The Sunday News
There is a psychological and sociological reason why supporters and followers of politicians frequently imagine their favourite leaders as saints and messiahs. The fear of monsters in politics makes men and women wish that leaders were saints and angels.
For the same reason, those that have been clobbered in politics and dealt death by politicians, the losers and victims of power politics, frequently see other people’s favourite leaders as monsters and devils. In that way the saint for one group of people becomes a monster for another group in the same logic in which the dictum “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” suggests.
This division in politics where there are friends and enemies that must, all the same share one country, belong to one nation and live under the same sovereignty is what political philosophers have called “the political proper” or simply “the political.”
If friend and enemy relations, the political, in any country are not managed with courage and intelligence, countries burn and people perish. What thinkers such as Pallo Jordan, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Ivor Chipkin and, in the past, even Joseph Stalin, have engaged with as “the national question” or the “question of nationhood” is that historical, philosophical and political project of bringing different classes, ethnicities, tribes, religions and other identities of people together under one national community that is settled in a geographic territory called a country.
Simply speaking a nation refers to a collective of different identities of people while a country is the land that has maps, borders and boundaries that separate it from other countries. To make friends and create fellow nationals and citizens out of contesting classes, feuding and conflicting tribes, inimical clans and clashing ideologies is the project of liberators who imagine philosophical and political ways of getting different people to, as Benedict Anderson said, “imagine” and “believe” themselves to be one people. Nations are constructed, physically, emotionally and spiritually. They are given names, flags, and anthems as national praises, hymns and prayers are composed and sung.
People must not only imagine and believe themselves to be one people under one God and one flag, singing the same anthem, but also live and love as such. As such, addressing the national question or advancing nation-building is not the job for partisan minds, personalists or other narrow sectarians, but it is the vocation of visionaries and liberators that have the philosophical and political stamina to fly above clans, tribes, races, classes and other narrow identities.
After defining the nation and the country, for this article to do justice to its promise, I must define the state. Most people mistake government for state and the opposite.
In simple terms, government refers to the organisation, administration and management of the business of the country and the state. The state itself is the collective of institutions, structures and system in a country that include parliament, the courts, the government itself, the media, civil society at large, and so on.
Like a country, a state is distinguishable from other states, at least not by physical maps and tangible borders, but institutional jurisdictions as invisible but systemic maps and boundaries.
By the foregoing, the first job of a great leadership is nation building, followed by efficient running of the state, and then ensuring that all this is done with the knowledge and consent of nationals and citizens. A good polity and economy can only be based on democratic governance, not simply through seasonal elections, but day to day respect and accountability to the state, nation and country.
I argue in this article and previous ones, that it is a post-political waste of everybody’s time to get busy with the question of which leader is a messiah and which one is a monster. A good country must have good state institutions that are managed transparently and independently to protect the nation from monsters among politicians and other individuals, parties and forces, internal and external.
A heroic state that defends the nation and a built up nation that believes in and supports the state makes for a liberated country. Strong states with weak nations and weak nations with strong nations make for disasters and failure. To be nationless or stateless, or both, is perhaps the worst condition any people can find themselves in.
On despotism as the enemy of nations
That French lawyer and political philosopher, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu is of capital importance to the subject at hand. Montesquieu invented in 1748, the political and legal concept of the “seperation of powers,” in his classic: The Spirit of the Laws, which he published anonymously to start with.
This concept is found almost in the constitution of every self-respecting country and state in the world as it is known today. Besides that canonical invention which the Founding Fathers of the USA used to craft the celebrated American constitution, Montesquieu popularised, but did not personally invent the term despotism.
Despotisme in French originates from despotes in Greek and in English it is despotism. Originally a despot was a master that ruled arbitrarily over slaves and servants that had no will, freedom or say of their own in anything except obeying the will and orders of the despot.
Despotism depended on the status of the rule that they were not free people and had no human agency. That is where despotism differs from its cousins tyranny, totalitarianism and absolutism that depend on the power of the ruler over what are supposed to be free people.
In the usage of the term that Montesquieu made, the term despotism referred to a political situation where an individual or organisation ruled over free people as if they were slaves and servants that had no choice to make. Despotisms are corrosive to nations, toxic to states and murderous to countries. Montesquieu challenged despotisms in France and the whole of Europe in his time.
Monarchs and other leaders feared Montesquieu and his philosophy of law and politics. It is for that reason, in Black Skin White Masks, that Frantz Fanon writes that white supremacists thought that a “black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched” because he was rebellious and dangerous to the white supremacist regime the world over.
So suspicious and critical of tyrannies and despotisms was Montesquieu that he had to write some of his works under pseudonyms but was so powerful and convincing that he could not be ignored. Enslavers, colonialists and imperialists that Fanon describes did not want blacks to read Montesquieu, Machiavelli or any other theorist of the political that might give them ideas of power and liberation.
