One
The Challenge of State-Building
in Africa
The history of every continent is written clearly
in its geographical features, but of no continent
is this more true than of Africa.
Lord Hailey, An African Survey
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM facing state-builders in Africa—be they precolonial
kings, colonial governors, or presidents in the independent era—
has been to project authority over inhospitable territories that contain
relatively low densities of people. Sub-Saharan Africa, with roughly 18
percent of the world’s surface area, has always been sparsely settled. Africa
had only 6 to 11 percent of the world’s population in 1750, 5 to 7
percent in 1900, and only 11 percent in 1997.1
Relatively low population
densities in Africa have automatically meant that it always has been more
expensive for states to exert control over a given number of people compared
to Europe and other densely settled areas. As John Iliffe wrote, “In
the West African savannah, underpopulation was the chief obstacle to
state formation.”2
In only a few places in Africa, including the Great Lakes region and the
Ethiopian highlands, are there ecologies that have supported relatively
high densities of people. Not surprisingly, these areas, with the longest
traditions of relatively centralized state structures, have been periodically
able to exercise direct control over their peripheries.3
However, ecological
conditions throughout most of the continent do not allow high densities
of people to be easily supported. More than 50 percent of Africa has
1
Calculated from John D. Durand, “Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation,”
Population and Development Review 3 (September 1977): p. 259 and World Bank,
World Development Report 1998, p 191.
2
John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), p. 70.
3
While hampered by very poor data, Robert Bates found that, in the African polities he
was able to code, “the higher the population density, the greater the level of political
centralization.” See his Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), p. 35. See also Robert F. Stevenson, Population and Political
Systems in Tropical Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).
12 C H A P T E R O N E
inadequate rainfall; indeed, contrary to the popular imagination, only 8
percent of the continent has a tropical climate. Approximately one-third
of the world’s arid land is in Africa.4
In Africa, two other factors have aggravated the cost of extending
power in the face of low population densities. First, African countries
have quite varied environmental conditions. Ecological differences across
provinces of a country in West Africa, which can be coastal, forest, savannah,
or near-desert, are greater than in any European country.5
Therefore,
the models of control an African state must develop for these highly
differentiated zones are more varied, and thus more costly, than what a
government in Europe or Asia must implement in order to rule over their
more homogenous rural areas. Second, it is expensive to project power
over distance in Africa because of the combination of a peculiar set of
geographical features. As Ralph Austen notes,
The geography of Africa also presents serious barriers to long-distance transport.
Water travel is limited by the small amount of indented shoreline relative
to the size of the interior surface of the continent, as well as the disrupted
navigability of most rivers, due to rapids and seasonal shallows. The wheel was
introduced into northern Africa for overland travel during ancient times but
then abandoned because the terrain and distances to be covered could not
feasibly be provided with the necessary roads.6
The daunting nature of Africa’s geography is one of the reasons the region
was only colonized in the late 1800s despite its proximity to Europe.
The Europeans found it easier to colonize Latin America hundreds
of years before despite the much greater distances involved.
Why the particular pattern of population density occurred, given Africa’s
geography, is not within my competence to explain.7
Rather, this
book examines how successive sets of leaders in Africa responded to a
political geography they were forced to take as a given. This is not an
argument for the kind of geographical determinism that has captivated
scholars from Ibn Khaldˆun to Montesquieu to Jeffrey Sachs.8
A variety of
paths were open to African leaders as they confronted their environ-
4
W. Bediako Lamous´e-Smith and Joseph School, Africa Interactive Maps, CD-ROM,
(Odenton, Md.: Africa Interactive Maps, 1998).
5
W. Arthur Lewis, Politics in West Africa (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), p.
24.
6
Ralph Austen, African Economic History (London: James Currey, 1987), p. 20.
7
For a provocative thesis, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human
Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), chapter 19.
8
See Ibn Khaldˆun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 63; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: Robert
Clarke, 1873), p. 255; and Jeffrey Sachs, “Nature, Nurture, and Growth,” The Economist,
14 June 1997, pp. 19–23.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 13
ments. However, the challenges posed by political geography, especially
low population densities, could not be ignored by any leader. Such an
approach offers a tremendous methodological advantage: by holding the
physical environment “constant,” I can focus on the precise political calculations
of different African leaders over time as they sought to design
their states.
In this book, I argue that leaders confront three sets of issues when
building their states: the cost of expanding the domestic power infrastructure;
the nature of national boundaries; and the design of state systems.
Understanding the decisions made regarding each is critical, and
there are profound trade-offs inherent to different approaches. Africa’s
political geography helped structure the responses that leaders adopted to
each set of issues just as European decisions were inﬂuenced by the structural
features of that region. The following two sections provide a comparison
of Europe and Africa’s political geographies. I then develop the
analytic tools that are central to this study.
The European Experience of State Consolidation
The African experience of politics amid large supplies of land and low population
densities while confronting an inhospitable physical setting is in dramatic
contrast to the European experience of state-building. In Europe,
through the fourteenth century, population densities were not high enough
to put immediate pressure on land and compel territorial competition. As
Mattingly notes, “In the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, the continental
space of Western Europe still impeded any degree of political organization
efﬁcient enough to create a system of continuous diplomatic pressures.”9
However, starting in the ﬁfteenth century in Italy and later elsewhere,
population densities increased. As a result, European nations began to
compete for territory, a tendency that only makes sense if population
densities are relatively high and vacant land is limited or nonexistent, so
that the value of conquering land is higher than the price to be paid in
wealth and men. In turn, there was signiﬁcant pressure to strengthen
states in order to ﬁght wars. Charles Tilly notes that one of the central
reasons for the creation of relatively centralized state apparatuses in Europe
was the “continuous aggressive competition for trade and territory
among changing states of unequal size, which made war a driving force
in European history.”10
Wars of territorial conquest, as chapter four notes
in much greater detail, have been central to the formation of particular
9
Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), p. 60.
