The Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa

...But as these examples also demonstrate, ethnicity operated in a dynamic context of social interaction in which economic competition was exacerbated by the constraints of underdevelopment...

...The two aspects of the African condition—the economic and the political—are inevitably tied...

...Nearly every national economy has collapsed or is on the verge of doing so...

...Colonialism was a transformative trauma, signaling a moment of profound historical discontinuity for Africans...

...Paradoxes The consequence was a paradox for African nationalism, both in its intellectual expression and in its popular manifestations...

...This territorial imperative was a consequence of the original "modular" framework (to borrow Benedict Anderson's term) within which African nationalism had to operate in the colonial context...

...Principles of political participation and civic association are central...

...Apart from humiliation and servitude, this order proceeded from haphazard patterns of conquest and annexation and left a legacy of untidy borders...

...Here we must focus on the one-party state, which has been rationalized as the political expression of the ideology of development, as the means of concentrating the political community's collective energy and will on the problems of nation-building...

...The themes of legitimacy, national identity, and the quest for a new order, which provide the background for the narrative development in works like these, also ground explorations of the defining dilemmas of contemporary Africa...

...Similarly, French conquests in Western and Central Africa were facilitated by a process of dissolution already at work within the traditional state formations in these areas...

...Thus it was, ironically, the colonial conflation of the material trappings of European modernity with "standing" in the world that fueled African nationalism...

...That this is a simplification often promoted and reinforced by selective reporting in the Western media does not diminish its basis in reality...

...In the new states, primary affiliations conditioned by factors such as ethnicity and language had to be subordinated to the claims of the nation-state...

...Needless to say, the colonial imposition did not yield in Africa the type of societies that industrial transformation created in capitalist Europe...

...The meteoric rise of Shaka and the unsettling effects of the Zulu SUMMER • 1992 • 297 Crisis of Legitimacy empire he fashioned in the early nineteenth century provoked general upheaval throughout the region that has imprinted itself on the collective memory as the mfecane, or "the great dispersal...

...The French simply suppressed traditional, precolonial institutions, and the British fashioned a myth of indirect rule...

...The consequence of transitions from agrarian to industrial modes of production was severe dislocation due to the exploitation of the continent's resources for the direct benefit of Europeans...

...Coercion became the inevitable practical corollary, as history has shown us in Africa and elsewhere...

...These were important factors enabling British penetration of the Niger-Benue basin, leading to the eventual emergence, after the First World War, of present-day Nigeria...

...As in Eastern Europe there has been both a quantitative scope and a qualitative dimension that distinguish the current African events from previous convulsions...

...Making matters more difficult were a variety of structural constraints, often ignored by Western critics and African radicals, which effectively blocked progress toward sustained growth—toward initiating Rostow's celebrated "take off...

...In such a situation, any wholehearted identification with the structures of power—I leave aside opportunistic collaboration—would have been unnatural...

...As the term suggests, the first priority was to consolidate the territorial basis inherited from colonial regimes...

...In an important sense, the Europeans simplified matters by integrating large populations of diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds into their colonial possessions...

...It assumed a salvational and even messianic significance, one that shined through popular forms of reaction to colonial rule such as the Kibangi movement in the Congo...

...The one-party state turned out to be the negation of the very principles— socioeconomic and political advance of the people—that it was supposed to enshrine...

...Africa's political scene has long been characterized by civil wars, dreary successions of military coups and various civic disorders...

...It rested largely on Western models of industrial and technological civilization driven by the capitalist mode of production...

...Importantly, an outstanding element of the Western model was missing when it was applied to Africa in the context of colonialism: the liberal values that had been shaped by the Enlightenment...

...There are enough signs of accumulated distress to warrant the growing pessimism that has taken hold of African minds over the past decade and now dominates discussion of the continent's affairs among qualified observers...

...The country enjoyed an "economic miracle," with annual growth rates of over 10 percent throughout the sixties...

...Africa has become so closely associated with instability that the popular image of our part of the world seems to be of ongoing politically induced disruptions of life with the attendant insecurity and constant misery...

...on the other, there was an acknowledgement that those antecedents would be superseded in a new order that drew from the West and therefore risked undermining those same claims to autonomy...

