One who seeks to produce knowledge and do it as an occupation, is compelled to face "the facts of life" from the very outset. To gain access to resources which would enable more than an artisanal perspective, such a scholar has to connect, directly or indirectly, with the very centers of wealth and power whose critique must be the springboard of any transformative knowledge. The effect is to discipline and shape the very process of production of knowledge; whether directly, as is apt to be with state connections, or indirectly, as is the case with the influence of market forces. This is, after all, one way in which dominant views tend to be reproduced as institutional ideologies while counterviews are marginalised as individual idiosyncracies.
The "Africanist" scholar, however, operates under a second limitation. To survive in the craft, he or she must also maintain regular access to the country or region of his/her specialisation. This means, at the minimum, maintaining minimum cordiality in relations with the host government; for without the tacit consent of that government, there will be no research clearance and thus no access to "the field". This is not to say that the result is inevitably the production of some sort of a crude apology. One cannot, though, fail to notice the amazing regularity with which "establishment" Africanists churn out marginal critiques of "conservative" African regimes, and the same velvet gloves with which "critical" Africanists approach "radical" African regimes. At this juncture, however, I shall only argue that the constraint tends to make the scholar "realistic", to one degree or another.
This "realism" is reinforced by yet another set of constraints that the Africanist is subject to. Normally an ocean apart from his/her object of analysis, the Africanist is distanced from real and concrete democratic struggles that aim at transforming the very reality he/she is trying to analyse. Now, if this constraint goes alongside a second one, a similar distance from democratic struggles in the home country, the physical distance from popular struggles in Africa is transformed into an organic one.
Knowledge is produced in a context both social and ideological. The context of "knowing" social reality is inevitably a double squeeze, that of official pressures embodied in institutional ideologies generated from above, and that of popular pressures embodied in the "community of scholars" as a variety of points of view. The contest between them takes on the form of an ideological struggle.
When not anchored to popular struggles, whether in Africa or at home, the Africanist tends to succumb to the pressure of institutional ideologies, and in fact to become an active participant in their very production and propagation. But I say "tends to" because not only is there no mathematical correspondence between the response and the predicament, there are also exceptions to the tendency, as I shall soon show. In other words, there does exist an ideological struggle, even in the very temples of the powers-that-be. But the tendency, the predominant outcome, flows from the "realism" the Africanist embraces, whether in succumbing to these constraints, or in an isolated rear-guard struggle against them. The effect of these sets of constraints is to lock the Africanist in an "official" world. Whatever his or her methodological preference, the analysis tends to take on a character either static and descriptive or speculative and scholastic. Where the personal disposition is in favour of popular emancipation, the tendency is for such a wide gulf to develop between the analysis and the conclusion as to render the latter preachy and prescriptive. And should this disposition be openly proclaimed, the unfortunate outcome is to make it appear more as a posture than a source of inspiration.
From the time our scholar becomes "realistic", he or she begins to take the "official" standpoint as the point of departure in the process of production of knowledge. The tendency is for the "realistic" point of view to overlap with the "official" point of view. The Africanist begins to speak in the language of a consultant, whether to the donor or to the recipient government.
This may be a harsh comment, but not unfair. Undoubtedly, it is too general. But I hope to make it more concrete through a review of the proceedings of a remarkable gathering of thirty "Africanist scholars" recently called to discuss the crisis of "Governance in Africa". Meeting in February (17 and 18) of 1989 to mark the inaugural seminar of the Governance in Africa program of the Carter Centre (Emory University, Atlanta, USA), this gathering of political scientists also included a sprinkling of economists and sociologists.
The seminar participants were "invited to reflect on the genesis and consequences of the current African predicament." (Beyond Autocracy in Africa, Introduction; this collection of working papers for the seminar is hereafter referred to as Papers) while this predicament was never explicitly defined, it is clear that both the organisers and the vast majority of participants agreed that at the centre of that predicament is "the African state" and the entire range of its practices: "governance". "The major analytical challenge now is to construct a theory of state reform so that the state can be linked to the vast creative energies of Africa's people". Tom Callaghy's exhortation to seminar participants is highlighted in the sumup report as formulating the agenda of Africanism (Perestroika without Glasnost in Africa, report of the Inaugural Seminar of the Governance in Africa Program, February 17-18, 1989, p.42; hereafter referred to as Report).
