Postcolonial State Research Articles

Immoral schoolgirls, sensual corruption and contestations over gendering the postcolonial Tanzanian state

In early postcolonial Tanzania, female students represented the future of the country and, as such, enjoyed more access to state-sponsored schooling than previous generations; they also developed a distinct youth culture, engaged in state sponsored youth organizations and participated in nation-building activities. At the same time, the new holders of Tanzanian state power, overestimating their reforming capabilities, demanded unprecedented intimacy into the lives of female students and, in the name of nation-building, worked to subject students to their coercive protection through intrusive testing and examination. Those found pregnant were deemed immoral and expelled from school. In response, female school-goers contested such demands over citizenship, highlighted the leaders' hypocrisy and even disregarded government imposed rules. Overall, this article connects gender and generation with the larger project of contesting the development of a new, patriarchal national culture, paradigms of economic development and a new puritanism, a trend evident throughout the postcolonial world.

The lyrics of hunger: Cabo Verdean music as a space for organic remembering

In the Atlantic Ocean island state of Cabo Verde, silence about hunger is perennial. Elderly people who lived through devastating famines during Portuguese colonialism seldom talk about their memories, and contemporary experiences of food deprivation are buried in silence. Yet there is one space in which the silence is broken: music. Exploring that space, this article analyses representations of drought and hunger in Cabo Verdean music and explores the social contexts, positionalities and sentiments that the lyrics evoke. The article portrays the everyday listening to and singing of the lyrics as a kind of ‘organic remembering’ and demonstrates how it contributes to a view of hunger as a key symbol of the nation at the same time as the experience of hunger is surrounded by silence in everyday life. Furthermore, the article brings up the silencing of the Portuguese’ colonial responsibility for the sufferings. It also presents some reasons for this, including Cabo Verde’s hybrid position in the Portuguese empire as an uneasy mixture between a distant and neglected appendage to the metropole and a colony. Finally, it argues that not blaming the ex-colonisers has been an important way forward for the small and dependent postcolonial state.

The October 2020 #EndSARS Protest and the Transformation of the Nigerian State

On October 8, 2020, sequel to a viral video where a young Nigerian was shot and dragged out of a vehicle by officials of SARS, who drove off with the vehicle; Nigerian youths trooped to the streets of Lagos and Abuja etc.; within days it has spread throughout Southern Nigerian with the youths demanding for the end of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) with the hastag: #EndSARS. Within two weeks it had metamorphosed to a number of other hashtags: #EndBadGovernment, #EndCorruption, #LekkiMassacre and others. On October 20, 2020, soldiers of the Nigerian Army, confronted the protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate, Lagos and opened fire point blank on Flag waving and National Anthem singing young Nigerians, killing scores of them. This drew condemnation and outcry in Nigeria and all over the world. Given that the extra-judicial killing of Yusuf Mohammed in 2007 triggered off the Boko Haram insurgency and the killings of IPOB members has also militarised IPOB: killed two DSS officials in Enugu, five Soldiers and scores of police personnel in Obigbo during the post-#EndSARS riot. This paper using the Marxian Post-Colonial State Theory, argues that the method of the #EndSARS protest; its non-visible collegiate leadership and the involvement of young people who are not under and influenced by the commodity mediating Nigerian post-colonial state, will lead to the resolution of the contradiction of the Nigerian state: from a Post-colonial state to a more inclusive state. The study used the qualitative method of study, with secondary data collection and content analysis to analyse data generated.

