B009THJ1WI EBOK
Page 52
But as I stress in the opening chapter and elsewhere, the recent phase of African political evolution shows a striking divergence of itineraries. Neopatrimonial habits are not erased, and continue to dominate in a distressing number of states, especially the weakest performers in Table 9.4. The subordinate location of Africa in the global arena and its high vulnerability to external shocks still shackle the continent. The sad chronicle of Haiti two centuries after 1804 liberation is a salutary reminder that there is nothing linear or inevitable about progress and that reproduction of state failure over an indefinite period is a real possibility for the most dysfunctional polities.70
Coinciding with some overall positive trends are several unforeseen vectors of change. The scale of diaspora remittances was first recognized only in the 1990s; in recent years, it has exceeded the flow of official aid. Chinese economic engagement with Africa has dramatically expanded and has now reached a scale sufficient to weigh substantially on future development. The balance of advantage, particularly of the huge mineral quest, remains for the future to determine, but China will be a major player. The new salience of developmental models different from the neoliberal postulates of the “Washington Consensus” offers both choice and modest leverage in external dealings.
At the base, even in the most deteriorated and dysfunctional polities, African society has demonstrated remarkable capacities for adaptation and survival. Theodore Trefon, in the context of a deeply pessimistic assessment of state-rebuilding efforts in Congo-Kinshasa, insists that the disappointments of reform do not imply a failure of society, which in contrast to the state “is strong, innovative and dynamic.”71 The populace of Somalia, dwelling in a stateless environment and perpetual warlord politics for two decades, find ingenious avenues of survival, operating the political economy of anarchy.
The shelters for survival are situated in the informal sector, whose emergence was first noted only in 1972.72 Informal sectors during the 1980s crisis decade exploded to engulf much of the economy in many countries. Their size and resistance to government capture in the weaker polities both provide social protection and constrain the state.
Other changing parameters merit passing note. The crisis years particularly blighted the hopes of the youth generation, who found their prospects for social ascension blocked. Their frustration and discontents found eloquent voice in the protest movements sweeping North Africa at the end of 2010, as well as in the sometimes desperate attempts to emigrate to Europe. They do not share the social memory of winning independence, and most have grown up under repressive and corrupt regimes. The contrast with the independence moment is stark; at that moment, the rising young generation, particularly its educated members, found their nationalist enthusiasm rewarded by expectations of social advance. The first generation of nationalist leaders were mostly under forty; in recent years few rulers were young, and a number were octogenarians (Mubarak, Mugabe, Wade).
The rapid spread of new forms of communication have already had a dramatic effect, cell phones in particular. The social media that follow in their wake are only beginning to make their impact felt; internet penetration re mains limited in many countries. But these new technologies will knit civil society together in novel ways and open the door to different forms of collective action.
Another momentous change is the greatly expanded role and influence of women in the political process, ably documented by Aili Tripp and others.73 In part stimulated by the landmark UN conferences on women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), women have claimed and won a place in political leadership mostly absent in 1960. Women now hold over 30% of parliamentary seats in Rwanda, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi, and a woman holds the presidency in Liberia. Many entered the ministerial ranks and play a crucial role in civil society and mediation of violent conflicts.
No country is more crucial to the future of Africa than South Africa. Its remarkable transition from apartheid to nonracial constitutional democracy was an epochal event. It is by far the strongest economy and polity in Africa, and thus by example and engagement its regional and continental leadership is a critical trump card. Two successions following Mandela later, its essential strength is intact. But the difficulties that lie ahead are daunting. The huge inequalities that are a legacy of apartheid remain, resistant to early reduction. Less saintly leadership than Mandela was doubtless inevitable, but Jacob Zuma has faced growing contestation, as did Thabo Mbeki before him. Tensions within the ruling ANC are growing, and the challenge of balancing prudent macroeconomic management of a capitalist order and satisfying populist pressures from its base is huge. South Africa is a growing contributor to the economies to its north and has been an energetic mediator in African civil conflicts, though it perhaps has disappointed many in its toleration for Mugabe’s destructive rule in Zimbabwe and its support for Gbagbo’s usurpation despite his clear electoral defeat in Ivory Coast; it has been a positive influence in most cases. The continuing success of South Africa as a political economy will shape the future far beyond its borders.
