Reclaiming the Nation

The Return of the National Question in Africa, Asia and Latin America

Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783718665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

This book compares the trajectories of states and societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America under neoliberalism, a time marked by serial economic crises, escalating social conflicts, the remilitarisation of North-South relations and the radicalisation of social and nationalist forces. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros bring together researchers and activists from the three continents to assess the state of national sovereignty and the challenges faced by popular movements today. They show that global integration has widened social and regional inequalities within countries, exacerbated ethnic, caste, and racial conflicts, and generally reduced the bureaucratic capacities of states to intervene in a defensive way. Moreover, inequalities between the countries of the South have also widened. These structural tensions have all contributed to several distinct political trajectories among states: from fracture and foreign occupation, to radicalisation and uncertain re-stabilisation. This book redraws the debate on the political economy of the contemporary South and provides students of international studies with an important collection of readings.

Part I

Africa

2

Rethinking Pan-Africanism, Nationalism and the New Regionalism

Thandika Mkandawire

INTRODUCTION

One of the major forms of globalisation has been regionalism, by which nations have sacrificed some of their sovereignty to regional supranational authorities in order to protect themselves from the assault on their sovereignty, social models and cultures.¹ The European Union is probably the most outstanding achievement in this respect, but there are many other regional initiatives and ideological expressions that indicate this response. In all these schemes, the regionalist ideologies and aspirations have to reconcile themselves to the nationalist aspirations, which remain a defining feature of the global order and, indeed, underpin much of the regional initiatives. It has often been argued that under the impetus of globalisation, the Westphalian project of ‘nation-building’ is passé, irrelevant and quixotic. For those of cosmopolitan inclinations, this is to be welcome: the nation-state became restrictive and exclusive; and in Africa, it provided a ‘safe haven’ for the practice of ‘human wrongs’, behind the veil of national sovereignty and non-interference. Transcending such an order in a world of diversity is thus celebrated. However, this celebration is premature, if only because it does not have much relevance for the life-world of human existence and political behaviour in much of Africa. And even among those whose horizons have been extended by globalisation, any mobility beyond that of the imagination is still severely restricted, as the developed countries close their borders and reinforce their regional identities.

For over a century, Pan-Africanism has been driven by different actors responding to a number of external pressures, of which globalisation is the most recent expression. From its origins as a movement for the assertion of the humanity of the people of African origin, it now appears as a movement both for collective self-reliance and the new regionalism. In its original form, Pan-Africanism was naturally borne by non-state actors, and it was deeply influenced by Africa’s Diaspora and by the racism that pushed Africans together. Pan-Africanism was not simply a moment bringing together people of African origin; it was also an ideology that has left a deep imprint on African political thinking and sensitivities. It covered cultural, political and economic dimensions. Like all ideologies, Pan-Africanism articulated a vision of what is desirable; it set norms by which adherents were judged; it gave a semblance of cohesion to disparate interests. But like all ideologies, it has had its blind spots, some of which have threatened to subvert its central projects. And if it is to maintain its relevance and vitality, Pan-Africanism must be subjected to constant critical re-evaluation and refurbishing. It must be seen to speak to contemporary issues. The role of intellectuals is not simply to give coherence to a shared ideology, but to permanently critique the project, revealing its myths, falsifications and lacunae, reinforcing its strong points and identifying for it new sources of energy and new challenges.

The history of Pan-Africanism is characterised by seesaw-like shifts in emphasis, as continental or Diasporic issues have become dominant. This is not surprising, given the fact that the imaginary of exile is quite different from the nation-building project of the nationalist at home. In Africa, as elsewhere, Diasporas have played an important role in the reinvention and revitalisation of the identity of the ‘home country’. And today, with the capacity to participate in the political life of their homelands, there can be no doubt that Diasporic groups will be even more immediate to the rethinking of a new Africa. In addition, Mamdani (1999) has noted the contributions to Pan-Africanism by the African intellectual work of the Creoles. The argument seems to be that their alienation has given them unique insight and driven their Pan-Africanism in a much more transcendental direction, which has been a source of its vitality and attraction. This is one of the reasons why, despite its poor record, Pan-Africanism has tenaciously held its grip on the minds of Africa’s intelligentsia. When it seemed to have disappeared from serious official discourse, it persisted in popular cultural expressions and intellectual discourse partly because, unlike the prevailing forms of nationalism, it was freely adhered to and not imposed by the state.

However, there is another side to its transcendental character: it may also have detached Pan-Africanism from the day-to-day trials and tribulations of national actors and given it what has at times seemed to be an ethereal existence. This may also account for the extreme voluntarism surrounding it, so that failure in meeting its exigencies has often been attributed to wrong thought and much less to any objective conditions. Thus, it is asserted, Africa would have been better off if one form of identity had prevailed over another, or if one understanding of the national state (the Eurocentric one) had been rejected, or if only the ideas of the founding fathers had prevailed in their pristine form. Such voluntarism and concentration on the ideational may be understandable, given the intellectual foundations of Pan-Africanism and its self-conscious claims of an ideological status. And there can be no doubt that ideas will be decisive in the success or failure of the Pan-African project. But this one-sided focus on the ideational fails to come to terms with the objective conditions that gave birth to the bearers of the different ideas that are bemoaned and does not come to grips with the reality with which Pan-Africanism has had to contend in difference places and times. Agency divorced from structure has tended to pose the question in a rather utopian and voluntaristic manner.

