commentary from the national question to the social...

TRANSFORMATION 69 (2009) ISSN 0258-7696 130

Commentary

From the national question to the socialquestion*

Thandika [email protected]

IntroductionLet me first thank the Harold Wolpe Trust for inviting me to give this lecturein honour of a man whom I have held in the highest esteem. I never met HaroldWolpe but, like many members of my generation, I knew of his ScarletPimpernel escapades not as a rescuer of the aristocracy but as a championof the downtrodden, his deep commitment to liberation, and his prodigiousand rigorous intellectual work. I do not know what he would think about whatI will be saying, but the underlying theme of my paper – the tensions betweenrace and class, between vertical and horizontal inequalities, between the“national” and “social” questions – would be familiar terrain for him, and onethat he addressed with greater rigour than I am able to.

I am aware that the questions I am addressing are old-fashioned.Nationalism and its questions do not enjoy as much favourable attention asthey did four decades ago. Civil wars, genocides and “ethnic cleansing”, thegross mismanagement of national affairs by erstwhile national heroes andthe weakening of the capacity of the nation-state have conspired to tarnishseverely the image of nationalism. In addition, cosmopolitan ideologies, theemergence of new transnational actors and new social movements suggestthat nationalism and the movements it inspired belong to museums, if not inthe dustbins of history. We have been told that concerns relating to the“national question” have been replaced by “discourses” on such weightyissues as transnationalism, borderlands, globalisation, ethnoscapes,

* This is a slightly revised version of lectures delivered in honour of the late HaroldWolpe at seminars organised by the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust in SouthAfrica in October 2007.

131

From the national question to the social question

diversity, diasporas, marginality and even “rainbows”. Some argue thateven the very idea of posing the “national” or “social” questions is wrong-headed ab initio because: (a) it is premised on the enlightenment ideas ofprogress and other associated totalising meta-narratives that deny diversity,difference, contingency, etc; (b) it essentialises social categories byattributing to them or posing to them questions they are presumablypredestined to ask; and (c) finally since nationalism was “invented” or“imagined” and was thus highly contingent and unpredictable, it did notwarrant much attention beyond its deconstruction.

I hold a different view and find much of this scholarship, with both its feetfirmly off the ground, aloof, cynical and patronising. By its cynicism, suchscholarship tends to occlude political economy and, a fortiori, does not helpin mapping the way forward. I am therefore relieved to see these questionsoccupy pride of place in the seminars and conferences thus far held inhonour of Harold Wolpe. One factor behind my choice of this topic agathering in South Africa is the alarming despondency that one detects inthe literature on the country. For years, many observers of Africa have beenafflicted by Afro-pessimism, captured, for example, by the title of MartinMeredith’s journalistic account of the post-independence saga: The Fate ofAfrica: from the hopes of freedom to the heart of despair (2005). The “heartof darkness” has transmogrified into the “heart of despair”. I somehow feltthe disease was spreading fast towards the south, especially to SouthAfrica. This is captured in a more academic vein by John Saul whose cris decoeur is poignant in this respect:

A tragedy is being enacted in South Africa, as much a metaphor for ourtimes as Rwanda and Yugoslavia and, even if not so immediately searingof the spirit, it is perhaps a more revealing one. For in the teeth of highexpectations arising from the successful struggle against a malignantapartheid state, a very large percentage of the population – among themmany of the most desperately poor in the world – are being sacrificedon the altar of the neo-liberal logic of global capitalism. (Saul 2001:1)

A number of other publications have made the same point.Because of the failure of African nationalism even on its own terms and

its mystification in official historiography, there is a whole literaturedeconstructing and demystifying nationalist struggles. This is of course auseful exercise, especially if it also happens to be well-informed – which itrarely is. I am not a historian, but from what I have read about the few caseswith which I am familiar, I believe the more recent accounts of nationalism

132

Thandika Mkandawire

do not do justice to the complexities of the post-colonial history of nationalism.I will suggest that part of the problem stems either from the conflation of the“national” and “social” questions or simply a preference for answering onlyone of them and eliding the question deemed uninteresting. In much of thiswriting, nationalist movements are discussed in terms of not what they wereor said, but in terms of what they were not and did not say. I also suspectconfounded teleology has a lot do with the despondency.

An obvious point of departure is the definition of the principal terms ofthe paper – namely, the national question and the social question. Thenational question has always been closely associated with the history ofoppressed or colonised peoples. For much of the twentieth century, thenational question involved first, simply asserting one’s humanity or thepresence africaine as the title of the main outlet of Negritude writingsuggested; second, the acquisition of independence, and third, maintainingthe unity and territorial integrity of the new state. National identity, whetherbased on ethnicity or not, always contains a territorial component. It doesnot matter how the borders of that territory were drawn. In the post-colonialperiod the problem was simply “how to hold the country together” (Wallerstein1961:95). The central premise of African nationalism was that nationalindependence could be achieved within the confines of the colonial delimitedterritory.

In its full sense, the social question addresses problems engendered bysocial differentiation along class, ethnicity, gender and other social cleavagesthat arise or are unresolved within a nation. In the nineteenth century, thesocial question, or Die Soziale Frage as the Germans called it, was how tosecure economic progress in light of the political and moral threat posed bythe condition of the working class. Not surprisingly, it was mainly concernedwith living and working conditions, and labour organisations and theirpolitical and organisational capacity (Beck 1995, McClelland 1973).

There are certain affinities between the nation-building objectives andresponses to the social question. However, it is important to bear in mind thenormative bases of these policies because they establish the politicalsalience and social resonance of the policies. We should also bear in mindthat there is nothing radical with focusing on the social question. The focuscould in fact be driven by a conservative intention to pre-empt social unrest– a kind of teleological foresight. Perhaps the most widely cited case of theaffinity is the Bismarkian welfare state which was intended to pre-empt theradicalisation of the labour movement and strengthen the recent unification

133


of Germany by establishing the superiority of the Prussian state over otherinstitutions such as the church. In this Bismarckian project, conservativethought played an important role because, at the core of its understandingof the social question, were fears of an organisational breakdown of society(Beck 1995). Significantly the intellectuals behind this welfare project werestudents of Hegel, who advocated giving the state a pre-eminent role in theconstruction of the nation.1 And today, a considerable amount of attentionpaid to the social question (for example, poverty-reduction strategies andthe new focus on social security in developing countries) is driven bysystemic security concerns about “failed states” as potential havens ofterrorism.

Implicit in the title of this presentation is the need to look beyond thenational question.2 Given the chequered history of nationalism, suggestingthat one go beyond it must seem an easy and obvious option. And in anycase in this age of “posts”, one more “post” – post-nationalism – would notbe totally out of place. Transcending nationalism does not necessarilyalways promise better things. In the African case, the many alternatives tonationalism have been disastrous – whether these take the form of ethnicsub-nationalism, idiosyncratic socialism or mimetic internationalism, religiousparticularism or neo-liberal globalism. We are all now familiar enough withthe rather protean notion of failed states to appreciate that failure to addresskey aspects of the national question can lead to disaster. The greatestdisasters in Africa have been when elites have failed to resolve, or havecompounded the national question. Therefore, before going beyond thenational question, it is necessary to take stock of the actual agenda of thenationalist movements and to identify items of the agenda that are stillrelevant or have a progressive thrust.

A Betrayal Foretold?There is today a steady flow of writing that is critical of the nationalists whoassumed office in the countries of Southern Africa during the last twodecades. Much of this criticism of “comrades in power” (if not in business)is not new and its often exhibits an innocence of the politics of nationalismin other parts of Africa, and indeed the world. An earlier critique ofnationalists came from the fiery pen of Frantz Fanon. The “pitfalls of nationalconsciousness”, as Fanon (Fanon 1966) termed them, is a recurring themein much of African literature. African novels such as A Wreath for Udomo,The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Petals of Blood or Les Soleils desindépendances, to name a few, tell the story with passion. To Nkrumah’s

134

Thandika Mkandawire

injunction, “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be addedunto you”, Chinua Achebe retorted 30 years later, “We sought the ‘politicalkingdom’ and nothing has been added unto us; a lot has been taken away”.In earlier unofficial Marxist and neo-Marxist literature, nationalists wereseen essentially as petty bourgeoisie who had mobilised the masses for theirown good or who were condemned to the pursuit of tawdry “develop-mentalism”, if that. In the dependency school or neo-Marxism, the centralcriticism was focused on the failure to deepen economic independence. Inthe less generous views, nationalists were seen as unwitting agents of thecolonialists with the “decolonisation” project seen as something stagemanaged to produce neo-colonial states.

