B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  ETHNIC GROUP VERSUS INDIVIDUAL ACTOR

  Finally, in grasping ethnicity one needs to unravel the difference between group behavior and individual action. In the analysis of ethnicity, even in its vocabulary, the inarticulate major premise reigns that cultural communities behave as groups. At moments of peak mobilization such may be the case, but at most times actions or interests imputed to the group do not equally engage all its members. Indeed, the very term “ethnic group” can, on close inspection, be seen to have problematic aspects. The intensity of identification with a group varies among ethnic subjects. At any given moment, many may have immediate interests at variance with those articulated by group spokesmen. The multiple identity repertoires (occupation, gender, religion, residence, among many others) held by most individuals may mean that cross-cutting interests are at play. If performing ethnic solidarity carries social costs in a given setting, the actor may hesitate, perhaps with the secret hope of being a “free rider.” Max Weber long ago suggested the necessary qualification to perceiving ethnic group as collective actor: “Ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere.”88

  In the final analysis, much social action occurs at the individual level; group behavior ultimately depends on large numbers making simultaneous identical choices. Through the conscious (or unconscious) performance of ethnicity by the actor, communal awareness achieves social visibility. Such performance can occur in a range of activities from participating in a group customary ritual to weighing marital choices, seeking employment, angling for a government favor, and voting in an election. In all these contexts, not all persons attach equal importance to ethnic solidarity; all competitive election studies show that even when ethnicity visibly textures the competing parties, the balloting does not completely align with communal divisions.89 The multilayered nature of ethnicity enters the equation. So also does the possibility of multiple cultural identities, a product of intermarriage (fairly common in urban areas), migration, or the ambiguity of ethnic boundaries. An apt example is supplied by Jean Bazin in pointing to the multiplicity of identities at play within the Bambara category in Mali: “Misled by the reassuring rigor of the colonial taxonomies and their internalization as a form of knowledge widely shared within urban milieux and amongst educated elites in Mali today, one cannot imagine the extreme variety of those who in one way or another, according to the context, the conjuncture, and the point of view of the interlocutor, in the past or recently, have found themselves designated, inventoried, honored, feared, insulted, mistreated, exterminated under this name.”90

  While acknowledgment of the element of individual choice in performance of ethnicity is necessary, so also is recognition that the options may be constrained. Although ethnicity is in part the assertion of the individual, the actor also encounters the ascription of identity by others. When ethnicity is salient in the social landscape, one’s actions may be interpreted by the other as ethnically motivated, whatever their intent. All persons are assumed to have an ethnic identity, usually known by those in socially proximate locations. Even if one aspires to ethnic anonymity, numerous cues are available to others to read ethnicity: name, language, visible social practices, dress, and sometimes facial scarifications. The ethnic attachment of major political figures is inevitably known to most, who readily attribute a communal orientation to parties or organizations they lead. Accordingly, the choices open to Africans in identity performances are far more constrained than the “ethnic options” Mary Waters engagingly explores for Euroamericans.91

  States at first usually responded to newly politicized ethnicity by projects of containment. A central claim of the single-party system was its purported capacity to cage ethnicity within the obligatory structures of the national movement, thus eliminating incentives for ethnic mobilization. State managers preoccupied with hegemony and legimation imperatives publicly excoriated “tribalism” while privately deploying it in ramifying neopatrimonial apparatuses. Rather than being regarded as an integral dimension in the social and moral order, ethnicity was negatively viewed; it was seen as a sin especially practiced by others and as an obstacle to the territorial nation. In the era of single-party and military autocracies, ethnicity was banned from the public square, and ethnic associations were outlawed. Yet as state capacity shrank by the 1980s, ethnic solidarity became an important shelter for many. Banned but not erased, ethnic currents flowed just beneath the surface of patrimonial autocracy. They periodically broke through the surface in many countries; Nigeria and Kenya are notable examples of inflamed and public ethnic politics during this period.

  The democratic moment around 1990 largely ended the illusion that even if it could not be eliminated, ethnicity could be at least confined within an underground private sphere. Around the world, national integration projects based on assimilative premises gave way to a realization that on close inspection most polities are culturally plural. The accommodation of diversity required its acknowledgment rather than denial and called for multicultural strategies that were adapted to the circumstances rather than single-track integrative doctrines.

