What nature of `nation` existed beyond Benedict Anderson`s

Platinum Global Journal of Social Science and Humanities (PGJSSH) Vol. X(X) pp. 010-018, April, 2015
Available online http://platinumglobaljournals.org/pgjssh/index.php
Copyright © 2015 Platinum Global Journals
Full Length Research Paper
What nature of ‘nation’ existed beyond Benedict
Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ of modernization
in Africa?: rethinking pre-independence project of
political entrepreneurs in social ‘writings’
and creative art
Alfred Ndi
University of Bamenda, Republic of Cameroon PO Box Bambili.
E-mail: ndifred@yahoo.com: Tel: 237677674455
Accepted 28th March, 2015
This critical paper in political and entrepreneurship studies argued that Benedict Anderson’s theoretical
insights about nations as ‘imagined communities’ are culturally reductionistic; their perspective is very
restricted to western/ised experiences of religion, capitalism, the press, etc, and, thus, they do not
throw sufficient light on the very complex situation of nationalistic identities and how they came out as
processes in Africa. While these theoretical insights about nationalism are impressive, they do not
illuminate the transcending nature of ‘nationalism’ in Africa as a shared identitarian history. Drawing
insights from social ‘writings’ and creative art, it reported that this historical nature has to do with
ambiguities in African nationalism, dichotomy between identity and nationhood, alienation of the script
of nationalism, the overwhelming presence of perennialist’ realities, the connotative functions of the
concept of ‘nation’ in different contexts and the determination of sociological conditions. The paper
suggested that the potential for the concept of nationhood to take a very productive and unpredictable
life of its own, the geographing of nationalism, the packaging of knowledge as power via maps and
continued relevance of effects that go beyond religion itself are innovative issues of identity and
nationhood in Africa that Anderson’s theoretical paradigm of ‘imagined communities’ obscures and
political entrepreneurs must understand in order to implement effective policies of development.
Keywords: Nationalism, creative destruction, economics and social development, political entrepreneurship
INTRODUCTION
One of the vital questions that Benedict Anderson fails to
consider seriously in his modernization theory about
‘imagined communities’ is as follows: “whose imagined
community” is he talking about? This question was very
critical for pre-independence political entrepreneurs and
policy managers in African nation states because during
the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and the years beyond,
nationalist elites such as Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo
Kenyatta, Oginga Odinga, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi
Azikiwe, Agostino Neto, Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson
Mandela fought against colonial rule with a ‘dichotomous’
mindset, namely, that their struggles were emancipatory
Ndi
in objective and the imperial powers that controlled them
were oppressive. In this way, as evidenced by their
autobiographical narratives, the process of nation
formation could not be collectively qualified as a
nationalism ‘imagined’ endogenously and constructed
‘from within’ the dynamics of their indigenous histories.
Their narratives were thus more accurately an
ambiguated form of nationalism: imposed ‘from without’
the continental context and negotiated exogenously. This
was a very serious strategic error that underpinned the
development and modernization programmes of most
African countries and partly explains the major causes of
Africa’s underdevelopment or slow and painful
evolutionary processes toward progress in the continent
today.
By pre-independence political entrepreneurs and policy
managers, we are referring to the adapted sense of the
term developed by Richard Cantillon, Frank Knight, and
Ludwig von Mises (McCaffrey and Salerno. 2011.).
Political entrepreneurs and policy managers are offshoots
of market entrepreneurs. Africa’s nationalist elites were
actually entrepreneurs groomed in market principles who
attempted to apply them in the political domain of
decolonization. Like entrepreneurs, they were very
motivated people who saw opportunity in the creation of
new nation states which they managed as their
organizations. Consequently, they redirected production
from the unregulated market to the sphere of politics.
This production generated resources to the political
entrepreneurs and managers, which resembled the profit
that market entrepreneurs acquired.
By exploiting Benedict Anderson’s theory, which is
related to the modernization project, development
policies and capitalist entrepreneurship and power, this
paper attempts to open up innovative avenues, couched
in the emancipation programme of decolonization, that
could have been exploited by these leaderships in order
to spare the continent of its subsequent turns of tension,
conflict and underdevelopment.
