Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference by Cooper Frederick

Author:Cooper, Frederick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Citizenship and the Nation-State in Post-Imperial Africa

And what of citizenship in Africa after the end of empire?56 The picture is mixed. One side is the vigor with which some Africans have defended the citizen’s right to a voice in politics. In 2012, when the incumbent president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, tried to manipulate the electoral system to perpetuate his power—first by allowing himself to get around term limits to run for a third turn, then by fiddling the electoral rules in his favor—young people in Dakar and other cities took to the streets. Rap musicians played a key role in mobilizing youth. The demonstrations succeeded in blocking Wade’s electoral manipulations and—to the surprise of some of my Senegalese friends—the elections turned out to be reasonably fair and resulted in Wade’s defeat and the installation of Macky Sall as president.57 A couple of years later, when Blaise Campaoré, president of Burkina Faso, tried to extend his 27 years in power, similar demonstrations erupted and Campaoré was forced to flee the country and new elections were held. An attempt by Campaoré’s praetorian guard to restore him failed in the face of popular demonstrations led by organizations with names like Balai citoyen (citizen broom), Citoyen africain pour la renaissance (African citizen for the renaissance), and Front de résistance citoyenne (citizen resistance front).58 In other countries as well there has been resurgence of political debate—in print, on radio talk shows, in “radio trottoir” (the street). Such debates have brought out both attachment to states as they exist today—to Uganda, to Kenya, to Benin—and insistence on the part of at least a portion of the public that the state respect the demands and expectations of its citizens.59

Claim-making in the name of citizenship—for political voice and fair elections, for equitable treatment of workers, for public services—does not necessarily triumph. The mobilization of citizens in African countries confronts not just the repressive power of the state but relationships that seem to offer more protection or opportunities than the collective action of citizens: poor people seeking wealthy patrons or people relying on the support of ethnic or religious communities.60 It confronts as well a global economic order in which African states have limited means to fulfill the expectations of their citizens for a decent standard of living.

Citizenship in its national sense is not always an unmitigated blessing; it can be the basis of xenophobic politics as well as civic order. In South Africa, mobs of young men have beaten and sometimes killed immigrants from neighboring countries who were selling things on the street or seeking low-skilled work. The mobs proclaim the desire to keep jobs in South Africa in the hands of South Africans. They do not recall the importance of regional connections in the struggle against apartheid. Such xenophobic behavior reflects, in this instance, the triumph of state-defined boundaries over webs of connection that at one time were important parts of people’s lives.61

Similarly, the Côte d’Ivoire had long attracted migrants from a wide region, and it shared

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