jlitical Studies (19S6), XXXIV, 647-661

Comparing African StatesCHRISTOPHER CLAPHAM*

University of Lancaster

The Africanist literature of the last few years has been redolent with referencesto the 'coming of age' of independent black Africa: not in the sense, certainly,that it is now capable of looking after itself—as reports of famine, debt andmilitary dependence daily remind us—but in the sense that a generation haspassed since the modal date of independence in 1960. A generation has likewisepassed in academic attempts to understand it. Independence coincided with theconvenient post-war boom in comparative politics, and presented the disciplinewith a host of unexplored but evidently comparable states on which a corres-ponding host of enthusiastic researchers descended in search of material forPhDs, Where have we got to since then? This collection of books, publishedover the last three years, all attempt an overview of the two and a half decadessince independence.' What do they tell us about the political comparison ofthird world states? What do they tell us about the political systems ofindependent Africa and the current crises of the continent? And at a simplerlevel, which is the best buy for those of us who teach undergraduate courses inAfrican politics or the politics of the third world?

Methodologically, two points come over very strongly from the wholecollection. The first is that, despite what may seem the obvious suitability ofAfrican states for political comparison, comparative studies—at any rate in anysystematic or behavioural sense—have never really found much favour amongAfricanists. This is partly the legacy ofthe fieldwork tradition. The only way tofind out about the politics of the great majority of African states is to go andlook, Africanists are distinguished above all by the place where—and often thedate when—they did their fieldwork. For political scientists as for anthro-

* The books reviewed in this article are: Peter Calvocoressi, Independent Africa and the World(London, Longman, 1985); John Cartwright, Political Leadership in Africa (London, CroomHelm, 1983); Richard Hodder-Williams, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa(London, Allen & Unwin, 1984); Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg., Personal Leadership inBlack .4frica (Berkeley, University of California, 1982); Aii A. Mazrui and Michael Tidy,i^ationaiism and New States in Africa (London, Heinemann, 1984); Roger Tangri, Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa (London, James Currey, 1985); William Tordoff, Government and Politics in•4/nc'a (London, Macmillan, 1984); Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in .Africa (>iev,-Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1982).

' There have also been several edited volumes which are not discussed here, including:tiwendolen M. Carter and Patrick O'Meara (eds), African Independence: the First Twenty-Five^ear.j (London, Hutchinson and Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1985); PeterDuignan and Robert H. Jackson (eds), Africa Since Independence (London, Croom Helm, 1986);and for a historical overview, Michael Crowder (ed.). The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 8,1940-1975 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984).

W32-3217/86/04/0647-15/$O3.00 © 19S6 Political Studies

648 Review Article

pologists, this experience imparts a deep sense of the particularity of Africanstates and societies. It likewise means that few of them have personalknowledge of more than a minority of the states with which they deal. There are39 independent 'black' African states, from Mauritania south to Lesotho, Theaddition of Arab North Africa, the islands, and South Africa and Namibia (allof which are effectively excluded from the volumes under review) takes the totalto just over 50, Few could claim detailed familiarity with more than three orfour of these, or a nodding acquaintance with more than ten or so others—athird of the total at most. For the rest, one has to rely on a literature which is atbest patchy, heavily geared to those states which use one's own metropolitanlanguage (all of these books are vastly stronger on anglophone than franco-phone Africa), and above all leave one with the uneasy feeling of having towork from someone else's picture of a country's politics, deprived of anypersonal sense of its plausibility. Any book about Africa as a whole thus tendsto reflect a viewpoint based on a limited number of core countries, supple-mented with inevitably secondhand information from elsewhere. Readingthrough this collection, one has no difficulty in picking out either the oneoutsider (Calvocoressi—all the rest have evident fieldwork experience), or thecountries where the others have worked. The collection as a whole, coinci-dentally, has a markedly East and Central African bent, with firsthatidexpertise especially on Kenya (Mazrui, Rosberg), Tanzania (Tordoff, Young),and Zambia (Tangri, TordofO, along with Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe.Among West African states, only Sierra Leone is well represented (Cartwright,Tangri). There is, so far as I can judge, no one with detailed experience ofindependent Ghana and Nigeria, the most significant anglophone West Africanstates, though Tordoff has written on pre-independence Ghana; the franco-phones, lusophones and independents (Ethiopia, Liberia) are covered almostentirely at second hand.

Whilst personal experience is necessarily limited, the other basis forcomparison—systematic data—is simply inadequate. Cross-national quantita-tive research in Africa is possible only for those who copy down their figuresfrom United Nations or World Bank handbooks, in happy ignorance of whatthey mean or how they were collected. What price GNP per capita whennobody knows (within a margin of error of 20 million or so) the true populationof Nigeria? How do you calculate a GDP figure in states where a large part ofproduction never finds its way into the monetary sector, and there are noreliable figures for income? Even foreign trade statistics may reflect more thelevel of smuggling than that of domestic production—cocoa consistentlyfigures among Togo's major exports, but most of it is grown in Ghana, Smallwonder, then, that comparison in African politics consists very largely of juxta-posed case studies, while general books on Africa, including most of thosereviewed here, make no serious attempt at comparison at all. The one outstand-ing exception, Crawford Young's book, is considered later.

