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published as: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., F.
Reijntjens & G.S.C.M. Hesseling, 1986b, ‘Aspects of modern
state penetration in Africa’, in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., G.
Hesseling en F. Reijntjens, eds.), State and local community
in Africa/Etat et Communaute locale en Afrique, Brussels:
Cahiers du CEDAF/ASDOC geschriften, 2-3-4/1986, pp. 369-400
html version without updating: June 2004
Please note: whenever ‘the present
collection’ or ‘the present book’ is mentioned below, the
following is meant: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., G. Hesseling en F.
Reijntjens, eds.), State and local community in Africa/Etat et
Communaute locale en Afrique, Brussels: Cahiers du
CEDAF/ASDOC geschriften, 2-3-4/1986.
Pursuing their discipline’s traditions as
rooted, for a century or more, in the North Atlantic intellectual
and political culture, constitutional lawyers, political
scientists and students of public administration have never had
to rediscover some problematic modern African state which
professional blinkers had at first blinded from their vision (cf.
Hodgkin 1956). Perhaps one could chide them for taking the
imported constitutional and bureaucratic organisational models at
face value. Perhaps they were a bit slow in appreciating the
complex socio-political realities that made light with the formal
administrative structures that were so confidently implanted on
the African soil with the advent of the colonial state, and so
proudly revised at the emergence of independent African states,
around 1960. It is only since a few decades that these
disciplines have addressed such features as patronage and class
formation; nation-building, ethnicity and regionalism; grossly
inadequate patterns of state legitimation, information and
participation; the often unchecked organisational and
technological power of the military; the nature of international
and intercontinental inequality; and the resilience (in some
incapsulated, redefined form) of historical African political
conceptions, such as focus on traditional rulers, precolonial
polities, and ethnic groups. But far more tragic has been the
case of the social sciences in the narrower sense: sociology and
anthropology. For the latter, one could claim, with little
exaggeration, that the discovery of the modern state in Africa
only began more than half a century after anthropologists (under
the tacit or explicit protection of the colonial version of that
modern state) had begun to study African communities. Despite the
fact that from the outset the economic, social, political and
ideological dynamics of these communities had been deeply
affected, if often only from a distance, by colonialism,
anthropological theory and method were such that (as long as one
gave the local remnants of precolonial states their due, and
underplayed the extent to which these were colonial
neo-traditional artefacts) one could largely ignore the colonial
state. Even so one could still rise to such mythical professional
heights as occupied by Evans-Pritchard, Fortes and Gluckman (cf.
Asad 1973). Although on a personal level very often sympathetic
to the Independence efforts, African Independence found the
anthropological profession largely unprepared, with a few notable
exceptions.[1] In the aftermath of
African Political Systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940)
anthropologists were still sharpening the theory of acephalous,
stateless societies, and comfortably managed to find such
societies within African colonial states (Colson 1962; Middleton
& Tait 1958)! The development of an anthropological approach
to the modern African state, both colonial and post-colonial,
only started in earnest towards the 1970s (cf. Goody 1968). This
was partly a somewhat delayed response to the changing political
realities in Africa itself (which did not always facilitate the
type of field research anthropologists had habitually engaged in,
and even forced many anthropologists to pose as sociologists or
historians). Moreover, African anthropology was affected by more
general discussions, including those on the allegedly weak nature
of the modern state elsewhere in the Third World (as initiated by
Alavi); the rekindling (by such authors as Poulantzas, Milliband
and Laclau) of the classical Marxist theoretical debate on state
and capitalism; and the tentative models of ethnicity and
primordial attachments as propounded by political scientists.
Perhaps a major factor of the emerging anthropological interest
in the state was the general rallying around the (inescapably
state-orientated) issues of development and under-development;
these issues have gradually come to dominate the genuine human
concern, the rhetoric, and the funding structures of social
science research on Africa.
As specialists in small-scale socio-political processes on the
grassroots level, anthropologists have access to one half of the
answer to the empirical, methodological and theoretical questions
that the modern state in Africa raises — but in order to
perceive this half as such, and to present it meaningfully in a
wider context involving broad national and continental formal
structures and prolonged historical periods, cross-fertilisation
is needed with the other disciplines mentioned.
The workshop of Belgian and Dutch researchers on the African
state, held in Antwerp, 20-21 December, 1984, provided such a
context.[2] It was the second of its
kind, the first having taken place in Leiden, December 1981 (cf.
van Binsbergen & Hesseling 1984). In 1981 the workshop’s
emphasis had been on somewhat furtive mutual exploration across
our national and disciplinary boundaries, and on the presentation
of the ongoing research of each of the participants, without any
more specific unifying theme than that of the African state in
general. In 1984 the convenors dared to be more ambitious.
Considering the fact that, among the likely participants,
specialists of the grassroots level (‘anthropologists’) were
neatly balanced with specialists at the national and
international level (constitutional lawyers, political scientists
and students of public administration), it was felt that the
theme of state penetration at the local level would bring out and
combine the best that either side would have to offer: the
attempted linkage (however problematic) between our respective
disciplines was to reflect the actual linkage (often much more
problematic) between national and local levels of socio-political
organization and action in the African societies and polities we
had studied. We envisaged a focused confrontation of case studies
and general statements, in an attempt to further a growth and
convergence of more systematic insights to which all the various
disciplines represented were hoped to contribute.
