Postcolonial State In Africa Research Articles

Chinua Achebe and an Archaeology of the Postcolonial African State

Patrick Chabal, the noted political scientist, should certainly have included non-African scholars of Africa too when he argues perceptively in his book, Power in Africa: An Essay in Political Interpretation, that African writers "did more to reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars" (8). After all, non-African scholars of Africa actually dominate both the production and dissemination of the myriad of explanations that have been employed to understand and supposedly ameliorate the crisis of the postcolonial state in Africa. To the extent that explanations have a concrete materiality to them--that is, in their ultimate transformation to (basis of) social actions--the crisis of the African state ought to be considered as much social as epistemological. Canonical social science exegeses have always taken the current dominant African sociopolitical institutions as given. But these dominant institutions of politics, economics, and management and administration are completely of colonial origin. Where they are questioned at all, it is with regard to their "improper management" by African political actors. It is partly for the recalcitrant blindness in the explanations that Chabal himself calls them "paradigms lost" (11-32). Rarely was it pondered that the problem might be primarily a crisis of institutions in their entirety in relation to context, not simply of their performance. Here then is the source of the comparative superiority of the fictional investigations of African writers: they have always foregrounded the foundational issue of institutions and their legitimacy, and few with greater perspicacity and subtlety than Chinua Achebe.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE AFRICAN DILEMMA

This paper states that while globalization had a hopeful ring for the developing countries in general and African countries in particular, it also promised new challenges and new risks. There was the hope that close integration with the world economy, through rapid liberalization of trade investment and finance, would be the recipe for rapid growth and prosperity for the common people, it was also considered that national economies of African countries and developing countries at large would be strengthened which will find their rightful place alongside those of the more advanced countries. However, given the dynamics of globalization, Africa will continue to miss the ample opportunities that the new international economic power and order have presented. The crushing external debt burden on African countries compounded the problem. It is quintessential to stress that the post-colonial state in Africa is too central to the development process to be ignored in the discourse on how Africa can gain from the emerging world capitalist system. The Nigerian state in particular and the African states generally, have to be restructured. That way, Nigeria (and other African countries) may be put in good stead to reposition itself in the emerging world economic order. (Humanities Review: 2001 1(1): 74-80)

Down the post-colonial road: reconstructing the post-apartheid state in South Africa

Abstract South Africa's transition to democracy earned its place among the ‘miracles’ of the twentieth century. The transition not only symbolised the end of a protracted struggle against apartheid but also ushered in a new era of the reconstruction of state and society. My intention in this paper is to analyse the reconstruction of the post-apartheid state in South Africa against the backdrop of the post-colonial state in Africa. The paper focuses on territorial restructuring and nation-building as some of the main challenges facing the new polity. Such challenges, I argue, are not unique to South Africa, but are a familiar feature of the post-colony on the continent. However, South Africa faces those challenges against a pessimistic record of its counterparts in Africa, and under different circumstances. Notwithstanding that pessimism, the question that is central to the analysis presented here is how South Africa has responded to challenges of territorial restructuring and nation-building.

Eleven Guilty Men from Goredema: Parallel Justice and the Moralities of Local Administration in Northwestern Zimbabwe

