Security and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa - Looking to the Future

Following is the presentation to the Commander's Speaker Programme at the US Africa Command, US Military Headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany on Tuesday 19th January 2010.

Africa's colonial legacy

by Moeletsi Mbeki

The challenge facing Sub-Saharan Africa is not State building as many analysts believe. The immediate challenge most of Africa faces is society building.

Building a viable, sustainable and stable society requires the establishment and development of legitimate, socially-hegemonic group or groups that can then build a viable state. This was what European colonial powers failed to do in Sub-Saharan Africa before they departed in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. Instead they left behind a semblance of a state which had no social anchors. This was what led to Africa's instability during the last half a century. This instability continues to this day in many countries despite a few signs of hope, in a handful of countries.

The most important factor in the creation of a stable capitalist society is the rise of a property-owning class that controls extensive assets. On its own, this class of property owners is not sufficient to create a stable society because in order to develop the assets of these property owners and make them profitable, the owners require the technical and managerial skills of professional and artisan classes, generally referred to as the middle class. The bargaining power of this middle class also acts as a restraining influence on the political power of the large property owners.

This power balance at the existential level culminates in the emergence of the state that is established by these social formations to codify their relationship into a stable order.

European colonial powers failed to develop their African colonies along the lines described above. Instead they founded what I call pseudo-states that were stable only as long as the colonial powers controlled them. Once the colonial powers departed, these pseudo-states became a focus for conflict among the various rudimentary elites that had emerged amongst the indigenous peoples during colonialism. These new elites fought amongst themselves for control of tax revenues and other privileges associated with access to power in these pseudo-states.

In the final analysis, it was this intra-elite competition that accounted for Africa's endemic political instability during the last 50 years.

Without the re-construction of the underlying societies of the former colonies, this instability can go on literally for centuries as we have seen for example in the case of Liberia, Sierra Leone and, of course, Haiti.

I will now try to trace the broader and deeper sources of Africa's instability which even predate colonialism.

Slave Trade

The African continent has been in turmoil for half a millennium since Europeans started to settle in the New World in the 16th century. It was African slaves who contributed to make the Europeans' plantations and mines in the New World a profitable business. Export of African slaves to the New World was accompanied by slave exports also to Egypt and West Asia (Arabia). It was estimated that between 1500 and the end of the 19th century 18 million Africans were sold into slavery.

Slavery was so extensive it touched virtually every part of sub-Saharan Africa. The only part of Africa which was not impacted upon by the slave trade was the small region south of the Limpopo River. This is the territory which now constitutes the Republic of South Africa.

The slave trade brought about enormous social, political and demographic instability to Africa. According to one expert the population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1850 would have been double what it was in 1700. The population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1850 was roughly 50 million. If there had not been the slave trade it is estimated that this population would have been 100 million.

Colonialism, Liberation and Cold War

The end of the slave trade in the 19th century was soon followed by the colonisation of the continent, this time driven by the European powers' desire to exploit Africa's vast natural resources. European powers at a conference held in Berlin in 1884-85 set down the ground rules on how to partition Africa amongst themselves. This triggered a second phase of instability in Africa starting with resistance to colonisation and forced labour and culminating in struggles for independence after the Second World War.

The end of the Second World War brought into existence another global phenomenon that was to play an important role in the continued destabilisation of African societies and of sub-Saharan Africa. The Cold War which started in the 1940s engulfed the entire world in the competition for spheres of influence and control between the western capitalist powers led by the United States and the communist powers led by the Soviet Union.

Once again Africa was caught in this whirlwind where these two camps vied with each other to control the newly independent countries or to stop them from aligning themselves with their adversaries. Some of the most well documented interventions in independent Africa were those by the United States government which connived in the assassination of Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba in 1961; the overthrow of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966 and in the attempt to destroy the Angolan government of Agostinho Neto and his party in the 1970s and 80s.

Intra-State Conflicts

African states as we know them today were not created by Africans. With a few exceptions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and perhaps South Africa, African states were created by European imperial powers at the Berlin Conference. Africans did not gain control of these foreign-created states until recently, in the 1960s.

African states therefore suffer from a number of important handicaps. They suffer from weak allegiance by their citizens to these states and vice versa. This explains why African countries during the past 50 years have been centres of many conflicts, in particular civil wars, inter-tribal wars, violent communal conflicts and pogroms, wars of secession, and more recently in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, attempts at genocide. These great conflicts have been accompanied by vast population movements in and out of different national boundaries. Africa, not surprisingly, is host to the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world.

Secondly, because these states have only recently been captured by African rulers, African elites therefore perceive sovereignty as a valuable economic asset because it enables them to enrich themselves. This further exacerbates the weak allegiance of the populous towards these states as the process of elite self-enrichment undermines the ability of these states to deliver services to the general population.

An important aspect of conflicts in Africa, unlike conflicts of the past in Europe, has been the almost-complete absence of inter-state wars in Africa. In the case of Europe fear of devastating inter-state wars was one of the driving forces behind the strengthening of the state. This is not the case in Africa. During the past 50 years there has been only two inter-state wars among African countries. These were the war between Tanzania and Uganda in the 1970s and the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1990s. The latter war could in fact be considered to have been the continuation of the secessionist war of Eritrean rebels from Ethiopia.

Inter-state wars have been an important factor in nation building, especially in Europe. Conflicts between states, which pose a threat to all citizens, irrespective of race, tribe, class, religious affiliation and so on, give rise to a number of unintended consequences.

Firstly, they strengthen the hold of the ruling class, and of the state it controls, over the general population, which, faced with an external threat, is compelled to surrender more and more of its autonomy to the state and its agents as a way of strengthening national defence and limiting dissension. This gives the rule of the rulers legitimacy, as they are seen as defenders of all the people.

Secondly, the state is forced to become better organised in order to raise and equip its armed forces while at the same time maintaining or even increasing production to sustain both the war efforts and the civilian population.