An Introduction to African Politics
It has now been more than half a century since the newly independent states of sub-Saharan Africa first emerged onto the world stage as independent nations, beginning a process of political liberation that spanned nearly 40 years. The bulk of the continent threw off the shackles of colonial rule between the mid-1950s and late 1960s, with the fall of the Portuguese empire in 1974 sparking the later decolonizations in southern Africa, culminating in the ending of apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994. The prospects for the political development and economic growth of Africa’s ‘new’ nations has remained a key element in scholarship on the region ever since, highlighted most recently in the creation of Africa’s two youngest nations – the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia in the 1990s, and South Sudan’s separation from its northern neighbour in 2011.
Africa’s politics has been in flux over all these years, as the transitions from colonial rule and liberation first saw the emergence of fragile and short-lived democratic structures, which in turn were typically swept aside by military rulers and one-party states in the 1970s. By the 1980s, Africa had become synonymous with an image of bad government, poverty, and economic stagnation, problems that structural adjustment only partially addressed. Then, in the early 1990s, Africa entered its second major political transition of the twentieth century – a return to electoral democracy, driven by both internal pressures for change and external global forces brought to bear at the end of the Cold War. Two decades on, Africa is still in the midst of this latest political transition, with most of its countries now identified as democracies, but ones that are still struggling to consolidate and strengthen their democratic practices and institutions.
The turmoil of transition marks African politics in the current century, and the study of these processes – the successes and the failures, the triumphs and the setbacks – has given enormous impetus to the growth of political studies on the continent. To understand politics in Africa one must grapple with the limitations of the African state; the strength of ethnic identities and their influence on political behaviour; the prevalence of conflict and civil wars; the delicate politics of peacebuilding; the struggles for economic development and political democracy; and the reasons for and the implications of the continent’s continued international marginalization. All of these themes are covered in this collection of essays, which focuses on the most important contemporary debates and current controversies.
Africa’s politics are now widely studied and extensively written about, but scholars are inevitably still constrained by their sources. One of the most significant barriers to political research in Africa has been the difficulty of collecting accurate and comprehensive data, and it is a problem that has both limited our knowledge of specific processes and restricted our ability to draw meaningful comparative insights. Authoritarian governments are not known for their willingness to open their archives or talk to researchers, and Africa has had more than its fair share of such regimes. In countries such as Angola, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, state control has made it extremely difficult – and at times impossible – for scholars to function. Within Africa itself there is a dearth of university departments of politics, in part because the study of politics has not always been welcomed by military dictators and one-party rulers. In other conflict-prone countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia, it has often been too dangerous for researchers to spend the necessary time on the ground. Even where the research environment has been more hospitable, reliable census data and economic indicators have been conspicuous by their absence. Moreover, in Africa the rise of the Internet did not initially generate ‘off-the-shelf’ data sets upon which researchers in other parts of the world thrived, adding to an information gap that widened the gulf between the study of politics in Africa and in North America and Europe.
Instead, researchers in Africa have been energetic and imaginative in identifying and collecting their own data, piecing together material from diverse sources, and often making extensive use of interviews, local newspaper sources and archives, and drawing upon research reported in the grey literature of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), human rights organizations, donors, and international agencies. This has had a profound impact on the way that the analysis of African politics has evolved. The tools used in the study of African politics have often been closer to those utilized by historians and anthropologists than they have to the methods adopted by political scientists working on modern Western democracies, and so the literature produced on Africa has also been different. The absence of easily available data encouraged researchers to focus their efforts on the construction of careful case studies through months of painstaking fieldwork in previously understudied countries, often investigating themes that would not be accessible through more conventional data sources. This has had its strengths, but it has also contributed to a fragmenting of Africa’s political studies, making it harder to compare across a large number of countries with any confidence. Without obviously comparable data, Africanists have been dissuaded from conducting ‘large-n’ projects. Thus, whereas the general trend in comparative politics over the last 50 years has been toward more comparative and quantitative methods, research on African politics has tended to be smaller in scale and more attentive to local context. Perhaps for these reasons, those who work on politics have often been uncomfortable with research that seeks to make broader generalizations about the continent. It is of more than semantic significance that many people who study African politics would never refer to themselves as ‘political scientists’, but see themselves as inhabiting a field best described as ‘political studies’.
