The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty by Amy Niang

Author:Amy Niang [Niang, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, History & Theory, African, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781786606549
Google: VYN2DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42063531
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2018-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

121Chapter 4

Statization and Centralizing Processes

in Eighteenth-Century Moogo

Introduction

Kopytoff posits an idea of the frontier as the production of similarly structured polities out of a complex ‘political core’ (1989, 3). The frontier thesis debunks evolutionary theories that conceptualize states as stemming from hypothetical archaic bands evolving into small polities and then into a variety of centralized states. The process of fission conceptualized in the frontier thesis resonates with Sahlins’ ‘heroic mode’, which attempts to explain the territorial expansion of core polities as a consolidation of the influence of ruling dynasties as they deploy power and cultural practices across outlying territories—in other words, physical and sociocultural frontiers (Sahlins 1983, 522).

In the Voltaic region, fission happened in an uneven manner, spreading lineage clusters across what would subsequently become Moogo. While the somewhat deterministic outlook of the frontier thesis does call for some relativization, it provides a usefully broad scaffolding for thinking about the fragmentation of the Naam. The fission of the Naam was primarily a strategy designed to make room for the countless contenders to a naam.

The Mossi Naam is characterized by a structure of authority which projects power as a tool of diffusion internally to effect a homogeneous political system replicated at all levels of authority, and externally to endow the state with greater territorial and political resources. At the core of this chapter is the widely perceived problem of how complex political systems emerged in West African societies, and therefore how political science may lay claim to the precolonial past and how through theoretical engagement with oral histories it can account for the nature of continuity, change, diversity and divergence and can cut through flawed accounts of the contemporary state in Africa. It 122does so using the politico-ideological logic of the Naam as a core principle of state formation in Moogo.

This chapter further shows how social integration, both a condition and product of the consolidation of state legitimacy, was a function of ritual, blood and political alliances within a historically diverse society. It also shows how the state negotiated territoriality, ‘ethnicity’ and social differentiation in its attempt to consolidate and stabilize state institutions through the elaboration of new rules and the implantation of new capital cities in the middle and end of the eighteenth century.

This historicity of the Naam in turn informs identity and the assimilation process of non-Mossi groups into wider Mossi society. I explain the making of mossiness (homogeneization and assimilation) not through bureaucratization or state-led ideology alone but through the penetration of the realm of Tenga by that of the Naam, in other words, the colonization of culture by politics. In the absence of technologies of effective enforcement, Mossi ideology spread into pre-existing society progressively and gradually.1 This development was a combination of intentionality and more or less deliberate propagation.

In exploring the making of political identity in Moogo, this chapter argues that the Naam’s confinement in things political does not prevent state ideology from ‘spilling over’ into the realm of Tenga. In fact, the very logic of political competition and territorial claims converged, and these drew Tenga into the realm of the Naam and vice-versa.

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