Routledge Handbook of African Politics

Nic Cheeseman, David Anderson, Andrea Scheibler, Nic Cheeseman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351550475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a comprehensive and cutting edge examination of this important continent, Routledge Handbook of African Politics surveys the key debates and controversies, dealing with each of the major issues to be found in Africa's politics today.

Structured into 6 broad areas, the handbook features over 30 contributions focused around:

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• The State

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• Identity

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• Conflict

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• Democracy and Electoral Politics

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• Political Economy & Development

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• International Relations

Each chapter deals with a specific topic, providing an overview of the main arguments and theories and explaining the empirical evidence that they are based on, drawing on high-profile cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. The Handbook also contains new contributions on a wide range of topical issues, including terrorism, the growing influence of China, civil war, and transitional justice, making it required reading for non-specialists and experts alike.

Featuring both established scholars and emerging researchers, this is a vital resource for all students of African Studies, democratization, conflict resolution and Third World politics.

PART I

The politics of the state

1

NATIONALISM, ONE-PARTY STATES, AND MILITARY RULE

Nic Cheeseman

Following the reintroduction of multi-party politics in Africa in the early 1990s it is easy to assume that topics such as the one-party state and military rule are no longer relevant. After all, these were the subjects that Africanists studied in the 1980s when authoritarian rule was ubiquitous and there was little to celebrate. What relevance could such issues have for the era of democratization? In fact, the legacy of authoritarian rule continues to loom large on the continent. The prospects for long-term economic development and democratic consolidation are shaped by whether or not a country was a one-party state or a military regime, was governed by a benign ‘philosopher King’ or a unscrupulous dictator, or experienced relative stability or endemic conflict. Nationalism, one-party states, and military rule thus remain important topics because they help us better to understand both the past and the present.

This chapter has three main aims. The first is to demonstrate the lasting significance of nationalism to African politics. Nationalism has consistently exerted a powerful hold on the continent’s trajectory, from the fragmentation of nationalist movements in the 1960s, which contributed to the emergence of one-party states and military rule, through to the continued use of nationalist discourse by political leaders, most notably Robert Mugabe, in the contemporary period. The second is to show that not all authoritarian regimes were the same. In fact, Africa has witnessed a broad range of undemocratic governments that have varied dramatically in terms of their commitment to human rights and political participation. Some, such as Mobutu Sese Seko’s brutal military dictatorship in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo – DRC) denied citizens any meaningful political rights. Others, though, such as Julius Nyerere’s one-party state in Tanzania, prohibited opposition parties but allowed citizens to enjoy a degree of free speech and to participate in elections in which they could choose their local representative, if not their government.

The third and final aim of the chapter is to trace the legacies of one-party and military rule, in order to show how they continue to influence political developments today. It is not possible to understand fully the international and domestic resonance of the power-sharing model of government – a form of inclusive government with no opposition, which has often been introduced as a way to end periods of conflict – without first recognizing that the one-party state was the most stable form of government in the years that followed independence. It is also not possible to fully understand the scepticism of many Africanists towards American plans to channel increasing resources to the continent’s armies through the recently formed US Africa Command (AFRICOM) without first appreciating the record of African militaries in power since independence.

Nationalism and after

The fight against colonial rule is often remembered across the continent as a moment of great national unity; of course, in many ways it was. Consider the proud history of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. Formed in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the ANC fought a struggle that was impressively inclusive of different black African ethnic groups, coloureds, Asians, and whites. This was remarkable because the apartheid government elected by white voters in 1948 employed a range of divide-and-rule strategies that were deliberately designed to prevent the emergence of a united opposition. By creating separate ‘homelands’ for black ethnic groups, the National Party sought to strengthen individual group identities and thus make it harder for a united black nationalist movement to emerge (Lodge 1983). By transferring modest amounts of patronage and power to black African leaders willing to engage with the state, the apartheid regime also hoped to create a tier of conservative black figures who would find it in their interests to defend the status quo.