However, since the turn of the present century this picture has been undergoing rapid change. The World Bank (www.data.worldbank.org) and a number of other international organizations have steadily improved the scope and accuracy of the data they make available on Africa. Google, for example, has teamed up with some governments to increase access to information, most notably through open data web portals, such as the one launched with the Kenyan government in 2011 (www.opendata.go.ke). More significantly, in 1999 a team of researchers from the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Michigan State University, and the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) launched the Afrobarometer – a survey of public opinion in Africa. Afrobarometer surveys were run in 12 countries in the first round (1999–2000), 16 in the second (2002–03), 18 in the third (2005–06), and 20 countries in the fourth (2008–09). The creation of a vast and easily accessible dataset on ordinary people’s attitudes on everything from economic policy to the quality of democracy has resulted in an explosion of research: by 2012, some 138 articles had already been posted in the Afrobarometer’s Working Papers series (www.afrobarometer.org). Some of the main findings of this body of work are summarized in Michael Bratton’s contribution to this volume. Especially in the United States, the availability of the Afrobarometer and other ‘off-the-shelf’ data sets, such as the democracy ratings provided by Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org) and the Polity Project (www.systemicpeace.org/polity), has encouraged more Africanists to engage in quantitative and ‘large-n’ comparative research. Put another way, there are far more Africanist political scientists than there used to be. As a result, the methods used to study Africa and the type of research produced continues to evolve and diversify – the innovation that marks the field continues but is now consolidated and endorsed by a stronger and growing comparative and quantitative body of work.
The African State and Identity Politics
The essays brought together in this Handbook display all of the richness that is evident in the field of African politics, including the diversity of sources and methods. The chapters are organized around six key themes that allow us to survey the breadth of the field. The opening set of essays looks at different aspects of the state in Africa. Wrestling with the problem of how to understand and categorize the modern state in Africa has generated a large and vibrant literature over the past two decades. To date, much of this literature has essentially sought to tackle one of two questions. The first relates to the strength of the state – its coercive capacity, physical reach, and ability to protect and provide for its citizens. From the very first years of independence, the weakness of African states has been apparent. Aristide Zolberg (1969) was first to document a centre-periphery divide, noting that the power of African governments appeared to dissipate the further away from the capital city one went. Numerous other studies followed, including Jackson and Rosberg’s (1982) influential article suggesting that African states did not have an ‘empirical’ reality, but only continued to survive because they were recognized by the international state system that worked to protect them. Later authors, perhaps most notably Jeffrey Herbst (2000), expanded on these early insights, demonstrating that the centre-periphery divide was related to the lack of infrastructural development during the colonial period and the absence of inter-state conflict. According to Herbst, the key factor was that African governments had failed to invest in the creation of strong borders – in sharp contrast to their European counterparts who built their states through conflicts at their borders.
The second main strand of literature on understanding the state in Africa has sought to explain its weakness by demonstrating its incompatibility with the forms of political organization present within pre-colonial African societies. Following Médard’s classic 1982 formulation, the African state was understood to be ‘neopatrimonial’ – the product of the clash between the ‘modern’ colonial state and ‘traditional’ forms of patrimonial authority (in short, the tendency of leaders to treat the resources of the community as if they were their personal possessions). The most valuable insight of this literature was that neither the state nor traditional forms of authority emerged unchanged from this collision. As patrimonial leaders found themselves in charge of centralized state bureaucracies upon independence, the scope and power of the continent’s ‘big men’ increased dramatically. At the same time, the ability of patrimonial leaders to use their personal networks to undermine official constitutional and legislative rules meant that key institutions of accountability and security failed to function according to the official rules. Indeed, one of the reasons that the concept of neopatrimonialism has proved to be so durable is precisely because it is so well suited to explaining the descent of a number of high-profile African states into authoritarian rule and corruption.
