4. Typology of the African nation-state
4.2. Nature of the postcolonial African nation
The evolution of nations and nationalism on the African continent has in many ways proceeded along a path akin to that of the African state, which is hardly surprising considering that state and nation are intimately linked in the theory and practice of the nation-state, which was and continues to be the model for African countries and their leaderships. In order to gain a better understanding of the development, the peculiarities and the obstacles to the creation of national identities and, in fact, national peoples, this chapter will begin by concentrating in 4.2.1 on the evolution of inclusive state-driven nationalism from the late anti-colonial struggle through decolonization until the present. The
468 Ribot, Jesse C. African Decentralization: Local Actors, Powers and Accountability. Geneva: UNRISD Programme on Democracy, Governance and Human Rights, Paper No. 8, 2002, pp. 9-10.
469 Smoke, Paul, “Decentralisation in Africa: Goals, dimensions, myths and challenges”, Public Administration and Development, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2003, pp. 7-16, p. 12.
470 Melmoth, Sébastien, “République démocratique du Congo: décentralisation et sortie du conflit”, Afrique contemporaine, No. 221, 2007, pp. 75-85, p. 84.
471 Englebert, Pierre, “Incertitude, autonomie et parasitisme: les entités territoriales décentralisées et l’État en République démocratique du Congo”, Politique Africaine, No. 125, March 2012, pp. 169-188.
472 Oyugi, Walter O., “Decentralization for good governance and development: The unending debate.”, Regional Development Dialogue, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 3–22, p. 10.
79
subsequent sections are, in contrast, going to look at alternative loyalties and impediments to successful propagation of nationalism: 4.2.2 looking in particular at politicized ethnic loyalties and 4.2.3 dissecting the new exclusive nationalism with its focus on autochthony, religion and other non-inclusive forms of belonging.
4.2.1. Inclusive state-driven nationbuilding
Nationbuilding was a formative ideology of the early postcolonial moment and its success or rather the lack thereof proved critical in shaping later forms of African nationalism, both officially
sanctioned and alternative national visions. This section on nationbuilding in the postcolony is therefore going to start in 4.2.1.1 with an overview of the standard narrative of inclusive African state nationalism that emerged after decolonization, subsequently in 4.2.1.2 look at elements of negative ‘othering’ in trying to create unity among the people confined within the nation’s territory and then in 4.2.1.3 deal with national identification that exists in spite of the state.
4.2.1.1. African inclusive nationalism in colonial and early postcolonial times
During the late colonial period and in the immediate aftermath of independence, African nationalism was seen as coterminous with opposition and resistance to colonial rule473; i.e. as anti-colonial nationalism, which “was a progressive movement in the colonial and semi-colonial world, when it embodied the struggle of a national bourgeoisie against imperialism”474. Genuine nations, on the other hand, were on principle presumed not to exist in Africa475. Based on this reasoning, the postcolonial African country was said to be at a similar developmental stage as Europe’s new
monarchies of the 15th century and described as “an aspirant nation-state” in which “*t+he state is to create the nation, not the reverse”476. This point is echoed by Tangri’s categorical statement that “at independence, African countries largely lacked a national identity, partly because colonial policy did much to strengthen ethnic, as opposed to national consciousness, and partly because the countries were too recent in existence to elicit a sense of common nationhood”477. In Nigeria, for instance, at the time of independence in 1960, the people of Nigeria did not conceive of themselves as Nigerians because people’s “identity as Nigerians lay in the shadow of their tribal and parochial allegiances”478. Most nationalist leaders that came to power with independence shared this assessment and in their aspiration of duplicating the nation-states of European pedigree, set about the project of building nations where none had been before – an aspiration possibly influenced by the fact that
“*n+ationalist movements rely very heavily on men and women to whom a Western style of
education and new types of employment and occupation have opened new horizons”479. In particular in countries that had emerged from war, governments composed of former ‘freedom fighters’ have a
473 Smith, Anthony D. (1983), p. 37.
474 Kedourie (1993), p. 85.
475 Hodgkin, Thomas. Nationalism in colonial Africa. New York: University Press, 1963, p. 23.
476 Curtin, Philip D., “Nationalism in Africa, 1945-1965”, The Review of Politics, Vol. 28, No. 2, Apr. 1966, pp.
143-153, p. 144.
477 Tangri (1999), p. 8.
478 Davis, Thomas J. and Kalu-Nwiwu, Azubike, “Education, Ethnicity and National Integration in the History of Nigeria: Continuing Problems of Africa's Colonial Legacy”, The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 86, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 1-11, p. 1.