The second methodological point that emerges from this collection is the verylimited impact that Marxist or dependency approaches have had on the study ofAfrican politics. Only Tangri, of the eight books reviewed here, draws to anyappreciable extent on the Marxian literature, and several authors entirelyignore it. This is, on the face of il, surprising, Marxian approaches, in thebroadest sense ofthe term, have enjoyed a prominent (though never dominant)

Review Article 649

place in the field over the last couple of decades. There is a reasonably flourish-ing journal, the Review of African Political Economy, which prints only workwilh a strong leftist commitment, while a number of small publishing houses(Spokesman, Verso, Zed) specialize in literature from a broadly leftistperspective. Yet the fact that this perspective does not figure at all prominentlyin this particular set of books reflects more than the ideological preconceptionsof a random group of authors: there has as yet, so far as 1 am aware, been nogeneral analysis of African politics since independence from a Marxist ordependency perspective.^ And this in turn, I suspect, may be not simply becauseno one has got round to writing it, but also because of difficulties inherent inthe enterprise itself.

This is again partly—and especially where 'classic' Marxism is concerned—alegacy of the fieldwork tradition, which plunges researchers into the intricaciesof local political structures not obviously amenable to the familiar categoriza-tions of industrial (or even feudal) societies. Ethnicity, especially in the form ofthat complex collection of identities covered by the misleading simplicity of'tribe', is only the most evident of the problems. Class is in a sense every bit asperplexing: not because classes don't exist, but because they are extremelydifficult to define, and remain very inadequate guides to both politicalconsciousness and political behaviour. Worst of all, as the comparative studiesin this collection demonstrate, it is very difficult to escape from the primacy ofthe political. Power produces wealth, much more evidently than the converse.And the African state itself cannot easily or plausibly be presented as theoutcome of class forces or the expression of class interests, except for theinterests of that 'class' which controls the state itself.

Dependency theories, despite their broadly Latin American origins, seemmuch more directly relevant to Africa than 'classic' Marxism: there are, afterall, few parts of the world more obviously dependent than black Africa on thewestern capitalist states. They are also ideologically appealing, in that theyenable the problems of the continent to be comfortingly ascribed to an externalsource. Nor is there much difficulty in finding corroborative data. Quite anumber of studies—of the transnational mining companies, for example—provide convincing evidence of the exploitation of African resources in wayswhich do little if anything to benefit African people.-^ There are nonethelessdifficulties in treating dependency as a general explanation of African under-development. One problem is that African social structure, in contrast to thecapitalist-created societies of Latin America and the Caribbean, is so resilient

' The absence of any general survey of post-independence Africa from a Marxian or dependencyperspective contrasts with a number of books on the colonial era, the most famous being WalterRodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972); Bill Freund, The Making of ContemporaryAfrica (London, Macmillan, 1984) is also good on the pre-colonial and colonial periods, but fizzlesout badly when it comes to the post-colonial era. There are equally, of course, quite a number ofbooks on individual countries, such as Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: the PoliticalEconomy of Neo-Cotoniatism (London, Heinemann, 1975), and edited volumes with a dependencythem, but these do not present the problems of generalization to which 1 have referred. At the otherextreme, there are works on general development theory, such as G. Kay, Development and Under-devetopment (London, Macmillan, 1975), which do not deal in any detail with contemporaryAfrica.

' See, lor example, G. Lanning and M. Mueller, Africa Undermined (Harmondsworth,Penguin, 1979), and Review of African Political Economy, No. 12, 1978.

650 Review Article

that it becomes unconvincing to ascribe 'failures in development' solely toexternal sources. Indigenous values and identities make a nonsense of Africa asan entity entirely created by a colonialism which in most of the continent isbarely a century old. But a second and converse problem is that Africa is sodependent that it is extremely difficult to elaborate any plausible scenario inwhich a rejection of dependence could produce an increase in development.Dependency theories in their various forms seem to rest ultimately on theassumption that if incorporation into the capitalist world order necessarilyleads to impoverishment and underdevelopment, then disengagement from thatorder must correspondingly release the resources that make 'real' developmentpossible. The snag is that there is not the slightest evidence that this is t r u e -least of all, as Young most convincingly demonstrates, in the experience ofthose African states which have sought since independence to reorder theireconomies along 'socialist' lines, however that slippery term is to be defined.And while it can convincingly be argued that even the most revolutionarystates, such as Ethiopia and Mozambique, remain locked into the worldcapitalist system, this indicates that escape from that system is impossible,rather than that there is an untried Kampuchean road to salvation.

The three books in this collection which explicitly seek to compare rather thanto generalize, those by Cartwright, Jackson and Rosberg, and Young, eachbase their comparison not on the structural characteristics of African states—interms of class, productive apparatus, or whatever—but on their top politicalleadership. It is the personal decisions and capacities of a very small number ofindividuals, which are seen as accounting for the differences between Africanstates, that political science seeks to explain, rather than the determiningfeatures of their structural endowment. The books by Cartwright and Jacksonand Rosberg are explicitly about leaders, based on the premise that in highlypersonalized political systems, what really matters is the way in which the manat the top chooses to play his hand. However repugnant this may be to thosewho see political comparison as the manipulation of infrastructural variables,there is something to be said for it in political systems where the sheer weaknessof institutional constraints gives leaders a level of personal discretion, to use orabuse, unknown in either capitalist or socialist industrial states.

