Recently, I attended an important conference at Cornell University on ‘Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa’ where I gave a keynote address in which I sought to reflect on the history of African nationalism over the last two centuries during which nationalism has been one of the world’s most important ideas and instruments of political leverage and legitimacy. It is clear nationalism has had a checkered career. Once valorized for its emancipatory possibilities, nationalism is now often vilified among many scholars, especially in the global North, for its alleged primordial pathologies. In the delirious discourses of globalization and the antifoundationalist anxieties of the ‘posts’—poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism—both the ideology of nationalism and its institutional anchor, the nation-state, are thought to be historically outdated, relics of discredited geographies and histories, incapable of shaping the trajectory of contemporary politics, economy, and culture. How true is this for Africa?
I would like to argue against the indiscriminate dismissal of nationalism, the need to distinguish the problematics and projects of nationalism, between the repressive nationalisms of imperialism and the progressive nationalisms of anticolonial resistance, between the nationalisms that led to colonial conquest and genocide and those that sought decolonization and liberation for oppressed nations and communities, between struggles for domination and struggles for freedom, between the reactionary, reformist, or revolutionary goals of various nationalisms. Socially, nationalism has diverse ethnic and civic dynamics; spatially, territorial and transnational dimensions. Its ideological and intellectual referents and representations also vary. Nationalism is, indeed, a house of many mansions. The nation-state remains a crucial site of organization of social life, a meaningful and coherent space of struggle for empowerment for billions of people across the world outside the imagined freedoms of transnational flows and identities that are often celebrated by so-called cosmopolitan intellectuals.
The fashionable repudiation of nationalism, and in the case of the Afropessimists of its proudest moment for Africa—decolonization—is ultimately a disavowal of history, an act of willful amnesia against the past and the future. Against the past because it forgets, in the case of Africa that the progressive nationalist project, which is far from realization, has always had many dimensions in terms of its composition, objectives, and tendencies. Some postcolonial critics dismiss nationalism because of its alleged mimetism and elitism; that it was a mimic and elite project derived from the master-narrative of European nationalism and colonial discourse. This echoes the charges by colonial ideologues at the height of empire that Africa had no history outside Europe, that the misguided nationalists were misleading the innocent masses, as if the masses had no material interests and imagination for a social order different from the colonial one and were not invested in elements of the nationalist project led or articulated by the elites. It is simply self-saving mystification, if not anti-intellectualist, to claim as some do that as intellectuals we can never understand what the subalterns say, think, or desire.
The widespread notion that nationalism was invented in Europe and exported to the rest of the world as a turnkey project is rooted in Eurocentric historiography, the teleological conceit of Europe as the original site of all modern phenomena that the rest of the world is doomed to follow, to repeat, without variation. It is a narrative that universalizes the ‘West’ and provincializes the ‘Rest’, a historical fiction that needs to be discarded. There can little doubt that nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial world has its own distinctive moments, motivations and meanings, its specific projects, possibilities, perils and even perversions rooted in their own histories and modernities. Certainly, notwithstanding any apparent parallels, African nationalism could not be a mere replica of nationalisms in Europe given Africa’s unique historical experiences with the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism and imperialism perpetrated by that very Europe that engendered Africa’s assorted brands of nationalism. In any case, nationalism was not an idea taught or diffused selflessly to the hapless ‘natives’ by the colonizers, but an insurgent initiative by the colonized to recover their history and humanity so cruelly seized by Europe. This is to caution against the tired practice of writing African history by analogy and subsuming it to European history, of confining African nationalism to the historical path allegedly already trodden by Europe.
Clearly, nationalism has never simply been an idea, a representational discourse or an ideological pastime of the elites; it has also entailed conditions of material dispensation, concrete struggles over resources and livelihoods that are of utmost concern to the so-called masses. And it encompasses other less tangible, but no less important moral and psychic dimensions: the striving for a sense of collective wellbeing, dignity, and integrity. Thus, there are political, economic, and cultural articulations of nationalism, although it is often difficult to separate them from each other, and nationalism is often aimed as much at existential empowerment as epistemic emancipation. In short, nationalism represents a constellation of ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, practices, activities, movements, and organizations, in which collective consciousness and action are mobilized to construct and promote national identity, historical agency, and cultural difference for the invented or imagined community—to use that poular term of nationalist historiography—that may, and often does, entail acquiring and defending state power. Clearly, the vocabularies and manifestations of nationalism exhibit enormous variations from one place to another and one period to another.
African nationalism was certainly marked by diversity so that it is quite difficult to define its parameters. Part of the challenge concerns the social and spatial boundaries of African nationalism, the units upon which it was based given the fact that African colonial states were an imperial cartographic invention that brought together disparate groups: in Ali Mazrui’s poignant phrase, colonialism separated people who had been together and brought together people who had been separate. Colonial states and societies in Africa were, and their postcolonial successors are, almost invariably multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and often multi-religious, and sometimes multi-racial. Under such circumstances, what is, or what can be the basis of nationalism? The pluralism of African countries has sometimes been used to point to the artificiality of African states and to the impossibility of creating coherent nations, and is used to discredit the legitimacy or integrity of African nationalism. This charge presumes that there are some ‘natural countries’ with ‘natural boundaries.’ Such countries hardly exist anywhere in the modern world. Which nations today have existed as unchanging entities for centuries and enjoy cultural or ethnic homogeneity?
The search for nationalism in the singular is obviously unhelpful not only for Africa but for much of the world as well. All nationalisms are not only constructions, but they are often multiple in their manifestations. The more useful question then might be: what are the main forms of nationalism and what are their connections, contradictions, and conflicts? For African nationalism the tendency has been to conceptualize and classify nationalisms in terms of periodization, social composition, spatial scope, and their objectives. In the first instance, distinctions are often made between colonial and postcolonial nationalisms. Second, elite and mass nationalisms are sometimes distinguished from each other. Third, differentiations are usually made between ethnic, national, regional, and Pan-African expressions of nationalism. Finally, ideological distinctions can be drawn between different secular or religious, liberal or socialist nationalisms, etc.
