3. Overview over trends in Africa’s political and social history
3.2. The nation-state in Africa: Colonial heritage in the postcolony
Contemporary Africa finds itself covered with what are at least nominally European-style territorial nation-states but the nation-state’s ubiquity has certainly not been to everyone’s delight. The relevance of discussing the nation-state in its specifically African context becomes apparent when
135 A dissenting voice to this mainstream narrative is Nicholas van de Walle who argues that “structural adjustment loans have had a negative impact on central state capacity and have actually reinforced [my emphasis+ neopatrimonial tendencies in the region”. van de Walle, Nicolas. African economies and the politics of permanent crisis: 1979 - 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 14.
136 Harbeson, John W., “Africa in World Politics: Amid Renewal, Deepening Crisis”, in Harbeson, John W. and Rothchild, Donald (eds.) Africa in world politics: post cold war challenges. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, pp. 3-20, p. 14.
137 Bangura, Yusuf, “Globalisation and African Development”, in Suttner, Raymond (ed.) Africa in the New Millennium. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Discussion Paper No. 13, 2001, pp. 34-48, p. 36.
138 Joseph, Richard, “Progress and Retreat in Africa: Challenges of a ‘Frontier’ Region”, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2008, pp. 94-108, p. 95.
139 Debiel, Tobias and Pech, Birgit, “State Formation and Persistent Hybridity in Africa: Reflections from a Development and Conflict Perspective”, in Kostovicova, Denisa and Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Vesna (eds.) Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 129-147, p. 139.
140 Forest, James J.F. and Crispin, Rebecca, “AFRICOM: Troubled Infancy, Promising Future”, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2009, pp. 5-27.
141 Duffield, Mark, “Autour d’un livre. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples. La Réponse de Mark Duffield”, Politique Africaine, No. 125, March 2012, pp. 228-232.
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considering the large body of writing and thought that is dedicated to blaming the introduction of the nation-state for the failure of contemporary African countries to deliver many of the benefits that the ideal-typical European nation-state promises. This is of great importance for the typology of the African nation-state because it highlights and illustrates the expectations, hopes and fears that were associated with and projected onto the nation-state in postcolonial Africa.
In recent years, there has been some debate about whether Africa’s adoption of the nation-state preceded the continent’s imperial conquest. The classical conception of pre-colonial African political organization is that of primitive states or stateless societies142, small in size and exhibiting little centralized authority143. A view predicated on the belief that “in Africa *…+ there was no pre-colonial tradition of statehood”144. The counterargument put forward is that at least some pre-colonial states were politically and economically strong enough to be deemed the equal of contemporary sovereign European states145. It is this line of thinking that informed the intellectual current of the Ibadan school of African historiography that treats the colonial period as a mere interlude while accentuating the long line of continuities between the present and pre-colonial times146. Thus, variations in the post-independence fate of intermediary institutions of governance, primarily chiefs and tribal leaders, “are attributable in very large part to preexisting forms of political authority and other factors external to the colonial state, such as lineage structure, land tenure relations, and religion”147.
A more accurate account of the evolution of political authority and statehood in Africa appears to be the recognition that states clearly existed in pre-colonial Africa but that these were overwhelmingly weak states148. These pre-colonial states did not reflect the model of the Westphalian nation-state and their weakness and inability to protect their inhabitants against the European intruders continues to impact present-day state capacity149. Hence, it is beyond doubt that the origins of the modern African territorial nation-states lie in the colonial period: “Despite the great variety of societies, cultures, languages, religions, forms of commerce and production, and indigenous political
142 Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, “Introduction”, in Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan (eds.) African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press, 1940, pp. 1-23, p. 5.
143 Horton, Robin, “Stateless societies in the history of West Africa”, in Ajayi, J.F.A. and Crowder, Michael (eds.) History of West Africa. Vol. 1. London: Longman, 1976, pp. 72-113.
144Sørensen, Georg, “An analysis of contemporary statehood: consequences for conflict and cooperation”, Review of International Studies, 1997, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 253–269, p. 260. This claim is evidently valid for those island states that were uninhabited prior to the arrival of colonialists and therefore do not have a genuine precolonial past: Mauritius, Sao Tomé and Principe, Seychelles, Cabo Verde. Gennaioli, Nicola and Rainer, Ilia,
“The modern impact of precolonial centralization in Africa”, Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2007, pp. 185-234, p. 193.
145 Warner, Carolyn M., “The Political Economy of ‘quasi-statehood’ and the demise of 19th century African politics”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1999, pp. 233-255, p. 254.
