Need done by tomorrow Tuesday 12/18 1pm! 5 full pages double spaced!
The Road to African Nationalism (Part I)
The Rise and Curse of the “Nation-State”
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
First, back to Acemoglu & Robinson
Three Tswana Chiefs sailed to England in 1895 to plead for their Tswana states to be saved from Cecil Rhodes, who had been organizing the wholesale takeover of territory by Whites in Southern Africa not only in what would become later known as Rhodesia (current-day Zimbabwe, that first became independent under British white-minority rule as Rhodesia, then after a black nationalist rebellion guerilla that lasted 15 years from 1964 to 1979, the “Rhodesian Bush War”, became the republic of Zimbabwe under black rule in 1980), but also in Bechuanaland (current-day Botswana, the became independent in 1966); (p. 404-405)
These three African kings were therefore those who would help to pave the way for the country later known as Botswana.
Notable Facts:
• Explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873) converted King Sechele to Christianity. (p. 404) • First translation of the Bible into an African
Language was in Setswana (Language of the Tswana people) (p. 404)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
Southern Africa around this time (1895) was a region of turmoil not only between Africans and Europeans, but also between Europeans themselves for the control of the area (Britain, Germany, the Boers/Afrikaners). (p. 404)
Cecil Rhodes singlehandedly took over huge swaths of land in the areas now known as Zambia (independent in 1964) and Zimbabwe. (p. 405)
Prior to the Europeans, the Tswana had already been developing indigenous forms of government that were both centralized and pluralistic: The power of the chiefs was constrained. (Read p. 407)
Monarchical traditions here were not hereditary either and the Tswana chiefs, it seems, were very preoccupied by their ability to keep these “non-despotic institutions” in the midst of increasing white incursions and encroachment (p. 406-407)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
Most societies in sub-Saharan Africa became victims of the extractive institutions that Europeans were busy introducing all over the continent (p. 409)
Such extractive institutions would naturally conflict with traditional Tswana government systems where the rulers were real emanation of the people and, thus, were perceived as having legitimacy and, thus, enjoyed authority over their people that came from such legitimacy in their dealings with the British. (p. 409)
A number of countries in Southern Africa at the time were ruled by white minorities (South Africa, Namibia (Independent 1990 after black insurgency), Rhodesia); the white minorities here did not want independent countries run by blacks (p. 409)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
Most African countries after independence
reproduced the types of extractive,
exclusive institutions that existed in colonial
times; what saved Botswana is that, owing to the old chiefs securing a protectorate
agreement with Britain that allowed them
to keep some of their old ideas about
government, they were able to quickly implement inclusive economic and political
institutions after independence (p. 410).
It was also important that 79% of the
population of Botswana was of Tswana
origin, which further allowed its traditional systems to be spared the destruction of British colonialism (p. 410)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
The Tswana traditional institutions were not unique in Africa. They may have just been lucky that some of their institutions survived the destructiveness of colonialism; so the least colonial impact one has, the more likely it is that an African society would be stable (Read p. 411)
Botswana was also lucky to be spared the types of extractive institutions that had existed in most of the areas where the British and the French had organized the terms of trade. Botswana was thus able to set up its own marketing board thanks to the fact that the British had not set up any and this gave them some economic independence as well as the ability to to set up inclusive economic institutions (p. 411)
Interestingly, the Tswana chiefs knew, as they prepared their trip to London in 1895, that if the British and other Europeans came to know about or discover precious minerals in their lands, their autonomy would be over. (Read pp. 411-412)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
So, in response to the discovery of diamonds, Chief Seretse Khama quickly moved to create a law saying that the diamonds belonged to the Tswana nation as a whole, not just to the part of Tswana land and not just the Tswana tribe that he controlled as chief. This helped to maintain a sense of unity among all Tswana tribes and spared them competition over the mineral resources (p. 412)
This was not the case in Sierra Leone and other sub-Saharan African countries where diamonds fueled and sustained civil wars (the notorious “Blood Diamonds”) (p. 412)
Although some of the policies adopted by the chiefs to consolidate the power of the state look like those taken by France and other European countries, what the chiefs did in Botswana created the type of centralization that quickly enshrined the powers of the state as controlled by Africans in replacement of those of the chiefs (pp. 412-413)
Acemoglu & Robinson: “Three African Chiefs ” (pp. 404-419)
They also quickly organized educational policies that taught Setswana and English in schools, thus avoiding too much linguistic fragmentation among the Tswana people (p. 412)
So, inclusive institutions prevented wars over diamonds discovered in the 1970s. There was less incentive to overthrow the central government because of investments in infrastructure were well redistributed across the country and the need for the types of patronage systems that prevailed in other parts of Africa after independence was reduced (p. 413)
Botswana is, thus, a rather unique case that does show that societies less affected by colonialism tend to do better in sub-Saharan Africa than those affected by it.
