States, Predation & Violence:
Reconceptualizing Political Action and Political Community in Africa.Abdul Raufu Mustapha. Queen Elizabeth House/St Antony’s College,
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK.Panel on State, Political Identity and Political Violence.
10th General Assembly of CODESRIA.
Kampala, Uganda, 8th -12th December 2002.
Since the late 1970s, African political and economic systems have been in a state of crisis. Many Africanist scholars have also come round to the view that a crisis exists in our understanding of the economic and political processes at work on the continent. This intellectual crisis is particularly acute in our comprehension of the nature of the state and of conflict in Africa, and how these two relate to the control of economic and political resources. In this paper, I propose to criticize a dominant strand in the neo-patrimonialist literature on the African state. In particular, I concentrate on the notion of the criminalization of the state in Africa by Bayart et al. [1999], while also bringing in aspects of the works of Reno [1998], and Englebert [2000]. I argue that this literature is erected on a number of methodological fallacies which have the potential to obscure vital elements of the political processes they seek to explain. This leads to implicit and explicit notions of political action, political community, and sovereignty in Africa which ignore important critical processes at work in Africa. It is my intention to offer a criticism of these methodological fallacies and problematic notions.
This paper will undertake a systematic critique of the methodological fallacies and political misconceptions arising from the currently fashionable literature on neo-patrimonialism and criminalization in Africa. In section two, I examine the five basic methodological flaws in recent work by Bayart and others. In section three, I argue that the criminalisation thesis, influential as it is in some circles, is not a fruitful way to explore the African state. I suggest that the thesis is as much about the prejudices of the authors, as it is about the changing nature of crime in Africa. Section four criticizes the notions of political action and political community implicit in the book by Bayart et al, as well as the notion of sovereignty in the works of Reno and Englebert. Section five draws the discussion together, pointing out the necessity to transcend the philosophy of despair implicit in the works of Bayart et al., Reno and Englebert.
The pervasiveness of the Bayart approach to the African state is surprising, given its obvious methodological flaws. Firstly, their methodological individualism orients them away from a view of politics as a group process in which both the rulers and the ruled participate, both exercising a measure of autonomy and political expectation. I argue that the notion of the ruled, or of the people, in the works by Bayart and others does not go beyond a passive mass of victims. In this sense, their conception of the African state lacks an active notion of the people. Secondly, the cultural determinism which is the hallmark of their methodology encourages the propagation of images of Africa as a theatre of the absurd whilst simultaneously deploying a reductionist picture of African political life. Thirdly, I argue that Bayart et al. have a tendency to draw definitive conclusions and imputations from a shaky evidential base. Fourthly, I argue that the historical method used degenerates into historical determinism, creating an implicit ‘trajectory’ for the evolution of the politics of the African state. Fifthly, I criticize the narrow and elitist notion of agency used by Bayart et al.
Sketching out his method, Bayart emphasised the importance of empiricism and conceptualization:
This is how I have approached my investigations …. On the one hand, I have worked as often as possible in the field, in order to collect original source material, to observe at first hand certain political processes, and to talk to people – an indispensable source of material in these oral cultures [Bayart 1993, xix].
This emphasis on empirical material and the invocation of the people may suggest that Bayart was going to give an account of African politics which placed emphasis on the lives and politics of ordinary people. But such an expectation remains unfulfilled as the so-called people are in reality an assortment of individuals, each the bearer of culturalist discourses or practices which Bayart uses to titillate his readers and construct his ‘Africa’:
In concentrating on the problematic of enunciation, … , I have to a certain extent highlighted the production of meanings as the production of social relationships. However, this book is a work of political science. Parting company here with Foucault, I did not wish to be restricted to an analysis of regimes of statements which excluded the subject of enunciation. In line with the methodologically individualistic approach, I have instead concentrated on the people involved, the social strategies and the material bases of this ‘governmentality’, ….[Bayart 1993, xix-xx]
It is the tales and practices of these individuals – the odd chief here, a textile factory worker there, or a Charles Taylor - which Bayart’s renders as the collective meaning of a continent, frequently augmented, at the conceptual level, with the analysis of political forms and episodes. However, colourful as some of Bayart’s characters are, they form only a part of the African drama and to present them as the totality of Africa as Bayart is wont to do is as ridiculous as suggesting that the French are an adulterous nation simply because Mitterand had a long-term mistress whilst being President. His Africa is replete with individuals, but the people, as a collective social reality, are missing. This tendency to see the tree for the forest is prominently displayed in the book on the criminalization of the state, and promotes an individualist reading of the political process. This leads to faulty political analyses which emphasize the agency of leaders and strongmen, whilst ignoring wider and more important popular processes that limit the options of the former. It is this excessively individualist approach that leads to a distorted notion of political action and political community in the African state.
