SELECTED STUDIES

European colonization of Africa followed a long history of contact between the two continents. Not until the 15th century, however, did the Portuguese establish trading posts on the sub-Saharan African shoreline. Although some early ports, such as Cape Town, became permanent settlements, the majority served as little more than entry-points for the exchange of African and European goods. Over the next 400 years Europeans acquired slaves, gold, ivory, and later agricultural commodities from coastal traders and rulers, but - with the exception of South Africa and a handful of Portuguese holdings - made few attempts to settle or otherwise control the interior. By the second half of the 19^th century, however, rapidly industrializing European economies needed reliable access to natural resources, new markets for their manufactured goods, and new sites for the investment of finance capital. The vast, mineral-rich African continent had the potential to offer all three.

Thus, during the late-19th-century "scramble for Africa," even leaders with little prior interest in colonization, such as German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, staked claims to the continent. Meanwhile, Christian missionaries' calls for European intervention to end African slavery and "barbaric" practices provided a moral rationale for European political and economic ambitions (Dumont 1969). These ambitions were officially legitimated and negotiated at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, when European leaders agreed to partition the African continent into neatly bordered "spheres of influence." By 1900, fewer than 30 years after the scramble had started, almost 90 percent of Africa was under European control.  

European colonial officials handled the ambiguities by imposing their own categories and by inventing tribal authority structures where none existed. In 1930 the British administration of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) issued the Native Administration Memorandum on Native Courts, which defined tribes as "cultural units possessing a common language, a single social system, and an established customary law." (Ajaya & Crowder 1976[II]: 581). Assuming that German colonialism must have destroyed Tanganyika's tribal kingdoms, the British administration grouped disparate communities of Sukuma people under a centralized chief. In Libya the Italian administration randomly divided the Bedouins in 1929 and appointed them to tribes and sub-tribes. In Rwanda/Burundi - the Belgian government assigned Africans passes labelling them as either "Hutu" or "Tutsi," thus creating a rigid distinction between previously contextual identities (Wunsch & Olowu: 60, 88).

Identifying "authentic" tribal authorities proved no less complicated. Where there was no obvious tribal ruler, colonial administrations summarily appointed one - typically a cooperative village "big man." Some non-hierarchical peoples, such as the Sagara of present-day Tanzania, were placed under the authority of a neighboring kingdom - in their case, the Zaramo - and expected to adopt its language and customs. In Kenya, Masai religious leaders were appointed as chiefs, even though they had not previously held administrative responsibilities. In Senegal the French, despite concerns about the potential for mass Islamic resistance movements, reinforced the power of the "marabouts" (or holy men) of the Mourides brotherhood, largely because of their capacity to mobilize large numbers of young disciples for farming (Italiaander 1961).

Tribal identities, understood in this way, were neither the only nor even the most important of the identities recognized in pre-colonial Africa. People also belonged to clans or lineages, both groups defined by shared ancestry. (In Islamic-Arabic North Africa, in fact, the word "tribe" has most often been used to refer to lineages.) The smallest subgroup of a lineage is a family. Households and extended families were also important sources of identity, as they continue to be today.

In many places people also belonged to age sets, groups of men or women who reached maturity within the same few years. Members of an age set operated together for many social purposes, and their social roles shifted as they passed through different stages of life. Finally, people of different lineages and ages belonged to village communities. Although they might have shared many of their daily life activities with their village neighbors, they often had political loyalties to rulers elsewhere, and connections through trade and secret societies to people in other villages and towns.

Nations existed in Africa prior to colonization, or, more precisely, there were nationalities but not nationhood in the sense that various nationalities existed. Both “tribe” and “nation” refer to a sense of belonging to a community separate from their communities, but colonial historians generally applied the concept “tribe” in an attempt to downgrade their importance. “Tribes” were divided and an artificial mélange was created, out of which a nation-state was expected to emerge only a handful decades later. This proved all the more difficult as colonial governors frequently applied divide and rule tactics of promoting one “tribe” against another to weaken the opposition to colonialism in general. The seeds of post-independence ethnic politics, then, were nurtured by colonial policies (Munslow 1983: 221).

One reason that pre-colonial Africans' membership in such a variety of groups is often overlooked today is that many of these earlier forms of identity began to lose their power in the colonial period. Village identities became less important as rates of urbanization in Africa increased, especially after World War II. Secret societies were often deliberately targeted for destruction in the colonial period, because they involved rituals and religious beliefs inconsistent with Christianity or European norms of civilization. As a result, age-set membership became less relevant once colonial rule deprived age sets of their role in community political structures.

Even where European colonial powers had no trouble identifying chiefs and kings, they were not always satisfied with them. In Dahomey, the French replaced three "independent-minded" rulers within the first ten years of colonial rule. In Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in 1927, the British administration abolished hereditary rights of succession and assumed the power to appoint chiefs, thereby minimizing the chances of chiefly disobedience (Ayittey 1992). Elsewhere, chiefs considered unsuitable were replaced with others deemed more authentic. In southern Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), for example, the French replaced the Kong Jula they had originally appointed as canton chiefs with members of a local Zara clan (Ajaya & Crowder 1976). Colonial administrators' ongoing efforts to find compliant local authorities meant that kings and chiefs enjoyed little job security.