  Within Africa, ethnicity slowly became more respectable. African intellectuals who once equated “tribalism” with backwardness read the trends and reframed their discourse to accord legitimacy to ethnic solidarity. The late Claude Ake wrote for a generation in declaring that a genuine African democracy “will have to recognize nationalities, subnationalities, ethnic groups and communities as social formations that express freedom and self-realization and will have to grant them rights to cultural expression and political and economic participation.”92 Still, states and political leaders viewed ethnicity warily; Uganda president Yoweri Museveni wrote in 1997: “A leader should show the people that those who emphasize ethnicity are messengers of perpetual backwardness.”93 In most countries, laws regulating political parties proscribe the use of ethnicity or religion as a basis for organization.

  Viewed comparatively, ethnicity in Africa stands out for its greater fluidity and less rigid self-conceptualizations. Its instrumentalist and constructivist dimensions are more salient, and its primordial aspects are less powerfully expressed than in major ethnonational formations in Europe or Asia. Indeed, most African ethnicity does not borrow the scripts of nationalism in its expression. The critical distinction between nationalism and ethnicity as ideologies of solidarity lies in the nature of the political claims arising from the identity. A fundamental precept of nationalism is the right to self-determination, the prerogative of creating an independent or at least highly autonomous political unit. Ethnic agendas point to cultural self-preservation and enhancement in social and economic spheres; members of the groups seek relative shares within a polity rather than separation from it.

  Some versions of ethnicity verge on ethnonationalism: the Zulu and Buganda cases come to mind. In Nigeria in the last couple of decades ethnic claims have frequently been labeled “the national question.” But only Ethiopia has reconstituted itself around the premise of ethnonationalism, reconfiguring itself into six ethnic provinces and three multiethnic ones without a single dominant group. To some extent, this ethnic federalism bears the imprint of imported Soviet nationality theory during the Afromarxist Mengistu regime (1974–91). More significantly, the main insurgent movements that drove out the Derg were (except for the Eritreans) ethnic armies. Thus constitutionalizing ethnonationalism with a theoretical right to self-determination and secession was a consequence of the dynamics of decay and demise of the Mengistu regime. The actual exercise of power remains highly centralized under the rule of Meles Zenawi, though in some domains, such as language policy, provincial autonomy may gradually deepen the “federal character” of Ethiopia; in addition, the Tigre leadership at the core of the state has eroded the Amharic cultural personality of the historic Ethiopian state.94

  INDIGENEITY BATTLES

  The era of at least nominal democratization introduced
another new dimension to the ethnic phenomenon: intensified battles over citizenship and indigeneity. African citizenship legislation stands out for its tendency to imply that there is a necessary tier of ethnic membership by which a person gains automatic entitlement to nationality. Many constitutions stipulate membership in ethnic communities geographically present at the time of territorial creation as prerequisite for natural citizenship.95 In a number of countries—notably Ivory Coast, Congo-Kinshasa, Kenya and Uganda—intense battles discussed in chapters 6 and 7 over rural land rights pitted immigrant or internal migrant cultivators against the home community. These violent contests spawned toxic doctrines of indigeneity: ivoirité, for example, in Ivory Coast. Indigeneity is claimed as exclusive basis for land rights and is invoked to question the legitimacy of the residence of “strangers” in the area.96

  Doctrines of indigeneity appear in a different form in Nigeria, where residents of the 36 states and the 774 odd local government authorities claim exclusive entitlement to employment, contracts, services, and other facilities; above all, they assert control over “their” areas. This precept of special entitlement for those indigenous to states and local government areas entered juridical language in the 1979 constitution, as a component to the “federal character” of the nation. Indigeneity doctrine and its discriminatory impact on long-resident migrants has become a source of bitter dispute in many areas and has led to several violent episodes in Jos, in which seven hundred were killed in 2008 and then three hundred more in 2010. Its workings are summarized by Philip Ostien, who led an inquiry into the serious 2008 Jos violence: “Administration of all [locally administered resources] is by a system of ‘indigene certificates’ issued by local governments. Access to indigene certificates and the resources depending on them is directed primarily towards members of the ethnic or subethnic group controlling the [local government].”97

  CONCLUSIONS

  In sum, the three master identities defining African polities—Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity—operate on different tracks.98 Any potential conflict between pan-African and national loyalties was eliminated at the outset of independence by the capture of pan-Africanism by the state system. Territorial nationalism usually does not compete directly with ethnicity; in contrast to what happens Europe, in Africa ethnic groups are never referred to as “national minorities” juxtaposed to a titular nationality. Most Africans perceive these identities as operating in separate spheres. Ethnicity has only infrequently been framed as ethnonationalism; the prevalence of multilingualism lowers the temperature of language issues that are so volatile in India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Belgium or Canada.