Not that either book plunges into any crude assumption that politics, inAfrica or elsewhere, is no more than a play of personalities: the constraintsunder which African leaders operate are much too evident for that. Someframework is thus needed in which to set the limitations and possibilities ofleadership, along with some typology of alternative leadership styles. Jacksonand Rosberg provide the more sophisticated operation. Their conception ofpersonal rule goes back to the paradox that African states enjoy vastly differentlevels of political stability and effectiveness, despite the absence in all of themof the political institutions which are often assumed in the western tradition tobe essential to success. (Those who view African politics as a game of musicalchairs may need to be reminded that over half the African leaders havebeen in office for longer than Margaret Thatcher—who has had the longestcontinuous tenure of any British Prime Minister this century—and that several

Review Article 651

oi them have been there since the premiership of Harold Macmillan.) Thoughst)me states are inherently easier or more difficuh to govern than others (due tosuch variables as ethnic composition, economic endowment or geographicallocation), the key ingredient with which they identify is leadership skill—notauthority, which can exist only within a framework of shared values which exhypothesi is absent, but the capacity to manage coalitions of supporters withinan essentially clientelist set of relationships. Jackson and Rosberg then classifyleaders according to a fourfold schema of alternative styles: the Prince, theAutocrat, the Prophet and the Tyrant. The first two come straight fromMachiavelli. The Prince is Machiavelli's fox, the leader who seeks to balanceand manipulate a court or coterie of surrounding politicians, taking few risks orinitiatives, and moving with the middle ground. It is a classic survivaltechnique, and small wonder then that several of the Princes—Haile-Selassie,Tubman, Senghor, Kenyatta—have been among the most long-lasting ofAfrican rulers. The Autocrat is the lion, one who is prepared to commithimself, whose reaction to any independent source of power is to crush ratherthan accommodate it, and who has a place only for loyal subordinates. Bandacomes plausibly enough within this category, though I have doubts aboutHouphouet-Boigny, and the dangers of procrusteanism soon start to appear.When we get to the Prophet and the Tyrant, the weakness of the typologybecomes all too clear, for the Prophet turns out to be a good Autocrat—onewhose rule is directed to achieving some ideological goal—while the Tyrant is abad one—an apt illustration of Hobbes's dictum that tyranny is 'monarchymisliked'. The first category is designed for Nyerere, the second for Amin. Butby this time the typology has become less a guide to the strengths andweaknesses of alternative leadership strategies, than a set of pigeonholes for the17 case studies. The reason why Sekou Toure and Nkrumah count as Prophets,1 suspect, is that the box would look rather empty without them.

It then comes down to how good the case studies are, and they are frankly apretty mixed bunch. It is a matter, once again, of the limitations of the field-work approach. The sketch of Kenyatta, Rosberg's bailiwick, is excellent;Nyerere in next-door Tanzania is quite good too. Many of the others degenerateinto potted histories, and some (like that of Tolbert in Liberia) seem to me tomiss the point entirely. It is a pity also that two rather important groups ofleaders are completely excluded. One is the revolutionaries, like Mengistu orMachel, who offer peculiarly interesting cases of leaders operating outside thepost-colonial framework which the collection as a whole rather takes forgranted. The other is the failures. Six of the leaders considered in Jackson andRosberg's book were forcibly ejected, but even the shortest-lived of them, IdiAmin, lasted for over eight years. What about the real failures, like Lumumbain the Congo or Ironsi in Nigeria, who were dead inside a year? A good deal oflight could be cast on the remarkable survival capacity of many African leadersby looking at those who didn't make it. In short, Jackson and Rosberg take aplausible starting point, and much of their general discussion especially is well\\orth reading, but the overall result is disappointing.

Cartwright's is a similar operation, but on a more modest scale, with fewercase studies (seven rather than 17) and a less ambitious conceptual apparatus.He loo avoids the failures, and includes only Mengistu, briefly, among therevolutionaries; but he can concentrate more attention on each of his cases.

652 Review Article

which come out rather better than those considered by Jackson and Rosberg.(Though is it just the fact that Ethiopia is the country about which I know most,1 wonder, that leads me to regard his Ethiopian chapter as by far the least satis-factory?) And in place of Jackson and Rosberg's four-fold classification,Cartwright is concerned largely with whether leaders sought to achieve theirgoals by force, or by some mixture of accommodation and persuasion. Thisresembles, but does not duplicate, the distinction between the Prince andJackson and Rosberg's other categories: Nyerere (a Prophet) and Houphouet(an Autocrat) are classed on the persuasive side. The conclusion he reaches issimple, sensible, and for the most part sound: that persuasion generally worksbetter than force. One may quibble with him here and there, for example overthe extent to which the use of force rather than persuasion may reflect theleader's circumstances more than his choice; but generally, this is a successfulbook, and a monument to the wisdom of not trying to do too much.

The outstanding book in the comparative group, and indeed in this collection asa whole, is however that of Crawford Young. His comparison is also based onchoices by individual leaders, especially by the founding fathers of thenationalist movements who carried their countries through the first decadesafter independence; but the choices which interest him are strategic rather thantactical, and especially the choice of an ideology of economic development. Thepoint that he emphasizes here—and the fact that he can do so explicitly in thecontext of political economy is a major challenge to any application of Marxiandeterminism to Africa—is that the economic performance of African states hasvaried dramatically since independence, and that this variance must largely berelated to indigenous ideological choice. He must then, of course, classify thepossible choices, and the categories he comes up with are (from right to left)African capitalism, populist socialism, and (only since the mid-1970s, and in asmall number of states) Afro-Marxism. The qualificatory adjectives areessential. These are not the capitalist, democratic socialist and Marxist-Leninist regimes of the industrial worid. Not only are their economies radicallydifferent, but so are the organizational capacities at the disposal of their leadersfor achieving political and economic goals. Neither the capitalist class impliedby the first option, nor the bureaucracy necessary for the second, nor thevanguard party essential to the third, exists in any but rudimentary form. ButYoung's triumph is to show how the choice matters, despite (or even becauseoO the inadequacies of the mechanisms needed to implement it.