One major task that Pan-Africanism set for itself – the complete liberation of the continent – has been achieved. However, on other items of the agenda that were expected to follow decolonisation, Pan-Africanism has not done well. The political unification and economic integration of the continent have thus far failed, at least when judged against the dreams of the key figures of the Pan-African movement. It has failed when judged against the well-articulated and widely shared understandings of the needs of the continent, as well as the declarations and rhetoric of African leadership and the documents and plans prepared at Pan-African conferences. It has also failed when judged against other projects of regional co-operation in other continents. I state these facts not to cast a diminishing light on the Pan-African vision writ large, and even less so to sow despondency among Pan-African ranks. Indeed, I believe that it is this Pan-Africanism that will ultimately make coherent the jigsaw puzzle of Africa’s multiplicity of identities and interests and that will provide us with the real basis for addressing Africa’s daunting problems and with a response to global pressures on our individual sovereignties.

NATIONAL PROJECTS AND PAN-AFRICANISM

While Pan-Africanism started as a ‘stateless’ and nationless movement over a century ago, since the Accra conference in 1958 it has had to reconcile its more transcendental agenda with the national agenda of new states and nations. And since then, the new agenda of Pan-Africanism has been much messier than its earlier variants, leading some nostalgically to long for the ‘Golden Days’ when the Pan-Africanist message, task and articulation were much more coherent and straightforward and with a moral sway that was unchallenged. The sheer size of the continent and the dispersion of peoples of African descent has meant that the Pan-Africanist project has had to come to terms with a wide range of identities, interests and concerns, which include gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, race and geographical allocation, to name only some major ones. At times, the conflicts arising from some of these identities have put the Pan-African project under severe stress, such as the recent tragedy in Darfur (see Mamdani, Chapter 3, this volume).

Ethnicity, Nation and Pan-Africanism

Let me start with that most ubiquitous and most dreaded identity – ethnic identity. The projects of both nation-building and development presupposed a strong state governing a coherent nation. In this scheme of things, ethnicity was seen as inimical to both. It weakened the state by the conflicts it engendered, while the multiplicity of its claims simply denied the new countries a ‘national image’. Nationalist movements saw recognition of this pluralism as succumbing to the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the erstwhile colonialists and neocolonialist forces that were bent to deny Africans real independence, and wherever it was recognised, it was seen as emptying independence of any meaning by nursing the fissiparous potential that social pluralism always harboured. And so nationalism saw itself as being up in arms against imperialism and the retrograde forces of tribalism.

In the process, something else happened: in combating tribalism, nationalism denied ethnic identity and considered any political, or worse, economic claims based on such identities to be as diabolic as imperialism. Radicalisation of the nationalists, through armed struggle, was to banish ethnicity even further from any serious political consideration. In those states where an extremely reductionist ‘Marxism’ became the leading ideology, class analysis simply rode roughshod over any other social cleavages. Ethnic identities were seen as something ‘invented’ by the colonialists or the petty bourgeoisie locked in combat among themselves. It was part of ‘false consciousness’ that was bound to disappear through ideological struggle or as the development of capitalism made class consciousness more salient. This may eventually be the case, but ‘false consciousness’, while subjective in its origins, assumes an objective political presence that can only be dismissed at one’s peril.

The nationalist quest for identity was inadvertently transformed into a quest for uniformity. The consequence – and a dire one at that – was that otherwise anodyne expressions of ethnic identity and claims were turned into something lethal. It also produced a rather schizophrenic political culture in which leaders were nationalist by day and tribalist by night.

The nationalist can be excused for the conflation of tribalism and ethnic identity for, in many ways, the forces ranged against nationalism tended to abuse ethnic identity. The shock of Katanga² in the course of Congo’s decolonisation, when Africa’s worst enemies, imperialism and racism, championed tribalism against the central government, was to affect the nationalists’ perception of ethnicity and regional claims so profoundly that ‘Tshombes’ and ‘Katangas’ were seen behind every movement challenging the authority of the central government. Part of the paranoia about ethnicity stemmed from a one-sided understanding of how colonialism affected African identities and how Africans themselves have responded to the colonialists strategy of ‘divide and rule’. The usual view was that colonialism simply fragmented African society. But as Nnoli (1998) persuasively argues:

despite the Machiavellian machinations of the colonial establishment in segmenting and fragmenting the colonized, the reality was that the socioeconomic upheavals unleashed by colonialism questioned people’s erstwhile identities, and therefore led to the continuation of identity formation and boundary redefinition. This process of identity formation continued, even if its focus was not the Nigerian ‘nation-state’ in formation. The point, therefore, needs to be made that right through the colonial period, into the immediate post-colonial period, and now to the contemporary post-independence period, the processes of identity formation and boundary re-definition have continued, and an understanding of this process is just as important as comprehending the vicious ‘divide-and-rule’ machinations of British colonialism, or the political opportunism of the various fractions of the ruling classes of the post-colonial state. It is the totality of these pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial experiences and identities which form the substance of the ‘National Question’.