METHODOLOGY
From the viewpoint of methodology, Benedict Anderson
created his theory of nationalism by employing chiefly
discursive narratives, that is, ‘fluid’ or ‘secondary’ sources
of knowledge seen as a mirror to society. This suggests
that creative literature is a mechanical reflection of a
nation’s character that could also function to echo future
directions it would take. His exploitation of cultural texts
such as creative literature (novels) and mass media
documents (newspapers) as a way to capture the reality
of ‘national consciousness’ is informed more by his
modernist understanding of the nation by which he ‘read’
nationhood as an ‘imagined’ phenomenon different from
nationhood in a primitive past. From this modernist
understanding, nations were ‘imagined’ as moulded by
011
the popular culture of a particular (‘primitive’) period
during a long time before they were achieved in a
practical (‘modernist’) context. This study therefore
exploits literary sources in Africa but in juxtaposition with
‘primary’/sociological ‘writings’ or sources about nationbuilding processes because the latter are more ‘direct’
evidences that can be used in conjunction with
secondary, discursive sources. In this light, it draws from
public, historical and researched records detailing
economic, cultural and ideological transformations in
selected nations of Africa. In particular, both its primary
and secondary records are employed to show how
concrete experiences of nationalism as well as shifts
emerging from them are effected from the communal
‘ownership’ of landed estates, and how labour and capital
underwent moments of mutation prior to and a postiori
periods of nationalistic change. In this way, the
methodology employed, namely, the exegesis of
nationalism from works of both art and social sciences is
structuralist and post-structuralist and departs from the
sometimes very subjective and unscientific opinions of
Anderson such as that nationalism originated from the
Americas.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
In autobiographies written by early African political
entrepreneurs and policy intellectuals such as Kenneth
Kaunda’s (1962) Zambia shall be free and Oginga
Odinga’s (1967) Not yet Uhuru, nationalism comes
across in Zambia and Kenya respectively as a ‘gift’ being
‘offered’ by progressive colonial (and less so in the case
of apartheid) administrations to the subjugated peoples of
Africa. These exogenously generated narratives were
further evidenced by the fact that no sooner were
foundations of the ‘modern nation-state’ set up as
developmental projects by the entrepreneurs in different
parts of Africa than the old, indigenous cultures, histories,
traditional economies, political systems, and social
habitus (i.e. ways of life) were rejected or undermined as
‘primitive’, unprogressive, childish, corrupt and were
gradually abandoned by the same elites, who were
hitherto claiming to be liberators of the African peoples.
The indigenous cultures and histories became a site of
otherness, a location qualified by the new political and
entrepreneurial elites, the Fanonian white masks, black
skins as ‘primitive’ (Fanon, 1967). In this way, the point
on ambiguity being made here is that, although
nationalism in Africa was not simplistically a
transposable, modular experience, but a different form of
elitist nationalism with its own anti-imperial dynamics, it
was the colonial system that thought out the nationalist
script inspired from European Enlightenment on behalf of
indigenous
Africans
and
through
their
new
sntrepreneurial elite class in countries like Malawi
(Kamusu Banda) Senegal (Leopold Sedar Senghor) and
012
Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Humanit
Cameroon (Ahmadou Ahidjo). As elaborated in Albert
Mukong’s (1990) autobiographical oeuvre against French
neo/colonial rule in Cameroon titled as Prisoner Without a
Crime. this ‘script’ induced these new ‘nation/s’ into a
post-independence epoch characterized by narratives of
dependency, moments of exploitation and a consequent
history of under-development and misery. The
nationhood ‘given’ and elaborated by these managerial
elites was ‘not quite’ (to borrow the term from Homi
Bhabha) ‘imagined’ by Africans but was brought into light
by the former colonial power/s as a strategy to deal
efficiently with growing resistance (such as Um Nyobe in
Prisoner without a crime) and the threat of de-linking and
at the same time continue with remote-controlled
dependency.