What makes this, for my money, one of the best books on African politics isthe way in which he uses his categories to illuminate the varying experiences ofAfrican states, rather than just fit them into boxes (as tends to happen wiihJackson and Rosberg). The basic classification is helpful and important, but itis not allowed to override the other elements which also contribute to economicand political performance, or to obscure the considerable degree of variationwithin each of the categories. His conclusions are marked by admirablecaution, arising from an awareness of the inadequacy of the data base availableand the shortness of the timescale with which he is dealing—two decades forAfrican capitalists and populist socialists, much less for the Afro-Marxists. He

Review Article 653

is also sensitive to the different goals towards which any quest for 'develop-ment' may be directed, and the different priorities accorded these goals bydifferent ideologies. The conclusions, accordingly, seek to assess the record interms not only of economic growth (important though that is to the achieve-ment of many other goals), but also of equality, autonomy, human dignity,participation, and state capacity.

The outstanding successes where growth is concerned, such as Kenya andIvory Coast, fall squarely into the capitalist group, though some of the populistsocialist states (such as Tanzania before the forced villagization campaign) haveperformed creditably, while the dreadful example of Zaire shows thatcapitalism—if that is a fair classification for chaotic free enterprise kleptocracy—cannot be relied on to produce the goods. The Afro-Marxist states have beendisrupted through all their brief existence by a level of human conflict andnatural disaster that makes fair assessment difficult, but it is at least clearenough that no massive mobilization of liberated human resources has yettaken place—and on the evidence of the five years since Young wrote, it isdoubtful whether it will. Whilst the findings under growth are mainly as mightbe expected, those for autonomy and equality reveal the inadequacy of manyoff-the-cuff assumptions. It is true enough that visible inequalities, in the formof conspicuous consumption by a small elite, are most dramatic in the capitaliststates; but since much of the success of Ivory Coast and Kenya, for example,has been due to increased agricultural production, growth may reflect acomparatively high level of rural income, while many of the socialist states havesucked purchasing power into the bureaucracy by underpaying rural producers.There is certainly no simple trade-off between growth and equality.

Autonomy and dependence, likewise, are not related to ideologicalpreference and subordination to the global capitalist system in the way thatmany applications of dependency theories would suggest. For one thing, thereis no close relationship between economic dependence and political autonomy:Angola can draw 90 per cent of its export revenues from Gulf Oil, and itsmilitary protection from Cuba and the Soviet Union. The capitalist states rangefrom the chronic indebtedness of Zaire to the voluntary dependence of theIvory Coast and the belligerent nationalism (economic no less than political) ofNigeria. And if dependence is the consequence of economic failure, thensuccess, however achieved, may be the best way to avoid it. Assaults on humandignity, in Young's view, are due more to the paranoia of individual rulers thanto structural considerations—whether these be derived from the revolutionaryviolence needed to create a socialist state or from the bureaucratic authori-tarianism which O'Donnell has identified as essential to the survival ofcapitalism in Latin America, The major question relating to Young's approachconcerns the extent to which the pursuit of capitalist, socialist or, perhaps'-^pecially, Marxist strategies in different African states may reflect the nature(I their incorporation into the global economy, rather than leadershipchoice; different patterns of incorporation, and also of decolonization, mayproduce different kinds of nationalist movement and hence of leader. This is,however, a book that excites thought and argument because its author isconstantly thinking and arguing himself. If there is one book that provides anidea of what African states have done and failed to do over the past quarter-century, then this is it.

654 Review Article

The other five books in this collection are all general introductions and surveys,and this puts them at a disadvantage. Since they are not trying to answerspecific questions, they can easily lose focus and direction; the summary ofother people's work does not excite the interest and engagement that enlivensthe elaboration of one's own ideas; and whilst a comparative study is constantlylooking for differences between states, an introductory survey ineluctablyconcentrates on similarities—regardless of its author's constant warnings aboutthe dangers of overgeneralization.

The worst of the collection, by far, is Mazrui and Tidy. Ali Mazrui is Africa'spremier political essayist, a master of the striking paradox captured in anarresting turn of phrase; Michael Tidy is an experienced author of history textsfor African secondary schools. The result is a collaboration in which Tidy,having 'immersed himelf in Mazrui's copious writings, has attempted to turnthese into ' comprehensive political history of Africa's period of decolonizationand of the first two decades of independence' (back cover). But it does noimeet the simplest requirements of a comprehensive history, because it is notwritten as one. The organization is neither chronological nor geographical, butthematic. Each chapter takes a theme—political parties, armed struggle, civilwars, military coups and regimes, international relations—and illustrates itwith brief case studies drawn from across the continent. This is simply not avery good way of telling readers what has actually happened. Since the chapteron civil wars precedes those on military coups and regimes, for instance, we aretold about the Nigerian war of 1967-70 before learning anything of the frantic18 months that led to it. The discipline of chronology is lost, and with it notonly the simplest way of learning historical facts, but also the sense of history asan unfolding tale in which people struggle with the consequences of what hasgone before. In the process, the case studies degenerate into little more than apotted outline of events.