The failure of African unity has not been because it has had to contend with primordial ties vying against its broader claims.

On the Artificial Problem of Artificial Borders

If nationalism made the error of believing that ethnic identity was incompatible with nation-building, Pan-Africanism has always run the risk of falsely assuming that national identity inherently undermines the Pan-African project. The usual observation is that African borders were artificially carved out at a conference in Berlin and that it is this artificiality that is the original sin. By accepting these boundaries, Africans had saddled themselves with the ‘Black Man’s Burden’ (Davidson 1992). Not only were the borders artificial, but they also produced ‘territorial absurdity’ and wrong territorial shapes which could only be remedied by ‘better boundaries’ (Breytenbach 1999). Now, all borders are a social construct and therefore artificial – the results of treaties and conquest, human imagination of community, invented histories, and so on. It is also argued that the nation-building exercise has ‘fostered a patriotic symbolism created by structures put in place by European imperialists at the beginning of the colonial encounter’ and that ‘identities left in place by departing colonial powers are glorified and sanctimoniously revered’ (Prah 1998: 39). Such patriotism is often said to lead to the detachment of nationalism from its Pan-African moorings and thus to work against the Pan-African ideal. I believe, however, what was crucial was not so much that ‘patriotism’ undermined the Pan-African ideal, but that authoritarianism allowed only a very narrow brand of patriotism which often took on those attributes that made Samuel Johnson describe patriotism as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’ (Boswell 1900).

The nation-state in Africa was premised on the extension of the Westphalian privileges of nationhood to the decolonised states. Such an order was characterised by the primacy of the territorial state as a political actor at the global level, the centrality of international warfare, the autonomy of the sovereign state to govern affairs within recognised international boundaries, and the legitimacy of states that were ethnically diverse. Much has been written on whether post-colonial Africa ever attained any of these attributes of nationhood. There is, however, little doubt that the new states found these principles quite congenial. The respect of colonial borders assured a modicum of peace in Africa by minimising interstate conflicts; African nationalism, its paranoia notwithstanding, has been successful in creating national identities among its multi-ethnic countries. We should also recall that the Berlin Conference took place in 1884–85, and generations of Africans have lived within the present borders since then. National identity was not forged on the morrow of independence, but in the course of the struggle against colonialism. The identification with these ‘artificial’ spaces, therefore, did not emerge since independence, but is more than 100 years old – older than some European countries like Belgium. This, rather than complicating the Pan-African project may actually make it much easier. Nations that are assured of their territorial integrity and identity are more likely to reach out to others than those faced with serious internecine conflicts and external threats to their very existence.

Furthermore, it is arguable that precisely because colonial borders ignored much more ‘natural’ or primordial affinities, they undercut ethno-nationalism, a much more difficult nut to crack, as the case of the Balkans has demonstrated. Instead, we have multi-ethnic nationhood and an interlocking of multi-ethnic nations, which does not make regional unification emotionally anathema to large sections of the population. On the contrary, it makes it particularly difficult to mount political positions against one neighbour without dismembering oneself. It has also made secession an extremely unattractive option in Africa. We often ignore the fact that none of the major actors in the wars in Angola, Mozambique, Liberia and Sierra Leone has sought to dismember the nation-state. The acceptance of the nation-state and rejection of ethno-nationalism suggests that Africans are much more comfortable with, or at least resigned to, living in multi-ethnic states than many other cultures in other parts of the world.

Rather than continually harping on this obvious artificiality of African borders, we ought to work on rethinking the meaning of these borders and how they can be the basis of a new Pan-African identity which would be at ease with the African people’s multiple identities. I do not believe that the failure of Pan-Africanism can be attributed to lack of identification with Africa by Africans chauvinistically mired in their diverse identities, as is often stated. Nor do I believe that the failure is due to the firm establishment of successful national identities by individual countries, which somehow militates against the Pan-African ideal. ‘Africa’ is probably the most emotionally evoked name of any continent. Its people sing about it, paint it, and sculpture it more than any continent. Its artists produce hundreds of icons of this much ‘beloved continent’. Even national anthems often evoke Africa much more than individual names. If artificial boundaries, ethnic identities and nation-states are not the barrier to the Pan-African project, then what is the main problem?

LACK OF NATIONAL ANCHORING

One source of failure of regional integration in Africa has been its lack of national anchoring, due to divergence between Pan-African and nation-building projects. The politics of constitutive national entities are crucial to the success of the Pan-African project. Some of Africa’s most prominent political actors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Africa
• Part II: Asia
• Part III: Latin America
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index