State penetration in modern Africa is still
a very broad topic indeed, involving not only a number of
disciplines but also a variety of levels of analysis, of methods,
and of underlying theoretical approaches.[3] It
is not the intention of the present concluding chapter to present
an exhaustive view, nor to formulate the synthetic theory that so
far has been missing in this field of enquiry. However,
overlooking the contributions to this volume, we felt that they
could be meaningfully subsumed under the following four headings:
Let us briefly discuss each of these four
topics in an attempt to situate our contributors’ positions in
the general field.
Under this general heading we comprise
studies which take as their point of departure African
communities at the local or regional level, and thus concentrate
on the receiving end of state penetration, tracing changing
political relations with a geographically and structurally
distant state in the context of a local economic, social,
political and ideological structure. The modern African state,
perceived as still a somewhat alien actor in the local set-up, is
itself largely left unanalysed. Methods of enquiry and underlying
theoretical perspectives are mainly those of anthropology , or of
an anthropologically-sophisticated historiography.
As a metaphor, the concept of state penetration is as crude as
the most prosaic representation of the sexual act, and as
mechanical as the terminology that classifies electrical
connectors as either male or female ones. Here history may allow
us to arrive at greater subtlety. A case in point is Schoenmakers
analysis of the ‘Establishment of the colonial economy in
Guinea Bissau’, an argument which encompasses more than a
century, and which shows Portuguese state penetration in the
regional economy of Upper Guinea to have been far from mechanical
or straight-forward. Similarly, in his contribution on ‘The
post-colonial state, “state penetration” and the Nkoya
experience in Central Western Zambia’, van Binsbergen argues
how, in contemporary Zambia, what initially looks as simply
increasing state penetration between the early and the late
1970s, in fact reflects a very complex historical process of
centuries. If one were to speak of state penetration here, it
would have begun not with the post-colonial state but at the very
moment (some time in the eighteenth century) when autarkic
communities, through a combination of endogenous factors and the
emanations of the distant Lunda state, and an even more distant
mercantilism, began to be involved in a tributary mode of
production centring on local royal courts, thus creating the
preconditions for statehood... In this one Zambian case, and very
likely in many other contexts, the notion of state penetration
thus would seem to obscure more fundamental relationships that
would better be discussed in a rather different idiom. What looks
as defective or increasing state penetration, might be attributed
to collective historical experiences of a rather different, and
sub-national (regional or purely local), nature. And such
patterns are scarcely revealed by exclusively synchronic
approaches: the penetration of limited selected elements of
modern statehood in a short-term perspective, often presupposes a
much wider process of incorporation in a long-term perspective.
Thus it is meaningful to explore the link between modern state
penetration and the ‘Early State’ in Africa (cf. Vansina
1966; de Heusch 1972; Claessen & Skalnik 1978), with special
emphasis on the more recent transformations which these forms of
political organisation have undergone in the colonial and the
post-colonial period. In this context one would particularly
consider ‘Early States’ as giving rise, in a process of
modern state incorporation, to such specific sub-national
identities as tend to be discussed under the headings of
ethnicity and regionalism (cf. Amselle & M’Bokolo 1985).
So-called traditional rulers or chiefs, and the encapsulated
neo-traditional forms of political organisation they are heading,
often form the condensation cores of such sub-national
identities, to such an extent that the position of these rulers
in post-independent Africa increasingly constitutes a reviving
topic of empirical study today. In a more contemporary
perspective, Peter Skalnik’s paper on ‘Nanumba chieftainship
facing the Ghanaian state’ takes up a similar issue, tracing a
sequence of violent conflicts suggestive of the limitations of
modern state power in the face of ethnic conflict, with
traditional rulers uneasily straddling both sets of
relationships.[4]
The concept of culture occupies a the central position in
idealist anthropology, much as the concept of production does in
materialist anthropology (with the articulation of modes of
production as the latter’s major stock-in-trade). Wouter van
Beek, in his paper on ‘Cultural proletarisation in Cameroon’,
manages to use an inversion of the current materialist idiom to
discuss the cultural effects of incorporation as viewed from a
Cameroonian segmentary society, in such terms as ‘articulation
of modes of destruction’, and ‘cultural proletarianisation.’
While such usage drives home the seriousness of the situation,
the systematic connections between what may have to be termed ‘symbolic,
or ideological, production’ on the one hand, and material
production and its exploitation on the other, remain to be
analysed. However, the paper links the ethnographic argument to
one concerning the contemporary emergence and manipulation of
popular culture in a context of state penetration — a topic to
which we shall come back below.
We now turn to a cluster of studies that
concentrate not on the passive but on the active actor in state
penetration: the state in its many administrative and
institutional forms, which constitute major vehicles of state
penetration. While the grassroots studies may often leave the
state itself in some indeterminate haze, with regard to the
present cluster the danger exists that the receiving side, that
of the clients of state bureaucracies, becomes relegated to some
unstructured monolith in itself; avoiding this trap, it would be
illuminating to specifically study the selective use of public
services by such relatively powerless groups as women, or ethnic,
regional and ideological minorities.
Probably the most conspicuous form in which the modern state
penetrates at the local level is through public services: health
care, education, agricultural extension work, maintaining of law
and order, crisis intervention etc. For many peasants and
urbanites in modern Africa, the perception of the state largely
if not exclusively revolves on the formal bureaucratic
organisations created within this framework. African
bureaucracies have been frequently studied in the context of
public administration, and while in earlier periods research of
this type may have tended to take for granted the formal
structure of bureaucratic organization, recent studies often look
at the manifold ways in which these structures (often at variance
with original policy intentions, and transformed beyond
recognition) are mediated to the members of African rural and
urban communities, the clients of these organizations.
