The African state and the legacy of empire

While southern Africa moved towards decolonization and the end of white minority rule, the history of much of the rest of the continent from the early 1960s onwards was defined by the tasks of stimulating economic development and creating new nation-states from the colonial legacy that they had inherited from the Europeans.

To a considerable degree the problems that the new states faced were the result of the legacy of colonial rule, which created a number of obstacles to the establishment of effective government. One important factor that hindered development and the practice of good governance was the shortage of qualified professionals capable of providing key services. For example, on independence in 1961 Tanzania had two trained engineers and nine doctors for a population of nine million people, of whom 85 per cent were illiterate. The situation was similar in the Congo, which in I960 contained only sixteen university graduates. While these shortcomings could be overcome by expanding university education and sending young men and women to study abroad, this solution took time to produce results, causing frustration among a population who had come to expect that independence meant the rapid extension of social provision.

More significant still was the very nature of the struggle for independence, which arguably had come too early for the good of the successor states. The independence movements that developed in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s tended to consist mainly of the educated classes from the urban population and the leaders of organized labour movements.

The problem with this approach was that it was unduly optimistic. The newly independent states had no tradition of pluralist political institutions upon which to draw and were therefore all grossly ill prepared to act as parliamentary democracies. Indeed, the reality of the situation was that the political figures who took power on independence did not rely on well-organized political parties based on the Western model with roots in class identification. Rather they looked to support from regional, tribal and familial groups linked to them by ties of patronage that had developed under colonial rule. Patron-client relations had been vital in the colonial era, because in this period the best way to get access to jobs and other privileges and to avoid tasks such as forced labour was to find a patron using one's tribal or family ties. However, there was naturally a cost involved for the client in this relationship, for the patron expected to be rewarded for his services with political support.

On independence, with the resources of the state now open to them, the irresistible temptation for the new leaders was to cement their rule by building on the patronage system. Thus, the members of their political parties and other supporters were rewarded with access to appointments in state-run organizations and to state funds and contracts as a means of ensuring their loyalty.

indirect rule

The system whereby a colonial power delegates limited powers to indigenous institutions.

see Chapter 4

The rapid move away from parliamentary democracy towards a one-party state did not, however, mean that governments became all-powerful, for other obstacles inherited from the colonial era acted to frustrate their ambitions. One of the most important was that a key feature of the colonial period in Africa had been the propensity, particularly in British colonies, towards ‘indirect rule' as a form of governance. Indirect rule had been attractive because, by finding collaborators among tribal chiefs and allowing them to raise taxes and administer customary law, the colonial Powers did not have to direct scarce resources towards developing an administrative network to cover the sparsely populated rural peripheries of their territories. What proved convenient for the colonial Powers was less so for their successors, for the consequence of indirect rule was that the leaders of the newly independent states discovered that they had only tentative control over much of their respective countries, as the state apparatus tended to be underdeveloped in rural areas.

This had a number of dangerous ramifications. One of the most important was that the tribal chiefs who had benefited from indirect rule were loath to give up their privileges and, being able to draw on the tendency towards tribalism that had been cultivated in the colonial period, often set themselves up as alternative centres of power to the government. The position of such tribal groupings was a challenge for many African states. In some countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea, where a large number of tribes existed without any one predominating, the one-party state was able to take rapid action on independence to break tribal power, seeing this as a prerequisite for the creation of national unity. However, where large and powerful tribes existed, they could lead to perpetual instability.

One example of this phenomenon is Uganda, where before transferring power the British decided in the face of pressure from the kingdom of Buganda to establish a federal constitution that would allow the latter considerable autonomy. However, this arrangement proved to be a serious obstacle to nation-building and political stability. Accordingly, in 1967 President Milton Obote declared the existing situation to be unsustainable and introduced a new centralized con­stitution that gave the presidency sweeping powers. The result was a wave of Bagandan agitation, which culminated in 1971 with the tribal elders supporting the successful coup against Obote launched by Idi Amin. Amin then promptly followed his predecessor's centralizing policies, recognizing that this was the only way to maintain power. Uganda only escaped from this cycle of violence in 1986 when, following Amin's fall and Obote's disastrous second term, Bagandan peasants led by Yoweri Museveni launched their own rebellion against both their own elite and Obote's state. Meanwhile in Nigeria, the existence of three powerful tribal groupings, the Hausa, the Yoruba and the Ibo, rapidly led to problems that culminated in 1967 with the secession of the Ibo-dominated south-east of the country, which named itself Biafra.

Another important problem that was in part inherited from the colonial era was the urban-rural divide which appeared in many of the newly independent African states. The key difficulty here was that the European colonial states had tended to raise revenue through taxing trade rather than land. Accordingly, when the Europeans sought to encourage economic development in their colonies from the 1940s they had concentrated on the expansion of agricultural exports as a way of generating wealth. In particular, they had developed the use of marketing boards, which bought goods cheaply from farmers and then sold them on the world market for a considerable profit, which could be invested in development. This model had great appeal to the largely urban elites that took office on the transfer of power, for they saw the profits from cash crops as a way of creating capital for investment in import substitution industries.