This Fanonian criticism of nationalism has been evoked in more recentyears with respect to latecomers South Africa and Namibia. But, as NeilLazarus (1999) rightly points out, Fanon’s critique of “bourgeois nationalism”was itself delivered from an alternative nationalist standpoint. It neverdegenerated into the kind of ontological despair akin to the Afro-pessimismof the 1990s. Similarly, much of the neo-Marxist criticism, especially thedependency theory, drew its inspiration from nationalism, earning itself thederisive sobriquet of “radical nationalism” among the more orthodox Marxists.If the earlier criticisms of nationalism were a reflection of revolutionaryvoluntarism, the new one seems informed by either a debilitating ontologicaldespair or a teleological mindset which obliges researchers to spendconsiderable time trying to untangle the self-imposed puzzle of why varioussocial classes invariably fail to play their historically-assigned roles.

In the case of much of Africa, we were faced with two teleologies: onepropagated by the nationalists in power who argued, often in hagiographicalform, that every anti-colonial movement presaged their ascendancy topower and was a logical and inevitable step towards the nation-state. Oftenthis has involved retrofitting the nationalist agenda to conform to the currentagenda. The other teleology suggested that the real subaltern agenda ofnationalism was populist, “grassroot democratic” or radical. Nationalismwas seen as an essentialising and totalising ideology that rode roughshodover all putatively more democratically anchored movements. In this narrative,before independence there were many social movements that had strongpopular roots and that posed a challenge to the entire colonial order.Sometimes there was the unstated presumption that the original nationalistcoalitions had placed society on some progressive path from which it wassubsequently derailed by cunning petty-bourgeois elements, and that the

135


heterogeneity of the nationalist movements meant that there were a multiplicityof alternative futures. The differences highlighted include ethnicity, age,gender, class and religion. The current crisis of the state is simply evidencethat, underneath the artificially constructed “unity”, there were different andconflicting agendas. In the more extreme versions, the nationalists in powerare seen as merely having struggled for the assumption of state power –deracialising it rather than transforming, let alone dismantling, it. In the morecynical “rational choice” view of politics, nationalism was merely a camouflageof the emergent urban interests who, in pursuit of future rents, rose againstthe colonialists whom they felt were blocking their access to such rents. Amore generous view is that the nationalists were fallen angels, initiallydecent but later corrupted by the temptations of power.

Nationalist movements and their respective agendas were not entirelyprogressive nor reactionary. They were creations of an excruciatingly slowprocess that sometimes lasted decades and were not merely used by theelites as a manipulative tool. Nor were the masses merely pawns in thenationalist project but actors in their own right who brought to the nationaliststheir aspirations, capacities and contradictions. The resonance of nationalismamong them came from the fact that it addressed some of their grievancesand pointed to their commonality and pervasiveness in both the country asdefined by the colonial masters and beyond. Colonialism as a conqueringforce was initially resisted by various nationalities and kingdoms as foreigndomination. Some of these struggles continued in one form or another evenafter what has euphemistically been labelled “pacification”. Some were laterto become the cornerstones of the nationalist struggle. From there on, thenationalist agenda was given impetus by the emergent indigenous elitesspawned by the process of colonisation itself.

These indigenous elites expressed initial signs of nationalism throughprotests against the non-recognition of their newly-acquired knowledgeand capabilities by the colonial powers. Thus, early forms of urban protestwere essentially what Charles Taylor (1994) refers to as the “politics ofrecognition” aimed at the acquisition of civil rights and the rights forautonomous spaces for self-organisation. Failure by these groups to havetheir grievances addressed by colonial rule and their recognition of theoxymoronic aspiration of status equality with one’s colonial masters, forcedthem to widen their recruitment base and take on more issues. They alsolearnt that that it was necessary to have as a broad an agenda as possibleand eschew what they considered “parochial” interests. They were thus

136

Thandika Mkandawire

pushed in a more nationalist direction, bringing the various ethnic grievancesinto one national programme. In addition, there were two other imperatives.The first was the understanding in the post–World War II period that muchof the decolonisation would involve general elections. It was thus that liberaldemocracy was added to the nationalist agenda. Since the nationalists hadchampioned “one man one vote”, the peasant vote would be decisive.Second, the colonialists claimed that they were prolonging colonial rulebecause the “natives” were divided, and handing independence to such adivided society would be tantamount to criminal dereliction of duty. This,the colonialist said while assiduously pursuing “divide and rule strategies”.The nationalists therefore had to demonstrate that they were united.

When colonial rule was intransigent and did not concede to the liberalagenda, nationalist movements resorted to armed struggle where appeals tomass support were important. The more prolonged the struggle, the sharperthe link between capitalism and colonial and racial manifestations – anarticulation poignantly formalised by Wolpe in his many works. In the settlereconomy, the “race question” and the “land question” were to occupy acentral role in the national question.3 This, in turn, led to a more radical andprogressive agenda. In this last phase, the nationalist movements may havebeen closely linked with Leftist or Marxist movements, but such a link wastenuous and ought to have been understood and treated as such. It isimportant to bear in mind that class analysis was never fully embraced bynationalist movements. Nationalism more often sought to separate thenational from the social question. In general, nationalist movementseverywhere have, for strategic and tactical reasons, avoided posing theproblem in a manner that might pit one group against another, the belief beingthat it could be divisive and only distract and destabilize the nationalistmovement.4 The national struggle required the allegiance of every possiblesector of society and that, as Nkrumah had argued, only after the “politicalkingdom” had been won could other social issues be addressed. The pointhere is not to argue that nationalist movements did not pay much attentionto the social question: They did but the social question was seen assecondary to the national question. A number of policies were adopted thataddressed some of these issues. Some were given a “socialist” colouring.However, it is important to bear in mind that the normative basis of suchpolicies was fundamentally nationalist. Not surprisingly, the items of thesocial question that were addressed were ones related to the nationalquestion.

137


Implementing the AgendaBy the time of independence the nationalists had drawn up a long agenda,as could be seen from the election manifestos and party programmes. Howwas this agenda to be addressed? Let me borrow from the language ofinventory accounting. Two methods of recording inventory are oftencontrasted: the “first in, first out” (FIFO) method and “last in, first out”(LIFO) method. In the FIFO method, the first items purchased are the firstones sold, while in the LIFO method, the last items purchased are the firstto go. The nationalists seemed to work on the LIFO method of keepinginventory. The last item that entered the nationalist agenda – democracy orsocialism – was the first to go, not because of class treachery but partlybecause it was the least firmly embedded in the nationalist agenda. Second,the item may have had a muted resonance, accounting for its tenuousposition on the agenda. The third reason was, quite frankly, that it was theelite that put it on the agenda in the first place. With respect to socialism,Almilcar Cabral had expressed the hope that, after independence, the elitewould “commit class suicide” as part of their commitment to socialism.However, this was so sociologically implausible that it ought not to havebeen given much attention. In the context of emerging African nations, threemajor preoccupations coloured the agenda of the dominant class: the needto end past forms of racial and horizontal inequalities spawned by theuneven development of the colonial period, the need to maintain nationalsovereignty and dignity, and the need for nation building and development.