For the papers that seek to analyse this predicament, the starting point is Robert Bates and the rational choice theorists. As summed up by Earnest J. Wilson III, "the statist urban bias of African political leaders rests on a bedrock political coalition of anti-market, anti-agricultural elements." (Papers, p.137) Hard-nosed political scientists that they are, seminar participants found it meaningful to relate policies to interests, and conclude that a change in policies is not possible without a change in interests at the political helm.
A number of contributions dwell on this. Achille Mbembe argues that "the transition from a clientelistic logic ... to a market logic" will be sabotaged by "the authoritarian bureaucracies of Black Africa"; he thus calls for political reforms to go beyond "simple privatisation" ("transfer of property") to "genuine liberalisation". (Papers, pp. 125-131) Ernest J. Wilson III distinguishes between varying degrees of policy changes and concludes that each will require a corresponding political shift. (Papers, pp. 137-140) Richard Sklar argues that the only way to cure "rent-seeking behaviour" is to make policy makers "accountable" to society. (Papers, pp. 141-145) Thus the concluding call of the seminar: successful economic reform requires an equally thorough-going political reform. (Report, p.45).
Given this chorus of an agreement - summed up in the words of Richard Sklar "No Perestroka without Glasnost", which the final report of the seminar adopts as its banner - one is surprised that there is no attempt, either in the papers or in the seminar report, to outline the political contours of the "reform coalition", or different and even competing reform coalitions in different African countries. On the contrary, the seminar report concludes with a call to foreign powers to add "political conditionalities" to the current economic conditionalities of SAP, and implement these through sanctions a la Poland and Solidarity. (Report, p.48) But since the proceedings of the carter Centre Seminar fail to identify any internal force for change in Africa, the reference to Solidarity simply appears demagogic. The conclusion is in reality no less than a call for further foreign intervention to "democratise" political life on the continent!
It is my view that this call reflects less a crisis of Africa than it does the crisis of Africanism in North America. I shall argue that the proceedings of the Carter Centre Seminar demonstrate brilliantly the cul-de-sac in which Africanism in North America presently finds itself. And furthermore, that this predicament is not forced upon it by the object of its analysis, but is reflective of an internal crisis constituted by at least three dimensions: a reliance on a borrowed paradigm and on officially generated information, reinforced by its distance from popular movements. Let me elaborate.
Unlike its elder cousin, orientalism, Africanism has yet to come of age. The hallmark of its stunted growth has been its persistent inability to be creative in confrontation with its subject matter. The unfortunate tendency of Africanism has been to borrow paradigms from the larger field of comparative studies, but without demonstrating a capacity to contribute to the stock of the family's intellectual assets.
This was true at the hour of its birth, the 1960s, also the dawn of state independence in Africa. Africanism borrowed liberally from the corpus of writings on "modernization" and wrote tomes on the epic struggle between "tradition" and "modernity" as the sum and substance of the process of development. It eulogised the process of "nation-building". And when the managers of the new states began to quibble and divide ranks in the face of popular resistance and an accumulation crisis, it documented the resulting factional strife in study after study of "tribalism" as further evidence of the force of "tradition" rampant in "primordial" Africa.
But this attempt to strike out on its own, to create a language specific to its own analysis, proved short-lived and unfortunate. Embarrassed at the exposure that in its very language of analysis Africanism had set up an epistemological curtain between the object of its analysis and the rest of humanity, between Africa and the rest of the world, between the world of the savage and that of the civilised, Africanism retreated. It abandoned the language of "tribalism" and began to use the more universalist terminology of "ethnicity". Once again, it returned to the larger fold, to the family of comparative studies, now to write in the language of "pluralism".
But the retreat was only tactical. The crisis of Africanism persisted. For "modernization" no longer seemed a cure for "ethnicity"; rather, "modernization" seemed to intensify "ethnic consciousness" and "ethnic conflict". Neither could this phenomenon be celebrated as evidence of a healthy "pluralism", for unlike the comparativists who saw in pluralism the surest sign of a healthy political life, Africanism saw in "ethnicity" the opposite, the resurgence of "particularisms" which it identified as a cancer undermining national health!