There was also a soft case of African nationalism by chiefs that were able to avoid becoming agents for the destruction of their people.
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197- 242)
The Road to African Nationalism
Many African nation-statist elites thought of the European nation-state model as holding the promise of real social and political development at the time of independence (p. 197).
But the first signs of disillusionment were already as visible as the early 1960s and 1970s.
•Nigeria: Biafra secession civil war (1967- 1970); •Ghana: Coup against Kwame Nkrumah
(1966); •Uganda: spread of tribalism •etc
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•And many other nationalists were still fighting anti-colonial wars, such as those against Portugal (Angola, Mozambique) and white settlers (South Africa, Rhodesia, Namibia) (p. 198)
•The Cold War also created issues that became part of Africa’s political landscape (p. 198)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Throughout the process that saw Africans transition from colonial rule to rule by Africans after independence, people inside and outside of Africa confused progress with modernization: African elites and their European advisors (those who came back to advise Africans about how to run the countries as neocolonialists) thought that modernization meant the wholesale importation of non-African scenarios and solutions (Africa and Africans had to reject themselves and self-alienate in order to “modernize”) (p. 199-200)
Hence the contradiction of a Liberia that, as a country manufactured by the United States, was supposed to be civilized, yet produced only barbarism with its civil wars (1989-1997;1999-2003), wars that came to symbolize the contradictions it inherited from its colonial legacy (p. 200)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
At first, many Africans and well- meaning non-Africans were optimistic when “signs of civilization” began to emerge in the form of banks, universities, schools, cars, urbanization, paved roads, with many beginning to be run by Africans themselves. “Modernization” seemed like a real thing (200-201).
And so people thought the nation-state model was a success (p. 201).
Indeed, there seemed initially to be no quarrels among most of these new nation-states and with Ghana becoming independent in 1957, things looked good (p.201-202)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
But the colonial borders left behind by the colonizers started to show their inefficacy pretty quickly:
•They were carved through and over ancient trades routes
•They were carved over indigenous nations (ethnicities) and, thus, these colonial borders that did not respect natural regions, territories and ethnic groupings caused ethnic segmentations that, at once, separated kin groups from one another while, at the same time, amalgamating different nations together inside of borders that now began to create antagonisms and divisions: It became hard for Africans to adjust to these new segmentations and amalgamations, and this naturally led to the phenomenon of “tribalism” and created a “tribal problem” where there was none before;
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•The new states (or forceful nation-states) were doomed to be “highly leaky” as indigenous people sought to maintain the links to their kin and trade associates across the borders, which then triggered the phenomenon of illegal migrations and smuggling of both people and goods, a phenomenon that became and common place endemic over time. (pp. 202-203)
The colonial borders, thus, were both a failure and a curse whose consequences were going to worsen with time.