A second methodological problem with the thesis on the criminalization of the state is the cultural determinism which contributes, in large measure, to the notion of Africa as a theatre of the absurd. The single-minded emphasis on ritual murder, trickery, deception and the occult sometimes reads like pages from Amos Tutuola’s ‘magical realism’ novels, and presents a very reductionist and sensationalist impression of political life in Africa. As if to suggest that if it is not culturalist, then it is not real, whole sectors of African political life, such as the institutional politics of the military, the organization of local village politics, the role of trade unions, the organization of business communities and the role of students’ movements are completely ignored.
Even more problematic is the connection drawn by Bayart et al. between African cultural dynamics and criminality:
The rise in Africa of activities officially classed as criminal is aided by the existence of moral and political codes of behaviour, especially those of ethnicity, kinship and even religion, and of cultural representations, notably of the invisible, of trickery as a social value, of certain prestigious styles of life, even of an aesthetic, whose capacity to legitimate certain types of behaviour is considerable [Bayart et al 1999, 15]
… the ‘social capital’ of Africa appears to display a marked affinity with the spirit of criminality … [Bayart 1999, 34]
Mimicking Weber’s phrase on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in Europe, Bayart does not hesitate in demeaning a whole continent by suggesting that their ‘social capital’ is consistent with the spirit of criminality. This is only a short step from the genetic argument of a ‘criminal gene’ or the racist argument of a criminal race, both of which have been deployed against people of African descent. In particular, Bayart et al repeatedly turn their culturalist gaze on the Igbo ethnic group in southeastern Nigeria who are accused of converting their ‘social capital’ into drugs trafficking:
The rise in importance of African drug networks appears all the more formidable since they are able to make use, for their own organizational ends, of the cultural resources of highly flexible, acephalous societies with well-established merchant traditions. Here, the case of the Ibo of eastern Nigeria is instructive in more than one respect. The comparative advantage of African drug traffickers, in a market of literally cut-throat competitiveness, stems from their membership of segmentary, decentralized and flexible communities, endowed with a high reputation for commercial expertise developed over generations. The distinction between these and the structures of Latin American and Italian mafias, which are hierarchical and subject to the control of established bosses or capos, is worthy of note [Bayart et al 1999, 11].
The kinship mode of operation is said to have shadow structures of power imbued with the cultural values of individual effort and success, a mentality of the end justifies the means, and a ready acceptance of sudden enrichment. Bayart et al. just stop short of calling the Igbo a criminal ethnic group, very much in the manner in which colonial anthropologists and administrators in Africa and India dubbed some ethnic groups as criminal, others warlike, and yet others as servile! In their so-called culturalist handling of the Igbo, Bayart et al seize on an admixture of observed behaviour and current prejudice, concocting out of it an interpretation which suits their purposes. This approach contrasts significantly with Anton Blok’s [1974] analysis of the Sicilian Mafia, which focuses on weaknesses in the processes of contemporary state formation rather than cultural predispositions to explain the emergence and resilience of the Mafia. He flatly rejects any notion of Sicilians as having a ‘spirit of criminality’.
Similarly, Okafor [1991] provides an analysis of the dynamics of demographic pressure on land in Igboland as the context for the predisposition of Igbo society towards migration and non-agricultural entrepreneurialism. This Igbo entrepreneurialism has been demonstrated in many fields of human endeavour – education, the professions, trade, sports, music – and even in the failed attempt to create the Republic of Biafra. Why Bayart et al. should choose to isolate possible Igbo participation in drugs trafficking, and decide to characterize the whole group by that single practice beats my imagination. And Igbo entrepreneurialism is a result of demographic pressures on poor quality land, and has nothing to do with the so-called ‘segmentary, decentralized and flexible communities’ which the cultural determinists wheel out from dubious colonial anthropology. In deed, the Igbos are not the only such ‘segmentary’ society in Nigeria.