This proved to be a dangerous path to follow for, as both Ghana and Senegal discovered in the 1960s with their exports of cocoa and groundnuts respectively, one could not rely on a single cash crop to generate sufficient revenue to fund import substitution. In addition, the concentration of taxation on cash crops for export led to few funds being allocated to diversifying agricultural production for the domestic market and to general neglect of rural areas. The result was that governments lacked any political or economic incentive to develop such regions, and therefore areas of low population density saw little state activity. This reached its apogee in Zaire under Mobutu, where the state was reduced to the capital, Kinshasa, and the mineral-rich region of Katanga, whose population relied ironically on food imports rather than on domestically produced crops. It is thus not surprising that, in the 1990s, the country disintegrated into civil war.

Debating the African state

One of the key issues for historians of Africa when dealing with the period since the transfer of power is why so many African states have found it difficult to achieve political stability and sustained economic development.

Other writers have gone even further in their analysis of the colonial state and the way in which it shaped the policies and politics of the new states. Crawford Young, in The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT, 1994), has outlined the importance of the autocratic nature of the colonial state, arguing that this has played a crucial role in encouraging the centrality of the bureaucracy and intolerance of opposition. Conversely, Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ, 1996), has argued that the legacy of colonialism was a weak rather than a strong state. Mamdani has pointed to the problems caused by indirect rule, which has helped to exacerbate the tendency towards tribalism in Africa and thus widened the urban-rural divide. Jeffrey Herbst, in States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ, 2000), has taken this idea even further, noting that state formation in Africa has been blighted by the problems caused by the difficulty of extending control over countries with relatively low population densities.This, in turn, has meant that the attempt to construct states in line with the traditional European model has been enormously problematical.

structural adjustment programme

The idea propagated by the World Bank from the end of the 1970s which linked the provision of development aid to Third World states to the latter committing themselves to balanced budgets, austerity programmes and the sale of nationalized industries and property.

neo-colonialism

The process whereby a colonial power grants juridical independence to a colony, but nevertheless maintains de facto political and economic control.

see Chapter 13

Another unfortunate colonial legacy was that the state boundaries did not respect religious divisions. For example, a swath of countries bordering on the Sahara inherited states that contained both Muslims and Christians, and the different attitudes of these religions towards social and political questions only helped to exacerbate tribal and ethnic confrontations. This was one of the issues that caused problems in Nigeria, where the Hausa are followers of Islam. However, the difficulties were even greater in Sudan, where the religious divide led to a cycle of violence that has plagued the country ever since independence.

Other factors blighted the quest for stability and development. One important point to remember is that the promises made on independence were always unrealistic, for African states faced serious natural obstacles to any increase in agricultural production. These included poor soil quality and the inability to use draught animals because of the tsetse fly. Most serious of all, however, was the unreliability of the climate. In the 1970s the countries bordering on the Sahara saw food production hit by a series of drought years that set back some of the progress that had been made in the 1960s. African states were also, of course, prey to the problems that afflicted developing countries more broadly, including fluctuations in the world economy and the frequent changes in thinking among economists about development issues. For example, African states suffered badly from the debt crisis and the collapse of commodity prices in the 1980s, and were poorly placed to benefit from the structural adjustment programmes urged on them by the World Bank. They were also in many cases trapped in neo-colonial relationships with their former imperial masters, this particularly being the case for the former French colonies. This had some advantages in terms of ensured access to markets, but also perpetuated a relationship of dependency.

Even those states that possessed great mineral wealth did not necessarily do well. For example, oil-rich Nigeria, which saw its overseas earnings soar in the 1970s as a consequence of the OPEC oil price hike, did not use its new prosperity to fund a breakthrough in development. Instead, much of Nigeria's oil wealth was dissipated on the financing of imports for the urban population. Moreover, imagining that oil prices would remain high, in the late 1970s the government sought vast loans from Western banks in order to finance its plans for import substitution. This proved, however, to be a costly error of judgement, for when oil prices fell in the early 1980s, Nigeria found itself weighed down by its debt burden. However, it is worth noting that some resource-rich states did prosper: for example, Botswana with its vast diamond deposits has been able to ensure political stability and a rising standard of living. That these states have prospered while others with rich reserves of raw materials have not implies that the colonial inheritance cannot be used as a blanket excuse for Africa's current state, and that the quality of African leadership needs also to be studied. In addition, the fact that those African states with a long tradition of independence, such as Liberia and Ethiopia, have also suffered from severe political and economic problems suggests that the colonial legacy cannot explain everything.

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) The organization founded in 1960 to represent the interests of the leading oil-producing states in the Third World.