Dept. of History, University of North Carolina
        <dnewbury@unc.edu>

[H-AFRICA is very pleased to present the second specially
commissioned response to AFRICA FORUM #7, also from a
leading writer on Central Africa, Associate Professor David
Newbury. (The final response will be presented as a summing
up after discussion by members has run its course)--editors]

  [RESPONSE TO "TOWARDS A STATE-LESS CENTRAL AFRICA? SOME
  THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS" of Stefaan Smis and Saskia Van
  Hoyweghen]

      by David Newbury *

The essay by Stefaan Smis and Saskia van Hoyweghen opens up
some important new parameters to thinking on politics and
space, power and identities, and boundaries and frontiers.
It also raises questions on who is charged with doing such
thinking.

The authors begin by noting the failure of those
institutions that are supposed to guide change and prevent
violent conflicts.  They continue by observing that
postcolonial African nationalism was supposed to usher in
"an ambitious project of nation-building, development, and
democracy."  But the past 40 years forces us to ask whether
such ambitious projects were truly the goal of either the
internal or external political actors influencing the
trajectory of postcolonial Africa.  On the one hand, while
some internal power-holders held to the vision set out
above, all too often power fell into the hands of those with
other objectives.  Once in power, change became a threat,
and violent conflicts (or their threat) became all too often
a tool of power not an object to be prevented: how many
powerholders came to their position through a coup d'Etat?
At least in Central Africa all three states referred to by
the authors were ruled for several decades by military
leaders, and in each of them, violence - either direct state
violence or violence encouraged by (or condoned by) the
state - was (at various times) an instrumental feature of
state power.  But it is also important to note that this was
not the only hegemonic form:  patrimonialism and deft
clientship was instrumental in both asserting state power
and dampening opposition to the state.  At any rate, in both
the use of violence and the development of other hegemonic
forms, state power and the control of state resources were
critical factors. Whatever the power of the state in
international or military terms, the internal structures of
state power were important.  These were not signs of the
collapse of state power - and hence models of "state
collapse" in eastern Europe after 1989 are not valid
analogies for Central Africa.  Instead, the violence
testified to the exercise of state power. Consequently while
we need to carry our analyses beyond state factors alone, as
the authors urge, we cannot entirely dismiss the state as a
critical actor.  These may be weak states in the
international context but they are nonetheless operative in
the lives of the people:  in each of these states civil
violence was initiated by the state, or by actors drawing on
state resources.

But there is a further factor to consider here.  Defining
state actors as motivated by "nation-building, development,
and democracy" seems remiss at two levels.  First, there
were many state actors who were more intent on the retention
of power than on the nurture of democracy, and more intent
on personal wealth than on national development.
Furthermore, many so motivated received powerful support
from outside forces; Mobutu is, of course, the principal
example.  Not only that, but those who did accept
"nation-building, development, and democracy" as their
objectives were often undercut by outside forces:  Nyerere,
Lumumba, and Samora Machel serve as three examples.  To
outside powers, internal democracy and self-reliant
development were less important than reliable dictators, no
matter how grasping and venal they might be.  But western
sabotage of democracy and development go further than that
and is shown in structures which upheld racist,
authoritarian, or reactionary regimes wherever possible:
witness the intense western support for the South African
regime, enduring support for Portuguese rule, and critical
assistance to UNITAS in the 1970s and RENAMO in the 1980s.

The west had many opportunities to support democracy in
Africa; seldom did outside power nurture an environment
where such a context could develop.  It was not for lack of
local initiatives, however; instead it was a result of
repressing or ignoring such local voices, an unwillingness
to seize on opportunities to translate such local
initiatives into programmatic policies.  Of course, this is
not to say that encouraging such local voices
"automatically" leads to true democracy; it is only to note
that "democracy, development, and nation-building" cannot be
achieved exclusively from the top down.

So it is questionable that it was the goal of postcolonial
power-holders (within or outside Africa) to promote
nation-building, development, and democracy; perhaps that
was more the rhetorical fantasy of the social scientists
than the agenda of the power-holders.  It would be closer to
the empirical reality to note that the goals of both parties
(internal and external power-holders) corresponded more to
state enhancement than to nation-building, more to export
economies than to internal development, and to political
reliability to outside agendas, not to democracy.  In this
set of goals, western powers and their internal allies were
largely effective.  The problem may be not that they failed
but that they were all too successful.

In these goals, one could argue that they were too often
aided by an uncritical and "objective" set of social
scientists in the west, whose major points of reference has
been the structures of present power, not the condition of
the peasants.  So the authors of the essay above are right
to call on social scientists to "engage in debate" on the
social structures of Africa.  But the argument fails to go
far enough, to my mind.  For prescription from above, in
what appears to be a new developmentalist agenda ("how to
improve political structures in Africa," as the authors
phrase it)  has been part of the problem of defining
well-being for Africa. Such a technocratic presumption has
been addressed in many recent works on development
(Ferguson; Escobar; Cooper and Packard; Scott) and it has
two principal drawbacks, it seems to me.  First, it fails to
incorporate the principal actors.  But second, it is
premised on the concepts of "governance"--strengthening the
capacity of the state to "deliver" certain goods, programs,
or structures--rather than on opening lines of internal
communication, debate, and even critique.  But these avenues
of interaction and political engagement need more than
formal structures, so easily controlled by political
authorities.  As we have seen time and again, analyses
premised on outside prescriptions do not have a long
self-life in African political presumptions.  (Whatever
happened to the "democratization discourse," another
attraction to social scientists' seeking "to improve
political structures in Africa"?)  So external prescription
has not been successful; nonetheless, opening up effective
lines of enduring internal communication is not an easy task
in Central Africa today, where the intense struggle over
material resources, control over information, and wilful
outside blinkered vision all so effectively stifle the
aspirations and expression of people who live there.