A specific problem with this ambivalent form of
nationalism in Africa, which is very unAndersonian, is that
it had no essentialistic character of its own; at one
instant, especially prior to the 1960s, it appeared as if
nationalism was combating the ill-effects of colonial
domination. In this case, the political entrepreneurs
adopted strategies that gave their early nationalism a
veneer of autonomy, sovereignty and power. For
example, at one instant, they initially constructed their
nationalist movements from the background of an
‘essentially’ indigenous cultural identity, employed to
undo the trappings of colonial rule even through the use
of violent methods as evidenced in Ya Otto’s (1981)
writing. At another moment, the post/nationalist
framework formed by the managerial elites retained the
same basic elements of segregation, exclusion
(rural/urban, poor masses/elite bourgeois, male/female,
etc) and exploitation that were hitherto embedded in
colonial discourse as explained by Asong’s (2009) oeuvre
No way to die. As a result, anti-colonial nationalist
movements in Africa shared the same epistemological
and discursive fields of politics as their colonial
oppressors (Chatterjee, 1986). These historical, cultural,
economic and political dynamics driving the ambivalent
post-colonial national experience in the continent whether
in Kenya (Ngugi, 1977), Ghana (Ayi Kwei,1968), Nigeria
(Achebe, 1997), are absent from Anderson’s ‘imagined
communities’. As Partha Chatterjee (1986) rightly notes
in his Nationalist thought and the colonial world,
Anderson's thesis on the national question, is 'highly
unorthodox' because he conceptualized the ‘nation’ not
by a set of objective Marxist determinist orthodoxies but
as a universal scheme of the nation, that is, construed as
a 'thought out' or 'imagined political community.'
Chatterjee (1993) goes further to observe in The nation
and its fragments that Anderson treats nationalism as
though it were part of the universal history of the modern
world.
The ways in which the ‘nation’ was formed in postindependence Africa were not consistent with the
'modular forms' thesis of identity that Anderson
formulated. The nationalist imagination in post-colonial
nation states was not necessarily premised on identity
but was based on difference (to borrow the term from
postmodernist scholar Jacques Derrida) with modular
forms of Western nationalism. For example, anti-colonial
African nationalists generated their bid for sovereignty by
exploiting the spiritual and material spheres of indigenous
cultures in the continent in order to fashion out a nonEurocentric, differentiated national culture that was then
employed in political struggles against the imperial
powers. But the critical issue here is that in their attempt
to bring their ‘nations’ into being, they were also
presented with ready-made modular forms by nonconservative European and American ‘progressive’
forces, to the point where there was nothing left for
political entrepreneurs and policy managers to imagine
other than something that was not quite European nor
American. For example, the nature of neo/colonial history
in Africa imposed not only a neo-classical and neo/liberal
form of economic consumption but also the ‘consumption’
of a national ideology of modernity. This Eurocentric
ideology based on a ‘provincialism’ of either ‘Europe’ or
‘Africa’ was imposed in the process of nationalism and
held that everything that was important in the modern
world originated from Europe/the west rather than from
Africa. In other words, Europe provided not only the
Enlightenment script (together with its possible openings
for exploitation), but also the processes of ‘re-writing’
anti-colonial imaginations and re-channeling the
itineraries of the struggles (The nation and its fragments).
This ‘script’ and the processes of the struggles were seen
as necessary to stop brewing forces of communism,
internationalism and nationalist revolution from eventually
taking hold of the continent and posing as a serious
threat to the expansion of capitalist development
cherished by the entrepreneurs.
The overly symmetrical link established between
‘identity’ and ‘nationalism’ in Benedict Anderson's
Imagined Communities was not borne out in many
examples of African nationalism. In Africa, there was no
parallel drawn systematically between ‘nation’ and
‘community’ as existing in a ‘homogeneous, empty, time’.
The idea of a ‘homogeneous, empty time’ was not a real
experience in Africa until colonial rule was established to
attempt enforcing it. As the literatures and social cases
show in abundant detail, prior to colonial rule, indigenous
relationships were created not through ‘horizontal’
feelings of friendship but through hierarchical ascription,
class structures (high ethnicity/low ethnic groups,
nobility/commoners, dominant male/submissive female,
etc) and via the celebration of feats such as possession
of wrestling skills and glorification of achievements like
foes killed in intertribal wars (Achebe, Things Fall Apart,
Arrow of God; Samkange, On Trial for My Country,
Jumbam, Lukong and the Leopard).
