3. Severe Conflicts: Frustration-Deprivation
5.1. Introduction: Betwixt and Between – The African Nation-State in Limbo
158 Chapter 5: Nationalism – Ordering and Disordering Narratives
159 state, money, Jews, whites) control and manipulate the small man and must be brought down (also present in anti-colonial movements).”437
Africa carries an uneven share of the unique challenges and diverse struggles attached to the creation and maintenance of modern nation-states. First, the shedding of direct colonial oppression is a relatively recent history as compared to many other parts of the world. Second, the demarcation of ethno-political, economic and geographical boundary-setting438 was an externalised, detached phenomenon masterminded by far away European colonialists, fraught with dubious motivations and ill-gotten gain, and most important of all with no markings of the organic evolutionary process of
‘ownership’ in the national consciousness experienced in other locations. Third, in the colonial race for the ‘spoils of Africa’, a comprehensive exploitation of land439, mineral reserves440 and human resources was undertaken leaving in its wake a landless peasantry, a depleted natural wealth and a disenfranchised people locked in a semi-feudal system of class struggle and elite cooption.441 Fourth, in the fragility of its newly born
independence, Africa’s vulnerable nation-states were quickly embroiled in, abused and discarded as pawns in the posturing and brinkmanship of East-West geopolitical Cold- war politics. Zimbabwe’s nationalist movement grew out of the turmoil and torrent of all of these obstacles, land being but just one nascent example:
437 Bozzoli, B. 2004. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 207.
438Clapham, C., Herbst, J. & Mills G. (eds.) 2006. Big African States – Angola, Sudan, DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. See also Herbst, J. 2000. States and Power in Africa – Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Herbst detours from the ‘glorified’ treatise of good governance in pre-colonial Africa: “Herbst’s bold contention – that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before the European penetration of the continent…runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything. In identifying how the African state-building process differs from the European experience, Herbst addresses the fundamental problem confronting African Leaders: how to extend authority over sparsely settled lands.
Indeed, efforts to exert control over vast, inhospitable territories of low population density and varied environmental and geographical zones have resulted in devastating wars, millions of refugees, and dysfunctional governments perpetrating destructive policies” (back cover).
439 Hart, G. & Sitas, A. 2004. “Beyond the urban-rural divide: linking land, labour, and livelihoods”.
Transformation Journal: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, Issue 56.
440 Hochschild, A. 1998. King Leopold’s ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Publishers.
441 Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject – Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.
New Jersey: Princeton University Press. See also Bayart, J. 1993. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London: Longmans Publishers, and Guest, R. 2004. The Shackled Continent – Africa’s Past, Present and Future. London: Macmillan Press.
160
“Even before the settlers and imperial troops put down the uprisings of 1896-7 some 15,000,000 acres of the country’s total of 96,000,000 acres had been expropriated from the Africans without any form of compensation. By 1898 an estimated 38 per cent of the total population of Matabeleland had been forced into reserves.”442
“In April 1980, when independence was won, close to 6,000 white commercial farmers owned 15.5 million hectares or 45 percent of the most productive land.
Small-scale, mainly black farming families (8,500) had 5 percent in the drier regions, and 700,000 black families owned the remaining 50 percent in low rainfall areas with very poor soil fertility.”443
There is a stream of ‘afro-pessimist’ thinking that approaches Africa’s precarious nation-building condition as a failed project. Unable to understand why Africa has not embraced the so-called ‘universal’ neo-functionalist (neo-colonial) agenda of western politico-judicial democratisation, progressive development and free market economies, these doomsday prophets have abandoned Africa to what they predict as a dangerous slippery slide into the dark abyss of chaos and disorder.444 However, in contrast to this view there are the ‘afro-optimists’ who maintain that Africa has not had a genuine opportunity to truly take full control of its own destiny and development as a continent.
These Africa-advocates do not see the current nation-state crisis as a sign of apocalyptic demise. Instead they interpret this time of upheaval and rapid social change as a
transitional phase, a new birth from the ashes of colonial structures that were never truly demolished in the mad rush for independence across Africa. Certain scholarship has even suggested that a new paradigm of “the political instrumentalization of disorder”445 as a governance model is emerging in Africa.
For while the independence struggles brought varied degrees of social freedom, colonialism remained in the vestiges of economic and governmental-political structures that were imported, self-serving and in multiple ways un-African in value. It has taken a
442 Martin, D. & Johnson, P. 1981. The Struggle for Zimbabwe. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 51.
443 Todd, A. 2007. “A Chronicle of Land”. The Black Scholar – Journal of Black Studies and Research. 37 (1): 21.
444 Kaplan, R. 1994. “The Coming Anarchy”. Atlantic Monthly, February.
445 Chabal, P. & Daloz, J. 1999. Africa Works – Disorder as Political Instrument. (The International African Institute). Oxford: James Currey Press and Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Chabal & Daloz develop their ‘disorder as political instrument’ notion by exploring three trends in Africa:
The informalization of politics, the re-traditionalization of society, and the productivity of economic failure.
161 generation (30-40 years since independence) to realise that these inherited governance systems will not work in Africa, and so the dragon of colonial, structural violence rears its ugly head as it heaves its last breath over Africa.446 For the afro-optimist, out of this seeming quagmire arises a Phoenix; a re-birthing of all that is truly African in the public and private realms of life. In the words of Ali Mazrui:
“The question that has arisen recently is whether real decolonization is not
winning formal independence but the collapse of the colonial state itself. It is not changing the guard, raising the flag, and singing the new national anthem while leaving the old structures intact. Rather, it is the cruel and bloody disintegration of colonial structures. Decolonization should no longer be equated with political liberation.”447
Hence, it is the firm belief of many Africa scholars that unless or until the nation-state scaffolding imposed on Africa by the colonial powers and embraced by most of the African independence leaders (either in word and/or in policy action) is intentionally deconstructed, and then reconstructed in alignment with innovative African-sensitive structures of political governance and social collaboration, post-independent Africa’s forays into replicating Western nationalisms will continue to fail.448 The proof of
‘nationalism’ is tested at the intersection of a shared collective identity affiliation
(common values) and its fusion with the socio-political structures institutionalised by the nation’s decision makers in order to reinforce that particular corporate identity and values.