479 Emerson, Rupert, “The Problem of Identity, Selfhood, and Image in the New Nations: The Situation in Africa”, Comparative Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3, Apr., 1969, pp. 297-312, p. 307.
80
strong sense of ownership of the nation480; the armed struggle, for example in Guinea-Bissau,
becomes coterminous with national identity, “engendering a veritable cult of the ‘nation-party-state’
as the sole pillar and symbol of authority”481.
But there is also a more pragmatic explanation that highlights the utility of the nationalist idea to states faced with high expectations and little to offer to citizens in terms of tangible benefits: “As such, nationalism is a particularly interesting issue for Africa because it may represent a way of broadcasting state authority that does not require the financial resources that poor countries lack”482.In post-genocide Rwanda, for example, the official state-sanctioned account of an idyllic pre-colonial unity that was shattered by divisions introduced by the pre-colonialists has become a pole-bearer of the government’s attempts at forced social engineering483. The degree of top-down propagation of nationalism has been so consistently high that John Markakis went so far as claiming that “*w+hatever it may be elsewhere, nationalism in Africa is the ideology of the state. More precisely, it is the ideology of those who wield state power”484. In that sense, African
state-nationalism is categorically different from the notion that state-nationalism emanates from an already pre-existing primordial nation485.
In another contrast to European nationalism, what stands out about African state nationalism is the subordinate role assigned to language as the common signifier of national belonging – at least outside the Arabic-speaking countries of Northern Africa486. In spite of occasional appeals to return to indigenous languages as a means of “decolonizing the mind”487, most sub-Saharan African states have chosen to retain the former colonial language as language of official discourse as even those African languages that were symbolically and constitutionally enshrined as national languages did not manage to take the place of English, French or Portuguese in the school, market or courthouse488. The main reason for this continuity lies in linguistic plurality, i.e. the lack of a common mother tongue, and in resistance toward the imposition of an African language among speakers of minority languages. Thus, Léopold Senghor, first president of Senegal and one of the fathers of Négritude – a philosophy based on the idea of a distinctly African way of being and thinking and “the awareness,
480 Dorman (2006), p. 1097.
481 Havik, Philip J., “Virtual Nations and Failed States: Making Sense of the Labyrinth”, in Morier-Genoud, Eric (ed.) Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, pp.
31-76, p. 36.
482 Herbst (2000), p. 126.
483 Purdeková, Andrea, “Building a Nation in Rwanda? De-ethnicization and its Discontents”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2008, pp. 502-523, p. 514.
484 Markakis, John, “Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Horn of Africa”, in Yeros, Paris (ed.) Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, pp.
65-80, p. 71.
485 Ibid.
486 Having a dominant linguistic group is, however, far from a guarantee of national cohesion as illustrated in macabre fashion by the ethnic slaughter that occurred in Rwanda and Burundi.
487 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. New Hampshire:
Heinemann, 1986.
488 Simpson, Andrew, “Introduction”, in Simpson, Andrew (ed.) Language and national identity in Africa.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 1-25. However, retaining the colonial language had the unintended consequence of precluding access to the vast majority of indigenous people that lacked proficiency and thus contributed to their alienation from the state. Alexander, Neville, “Ten Years After Apartheid: The State of Nation-Building in South Africa”, in Dorman, Sara; Hammett, Daniel and Nugent, Paul (eds.) Making Nations, Creating Strangers. States and Citizenship in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 197-219, p. 199.
81
defence and development of African cultural values”489 – was nonetheless a virulent proponent of French as Senegal’s official language. Although the indigenous Wolof is the de facto lingua franca, when people breach the matter of “official recognition of Wolof as a national language above and beyond all other languages, there is much resistance and speakers of other languages are quick to remind the government that Senegal is a democratic multilingual society”490. Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere’s government successfully installed Swahili as the national language is clearly the exception to the rule491.
Writers and artists were in some countries integrated into efforts at popularizing national identity, for example by commissioning songs. In West Africa, in particular, the composition and performance of hagiographic songs has a long tradition predating the colonial period and is preserved among a specialized class or caste of performers, today commonly known as griots492. As a rule, however, the role of cultural actors was rather limited in the formulation of national identities in sub-Saharan Africa, lest they had to function as in Congo where “the nation has been engineered top-down by ideologues and state-sponsored official literature, which has in turn been challenged by orality and non-official and diasporic literature”493. On the other hand, authors have often sat uneasily with attempts to instrumentalise their work for nationbuilding purposes and, as Simatei shows for East Africa, have in their literary production reacted against the nation-state’s homogenizing
tendencies494.