But if it is not history, neither is it social science. Mazrui's genius, highlystimulating in short bursts, is not adapted to the systematic approach that abook of this length and scope requires. Occasionally some characteristic sparksurvives: 'The real danger posed by state socialism in a society with fragileinstitutions is not a danger of making the government too strong but the risk ofmaking it more conspicuously ineffectual' (p. 294), But these passing gems areburied in four hundred pages of schoolbook prose ('in chapter 2 we saw how. . .') which are not pulled together by any organizing theme, and which leavelittle sense of why things happen apart from the good or bad actions otindividual politicians. The book as a whole seems to me to have been seriouslymisconceived.

While Mazrui and Tidy's book runs to nearly 400 large pages, Calvocoressi'sbook stops short at 123 small ones. This is an essay, rather than a text: a brief,fluently written introduction, concentrating on the external politics of thecontinent, and showing very little familiarity with its domestic setting, Caho-coressi is an international historian, the sole author in this collection without anAfricanist background, and the book is essentially a set of lectures giver inFlorence, Inevitably the resulting impression throughout is of a non-speciaiistspeaking to other non-specialists. The style is brisk, self-confident, and at timesrather patronizing—a fault for which the authors with personal knowledge ofAfrica never fall, however harsh their criticisms of African states and leadf rs.

Review Article 655

The brusque statement that 'military rule in Africa has been noted either for itsexcesses or for its inadequacies' (p, 24), for example, sweeps a variety of vastlydiffering experiences into one slick all-encompassing aphorism; and theascription of corruption to 'greed, opportunity and emulation' (p, 118)substitutes offhand condemnation of individual behaviour for any attempt atanalysis of a phenomenon which, however evil, needs to be understood instructural terms. The factual errors are constantly irritating: in one classic tourde force, he describes General Ironsi, leader of the first Nigerian militaryregime in 1966, as exemplifying 'the feudal, pro-British upper crust in theNorth' (p. 98), when he was in fact an Igbo southerner, and his successorGowon as 'not a Northerner' (p. 99), when in fact he was. There are plentymore. Understanding African international relations requires a priorknowledge of its domestic politics, and in seeking to explain one without theother, Calvocoressi presents us with a picture of the separated peaks of aniceberg whose base remains hidden under water. His publishers, finally, haveserved him ill with a map of 'main communications' which shows only rivers(few of which are navigable) and railways as they were some 20 years ago. Mostof Africa's transport is by road.

He is at his best in fitting Africa into the global relationships with which he isthoroughly familiar. The assessment of western and Soviet roles in southernAfrica is fluent and persuasive, notably the ambivalence of the western attitudetowards South Africa on the one hand, and the inability of the Soviet Union totake advantage of it on the other. There are useful discussions also of problemsof aid and relationships between African states and the international miningcompanies, and an interesting section on Islam—though to describe KingHassan II of Morocco as a megalomaniac (p, 29) seems to me to beexaggerating; I would describe him as an unscrupulous operator myself. Thereis, too, a pervasive assumption of African failure, harsh but justified, which thesympathies of the Africanists too easily lead them to overlook.

The last three books confirm the well-known law of publishing which states thatif nothing has been published on a subject in 20 years, then three competingvolumes will appear within a few weeks of one another. All are general intro-ductions to the politics of what none of them quite dare to call Black Africa,designed for an undergraduate market, Tordoffs book in principle covers thewhole of Africa, although in practice the coverage is heavily sub-Saharan;Hodder-Williams's 'tropical Africa' excludes the Mediterranean littoral andSouth Africa, while Tangri additionally (and in my opinion regrettably)excludes the Horn, but basically the coverage is the same. The layout, too, isvery similar: a sandwich, with chapters on colonialism and nationalism^ at thebeginning, and on Africa's international relations at the end, with the 'meatybit' on domestic politics in the middle, and (for Tordoff and Hodder-Williams)a wrapping of introduction and conclusion, Tangri's book is much the shortest,wiih 133 pages of text compared with 236 for Hodder-Williams and 288for Tordoff, and his treatment is correspondingly brisk, especially over thepreliminaries. Whilst Tordoff starts with a discussion of pre-colonial civiliza-tions, and Hodder-Williams devotes his first chapter to the acquisition of

656 Review Article

empire, Tangri dismisses all this with a crisp opening line, 'By about 1900 theconquest of sub-Saharan Africa was over', and moves rapidly on to the thingswhich interest him, I find this haste attractive: Tordoff and Hodder-Williamsseem to be working their way through an agenda, but Tangri instantly conveysthe impression that there is something he wants to say, I like, too, the way inw hich his chapter on colonialism concentrates on the effects it had on Africans,especially their incorporation into a global economy, rather than on colonialpolicy from an essentially European perspective, Tangri is open to the objectionthat he gives much more attention to the few and sporadic instances of Africanresistance to colonial rule than to the normal acquiescence through which anew political and economic system came to be accepted with surprisingly littledifficulty; but his emphasis on the experiences of the ordinary African enableshim to give a convincing picture of nationalism and its roots in a mass of localgrievances and resentments. Both Tordoff and Hodder-Williams, in contrast,devote chapters to the 'transfer of power', a phrase which automaticallyconcentrates attention on colonial rulers and African elites, and tends to over-state the smoothness of the process by which one gave way to the other. Theseare strangely bloodless accounts of a tense and exciting period. What is missing,in particular, is much sense of the competition, not just between nationalistsand colonialists, but between rival would-be nationalist leaders themselves,each desperately seeking to grab the inheritance of colonial state power, andw illing to mobilize any available source of support—most dangerously regionaland ethnic identities—in order to do so. Round one goes, then, to Tangri,