When studying these bureaucratic mechanisms of state penetration
the lowest echelon of civil servants forms an interesting
sociological category; their social background, processes of
recruitment, attitudes, aspirations, problems of communication,
income, power bases, networks of patronage, etc., deserve the
closest attention. The relations between (lower) civil servants
and their clients (peasants and the urban poor, and citizens in
general) are influenced by the relations between civil servants
and their superiors within the state bureaucracy — and further
research along these lines might help us to identify the
idiosyncratic logic of bureaucratic penetration.[5] Here
one would encounter such patterns as: the arbitrary imposition
and proliferation of administrative territorial boundaries;
bureaucrats’ conflicts over competence, jurisdiction, and
informal factional support; the tension between bureaucratic and
general societal norms and values (so that an individual’s
bureaucratic position may be made subservient to kinship demands
to the point of misuse of public funds and authority, or become a
foothold for personal economic expansion in the market economy)
— in other words the problem of corruption; the mutual spilling
over between bureaucratic and traditional authority, both
confronting and/or allying with modern political power. All this
makes (cf. Thoden van Velzen 1977) for the potential of the state
bureaucracy to generate networks of exchange and patronage (often
ethnically, regionally or religiously based), which are far from
envisaged in official policy declarations, yet come to form major
vehicles of state penetration .
Within the more general framework of the Tanzanian development
efforts (which makes his paper intermediate between the present
and the next cluster of studies), Haile Asmerom takes up some of
these issues in his paper on ‘The Tanzanian village council’.
This paper, situated in a body of work associated with the
publication, nearly a decade ago, of the seminal Government and
Rural Development in East Africa (Cliffe, Coleman & Doornbos
1977), already makes it very clear that it is not always easy to
distinguish between state penetration as brought about by formal
bureaucratic organisations on the one hand, and the juridical
mechanisms for state penetration, on the other. Of course, any
bureaucracy has its own juridical foundation, stipulating the
internal organization of an organisational body as well as its
place and function within the overall state structure. The study
of state penetration would be very incomplete without ample
attention being given to administrative law.
That this is a more dynamic field of study than many
anthropologists would suspect, allowing for considerable
variation in the extent to which non-juridical, socio-political
factors could be drawn into the argument, is clear from the
presence, in this volume, of two overlapping studies relating to
contemporary Algeria: Gauthier de Villers’s piece on ‘La
revolution agraire et le pouvoir communal en Algerie’, and
Dirk Beke’s on ‘The administration of the municipality in
Algeria’. Not unlike Asmerom, Beke takes the formal
institutional structure as his main point of reference, carefully
avoiding the kind of analytical distance (an ‘etic’
meta-perspective to offset the bureaucrats ‘emic’ or folk
categories) that enables de Villers, on the other hand, to
appreciate the administrative dynamics concerned in a perspective
of the socialist transformation of rural society in Algeria.
Underlying these two papers is also the theme of
decentralisation, which forms a central political and
administrative issue in many African states today, and which in
the present context could be interpreted as both the
administrative-legal vehicle of state penetration, and the
limitations to such penetration at the local level.
National legal structures on the one hand render the state
visible and make its power felt at the local level, but on the
other hand enable us to explore the limits to effective state
penetration, in so far as under the familiar conditions of legal
pluralism in present-day Africa the state may aspire to legal
hegemony but has seldom yet achieved a powerful monopoly. In her
contribution on ‘Reforme fonciere au Senegal’, Gerti
Hesseling argues how state penetration in the field of law not
always has to result in the juxtaposition of two totally alien
and unconnected legal systems — one local, the other national.
Recent legal innovations are introduced within a more general
economic and politico-legal context that (at least in the
Senegalese case) has had more than a century an a half to
gradually seep through to popular consciousness. Hence the
diversity of perceptions and interests between peasants and
bureaucrats yet turns out to lead to amazingly converging views
on contemporary land tenure.[6]
Finally there is also an obvious place here (although not in the
present volume) for constitutional law, such as stipulates
fundamental human rights (sometimes also fundamental duties)
which effect the linkage between the individual and the state in
so far as they determine the nature and the extent of citizens’
information and participation; the latter two concepts in
themselves offer qualitative indicators of effective (and
desirable) state penetration in a democratic context (cf.
Hesseling 1985; Doornbos, van Binsbergen & Hesseling 1985;
Reijntjens 1980, 1986, 1987).
Having briefly dwelled on the organisational
and administrative-legal forms of state presence on the
peripheral African scene, it is now time to turn to their
specific, both manifest and latent (unintended), functions in
public life, and particularly in the peripheral economy of
African countries. This third cluster has already been
foreshadowed by Asmerom’s argument on the specific instruments
for rural development in Tanzania; and by Hesseling’s
discussion of national land reform: in many African countries
state-initiated land reform has as an unintended effect, if not
an explicit aim, the creation of a framework within which the
historic rural communities and their non-capitalist relations of
production can be effectively penetrated.