Hope for a better future thus is daily reborn. The path to redemption and recovery has been found in an encouraging number of instances. Not all will find and follow this trail in the years ahead, but I believe that enough states will do so to build on the positive recent overall trends in political and economic liberalization. Returning to the conclusion of chapter 2, my reading of the last half century is that the most certain avenue to a performing, efficacious state is through constitutional democratic rule-of-law governance that is respectful of universal values of human rights and authenticated by a grounding in an African heritage.
Notes
CHAPTER 1. A HALF CENTURY OF AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE
1. Other earlier dates of at least nominal independence might be noted: 1847, when Liberia shedded the tutelage of the private American Colonization Society; 1910, when South Africa won dominion status and power was transferred almost exclusively to its white minority; 1922, when Egypt gained heavily circumscribed sovereignty, although Britain retained important defense, foreign policy, and financial powers; 1941, when the brief Italian occupation of Ethiopia was thrown off; and 1951, when a jerry-built Libyan state was launched unaware of its oil riches by the United Nations. None of these earlier developments had any broader African impact.
2. From 1960 until 1971, Congo-Kinshasa was known as the Republic of the Congo; from 1971 to 1997, it was rebaptized Zaire. The formal title of the country was again changed in 1997 to Democratic Republic of Congo, often shortened to DRC or DR Congo. Until a new constitution was adopted in 2005 and internationally monitored national elections were held in 2006, this was a misnomer; the regime founded by Laurent Kabila as self-proclaimed president was neither democratic nor republican, since Joseph Kabila succeeded his assassinated father in 2001. Though the country now formally conforms to its title, for purposes of clarity and consistency, I use “Congo-Kinshasa” to refer to it during the entire postcolonial period, and I use “Congo-Brazzaville” for the neighboring Republic of Congo, whose capital is Brazzaville.
3. G. N. Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6, ed. J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 96–102.
4. Ali A. Mazrui, introduction, General History of Africa, vol. 8, ed. Ali A. Mazrui and Christophe Wondji (Oxford, UK: Heinemann, 1993), 9–10.
5. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
6. Diverse examples include W. E. Abraham, The Mind of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
7. Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (
London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Léopold Senghor, On African Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1964).
8. Michael G. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
9. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
10. Daniel R. Headrick engagingly shows how the steamboat, the machine gun, the telegraph, and quinine were powerful force multipliers for colonial conquest. See Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
11. Young, The African Colonial State, 280.
12. A fifty-fourth state entered the African roster in 2011, South Sudan.
13. For example, David Apter notes that the average age of ministers in the first Ghanian government was forty-four; the average age of assembly members was forty. Ghana had an unusually well established political elite. See Ghana in Transition, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
14. Bertrand Badie, L’état importé: Essai sur l’occidentalisation de l’ordre politique (Paris: Fayard, 1992).
15. John Campbell, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011); 12; Chinua Achebe, “Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope,” New York Times, 16 January 2011, WK12.
16. Goran Hyden, African Politics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); William Tordoff, Government and Politics in Africa, 4th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Victor T. Le Vine, Politics in Francophone Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004); René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Patrick Chabal, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling (London: Zed, 2009).
17. The term derives from Jean Copans, Les marabouts et l’arachide: La confrèrie mouride et les paysans au Sénégal (Paris: Sycamore, 1980), 248; see also Christian Coulon, Le marabout et le prince: Islam et pouvoir au Sénégal (Paris: Pedone, 1981), 289. I draw on this concept in “Zaire: The Shattered Illusion of the Integral State,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32.2 (1994): 249–63, and The African Colonial State, 287–88.
18. Hyden, African Politics, 26–37.
19. For an excellent account, see Anthony Low, “The End of the British Empire in Africa,” in Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power 1960–1980, ed. Prosser Gifford and W. Roger Louis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 33–72.
20. Cited in Crawford Young, “Decolonization in Africa,” in Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960, vol. 2, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 452.
21. With the exceptions of Algeria, whose armed struggle for independence succeeded only in 1962, and the microstates of Comoros and Djibouti, which became independent in 1975 and 1977 respectively.
22. In the words of his biographer, Brian Urquhart; see Hammarskjold (New York: Knopf, 1972), 382.
23. Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 29.