Switching to the back of the sandwich, I find all three authors' treatment ofthe international angle somewhat disappointing. The very fact that theobligatory foreign relations chapter is tacked on at the end suggests a separationfrom the ordinary business of domestic politics which, at least in my view,seriously understates the constant and critically important interaction betweenthe two arenas. And whilst all three books conduct their discussion ofdomestic politics in thematic and analytical terms, on international relationsthey are all too often content with simple narrative. Here, Hodder-Williams'sbook is most successful, with a solid and sensible chapter which starts from thesubordination and penetration of African states within the global system andmoves on from there to discuss their relationships with one another and withthe external powers. Accepting that 'the basic framework of the dependencytheorists is sound' (p. 202), he nonetheless quite correctly allows a level ofautonomous action by African leaders, derived from their capacity to makecommon cause with one another and to manipulate their relationships with theoutside world, Tangri, rather more committed to a dependency framework,allows it to carry him into an over-emotive stance which badly understates thelevel of African autonomy, the flavour of which is indicated by his reference to'Africa's abject weakness and demeaning dependency on Western assistance'(p, 130), It is likewise entirely misleading to state that the former colonialpowers 'have intervened almost at will' in Africa (p, 131), and the judgementthat the Organisation of African Unity was 'of very limited use' (p. 133) in theNigerian, Angolan and Saharan wars underestimates, 1 think, the extent towhich the OAU, while possessing no military power, nonetheless helped toframe the diplomatic parameters within which the conflicts took place. Most ofhis chapter is given over to the problems of southern Africa, including a

Review Article 657

substantial narrative account of a rather unimportant organization, theSouthern African Development Co-ordination Council, and a puzzlingemphasis on the commitment of black African states to peaceful change in theregion. A case study of the means by which Zimbabwe gained its independence—a fascinating sequence of events—could have helped a lot, but it is notmentioned.

Finally, Tordoffs chapter on 'Regional Groupings and the OAU' largelyignores relations with the outside world, which are vastly more important toAfrican states than intercontinental connections, and is heavily descriptive.Unusually in a book which is mostly very sure of its facts, it makes a number oftrivial errors [for example, the reference to Somalia as being 'allied with theSoviet Union between 1969 and 1974 and with the United States thereafter'(p. 247)—the switch did not take place until 1977, and there is no alliance withthe USA in any sense comparable to that with the USSR]. Furthermore, 1 knowthat Haile-Selassie's stock is currently at a low level on the academic market,but it simply will not do to claim that 'the OAU . . , owed much to Nkrumah'sstatesmanship' (p. 224), whilst adding that 'it is not easy to say precisely whythis particular conference [at Addis Ababa in May 1963] succeeded' in settingup the OAU (p. 241), It succeeded because Haile-Selassie, in a virtuoso displayof" diplomatic skill, reduced Nkrumah to a minority of two (with Uganda) bydetaching his two main allies, Nasser and Sekou Toure, and reassuring theconservative leaders of the Brazzaville and Monrovia groups that the organiza-tion he proposed would uphold rather than undermine their precious nationalsovereignty.

The 'meaty bit' in each book consists of anything from three to five chaptersdevoted to the relationships between African state structures, and the societiesand economies which they attempt to control. The 'meatiest' of the three isTordoff. It is also the least digestible. Although it covers the research done onAfrican politics over the last 20 years, it fails to give a sen.se of what Africanpolitics is like, Tordoff's approach is broadly institutional. After a chapteron state and society, effectively a discussion of ethnicity and class, he looksin turn at political parties, bureaucracies, militaries and revolutionaryregimes. His technique is to summarize each subject through a discussion of theconclusions reached by the available literature. The impression of a literaturesurvey, indeed, is evident throughout the book, and, despite a lot of usefulmaterial and a great deal of work, it is regrettably a thoroughly disappointingbook. What is missing above all is the author's own perspective—a perspectivein which Tordoff, after a lifetime of teaching in and about Africa, is almostunrivalled. At the end of it all, the reader feels that he should have learnt a lotabout African politics, but he is lefi with very little sense of why it matters, orhow it fits together. And since the exercise is carried out almost entirely atsecond remove, by looking at academics writing about events rather thanevents themselves, it conveys no impression at all of what Africa is like—ol theheat and sweat, torpor and excitement, uncertainty and occasional paralysingfear that make up the environment in which African politicians have to work.

It is an exercise that leads almost automatically to a tedious style. To take aaracteristic passage from the chapter on military regimes:

Finally, even a military regime which claims, with some justification, to

658 Review Article

have intervened to restore stable and democratic government may be suckedinto politics as the boundaries between the military establishment and itssocio-political environment become fragmented: expressed in Luckham'sterms, this means that the guardian state then becomes the praetorian state,carrying the danger that factionalism will sap the military's unity ofpurpose. As Ruth First has pointed out, once in power the military leadershiptends to 'soak up social conflicts like a sponge'—that is, in Lamb's words,'the military organisation immediately becomes vulnerable to social andpolitical pressures from which it was hitherto to some extent protected, and isrequired to operate under conditions and for purposes for which it was notdesigned' (p. 172).

