jlitical Studies (19S6), XXXIV, 647-661

Comparing African States

CHRISTOPHER CLAPHAM*

University of Lancaster

The Africanist literature of the last few years has been redolent with references to the 'coming of age' of independent black Africa: not in the sense, certainly, that it is now capable of looking after itselfas reports of famine, debt and military dependence daily remind usbut in the sense that a generation has passed since the modal date of independence in 1960. A generation has likewise passed in academic attempts to understand it. Independence coincided with the convenient post-war boom in comparative politics, and presented the discipline with a host of unexplored but evidently comparable states on which a corresponding host of enthusiastic researchers descended in search of material for PhDs, Where have we got to since then? This collection of books, published over the last three years, all attempt an overview of the two and a half decades since independence.' What do they tell us about the political comparison of third world states? What do they tell us about the political systems of independent Africa and the current crises of the continent? And at a simpler level, which is the best buy for those of us who teach undergraduate courses in African politics or the politics of the third world? Methodologically, two points come over very strongly from the whole collection. The first is that, despite what may seem the obvious suitability of African states for political comparison, comparative studiesat any rate in any systematic or behavioural sensehave never really found much favour among Africanists. This is partly the legacy ofthe fieldwork tradition. The only way to find out about the politics of the great majority of African states is to go and look, Africanists are distinguished above all by the place whereand often the date whenthey did their fieldwork. For political scientists as for anthro* The books reviewed in this article are: Peter Calvocoressi, Independent Africa and the World (London, Longman, 1985); John Cartwright, Political Leadership in Africa (London, Croom Helm, 1983); Richard Hodder-Williams, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa (London, Allen & Unwin, 1984); Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg., Personal Leadership in Black .4frica (Berkeley, University of California, 1982); Aii A. Mazrui and Michael Tidy, i^ationaiism and New States in Africa (London, Heinemann, 1984); Roger Tangri, Politics in SubSaharan Africa (London, James Currey, 1985); William Tordoff, Government and Politics in 4/nc'a (London, Macmillan, 1984); Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in .Africa (>iev,Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1982). ' There have also been several edited volumes which are not discussed here, including: tiwendolen M. Carter and Patrick O'Meara (eds), African Independence: the First Twenty-Five ^ear.j (London, Hutchinson and Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1985); Peter Duignan and Robert H. Jackson (eds), Africa Since Independence (London, Croom Helm, 1986); and for a historical overview, Michael Crowder (ed.). The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 8, 1940-1975 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984). W32-3217/86/04/0647-15/$O3.00 19S6 Political Studies

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pologists, this experience imparts a deep sense of the particularity of African states and societies. It likewise means that few of them have personal knowledge of more than a minority of the states with which they deal. There are 39 independent 'black' African states, from Mauritania south to Lesotho, The addition of Arab North Africa, the islands, and South Africa and Namibia (all of which are effectively excluded from the volumes under review) takes the total to just over 50, Few could claim detailed familiarity with more than three or four of these, or a nodding acquaintance with more than ten or so othersa third of the total at most. For the rest, one has to rely on a literature which is at best patchy, heavily geared to those states which use one's own metropolitan language (all of these books are vastly stronger on anglophone than francophone Africa), and above all leave one with the uneasy feeling of having to work from someone else's picture of a country's politics, deprived of any personal sense of its plausibility. Any book about Africa as a whole thus tends to reflect a viewpoint based on a limited number of core countries, supplemented with inevitably secondhand information from elsewhere. Reading through this collection, one has no difficulty in picking out either the one outsider (Calvocoressiall the rest have evident fieldwork experience), or the countries where the others have worked. The collection as a whole, coincidentally, has a markedly East and Central African bent, with firsthatid expertise especially on Kenya (Mazrui, Rosberg), Tanzania (Tordoff, Young), and Zambia (Tangri, TordofO, along with Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Among West African states, only Sierra Leone is well represented (Cartwright, Tangri). There is, so far as I can judge, no one with detailed experience of independent Ghana and Nigeria, the most significant anglophone West African states, though Tordoff has written on pre-independence Ghana; the francophones, lusophones and independents (Ethiopia, Liberia) are covered almost entirely at second hand. Whilst personal experience is necessarily limited, the other basis for comparisonsystematic datais simply inadequate. Cross-national quantitative research in Africa is possible only for those who copy down their figures from United Nations or World Bank handbooks, in happy ignorance of what they mean or how they were collected. What price GNP per capita when nobody knows (within a margin of error of 20 million or so) the true population of Nigeria? How do you calculate a GDP figure in states where a large part of production never finds its way into the monetary sector, and there are no reliable figures for income? Even foreign trade statistics may reflect more the level of smuggling than that of domestic productioncocoa consistently figures among Togo's major exports, but most of it is grown in Ghana, Small wonder, then, that comparison in African politics consists very largely of juxtaposed case studies, while general books on Africa, including most of those reviewed here, make no serious attempt at comparison at all. The one outstanding exception, Crawford Young's book, is considered later. The second methodological point that emerges from this collection is the very limited impact that Marxist or dependency approaches have had on the study of African politics. Only Tangri, of the eight books reviewed here, draws to any appreciable extent on the Marxian literature, and several authors entirely ignore it. This is, on the face of il, surprising, Marxian approaches, in the broadest sense ofthe term, have enjoyed a prominent (though never dominant)