Explanations of the weakness of the state that reference neopatrimonialism, or other theories that similarly focus on the clash between culture and institutions, such as those most famously offered by Bayart (1993) and Chabal and Daloz (1999), are intimately connected to the literature on ethnic, linguistic, and religious politics. After all, it is through their position as the leaders of ethnic groups – or other forms of community – that ‘big men’ draw their authority. For this reason, the second section of the Handbook addresses the politics of identity. Commentators have long noted the tendency for people of the same community to line up behind their community leaders, whether chiefs during the colonial era, ‘big men’ under authoritarian rule, or political leaders under multi-partyism (Horowitz 1985; Posner 2005). There is considerable evidence that in many countries the situation worsened since the 1990s, over a period when democratization has been in vogue. Research conducted by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including anthropologists and historians, as well as political scientists, has documented the worrying development of ‘ethnic politics’ in many parts of the continent, in which communities that claim to be the original ‘sons of the soil’ – ‘autochthons’ – reject the rights of other ‘immigrant’ communities to vote, stand as candidates, or access resources, outside of their home area. The rise of this ‘politics of belonging’ has intensified local disputes over land and power and has made identity politics a key theme. It is therefore understandable that ethnicity is often posited as being at the root of Africa’s ills, from poor economic performance, to civil war (see, for example, Easterly and Levine 1997).
Investigations into the identity politics of ethnicity in Africa have allowed us to appreciate much about mobilization and electoral politics in particular, but other strands of this research into ethnicity have demonstrated that, in reality, the African state and the politics of identity are more complex than predominant narratives allow. For one thing, African states have not been equally weak and the rule of law has not been equally abused. Ruling parties in one-party states, such as those in Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia, were able to effectively hold on to power for two to three decades precisely because they maintained a mixture of coercive control and political legitimacy. So it is that, while neopatrimonialism remains an over-arching theme, other chapters included here on the importance of state bureaucracies, the struggles to restore and maintain the rule of law, the resilience of forms of one-party rule and the influence of the military, the privatization of violence, and the options offered by federalist approaches to government, all provide further evidence of the workings of the state in Africa.
Similarly, the dominant narrative of ethnic politics, which remains essential to any understanding of African politics, also needs to be put into context. In practice, ethnic identities have been shown to be remarkably malleable in many parts of Africa: more open and inclusive during times of peace and common need, and more closed and hostile during times of conflict. One of the main findings of the literature on communal identities is that the development of pronounced ethnic identities and distrust is not a natural process, but rather is often the product of the deliberate efforts of local cultural entrepreneurs and political leaders to shape communal identities for their own agendas (Ranger 1983; Vail 1989).
The emphasis on ethnicity has also served to obscure the significance of other markers of political identities, such as class, religion, and gender. Although often more subtle, these forms of identification affect politics in powerful ways – a point that has received far greater acceptance following the rise of radical Islamic movements in Somalia and, more recently, Nigeria. Given this, it is important to always keep ethnicity in context and not to give it too great an explanatory power: rather, we should follow the example of the best research on ethnic politics in Africa and ask how ethnicity, religion, and other forms of communal identity interact, and through what processes they become more overtly politicized. Our chapters on political ethnicity and the politics of belonging therefore need to be read in tandem with those dealing with class, Muslim politics, religion and witchcraft, and gender.
The Conflict Continent?
