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

Notes

375 Notes Chapter 1. A Half Century of African Independence 1. Other earlier dates of at least nominal independence might be noted: 1847, when Liberia shedded the tutelage of the private American Colonization Society; 1910, when South Africa won dominion status and power was transferred almost exclusively to its white minority; 1922, when Egypt gained heavily circumscribed sovereignty, although Britain retained important defense, foreign policy, and financial powers; 1941, when the brief Italian occupation of Ethiopia was thrown off; and 1951, when a jerry-built Libyan state was launched unaware of its oil riches by the United Nations. None of these earlier developments had any broader African impact. 2. From 1960 until 1971, Congo-Kinshasa was known as the Republic of the Congo; from 1971 to 1997, it was rebaptized Zaire. The formal title of the country was again changed in 1997 to Democratic Republic of Congo, often shortened to DRC or DR Congo. Until a new constitution was adopted in 2005 and internationally monitored national elections were held in 2006, this was a misnomer; the regime founded by Laurent Kabila as self-proclaimed president was neither democratic nor republican, since Joseph Kabila succeeded his assassinated father in 2001. Though the country now formally conforms to its title, for purposes of clarity and consistency, I use “Congo-Kinshasa” to refer to it during the entire postcolonial period, and I use “Congo-Brazzaville” for the neighboring Republic of Congo, whose capital is Brazzaville. 3. G. N. Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics,” in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 6, ed. J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 96–102. 4. Ali A. Mazrui, introduction, General History of Africa, vol. 8, ed. Ali A. Mazrui and Christophe Wondji (Oxford, UK: Heinemann, 1993), 9–10. 5. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 6. Diverse examples include W. E. Abraham, The Mind of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the 376 Notes to pages 5–11 Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7. Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Léopold Senghor, On African Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1964). 8. Michael G. Schatzberg, Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 9. Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 10. Daniel R. Headrick engagingly shows how the steamboat, the machine gun, the telegraph, and quinine were powerful force multipliers for colonial conquest. See Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 11. Young, The African Colonial State, 280. 12. A fifty-fourth state entered the African roster in 2011, South Sudan. 13. For example, David Apter notes that the average age of ministers in the first Ghanian government was forty-four; the average age of assembly members was forty. Ghana had an unusually well established political elite. See Ghana in Transition, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 14. Bertrand Badie, L’état importé: Essai sur l’occidentalisation de l’ordre politique (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 15. John Campbell, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield , 2011); 12; Chinua Achebe, “Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope,” New York Times, 16 January 2011, WK12. 16. Goran Hyden, African Politics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); William Tordoff, Government and Politics in Africa, 4th ed. (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2002); Victor T. Le Vine, Politics in Francophone Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004); René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Patrick Chabal, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling (London: Zed, 2009). 17. The term derives from Jean Copans, Les marabouts et l’arachide: La confrèrie mouride et les paysans au Sénégal (Paris: Sycamore, 1980), 248; see also Christian Coulon, Le marabout et le prince: Islam et pouvoir au Sénégal (Paris: Pedone, 1981), 289. I draw on this concept in “Zaire: The Shattered Illusion of the Integral State,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32.2 (1994): 249–63, and The African Colonial State, 287–88. 18. Hyden, African Politics, 26–37. 19. For an...