Another expectation was that the new nation-states would quickly become democratic based on the French, American or British models. But, to do so, they would have to create political parties and parliamentary systems just like in the West (p. 205);
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
But the problem was that in Europe, societies were already used to being established in the form of stratified social classes that,
• in Feudal times organized society along the lord vs. serf opposition, with the serf being maintained in that position by blood and privilege (and even by religion); •Then, after the revolutions, an elitist
bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant group, but with the emerging middle-class beginning to assert its power, power that was built over 150 years since the revolutions; •There was also the emerging working class
(that the middle-class began to manipulate on its way to seizing power) in the new European nation-states that had begun to assert themselves in the 19th century (pp. 205)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
But, in Africa, there had not been, before the Arabs and Europeans, many societies built around feudal systems and clearly identifiable social classes. So, Africans were not necessarily prepared for the sudden so called “modernization” along such social classes as had been practiced in Europe since the Middle Ages on the one hand, and then following the Industrial Revolution on the other (p. 206)
But, Arab (7th century) and European intrusions (15th century) triggered a system of territorial, regional, ethnic, political, and commercial competition that suddenly and abruptly flowed into African party politics and parliamentary structures after independence, as opposed to social classes as was the case in Europe (p. 206).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
This basically ensured that political competition would not be able to follow class structure and competition, but ethnic contours. In other words: • There was just not enough time for economic
classes similar to those in Europe to form since Africans were thrust into these new nation- states without having been prepared to manage their economies and without a distinctive bourgeois or middle class due to very few Africans being trained and integrated into the colonial economies while Europeans were there. • The Africans’ only point of reference for social
belonging was therefore the ethnic group that one belonged to: this automatically caused political parties to take an ethnic contour, hence the birth of what Europeans called “tribalism” (p. 206) (Note: Tribalism refers to a society organized along tribal or ethnic lines; it takes a negative connotation when leaders in such societies begin to advocate for policies and ideologies meant to favor some groups in exclusion of others).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Because Europeans noticed Africans lived in ethnic groupings that they called “tribes”, they confused the very conflicts that they and the Arabs had triggered among indigenous people with traditional tribal rivalries and even began to actively divide Africans into tribes without understanding how they had initially been organized; they even fabricated such “tribes” where there had been none before (p. 206) •But what was triggered was not even
tribalism, but something worst called clientelism and its lot of corruption and patronage systems.
•These patronage and clientelist systems caused a sociopolitical phenomenon whereby state leaders, in order to preserve power and maintain their grip on power, had to secure (therefore “buy”) the support of regional, local or “tribal” leaders by allocating to them state resources in a way that ensured they would not rebel against the central government.
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•The problem with the patronage system was that it caused each leader, and not just the president of the country, to work hard to win the support, not of a given social class, but of his/her tribal kinsmen and women, thus reinforcing the tribal and kin relationships within each group as opposed to exploding and scattering them into (non- existent) socioeconomic classes. •This, in turn, encouraged ethnic/tribal
competition for state resources, even within each ethnic group as each leader within each ethnic group sought to show he or she best defended the interests of the group or the region. •Additionally, developing access to state
resources became a must for each leader as each sought to leverage such access to buy support among his own people; this practice gradually became the norm of political activity in Africa, and morphed into a race for the spoils of political power (p. 206-207).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•And the reason why things evolved this way mostly had to do with the various forms of rivalries that Africans had developed first during the slave trade days, but also under a colonial system that often pinned African ethnic groups against one another in a bid to better control them; •Thus, the phenomenon of corruption that,
more than anything else, killed African economies over time, was born, not because it was part of the underlying cultures, but because it was triggered by the borders that forced the ethnicities now fighting for access to state resources within these fabricated states to find a way to defend their own interests (or, in many cases, the interests of their now corrupt leaders who in many cases exploited these rivalries to their advantages, just like Europeans had done before independence).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
In other words, in Europe, the structure of political parties and the parliamentary systems became class-based whereas, in Africa, it became based on regional and/or ethnic kinship considerations. Consequently, the political model in Africa, whether based on multi-party politics or single-party politics, became a model based on clientelism and patronage (p. 207). Democratic practice itself became an illusion. During colonial times, Africans became used to the model of governance that the white colonizers used: one with very rigid and dictatorial laws and government systems meant to keep Africans under firm control. Colonial authorities ruled by decree and not by democratic dialogue or laws. This manner of ruling arbitrarily became the norm and example that Africans were exposed to on a daily basis. To them, this was the “modernization” that Europeans were talking about (Read p. 208).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
So, the reign of dictatorship, from the start, was almost unavoidable and bureaucracy and clientelism as used by Europeans in the colonies became the same thing: they encouraged dictatorship and the practice of patronage (that is, corruption) (pp. 208-209).