Critical views of state penetration in Africa may claim that the
dominant function of state services are to represent (i.e. serve
the penetration of) the central state in the first place; their
secondary function would then seem to be: to serve the interest
of a bureaucratic elite and middle class whose main source of
power and income is the national state; while finally the
discharge of public functions in the interest of the local
population would be relegated to an accidental side-effect, if
that. This pessimist view is strongly present in Sjaak van der
Geest’s paper on ‘Health care as politics: Missed chances in
rural Cameroon’. Even as a form of state penetration the
defective functioning of the governmental medical services in
that country is claimed to be counter-productive: instead of
rallying around a central state that dispenses health and
medicine, the local population is said to turn away from the
state, not only for medical matters but in general.
Does the performance of state bureaucracies in other sectors of
public life give reason to seriously doubt van der Geest’s
allegations? A case in point is state intervention with regard to
the incorporation of peasants and marginal urbanites in the
market economy: through the efforts of state marketing boards and
agricultural extension work, or in the framework of development
projects.[7] In the present volume,
these topics are represented [8] by
W.A.S. Cornelis’ paper ‘An analysis of the mechanism and
evaluation of a state penetration in rural Mali’, and by Johan
Pottiers’ study of ‘Food security, local administration and
peripheral development in Northern Zambia’[9] .
Peasants are depicted as no longer looking to the state for
solutions to their economic predicament, and the services that
the state has set up, seemingly in order to alleviate this
predicament, turn out to primarily or exclusively serve state
penetration, at the expense of local initiative, control and
economic growth. A similar concern forms the backbone of Asmerom’s
argument, where an interesting contrast is drawn between state
penetration and development, the latter meaning both increased
levels of rural productivity and peasants’ continued or if
possible increasing political competence concerning their own
situation.
Is the price of economic development[10]
not too often that the peripheral population is reduced to
powerlessness? Must one expose much of the official development
rhetoric as a thin ideological wrap around state aspirations of
increased political control in the periphery? The present case
studies offer ample empirical substantiation for the
applicability of such a view in at least selected specific
situations. But to the extent to which the failure of these
development-orientated services estranges the peripheral
population from the state (a point stressed by van der Geest’s),
one might suspect that the state has other, more effective and
less costly means at its disposal to effect successful
penetration among the same people. Or is it simply that health
care and increased income from agricultural production constitute
the two desiderata that so absolutely dominate the consciousness
both of the rural populations involved and of international
donors, that the state is persuaded to spread its limited
resources for these services too thinly, with both economic and
medical failure as an unavoidable result?
Since a pessimist, dismissive view of state penetration has
become almost commonplace in studies of the relations between
modern African states, and peasants and urban poor, we should ask
ourselves to what extent such a view may yet take on, among less
scrupulous researchers than our contributors, the characteristics
of a scholars’ myth? Those contemporary researchers who take
the grassroots level as their point of departure in the study of
the modern African state and thus are the main heirs to the
anthropological tradition of an earlier day, can no longer afford
to ignore the modern African state, but a profound scepticism
bordering on cynicism is often the only response they can manage.
The state is still perceived as doubly alien: both to their
discipline as they see it, and to the peripheral population
groups they study. And while familiarity may be said to breed
contempt, much of the social sciences is there to show that
alienness can inspire equally ugly feelings. Does the widespread
cynicism concerning the African state always base itself on
empirical proof relating to specific political and economic
conditions? Probably the fashionable appeal, also noticeable in
the present volume, of Hyden’s altogether too sketchy notion of
an ‘uncaptured’ African peasantry (1980; cf. Geschiere 1984)
owes much to these misgivings.
The other, more macro-orientated mainstream in the contemporary
study of the African state would take state structures much more
for granted. It may be better equipped for the identification of
the concrete mechanisms through which state penetration is
effected; here, for instance, recent studies have come to
emphasise strategies of regional planning, at a level
intermediate between the grassroots and the national centre. Only
when we move from global sweeping statements to detailed
empirical observations of specific processes within a
well-defined socio-political and economic environment, does it
become possible to level meaningful, specific criticism at the
structure and performance of modern African states. Then, also,
the necessarily limited, but still tangible results of genuine
commitment on the part of bureaucrats and politicians in Africa
may become discernible and appreciated. A closer look at our own
class position as North Atlantic academics might also be
conducive to greater modesty (cf. van Binsbergen 1984). State
penetration, just like capitalist encroachment (cf. van
Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985), cannot be automatically deemed
a bad thing for the peasants and urban poor we identify with, and
under certain conditions (which our scholarly research may help
to specify, and which certainly imply the local political
competence stressed by Asmerom) it may even begin to offer the
solutions for the extreme predicament affecting these people.
The topics indicated under this heading all relate directly to
the economic crisis of Africa in the 1980s. Can the continent’s
increasing inability to feed itself be attributed to ineffective
state presence in the rural areas and in the distributive and
management sectors of the economy, in other words to defective
state penetration? Or, alternatively, is the very penetration of
the state partly responsible for a stagnant economy?
Meanwhile, it is not only through such clearly developmental
issues as health services or planned agricultural change that the
modern African state endeavours to penetrate, with varying
degrees of success and justification. Another aspect,
unfortunately not treated in the present volume, is education.