In this intervening lull, the family of Africanists could be found demoralised and scattered. The "survival strategy" of Africanists then was to appropriate the language of their critics. Some appeared in the garb of "dependencia", while yet others began to talk the language of "class formation". An eclectic blend of borrowings became a substitute for fresh, creative departures.
This lull is now drawing to a close. For the second time in its short life, US Africanism has borrowed a new paradigm, lock-stock-and-barrel, from the family of comparative studies. This is the paradigm structured around the polarity state vs. civil society. It is, of course, in the very nature of second-hand clothes that they ill fit a borrower. For the fact is that, no matter what its merits, at its inception the paradigm is an attempt to read reality; but in the second hands of Africanism, the relationship is reversed as the reality is read from the paradigm! But combine the limitations of the state-society paradigm with the "realism" of Africanism, and you get a particularly ill fit which in my opinion is likely to have a life span even shorter than did earlier "modernization" theory.
At the Carter Centre seminar, just about every Africanist paid homage under this new banner. Just about everyone. I shall discuss the dissidents in context. Within this broad consensus, however, there was a difference in emphasis. While both sides agreed that the reality in Africa - the motive force of its contemporary development - is the struggle between state and society, they differed on which of the two is the potential source of reform.
The argument for state-enforced reform is put forth by Callaghy; that for society-initiated reform by Sklar. The former advocated greater state autonomy to enable reform; the latter called for greater state accountability. The tension between the two, autonomy and accountability, is clear from the Papers; as we shall see, Callaghy unabashedly argued that democracy will reduce state autonomy and thus undermine the possibility of reform! But the clash never surfaced in the open during the seminar; it can only be discerned from a reading of the Papers, one assumes because what united the two points of view was more important than what divided them.
Thus Richard Sklar's partial critique of the state-centered perspective: "Many political scientists have rediscovered the state, a traditional subject of political inquiry which antecedes the age of industrial era ideologies. This too will pass. State-centered studies of social and political change in Western societies were rendered obsolete by behavioural scientists some fifty years ago. Political science is probably destined to recapitulate that experience on a world-scale. The inadequacy of state-centered approaches to social theory is clearly intimated by the ultimate reformulation of every important question about the state as a state-society relationship question." (Papers, p. 141)
But Sklar writes from within the parameters of the state-society paradigm. Within that framework, whose distinguishing feature is the polarity it sets up between the state and civil society, he raises a question of emphasis; he does not question the polarity itself. As such, his is the voice of the loyal opposition.
If, as Sklar argues, "every important question about the state" must be formulated "as a state-society relationship question," then we are compelled to question the very polarity between state and society as central to social theory. For there exists no Chinese wall between state and society. Forces within society penetrate the state and society. Forces within society penetrate the state differentially, just as the state power reinforces certain social interests and undermines others. Not only is the struggle between social forces found within civil society and telescoped inside the state; it shapes the very character of state power.
The relationship between social processes and state power is a marginal issue from the point of view of the state-society paradigm. But surely there is a world of a difference between a country where large-scale agrarian interests are the primary producers of social wealth (as in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Malawi), as opposed to where this wealth is produced by a sea of small peasants confronting merchant capital, whether private or parastatal (as in Uganda or Tanzania), or where state revenue is drawn primarily in the form of "rent" from strategic minerals, with the peasantry a marginalised majority (as in Zaire or Zambia). Surely, the concrete character of the process of production of social wealth and therefore of state revenue; how it shapes the contours of the social groups that develop, their demands and their capacities to wage struggles around these; surely, these great facts of social life cannot but shape the character of the state power and state policy in different countries.
Unlike Hyden's vacuous generalisation about "the [African] state suspended in mid-air above society" (Papers, p.3), Sklar does recognise the existence of a variety of state forms in Africa when he wonders why "rent-seeking behaviour on the part of state officials" has been "combatted" in Kenya and Zimbabwe, but not elsewhere. (Papers, p.142) But Sklar cannot answer the question satisfactorily for he is unable to link the question of changing state forms to the struggle within civil society.