146 See, for instance, Ajayi, J. F. Ade, “The Continuity of African Institutions under Colonialism”, in Ranger, Terence (ed.) Emerging Themes in African History. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1968, pp. 189-200.
147 Boone, Catherine. Political Topographies of the African State. Territorial authority and institutional choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 27.
148 Hopkins, A. G., “Quasi-states, weak states and the partition of Africa”, Review of International Studies, Vol.
26, No. 2, 2000, pp. 311–320, p. 313.
149 Ojo, Bamidele A., “Africa’s Triple Dilemma: The State, Democratization and the Challenges of Globalization”, Globalization, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2004, pp. 1-14.
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structures that existed in the precolonial and colonial eras, the process of de-colonization produced a single format – the Western territorial state”150.
Continuing ties to the former colonial power played a significant role in perpetuating the incumbent state order. Oftentimes, senior colonial officers (including in the armed forces) continued on in their posts151 and in many parts of what came to be known, derisively, as Françafrique, the French 5th Republic’s institutional design was simply imposed on the newly independent states that
surrendered control over monetary policy, external economic relations and defence to the Elysée152. In a kind of vicious circle, at independence there were few Africans skilled and trained in the running of a country since the colonists had deliberately kept them out of state administrations153, and the resulting lack of capacity and weakness of the state fed into the continuing reliance on the former masters154.
Alas, the failure of the Pan-African dream to materialize and leave an imprint on political realities on the continent is not only grounded in the independence generation’s political leaders’ parochial interests and lack of a vision that went beyond the nation-state. To some extent, the nation-state was bequeathed upon Africa because it suited the established notions of political organization prevalent among the exiting colonial rulers155. In fact, most of the states that came into being as a result of decolonization did and do not meet the criteria for statehood that were part of international law in the 1930s during the era of the League of Nations, i.e. effective government with centralized institutions156. During the wave of decolonization, in contrast, the United Nations lent its support to an immediate end to colonialism which included a provision that “*i+nadequacy of political,
economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence”157. Thus, the quick success of anti-colonial movements and the rushed nature of decolonization also had an impact as none of the new leaders was forced to seek out alternatives to the metropolitan nation-state model158. Therefore, African states arguably “have been obliged to adopt the model of the sovereign, territorial state (with the corollary that every state must evolve into a nation-state) as the exclusive form of organization to order their political lives”159.
150 Holsti, Kalevi J. The state, war, and the state of war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 79.
151 Clapham, Christopher. Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 21.
152 Muiu and Martin (2009), p. 56; see also Bangoura, Dominique, “État et sécurité en Afrique”, Politique Africaine, No. 61 (Besoin d’Etat), 1996, pp. 39-53, p. 40.
153 Dumont, René. L’Afrique noire est mal partie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.
154 Clapham (2007), p. 21.
155 Cooper, Frederick, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5, Dec. 1994, pp. 1516-1545, p. 1537.
156 Milliken, Jennifer and Krause, Keith, “State Failure, State Collapse and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies”, Development and Change, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2002, pp. 753–774, p. 763.
157 United Nations. Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV), 14 December 1960, available at:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/independence.htm (accessed: 27 April 2012).
158 Wirz, Albert, “Körper, Kopf und Bauch. Zum Problem des kolonialen Staates im subsaharischen Afrika“, in Reinhard, Wolfgang (ed.) Verstaatlichung der Welt? Europäische Staatsmodelle und außereuropäische Machtprozesse. München: Oldenbourg, 1999, pp. 253-272, p. 258.
159 Ayoob, Mohammed, “Subaltern Realism: International Relations Theory Meets the Third World”, in Neuman, Stephanie G. (ed.) International Relations Theory and the Third World. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, pp. 31-54.
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As the nation-state as the template for political organization in postcolonial Africa is thus a given, the following four sections will investigate more closely how and to what extent the existing nation-states in Africa are shaped and beholden to the heritage of the colonial nation-states they succeeded. In 3.2.1 the focus will be on principled criticism of the imposition of nation-states on African societies, subsequently 3.2.2 discusses the value or plight of colonial territorial boundaries, 3.2.3 analyses the continuities of the political system from colonial to post-colonial regimes and 3.2.4 questions the idea of African states as remote and weak ‘Berlinist’ states.