  All three of these overarching identities contain major ambiguities. The evolution of pan-Africanism from the shared consciousness of the subordinated and victimized African to a more geographical and interstate cooperative sphere removes a good deal of its original emotional charge. But the logic and value of the perennial quest for more effective pan-African institutions is rarely challenged. At another level, Africanism lives on in the cultural personality of states. A subliminally racial African component to territorial nationalism finds reflection in the ambivalence toward citizenship for those immigrating from other continents.

  Territorial nationalism has become embedded in the quotidian subconscious of most Africans. Nothing else could fully explain the extraordinary persistence of African states, even in circumstances of failure. This form of nationalism doubtless remains limited in the depth of the attachments it can command by its original sin of derivation from the colonial partition and its shallow historical narrative. But its enduring reality finds irrefutable proof in the insistence of nearly all warring parties in the many civil conflicts of the 1990s that they, like the young men in Kivu dancing the frontier, were defending the territorial nation.

  The seeming simplicity of commonly accepted ethnic mappings dissolves on realization of their multiple layerings, permeability, and interpenetration, as well as their flux and contingency. Yet in the competitive struggle for relative shares in state institutions and resources, decolonization and postindependence politics politicized ethnic identities, particularly among the larger groups whose numbers amplified their voice. The changing situations of and interplay between regional, ethnic, and subgroup categories illuminate the premise that social construction never has a fixed end point.

  Returning to the overall themes of this volume, I would suggest that analytical capture of these three pillars of identity are prerequisite to an overall understanding of the postcolonial state. The Africanism dimension is a constitutive element in the African state system through the superstructure of pan-African institutions. It also finds expression in the meaningful sense of affinity that transcends borders. The growth of an unreflected affective attachment to the originally artificial territorial containers assures an overall stability to the state system, irrespective of the dysfunctions of a number of its units. An adequate conceptualization of the complex phenomenon of ethnicity is essential to an informed reading of state political dynamics.

  If one accepts that a healthy and functioning state, adapted to the evolving norms of the global state system, is an ineluctable element in a better future for Africa, then the counterintuitive naturalization of territorial nationalism is in my view a positive force. So is the reconciliation of state and ethnicity, which the growing acknowledgment that cultural pluralism is a natural condition, not unique to Africa, has led to. Though pan-Africanism has a far more limited role than in the dreams of its pioneers, its place as venue for interstate cooperation and joint action has value. The ambiguous triple identity helix of Africanism, nationalism, and ethnicity endures and continues to shape the political landscape.

  9

  * * *

  The African Postcolonial State

  Concluding Reflections

  By and large, the states of sub-Saharan Africa are failures.

  —Pierre Englebert, 2009

  There is no reason to downplay the progress that African countries have made in the past two decades under very difficult circumstances. The distance they have covered is considerable in many instances.

  —Goran Hyden, 2006

  EVALUATING THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE

  These contrasting conclusions capture the spectrum of perception of a half century of African independence. Both authors are distinguished scholars of African politics who have immersed themselves in researching a number of states over most of this period. The disparity in their positions reflects the complexity and contradictions of the African state in its postcolonial journey.1

  Closely inspected, the evaluative disparity is less complete than the quotations might suggest. Englebert concedes that there are some exceptions to his stark indictment, though he finds the modal pattern to be one of states that are “parasitic or predatory” yet also “weak and dysfunctional.” Hyden devotes a chapter to “the problematic state,” which he defines as the state that has a far weaker hold on an elusive society and its informal moral economy than its counterparts in other regions.

  Part of the divergence also lies in time perspective. Hyden restricts his point of reference to the last two decades. If one measures recent performance against the depth of the state decline in the 1980s, then a more optimistic reading of the postcolonial state is possible. Although several of the most derelict states have stagnated or even regressed, the condition of the majority of countries has improved. But a 1960 benchmark poses a sterner test.

  FROM DEVELOPMENTAL DISAPPOINTMENTS TO MIXED RECOVERY

  Beyond doubt, the African state failed to achieve the march to modernity that many hoped and mainstream development economists forecast when independence dawned. Although a leading textbook at the time ranked Africa’s development potential well above East Asia, real per capita GDP did not grow over the 1960 to 1990 period; in East Asia and the Pacific, by contrast, there was a 5% per annum per capita increase, while in Latin America, there was 3% growth.2 The level of disappo
intment finds measure in the Congo-Kinshasa case; its legendary resources appeared in 1960 to promise a bright future. Five decades later, a meticulous study of contemporary state rebuilding efforts concludes that, with stability and competent economic management, the population might regain the average level of 1960 well-being by 2030.3