No sooner had the flag been raised than the new states were faced withnew aspects of the national question and clear signs of the social question.Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru (1967) and Rene Dumont’s False Start in Africa(1969) were the more popular expressions of the emerging social question.The new social question in post-colonial Africa included as key elements,the problem of growing inequality; the persistence of the scourge of whatthe nationalists referred to as the “unholy trinity of ignorance, poverty anddisease”; growing urban poverty in the face of capital-intensiveindustrialization; an “agrarian crisis” that was wrongly described as the“food crisis”; and growing ethnic tension exacerbated by processes ofuneven development and political manipulation. In countries of SouthernAfrica, the race divide and the “land question” remained a significant socialproblem. It was also clear from experiences in other countries, especiallythose of Asia and Latin America, that these social problems would becomemore acute. However, any number of factors were to account for the

138

Thandika Mkandawire

nationalist failure to address these issues in the form of the “social question.”

The Politics of Recognition ReduxWe should recall that one of the earliest items on the nationalist agenda wasan opposition to the colour bar. Many of the critics of the nationalists inpower tend to mention race rather perfunctorily and almost as a minor irritant,so that even its removal is treated pejoratively as “mere deracialisation” ofcolonialism. Deracialising anything in Africa was an important step.Significant for our analysis is that the shelf-life of this particular item on thenationalist agenda is always long. The “politics of recognition” has anumber of implications. The first is that nationalism will tend to favour formsof redistribution that underplay the growing social differentiation within thenation while stressing differences or inequalities between citizens andforeigners or groups that have lorded over them in the past. Indeed, this canencourage a focus on inter-national or inter-racial levelling while toleratingor even enhancing intra-racial or intra-national differences. In such acontext, social policy is less likely to deal with class distributional issuesthan with race relational issues. Solidarity with one’s group might supporta redistributive posture, but this will be attenuated by the larger issues ofequality between one’s group and the hitherto dominant and privileged one.It does not help much to argue that the redistribution is not socialist or thatit is creating a national bourgeoisie – that may indeed be the whole point!Most of the indigenisation programmes were carried out in full recognitionthat they could lead to inequality among the “indigenes”. Neo Simutanyimay be right when he argues that “the promotion of the BEE (black economicempowerment) and its vehement defence by the government exposes theclass nature of the South African state and schisms within the tripartitealliance”(Simutanyi 2006), but it could just as well be simply a genuinereflection of nationalist aspirations. Like all “indigenisatrion” programmes,BEE is premised on this acceptance of intra-racial inequality. In a notedspeech to the Black Management Forum in 1999, Mbeki justified support fora black bourgeoisie thus:

As part of the realization of the aim to eradicate racism in our country,we must strive to create and strengthen a black capitalist class. ... Iwould like to urge, very strongly, that we abandon our embarrassmentabout the possibility of the emergence of successful and thereforeprosperous black owners of productive property and think and act ina manner consistent with a realistic response to the real world. As partof our continuing struggle to wipe out the legacy of racism, we must

139


work to ensure that there emerges a black bourgeoisie, whose presencewithin our economy and society will be part of the process of thederacialisation of the economy and society. (http://www.one.org.za)

It is important to recall that the item Mbeki is evoking here has always beenon the nationalist agenda. He is not conjuring something out of thin air.Mbeki had noted in 1984, when he was a rising star in the South AfricanCommunist Party (SACP) as well as the African National Congress (ANC),that “The ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, ithas never said it was, and it is not trying to be” (Mbeki 1984:609). Whatfollows from this statement is that the society would be a class society – non-racial, yes, but classless no. It is interesting to note that in much of Africa,even the case for socialism was advanced not so much to solve the socialquestion as to deal with the question of decolonisation of the post-colonialeconomy. Nyerere stated the problem most clearly in the following terms:

The question is not whether nationals control their economy but howthey do so. The real ideological choice is between controlling theeconomy through domestic private enterprise, and doing so throughsome state or other collective institution. But although this is anideological choice, it is extremely doubtful whether it is a practicalchoice for African nationalists. The pragmatist in Africa will find thatthe real choice is a different one. He will find that the choice is betweenforeign ownership on the one hand and local collective ownership on theother. For I do not think there is a free state in Africa where there issufficient local capital, or a sufficient number of entrepreneurs forlocally based capitalism to dominate the economy. Private investmentin Africa means overwhelmingly foreign private investment. (Cited inSaul 1973:240)

Nyerere was more explicit on the racial dimension of his socialism:When asked in June 1997 about nationalization policies that hisgovernment had implemented during the 1970s, Nyerere replied that hehad no choice. If he had left the country to the private sector, he argued,it would have become entirely Asian and this would have producedunacceptable racial conflicts. (Aminzade 2003:47)5

Orthodox class-based analyses often have problems reconciling the adhesionto the nationalist agenda by workers and peasants. The failure to factornationalism into the concrete consciousness of these social classes and howthis ultimately shapes their concrete praxis is suggested by some of theresponses to the assertion of the Congress of South African Trade Unions(COSATU) that the “principal contradiction remains the national question”

140

Thandika Mkandawire

(Andreasson 2006:315).6 Presumably the intertwining of race and race/ethnic issues, a central features of all forms of racial and colonial domination,is somehow attributed to the national movements who are then are blamedfor distracting attention from the “straightforward class focus” (Andreasson2006: 315).7

Policies such as “indigenisation”, “Black Economic Empowerment” and“Africanisation”, while exacerbating inequality, may be widely applaudedbecause they address a historical injustice (racism). One should recall howBenedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” tended to condone inequality“because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that mayprevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontalcomradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over thepast two centuries, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limitedimaginings” (Anderson 1983:7). The policies may also be popular becausethey raise the hopes of even those who do not immediately stand to gain.Albert Hirschman refers to this phenomenon as the “tunnel effect”. Accordingto this, people tolerate increasing inequality because they interpret therising of others’ incomes as signalling social mobility, and so they choosepatiently to await their turn.

Part of this criticism retrospectively and perhaps inadvertently downplaysthe centrality of the struggle against colonialism or racism in many class-based movements. It also involves a unilateral declaration of the end of astruggle even when the key social actors have good reasons to believe thosequestions are unresolved. In the extreme, this position produces somethingtantamount to “socialism for one race” or “Bantustan socialism”, when moreconcern is expressed about growing intra-racial inequality, while the measuresfor bridging the racial divide are dismissed merely as benefiting the newelite.8 Many “socialist” African governments like Zimbabwe, Tanzania andZambia went through a phase of segmented socialism when populistinjunctions against illicit enrichment were largely addressed to the Blackelites who were restrained through such things as “leaderships codes” thatdid not apply to non-Black capitalists. In Tanzania such a code prohibitedgovernment and party officials from engaging in “capitalist activities”,including renting houses, earning more than one salary, owning shares inprivate companies, or serving on the board of directors of a private company.This segmented socialism had important implications:

Despite a strong commitment to the value of equality, the socialistexperiment failed to eliminate a racially stratified class system. The

141


suppression of discussion of racial issues during three decades ofsocialist rule, and the embracing of a race-blind approach thatemphasized consensus rather than diversity, meant that affirmativeaction policies of redistribution to reduce racial inequalities were notpublicly discussed or implemented. The collapse of state socialism andimplementation of neoliberal economic policies have helped to furtherexacerbate racial inequalities and animosities. (Aminzade 2003:48)

Not surprisingly, it is in the formerly more socialistically oriented countriesthat the issue of race has subsequently been posed sharply during the eraof neo-liberalism and privatisation because about the only capitalistsaround have tended to be ethnic or racial minorities that had somehowoperated outside state controlled institutions. In such contexts privatisationis likely to generate racial tension . The “indigenous” bourgeoisies will oftenbe, as in Tanzania, “former public officials who have used their culturalcapital and social connections to develop businesses”. Such businessmen“have been in the forefront of efforts to implement policies of racial preferencein the transition from state socialism to capitalism” (Aminzade 2003:48).

