Invented Communities in Africa and America
by zunguzungu
In Garry Wills’ Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the phrase is used in a positive way, just as when Mark Egan Essig used the phrase for his Inventing America: the life of Benjamin Franklin or Jack Rakove’s Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. When the American state is “invented,” it is a good thing.
By contrast, when the New York Times offers us the picture on the left and the following text, the unmistakable implication is that political states which do not perfectly align with pre-existing ethnic communities are, if not unnatural, somewhat problematic:
A Continent Carved Up, Ignoring Who Lives Where The map of today’s African nations looks much like the map drawn by Europeans to meet their own interests: diverse groups are scattered across many countries with little concern for ethnic links. The patterns shown here represent only the broadest ethnic and language groupings; within those are further divisions, like tribe and clan, too numerous to show.
In the accompanying article, this point (the “Colonial Curse”) is made explicit:
More than any other continent, Africa is wracked by separatists. There are rebels on the Atlantic and on the Red Sea. There are clearly defined liberation movements and rudderless, murderous groups known principally for their cruelty or greed. But these rebels share at least one thing: they direct their fire against weak states struggling to hold together disparate populations within boundaries drawn by 19th-century white colonialists. That history is a prime reason that Africa remains, to a striking degree, a continent of failed or failing states.
The most obvious point, of course, is that the USA is about as invented a community as it’s possible to imagine; ours is a map drawn by Europeans utterly without reference to ethnic groups, and yet we’ve done all right, haven’t we? And every state, every map, every nation in the world is this as well. So, um, what’s the point again?
The second thing is that Jeffrey Gettleman’s opening paragraph doesn’t really say anything at all. In that most African states are “weak states struggling to hold together disparate populations within boundaries drawn by 19th-century white colonialists,” then yes, it’s true that African rebels have in common the fact that they’re rebelling against that kind of state. But at least as many rebels are trying to capture the state as seperate from it, and in the most war-torn parts of the continent, they’re just trying to maintain the status quo; war is its own political economy in Eastern Congo, for example, and there are many places where borders are too irrelevent to fight over. Gettleman’s sweeping generalization works, in other words, because it actually says so little, and so tautologically.
And the third point to make is –um, how should I put this — what a useless map that is. It purports to demonstrate something like ethnic diversity, but what it really shows is an incredibly impoverished version of linguistic diversity, by which, apparently, everyone between Gabon and Mozambique speaks the same language. In fact, just to hit up the difference between Tanzania and Mozambique which that map doesn’t flag: Portuguese is the closest thing to a national language of Mozambique, but because of the particularities of colonial and postcolonial experience, the country is completely divided by language, while Tanzania is almost completely unified by Kiswahili, thanks to the success in doing so first by the Germans and British and then by Nyerere’s postcolonial government. That map tells you nothing of what is actually important, nothing of the histories by which Tanzania and Mozambique were made into what they are as national communities.
One would never want to ignore the destructive effects the scramble for Africa had on Africans, and the last thing I want to do is downplay the extent to which contemporary African politics are organically related to that historical event. But history didn’t stop after that point, and this capsule account of the “colonial curse” relies on your being completely ignorant about almost all of it. The problem with colonization isn’t that Europeans drew up maps “with little concern for ethnic links,” and it isn’t true anyway. The problem is that Europeans drew up the maps they did with the intention of extracting as much in the way of labor and resources as they could from Africans, and then did exactly that, often by quite carefully seeking to divide and conquer Africans by ethnicity.
It lets Europe off the hook in a hugely important ways to imagine that Europeans were, in any sense, unaware of ethnicity. Precisely the opposite was the case. In most cases, it was Europeans who taught (and forced) Africans to be “ethnic” in the first place. This is not a small point. When Europeans set about conquering Africa, they discovered quite quickly that it was a lot harder than they expected: it was relatively easy to kill Africans, but simply shooting people didn’t actually give a colonial administrator much to work with in terms of actually controlling them and extracting labor and resources. Africans often didn’t live in anything like the absolutist ethnic states which Europeans wanted them to live in — which would have made it easier to govern them — so Europeans colonial administrators worked very hard to create absolutist ethnic tribal groups and then force Africans to live in them.
