Politics in Africa

A New Introduction

Nana Poku, Anna Mdee

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780329314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy, prosperity and self-rule, this was the vision of African independence. Across the continent, however, the 'optimism' that characterized the immediate post-independence period has largely faded. Meanwhile, ordinary Africans lurch between undemocratic, unaccountable and unresponsive governments and a decaying traditional African past. How did things go so wrong? Why has the continent lagged behind others in economic development despite its potential natural resources? Why are so many African states prone to conflict? And why has democracy been slow to take root in a majority of the countries? Covering everything from African economies to the role of the state, rural livelihoods to issues of gender, 'Politics in Africa' offers a fresh perspective in answering these questions, making the continent's problems more understandable, less wretched and even intensely hopeful. Up-to-date, concise and provocative, this is indispensable reading for anyone interested in African politics.

ONE

Colonialism, racism and African resistance

It is surprising for many students that most of the African continent was under European control for less than a seventy-year period and that the Congress of Berlin which initiated this took place just over 120 years ago. Yet in this relatively short period, massive changes took place on the continent that not only established the immediate context of African politics, but also continue to constrain and shape its future to this day. The purpose of this chapter is not to detail Africa’s colonial history or indeed its many legacies, but to outline some of the debates around each, which have relevance for our understanding of Africa today. We need to consider the explanations of the ‘scramble’ and of the colonization that followed the Congress of Berlin in 1884 within the context of ideology, commerce, resistance and liberation. In so doing, the chapter will highlight two things: impact and continuity. It draws obvious attention to the impact of the years of imperial rule, but the chapter also assumes an element of continuity, a degree of initiative and autonomy, on the part of those subject to foreign rule. Importantly, both forces – impact and continuity – established the environment for politics of the new state at the time of independence – the subject of the next chapter.

The scramble for Africa

Colonialism is a general term signifying domination and hegemony, classically in the form of political rule and economic control on the part of a European state over territories and peoples outside Europe. The earliest forms of colonialism in this sense (not all empires were colonial empires) were exhibited in the New World by Spain and Portugal, although classical colonialism flowered later only in conjunction with the rise of global capitalism, manifested in the rule by European states over various polities in Asia and Africa. Imperialism as a term is sometimes seen as interchangeable with colonialism, even as it has often been used to focus on the economic, and specifically capitalist, character of colonial rule. Colonialism itself has sometimes been reserved for cases of settler colonialism, where segments of the dominant population not only rule over, but settle in, colonial territories. However, most scholars agree that colonialism was in fact a form of rule that was most often not accompanied by European settlement, and that the term ‘colonialism’ entails sustained control over a local population by states that were interested in neither settlement nor assimilation.

Allied to both colonialism and imperialism was the notion of enlightenment; more precisely, discovery and reason. Reason gave discovery a justification and a new meaning, but it also took its expanding global laboratory for granted. Science flourished in the eighteenth century not merely because of the intense curiosity of individuals working in Europe, but because colonial expansion both necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of the scientific imagination. It was through discovery – the seeking, surveying, mapping, naming and ultimately possessing – of new regions that science itself could open new territories of conquest, among them cartography, geography, botany, philology and anthropology. As the world was literally shaped for Europe through cartography – which, writ large, encompassed the narration of ship logs and route maps, the drawing of boundaries, the extermination of ‘natives’, the settling of peoples, the appropriation of property, the assessment of revenue, the raising of flags, and the writing of new histories – it was also parcelled into clusters of colonized territories to be controlled by increasingly powerful European nations, the Dutch, French and British in particular.

With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see how European intellectuals became colonialism’s greatest champions. Hegel (1956), for example, in his introduction to The Philosophy of History, offers the following: ‘The Negro represents natural man in all his wild and untamed nature. If you want to treat and understand him right, you must abstract all elements of respect and morality and sensitivity – there is nothing remotely humanised in the Negro’s character […] nothing confirms this judgement more than the reports of missionaries.’

In other words, if Europeans were enslaving and treating Africans as they did, Africans had to be thought of as animals or at best subhuman; the God-fearing Caucasian was incapable of treating ‘brothers in Christ’ in such inhuman ways (Eze 1997). Arguably, it was this inversion of reason and morality which set the scene for the advent of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific racism with surprising effect on the European intellectual class. Liberals like Hobson cast their vote against empire, while Marx, ambiguously, regarded imperialism as morally repugnant, but historically progressive. Similarly, Mill had no difficulties in accepting that the civilized had special rights over, but also obligations towards, barbarians and savages, while also advocating a world order based on the right of national self-determination.

