The colonial and postcolonial state

Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the area of the colonial state, in its late manifestations and its postcolonial legacies. The penetration of the colonial state into colonized societies – whether through taxation, the policing of labour unrest, surveillance, anti-insurgency or ostensibly more benign ‘development’ schemes – was itself a driving force of nationalist consciousness. But the historiographical focus on the state – distinct from, though historically and analytically connected to, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism – has brought into view a range of other important questions. The early Fanonist critique of an elite-led ‘false decolonization’, in which very little changed – and, crucially, core elements of the state and economy carried over in the transition from colonial to postcolonial periods – has evolved through various forms of analysis and criticism of the postcolonial state from within Africa itself. A different historiography, more imperial in its focus, has sought to bring the late colonial state into analytical perspective as something that marked both colonizer and colonized. Fanon’s position would feed into postcolonialism, a mode of critical enquiry citing knowledge itself as a form of colonial power and control. Initially theoretical, concentrating on the sometimes overly abstract idea of discourse, one can detect the influence of this mode of enquiry in the new historiography of decolonization that advances a more empirical social history of ideas, seeking to elucidate the ways in which colonial knowledge was reified in state practice and social organizations that bridged the late colonial and colonial periods, for example through the field of ‘development’. This has meant looking not only at the composition and support base for national movements but also at the nature of the state inherited from the colonial power.

Economic explanations for imperial expansion were prominent throughout the twentieth century, and as early as 1957 an economic explanation for decolonization was being offered by Paul Baran in his seminal The political economy of growth. Baran argued that, whereas empires had previously been advantageous to the fortunes of international capitalism, after 1945, and increasingly into the 1950s, the politics of imperialism and the interests of international capitalism were at loggerheads. Where multinational businesses felt that they were well placed to work with new nationalist leaders, the intransigence of colonial rulers was likely to create anti-foreigner and anti-capitalist extremism that would play into the hands of the communist world.⁷⁹ For this reason, European imperial powers were under huge pressure to facilitate a swift political decolonization, enabling the capitalists to carry on with business as usual, under new arrangements. The emergence of ideas based around ‘dependency’ or the neo-colonialism of markets and international organizations drew heavily on neo-Marxism and on the politics of the Cold War context out of which they emerged. Andre Gunder Frank’s highly influential Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) provided a great deal of the theoretical apparatus for work on other parts of the Third World.

A classic example for the African context is Walter Rodney’s 1973 How Europe underdeveloped Africa, a longue durée perspective on colonial exploitation leading right through to the postcolonial persistence of dependency.⁸⁰ From a different political perspective, Ronald Robinson and Roger Louis’ important article on ‘The imperialism of decolonization’ stressed the role of the United States, particularly through collaborations with Great Britain, in pursuing informal empire after decolonization as a means of fighting the Cold War.⁸¹ Broad ideas of dependency and ‘neo-colonialism’ continued to resonate throughout the developing world, particularly in Africa and Latin America, through the 1980s and well into the 1990s. Opposition to the ‘Washington Consensus’ on neoliberal state reform, thought to be imposed on Africa via the ‘structural adjustment’ plans of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, became a rallying cry. In terms of decolonization scholarship, one of the few historians to engage in a careful rebuttal of the arguments advanced by the dependency theorists was David Fieldhouse, who argued that, in fact, the emphasis on commodity exports in sub-Saharan Africa after independence was, first, ‘not necessarily fatal to economic development’ and, moreover, explanations for underdevelopment should place far more emphasis ‘on the policies adopted by the new rulers of Africa, on the way these were carried out and, above all, on the political systems evolved to support the ruling elites’.⁸² Within the field of history, the economics of decolonization as it affected Africa remains an area of enquiry that is arguably in need of expansion, though the literature on the metropolitan economic dimensions of decolonization has been more thoroughly explored.⁸³ A current contribution to the historiography has in fact subjected the whole idea of neo-colonialism to scrutiny, suggesting that, in East Africa at least, the claim that colonial structures of power remained in place after decolonization because former colonial powers had willed it to be so is too simplistic.⁸⁴

