Coloniality of the Nation State in Africa

15 Apr, 2018 - 00:04 0 Views

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

Our problems began in 1492. 1492 is the year that the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella conquered the City-State of Granada in Southern Spain, which was the very last stronghold of the Muslims in western Christendom.

After the conquest of Granada all Jews in the land, by the Edict of Expulsion, a law that was made by the conquerors were supposed to convert to Christianity or leave to wherever they could go, some were hanged, especially midwives that because of their knowledge and science were considered witches, they were after all not Christians.

Any knowledge that was not Christian knowledge was considered sorcery. Soon enough in 1499, all the Muslims were asked, under the same colonial law to convert to Christianity or leave.

Thus 1492 gave birth to the unification of the nation and the state, the christianisation of the state and also imperial expansion and globalisation of conquest. From then, a nation became a group of people sharing the same culture, religion, political and economic interest, same loves and same fears, living together.

The land on which they lived, the territory became the country that was to be loved and defended from outsiders, two dangerous passions were born with the nation-state: patriotism and nationalism. Passions out of which men and women are ready to die and to kill.

The institutions and organisations that managed the economic and political affairs of the country and the nation became what we know now as the state: principalities, monarchs, parliaments, courts and other entities of governance. In that way, the nation-state was born, through conquest and the racism and xenophobia of expelling those that did not share the religion and culture of the nation.

The nation-state had a violent, colonial, imperial and racist birth. The nation-state was also born, not only with genocides but epistemicides, the destruction of the scientific knowledge of natives such as the unlucky midwives. The then biggest library in the world, an Islamic library was burnt down to erase Islamic history and philosophy. The fate of Granada was to be the fate of all colonies in the Global South. Granada became a template of conquest and domination that was to be applied, from the 16th Century onwards on all corners of the planet that were being colonised.

After a thirty-year long war of European nation-states, on the 24th of October 1648 in Westphalia a peace treaty was signed that bound the states to respect for each other’s sovereignty, and the end of hostilities.

This inter-state respect was not extended to the colonies but was kept as a European privilege. Our problems that began in 1492 were made worse in Berlin, 1884. Africa was sliced up much like a loaf of bread into slices of land to be controlled and ruled by foreign conquerors.

I hope I have clarified how the nation-states that we have were born, and how the even worse state model that we inherited from colonisers did not benefit from laws and peace treaties that were made among European nation-states.

The nation-state, that grew from the city-state, is a creature of western modernity that was born with violence and was to live by it, especially in the Global South where modern laws and peace treaties of sovereignty were not extended to the so-called barbarians.

The same nation-state was created with deep racism of the purity of blood and authenticity of identity. Racism, tribalism and xenophobia are original diseases of the nation-state, foundational pathologies.

The Post-Berlin Nation-State

Berlin was a slicing. People that lived in cultural and language communities with their own religions and forms of rule were torn asunder and bundled into convenient colonies.

Clannism and tribalism was worsened when people of different cultures were forced to share territories and live under one colonial administration.

Kingdoms were destroyed and replaced with colonial administrations. In the name of civilisation and modernisation communities were destroyed to be turned into nation-states that were essentially colonial states.

Disorder was created in the name of order and old traditional gods were replaced with one God. One nation was to be under one God and all nations under God. Empire had arrived and from 1945 to date, a new prefect, the United States of America took over the leadership of the world. The USA can change the economic, political, cultural and spiritual temperature and weather of any part of the planet now. Lately there is stiff competition from China, a resurrecting Empire, with its own history of defeats and conquests.

The State of the Nation-States in Africa

The nation-states that were given to us by colonialism are systemically and structurally linked to the Euro-American states, economically and politically. We belong to a world economic, political and cultural system. What we call globalisation is actually the universalisation of conquest, domination and control that began in 1492. It is for that reason that I argue that the first corruption and first problem in Africa is coloniality and imperiality of the nation-state as a tributary of the modern, imperial and colonial world system.

Coloniality was able to continue and progress after colonialism because the nation-states are subject in all ways to an Empire, that is modern, colonial, Christian, western, patriarchal (Empire is male), capitalist and also fundamentalist politically. With the end of the Cold War, a war that still otherwise continues, the Euro-American Empire fortified its power and hold of the very political and economic windpipe of the Global South.

For that and other reasons, the first and foremost baptismal wisdoms of decoloniality is the understanding of the coloniality of the world system.

In truth, there is no independent nation-state in the Global south, all nation-states are in actuality still in colonial subjection. It is for that reason, again that arguing decolonially, I insist that most of what are called African problems that need African solutions are world problems that the world system structurally and systemically created for Africa.

Politically and economically, as I write, the USA and China are competing aggressively over the ownership and control of the world political and economic system. The two titans are battling over the control of partisan and national regimes in the nation-states of the Global South.

Can we Decolonise the Nation-State in Africa

The answer is yes, we can! The first achievement is to know where the world comes from and how the world works. The first subject of African history and philosophy should be how the world system works. Africans should not be passive victims of Empire. Empire should be resisted and confronted at every level. The treachery of the African and black economic and political elite has let Africa down. Powerful politicians and businesspeople have found it easier to co-operate and comply with Empire than to challenge it. Most governments of the Global South have become trading companies whose business is to sell their countries and the natural resources therein to Empire in exchange for partisan and personal power and wealth. Empire punishes and also pays. Those that do its bidding are rewarded with political power and wealth while those that resist are crucified.

We have tried one-party states in Africa and they quickly became tyrannical and genocidal. We have tried developmental states and they only achieved to be states of underdevelopment. Welfare states have also been tried but that welfare would soon be distributed along the lines of friendship, clans and tribes and the welfare state became an unfair state.

In 1972, Nigeria under Nnamdi Azikiwe tried to decolonise the state by creating a Diarchy, which is a kind of government where power is shared between a civilian government and the military to avoid coups and instability, and that soon collapsed. Africa has tried multi-party democracy and parties soon enough become ethnic organisations and elections collapse to ethnic censuses.

Uganda under Yoweri Museveni has tried the no-party democtratic state but that also has not protected Uganda from personalised tyranny. Some scholars have proposed the multi-parliamentary state under a no-party president, where parliamentarians come from political parties and the executive president is elected from outside the party system.

After being elected by their parties, the elected MPs will then choose a wiseman or wise woman to the presidency. This has one problem; some rich hooligans might literally buy presidency; money might just trump wisdom.

While the world system remains racist in favour of white people, in Africa states have largely become ethnicised in favour of dominant ethnicities. Nation building as the uniting of different ethnicities under one national community has largely lost to ethnic building, that is turning tribes into parties, governments and nations.

What I call political personalism has also taken place, where powerful persons turn their nations, parties and states into their property and the property of their families.

Maybe it is because of our history with kings that Africans generally love strong powerful rulers. Control of states has been used, in Africa, by dominant tribes to control political power and resources, creating some inter-country colonialisms, where there is internal colonialism in a country.

Ethnicising the nation and nationalising ethnicity is a form of coloniality, and this began in Granada and spread out to every corner of the planet. It began with thinkers that advised Empire builders and imperialists.

Coloniality at a world scale was conceptualised by philosophers and economists and scientific racism was thought out by biologists and anthropologists. To decolonise Africa, Africans need to put on their thinking caps, coloniality was created by thought and it will be destroyed by the same.

-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), he writes from Gaborone, Botswana: [email protected]

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