“The Enemy Within” or “Look, Mom: Proof That I’ve Been Reading”

A common thread common running through much of the reading, both assigned and personal, that I’ve digested since arriving has been a sustained, biting critique of the political elite of post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa. The main elements of the attack are as follows. The African state is defined by neopatrimonialism (pervasive patronage). Bratton and van de Walle writing on the “Third Wave” of democracy that resulted in multi-party elections in several African nations in the early 90s, argued, “State elites in Africa have sought political power primarily to obtain and defend economic benefits, to the point that they have blocked private accumulation by independent groups in society thus undermining the entire project of economic development.” Another scholar (Sklar) has asserted that accessing political power has been the primary means of class formation in Africa. African scholars have been no less acerbic in their criticism. Mamdani claimed that the post-independence state de-racialized but didn’t democratize. I think the most damning indictment has been the call for a “second independence.” Petals of Blood and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born transform this criticism into great, if not exactly uplifting, fiction. My understanding is that Fanon writes along these lines as well.
Why didn’t the idealism of the independence struggle translate into good post-independence governance? First of all, I’m not prepared to endorse such a sweeping generalization. Africa is not one big country. We can’t just pay lip service to the diversity here. At a minimum, if we’re going to speak about Africa as a whole, we at least need to qualify our statements.

But why generally did elites look first to consolidate power and second to development? I know the answer that I don’t like. I’ve read/heard an argument that culture has a role to play in all of this, and I’m extremely wary of that one. The idea is that a “big man” has expectations to take care of his kinship network, and these social obligations are carried into the political realm. This hypothesis was advanced by a student in my sociology class and seemed to be favorably received. I specifically asked, “What do I tell my friends back home when I tell them about that argument and they say, ‘Of course. Africans are corrupt.’ I still have more reading to do on this, but here’s my preliminary answer. Colonialism destroyed and distorted indigenous political institutions, many of which had checks and balances interwoven into them. Huntington also notes that modernization happened in the developing world a lot faster than it did in the West. The rapidity of social change further dissolved indigenous institutions before new ones could arise. Institutional weakness opens the door to corruption.

So to state that response as an answer to the above question: I’m inclining more towards the “perverse incentives” argument that institutions constraining the top echelon of government are extremely weak (in large part because colonialism vested absolute power in individuals at all levels of government) which means opportunities to derive rents (for corruption) are manifold, and the executive needs those rents to maintain power because of the deep, often non cross-cutting cleavages in many of these nations (ethnicity and rural/urban).

This set of arguments should be put alongside dependency and modernization theories, which I will post on soon. So just withhold judgment for a bit. In the mean time read Mamdani, Citizen/Subject; van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis; and Young, The African Colonial State in Historical Perspective.