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place in the field over the last couple of decades. There is a reasonably flourishing journal, the Review of African Political Economy, which prints only work wilh a strong leftist commitment, while a number of small publishing houses (Spokesman, Verso, Zed) specialize in literature from a broadly leftist perspective. Yet the fact that this perspective does not figure at all prominently in this particular set of books reflects more than the ideological preconceptions of a random group of authors: there has as yet, so far as 1 am aware, been no general analysis of African politics since independence from a Marxist or dependency perspective.^ And this in turn, I suspect, may be not simply because no one has got round to writing it, but also because of difficulties inherent in the enterprise itself. This is again partlyand especially where 'classic' Marxism is concerneda legacy of the fieldwork tradition, which plunges researchers into the intricacies of local political structures not obviously amenable to the familiar categorizations of industrial (or even feudal) societies. Ethnicity, especially in the form of that complex collection of identities covered by the misleading simplicity of 'tribe', is only the most evident of the problems. Class is in a sense every bit as perplexing: not because classes don't exist, but because they are extremely difficult to define, and remain very inadequate guides to both political consciousness and political behaviour. Worst of all, as the comparative studies in this collection demonstrate, it is very difficult to escape from the primacy of the political. Power produces wealth, much more evidently than the converse. And the African state itself cannot easily or plausibly be presented as the outcome of class forces or the expression of class interests, except for the interests of that 'class' which controls the state itself. Dependency theories, despite their broadly Latin American origins, seem much more directly relevant to Africa than 'classic' Marxism: there are, after all, few parts of the world more obviously dependent than black Africa on the western capitalist states. They are also ideologically appealing, in that they enable the problems of the continent to be comfortingly ascribed to an external source. Nor is there much difficulty in finding corroborative data. Quite a number of studiesof the transnational mining companies, for example provide convincing evidence of the exploitation of African resources in ways which do little if anything to benefit African people.-^ There are nonetheless difficulties in treating dependency as a general explanation of African underdevelopment. One problem is that African social structure, in contrast to the capitalist-created societies of Latin America and the Caribbean, is so resilient
' The absence of any general survey of post-independence Africa from a Marxian or dependency perspective contrasts with a number of books on the colonial era, the most famous being Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972); Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa (London, Macmillan, 1984) is also good on the pre-colonial and colonial periods, but fizzles out badly when it comes to the post-colonial era. There are equally, of course, quite a number of books on individual countries, such as Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: the Political Economy of Neo-Cotoniatism (London, Heinemann, 1975), and edited volumes with a dependency them, but these do not present the problems of generalization to which 1 have referred. At the other extreme, there are works on general development theory, such as G. Kay, Development and Underdevetopment (London, Macmillan, 1975), which do not deal in any detail with contemporary Africa. ' See, lor example, G. Lanning and M. Mueller, Africa Undermined (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979), and Review of African Political Economy, No. 12, 1978.

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that it becomes unconvincing to ascribe 'failures in development' solely to external sources. Indigenous values and identities make a nonsense of Africa as an entity entirely created by a colonialism which in most of the continent is barely a century old. But a second and converse problem is that Africa is so dependent that it is extremely difficult to elaborate any plausible scenario in which a rejection of dependence could produce an increase in development. Dependency theories in their various forms seem to rest ultimately on the assumption that if incorporation into the capitalist world order necessarily leads to impoverishment and underdevelopment, then disengagement from that order must correspondingly release the resources that make 'real' development possible. The snag is that there is not the slightest evidence that this is t r u e least of all, as Young most convincingly demonstrates, in the experience of those African states which have sought since independence to reorder their economies along 'socialist' lines, however that slippery term is to be defined. And while it can convincingly be argued that even the most revolutionary states, such as Ethiopia and Mozambique, remain locked into the world capitalist system, this indicates that escape from that system is impossible, rather than that there is an untried Kampuchean road to salvation.

The three books in this collection which explicitly seek to compare rather than to generalize, those by Cartwright, Jackson and Rosberg, and Young, each base their comparison not on the structural characteristics of African statesin terms of class, productive apparatus, or whateverbut on their top political leadership. It is the personal decisions and capacities of a very small number of individuals, which are seen as accounting for the differences between African states, that political science seeks to explain, rather than the determining features of their structural endowment. The books by Cartwright and Jackson and Rosberg are explicitly about leaders, based on the premise that in highly personalized political systems, what really matters is the way in which the man at the top chooses to play his hand. However repugnant this may be to those who see political comparison as the manipulation of infrastructural variables, there is something to be said for it in political systems where the sheer weakness of institutional constraints gives leaders a level of personal discretion, to use or abuse, unknown in either capitalist or socialist industrial states. Not that either book plunges into any crude assumption that politics, in Africa or elsewhere, is no more than a play of personalities: the constraints under which African leaders operate are much too evident for that. Some framework is thus needed in which to set the limitations and possibilities of leadership, along with some typology of alternative leadership styles. Jackson and Rosberg provide the more sophisticated operation. Their conception of personal rule goes back to the paradox that African states enjoy vastly different levels of political stability and effectiveness, despite the absence in all of them of the political institutions which are often assumed in the western tradition to be essential to success. (Those who view African politics as a game of musical chairs may need to be reminded that over half the African leaders have been in office for longer than Margaret Thatcherwho has had the longest continuous tenure of any British Prime Minister this centuryand that several

