3. Overview over trends in Africa’s political and social history
3.1. From colonialism to life in the postcolony
For a satisfactory grasp of contemporary African politics and in particular for an accurate
understanding of African states and nations, it is in my opinion inevitable to take into account the thorough and often traumatic restructuring of realities that the colonial occupation and division of Africa wrought upon the continent’s peoples, incumbent political structures and collective groupings.
Similarly, the demise of colonialism and the transition to the countries that today occupy the world map has been of crucial importance to the shape and form of African nation-states. This section will accordingly begin in 3.1.1 with a part on the impact of colonization and decolonization and then in 3.1.2 present political and social organization in the postcolony at a glance.
3.1.1. Colonization and decolonization
The one element that unites the African continent beyond its geographical boundaries is the shared experience of colonization by European powers. Coastal trading posts were established in West Africa as early as the mid-15th century but the colonial period, the systematic colonization of Africa by European powers, began in earnest only around 1880100, punctuated by the Berlin Conference of 1884/5 that legalized and regularized the contemporary scramble for African soil101 and put an end to the previous system of hands-off rule content with “ensuring the continuation of the traditional
100 Wesseling writes about the starting point of imperial partition: “Various answers have been given by various historians, the years 1879, 1881, 1882 and 1884 all having their proponents. Whether the partition started a year earlier or a year later does not after all make a great deal of difference”. Wesseling, Hendrik L. Divide and rule: the partition of Africa 1880 – 1914. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996, p. 361.
101 For a detailed account of the conference and its afterlife see Förster, Stig; Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Robinson, Ronald. Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset of Partition. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the German Historical Institute, 1988.
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trading system on its coasts and its great rivers”102. Explanations for the European conquest cover a wide range of points of views: a classic argument sees colonialism as the result of bourgeois capitalist competition in the search for new markets103 and – in the case of Britain – in geostrategic
considerations bent on protecting valuable possessions in East and South Asia104; another line of thinking argues that the ultimate object was national aggrandizement in a less competitive setting than 19th century Europe105 in order to divert the working classes’ aspirations from revolution at home to colonial conquest abroad106. This is contrasted with a portrayal of European publics’ attitude toward the colonization of Africa as absentminded indifference107, which is why some actually take the colonial adventure to have been an outright irrational undertaking108.
This discussion of the origins of and motivations behind European imperialism in Africa belongs, however, to an intellectual enterprise whose focus of analysis is on the European state rather than on its African equivalent and I shall not engage with it any further. What can be said is that the European colonial empires in Africa, though substantial in physical area, do not compare favourably with other historical empires such as Rome or Spain when it comes to duration. After the treaties of the 1880s that partitioned Africa on paper, the partition on the ground using negotiations with local rulers and – increasingly – the technological superiority of machine guns, took place during the following decade (1891-1901)109, which included the defeat of the Mahdist state and the re-conquest of the Sudan by the British led by General Kitchener in 1899. The subsequent period between 1900 and roughly the end of World War I when most of the initial resistance movements had been subdued has been characterized as the key moment in African colonial state-formation110. Yet, just as soon as ‘effective occupation’ had begun to take hold, World War I intervened, seeing large numbers of colonial subjects take part in and experience the horrors of fighting and lastingly damaging the “familiar rationale of white rule in Africa *…+ that it conferred the benefits of civilization”111. These effects were multiplied during World War II, which “greatly increased the number of Africans who were politically conscious”112 and was also the period that saw the rise of anti-colonial parties with a mass following especially in West Africa113. All colonial powers with the exception of the United Kingdom suffered the embarrassment of occupation (Britain’s East Asian
102 Brunschwig, Henri. Le Partage de l’Afrique noire. Paris: Flammarion, 1971, p. 51, quoted in Hargreaves, John D., “The Making of the Boundaries: Focus on West Africa”, in Asiwaju, A. I. (ed.) Partitioned Africans. London:
Hurst, 1985, pp. 19-27, p. 20.
103 Hobson, John Atkinson. Imperialism: a Study. New York: Cosimo, 2005 [1902], pp. 71-93.
104 Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John. Africa and the Victorians. The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent. London and New York: Macmillan, 1961, p. 464.