Anderson’s version of nationhood as a product of
‘imagined communities’ was not itself a modernist project
in Africa in the sense that it was about how nationhood
Ndi
was a discursivity to be subverted (Smith, 1998) rather
than to be imagined. But this is where Anderson’s theory
is very vulnerable to the alternative reality that existed in
the continent. In Africa, ‘imagined communities’ were not
‘imagined’ at will as such, and identities were not chosen
as one selects a particular house, location or lifestyle and
decides to ignore others (Pittock, 1999). In Nigeria, for
example, communities like the Igbo, Yoruba or
Fulani/Hausa were rooted in much older ethnic identities
rather than constructed only by signifiers of modernist
‘images’ and developmental ‘representations’. And even
their ‘perennialist’ realities were derived from sociological
facts like bonds of loyalty, ritual institutions (e.g. Ulu deity
in Achebe’s Arrow of god) and political constitutions like
exclusion of the osu/outcasts in Nigeria (see the
Nollywood film ‘Royal Sacrifice’). Popular and musical
cultures (social ‘writings’) like the ngondo festival among
the littoral people of Cameroon, the bottle dance of the
grassfielders of Cameroon and traditional resources like
hunting skills among the Baka Pigmies of the Equatorial
forests that endowed them with a sense of belonging and
identity. Hence, our chief argument is that the notion of
nationalism among Africans was not momentary, it was
not a simplistic question of the ‘here and now’; it was
certainly a matter of the spatial here but also one that
stretched back to early times and was constantly
revisited. Thus, contrary to contemporary and popular
belief, the concept of ‘nation’ in Africa was much older
than the notion of ‘nation’ in the modernist sense of the
term, which began only recently from approximately the
1940s to the 1960s. The evidence to this critical
submission is that in Africa the ideas of ‘nation’ and
‘nationalism’ as modernist and contemporary concepts
were vigorously contested during the decolonization
period and challenged by post-independence populations
via a systematic recourse to a ‘certain ‘primordial
‘essentialism’ in virtually every nation-state such as
Nigeria and this is represented in literature (e.g. Aluko,
1978, A state of our own). This is also consistent with
what Tom Nairn had rightly attested, namely, that
“nationalism is constitutive of man’s social nature” (Nairn,
1981).
Another evidence may be culled from the situation of
human geography in Africa, which instructs us in rich
historical, economic (Geertz, 1963; Whitaker, 1970) and
artistic
detail
(Achebe,
1958)
that
‘national
consciousness’ is determined by sociological conditions
and not merely by collective imaginaries, consciences
and signifiers. In this light, we may consider the relevant
viewpoint of Karl Marx (1975: 425), who declared that: ‘it
is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their
consciousness.’ The issue of ‘consciousness’ emerged in
the pre-colonial continent with the embedded mode of
production (to borrow the term from Karl Polanyi) that
required communalistic/group rather than individualistic/
elitist responses to nationalistic imagination. The
013
materialist conditions of social, religious and political life
richly described in sociology and in literature suggest that
in Africa, the idea of establishing a capitalist/materialist
order based on ‘timelessness’ was soon vulnerable to
forces of transitivity. For example, in literature, the
bourgeois gentry, Nwaka, insists that the Ulu deity has
outlived its usefulness in Umuaroan anthropological
history against the conservative opinion of the aristocratic
priest, Ezeulu (Achebe, 1962). From this artistic insight,
which reflects reality, the concept of ‘nation’ was
historically relevant not only to capitalist entrepreneurial
societies, but also to communalistic ones such as those
in Africa.
A concept such as nation is not simply a ‘word’ or an
‘idea’ in the Andersonian sense; it is also a context.
