the average income in sub-Saharan Africa was twice that of both South and East Asia. In the intervening decades an astonishing turn-around has taken place. The average income in Africa is now well below half of that in East Asia. The story is similar in South Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating (Commission for Africa, 2005: 16).
‘Why has Africa fallen so behind?’ the commissioners ask. The answer comes shortly afterwards: ‘One thing underlies all the difficulties caused by the interactions of Africa’s history over the past 40 years. It is the weakness of governance and the absence of an effective state’ (Commission for Africa, 2005: 23–24).
Jean and John Comaroff periodise this discourse as characteristic of what they call the first of ‘two epochal phases’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632). They associate it with the period of decolonisation, though its terms, as witnessed above, are still pervasive. Here ‘postcoloniality’ is thought of in terms of ‘the international order of sovereign nations within the industrial capitalist world system’ (p. 632). According to this narrative, ‘Africa found the promise of autonomy and growth sundered by the realities of neocolonialism, which freighted [African countries] with an impossible toll of debt and dependency’ (p. 632). Under such conditions, African regimes became more and more authoritarian, evidencing deteriorating standards of governance and respect for human rights.
The Comaroffs observe a ‘second epoch’, beginning in 1989, in the genealogy of independent African states. Associated with the coming of age of ‘neoliberal global capitalism’, sub-Saharan African countries began to experience unprecedented demands for democracy (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632–33). Yet this movement has seen a lot more than democratisation. According to this discourse, it has
metamorphosed the old international order into a more fluid, market-driven, electronically articulated universe: a universe in which supranational institutions burgeon; … in which transnational identities, diasporic connections, ecological disasters, and the mobility of human populations challenge both the nature of sovereignty and the sovereignty of ‘nature’; in which … liberty is distilled to its postmodern essence, the right to choose subjectivities, commodities, sexualities, localities, identities, and other forms of collective representation (p. 633).
In Africa, the coming of post-modernity, however, is said to bring with it growing appeals to difference and diversity. The very existence of society itself is called into question. The state is said to be in perpetual crisis, its power chaotically dispersed (pp. 633–34).
The difference between these two moments, pre- or post-1989, on the Comaroffs’ terms, hinges on the characterisation of the state: singular and unified, as opposed to polymorphous and pluralistic. Even if, according to the Comaroffs, the sense of crisis evoked by these discourses is exaggerated, they nonetheless speak to a real condition: the predicament of the African nation state (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001: 632). At stake is the increasingly hyphenated relationship between state and nation: the former is unable to fulfil its task as progenitor of the latter.
The sense of crisis – hyphenation – of the relationship between state and nation in Africa has been associated with renewed interest in the (dis)organisation of African societies. As the African state haemorrhages into a multiplicity of fragmented organisations and authorities, as it loses its ability to manage urbanisation, poverty relief, service delivery or economic growth, what new powers have occupied this space? How are they organised? What is the form of society that emerges in and through their activities? These are the questions that are increasingly being taken up by Africanist scholars. Abdou-Maliq Simone, for example, situates Johannesburg in a larger African context of what he terms ‘ruined urbanization’ (Simone, 2004: 407). ‘[T]he truncated process of economic modernization at work in African cities’, he argues, ‘has never fully consolidated apparatuses of definition capable of enforcing specific and consistent territorial organizations of the city’ (p. 409). By this he means that state administrations and civil institutions have been unable to order and control activities taking place in the city (buying, selling, residing, etc.) (p. 409).
This renewed interest in the state of African society (or societies in Africa), its cultural practices and its cosmological organisation (witchcraft, religion, etc.) is not simply a corrective to at least 20 years of attention to the state as a political-institutional configuration. The current interest in the inscrutability of the African scene and the elusive8 and elliptical character of African societies follows from the sense that Africa has witnessed 50 years of ruined modernism. At stake is the supposedly hyphenated relation between state and nation in the continent. We can summarise the conclusions of this scholarship as such: African nationalism has not given rise to African nations. There is now a substantial literature, both journalistic and academic, dealing with this apparent failure. It seeks its reasons on a continuum from avaricious African elites (Meredith, 2005), bad governance (European Union, 2005; Commission for Africa, 2005), the position of Africa in the world capitalist system (Wallerstein, 1991) to the form of the African state (Bayart, 1993; Mamdani, 1996).
In his new book on the state of Africa 50 years after independence, Martin Meredith, for example, asks ‘why, after the euphoria of the independence era, so many hopes and ambitions faded and why the future of Africa came to be spoken of only in pessimistic terms’ (Meredith, 2005: 13–14). What is striking, he suggests, is that despite the variability and diversity of African states, they have all ‘suffered so many of the same misfortunes’ (p. 14). ‘Time and time again’, he concludes, ‘[Africa’s] potential for economic development has been disrupted by the predatory politics of ruling elites seeking personal gain, often precipitating violence for their own ends’ (p. 14). ‘The problem is not so much that development has failed,’ he states, citing the Nigerian academic Claude Ake, ‘as that it was never really on the agenda in the first place’ (p. 688). At stake is an African state used for purposes other than nation-building. If Meredith et al., including the Commission for Africa publication mentioned earlier, lay the blame for the state of contemporary African states at the door of African leadership (but it is also where they find reason for hope), more academically oriented scholarship stresses the form of the African state.
A case in point is Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996), which relates the corrupt and authoritarian character of contemporary African regimes to the form of the colonial state that preceded them. His argument, somewhat telescoped, is that the colonial state was a double-sided affair. In the cities it governed directly through civic institutions that, though they refused citizenship to Africans, nonetheless established a public domain constituted on the basis of individuated rights and contract. In the rural areas, however, the colonial state ruled indirectly through tribal authorities. These fused in the authority of the chief, judicial, legislative, executive and administrative powers, interpolating those under its ‘clenched fist’ as tribal subjects. Post-colonial regimes usually set out to ‘deracialise’ civil society, neglecting to ‘detribalise’ the ‘Native Authority’. As a result, argues Mamdani, ‘the unreformed Native Authority came to contaminate civil society, so that the more civil society was deracialized, the more it took on a tribalized form’ (Mamdani, 1996: 21). In his terms, clientism, ethnic mobilisation and corruption are all effects of the ‘bifurcated’ form of the African state. What is important to note is the consequence of this argument. We might infer that the failure of such states to realise the nation in Africa had less to do with the ad hominem qualities of their elites than with the very form of the state itself. The ‘bifurcated state’ was an inappropriate instrument for nation-building.
Achille Mbembe too locates the form of the contemporary African state in the character of colonial sovereignty. Yet unlike others before him, Mbembe is not content to analyse corruption and violence as symptoms of failure or crisis. Rather, the gothic form of power in Africa