To be sure, these categorizations are not mutually exclusive. It is often said, for example, that early nationalist movements were elitist before mass nationalism developed in the aftermath of the vast depredations of the Great Depression and the Second World War that galvanized the masses. In this case, the social constructs of nationalism are given a temporal framing. In fact, I am inclined to argue that while classifications cannot be avoided because of their heuristic value, our analyses of nationalism, as of other historical phenomena, must always be attentive to the sheer messiness of social reality, the dangers of forcing complex social movements into sealed boxes of mutual exclusivity. In particular we need to beware of dichotomous models. For this reason, I would propose more varied periodizations for the different nationalisms and their intersections in different parts of Africa. This is to suggest that we need to resist the temptation to homogenize developments across Africa.
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that amidst all its internal complexities and diversities, African nationalism—with a capital N—was a project that sought to achieve what Thandika Mkandawire has insightfully called five historic and humanistic tasks: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration. In other words, in spatial terms African nationalism was a territorial, regional, and transnational nationalism; in social terms a democratic and developmentalist nationalism. Even a cursory glance at the archive of African nationalism shows that since the nineteenth century African nationalists were as concerned with their specific societies as they were about Pan-Africanism and other internationalist movements and ideologies. The reasons for this lie in the fact that the experiences of imperialism and colonialism, from whose exploitative and oppressive entrails new collective African identities and struggles emerged, were experienced at local, regional, and international scales, so that they were simultaneously localizing, regionalizing, and internationalizing. The fact that the dreams of African nationalism have yet to be fully achieved is not an argument for their irrelevance. In fact, I would submit, much of the anguish in Africa and the angst of its intelligentsia are engendered by the unfulfilled promises of Uhuru.
African nationlism was born and bred in the tumultuous maelstrom of European imperialism that began with the Atlantic slave trade and culminated in the continent’s colonization which engendered the dangerous fictions of civilizational difference between Africa and Europe and the destructive realities of mass exploitation and oppression. From its inception, then, African nationalism had a dual face: it was a struggle against European rule and hegemony and a struggle for African autonomy and reconstruction, a drive to substitute European suzerainty with African sovereignty, to recapture Africa’s historical and humanistic agency. Thus African nationalism was both a revolt against Europe and a reaffirmation of Africa. It was woven out of many strands. Ignited and refueled by local and specific grievances against colonial oppression and exploitation, it drew ideological inspiration from diverse sources, including those from Africa itself, the African diaspora, Europe, and the colonial and ex-colonial worlds of Asia and Latin America. If the nationalist movement constituted the primary institutional vehicle for nationalist expression and struggle, decolonization was the immediate objective. Clearly, the African nationalism that was championed by the nationalist movements and intelligentsia was forward-looking, notwithstanding the appeals to tradition and the African past. It sought to build new societies, to refashion precolonial and colonial cultures, the registers of nativity and coloniality, into a new African modernity or rather modernities.
It cannot be overemphasized the nature and dynamics of African nationalism were exceedingly complex. To begin with, the spatial and social locus of the ‘nation’ imagined by the nationalists was fluid. It could entail the expansive visions of Pan-African liberation and integration, territorial nation building, or the invocation of ethnic identities. Secular and religious visions also competed for ascendancy. Some nationalists wanted the future political kingdom to follow the edicts of Islam, others preferred capitalism stripped of its colonial associations, and yet others professed various socialisms—Marxist, African or Arab. These visions were often inspired as much by internal discourses as by the need to make gestures to foreign ideological friends. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of great intellectual ferment, which saw a flowering of African thought and creativity in literature, the arts, and political philosophy. Thus decolonization was also a literary movement, a cognitive protest against the imperial epistemic order and its erasures, distortions and fabrications of Africa.
Articulated and fought on many fronts—the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual—nationalism embodied self-conscious struggles by African peoples to protect and promote their interests and identities through the assumption of colonial state power. The development of nationalism of course varied from colony to colony, even in colonies under the same imperial power, depending on such factors as the way the colony had been acquired and was administered, the presence or absence of European settlers, the traditions of resistance, the social composition of the nationalist movement and its type of leadership. Anti-colonialism was expressed through political and civic organizations, including professional parties, youth organizations, welfare associations, ethnic movements, and trade unions, as well as cultural and religious organizations, such as independent churches, and peasant movements.
Each of these movements had its own spaces and strategies of struggle. Almost invariably the political and civic organizations were led by urban based elites, although their members were drawn from both urban and rural areas especially as mass political parties developed. The membership of the cultural and religious organizations was similarly broad in their spatial identities. The peasant movements were largely confined to the rural areas, although some of their leaders and ideas might be drawn from urban elites and workers. Campaigns, petitions, demonstrations and boycotts were the weapons of choice by the political parties and civic associations. In addition to using some of these tactics, trade unions wielded the strike weapon, while the independent churches encouraged their members to disobey colonial laws, boycott colonial institutions, and sabotage colonial infrastructure. Rural peasants engaged in both individual and collective acts of protest, including flight, evasion of taxes, agricultural regulations, and official markets, harassment and attacks on chiefs and their minions, and they undertook episodic holdups and rebellions to protect their land, livestock, and livelihoods.
It was often assumed in old histories of African nationalism that women were not as involved as men. Research conducted since the 1970s shows that this was clearly not the case, although women’s participation varied among the movements identified above, depending on their gender dynamics. The nationalist movements contained many illustrious women leaders and activists. Women were to be found in the political parties, trade unions, independent churches, welfare associations, peasant movements, and as combatants in the liberation struggles of Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. There were also protests organized entirely by women. Renowned examples include the Aba Women’s War of 1929 in Nigeria, the Anlu Women’s uprising in the Cameroons, and the spontaneous uprisings of South African women in the 1950s. But as might be expected given the under presentation of women in the wage labor force during the colonial period, women’s presence and activism was more evident in peasant than in labor movements. Similarly, the likelihood of women being leaders in cultural and religious movements was higher than in political and civic movements led by the educated elite in so far as women’s access to colonial education was limited.
African nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent at least four phases. The first phase consisted of the varied resistances against colonial conquest itself. These were struggles to retain existing African sovereignties. The second phase was marked by struggles to reform colonialism in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of what used to be called ‘primary resistance’. The third phase was characterized by the drive to remove colonialism. The fourth phase sought to recreate independence. To use the colonial-postcolonial typology, the first three were characteristic of colonial nationalisms and the last of postcolonial nationalisms—the grueling challenges of trying to create viable nation-states in the face of turbulent transformations in the constellation of domestic social forces, including in some cases the crumbling of the nationalist coalition into its constituent ethnic, class, cultural, and gender separatisms, as well the recurrent interventions of outside powers and the cruel sanctions of the global political economy.
It stands to reason that the timing, trajectories, and facilitating factors of these phases differed from colony to colony and country to country, as did the identities of the main actors, their strategies, and the languages and weapons of combat change over time. The differences are quite evident if we look at the temporal span of the decolonization drama. If we take the restoration of the monarchy in Egypt in 1922 as the beginning and the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 as its end, then decolonization lasted 72 years, although the bulk of African states got their independence in the two decades between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. The winds of political change were initially concentrated in North and West Africa before they started blowing across the settler laagers of Southern Africa. The process of decolonization involved both peaceful transitions and liberation wars and local accommodations and international conflicts. Almost invariably, the later the decolonization, the more violent it was.
As on many topics in African history, decolonization is a subject that has generated spirited debate. Some argue that African nationalism was primarily responsible for the dismantling of the colonial empires. Others contend it was a product of imperial policy and planning. And there are those who seek to place decolonization in the context of changes in the world system. It would seem to me that a process as complex as decolonization was undoubtedly a product of many factors. It involved an interplay of the prevailing international situation, the policies of the colonial powers, and the nature and strength of the nationalist movements, which in turn, reflected internal conditions both in the metropoles and the colonies and the ideologies and visions of the postcolonial world. There were clearly variations in the patterns of decolonization among regions and colonies conditioned by the way in which these factors coalesced and manifested themselves. Decolonization was also affected by the relative presence and power of European settlers and each colony’s perceived strategic importance.
Decolonization was undoubtedly a great achievement for colonized peoples, of anti-colonial nationalism, one of the monumental events of the twentieth century. With the demise of apartheid African nationalism could claim to have achieved its first historic and humanistic agenda. What about the other four agendas: nation building, development, democracy, and regional integration? It is of course not possible here to provide a full stocktaking of the last half-century of African history. Suffice it to say, the record of performance is extremely complex and uneven across postcolonial periods, countries and regions, social classes, economic sectors, genders and age groups, which fit neither into the unrelenting gloom of the Afropessimists or the unyielding hopes of the Afroptimists.
What can be said with certainty is that postcolonial Africa has undergone profound transformations in some areas and not in others. Nation building exhibits palpable contradictions: both state and ethnic nationalisms are probably both stronger now than at independence. National and ethnic identities and the struggles over them eclipse the Pan-African nationalisms within the continent and with the diaspora, although the latter are experiencing renewal in the thickening circuits of regional mobility and integration schemes, transnational migrations and globalization including the emergence of new African diasporas. Thus, the dreams of regional integration have been compromised on the stakes of nation building, but are stirring more vigorously than before.
Development remains elusive amidst the rapid growth of the early post-independence era, the debilitating recessions of the lost structural adjustment decades, and the tentative recoveries of more recent years; but the African population is much bigger than at independence, currently stampeding towards a billion despite all the calamities of war, disease, and natural disasters; and this population is more educated, more socially differentiated, and more youthful than ever. And democracy is cautiously emerging on the backs of expanding and energized civil societies and popular struggles for the ‘second independence’, from the suffocating tentacles of one party state and military authoritarianisms, notwithstanding the blockages, reversals, and the chicaneries of Africa’s wily dictators adorning ill-fitting democratic garbs.
Clearly, nationalism is one of the great intellectual and ideological forces of modern African history. Contemporary Africa is simply inconceivable without understanding the role and impact played by nationalism which gave rise to postcolonial African states as they are currently configured and the imperatives for self-determination and development that have driven African political cultures and imaginaries. Trying to unpack the historical dynamics of African nationalism—its causes, constructions, compositions, contexts, courses, and consequences—is immensely complicated but critical to mapping more productive futures for Africa by separating the retrogressive nationalisms of ethnicity and religion that have wrecked some parts of postcolonial Africa from the progressive civic, regional and Pan-African nationalisms that are indispensable for Africa’s historic and humanistic reconstruction.
First Written October 6, 2006
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We are again using Eurocentric models (habit) to explain what is obvious. Africans love their respective countries and so do Europeans but the difference is that it becomes a power trip for Europeans to be as we are today in present societal milieu. It is a different matter to be a nationalist but if you seek to destroy other cultures to makes yours superior, then that is not nationalism.
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Yes there is nationalism (Tribalism) in Africa that is way we have the civili war in Darfur, the fighting in Nigeria, Chad , and many other African cultures. Nationalism is a curse . Its ugly head leads only to death and distruction as people fight to found their own nation(s). These movements are usually led by people seeking to rule others so they can get money and wealth from the West.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Nationalism doesn't have to be a curse, under the right circumstances. The global working class has got to be the most disorganized social group I ever known. It is no accident that ruling elites world over, who are almost universally greatly outnumbered by the ordinary working class layers, are where they are, because they are more organized and quite conscious of where their interests converge and diverge.
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Tribal groups (wherever they are located) have never gone beyond their homeland boundaries so they are engulfed in the most barbaric forms of conflict as they know and that shows in Africa. Groups who see beyond tribal identity and that means they must move away from their 'roots' gain the insight that if I can manipulate without killing, I can have people come to my cause and have them "kiss my arse", and they will enjoy it. It means I have to develop a strategy to keep my enemies eating from my hands and profit from their ignorance and use their own lack of insight to my benefit. That is modernism, albeit a present strategy in the present social milieu and we are not aware of it.