...Although all these achievements were modest in comparison, say, to those of the Asian Pacific rim countries, they were real, and in some instances such as in COte d'Ivoire, impressive...

...What needs to be stressed is that African leaders staked their claims to legitimacy on their ability to realize the promise of independence in concrete terms...

...its capital, Abidjan, became a model of urban development in Africa...

...This meant welding disparate populations brought together in each new state by the vagaries of European conquest...

...in fact, they have been largely ignored by the media...

...The most distinctive feature of recent African developments is that localized manifestations of dissidence have metamorphosed into a determined and general reassessment of long-standing post-independence political and social arrangements...

...In the colonial period, the discourse of freedom elaborated by Europeans as a function of their own internal development— the source of contemporary modernity— was deployed by Africans against the unprincipled (European) violation of Africa...

...They imposed their own order on an especially fluid internal situation...

...The party was summarily assimilated into the state as an embodiment of the people, thus substituting a part for the whole...

...Furthermore, a one-party state could not be reconciled with the Pan-African ideal with which African nationalism had been closely associated in the colonial period...

...The gloomy economic reality of Africa today is compounded by chronic political instability...

...For, despite frequent use of the rhetoric of archaism, it was always clear to African nationalists that the African past to which they appealed was, in the final analysis, irretrievably lost...

...To put the matter another way, the Europeans exploited dynamics within African societies to their own imperial advantage...

...Obsession with national unity soon became a narrow territorialism that often served as a means by which dictators protected individual turfs...

...But the appeal of socialism also lay in the instrumental value ascribed to it, the application of rationality to social life, which, it was thought, offered the means of accelerated development...

...The order imposed by the colonial powers was conceived on European terms, served their interests, and came at considerable cost to Africans...

...The justified fear of general chaos arising from any attempt to "unscramble" Africa—the crisis in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) was an early, dire portent— induced an official rigidity concerning the inviolability of colonial boundaries...

...The premise of the colonial "pact," as this reorganization was frequently portrayed, was the deliberate narrowing of horizons open to Africans...

...At long last the inherent crisis of political legitimacy that was masked both during the colonial period and after has ripened...

...In all spheres of life a new paradigm was imposed...

...It has cast a shadow on African prospects and created the current mood of disillusionment so well reflected in the dystopias that now dominate African literature, especially fiction...

...The meaning of this injunction was clarified in the Action Group's electioneering slogan on the eve of Nigerian independence in 1959: "Freedom for all and life more abundant...

...The moral ambiguities explored in such works as Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ahmadou Kourouma's The Suns of Independence, and Nurrudin Farah's Maps proceed directly from the problematic relation between the immediacies of consciousness and the public context of individual life...

...For our purposes, most salient are the internal impediments to the political legitimacy of African rulers and the links to development...

...It is the story of an inspiring idea that lost its way through mismanagement, corruption, and the arrogance of power...

...As such, the new structures were in direct competition for legitimacy with traditional precolonial systems...

...That fundamental institutional questions are being posed is attested to by the means of struggle, in particular the calling of a "National Conference" by the reform movement in Benin, and similar patterns that ensued in other francophone African countries...

...It addresses the question of legitimacy not merely in terms of the competence and morality of today's leaders but in terms of the adequacy of present arrangements to the lives and aspirations of the African people...

...And the mobilizing force of the moral ideals associated with socialism counted as a strategic consideration...

...Economic, Cultural and Moral Dimensions The economics of colonial dependency played a vital role in shaping the crisis of legitimacy...

...302 • DISSENT...

...298 • DISSENT Crisis of Legitimacy Africans were sucked into a new world system—an expanding capitalist order—and into an immense vortex of social and cultural change demanding painful adjustments, not just by individuals but of whole collectivities...

...But on the essentials there was no fundamental difference: there was no question as to where ultimate authority lay, who was ruler and who was subordinate...

...These were Africans for whom, as Mariama Ba's novel So Long a Letter demonstrates, Western life-styles were taken for granted...

...Their emphasis on socialism as the preferred route to economic development proceeded logically out of disaffection with the historical nexus between capitalism and colonialism...

...One glaring aspect is the material deprivation suffered by most Africans: the situation has degenerated to outright destitution because of steep economic decline across the continent in the past decade or so...