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oi them have been there since the premiership of Harold Macmillan.) Though st)me states are inherently easier or more difficuh to govern than others (due to such variables as ethnic composition, economic endowment or geographical location), the key ingredient with which they identify is leadership skillnot authority, which can exist only within a framework of shared values which ex hypothesi is absent, but the capacity to manage coalitions of supporters within an essentially clientelist set of relationships. Jackson and Rosberg then classify leaders according to a fourfold schema of alternative styles: the Prince, the Autocrat, the Prophet and the Tyrant. The first two come straight from Machiavelli. The Prince is Machiavelli's fox, the leader who seeks to balance and manipulate a court or coterie of surrounding politicians, taking few risks or initiatives, and moving with the middle ground. It is a classic survival technique, and small wonder then that several of the PrincesHaile-Selassie, Tubman, Senghor, Kenyattahave been among the most long-lasting of African rulers. The Autocrat is the lion, one who is prepared to commit himself, whose reaction to any independent source of power is to crush rather than accommodate it, and who has a place only for loyal subordinates. Banda comes plausibly enough within this category, though I have doubts about Houphouet-Boigny, and the dangers of procrusteanism soon start to appear. When we get to the Prophet and the Tyrant, the weakness of the typology becomes all too clear, for the Prophet turns out to be a good Autocratone whose rule is directed to achieving some ideological goalwhile the Tyrant is a bad onean apt illustration of Hobbes's dictum that tyranny is 'monarchy misliked'. The first category is designed for Nyerere, the second for Amin. But by this time the typology has become less a guide to the strengths and weaknesses of alternative leadership strategies, than a set of pigeonholes for the 17 case studies. The reason why Sekou Toure and Nkrumah count as Prophets, 1 suspect, is that the box would look rather empty without them. It then comes down to how good the case studies are, and they are frankly a pretty mixed bunch. It is a matter, once again, of the limitations of the fieldwork approach. The sketch of Kenyatta, Rosberg's bailiwick, is excellent; Nyerere in next-door Tanzania is quite good too. Many of the others degenerate into potted histories, and some (like that of Tolbert in Liberia) seem to me to miss the point entirely. It is a pity also that two rather important groups of leaders are completely excluded. One is the revolutionaries, like Mengistu or Machel, who offer peculiarly interesting cases of leaders operating outside the post-colonial framework which the collection as a whole rather takes for granted. The other is the failures. Six of the leaders considered in Jackson and Rosberg's book were forcibly ejected, but even the shortest-lived of them, Idi Amin, lasted for over eight years. What about the real failures, like Lumumba in the Congo or Ironsi in Nigeria, who were dead inside a year? A good deal of light could be cast on the remarkable survival capacity of many African leaders by looking at those who didn't make it. In short, Jackson and Rosberg take a plausible starting point, and much of their general discussion especially is well \\orth reading, but the overall result is disappointing. Cartwright's is a similar operation, but on a more modest scale, with fewer case studies (seven rather than 17) and a less ambitious conceptual apparatus. He loo avoids the failures, and includes only Mengistu, briefly, among the revolutionaries; but he can concentrate more attention on each of his cases.

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which come out rather better than those considered by Jackson and Rosberg. (Though is it just the fact that Ethiopia is the country about which I know most, 1 wonder, that leads me to regard his Ethiopian chapter as by far the least satisfactory?) And in place of Jackson and Rosberg's four-fold classification, Cartwright is concerned largely with whether leaders sought to achieve their goals by force, or by some mixture of accommodation and persuasion. This resembles, but does not duplicate, the distinction between the Prince and Jackson and Rosberg's other categories: Nyerere (a Prophet) and Houphouet (an Autocrat) are classed on the persuasive side. The conclusion he reaches is simple, sensible, and for the most part sound: that persuasion generally works better than force. One may quibble with him here and there, for example over the extent to which the use of force rather than persuasion may reflect the leader's circumstances more than his choice; but generally, this is a successful book, and a monument to the wisdom of not trying to do too much.

