Self-determination, prosperity and progress – this was the dream of African independence. For a people who had for many centuries been little more than objects of external rivalries, independence was an opportunity to prove, in the words of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s head of government in 1961, that ‘the African was capable of running his own affairs; fighting his own battles and developing his own people’ (Davidson 1964). Kwame Nkrumah, the founding father of Ghana, came to symbolize this new-found confidence. Upon hearing in 1957 that Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire favoured greater fraternity with France rather than full independence, Nkrumah’s advice to him was unambiguous: ‘seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be added unto you’ (Busia 1967). The advice, though heady, must be seen in the context of the time; the whole colonial system functioned on the conviction that the Europeans were superior, that their subjects – who by definition were inferior – neither understood nor wanted self-government. For leaders of the African independence movements, therefore, independence was an opportunity to demonstrate not only their qualities as human beings, but also their competence as state managers. Again Nkrumah offers insight: ‘with self government, we’ll transform Africa into a paradise in ten years’ (Nkrumah 1957).
The wheels of fate did not permit Nkrumah a full decade of power. By the time of his political demise in 1966, Ghana was far from being a paradise, locked, as it was, into a pattern of corruption, stagnation and conflict, which persists to the present. Today, it is hard to escape the painful reality that ‘all else’ has not followed. The early optimism has long faded, the enormous challenge of self-government, nation-building and development assuming ever more challenging realities in a fundamentally transformed continental and global landscape. In the interim, Claude Ake offers the following indictment of post-colonial rule: ‘indigenous leaders are responsible for a perverse alienation, the delinking of leaders from followers, a weak sense of national identity and the perception of the government as a hostile force’ (Ake 1996). The resulting social decay presents a dramatic picture of insecurity for ordinary people in circumstances where states have proved either unable to provide their protection or in some cases were the principal sources of violence.
A common theme runs through virtually all the predictions made of the continent. The vast landmass appears to be cited in order to stress its transience or decrepitude, as if some curse of dubious scientific basis had been laid on political analysis of the whole continent. Ignored by theoreticians and discredited by militant attackers of imperialism whose dialectical reasoning proved Africa’s impotence in global politics, the continent now appears to exist only as a reminder of the failures of indigenous rule. In retrospect, even the colonial regimes have gained a certain measure of respect: Johnson U. J. Asiegbu, for example, found it possible to contrast the ‘patriotism and probity, […] self-discipline’ and other remarkable ideals of public responsibility of the colonial period with the ‘bad and dishonest examples, […] the criminal wastage, the fraudulent and selfish mismanagement of the continent’s resources practised by the new “predatory elites” in post-colonial Africa’ (Asiegbu 1984).
There is no denying the facts to which these conclusions speak: to the extent that international calculations of national poverty indices can be trusted, Africans are not yet the poorest people in the world. Only 23 per cent of the continent’s population of 850 million were classified by the World Bank as poor in 2010; this proportion is nowhere close to the 40 per cent poverty-afflicted population among Asia’s 2.2 billion people (World Bank 2010). Yet Africa’s consistently declining rates of economic productivity and surging population growth portend deepening impoverishment, compared with South Asia, where an increase in per capita income is already evident. Moreover, for most people, the heart-rending pictures of starving children in Ethiopia or young people suffering from the debilitating and dehumanizing effects of the HI virus (HIV), the atrocities of Darfur or Rwanda, the absurd posturing of Robert Mugabe or Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir make up the primary picture of the continent.
In reality, there is more to modern Africa than a vast list of failures. Undoubtedly, self-rule as perverted by indigenous African elites is an important factor in accounting for the continent’s current malaise, but is it any more so than the legacies of colonialism or Africa’s place in the global economy? Through much of the continent, ordinary people and officials are grappling with a host of issues and crises within the financial and technical limitations that lie so heavily upon them. Political parties and civil society organizations operate in many countries, by no means always under the oppressive gaze of dictatorial or autocratic regimes, as is sometimes commonly supposed outside the continent. Local communities discuss seriously the problems of education, health and livelihoods, while resolving conflicts and pushing for compromises as the need arises. In short, a real learning curve can be discerned. Governments have finally started to sift sense out of nonsense. They have, in the words of former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, ‘begun to take responsibility for their misguided actions while recognising that their countries are bleeding from self-inflected wounds’ (Poku 2013).