Leadership, nation-building and war in South Sudan: the problems of statehood and collective will

Leadership, nation-building and war in South Sudan explores the historical contradictions in the foundation of the South Sudanese state as well as the country's future prospects. The book is based on fieldwork research that the author conducted between 2015 and 2018. With a historical approach, Sonja Theron seeks to explain why ‘South Sudan has not known peace since 1955’ (p. 15). Here, the author is alluding to the reigniting of old political feuds, including the outbreak of the civil war in 2013. Theron revisits the history of conquests, slave trade and the Islamic sentiments that propelled the Mahdist revolt of the late 1880s, which she places in the context of the push for independence, which lasted from 1821 until the outbreak of the Sudanese civil war in 1955. With the support of Christian missionaries and the Anya Nya liberation movement in the 1960s, a South Sudanese political consciousness flourished. The book also illustrates how the shaky foundation of the postcolonial state triggered the emergence of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in 1983, with a broad-based alliance against marginalization. Three decades later, the SPLM invoked the right to self-determination for South Sudan's independence in 2011. Crucially, Theron points to the peace agreements that the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediated between 2002 and 2018, and their failure to address the root causes of the conflict. According to the author, IGAD sought to accommodate the political priorities of different factions, which allowed them to continue plundering the state and which ultimately worsened the country's underdevelopment and political fragility.

ETHNO-NATIONALIST MOVEMENTS IN BALUCHISTAN AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON POLITICAL SYSTEM OF PAKISTAN

Post-colonial states has been remained a home to multi ethno lingual and hetero cultural folders. Pakistan is one of the examples, having diversified ethno lingual groupings. It has four provinces and each have a distinct socio, cultural and lingual identity. Currently these Ethno-Nationalist movements have pivotal position in the political life of Baluchistan. The land of Baluchistan has experienced the violent tides of different ethno national and sectarian movements, but communalism in Baluchistan pushes the country toward hot water. Along this, uncountable waves of religious extremism in the region add fuel to fire. Both communalism and religious extremism is proving a thorn in flesh and the major hurdle to strengthen the socio economic political path. The concerned study aims to detect major driving factors that contribute to violent moves and also suggests remedial measures to eradicate yielded crisis. That voices our endeavors to cultivate literacy, harmony, equality, and in short neutralization of ethno national movements. The research concludes that intensity of ethnic rise must be the Centre of our priorities because still the water is in dormant position once it flowed, than it would be an uphill task to bear the aftershocks. This piece is intended to highlight the root cause of ethno nationalism and also the expected nightmare as we had faced in the form of Dhaka’s fall. Keywords: Ethno-nationalism, fragmentation, harmony, regional stability, socio economic political disparities.

Representation and Recognition: State Sovereignty as Performative

What is the relationship between a state’s sovereignty and the recognition of its sovereignty by other states? This article argues that in critical circumstances, the recognition of state sovereignty is performative: recognition helps to bring sovereignty about, paradoxically because it appears merely to reflect it. I outline a performative mechanism of sovereignty, identifying the class of cases that it best explains and the social conditions under which it obtains. Sovereignty is particularly performative for independence movements and revolutionary regimes. And performative claims to sovereignty tend to be recognized when its performers are socially aligned with their audience. This requires a sociology of the agents that represent sovereignty externally, its diplomats, and the wider relations in which they are embedded. I illustrate this argument by analyzing the diplomacy of a revolutionary state, England between 1688 and 1713, in relation to a critical audience, France. Performative sovereignty has implications for the study of state formation and world politics, for theories of revolutionary and postcolonial states, and for the concept of performativity itself.

Cross-Border Lives and the Complications of Citizenship

Abstract This article argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, the postcolonial state in Guinea and the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau came to define national belonging through ideas of “sacrificial citizenship,” ideas that did not correspond with how many borderland residents saw their own geographies. Borderland residents used the border to, for the most part, ignore or complicate territorial concepts of national belonging, while informally putting forward their own geographic conceptions and networks. The history of cross-border migration and mobility during this period illustrates the unfinished nature of postcolonial ideas of citizenship and belonging, and the alternative communities and imaginaries that borderland residents developed after independence in parallel to the modern nation-state. These cross-border networks and spaces offer an example of the contestation of sovereignty and the nation-state in the decades immediately following the independence of West African states.