National UnityWhile by its very nature nation building and the national question it seeksto answer, together with the territorial mobilisation that goes along withthem, touch upon the social question, many social measures associated withwelfare states and that have been taken elsewhere as responses to the socialquestion were driven by the national question in the new African states. Newstates were faced with problems of uneven development and ethnic divisionsthat had been assiduously cultivated by the erstwhile colonial masters aspart of the “divide and rule” strategy. The quest for unity was expressedthrough such slogans as “one Zambia, one nation”, “harambee”, “ujamaa”,“reconciliation”, “rainbow nation”, “non-racialism”, etc. The holding togetherof the nation and the mobilisation of the population behind the new nation-building project demanded that the state embark on some form of socialpolicy even if only to establish the fact that its policies were inclusive. Socialpolicy was important in the nation-building project because it offered allcitizens a set of worthwhile goods and opportunities that installed a senseof affinity and a hope for a better future, even in face of current inequalities(Adesina 2007). As Béland and Lecours (2006) observe, there is an affinitybetween the answers to the two questions. Nationalism and the welfare staterevolve around the notion of solidarity because they often involve transfersof money between citizens. They further observe that that “the political

142

Thandika Mkandawire

discourse of social policy lends itself well to national identity-buildingbecause it is typically underpinned by collective values and principles” (77).This might partly explain the fact that a number of nationalist movementsadhere to various forms of idiosyncratic socialism as recognition of theproblems. The point I would like to stress here is that the quest for nationalunity is not only about feelings of one-ness or nation-ness or of simplyperching on the same rainbow, but it also has serious redistributiveimplications.

For a while, the imperative of national unity and legitimacy kept thepolitical leadership alert to emerging social problems that might subvert thenationalist project. Therefore, there were many elements of nation-buildingin much of policy that were redistributive among nationals themselves. In theAfrican case, Tade Aina (2004) notes, central to the post-independenceaccumulation model was

the legitimisation strategy of the populist and in some case, socialistprogrammes of the nationalist parties that came to power afterindependence. A key element of the legitimisation strategy was a strongsocial policy initiative tied to a ‘constructionist’ approach to economicdevelopment, that is, the building of physical and social as well ashuman infrastructures. This was the period of ‘constructing’ elaboratesocial subsidies and major social programmes in education, housing,health, and urban planning. (Aina 2004: 12)

Many of these concerns were to disappear with the wave of authoritarian rulethat swept the country. The overthrow of the nationalist agenda by soldiersoften beholden to foreign powers simply erased the entire nationalist agendaand the issues pertinent to that agenda without necessarily advancing thesocial agenda. Structural adjustment programmes were to further erode anyremnants of “developmental welfareism” (Adesina 2007).

There were, however, blind spots in this quest for national unity – blindspots that further contributed to the failure squarely to place the socialquestion on the agenda. The nationalism of liberation movements tended totake it for granted that emergent nation-states would be multiethnic or non-ethnic or non-racial. “Kill the tribe and build the nation” were the famouswords of Samora Machel. Ethnicity was seen as inimical to nation buildingbecause it weakened the state by the conflicts it engendered, and themultiplicity of its claims simply denied the new countries a national image.The nationalist movement saw recognition of this pluralism as succumbingto the divide and rule tactics of the colonialists and the neo-colonialist forces

143


that were bent on denying Africa independence, or, wherever they acceptedindependence, on emptying it of any meaning by nursing the fissiparouspotential that social pluralism always harboured. And so nationalism sawitself as fighting imperialism and the retrograde forces of tribalism. In theprocess something else happened: in combating tribalism, nationalismdenied ethnic identity and considered any political, or worse, economicclaims based on these identities as diabolic as imperialism, if not worse. Thenationalists could be excused for their conflation of tribalism and identityfor, in many ways, the forces ranged against them tended to abuse identity.The shock of Katanga – in which Africa’s worst enemies, imperialism andracism, championed tribalism against the central government – was toprofoundly affect African nationalism’s perception of ethnicity and regionalclaims. One should also add here that it was always important for authoritarianregimes to emphasise or exaggerate the centrifugal forces that threatenednational cohesion and to underestimate the centripetal values that tendedto hold the country together.

The radicalisation of the nationalists, through armed struggles, was tobanish ethnicity even further from any serious political consideration. Inthose states where Marxism became the leading ideology, class analysissimply rode roughshod over any other social cleavages. Ethnic identitieswere something “invented” by the colonialist or the petty bourgeoisielocked in combat among themselves. It was part of a “false consciousness”that was bound to disappear through ideological struggle, or as developmentof capitalism made class consciousness more salient. This may eventuallybe the case, but false consciousness, while subjective in its origins, assumesan objective historical presence that can only be dismissed at one’s peril.

The nationalists were cheered on by the modernisers who consideredethnic identities and social pluralism as barriers to development. Karl Deutch(1978), who contributed considerably to the modernisation school, arguedthat modernisation would lead to the disappearance of ethnic differences asthe smaller groups were progressively absorbed by the dominant group.9 Ifnationalist leaders could somehow bedazzle those mired in their tribal worldview with a more cosmopolitan (“nationalist”) world view, modernisationwould begin. The leaders could, in a Weberian way, use their charisma tosymbolise the new nations. The new myth was that such charisma, ifnurtured, would gradually replace the retrograde and anti-developmentalmyths of tribe.

144

Thandika Mkandawire

One consequence of this posture was little attempt at addressing theinstitutional requirements of governing such multiethnic societies. Suberuis close to the truth when he argues, “The student of comparative ethnicityis immediately confronted with the irony that while Africa contains some ofthe most deeply divided countries on earth, the continent appears the leastcreative, innovative, responsive in development institutional solutions toethnicity” (Suberu 2000: 130).10 Paradoxically, while formally andconstitutionally denying the salience of social pluralism and the ubiquity ofethnic identity, the nationalist movement engaged in the politics of “regionalbalance”, especially while in power. It is this practice that produced“nationalist by day and tribalist by night” politics. And so we had the almostschizophrenic politics which prided itself on ensuring that all ethnic groupswere somehow officially recognised, while the existence of such groups,their interests, composition and even size were denied. The regional balancearrangements practised by the one-party regimes seemed more cognisant ofthe social complexities of African nation-states than the constitutionalarrangements that we have so mimetically adopted as our own. Althoughethnic diversity did not produce the apocalyptic scenarios that had beenforetold many times, it did produce a low-intensity cohesion, which, whilesufficient for the survival of the nation-state, only produced conditions ofpermanent anxiety among the political elite. I believe an important lessonfrom Africa is that recognition of ethnicity does not make one a tribalist.Similarly, recognition of the racial question does not make one a racist.

Paradoxically, one factor that devalued the status of the legitimationpolicies in the post-colonial period was the apparent settlement of thenational question, or at least its mastery, in a large number of countries.Contrary to predictions of the dismemberment of multiethnic African statesfounded on “artificial boundaries”, African states have proved remarkablyresilient, and secessionism has been a minor concern, prompting somescholars to speak of a “secessionist deficit” in Africa (Englebert and Hummel2005). This, at least in retrospect, should not be surprising. African nationsare not new: the identification with the geographical space they cover datesmuch further back than their independence. Most of the borders go as farback as the infamous Berlin conference of 1884-1885 that partitioned Africa.As Neville Alexander (2001) observes, administrative units, if they endureover time, can acquire or create meaning. Concretely, this means that evenoppressed, indeed enslaved, groups of people and individuals eventuallyidentify with the political-territorial community that has evolved, no matter

145


how arbitrary or artificial its origins. Even though conventional wisdomsuggests that large sections of African populations that are far from thecapital do not identify with the capital, the empirical evidence points in adifferent direction. As has been observed with respect to Kenya and Nigeria,even communities located on the geographic margins are very conscious oftheir belonging to a nation (Barkan 1976, William et al 1991).

One should also note here the acumen and commitment of some of thefirst-generation leaders in holding their countries together. This has becomeclear in the light of state failures in some parts of Africa. It is perhapssignificant that while the Western press wrote an obituary on the “economicdisaster” that Nyerere had putatively wrought on Tanzania, Tanzanianscelebrated the fact that he had created a nation out of disparate groups andmaintained peace. Even the detractors of Mobutu point to his uniting theCongo as one of his important contributions through a kind of redistributivekleptocracy that distributed the loot among elites of different ethnic groups.