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quote:Originally posted by Arwa: By Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Recently, I attended an important conference at Cornell University on ‘Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa’ where I gave a keynote address in which I sought to reflect on the history of African nationalism over the last two centuries during which nationalism has been one of the world’s most important ideas and instruments of political leverage and legitimacy. It is clear nationalism has had a checkered career. Once valorized for its emancipatory possibilities, nationalism is now often vilified among many scholars, especially in the global North, for its alleged primordial pathologies. In the delirious discourses of globalization and the antifoundationalist anxieties of the ‘posts’—poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism—both the ideology of nationalism and its institutional anchor, the nation-state, are thought to be historically outdated, relics of discredited geographies and histories, incapable of shaping the trajectory of contemporary politics, economy, and culture. How true is this for Africa?
I would like to argue against the indiscriminate dismissal of nationalism, the need to distinguish the problematics and projects of nationalism, between the repressive nationalisms of imperialism and the progressive nationalisms of anticolonial resistance, between the nationalisms that led to colonial conquest and genocide and those that sought decolonization and liberation for oppressed nations and communities, between struggles for domination and struggles for freedom, between the reactionary, reformist, or revolutionary goals of various nationalisms. Socially, nationalism has diverse ethnic and civic dynamics; spatially, territorial and transnational dimensions. Its ideological and intellectual referents and representations also vary. Nationalism is, indeed, a house of many mansions. The nation-state remains a crucial site of organization of social life, a meaningful and coherent space of struggle for empowerment for billions of people across the world outside the imagined freedoms of transnational flows and identities that are often celebrated by so-called cosmopolitan intellectuals.
The fashionable repudiation of nationalism, and in the case of the Afropessimists of its proudest moment for Africa—decolonization—is ultimately a disavowal of history, an act of willful amnesia against the past and the future. Against the past because it forgets, in the case of Africa that the progressive nationalist project, which is far from realization, has always had many dimensions in terms of its composition, objectives, and tendencies. Some postcolonial critics dismiss nationalism because of its alleged mimetism and elitism; that it was a mimic and elite project derived from the master-narrative of European nationalism and colonial discourse. This echoes the charges by colonial ideologues at the height of empire that Africa had no history outside Europe, that the misguided nationalists were misleading the innocent masses, as if the masses had no material interests and imagination for a social order different from the colonial one and were not invested in elements of the nationalist project led or articulated by the elites. It is simply self-saving mystification, if not anti-intellectualist, to claim as some do that as intellectuals we can never understand what the subalterns say, think, or desire.
The widespread notion that nationalism was invented in Europe and exported to the rest of the world as a turnkey project is rooted in Eurocentric historiography, the teleological conceit of Europe as the original site of all modern phenomena that the rest of the world is doomed to follow, to repeat, without variation. It is a narrative that universalizes the ‘West’ and provincializes the ‘Rest’, a historical fiction that needs to be discarded. There can little doubt that nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial world has its own distinctive moments, motivations and meanings, its specific projects, possibilities, perils and even perversions rooted in their own histories and modernities. Certainly, notwithstanding any apparent parallels, African nationalism could not be a mere replica of nationalisms in Europe given Africa’s unique historical experiences with the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism and imperialism perpetrated by that very Europe that engendered Africa’s assorted brands of nationalism. In any case, nationalism was not an idea taught or diffused selflessly to the hapless ‘natives’ by the colonizers, but an insurgent initiative by the colonized to recover their history and humanity so cruelly seized by Europe. This is to caution against the tired practice of writing African history by analogy and subsuming it to European history, of confining African nationalism to the historical path allegedly already trodden by Europe.
Clearly, nationalism has never simply been an idea, a representational discourse or an ideological pastime of the elites; it has also entailed conditions of material dispensation, concrete struggles over resources and livelihoods that are of utmost concern to the so-called masses. And it encompasses other less tangible, but no less important moral and psychic dimensions: the striving for a sense of collective wellbeing, dignity, and integrity. Thus, there are political, economic, and cultural articulations of nationalism, although it is often difficult to separate them from each other, and nationalism is often aimed as much at existential empowerment as epistemic emancipation. In short, nationalism represents a constellation of ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, practices, activities, movements, and organizations, in which collective consciousness and action are mobilized to construct and promote national identity, historical agency, and cultural difference for the invented or imagined community—to use that poular term of nationalist historiography—that may, and often does, entail acquiring and defending state power. Clearly, the vocabularies and manifestations of nationalism exhibit enormous variations from one place to another and one period to another.
African nationalism was certainly marked by diversity so that it is quite difficult to define its parameters. Part of the challenge concerns the social and spatial boundaries of African nationalism, the units upon which it was based given the fact that African colonial states were an imperial cartographic invention that brought together disparate groups: in Ali Mazrui’s poignant phrase, colonialism separated people who had been together and brought together people who had been separate. Colonial states and societies in Africa were, and their postcolonial successors are, almost invariably multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and often multi-religious, and sometimes multi-racial. Under such circumstances, what is, or what can be the basis of nationalism? The pluralism of African countries has sometimes been used to point to the artificiality of African states and to the impossibility of creating coherent nations, and is used to discredit the legitimacy or integrity of African nationalism. This charge presumes that there are some ‘natural countries’ with ‘natural boundaries.’ Such countries hardly exist anywhere in the modern world. Which nations today have existed as unchanging entities for centuries and enjoy cultural or ethnic homogeneity?
The search for nationalism in the singular is obviously unhelpful not only for Africa but for much of the world as well. All nationalisms are not only constructions, but they are often multiple in their manifestations. The more useful question then might be: what are the main forms of nationalism and what are their connections, contradictions, and conflicts? For African nationalism the tendency has been to conceptualize and classify nationalisms in terms of periodization, social composition, spatial scope, and their objectives. In the first instance, distinctions are often made between colonial and postcolonial nationalisms. Second, elite and mass nationalisms are sometimes distinguished from each other. Third, differentiations are usually made between ethnic, national, regional, and Pan-African expressions of nationalism. Finally, ideological distinctions can be drawn between different secular or religious, liberal or socialist nationalisms, etc.
To be sure, these categorizations are not mutually exclusive. It is often said, for example, that early nationalist movements were elitist before mass nationalism developed in the aftermath of the vast depredations of the Great Depression and the Second World War that galvanized the masses. In this case, the social constructs of nationalism are given a temporal framing. In fact, I am inclined to argue that while classifications cannot be avoided because of their heuristic value, our analyses of nationalism, as of other historical phenomena, must always be attentive to the sheer messiness of social reality, the dangers of forcing complex social movements into sealed boxes of mutual exclusivity. In particular we need to beware of dichotomous models. For this reason, I would propose more varied periodizations for the different nationalisms and their intersections in different parts of Africa. This is to suggest that we need to resist the temptation to homogenize developments across Africa.
