The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010

2. In Search of the African State

The epigraphs to this chapter capture the yawning chasm separating once widespread visions of the mission and destiny of the African state, which reached a climax in the early 1970s, and the dispiriting realities of widespread state decline, crisis, failure, or even collapse that became dominant in the later 1980s.1 The itinerary of the state is central to comprehension of the dilemmas facing contemporary Africa; its analytical capture is a major purpose of this work. Thus we need to suggest a conceptualization of the state, review the 32 2 In Search of the African State Not just the management of development belonged to the state, but also its initiation, implementation, and direction. One expected that the state would be not just a gendarme or even a welfare state, but also a demiurge of development. —Jean-François Médard, 1990 The new state is everything. It must exercise a role of surveillance and control for territorial integrity, public security and application of administrative instructions. It must be the catalyzer of development through the organization of production, harmonization of exchange, nationalization of the means of production and egalitarian satisfaction of the needs of the people. —Pascal Chaigneau, 1985 The state does not exist in Zaire [Congo-Kinshasa]. It is no more than a skeleton that sustains the illusion. —Buana Kabwe, 1978 The state is nothing more than organized pillage for the benefit of the foreigner and his intermediaries. —Declaration of Congo-Kinshasa Bishops, 1981 In Search of the African State 33 diverse interpretations of its nature, and examine its diverse mutations from the decolonization point of departure. The State as Conceptual Field To set the stage for this task, a return to the state as conceptual field is indispensable . I turn first to the idea of the state as a general theoretical category, whose construction builds on a conceptual tradition of remarkable lineage, stretching from such classical political philosophers as Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau to the monumental contributions of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. The vast corpus of recent state theory can be seen if closely inspected to travel along a dual path: a deductive one manifested in successive elaborations of its conceptual superstructure and an inductive one reflected in the extraction of qualities of a small number of countries deemed exemplary: the thorough bureaucratic centralization through its prefectoral instrument of France, the strong but parliamentary regime of the United Kingdom, the effective social democracy of the Scandinavian states, the liberal constitutionalism of the United States, and more recently the state-led developmental achievement of the Asian “tigers.” These attributes fuse with the stream of theoretical reflection into abstracted and idealized visions of the model state, which has evolved over time and presented somewhat varying parameters. This normative state, equipped with a Weberian self-image as a rational-legal essence, has pretensions to universality and is accompanied by a corollary premise of exportability irrespective of the cultural specificities of receiving societies.2 How then may one win conceptual purchase on the modern state, whose model sets such aspirational parameters for postcolonial Africa? Representing the state usually involves enumerating its characteristics and tends to focus on the institutions of rule and its visible manifestations. However, such a perspective captures only a portion of the state as organism. Beyond its empirical form, Hegelian ghosts lurk; the state is also an idea, engraved in the perceptions and expectations of civil society and its own human agents.3 The state is also a macrohistorical actor that persists through time, constrained by the path dependencies of its past and engaging the future in its daily action. An important determinant of its purposive behavior is its location in a global universe of 194 sovereign polities, as defined by membership in the United Nations. The webs of internal conflict drive security regimes; patterns of interstate cooperation produce a partial international juridical order. The state at once faces inward toward the populace it rules, a relationship marked by scarcity and thus allocation, and outward toward the international arena, a zone of danger and thus defense.4 Early versions of a state can be traced back six millennia.5 However, the contemporary form flows from the emergence of the absolute state in Europe in the sixteenth century, with France as a critical model. Gradually over the next three centuries, the state acquired the instrumentalities and resources that define its modernity: permanent armies, professional bureaucracies, elaborate fiscal mechanisms...