Above we already mentioned the contribution of ethnicity and
patronage to state penetration. Moreover, the dynamics of state
penetration include channels and processes of mobilisation at the
grassroots level. On the one hand one could think here of
organisations which, from the national or international level,
descend to the basis: political parties, women’s movements,
trade unions, Islamic brotherhoods, Christian churches and other
religious and ideological organisations. Whereas the origin and
the early development of such bodies was often situated outside
the (colonial) state, and whereas they were initially often
directed against that state, the post-colonial situation offers a
varied picture of the ways in which such organisations tend to
become caught up in the modern state. In extreme cases they have
become fully incorporated in the post-colonial state, as happened
to dominant political parties in many African countries — to
the extent that the distinction between state and party has
become ideologically blurred, with party membership turning into
a major form of state penetration. In many other cases the state
attempts to control such mobilisation organisations with varying
judicial and political measures; again we touch on constitutional
law. The local-level reactions to this interaction between the
state and voluntary organisations deserve our closest attention.
To what extent, and because of what structural and accidental
historical factors, is the state’s hold on these mobilising
movements effective or ineffective, and in what direction does
the process move? To what extent do these movements engender
counter-currents once again directed against the (post-colonial)
state? Under what circumstances can these counter-currents grow
into revolutionary and secessionist movements, or strike
alliances with such movements? (Buijtenhuijs 1978; Ranger 1985).
Can they team up with more ‘traditional’ sub-national
identities such as indicated above (under heading 2)? Do ‘socialist’
regimes in modern Africa display a significantly different
response from ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’ ones in this
connexion?
Some of these issues are taken up in Piet Konings’ discussion
of ‘The state and the Defence Committees in the Ghanaian
revolution, 1981-1984’. His argument, relating to a very
topical series of events in modern African politics, and
highlighting the differential success of corporatist (ultimately
populist) and collectivist tendencies within the recent Ghanaian
revolution, shows the complexity and the limitations of state
penetration through mobilisation.
In addition to more or less clear-cut movements that have evolved
(independently, or under state initiative) a specific
organisational structure of their own, we should pay attention to
the more diffuse ideological expressions of a growing national
(particularly urban) popular culture. The emergence and internal
coalescence of such national cultures can be seen to make use of
music, dance, drama, representational and literary arts, cults;
in this way they are selectively mediating an ancient cultural
heritage[11], but also inventing and
restructuring the new values and symbols of a multi-ethnic,
dominantly-urban, peripherally capitalist society in modern
Africa (cf. Ranger 1975; Fabian 1978). Often the forms,
organisational structures and contents in this field are to a
considerable extent determined by North Atlantic cultural
imperialism, and by both North Atlantic and Far East electronic
technology. Yet, making a highly eclectic and innovative use of
African cultural heritages, these national popular cultures may
yet begin to gradually supplant the sub-national (neo—)traditional
identities that, in a more particularistic fashion, continue to
legitimate themselves by reference to a past long bygone. Van
Beek shows how the results of such cultural penetration (as
compared with the situation immediately before effective
penetration) is often far from reassuring. But by addressing
themselves to the realities, frustrations and aspirations of
Africa today, these expressions of an emerging popular culture
have also formed a major (if diffuse) growth point of citizens’
attitudes vis-a-vis the colonial and the post-colonial state —
they are the cradle of a modern political culture. In so far as
this culture includes historic, autochthonous elements (notably
notions of sorcery, and traditional rulers), these should not be
mistaken for simple revivals from a pre-colonial past, but as
essentially neo-traditional innovations, reflecting a recent
symbolic and organisational transformation in the course of state
penetration.
It is clearly for good reason that in the 1980s many students of
African politics[12] have extended their
fields of enquiry beyond party organisations, elite formation and
voting behaviour, and turn to ‘popular modes of political
action’, sometimes including activities as relatively amorphous
and unfocused as petty crime, prostitution or students’
clamouring for better facilities, but which yet could be argued
to reflect on the interaction between state and citizen at the
grassroots level. This line of argument owes much to Bayart’s
work on Cameroon (e.g. Bayart 1979, 1983a, 1983b). In the present
volume, this emergent approach is represented by Peter Geschiere’s
‘Hegemonic regimes and popular protest — Bayart, Gramsci and
the state in the Cameroon’, to which we shall come back below.
Working within the Belgian tradition of critical Zaire studies
(including such other exponents as B. Verhaegen and L. Martens,
among others), a similar inspiration is behind Jean-Claude
Willame’s ‘Reflexions sur l’Etat et la societe civile au
Zaire’ — an attempt to interpret the remarkable features of
the post-colonial state of Zaire (an extreme frequency of
internal insurgencies; populist state-initiated mobilisation
under the aegis of ‘authenticity’; and extreme
intercontinental dependence) by a juxtaposition between ‘civil
society’ and state — the latter manifesting itself, in
present-day Zaire, in an exceptionally pathological and
chimerical form.[13]
Beyond these rather anonymous mass aspects of modern popular
(including political) culture, one could begin to ask how
cultural elites and leaders (modern media, formal education, the
intelligentsia, artists, religious leaders and world religions)
affect, perhaps dominate or exploit these processes. Do they each
in their specific way contribute to the construction of a civil
ideology which underpins the state and its dominant elite; in
other words, do they construct and maintain ‘ideological state
apparatuses’ which, among other factors, enable an imperfectly
legitimated state to yet impose its hegemony? Or is their
contribution to the ideological penetration of the modern state
in everyday life not the whole story, and do their ideological
expressions retain an element of protest, challenge and
resistance — and if so, what sort of response do they then
encounter from the part of the state and the citizens in general?
At any rate, further explorations of the similarities and
differences between state penetration, and such forms of
ideologico-organisational penetration as attend the spread of
world religions and modern mass culture are well worth taking up.
