Perspectives on Nation-State Formation in Contemporary Africa

Preface

T he 1990s marked for most African nations great moments of coming to terms in defining and properly setting a course of their internal collusion, integration, coalescence, and intra-nationalism. Besides the fact that after the erstwhile intractable process of decolonisation in Southern Africa and the eclipse of apartheid, one after the other, the leviathan of militarism in national politics came on a course of quietus, the effervescence of home-grown political equanimity and democratic triumphalism became the order.

The results were in many cases pointed to a great line on the other side of the divide in ushering in erstwhile military dictators, who now reverted into the cradle of political pluralism and democratic fervour. A typical case of Nigeria was quite epical; Olusegun Obasanjo, the former military dictator who made history by being the first African of his time to hand over power after conducting a widely accepted election in 1979, came back to power in 1999 as a democratically elected President. Besides inheriting political power, he wrote his prison memoir titled Animal Called Man, portraying rather satirically the challenges of nationhood, nationalism, and governance in Africa.

Against this backdrop of the events of African statehood in the 1990s, we get a flashback of what nations have experienced globally in bringing together and building a political community; the experience of South America typically becomes the reference point. As a political historian, it was easy to use the South American example as a paradigm for the African case study. Indeed, by the nature of how states were formed in Africa, this experience therefore had great relevance for global enquiry of this nature.

As Africa, along with other formerly colonised countries in Asia and Latin America, was part of the processes of contemporary nation-state formation, I examined the processes of national integration in Africa from independence till the end of the military era in the 1990s. Therefore, as currently presented in this work, it has been revised and expanded. The work incorporates the benefits of my additional observations and reflections on the profound practical challenges of national integration.

It is now much clearer to me that these processes are profoundly evolutionary and that most times national integration proceeds incrementally over time partly through state political, social, and economic developmental activities as well as through the reciprocal actions of states, leaders, and people. In fact, even the passage of time, during which vast political, economic, social changes, and interactions occur among the people, although often unnoticed, is all part of the process of national integration and nation-state formation.

At the same time, it is also clear that the process has not ended and it is quite complicated and challenging, especially in a new global order in which there is severe pressure from powerful external forces for new states to adopt political systems rather prematurely. In such an environment, it is important that African states, leaders, and peoples have to take responsibility for self-consciously designing their desired state systems and promoting perspectives, activities, and developments that deepen national unity and integration among the people in their societies. In this way, their emergent nation-states and national integration will be well grounded in their cultural and historical heritages and will therefore be more familiar and acceptable to their people. Moreover, it will be more secure and supported by the populace.

I hope that my survey of the processes of national integration and nation-state formation in Africa from ancient times through the colonial period and since independence will, with all the ongoing challenges, provide perspectives that deepen the understanding of these nation building processes. I hope also the work provides valuable hints of further steps or actions to be taken to further advance and consolidate the processes of political integration and nation-state formation in Africa. If it contributes to enriching the fields with fresh intellectual perspectives and policy options, it would have served its purpose.

Godknows Boladei Igali

Abuja, March 2013

Introduction

W e have tried to review the processes and challenges of nation building, national integration, and the formation of nation-states in Africa. This journey starts from the pre-colonial days to European conquest, then from independence to the end of the military interregnums and consolidation of democracy. It is examined from the perspective of political philosophy or political history. The question of the formation of political communities variously described as nations, nation-states, states, and their various political configurations has been a long-standing subject of political philosophy from the formation of the old nation-states of the Western and Eastern worlds to the process in most societies that attained independence from Western colonialism in the mid-twentieth century. The primary focus is on the political aspects of national integration, even though we are aware that other aspects like the construction of physical, social, economic, and cultural infrastructure are part of the processes of nation-state formation and national integration.

In the case of Africa, these challenges of national integration and the formation of new nation-states have been a subject of much interest and study. As the process is ongoing, with varying outcomes, half a century after independence in the early 1950s, the interest in understanding the complex evolutionary process so as to contribute to its advancement remains a subject of intense concern among leaders, people, states, and scholars throughout the world. This concern is given added urgency with the tendency in the upsurge of factionalisation along ethno-cultural and confessional lines in recent times. Development along these lines, while global in expression, is a matter of great concern in Africa, partly because of Africa’s heritage of multiple pluralisms and partly because of the manner in which it came into the modern world through Western colonial domination. This background means that the formation of new nation-states in Africa was ab initio faced with complex challenges.

The heritage of state formation from ancient Africa through the colonial conquest, domination, and administration with the creation of a perverse colonial state that comprised minimum territorial integration combined with political divisiveness meant that there was no national integration or the formation of nation-states in the colonial period.

Therefore, the initiation of the processes of national integration and the formation of nation-states was the responsibility and challenge that post-independence states and leaderships had to address and have been addressing since independence in the 1950s. These complex processes and ongoing challenges of the nation-state formation provide the context. This work is organised in thirteen chapters.

