State and Class in Africa by Nelson Kasfir Nelson Kasfir

Author:Nelson Kasfir, Nelson Kasfir [Nelson Kasfir, Nelson Kasfir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317792086
Google: jlZdAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-16T01:21:24+00:00

Mobutu Sese Seko and the Zairian State: Patrimonialism, State Formation, and Class Formation

The Zairian state is an emerging organisation of domination seeking to expand its domain in a very hostile and uncertain environment, both internally and externally.6 The survival of this patrimonial state never appears assured; uncertainty remains a pervasive fact for the ruler and his political aristocracy.

The state of Mobutu Sese Seko can be conceptualised as an African variant of early modern European absolutism. Responding to a severe crisis of order and authority in Zaire in the early 1960s, Mobutu seized power in a military coup d'état in November 1965. Over time his regime evolved from a relatively typical military autocracy with striking caudillo and Bonapartist characteristics into an African version of an absolutist state with key elements of single-party corporatism, departicipation, and military despotism. The extra-absolutist characteristics of the regime are weakly institutionalised, but nonetheless important supportive elements. This evolution of the regime took place haltingly and unevenly, but surely, and was greatly facilitated by considerable external assistance.7 The Zairian absolutist regime is an authoritarian state organised around a presidential monarch who adopted the Belgian colonial state structure and patrimonialised it by creating an administrative monarchy which was then used to recentralise power. In this state, patriarchal patrimonialism and patrimonial forms of administration, mixed with emerging bureaucratic ones, are both salient characteristics.8 But, like all absolutist states, Mobutu's kingdom has distinctly limited capabilities. Old forms and structures of authority continue to operate. Mobutu has increased his personal discretion beyond the confines of both traditional (precolonial) restraints and modern, legal ones, but has used elements of both for legitimation purposes. He has appropriated the coercive, administrative, and financial means to increase his patriarchal patrimonial power. He has used police and military forces and a cadre of territorial administrators or prefects - the king's men - to control all key societal groups via the corporatist elements of the single party, the Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR), and to emasculate the power of all traditional and quasi-traditional intermediary authorities.

With these coercive and administrative instruments, Mobutu has sought to 'whittle away traditional rules and practices'9 and limit the power of workers, students, churches, etc. This has been an uneven and halting process, but the distinction between state and subject has become increasingly sharp. Like its European predecessors, Zairian absolutism 'c'est tout d'abord l'expression d'une volonté de puissance qui s'est exercée dans tous les domaines'.10 It is a will to dominate, a desire for unification, obedience, and glory; it is an impulse to overwhelm doubt. The authoritarian control structures of absolutism have been so grandiosely promulgated because the reality is often so shallow. Success has been both remarkable and limited. Basic order has been maintained, but with periodic and sometimes significant external assistance. This might be considered an achievement, though a brutal one, given the country's history, but the authority of the Zairian absolutist state often appears like a 'sort of authoritarian bragging which drowns in an often mocking passivity'.11

In the depths of the regions, the norm is disobedience tempered by absolutism.

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