10
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1992 (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, 1990), p. 54.
14 C H A P T E R O N E
types of states because they create, quite literally, a life and death imperative
to raise taxes, enlist men as soldiers, and develop the necessary infrastructure
to ﬁght and win battles against rapacious neighbors.
Because European states were forged with iron and blood, it was critical
for the capital to physically control its hinterland. Tilly notes, “as
rulers bargained directly with their subject populations for massive taxes,
military service, and cooperation in state programs, most states took further
steps of profound importance: a movement toward direct rule that
reduced the role of local or regional patrons and places representatives of
the national state in every community, and expansion of popular consultation
in the form of elections, plebiscites, and legislatures.”11
In particular,
the constant threat of war and the need to protect valued territory
meant that the physiology of the state forced leaders to place particular
emphasis on control of remote areas that could be lost in battle. Again,
Tilly notes: “Europeans followed a standard war-provoking logic: everyone
who controlled substantial coercive means tried to maintain a secure
area within which he could enjoy the returns from coercion, plus a fortiﬁed
buffer zone, possibly run at a loss, to protect the secure area.”12
These border defenses protected the state from its external competitors
and, simultaneously, completed the job of internal consolidation. Thus,
frontier fortiﬁcations have been, according to Frederick the Great, the
“mighty nails which hold a ruler’s provinces together.”13
Lord Salisbury—
a critical participant in the scramble for Africa, and the eponym for the
capital of Southern Rhodesia—even said, in exasperation, that if his military
advisers had their way, they would garrison the moon to prevent an
attack from Mars.14
Successful European state development was therefore characterized by
profound links between the cities—the core political areas—and the surrounding
territories. Indeed, the growth of states was closely correlated
with the development of signiﬁcant urban areas. As Tilly has argued,
“The commercial and demographic impact of cities made a signiﬁcant
difference to state formation. . . . The existence of intensive rural-urban
trade provided an opportunity for rulers to collect revenues through customs
and excise taxes, while the relatively commercialized economy
made it easier for monarchs to bypass great landlords as they extended
royal power to towns and villages.”15
Critically, for this study, he goes on
11
Ibid., p. 63.
12
Ibid., p. 70.
13
Quoted in John H. Herz, “Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” World Politics 9
(1957): p. 477.
14
Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p.
23.
15
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 49. Similarly, Michael Mann notes that
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 15
to note, “Cities shape the destinies of states chieﬂy by serving as containers
and distribution points for capital. By means of capital, urban
ruling classes extend their inﬂuence through the urban hinterland and
across far-ﬂung trading networks.”16
So profound have been the ties between
the major cities and the countryside that the roster of great cities
that have dominated the western world (Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam,
London, New York) stand as excellent proxies to the rise and
fall of national powers.17
Understanding African Politics
However, Europe’s demographic history is not shared by many other
parts of the world. It is quite remarkable that by 1975, Africa had only
reached the level of population density that occurred in Europe in 1500.
Nor is Africa’s population density unusual. Many other regions of the
world are also sparsely settled. As is clear from table 1.1, Latin America,
North Africa, and the areas of the former Soviet Union have population
densities that are historically much closer to Africa than to Europe.
The ramiﬁcations of lower population densities can be seen in the very
different history of relations between capitals and their hinterlands. In
Africa, in contrast to Europe, the current states were created well before
many of the capital cities had reached maturity. Addis Ababa appears to
be the only example of rapid urban growth in a designated capital not
under the control of Europeans.18
Elsewhere in the precolonial period,
even royal villages moved periodically as “soil become exhausted or
buildings deteriorated or as bad fortune indicated that the old site had
lost its virtue.”19
Even most of the storied towns of West Africa were
quite small until after colonial rule began. For instance, in 1901, Lagos
had only eighteen thousand people and Accra about twenty-one thousand,
while as late as 1931 only ten thousand people lived in Abidjan. At
the turn of the century, only Ibadan, with two hundred thousand, had
what could be considered to be a large population. Similarly, in 1906, the
for Europe, “The state loomed rather larger in the urban sector.” The Sources of Social
Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D.1760, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), p. 423.
16
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 51.
17
Ibid., p. 47.
18
Richard Pankhurst, “Menelik and the Foundation of Addis Ababa,” Journal of African
History 2 (1961): p. 103.
19
Elizabeth Colson, “African Society at the Time of the Scramble,” in Colonialism in
Africa, 1870–1960, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), p. 42.
