African State and Society in the 1990s: Cameroon's Political Crossroads (review)

The political shifts in Africa in the 1990s have been well noted. It seems that every academic and armchair scholar has an explanation for what is happening. Many have argued that sub-Saharan Africa is in the process of democratization while others have argued that the continent is doomed to disaster. In African State and Society in the 1990s, Joseph Takougang and Milton Krieger join these discussions mostly with regard to Cameroon, but also more broadly. While normatively the authors yearn for democratic transition, empirically they argue that an actual transition is not yet in the works in Cameroon. They argue that the groundwork for a democratic transition may be in the process of being laid, as the elite class that has maintained both the Ahidjo and Biya regimes in power since independence is shifting and realigning itself. However, in the end they express concern that "'the prospects for peace look bleak'" (p. 245).

The book is divided into three primary temporal foci: 1960 to 1982, 1982 to 1990, and 1990 to 1997. These are appropriate time frames for an analysis of Cameroonian politics, as they coincide with major political shifts. The book is well-grounded in history without deluging the reader with overwhelming details. In their attentiveness to Cameroon's history, the authors lay a sturdy background for analyzing contemporary politics. In fact, an admirable aspect of the book is that the authors do not privilege external forces or explanations to explain the political initiatives of the 1990s. Rather, they trace the explosion of political activity in the 1990s back to internal Cameroonian politics, thus explicitly imparting agency to African actors that is frequently overlooked or ignored.

In addition to making a contribution to Cameroonian political studies, the authors also engage general Africanist and comparativist discourses to further our thinking about what is happening in Africa. They offer a summary and critique of recent literature on the African state and civil society. Despite their apparent agreement that the "'strategic elite perspective' discounts struggles against regimes lodged deeper in African history, in social sectors disparaged as parochial but in fact autonomous," they, too, fall partially into the trap of privileging elite analysis. This likely results from their own theoretical perspective and earlier dynamics of Cameroonian politics under Ahidjo and early Biya when elite allegiances did largely shape national politics. Perhaps it is inevitable that scholars will not (or cannot) shake their focus on urban, middle-class and elite sectoral politics as long as the theoretical underpinnings of concepts such as civil society and the state rely on those sectors for explanation.

As many authors have done before them, they address the question of whether the African state, or states, are hard or soft and what that means. And, like others, they fail to provide an explicit conceptualization of the "state" other than to say it is "the primary agency which assembles and allocates basic national resources" (p. xx). Without providing clear conceptualizations of these terms, the authors critique them in an analysis that becomes somewhat muddled. Similarly, Takougang and Krieger discuss "civil society" in terms of what it should do. Civil society should, they say, "'balance the state'" (p. xxi), which is conceptually vague. As the backbone of their analysis, the authors identify the well-known frameworks of Pierre Ngayap's "la classe dirigeante" and Jean-Francois Bayart's "la recherche hegemonique" and "politique du ventre [politics of the belly]" to act as sounding boards for their discussion. Similarly, they consider the work of democratic transition theorists such as Alfred Stepan and Larry Diamond to lend focus to their emphasis on the role of elites and the bourgeoisie in transitions. Shifts in elite allegiance are taken as indicators of nascent civil society and a necessary but not sufficient precursor to future democratization.

There are many aspects of the book that are to be admired. First...