The question whether modern state
penetration in Africa is a good or a bad thing has obvious
practical and political implications, but can hardly be aid to
advance our theoretical insight in the processes involved. Now
African Studies throughout have tended to concentrate on case
studies and empirical generalisations, and as a regional
specialisation have not been remarkably conducive to the
development of abstract theory. In this respect the present
volume is rather representative. However, a few illuminating
attempts at generalisation and theory formation are available
among the contributions to the present volume.
Geschiere’s chapter, reflecting on a good deal of the current
literature on modern state penetration in Africa, and combining
(in his concluding section) the emerging theory of hegemony
formation with the paradigm of the articulation of modes of
production that has captivated scholarly attention since the
mid-1970s, comes perhaps closest to the formulation of a partial
theory of the dynamics of state penetration. Stemming from an
anthropologist-cum-historian, it is still somehow situated in the
grassroots stream of approaches to the African state, and may yet
require further elaboration on the legal, institutional and
constitutional side in order to convince researchers more
squarely identifying with formal approaches that take the central
state, rather than local and regional political processes, as
their point of departure. In fact Geschiere’s emerging approach
is strikingly transactional, in that it tends to redefine the
accepted hierarchy of organisational levels (national, regional,
local) as a rather inchoate field of essentially horizontal,
complex and dialectical interaction, whose uncertain and
ephemeral outcome (the creation of effective hierarchy and
control centring on the state) is based more on success or
failure of alliance strategies (focused on personal interests and
even on persons) than on structural characteristics of
institutional units involved. As a consequence, his insights are
heuristic and methodological rather than that their concrete
substance is yet capable of generalisation: the specific features
of the field at a given time and place can lead to totally
different outcomes — and, as in other domains of African
studies today, the methods of anthropology gradually give way to
those of contemporary history.
Martin Doornbos in his paper on ‘Incorporation and cultural “receptivity’
to change” arrives at similar conclusions as Geschiere, albeit
that Doornbos’s conclusions are wrapped in a totally different
idiom (one much more reminiscent of the type of
structural-functional cross-cultural comparison that was en vogue
around 1960), and derive from a rather different theoretical
inspiration (a much more classical anthropology, in combination
not only with latter-day political science but also with the
accumulated experience of social research institutes in East and
South Central Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s). But also for
Doornbos the process of state penetration remains essentially
unpredictable as long as one concentrates on structural
characteristics of the social units involved at the receiving
end:
‘In the final analysis, receptivity to planned
change appears primarily a function of the nature and quality of
political goals and strategies’.
Bringing together a variety of disciplines
in an attempt to highlight significant connections between micro
and macro levels in African political systems today, one can
hardly be surprised that, out of the above panorama of possible
themes and exciting lines of enquiry, only a few were actually
pursued in the present collection of papers.
Probably in an attempt to explore untrodden ground, at least one
classic theme of African political studies has remained
under-represented: political parties; yet, as vehicles of state
penetration par excellence, they deserve more than the cursory
references they receive in the present collection.
Further it would appear that more specific attention could have
been paid to the specific problems of legitimation that beset
African modern states, and to a variety of partial solutions to
this predicament, such as
That the present collection would appear to display blind spots
on these points is partly due to the fact that ‘legitimation’
and ‘state penetration’ refer to a different phase in the
process of state formation, and to a different realm of scholarly
discourse. The legitimation of the state might well form the
final outcome, on the ideological plane, of a crude and still
uncertain process (often characterised by great socio-cultural
distance, lack of political participation in the periphery, and a
considerable degree of physical and structural state violence) by
which a central state power seeks to gain access to a
geographical and/or social periphery. In such a context
ideological factors are of eminent importance: they may reduce
distance, create incentives for identification and participation,
and thus allow a reduction of the level of conspicuous and
violent state presence. But alternatively, ideological factors
may in this phase create new boundaries behind which peripheral
citizens may entrench themselves, in the pursuit of an ethnic or
religious local particularism.
On closer analysis the present papers have substantial insights
to offer on these points, albeit in a different idiom than the
Weberian one centring on legitimation. Thus, a fair proportion of
them illustrate the failure of the state to legitimate and assert
itself even despite all the above options, and as a consequence
its being challenged by revolutionary alternatives, uprisings,
secession movements,[15] coups, or (by far the
most common option) citizens’ more passive withdrawal from
civil participation. Yet as editors we would have liked to
include more specific discussions of these ideological
dimensions, which (as the present contributions by and large
imply) may even take precedence over institutional and economic
aspects as determinants of differential patterns of state
penetration.
What appears to constitute a genuine blind spot is the
international context of state penetration. The rise, in recent
decades, of international organisations for development
co-operation of a bilateral or multilateral nature (including
such immensely powerful bodies as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund[16]),
introduces a powerful external element. Have these development
agencies effectively inserted themselves between the modern
African state and its peripheral citizens, mediating between
both, and possibly eroding national state power in a context of
international and intercontinental economic and political
dependency?[17] Another aspect of this
international context is to be found in the field of law and
international relations. The internal affairs of modern states
(and this includes their relations with their citizens) are
influenced (if not exactly determined) by constitutional
arrangements stipulating fundamental rights, the legitimate
exercise of political power etc.; these are often underpinned by
international treaties and international public opinion as
articulated by the media. A case in point in Zaire, whose
constitution and state ideology ‘window-dress’ the actual
internal state performance and intercontinental dependency so as
to maintain a level of international respectability in the eyes
of North Atlantic patrons. Nor is this merely a matter of
ideological mimicry: ultimately, internal state-citizen relations
within African countries may be subject to the power politics
between major blocs in the centre of the world system — who
transport their competition to the African soil, where it becomes
a major factor in the relation between, e.g., peripheral
populations of the Angolan, South African, and Ethiopian state
(all displaying varieties of the East-West confrontation) or the
Senegalese state (as a clear case of French imperialism within
the Western bloc). In this connexion one could also think of more
tangible transgressions of national boundaries: military action,
and refugees, which together significantly contribute to the
picture of modern African politics, but which were largely
ignored in the present context of state penetration — perhaps
since our central metaphor erroneously conveys a sense of
increasing order rather than of increasing chaos and misery?