To bring the dispute about neo-colonialism full circle, the critique of the postcolonial state has actually extended far beyond the realm of the economy to include, in some cases, calls for the establishment of a ‘new trusteeship’ to rescue the supposedly ‘failed’ African postcolonial state from itself. This debate probably reached its most heated point in the mid-1990s, in the context of strong disagreement about the bearing of structural adjustment in Africa. Perhaps the most controversial figure at that time was Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan-born author of many works in history and political science, who by the 1990s held a professorship in the humanities at Binghamton University, New York. Mazrui’s interventions in the press calling for the ‘benign colonization’ of Africa by African hegemons (a Pax Africana) drew predictable outrage from many quarters, but were in fact provocative expressions of a wider anxiety about the viability of the African state.⁸⁵ Attention has also been focused on the African state from the fields of political science and international relations, less out of a concern for African welfare than from a fear of the African ‘failed state’ being a seedbed of international terrorism. An early proponent of this thesis was Robert Jackson, who termed the African postcolonial state a ‘quasi-state’, which could survive only because the ‘precipitous decolonization’ in Africa had been facilitated by an international state system whose legal principles worked against the maintenance of domestic jurisdiction on the part of colonial powers, and hence encouraged a rapid decolonization process.⁸⁶ The upshot, Jackson argued, was that ex-colonial states had been ‘internationally enfranchised’ with ‘juridical statehood’, but many of them have not ‘been authorised and empowered domestically and consequently lack the institutional features of sovereign states, as also defined by classical international law’.⁸⁷

While Jackson and others point the finger of blame towards the legacy of decolonization in the realm of international law, others have argued for a process of ‘second independence’, which takes into consideration the international realm but seeks to combine this with historical particularity and specificity in its search for solutions to the problems of the African state.⁸⁸ According to Eghosa Osaghae, ‘second independence’ is a popular movement from below that calls for decentralized, sometimes federal forms of government that can meet the development needs of African people.⁸⁹ As Paul Ekeh has put it, second independence – or what he calls ‘second liberation’ – is not about the violent guerrilla wars of the 1970s but ‘about gaining democratic rights from post-independence domestic tyrants’, which must be done by developing ‘a sharp focus on the behavior of the state, especially in its uses of the public domain and its interaction with the institutions of civil society’.⁹⁰ For Africa, then, the debate about the postcolonial state hinges not simply on the colonial legacy but, equally, on the nature of postcolonial political participation, pointing us yet again to the interconnectedness of past and present when seeking to reimagine new future trajectories of political and economic development.

Despite the ongoing conceptual and political resonance of ‘dependency’, ‘neo-colonialism’, ‘failed’ or ‘quasi’ states, Osaghae’s point about popular participation and interaction with the state reminds us once more of the importance of placing agency – or, put simply, just ‘people’ – centre stage; this is something that, arguably, historians are more prone to doing than their political science and international relations counterparts.⁹¹ Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (1996), for example, utilizes the concept of the ‘bifurcated’ colonial state, split between the direct rule of administrative colonial cities and towns and the decentralized, indirect rule of the rural areas. The legacy for Africa has been rural power structures that were not broken but, rather, further ‘Africanized’ and that maintained their coercive capabilities vis-à-vis rural labour. As such, questions of civil society, political leadership and collective action have become central to the analysis.⁹² Frederick Cooper’s influential Decolonization and African society, published in the same year, shows how African workers and trade unionists interacted with and hence shaped French and British schemes for colonial modernization.⁹³ Cooper posits the idea of colonial states as ‘gatekeeper’ states, which had ‘weak instruments for entering into the social and cultural realm over which they presided, but…stood astride the intersection of the colonial territory and the outside world’.⁹⁴

The implications of this were that Africans under colonial rule sought ways to circumvent the colonial state’s control of access to the world beyond its borders. At the same time, anti-colonial nationalist elites were aware that the power they were inheriting was limited, and indeed the reality was that ‘the postcolonial gatekeeper state, lacking the external coercive capacity of its predecessor, was a vulnerable state, not a strong one’. As a consequence, ruling elites after decolonization have tended to utilize methods of patronage and coercion in order to maintain control of ‘the gate’. In a political version of the economic ‘resource curse’, in which efforts to seize control of single or very limited economic resources such as mineral wealth or oil tend to lead to corruption and dictatorship, the gatekeeper state is vulnerable for the simple reason that anyone who seizes control of it must stay in power. No one can afford to lose control, because there are no avenues for wealth or other loci for power other than controlling the gate. Cooper suggests that the gatekeeper state concept helps us to look at the post-war era in its entirety, enabling us ‘to explain the succession of crises that colonial and postcolonial states faced, without getting into a sterile debate over whether a colonial “legacy” or the incompetence of African governments is to blame’.⁹⁵ The overarching point is that contextualized political action, fundamentally a problem of structure and agency, has shaped Africa after decolonization in ways that require more subtle forms of analysis than the ‘culpability quest’ that has sometimes seemed to predominate in the older literature. Social, economic, political and cultural structures in postcolonial Africa are neither imported nor indigenous, but have developed through the interaction of the said structures with African agents at all social levels, and in particular contexts.