105 Doyle, Michael. Empires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 146.
106 Winkler, Heinrich August. Geschichte des Westens. Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert.
München: Beck, 2009, p. 892.
107 Porter, Bernard. The absent-minded imperialists: empire, society, and culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
108 Münkler, Herfried. Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft – vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten.
Berlin: Rowohlt, 2005, pp. 36-40.
109 Oliver, Roland and Atmore, Anthony. Africa since 1800. Fifth Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 130-45.
110 Reid, Richard. A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 145.
111 Ferguson, Niall. Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power. New York: Basic Books, 2004, p. 253.
112 Oliver and Atmore (2005), p. 213.
113 Barraclough, Geoffrey. Tendenzen der Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert. München: C.H. Beck, 1971, pp. 199-204.
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possessions, though, succumbed quickly to the Japanese) and the post-war world order was governed by the United States and the Soviet Union, two at least nominally anti-colonial superpowers.
For the majority of the continent, the colonial era lasted until about 1960 when most of the British, French and Belgian colonies were released into independence. Forerunners had been Egypt (de jure 1922, de facto 1952) and Sudan (1956) in Northern Africa, although Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra provided arguably the greatest impulse for further decolonization across the continent114. The Portuguese possessions (1975) and white settler colonies in Southern Africa all followed suit until 1990 when Namibia gained independence from South Africa, which held its first free elections in the same year (1994) that Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia. The relatively short duration of Africa’s colonial period, however, had a massive impact on the political, social and economic, not to mention the linguistic, religious and cultural character of most of the continent and its people. As Crawford Young states in a succinct and much-quoted trope:
“The colonial state in Africa lasted in most instances less than a century – a mere moment in
historical time. Yet it totally reordered political space, social hierarchies and cleavages, and modes of economic production”115.
3.1.2. Life in the postcolony – a brief overview
The end of colonialism was at least as decisive a turning point in African history as its onslaught a couple of decades earlier had been, grouping subsequent events under the common header of the postcolonial period. The overall narrative of life in what Mbembe calls the postcolony116, i.e. a distinct historical entity shaped as much by colonization as by decolonization, follows a pattern whose
roughness when zooming in on the individual country case does not tarnish its overall relevance and accuracy when sticking to the continental scale. Thus, loosely based on Chabal’s categorization117, these subsequent if overlapping stages (plus the theoretical models en vogue to explain them) are: 1) Pan-Africanism; 2) Modernization; 3) Dependency; 4) Cold War; 5) Structural Adjustment; 6)
Democratization; 7) War on Terror; 8) Asia’s entry.
In the immediate post-independence period, African intellectuals as well as some of its most prominent political figures saw independence from European empires as only the first step of
114 Asante, S.K.B. in collaboration with Chanaiwa, David, “Pan-Africanism and regional integration”, in Mazrui, Ali (ed.) General history of Africa. 8. Africa since 1935. Oxford: Heinemann, 1993, pp. 724-743, p. 725.
Namibia’s first president Sam Nujoma, for example, stated that “Ghana’s fight for freedom inspired and influenced us all, and the greatest contribution to our political awareness at that time came from the
achievements of Ghana after its independence. It was from Ghana that we got the idea that we must do more than just petition the UN to bring about our own independence”, quoted in Bines, Ama, “The Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah in Retrospect”, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008, pp. 129-159, p. 132.
115 Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 9-10. Twenty years prior, Coquery-Vidrovitch’s eerily similar phrasing had been:
“L’époque colonial fut brève: à peine plus d’un demi-siècle dans la majeure partie des cas. Elle a pourtant marqué le pays d’une empreinte indélélible, et légué des ferments de transformation profonde”. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, “Problèmes actuels”, in Coquery-Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine and Moniot, Henri (eds.) L’Afrique Noire. De 1800 à nos jours. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974, pp. 381-438, p. 381.