Initially, most African governments opted for an inclusive version of nationalism rather than an exclusive one. By promoting an assimilationist idea of the nation, they thereby strove to place their legitimacy on a broader footing495. Hence, during the first decade after independence, “it seemed natural that the priority should lie in the projection – the making concrete – of the myth of national unity”496. Nation-building as the counter-project to imperial strategies of divide-and-rule morphed into the guiding principle that inspired the first generation of independence leaders497. As the postcolonial historian Gyan Prakash pointed out, third World Nationalism was thus built on a
paradoxical stance. It attributed agency to the nation long subjected to subservience under a colonial yoke and yet staked its own claim to national leadership on the order of reason and progress of European colonial pedigree498.
489Senghor (1996), p. 49.
490 McLaughlin, Fiona, “Senegal: The Emergence of a National Lingua Franca”, in Simpson, Andrew (ed.) Language and national identity in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 79-97, p. 87.
491 Topan, Farouk, “Tanzania: The Development of Swahili as a National and Official Language”, in Simpson, Andrew (ed.) Language and national identity in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 252-266.
492 Panzacchi, Cornelia, “The livelihoods of traditional griots in modern Senegal”, Africa, Vol. 64, No. 2, April 1994, pp. 190-210.
493 Thomas, Dominic Richard David. Nation-building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 2.
494 Simatei, Tirop Peter. The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa. Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2001.
495 Bratton and van de Walle (1997), p. 75.
496 Chabal, Patrick, “Imagined Modernities: community, nation and state in postcolonial Africa”, in Torgal, Luis Reis; Pimenta, Fernado Tavares and Sousa, Julião Soares (eds.) Comunidades Imaginadas: Nação e Naciolismo em África. Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 2008, pp. 41-48, p. 44.
497 Tetzlaff and Jakobeit (2005), p. 125.
498 Prakash, Gyan, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5, 1994, pp. 1475-1490, p. 1475.
82
Yet, governments generally failed to put the lofty ideals of state-nationalism into practice as popular identification with the state was widely lacking, and few signs of genuine expressions of nationalism could be found apart from “the now pro forma exhortations from propaganda organs to engage in state-building”499. At least as important as loyalty of the mass or at least a significant share of the population is the evolution of a national elite that actually and genuinely conceives of the nation as their prime focus of loyalty and whose attachment to the idea of the nation exceeds mere cost-benefit calculations. The failure of nationalism is therefore related to the failure of political elites to act as genuine representatives of the nation (as opposed to ethnic group, e.g. Kenya, or family, e.g.
Mobutu).
4.2.1.2. Othering to create national unity
The flipside to the inclusive narrative of the newly independent African state was the designation and creation of groups of people that were to serve as the ‘other’ to the respective national group. There were, as Dorman et al. point out, very sound reasons and motives for African governments and state elites to act in this way.
Working with a problematic colonial legacy, political elites have manipulated history, land, and social and economic factors to exert a collective sense of identity over their citizens. The claiming of control over the defining of citizenship and nationhood provides unrivalled political power. [...] To maintain this position it is necessary for them to cast a negative other against which to rally their nation.500 The attempt to define citizenship and thus identity (and vice versa), often by way of designating a negative other, functioned as a tool to ensure a continued position of influence in the country.
Creating strangers that did not belong to what had been circumscribed as the national community thus arose both from a need to supply a glue to a disparate population and the void left behind by the desertion of the previous enemy ‘other’. Edward Said famously posited the Orient as Europe’s
‘other’, functioning as a typically negative mirror-image of European self-conceptions501. Anti-colonial movements used Europe and specifically the colonial oppressors in much the same manner to
strengthen self and group identification among African populations because
societies undergoing rapid social change, or nation building, or territorial or political expansion, can escape or postpone internal political difficulties – the fear of established groups for the loss of privilege – by mobilizing the society against some ‘external’ force, or for some common ideological purpose.502
A case in point, many nationalist movements-turned-governments derived their legitimacy to rule from the fact that they had resisted the colonial powers and portrayed their own struggle as a continuation of earlier resistance movements, e.g. Tanzania’s TANU party presenting itself as the
499 Herbst, Jeffrey, “War and the State in Africa”, International Security, Vol. 14, No. 4, Spring 1990, pp. 117-139, p. 127.
500 Dorman, Sara; Hammett, Daniel and Nugent, Paul, “Introduction: citizenship and causalities in Africa”, in Dorman, Sara; Hammett, Daniel and Nugent, Paul (eds.) Making Nations, Creating Strangers. States and Citizenship in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 3–26, pp. 19-20.