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Of Ants and Men

Of Ants and Men

Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India during the 1950s and 1960s. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labor, the views of its major proponents, and the processes through which the discipline sought generalized relevance within the postcolonial regime. It also discusses the intersection of managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform and follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. In doing so, the paper examines the modes and rationales through which managerialism established its own normative vocabulary and deployed it for assessing not just the objectives of industrial capital but also the newly consolidating postcolonial state and its developmental ambitions. This circulation of management ideas is analyzed by following the experiments that were conducted in the industrial enterprises of Ahmedabad by a group of textile industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants. Even when, in most cases, such studies on management did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, the paper demonstrates how managerialism maintained its relevance by parallelly turning its focus onto the postcolonial state and its developmental activities. Broadly, the paper argues that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It eventually acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.

Political Orientation in Ecocriticism: National Allegory in Vietnamese Ecofiction by Trần Duy Phiên

Since the late 1990s, theories and practices of ecocriticism have tended to be more politically engaged than in its earliest phase, considering that “environmental problems cannot be solved without addressing issues of wealth and poverty, overconsumption, underdevelopment, and the notion of resource scarcity” (Heise 251-2). This paper engages with the political orientation in ecocriticism by examining presentations of humans and nature in three Vietnamese short stories – “Kiến và người” (The Ants and the Man, 1990), “Mối và người” (The Termite and the Man, 1992), and “Nhện và người” (The Spider and the Man, 2012) by Trần Duy Phiên (born 1942). These presentations center around conflicts between human characters and insect characters, in which the former attempt to dominate and exploit the latter and the latter resist and take revenge on the former. This paper delves into the political context of these presentations which is the Vietnamese government's projects of modernizing the nation since the time it came into power in 1945 and particularly since the time of Reform in 1986. These projects include the making of modern citizens, civilizing the highland, and modernizing the national economy, all have aimed at clearing colonial legacies in material and mental aspects of postcolonial Vietnam. The paper argues that national allegory is a characteristic of Vietnamese ecofiction, which forms Vietnamese intellectuals’ engagement with the postcolonial condition of Vietnam. This argument in its turn affirms political engagements in ecocriticism as a historical situation, particularly in former colonial countries.

Policing Sati: Law, Order, and Spectacle in Postcolonial India

AbstractThis article explores the response of the postcolonial state to the question of widow immolation – sati. It demonstrates that the conversation on the practice of sati at the high point of Hindu law reform in the 1950s reflected the simultaneous pressures on the new democracy to establish rule of law while also accommodating the renewed reverence for tradition and religious custom in an independent nation state. Distinct from the colonial response to sati that treated women as either “helpless and pathetic” or “brave and valiant,” post-independence police records describe women committing sati mostly as “insane” or “not in their senses,” and yet chiefly responsible for their actions. The article contrasts administrative and parliamentary narratives of the crime. Local belief in miracles surrounding the performance of sati not only obscured the experience of the woman's suffering but also made collection of evidence in such a case particularly difficult. This rendered convictions of the abettors of such “painless suicide by insane women” weaker. Legal interventions in sati eventually prompted administrative responses to shift from emphasizing the “uncontrollability” of the spectacle to deeming the spectacle a necessary precondition in distinguishing a sati from suicide.

UN Resolution 1514: the creation of a new post-colonial sovereignty

What role did the post-colonial world play in shaping the contemporary norm of sovereignty? Challenging the traditional understanding of the development of sovereignty as a norm that expanded from Europe, this article recentres the post-colonial contribution to the development of sovereignty. This article first presents the Western powers’ understanding of the norms of sovereign recognition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before outlining the post-colonial states’ efforts to develop new norms in favour of equal sovereignty for the post-colonial world. It does this first by analysing the contribution of the post-colonial world in the shaping of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and how these normative documents were taken up by the post-colonial world to argue for an end of colonial rule. It then provides a history of the normative ideas developed in the post-colonial world in the 1950s, expressed at the Bandung conference (1955) before being normalised into our contemporary understanding of international sovereignty through the passage of United Nations Resolution 1514: The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960. This work addresses the radical disjunctures and enduring continuations between ideas of sovereignty in the colonial and post-colonial eras of international relations.