With the realisation that the threat of secession had been exaggerated orwas receding, African leaders became more complacent about social issues.The instrumental value of social policy in the nation-building project wasthus downgraded as the social question receded into the background.

Developmentalist ImperativeWriters on nationalism have stressed the affinity between nationalism anddevelopmentalism, with some arguing that the success of the nation-building project depends on economic growth. Not surprisingly, embeddedin the nationalist project was developmentalism. In much of the twentiethcentury, there has been a close affinity between nationalism and developmentor industrialisation. And few ideologies have goaded economic development,including the “spirit of capitalism” and Stalinist industrialisation, with suchunrelenting persistence as nationalism. Development was a political project,and it was largely driven by ideologies of nation building and develop-mentalism. .This developmentalist approach has implications on howemerging social issues were treated. First social policies tended to pay muchgreater attention to their productive functions (that is, producing humancapital) rather than their redistributive and protective roles.

The point I have tried to make so far is that nationalist movements havetheir own agenda and have their own ways of placing weights on the items.There is thus a potent criticism of nationalism from within its own logic thathas been effectively evoked against nationalists in power. First, we noted

146

Thandika Mkandawire

how government have spawned growing inequality on nationalist groundand the exploitation of the “tunnel effect”. But this “tunnel effect” cannotlast forever. It is a loan which eventually expires.

This caveat is important because it points to the limits of people’spatience. Reference is often made to the Malaysian case as one way ofhandling horizontal inequality, thereby reducing the China/Bumiputra incomedisparate ratio from 2.29 to 1.74. However, often ignored is the fact that thegovernment simultaneously addressed issues of poverty throughdevelopmental policies that ensured growth and redistribution. The GINI co-efficient, which had been .51 in 1970, was reduced to .44 by 1999. In thisrespect, the data suggesting that for the countries of Africa for which datawas available South Africa was the only country in which the percentage ofpeople living under one dollar increased (from six to ten per cent) isfrightening reading. Even more alarming is the dramatic increase in overallinequality as measured by the GINI co-efficient.

One potent nationalist criticism of some of the programs of“indigenisation” is that they do not really further the developmental cause.Sometimes programmes of indigenisation are criticised on productivitygrounds. Nationalist economies policies may favour the less efficient overefficient producers, for instance. Nationalism, like social policy, has bothproductivist and distributivist attributes, with the former referring to the useof nationalism to galvanise human resources for development, while thelatter refers to policies that are redistributive when, in the name of bridgingthe gaps between national or ethnic or racial groups, the state transfersresources from one group to another – even at the expense of moreproductive and efficient resource allocation. Which of these aspects acountry emphasises will depend on its history. In many cases, the emphasison “politics of recognition” has undermined economic development but thismay be deemed part of the price. One should remember Sekou Toure’sinjunction that it was better to be poor on one’s feet than rich on one’s kneesthat has been echoed by many nationalists.

In a nationalist project, empowerment would be concerned with (a)whether it effectively transfers power to the “nationals” and (b) whether itserves the national developmental objectives. In radical nationalist theories,the real issue was: who were the elites? The choice was between a “nationalbourgeoisie” and “comprador bourgeoisie”. This argument was first raisedby Fanon against the acceptance by the new African leaders of essentiallycompradorial roles. Recall that Fanon’s criticism of a black bourgeoisie was

147


more about its effeteness, pettiness and senility than about its beingbourgeois per se. He railed against them for having become senile withoutever embarking on a renaissance. In many current efforts to promote“national capital” we are faced with situations where governments give out“rents” but have no instruments for ensuring that the beneficiaries reciprocatein the desired way. In a sense, the adoption of neo-liberal policies mayaccount for the predatory nature of the rent distribution since the state hadcarrots (rents) but not sticks to ensure reciprocity of the new black capitalistsor any other capitalists for that matter. Empowerment would be judged onwhether it effectively transfers power to the nationals and whether its servesits developmental objectives by producing true “captains of industry”rather than the “container capitalists” it seems to be currently spawning. Thepoint here is that the problem of many “indigenisation” problems was notthat they created a bourgeoisie but that they undermined development.

Structural adjustmentThe economic development strategies embarked upon after independenceled to greater economic inequality. Already by the end of the 1970s thenationalist project was in deep trouble. Many of the social pacts andcoalitions that had provided African societies with some welfarist or populistinclinations collapsed. Rising social inequality, growing unemployment andunrelenting rural poverty attracted considerable attention from theinternational community, with the ILO calling for a “basic needs strategy”,and Robert MacNamara, the then president of the World Bank, placedpoverty at the centre of the Bank’s policy and insisted on “redistributivegrowth”. However, the coup de grace was structural adjustment, when boththe national and social questions were moved off centre stage since theanswer to both was said to be reliance on the market. The ideology ofglobalisation suggested that the nation was no longer the space withinwhich the issues of poverty, development and equality would be resolved,if only because its principal actor – the state – no longer occupied centrestage. The social question also disappeared from the agenda, and concernswith poverty and growing inequality that received the internationalcommunity’s attention were replaced by structural adjustment with itssocially-blind macroeconomics. Concern with such social issues was partlyblamed for the crisis of the welfare state in the North and for the fiscal anddebt crisis in the South.

148

Thandika Mkandawire

The authoritarin turnA final factor working against placing the social question on the agenda wasthe authoritarian turn of African politics. This is not to suggest thatdemocratic rule would automatically have placed the social question on theagenda; nor is to deny that authoritarian rule always ignores the socialquestion. There are many democracies that have failed to address the socialquestion adequately. In the African case, the pursuit of national unity anddevelopment simply overwhelmed any other rationale for social concerns.Furthermore, early experiments in democracy failed partly because politicalparties evolved along tribal lines. But it was equally true that the institutionalarrangements bequeathed by our erstwhile colonial masters did not facilitatethings. Indeed, they made things devastatingly worse. The great source ofincoherence arose from the failure to reconcile what was obviously a sociallypluralistic arrangement with political and economic arrangements that weremonolithic and highly centralised. In many ways, authoritarianism, whosejustification had been that it would contain the fissiparous forces ofdemocracy, only exacerbated the social question (Laakso and Olukoshi1996, Osaghae 1999).

Development was essentially a statist and elitist project – not in the sensethat it deliberately sought inequality and protection of elite interests butrather in the sense that it presupposed the pre-eminence of the elites in bothits elaboration and implementation. In such a schema, democracy played asecondary role. Development presupposed a strong state running a coherentnation. The strong belief at the time was that there was a trade-off betweendevelopment and democracy. In more right-wing circles there was a greaterwillingness to accept the military because it was seen as bringing “law andorder”, à la Samuel Huntington. Both in the name of development andnational unity, nationalist parties in power resorted to one-party rule. Someof the nationalist parties were overthrown and replaced by military rule.Niceties about legitimacy were put to rest in undemocratic turns of governancein Africa, which radically reduced the space for popular expressions of socialdemands.

By the 1980s, a new arguments for authoritarian rule was advanced in thepursuit of structural adjustment. It was now argued that only authoritarianregimes would ride roughshod on specialised rent-seeking interests thatwere blocking adjustment. The performance of Pinochet in Chile and theputative success of Jerry Rawlings and Museveni lent credence to thisargument.

149


Bringing the Social Question Back InThis brings me to the last point which deals with potential or incipient factorspushing a new agenda in which the social question is prominent. Some ofthe factors are instrumental and still related to answering the nationalquestion, while others are about the intrinsic values of matters addressedby the social question itself and a reflection of the rise of new social forcesclamouring for equity, citizenship and justice.