This strategy was not without success. For example, having established the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in 1975, Inkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi, son of the Zulu Chief Mathole Buthelezi, became the chief minister of the ‘semi-autonomous’ KwaZulu homeland. Although the ANC initially accepted the new party, radical nationalists soon accused Buthelezi of being an apartheid collaborator (Mare and Hamilton 1987). For his part, Buthelezi recognized that his privileged status depended on the ongoing support of the apartheid government; his power was therefore threatened by the prospects of majority rule. As a result, following the negotiations to bring an end to apartheid rule in the early 1990s, Buthelezi initially refused to participate in democratic elections and only agreed to stand after ANC leader Nelson Mandela and National Party leader F.W. de Klerk had promised that they would recognize the special status of the Zulu monarchy after the polls.

However, although such fissures existed, the ANC proved able to win and retain the loyalty of the vast majority of the black population over some 100 years. Despite being banned and forced into exile by one of the most effective authoritarian states in sub-Saharan Africa, the message of the movement’s Freedom Charter – that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, black and white – continued to resonate. The hold of the party over the South African political imagination shows no signs of abating: after 20 years of multi-party elections, the ANC’s share of the vote has yet to drop below 62 per cent.

Yet the notion of the late colonial period as a time of African unity was also a necessary myth, valuable to leaders in both colonial times and the post-colonial era because it allowed those in power to gloss over internal schisms and to obscure competing visions of how power should be distributed. As the case of the ANC and IFP suggests, even the most effective nationalist movements contained deep divisions (Hodgkin 1956). The boundaries of African states had been drawn not with respect to the location and history of different ethnic groups, but according to a geo-strategic logic. Even if European cartographers had been more sensitive to local context, they would have struggled to design states that made economic and cultural sense: the average African polity is at least twice as ethnically diverse as New York or London, and the high number of small ethnic groups in countries such as the DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Uganda would have made it impossible to design polities that would have been both ethnically homogenous and large enough to be viable. It is therefore unsurprising that African states group together a range of different communities with little sense of a common identity, and that subsequent inter-communal relations have often been characterized more by competition than by a sense of solidarity.

Prior to independence, ethnic identities were reified and entrenched by colonial practices of codifying groups and mapping the location of ethnic groups, appointing and solidifying the role of chiefs over distinct ethnic communities, and playing divide-and-rule politics. Taken together, these policies served to institutionalize identities while simultaneously providing Africans with incentives to organize as ethnic communities to be better able to press their demands on the colonial regime. Following Ranger, one might say that colonial governments believed in tribes, and Africans gave them tribes to believe in (see Ranger 1983, 1993). In turn, more politically salient ethnic identities made it less likely that political movements would remain united – a major problem for nationalist movements but a boon for authoritarian incumbents seeking to defend their positions after independence (see Lynch, this volume).

Inter-ethnic tensions were also fostered by the impact of the colonial era on local political economies, which varied within countries as well as between them. The communities that lived near sites of colonial settlement usually suffered the greatest disruption as a result of occupation, but were also the groups that benefitted the most from the opportunities colonial rule had to offer. Mission education may have provided the basis for self-advancement, but it was proximity to wage labour and positions in the colonial administration that facilitated the emergence of a new elite. Because the communities that suffered the most painful consequences of colonial rule, such as land alienation, often also enjoyed higher levels of education, know-how, and capital, their leaders typically had both the motivation and the confidence required to campaign for a rapid transition to independence. The Kikuyu of Kenya illustrate this pattern well. The reservation of land in the Rift Valley for white settlers helped to radicalize the Kikuyu community, ultimately leading to the violent Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s (Anderson 2005b).

Simultaneously, high levels of missionary education and the greater employment options available in Nairobi ensured that the Kikuyu community assumed an economically privileged position. Many Kikuyu did not join Mau Mau, but rather became ‘loyalists’ and worked for the colonial regime (Branch 2009). As a result, the Kikuyu were both strongly represented within the colonial administration and were at the forefront of the nationalist movement: it was predominantly leaders from the Kikuyu and Luo communities that in 1960 established the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) to push for the speedy end of colonial rule, confident that they had the necessary skills and opportunity to reap the benefits of independence.

By contrast, economically and politically marginal communities faced a more uncertain future. For such groups, independence promised not a new set of freedoms, but rather the prospect of being dominated by their rivals. In Kenya, the Nandi, Maasai, and coastal communities were numerically smaller and less economically advanced than the Luo and Kikuyu. They thus established their own ‘nationalist’ organization, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which pushed a far more conservative agenda. Encouraged by European settlers – who also had good reason to fear majority rule – KADU campaigned for a more gradual transition to independence and for the introduction of a majimbo (regionalist) constitution that would allow Kenya’s communities a degree of local self-government (Anderson 2005a). Subsequent competition between KANU and KADU split the nationalist movement in two and resulted in considerable inter-party violence.