501 Said, Edward (1979).
502 Bell, Daniel, “Ethnicity and social change”, in Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (eds.) Ethnicity:
Theory and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 160-171, p. 164.
83
successor to the Maji-Maji that led a violent uprising against the German colonizers503. Another example is the Zimbabwean ZANU-PF government’s decision to circumscribe academic freedom in historiography and decree the propagation of ‘patriotic history’ in order to disseminate their preferred reading of recent history, including the party’s own role in it504: “The ruling party has deliberately venerated the victimhood of the war veterans for political expediency and for purposes of playing down the significance of opposition”505. Mugabe herein followed in the footsteps of president Banda in Malawi where in the 1960s “to ensure that his version of Malawian culture and history prevailed, the machinery of the ruling Malawi Congress Party set out to control what could or could not be published or taught in schools and colleges”506.
Patriotic history is also reflected in the different memorial cultures and lieux de mémoire of countries which had to wage a war of liberation: whereas Zimbabwe has a strictly hierarchical layered system of commemorating its heroes (which, for instance, leads to frequent quarrels over which tier a deceased fighter is supposed to be interred in), Eritrea pursues a highly egalitarian culture of
memorialisation embodied by the statue of a sandal that was worn by virtually all combatants during the liberation struggle507. Yet, memorials can also continue to divide nation-states as in Mozambique where the civil war between Frelimo and Renamo is being replayed on the country’s public squares in a struggle over monuments that is equally a struggle over recent national history and national
identity508.
However, in contrast to the late colonial period when nationalism blossomed due to the visible presence of an easily identifiable enemy – the colonialists – post-independence regimes struggled to define a relevant other and concomitantly struggled to create virulent symbols of national identity509. In a rather cynical assessment, Jeffrey Herbst blames the absence of inter-state wars because no peaceful scenario can come close to equalling the unifying effect that warfare has on a disparate and heterogeneous society510. Alas, the new wars of the post-Cold War era are more likely to exacerbate existing fissures and cleavages in society rather than rally the people to unite511. Civil wars, which have been the predominant form of large-scale violence in Africa in the last decades, often revolve around issues of identity and apportioning of resources and thus are the antithesis of state-making wars in early modern Europe.
503 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph; Mazrui, Ali and Wondji, Christophe in collaboration with Boahen, A. Adu, “Nation-building and changing political values”, in Mazrui, Ali (ed.) General history of Africa. 8. Africa since 1935. Oxford:
Heinemann, 1993, pp. 468-498, p. 474.
504 Ranger, Terence, “Historiography, patriotic history and the history of the nation”, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2004, pp. 215-234.
505 Matereke, Kudzai Pfuwai, “One Zimbabwe Many Faces: The Quest for Political Pluralism in Postcolonial Zimbabwe”, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. and Muzondidya, James (eds.) Redemptive or Grotesque Nationalism? Rethinking Contemporary Politics in Zimbabwe. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 217-260, p. 235.
506 Kalinga, Owen, “The Production of History in Malawi in the 1960s: The Legacy of Sir Harry Johnston, the Influence of The Society of Malawi and the Role of Dr Kamuzu Banda and his Malawi Congress Party”, African Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 389, 1998, pp. 523-549, p. 549.
507 I am very grateful to Sara Dorman who raised these points during a conversation in July 2013 in Edinburgh.
508 Igreja, Victor, “Politics of Memory, Decentralisation and Recentralisation in Mozambique”, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2013, pp. 313-335.
509 Herbst (1990), p. 130.
510 Herbst (1990), p. 129.
511 Münkler, Herfried. Die neuen Kriege. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002.
84
Although there were genuine attempts at uncovering local history, for example in newly independent Mozambique where ‘Interest Circles in People's History’ were formed in factories, secondary schools and communal villages that helped to find precolonial archaeological sites512, another major obstacle aspiring African nations have to overcome “is the lack of any shared historical mythology and
memory on which state elites can set about ‘building’ the nation”513. Following independence, “the aspiration to create a state-nation from virtually nothing was stronger than the desire to base new states on old nations”514 that had existed prior to the colonial onslaught. In some cases, relying on national symbols that hail from the colonial period can actually be advantageous because – much in
memory on which state elites can set about ‘building’ the nation”513. Following independence, “the aspiration to create a state-nation from virtually nothing was stronger than the desire to base new states on old nations”514 that had existed prior to the colonial onslaught. In some cases, relying on national symbols that hail from the colonial period can actually be advantageous because – much in