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

8. Africanism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity: The Ambiguous Triple Helix of Identity

The Three Pillars of Identity The introductory citations point to the three pillars of identity this chapter will explore: Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.1 I recollect sitting in a Wellesley College audience in 1960 mesmerized by the eloquent charisma of future president Julius Nyerere when he uttered the words cited in the epigraph. They draw attention to a pair of aspects of Africanism: its original reference point of identity formation in the European other and its racial subtext. The visibility of the difference came not just from subjugation but also from phenotype. The Kivu dance troupe was encountered by a pair of American academics crossing from Rwanda into Congo-Kinshasa in 2003, at the moment when an accord that promised to bring peace and reunification to the tormented country had been signed. Asked why they were dancing, the young men replied 291 8 Africanism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity The Ambiguous Triple Helix of Identity Africans, all over the continent, without a word being spoken, either from one individual to another or from one African country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one. —Julius Nyerere, 1960 We are dancing the frontier. —Kivu youth group (Congo-Kinshasa), 2003 Nigerian nationality for me and my generation was an acquired taste. . . . Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. —Chinua Achebe, 2010 that they were “dancing the frontier,” adding that once they had completed the ritual at this crossing they planned to continue to other frontier posts to repeat the ritual. In their dance, they were performing the nation, suggesting a deeply naturalized attachment to the vast territory created by the imperial diplomacy of Belgian King Leopold II in 1885. Their performance not only celebrated a territorial “self” but also demonstrated a marked antagonism to the national “other” beyond the frontier, Rwanda. Unspoken but embedded in the ritual was a pronounced hostility toward the external enemy within, namely, populations of Rwandan origin, especially Tutsi, established within the Kivu region. Achebe in his autobiography captures the ambivalent grip of territorial nationalism.2 Nigeria was not a compelling category in his childhood in the 1930s. It became so only with the rise of anticolonial nationalism in his youth. After a literary lifetime exposing the country’s dysfunctions in a brilliant series of novels while also celebrating his Igbo origins and after momentarily transferring his loyalty to the abortive Biafra secession, he finds his renewed Nigerian attachment “unbelievably exciting.” This chapter explores these three pillars of identity, Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity. These frames have provided the discursive categories of the state and much of the political process. Yet each of them, closely inspected, contains important ambiguities. As activated modes of consciousness , all three are products of the last two centuries. In terms of the triple helix metaphor, territorial nationalism operates as connecting middle strand, intertwined both with pan-Africanism and ethnicity, though the last two have little direct connection. One might suggest that these elements correlate with a threefold constitution of the subject by the colonial state. The colonizer had various labels signifying the racial otherness and presumed inferiority of the subject: African , black, native, indigene (or the delectable Belgian colonial census categorization “homme adulte valide” [able-bodied adult male, or unit of labor]). For other purposes, the colonizing country applied the territorial designation, usually solely to reference the indigenous population. Even within a given colonial domain of contiguous territories, distinct ordinances and administrative provisions operated, evoking a territorial label (Congolese, Nigerian, Senegalese). Further, ruling the subject population required sorting it into legible cultural categories; the master premise of colonial occupation was that Africa was “tribal.” Africans internalized each of these categorizations and transformed them into a discourse of solidarity: pan-Africanism, territorial 292 part three Themes and Conclusions nationalism, and ethnic community. This chapter explores each of these axes of identity and their ambiguity.3 Hovering in the background is a critical question arising from the preceding chapter: what can explain the astonishing persistence of the African territorial map of independence, in the face of widespread state crisis by the 1980s and the proliferation of internal wars in the 1990s and beyond? This puzzle is stated in stark terms by Pierre Englebert in his insightful search for an answer. Most African states, he argues, have not brought about or facilitated much economic or human development for their populations...