This is not to say that ethnicity didn’t exist before colonization; that sort of generalization is also hard to sustain, as most continental level generalizations are. But the general rule was that the sort of political state which was suited for organizing and controlling a population’s labor and resources did not exist before colonial rule, and had to be invented, and was, by Europeans. “Gikuyu,” for example, means “farmer,” and it distinguished the people (in what is now Kenya) who lived by farming, and took a pride in it, from the people who lived a more pastoral life in the same area, and spoke a different language. But the groups intermarried, crossed over, and traded with each other when they felt like it, and neither was a single political group anyway; there was no Maasai state or nation, nor was there a Gikuyu nation. That is, until Europeans — with their maps and censuses — decided that there was, and codified it into colonial law. After that, there were such “ethnic” groups, and you can find a version of this phenomenan across the continent; “We didn’t know we were members of X tribe until Europeans told us we were,” is a common refrain. And after that point, it became true, in the same way that my ancestors became “American” at the moment a census decided they were.
This is not even a controverisal argument, by the way. Read Terence Ranger’s “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” or Leroy Vail’s The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, or Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, or Crawford Young’s Ethnicity and Politics in Africa, or listen to Bruce Berman on this subject, or read just about anything at all on the subject but the New York Times. What you will get from that experience is a better understanding of the extent to which the MSM’s conception of Africa presumes and propogates an intuitive distinction between Africans and the West based on this difference: while it is normal for Westerners — being nturally secular and creative and self-making — to invent and create our own states and governments (to declare our independence and “constitute” ourselves), the fact that Africans are saddled with artificial states is an inherent problem because Africans are, you know, basically tribal, ethnic, and clannish, basically the same as they always were. Because they’re so naturally insular and tribalist, it’s natural for them to fight against the artificial states they’ve been saddled with by colonialism, even a thing to be celebrated. Except — and here’s the really important point — those colonial maps have long ceased to be foreign to Africa, any more than it continues to be weird for Virginians and Pennsylvanians and Californians to live in the same country. “Nigeria” might have once been a colonial imposition, but as Chinua Achebe put it in The Education of a British-Protected Child:
I lived through a civil war in which probably two million people perished over the question of Nigerian unity. To remind me, therefore, that Nigeria’s foundation was laid only a hundred years ago, at the Berlin conference of European powers and in the total absence of any Africans, is not really useful information to me. It is precisely because the nation is so new and so fragile that we would soak the land in blood to maintain the frontiers mapped out by foreigners.
zunguzungu 
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“Africa is wracked by separatists,” unlike those unified Europeans.
Europe: 50 states, avg size: ~200km2 / 14m souls
Africa: 54 states, avg size: ~560km2 / 18m souls
Yes, but ‘those Europeans’ have spent the better part of the last 1000 years sorting out those borders and communities. Moreover, for a large part of that period the nature of the means of violence was a centralising rather than decentralising phenomenon.
The result is, largely, 50 states with a central government who controls the means of violence within that state. This means that most violence is inter-state. Because of this, the western world understand and has developed rules for and mechanisms for preventing inter-state violence.
This is not the case with Africa. Most violence in Africa is intra-state. This is waht is meant by “Africa is wracked by separatists,”.
I’ll leave Africa to the post’s author, but to put that “1000 years” in Europe in perspective, I refer to the maps on p. 36 of Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ja2MUXS_YQUC&lpg=PP1&dq=atlas%20of%20the%20european%20novel&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false
Effectively *no* European borders are > 200 years old, and of the three “pan-European” events of the past century, two–WWI and the collapse of the USSR/Warsaw Pact–yielded many, many new states. What in Africa is called “separatism” and in the US is called “secession” seems to be called “self-determination” in Europe.
Furthermore, I’m pretty sure the Catalans, Basques, Corsicans, Scots, Welsh, Northern Italians, Flammands, etc. might disagree with the idea of a Europe without intra-state strife–with varying levels of commitments to violence.
On the other hand, part of the point, from my understanding of the situation in Sudan, of the referendum is to show that separatism can be “solved” at the ballot box.
My response comes off as patronising. I don’t mean that. My point is simple: Separatism is a crucial component of the last 200 years of world history, so being surprised that there’s dissatisfaction somewhere with how the state is composed and wanting to create a new state on different terms, whether in Africa, Europe, or whatever strikes me as weird.
Another way, without patronising Africans, what the NYT ignores is the political sense of these populations turning towards Europe and saying “I learned it from watching you, dad!”