116 Mbembe, Achille. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
117 Chabal (2009), p. 3.
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political emancipation to be superseded by a pan-African political structure118. For, “unlike any other continent except Australia, ‘Africa’ is a political idea as well as a geographical fact with a distinctive ideology: African nationalism”119. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Léopold Senghor of Senegal, Peter Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria and Sekou Touré of Guinea were only the most well-known proponents of the idea that the small colonial units of governance had to be overcome to construct a continent-wide form of rule while reconstituting communalism as the base of political life120. What united the ethnically, linguistically and in many other facets highly heterogeneous inhabitants of the geographical continent to proclaim themselves as Africans was, paradoxically, the common yearning for independence and hence, by extension, the common experience of subjugation under the yoke of colonialism121. In Nyerere’s words, “colonization had one significant result. A sentiment was created on the African continent – a sentiment of oneness”122. In spite of the firm belief among some leaders like Azikiwe that an ‘African Leviathan’ was going to emerge123, African unity as envisioned by the pan-African movement was to be short-lived as a realistic option124 as in 1964 the newly founded ‘real-life Leviathan’, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), enshrined the sanctity of colonial borders. As Warner argues, “Pan Africanism failed because the other units in the international system valued sovereign states”125 and it could be added that most of the African units in this system also valued their own sovereign statehood more than the utopian vision of African oneness126. Imperialism’s demise and the form of decolonization imperial powers reluctantly agreed to unwittingly served as midwife to the present-day international order of nation-states127. Retention of the nation-state and retention of colonial borders were thus the two most important decisions taken in the liberation period. One of the results was that, in direct
contradiction to traditional models of international relations, politics between countries in Africa was well-ordered (the Horn of Africa being an exception), yet domestic politics was highly unstable128.
118 Geiss, Immanuel. Panafrikanismus: zur Geschichte der Dekolonisation. Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, 1968, p. 11
119 Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G. “Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood”, World Politics, Vol. 35, No. 1, Oct. 1982, pp. 1-24, p. 17.
120 Ochieng’-Odhiambo, F. Trends and Issues in African Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 155-167.
121 Mazrui, Ali, “On the Concept of ‘We Are All Africans’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 57, No. 1, 1963, pp. 88-97, p. 89.
122 Nyerere, Peter, “Africa's Place in the World”, Symposium On Africa, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass., 1960, p. 149, quoted in Mazrui (1963), pp. 89-90.
123 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, “The future of Pan-Africanism”, Présence Africaine, Vol. 40, No. 12, 1962, pp. 7-29.
124 As an enticing idea and ideology, pan-Africanism has survived into the present and has spawned a very varied intellectual offspring. There is a strand of pan-African thought that continues to seek a continental political order, a sort of United States of Africa in which the existing states would either merge or continue as federal states under a continental government. For recent proponents, see for instance: Adebajo, Adekeye. The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War. London: Hurst & Co., 2010; Mwakikagile, Godfrey. The modern African state: quest for transformation. New York: Nova, 2001; Fonchingong, Tangie Nsoh, “The State and Development in Africa”, African Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 8, Nos. 1&2, 2005, pp. 1–21.
125 Warner, Carolyn M., “The rise of the state system in Africa”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 27, No. 5, 2001, pp. 65–89, p. 87.
126 An interesting exception at least in terms of constitutional provisions is Mali where the constitution from 1992 contains a clause that allows for the renunciation of sovereignty in the interest of African unity. Häberle, Peter. Nationalhymnen als kulturelle Identitätselemente des Verfassungsstaates. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007, p. 34.
127 Osterhammel (2009), p. 570.
128 Herbst, Jeffrey. States and power in Africa: comparative lessons in authority and control. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 109.
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The early paradigm for African rulers in these new old state-units was to follow modernization theory’s precepts in catching up to the industrialized world through industrialization and nation-building: the developmental state paradigm promoted in the 1960s and 1970s129. Yet, the transition from dependence on the export of raw materials to a flourishing industrialized economy was not successful. A popular explanation for Africa’s shortcomings, in particular in the economic field, was found in a transposition of dependency theory that had developed in Latin America. There,
dependency had been defined as the historically grown imbalanced structure of the world economy that benefits only the advanced industrialized economies and is thus “a type of international and internal structure which leads [countries] to under-development or more precisely to a dependent structure that deepens and aggravates the fundamental problems of their peoples”130. For the African context, this meant – according to Walter Rodney’s influential work How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa (1973)131 – that the colonial powers had only sought to exploit the colonies for the benefit of the metropolitan state, distorting economic development (monocultures, raw materials but no industry), infrastructure (communications oriented toward the sea-ports) and politics (authoritarian command structures)132.