The Social CrisisA major factor lending urgency to the social question is the grinding povertythat still inflicts Africa and the revival of efforts at development after yearsof deflationary adjustment policies. During the first decades of independence,African countries performed reasonably in both economic and social terms.Indeed one could justifiably classify some African states as developmental(Mkandawire 2001, Sender 1999). All this ceased at the end of the 1980s.Removal of opportunities for rent-seeking and other distortions would allowthe market to allocate resources so as to make welfare dependent not on theresolution of a social question but on an individual’s own efforts. Anycollective social action would be left to non-governmental organisations(NGOs) or civil society in general. There have been acrimonious debatesboth on the cause of the crisis and the proposed solutions. The Washingtonconsensus won this debate in policy circles but structural adjustmentpolicies (SAPs) have been a failure both on their own terms and in terms ofthe needs of the African continent.

If in earlier policies legitimation was a central occupation of state policies,in the neo-liberal era facilitation became the central objective, with SAPsproducing what O’Donnell in 1993 called “low intensity citizenship”. But ifthe new capitalist system – to which many have become resigned or havebenefited from – is to survive, it requires legitimation. Reconciling the nationand the market has always been one of the central preoccupations of policy.The ravages of depression and the social upheavals they produced lentcredence to Polanyi’s proposition that markets had to be socially embeddedif they were to perform that allocative role without causing socialdisintegration. Even for societies that were quite developed, the view wasthat social policy would not only embed the market but would also make itsvery existence compatible with the national project. Karl Polanyi could state,more than 50 years ago: “To allow the market mechanism to be sole directorof the fate of human beings and their natural environment ... would result in

150

Thandika Mkandawire

the demolition of society” (Polanyi 1946:73). During the last two decades,we have witnessed a disembedding of the market that threatens social order.This social dislocation has engendered many problems. For one, growingcrime is forcing many members of the elite to escape to “gated” communitiesand is a general source of unease. In other cases, it has created urban malaisethat has contributed to fuelling civil wars in many parts of Africa (Mkandawire2002).

The Challenge of EthnonationalismI have argued that the apparent achievement of “national unity” and therecession of the threat of secession led to complacency about both thenational and social question. Authoritarian rule further occulted the ethnicquestion by simply denying its salience in African politics. Ethnic claims orsub-nationalism has often been driven by either cultural distinctions orsocio-economic disparities. In the immediate post-colonial era, it was theformer that seemed to pose the greatest challenge to the new states,especially in light of the colonial exploitation and exacerbation of ethnicconflicts through deliberate policies of divide and rule, which often intensifiedat the dawn of independence as the outgoing colonial masters sought toweaken the emerging nation-state. There was a general recognition ofhorizontal inequalities as the legacy of colonial-development patterns withthe characteristic unevenness of development and their reliance on enclaveproduction.

One consequence of the current crisis has been the exacerbation ofdistributive conflicts as erosion of faith in social justice has weakened civicnationalism and given room to the resurgence of the politics of identity thatthreatens the entire nation-building process. The removal of distributiveconcerns from the political agenda has given room to the resurgence of thepolitics of identity that threatens the entire nation-building process. It ispartly the failure of the “social project” of nationalism that drove peopletowards ethnicity, with its cultural intimacy that gave some semblance of acommon purpose across class lines.

Democratization has the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing ethnictensions. It has, in addition, by insisting on the notion of citizenship as thebasis for voting, raised questions about the definition of citizenship. Acommon response of dominant groups has been to assert exclusionarynational identities so that the civic-nationalist vision is replaced by amajoritarian ethnocultural nationalism. We saw it earlier in the expulsion of

151


Ghanaians from Nigeria and Ugandans of Asian origin from Idi Amin’sUganda, and more recently in Chiluba’s denial of nationality on the basis ofthe parents’ birth, and the similar action against Quattara by Bedie in Coted’Ivoire. This behaviour would be incomprehensible to the founding fathersof these nations. I have argued elsewhere that “the discrete charm” ofAfrican nationalism has actually been its deafening silence and profoundnon-specificity on cultural matters. It has been sublimely vague with respectto the identity of the political community it embraced while being quitecertain about the boundaries of its territory (Mkandawire 1999). Hobsbawn(1996) reminds us how a great deal of suffering has been caused by the shiftsfrom the conception of a nation as an entity whose inhabitants wereheterogeneous and whose citizenship had nothing to do with their ethnicorigins, religious beliefs, spoken language or other personal characteristicstowards a conception of a citizenry based on a “community” whose memberswere united by a supposed common origin (“ethnicity”) and history, bycommon language and culture.

The reality is that where nationalism has sought more definite and fixedidentities, it has only fanned “ethnic cleansing”, irredentist expansionism ora genocidal exclusion of the other. Furthermore, democracy has raised ethnicdemands as newly-empowered groups stake their claims on national resources(Apollos 2001). Where institutions are weak and the politically -dominantgroup is unaccommodating of these claims, democracy can lead to bloodbathsand even the break-up of the nation.

Democratisation and the New Social DemandThe revival of the social question has been advanced by the greaterdemocratization of the polity. There is, of course, no isomorphic relationshipbetween democratisation and how intensively the social question isaddressed. In recent years, new democracies have initially, at least, tendedto pursue quite orthodox economic policies in which social policies aremarginal. Indeed one could argue that in era of globalisation, the newer thedemocracy, the more orthodox its economic policies (Mkandawire 2004).South Africa was not exceptional in this sense. However, with the passageof time, democracies have tended to put pressure against orthodox policiesas they push for redistributive policies. We have already seen signs of thisin Latin America where the new democracies are shifting towards populistor more social democratic options.

152

Thandika Mkandawire

The New Threats to SovereigntyNot only are the fissiparous pressures of politicised ethnicity puttingenormous pressures on national unity, there are, in addition, new internationalforces that are challenging the sovereignty of African states. Nationalismhas always been mediated by the international order which defines itsterritorial limits, poses challenges and evokes responses, legitimises itssovereignty, and so on. Neo-colonialism notwithstanding, the post-WorldWar international system was premised on the acceptance, albeit nominal,of the existence of sovereign states. The “embedded liberalism” that prevailedallowed considerable room for states to pursue their developmental andwelfare policies. There is considerable literature suggesting that globalisationhas placed significant constraints on the autonomy of nation-states in themaking of social policy. The processes of globalisation have, in many cases,undermined the old “social contracts” and the established rules of accessto political and economic resources.

Today the nation-building project is challenged by humanitarianinterventions that carve out certain areas as “safety zones” or that challengethe authority of the nation-state There is a slew of writing, mostly not fromAfrica, that argues for the redrawing of African boundaries to create moremanageable entities (Herbst 2000, Spears 2004). Drawing on Charles Tilly’sargument that countries make war and war makes countries, it is argued thatthe primary cause of the weakness of the state in Africa lies in the absenceof inter-state conflict, since “fundamental changes in economic structuresand societal beliefs are difficult, if not impossible, to bring about whencountries are not being disrupted or under severe external threat” (Herbst1990: 118). The low levels of secessionist movements in Africa are describedas a pathology producing “secession deficits”, partly because of aninternational system that recognises the sovereignty of otherwise weak andincompetent states. It is then suggested that by simply making territorialpartition politically feasible, African leaders would modify the parameters ofAfrican elites’ political calculus (Englebert and Hummel 2005). Implicit insome of this writing is that a little war of secession or threat of occupationwould help to sort out the mess (Herbst 2004; Luttwak 1999). After all, warplayed an important role in the strengthening of Europeans states andnationalism. This then leads Herbst to the argument that we ought really todo away with the “dogmatic devotion to the current boundaries” (Herbst2000).

153


This Eurocentric, linear and bloody view of nation-building is proposedwithout the least consideration of what it would entail to the lives of millionsof Africans.11 But even more significantly, it sanctions the new “humanitarianimperialism” which , in the name of “failed states”, has driven the self-described “most powerful nation on earth” to take upon itself the task of alittle “nation-building” here and there with incredibly destructiveconsequences.12 This should remind us that nationalism has always been theother side of imperialism, which today goes under a whole new range oflabels such as “armoured cosmopolitanism”, “ethical imperialism” and“unilateral globalism”.13

ConclusionI have throughout assumed that a distinction can be made between thenational and the social question. I know that, like all social matters, there isno Chinese wall between the two questions. Social agendas are neverconstituted by completely displacing old items of the agenda. Whileconceptually one can imagine a neat sequencing of the question – first thenational and then the social question – societies do not often follow this neatlogic. There is generally a layering of problems because of inertia, “pathdependence” and the ambiguities of social questions. And so there will bemany overlaps, and in some situations they may collapse into a singlequestion of survival. Furthermore, in the new states of Africa, a number ofproblems relating to the national question have yet to be resolved. However,these caveats notwithstanding, I still argue that failure to distinguishbetween the different normative underpinnings of the social and the nationalquestions can lead to absurd political positions.