Is it really necessary to cite three different authorities to make such a simplepoint? 1 keep having to remind myself that there is lots of useful material here.It is in many ways a worthy book. But it will certainly not convey any sense ofthe excitement of African politics to anyone who has not already experienced it.

Hodder-Williams's book is better, because it seeks to convey the author'sown views about Africa, There is no attempt to fit the subject into any singletheoretical framework—his approach is, as he says, 'unashamedly eclectic'—but there is certainly a coherence of style and tone. The central chapter on 'thepolitical environment', following a stiff hi.storical introduction, seeks toestablish a picture of what African politics is about: an admirably balanceddiscussion of what he calls 'the extractive view of polities', derived fromuncertainty and scarcity of resources, and linked in turn to ethnic contlict andthe prevalence of patron-client ties. This informs subsequent chapters oninstitutions and on 'the view from below', which relates government to socialstructure, especially at the local level. It is a quiet and solid book, which showsmore the ordinariness than the passion of African politics. It portrays an Africaof suited civil servants and hard-headed peasants, rather than a place wherepeople get so excited about their politics that they kill one another. Whileextraction and corruption are far from overlooked, the book retains a generallysympathetic attitude towards African rulers and elites. There is no hint otdemonology or the carping of the committed, but it makes a lot of points worthmaking: for example, that it is often external capitalists, such as the WorldBank or French businessmen (pp. 157-8) who urge reluctant African leaders tospread the available wealth more evenly among their people; that rural life i.scharacterized above all by 'the essential rationality of the inhabitants' (p, 189);that 'on balance, the more conservative regimes have survived better than theradical ones' (p, 193),

Yet the air of gentle reasonableness which pervades the book is possible atleast partly because Hodder-Williams draws, naturally enough, on those partsof Africa which he knows best—in this case, Anglophone East and CentralAfrica, On the whole, this has been the most peaceful and stable part of thecontinent; Uganda is the glaring exception, but is seen as a one-off horror story,not as a symptom of deeper troubles, and the violence in Zimbabwe can beascribed to the peculiar circumstances of .settler colonialism. There is little hereof the great morass of Zaire, or the traumas of Angola and Mozambique. Staiessuch as Sudan and Ethiopia, and the West African region as a whole, are raidedfor examples without, 1 feel, really affecting the analysis. And an unfamiliaruy

Review Article 659

w ith West Africa is reflected in a series of little errors of a kind that do notappear on the other side of the continent. Flight Lieutenant Rawlings, forinstance, is described as an NCO (p. 129); General Akuffo is mistaken forhis predecessor Acheampong (p. 139); the February 1966 coup in Ghana isreferred to twice as having taken place in January (pp. 142, 146). There is muchthat is true and valuable in Hodder-Williams's view of Africa—especially sinceit emphasizes those features of the continent that tend to get overlooked amongthe dramas of coup, famine and civil war. But it is not the whole picture.

Tangri is the most sympathetic ofthe three to a Marxist approach—althoughby no means entirely committed to it—and he concentrates on topics such aseconomic management and class formation which lend themselves to treatmentin these terms. Unlike many authors of this school, however, he writesadmirably, in short clear sentences, and is unconcerned with issues of doctrinalpurity. Only occasionally does he lapse into the kind of statement to which thisapproach too easily gives rise. I am quite unable to work out what he means, forinstance, when he writes: 'In every country subject to the rule of capital, capitalrules, at the political level. In African countries, the state is run on behalf of theforeign bourgeoisie; it is the state of international capital' (p. 79), Butmercifully, such passages are few. His analysis on the whole reveals the relativeautonomy of the African state, and an excellent section (pp. 50-5) shows howits economic orientation was largely determined by a balance of leadershipideology and class forces within the state itself. His view of African politics isquite as extractive as that of Hodder-Williams, and a good deal less sympatheticto African governing elites, even in 'socialist' states such as Tanzaniaand Mozambique. There is, as he says of Mozambique, 'no certainty that acountry that achieved independence through an armed liberation struggle willprogress automatically towards the building of a socialist order' (p. 75). Yetbehind these disappointments lurks the unstated assumption that the problemlies not in '.socialism' it.self, but in its subversion by bourgeois vested interests,most obviously in the bureaucracy. The key questions of what socialism is, andof what it may be expected to achieve in small dependent states weaklyorganized at both party and bureaucratic levels, remain unasked. It is for thisreason, above all, that Tangri does not adequately fill that gap in the Marxiananalysis of African politics which I have already noted. But this is toconcentrate too much on criticism. There are good sections on the politics ofthe urban poor and the demobilization of the countryside, and the argumentthat ethnicity may best be seen as a manipulation of class interests is plausiblypresented. This is one of the best short and readable introductions to Africanpolitics from a viewpoint broadly sympathetic to the left and is also one of anexcellent first batch of books from a new independent publisher.

In a review written at a time when African fragility and dependence are brought^aily to our attention, in the form both of ecological collapse, as in Sudan andEthiopia, and of state collapse, as in Uganda and Chad, the question of whathelp these books give in understanding the forces at work is unavoidable. Theanswer is, not much. However, one must immediately guard against treating a•-eries of catastrophes, no matter how horrifying, as the normal condition ofthe

660 Review Article

continent, particularly when these are seen through the distorting spectacles ofthe western media. But equally, the problems of Ghana and Chad, Sudan andEthiopia, Zaire and Uganda, Angola and Mozambique, cannot be dismissed asisolated misfortunes, divorced from any general analysis of the nature andperformance of African states. Had the authors been writing now, however,rather than over the last two to six years, these issues would certainly have ratedmore prominence.