Africans resisted colonialism. They resisted it by force and they resisted it culturally and intellectually. There were many examples of this type of resistance. They ranged from the rising by the Mahdists in the Sudan (General Gordon and all that, 1884) through religious oppositional cults such as Mumboism in Kenya (1913–58) to refusal to pay hut and head tax in many places, refusal to work on plantations and to adopt agricultural and other types of innovation, and, perhaps of greatest lasting importance, the development of ‘voluntary associations’ in most parts of Africa, urban organizations which quickly took on a quasi or explicitly political complexion. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, African-ness and ‘the negro’ were well established as low points in the consciousness of Europe. W. E. B. Du Bois (1964: 39) was later to conclude that ‘never in modern times has [so] large a section of [any society] so used its combined intellectual energies to the degradation of [black humanity]’.

As Edward Said suggests in his book Orientalism (1979), if ‘the Orient’ was created as an object to be studied as exotic and ‘other’, and thus alienated from the mainstream of the world (meaning European) history, then this is also true of Africa. What we see is cultural dehumanization and alienation in the European perception of Africa. It is this dehumanization which explains why the cultural battle was so important and shows us how brave were people who raised dissenting voices to the imperial orthodoxies (as were those European intellectuals who allied themselves with this view). In his important survey of ‘African and Third World theories of imperialism’, Thomas Hodgkin suggests the following periodization of such resistance: the late nineteenth century (writers such as Blyden) in the period of imperial expansion; 1900–45, the period of partially effective colonial domination, notably the francophone African writers associated with the cultural/political movement known as négritude, including Lamine (Leopold) Senghor, Emile Faure, Garan Kouyaté and Aimé Césaire; and the post-1945 phase, concerned with the more active political leaders, Kwame Nkrumah (Towards Colonial Freedom, emphasizing pan-African ideals), Julius Nyerere (Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism, emphasizing African socialism) and Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), who concerns himself with the impact of colonialism on the personalities of the colonized and the colonizers (Owen and Sutcliffe 1972). Most of this thought in the twentieth century was to a greater or lesser degree influenced by Marxism, which is unsurprising as this was the main oppositional ideology, with its own power bloc.

An important intellectual/cultural/political strand, most of all among francophone Africans, is identified with the name of Senghor. Senghor (b. 1906), a colonized French soldier, member of the French National Assembly, poet, member of the Académie Française, later president of Senegal, was representative of much in the whole culture of négritude. He was very intellectual, scholarly, literary and French. The titles of his essays indicate the seriousness of his thought and also the debt it owes to French culture: ‘African metaphysic’, ‘The relevance of Marx to Africa’, ‘No political liberation without cultural liberation’. However, the point about négritude is that it arose in response to French assimilationist policies (turning Africans into Frenchmen) and said there is much in African culture which is important and valuable. Arguably it was a step in a dialectical movement, which sought to bring white and black together in a classless society.

As such, the notion that négritude was racist is profoundly inaccurate. In truth, the movement was not a negation of others; rather it was an affirmation of Africa’s contribution to the universal culture. As Senghor says, ‘Africa’s misfortune has been that our secret enemies, in defending their values, have made us despise our own.’ Whereas in fact: ‘Négritude is a part of Africanity. It is made of human warmth. It is democracy quickened by the sense of communion and brotherhood between men. More deeply, in works of art, which are a people’s most authentic expression of themselves, it is sense of image and rhythm, sense of symbol and beauty’ (Senghor 1950).

It was ultimately this curious identity of interest between the diasporic character of the disciples of négritude and the fact that French was the only medium available to them to communicate which created the impression of racism. By adopting the French language, these writers found themselves in the paradoxical situation of espousing the very culture that they appeared to be bent on rejecting. As Sartre points out, ‘they speak in order to destroy the language in which the oppressor is present: their main project is to “de-gallicize” its signifiers’ (Sartre 1979).

A more recent development from this tradition in an unexpected form appears in the work of Bernal. In his book Black Athena (1991), Bernal suggests that before the late eighteenth century in Europe, it was well known that classical Greece was deeply rooted culturally and linguistically to the south and the east, in Ancient Egypt (Africa) and in Palestine (Phoenicians, Jews), rather than in some northern invasion. The response to this knowledge in the nineteenth century and after was to suppress it because it did not fit in with European racial prejudices. Bernal does not make this argument lightly; he supports it with a wealth of scholarship. The impact of the book among black American intellectuals has been enormous. Bernal has become a cause célèbre. In some American departments of black studies, people are now taught that all knowledge comes from Africa and that all European knowledge is to be dismissed as racist (although some of it certainly is). This, in our view, is as racist a response as any other and a response that threatens to throw out the rational baby with the white racist bathwater.