The outstanding book in the comparative group, and indeed in this collection as a whole, is however that of Crawford Young. His comparison is also based on choices by individual leaders, especially by the founding fathers of the nationalist movements who carried their countries through the first decades after independence; but the choices which interest him are strategic rather than tactical, and especially the choice of an ideology of economic development. The point that he emphasizes hereand the fact that he can do so explicitly in the context of political economy is a major challenge to any application of Marxian determinism to Africais that the economic performance of African states has varied dramatically since independence, and that this variance must largely be related to indigenous ideological choice. He must then, of course, classify the possible choices, and the categories he comes up with are (from right to left) African capitalism, populist socialism, and (only since the mid-1970s, and in a small number of states) Afro-Marxism. The qualificatory adjectives are essential. These are not the capitalist, democratic socialist and MarxistLeninist regimes of the industrial worid. Not only are their economies radically different, but so are the organizational capacities at the disposal of their leaders for achieving political and economic goals. Neither the capitalist class implied by the first option, nor the bureaucracy necessary for the second, nor the vanguard party essential to the third, exists in any but rudimentary form. But Young's triumph is to show how the choice matters, despite (or even because oO the inadequacies of the mechanisms needed to implement it. What makes this, for my money, one of the best books on African politics is the way in which he uses his categories to illuminate the varying experiences of African states, rather than just fit them into boxes (as tends to happen wiih Jackson and Rosberg). The basic classification is helpful and important, but it is not allowed to override the other elements which also contribute to economic and political performance, or to obscure the considerable degree of variation within each of the categories. His conclusions are marked by admirable caution, arising from an awareness of the inadequacy of the data base available and the shortness of the timescale with which he is dealingtwo decades for African capitalists and populist socialists, much less for the Afro-Marxists. He

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is also sensitive to the different goals towards which any quest for 'development' may be directed, and the different priorities accorded these goals by different ideologies. The conclusions, accordingly, seek to assess the record in terms not only of economic growth (important though that is to the achievement of many other goals), but also of equality, autonomy, human dignity, participation, and state capacity. The outstanding successes where growth is concerned, such as Kenya and Ivory Coast, fall squarely into the capitalist group, though some of the populist socialist states (such as Tanzania before the forced villagization campaign) have performed creditably, while the dreadful example of Zaire shows that capitalismif that is a fair classification for chaotic free enterprise kleptocracy cannot be relied on to produce the goods. The Afro-Marxist states have been disrupted through all their brief existence by a level of human conflict and natural disaster that makes fair assessment difficult, but it is at least clear enough that no massive mobilization of liberated human resources has yet taken placeand on the evidence of the five years since Young wrote, it is doubtful whether it will. Whilst the findings under growth are mainly as might be expected, those for autonomy and equality reveal the inadequacy of many off-the-cuff assumptions. It is true enough that visible inequalities, in the form of conspicuous consumption by a small elite, are most dramatic in the capitalist states; but since much of the success of Ivory Coast and Kenya, for example, has been due to increased agricultural production, growth may reflect a comparatively high level of rural income, while many of the socialist states have sucked purchasing power into the bureaucracy by underpaying rural producers. There is certainly no simple trade-off between growth and equality. Autonomy and dependence, likewise, are not related to ideological preference and subordination to the global capitalist system in the way that many applications of dependency theories would suggest. For one thing, there is no close relationship between economic dependence and political autonomy: Angola can draw 90 per cent of its export revenues from Gulf Oil, and its military protection from Cuba and the Soviet Union. The capitalist states range from the chronic indebtedness of Zaire to the voluntary dependence of the Ivory Coast and the belligerent nationalism (economic no less than political) of Nigeria. And if dependence is the consequence of economic failure, then success, however achieved, may be the best way to avoid it. Assaults on human dignity, in Young's view, are due more to the paranoia of individual rulers than to structural considerationswhether these be derived from the revolutionary violence needed to create a socialist state or from the bureaucratic authoritarianism which O'Donnell has identified as essential to the survival of capitalism in Latin America, The major question relating to Young's approach concerns the extent to which the pursuit of capitalist, socialist or, perhaps '-^pecially, Marxist strategies in different African states may reflect the nature (I their incorporation into the global economy, rather than leadership choice; different patterns of incorporation, and also of decolonization, may produce different kinds of nationalist movement and hence of leader. This is, however, a book that excites thought and argument because its author is constantly thinking and arguing himself. If there is one book that provides an idea of what African states have done and failed to do over the past quartercentury, then this is it.

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The other five books in this collection are all general introductions and surveys, and this puts them at a disadvantage. Since they are not trying to answer specific questions, they can easily lose focus and direction; the summary of other people's work does not excite the interest and engagement that enlivens the elaboration of one's own ideas; and whilst a comparative study is constantly looking for differences between states, an introductory survey ineluctably concentrates on similaritiesregardless of its author's constant warnings about the dangers of overgeneralization. The worst of the collection, by far, is Mazrui and Tidy. Ali Mazrui is Africa's premier political essayist, a master of the striking paradox captured in an arresting turn of phrase; Michael Tidy is an experienced author of history texts for African secondary schools. The result is a collaboration in which Tidy, having 'immersed himelf in Mazrui's copious writings, has attempted to turn these into ' comprehensive political history of Africa's period of decolonization and of the first two decades of independence' (back cover). But it does noi meet the simplest requirements of a comprehensive history, because it is not written as one. The organization is neither chronological nor geographical, but thematic. Each chapter takes a themepolitical parties, armed struggle, civil wars, military coups and regimes, international relationsand illustrates it with brief case studies drawn from across the continent. This is simply not a very good way of telling readers what has actually happened. Since the chapter on civil wars precedes those on military coups and regimes, for instance, we are told about the Nigerian war of 1967-70 before learning anything of the frantic 18 months that led to it. The discipline of chronology is lost, and with it not only the simplest way of learning historical facts, but also the sense of history as an unfolding tale in which people struggle with the consequences of what has gone before. In the process, the case studies degenerate into little more than a potted outline of events. But if it is not history, neither is it social science. Mazrui's genius, highly stimulating in short bursts, is not adapted to the systematic approach that a book of this length and scope requires. Occasionally some characteristic spark survives: 'The real danger posed by state socialism in a society with fragile institutions is not a danger of making the government too strong but the risk of making it more conspicuously ineffectual' (p. 294), But these passing gems are buried in four hundred pages of schoolbook prose ('in chapter 2 we saw how . . .') which are not pulled together by any organizing theme, and which leave little sense of why things happen apart from the good or bad actions ot individual politicians. The book as a whole seems to me to have been seriously misconceived. While Mazrui and Tidy's book runs to nearly 400 large pages, Calvocoressi's book stops short at 123 small ones. This is an essay, rather than a text: a brief, fluently written introduction, concentrating on the external politics of the continent, and showing very little familiarity with its domestic setting, Cahocoressi is an international historian, the sole author in this collection without an Africanist background, and the book is essentially a set of lectures giver in Florence, Inevitably the resulting impression throughout is of a non-speciaiist speaking to other non-specialists. The style is brisk, self-confident, and at times rather patronizinga fault for which the authors with personal knowledge of Africa never fall, however harsh their criticisms of African states and leadf rs.