In the end, the political content, configuration and landscape of the new nation-states in Africa narrowed down into groups (ethnicities) and individuals (corrupt elites) with command or access to state resources as opposed to institutions. And this created a rigid opposition between the cities, where the educated elites and, therefore, state power resided, and the rural areas, that became almost ignored in the mathematics of power in the new nation- states. In other words, real political power was now wielded by city-dwelling educated elites, to the detriment of traditional forms of authority and social organization (p. 209)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Authoritarianism and bureaucracy (non- elected government policy-makers, officials and groups working within an administration, often with the negative connotation of corruption and inefficiency that goes with it) became allied and led leaders of the new states that had initially relied on foreign “aid” (as well as neocolonial “assistance”) to begin to use such aid to not only advance their own personal interests, but also to build the clientelist and patronage systems that would help them stay in power (p. 209)
So, in Africa, power at the time of independence could never really be about any class-based ideology. In fact, in Africa it did not really matter whether a given government was socialist or capitalistic (these ideologies made no sense in societies not culturally organized along economic class lines): The results were always the same, that is, the conditions for endemic poverty were created. (p. 210)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
What followed, thus, for most African countries after independence was an almost immediate decline in production in rural areas since wealth and status no longer came from work in the fields and farms, but from, on the one hand, bureaucratic status in the cities (being a civil servant in the administration), and, on the other hand, the patronage system.
Political parties, because of their ethnic make-up, began to function on the basis of the patronage model: use of state resources to “reward” individuals for electoral support, leading to people at every level of the party beginning to “sell” their electoral support in exchange for the scraps of state resources that those in power were willing to give them. Political parties and becoming a political party member became the main way to ascend to socioeconomic status, and not hard work in the fields and farms (p. 210).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Thus, even after independence, African governments kept the economic models that they had inherited from Europeans and that basically relied on the exploitation of rural producers to generate wealth for the state; in Ghana, for instance, the government had initially kept the British model that essentially milked the peasants, leading to their impoverishment (p. 201-211). But the mistake, of course, would be to assume that, once independent, the Europeans left for good and ceased to intervene in the affairs of their former colonies: • They had left advisors behind: most African
elites were not prepared to run the new countries they inherited; • The goods that used to be produced in colonial
times for colonial economies (that is, European economies) continued to be produced and follow their old patterns, and their commercialization and sale prices continued to be controlled internationally by the former colonial powers (the buyers were often the former colonial powers) (p. 211)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
This situation led to disastrous
consequences:
•It caused rural farmers to cease to produce for sale and only of local consumption, due to terrible terms of trade that began to cause extreme poverty in the countryside, leading to all (farmers, people and states) becoming poor and dependent on “foreign aid” and the importation of food that they actually could be producing locally (Read p. 211); •In most cases, the state-controlled
economies died and most trading became informal, leading to smuggling becoming the natural response of peasants and farmers to the predatory international
economy in which the formal economy functioned. Countries such as Benin, Senegal, etc. became subject to, and victims of, this phenomenon, which caused huge economic losses to the state as well as generalized poverty (p. 213)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Additional issues:
•The nation-states transmitted to the Africans became awkward constructs; •They became contradictions between what
gradually emerged as state authoritarianism and the expectations of state democracy that the populations were looking for; •They also encouraged growth in illegal
trade; leaders were forced to close their eyes on this illegality to avoid collapse of the state (p. 215)
Yet, nowhere in pre-Arab and pre-Europe Africa was there ever famine (pp. 215-216). Explanations for this poverty after independence became, of course, that African agricultural practices and knowledge were too primitive and, thus, could not produce enough food for Africans.
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The solutions were, thus, that Africans had to:
•Abandon their primitive agricultural methods and “modernize” by importing foreign experience, knowledge and technology
•Adopt agricultural development plans that, in most cases, were inherited from colonial practice, plans that, ultimately, would prove inadequate and ill-adapted to how Africans approached agriculture (pp. 216-217).
As for the generosity of Europeans, there is much doubt:
•Europeans had popularized the fallacy that they had spent their wealth on Africa and Africans. It was actually the opposite: the Colonial powers had squeezed and fleeced Africans in ways never seen before:
•The British put in 40 million pounds (to its own manufactures and experts established in Africa), but extracted 140 million pounds between 1945 and 1951 alone (p. 218-219)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•In the Belgian Congo, 1% of the population was white, but they owned 95% of the total economic assets in the colony and 88% of private savings belonged to foreigners (p. 219) •The extraction of wealth from the colonies
was not halted by the transfer of power to Africans at the time of independence: these former colonial territories remained under the overall financial and commercial domination of the West, and the West continued to dictate the course of political life (supporting or overthrowing regimes), especially at height of the Cold War (pp. 219-220) •The pace of poverty accelerated in Africa:
in just 5 years between 1875 and 1980, most African exports dwindled in value due to unfavorable terms of trade dictated by Western powers (Europeans and Americans) (Read p. 220);
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Of course, generalized poverty caused a decline in both moral and political values in African leaders now forced to grapple with the impossible task of managing the new nation-states into which they were thrust with no preparation (pp. 221-222). What solutions were considered?