Consequently, the value of a concept is contingent not
simply on its denotation, but also on the connotative
function of the concept in a given social life. This implies
that different forms of social life make provision for
varying roles to be played out by a given concept. Even
in indigenous African societies, the notion of ‘nation’ was
employed in the sense of ‘village’ in chieftaincies that had
fairly settled populations such as Nso’ in Cameroon, and
in the sense of ‘migratory groups with common family
stems’ in nomadic communities such as the Woodabe
tribe who do not have a fixed national geography. During
the slave trade period of mercantilism and the Harlem
Renaissance epoch, nation connotated with ‘Black
nationalism’. In the colonial epoch of plantation
economies, the concept of nation was akin to ‘several
different villages brought together in a larger national
geography speaking one foreign/colonial language’. In
the decolonization period, its meaning shifted to ‘panAfricanism’ as advocated for by WEB Dubois, Kwame
Nkrumah, etc, and in the post-independence era of
internationalism marked by integration of the continent
into the neo-classical or free market economy, the
service economy, etc, the nationalistic concept was
employed to mean the ‘neo-patrimonial nation of single
parties’ and ‘fathers of the nation’ (Asongwed, 1993).
Recently, in the era of globalization, nationalism
designated the alienated/globalized diaspora of Africans.
These shifting meanings suggest that the ways Africans
understood the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in
the past were never the same as they meant them in the
recent or contemporary epochs. This is so not because
the respective groups of Africans did not have the
capacity to ‘imagine’ as Anderson insists, but because
their modes of production and their sociological,
historical, geographical and political lives were different
and more critical in determining the character of a nation
than the Andersonian ‘minds’ of people living in it.
This Marxist insight, which Anderson departs from, with
his more or less modernist orientation, suggests that
different African communities living at different epochs
and geographies could not have shared the same
conceptual meaning of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, not just
014
Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Humanit
because of the commonality of the words, but because of
the different forms of consciousness that the
word/concept ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ expressed. In this
way, different forms of social life allowed for different
forms of consciousness, and for varied modes of
expression of the concept of ‘nation’ to emerge into
existence. In Nigeria, like in Cameroon, Ghana, Togo,
Kenya, Botswana, Ivory Coast, Algeria and Zanzibar,
nationalism was an all-pervasive narrative that did not
necessarily coincide with technological advances such as
the printing press or religious encroachments like
Christianity.
Anderson’s idea of ‘nationalism’ as an imagined
narrative idealizes the ‘nation’ as though it were a stable
‘textuality’. And this ‘text’ of ideas depends on a political
economy or ‘materialist’ environment that Anderson
theorizes as defining underlying social and material
relations. Nevertheless, although this materialist base
determines mechanisms of the capitalist entrepreneurial
economy, and its modes of social production, an
argument can be raised against this insight as oldfashioned Marxist influence. This is where Anderson’s
position is reductionalistic; Marxist influence caused him
to imagine the ‘text’ of national ideas as simply mirror
images of the social and economic base, that is, as the
reality underneath ideology. But the experience of nation
formation in Africa was not merely anthropomorphic, that
is, it was not merely a ‘social construction’. Nation
formation in Africa most critically assumed as well a
perspective of self-sustaining productivity and was
implicit in a viewpoint of the power of new imperial
‘knowledges’ to take a life of its own in the Foucauldian
(1980) sense of the concept. The process of nationalism
was not only ‘social’; material relations were not the only
means through which Africans became aware of
themselves as historical agents. Modern African history
did not only disclose its nationalistic trends by following
certain deterministic logics of materialism/ capitalism,
with its social relations of production. Rather there were
also non-human actors and ‘materials’ (Walters, 2002)
involved in the reconstitution and production of
knowledge, space, and subjectivity.
For example, during and after the colonial era, the
nation state map was used as an instrument of
knowledge/production by most imperial powers in Africa
in order to sustain the legitimacy and relevance of the
colonial administration. The map was historically
inscribed in a geo-graphing process (O’Tuathail, 1996) of
knowledge construction with the aim to politically
conceive, locate and control land. As an immutable,
flexibly movible, packaged-up ‘knowledge’ system
transported from Europe by the colonial administration, it
was manufactured from insights derived from travel
writings, imperial theories, indigenous practices, and so
forth. This charted ‘knowledge’ was not just objectively
informational or technical, it was the product of a
conspired territorial and Enlightenment appropriation. The
conspired knowledge was
produced to justify
representation of the African as the Orient. Even though
Africans were actively narrating their own history, the
map that was often handed down to and was adopted by
post-colonial nation-states was exploited to redefine the
national terrain and ultimately modify the life, cultures,
customs, practices and societies of the colonized African
(Scott 1995). In British colonies, the imperial policy of
indirect rule was instrumentalized to justify racial
domination of the artificially constructed nations and to
exploit the power of various ethnic groups. In this way,
the map embodied a power/knowledge technique of
normalization and discipline, a certain ‘material semiotics’
(Kendall 2004; Walters 2004) in which knowledge of a
given territory was carefully packaged up to be employed
easily as an unchangeable and itinerant technology of
information.