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The brusque statement that 'military rule in Africa has been noted either for its excesses or for its inadequacies' (p, 24), for example, sweeps a variety of vastly differing experiences into one slick all-encompassing aphorism; and the ascription of corruption to 'greed, opportunity and emulation' (p, 118) substitutes offhand condemnation of individual behaviour for any attempt at analysis of a phenomenon which, however evil, needs to be understood in structural terms. The factual errors are constantly irritating: in one classic tour de force, he describes General Ironsi, leader of the first Nigerian military regime in 1966, as exemplifying 'the feudal, pro-British upper crust in the North' (p. 98), when he was in fact an Igbo southerner, and his successor Gowon as 'not a Northerner' (p. 99), when in fact he was. There are plenty more. Understanding African international relations requires a prior knowledge of its domestic politics, and in seeking to explain one without the other, Calvocoressi presents us with a picture of the separated peaks of an iceberg whose base remains hidden under water. His publishers, finally, have served him ill with a map of 'main communications' which shows only rivers (few of which are navigable) and railways as they were some 20 years ago. Most of Africa's transport is by road. He is at his best in fitting Africa into the global relationships with which he is thoroughly familiar. The assessment of western and Soviet roles in southern Africa is fluent and persuasive, notably the ambivalence of the western attitude towards South Africa on the one hand, and the inability of the Soviet Union to take advantage of it on the other. There are useful discussions also of problems of aid and relationships between African states and the international mining companies, and an interesting section on Islamthough to describe King Hassan II of Morocco as a megalomaniac (p, 29) seems to me to be exaggerating; I would describe him as an unscrupulous operator myself. There is, too, a pervasive assumption of African failure, harsh but justified, which the sympathies of the Africanists too easily lead them to overlook.

The last three books confirm the well-known law of publishing which states that if nothing has been published on a subject in 20 years, then three competing volumes will appear within a few weeks of one another. All are general introductions to the politics of what none of them quite dare to call Black Africa, designed for an undergraduate market, Tordoffs book in principle covers the whole of Africa, although in practice the coverage is heavily sub-Saharan; Hodder-Williams's 'tropical Africa' excludes the Mediterranean littoral and South Africa, while Tangri additionally (and in my opinion regrettably) excludes the Horn, but basically the coverage is the same. The layout, too, is very similar: a sandwich, with chapters on colonialism and nationalism^ at the beginning, and on Africa's international relations at the end, with the 'meaty bit' on domestic politics in the middle, and (for Tordoff and Hodder-Williams) a wrapping of introduction and conclusion, Tangri's book is much the shortest, wiih 133 pages of text compared with 236 for Hodder-Williams and 288 for Tordoff, and his treatment is correspondingly brisk, especially over the preliminaries. Whilst Tordoff starts with a discussion of pre-colonial civilizations, and Hodder-Williams devotes his first chapter to the acquisition of