These and other omissions in our present collections do not
necessarily reflect the state of scholarship in The Netherlands
and Belgium today. We could not hope to cover the total research
effort currently directed, in both countries, on the African
state.[18] Even the selection as
represented at the conference could not be entirely reflected in
the present volume, for practical reasons such as limitations of
space and time, or the fact that some papers had already found
another venue of publication. Where really disproportionate
omissions threatened to occur, we decided to co-opt additional
papers.
One major gap turned out to be unavoidable. If much of the
intervention of the modern state at the local level in Africa
today takes place in a context of ‘development’, we are
clearly dealing with a field intensively covered by such
disciplines as economics, geography, demography, agronomy, and
the planning and evaluation specialities that have evolved in
these fields in recent decades. We fully acknowledge the
relevance of these approaches to our theme. However, for
structural reasons beyond our control as convenors, disciplinary
networks and organizations in both The Netherlands and Belgium
have somehow led to a structure of academic exchange and a
division of academic labour not conducive to the representation
of these disciplines at our conference. On the other hand, when
it comes to contents and substance, in modern African studies
disciplinary boundaries tend to fade. We flatter ourselves that a
sizeable part of the present collection of papers would not look
out of place in the context of a conference of geographers and
economists.
Although this volume clearly brings out the
extent to which the concept of state penetration has heuristic
value and is capable of providing a common field of debate and
exchange across disciplinary boundaries, we should not
overestimate the theoretical and explanatory potential of what
remains essentially a metaphor — not even a paradigm, let alone
a theory.
Perhaps the most obvious limitation of the metaphor is that it
tends to view the penetrating agent, the state, as a monolith
(and one with phallic connotations at that). Of course we all
know that the state is a very complex, multi-dimensional set of
contradictory socio-political and ideological relationships, only
some of the most obvious ones of which have been highlighted
above. One wonders how much of the initial insight that the
metaphor suggest, remains once one tries to steer away from the
reification it so clearly entails. It is here perhaps that a
class analysis of modern African societies, which so far has
failed to convince as attempts at exhaustive description of
contemporary relationships,[19]
may yet have the great advantage of drawing our attention to the
selective and differential class interests behind state presence
in the lives of African peasants and the urban poor: modern state
penetration is, after all, to a considerable extent a form of
class formation in an overall capitalist context. Konings’s
recent book (1986) on The state and class formation in rural
Ghana is a eloquent statement to this effect.
The problem of monolithic over-simplification also exists at the
receiving side, and there it turns out to be not only a
conceptual but also a methodological problem. State penetration
may not primarily be a matter of a confrontation between the
modern state and atomistic individuals (the most likely unit of
study in the popular type of superficial sample surveys
administered by teams of research assistants), or defenceless
peasant communities, but between that state and rather
well-defined groups that (as ethnic groups, perhaps also as
religious bodies) cluster around some conscious sub-national
identity, and which one can only approach through prolonged
participant observation and more or less formal group interviews,
in combination with the documentary methods of contemporary or
not-so-contemporary history.
We have already pointed out the danger of too synchronic a view
of state processes in Africa (for an extensive argument, cf.
Lonsdale 1981). Understanding of the modern state often requires
understanding of a complex local political history of
considerable pre-colonial time depth. The African pre-colonial
past was (at least for the present millennium) not predominantly
stateless, and although the specific type of modern state
(literate, rational, formal, bureaucratic — it is remarkable
that few contributors have bothered to define the modern state at
all) may be relatively new to Africa, state penetration in
general was often not a phenomenon that started with the Scramble
for Africa, or with North Atlantic involvement in general. Modern
state penetration, therefore, may often constitute a particular,
recent form of incorporation, building upon earlier processes of
incorporation which partly shape the peripheral citizens’
selective appreciation of the modern state. In this light
considerable attention should also be paid to the specific
patterns of continuity and discontinuity between the colonial and
the post-colonial state in their penetration efforts and success.
Finally we should be conscious of the fact that the metaphor of
state penetration is not totally neutral. It belongs to an idiom
of meta-academic solidarity. In addition to its academic use, the
model may easily provide a vehicle for the expression of such
suspicion, scorn and protest in the face of the many and
undeniable contemporary cases of state failure in Africa — in
such fields as the food and energy crisis, rural development,
internal justice and international relations. Here the sexual
symbolism of the metaphor of state penetration can be explored to
its full extent, reducing Africa, and the modern Third World in
general, to an arena where brave but doomed pre- or extra-statal
remnants (cultural, ethnic and linguistic minorities, segmentary
acephalous societies and ‘traditional’ chiefdoms,
secessionist movements, religious systems outside the mainstream
of world religions, systems of production and circulation outside
the direct control of capitalism) are first ‘captured’ and
then violated by a brutal state and the cynical and greedy
personnel that fill its bureaucratic apparatus.
