How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (review)

This courageous book, written with verve, clarity and an impressive command of social theory, is essentially a work of 'philosophical history', a morally engaged analysis of Africa's contemporary predicament in the light of a particular, selective reading of its history. Olufemi Taiwo passionately wants Africa to become 'modern', and (while insisting that Africans will do it their own way) has no truck with any relativistic shilly-shallying about multiple modernities: in his view, modernity is a complex good of universal applicability. As a philosopher of law, he focuses especially on its legal-political dimensions, taking its core components to be the recognition of the individual subject, the centrality of reason, and rule by consent. His enquiry began when he asked himself why African governments have nearly always won cases involving conflicts between citizens and the state.

Taiwo's main contention is that colonialism, far from being the source of a modernity which has failed properly to take root in post-colonial Africa, has actually been the main obstacle to its implantation. Colonial policy aimed at what he calls 'sociocryonics', or the preservation of archaic social forms, instead of allowing Africans to decide for themselves what institutions they wanted. By contrast, the seeds of genuine modernity were to be found in the work of the mid-nineteenth century missions, since they fully accepted the human subjectivity of Africans and their capacity to appropriate universal values. Against such models of colonialism as those of Mudimbe and the Comaroffs, which conflate the roles of administrators, missionaries and traders, Taiwo insists on their differences, and sees colonialism essentially in terms of its political instance. So of the Europeans who figure in his story, the hero is the Church Missionary Society secretary Henry Venn, for his commitment to 'African agency' and the preparation of African converts to take over control of the church - a programme which spilled over into a more general movement of African bourgeois self-empowerment. In a chapter on 'Prophets within Honor' - taking S. A. Crowther, J. A. B. Horton and S. R. B. Attoh-Ahuma as examples - he argues strongly for the modernization potential of this early period, and how it was choked off by the colonial takeover at the end of the century. Here the villain is Lord Lugard, the architect of indirect rule, which blocked African access to these universal values by imposing an externally defined notion (ironically dressed up as their own tradition) of what Africans were fitted for. I thought it unfortunate that his account of Lugard was quite so personalized (and that his attribution to Tony Kirk-Greene of the same racist 'mindset' as Lugard verged on the libellous). Since Taiwo grew up in Ibadan, I was sorry he did not mention the notorious incident when Resident W. A. Ross - founder of what J. A. Atanda dubbed 'the New Oyo Empire' - once required a prominent Ibadan clergyman to dọbalȩ to him in the dust, because that was the way Yoruba were supposed to show respect to superiors: a perfect example of the colonial bond between sociocryonics and racism.

The second half of the book moves on to the consequences of colonialism. Taiwo comes fully into his own in a long chapter on its legal legacy, where he shows to devastating effect how colonialism made a great show of introducing the rule of law, but reduced it to a shell by persistently subordinating judicial to executive power. Citing the work of African (especially Nigerian) jurists, he persuasively argues that the groundwork for the subservience of judges to authoritarian regimes in independent Africa, despite the lengthy human rights provisions in their constitutions, was laid under colonial tutelage. He uses two early African-devised constitutions, those of the Fanti Confederation and the Egba United Board of Management, to show aborted paths that have yet left a 'legacy of modernity' of continuing relevance. A final chapter looks to the future. In a wide-ranging argument about how Africans have...