The chapters that make up this book are better viewed as a series of interpretative essays that draw on a variety of sources with the explicit aim of placing, within an overall perspective, a broad range of modern political developments on the African continent. Yet the book is neither intended as a chronology of history nor a chronological study of contemporary events; both tasks are too vast and complex for any single volume. Besides, there are many books currently available; this means that the specialist and even the non-specialist will be aware of the many omissions in these pages. We are aware of them ourselves. Yet those omissions may be forgiven for the sake of clarity and readability within a relatively short volume, which is designed to offer a framework for understanding contemporary events and issues. Accordingly, what follows here is a rather modest attempt to equip readers with a sound understanding of continental themes which will enable them to analyse and make sense of their complexities, and objectively contribute to some of the major debates that preoccupy scholars of the continent.
A central feature of our analysis, therefore, is an exploration of the interplay between contingency (the unintended effects of colonial legacies); choice (the corrosive effects of post-colonial policies, leadership and governance); and the structural influences on development (Africa in the global economic system). It may be charged that such an argument risks encouraging the tendency to find excuses for failure on the African continent in the heritage of colonialism or the machinations of outside forces, and that it is time we stopped blaming everything on the colonial past. To this charge our response comes in the form of a responsibility to focus on the failings of Africa’s political elites; to analyse which of the many failings are intrinsic to the condition in which colonialism left the continent and which, given clearer purpose and properly pursued, might have been surmounted. In the process we shall examine the state structures built up during the colonial period and taken over at the time of independence and how, in the phase of decolonization and beyond, African elites have sought to utilize their power.
The size and variety of the African continent, which makes any generalization difficult, is perhaps too obvious a point to labour. However, it is the necessary starting point. No matter how they are viewed, the people of Africa are arranged into patterns of great diversity. The shortest-statured people in the world (Pygmoids) live in close proximity to the tallest (Tutsi). Skin tones vary widely across the continent. Subsistence modes cover a spectrum from Palaeolithic-like hunting and gathering to nomadic pastoralism, to shifting cultivation, to paddy-rice cultivation, to livestock ranching, to dairy farming, and to all the occupations associated with urban industrial society. Islam, in its several traditions, and all conceivable forms of Christianity are intermixed with traditional forms of worship, and in some cases the contact has produced ‘new’ forms of syncretic religions. This recitation could be continued almost indefinitely and represents only a snapshot of the richness of the African experience.
For some students in the West, this awareness of Africa’s utterly unfamiliar environment can easily produce a despairing conviction that it is impossible to understand people and societies so different. Such a lament is understandable, but it is necessarily defeatist. It also negates the central principle of social sciences; by observation, careful probing and empathy, good scholars can detach themselves from the confines of their own history and enter into the perceptions and prejudices of those they study. It is not easy and no doubt mistakes will be made. Yet to deny the possibility is to condemn us to wallowing in the backwaters of our own narrow worlds; this applies equally to some African scholars who sometimes despair about oversimplification and exaggerated portrayal of their continent by outsiders.
In reading this book, our hope is that a general reader will gain sufficient understanding of the complex political history of the continent to enable them to fit the confusing array of men and events into a framework of general patterns. For the serious student of Africa, we hope to use the empirical analysis of recent African political history to throw some light on general principles.
The book is divided into five chapters. The first two provide a foundational analysis relating to the intellectual political economy and history of the African continent. They consider the formation of the African state and its evolution since pre-colonial times to the present day. In doing so, we seek to contextualize our analysis of contemporary political challenges in Africa in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. In a short volume such as this, space is never sufficient to satisfy every point of analysis or pertinent and important issue. Our perspective always attempts to complexify rather than simplify, to present a holistic yet digestible analysis and to raise more questions than answers.