In line with modernization theory, during the post-independence decades the state as an economic and political actor expanded massively, irrespective of the regime’s ideological leanings, crowding out competition in the market-place as well as at the ballot box. Offered “a cruel choice between rapid (self-sustained) expansion and democratic processes”133, most African states opted for growth and against democracy. By the early 1980s, faced with a sharp drop in commodity prices, a
concomitant drop in export revenues, a massive hike in U.S. interest rates (1979) and with ‘rapid self-sustained expansion’ no longer within reach, the overextended one-party-state could no longer service its debts and had to seek help from the World Bank which, following the 1981 Berg Report, made loans conditional on the state undergoing a structural adjustment programme134. In turn, national institutions were obliged to follow policies designed by international creditors, most notably the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank.
The resulting downsizing in state apparatuses and state services along with the overall economic crisis on the continent led to a substantial decrease in living standards and also undermined the
129 Muiu, Mueni wa and Martin, Guy. A new paradigm of the African state. London: Palgrave, 2009, p. 12.
130 Dos Santos, Theotonio, “The Structure of Dependence”, American Economic Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, May 1970, pp. 231-236, p. 231.
131 Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1973. For a more recent example, see for instance a study of Tanzania under German colonial rule, which argues along similar lines that economic exploitation was the colonial state’s ultimate goal. Koponen, Juhani. Development for Exploitation:
German Colonial Policies in Mainland Tanzania, 1884-1918. Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1995.
132 A very intriguing longue durée explanation for Africa’s underdevelopment is proffered by Nunn, who establishes an empirical link (as much as that is possible) between the contemporary economic plight and the slave trades which go back to about the year 1400; Nunn, Nathan, “The long term effects of Africa’s slave trades”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 123, No. 1, 2008, pp. 139–176. A counterargument is given by John Iliffe who argues that the demographic effects of the slave trade were “a calamity but not a catastrophe”.
Iliffe, John. Geschichte Afrikas. München: Beck, 1997, p. 187, cited in Eckert, Andreas, “Transatlantischer Sklavenhandel und Sklaverei in Westafrika“, in Eckert, Andreas; Grau, Ingeborg and Sonderegger, Arno (eds.) Afrika 1500-1900: Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Wien: Promedia, 2010, pp. 72-88, p. 82.
133 Bhagwati, Jagdish N. The economics of underdeveloped countries. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966, p.
204; quoted in Sandbrook, Richard. Closing the circle: democratization and development in Africa. Toronto:
Between the Lines, 2000, p. 10.
134 Freund, Bill. The making of contemporary Africa: the development of African society since 1800. 2nd edition.
Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1998, pp. 253-256.
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patrimonial system of governance that had relied on buying off rival groups in a form of monetary appeasement135. The plight of sub-Saharan Africa as well as its peripheral standing in world affairs further intensified with the end of the Cold War as both Soviet and U.S. aid to proxy regimes dried up while Western aid increasingly came attached with political conditions136. One of the paradoxes of African development in the 21st century have been the parallel yet diverging processes of very low levels of integration into global trade, finance, production and communication and high levels of political and economic reform, generally on par with developed economies137. Thus, in tune with global trends, a wave of democratization swept through Africa (though losing steam in the 2000s)138 and (re-)introduced multi-party competition across much of the continent. One unintended result has been a resurgence of political ethnicity and often vitriolic struggles over the politics of belonging.
In the 2000s, several developments have triggered a resurgence of Africa in the global arena. On the development front, the allegedly widespread failure of African states combined with a focus on indigenous state-building and capacity-building, which has been explicitly spelled out in among others the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (to name but three), has led to a stronger
concentration on strengthening the governing apparatuses instead of providing mere relief aid139. Secondly, the U.S. government’s global war on terror has contributed to a rededication of military resources to and strategic focus on Africa140, in particular the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa and Nigeria. Finally, China and India’s emergence as resource-poor economic super-powers has opened up Africa as a source of raw materials to the Far East, in what amounts to a renewed scramble for Africa, which according to Duffield marks the declining relevance of the West or at least of Western aid to all but the most downtrodden and desolate of countries141. The continent’s overall
extraversion, though, has remained the same, even if France, Belgium, Portugal and the UK have been gradually supplanted first by the USA and Soviet Union and now also by China, India and Brazil.