However unsubstantiated their employment, many African rulers were granted unprecedented powers by colonial administrations, often at the expense of pre-existing judicial and advisory bodies. In pre-colonial Swaziland, for example, both the queen mother checked the king’s power and a council composed of royal family members, village headmen, and commoners. Under British rule, women and commoners were excluded from the council, and the king's decisions were subject to approval only by the British administration (Carter & O’Meara 1985: 5). In many parts of Africa, chiefs were expected to allocate land and adjudicate local disputes, both responsibilities that had previously often belonged to lineage heads or village councils. Backing up chiefs' new powers was the implicit threat of military force, provided by colonial armies and police.

In the colonial period it was the monopoly rents extracted by the expatriate merchant and the settler classes that inhibited the further development of the productive forces after the export economy had been created. The transition to independence and the creation of democratic structures suggested that the planning process could be brought under social control and turned into an engine for the sort of growth stimulated by the social democratic experience of Western Europe in the 20 years after World War II. However, it is now clear that this model, and in particular the bureaucratic structures derived from it, was entirely inappropriate in the context we have described, where monopolistic state power, exercised by a new bureaucratic class, was expected to determine the relative needs of an extensive class of autonomized petty producers, and to find some rational basis on which to allocate resources to them (Brett: 27).

The nature of the dependency relationship established with the colonial economies in Africa precluded the emergence of a bourgeoisie, at the very least when the institutions of representative democracies were being established, and on the whole for a considerably longer period afterwards. Even today, there is no strong industrial bourgeoisie existing in the majority of African states outside of South Africa (Munslow: 219).

The emerging elites were those who would lead the African nationalist movements. Their own interests, namely the gaining of power and the use to which it could be put for the accumulation of wealth. These elites were the few trained and educated in European universities. They accepted the European models as being the only for Africa, hence accepting the ruling ideology and institutions. The main problem with such beliefs are discussed by Barry Munslow is that “the models and institutional framework established by a particular country in Europe is the product of its own history. They cannot be easily transported to a society whose social, economic, and political tradition has been extremely different.” (Munslow: 223).

Based on Munslow’s argument, blueprinting the British Westminster model of governance in ‘post-colonial’ Africa failed. The model was generally inappropriate, lacked a supportive environment socially and economically as well as politically, and that there was no real preparation for the working of the model. Another aspect of colonial rule that had its effect on post-colonial systems in Africa was the militaristic influence, which resulted in the ruling of army officers trained in European military academies. In Sudan, for example, Kutchener, Wingate and Cromer, graduates of the Royal Military Academy, were responsible for the formation of policy over a 36-year period (Wunsch & Olowu 1989: 77-78).

Corruption in general may be seen as a means of accumulation when many of the more conventional channels are sealed off by the weakness and dependent nature of the economies. Dictatorship in one form or another emerged to contain the rivalries or marked outright victory of one of the contenders, giving unbridled rein to divert a country’s resources at will. This was the case with the Kenyatta family in Kenya and many other examples could be cited (Wunsch & Olowu: 49).

Borrowing the words of Barry Munslow, “Colonial rule was not a preparation for operating the Westminster model; it was singularly different from it. The problem was not so much a failure by Africans to learn the lesson of parliamentary government; rather, the lesson of authoritarian colonial rule was taught and learnt too well.” (Munslow: 227).

Although scholars debate the extent to which contemporary Africa's political and economic woes can be "blamed" on colonial rule, it is clear that rigid ethnic categories created during the colonial era have become one of the greatest obstacles to nation-building and regional stability in much of Africa. The fact that the postcolonial state has for many years been one of the only reliable channels of upward mobility in Africa has also undermined the stability and effectiveness of many governments. In addition, postcolonial African states have inherited their predecessors' ambivalence toward customary authorities. Modern African politicians look to village chiefs, spiritual leaders, clan heads, and other such authorities to support their development programs as well as their political campaigns, but cannot always depend on their loyalties.

Bibliography

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Blanton, Robert and T. David Mason. “Colonial style and post-colonial ethnic conflict in Africa.” Journal of Peace Research 38(4), 2001: 473-491.

Brett, E.A. “State Power and Inefficiency: Explaining Political Failure in Africa.” IDS Bulletin 17(1), 1986: 22-29.

Calchi-Novati, Giampaolo. “Postcolonial state versus ethnicity: a reassessment of decolonization in Africa,” Latin American Perspectives 23 (2), Spring 1996: 130-138.

Carter, Gwendolen M. & Patrick O’Meara (Eds.) African Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

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Italiaander, Rolf. The New Leaders of Africa. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.

Koncazacki, Zibigniew A., et al. Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa. London: Frank Cass & Co. LTD, 1991.

Munslow, Barry. “Why has the Westminster model failed in Africa?” Parliamentary Affairs 36(2), 1983: 218-228.

Parsons, Neil. A New History of Southern Africa. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc, 1983.

Ranger, Terence and Olufemi Vaughan (Eds.) Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa. Ipswich: Ipswich Book Co. Ltd., 1993.

Shillington, Kevin. A History of Southern Africa. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1987.

Wiredu, Kwasi. “Society and democracy in Africa,” New Political Science 21(1), March 1999: 33-44.

Wunsch, James S. and Dele Olowu (Eds.) The Failure of the Centralized State: Institutions and Self-Governance in Africa. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989.

Essam Farag is a BA Combined Honors student majoring in International Development Studies & History and elected president of Dalhousie Arabic Society (DALAS), Halifax, NS, Canada.

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