The role of ideology
The ideology of nationalism was the domain of the intelligentsia and the middle-class leaders of these movements. These were in many cases the product of colonial metropolitan universities, colleges, and scholarships. They tended therefore to adopt an approach to governance that was not dissimilar to their colonial predecessors during the mid-twentieth century. State power, historically centralized in the position of the colonial governor, was now transferred to the president and his ruling party. The assumption of a national, technically conceived developmental project resulted in the denial of political autonomy for either opposition parties or social movements and created a continued reliance on foreign advisors. Constructing a nation and determining its identity and priorities ceased to be the task of a broad movement and became dominated by the nationalist party and, more particularly, its leader. These parties, particularly after the advent of one-party states, not only suppressed dissent but also retreated in most cases from their engagement with the wider population, particularly in rural areas. Simultaneously, Africa’s postcolonial rulers tacitly accepted the subordinate position of their countries in the international economic and political system and thereby effectively ruled out support for any project that would seek to alter the global system of Western-driven capitalism that had rendered the continent poor and undeveloped in the first place.
For many new African leaders, the most relevant model of national development was the Soviet Union, a country that had transformed itself in a few decades from a backwater of underdevelopment into an industrial superpower of global importance. Kwame Nkrumah stated: “In a little over thirty years [it] has built up an industrial machine so strong and advanced as to be able to launch the Sputnik. . . . I pose it as an example for Africa.”17 The Stalinist model of state-capitalist development reigned supreme in the minds of this new ruling class: all that was necessary was to lay one’s hands on the levers of state power. The developmental model promoted by the Comintern that was so influential across the “Third World” was also rooted in a two-stage transition to socialism, effectively postponing any political formulation that would directly address class contradictions within African societies.18
Other leaders adopted versions of “African socialism” supposedly rooted in the “unity” of pre-colonial African society, something which served to deny the expression of diverse or localized demands. In either case, national independence and development was the primary task; all questions of social transformation had to be postponed. In reality, this not only hampered social movements’ capacity to address their immediate concerns, it also placed in the hands of their new rulers the right to determine the pace and direction with which such social questions were addressed. In such a national context, the rights or aspirations of any particular section of society could thereby be dismissed as “sectional” or “parochial.”
While labor movements in a number of countries were able to resist their total incorporation into the nationalist project, their biggest problem was their inability to generate intellectual or ideological alternatives to the developmentalist-Stalinist framework that dominated nationalist thinking. In this context, trade unions sometimes adopted syndicalist or economistic approaches, rejecting nationalist or new state ideologies by arguing that their role was “non-political.” This unfortunately dovetailed with the (in our view, incorrect) accusation that organized workers represented, in an African context, a “labor aristocracy” whose selfish defense of its privileges came at the expense of other, particularly rural, sections of society.19 The curtailment of multi-party democracy during the first decade of independence as the logical extension of unified nationalism in the postcolonial context also prevented the emergence of new political parties that might represent particular social classes or forces. More generally, however, African social movements tended not to develop their own independent intellectual explanations of their own subordination.
Helpful insight into the postcolonial reality was, however, provided by Frantz Fanon. Writing in the period when the first wave of newly independent states were asserting themselves, Fanon, himself a leading figure in the Algerian revolutionary movement, was among the first to see the dangers of a “nationalist consciousness.”20 He identified how the national bourgeoisie—the nationalist elites and intelligentsia—evolved after independence into the very exploiting class that it had supplanted: it became “a sort of little caste, avid and voracious . . . only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it.”21 Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth grasped the predicament that independence presented to the movements and leadership of national liberation. Postcolonial power was caught between an enfeebled national bourgeoisie and the global limitations imposed on any newly developing nation in the modern world. In this context, it was inevitable that these new national bourgeoisies would act to suppress those in their own societies whose demands could not be met within the existing economic and political system. Fanon, like many thinkers of his time, was influenced by Maoist interpretations of socialism and by the successful revolution in Cuba, which emphasized the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary struggle. Fanon accepted the widespread argument that the organized African working class had been effectively “bought off” with the profits of imperialist exploitation, and that revolutionary action against the new African ruling classes would only come from the poorest African rural masses.
Further insight into the failures of independence came from national liberation leaders whose fight for self-rule was frustrated by settler colonialism. As they observed the realities of actually existing independence in other African countries, some analyzed the pitfalls of nationalism and developed political positions that sought to repeat their mistakes. Amílcar Cabral, who led the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde against Portuguese colonial rule, initially focused his political activity on Guinea’s urbanized coastal areas. This changed in 1959, however, when a group of strikers were shot at the Pijiguiti docks in the port of Bissau. Like Fanon, Cabral’s orientation then shifted to the countryside and agitation amongst the peasantry. During the struggle for independence, he sought to establish “organs of popular power,” local organizations providing health and education services that would demonstrate the link between the seizure of political power and material improvements in the lives of ordinary Africans.22
Like Fanon, Cabral was dismissive of “African socialism” and its characterization of a static and classless Africa, believing that cultural change occurred in the process of revolutionary struggle. He argued for the preeminence of class over ethnicity; although his party organized primarily among the peasantry, Cabral believed this movement would eventually combine with the country’s small urban working class. Cabral also thought the revolution would require what he termed an “ideal proletariat,” which he saw as constituted of the radical elements of the petit bourgeoisie. They would help create unity between the oppressed classes and combat ethnic divisions. Out of the specificity of the anti-imperialist struggle, Cabral developed a critical analysis of a new African culture, fulfilling the “historical personality of the people.”23 This was what Cabral meant by his much-misinterpreted slogan “return to the source”—not a return to tradition, but a critical engagement with African history.
Cabral did not therefore regard nationhood as equivalent to liberation: “We accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played.”24 Yet his criticisms of independent African states conceal a more general tension in the politics of nationalist Third Worldism (the idea that the central division in the world was between developed countries and the “Third World,” or developing, bloc). The question “What is to be done with the state after independence?”—the fundamental question for Cabral and the key to Fanon’s “curse of independence”—was acknowledged but never satisfactorily answered by those who identified the limitations of the “flag independence” of the 1950s and 1960s. As Cabral wrote before he was murdered by the Portuguese in 1973, the year before Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau finally achieved independence: “The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African