3.2.1. The nation-state in Africa: the Black Man’s Burden?
There is a strand of thought epitomized by Basil Davidson’s aptly named book The Black Man’s Burden160 that argues that the nation-state has been a harbinger of doom and downfall for African societies that have suffered due to its alien and ill-fitting institutional and normative straitjacket161. Regardless of where one stands on the matter of choice or inevitability, the fact that African leaders upon independence retained and embraced the status quo of the territorial nation-state model has been a major bone of contention in academia and beyond. This strand of thought is represented by the claim that “the vast majority of national trajectories in Africa starkly reflect the limits on the nation-state’s ability to deliver the prosperity and freedom that it was thought to embody in the heyday of decolonisation”162.
The territorial nation-state has been characterized as a “prison house” and “*t+he West’s cruelest joke at the expense of Africa”163. In a somewhat circular argumentation, some blame the exogenous origin, the lack of ‘Africanness’ of the African state for its lack of legitimacy164 and see the state as “a purely imported product, a pale imitation of the diametrically opposite European political and social systems, a foreign body”165 whose imported institutions will lead to a popular backlash by those opposed to alien institutions166. This argument does not seem very convincing in and by itself. After all, the nation-state was, initially at least, an alien introduction wherever it was introduced and it is far from certain that African societies in a counterfactual universe without any nation-states would be more peaceful, prosperous and stable than in the actual world.
The postcolonial state’s critics vary, however, in their analyses of why and how the nation-state is detrimental to African countries and societies. The most famous articulation of the idea that the nation-state in Africa failed (and thereby failed Africans) is Basil Davidson’s argument that
“acceptance of the post-colonial nation-state meant acceptance of the legacy of the colonial
160 An allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ that praises the civilizing task of British rulers in their colonized territories.
161 Davidson, Basil. The Black man's burden: Africa & the curse of the nation-state. Oxford: Currey, 1992.
162 Berger, Mark T., “From Nation-Building to State-Building: The Geopolitics of Development, the Nation-State System and the Changing Global Order, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2006, pp. 5-25, p. 15.
163 Mazrui, Ali, “Africa Entrapped: Between the Protestant Ethic and the Legacy of Westphalia”, in Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam (eds.) The Expansion of International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 289-308, p. 289
164 Englebert, Pierre, “The Contemporary African State: Neither African nor State”, Third World Quarterly, Vol.
18, No. 4, Sep. 1997, pp. 767-775, p. 771.
165 Badie, Bertrand and Birnbaum, Pierre. The sociology of the state. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 181.
166 Badie, Bertrand. The imported state: the westernization of the political order, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
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partition, and of the moral and political practices of colonial rule in its institutional dimensions”167. This quote embodies two of the main facets of the African nation-state that have been instrumental in shaping the political and societal structures in the postcolony: a) the imposition of colonial borders on disparate peoples and ethnic groups, and b) continuities between the state structure and form of governance from colonial to postcolonial rulers. These two will be looked at in more detail because they provide deep insights into the makeup of African nation-states in the independence period.
3.2.2. Colonial boundaries: obstacle or asset to state-building?
The fixed territoriality of today’s states goes counter to the African pre-colonial experience where control over people was much more crucial than control over territory. As population density was low, wars were fought “to capture people and treasure, not land which was available to all”168. People were highly mobile and their mobility ensured accountability among political leaders as populations could simply move on to a different location if pressed too hard by the rulers169. Pre-colonial Africa was thus, in the words of Igor Kopytoff, a “frontier continent”170. As a consequence, rule and authority lacked the stringent focus on territoriality so central to European history and state-making.
Colonial border-making forever changed this state of affairs as it introduced to Africa an entirely new principle of political organization171, the principle of the territorial nation-state. Decolonization did not alter the territorial status quo of colonial subdivision172 as colonial borders that were often only ill-defined on the ground were appropriated, reassessed and refined by post-colonial
governments173. Then in 1964, the OAU decreed that “all Member States pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence”174. As a result, Africa’s map “was entirely constructed by colonial cartography, thus bearing the original sin of alien origin and artificiality”175. Up until South Sudan’s secession from the North in July 2011, Eritrea’s secession
167 Davidson (1992), p. 162.
168 Herbst (2000), p. 20.
169 Kelsall, Tim, “History, Identity and Collective Action: Difficulties of Accountability”, in Engel, Ulf and Olsen, Gorm Rye (eds.) The African Exception. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005, pp. 53-67, p. 55.
170 Kopytoff, Igor, “The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture”, in Kopytoff, Igor (ed.) The African Frontier: the reproduction of traditional African societies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 3-83, p. 7.
