African Upheavals Since Independence

Grace Stuart Ibingira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429727863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Grace Ibingira seeks the fundamental causes of the widespread upheavals (at least thirty-eight army coups in the past fifteen years) in African states today and finds them in the inadequate colonial preparation of African leaders for the responsibilities of independence, the earlier practices of "divide and raie, and the "winner-take-all policies o

Part 1
The Nature of the Colonial Legacy

1
Introduction

It is not an overstatement to say that the principal purpose of African colonization was the material enrichment of the European colonizers, and that the welfare of the indigenous people was often irrelevant, or at best secondary, to the colonizers’ needs. Yet it is constantly argued in justification of colonialism that the colonizers were equally motivated to promote the welfare of the indigenous peoples. Such great proconsuls of colonial rule as Lord Lugard claimed that the mission of colonization was a “dual mandate":

Civilized nations have at last recognized that while on the one hand the abounding wealth of the tropical regions of the earth must be developed and used for the benefit of mankind, on the other hand an obligation rests on the controlling power not only to safeguard the material rights of the natives, but to promote their moral and educational progress.¹

How genuine was this “dual mandate"? In the first place, it was self-imposed and unilateral on the part of the colonizers, for although it is true that in some cases a colonial power was invited by a local ruler to assume jurisdiction — as did Kabaka Mutesa I of Buganda — it is on the whole equally true that the majority of African societies did not invite colonial rule, that they did not have a say in meaningfully formulating the terms of this “dual mandate.” Consequently, its terms were disproportionately in favor of the colonial rulers. Admittedly, some of its principles were constructive, such as promoting the moral and educational progress of the “natives.” And yet the level that these worthy goals attained was largely determined by a fundamental desire to make the colonies viable and profitable. Nowhere was it considered in the founding and consolidation of these empires that the indigenous people were to be systematically trained and educated in the art of governing themselves, or that they were destined to be independent in some new state structure after a long and purposeful training in self-government.

Furthermore, the claim that the dual mandate was “to safeguard the material rights of the natives” has very important qualifications and exceptions. The naked exploitation of Africans in such areas as South Africa, Rhodesia, and, to some extent until shortly before independence, Kenya, provides real reservations to this claim. Besides, who determined the fairness of the prices Europe had to pay for the “abounding wealth of the tropical regions"? An economic system both domestic and international had been established by European powers in which they alone, to the exclusion of the African, determined the price of Africa’s raw materials. The result was a system of unjust economic enrichment for the colonizers that subsisted into the postindependence era and provided the young African states with the grievances and justifications to demand a new economic order.

Often attempts have been made to distinguish between different types of colonial rule in Africa. Some, like the French, have been said to have ruled colonial people “directly” through French administrators, while others, like the British, were supposed to have ruled “indirectly” through the indigenous systems of government. Furthermore, it is said that the French aimed at transforming their colonials into Frenchmen, unlike the British, who preserved the local identities of the ruled. Contrasts go on and on. But was there really a lasting fundamental difference in the nature of colonialism as practiced by the different European powers? Empirical reality seems to prove the contrary as these differences often become more academic than real. For instance, the claim that the British ruled their colonials indirectly can be misleading. While it is true that they made greater use of local institutions where they were well established, there was no doubt in the minds of both the ruler and the ruled that the actual power was with the colonizer. Moreover, part of the typical routine of a British administrator was to tour his area, hold large public gatherings of the people and their chiefs with whom he communicated directly. On the other hand, the French, who supposedly ruled directly, did not altogether ignore the services and uses of traditional rulers in governing their people. While administrative circles were purposely constituted without regard to tribal boundaries, on the ground that any other course might encourage “separatist traditions,” from the 1950s onwards French colonial administrators began using chiefs with local support among their people.² Because the number of Frenchmen available to administer a vast empire was necessarily limited by the great expense of staffing a colony, France had to rely on indigenous chiefs for governing the colonies and to this extent, an element of indirect rule was unavoidable.

Again, the capacity of French assimilative colonial policies to turn blacks into Frenchmen should not be exaggerated. It is ture that a small black elite was transformed into Frenchmen. As early as 1848, some 12,000 Africans in Senegal had become French citizens who could send representatives to the Parliament in Paris. And yet, nearly a century later, there were only 78,000 black French citizens in Senegal and only 2,400 in the rest of the French West African empire.³ Given the fact that over 85 percent of the populations in these territories lived and still live in their ancestral home areas and that the literacy rate even now, a decade and a half after independence, is less than 25 percent in Senegal and the Ivory Coast, the overwhelming majority of Africans remain African. Similarly, the English claim of not creating “British Africans” is not without some limitation, because there were some elite groups produced in British colonies in Africa and Asia who were as British as some French African colonials were French.⁴

For the preponderant majority of Africans, colonial rule was fundamentally the same, not only in its operation but also most especially in its legacy. To all the ethnic groups or nationalities who had previously lived as a sovereign people, it meant the loss of sovereignty. Everywhere there was denigration of local culture. Local populations were divided. There were those who stood their ground and fought heroically against overwhelming odds with spears against guns, like the Ashanti in Ghana, the Banyoro in Uganda, and the emirates of northern Nigeria; there were others who chose to collaborate with the invading colonizers to advance their interests, as did the Fanti in Ghana and the Baganda in Uganda. And, much later, there were the nationalists who agitated or fought for independence from colonial rule.

