Politics in Africa

POLITICS IN AFRICA

SÉANCE 2:

Intro:

Africa is the continent on earth with greatest genetic diversity. Idea that the human race started in Africa and got out of there.

Religion was replaced by race in the more modern times (17th century). Idea of pure blood, blood is what is going to be the way of distinguishing people. Africa was gradually rationalized.

Origins of African states:

        States and societies in the “longue durée”

1. Beyond the state and the segmentary

1. Jeffrey Herbst: geographical and democratic constraints on broadcasting on African settings

The main challenge for Africa’s development was very low population density. Africa reached in 1975 the same pop density than Europe in 1500 => underpopulation.

Low pop density has political consequences. Control of the people is more important than control of territory. War and taxation set the basis of state building.

Most of African agriculture was shifting agriculture. They kept shifting and moving because there was no irrigation. More flexible but less productivity of the agriculture.

African states didn’t spend a lot of energy in military domains, because states only needed small armies.

Traders more than peasant contribute for the capital/resources of the state.

Why few social revolutions? In Europe with the increasing of taxations came social movements. In Africa, because the exit option was so easy, instead of protest, peasant would leave the lands and settle elsewhere.

The leaders of colonial entities didn’t bother on control the borders, which means moving was easy.

Loosing adequations between identities and polities. -> The leaders don’t have the incentive to homogenize the pop. Leaders were interested in extorting taxes from the peasants.

To build a state, you needed a high level of coercion. The lack of pop density explains the intern slavery.

The decentralization was the only way for leaders to keep entities grow with power, otherwise entities would easily break if too harsh.

In Africa, there was a lot of different regimes (city states, oligarchy republics…). Africa was synonym to statelessness.

• Evans Pritchard  (“stateless societies)

Segmentary society = society in which coercive power is not held by a specific institution or authority, like a bureaucracy… no centralized coercive power.

Society is divided in segments, base on clanship. There’s only temporary coalition of segment or segments (in war times for instance).

What best describes those societies is organized anarchy. There was stability, internal capacity to regulate the tensions of the group. Most of these societies proved to be the fiercest societies against colonial forces. They were difficult to defeat. The systems could last by hundreds of years.

They caused problems to colonial rule because in their societies no one was designated chief, so Europeans had to designate a chief within the society that they would refuse. There was a strong refusal to develop state institutions. He puts African societies in boxes, there were labelled. This caused a lot of criticism. It’s still improper to have a linear view.

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