Abstract: In the late 1980s, at a time when the newly independent Zimbabwean state was still struggling fortify local organs of legal and development administration, a group of male collaterals in the northwestern district of Gokwe was inventing a parallel corporate structure for purposes of limited self-governance. This article narrates the dramatic events consequent upon a case of rape and incest, using it as a point of departure explore how spheres of local jurisdiction may be carved out and tested, and the morality of state intervention ultimately contested, by a newly imagined, if deeply patriarchal, form of civil society. A society composed of an infinite number of unorganized individuals, that a hypertrophied State is forced oppress and contain, constitutes a veritable sociological monstrosity. For collective activity is always too complex be able be expressed through the single and unique organ of the State. Moreover, the State is too remote from individuals; its relations them too external and intermittent penetrate deeply into individual consciences and socialize them within. -- Emile Durkheim, 1964 [1902]: 28The state in postcolonial Africa routinely fails provide the kind of moral authority it pretends command, as the lengthening literature on corruption, terror and arbitrary or personal rule well attests (see Davidson, 1992). Still, communities must somehow make their way within the state's shadow, constantly testing or negotiating the limits of autonomy under circumstances that are often as hard fathom as they are predict (Bayart, 1993). Some limits are more easily, or more urgently contested than others, of course, so that asserting the right raise a local militia may be less worthwhile or important than adroitly avoiding the payment of crop levies. In any case, the pathways through and around the web of laws that authorize state power are not easily classified as instances of resistance to or compliance with the state (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991; Lazarus-Black and Hirsch, 1994). So much, I hope, will become clear from the story I will shortly present, the story of an effort constitute a limited form of patriarchal self-governance lying parallel the official state.The now-independent nation of Zimbabwe was claimed as a colony for the British by Cecil Rhodes and the Pioneer Column in 1893. The same year, we might note, marked the publication of De la division de travail social, Durkheim's famous essay on the changing relation of moral order social form under conditions of industrial and political modernity. At the time, the problem of state-making in western Europe had, at least for the time being, been effectively resolved. Neither the formal sovereignty of the state, nor its moral hegemony over ordinary citizens were any longer seriously in question (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). It was the excessive, rather than the exiguous, permeation of social life by the state that Durkheim seems have found worrisome. By comparison, the nature, degree and terms of hegemonic domination enjoyed by the postcolonial states of Latin America at the same moment were all at that time still very much being worked out (Joseph and Nugent, 1994; Mallon, 1995).African societies, in contrast, had only just begun find themselves compressed into the straitjacket of colonial boundaries and the regimes of colonial discipline, the results of which are still today openly contested in many African states, three or four decades after achieving independence. At the 19th century's end, the multi-imperial project famously initiated on paper at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 had largely been realized in the form of colonies on African soil, just as the British defeat of Boer independence heralded the unification of the modern South African state. These events have been meticulously documented, of course, but the experiential meaning or moral assessment of the colonial state for Africans newly subjected it is rather less well described (see Mamdani, 1996, Vincent, 1994). …

Capitalist Agriculture and the Colonial State in Portuguese Guinea, 1926-1974

he relationship between capital, states and rural producers has been a major and recurring theme in contemporary development litera ture. A lively debate centered particularly on the postcolonial state in Africa.' This study looks backward at producers, investors and the state in Portuguese Guinea in order to trace the economic and, in part, the ideological baggage of the postcolonial regime. The terms of the debate generally pitted state officials and producers in locked battle over resources and entitlements; the state being portrayed on the side of capital while, depending upon the point of view of the author, African smallholders were put in the guise of backward subsistence farmers, petty capitalists, or autonomous noncapitalist cultivators. In one of the important theoretical contributions to this debate, Henry Bernstein argued that, in the process of commoditization, direct pressure was being applied on rural producers by states, companies and international aid agencies.2 However, Bernstein did not represent commoditization as a one-sided process resulting in the complete dispossession or marginalization of African smallholders. Rather, he stressed the nuanced and varied nature of the forms of production deriving from the mutual interaction of producers and representatives of capital. Nevertheless, Bernstein was not optimistic about the long-term viability of petty commodity production. In his study of state intervention in Nigerian agriculture, Gavin Williams, like Bernstein, showed that the state is not neutral in the struggle for resources.3 The Nigerian state has been an active participant on the side of capitalism. However, Williams' point is that the state and capital have not succeeded because African peasant farming is an independent, noncapitalist, essentially household form of production that resists all attempts to subsume it to the needs of capitalist farming. That capitalist relations are not the inevitable outcome of expanding commodity relations is also one of the themes of this study.While both commodity relations and capitalist relations aim at increasing exchange value through the expansion of production, the distinguishing characteristic of