Delinking ‘the two rupees’: The devaluation dilemma and economic divergence in the decolonized subcontinent, September 1949–February 1951

AbstractBy looking at the September 1949 devaluation dilemma faced by the governments of Pakistan and India, this article argues that it was an early episode of divergence between them following partition. The reasons why Pakistan did not devalue when India did so have remained largely obscured in the historiography. Deeply contested, the decision was a determining event through which the state staked its claim for economic sovereignty, internally and externally. It led to a 17-month-long official trade deadlock, especially in the eastern region of partitioned Bengal. It ended when the two governments established an exchange ratio for the two rupees, no longer at par with each other. This interactive delinking of currencies was symptomatic of the improvisational decoupling of the colonial subcontinent’s post-colonial states. In tracing its trajectory, this article contributes to the inconsiderable literature on why devaluation did not happen in Pakistan, revises the rationale offered, and presents the event as a contingent exercise in economic decolonization, generative of a post-colonial sovereign difference.

Theory and process of socialist migration: local enmities and international friendships in the Vietnam-Bulgaria relations (1975-1985)

ABSTRACT The essay explores the labor-exchange programs between postcolonial and socialist states as a form of moral economy that attempted to reconcile the notions of socialist internationalism and ‘mutually beneficial’ migration. Focusing on the relationship between Vietnam and Bulgaria, the article traces key logics of socialist migration and internationalism that informed, broke, and reshaped the relationships between different units of solidarity. These include links between the Party, mass organizations, and economic enterprises; between economic units, political organizations, and foreign workers; and essentially between the two countries, Vietnam and Bulgaria. The essay contends that the constant renegotiation of the meaning of internationalism between economic enterprises and ministries, on the one side, and the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and foreign workers, on the other, produced two competing logics on whether labor-import from postcolonial states was politically valuable. To explore the clash, I concentrate on the years between 1975–1985, when some voices required the halt of labor exchange programs. This notwithstanding, in this period, the number of Vietnamese workers to arrive in Bulgaria more than tripled. The essay enters the spaces where socialist internationalist theory and the social practice of migration interacted, to make internationalism an open-ended domain.

Sovereignty, freedom, and the problem of blackness in Jamaica

ABSTRACT Within the pursuit of black freedom, this article is concerned with the everyday experiences of the black poor in 21st Century Jamaica. I refer to both this experience and its potential politics as organic blackness. I locate this notion in relation to the coloniality of power in the postcolonial state and to creole nationalism which brought Jamaica to independence. I argue that colonial power norms worked alongside creole nationalism to produce limited sovereignty, particularly concerning the conditions of the black majority on the island. In thinking about what ‘black freedom’ could look like from an ‘organic blackness’ perspective, I question what is demanded by those who live blackness as a lack of resources, space, and power. My interrogation is mainly concerned with the intersection of blackness with poverty and how thinking about sovereignty from below or as ‘people’s sovereignty’ versus ‘state sovereignty’ would construct black spaces as sites of upliftment.

Nigeria’s Bloated Recurrent Expenditure: Interrogating the National Assembly’s Proposed Additional Constituencies for Women

Women representative in Nigeria executive and parliament has since 1999 continuously beaten a spiral downward trend from 35/7% in 2014 to 19/6% in 2021. This has generated debates on the need for mechanisms to engender gender inclusiveness in Nigeria. Therefore, the stride of the National Assembly to proffer a modus Vivendi to this political malaise is a welcome development. However, there are already two contending debates which the National Assembly’s additional constituencies will compound in Nigeria: over bloated recurrent expenditure and National Assembly budget. This paper examines the problems and prospects of the National Assembly’s proposed additional constituencies for women in an era of bloated recurrent expenditure in Nigeria. Using the post-colonial state and women’s empowerment framework of analysis and qualitative method of research, the paper argues that rather that filling the gap of women participation in Nigeria politics, additional constituencies for women shall aggravate two already existing problems in Nigeria: bloated recurrent expenditure, National Assembly budget and two other new ones. This paper concludes that Nigeria’s First Past the Post Electoral System has never engendered inclusive participation anywhere in the world and recommend that the National Assembly should rather change the electoral system to the Proportional Representative System.