As a non-human and material object, the map was
exploited to generate knowledge that could be deployed
to reproduce the African as an Oriental Other (to borrow
the term from postcolonial theorist Edward Said, 1979).
Although the African subject was active even as a postcolonial victim, and attempted to rethink his national
history, the imperial states tried to redefine and change
the social structure of the life of Africans as they lived it
(Scott 1995). For example, in British colonial territories,
indirect rule was practised as a managerial policy to
construct racial/ethnic hierarchies. The most notable
example was in South Africa where this policy created a
white/upper and black/lower racial, and by ideological
logic, a political order determined by Boers. The outcome
was
a
negative,
segregated
nationhood,
a
‘geographication’ of division and exclusion, that was
unacceptable to the marginalized indigenes and was
unrecognized internationally and rejected by the black
majority population. But inspired from this ideological
logic, even the post-apartheid era was still marked by
racial tensions and by a new form of compensatory ‘black
racialism’ in which the ruling elites became intolerant of
all forms of radicalism against the ANC party and its
meager achievements vis-a-vis improvement of standard
of living for the suffering black masses. This ‘division’ in
the South African nation was echoed in many other
African countries where the ruling elites, now the ‘neocolonial’ forces, treated the legitimate demands of
different ethnic populations as a ‘threat’ to their power
and sought to eliminate them. Consequently, many
African countries faced devastating civil wars as was the
case in Nigeria (Amadi, 1973), Rwanda, the Congo
Kinshasa, Sudan, and prospects of secessionist conflicts
as in Cameroon (the SCNC secessionist movement), etc.
In addition, as portrayed in the internationally acclaimed
film ‘Hotel Rwanda’, the colonial policy of supporting
particular ethnic populations within an artificially
constituted national territory such as the Tutsis (against
the Hutus) in Rwanda fueled tensions in the continent.
The physical construction of the map as a
Ndi
representation was a crucial example of the materiality of
a Foucauldian power/knowledge binary, which itself
resulted from a multiplicity of specific discursive practices
and subjectivities. National projects of entrepreneurship,
at the same time, were imbued with techniques of
‘normalization’ and discipline, or with what could be
called “embodied” knowledges. Nationalism, in this
sense, was understood not merely as ‘socially
constructed,’ but as a phenomenon that was indeed, also
lived. In addition, the production of knowledge was
closely related to the geography of colonial conquest, for
instance, mapping and other forms of land surveys etc.,
laid the cartographic basis for the entrepreneurial
imposition of developmental policy, and further
accumulation of capitalism in much of Africa (Harvey
1984). While traditionally ‘positivistic’ forms of scientific
knowledge often naively claim objectivity and neutrality, it
is indisputable that the colonial context of imperialism and
expansionism provided the social basis for the production
and use of that knowledge. In order to continue to exploit
and dominate previously unclaimed territory through
capitalist accumulation, there had to be necessary
societal, material, and epistemological preconditions set
in place.
In contrast to Anderson’s positions, the contexts of
nationalism in Africa evidenced an elaborate approach to
nationalism in which thematic continuities were in sync
with
historical
and
cultural
particularities
or
discontinuities. Post-colonial theorist Edward Said
formulated an orientalist framework in which he explained
that ‘civilizing missions’ were invented to promote the
Christian religion and establish close and physical
relationships to colonial territories. This process was
aided by scientific surveys, maps and censuses that were
created by colonial masters in the name of statistics,
‘human progress’ and population count but were actually
exploited to reconstruct an Orient that they knew very
well in terms of his habits, beliefs, culture, etc. As a
result, ‘anti-colonial’ nationalist movements in Africa were
attempts to deconstruct the power of knowledge as
defined by these imperial states. This sometimes took the
forms of violation of colonially defined borders between
nation states. For example, the conflict over the
borderline between South Africa and Namibia is over a
river!