How to avoid the underlying stereotypes: the anachronistic
assumption of non-penetration, of ‘statal virginity’, among
the peripheral citizens in African states today; or the rhetoric
of indiscriminately suspecting or condemning all state action and
by the same token automatically supporting all sub-national
identities that confront the state? How to arrive at a positive,
yet critical and independent academic contribution to the immense
problems of Africa today?
While the refinement necessary to escape from such stereotypes
may not be found in the concept of state penetration itself, the
studies collected in the present volume may go some way to
suggest that that concept offers at least the heuristic
inspiration for the sort of detailed and incisive research
necessary for a more balanced and profound understanding of the
relation between modern African states and peripheral local
communities.
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NOTES
[1] E.g. Worsley 1960; Geertz 1960; and the authors discussed in Doornbos’s paper as referred to below.
[2] The conference was initiated and realized by a committee consisting of Filip Reijntjens (Department of Law, Antwerp University Establishment; Centre for Research and Documentation on Africa, Brussels), and Gerti Hesseling and Wim van Binsbergen (Department of Political and Historical Studies, African Studies Centre, Leiden). We are indebted to the African Studies Centre for financial support, to the Antwerp University Establishment for hospitality, and to all participants for their papers and their open and incisive discussion, which greatly contributed to the success of this conference.
[3] Cf. Cliffe, Coleman & Doornbos 1977, and specifically Coleman 1977; Doornbos 1983 (which was also presented at our 1984 workshop); Coleman & Halisi 1983; Geschiere 1982; Elwert 1983.
[4] Besides the arguments by Skalnik and van Binsbergen as included in the present volume, this topic was represented at the conference by E.A.B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal’s paper on ‘L’Etat et les chefs coutumiers en Afrique’, a shorted version of his inaugural address (in Dutch), University of Leiden, 1984.
[5] Cf. Doornbos 1983; Samoff 1979; Leys 1976.
[6] On the basis of the same research project of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, M. Sypkens Smit, in an oral presentation entitled ‘What shall we do with the big bad wolf: Land tenure and village secrets in Diatock, a Diola village, Senegal’, offered a picture of alleged non-pentration in South Senegal.
[7] Among a great many relevant studies, some of which have already been referred to here, we mention Finucane 1974; Bates 1978, 1981; Dumont & Mottin 1983.
[8] At the conference, these aspects of rural state penetration were also discussed in the context of a paper by A.N. Achterstraat, ‘State intervention in agriculture and the peasant farmer’s crop selection: The development of cotton growing in Senegal’, which has meanwhile been published (in Dutch) in van Binsbergen & Hesseling 1984: 419-50.
[9] The contrast between the pessimist view as propounded by Pottier’s study, relating to Northern Zambia, and the more optimist argument by van Binsbergen on Western Zambia is only apparent: both are situated in the context of that country’s poor and still declining rural economy; but while the latter forms Pottier’s primary focus, van Binsbergen attempts to demonstrate how the historical background of the Nkoya ethnic minority has brought them to be fixated on political relations with the central state, within a situation of economic misery they have come to accept as inevitable. More in general on state penetration in Zambia, cf. Bratton 1980a, 1980b.
[10] Even disregarding, for a moment, emergent rural class formation and increasing exploitation by a state-based middle class, factors which make for the uneven local distribution of the economic fruits of development.
[11] Generally, in Africa, this selection includes, besides a concept of traditional rulers, sorcery beliefs, which in many contemporary local contexts in Africa have been recorded as an expression of and a weapon in the confrontation between local-level concerns and the state-associated power of bureaucrats, chiefs and middle farmers. A Cameroonian case in point is P. Geschiere, in press, also presented at our 1984 workshop; for a Tanzanian case, cf.van Hekken & Thoden van Velzen 1970; for a Zambian case, cf van Binsbergen 1975, which complements the picture of political attitudes at the village level as described in his paper in the present volume.
[12] Partly against the background of earlier work, cf. Geschiere’s note 5.
[13] For a more general perspective cf. Jackson & Rosberg 1982, who — much like our conference discussions on the ‘extra-territorial state’ — reflect on the various merely ‘technical’ ways of being a state.
[14] Cf. van Binsbergen 1981: 298f; for general discussions cf. Glele 1981a, 1981b; Heijke 1984; Sinda 1983; Verhaegen 1977.
[15] R. Buijtenhuijs discussed these and related topics (including ethnicity) in his paper on ‘Les Toubou et la rebellion tchadienne’, which was not available for inclusion in the present volume; however, see Buijtenhuijs, n.d.
[16] Cf. World Bank 1981; Gruhn 1983; Helleiner 1983.
[17] In this respect we regret that G. Diemer and E. van der Laan’s conference paper on ‘The relations between peasants and bureaucrats in small-scale irrigated agriculture on the Senegal river, 1975-1982’ was not available for inclusion here: particularly in the discussion it offered an interesting perspective on this theme.
[18] Thus the ‘Department of Political and Historical Studies’, one of the two research departments of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, since 1980 has concentrated its research and publications on the historical and contemporary dynamics of the African state; cf. van Binsbergen 1982.
[19] Cf. Mamdani 1976; Shivji 1976; Cliffe, Coleman & Doornbos 1977; Buijtenhuijs & Geschiere 1978; also Konings’s concluding remarks in his paper as included here.
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