The weakness of the African state and the strength of communal identities represent important foundations for the understanding of contemporary domestic politics on the continent. Our third section gathers together chapters on the theme of conflict – work that has often traced incidents of political disorder and violence back to the combination of weak states, predatory leaders, and intense competition over scarce resources (Bates 2008). The logic here has been intuitive. Neopatrimonial leaders in countries with highly politicized ethnic identities face few barriers to corruption and strong pressure to reward their supporters, and so are more likely to steal state resources and divert them to consolidate their position within their communities. When this happens, rival communities learn that losing power means losing economic opportunities. As a result, the stakes of political competition increase (Cooper 2002) to the point where no group is willing to accept defeat: the winner must take all, and so competition too easily spills over into conflict.
While African states have rarely fought against each other since the 1950s, civil conflicts have been all too common. Botswana is perhaps the only resource-rich state that has escaped this particular curse, managing its bounties in a way that has actually contributed to long-term economic growth and national unity. Too often, Botswana has simply been presented as the exception – a place of tranquillity in a continent of conflict. However, the notion that Africa’s history since the 1960s has been a story only of conflict is both inaccurate and misleading. Military coups and insurrections have been multiple, to be sure, but a study of patterns and trends in African conflicts reveals peaks in intensity at the end of the Cold War and a more recent decline (Strauss 2012).
It is therefore important to consider not only what causes these conflicts – how states enter conflict – but also how they have avoided it and how they can emerge out of it. It is true that the strongest predictor that a country will have a civil war in the future is that it has had a civil war in the past (Collier and Hoeffler 2004), but it is also true that countries experiencing civil wars have a very bad impact upon their neighbours. It is therefore not surprising that African states have been playing an increasing role in seeking settlements to conflicts on the continent. Countries do not passively accept their ‘destiny’; instead, we have seen concerted efforts by brave coalitions of domestic and international actors – peacemakers and peacekeepers – to break the cycles of violence in places such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. These efforts have empowered people in these states to imagine new futures, even if their countries still have a long way to go before the spectre of violence will begin to recede and the infrastructure of the state is restored. While considering the importance of the ‘resource curse’ in Africa’s oil politics and the prevalence of civil war, it is thus also essential to understand the mechanisms of power-sharing, peacebuilding, and the imposition of transitional justice.
Democratic Transitions and the Politics of Development
Much of the analysis of African politics since the end of the Cold War has focused on the question of whether or not democracy can be built in countries that lack the rule of law, have recently emerged from conflict, and in which political behaviour is so strongly shaped by ethnic identity (Ake 2000). This is the theme of our fourth set of essays.
One of the most fundamental reasons why democracy is so valued in much of Africa is that it provides the opportunity to ‘vote the rascals out’. Democratic electoral politics promises more accountable and effective governance, and rule-bound leadership. However, if unscrupulous leaders can legitimate themselves by diverting resources to their communities through neopatrimonial structures, then they may be able to mobilize support even when they have performed poorly in terms of the economy or national security. Under these conditions, the relationship between political competition and accountability, as it has been commonly understood in Western democracies, breaks down.
It is therefore unsurprising that research and media coverage of democracy in Africa has reported a mixed picture. South Africa is often identified as a leading democratic light, but has often been kept out of the headlines by the continuing failure of democratic institutions in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Ghana has managed to escape from a history of coups and counter-coups to establish a stable democracy in which both main parties have been willing to accept defeat, but elections in nearby Nigeria have been denounced as a farce. Some of those countries that were once thought to be among Africa’s more stable states, such as Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya, have suffered significant episodes of unrest following the reintroduction of multi-partyism. All of this has raised inevitable – and very important – questions regarding the suitability of introducing divisive electoral competition into Africa’s divided societies (Chua 2002). Michael Mann (2005) perhaps put this point most starkly when he argued that the Rwandan genocide – in which over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in a genocide led by a faction of the government desperate to retain power at all costs – should be interpreted as a manifestation of the ‘dark side of democracy’.