Finally, the authors offer several interesting points of
departure for thinking on these issues:  the legal
construction of the state; the concept of nationality; the
use of ethnic identity as a form of exclusion, in regions of
significant population flows; and the ready resort to
free-form violence.  Each of these issues could elicit a
long discussion, but it is also useful to see them all as
variants of a single issue:  the character of state power in
a world in which state structures are often the primary
depository of such power. And the dysfunction of the state
(and its command of violence) arises from the disjunction
between legal structures (defined within and between states)
on the one hand, and experiential processes (illustrated by
the flow of people, goods and arms) on the other.

But in addressing these elements, there are dangers in
drawing too closely on European experience as a model for
Africa.  First, this can reproduce the problem of earlier
ages with colonialism, with Christian evangelization, with
development paradigms; the historical landscape is strewn
with the unfortunate residue of earlier western models
applied to Africa.  Instead, perhaps we need to attend more
to local dynamics and realities than to models or
assumptions drawn from outside.

A second danger concerns the nature of history.  Despite
their call "to return time and space" into social
scientists' understanding Africa - or is it social
scientists' prescriptions for Africa? - the "time" element
here seems to ignore the fact that contemporary western
European structures are the product of a half-century of
intense negotiations, even in a post-war context of a shared
flight from two European wars and a shared threat from the
Soviet bloc.  This is the context that nurtured the
evolution from the EEC and the Common Market to the European
community. To ignore the process--and the difficult
problems--of this evolution is to subvert the validity of
the historical analogy of Europe's transformations applied
to Africa.  In considering such fundamental restructuring
for Africa as that implied here, the historical evolution of
such patterns need be based on similarly locally and
regionally defined patterns (see, for example, D.  Newbury
1997, 1986), rather than imposing yet another arbitrary
element on Africa drawn from outside perceptions and models.

Surely these issues need to be addressed and thought through
carefully.  And surely the pattern drawn from elsewhere -
the political dissolution of national boundaries in Europe,
for example - can be instructive: however, not as blind
blueprints, only as part of a complicated process. They need
be seen as food for thought - thinking through the
particular circumstances--not as prescriptions of some
"universal" (read: "European") solution based on outside
models.

In conclusion, the authors have done us great service in
initiating the conversation.  But the role of social
scientists, it seems to me, is best reserved for analysis
and diagnosis (as the authors have done here), rather than
for prescribing solutions (as they sometimes seem to call
for).  And surely too, this is not just "an African"
problem, it is at least to an important degree a problem of
international influences in Africa; therefore understanding
these issues requires moving beyond the rhetoric of the
western powers to examine instead their policies.  And
finally, this is not only "an African" problem in the
singular, but multiple problems which affect many Africans.

It is important that we account for which voices are being
heard, which are being ignored, and which are being
repressed.  It is not just _African_ voices that matter, but
_which_ African voices, as well.  Today in Central Africa,
the audible voices derive from a small segment of the
politically powerful, and outsiders often lack sufficient
independent knowledge to assess the validity of the
assertions to come out of political circles.  One thing
outside social scientists can do is to inform themselves
better than they have been informed in the past, in order to
be prepared to evaluate the resonance of these voices among
a broad spectrum of the population. The internal voices are
there; the outsiders' listening is what is in question.  As
the authors well remind us, the struggle for improvement is
a struggle on many fronts.


References:

Cooper, Frederick and Randall Packard (eds). 1998.
_International Development and the Social Sciences Essays on
the History and Politics of Knowledge_ (Berkeley: University
of California Press).

Escobar, Arturo. 1994. _Encountering Development: The Making
and Unmaking of the Third World._ Princeton University
Press.

Ferguson, James. 1994. _The Anti-Politics Machine.
"Development,"  Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho_. (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press).

Newbury, David. 1986. "From Frontier to Boundary: Some
Historical Roots of Peasant Strategies of Survival in
Zaire," in Nzongola-Ntalaja (ed.), _The Crisis in Zaire:
Myths and Realitites_(Trenton N.J.: Third World Press);
87-99.

Newbury, David.  1997. "Irredentist Rwanda:  Ethnic and
Territorial Frontiers in Central Africa," _Africa Today_ 44,
2; 211-222.

Scott, James C. 1998. _Seeing like a state : how certain
schemes to improve the human condition have failed_ (New
Haven : Yale University Press).

____________________

* David Newbury is Associate Professor, Dept. of History,
University of North Carolina. His research is on the social
history of East and Central Africa, especially Rwanda,
Burundi, and eastern Congo. His books include _Vers le Passe
du Zaire_: _Methodes Historiques_; _Kings and Clans: A
Social History of the Lake Kivu Rift Valley_; _African
Historiographies: What History for Which Africa?_; and
_Paths to the Past: Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina_. Among
his recent articles are: "Bringing the Peasant Back In: The
Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in
Rwanda," _American Historical Review_ 105, 3 (June 2000);
(with Catharine Newbury) "A Catholic Mass in Kigali:
Contested Views of the Genocide and Ethnicity in Rwanda,"
_Canadian Journal of African Studies_ 33, 2/3 (1999) and
"Ecology and Political Violence: Rwanda 1994" _Cultural
Survival Quarterly_ 22 4 (1999).
____________________

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