While it is true that culture is an important element in the economic and political processes at work in Africa, the reduction of this important variable to absurd sensationalism and the so-called ‘spirit of criminality’ has only served to demean Africans without contributing, in any meaningful way, to improving our knowledge of the complex linkages between cultural, economic and political processes. Furthermore, it is the amorphous and heuristic deployment of culturalist categories like the ‘Ibo’ which replaces any serious examination of concrete social and political communities.
A third problem with Bayart’s method is the assertion of definitive positions despite the flimsy evidential material at his disposal. Bayart claims that:
The most prominent drug networks in the continent are without doubt Nigerian, and especially Ibo. These are said to control up to 70 or 80 per cent of Burmese heroin reaching the American market and up to 35 or 40 per cent of heroin of all origin going to the United States [Bayart 1999, 10].
Yet on the same page, Bayart raises the fact that the US drug enforcement agency from which he derives his evidence, occasionally ‘modify’ (manipulate?) its data for operational and political reasons. Bayart’s unquestioning and ready acceptance of the figures on Nigerian or Igbo share in the American heroin trade tells us much about his a priori disposition. And we are entitled to call his prejudices to question. After a comprehensive review of the trends in trans-border trade in the West Africa region in the 1990s, Meagher concludes that:
Trends in flows of criminal commodities are not as well documented, though the reasons are as much ideological as practical. As several commentators have noted, studies on the subject tend to be long on anecdote, hearsay and innuendo, and short on substantiated information …. Estimates of illicit arms and drugs flows are more vague and subject to exaggeration, and tend to gloss over the fact that West Africa acts largely as an entrepot in the drugs trade, while the main profits are concentrated in the centres of production and consumption [Meagher 2003]
Indeed, the tendency to parade innuendo and hearsay as facts permeate Bayart’s analysis. After feeble disclaimers such as ‘it is reasonable to speculate’ or ‘it is none the less probable…’, these innuendoes are repeatedly wheeled out as authoritative facts. Commenting on Nigeria, Bayart asserts:
The drug trade is said to be viewed with disdain by the leading aristocratic families of the North which have dominated the country’s politics since independence, or at least by the older generation among them. The military establishment cannot be shown to have been directly compromised other than by the participation in the international cocaine trade of the wife of a former head of state, herself from a rather dubious background, …[Bayart 1999, 29].
The assertion of the ‘participation’ of the wife of a former head of state is conferring academic respectability on beer parlour rumours and tittle-tattle without any attempt to back these assertions up with evidence or reasoned argument. Surely, an analysis that seeks to go beyond a regime of rumours must provide some logical bases for its assertions. And the reference to ‘leading aristocractic families’ dominating the North and Nigerian politics betrays an ignorance of the class and political dynamics of northern Nigeria, particularly since 1966. It is difficult to escape the feeling that sensationalist claims are being trumpeted simply to justify preconceived ideas. In a similar vein, Bayart makes a flippant reference to Moshood Abiola to buttress his culturalist argument about the salience of sudden and unexplained wealth in African social systems:
Even the career of someone as well known and as wealthy as Moshood Abiola, undoubtedly the true winner of the 1993 presidential election in Nigeria, had an element of the unexplained and inexplicable [Bayart 1999, 35].
On the contrary, most informed observers of Nigerian politics know of Abiola’s poor family background, of his driving desire for self-improvement through education and the profession of accountancy, of his sojourn in England, his employment in the university of Lagos teaching hospital, his unorthodox rise in the multinational ITT, and subsequently, his close personal and business friendships with many Nigerian military officers, traditional leaders and politicians in oil-boom Nigeria. The logic in this trajectory is neither unexplained nor inexplicable as Bayart would want us to believe. The book on the criminalization of the state is seriously weakened by the often tenuous link between intellectual assertion and its evidential base. We are therefore well advised to be dubious about the supposed thesis of the criminalization of the African state.