The first chapter outlines the immediate context and challenges of national integration in Africa in its human dimension in terms of the multiple identities of citizens from different ethnic backgrounds but who now live in a common political community or country. The various perceptions of individuals and how they self-identify and are identified are important elements of the evolution of a new national identity and integration. The study of national integration in Africa has generated various theoretical frameworks and analytical prisms that seek to understand and describe the processes of nation-state formation in Africa. While recognising the existence of these theoretical platforms, this study proposes a fresh theoretical/analytical framework within which the study of national integration could be undertaken. This is the concept of ‘diachronic development’. This analytical tool was enunciated in Latin America and is derived from its approach to the Latin American evolutionary historical experience that includes colonialism, nationalism, ethnic and racial variety, independence, and nation-state formation which is somewhat similar to the African experience. Thus, the concept of ‘diachronic development’ is an insightful and germane analytical mirror to view and investigate these national construction processes in Africa. It is a powerful tool and framework of analysis.

The second chapter reviews the political formations of ancient Africa, which were varied in size, philosophical premise, and organisational structures. They ranged in size from empires to kingdoms to city-states, and the unique village—and town-based decentralised political systems were commonly but erroneously described as ‘stateless societies’ that organised decentralised republics, but those were no less effective social formations. These ancient African political formations formed the basis of the existence and growth of these societies over several centuries and their subsequent encounter with the external world.

While they had relations with various outsiders, Africa’s encounter with Europe was fateful and ultimately determinative of its historical evolution and journey to the present era, including the modern nation-state forms that Africans have been trying to establish since independence. The Euro-African relations evolved from benign diplomatic exchange to Christian ingress, to enslavement, and to the eventual colonial scramble. The rest was partition, military invasions, conquest, and colonisation. These are reviewed in Chapters Three and Four.

The stories of colonial rule or administration, African nationalism, and decolonisation are addressed in Chapters Five and Six. These chapters outline the various systems of administration used by the European colonial powers in Africa. These range from indirect rule to direct rule, assimilation, assimilado, and to variations of these systems. The process of colonial invasion and conquest had generated stout resistance by the various African societies before the eventual imposition of colonial domination. In the new colonial context, new African-educated elite emerged and took up the challenges of living with colonialism and achieving freedom from colonial domination. They created a plethora of anti-colonial nationalist movements that were inspired by colonial domination, the experience of colonial rule, as well as by the example of global African political movements, especially pan-Africanism. It was on this basis that the nationalist intelligentsia began to struggle for political liberalisation, self-determination, freedom, and independence. The colonisers after much denunciations of the nationalist intelligentsia as unrepresentative upstarts and other delaying tactics eventually responded gingerly and grudgingly with decolonisation projects that weakened and divided the united nationalist movements and freedom drive but eventuated in the independence of African states in the early 1950s.

The nature and character of colonial administration had far-reaching and enduring impact on the post-independence nation-building processes. Chapter Seven therefore examines the sociology of colonial administration in the areas of political, social, economic, and educational activities and the potential impact that these legacies were to have on African developments after independence.

The achievement of independence provided the context for the commencement of the project of national integration and the formation of new nation-states. This monumental political and cultural engineering project necessarily had to take place partly with the heritage and legacies of colonialism on the one hand and the ideological formulations of the nationalist movements on the other.

The post-independent state formation efforts were made in the context of pessimistic forecasts by colonial officials and some European intelligentsia that Africans would descend into chaos as they were not considered mentally capable of running new democratic states. On the other hand, African leaders were optimistic that Africa would succeed in building and running new states and would thereby surprise the world.

In this context, Chapter Seven analyses the process of nation-state formation in post-independent Africa from the perspective of the political systems and ideologies that were devised and used for the national construction work during the early years after independence. Two major systems are identified and reviewed in terms of their application to processes of national integration and state formation. These were African socialist republicanism and Western parliamentary republicanism.

The African socialist republicanism experiments were attempted by various African countries such as Guinea-Conakry, Egypt, Tanzania, Kenya, Mali, Ghana, and Senegal. These came under different designations like pragmatic socialism, positive socialism, democratic socialism, realist socialism, African socialism, and revolutionary socialism. The leaders of these particular countries wanted to achieve three objectives. First was to build political and social systems that were partially connected with African traditional political and social systems; second to give their societies common ideologies or social belief system to enhance national integration and promote cohesion; and third to pursue egalitarian social development processes.

On the other hand, a number of countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Congo did not bother to create new systems but merely maintained and used the formal system inherited from colonialism—Western parliamentary republicanism, with its veneer of Western democracy.

Whatever system the various African leaders and states chose, the challenges were the same: how to create institutions, processes, and attitudes that would foster national integration and see the emergence of new nation-states. Consequently, they all had to attend to the same problems of the construction of new administrative systems, new physical and transport infrastructures, and new educational and economic systems to address their needs. In both emergent political systems, some leaders often attempted to stay in power for long periods through various mechanisms. These included the creation of one party or single party systems, banning of multi-party systems, and suppression of oppositional perspectives and groups, including repressions, detention trial, and illegal imprisonment of opposition groups. In addition, these new states and leaders faced the profound challenge of creating a new inclusionary mechanism to accommodate and represent their diverse peoples which they inherited. This was solely to minimise the exploitation of difference, the use and abuse of diversity, thereby reducing inter-group conflicts that could generate crises, instability, and even threats to the new nations’ territorial integrity. The attempt at the resolution of these challenges led to the next phase in Africa’s nation-state formation project.