Human-Animal Relations and Livestock Disease Management in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, c.1980 to 2022

Abstract The history of livestock disease management strategies in colonial Zimbabwe has generally revealed uneven and racialised access to conventional veterinary facilities that favoured white- over black-owned livestock. In light of this context, this article examines the human-animal relationships that emerged in post-colonial Zimbabwe when access to such facilities was liberalised in a new era in which communal livestock owners still had broken interrelations with the state. In articulating this, it also explores factors that precluded communal livestock farmers from raising 'healthy' livestock. Using qualitative methods, it discusses how the postcolonial state failed to provide robust state veterinary services, and demonstrates communal farmers' agency amidst loss to epizootics and enzootics. As this study will show, livestock diseases and the challenges they posed significantly impacted on how humans (communal farmers) determined which animals to raise and how to raise them. It concludes that livestock diseases and the human-animal relationships that emerged out of the quandary posed by the former, had a negative impact on state-communal livestock farmer relationships, and promoted the continued relevance of otherwise officially despised livestock knowledge regimes in Zimbabwe's communal areas.

The political economy of 'strengthening health services': The view from WHO AFRO, 1951-c.1985.

Our contribution to this special issue examines the early history of international striving for universal health care, from the perspective of the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) Regional Office for Africa (AFRO). The aspiration was repeatedly reframed, from 'strengthening health services' in the 1948 constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO), to 'Health For All' through primary health care (PHC) in the 1970s, to today's articulations of universal coverage and 'health systems strengthening'. We aim to establish how AFRO supported member states in implementing these policies up to the mid-1980s, and with what degree of success. We also compare AFRO's experience to the established historiographical narrative of global health, as over-fixated on vertical interventions, save for the transitory impact of the PHC movement. Using the archives of WHO in Geneva and AFRO in Brazzaville, we first analyse AFRO's influence and capacity through quantitative financial data. The AFRO nations were net recipients of WHO resources, raising questions about their relative autonomy and voice in the organisation. We then examine AFRO's expenditure, showing that though circumscribed by funds with allocated purposes, there was nonetheless a significant proportion committed to services from the early 1960s, specifically capacity for planning and administration and the nursing, maternal and child health workforce. Counter to expectations though, there was no significant boost to these areas, nor to funding PHC projects, in the 1970s/early 1980s, when disease-specific interventions obtained a larger share. Qualitative sources show that despite its slender resources AFRO accomplished much with respect to training, capacity building and supporting innovative service-delivery, while insisting on African policy input into design and implementation. However country level system-wide planning in health was persistently vulnerable, and the bureaucratic capacity of post-colonial states often weak. Thus AFRO's overall impact was decisively bounded by the global structural inequalities in which it operated.

JUDICIAL CORRUPTION, INSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND THE ELECTORAL PROCESS IN NIGERIA

Shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of several African one-party regimes, leaders of a number of African countries began the process of reconstructing the postcolonial African state by embarking on policy and political reforms. This decision was informed by the fact that, since independence, many African countries have been wracked by political and economic crises that have prevented the state from pursuing the rapid growth and economic development needed to fight poverty and material deprivation on the continent. This study argues that while corruption has contributed largely to the development crises in post-independence Nigeria, the problem of judicial corruption is a major impediment to the attainment of sustainable electoral reform in Nigeria. The study substantiates this hypothesis by citing instances of corruption in the Election Petition Tribunals of the 2003 and 2007 general elections in Nigeria. It is submitted that corruption in the judiciary helps to undermine electoral reform by ensuring that the decisions of the Election Petition Tribunals are compromised and the mandate of the people is subverted. Suggestions are offered to reform of the Nigerian electoral process with a view to fighting corruption in the judiciary.