16 C H A P T E R O N E
TABLE 1.1
Comparative Population Densities over Time (People/Sq. Km)
Region 1500 1750 1900 1975
Japan 46.4 78.3 118.2 294.8
South Asia 15.2 24.1 38.2 100.3
Europe 13.7 26.9 62.9 99.9
China 13.4 22.2 45.6 91.1
Latin America 2.2 0.8 3.7 16.3
North Africa 1.6 2.2 9.4 14.1
Sub-Saharan Africa 1.9 2.7 4.4 13.6
Former U.S.S.R. area 0.6 1.6 6.1 11.6
Sources: Calculated from John D. Durand, “Historical Estimates of World Population: An
Evaluation,” Population and Development Review 3 (September 1977): p. 259; World
Bank, World Development Report 1992 (Washington, D.C.: 1992), p. 219; and Food and
Agriculture Organization, Production Yearbook 1993 (Rome: FAO, 1994), pp. 3–14.
Table was calculated using the midpoint of the population estimates that Durand
presents.
two largest towns in East Africa were Dar es Salaam with twenty thousand
and Mombasa with thirty thousand people.20
The Europeans, after formally colonizing Africa in the late-nineteenth
century, did create many urban areas. However, these cities did not serve
as the basis of state creation in the same manner as occurred in Europe
because the colonizers were not interested in duplicating the power infrastructure
which bound city to hinterland in their homelands. Rather, the
cities were mainly designed to service the needs of the colonizers. Particularly
telling are the location of the capitals the colonialists created. By
1900, twenty-eight of the forty-four colonial capitals were located on the
coast, demonstrating the low priority of extending power inland compared
to the need for easy communication and transport links with Eu-
rope.21
Rather systematically, Europeans created capitals that moved
power toward the ocean and away from the interior centers of power that
Africans had slowly created and that had managed to exert control over
parts of their surrounding territories. Thus, Lagos became the capital of
Nigeria rather than Ibadan, Ife, or Sokoto; Accra the capital of the Gold
Coast (Ghana) rather than Kumasi; and Bamako (with its good links to
the Senegalese coast), the capital of Mali instead of Timbuktu. Some
colonial capitals, including Lusaka, Nairobi, Salisbury (now Harare), and
20
Walter Elkan and Roger van Zwanenberg, “How People Came to Live in Towns,” in
Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, ed. Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, vol. 4, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 655.
21
A. J. Christopher, “Urbanization and National Capitals in Africa,” in Urbanization in
Africa: A Handbook, ed. James D. Tarver (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 411.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 17
Windhoek were created de novo outside of preexisting polities in order
to service the logistical and health needs of the white conquerors. Many
others, including Abidjan, Banjul, Dakar, and Kinshasa, were also newly
established by the colonialists but quickly acquired an African veneer because
they were not in settler colonies.22
In extreme examples of how
African capital cities did not follow the European pattern of extending
power, Mauritania and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) were actually
ruled by capitals outside their nominal boundaries during the colonial
period (Saint-Louis and Mafeking, respectively).
Accordingly, once the capitals were created, they did not immediately
begin to effectively extend power throughout their extensive but sparsely
settled territories. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch ﬁnds that “as of the beginning
of the twentieth century, the colonial penetration had barely be-
gun.”23
W. Arthur Lewis concluded that prior to World War II, “The
countryside had no continuous politics.”24
Tellingly, it was only in the
limited number of settler colonies, almost entirely in southern Africa, that
the colonial state’s reach was extended in a comprehensive manner. In
Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the presence of a relatively large
number of white settlers who saw themselves living permanently in Africa,
in contrast to most colonialists who were transients, propelled the
creation of a remarkably efﬁcient and brutal state that protected the settlers
from market forces while dispossessing many Africans of their land.25
The fact that wars of liberation had to be fought in Africa’s settler colonies
(e.g., Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia) was in good part
a reﬂection of the simple fact that unlike the rest of Africa, where the
transfer of power was astonishingly peaceful, those colonial states had the
motivation and the ability to ﬁght for power.
During the terminal colonial period, politics become national in many
countries as nationalist movements emerged. However, neglect of the
rural areas by colonial governments over decades, combined with organizational
problems posed by a large peasant population atomistically dispersed
across a vast hinterland that had few roads or telephones, deterred
most politicians from investing heavily in mobilizing the rural areas. As a
result, nationalist politics in the 1950s and 1960s were very much urban
affairs. As Aristide Zolberg concluded:
22
See David Simon, Cities, Capital, and Development: African Cities in the World Economy
(London: Belhaven Press, 1992), pp. 24–5.
23
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa: Endurance and Change South of the Sahara
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 174.
24
Lewis, Politics in West Africa, p. 14.
25
See Jeffrey Herbst, State Politics in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), chapter 2.