This is scarcely the place to attempt an appraisal of the problems of Africanpolitics, but a very quick sketch may provide some perspective. Colonialismimposed on Africa a state framework, separate from local society, and depen-dent—militarily, economically, and organizationally—on the outside imperialpowers. The challenge taken up by nationalist elites at the time of independencewas to accept this framework, yet at the same time trying to integrateindigenous societies into it, in such a way as to create—from the top downwards—a nation-state similar to the European model. It was a challenge of whichthey were very much aware, as the post-independence rhetoric of 'nation-building' indicated, and it should not be assumed that they entirely failed tomeet it. It was, however, a very difficult task, and in many territories a virtuallyimpossible one. Under threat, it was always easiest to fall back on themechanism of the state. The state was an apparatus of control, and in theuncertain world after independence, it was the one thing which the elites didcontrol. It was also an apparatus of extraction, and one in which elites heavilydependent on state employment had a strong vested interest. And mostimportant of all in many ways, it was an organization with privileged access tothe outside worid: created by the international system, and sustained by itdiplomatically (through the support of its colonial patron and other majorpowers, as well as by organizations such as the UN and the OAU), economically(not just by aid, but much more importantly by the external trade whichprovided its government revenues), and if need be militarily as well.

The central problem of African politics has been, therefore, whether (or forhow long) a state thus artificially created, suspended between a domestic societywhich it does not adequately represent, and an international environmentwhich it can do little to infiuence, can bear the strains which this position placeson it. And the fact that African governments have largely succeeded in this taskhas often led observers to take that success for granted, and to look beyond it toother goals, such as economic development or domestic political stability, atwhich they have been less successful. This is the general problem of the booksreviewed here: in concentrating on day-to-day politics (even revolutionarypolitics, which is simply an explicit attempt to do what all African states are infact trying to do), the authors tend to ignore the base on which this politics sits,and to ascribe the more dramatic instances of state failure to particular localcircumstances, rather than to an intensified expression of a universal threat. Allthe authors fail to consider the Hobbesian question of how thin is the crust oforder on which politics depends. And equally, concentrating for the most parton the structure of domestic politics, they tend to ignore the intimate relation-ships between state maintenance and the international order.

The first threat facing African states is that they may fail to maintain theirown apparatus; that the hierarchy of control may fall apart, either because ofits inherent fragility (as in Congo/Zaire at independence), or because of its

Review Article 55]

wanton destruction by its own ruler (as in Uganda under Amin). Theframework of state order, which in industrial states can effectively be taken forgranted, is dependent here on at least a minimum level of competence andcoherence among domestic elites, coupled with support from outside. It isuseful to remember Huntington's point that the traditional concern of politicalscience with what kind of government a state has is secondary to the question ofhow tnuch government it has. All African states are 'soft', in terms of organiza-tional capacity, and their ability to maintain themselves as bureaucracies takesprecedence over issues of either representativeness or policy orientation.

The second threat is that the tension between the state as a mechanism ofcontrol and the society into which it is rather awkwardly meshed may becomeunmanageable; it is possible to detect, in Africa's increasing problems of publicorder, a process by which African societies are coming to avenge themselves onthe states to which they have been subjected.'* As a general rule, however, evenwhen this tension is not fully resolved (through the creation of some w idespreadawareness of national identity), it is nonetheless quite effectively managedthrough the well-tried techniques of patronage and clientelism. These bindtogether a coalition of forces, both within the domestic state and society, and inthe international order, with a vested interest in the state's preservation. Givenreasonable skill at the top, and reasonable acquiescence at the bottom, thestatus quo may be preserved almost indefinitely, with only limited andoccasional need for external military intervention. The danger is that clien-telism provides little basis for any shared sense of identity on which to fall back,should skill and acquiescence fail; and while a combination of domestic andexternal interests is normally enough to sustain the state, an equivalent alliancemay equally be mobilized to fragment it—as in Chad, Angola or Mozambique.'

The third threat is that the imposition of an extractive state, and moregenerally of a parasitic urban community as a whole, may prove too great aburden for a weak and overwhelmingly rural productive base,^ The collapse ofthe Ghanaian state has mainly resulted from the inability of an ever-growinggovernment apparatus to continue extracting resources from an ever-shrinkingrural economy. Famine is likewise, partly though by no means entirely, aconsequence of central government policies which discourage rural production.

A generation after independence, the survival of African states is their mainachievement. And though that survival has still not, in most cases, beenseriously threatened, the conditions on which it rests have become increasinglystark. These books deal, in varying ways, with 'normal' politics. That is, in asense, fair enough: most politics is normal. But the foundations on whichnormality was built now need more urgent examination.

" See Jean-Francois Bayart, 'La revanche des Societes Africaines', Politique Africaine, 11Scpiember 1983.

See R. H. Jackson and C G Rosberg, 'Why Africa's weak states persist'. World Politics, 35i : • ' « ) .

See Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: UrbanBiasin World Development (London,' 'Ple Smith, 1977)—a work ofthe first importance which, strangely, is cited in none of the books'• -wed here.