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empire, Tangri dismisses all this with a crisp opening line, 'By about 1900 the conquest of sub-Saharan Africa was over', and moves rapidly on to the things which interest him, I find this haste attractive: Tordoff and Hodder-Williams seem to be working their way through an agenda, but Tangri instantly conveys the impression that there is something he wants to say, I like, too, the way in w hich his chapter on colonialism concentrates on the effects it had on Africans, especially their incorporation into a global economy, rather than on colonial policy from an essentially European perspective, Tangri is open to the objection that he gives much more attention to the few and sporadic instances of African resistance to colonial rule than to the normal acquiescence through which a new political and economic system came to be accepted with surprisingly little difficulty; but his emphasis on the experiences of the ordinary African enables him to give a convincing picture of nationalism and its roots in a mass of local grievances and resentments. Both Tordoff and Hodder-Williams, in contrast, devote chapters to the 'transfer of power', a phrase which automatically concentrates attention on colonial rulers and African elites, and tends to overstate the smoothness of the process by which one gave way to the other. These are strangely bloodless accounts of a tense and exciting period. What is missing, in particular, is much sense of the competition, not just between nationalists and colonialists, but between rival would-be nationalist leaders themselves, each desperately seeking to grab the inheritance of colonial state power, and w illing to mobilize any available source of supportmost dangerously regional and ethnic identitiesin order to do so. Round one goes, then, to Tangri, Switching to the back of the sandwich, I find all three authors' treatment of the international angle somewhat disappointing. The very fact that the obligatory foreign relations chapter is tacked on at the end suggests a separation from the ordinary business of domestic politics which, at least in my view, seriously understates the constant and critically important interaction between the two arenas. And whilst all three books conduct their discussion of domestic politics in thematic and analytical terms, on international relations they are all too often content with simple narrative. Here, Hodder-Williams's book is most successful, with a solid and sensible chapter which starts from the subordination and penetration of African states within the global system and moves on from there to discuss their relationships with one another and with the external powers. Accepting that 'the basic framework of the dependency theorists is sound' (p. 202), he nonetheless quite correctly allows a level of autonomous action by African leaders, derived from their capacity to make common cause with one another and to manipulate their relationships with the outside world, Tangri, rather more committed to a dependency framework, allows it to carry him into an over-emotive stance which badly understates the level of African autonomy, the flavour of which is indicated by his reference to 'Africa's abject weakness and demeaning dependency on Western assistance' (p, 130), It is likewise entirely misleading to state that the former colonial powers 'have intervened almost at will' in Africa (p, 131), and the judgement that the Organisation of African Unity was 'of very limited use' (p. 133) in the Nigerian, Angolan and Saharan wars underestimates, 1 think, the extent to which the OAU, while possessing no military power, nonetheless helped to frame the diplomatic parameters within which the conflicts took place. Most of his chapter is given over to the problems of southern Africa, including a

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substantial narrative account of a rather unimportant organization, the Southern African Development Co-ordination Council, and a puzzling emphasis on the commitment of black African states to peaceful change in the region. A case study of the means by which Zimbabwe gained its independence a fascinating sequence of eventscould have helped a lot, but it is not mentioned. Finally, Tordoffs chapter on 'Regional Groupings and the OAU' largely ignores relations with the outside world, which are vastly more important to African states than intercontinental connections, and is heavily descriptive. Unusually in a book which is mostly very sure of its facts, it makes a number of trivial errors [for example, the reference to Somalia as being 'allied with the Soviet Union between 1969 and 1974 and with the United States thereafter' (p. 247)the switch did not take place until 1977, and there is no alliance with the USA in any sense comparable to that with the USSR]. Furthermore, 1 know that Haile-Selassie's stock is currently at a low level on the academic market, but it simply will not do to claim that 'the OAU . . , owed much to Nkrumah's statesmanship' (p. 224), whilst adding that 'it is not easy to say precisely why this particular conference [at Addis Ababa in May 1963] succeeded' in setting up the OAU (p. 241), It succeeded because Haile-Selassie, in a virtuoso display of" diplomatic skill, reduced Nkrumah to a minority of two (with Uganda) by detaching his two main allies, Nasser and Sekou Toure, and reassuring the conservative leaders of the Brazzaville and Monrovia groups that the organization he proposed would uphold rather than undermine their precious national sovereignty. The 'meaty bit' in each book consists of anything from three to five chapters devoted to the relationships between African state structures, and the societies and economies which they attempt to control. The 'meatiest' of the three is Tordoff. It is also the least digestible. Although it covers the research done on African politics over the last 20 years, it fails to give a sen.se of what African politics is like, Tordoff's approach is broadly institutional. After a chapter on state and society, effectively a discussion of ethnicity and class, he looks in turn at political parties, bureaucracies, militaries and revolutionary regimes. His technique is to summarize each subject through a discussion of the conclusions reached by the available literature. The impression of a literature survey, indeed, is evident throughout the book, and, despite a lot of useful material and a great deal of work, it is regrettably a thoroughly disappointing book. What is missing above all is the author's own perspectivea perspective in which Tordoff, after a lifetime of teaching in and about Africa, is almost unrivalled. At the end of it all, the reader feels that he should have learnt a lot about African politics, but he is lefi with very little sense of why it matters, or how it fits together. And since the exercise is carried out almost entirely at second remove, by looking at academics writing about events rather than events themselves, it conveys no impression at all of what Africa is likeol the heat and sweat, torpor and excitement, uncertainty and occasional paralysing fear that make up the environment in which African politicians have to work. It is an exercise that leads almost automatically to a tedious style. To take a aracteristic passage from the chapter on military regimes: Finally, even a military regime which claims, with some justification, to

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Review Article have intervened to restore stable and democratic government may be sucked into politics as the boundaries between the military establishment and its socio-political environment become fragmented: expressed in Luckham's terms, this means that the guardian state then becomes the praetorian state, carrying the danger that factionalism will sap the military's unity of purpose. As Ruth First has pointed out, once in power the military leadership tends to 'soak up social conflicts like a sponge'that is, in Lamb's words, 'the military organisation immediately becomes vulnerable to social and political pressures from which it was hitherto to some extent protected, and is required to operate under conditions and for purposes for which it was not designed' (p. 172).

