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Chapter 4 Elusive Autonomy in Sub-Saharan Africa Coel Kirkby and Christina Murray Many conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are framed as “ethnic” or “tribal.” In such situations, it is increasingly common to attempt to accommodate diversity through power-sharing arrangements and, particularly, autonomy (Ghai 2005; Haysom 2002). But few African rulers are prepared to contemplate regional or local autonomy in response to domestic conflicts. Colonial powers created highly centralized states and only in the run-up to independence did they consider federal solutions to hold together their fractious creations. Every federal and consociational experiment— Cameroon, Ethiopia (and Eritrea), Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland , the Mali Federation, Nigeria and others—either fell apart or was held together by violence (Currie 1964). Most postindependence rulers have put considerable effort into further consolidating power and securing their states, frequently in the context of artificial boundaries, first drawn at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, that split ethnic and linguistic groups. Rulers often maintain control by limiting access to scarce resources to family or “tribe,” and by dispensing state monopolies through vast patronage networks. But excluding groups of people from governance (and even a decent livelihood) has done little to build strong national identities. Given this particular history, African states have proven especially prone to having communities demand autonomy, threaten secession, or even take up arms to forge their own states. It is thus unsurprising that African rulers have remained committed to the 1964 Organization of African Unity resolution “to respect the frontiers existing on their achievement of national independence,”1 and have resisted any proposals that might weaken them (Herbst 2000). In the wave of constitution-making and multiparty reforms in the 1990s, asymmetrical arrangements granting autonomy to subnational groups continued to be as unpopular as ever (Prempeh 2007). 98 Coel Kirkby and Christina Murray Accordingly, none of the three countries examined in this chapter, Tanzania, Mali, and South Africa, constitute a textbook example of asymmetrical arrangements adopted to resolve ethnic conflict.2 Tanzania is usually considered an example of an asymmetrical federation (or federacy , as McGarry 2007 would label it), but its asymmetry is an accident of hasty union rather than a cure for ethnic division. Mali has confronted persistent demands for autonomy from its northern Tuareg population by choosing symmetrical devolution rather than fulfilling an earlier promise of “special status” for the Tuareg regions.3 In South Africa, the formally symmetrical Constitution anticipates that provinces and municipalities may have unequal responsibilities, but such arrangements have proven politically impossible. This chapter uses these three examples for the modest purpose of highlighting some of the particular problems with territorial asymmetry as a solution to ethnic conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. While personal and cultural autonomy are important forms of asymmetrical political arrangements and are common in the plural legal orders of Africa, this chapter focuses on the elusiveness of asymmetry in territorial arrangements.4 The United Republic of Tanzania The peculiar union of Tanzania is best described, following McGarry, as a federacy, where a small, autonomous unit exists within an otherwise unitary state (McGarry 2007; Stevens 1977). The mainland, Tanganyika, is the silent partner that has almost 40 times the population and 570 times the area of autonomous Zanzibar, which is composed of two main islands, Unguja and Pemba, lying fifteen miles east of the coast. The current Union Constitution gives Zanzibar the right to govern over all but twenty-two matters reserved for the Union government, as well as certain powers, such as electing its own president and legislature. These can be amended only by a super majority in both the Union and Zanzibar legislatures .5 In short, the Tanzanian federacy is a unique arrangement with both federal and unitary features. The peoples of Zanzibar and the mainland have long had an interdependent relationship symbolized by the shared Kiswahili language—the language of people on Zanzibar and the coast, and the de facto language of everyday affairs and government in Tanzania. They also share a colonial past under the British, who, however, undid much of Kiswahili’s unifying power by dividing these people into races and tribes. In 1948, the British took a census of East Africa that forced Zanzibar’s population to divide itself into predetermined categories: Shirazi (so-called mixed African-Persian), Arab, Indian, and various African tribes. By the 1950s, newspapers on Zanzibar battled each other to forge strong “African” and [18.117.216.229] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06:48...

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