18 C H A P T E R O N E
But it is difﬁcult to believe, on the basis of the evidence available, that under
existing circumstances the capacity of these [nationalist] movements for “mobilization”
extended much beyond intermittent electioneering and the collection
of more tangible support in the form of party dues from a tiny fraction
of the population. Although their ambition was often to extend tentacles
throughout society, they were creatures with a relatively large head in the capital
and fairly rudimentary limbs.26
The nationalists received states that were appropriate to the way they had
conducted their politics: primarily urban, with few links to the surrounding
countryside where most of the population lived. In turn, they furthered
the urban bias of their states by marginalizing peasant populations
and by providing urban groups with privileged access to many of the
resources allocated by the state. As Robert H. Bates documented, African
politicians traditionally equated their political survival with appeasing
their urban populations via subsidies even if the much larger, and poorer,
rural populations had to be taxed.27
After independence, many African countries made signiﬁcant progress
in extending administrative structures over their territories. However, African
leaders still ﬁnd physical control over substantial parts of the population
to be a difﬁcult issue. For instance, Goran Hyden argues that because
African peasants depend primarily on rain-fed agriculture rather
than on cooperative techniques of production, such as irrigation found in
more densely settled areas, and because smallholders are less integrated
into the cash economy than elsewhere in the world, the peasantry in
Africa is “uncaptured.”28
Hyden argues that because “the state does not
really enter into the solution of his [the African peasant’s] existential
problems” there is “a deﬁnite limit . . . to how far enforcement of state
policies can go in the context of peasant production.”29
Similarly, Michael
Bratton has argued that “The essence of the postcolonial history of subSaharan
Africa is therefore an unresolved political struggle: On one hand,
political elites wish to extend the authority of the state over scattered
populations, most of whom live in rural areas; on the other hand, peasants
remain determined to preserve a realm of authority within which to
26
Aristide R. Zolberg, Creating Political Order: The Party-States of West Africa (Chicago:
Rand McNally and Co., 1966), pp. 34–5.
27
Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Sub-Saharan Africa (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981), p. 33.
28
Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured
Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 9–18. See also Stephen G.
Bunker, Peasants against the State: The Politics of Market Control in Bugisu, Uganda, 1900–
1983 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 5.
29
Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania, pp. 23–4.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 19
make decisions about their own lives.”30
It is hardly surprising that in a
United Nations’ survey, African governments were more likely to express
unhappiness over their population distributions than governments in any
other regions of the world.31
Further, the long economic crisis that many African countries have experienced
since the late 1970s has caused a profound erosion of many governments’
revenue bases and, consequently, their ability to project power.
Instead of African states gradually consolidating control over their territories
as time progresses, even the most basic agents of the state—agricultural
extension workers, tax collectors, census takers—are no longer to
be found in many rural areas. The Economic Commission for Africa lamented
that, because of the poor state of the road systems, “whole areas
are practically cut off from capital cities.”32
This is an especially important
problem in Africa because about 69 percent of the population, on average
across the continent, still live in rural areas compared to 61 percent for all
low and middle income countries.33
Some states are increasingly unable to
exercise physical control over their territories. William C. Thom, U. S.
Defense Intelligence Ofﬁcer for Africa, has written that
Most African state armies are in decline, beset by a combination of shrinking
budgets, international pressures to downsize and demobilize, and the lack of
the freely accessible military assistance that characterized the cold war period.
With few exceptions, heavy weapons lie dormant, equipment is in disrepair, and
training is almost nonexistent. . . . the principal forces of order are in disorder
in many countries at a time when the legitimacy of central governments (and
indeed sometimes the state) is in doubt.34
For instance, a parliamentary report of Zimbabwe’s army—long thought
to be one of the more competent militaries on the continent—found
that the force had only 5 percent of its vehicles in working order,
monthly pilot training had been abandoned, and 70 percent of the troops
in one brigade had been off duty for a year or more, on forced leaves in
order to save money.35
30
Michael Bratton, “Peasant-State Relations in Postcolonial Africa: Patterns of Engagement
and Disengagement,” in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation
in the Third World, ed. Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 231.
31
United Nations, Concise Report on the World Population Situation in 1993 (New York:
United Nations, 1994), p. 36.
32
Economic Commission for Africa, Survey of Economic and Social Conditions in Africa,
1991–2, (Addis Ababa: Economic Commission for Africa, 1994), p. 117.
33
World Bank, World Development Report 1998, p. 231.
34
William G. Thom, “An Assessment of Prospects for Ending Domestic Military Conﬂict
in Sub-Saharan Africa,” CSIS Africa Notes 177 (October 1995), p. 3
35
“Zimbabwe: Report Cites UK Paper on ‘Ominous’ State of Defense Force,” Harare
20 C H A P T E R O N E
Even the wave of democratization that swept Africa in the 1990s has
not breached the center-periphery divide. The revolts since 1989 against
African authoritarianism were largely urban affairs, with little participation
by any organized rural group.36
Not surprisingly, few if any of the
political parties that have come into existence since 1989 have strong
rural roots.37
It still appears too difﬁcult to organize the peasants qua
peasants, despite the fact that spatial location is an excellent determinant
of life chances in much of Africa.38
An appropriate capstone to the comparison between Africa—precolonial,
colonial, and independent—and Europe is their strikingly different
traditions involving the most dramatic action typically associated with
a state: warfare. Due to low population densities and the large amount of
open land in Africa, wars of territorial conquest, as chapters two, three,
and four will discuss at length, have seldom been a signiﬁcant aspect of
the continent’s history. In precolonial Africa, the primary object of warfare,
which was continual in many places, was to capture people and
treasure, not land which was available to all. In contrast to European
states that, at least at some points in their histories, needed to mobilize
tremendous resources from their own populations to ﬁght wars and were
therefore forced to develop profound ties with their own hinterlands,
precolonial African leaders mainly exploited people outside their own
polity because the point of war was to take women, cattle, and slaves.39
Thus the slave trade, especially in the eighteenth century, should be seen
Zimbabwe Standard, 11 May 1998, cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily
Report: Sub-Saharan Africa, 12 May 1998.
36
Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, “Toward Governance in Africa: Popular
Demand and State Responses,” in Governance and Politics in Africa, ed. Goran Hyden and
Michael Bratton (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 1992, p. 31.
