Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker

The African post-colonial state and the African elite

57 Dani W Nabudere The African post-colonial The African post-colonial state and the African elite state and the African elite If we interrogated Mafeje further as to how we can endogenise African knowledge production and who would be the agents of such a change, Mafeje would explain that he had a very low opinion of the African postcolonial states and the African petit-bourgeoisie class. Mafeje had traced the weakness of the post-colonial state and its modern petit-bourgeois class to its character in the global economic and political system. In an article written for the ‘Special Issue on Africa and the Future’ in the ‘African Development Review’ of the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Mafeje posed the question: ‘What is so peculiar about Africa?’ His answer was that Africa was the ‘weakest link in the global capitalist system’ and therefore, ‘like the HI-virus, strains in the global systems easily get amplified in Africa in proportion to the level of resistance of the global system’s affected parts’. But he added that ‘contrary to Ali Mazrui’s assertion, Africa has always been at the bottom of the international ladder since its incorporation into the global system and is not by nature weak’. Mafeje instead preferred to explain Africa’s weak position from five angles. First, the fact that Africa was at the centre of the global system as the biggest source of slaves in modern history; second, the fact of it ‘having been so bled’ in the process and emerged from colonialism as the last frontier consisting of weak and fragmented social formations; third, the fact that being a direct product not simply of colonialism but of pervasive global capitalism, African economies (with the exception of South Africa), unlike any other regions of the world, had suffered total vertical integration into the global system; fourth, despite their weaknesses, the African elite had adopted the Western consumerism as a norm; and finally, as a concomitant of their conception of a nation state with fixed boundaries, they ipso facto accepted strong military establishments as a necessary aspect of the postcolonial states. However interpreted, he further argued, these were the underlying causes of the African states’ extreme vulnerability in the global system.116 Alluding to these five factors, Mafeje added: 58 Africa Institute of South Africa Archie Majefe: Scholar, Activist and Thinker In their combination they pre-dispose the continent towards more acute manifestations of the same crisis or phenomena which are otherwise worldwide than those regions which are higher up on the international hierarchy. This is a logical imperative whose determinate effects are note attributable immediately to what Africans did or did not do in the past 30 years. Of course, as contemporary history is being made, Africans will progressively get caught up in circular causation where distinction between cause and effect loses its practical significance.117 Mafeje explained that whereas between 1966 and 1976, the Dependencia paradigm seemed to provide an adequate conceptual framework for locating the root causes of under-development, in the 1980s ‘it became necessary to look for new conceptual frameworks which could explain why what had been diagnosed could not be cured’. Why were the causes of underdevelopment ‘not eradicated or at least mitigated’? In his view, these were the reasons why there was a shift in academic analysis by African scholars from ‘an over-emphasis’ on external factors to their opposite, namely, ‘the prevailing conditions in African countries and the existing strategies for development’. This is what inclined most African scholars to neo-Marxist theories.118 The emphasis was now on internal structures and class analysis, and the role of the state occupied the foreground. The nature of the African state ‘became a major preoccupation’. The emphasis was on the social classes that wielded state power, which explained why certain development policies were adopted and why others were not. In the process class categories such as ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, ‘compradorial bourgeoisie’, ‘state petitbourgeois ’, ‘or simply kleptocracy’ were deployed. Earlier in his collection of essays in search of alternatives, Mafeje had gone into the reasons why the African petit-bourgeoisie had encountered problems in this period. He pointed out that, unlike the ascending bourgeoisie of Europe, which transformed all political and economic institutions into its own image and became socially hegemonic, the petitbourgeoisie in Africa ‘has no criteria of its own’. It merely inherited colonial institutions with which the mass of the people did not identify, as is evidenced by the struggle for independence...