The challenges of the nation-state formation after independence as seen in Chapter Six often overwhelmed the early leaders due to the enormity of the task and the variety of work that had to be done in the political, social, economic, cultural, infrastructural, and education spheres. Thus, the new states faced serious multiple challenges of the establishment and construction of virtually all infrastructures of a new state and at the same time had to manage the relationships among the various ethno-national groups in the country so as to foster a sense of belonging. In addition, economic challenges remained as they did not move their economies outside the inherited colonial economic system. They were therefore unable to sustain the social facilities they built, expand them, or create sufficient jobs to address unemployment and other social issues. All these factors most of the times led to disruptive inter-group competition, conflict, instability, and threats to these countries’ survival. It was in this context that military groups seized power in many African countries and ruled for over three decades between the 1950s and the 1990s. All the military regimes commonly claimed a messianic mission to rescue their countries. However, it is important to stress that despite their claim to a revolutionary mantle, they were of different political and ideological orientations as follows: reformist, ethnic, and revolutionary. In practice, they were not often able to accomplish their stated objectives due to the enormity of the task and their own ideological limitations. While they were unable to radically transform their states economically and socially, but they were at least able to keep them together. Sometime bequeathing some political blueprint for integration, the military’s longevity in power and inability to move forward often aroused opposition movements that campaigned for liberalisation and democratisation. These eventually led to the exit of numerous military regimes from the 1980s onwards and the emergence of new democratic regimes. This signalled the virtual end of the military era in contemporary African history as they became less acceptable and tolerated. By the time the African Union Charter was adopted on May 26, 2001, it outlawed forceful and undemocratic takeover of power on the continent.

The conclusion sums up the study and notes the accomplishments and the remaining challenges. It emphasises the importance of African leaders and citizens consciously assuming complete responsibility for the advancement of their nation-state formation processes to achieve complete political integration and new nationhood in which people share a sense of common nationality and identity.

Chapter One

On Political Integration and the Notion of ‘Diachronic Development’

The Challenge of Political Integration and Nation-state Formation in Africa

H istorically, the formation of nation-states has always involved the processes of political integration of various pre-existing groups that should result in the emergence of a new political community. Given the variety of ethno-cultural groups that often come together or are brought together to form nations, states and political leaders in the past have always had to design frameworks and strategies to lead to the emergence of cohesive political communities that are accepted and taken for granted by subjects or citizens as their ‘own’ specific nation-states.

Political Map of Africa

It would be appropriate from the outset of this book to state that neither the uncertain situation of political peace in the African state nor the overall global tendency towards disorder appears amiss. On the contrary, one thing that has defined the entirety of human history is the constancy of change within the wheel of time. What the entire process of state formation means is the continuous shifting, fusion, and diffusion of human populations and territories. So every human society has, in the course of time, undergone tremendous changes and at any given time remains in transition. We suggest that such a prism would help better explain the global trend and African experience in practice.

In no other part of the world does the task of defining and properly articulating these problems of common existence in an integrated political community seem as pressing as on the African continent. This is the primary challenge which faced African people and leaders in contemporary times as they attempted to form new nation-states after the European colonial rule.

It is an unsubtle factuality that in virtually every country around the world there exist diversities of various sorts. But the difference in the case of Africa lies in the hard fact that the cultural olios which had been largely meshed in other parts of the world are more real and continue to pose a problem for the installation of social peace due to the nature and origins of the modern state in Africa. Due to the distinctive process of state formation in Africa and the relatively newborn nature of these politics, the predisposition to atavistic ethnic sectionalism remains an ongoing challenge over fifty years after ‘independence’.

This state of affairs has itself generated multifarious problems and has kept the African state in perpetual political outburst and circuit. It is due to this situation that Robert Kaplan made the rather generalised and hyperbolic claim: ‘South of the Sahara to speak of states and national borders was meaningless. Life was Hobbesian war of all against all: there were no Leviathans.’¹ It is also for the reason of its deep ethnic variety that a poet once described Africa as ‘a broken china in the sun’. In most cases, the sectionalisation is along ethnic and religious lines, although increasingly, economic or rather class and social factors are also beginning to play important roles.

The Challenges of National Identity and Unity in Africa

The processes of generating national unity and national identity have practical, infrastructural, and human dimensions, all of which underscore the enormity of the work that the African states and leaders have to undertake to achieve a credible level of national integration and the emergence of their countries as nation-states.

A personal experience with regards to this real situation and challenges of ethnic diversity would be useful to further clarify this point. While commuting in a bus from CMS to Ajegunle² on October 19, 1996, in the normally overcrowded Lagos urban transportation, one could pick excerpts from a heated conversation between two elderly passengers seated in the adjacent row, dressed in the uniform of the Nigerian Legion.³ An unlawful conduct had