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that amidst all its internal complexities and diversities, African nationalism—with a capital N—was a project that sought to achieve what Thandika Mkandawire has insightfully called five historic and humanistic tasks: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration. In other words, in spatial terms African nationalism was a territorial, regional, and transnational nationalism; in social terms a democratic and developmentalist nationalism. Even a cursory glance at the archive of African nationalism shows that since the nineteenth century African nationalists were as concerned with their specific societies as they were about Pan-Africanism and other internationalist movements and ideologies. The reasons for this lie in the fact that the experiences of imperialism and colonialism, from whose exploitative and oppressive entrails new collective African identities and struggles emerged, were experienced at local, regional, and international scales, so that they were simultaneously localizing, regionalizing, and internationalizing. The fact that the dreams of African nationalism have yet to be fully achieved is not an argument for their irrelevance. In fact, I would submit, much of the anguish in Africa and the angst of its intelligentsia are engendered by the unfulfilled promises of Uhuru.
African nationlism was born and bred in the tumultuous maelstrom of European imperialism that began with the Atlantic slave trade and culminated in the continent’s colonization which engendered the dangerous fictions of civilizational difference between Africa and Europe and the destructive realities of mass exploitation and oppression. From its inception, then, African nationalism had a dual face: it was a struggle against European rule and hegemony and a struggle for African autonomy and reconstruction, a drive to substitute European suzerainty with African sovereignty, to recapture Africa’s historical and humanistic agency. Thus African nationalism was both a revolt against Europe and a reaffirmation of Africa. It was woven out of many strands. Ignited and refueled by local and specific grievances against colonial oppression and exploitation, it drew ideological inspiration from diverse sources, including those from Africa itself, the African diaspora, Europe, and the colonial and ex-colonial worlds of Asia and Latin America. If the nationalist movement constituted the primary institutional vehicle for nationalist expression and struggle, decolonization was the immediate objective. Clearly, the African nationalism that was championed by the nationalist movements and intelligentsia was forward-looking, notwithstanding the appeals to tradition and the African past. It sought to build new societies, to refashion precolonial and colonial cultures, the registers of nativity and coloniality, into a new African modernity or rather modernities.
It cannot be overemphasized the nature and dynamics of African nationalism were exceedingly complex. To begin with, the spatial and social locus of the ‘nation’ imagined by the nationalists was fluid. It could entail the expansive visions of Pan-African liberation and integration, territorial nation building, or the invocation of ethnic identities. Secular and religious visions also competed for ascendancy. Some nationalists wanted the future political kingdom to follow the edicts of Islam, others preferred capitalism stripped of its colonial associations, and yet others professed various socialisms—Marxist, African or Arab. These visions were often inspired as much by internal discourses as by the need to make gestures to foreign ideological friends. The 1950s and 1960s were a period of great intellectual ferment, which saw a flowering of African thought and creativity in literature, the arts, and political philosophy. Thus decolonization was also a literary movement, a cognitive protest against the imperial epistemic order and its erasures, distortions and fabrications of Africa.
Articulated and fought on many fronts—the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual—nationalism embodied self-conscious struggles by African peoples to protect and promote their interests and identities through the assumption of colonial state power. The development of nationalism of course varied from colony to colony, even in colonies under the same imperial power, depending on such factors as the way the colony had been acquired and was administered, the presence or absence of European settlers, the traditions of resistance, the social composition of the nationalist movement and its type of leadership. Anti-colonialism was expressed through political and civic organizations, including professional parties, youth organizations, welfare associations, ethnic movements, and trade unions, as well as cultural and religious organizations, such as independent churches, and peasant movements.
Each of these movements had its own spaces and strategies of struggle. Almost invariably the political and civic organizations were led by urban based elites, although their members were drawn from both urban and rural areas especially as mass political parties developed. The membership of the cultural and religious organizations was similarly broad in their spatial identities. The peasant movements were largely confined to the rural areas, although some of their leaders and ideas might be drawn from urban elites and workers. Campaigns, petitions, demonstrations and boycotts were the weapons of choice by the political parties and civic associations. In addition to using some of these tactics, trade unions wielded the strike weapon, while the independent churches encouraged their members to disobey colonial laws, boycott colonial institutions, and sabotage colonial infrastructure. Rural peasants engaged in both individual and collective acts of protest, including flight, evasion of taxes, agricultural regulations, and official markets, harassment and attacks on chiefs and their minions, and they undertook episodic holdups and rebellions to protect their land, livestock, and livelihoods.
It was often assumed in old histories of African nationalism that women were not as involved as men. Research conducted since the 1970s shows that this was clearly not the case, although women’s participation varied among the movements identified above, depending on their gender dynamics. The nationalist movements contained many illustrious women leaders and activists. Women were to be found in the political parties, trade unions, independent churches, welfare associations, peasant movements, and as combatants in the liberation struggles of Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. There were also protests organized entirely by women. Renowned examples include the Aba Women’s War of 1929 in Nigeria, the Anlu Women’s uprising in the Cameroons, and the spontaneous uprisings of South African women in the 1950s. But as might be expected given the under presentation of women in the wage labor force during the colonial period, women’s presence and activism was more evident in peasant than in labor movements. Similarly, the likelihood of women being leaders in cultural and religious movements was higher than in political and civic movements led by the educated elite in so far as women’s access to colonial education was limited.
African nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent at least four phases. The first phase consisted of the varied resistances against colonial conquest itself. These were struggles to retain existing African sovereignties. The second phase was marked by struggles to reform colonialism in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of what used to be called ‘primary resistance’. The third phase was characterized by the drive to remove colonialism. The fourth phase sought to recreate independence. To use the colonial-postcolonial typology, the first three were characteristic of colonial nationalisms and the last of postcolonial nationalisms—the grueling challenges of trying to create viable nation-states in the face of turbulent transformations in the constellation of domestic social forces, including in some cases the crumbling of the nationalist coalition into its constituent ethnic, class, cultural, and gender separatisms, as well the recurrent interventions of outside powers and the cruel sanctions of the global political economy.