Urban Planning and the Post-Colonial State in Africa: A Research Overview

Rapid urbanization has been perhaps the most dramatic of the social phenomena that marked the end of the colonial era in Africa. From a situation in 1950 in which the total urban population was no more than 28 million, the figure had by 1984 jumped to well over 125 million, representing a sharply increasing proportion of the total population (World Bank, 1986a). Yet, after an initial period when urbanization was welcomed as a positive tendency in the modernization of the continent (Friedmann, 1961) there is today some ambivalence as to the contributions of urban centers to the overall development of the continent. There are those (Santos, 1971; Bardinet, 1977) who argue that urban centers have failed to serve as a major force in the economic transformation of African countries but have, instead, highlighted their economic dependency and the negative social consequences that go with this. Others (Collier and Lai, 1980; Mabogunje, 1983) argue that much of the limited development that has been achieved in these countries has been due in no small measure to non-farm activities of these urban centers. Cities and towns are therefore apprehended not as the cause but only as the scene of social and economic problems, their role being to draw attention to endemic poverty and social degradation which otherwise remain buried and unobtrusive in the rural areas. When it comes to the role of urban planning and policies in resolving these problems, the pervading impression is of the failure of governments in most African countries to make any appreciable impact on the situation, a fact which has in turn provoked serious debates as to the nature of the post-colonial state in Africa (Hyden, 1983).

The Nature of the Dominant Elite in Africa

African countries seem to be constantly groping for the distinctive political paradigm as evinced by the fact that forms of political order have followed each other in rapid succession—the multi-party state, the one party syndrome, the charismatic presidency, the military coup d'etat and in some cases, like that of Nigeria and for a short while in Ghana, a return to civilian rule. The future of the African continent is thus viewed with deep rooted pessimism by political analysts, economists and literary writers. They prophesy in symphony that African countries are catapaulting down the path of political unrest—economic disorder, suspension of human rights, a breakdown of law and order—towards instability and general anomie. In the words of the noted author Chinuah Achebe, in Africa “things fall apart.”1 Dennis Austen using the title of this book for his article, writes that since their inception African states have been in a state of flux moving with regularity in and out of misfortune: The treachery of political life has been very real: armed coups, civil wars, public executions, the threat of secession, the recurrence of famine, the fanaticism of religious beliefs, regional wars, the near genocide of entire communities, the transitory nature of military and party regimes and the indebtedness not only of corrupt dictatorships (as in Zaire) but also of governments that still struggle to preserve an element of political decency in their public life (as in Tanzania).2 The keynote of the criticisms made in this vein3 is the absence of stability and the consequent destabilization, disorganization and anarchy. However, all evidence in the African countries points to the centralization of power and authority which can lead to a kind of stability—i.e. if stability is the only end of government and politics. The post-colonial state in Africa has created strong centralized administrations to weld the various social groups in common structures. The striking feature of post-independence politics to Markovitz, is not the lack of stability, but “indeed from any long range historical perspective the rapidity with which stability has been achieved…. The military coup d'etats and civil wars, appearence of anarchy notwithstanding, have furthered this process of consolidation.”4 The modern African state is one which is increasingly dominated by a powerful public sector, an overpowering bureaucracy and increasing militarization.5 The highly centralized nature of the African state is almost a throwback to the early colonial state. The colonial state was based on patterns of domination, its very raison d'etre was domination. The colonial institutional form consequently was aimed at establishing hegemony over the subject population, together with its essential militarised character and the system of irresistable power and force associated with it. In the Belgian case, the state was known as “Bula Matari” (the crusher of rocks).6 The pre-independence state forms have persisted. The observations of De Tocqueville are brought to mind. To De Tocqueville the 1789 Revolution did not bring an end to the ideas and order of the old regime in France. Springing from the chaos created by the revolution was a powerful institutional framework. Never since the fall of the Roman Empire, he commented, had the world seen a government so highly centralized. This new power was created by the Revolution, or, rather grew up almost automatically out of the havoc wrought by it. True, the governments it set up were less stable than any of those it overthrew; yet paradoxically they were infinitely more powerful.7 In Africa the heritage of colonial politics, namely power-politics, has been taken up by the post-colonial state. The colonial tradition has led to a scheme of affairs in African states where a premium has been placed on the holding and consolidation of political power. Politics has been construed strictly as a “struggle for rulership.”8 Political power is seen as a means of controlling the socio-economic structures of society. What becomes important in this context is the identification of the group that wields power. What is the nature and social basis of this ruling elite? As a pre-requisite to this, is the question as to what is the nature of class in Africa, so that the nature of class domination can be comprehended,