Africa—In Theory
The Political Kingdom in Uganda.
by David E. Apter.
Princeton University Press. 498 pp. $10.00.
Decolonization In Africa proceeds no less importantly in the fields of scholarship and culture than in politics, but the process is slower. It is possible to withdraw a sovereign administration and grant independence on a single day, but the refashioning of intellectual attitudes can scarcely be achieved in a generation. On a general cultural level, one difficulty is to avoid value judgments based on equating power and technology with worth. In scholarship, the problem is to banish the notion that African history really began with the European presence and that, because independent Africa has to “modernize” itself in order to survive, its problems must be interpreted from the standpoint of an “advanced” society. The old attitudes are still prevalent both in Europe, as the survivals of the colonial relationship, and in America, as a political naivety which measures “progress” by the yardsticks of “democracy” or “freedom” or material standard of living. They are prevalent among Africans too, of course, because the emergent elite in politics and culture is European-educated: the result, very often, is a painful form of schizophrenia. The dilemma is seen in such organizations as Présence Africaine, a publishing house formed in Paris by a group of Europeanized, Francophilic Africans, mostly with Parisian addresses and Parisian wives, dedicated to the propagation of the concept of négritude. Similarly President Nkrumah of Ghana, who has recently made arrangements for government supervision of the university, speaks of the “African personality”; President Sekou Touré of Guinea vigorously denies any imputation of Communism because “we have no isms but Africanism.” In the moderate, pro-Western regimes like Senegal, there is an insistence that the application of socialism only conforms with traditional village practice.
In British scholarship a “new wave” of thinking is typified by Professor Thomas Hodkin, who has recently suggested that “it might be a good thing if we gave up trying to say or write anything [about Africa] in the next few years, and concentrate instead upon observing, learning, thinking, understanding within the limits of our capacities.” In a recent issue of Encounter he wrote: “We are deplorably ignorant about the past of the various African peoples and states. Moreover, what we think we know is largely wrong. . . . The study of African history is only now beginning to develop its proper methods of inquiry, its critical standards, and the authority that is the consequence of these.” In the U.S., the recent detailed study of The Emerging States of French Equatorial Africa, by Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, typifies, in this context, the old approach. In twenty-five painstaking chapters, admirably objective and well written, these ancient areas are measured, inch by inch, against yardsticks fashioned by a civilization which has impinged a mere fifty years there.
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In the present work, The Political Kingdom in Uganda, David Apter starts from an awareness of this problem. “Profound though contact with the West has been, Africa can no longer be viewed as a consequence of European institutions planted on exotic soil,” he writes. “In the history of Africa, the colonial period is but a moment of time.” He sees the problems of Uganda as representing a “phenomenon in Africa which has been much overlooked as the successes of secular nationalism have naturally focused our attention on anti-colonialism. Uganda raises the question of what shall remain when colonialism departs. What are the stubborn and persistent forces of an accommodated traditionalism which will remain in the new Africa, to be absorbed or not as time and wisdom decree?” His object is to dissect a system of political relationships inherent in a highly traditionalized and conservative society on the eve of political independence and to find in this system pointers for the future course of development. He says at one point that Uganda’s problems “are not interesting from a merely theoretical point of view.” However, he is a theorist by trade—associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago—and his book is a web of theory. The test of its usefulness is how far his classifications and abstractions are relevant to Uganda and Africa.
His thesis is that Uganda has a very different pattern of development from other countries, notably Ghana, the subject of his previous study, The Gold Coast in Transition. According to classifications which he derived with the assistance of students in a seminar, he labels societies such as those of Ghana or Guinea mobilization systems, which “mobilize the total energies, resources, and skills of the country for a grand assault on the problems of poverty, ignorance, and backwardness.” Others, such as the Federation of Nigeria and the ex-Federation of Mali, he calls consociations, which “seek political unity in a common denominator to unite all the groups within the country for the purpose of common action.” The third type, exemplified in the Buganda kingdom, the most important of the four kingdoms that make up Uganda, he calls a modernizing autocracy, in which “change is filtered down through the medium of traditional institutions.” Morocco and Ethiopia are given as other examples. Then, like some contrapuntal composer intoxicated by a theme, Apter draws up an elaborate list of characteristics belonging to each system. The mobilization system has “hierarchical authority,” “total allegiance,” “tactical flexibility,” “unitarianism,” and “ideological specialization.” The consociational has “pyramidical authority,” “multiple loyalties,” “necessity for compromise,” “pluralism,” “ideological diffuseness.” The modernizing autocracy has “hierarchical authority,” “exclusivism,” “strategic flexibility,” “unitarianism,” and “neo-traditionalism.” The ingenious catalogue swells in a crescendo of abstractions until the earth, Africa, and even plain English are left far behind: “. . . a hierarchical pattern of authority without intermediate and relatively autonomous sources of power . . . a set of roles and institutions which can be summarized as being essentially instrumental in their orientations. . . .”
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Measured against political realities, these classifications are not always helpful: sometimes they are inappropriate, inaccurate, irrelevant, or tautological. Buganda’s brand of militant reaction, for example, is more of an oligarchy than an autocracy. To include in the category modernizing autocracy three such different countries as Buganda, whose archiac brand of nationalism is likely to be overthrown within a few years of independence; Ethiopia, feudalistic and reactionary; and Morocco, so militantly nationalist as to be included in the Ghana-Guinea group in African politics—shows up the distinction as devoid of any precise meaning. Nor is it illuminating to list such qualities as “pluralism,” “multiple loyalties,” and “the necessity of compromise” as features of the consociational system. They are too obvious: and is not the necessity for compromise a feature of all governments? Even Sekou Touré of Guinea and Nkrumah of Ghana must maintain a balance between the radicals and the moderates, the extremists and the pro-Westerners, the doctrinaires and the pragmatists, the townsfolk and the farmers.
One might justifiably react to Apter’s excess of theory in a general way and claim that it makes nonsense of politics. But in Africa today such theorizing is especially unhelpful. If one thing stands out from the array of regimes and alignments in independent Africa, it is the lack of rigidity, the blurring of frontiers between one “type” and another. Even where a “system” seems clear cut, it is not necessarily stable. Apter’s enlightened starting point in this study is betrayed by a curious naivety. “Each of the three types has developed as a result of the challenge which has emerged with lightning speed: the extension of political democracy and freedom to Asia and Africa. This has ended the Western world’s political hegemony and affirmed instead the road to both spiritual and material achievements in Asia and Africa.” In fact, democracy in Africa is limited by much the same considerations that apply in Soviet Russia: the need to achieve quick results in a society that has no democratic tradition. “Freedom” is a largely meaningless term in this context; so is “spiritual achievements.”
Yet African “systems” are not only more different but also more similar than Apter conceives of them. They are alike in that all contain the same double revolution in progress or in embryo: the revolt against the colonial power and the revolt of the “have-nots” against “haves.” On the surface this latter revolution is more advanced in Ghana and Guinea than in Nigeria and Senegal, but in practice the new elites in the radical countries are as divorced in wealth and power from the people as the Nigerian merchant or Senegalese bureaucrat. After independence, Uganda will be no exception; despite the elaborately conservative traditions which Apter describes with skill and insight, the same pressures will be exerted there, and the traditionalism which has kept it apart from the mainstream of nationalism will founder. Who will care, then, whether it is a modernizing autocracy or a mobilization system?
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