The need for more democracy:
•Except that those who advocated for this tended to push for Western-type models, such as parliamentary democracy; •But the reality was that the West never
pushed for real democracy in Africa as this would quickly turn against its interests (which only dictatorial regimes that they put in place and control could protect); the West, thus, was actually to downgrade and crush the old indigenous systems that had provided effective public forms of control over institutions and people (as in Botswana), that is, Africans’ own sense of communal democracy (Read p. 223)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
In other words, •Traditional European thinking about Africa
has never seen Africa as a possible or viable source of democratic thought or practice (Read p. 224) •And the West has tended to reject any
form of nationalist thought in Africa as communist, subversive behavior or tribalistic behavior, and current turmoil in Africa has appeared to confirm such Western stereotypes when, in fact, all those issues were caused by Western intrusion and continued meddling (Read p. 224); •What Europeans called “tribalism” in the
context of the new nation-states that they forced upon Africans was actually natural attempts by various groups to subvert the imposed-nation state prison they were now forced to share, in a vain attempt to reassert their national identity and protect their interests in the context of multiethnic states that too often were forced to become oppressive from the start because of their ungovernable structure (Read pp. 224-225).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
It can, therefore be asserted that colonial powers, not Africans, created tribalism in Africa (p. 225)
• Not only because of the modern borders that artificially triggered ethnic conflicts within the independent African states; • But also because of the older ethnic rivalries
that has been triggered by the slave trade: wherever this trade occurred, it strengthened kinship (ethnic) associations in response and, thus, allowed for both protective and defensive reorganization within each group; • And so, while the slave trade triggered the
birth of slave states in Africa and gave birth, in West and Central Africa, to states whose main economic activity now revolved around the trade of humans, in addition to that of gold and ivory, these states were unable to fully provide security for all those within their control. This led to a reinforcement of kinship (tribal) relationships ho fell under their political influence. as a defense and protective mechanism (Read p. 225-226)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The same phenomenon naturally continued within the postcolonial states: •Failure of the African nation-states after independence naturally led to a reinforcement of kinship (tribal) associations and structures as a way of providing security for each of the groups now “imprisoned” inside of the colonial borders left by Europeans (p. 226); •Most of the political parties that erupted in Africa on the cusp of independence in the 1950s and 1960s or later in the early 1990s as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union were usually kinship (ethnic) based (p. 227).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
What the colonial borders inherited from colonization did, thus, was to prevent the birth of democracies since: •States in which competitive kinship
corporations/associations existed as a political tool (as opposed to competitive class associations) could not viably produce stable democratic states. •Any failure of the state almost always led,
in such cases, to potential of ethnic warfare, especially during the 1980s, which became known in Africa as the decade of the AK47 (Read p. 227-228) •And, thus, several military regimes
emerged in some countries throughout Africa that came to power for the specific goal of defending the interests of specific groups (Rwanda and South Sudan are extreme examples of this) (p. 228).
