After Colonialism
Africa: the Politics of Independence.
by Immanuel Wallerstein.
Vintage Books. 173 pp. $1.25.
“They make things far more complicated than they are,” complained an Ambassador from one of the more militant African nations recently; he was speaking of both the West and the East. “They talk about aid and trade, but all the time they are thinking about power blocs and influence and hidden plots. What we want is to develop our country with the friendship of everyone. When hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on trial rockets that fall into the sea while there are people in my country going hungry, it baffles us.” The Ambassador was referring to the disturbing gap today between the mental climate of African politics and the politics of the “established” world, both West and East. While the Western observer thinks in terms of cold war alignments or of the erosion of democracy among the new states, the African politician or official is often on an entirely different wave-length. If he belongs to one of the radical countries which have broken away administratively and economically from the colonial pattern, he is likely to be concerned with the continued political and economic cohesion of his country rather than with the form of its government. And to whatever group he belongs, as an African he is probably more preoccupied with continually reasserting and proving his independence than with many a weightier and more tangible issue.
To be at ease in the mental climates of African and “established” worlds requires not only agility but a profound knowledge of what African intellectuals are beginning to call “the African situation.” To have such knowledge, and to be able as well to write about it intelligibly, is a rare combination of virtues. Mr. Wallerstein here shows beyond doubt that he possesses it. His ability to write is especially delightful because he is a member of a species normally given over to ponderous jargon and afflicted with a tendency to reduce every issue to a diagram: he is a sociologist. He has attempted no less than an interpretation of African politics in 167 pages. That he succeeds is due to a firm grasp of the background and the issues.
He begins, as he must, by wiping away the cobwebs of the old-fashioned idea that Africa had no history before the European arrival. He is inconclusive on certain key specifics of this subject. He doesn’t commit himself on whether Negro civilization was Egyptian in origin, or whether the Egyptians were in fact Negro in origin. But this irresolution is not Wallerstein’s fault. However crucial the question of origins is for resolving the deeper matters of racial amour propre, it is a symptom of the intellectual myopia of the colonial period that the question has been neglected so long that a definite answer is not yet possible. What can be said, and what Wallerstein insists on, is that before the Europeans came Africa “was neither anarchy nor barbarism, nor unchanged and unchanging villages. It was movement and splendor, conquests and innovations, trade and art. It was above all wide variety and much experimentation. There is no single nor simple stereotype we can call ‘old Africa,’ against which we can measure how far Africa has evolved today. This is as true of Africa as of medieval Europe. . . .”
The author goes on to trace the colonial impact, isolating its components with insight and wit—“The Missionaries came not to buy, but to sell”—and establishing a cruelly precise contrast between the French and British regimes—“Britain, empirical, commercial, practising indirect rule, keeping Africans at a distance, verging on racism; France—Cartesian in its logic, seeking glory, practising direct administration, acting as the apostle of fraternity and anti-racism.” Then, after independence, comes the nationalist hero, the single-party state, chauvinism, nationalization (or the threat of it), and flirtations with the East. Wallerstein is unerring in his analysis of the process’ main features: the need to create, in countries with a random set of borders drawn by accidents of colonial history, a sense of nationhood.
It is obviously pointless to yearn for an opposition in African countries in the Whitehall sense, Wallerstein indicates, when the only opposition is a set of irresponsible gangsters. It is perhaps caviling a little to reproach the author of so concise a book for not having gone on to make the further important point that political power has an entirely special value in an underdeveloped country—there the fruits of power bring a standard of living immeasurably higher than that experienced by the rest of the populace; whereas in the industrial societies of the West a man might well have to make financial sacrifices to enter politics. The African Ambassador quoted at the head of this review lives in unrestricted luxury in Europe, employs his son-in-law as Embassy chauffeur, and has a dozen nephews and nieces installed in his residence. Such a style of life helps explain a great deal about the African attitude to an opposition: one’s opponents are usually seen simply as another lot of people anxious to get their hands on all the luxuries that power brings.
One might question Wallerstein’s sanguine view that, because African totalitarianism is born of legitimate and easily understood causes, all in Africa is for the best. One can hardly disagree when he says that, “although African independent states are not liberal in their practices, they are by no means totalitarian. The citizens do not live in terror of a secret police. Political debate is a commonplace of African life. . . .” But does this take into account Ghana’s Preventitive Detention Act, as put into practice last year, when several hundred trade unionists and members of the opposition were put into prison without trial, remaining there at the time of rioting? The author’s conclusion, although based on wide observation, also sounds optimistic: Wallerstein asserts that “the one-party structure is an interim system of African states which they are maintaining for the present.” If this implies that democracies are around the corner, it is plainly wishful thinking. However, concerning the immediate situation he is right, and Wallerstein makes a shrewd point when he maintains that “pressure for formal constitutional guarantees and outward comformity to parliamentary norms, if premature, may only lead to the breakdown of these institutions, as has occurred in a number of Asian countries, and consequent disillusion with the usefulness of such institutions at any time.”
However boring and frustrating the question of Eastern versus Western influence in Africa may be, it has to be faced. Wallerstein can be excused for treating it scantily in his short book. But one aspect of this question overshadows all other problems, in African minds especially: the issue of neocolonialism. Is the West, as Presidents Nkrumah and Touré are constantly claiming, actively seeking to perpetuate its domination of independent Africa by economic and other means? Even in the situation in Katanga, no one has ever definitely pointed to the existence of a deep-laid “colonial” plot. Still, it is undeniable that the economic facts of life are retying some African countries, especially those under the domain of France, so closely to their former master as to put their very independence in jeopardy. “The relationship between colonial power and independent state is also reinforced by the fact that, in a number of cases, the former colonial power continues for political reasons to purchase some primary products at above the world price.” That, Mr. Wallerstein, is the understatement of the year. A handful of countries in Africa—Niger, Upper Volta, Tchad, Central African Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville)—to take only the most flagrant examples, will not be able to keep their economic heads above water for several decades without concealed subsidies from France. If France stops paying them, someone else will have to start.
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