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Theoretically, a state is presumed to represent a particular nation's achievement of self-determination. But in post-colonial Africa, states were invented before there were any singular nations to represent; state-builders had to rationalize the existence of nations in order to justify their control over the state. During the 1950s and 60s, as European powers liberated African colonies from bondage, they commonly turned over the control of political institutions to certain indigenous peoples who had been favored due to their compliance or usefulness in subjugation. The peoples who thus inherited dominance attempted to consolidate and legitimate their control of state apparatus through nationalist ideologies that served their interests in particular, which meant that they had to succeed in "nation-building" to legitimize control over their immediate neighbors. Nation-building implied "teaching" subordinated peoples to embrace the new national identity that the state would ostensibly represent.
The ideology of nation-building had powerful external proponents, especially the former colonial masters in Europe who linked the ideology to "modernization and development" programs.2 They encouraged African nation-building projects, in large part because that exercise supported their own neo-colonialist objectives of extracting natural resources and cheap labor from former colonies, without having to use military force to do so, as in earlier times. What was rarely emphasized, except by critics like Walker Connor,3 was that the "nation-building" agenda was also a "nation-destroying" agenda, as it intentionally attempted to eradicate the traditional (i.e. "backward") indigenous identities that stood in the way of the state and its monopoly of control and legitimized violence. "Modernization and development" in the Third World was always predicated on the nation-building teleology that "ethnic consciousness" would disappear, as infrastructure and social communications advanced, which was exactly the effect that state-makers were attempting to achieve. However, the history of the current era instructs that any attempt to diminish an identity may in fact stimulate it instead, possibly in the magnified form of "ethno-nationalism."4 There is a kind of yin-yang principle at work: a latent sense of identity can be crystallized as a result of political pressures to negate it. Once articulated, claims of ethnic domination in zero-sum terms (or declining-sum terms, in Nigeria) take on a life of their own, complicating the nation-building project upon which state-makers pin their hopes. This paradox requires state-makers to recognize ethnic claims while attempting to co-opt and finally eradicate them.
Nation-destroying was not the only problem for the statists to resolve. Colonial rule had created government machinery distant from the civil society; the people of civil society defended themselves against the state while they pressed it for resources. Post-colonial African experience saw the emergence of "two publics"5 that responded to distinct issues. Post-colonial governments did little to diminish popular distrust, despite whatever initial surge of enthusiasm might have accompanied liberation from colonial rule. Power, including control of resources, remained at the center. Resources at the local level were distributed from the "core," even though they were likely extracted from the farmers, miners or traders living in the "periphery." The result was another difficult paradox, in which people learned to suspect the corruption of leaders and institutions, but had to work with those leaders and institutions in order to acquire funds and jobs in local areas.
Post-colonial nation-building patterns vary across Africa, due in some large part to the fact that Europeans practiced several forms of colonialism, and each left its own particular legacy. The most important paradoxical legacy of the British style of colonialism was that it called into being a "national" consciousness shaped by the international boundaries of European domination of the "Nigerian" or "Ghanaian" or "Kenyan" (etc.) colonies, while the colonial practice of "indirect rule" concomitantly resulted in strengthening "ethnic" solidarity among Ogoni, Igbo, Ijaw, or other communities or peoples that had had no previous motivation or means to unify. (The French and other Latin colonies were notably different in this latter effect).6
As the statist institutions inherited from Europeans intensified local-level consciousness based on pre-colonial indigenous identities, competition increased between the "national" and "ethnic" levels of social and political organization. As various indigenous peoples began to compete for control, those who had seized the state apparatus attempted to gain advantage through nation-building ideology which required the diminishment of peoples generally to the level of "ethnic groups" or "minorities" that could be presumed to have none of the collective political power of "nations." Often, the state-makers would co-opt "ethnic groups" through "power-sharing" or "consociational" institutions which were transparent disguises for control monopolized by certain peoples. The paradox was that the state often provoked the very political consciousness and conflict that it ostensibly sought to prevent, avoid or eradicate.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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