The idea of the African state as a bridge between colonies and ‘the outside world’ takes us back to a historiography of the colonial and postcolonial state in which there is an alternative line of investigation: re-centring the realm of imperial politics towards an emphasis on the impact of the state for both the colonizer and the colonized. Here, the debate does not ignore the role of the colonial state in Africa; far from it. Instead, it seeks to keep both colony and metropole in the same framework of analysis, and, in so doing, also points towards the ways in which the late colonial state in Africa had commonalities with colonial states elsewhere. As discussed above, historians have argued that the whole project of late colonial ‘modernization’ gave impetus to processes of social change that in turn increased demands for decolonization. At the same time, what Anthony Low and John Lonsdale famously termed the ‘second colonial occupation’ also gave rise to a new impetus for colonial economic development, science, technology and modernization schemes that would have ramifications for the colonial powers themselves, and indeed for newly emerging international institutions.⁹⁶ The concept of the late colonial state therefore points not just to the politics of decolonization in the newly emerging nation state itself but also to the imaginings of continued colonial rule, in modified form, on the part of the politicians and policy-makers in imperial centres after 1945.⁹⁷

In Martin Shipway’s comparative study of decolonization, the late colonial state – particularly in Africa – plays a central part in revealing connections between the late colonial and decolonizing experiences of Britain and France. Thinking about the view from London or Paris, Shipway argues that, even before the material and ideological shifts effected by the Second World War, colonial powers were having to work far harder to maintain the imperial equilibrium as they ‘confronted the deeper continuities of imperial instability, or of resistance or challenge to colonial rule, or contemplated the sort of policy reforms which were to become commonplace after 1945’. What is brought sharply into relief is the fact that any ideological division between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ in Europe after 1945 was simply false: both groups were intent on preserving empire ‘in some shape or form’ in order to at least ‘manage the process of colonial change over the medium to long term’.⁹⁸ The added advantage of Shipway’s emphasis on the late colonial state is that it provides another framework for thinking about agency from the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. The evolving nature of the late colonial state’s adaptation, contestation and rejection explicitly involved the colonized not simply as an undivided nationalist ‘mass’, represented by a handful of elite leaders, but a delineated range of actors and groups interacting with colonial powers, and each other, as the postcolonial state entered into view.⁹⁹ On the other side of the spectrum, the project of late colonialism, varied as it was, required ongoing commitment from metropolitan actors that raises yet again the importance of decolonization – and often specifically African decolonization – in which British and French academics, intellectuals, policy-makers and administrators continued to see themselves as having a major role to play.¹⁰⁰

One area of interest that draws out the ways in which the colonial state had local, as well as comparative or even transnational, dimensions lies in the study of colonial violence and coercion. The previously discussed historiography on Mau Mau has been an important driver in this area, as has the vast literature on French colonial violence, particularly in Algeria.¹⁰¹ Yet colonial violence cannot be reduced to large-scale massacres or brutal acts of violence that captured international media attention. In fact, the everyday, banal nature of colonial violence is crucial to our understanding of colonialism and decolonization. The colonial state’s capacity to police and control colonial populations at the local level was, as is now widely understood, heavily dependent on indigenous collaborators.¹⁰² This is turn shaped the politics of intra- and inter-ethnic violence that has been a marked legacy in the postcolonial era. Violence and coercion arose too in the context of the political economy that was fundamental to the daily workings of colonialism – indeed, that was arguably central to its rationale. For example, historians have explored the ambivalent effects of colonial taxation as a means of coercing natives into the labour force or to produce certain kinds of cash crops.¹⁰³ As Ann Laura Stoler has made us aware, albeit from a South-East Asian angle, the repression of anti-colonial resistance often involved a blurring of the lines between political agitation, economic grievance and criminality, which brought labour relations very much to the forefront of the minds of colonial administrators and their police powers.¹⁰⁴ Martin Thomas’ recent seminal work on Violence and colonial order places great emphasis on the centrality of political economy to our understanding of how the colonial state reacted to and evolved its approaches to coercion, with the control and policing of labour unrest being central to this development.¹⁰⁵ Thomas’ work also makes a major contribution to a decolonization historiography that is comparative and transnational in its perspective.¹⁰⁶ While going to great lengths to detail spatial and temporal specificity, Thomas borrows from more sociological and theoretical approaches to develop a cross-imperial comparison taking in British, French and Belgian policing regimes, revealing some of the ‘distinctively colonial types of repression as written in the very formation of colonial states’.¹⁰⁷