Is it really necessary to cite three different authorities to make such a simple point? 1 keep having to remind myself that there is lots of useful material here. It is in many ways a worthy book. But it will certainly not convey any sense of the excitement of African politics to anyone who has not already experienced it. Hodder-Williams's book is better, because it seeks to convey the author's own views about Africa, There is no attempt to fit the subject into any single theoretical frameworkhis approach is, as he says, 'unashamedly eclectic' but there is certainly a coherence of style and tone. The central chapter on 'the political environment', following a stiff hi.storical introduction, seeks to establish a picture of what African politics is about: an admirably balanced discussion of what he calls 'the extractive view of polities', derived from uncertainty and scarcity of resources, and linked in turn to ethnic contlict and the prevalence of patron-client ties. This informs subsequent chapters on institutions and on 'the view from below', which relates government to social structure, especially at the local level. It is a quiet and solid book, which shows more the ordinariness than the passion of African politics. It portrays an Africa of suited civil servants and hard-headed peasants, rather than a place where people get so excited about their politics that they kill one another. While extraction and corruption are far from overlooked, the book retains a generally sympathetic attitude towards African rulers and elites. There is no hint ot demonology or the carping of the committed, but it makes a lot of points worth making: for example, that it is often external capitalists, such as the World Bank or French businessmen (pp. 157-8) who urge reluctant African leaders to spread the available wealth more evenly among their people; that rural life i.s characterized above all by 'the essential rationality of the inhabitants' (p, 189); that 'on balance, the more conservative regimes have survived better than the radical ones' (p, 193), Yet the air of gentle reasonableness which pervades the book is possible at least partly because Hodder-Williams draws, naturally enough, on those parts of Africa which he knows bestin this case, Anglophone East and Central Africa, On the whole, this has been the most peaceful and stable part of the continent; Uganda is the glaring exception, but is seen as a one-off horror story, not as a symptom of deeper troubles, and the violence in Zimbabwe can be ascribed to the peculiar circumstances of .settler colonialism. There is little here of the great morass of Zaire, or the traumas of Angola and Mozambique. Staies such as Sudan and Ethiopia, and the West African region as a whole, are raided for examples without, 1 feel, really affecting the analysis. And an unfamiliaruy

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w ith West Africa is reflected in a series of little errors of a kind that do not appear on the other side of the continent. Flight Lieutenant Rawlings, for instance, is described as an NCO (p. 129); General Akuffo is mistaken for his predecessor Acheampong (p. 139); the February 1966 coup in Ghana is referred to twice as having taken place in January (pp. 142, 146). There is much that is true and valuable in Hodder-Williams's view of Africaespecially since it emphasizes those features of the continent that tend to get overlooked among the dramas of coup, famine and civil war. But it is not the whole picture. Tangri is the most sympathetic ofthe three to a Marxist approachalthough by no means entirely committed to itand he concentrates on topics such as economic management and class formation which lend themselves to treatment in these terms. Unlike many authors of this school, however, he writes admirably, in short clear sentences, and is unconcerned with issues of doctrinal purity. Only occasionally does he lapse into the kind of statement to which this approach too easily gives rise. I am quite unable to work out what he means, for instance, when he writes: 'In every country subject to the rule of capital, capital rules, at the political level. In African countries, the state is run on behalf of the foreign bourgeoisie; it is the state of international capital' (p. 79), But mercifully, such passages are few. His analysis on the whole reveals the relative autonomy of the African state, and an excellent section (pp. 50-5) shows how its economic orientation was largely determined by a balance of leadership ideology and class forces within the state itself. His view of African politics is quite as extractive as that of Hodder-Williams, and a good deal less sympathetic to African governing elites, even in 'socialist' states such as Tanzania and Mozambique. There is, as he says of Mozambique, 'no certainty that a country that achieved independence through an armed liberation struggle will progress automatically towards the building of a socialist order' (p. 75). Yet behind these disappointments lurks the unstated assumption that the problem lies not in '.socialism' it.self, but in its subversion by bourgeois vested interests, most obviously in the bureaucracy. The key questions of what socialism is, and of what it may be expected to achieve in small dependent states weakly organized at both party and bureaucratic levels, remain unasked. It is for this reason, above all, that Tangri does not adequately fill that gap in the Marxian analysis of African politics which I have already noted. But this is to concentrate too much on criticism. There are good sections on the politics of the urban poor and the demobilization of the countryside, and the argument that ethnicity may best be seen as a manipulation of class interests is plausibly presented. This is one of the best short and readable introductions to African politics from a viewpoint broadly sympathetic to the left and is also one of an excellent first batch of books from a new independent publisher.