A fourth problem with Bayart’s method is the tendency for historicity to degenerate into historical determinism. A good quality of The State in Africa is Bayart’s insistence on the historicity of the state in Africa. In my view, however, in The Criminalization of the State in Africa, this historicity has veered towards a vulgar historical determinism. In this second book, we are presented with a ‘general model’ which, feeble disclaimers and hedging notwithstanding, can only be described as deterministic, if not downright teleological. In the first place, the control of rents by intermediary dominant groups is emphasised:
… the problem of the criminalization of the states and economies of sub-Saharan Africa has its own historical specificity. … [I]n Africa, the interaction between the practice of power, war, economic accumulation and illicit activities of various types forms a particular political trajectory which can be fully appreciated only if it is addressed in historical depth. One of the characteristics of this trajectory is the exploitation by dominant social groups, or by the dominant actors of the moment, of a whole series of rents generated by Africa’s insertion in the international economy in a mode of dependence. Examples include the rents obtained from the control of exports of gold, ivory and slaves, or later from collaboration with colonial governments. Current examples include rents derived from diplomatic and military alliances, from the control of exports of agricultural goods and oil and of imports of all kinds, as well as from the management of external financing and aid [Bayart et al 1999, xvi]
From this premise, the so-called ‘general model’ [Bayart et al 1999, xvii] emerges: (1) in the nineteenth century, a predatory economy based on the export of gold, ivory and slaves; (2) the prolongation of the predatory economy into the colonial period, often on the basis of concessionary companies and forced labour regimes; (3) from the 1930s, a neo-merchantilist exploitation of primary resources which, after the Second World War permitted the growth of a nationalist elite; (4) in the 1990s, the obsolescence and collapse of the neo-merchantilist model under nationalist regimes and the possible return to a predatory economy which is associated with the process of the criminalization of the state.
This theorization, like much of the book, is interesting but unconvincing. At its roots is a belief that African politics can be summed up in only two concepts, rents and predation. It would seem that Africa has nothing in its repertoire of political experience other than these two concepts. After rightly criticizing the democratization processes of the 1990s, Bayart et al. leave us with the implicit and depressing impression that Africa must fulfil its historical trajectory, that is move inexorably toward embracing the ‘spirit of criminality’. It is precisely this mind-set that has led writers like Roitman [1998] and Reno [1998] to describe the future of African states in terms of ‘the Garrison-Entrepot’ and ‘Warlord Politics’. In the brave new Africa of these authors’ imaginations, politics is the preserve of bandits.
This leads to the fifth and final problem with Bayart’s method: the problematic notion of agency implicit in his approach. This is a political world inhabited only by elites driven by pecuniary and culturalist motives, sometimes given added colour by bizarre behaviour which is highlighted to titillate the reader. Politics is reduced to the world of kleptocrats, criminals and cranks; the people, however defined, are missing. This problematic notion of political agency can be illustrated by a comparison of Bayart’s explanation of the Sierra Leone crisis with an alternative explanation provided by a group of Sierra Leonean academics. In their usual sensationalist manner Bayart et al. open their explanation with a sustained dramatic sweep:
When Charles Taylor, in those days known as ‘Superglue’ escaped from an American prison to pursue his ambition of wrestling from his former chief Samuel Doe the royalties of the world’s largest commercial shipping fleet and the rents to be earned from narco-dollars passing through Liberia thanks to the convertibility of its currency, he offered a stake in the enterprise to Joseph Momoh. President Momoh, whom one might describe as more of a Sierra Loan-er than a Sierra Leonean, promptly offered his services to the highest bidder, which turned out to be Samuel Doe. This whole episode came to a ghastly conclusion, worthy of a second-rate horror movie, with Doe being tortured to death ... By early 1997, Taylor had still not realized his political ambition but had succeeded in amassing vast wealth and in punishing Momoh by starting a rebellion in Sierra Leone, which soon provoked Momoh’s own overthrow[Bayart et al. 1999, xv].
By this account, Taylor ‘started’ the rebellion in Sierra Leone; Momoh got involved in order to sell his services to the highest bidder. We should also note that not a single shred of evidence is produced to support these sweeping and authoritative assertions. For their part, leading Sierra Leonean academics start by warning against the tendency to attribute the crisis in Sierra Leone to what was happening in Liberia. Secondly, they emphasised the crucial role of marginalized urban youth in Freetown, the raray boys who, in making common cause with disaffected and repressed students from Forah Bay University, constituted a festering social sore which culminated in armed mobilization against the state.
