Preliminary Thoughts on the Congo Crisis

It is widely believed that the root problem of the African state is the artificial nature of its boundaries; were not these boundaries, after all, first arbitrarily drawn up at the Berlin Conference of 1885–86 and then imposed from the outside? I would like to begin by putting forward two suggestions for consideration. One, all boundaries are more or less artificial. Two, if we want to understand the crisis of the state, an understanding of how power is organized is likely to prove a more illuminating starting point than the nature of boundaries.

Citizenship and the Congolese State

There is a thesis now common in Africanist political science that the state is collapsing in more and more African countries. The Congo is often held up as an example of this. The key problem with this thesis is that it proceeds by making analogies and, in the process, overlooks what is different about the state in Africa. Its starting point is not the state in Africa, particularly the type of state created under colonialism, but the assumption that the African state is an attempt to reproduce the modern state in Europe. Hence the conclusion that the attempt to imitate the original has failed. The difference is understood as evidence of a failure, and is then theorized as a collapse.

State crisis in Africa can be illuminated by Africa’s experience with globalization. From this point of view, Africa has gone through several globalizations, starting from the original diaspora that led to the peopling of the world, to slavery, to colonialism, and to the current globalization whose post-Fordist waves are said to be dissolving the nation-state. My point is that the roots of state crisis in Africa lie not in the current globalization but in an earlier one: colonialism. The key problem with the talk about the “crisis of the state” in Africa is that it misses its colonial genealogy. In doing so, it misses the link between the current problems of African polities and the bifurcated nature of African states—a phenomenon forged in the colonial period.

The state in Africa is a product of a radically different history, a history of conquest. Alien power faced the problem of legitimacy. In response, the British reformed their mode of rule, first in equatorial Africa in the early part of this century. They called it “indirect rule.” The French followed suit in the 1920s, when they shifted from “assimilation” to “association” as the basis of colonial rule in the African colonies. Belgium effected a similar shift in its African colonies in the 1930s.

It is this reform that begins to explain what is different about the state in Africa. Indirect rule reorganized colonial power as two distinct authorities, each ruling through a different legal regime, one civic and the other ethnic. The basis of civic power was the central state, which expressed its will through civil law. In contrast, the local state was organized as a Native Authority, overseeing the implementation of a customary law. Civil law claimed to speak the universal language of rights, but the regime of rights was applied only to the population of metropolitan origin, described as racially distinct. Natives were portrayed as creatures of habit, rather than as being capable of a rational exercise of freedom. It was said that they needed to be ruled through a different regime, one that would enforce custom. This, however, did not lead to the creation of a single customary law and a single customary regime ruling all natives. Instead, the colonial power claimed that each ethnic group had its own distinctive custom; it thus created a different set of customary laws for each ethnic group and established a separate Native Authority to enforce each set of laws. The final result was a Janus-faced power. Like civic power, native power too was a colonial creation. The difference, however, was that while civic power was racialized, the Native Authority was ethnicized.

This bifurcated form of the state underwent a reform after independence. The reform process varied from one country to another, but one could discern the more...