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
Generally, failures of the state in Africa have been attributed to failures of persons (ignorance principle) as opposed to failures of institutions. But, in reality, the nature and structure of postcolonial societies as they now existed in Africa could not meet the requirements of the Western parliamentary model. Why? Simply because: •The Western parliamentary model relied
on the prior existence of social classes, especially an hegemonic middle class: There were no hegemonic middle classes in indigenous African societies prior to the Arabs and Europeans, and there were still none immediately after independence due to most Africans having been excluded from colonial economies due to the extractive institutions created in the colonies by the colonial powers;
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
•The void caused by the absence of classes was, thus, naturally occupied by kinship corporations (groups organized around the violence and domination of one group over the other in their mutual attempt to control access to state resources and, therefore state power) (Read p. 230) • In the end, most governments turned into
military regimes since they alone, and not a non-existent middle class or the masses, had the power to actually quickly change a regime: This is how the coup d’état culture as a way of removing regimes was born in Africa; and while each military regime often used the argument of saving people from oppression to justify the takeover, it often itself quickly became oppressive as there was no real way of actually preserving power; there was simply no middle-class structure capable of sustaining or promoting durable democratic principles and rule (p. 230)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
So, while African nationalism has been primarily anti-colonial (and thereforesome sort of continental colonialism) before independence, after independence, a new type of nationalism emerged that had
nothing to do with class or the need to improve the social conditions of citizens. Africans now claimed nationalisms that became expressions of violence within the new countries and translated into a culture of coups and civil wars: •Murder of Lumumba in Belgian Congo
(1961) •Coup against Kwame Nkrumah (1966) •Etc. Ideologically, one saw the emergence of regimes defining themselves as Marxist pushing Marxist policies and proclamations
that made no sense and did not work either (Benin, Zaire, Congo) (pp. 230-231)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The Benin Case
The case of Benin is a bit notable because its government succeeded somewhat in its
attempt to economically link city to provinces. Benin may have benefitted from the fact that, having no mineral wealth, it was somewhat left mostly alone by Western powers (a little bit). So, it began to consolidate a state that was minimally able to allow for some economic and political voice by rural people (p. 237); Benin survived also because the state allowed
its populations to operate illegally in a way that
allowed for a freer and illegal flow of
merchandise across its borders. Benin thus became a sort of smuggling entrepot and base
for one of the world biggest smuggling
operations under the complicit eye of the state.
By allowing its borders to remain porous according to, perhaps, old ancient trading practices, Benin allowed non-city people to prosper and, thus, allowed them to continue to produce and trade unimpeded by the state.
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The Benin Case
The downside of this was that: •90% of Benin’s trade was in the informal
sector;
•The state lost control of its economy, ceding most of it to the informal sector, that thus triggered some sort of productive illegality.; •This is because official state channels had
proved disadvantageous to the farmers because they were linked to the international market responsible for impoverishing them (p. 238)
This parallel, informal economy, however, gave the state some political stability. In other words, if the state had tried to become intrusive and attempted to take control of trading via taxation and other impositions, the state could have collapsed. (p. 237)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The Benin Case
The Benin state did go through some of the troubles that most African countries went through at the time of independence.
•It went through ethnic strife and several military coups for 12 years after its independence in 1960, until Mathieu Kérékou took power via a coup in 1972.
•Benin thus underwent several transformations under the dictatorship of Mathieu Kérékou and did not undergo another coup after 1972, due to, probably, the “official illegality” that Kérékou had accommodated in the economy of the country. (p. 237)
•Benin also implemented ways for rural communities to be represented in politics without having to be rich, notables, educated or familiar with French culture; (pp. 238-239)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The Benin Case •Even if economically poor by modern standards, Benin became the only West African country besides Senegal to develop sustained democratic practice since 1990 following the upheavals that forced Kérékou to open the country up to multi-party politics. Kérékou lost the first democratic election to Nicéphore Soglo in 1991. Since then, Benin has cultivated a durable and credible democracy. Now, while Benin has represented a potential model of the ways in which African economic systems could thrive by opening up their borders to regional free trade and finding ways of involving rural communities in political decision-making (as used to be the case in pre-Arab and pre- European times), it has still not been able to: •Fully develop a coherent approach to this system (p. 239)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
The Benin Case And it has still not been able to:
•Harness the economic energy generated by the informal sector in a way that translates into state control and, thus, prosperity that would benefit all (p. 239) •Fully extirpate itself from the curse of
tribalism: even if multi-party politics seem to be working there for now, it is still mostly based on the inescapable model of kinship corporations, one that is ill-suited for the European parliamentary model that the country is following (Read p. 239)
Davidson “The Black Man’s Burdern” (pp. 197-242)
What, then, about African nationalism and the way African countries were able to become independent?
In many cases, Africans had to fight militarily to conquer their independence. For this, they organized armed resistances in such Portuguese colonies as Angola and Zimbabwe, but also in others such as Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, among others.
In some others, Independence was directly granted due to the decolonization atmosphere that became inescapable after World War II (pp. 240-241)