New work is now being done in an area of decolonization historiography that explores not just empire – or colony-specific case studies – but also the broader networks of knowledge and practice that offer another linkage between the late colonial, decolonization and postcolonial periods. Here we also see, either implicitly or explicitly, the legacies of postcolonialism’s theoretical innovations at play, with an emphasis on the longevity of colonial ‘power-knowledge’ and the need to move beyond formal, flag independence to look at deeper processes of decolonizing in the realm of culture and intellect as well as the postcolonial state.¹⁰⁸ At the level of Foucauldian discourse, the postcolonial turn has had a major sway in studies of the postcolonial state in Africa and the limits of decolonization as manifested in the legacies of international influence and control.¹⁰⁹ James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine (1990) was a major interdisciplinary contribution, focused on the ‘depoliticizing’ effects of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ discourses in Lesotho that substituted technocratic perspectives for the views of those actually being governed.¹¹⁰ In general terms, however, particularly when they operated most clearly as a form of theoretical, moral or literary critique of broad, abstract categories such as ‘the imperial’, ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’, the openings offered by the postcolonial turn have also arguably obscured and closed down some areas of investigation. As Stephen Howe put it in a typically trenchant critique, some of what emerged from postcolonialism, particularly in the 1990s, appeared to abandon the idea that colonialism was at its core ‘a juridical relationship between the state and territory; one in which the colonizing state took complete power over the government of the territory which it had annexed.’¹¹¹ Others, such as Achille Mbembe, have articulated similar concerns about the abandonment of the political in favour of the discursive.¹¹² As Andrew Zimmermann has put it, historians can sometimes be too keen to resist Eurocentrism by an exploration of the European racist discourses that inform it, rather than the non-European histories that Eurocentrism obscures.¹¹³

Much of the best literature now operates as a form of social- intellectual history, what might be termed a social history of ideas, in which the abstract notion of discourse is supplemented by a more concrete investigation of how forms of knowledge were developed and deployed in particular institutional or social contexts. This can be seen in the important work on both anglophone and francophone Africa of Christophe Bonneuil, which homes in on the crucial role of scientific thought in the processes of development that marked the late colonial and postcolonial state and ‘played a central role in the making of this development regime and its maintenance after decolonization’.¹¹⁴ In recent years a very large literature focusing on decolonization and the legacies of empire has centred on these problems of development and scientific knowledge, again demonstrating the possibilities of studying the decolonization and postcolonial condition of Africa by drawing on the insights of postcolonialism and using a wider lens that seeks to incorporate international and transnational perspectives as well as the older metropole–colony perspective.¹¹⁵ The focus on science and development in Africa’s decolonization has provided strong empirical grounds for such investigations. A new interest in the history of humanitarianism seeks to understand the shifting relationship of non-governmental humanitarian organizations in relation to colonial power and authority as well as the challenges of operating in newly sovereign postcolonial Africa.¹¹⁶

What is clear, then, is that, from many different angles, there is an enduring and in fact renewed interest in and emphasis on the nature of the state during and after African decolonization. Whereas many African historians have long asserted the importance of the state, and indeed the related concept of ‘political economy’, this is a move that constitutes something of a departure in terms of the ‘New Imperial History’, which has often tended to focus on questions of discourse and identity. Richard Price, a social historian of Britain who, along with many others of a similar generation and early training, took the ‘imperial turn’ in the 1990s, has pointed to the renewed vigour in the study of the history of the British empire and its decolonization, particularly in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’ and its emphasis on culture; but he has also asked: ‘Is it possible to write a history of Empire without considering political economy or without some notion of the state as a historical actor in the imperial process?’¹¹⁷