Despotism, therefore, then and now, is any historical and political situation and process where an individual or group of powerful people rule over the state, nation and country in disregard and disrespect of the freedom and will of the nationals and citizens.
Interestingly, Montesquieu actually argued that most despotisms in the world are carried out by elected governments. To be elected does not make a government naturally democratic or liberating.
To avoid despotism, countries must have strong states and strong nations, where individuals and their organisations, even if they wished, cannot monopolise power and ignore the agency and will of the nationals and citizens. The world over, democratic events and processes such as elections and other forms of consulting populations are used by despotic individuals and organisations to legitimise their despotisms.
Despotism is so dangerous to nations, states and countries because like true witchcraft, it can hide behind the apparently good name of its opposite, in this case democracy. Even some very clever people laugh when one argues that Donald Trump is a tyrant and a despot, only that his tyranny and despotism are effectively kept under check by the strong institutions of the USA that owe their strength to the wisdom of Montesquieu.
The separation of powers, sharing of power and independence of state institutions are the soul, not just of democracy but also of liberty. That the executive, legislature and judiciary should work together but independently is the true balance and also wizardry of democratic and ethical governance.
Countries, nations and states have learnt it the hard way in history that no singular hero, be they a messiah or monster, should be more important that the independence of state institutions that are the only ones in their independent work that can expel despotism from the land. In the absence of despotism, nation building or answering the national question in practice is, creating nationals for nations, producing nations for nationals, citizens for countries, and an independent strong state to manage and administer everything in the knowledge and consent of the nations.
Two forms of despotism
Montesquieu described two different forms and modes of despotism. The first one is characterised by poverty, violence, fear and misery in the land. In that kind of despotism, guns and other weapons are used to clobber the people to order. Because of biting poverty, food, money and other resources are used to buy the consent and support of some individuals and groups in the country.
The second form of despotism is the opposite of the first. In this one there is great urbanisation, accompanied by avarice and pleasure, luxury and opulence. People live immoral lives of licentiousness and debauchery and care nothing about public affairs.
In short, there are despotism of poverty and despotisms of prosperity. In both cases large parts of national and state resources are monopolised in the hands of few powerful people, economic and political despots, who become rich on behalf of the country, sometimes more than the country.
Networks of political patronage arise where hangers on, flatterers and sycophants support and grovel around despots to pick up crumbs from under their tables. Inventing praises and worshipping despots becomes a full time profession for some citizens, and corruption like a cancer eats the nation and impoverishes countries.
Montesquieu notes that in both forms of despotism, citizens for fear of guns and some of them love and hope for bribes, keep tranquil and orderly, “but this tranquillity cannot be called peace, no it is silence” that comes from the memory of past punishment and fear of future persecution by powerless populations. While in democratic governments people are equal because they are the same, in the despotic regimes they are equal because they are nothing, noted Montesquieu.
Despots, says Montesquieu, do not rule directly but by delegation. Party members, supporters, militias and others that can, here and there, flash the party card or drop the name of the leader become powerful among fearful populations. All over the place dubious spokespersons and advocates, however, under-equipped for the job, emerge as experts that speak in the name of and interpret the words of the leader to the populations, in the process dividing and destroying the first property of any country and state, the nation.
These incompetent spokespersons are normally partisans and personalists that are fond of talking of “national interests” and “state interests” when their fundamental goal is personal interests, and so how do they destroy national leaders and finish off nations.
When patronage becomes a political culture sincerity disappears from the land, no one actually loves the leader, the party or the government, the state and the nation, they all pretend to do so simply for the spoils, promotions and elevations. They love themselves in the leader not the leader.
And these patrons of the patronage system turn great leaders into despots with fake praise and fake support; fundamentally they are a liability to leaders, parties and nations. As ridiculous a leader as Donald Trump has clubs of individuals praising him for just breathing and walking and expecting rewards for the job and woe unto him if he believes the praises.
Despotism can be infectious and highly transmittable. Under despotic regimes, despotism becomes a kind of national culture.
Husbands become despotic to wives, boyfriends to girlfriends and the opposite. Headmasters in schools, managers in private and public companies all in one way or another mirror and reproduce, copy and repeat the despotism of their principals. As a toxic political culture and evil political practice, Montesquieu indicated despotism is a human challenge and a world problem.
They are depots those white supremacists and racists in Europe, America and elsewhere who want the world to believe that despots are found only in Africa, Asia and other parts of the Global South. The first forms of despotism and the worst were in slavery, imperialism and colonialism where states and countries of the North took it upon themselves to conquer and dominate nations of the South.
The principal lesson from Montesquieu and others is that, in the North and the South, courageous leaders and committed people can build their nations, states and countries and avoid despotisms. When nations have been built, it will not matter in countries whether this leader is a saint and that one a monster, there will be durable institutions, structures and systems to curb monstrosities by messiahs and monsters alike.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected]