...The implications were not only political and economic but cultural and moral as well...

...The full significance of these developments must be grasped in the broad perspective of Africa's history—of long decades of misery in which this continent's people were tossed about by internal and external forces always beyond their control...

...For example, considerable expansion of education set in motion a process of social mobility, whose dynamics (admirably captured in the adventure of Amamu, Kofi Awoonor's fictional hero in This Earth, My Brother) produced a whole category of Africans with new aspirations and life orientations...

...Because of the conflictual nature of the colonial situation (graphically underlined by racial and cultural differences between rulers and ruled), the question of legitimacy was largely irrelevant for the imperial powers...

...Also, there were grave ecological consequences, such as the rapid depletion of pastures through overgrazing in the case of the Masai...

...Still, traditional authorities exercised more than a vestigial pull on political and moral sensibilities...

...From this point of view, nationalism was an overtly political expression of a fundamental dilemma arising out of an ambivalent relation to a modernity associated with the historic encounter with the West...

...Major transformations have been effected in a number of countries (for example, Ethiopia, Benin, and Zambia) and there has been vigorous contestation in many others (such as Zaire and Kenya...

...The breakup of the East African Community is instructive in this regard, as is the fact that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has maintained only marginal interest for the populations of the subregion, in spite of countless protocols signed by leaders over the past twenty years...

...The same impulse pervaded the more reflective forms of the nationalist project, as is evident in Kwame Nkrumah's injunction to his followers, expressed in terms adapted from the Christian Bible: "Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto ye...

...The terrible suffering that resulted provides sad confirmation that Africans have become locked into a nationstate model that is not only inappropriate to their situation but patently dysfunctional...

...These cases demonstrate that, even when allowance has been made for the superior arms of the Europeans, the aims of Western imperialism were often furthered by internal crises within African societies...

...As a result, the meager infrastructures bequeathed by colonialism to many African countries began to be expanded or overhauled: roads, ports, and railways were built or improved (the "Tanzam" line from Dar-esSalaam to Lusaka, constructed with Chinese help in the face of Western opposition, took on a symbolic value in this regard...

...The nation-state was its political and territorial expression...

...The history of Southern Africa provides perhaps the most striking instance of convergence between internal African developments and external pressures...

...In the early years of independence, efforts were undertaken to tie the immediate political objectives of national independence to the spread of the amenities of modern civilization...

...Africa, in colonialism's scheme, only existed as a source of raw materials and primary labor...

...From this point of view, events in Africa parallel those in other parts of 296 • DISSENT Crisis of Legitimacy the world, notably the transformations in Eastern Europe (which helped stimulate current agitation in Africa...

...Substantial economic development and rising living standards were achieved in the aftermath of independence, and a few cases sustained their gains well into the late seventies and early eighties...

...A few examples will illustrate this point...

...This accounts for the utopianism that was integral to nationalism in colonial Africa...

...If agitation across Africa has not assumed the proportions of the levee en masse of Frantz Fanon's populist imagination, it conforms to his call for a reprise of the nationalist project in the context of post-independence Africa...

...We need not dwell here on the external constraints, besides noting that they ensured a post-independence perpetuation of the colonial pact and guaranteed the vested interests of African ruling classes in neocolonial arrangements...

...This disruption remains an essential backdrop to Cecil Rhodes's colonizing enterprise in Southern Africa and, in retrospect, may be seen as the first act in the historical drama enmeshing the indigenous populations of Southern Africa, the English, and the Boers—a drama still being played out in our own day...

...In the process self-confidence returned to Africans...

...The African was not a citizen but a subject...

...In the nineteenth century massive historical transformations touched nearly every corner of Africa...

...But this rigidity had to contend with national realities on the ground, realities so powerfully dramatized by the movement for Biafran secession and highlighted by Somali irredentism in the Ogaden...

...As state policy such unity limited broader scope, such as the continental vision of earlier ideological leaders...

...In the West, outside of a narrow circle of specialists, not much attention has been paid to these developments...

...They sought an accommodation between traditionalism, conceived as a counter discourse to imperialism, and the pragmatic requirements of the Western paradigm...

...Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana played an exemplary role, for his grandiose ambitions for modernization corresponded to the inspirational needs of the moment...

...This was a brief but heroic period, when energies that had lain dormant were effectively released...

...There has been a rolling movement of challenges to existing power structures across the continent...

...National and ethnic loyalties were called into play more by economic and social factors than sheer atavistic impulses...

...In the early period of imperial rule, widespread recourse to forced labor made blatant the brutality of colonialism's economic imperatives...

...But its motive force derived ultimately from sociological factors: nationalism in colonial Africa, in its mass aspect, was a reaction not only against foreign rule but also to particular pressures of historical change...

...African nationalism was predicated on new beginnings on the continent, in immediate and specific relation to the exigencies of modern life...

...In the present "season of our discontent" we see Africans deploying it inward, proposing freedom as a condition of political legitimacy and as the principle enabling the implementation in Africa of the original project of modernity—the maximization of life chances for all humanity...

...This, then, is the underside of modernization as pursued in the era of African independence...

...SUMMER • 1992 • 299 Crisis of Legitimacy In this way, the ideology of nationalism was firmly linked to the ideology of development...

...Exceptions were made for certain categories (for example, for those born in the so-called four communes of Senegal and within the crown colony of Lagos, in Nigeria) but these merely confirmed the degraded status of everyone else...

...While this idea was argued with persuasive force, especially by Nyerere (whose views derived, it needs to be said, from admirable principles), it harbored obvious contradictions from the beginning...

...Commitment to modernization conceived as the recovery of historical initiative by Africans was thus made unambiguous...

...Yet there was a particular irony to the African developSUMMER • 1992 • 301 Crisis of Legitimacy ment, for one government after another fell back upon the authoritarian methods of colonial rule to enforce an impossible unanimity on national objectives...

...The formal and legal status of the latter were often ill-defined, even nonexistent...

...crisis, we must consider how Western imperialism profoundly modified the way questions of political legitimacy were posed by and for Africans...

...Without a doubt, this set the pace for what came to be seen everywhere in Africa as a political imperative...

...Contradictions within African societies were not transcended but given new complications by the impact of colonialism...

...It is against this background—a despair that has assumed the dimension of existential angst—that recent developments require a special form of attention...

...While African socialism did not represent a general consensus, it was the most serious conceptual effort to cope with the urgent tasks facing Africa at independence, tasks that came to be subsumed under the term "nationbuilding...

...Europeans appeared at a particular historical moment, when important readjustments were taking place in Africa, and they brought a new complexion to the process...

...Although Soviet achievement certainly impressed African ideologists at this time, what they proposed was an original form of socialism, uniquely African in its attention to the human rather than the instrumental import of its modalities...

...Consequently, it undermined the basis of the legitimacy craved by African rulers...

...Forces were at play that, though often initially independent of the European incursions, became directly implicated in the imposition of European rule...

...Burdens and Ambiguities Such successes vindicated the central proposition of nationalism—that Africans could really take charge of their destiny—but fostered great—revolutionary—expectations...

...This authoritarianism was codified in the colonial legal arsenal with an array of laws that prohibited assembly, restricted movement, proscribed "sedition," and so on...

...The linkage has been underlined in recent years by graphic television pictures of starving refugees fleeing the ravages of civil war in Ethiopia, Chad, Liberia, and other theaters of ethnic and political violence...

...It is understandable that African attitudes to colonial regimes were governed by what might be called affective disengagement...

...Colonialism involved nothing less than a comprehensive reconstitution of African societies: of the traditional modes of production and governance and of social organization, cultural expression, and fundamental norms...

...In the Sahel (in Western Africa) in particular, disaffection of Samori Toure's vassal states and populations (the background to Ahmadou Kourouma's recent novel, Monne, outrages et defis) paved the way for both his defeat in 1898 and the ensuing incorporation of these populations into the French empire...

...The gravity of the situation has to be measured not just in terms of painful statistics but against the economic optimism that pervaded the majority of African states in the early sixties...

...Colonial borders became effective barriers to the movement of people and the normal flow of trade and other transactions, with serious implications for the traditional economies from which the common people derived their livelihood...

...In addition, the spread of modern medicine led to a sharp drop in infant mortality, drastically altering the demographic picture of Africa...