It stands to reason that the timing, trajectories, and facilitating factors of these phases differed from colony to colony and country to country, as did the identities of the main actors, their strategies, and the languages and weapons of combat change over time. The differences are quite evident if we look at the temporal span of the decolonization drama. If we take the restoration of the monarchy in Egypt in 1922 as the beginning and the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 as its end, then decolonization lasted 72 years, although the bulk of African states got their independence in the two decades between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. The winds of political change were initially concentrated in North and West Africa before they started blowing across the settler laagers of Southern Africa. The process of decolonization involved both peaceful transitions and liberation wars and local accommodations and international conflicts. Almost invariably, the later the decolonization, the more violent it was.
As on many topics in African history, decolonization is a subject that has generated spirited debate. Some argue that African nationalism was primarily responsible for the dismantling of the colonial empires. Others contend it was a product of imperial policy and planning. And there are those who seek to place decolonization in the context of changes in the world system. It would seem to me that a process as complex as decolonization was undoubtedly a product of many factors. It involved an interplay of the prevailing international situation, the policies of the colonial powers, and the nature and strength of the nationalist movements, which in turn, reflected internal conditions both in the metropoles and the colonies and the ideologies and visions of the postcolonial world. There were clearly variations in the patterns of decolonization among regions and colonies conditioned by the way in which these factors coalesced and manifested themselves. Decolonization was also affected by the relative presence and power of European settlers and each colony’s perceived strategic importance.
Decolonization was undoubtedly a great achievement for colonized peoples, of anti-colonial nationalism, one of the monumental events of the twentieth century. With the demise of apartheid African nationalism could claim to have achieved its first historic and humanistic agenda. What about the other four agendas: nation building, development, democracy, and regional integration? It is of course not possible here to provide a full stocktaking of the last half-century of African history. Suffice it to say, the record of performance is extremely complex and uneven across postcolonial periods, countries and regions, social classes, economic sectors, genders and age groups, which fit neither into the unrelenting gloom of the Afropessimists or the unyielding hopes of the Afroptimists.
What can be said with certainty is that postcolonial Africa has undergone profound transformations in some areas and not in others. Nation building exhibits palpable contradictions: both state and ethnic nationalisms are probably both stronger now than at independence. National and ethnic identities and the struggles over them eclipse the Pan-African nationalisms within the continent and with the diaspora, although the latter are experiencing renewal in the thickening circuits of regional mobility and integration schemes, transnational migrations and globalization including the emergence of new African diasporas. Thus, the dreams of regional integration have been compromised on the stakes of nation building, but are stirring more vigorously than before.
Development remains elusive amidst the rapid growth of the early post-independence era, the debilitating recessions of the lost structural adjustment decades, and the tentative recoveries of more recent years; but the African population is much bigger than at independence, currently stampeding towards a billion despite all the calamities of war, disease, and natural disasters; and this population is more educated, more socially differentiated, and more youthful than ever. And democracy is cautiously emerging on the backs of expanding and energized civil societies and popular struggles for the ‘second independence’, from the suffocating tentacles of one party state and military authoritarianisms, notwithstanding the blockages, reversals, and the chicaneries of Africa’s wily dictators adorning ill-fitting democratic garbs.
Clearly, nationalism is one of the great intellectual and ideological forces of modern African history. Contemporary Africa is simply inconceivable without understanding the role and impact played by nationalism which gave rise to postcolonial African states as they are currently configured and the imperatives for self-determination and development that have driven African political cultures and imaginaries. Trying to unpack the historical dynamics of African nationalism—its causes, constructions, compositions, contexts, courses, and consequences—is immensely complicated but critical to mapping more productive futures for Africa by separating the retrogressive nationalisms of ethnicity and religion that have wrecked some parts of postcolonial Africa from the progressive civic, regional and Pan-African nationalisms that are indispensable for Africa’s historic and humanistic reconstruction.
First Written October 6, 2006
All of which is saying that Africans are not really nationalists. If you are a nationalist there is no apologizing for your aim of putting your nation on top socially, economically, politically, culturally and militarily. It defines who you are and what you do. African nationalism, therefore, cannot exist because TRUE African nationalism would evict the white neo-colonial rulers in place, the white run businesses and plantations and put the real benefit and power of the land, labor and resources of Africa to use in building Africa for African people FIRST and everyone ELSE second. Nationalism is a self centered focus on country and state as the FIRST priority in international affairs governing economics, politics, culture and so on. It is NOT something that is practiced as a whim or flight of fancy. In fact, it is a means of preserving one's own place in the world of competing interests by taking care of #1 (yourself/your country/your people) before anyone else. NEVER has Africa had any true sense of nationalism since Patrice Lumumba or Kwame Nkruma. What this whole piece seems to be more about is a bunch of apologetics from various African camps trying to explain why in many cases the plight of black Africans has gone backwards since independence and not forwards. Which is a way of admitting that by NOT being nationalists and NOT putting the PEOPLE and INTERESTS of Africa FIRST, they are allowing Africa and her interests to slip further behind the interests of EVERYONE ELSE as they COMPETE to get ahead.
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All of which is saying that Africans are not really nationalists. If you are a nationalist there is no apologizing for your aim of putting your nation on top socially, economically, politically, culturally and militarily.
Not so by a long shot, pending of course, your “contextualization” of “nationalists”…otherwise you wouldn’t be here discussing a world first African nation state, called Dynastic Egypt. The author of the article, however, seems to have a sense of direction on what is being implied by “African nationalism” here, and it happens to be one of post-colonization, with the goal of attaining a ‘real‘ sense of Pan-Africanism…
From the article in question:
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that amidst all its internal complexities and diversities, African nationalism—with a capital N—was a project that sought to achieve what Thandika Mkandawire has insightfully called five historic and humanistic tasks: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration.
Which is to be broken down into:
In other words, in spatial terms African nationalism was a territorial, regional, and transnational nationalism; in social terms a democratic and developmentalist nationalism.