… the culture of resistance that characterised youths in Freetown was formed in the context of non-conformism, student radicalism, reggae music, and drugs. The context within which this culture flourished was also marked by a progressive deterioration of the economy, which meant constricting opportunities for youth, the collapse of public institutions, dwindling revenues …, and an intolerant political culture that drove subalterns into a decidedly confrontational stance. … [S]tudents confronted the state on a national scale in 1977 and 1985 [Abdullah 1997, 6-7].
Indeed, given the crucial agency of the underclass youth in the development of the Sierra Leone crisis, Bayart et al.’s attempt to write them out of the script whilst emphasising the mercenary ambitions of ‘superglue’ can be likened to staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark! And how can we comprehend the political dynamic of the African state with such a problematic notion of political agency?
Despite the shortcomings listed above, the thesis of the criminalization of the state and its related thesis of the ‘politics of the belly’ have been enormously influential in Africanist circles. This school of thought suggests that criminal activities, control over economic resources and the state are converging in Africa to create a specific economy of predation. In the Great Lakes region, we see how violent conflicts proliferate and interpenetrate, with the illegal control of resources in the DRC by official and personalistic networks being a central element of the conflict. In a sense therefore, the convergence in some cases of markets, violence, and elements of the state is not in doubt, even if the degree of convergence differs from case to case. What remains debatable, however, is whether this convergence represents a new stage of ‘the criminalisation of the state in Africa’, and how such a criminalization can be fruitfully studied.
Indeed, on this important point of ‘the criminalization of the state in Africa’, Bayart et al. offer perplexing perspectives. The sensationalist tone of the book gives the impression that, following the deterministic notion of the ‘economic logic of predation’, many African states have already been transformed into criminalized states:
A first impression would suggest that the process of criminalization as we have defined it has become the dominant trait of a sub-continent in which the state has literally imploded under the combined effects of economic crisis, neo-liberal programmes of structural adjustment and the loss of legitimacy of political institutions [Bayart 1999, 19].
Yet, this ‘hypothesis’ which is so stridently pushed in the most lurid and colourful language throughout the book remains unproven when confronted with the authors own set of criteria:
By following this line of reasoning we arrive at a somewhat paradoxical observation. For, on the one hand, few of the countries south of the Sahara fulfil a sufficient number of our six criteria to qualify for the description of criminal states. Information currently available would suggest that only Equatorial Guinea, the Comoros and Seychelles could be correctly classified as criminal states [Bayart 1999, 26].
But such is the strength of the language used – ‘There is the strong possibility that sub-Saharan Africa is returning to the "heart of darkness" [Bayart 1999b, 116]’ - that one is left in no doubt that it is only a matter of time before the determinism of the ‘political economy of predation’ catches up with the other countries. Couching the argument in the language of globalization, Africa finding its own dependent comparative advantage, the deployment of Africa’s cultural repertoire, and the historic role of crime in the process of primitive accumulation reinforces this impression of determinism. The changing nature of crime in Africa and its political implications for the state is a point that could have been made without belabouring the argument with the authors’ prejudices, preconceptions, and smug sensationalism. Why should criminal activities and their connections to the state in Italy, Colombia, Japan, China, India and Russia be understood by Bayart within the context of the ‘internationalization and of the growth of organized crime’ [Bayart 1999, 9], while similar processes in Africa are explained in terms of a return to the so-called ‘heart of darkness’? Is this the usual rhetorical excess or are some criminal states more criminal than others for ‘cultural’ and historical reasons? Why should crime be seen as one out of many defining characteristic of those societies, while in Africa it is presented as the sole defining characteristic?
The confusion about the applicability and utility of the concept of the criminalization of the state in Africa, pales into insignificance when we turn our attention to its implicit consequences. Particularly, I am interested in its implication for the definition of political action and political community, and the related question of state sovereignty in the works of Reno and Englebert.
