A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa

Abstract

A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. By Patrick Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert, and Elisa Silva Andrade. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 339; 1 map. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa explores contemporary debates regarding African politics in the context of the countries of Africa, that is, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe. The first three chapters by Patrick Chabal provide a theoretical and analytical framework for the five country case studies that follow. The book is ambitious and covers a great deal of material both chronologically and intellectually. All of the contributors are very knowledgeable about their subject matter and for the most part, the book is well referenced and informative. It would prove useful in familiarizing advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students with the commonalities and particularities of political systems in Africa. The three thematic chapters by Chabal cover the political history of Africa over the last forty years. Through comparative analysis, he revisits a number of questions that have perplexed students of Africa and of the continent more generally such as: What were the origins and outlooks of the decolonization movements that took hold across Africa after World War II? What is the nature of the postcolonial state in Africa? Why has the postcolonial state had such a poor record? In addressing these issues, Chabal is careful to draw out the distinctions among the countries and at the same time, to show how their experiences-particularly those of Mozambique, Angola, and GuineaBissau-have a great deal in common with those in the rest of Africa. He interrogates conventional beliefs about the nature of the liberation movements in the three countries and their objectives after independence. While not dismissing their revolutionary and socialist orientations, he stresses instead the competing nationalist visions within the movements among the modernisers, traditionalists, and ethno-nationalists, and the impact that these divisions had on subsequent political developments, particularly in Angola. Further, he argues that although the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the international context posed formidable obstacles to the construction of postcolonial nation-states in Portuguese-speaking Africa, it was the neopatrimonial character of those states (with the exception of Cape Verde) that debilitated economic development, and rendered these countries ungovernable and unstable. Since the characteristics of clientelism, personalism, and abuse of power that typify neopatrimonialism are mirrored in the political experiences of other African countries, Chabal is able to show the commonalities between Africa and the rest of the continent. In doing so, he goes some way towards debunking notions of lusophone exceptionalism that characterize the literature on Portuguese-speaking African countries. This is a useful contribution and should encourage scholars to engage in more cross-national and crossregional comparisons. On a more critical note, when Chabal discusses concepts such as the state, civil society, and neopatrimonialism, he frequently refers to his own work and omits important contributions by such scholars as William Munro, Naomi Chazan and Donald Rothchild, Crawford Young, Peter Lewis, and Nicolas van de Walle. …