Similarly, Richard Sklar notes somewhat uncomfortably that "African data do not disclose strong or systematic correlations" between democracy and capitalist development. (Papers, p.141) But he fails to grasp the analytical implications of this observation. As amply brought out in the decade-long debate around dependency theory, the paths to development (whether capitalist or socialist) are various and contradictory. The experience of African countries with "development" is not uniform. This diversity cannot be rendered meaningful by just tracing it to different state policies; in the event it is, the result is likely to be anecdotal and anthropological. It must be traced further, to the very interests and struggles in civil society.
As their state-centered counterparts, the society-centered theorists too set up a onesided opposition between the state and civil society. The difference is that while the former see in civil society nothing but an ensemble of "particularisms", the latter tend to glamourize civil society and present it as non-contradictory. This, however, is only possible from a distance, from a vantage point that allows either broad brushstrokes leading to equally broad generalisations, or microscopic concentration on minutia. This is the real failing of the society-centered group amongst the Africanists.
The tendency to glamourise civil society and present it as non-contradictory finds a variety of expressions in the seminar proceedings. The most naive instance is found in the papers of Diamond (Papers, pp.24-27) and Bratton (Papers, pp.28-33) who are given to celebrating the development of any association provided it is "voluntary", whatever be the interests organised in and through it! Far less naive but just as crippled analytically by the new paradigm is a scholar like Robinson whose paper focuses on "new forms of grass roots participation" in Bourkina Faso (1983-87) and Niger (1979-84). While the extremely interesting narrative describes ideological and political struggles internal to civil society and factional struggles within the state power, both part of a larger process leading to developments such as the coup in Bourkina Faso in 1987, the conclusion succumbs to the group refrain and confirms "these struggles between the state and civil society" (Papers, p.71) as explaining the events under consideration!
This methodological bias, towards treating civil society as non-contradictory and homogeneous, easily lends itself to substituting description for analysis, and to swinging like a pendulum between single-country narratives and Africa-wide generalisation. The more ambitious scholars, like Hyden (Papers, pp.2-7, 90-94), stretch the findings of their concrete but limited studies on particular countries into generalities about "Africa". More modest scholars, such as Holm on Botswana (Papers, pp.34-41) and Mikell on Ghana (Papers, pp. 7-13), are content to reproduce summaries of earlier country studies.
A few go beyond narration and attempt a typology of regime types on the continent. Rothchild (Papers, pp.47-50) characterises regime types on the basis of whether they use political or military means to resolve internal conflict. But since this is hardly the single most important feature distinguishing political regimes (let alone state forms) in Africa,the attempt remains not only modest but also superficial. Kasfir (Papers, pp.60-64) attempts a typology on the basis of regime ideology and in the process ends up with a conclusion that reaches the proportions of the truly banal: "all regimes say they act for the good of the people, none do it." (Papers, p.63) On the basis of a finding non-too-surprising that all advertisements exaggerate, he concludes that all products are equally bad!
The romanticization of civil society is reinforced by ignorance of concrete social processes. This in turn feeds the tendency of most scholars to take at face value official claims of success of liberalisation programs initiated by external agencies (particularly, the IMF's Structural Adjustment Program). There is a remarkable silence about the differential impact of these programs on social groups in the continent. While some simply assume that intention is automatically translated into effect, that advertisement is the product, others just accept and reconcile themselves to these programs as part of "reality". The seminar report blandly states just so much: "It was acknowledged that there are few alternatives at present to these policies."(p.29)
Two articles that raise questions do so not on the basis of concrete investigations of social processes but of narratives that underline contradictions internal to official publications or programs. Such is the narrative on the evolution of World Bank and IMF policies by Lancaster (Papers, pp.100-105), or Sommerville's sketch (Papers, pp.106-113) of two contrasting official prescriptions of Africa's economic ills, coming from the IMF and the ECA respectively.
Far more interesting, but also in the nature of warnings, are the contributions by MacGaffey (Papers, pp.132-136) and Jane Guyer (Papers, pp.146-149). MacGaffey ridicules the very assumptions embodied in the SAP. Based on concrete investigations she has been making along with a number of Zairois scholars, MacGaffey argues that while official figures in and about Zaire show the "official economy" to be shrinking, actual investigations show the "real economy" to be expanding. Thus, while SAP is devised in response to the "official" trend, the need of the hour is for programs that will respond to the "real" trends on the ground.