Other
boundary
crises
(Ethiopia/Eritrea,
Cameroon/Nigeria over Bakassi peninsular, North
Sudan/South Sudan, Congo/Rwanda, etc) resulted in
tragic conflictual outcomes. In de/appropriating Orientalist
texts for the purposes of re/legitimatization, African
nation-state policy entrepreneurs asserted new forms of
unity, with all of their exclusionary components. They
unfortunately became ‘inside-out orientalists’ to add value
to what was absent (Burke 1998: 494-495). Just as
nationalism meant the excluded Other in colonial
discourse, so too did radical Islamic movements such as
the Boko Haram, Al Shabab, etc, come up with an
ideology of excluding all forms of technological
015
modernization and cultural westernization such as
education and Christianity in Nigerian nationalist
discourse.
According to Anderson, a sudden rupture from the
‘imagined communities’ constructed by Christianity gave
way to nationalist movements after the Enlightenment
epoch. However, in Africa, this experience of nationalism
took a different form: there was a continuity from (the
advent of) colonial Christianity to the exploitation of
orthodox and protestant religious movements during the
decolonization period. This religious effect in Africa was
evident in multiple post-independence contexts of the
psychology of faith: consequently, in addition to different
revivalist religious movements, there was ‘faith’ in the
overpowering capacity of the ‘Nation’ to develop itself.
There was a strong belief in miracles of scientific
progress through projects of modernization like the
hydro-electric dam for energy production by Ghana’s
president Kwame Nkrumah, excessive trust in the
socialist policies and capitalist strategies of charismatic
figures like Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania (the Ujamaa), Leopold Senghor of Senegal and
Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. This faith in the almost
supernatural abilities of the nationalist fighters to liberate
and develop their nations transformed the policy
entrepreneurs from mere physical subjects to
transcendental personalities and new, recognized forces
of world-history.
The Andersonian perspective of religion drawn from
Marxism claimed that free societies emerged as religious
institutions lost their power. Marxism carries a negative
view of religion which can, and, in this case, caused the
theorist to misdiagnose the subject matter. Well, one may
understand the rationale for this claim as originating in
Marxist influence given that Marxism presents a negative
picture of religion. But this claim was a reference to
another type of experience, namely, secularization as
opposed to nationalism which are distinct processes
(Claudio Lumnitz Lomnitz 2000: 352). The Nigerian
nation, for example, came into light with Christianity,
Islam and indigenous religions still in place as evidenced
by the partitioning of the country into three regions,
namely, the Islamised Grand North, the Christianised
East dominated by the Igbos and the western Yoruba
region.
Edward Said’s approach to orientalism demonstrates
that the colonial-historical chain of events continues to
have an impact today with American orientalism pursuing
new forms of ‘civilizing missions’ under the guise of
liberal democracy, privatization, deregulation, freedom of
press, human rights, etc. Employing the rhetoric of war
against terrorism, for example, US President George
Bush launched a military command, AfriCom, in February
2007 to help African states fight against terror. AfriCom
provided military formation and shared intelligence so as
to carry out special operations in all the states of the
continent. This new form of US imperialism only went
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further to validate the Saidian position of orientalism as a
new scramble for African resources. Africans were now
‘homogenized’ as potential victims under the ‘Islamic
threat’ and the protection of American hegemony. African
nations are now wedged into the ‘clash of civilizations’
logic (to borrow the concept from Samuel Huntington);
they are now hemmed in between an essentialism of
difference, an East/West, us versus them, mentality,
which articulates a ‘dark side’ of the nationalistic process
and stands in stark contrast to the rather optimistic
Andersonian perspective that represents nationalism as
modernization and therefore is just a question of what
people desire, imagine or hope for. In this sense, the
‘clash of civilizations’ thesis occupies the same discourse
as religious fundamentalists who posit a similar us/them
duality.
