Though for many there is little dispute that colonialism “happened.” What that historical fact means for the contemporary lives of people across the world today is matter of dispute, and not only amongst scholars. Those who were once upon a time either colonizer or colonized would more readily find agreement that some countries colonized other countries. Or more precisely, that some European empires colonized many territories.The recent coronation of a new British monarch recalls that famous phrase that the “sun never sets on the British empire.”Simply put, the British Empire’s reach was so geographically expansive—it is said nearly 25% of the Earth’s land mass at its mightiest–that if the sun was setting in some part of the empire it was also simultaneously rising in another part of the empire.
The lights never went out, so to speak. Extending this luminous metaphor further, it was projected that the light of Enlightenment radiated by British civilization would also illuminate the darkness of consciousness amongst the colonized. But as signaled by British prime minister Harold Macmillan’s famous speech to the whites-only parliament of South Africa in Cape Town in 1960, the winds of change were to set the sun on the political rule of empires over colonies, at least as a legitimate political practice that had started in 1497, for the British. Chiding his white South African audience a tinge, Macmillan observed:
In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation states of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of national consciousness in peoples who have for centuries lived in dependence upon some other power. Fifteen years ago this movement spread through Asia. Many countries there of different races and civilisations pressed their claim to an independent national life…The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.
The idea of national consciousness as the inevitable expression of freedom, in this account, first thought of and lived out in Europe, was now repeating itself in the rest of the world. This was how Macmillan’s liberal contemporaries had come to philosophize the relinquishing of political rule and trusteeship over “their” colonies. Liberal imperialists narrate decolonization as a benevolent act in the inevitable march toward freedom and the nation-state that liberalism would claim as its proud heritage to this day. It remains a narrative denuded of the actual story of liberal trusteeship and paternalism that violently denied colonized peoples their sovereignty for hundreds of years. My point in recalling this is to underscore the consensus by most people—erstwhile colonizer and colonized— that colonialism happened, but also that colonialism definitely ended. (With more nuance, a version of this argument can be found in the Cornell philosopher Olufemi Taiwo’s Against Decolonization, Taking African Agency Seriously.)
It has a start date and a terminal date: colonization ended with decolonization by the 1960s. Except in settler colonies, in territories such as Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, South West Africa, and South Africa. Well, yes it did end in that sense. But even in the very moment of hoisting up the new flag of national independence with exuberance, anti-colonial leaders like Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana and Nyerere of Tanganyika already began to talk of “neocolonialism,” the new form of colonialism they discovered, which tethered politically free countries to economically dependent relations with the former colonizing powers. It was a relationship they experienced immediately as a fetter on true independence and sovereignty.
Over the next decades, African political leaders preoccupied themselves with the processes of state formation, of building the national consciousness seen as necessary to produce new forms of communities that could unite around the nation. Charismatic political leaders, and the ideologies of development, offered symbols and programs around which to unite. At the same time, a generation of critical intellectuals and scholars drew attention to the limits that neo-colonial relations placed on the freedom of the freed states. Africa could not “develop” if development itself was being kicked at the shins from the very beginning.
Walter Rodney, the Caribbean historian and activist who found himself in the heady debates at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s articulated the problem powerfully in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Colonialism was formally over, but it held on to its mission and gains through a systematic relationship of economic dependency. Critical intellectuals in Latin America were coming to the same conclusions, and developed concepts such as “dependency theory,” articulated by historical sociologists such as Andre Gunder Frank to describe the historical phenomena they were living through.
At the same time, holding the postcolonial nation-state together was a challenge across many parts of the African continent, but also elsewhere right at the very beginning of decolonization as an expression of Macmillan’s celebrated national consciousness. Think of the slaughter that accompanied the fracturing of India through partition to produce two new political entities, a homeland for Muslims by the name of Pakistan, and the contested idea of whom India should be a homeland for, a question that features prominently in India’s current predicaments. There was also the secessionist impulse that produced the Biafra war in Nigeria (1967-1970). It was Julius Nyerere’s political dexterity that successfully welded Tanganyika and Zanzibar together despite the Zanzibari revolution.
The precarity of unity increasingly required a firm grip on political life and more centralized states. The suspicions of coups and palace intrigue further concentrated political powers, encouraging military rulers to take on political roles in the name of unity and development. New kinds of political figures emerged in this context—playing into the bigman theories of African politics were figures such as Idi Amin, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Mobutu Desire Sese Seko.
Another trajectory of post-independence leaders is symbolized by the lionized and tragic figure of Thomas Sankara, or the ideologically syncretic figures of Sekou Toure and Muammar Gaddafi; they represented a different kind of hope for radical nationalist commitments. The civil wars that took place in the post-independence period in Africa mobilized constituencies defined in some places by tribal solidarities, in other places by religious solidarities or combinations of either, and mapped onto territorial notions of who belonged. And often also inflamed by the Cold War.
When it came to intellectuals, the mainstream orthodoxies of those “studying Africa” as professional vocations—the policy experts and many mainstream Africanists of North America or Europe—looked askance at some of their colleagues, who tended to valorize the social reality of solidarities and consciousness of clan or tribe over nation and state. Africanist political science tended to lament the absence of national consciousness as an antidote to a parochial consciousness. The future, as modernization theory wished it, would produce the modern individuated and supposedly abstract citizen of liberal political theory, unencumbered by tribal or religious identity. On the Western, Marxist-influenced left there was a lament too, less for the individual of liberal freedom but for the radical collective political subject united by class relations that was being fractured by the cultural/ethnic consciousness of tribal mobilizations.
But what a consensus about the historical fact of colonialism means in relation to understanding political life today remains a major debate. Political movements on the continent critical of the centralization of leaders and powers of states and political figures, increasingly identified the problems of contemporary Africa as a product of the agency of African elites and leaders. Disillusioned by the emphasis on state formation and unity at the expense of the people, while claiming to be in the name of the people, the answer to the problems for post-Cold War opposition movements resided in the panaceas of civil society and multipartyism championed in the late 1990s.
By the early 1970s analyses of the practices of states and leaders were understood through concepts such as corruption or neopatrimonialism; both are concepts that conflate descriptions of power with explanations of political practices. More elaborate descriptions of agency as the expression of pathologies of grotesque and even libidinal power would follow (for example in the writings of Bayart, and Mbembe). These arguments increasingly emphasized agency or the choices made by African leaders themselves as primary culprits, whether as participants in colonial rule or agents of their own dire fates as post-independence African societies.
Over time, this mode of critique produced two responses as solutions. First, a current wave of well-meaning policies and think-tanks dedicated to leadership studies, and the need to produce more “ethical leaders.” The hope that leadership studies will solve Africa’s problems is an expression of an idea of agency. Second, emphasizing agency by holding individual leaders accountable through criminalizing abuses of power—a response driven by a human rights approach.
The emphasis in many of these approaches is on the solutions to African political and economic predicaments, as primarily solved by African agency; where agency is interpreted as the choices individuals make in the present. These choices are understood as bad choices when political leaders derive…