The intention of my remarks was not to dampen revolutionary sprits, norsow despondency or simply assert the normality of the situation in SouthAfrica, given the historical experience elsewhere. Even less is the intentionto suggest some kind of Panglosian resignation, to say that what befell ourcountries was the best of all possible outcomes. Rather it was to argue thatsince the theme of betrayal has been recurring for close to half a century andsince the denouement seems quite standard, the deep sense of “betrayal”may actually signal the naivety of the expectations, the extreme voluntarismabout social changes, and the teleological cast of mind of those who feltbetrayed. It is, rather, to argue that, given the task that the nationalists hadset for themselves, it was unrealistic under the circumstances to haveexpected a revolutionary outcome. It was also to insist on the importance of

154

Thandika Mkandawire

paying serious attention to the agenda of social movements and actors.One common tradition on the Left is to declare peremptorily that a

question has been solved even as social actors hold an entirely differentview, or to insist that the continued preoccupation with the problem is simplyevidence of a bout of false consciousness or betrayal. Often to accommodatenationalist aspirations, the Left has worked on a perfunctory recognition ofsomething like a “national democratic” phase that would be mercifully brief.It is this posture that has led to disillusionment among some people becausethey somehow privileged their own questions over the many questionsnationalists sought to resolve. They therefore could not understand theprioritisation of the nationalists in power and the apparently quiet acceptance,if not complicity, of the working class and peasants in the post-colonialproject. We ought to take such “phases” seriously and to examine criticallyin light of the core of the nationalist agenda what is possible, given the deadweight of history and the conscious agenda of social actors. The resolutionof the national question is a prerequisite to an adequate addressing of thesocial question. We have to recall that where societies have failed to resolvein some meaningful way both the national and social questions, they havedrifted towards various forms of “national socialisms”.

My reading of the situation in Africa is that for many countries it isimperative to move on to addressing the emerging social question, partlybecause in some countries considerable achievements have been made inaddressing this question while, for others where the national questionremain unresolved, many of the problems complicating matters requireactive socio-economic policies to address them. In both cases, the newagenda will require new actors, new coalitions and new thinking. In much ofAfrica the national question has been removed from the agenda throughattrition and the degeneration of the nationalist movements, and it is clearit can no longer be solved by the same coalitions that brought usindependence or liberation. The shift entails a movement from a state-centred nationalism to a more citizenship-centred order.

I have suggested that there are new factors pushing for the ascendancyof new agendas – the crisis of the development model, the growing socialdifferentiation along both vertical and horizontal lines, the rise ofethnonationalism and the new wave of democratisation. Egalitarianredistributive struggles to deal with the social question will require differentsocial coalitions and different agendas. They will involve decouplingstruggles for recognition (Black Empowerment) from struggles for

155


redistribution and equality. There have been calls all across the continentfor a “second independence”. These calls are a reminder of both the initialpromise and the failures of “first independence”. In this still veryWestaphalian world, it is difficult to imagine the solution of the socialquestion before key elements of the national question are dealt with. Withrespect to Africa, one can still ask the nationalist questions: what happenedto the development agenda and the fight against the “unholy trinity ofignorance, poverty and disease”? What is happening with social inclusionand the end of inherited colonial or racial divisions? What is happening tothe democratic exercise of the rights that liberation has brought? These areweighty questions and firmly within the nationalist agenda. It is by revisitingthe issues of nation-building, pan-Africanism, development and democracythat we will be able to address the main issues that devastate the lives of somany African people – poverty, wars, repression and inequality that constitutethe social question.

Finally, I want to stress the point that scholarship ought to be more thanan incantation of acts of betrayal committed by any chosen group. What isneeded is a more open-ended research and understanding of both theconflicted agendas of key social actors and the structural limitations theyhave to contend with. One of the lessons from the African experience is thatall too often our voluntaristic will for change blocked the dispassionateanalysis of our societies. I believe the greatest tribute we can pay HaroldWolpe is through dispassionate analysis in search of a world of passionatepossibilities.

Notes1. It is often forgotten that it was Hegel who laid the theoretical foundations for

the German discourse on the social embedding of the markets. Hegel’s fear wasthat the emerging marketing system would be destructive and create a “rabble”that would be a threat to social order. These ideas were taken up by the YoungHegelians under the influence of the German historicist school. They argued thatsocial reforms were essential for pre-empting social revolutions and that onlyinstitutions that stood above the contending classes – the bureaucracy in theircase – would take up the challenge. The basic concern was the social questionand the reconciliation of economic dynamism and social cohesion. (Ebner 2006,Lehmbruch 2001).

2. The theme of going beyond the national question is not a new one. In the 1980s,many African scholars, such as Anyang (Nyong’o 1987), Mamdani, Mkandaiwireand Wambia dia Wamba (Mamdani et al 1988) began to raise issues of socialmovements and democratisation.

156

Thandika Mkandawire

3. Or as Sam Moyo, for instance, has argued: “Land reform is a fundamentaldimension of the agrarian question, while the agrarian question is a fundamentaldimension of the national question” (Moyo 2004).

4. This, of course, is not a peculiarly African trait. On the similar stance taken bythe Irish nationalists, see Nelson (2004).

5. For some nationalists, doing good was equated to doing well for oneself.President Jomo Kenyatta attacked one of his socialist detractors by rhetoricallysaying: “We were together with Paul Ngei in jail. If you go to Ngei’s home, hehas planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for yourself?If you go to Kubai’s home, he has a big house and has a nice shamba (farm).Kaggia, what have you done for yourself? We were together with KunguKarumba in jail, now he is running his own buses. What have you done foryourself?” (cited in Karioki 1974:45).

6. As Andreasson insists “This sort of argumentation, which prioritizes nationalor racial/ethnic struggle over class struggle, is at the very least theoreticallyproblematic for an ostensibly socialist organization” (2006:315).

7. The remarks of Avineri may be appropriate here: “Socialism has thus beenburdened with an anti-national bias, which, drawing on the universalist ideas ofthe eighteenth-century Enlightenment, did not make it especially capable ofmeeting the challenges of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In thisblindness and in a very profound sense, Marxism shares this poverty with itsrival, classical liberalism. Both, being offspring of the universalist ideas of theEnlightenment, have difficulties in perceiving and granting legitimacy to historicalentities which cannot be subsumed under purely universal criteria” (Avineri1991:654-5 ).

8. One has only to read some of the complaints in conservative British newspapersthat ZANU(PF) is building a black agrarian capitalist class who are presumablyMugabe’s cronies.

9. As Calhoun succinctly observes: “Modernization theory thus predicted thatwhen outlying regions were incorporated into a social system they wouldgradually be ‘homogenized’ into cultural similarity with the rest of the system,nationalism centered on the encompassing state would grow and contrary ethnicmobilization would be transitory” (Calhoun 1993:218).

10. One explanation could be that there has not been much intellectual effortdeployed to understanding ethnicity in Africa. Within Africa, the criticism ofthe primordialists by scholars such as Mafeje and Nnoli was misconstrued asto suggest that the study of ethnicity and the recognition of its political saliencewas playing into the hands of the erstwhile colonial masters.

11. Tilly himself was not as sanguine about the process as some of his followers seemto be. He considered war-making state formations as our “largest examples of

157


organised crime” which “cost tremendously in death, suffering, loss of rights”(Tilly 1985:170).