37
Henry Bienen and Jeffrey Herbst, “Economic and Political Reform in Africa,” Comparative
Politics 29 (October 1996), p. 36.
38
In Ghana, 80 percent of the poor and almost all of the poorest are in the rural areas
outside of Accra. Similarly, in a survey of Cˆote d’Ivoire, researchers found that while 59
percent of all Ivorians live in the rural areas, 86 percent of the poorest 30 percent of the
population and 96 percent of the poorest 10 percent of the population live outside the
cities. See respectively E. Oti Boateng et al., A Poverty Proﬁle for Ghana, 1987–1988, Social
Dimensions of Adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa Working Paper no. 5 (Washington, DC:
The World Bank, 1990), p. 14, and Paul Glewwe and Dennis de Tray, The Poor during
Adjustment: A Case Study of Cˆote d’Ivoire, Living Standards Measurement Survey Paper no.
47 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1988), p.13.
39
The classic statement is by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “The Political Economy of
the African Peasantry and Modes of Production,” in The Political Economy of Contemporary
Africa, ed. Peter C. W. Gutkind and Immanuel Wallerstein (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications,
1976), p. 105. Compare to Charles Tilly “War Making and State Making as
Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 183.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 21
as part of the process by which African states grew: by capturing people
rather than by gaining control over territory.40
In the colonial and independence periods, Europeans and Africans
have gone to elaborate lengths to prevent wars of conquest from occurring
in Africa, a series of efforts that were strikingly successful compared
to the war-torn history of Europe and other regions throughout the
twentieth century. The consequential role that war played in European
state development was not replicated in Africa, or in Latin America for
that matter.41
In particular, African states have never had the security imperative
to physically control the hinterlands in the face of competition
from hostile neighbors. Since the external imperative for capitals to consolidate
authority was largely absent, African leaders have had to devise
an entirely different set of strategies to exert control over their territories.
The Extension of Power in Africa
How those who sought to create African states responded to the continual
problem of extending authority over distance, given a particular political
geography, is the focus of this book. This question goes to the very
essence of politics because, as Weber and others have repeatedly noted,
the signal characteristic of a state is its monopoly on the legitimate use of
physical force in the territory it is said to control.42
It is also an issue that
has been analyzed almost entirely by focusing on Europe.43
Scholars have
concentrated on the European experience when trying to understand
state development despite the fact that Europe contains only a small percentage
of the states formed throughout history. In part, this myopia is
due to the fact that the rise of European states is well documented. Of
course, concentrating on Europe, the taproot of the nation-state, appears
logical because today all states worldwide do have the form of the nation-
40
James L. Newman, The Peopling of Africa: A Geographic Interpretation (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 129–130.
41
See the paper of my colleague Miguel Angel Centeno, “Blood and Debt: War and
Taxation in Nineteenth Century Latin America,” American Journal of Sociology 102 (May
1997): pp. 1565–1605.
42
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” reprinted in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958),
p. 78.
43
Representative books include Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States; Brian M.
Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy
in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) Mann, Sources
of Social Power; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and
Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); and Hendrick
Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994).
22 C H A P T E R O N E
state as theorized and executed by the Europeans. Indeed, the analysis of
the creation of many third world states is, by necessity, intertwined with
accounts of European imperialism and colonialization.44
There was also a
long-term western project of delegitimating nonwestern sovereignty that
was critical to the colonial project and that, inevitably, seeped into the
academic literature.45
However, the European experience does not provide a template for
state-making in other regions of the world. As S. E. Finer has noted in
his monumental work on the history of government, “the development
of states in Europe is—in a world-historical perspective—highly idio-
syncratic.”46
Many other regions of the world share the African experience
of having signiﬁcant outlying territories that are difﬁcult for the
state to control because of relatively low population densities and difﬁcult
physical geographies. For instance, Gledhill notes that in Mexico, “The
hills are associated with wildness, violence, and political freedom, the
plains with docility, paciﬁcation, and susceptibility to repression, a contrast
which contains an element of truth.”47
Similarly, the idea of the
anarchic northern frontier that presented the opportunity to escape from
the state is an integral part of old Russian political mythology.48
In Southeast
Asia, the divide between center and periphery is also often pronounced:
“In many senses, the capital was the state, and its power radiated
from center to the periphery.”49
Of course, there is also a long
historical tradition of examining the American frontier and the political
consequences of open spaces.50
Similarly, the study of international relations, which has much to say
44
I am grateful to Deborah Yashar for this point.
45
David Strang, “Contested Sovereignty: The Social Construction of Colonial Imperialism,”
in State Sovereignty as Social Construct, ed. Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 34.
46
S. E. Finer, The History of Government from Earliest Times, vol 1. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 5.
47
John Gledhill, “Legacies of Empire: Political Centralization and Class Formation in the
Hispanic-American World,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social
Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. John Gledhill, Barbara Bender, and Mogens
Trolle Larsen (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 317.
48
David Z. Scheffel, “‘There is Always Somewhere to Go . . .’ Russian Old Believers and
the State,” in Outwitting the State, ed. Peter Sakln´ık (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1989), p. 115.
49
Emphasis in the original. Donald G. McCloud, Southeast Asia: Tradition and Modernity
in the Contemporary World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), p. 71.