171 Wirz (1999), p. 256.
172 African leaders may have been swayed to refrain from border realignment by the massive violence that accompanied the partition of British India in 1947. Alao, Charles, “The problem of the failed state in Africa”, in Alagappa, Muthiah and Inoguchi, Takashi (eds.) International Security Management and the United Nations.
Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1999, pp. 83-102, p. 84.
173 An example would be the joint border demarcation mission between Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – the entire process lasted from 1970 to the late 1980s – which fixed the exact location of the border and made it visible on the ground by constructing fortifications; Stary, Bruno, “Un no man’s land forestier de l’artifice à l’artificialité:
l’étatisation de la frontière Côte-d’Ivoire-Ghana”, Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, No. 222, April-June 2003, pp. 199-228.
174 Organization of African Unity, “Border Disputes Among African States“, AHG/Res. 16(I), Resolutions Adopted by the First Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, held in Cairo, UAR, from 17 to 21 July 1964.
175 Young, Crawford, “Nation, Ethnicity, and Citizenship: Dilemmas of Democracy and Civil Order in Africa”, in Dorman, Sara; Hammett, Daniel and Nugent, Paul (eds.) Making Nations, Creating Strangers. States and Citizenship in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2007,pp. 241-264, p. 244.
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from Ethiopia in 1994 had been the only example (apart from minor border corrections) of a successful and internationally recognized redrawing of Africa’s political map176.
Hence, the classic critique of African borders is to bemoan the borders’ artificiality as a major reason for the African state’s present-day lack of cohesion and politico-economic success in state-building and nationbuilding177. The political boundaries adopted by postcolonial states were in reality the ossified expression of European and not African interests178, often reflected the short-term rationale of European politicians in the late 19th century and were characterized by “the high degree of geographical ignorance on the part of negotiators and their consequent desire to avoid ambiguity by defining lines capable of objective survey”179.
Colonialism thus forcibly brought people of different ethnic, political and religious affiliations together to form a state and forge a common sense of citizenship in an arbitrarily circumscribed territory180. This fact that the inherited borders cut across traditional group entities such as the Hausa or across natural resources claimed by several states as in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso has been widely lamented181 because African borders “distort processes of political development and divide communities that otherwise would be organically constituted”182. While some have challenged the artificiality hypothesis on the grounds that the colonial intruders often did take into account the ethnic and demographic facts en place183, the main opposition to this line of thinking arises from the claim that, at the end of the day, all borders whether in Africa or Europe are artificial184.
176 Mayotte, one of the four islands comprising the Comoros archipelago, opted to remain a part of France when the other three islands declared their independence in 1975. Although the United Nations have called on France to cede control of the island to Comoros, in a 2009 referendum 95% of voters in Mayotte chose to officially become a part of France. Along with Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, Mayotte was explicitly cited by Russian foreign minister Lavrov to highlight Western countries’ hypocrisy in criticizing the secession of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014. Lavrov, Sergei, “It’s not Russia that is destabilising Ukraine”, The Guardian, 7 April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/sergei-lavrov-russia-stabilise-ukraine-west (accessed: 8 April 2014).
177 Ravenhill, John, “Redrawing the Map of Africa”, in Rothchild, Donald and Chazan, Naomi (eds.) The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988, pp. 282-83.
178 Bjornson, Richard, “National Identity Concepts in Africa: Interplay between European Categorization Schemes and African Realities”, in Boerner, Peter (ed.) Concepts of National Identity – an Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen zur Frage der nationalen Identität. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1986, pp. 123-139, p. 124.
179 Hargreaves (1985), p. 26.
180 Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G. “The Marginality of African States”, in Carter, Gwendolyn and O’Meara, Patrick (eds.) African Independence. The First 25 Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 45-70.
181 Igue, Ogunsola John. Le territoire de l’Etat en Afrique: Les dimensions spatiales du développement. Paris:
Karthala, 1995, p. 28.
182 Larémont, Ricardo René, “Borders, States, and Nationalism”, in Larémont, Ricardo René (ed.) Borders, nationalism, and the African state. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005, pp. 1-31, p. 24.
183 Gallais, Jean, “Poles d’État et frontières en Afrique contemporaine”, Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, No. 38, 1982, pp. 114-121.
184 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, “Political Reforms and Conflict Management”, in Suttner, Raymond (ed.) Africa
184 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, “Political Reforms and Conflict Management”, in Suttner, Raymond (ed.) Africa