In my view, the most pernicious element in the thesis by Bayart et al. concerns their biased notions of African political action and political community. In the first place, political action is reduced to the movement along the longue duree of the economics of predation, and under the agency of kleptocrats and crooks. Charles Taylor and Joseph Momoh take all the analytical space, when in fact attention should have been concentrated on the emergence of the lumpen raray boys of Freetown. This is a reductionist perspective on African politics which robs non-elite groups of political agency for good or for ill. In the context of Africa’s contemporary crises, to propound a perspective which implicitly leaves purposive action as the preserve of the World Bank and the IMF with their governance agenda, the French foreign ministry and other bilateral agencies, and African crooks and kleptocrats, is to propound a philosophy of despair.
It would seem that the sub-text to the Bayart school of African politics is that in the long run, some manner of state formation might take place in the context of Africa’s ‘criminalised’ trajectory. The fate of ordinary African people in these states, dripping in blood and possibly led by ‘stationary bandits’, can only be left to the imagination. This school of political analysis, premised on a so-called cultural and historical realism, is not only fanciful, it is also profoundly dangerous. Under the guise of realism, it provides the intellectual ‘normalization’ for all manners of tyrannies. And Ake [1996] is right in insisting that authoritarian political elites are responsible for the failure of development in Africa and a broad based democracy is the surest antidote. Bayart is rightly sceptical of the prospects of the 1990s democratization coming to any meaningful fruition. But he throws the baby away with the birth water by implicitly presuming that the criminalization path is the only game in town.
Related to this restrictive notion of political action is the equally problematic notion of political community (or lack of it) implicit in the works under review. Bayart asserts that ‘Political life in Africa consists first and foremost of the management of factional intrigues for personal interests [Bayart 1999, 21]’. Indeed, the real impression you get from the book is that factional intrigues and personal interest are the first and last principles of African politics. This monochromic fixation on elite politics implicitly reduces African politics to the struggle for spoils within the elite. The visions and passions that have fuelled broad-based African political life since the colonial period – nationalism, Islamic radicalism, African Christianity, communitarian self-improvement, ethnic mobilization, etc – all disappear from analytical view. Political community is reduced to the narrow elite, and greed and predation are the only sentiments in evidence. Effectively in these analyses, political community disappears, to be replaced by a grim realism with its gaze decidedly fixed on the shenanigans of wayward and self-serving elites.
The fallacy of this second reductionism was laid bare by Englebert [2002] in his study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Basing himself on the thesis of predation and neopatrimonialism, Englebert surveys the state of the DRC, pointing out incidences of colonial and post-colonial pillage, culminating in Mobutu’s 32 years of wanton mis-rule and economic and political collapse:
‘Liberation’ from the Mobutu regime only compounded the existing arbitrariness and poverty with renewed armed conflict, the collapse of the central administrative apparatus and marginalization of civil society, the occupation and plunder of the country by foreign troops, its polarization in three main rebel groupings, its partition into at least two zones of military influence, and the estimated death of 2.5m Congolese from warfare, starvation or war-induced deprivation. Nor has the Congolese state ever given its citizens an opportunity to freely choose their leaders, political system, or identity, luring them instead towards frequent communal, ethnic and political violence over the sharing of its resources [Englebert 2002, 1].
Yet, as Englebert discovered, the Congolese people continue to affirm their nationalistic faith in their country with 90% of the general public rejecting any idea of the partition of the country. He also notes a heightened nationalist discussion in the midst of all the mayhem. Though Engelbert’s explanation of this ‘paradox’ of continuing commitment to a predatory state is not convincing, what is clear from his evidence is that a nationalistic political community exists in the DRC, in spite of the politics of predation. Nationalism is an important sentiment and impulse in Africa ignored not just by the World Bank, but also by people like Englebert and Bayart.
Bjorn Beckman long ago advanced the view that structural adjustment programmes were targeted at de-legitimating and dismantling the forces of Third World nationalism which were regarded as obstructing hegemonic political and economic projects emanating from the West. There is no doubt that the forces of nationalism had little room under the failed regime of structural adjustment. With the privatization of the institutional underpinnings of the nationalist project and the rolling back of shared social entitlements, the impersonal and individualistic market became the motive force in society. At the same time, multi-party electoralism and technocratic ‘governance’ reforms created a formalistic and procedural political and administrative structure with little vision and affective content as far as the bulk of the population were concerned. Implicitly, this sentimental and affective deficit in liberalizing Africa is to be filled by ‘civil society’, variously defined.
