Rethinking Third World Politics by Manor James

Author:Manor, James.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Chapter Seven

The Show of State in a Neo-Colonial Twilight: Francophone Africa

Donal B. Cruise O’Brien

The inhabitants of African states, whether they should properly be designated citizens or subjects, do not readily regard their rulers as providing a legitimate authority, and state power does not rest on a secure foundation of popular belief in the right of rulers to rule. Nearly three decades of independent African government have led to situations where it is the decomposition of state structures, the tendency to de-institutionalisation, which are remarked. Richard Sandbrook puts it bluntly, but he speaks for many when he talks of fictitious states.1 This may be a mot juste in certain African circumstances (Uganda, Chad at a certain period, etc.), but one should recognise a widely variable African capacity to sustain this fiction.

The African states have in general survived, some in better condition than others, after some thirty years of independence. It may be suggested that this survival of the state should redirect our attention to the pre-colonial history of the political entities subsumed within the state. While it is clear on the one hand that the state in its modern form (with bureaucracy, fixed boundaries, standing army, police) is largely a European import, or a graft, it may be on the other hand that the graft will take more readily where there is an approximate fit with some precedent socio-political reality. This ‘fit’ may not always (or ever?) be readily discernible, may not be explicitly recognised by the political actors concerned, but it is in principle an important issue for the success or otherwise of the European graft of state.

Three decades of independence seem to have witnessed the emergence of something like an African style of statehood, not indeed of reassuring institutional solidity, but remarkable enough in terms both of the political inventiveness deployed by those who have charge of the state, the political elite, and of skills deployed by those who seek to avoid the state. Between the ambitions of the elite and the survival strategems of the masses, the state often appears to survive essentially as a show, a political drama with an audience more or less willing to suspend its disbelief. The audience in question lies both within the boundaries of the state and in the international arena: the material basis of the African state lies in the manipulation of relations between these two sets of spectators. Jean-François Bayart’s assessment is thus that ‘the groups which hold power in Africa live, in the main, from the rents which they procure from their intermediary position towards the international system’.2 In this intermediary role, it is the display of state which must satisfy the ‘international system’ with its increasingly impatient creditors and its frustrated multinational businessmen as well as its various bureaucracies and its information-gathering officials.

The show of state also plays to a home audience, with a display of institutional activity in the form of ministerial bureaucracies, of courts, of agencies of ‘development’. Such institutions are unlikely to be accepted at

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