24. Alistaire Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 538–40.
25. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 13–14.
26. Young, The African Colonial State, 213.
27. Meredith, The Fate of Africa, 66.
28. Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1961), 117.
29. See Tony Killick’s Development Economics in Action (London: Heinemann, 1978), an insightful review of the impact of development economics of the 1950s in framing the radical (and ultimately flawed) strategy of Nkrumah’s Ghana,.
30. W. W. Rostow, States of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Albert Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Planning in Latin America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963); Albert Waterston, Development Planning: Lessons of Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); Andrew W. Kamarck, The Economics of African Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1967).
31. Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 402; the original source is Staff Problems in Tropical and Subtropical Countries (Brussels: International Institute of Differing Civilizations, 1961), 174.
32. Thomas Hodgkin, African Political Parties (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1961); Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); James Coleman and Carl Rosberg, eds., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
33. Important examples include Aristide Zolberg, One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), Apter, Ghana in Transition, and Herbert Weiss, Political Protest in the Congo: The Parti Solidaire Africain During the Independence Struggle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).
34. Goran Hyden, Political Development in Rural Tanzania: TANU Yajenga Nchi (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969).
35. Crawford Young, “United States Policy toward Africa: Silver Anniversary Reflections,” African Studies Review 27.3 (1984): 1–17.
36. Apter, Ghana in Transition, ix.
37. For detail on the Nkrumah turn to repression, see Meredith, The Fate of Africa, 179–92.
38. Notably Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa; Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1971).
39. Lionel Cliffe, ed., One Party Democracy: The 1965 Tanzania General Election (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), 467. Substantial extracts from the 1965 report are reprinted in this volume.
40. Aristide Zolberg, Creating Political Order (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966).
41. Wallerstein, Africa; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Decline of the Party in Single-Party African States,” in Political Parties and Political Development, ed. Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 201–14.
42. Qtd. in Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 411.
43. René Dumont, L’Afrique noire est mal partie (Paris: Seuil, 1962); Albert Meister, L’Afrique: Peut-elle partir? (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
44. Martin Kilson, “Authoritarianism and Single-Party Tendencies,” World Politics 15.2 (1963): 262–94.
45. W. Arthur Lewis, Politics in West Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 63.
46. Lewis, Politics in West Africa, 32.
47. The size of the literature on the 1960–61 Congo crisis bears witness to the magnitude of the drama. The most invaluable single source remains the annual documentary volumes published from 1959 to 1967 by the former Centre de recherches et d’informations socio-politiques in Brussels, especially Benoît Verhaegen and Jules Gérard-Libois, Congo, 1960, 2 vols. (Brussels: CRISP, 1961). Other especially invaluable guides include Jean-Claude Willame, Patrice Lumumba: La crise congolaise revisitée (Paris: Karthala, 1990), Thomas Kanza, Conflict in the Congo (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), and, on the international dimensions, Madeleine G. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1982). Larry Devlin, CIA station chief in Kinshasa at that time, has recently published his Congo autobiography, which sheds some new light on the CIA role in ousting Lumumba; see Chief of Station Congo: A Memoir of 1960–67 (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).
48. Influential contributions include Robin Luckham, The Nigerian Military (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), and Dennis Austin and Robin Luckham, eds., Politicians and Soldiers in Ghana, 1966–1972 (London: Frank Cass, 1975). One might recollect that a wave of mutinies, ultimately put down by British troops afflicted Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in 1964, another indicator of the possible fragility of new power.
50. Of special value on the Nigerian civil war are Anthony Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), on the internal dimension, and John J. Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
51. Francis Deng offers a sensitive and discerning exegesis in War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995).
52. E.-Xavier Ugeux, “La diplomatie agissante de Mobutu,” Remarques Africaines 16– 30 September 1973, 49–70. Jean-Claude Willame at the time joined in the sanguine appraisal, although he subsequently became a stinging critic; see Patrimonialism and Political Change in the Congo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972). See also Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
53. Richard L. Sklar, “Crisis and Transitions in the Political History of Independent Nigeria,” in Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria, ed. Paul A. Beckett and Crawford Young (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 21–22.
54. Deng, War of Visions, 158.
55. These arguments appear in a number of influential works; among them are Morris Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), John J. Johnson, ed., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), and Claude Welch, Soldier and State in Africa (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).