In a review written at a time when African fragility and dependence are brought ^aily to our attention, in the form both of ecological collapse, as in Sudan and Ethiopia, and of state collapse, as in Uganda and Chad, the question of what help these books give in understanding the forces at work is unavoidable. The answer is, not much. However, one must immediately guard against treating a -eries of catastrophes, no matter how horrifying, as the normal condition ofthe

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continent, particularly when these are seen through the distorting spectacles of the western media. But equally, the problems of Ghana and Chad, Sudan and Ethiopia, Zaire and Uganda, Angola and Mozambique, cannot be dismissed as isolated misfortunes, divorced from any general analysis of the nature and performance of African states. Had the authors been writing now, however, rather than over the last two to six years, these issues would certainly have rated more prominence. This is scarcely the place to attempt an appraisal of the problems of African politics, but a very quick sketch may provide some perspective. Colonialism imposed on Africa a state framework, separate from local society, and dependentmilitarily, economically, and organizationallyon the outside imperial powers. The challenge taken up by nationalist elites at the time of independence was to accept this framework, yet at the same time trying to integrate indigenous societies into it, in such a way as to createfrom the top downwards a nation-state similar to the European model. It was a challenge of which they were very much aware, as the post-independence rhetoric of 'nationbuilding' indicated, and it should not be assumed that they entirely failed to meet it. It was, however, a very difficult task, and in many territories a virtually impossible one. Under threat, it was always easiest to fall back on the mechanism of the state. The state was an apparatus of control, and in the uncertain world after independence, it was the one thing which the elites did control. It was also an apparatus of extraction, and one in which elites heavily dependent on state employment had a strong vested interest. And most important of all in many ways, it was an organization with privileged access to the outside worid: created by the international system, and sustained by it diplomatically (through the support of its colonial patron and other major powers, as well as by organizations such as the UN and the OAU), economically (not just by aid, but much more importantly by the external trade which provided its government revenues), and if need be militarily as well. The central problem of African politics has been, therefore, whether (or for how long) a state thus artificially created, suspended between a domestic society which it does not adequately represent, and an international environment which it can do little to infiuence, can bear the strains which this position places on it. And the fact that African governments have largely succeeded in this task has often led observers to take that success for granted, and to look beyond it to other goals, such as economic development or domestic political stability, at which they have been less successful. This is the general problem of the books reviewed here: in concentrating on day-to-day politics (even revolutionary politics, which is simply an explicit attempt to do what all African states are in fact trying to do), the authors tend to ignore the base on which this politics sits, and to ascribe the more dramatic instances of state failure to particular local circumstances, rather than to an intensified expression of a universal threat. All the authors fail to consider the Hobbesian question of how thin is the crust of order on which politics depends. And equally, concentrating for the most part on the structure of domestic politics, they tend to ignore the intimate relationships between state maintenance and the international order. The first threat facing African states is that they may fail to maintain their own apparatus; that the hierarchy of control may fall apart, either because of its inherent fragility (as in Congo/Zaire at independence), or because of its

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wanton destruction by its own ruler (as in Uganda under Amin). The framework of state order, which in industrial states can effectively be taken for granted, is dependent here on at least a minimum level of competence and coherence among domestic elites, coupled with support from outside. It is useful to remember Huntington's point that the traditional concern of political science with what kind of government a state has is secondary to the question of how tnuch government it has. All African states are 'soft', in terms of organizational capacity, and their ability to maintain themselves as bureaucracies takes precedence over issues of either representativeness or policy orientation. The second threat is that the tension between the state as a mechanism of control and the society into which it is rather awkwardly meshed may become unmanageable; it is possible to detect, in Africa's increasing problems of public order, a process by which African societies are coming to avenge themselves on the states to which they have been subjected.'* As a general rule, however, even when this tension is not fully resolved (through the creation of some w idespread awareness of national identity), it is nonetheless quite effectively managed through the well-tried techniques of patronage and clientelism. These bind together a coalition of forces, both within the domestic state and society, and in the international order, with a vested interest in the state's preservation. Given reasonable skill at the top, and reasonable acquiescence at the bottom, the status quo may be preserved almost indefinitely, with only limited and occasional need for external military intervention. The danger is that clientelism provides little basis for any shared sense of identity on which to fall back, should skill and acquiescence fail; and while a combination of domestic and external interests is normally enough to sustain the state, an equivalent alliance may equally be mobilized to fragment itas in Chad, Angola or Mozambique.' The third threat is that the imposition of an extractive state, and more generally of a parasitic urban community as a whole, may prove too great a burden for a weak and overwhelmingly rural productive base,^ The collapse of the Ghanaian state has mainly resulted from the inability of an ever-growing government apparatus to continue extracting resources from an ever-shrinking rural economy. Famine is likewise, partly though by no means entirely, a consequence of central government policies which discourage rural production. A generation after independence, the survival of African states is their main achievement. And though that survival has still not, in most cases, been seriously threatened, the conditions on which it rests have become increasingly stark. These books deal, in varying ways, with 'normal' politics. That is, in a sense, fair enough: most politics is normal. But the foundations on which normality was built now need more urgent examination.

" See Jean-Francois Bayart, 'La revanche des Societes Africaines', Politique Africaine, 11 Scpiember 1983. See R. H. Jackson and C G Rosberg, 'Why Africa's weak states persist'. World Politics, 35
i :').

See Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: UrbanBiasin World Development (London, ' 'Ple Smith, 1977)a work ofthe first importance which, strangely, is cited in none of the books ' -wed here.