and empowered new pan-African framework: “The dynamo behind the negotiations was Qadhafy, and the form of the Union with its parliament, court, and many state-like (and European Unionlike) institutions reflected his insistence and his purse in encouraging support. A group of moderate, sound-thinking leaders supplied the substance of the Union, which in working essence is much like its predecessor but animated by a new sense of purpose and order.”10 Although the AU, formally launched in 2002, is more ambitious in its institutional design, it is likely to founder on the same tenacious attachment of existing states to their sovereignty and to face the same the circumscribed means that restricted the ambit of the OAU.

  And yet the durability of the pan-African project is striking. Beyond the AU, an array of regional bodies for inter-African cooperation (ECOWAS, SADC, and other regional organizations) demonstrate an attachment to Africa as interstate frame. African states at the UN have a formalized caucus and often achieve joint positions. A new array of slogans and structures bear witness to an engagement with continental uplift—the African Renaissance, the New African Partnership for Development (NEPAD). The OAU frequently played a consequential role in mediating interstate conflicts or resolving internal wars, and the AU has followed in its footsteps. Recently in Somalia and Darfur African peacekeeping forces under AU command and mandate have deployed. The penalty of suspension for those seizing power by force has been applied to a number of countries, notably Mauritania, Togo, Guinea, Central African Republic, and Madagascar. Though the required elections to legitimize rule do not necessarily result in a new leader taking the reins, they do set some limits to military interventions. In a very different mode, the intensely symbolic realm of international football (soccer) offers another venue for the performance of pan-Africansm. During the 2010 World Cup competition, once Ghana became the last surviving African team, the huge pool of avid football fans across the continent fixed their passions on what became the emblem of all of Africa.11

&nbs
p; AFRICANISM AS RACIAL BELONGING

  Once it was removed from the domain of an intellectual discourse of populist resonance and was captured by the state system and its leadership, pan-Africanism as an identity-forming ideology lost much of its force among the population at large.12 But Africanism—a sense of racial belonging and affiliation—remains embedded in the popular psyche. African travelers and emigrants of sub-Saharan origin are perceived in Europe, North America, Japan and China as racial others, even if the stigma attached is much attenuated from the early days of pan-Africanism. Within Africa, the visible role played by expatriate executives and resident racial minorities sustains an African consciousness. A racial subtext to the idea of the nation shaped decolonization debates about the extension of citizenship to settled European, Asian, or Levantine populations. To this day their claims to a right to belong to the nation remains a contentious issue in a number of countries; opponents cite their privileged standing in the colonial hierarchy, their maintenance of external citizenship, and their presumed contingent loyalty.13 The “rainbowism” that is the official nation-building metaphor of multiracial partnership in South Africa has not come close to erasing the conviction of a good part of the African majority that its impoverishment and oppression under the apartheid regime call for a more African-centered ideology of nationhood. Race may be a mere social construct, but phenotype as social signifier remains embedded within Africa and in the world at large.

  EXPLAINING STATE PERSISTENCE

  More surprising than the rise and decline of pan-Africanism is the naturalization of what can only be understood as territorial nationalism. I alluded to the remarkable fact of state persistence in Africa in the face of widespread dysfunctionality and decline, not to mention the wave of civil wars in the 1990s. As chapter 7 demonstrates, a Somalia continues to exist in the social imaginary even in the circumstances of more than two decades of virtual anarchy in much of the country and the absence of really functioning institutions of rule. A significant number of African states are so weak that they would be unable to resist or overcome a determined effort by a segment of its citizenry to secede, yet secessionism is surprisingly rare. Of the eighteen recent internal wars examined in chapter 7, in only two, those in Senegal and Sudan, were separatist agendas explicitly on the table (at times more ambiguously autonomy or even independence figured in Touareg rebel discourse in Mali and Niger); after fifty years of independence, the only actual secession was South Sudan in 2011. A significant part of the explanation for the astonishing persistence of the postcolonial state lies, I believe, in the crystallization of a territorial attachment that belongs to the ideological genus of nationalism. In other words, states persist because their citizenry expect and prefer that they do.