50
See, for instance, Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New
York: Henry Holt, 1920), and Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, ed., The Frontier in
History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981). Of course, both these books examine how colonialists or whites have dealt with the
frontier, rather than the perspectives of the indigenous populations.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 23
about the nature of state development, has had an almost exclusive focus
on Europe despite the presence of state systems elsewhere in the world
that have had radically different operating assumptions. The focus on
Europe has been continually bemoaned in the international relations literature
although little has been done to correct the problem that almost
the entire study of international relations is really an extended series of
case studies of Europe. As Gilpin notes, “There is a need for a comparative
study of international systems that concentrates on systemic change
in different types of international systems.”51
However, to understand the extension of power in Africa, the traditional
tools of political science that stress leadership decisions, institutional
structures, and systemic considerations can continue to be used. In
the analysis that follows, I suggest that state consolidation in Africa can
be understood by examining three basic dynamics: the assessment of the
costs of expansion by individual leaders; the nature of buffer mechanisms
established by the state; and the nature of the regional state system. Only
by understanding all three levels is a complete analysis of the consolidation
of power in Africa possible. I disregard the boundaries between
comparative politics and international relations because a more holistic
analysis is necessary to understand the consolidation of power in Africa,
or other areas for that matter.
Costs
All leaders face costs when trying to expand their writ of authority. Given
the lack of a security imperative, which forced European state-builders to
place assets at the frontier at a loss, African statemakers were able, within
certain constraints and given historical circumstances, to make much
more nuanced calculations about the costs and beneﬁts of broadcasting
power. Of course, the extension of authority always costs something
given the need to deploy soldiers and administrators. The exact nature of
the costs leaders face depends, in part, on how far power is being broadcast:
if a state is making an incremental step beyond its central base that
can be achieved using existing capabilities, costs will be lower than if
authority is being projected to an area far beyond the base, as this requires
mobilization of an entirely new set of resources. Of course, consolidation
of rule is also a function of how the state system deﬁnes territorial
control. Consolidation may only be the investment in enough security
assets to secure an area physically, while other states may have to make
extensive investments in such areas as roads, telecommunications, and
51
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), p. 43.
24 C H A P T E R O N E
local government in order to integrate a peripheral area into the overall
economy. Thus, African leaders seeking to extend their power face a variety
of costs: some inescapable in the short-term associated with conquest;
some that are contingent on the scale of the changes being brought
about; and some that can be postponed to the long-term that are largely
associated with the consolidation of authority.52
The implications of understanding, from the perspective of the statemaker,
the extension of authority as a series of different types of costs
that have to be met are signiﬁcant. For instance, the cost calculations of
African leaders were radically different than those made by Europeans: in
Africa, conquest and consolidation must be understood as different processes,
with different cost structures, because wars were primarily not
over territory and the end of wars did not leave the organizational and
infrastructure residual that was typical in Europe. As a result, as chapter
ﬁve discusses at length, the desired characteristics of a state in Africa are
different from those traditionally valued in Europe.
Boundaries
The second major dynamic the book examines is the politics of boundaries.
Understanding boundary politics—broadly deﬁned as attempts by
states to mediate pressures from the international system through the use
of buffer mechanisms to maximize their authority over territory—is obviously
an important component of analyzing the extension of authority.
States can and do lower the costs of controlling a territory by developing
a set of boundary institutions that insulate them from possible economic
and political threats while enhancing the capabilities of the center. As
William J. Foltz has noted, “Who studies systems studies boundaries”
because effective boundaries “increase the collective power of those
within them by providing the potential for organization and preventing
the diffusion of effort and energy.”53
The particular institutions that mediate the pressures from the international
system become of special concern to weak rulers who do not have
clear control over their territory; therefore, examining them may be especially
informative in understanding the politics of African state development.
In many ways the most consequential buffer mechanism is the
52
Here I am borrowing from W. Arthur Lewis’s excellent discussion of ﬁxed costs in his
Overhead Costs: Some Essays in Economic Analysis (New York: Augusts M. Kelley, 1970),
p. 9.
53
William J. Foltz, “Modernization and Nation-Building: The Social Mobilization Model
Reconsidered,” in From National Development to Global Community, ed. Richard L. Merritt
and Bruce M. Russett (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 39.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 25
territorial boundary that mediates political pressures, including threats of
intervention, from rivals. The traditional view of African boundaries is
that they are a critical weakness of African states because they have remained
unchanged despite the fact that the original colonial demarcations
were done in a hurried manner that often did not account for local
political, sociological, economic, or ethnic factors. As Jackson and
Rosberg argue, “The boundaries of many countries, particularly but by
no means exclusively in French-speaking Africa, were arbitrarily drawn by
the colonial powers and were not encouraging frameworks of uniﬁed,
legitimate, and capable states.”54
Similarly, Davidson regrets that those
who recognized that “the colonial partition had inserted the continent
into a framework of purely artiﬁcial and often positively harmful frontiers”
did not come to the fore at independence.55
Or as Bentsi-Enchill
argues, “the nineteenth century partition of Africa by the European colonial
powers was not made with any attention to the boundaries of these
traditional polities . . . the newly independent African states, are, in general,
territorially composite and have inherent problems of domestic
boundary demarcation and maintenance between the traditional polities
and jurisdictions of which they are composed.”56
In fact, the system of territorial boundaries, as this book demonstrates
in detail, has been critical to the particular patterns of African state consolidation
and has been seen as a tremendous asset by African leaders,
both in the colonial and independence periods. Far from being a hindrance
to state consolidation, African boundaries have been perhaps the
critical foundation upon which leaders have built their states. In addition,
the territorial boundaries help shape other buffer institutions that also
insulate polities from international pressures. These other buffer institutions
vary considerably but include currency exchange mechanisms (which
deﬁne the means of conversion between domestic and international units
of money) and citizenship rules (which determine the difference between
citizens and foreigners). Chapters seven and eight demonstrate that these
boundary systems have also had signiﬁcant effects on African state
consolidation.