12. As Morton has noted, this policy-making approach which “represents apathological view of conditions in postcolonial states as characterised bydeviancy, aberration and breakdown from the norms of Western statehood “(has) a significant signalling function contained within the metaphors: ofdarkness, emptiness, blankness, decay, black holes and shadows. There is, then,a dominant view of post-colonial states that is imbued with the imperialrepresentations of the past based on a discursive economy that renews a focuson the post-colonial world as a site of danger, anarchy and disorder. (Morton2005:372-73)

13. This new imperial order is given moral credence by a new “revisionist” literaturethat celebrates yesteryears’ imperial order.

ReferencesAdesina, J O (2007) In Search of Inclusive Development: social policy in the Sub-

Saharan African context. Basingstoke: Palgrave/UNRISD.Aina, Tade Akin (2004) ‘Introduction: how do we understand globalisation and

social policy in Africa?’, in Tade Akin Aina, C Chachage and Elisabeth Annan-Yao (eds) Globalization and Social Policy in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA: 1-20.

Alexander, N (2001) ‘The state of nation-building in the new South Africa’, Pretexts:Literary and Cultural Studies 10(1):83-91.

Aminzade, Ronald (2003) ‘From Race to Citizenship: The Indigenization Debatein Post-Socialist Tanzania’, Studios in Comparative International Development38(1):43.

Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities. London.Andreasson, Stefan (2006) ‘The African national congress and its critics: “predatory

liberalism” black empowerment and intra-alliance tensions in post-apartheidSouth Africa’, Democratization 13(2):303-22.

Apollos, M (2001) ‘Ethnicity, violence and democracy’, Africa Development26(1):99-144.

Avineri, S (1991) ‘Marxism and nationalism’, Journal of Contemporary History26(3/4):637-57.

Barkan, Joel D (1976) ‘Comment: further eeassessment of “conventional wisdom”:political knowledge and voting behavior in rural Kenya’, American PoliticalScience Review 70: 452-55.

Beck, H (1995) The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia:conservatives, bureaucracy, and the social question, 1815-70. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

158

Thandika Mkandawire

Calhoun, C (1993) ‘Nationalism and Ethnicity’, Annual Review of Sociology 19(1):211-39.

Deutsch, Karl Wolfgang (1978) Nationalism and Social Communication : an inquiryinto the foundations of nationality. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Dumont, René (1969) False Start in Africa. London: Andre Deutsch.Ebner, Alexander (2006) ‘The intellectual foundations of the social market economy’,

Journal of Economic Studies 33(3):206-23.Englebert, P and R Hummel (2005) ‘Let’s stick together: understanding Africa’s

secessionist deficit’, African Affairs 104(416):399-427.Fanon, Frantz (1966) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.Herbst, J (1990) ‘War and the state in Africa’, International Security 14(4):117-39.——— (2000) States and Power in Africa: comparative reasons in authority and

control. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.——— (2004) When States Fail: causes and consequences. Princeton NJ: Princeton

University Press: 302-18.Hettne, Björn (2005) ‘Beyond the “new” regionalism’, New Political Economy

10(4):543-71.Hirschman, Albert (1981) ‘The changing tolerance for income inequality in the

course of economic development’, in Hirschman (ed) Essays in Trespassing:economics to politics and beyond. London: Cambridge University Press: 39-58.

Hobsbawm, Eric (1996) ‘The future of the state’, Development and Change27(2):267-78.

Karioki, James N (1974) ‘African scholars versus Ali Mazrui’, Transition 45:55-63.

Laakso, Liisa and Adebayo Olukoshi (1996) ‘The crisis of the post-colonial nation-state project in Africa’, in Liisa Laakso and Adebayo Olukoshi (eds) Challengesto the Nation-State in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet.

Lazarus, Neil (1999) ‘Disavowing decolonisation: Fanon, nationalism, and thequestion of representation in postcolonial theory’, in Anthony Alessandrini(ed) Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge:161-94.

Lehmbruch, Gerhard (2001) ‘The institutional embedding of market economies: theGerman “model” and its impact on Japan’, in The Origins of NonliberalCapitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Wolfgang Streeck and KozoYamamura (ed). New York: Cornell University Press: 39-93.

Luttwak, E N (1999) ‘Give war a chance’, Foreign Affairs 78(4):36-44.Mamdani, M, Thandika Mkandawire and Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba (1988) Social

Movements, Social Transformation and the Struggle for Democracy. Dakar:CODESRIA.

159


Mbeki, Thabo (1984) ‘The Fatton Thesis: a rejoinder’, Canadian Journal of AfricanStudies 18(3).

McClelland, Charles E (1973) ‘Berlin historians and German politics’, Journal ofContemporary History 8(3):3-33.

Meredith, Martin (2005) The Fate of Africa: from the hopes of freedom to the heartof despair. Johannesburg: Jonathon Ball Publishers.

Mkandawire, Thandika (1999) ‘Shifting commitments and national cohesion inAfrican countries’, in Lennart Wohlegemuth, Samantha Gibson, Stephan Klasenand Emma Rothchild (eds). Common Security and Civil Society in Africa.Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet: 14-41.

Mkandawire, Thandika (2001) ‘Thinking about developmental states in Africa’,Cambridge Journal of Economics 25(3):289-313.

Mkandawire, Thandika (2002) ‘The terrible toll of post-colonial “Rebel Movements”in Africa: toward an explanation of the violence against the peasantry’, Journalof Modern African Studies 40(2):181-215.

Mkandawire, Thandika (2004) ‘Disempowering new democracies and the persistenceof poverty’, in Max Spoor (ed). Globalisation, Poverty and Conflict. Dordrecht:Kluwer Academic Publishers: 117-53.

Morton, Adam (2005) ‘The “failed state” of international relations’, New PoliticalEconomy 10(3):371-79.

Moyo, S (2004) ‘The land and Agrarian question in Zimbabwe’, paper presentedat First annual colloquium, University of Fort Hare, September 30.

Nelson, B (2004) ‘Irish Americans, Irish nationalism, and the “Social” question,1916-1923’, Boundary 2, 31(1):147-78.

Nyong’o, Peter Anyang (1987) Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa.London: Zed Books.

O’Donnell, Guillermo (1993) ‘On the state, democratisation, and some conceptualproblems: a Latin American view with glances at some postcommunist countries’,World Development 21(8):1355-75.

Odinga, Oginga (1967) Not yet Uhuru: the autobiography of Oginga Odinga. NewYork: Hill and Wang.

Osaghae, E E (1999) ‘Democracy and national cohesion in multiethnic AfricanStates: South Africa and Nigeria Compared’, Nations and Nationalism 5(2):259-80.

Polanyi, Karl (1946) The Great Transformation: the political and economic originsof our time. Beacon Press: Boston.

Saul, John (1973) ‘African socialism in one country: Tanzania’, in Giovanni Arrighiand John Saul (eds). Essays on The Political Economy of Africa. New York:Monthly Review Press: 237-337.

160

Thandika Mkandawire

Saul, John (2001) ‘Cry for the beloved country: the post-apartheid denouement’,Monthly Review 52(8):1-51.

Sender, John (1999) ‘Africa’s economic performance: limitations of the currentconsensus’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 13(3):89-114.

Simutanyi, Neo (2006) ‘The state and economic development in Africa: challengesfor post-apartheid South Africa’, paper presented at Harold Wolpe MemorialTrust Eastern Cape Lecture Series, East London, October 16.

Spears, I (2004) ‘Debating secession and the recognition of new states in Africa’,African Security Review 13:2.

Suberu, Rotime (2000) ‘Governance and the ethnic factor’, in Goran Hyden, DeleOlowu and H W O Okoth-Ogendo (eds). African Perspectives on Governance.Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press: 123-51.

Taylor, Charles (1994) ‘The politics of recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed).Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Tilly, Charles (1985) ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in PeterEvans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds). Bringing the State BackIn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:169-85.

Wallerstein, Emmanuel (1961) The Politics of Independence. New York: VintageBooks.

commentary from the national question to the social...

Documents