In reality, the neglect of political community, very similar to the neglect of the impulses of nationalism, can have negative political consequences. We should ponder why Mugabe, given the blatant corruption and oppression by his regime, was able to get not only Obasanjo, Mbeki and the OAU, but also a large majority of popular opinion in Africa, on his side in his so-called fast-track land reform and electoral politics. While the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai spoke of democracy and cultivated allies in London and Ottawa, the African nationalist constituency was either thought to be unimportant, or it was conceded to Mugabe from the start. Tsvangirai was even reported to have attended political rallies where he sat on podiums alongside white farmers, while multitudes of black farm workers sat at their feet! Like Tsvangirai, we ignore the nationalist impulse in Africa, – no matter how jaded, faded, or abused – and the political community constituted around it, to our peril.
The important question of sovereignty comes up in the works of Reno and Englebert. How does Englebert reconcile the idea of the prevalence of the Congolese idea and identity within the context of the predatory and failed Congolese state? Englebert rejects the obvious answer that Congolese nationalism might be the motive force behind the attitude of the Congolese people. Instead, he looks for the answer in predatory institutions and ‘global cultural norms of statehood’:
Congo’s nationalist discourse serves as ideological foundation for the reproduction of these otherwise failed and predatory institutions … [B]y maintaining and reproducing the weak but sovereign state …, the nationalist discourse also provides the rationale for continuing aid flows and perpetuates the necessary structure of … contract and insurance guarantees … These aid and investment flows, in turn, provide the funds that finance networks of patronage throughout the state and magnify thereby the return to sovereign statehood [Englebert 2002, 3].
Global norms of statehood are thought to confer international recognition of sovereignty on empty shells of institutions, thereby guaranteeing there exchange value and making them available for predation. But what Englebert fails to explain is why ordinary Congolese people, victims of this predatory but vacuous state, should nevertheless continue to show massive support for the Congolese state. The implicit answer is either by claiming that the people are caught up in patron-client networks or to suggest that they are suffering from false consciousness. Either way, Englebert is anxious to ignore Congolese national sentiment which he describes as ‘an imported nation-state discourse … essentially a reproduction of the colonial "Congolization" of their society’ [2002, 4]. Obviously, if it is Africa, it has to be predation and rent seeking!
The scenario sketched by Englebert is what Reno refers to as ‘the pernicious effects of negative sovereignty’ [Emory University 1998, 19]. African states, he charged, are weak, and continue to survive because they receive ‘life-support externally’. They are becoming less state-like and more like private entities: ‘Should they in fact be called states?’ He dismissed the DRC as a ‘collection of commercial syndicates’ which is not really a state. Violence and the militarization of commerce are the real content of the state, while the claims to sovereign status are an externally oriented resource. It is this particular understanding of the linkage between rent seeking, predation and sovereignty that led Englebert to call for the redefinition and ‘reconfiguration’ of African states in terms of both their institutions and their borders. He also associates himself with calls to ‘redefine state sovereignty as state responsibility, rather than as freedom from foreign interference ….’ [Englebert 2000, 10]. This redefinition is seen as being ‘more propitious’ to the debate on African statehood. In the context of George W. Bush’s new policies of ‘regime change’ in Iraq, and the threat of ‘intrusive’ distribution of food aid in rural Zimbabwe, this point of view on African sovereignty is likely to worsen the blatant dictation to which many African countries are already subject. And if this happens, the criminalization school of thought would have served to legitimate wanton international intervention by interests more committed to the protection of mineral resources, strategic concerns, rents and profits than to the welfare of the African people.
The crisis which pervades our understanding of the roles of states and violence in contemporary Africa is far from being resolved, despite the predominance of the rent seeking-predation school in some circles. As I have tried to argue in this paper, serious methodological questions remain unaddressed, not to mention the biases and prejudices implicit in the theorization. Even more important are the negative implications of this school of thought for our understanding of political action, political community and sovereignty in Africa. The literature which deals explicitly with the violence component of this conundrum is just as confused and contradictory as that on the state and predation [cf. Kaplan 1994; Richards 1996; Collier & Hoeffler 2000; and Mkandawire 2002]. The African and Africanist academic community are therefore confronted with enormous challenges and it is my firm belief that the first step in confronting those challenges lies in sweeping aside the cobwebs of confusion spun by the thesis of the criminalization of African states.
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