One of the most adverse consequences of colonization was the arbitrary partitioning of Africa by the colonizing powers in their scramble for an empire. The boundaries of the present African states were drawn in European capitals with predominantly political, strategic, and commercial interests of the colonizers in mind, almost totally disregarding whether any ethnic group was cut up into pieces by the new frontier lines. The problematic legacy was that the ethnic groups of an overwhelming majority of African states, except where they border a geographical impediment like the sea or desert, are split up into different states on all the four corners of the compass. The colonizers completely disregarded which nationalities or ethnic groups might or might not live compatibly together within a given boundary. There was no consideration of the fact that African societies had systems of government and social organization as diverse as the groups themselves. Notwithstanding the relative homogeneity of a few African colonies like Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and particularly Somalia, when the process of African partition was complete, there were within each colony many diverse ethnic groups with their own distinct cultures and political systems, ranging from groups who knew only loose extended families as a system of administering themselves to groups with relatively sophisticated centralized kingdoms. As our examples will show, some of those grouped together in one colonial entity were inveterate enemies in precolonial times. Thus the new Africa was made up of artificial entities that were to form the future independent states.

Having thus created and shaped the colonies, to what extent did the colonizers develop and promote methods to foster intergroup, interethnic harmony among the diverse nationals they had forcibly and arbitrarily brought together? To what extent were these colonial peoples conversant with and trained to administer the national institutions intended to regulate and resolve interethnic competition and conflict? To what extent were they in fact prepared to share a common nationhood on independence?

The Concept of Preparation: Myths and Realities

There is some controversy as to whether European colonial powers deliberately prepared African colonies for independence. Among some academics the British system is credited with having been more benevolent, leaning toward a greater devolution of power to colonials than others. Distinguished colonial administrators like the late Sir Andrew Cohen, while claiming there was a process of preparation for independence, conceded that the colonial powers had erroneously assumed unlimited time within which to do it. But there are others who persuasively argue that the idea of preparation was an afterthought.⁵ What is the truth? It is the central argument of this book that there was no well-conceived, systematic preparation of the colonies to shoulder the responsibilities of nationhood. There was therefore little foundation to help withstand the destabilizing problems of independence. In any given state there are two types of resources: human and material. The material legacy of colonial rule was not insubstantial; some of the positive, statistical records of colonial rule will be discussed later on. It is this material record of the infrastructures of the new states that apologists for colonialism cite in its defense. And yet it should not be forgotten that in order to exploit the resources for their own benefit, the colonizers had to establish an infrastructure and the natives had to be trained and educated in order to make the venture profitable and worthwhile. It is significant that even great missionaries who espoused the conversion of the “dark continent” to Christianity as their primary goal were in reality engaged in a dual mission. As the famous David Livingstone put it, there was a prospect before them of “opening Africa for commerce and the gospel.”⁶ If one wishes to refute the charge that the primary reason for developing the colonies’ material resources was not mainly to benefit the colonial powers, and that the beneficial results to the Africans were not largely consequential, one has to show that Africans were indeed fully prepared for independence, prepared to manage the modern infrastructure left behind, and systematically trained in the art of government to better manage their multiethnic communities.

There can be no doubt that the most important resource of any state, developed or developing, is its people. The degree to which they are trained to manage their affairs in private and public life ultimately determines the extent to which they can develop and enjoy the material resources of their country. If, as was predominantly the case with the African states, people were denied the opportunity to exercise and share responsibility and power at the highest levels of government, which determine the stability of the state, and if the future leaders of Africa played a passive, marginal, or merely supportive role throughout the colonial experience, it logically follows that such a people — especially having been brought together in such an artificial manner — run a great risk of a destabilizing postindependence experience. The new leaders’ main qualifications were their anticolonial sentiments, but that was no substitute for acquiring the art of good government or knowing the uses and limits of political power. It is this lack of sound preparation for the crucial functions of government together with the inclination of many postindependence leaders to monopolize power at all costs that have more than anything else accounted for most of the instability in postindependence Africa.

Once the foundations of a stable government are negated, it becomes secondary to talk of the blessings of material inheritance from colonial rule. For instance, of what wholesome benefit was the infrastructure left by colonial rule to the more than one million Nigerians who perished in that country’s civil war? The railways and roads may have been useful to transport contending armies as they slaughtered Nigerian citizens on either side and the hospitals may have saved the lives of the combatants only so that they might be strong enough to kill again. Of what value was the material legacy to the thousands of Ugandans who have perished since the 1966 revolution? What benefits did such material legacies confer on the thousands who have been arbitrarily detained and reduced to nonpersons in the land of their birth across the length and breadth of Africa as a result of bad, inexperienced government?^* The precondition for enjoying the material blessings of colonial rule was availability of leaders experienced in good government, which did not exist. Indeed, because of bad government, rather than becoming an asset the benefits sometimes carried seeds of discord and conflict as postindependence leaders sought to monopolize them rather than share them equitably throughout their societies.

For this reason I will focus subsequent discussion predominantly on the shortcomings and problems that were created by the excessive delay of colonial powers in meaningfully involving Africans in learning how to govern a modern, multiethnic state.

Although I will dwell on these shortcomings, it is important to mention two fundamental positive aspects of colonial rule that permeated the entire colonial experience of most states. The first was the introduction of a set of values and ideals that had successfully governed a metropolitan society: liberty, justice, and representative government. The fact that the African was denied these in varying degrees does not detract from the fact that he was taught of their existence. Indeed the whole challenge of colonial rule was based primarily on the Africans’ insistence to be permitted to live by these values and ideals. This is not to say that the ideals of Western society, rooted in the Christian teachings though they are, are not without shortcomings, but at their very best they contributed the fundamental philosophical guideposts by which most postindependence leaders have tried or have claimed to try to steer their nations.

The second positive legacy was the inculcation of a sense of orderly government, even if it was basica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 The Nature of the Colonial Legacy
• Part 2 The Politics and Practices of Winner-Take-All and Their Consequences
• Part 3 The Future: Some Lessons and Some Basic Principles
• Notes