The article goes onto mention:
African nationlism was born and bred in the tumultuous maelstrom of European imperialism that began with the Atlantic slave trade and culminated in the continent’s colonization which engendered the dangerous fictions of civilizational difference between Africa and Europe and the destructive realities of mass exploitation and oppression. From its inception, then, African nationalism had a dual face: it was a struggle against European rule and hegemony and a struggle for African autonomy and reconstruction, a drive to substitute European suzerainty with African sovereignty, to recapture Africa’s historical and humanistic agency. African nationalism was both a revolt against Europe and a reaffirmation of Africa.
quote:Doug M: All of which is saying that Africans are not really nationalists. If you are a nationalist there is no apologizing for your aim of putting your nation on top socially, economically, politically, culturally and militarily. African nationalism, therefore, cannot exist because TRUE African nationalism would evict the white neo-colonial rulers in place, the white run businesses and plantations and put the real benefit and power of the land, labor and resources of Africa to use in building Africa for African people FIRST and everyone ELSE second.
Furthermore….
From the article:
Each of these movements had its own spaces and strategies of struggle. Almost invariably the political and civic organizations were led by urban based elites, although their members were drawn from both urban and rural areas especially as mass political parties developed. The membership of the cultural and religious organizations was similarly broad in their spatial identities. The peasant movements were largely confined to the rural areas, although some of their leaders and ideas might be drawn from urban elites and workers. Campaigns, petitions, demonstrations and boycotts were the weapons of choice by the political parties and civic associations. In addition to using some of these tactics, trade unions wielded the strike weapon, while the independent churches encouraged their members to disobey colonial laws, boycott colonial institutions, and sabotage colonial infrastructure. Rural peasants engaged in both individual and collective acts of protest, including flight, evasion of taxes, agricultural regulations, and official markets, harassment and attacks on chiefs and their minions, and they undertook episodic holdups and rebellions to protect their land, livestock, and livelihoods….
African nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent at least four phases. The first phase consisted of the varied resistances against colonial conquest itself. These were struggles to retain existing African sovereignties. The second phase was marked by struggles to reform colonialism in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of what used to be called ‘primary resistance’. The third phase was characterized by the drive to remove colonialism. The fourth phase sought to recreate independence. To use the colonial-postcolonial typology, the first three were characteristic of colonial nationalisms and the last of postcolonial nationalisms—the grueling challenges of trying to create viable nation-states in the face of turbulent transformations in the constellation of domestic social forces, including in some cases the crumbling of the nationalist coalition into its constituent ethnic, class, cultural, and gender separatisms, as well the recurrent interventions of outside powers and the cruel sanctions of the global political economy…
Nation building exhibits palpable contradictions: both state and ethnic nationalisms are probably both stronger now than at independence. National and ethnic identities and the struggles over them eclipse the Pan-African nationalisms within the continent and with the diaspora, although the latter are experiencing renewal in the thickening circuits of regional mobility and integration schemes, transnational migrations and globalization including the emergence of new African diasporas. Thus, the dreams of regional integration have been compromised on the stakes of nation building, but are stirring more vigorously than before….
Development remains elusive amidst the rapid growth of the early post-independence era, the debilitating recessions of the lost structural adjustment decades, and the tentative recoveries of more recent years; but the African population is much bigger than at independence, currently stampeding towards a billion despite all the calamities of war, disease, and natural disasters; and this population is more educated, more socially differentiated, and more youthful than ever. And democracy is cautiously emerging on the backs of expanding and energized civil societies and popular struggles for the ‘second independence’, from the suffocating tentacles of one party state and military authoritarianisms, notwithstanding the blockages, reversals, and the chicaneries of Africa’s wily dictators adorning ill-fitting democratic garbs.
^The contextualized post-colonial idea of what constitutes African nationalism herein, is therefore seen as existing in a state of an ongoing evolution, whatever the pace. Nothing herein, which suggests that Africans aren‘t “nationalists”, if not saying quite the contrary.
Speaking of ongoing evolution…
From the article: Contemporary Africa is simply inconceivable without understanding the role and impact played by nationalism which gave rise to postcolonial African states as they are currently configured and the imperatives for self-determination and development that have driven African political cultures and imaginaries.Trying to unpack the historical dynamics of African nationalism—its causes, constructions, compositions, contexts, courses, and consequences—is immensely complicated but critical to mapping more productive futures for Africa by separating the retrogressive nationalisms of ethnicity and religion that have wrecked some parts of postcolonial Africa from the progressive civic, regional and Pan-African nationalisms that are indispensable for Africa’s historic and humanistic reconstruction.
^In other words, “organized” social mobilization towards attaining real socio-economic development, true democracy and ultimately, transnational [desirably, true Pan-Africanist] nationalism, is dependent at minimum, on basic understanding of lessons of the heightened past struggles fuelled by ‘nationalism’ nurtured in broad layers of the general populace, in response to grievances brought about by oppression [in this case, in its acute form under territorial colonization (occupation) policies of European imperialism].
quote:Doug M:
What this whole piece seems to be more about is a bunch of apologetics from various African camps trying to explain why in many cases the plight of black Africans has gone backwards since independence and not forwards. Which is a way of admitting that by NOT being nationalists and NOT putting the PEOPLE and INTERESTS of Africa FIRST, they are allowing Africa and her interests to slip further behind the interests of EVERYONE ELSE as they COMPETE to get ahead.
From the article:
Clearly, the vocabularies and manifestations of nationalism exhibit enormous variations from one place to another and one period to another.
African nationalism was certainly marked by diversity so that it is quite difficult to define its parameters. Part of the challenge concerns the social and spatial boundaries of African nationalism, the units upon which it was based given the fact that African colonial states were an imperial cartographic invention that brought together disparate groups: in Ali Mazrui’s poignant phrase, colonialism separated people who had been together and brought together people who had been separate. Colonial states and societies in Africa were, and their postcolonial successors are, almost invariably multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and often multi-religious, and sometimes multi-racial. Under such circumstances, what is, or what can be the basis of nationalism? The pluralism of African countries has sometimes been used to point to the artificiality of African states and to the impossibility of creating coherent nations, and is used to discredit the legitimacy or integrity of African nationalism. This charge presumes that there are some ‘natural countries’ with ‘natural boundaries.’ Such countries hardly exist anywhere in the modern world. Which nations today have existed as unchanging entities for centuries and enjoy cultural or ethnic homogeneity?