...It is demonstrated, for instance, by official promotion of xenophobia in order to justify the expulsion of "aliens" (that is, other Africans) from Ghana and Nigeria...

...African productive capacities were systematically reorganized on behalf of the economic interests of the colonial powers, and this produced distortions in African economies that remain to this day...

...Industries were established, often with foreign investment, but sometimes with capital generated from internal sources...

...This put tremendous burdens on states that had deliberately assumed the role of agents of development...

...The political leaders and the emergent bourgeoisie of Africa assumed in real earnest the role of a modernizing elite...

...Given the extreme diversity that characterized most African states, the problem was to infuse the political community defined in these spatial and legal terms with an "organic" quality...

...It is in these circumstances that the Western model of the nation-state as the unit of political life assumed critical importance for African 300 • DISSENT Crisis of Legitimacy governments, which were also preoccupied by social development...

...In any case, there was little incentive for active identification, for the colonial regimes provided very limited scope for personal advancement, except in the indirect or frankly devious ways so well shown in Ahmadou Hampatê Ba's novel The Fortunes of Wangrin...

...Colonialism bequeathed not national entities but administrative structures, at best intimations of future national formations—from the point of view of history, modes of hypothesis rather than embodiments of fact...

...The length to which the tunnel vision of national interests can go is depressing...

...Current agitation for democratization and human rights is a response to these dilemmas, the sign of a profound movement of the collective consciousness...

...On one hand, there was a need for self-affirmation, which drew on cultural (precolonial) antecedents to give substance to claims to autonomy...

...African populations were forcibly thrust into the imperial cash nexus and the consequent social dislocations unraveled the fabric of communal life everywhere...

...The preoccupation—and even obsession— with territorial integrity and "national unity" arose from the fragility of the institutional framework of the newly independent states...

...By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had refashioned the continent, giving it an entirely new configuration...

...A strict application of the national principle to satisfy these sensibilities was impracticable, more so than in other parts of the world with similar problems...

...Although the theoretical separation between formal citizenship and original nationality (made familiar by the American model) did not enter into the thinking of African leaders at this point, something resembling it became established as the norm: political identity was deemed to stem from one's spatial situation within administrative and juridical boundaries rather than from rooted connections...

...Recent events in Africa continue to be interpreted as signs of a condition of chaos, thereby confirming colonialist ideology, according to which Africans are inherently incapable of governing themselves...

...In short, the colonial experience in Africa, as in other parts of the non-Western world, amounted to a wrenching and harsh confrontation with triumphant (Western) modernity...

...The latter was envisaged essentially in legal terms...

...To be meaningful, nationalism required a prospective rather than a retrospective vision...

...Me d'Ivoire thus became a measure of new possibilities, pointing to a real fulfillment of the hopes of formal independence...

...Africans stood no real chance of benefiting collectively from the material advantages such transformations offered, even though they had been incorporated into the cogwheels of its world system—and even though the discomforts were as real for Africans, if not more so, as for the European masses...

...The Legacy of Imperialism To understand this...

...The various theories of African socialism propounded in the early years of independence, notably by Leopold Sedar Senghor, Julius Nyerere, and Kwame Nkrumah, sought to expand the utopian vision inherent in the nationalist project, to resolve the tension between its two poles of reference in the quest for a new society...

...But they failed to resolve the problem of political legitimacy, which had been fundamental to antecedent history in Africa...

...African nationalism, especially its Pan-African variants, was initially an intellectual response to this contradiction...

...There was deep-seated resentment against exclusion from the benefits of modern civilization—benefits visible in the living standards of Europeans living in Africa itself...

...The endeavor to endow Africa with industrial capacity was complemented by an effort to institute a system of social services, with palpable and often dramatic results...

...We are therefore witnessing a complete reversal of the rising expectations that came with the triumph of nationalism...

...Othman dan Fodio's jihad, undertaken at the very dawn of the century, imposed Fulani hegemony over the northern parts of what came to be known as Nigeria and precipitated the fall of the Yoruba empire centered at Oyo to the south...

...After independence, these laws survived in nearly every African state and proved to be convenient repressive tools in the hands of the successor governments...