As Hindess (2002) rightly argues, narratives of
‘civilization’ were the organizing principle for imperial rule
and incorporation of the world into the modern system of
nation-states in the 19th century. Today, we are
witnessing what Rojas (2004: 108) terms as ‘the return of
civilization’ in which the Anglo-American hegemonic
structures advocate pre-emptive military interventions in
countries seen as security failures in nation building.
This type of justification is used to explain the need for
neo-liberal market reforms, which so far have not had the
expected results as poverty continues to increase in most
African countries now referred to as ‘Third World.’
CONCLUSION
In concluding this paper, we maintain that the theoretical
premises of Benedict Anderson, this modernist historian,
are inspirational as he attempted to bring together
contending positions in order to emerge with a unified
picture of nationalistic reality. This analysis against the
grain of ‘imagined communities’ gives one a deeper
understanding of nationalism as a modernist project that
could have been properly managed if the early political
entrepreneurs of Africa were more alert to the
opportunities emerging out of the changing times and
were innovative with a more productive and alternative
exegesis of nationalism from its African context.
However, these early political entrepreneurs and policy
managers failed to see the complexity of the situations
that nationalist politics had created. Consequently, they
failed to take African countries forward. This explains why
Africa, which was at the same level of development with
the tiger economies like South Korea, Singapore, Japan
and Taiwan before the 1960s, could not take off the
ground at the same speed as these entrepreneurial
states of Asia. Economic resources alone, which Africa
had in abundance, cannot explain the whole picture. In
this light, we accept Claudio Lomnitz’s (2000) notion of
nation according to which “nationalism’ does not form ‘a
single fraternal imaginary community’; rather, it is
constituted from bonds of economic dependency, and
new capitalist colonialisms as well as from new human
geographical productivities rather than simplistically from
existentialist imaginaries of communities
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Brief Bio
*I am an assistant professor and holder of a Doctorat d’État degree in business entrepreneurship and development
studies with research focus on political economy, psychoanalysis and critical studies. I investigate into strategic policies,
management and pedagogy of risk, innovation, opportunity, ventures, social change and multi-facetted development.
I lecture presently at University of Bamenda, P.O. Box Bambili, Bamenda, North West Region, Republic of Cameroon.
My publications in different academic journals and books as detailed below as follows:
- 2014, Beyond Marxist economism and entrepreneurial essentialism: post-colonial politics of empire in Chinua
Achebe's and Linus Asong's writings. (Journal of Social Economic Research),
- 2012, Setting the stage of ‘ab/normality’ in rehabilitative narratives: rethinking medicalization of the disabled African
body (Disability Studies Quarterly),
- 2011, What happened to post-imperial development in Africa during the last fifty years? Re-thinking the post-colonial
turn in creative art, social 'writings' and films. (Journal of African Studies and Development),
- 2011, US policy of capitalization and its discontents in Africa: A post-Marxist reading of postcolonial responses in art,
film and social 'writings' (African Journal of Political Science and International Relations),
- 2011, Why liberal capitalism has failed to stimulate a democratic culture in Africa: Rethinking Amartya Sen’s theory
about development as freedom (Journal of Developing Societies),
- 2011, Can capitalist 'core' survive the history driving development in the African periphery: re-evaluating Immanuel
Wallerstein's world systems analysis (Journal of African Studies and Development),- 2010, Why economic growth
theoriesbecame a fiction of development in postcolonial Africa: Critiquing foreign aid policy as discourse (Journal of
African Studies and Development),
- 2009, Disciplinary regime, neo-liberal bio-power and alienation of national sovereignty in Cameroon: political
economy of the imprisoned body (African Journal of Political Science and International Relations),
- 2007, Metropolitanism, capital and patrimony: theorizing the postcolonial West African city (African Identities),
- 1999, Critical perspectives in oral literature: the case of Nso’ elegy (VOICES, A Journal of University of Wisconsin
Madison),
- 2005, A chapter on Relationship between literature and developmental legacy of history in Achebe\s writings
(Ernest Emenyonu, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe,Trenton, N.J.: African World Press),
- An entry on power, discourse and politics of marginalization in Anglophone Cameroon literature (GD Killam,
eds.,Anthology on African Literature).