Yet the news about democratization has not been all bad. Progress might be slow, but there have been genuine advances. Posner and Young (2007) have argued that African politics is becoming more ‘institutionalized’. Their research shows that more African leaders than ever before are leaving power through constitutional means, in part because term limits on presidential office are increasingly being respected, forcing a change of president even where countries have not witnessed a transfer of power between parties. In a similar optimistic vein, Cheeseman (2010) suggests that ruling parties are much more vulnerable to electoral defeat when they are forced to change their presidential candidate: it is under these conditions that African elections can act as vehicles of change. Moreover, there is some evidence that formal checks-and-balances institutions, such as legislatures, are starting to become more effective in protecting term-limits but also in exposing corruption and debating policy, at least in those countries that have established a basic level of political rights and civil liberties. The ‘mixed bag’ of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa is examined here over chapters that range through the resilience of electoral authoritarianism, the power of elections to effect change, the rise of African legislatures, the evolution of political parties, and the growing place of public opinion in democratic consolidation.
Given that development is a constant demand from African voters, at both the national and local level, it might have been expected that the reintroduction of multi-partyism would have led to a dramatic improvement in the quality of healthcare, education, and other public services on the continent. However, this would be to ignore both the patchy progress towards political liberalization and the economic constraints on African governments. The loans that African countries accepted from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, combined with poor economic performance during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s, left many African governments saddled with debts they could not pay, and dependent on aid from international donors. Our essays dealing with this theme, in section five, document the restrictions that current patterns of aid and trade place on the choices available to African leaders, and of the historical reliance on NGOs – what some would call civil society – to provide public services. A further essay here revisits the significance of ingrained sets of informal rules and behaviours that govern inter-personal relationships and patterns of exchange, this time with a focus on the impact of the ‘economy of affection’ on development and economic management.
The picture is not all gloomy, however. By the second decade of the twenty-first century many African countries were growing again, while debt relief had allowed many more African governments to spend an increasing share of government revenue on public services. While the provision of clean water and electricity remains highly uneven across the continent, an impressive number of countries have invested in free primary school education, and while states such as South Africa were terribly slow to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, many are now providing antiretroviral medication and expanding still-limited coverage. These more positive developments are highlighted by chapters that address recent developments in social policy, and the possibility that by better understanding the local politics of development, it will be possible to promote effective economic growth and public services provision in certain types of neopatrimonial regimes.
Regional and International Dimensions
Our final section turns attention to Africa’s international relations. A concerted literature on Africa’s international relations has not yet really emerged, in part, one suspects, because international relations theorists have typically assumed that African countries are simply too weak to be able to shape outcomes at the international level in a meaningful way (see Clapham 1996). African states have thus often been treated as a residual category without effective agency: the plaything of global actors, rather than a genuine player on the world stage. This is unfortunate, because sovereignty has been a key concern of those studying African politics since the ending of colonial rule. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the rise of African nationalism, research naturally focused on these new political organizations, the prospects for independence, and the capacity of African states for self-rule (Scott 1971). In the years that followed, the debate shifted to ask whether political independence was meaningful if African countries were effectively confined to the periphery of the international system, locked in a system of never-ending economic dependency (Rodney 1972; see also Leys 1996).
This view, known as dependency theory, eventually became unfashionable, in part because the success of countries such as Botswana and Mauritius demonstrated that there was nothing inevitable about African poverty. The capacity of leaders such as Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni to manipulate the strategic importance of their countries to secure support and resources from international actors with far more wealth and military might has also demonstrated that, sometimes, the tail can wag the dog. Despite this, though, it is clear from the chapters collected here that concerns about the sovereignty of African states being undermined by the agendas of foreign powers remain as prominent as ever, whether the focus is the unfair treatment of African producers at the World Trade Organization, the attempts by Western donors to promote democracy in Africa, the potential militarization of the continent as a result of the ‘war on terror’, or the impact of the rise of China on prospects for African democracy. It should therefore come as no surprise that the need for, and limitations of, the unity of African states continues to be one of the most debated issues within the continent’s regional organizations.
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