Understanding the precise manner in which pressures from the international
system are mediated by state structures offers a way to move
54
Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “The Marginality of African States,” in African
Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years, ed. Gwendolen M. Carter and Patrick
O’Meara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 46.
55
Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
(New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 163.
56
Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill, “The Traditional Legal Systems of Africa,” in Property and
Trust, vol. 6, International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, (T¨ubingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1976), pp. 2–138.
26 C H A P T E R O N E
beyond grand theorizing to developing concrete propositions that analyze
the relationship between the international and domestic systems.
There is today something of a scholarly consensus that the international
system is important to understanding politics in African countries, but
that even third world states have a degree of autonomy, which necessitates
examining purely political factors and avoiding the economic determinism
that characterizes dependency theory. Accordingly, the next logical
step is to better specify how international pressures are mediated by
state institutions to affect domestic politics. Such a speciﬁcation will be
especially useful at the end of the millenium because international
forces—be they international ﬁnancial institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) or the even more impersonal forces of international
capital markets—are perceived as having an increasingly profound
effect on the domestic decisions of leaders in Africa and elsewhere
in the developing world.57
The analysis that follows demonstrates that
much of this conventional wisdom is incorrect.
State Systems
Finally, the study will concentrate on the state system that successive
African leaders constructed in order to further their own efforts at state
consolidation. One of the reasons that Tilly’s analysis is so successful for
Europe is that he develops a convincing picture of the international context
of state development by focusing on the continual threat of war that
all nations faced. There is a similar need to understand the international
context African states face, although it is radically different from Europe.
It is particularly important to recognize that the international system was
not simply a given for even the weak leaders who successively ruled African
states. Repeatedly, this study will report that rulers in Africa created a
particular type of state system in order to help them confront the peculiar
difﬁculties they were having in exercising their authority across the territories
they were said to control. Cooperation, rather than continual conﬂict,
has characterized Africa during the last century of state-making, a
vision that directly challenges traditional realist assumptions about the
anarchical nature of international society and the importance of the threat
of force.
An appreciation of the importance of being able to manipulate the
state system immediately allows for an understanding of why simple cost
models of state expansion are wrong. For example, Richard D. Auster
57
Barbara Stallings, “International Inﬂuence on Economic Policy: Debt, Stabilization,
and Structural Reform,” in The Politics of Economic Adjustment ed. Stephan Haggard and
Robert R. Kaufman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 43.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 27
and Morris Silver develop a model of state development where the state
expands until average costs are rising, an adaption of venerable cost
models in economics.58
However, this model ignores the fact that by
changing the nature of the international system, states can profoundly
alter the costs of gaining and consolidating control over land. Since international
society determines what state control actually means, to not investigate
the nature of the state system is to fail to grasp the fundamental
dynamics of state consolidation. Of course, pure economic models of
state expansion cannot incorporate such overarching design considerations
because they are based on the assumption that states are systemtakers,
just as ﬁrms are assumed to be price-takers, and therefore unable
to affect the economic system within which they operate.59
That African states, perhaps best known in the literature as colonial
creations and among the weakest in the world, were still strong enough
to affect the state systems they operated within is critical to note because
scholars have too often taken the international system as simply the background
to the drama of domestic state development. One of the unfortunate
implications of the division between comparative politics and international
relations is that while scholars in the latter discipline have been
quick to point out the effect of international forces on domestic politics,
the impact of state development on international relations has sometimes
not been fully appreciated. In examining how leaders affect the design of
the state system, this book thus examines what Robert Gilpin has called
the most fundamental type of change in the international system:
“change in the nature of the actors or diverse entities that compose an
international system.”60
Costs, Boundaries, and State Systems
Maximum analytic leverage is gained when the interplay between the
cost of state expansion, boundary mechanisms, and the state system can
be understood. For instance, the cost of territorial expansion can be manipulated
by states by changing the international understanding of what
it means to control territory. Similarly, particular types of buffer mechanisms
increase or reduce the cost of territorial expansion. Likewise, the
nature of the international system affects what kind of buffer mechanisms
58
Richard D. Auster and Morris Silver, The State as a Firm: Economic Forces in Political
Development (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 30. See also Gilpin, War and Change in
World Politics, p. 106.
59
See, for instance, Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the
World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 27.
60
Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, p. 39.
28 C H A P T E R O N E
Figure 1.1. Possible Paths to State Consolidation
states can establish. Chapters two, three, and four explain the overall
development of African states in the precolonial, colonial, and postindependence
periods using this model. Chapters ﬁve and six then examine
internal design questions to illustrate in greater detail the ramiﬁcations of
the cost calculations that leaders have made. Chapters seven and eight
explain the impact of different types of boundaries on state consolidation.
Finally, chapter nine explains the overarching trajectory of African states
and develops alternatives to the status quo that might allow states to
broadcast power in a more effective manner.