Absolutely Africa is following the example of the western world (see my other post). However, my point is that Europe’s experience has not been entirely ‘seperatist’; a lot of blood has been spent creating stable communities within Europe’s states. Nor would I suggest that Europe’s borders (or communities) have been stable over the last 200 years (let alone 1000): but Europe’s current stability (relative to Africa) is in part because Europe is at the end of a long process of negotiating conflict between communities. By and large it has strong central governments which have the both the support of their population and power to maintain their position.
African nations, on the other hand, by-and-large do not possess these things. African nations ‘wracked by seperatism’ tend to have weak central governements and whose pre-eminent position is contested.
Part of the reason for the difficulties African nations face is historical. African states need to deal with the effects of potent and easily accessible small arms in the hands of child soldiers: Europe didn’t.
The comparison between Africa and America is specious and not a little insulting.
America has ‘done well’ largely by creating, through genocide, a tabular rasa upon which it can invent its community.
Actually, in hindsight, I’ll retract my initial argument: perhaps America’s experience is actually quite informative.
A fair point, of course, to which I would add the generalization that every nation-state has a ton of ethnic-cleansing blood on its hands. The US is unusually bad in this sense, but far from unique. And to address your point specifically, my argument would be that it’s what a coutnry like Sudan has in common with the “normal” Western nation-state (an insistence on controlling its borders and maintaining the sovereignty of the central state at all costs) that has produced so much violence in the South and the West. There’s nothing uniquely or unusually “African” about that dynamic, which was my point in comparing them;.
So yeah, “done well” was a dumb phrase to use, I guess; what I was trying to indicate was just that you can’t blame Africa’s problems on that unless you have an excuse for why the USA doesn’t have the same kinds of seperatist movements (my point was about the media, not trying to make a claim about Africa or the USA themselves).
“what I was trying to indicate was just that you can’t blame Africa’s problems on that unless you have an excuse for why the USA doesn’t have the same kinds of seperatist movements”
That’s why I retracted my initial ‘specious’ argument. America is actually an instructive example. Genocide is an effective method of ‘inventing’ a community. To such an extent that I think it would be hard to find a successful ‘normal’ state that has not engaged in some degree of ethnic cleansing to create its community. Or, alternatively, isn’t the rump left when the ethnic cleansing wasn’t 100% successful.
On the Europe/Africa distinction – from the Leroy Vail book, in 1989:
“(the Left hoped that nations).. would provide the material base for a pan-ethnic class consciousness that would transcend, if not negate, cultural differences. Africa would be a continent of new Yugoslavias.”
That last sentence turned out to be true, if not in quite the way we’d hoped.
I’ve been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts”. It is startling how clearly it illustrates how the boundaries of Europe’s countries have been in constant motion.
The NYT can’t talk about Africa without sounding patronizing. And not just Africa but the Near East Asia and South America too. Our leaders are grave and respectable; their leaders are clowns and incompetents. Their people are masses, mostly poor. Our people are upstanding citizens (unless they are poor and needy.) American was created by the hand of god, and frankly, the rest of the world is just a mess. Don’t we feel good about ourselves!
This bit (and the surrounding bits) was something of a revelation to ignorant American me:
“But the general rule was that the sort of political state which was suited for organizing and controlling a population’s labor and resources did not exist before colonial rule, and had to be invented, and was, by Europeans.”
Despite actually having Gikuyu family members I wasn’t really fully aware of this. In some nice synchronicity, it reinforces and broadens some thoughts I’ve been having recently about resistance and possible futures.
[…] finally, check out zunguzungu‘s “Invented Communities in Africa and […]
[…] When we look at governance, the Europeans share part of the blame for present-day authoritarianism in Africa: Africans often didn’t live in anything like the absolutist ethnic states which Europeans wanted them to live in — which would have made it easier to govern them [and extract labor and resources] — so Europeans colonial administrators worked very hard to create absolutist ethnic tribal groups and then force Africans to live in them. This is not to say that ethnicity didn’t exist before colonization; that sort of generalization is also hard to sustain, as most continental level generalizations are. But the general rule was that the sort of political state which was suited for organizing and controlling a population’s labor and resources did not exist before colonial rule, and had to be invented, and was, by Europeans. (source) […]
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