The facts are that Bernal’s book redresses the balance. Used wrongly, it leads to irrationalism. Now this is perhaps an obscure example, but the unbalancing effect of recognizing racism in scholarship and then dismissing all scholarship is more profound in another area, the research on AIDS. In their book AIDS, Africa and Racism (1989), R. and R. Chirimuuta argue that most of the research on AIDS in Africa has tended to blame Africa and Africans for the disease, and that this is a racist conspiracy, when in fact AIDS may well be the result of escapes from germ warfare laboratories – see Chapter 5. There seems little evidence for this latter point. What does seem to be the case is that HIV may have originated in Africa, that around 38 million people are infected, and that the Western press has often made, and continues to make, the link between sexuality, race and disease. However, all this should not lead us to dismiss the results of research that produces information of use in fighting an epidemic disease. The point is that just because the balance has gone one way (suppressing African history and culture, racism) we should always be careful not to let the balance swing the other way in order to assuage our liberal consciences. We must remain critical of the way that all knowledge is constructed.

However, the more pointedly political expressions of African thought in the period before independence and in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the socialistic and pan-African nature of African thought and tradition. The two most influential writers here are probably Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, although Senghor’s On African Socialism was also important. The former, educated in Britain, leader of the Ghanaian independence movement and first president of Ghana, emphasized the need for African unity and a common position vis-à-vis the imperialists; Nyerere (1968) argued that African culture had always been socialist, thus:

In our traditional African society we were individuals within a community. We took care of the community and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men and in rejecting the capitalist attitudes of mind which colonialism brought into Africa, we must reject also the capitalist methods which go with it. To us in Africa land was always recognised as belonging to the community […] the foundation and the objective of African socialism is the extended family.

These important philosophical positions, pan-Africanism and socialism, were the organizing principles of the independence struggles and the early years after independence. In Tanzania, the idea received its fullest expression in the official policy of ujamaa, and it is here that we learn a depressing lesson. Ujamaa turned into statist direction of the peasantry; in Ghana, the Convention People’s Party became a site of corruption and oppression. Pan-Africanism received much formal support, but the institutions were not developed. Indeed, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its successor the African Union (AU) have remained ineffective and conservative, while African states have had diverse interests and have been the plaything of individual rulers and the victims of dabbling by foreign powers. With the changes in South Africa, even that unifying issue has become a less certain reference point.

The colonial impress

By the midpoint of the nineteenth century, the European political elite had accepted the civilizing logic of imperialism as propagated by the intellectual class. Empires were, therefore, justified on the basis of good government and the transmission, through education, of civilizing values. As a result, Africa would exist in the European psyche as the barbaric Other, and the point is not whether it had foundation in either logic or reason; it simply offered the legitimacy for the politics of dominance to be pursued against people of difference. At no point was this more evident than in the lead up to the Congress of Berlin of 1884. In the decade leading up to the conference, the chief instigator, King Leopold II of Belgium, summoned a conference in Brussels to which he invited representatives from Europe and America to launch what came to be known as the International African Association. There, in 1876, King Leopold II spoke as a humanitarian, and as one interested in geographic exploration for the sake of science: ‘To open to civilization the only part of the globe where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness shrouding entire populations, that is, if I may venture to say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.’

However, from beneath King Leopold II’s affable altruism there peeped the true intent of European interest in Africa:

Among those who have most closely studied Africa, a good many have been led to think that there is advantage to the common object they pursued if they could be brought together for the purpose of conference with the object of regulating the march, combining the effort, deriving some profit from all circumstances, and from all resources, and finally, in order to avoid doing the same work twice over. (Legum 1961)

Leopold’s persuasive approach dovetailed with that of Prince Otto von Bismarck, the then Chancellor of Germany, intent on preventing any of the large European competitors from gaining advantage in Africa. Under King Leopold of Belgium’s pretext of settling the narrow issue of Congo, the Congress of Berlin became the Magna Carta of the colonial powers in Africa. Because the Congress made effective control of territory the test of ownership, the continent was rapidly occupied and divided. As a result, any European power which, by treaty or conquest, picked out a choice bit of Africa would be recognized as its lawful ruler, provided no other power had already laid claim to it. ‘We have been giving mountains and rivers and lakes to each other,’ British prime minister Lord Salisbury admitted after the Congress, ‘unhindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were’ (cited in Midwinter 2006). They were unhindered as well by the fact that all these lands belonged to others. Over the next fifteen or so years, the European powers consolidated their coastal enclaves and expanded them into the interior. Basically, this involved pushing the borders along the coast until they collided with another European power’s borders and then drawing points of contact inland.

Within their colonial boundaries, the colonizers constructed African economies to serve European rather than African interests and integrated African markets into the global division of labour. As large-scale plantations developed and expanded on the continent in order to service European demands, there was also an influx of a significant number of European settlers. These settlers were concentrated heavily in the eastern and southern parts of the continent, as well as in Algeria. Although their numbers were relatively small, paradoxically this was a major source of strength. It provided a very effective way of preserving the assumption of white superiority on which the whole edifice of colonial administration depended. The patents for the administrative grids fashioned in London or Paris, in Brussels or Lisbon, varied in style and design, but colonialism in its different variations (see Table 1.1) was either direct or indirect rule with the norm being a mix of the two.

Direct rule usually involved the breakdown of traditional structures of power and authority, which wer...