Guyer's starting point is also the concrete situation. Starting from the premise that the impact of the same general prescription, like "liberalisation", must vary depending on the concrete situation, she sounds a warning that SAP may be having contradictory and even negative consequences. Pointing out that most African states lack either the control over their economies or over economic information that states in North America, Europe or the Soviet Union do, Guyer contends that there are likely to be several "unintended consequences" of programs drawn from experiences in other parts of the world. To back up this claim, she points to such unintended consequences of devaluation as the boost to merchant banking, to the brain drain, and to the dollarisation of local economies. (Papers, p.148) Guyer thus calls for the need to study local linkages.
An exceptional contribution that has potentially the effect of liberating Africanism not only from the constraints of official data, but also from that of official perspectives they reinforce, comes from the pen of Thomas Bierstecker. (Papers, pp.85-89) His argument is three-fold. With respect to an analysis of the principle actors in the reform drama - African leadership, international financial institutions (IFIs) - Bierstecker points out that none of these is acting in a "historical vacuum". To understand their true significance is to put them in a social, historical and policy context. Thus, the leadership of African states that have "simultaneously reversed decades of development policy" are in fact operating "in a context of the exhaustion of post-colonial economic models, and the absence of any viable indigenous models." Similarly, the IFIs are "an important institutional enforcement mechanism for the international financial regime and global power of capital."
Secondly,the significance of reform policies they enforce can also be grasped only by separating changes that are easily reversible (e.g., concerning money supply, budgetary allocations) from those that are truly institutional. And finally, how durable the "adjustment" is likely to be will depend on the ideological coherence and political capacities of the forces ranged for and against these policies, and the very internal consistency of the reform package (e.g., can the private sector in most African countries survive without state subsidy?). These questions are significant because they go beyond the narrow empiricism that turns so many Africanists into hostages of official figures and their claims.
Bierstecker (and MacGaffey and Guyer) notwithstanding, the majority of Africanists continue with their touching faith in official figures and official claims, especially if these originate from governments or agencies outside Africa! As a result, this majority tends to be trapped in contradictions of their own making. I shall cite some instances from the official report of the seminar.
An interesting debate unfolds in the Papers on the political significance of economic reform programs, particularly SAP. The contrasting points of views are best articulated in the contributions of Lofchie (Papers, pp.119-124) and Hyden (Papers, pp.90-94). While Lofchie argues that the political consequence of SAP is to end the sovereignty of african countries, Hyden tends to ridicule those who claim that "Africa is in the process of being recolonised". (p.90) While the seminar report rebukes Hyden and reflects the majority view - "fears expressed about the gradual recolonisation of Africa cannot be dismissed as mere posturing" (Report, p.37) - far more interesting are the assumptions held by that majority about the consequences of SAP for African societies.
These assumptions come out in contributions from Abernathy (Papers, pp.79-84), Joseph (Papers, pp.114-117), and Callaghy (Papers, pp.95-99). They share an uncritical acceptance of official claims that externally-enforced "reform" programs "work". Thus, while Abernathy is concerned that SAP undermines sovereignty in Africa, he also proceeds on the basis of the "urban bias" thesis, the intellectual underpinning of SAP,and assumes that rural areas are uniform beneficiaries of reforms initiated by SAP. Caught in a perspective which sees the very forces that undermine African sovereignty as the only source of internal reform, and effective at that, Abernathy ends up positing a contradiction between sovereignty (state independence) and rationality (policy reform). Joseph implicitly accepts the same formulation and wonders which of the consequences will be telling in the longer run, and whether the end result will be reconlonisation or transformation or a mix!
The same contradiction is reformulated by another group of Africanists in different words. For those who argue that the root of the crisis lies in clientalism (Joseph: "prebendalism"; Hyden: "economy of affection"), democratic reform must surely look like magnifying the problem! This implication is boldly underlined by Callaghy. Arguing that "the ability to implement economic reforms is primarily influenced by the government's degree of autonomy" from organised social forces, Callaghy concludes that democracy reduces state autonomy and makes reform more difficult! (Papers, p.96) One is reminded of the debates on the eve of Africa's independence when the first generation of Africanists speculated on the contradiction between "self-government" and "good government" in the coming period!