Continuities in African Politics
By examining the different answers that leaders over centuries have given
to the dilemmas of state consolidation, I am also offering an approach to
confront the fundamental problem of studying African politics. The major
difﬁculty scholars have is that almost all would agree with Patrick
Chabal that the colonial interlude was relatively brief and that it is necessary
to study lines of continuity between precolonial politics and the
modern era.61
At the same time, attempting to place colonialism within
the context of the continuities of African history has been stressed by
61
Patrick Chabal, Political Domination in Africa: Reﬂections on the Limits of Power
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 3.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 29
historians who note colonial rule’s artiﬁciality, Africans’ role in modifying
it through protest, and the long history of intergroup conﬂict in Africa
that predates the Europeans.62
However, most scholars would also agree
with Crawford Young that the imposition of colonial rule changed
everything:
The colonial state in Africa lasted in most instances less than a century—a mere
moment in historical time. Yet it totally reordered political space, social hierarchies
and cleavages, and modes of economic production. Its territorial grid—
whose ﬁnal contours congealed only in the dynamics of decolonization—determined
the state units that gained sovereignty and came to form the present
system of African polities.63
Similarly, Naomi Chazan and her colleagues justify beginning their study
of modern African politics with the creation of the colonial state by stating
simply: “The basis of the postcolonial state in Africa is the colonial
state.”64
Or, as the manifesto of the Belgian-Congolese elite claimed in
1956, “In the history of the Congo, the last eighty years have been more
important than the millenniums which have preceded them.”65
Faced with the intuition that African politics must have deep continuities
but aware of the profound disjuncture in form and practice caused
by colonialism, scholars have generally been unsuccessful in developing a
view of African politics that takes the precolonial period seriously while
still acknowledging the traumas created by white rule. Thus, most textbooks
on African politics begin their substantive discussions with the colonial
state while only making the briefest of acknowledgments regarding
the possibility of continuities with the precolonial era.66
However, the continued failure to fully understand the course of African
politics is unacceptable. As is argued in the following chapters, there
are broad continuities in African politics that become apparent when the
approach of successive leaders to the same political geography is exam-
62
See, for instance, J. F. A. Ajayi, “Colonialism: An Episode in African History,” in Colonialism
in Africa, 1870–1960, ed. L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan vol. 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 508.
63
Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 9–10.
64
Naomi Chazan et al., Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 1988), p. 40.
65
“Manifesto of the Belgian-Congolese Elite, 1956,” reprinted in The Political Awakening
of Africa, ed. Rupert Emerson and Martin Kilson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1965), p. 99.
66
See, for instance, Chazan et al. Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa; William
Tordoff, Government and Politics in Africa, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillian Press, 1993);
Richard Hodder-Williams, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1984).
30 C H A P T E R O N E
ined. Given that, as chapter three discusses, the colonial and postcolonial
states are such recent creations, it is also hard to believe that the political
traditions developed over the centuries have not had an effect on politics
since 1960. It would seem, for instance, relatively easy to make the case
that precolonial traditions, still vibrant in the early part of the twentieth
century in most parts of the continent, have a resonance in modern Africa
compared to the rather heroic efforts Robert Putnam undertakes in order
to suggest that developments in the Italian peninsula beginning around
1100 A.D. structure modern Italian politics.67
Thus, one of the operating
assumptions of this study is that Pliny the Elder was wrong: there is often
nothing new out of Africa.
As some African states break down and the facade of sovereignty that
was erected in the early 1960s begins to crumble, it also becomes more
important to understand the past in order to foresee a better future for
Africa.68
This is not to engage in misty-eyed nostalgia, believing that
somehow political formations developed hundreds of years ago can be
replicated today. Basil Davidson is correct in arguing that “the precolonial
past is not recoverable.”69
Nor should it be. However, it does
seem reasonable to understand what the colonialists did and did not
change several decades ago if a more indigenous alternative to the nation-state
as theorized, designed, and imposed by the Europeans is to be
developed. Certainly, such investigations are already beginning. For instance,
Ali Mazrui looks to the African past in proposing models of dual
sovereignty that would include both civilians and representatives of the
security forces in a new type of parliament.70
Conclusion
For a truly comparative study of politics to develop, the great but incomplete
drama of African state creation must be understood. This drama is
as important to analyze as the processes that led to the creation of
France, Germany, and their neighbors. By examining both the environ-
67
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 121. For another argument that state structures
are highly path dependent, that is, they reﬂect events that occurred hundreds of years ago,
see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 317–8.
68
Christopher Clapham, Africa in the International System: The Politics of State Survival
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 30.
69
Davidson, Black Man’s Burden, p. 315.
70
Ali A. Mazrui, “The African State as a Political Refugee,” in African Conﬂict Resolution:
The U.S. Role in Peacemaking, ed. David R. Smock and Chester A. Crocker (Washington,
DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995), p. 18.
T H E C H A L L E N G E O F S T A T E - B U I L D I N G 31
ment that leaders had to confront and the institutions they created in
light of their own political calculations, the entire trajectory of state creation
in Africa can be recovered. I will demonstrate that, fundamentally,
there is nothing exotic about African politics. Rather, as elsewhere, political
outcomes are the result of human agency interacting with powerful
geographic and historical forces. And, as is the case in other parts of the
world, the viability of African states depends on leaders successfully meeting
the challenges posed by their particular environment.