While a number of more homogenous countries, such as Botswana, did not have to face these challenges, Kenya was far from alone in struggling to manage the tension between the need for unity within the nationalist movement and the desire of sub-national communities for a degree of self-government and protection against the threat of the tyranny of the majority. These internal contradictions meant that the struggle against colonial oppression was often more messy – and divisive – than official narratives of nationalism allow. Such fissures proved to be particularly significant in the post-colonial period because, when mishandled by post-colonial political leaders, they formed the foundations of civil conflict and unrest.

In addition to the internal contradictions within many nationalist coalitions, there was a deep tension in the ideas that motivated nationalism. On the one hand, the cry of freedom resonated everywhere. In East Africa, the nationalist struggle was known as the battle for uhuru (freedom). In South Africa, the ANC’s Freedom Charter guided successive anti-apartheid campaigns, including that of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the mid- to late 1980s. Freedom was a particularly effective rallying call because it could mean all things to all people: freedom from colonial oppression, freedom from poverty and unemployment, freedom to fulfil one’s aspirations.

However, the demand for freedom went hand-in-hand with a call to unity. In the eyes of philosopher-kings such as Leopold Senghor of Senegal, unity had instrumental value because internal divisions would weaken the effectiveness of African nationalism. It also had intrinsic value, though, because it reflected a common African heritage and culture that needed to be preserved against the challenges that would come from within and without. The call to unity took a variety of forms. In the hands of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s influential independence leader, it became a message of pan-Africanism – a call to move beyond colonial borders and to celebrate the continent’s common history and needs. Other founding fathers, such as Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, were rhetorically supportive of pan-Africanism but in practice were more concerned to ensure domestic unity, which they saw as being necessary first to secure independence and later to meet the challenge of nation-building (for a full discussion see Khadiagala, this volume).

These two key goals of freedom and unity continue to exert a great hold over the political imagination, yet they have existed in perpetual tension. Post-colonial regimes typically viewed disunity as the forerunner of civil conflict and responded by promoting unity at any costs, even when this meant imposing significant constraints on the freedoms of ordinary people to speak and act freely. As a result, the quest for unity frequently gave rise to the emergence of an authoritarian form of politics that often has been viewed as more acceptable by domestic and international actors because of its rhetorical roots in the nationalist struggle.

Especially where the liberation struggle was longer and more violent, as in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, governments have been particularly concerned to maintain the unity that was essential to the success of their former guerrilla/military operations in order to establish political hegemony. Some former liberation movements have managed to maintain a balance between the quest for control with a respect for civil liberties, as in Namibia and South Africa, but in cases in which former liberation parties have suffered a decline in popularity but were unwilling to contemplate losing power, they have often proved adept at manipulating the memory of the liberation struggle in order to depict opposition groups or dissenting individuals as ‘sell-outs’ and ‘traitors’, and thus as legitimate targets of state violence. The response of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) to the threat posed by the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) opposition is a classic example of the use of ‘patriotic history’ to cow dissent (Tendi 2010). Although the quest to maintain political order did not always lead to such repressive consequences, in the struggle between freedom and unity it was typically the latter that won out.

Authoritarian rule

Chris Allen (1995) has described how, following the victory over colonial rule, many of the nationalist coalitions began to fragment under the weight of their own contradictions. Across the continent, leaders struggled to hold their alliances together as competition over power and patronage intensified both between and within ethnic groups. As leaders scrambled to maintain order, they drew on the nationalist rhetoric of unity to justify the extension of political control, paving the way for the marginalization of rival parties and the steady erosion of political space. The consequence was a decade of democratic backsliding and political unrest.

However, as Allen points out, there was no single ‘African’ experience. Instead, two main trajectories emerged. In those states where ruling parties had a national reach, and the executive was able to retain control of the party machinery, the nationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• An introduction to African politics
• PART I The politics of the state
• PART II The politics of identity
• PART III The politics of conflict
• PART IV Democracy and electoral politics
• PART V Political economy and development
• PART VI International relations
• Index