Certainly, the outmoded colonial boundaries [which present a contradiction in the attainment of 'African nationalism'], under the banner of nation states today, as I've noted time and again, doesn't limit the potential of attaining 'real' Pan-African nationalism; rather, such nationalism needs to take into consideration, amongst the various others, the need for understanding the history of the drivers behind creating these nation-state boundaries, and therefore addressing them [i.e. the contradictions inherent in them] accordingly in the attainment of the complete form of the "African nationalism" in question....
The article continues:
The search for nationalism in the singular is obviously unhelpful not only for Africa but for much of the world as well. All nationalisms are not only constructions, but they are often multiple in their manifestations. The more useful question then might be: what are the main forms of nationalism and what are their connections, contradictions, and conflicts?
For African nationalism the tendency has been to conceptualize and classify nationalisms in terms of periodization, social composition, spatial scope, and their objectives. In the first instance, distinctions are often made between colonial and postcolonial nationalisms. Second, elite and mass nationalisms are sometimes distinguished from each other. Third, differentiations are usually made between ethnic, national, regional, and Pan-African expressions of nationalism. Finally, ideological distinctions can be drawn between different secular or religious, liberal or socialist nationalisms, etc.
To be sure, these categorizations are not mutually exclusive.
...In fact, I am inclined to argue that while classifications cannot be avoided because of their heuristic value, our analyses of nationalism, as of other historical phenomena, must always be attentive to the sheer messiness of social reality, the dangers of forcing complex social movements into sealed boxes of mutual exclusivity. In particular we need to beware of dichotomous models. For this reason, I would propose more varied periodizations for the different nationalisms and their intersections in different parts of Africa. This is to suggest that we need to resist the temptation to homogenize developments across Africa.
Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that amidst all its internal complexities and diversities, African nationalism—with a capital N—was a project that sought to achieve what Thandika Mkandawire has insightfully called five historic and humanistic tasks: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration. In other words, in spatial terms African nationalism was a territorial, regional, and transnational nationalism; in social terms a democratic and developmentalist nationalism.
^I see nothing "apologetic" about this article, or that it focuses on 'apologetics from various African camps'...and certainly nothing herein, that is suggestive of the author admitting to idea of Africans not being 'nationalists'. I do however, see the author first attempting to contextualize the "African nationalism" being spoken of here, by quickly looking at the distinct and broad perspectives of what 'nationalism' can mean, and therefore, then specifying the context in which it is being applied in the rest of the article. The intent of the article, it seems to me, is to enrich the understanding of the politically unconscious on the matter at hand, which goes without saying, hand in hand with divulging the complexities therein.
Ps - In any case, nationalism was not an idea taught or diffused selflessly to the hapless ‘natives’ by the colonizers, but an insurgent initiative by the colonized to recover their history and humanity so cruelly seized by Europe. This is to caution against the tired practice of writing African history by analogy and subsuming it to European history, of confining African nationalism to the historical path allegedly already trodden by Europe.Posts: 1947 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Good points for sure and what was being said is not lost to me. However, most of Africa is in reality subservient to the interests of foreigners. That is why you have any number of mines that produce various metals that can be used for piping and plumbing, yet at the same token you see Africans on TV that need projects to make "playground pumps" so they can get water. TRUE nationalism says that the purpose of mining in Africa is to produce the THINGS that are NEEDED in the daily lives of Africans FIRST and THEN worry about exports and the economic interests of foreigners SECOND. This goes for ALL areas of the mineral and agricultural economy in Africa. THAT is a form of nationalism. Going along with that raising an army to PROTECT that mineral and agricultural wealth, as opposed to having armies to PROTECT the crook, corrupt leaders and foreign interests is another example of nationalism. Yes, this has much to do with ancient Egypt and the ancient Egyptians were 500% more nationalist in all respects than most African countries today.
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Good points for sure and what was being said is not lost to me. However, most of Africa is in reality subservient to the interests of foreigners.
One of the points that the intro article tries to instill in its audience, is to look at the complexity of the issue at hand, and not make simplistic assessments of the situations across the continent. You need to be able to distinguish the different post-colonial social layers and variant progressions in socio-culture, nation-building, development, and democracy across the continent, and understand the various levels of barriers confronting the continental-wide transnational nationalism, and global correspondence with social colleagues, necessary to make sweeping changes in broad areas of progress across the continent.
quote:Doug M:
That is why you have any number of mines that produce various metals that can be used for piping and plumbing, yet at the same token you see Africans on TV that need projects to make "playground pumps" so they can get water. TRUE nationalism says that the purpose of mining in Africa is to produce the THINGS that are NEEDED in the daily lives of Africans FIRST and THEN worry about exports and the economic interests of foreigners SECOND.
The main difference between your idea of nationalism and that laid out in the intro-article, is that the intro-article comes to terms with the variant vocabularies of 'nationalism' in the different camps, and contextualizes the sort of 'nationalism' that the author seeks to emphasize throughout the discourse. The author sees complexity in ideas, as well as social layers within nation states and across nation states.
quote:Doug M:
This goes for ALL areas of the mineral and agricultural economy in Africa. THAT is a form of nationalism. Going along with that raising an army to PROTECT that mineral and agricultural wealth, as opposed to having armies to PROTECT the crook, corrupt leaders and foreign interests is another example of nationalism. Yes, this has much to do with ancient Egypt and the ancient Egyptians were 500% more nationalist in all respects than most African countries today.
You and the author are in two different worlds. The author is referring to post-colonial realities as a product of European imperialism across the continent, and you're dealing with pre-colonial times. The situation is different; the history of colonialism is reality that affects countries across the globe in varying degrees, and one shouldn't pretend that it never occurred, especially in any forward-looking perspective in terms of routes for transnational nationalism and development across Africa, one of the points that the author makes. For instance, why isn't contemporary Egypt the same as Dynastic Egypt, even though there are ties? Does Egypt today contain no nationalists?
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