But these moral dilemmas are of the Africanist's own making. A popular response to an existing balance of social forces against reform is not to impose a reformist dictatorship from above but to accelerate the organisation of pro-reform social forces. This is why the ignorance of real social processes and real social forces that struggle for democratisation is so crippling for Africanists.
Is it not a lesson of the history of Africa that every new coloniser has come to it in the guise of a liberator? That every limitation on self-government has been effected in the name of good government? The organisers of the seminar did honestly and clearly announce their intentions from the outset: "The underlying premise of the seminar was that a considerable store of knowledge about the African predicament circulated largely within the academic community, and that this should be made accessible to decision-makers in Africa, international agencies and our own government." (Papers, Introduction) Would it be an exaggeration if an African patriot read the proceedings of the Carter Centre seminar as a gathering of latter day secular missionaries, consultants to the new colonisers of Africa?
The real shortcoming of Africanism is its distance from popular struggles inside the countries of Africa. Where this is combined with a similar distance from popular movements at home, the result is to introduce an anti-democratic bias in their very perspective. It is not an accident that the Carter Centre seminar failed to identify an agency for change inside the continent, but instead ended up calling for a solution imposed on Africa from the outside.
Let me recall the division between state-centrists and society-centrists inside Africanism. We have seen that the former are openly hostile to democracy, seeing it a threat to state autonomy and therefore to reform. But if the existing state powers are to initiate policy reforms, who is to reform the reformer? It is understandable that they look for an answer to this question outside the boundaries of Africa.
But why should society-centered theorists pick up the same refrain? They are led to it inspite of their democratic protestations. Because they lack a concrete analysis of civil society and its contradictory character, they are unable to identify the development of concrete struggles for reform inside African societies. Their discussion on democracy thus stops short of an analysis of democratic forces,their capacities and conceptions; instead, it tends to turn into a shopping list or a list of Christmas wishes addressed to Uncle Sam! Whether it is recommendations on "new forms of governance" from Hyden (Papers, pp. 2-6) or Johnson (Papers, pp.14-19) or pleas on the need for accountability from young (Papers, pp.21-23) and Sklar (Papers, pp.141-145), these read like prescriptions tacked on to a description, not a synthesis derived from a concrete analysis of the problem. Because it lacks a concrete understanding of the problem, Africanism is forced to impose on its subject a solution from without.
It is not unusual for such a methodological bias to go hand-in-hand with open and democratic protestations. The carter Centre seminar, after all, resounded with calls for "the African people to seize the initiative" (Report, p.27), but this did not stop its participants from joining in a chorus, calling on their government to impose "political conditionalities" on Africa for its own good!
One exception to such well-intentioned posturing is the contribution by Frank Holmquist (Papers, pp.51-57). In a thought-provoking paper, he moves away both from a non-contradictory conception of civil society and from a prescriptive temptation. In an attempt to make sense of the struggle within civil society, Holmquist distances himself from those Africanists "who define African society as the cause of the problematic African state."(Papers, p.51) The result is to pose both the question of what type of change and that of the agency of change.
In spite of a desire to be "relevant" and a well-meaning concern for the crisis that is Africa, motives that may have been widely shared amongst the Africanists who gathered at the Carter Centre seminar, there is reason to pause before rushing to look for "the solution" to Africa's "predicament". Because the African reality is not uniform but various, there is likely to be not one but several "solutions" in response to it. And, because these "solutions" will inevitably be shaped by real struggles of real social forces on the continent, they cannot be thought out in the splendid isolation of professorial studies or consulting offices; rather, their outlines can only be discerned through an understanding of concrete struggles for social transformation in the African continent.
1 . I have attempted a fuller critique of the state-society paradigm in Africanism in another paper. See Mahmood Mamdani, "State Formation and Social Process," paper prepared for the meeting of the CODESRIA network on "Social Movements, Social Transformation and the Struggle for Democracy in Africa," Tunis, May 1990.
1 . It is not surprising that Robinson is one of the two scholars who during the seminar warned that "some civic groups can display authoritarian modes of governance" (Report, p. 17) while Johnson cautioned against "simply romanticising NGOs".