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Colonialism cast a long shadow, and the independence leaders of the new states soon found themselves
facing countless challenges. When Ghana achieved independence from Great Britain in 1957, for
example, it had a population of 6 million people, a life expectancy of 44 years, and
a gross domestic product per capita of just $170.
The new states faced several key challenges. First, and perhaps most directly, they faced
the practical problem of state building. That is, they had to construct all the institutions
of governance and administration necessary for the modern state. They had to draft constitutions,
build parliaments and national bureaucracies, construct roads, enact trade rules, and do
all the other functions we take for granted in a modern economy.
State building was often exacerbated by colonial infrastructure, which had been built to facilitate
the export of primary commodities rather than to integrate the nation. Rail lines and roads,
rather than connecting cities to one another, usually ran from the mines or plantations
to the ports. Telephone lines similarly often were routed through the colonial capital.
Thus, a person wanting to call from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, to Johannesburg,
the largest city in South Africa, would have their call routed through London, some 5,000
miles away. Existing infrastructure was underdeveloped.
Africa's major highways (mapped here) range from well-developed four lane superhighways,
like this one in South Africa, to basic but well-maintained two-lane roads. Once you get
off the main thoroughfares, (travels can often become a bit more precarious, with pavement
giving way to dirt roads that become mud traps during the rainy season. Construction of infrastructure
is thus, not surprisingly, a key focus of state-building.
The second challenge was that of nation building. National boundaries in the developing world,
particularly in Africa, were often constructed with little regard for existing political
divisions. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 resulted in the division of Africa between
the major European powers. Yet there were no Africans present at the conference, and
the authorities who divided the land at the Conference had never been to Africa. As British
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury observed of the Berlin Conference,
"We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's feet have ever trod;
we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by
the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were."
As a result, postcolonial boundaries bore little correlation to the lived reality of
Africans on the ground. This phenomenon was hardly unique to Africa.
In South Asia, the division of India and Pakistan (and the ongoing dispute over the Kashmir
region) stems from British colonial divisions and the artificial—and thus disputed—nature
of the postcolonial borders. And in the Middle East, contemporary boundaries reflect British
and French agreements over how to best divide the region between them rather than any real
or lived realities on the ground. Colonial authorities often viewed these boundaries
in flexible ways. The contemporary Israeli-Palestinian dispute, for example, has its roots in British
colonial machinations. In 1915, the British government secretly promised Hussein bin Ali,
the Sharif of Mecca, control of large portions of the Middle East, including much of modern
day Israel and Palestine. The territory, promised to Hussein in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence,
would be granted in exchange for Hussein's agreement to lead a rebellion against the
Ottoman Empire and Turkey. At the time, World War I was underway, and Britain was fighting
against Germany, who was supported by Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Britain hoped that
a rebellion within the Ottoman Empire would severely weaken the alliance and bring the
war to an early conclusion. Less than a year later, in 1916, the Sharif
of Mecca would launch the rebellion as agreed with the British. But the British had already
secretly entered a second agreement, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which they divided most of the
Middle East between themselves and France. The new agreement partitioned the region into
zones of control, with much of Syria, Lebanon, and northern Iraq falling under French control,
while Britain assumed position of most of Jordan, the bulk of southern Iraq, and much
of the Persian Gulf region. But the British were not done yet. In November
of 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in which they formally stated their support
for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. That region, which according
to many had also been promised to the Sharif of Mecca to be part of his pan-Arab state,
would become the modern state of Israel. As a result of these colonial machinations,
the boundaries of postcolonial states often made little sense. Remember that a state refers
to a political unit that occupies a defined territory, has a permanent population, and
exercises sovereignty. A nation is a group of people that share a common sense of belonging
derived from a shared history, culture, language, and so on. Ideally, these combine in the ideal
form of the nation-state, a political unit in which the boundaries of the state and the
nation are contiguous. In other words a nation-state exists when a group of people sharing a common
national identity living neatly within a single political unit.
However, this ideal was never realized in many postcolonial states around the world.
Rather, borders often divided nations between multiple states, or combined nations that
had historically been at conflict into a single state. Nigeria, for example, is today home
to some 250 different ethnic groups, the three largest of which, the Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba,
were often at odds. The DR Congo is similarly home to hundreds of different ethnic groups.
To make matters worse, colonial powers often employed a strategy of divide-and-rule to
make colonial administration easier, as we have previously discussed.
Creating a shared sense of identity thus became a central goal of many postcolonial states.
That process, often referred to as nation building, took different forms. In some states,
minority groups were violently repressed in an effort to create a state comprised of a
single nation. In others, political leaders sought to transcend fractious identities with
a new national or transnational identity. The most salient example here is that of Patrice
Lumumba, the first leader of post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo. Seeing the
problems associated with ethnic divisions and nationalism in the Congo, Lumumba promoted
the idea of Pan-Africanism as a solution, arguing that the Congolese should see themselves
not as Luba, Mongo, or Kongo, or any of the other estimated 200+ ethnic groups in the
country, but as Congolese and above all, as Africans.
Pan-Africanism was closely linked to the idea of Pan-Arabism, promoted by Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser. The ideologies promoted a vision for achieving social and political
union among African and Arab peoples respectively. In their most radical formations, Pan-Africanism
and Pan-Arabism sought to transcend the postcolonial states, which they viewed as being founded
on the geographic divisions of colonial authority, and replace them with a single political unit
encompassing all of Africa and the Arab World respectively.
However, both proved difficult to implement on the ground, as local political elites wanted
to transcend the political divisions of colonialism less than they wanted to use those divisions
for their own purposes. In Egypt, Nassar was never able to convince other leaders in the
region to abandon their own plans and unify behind his vision. The defeat of Egypt by
Israel following the Six-day War in 1978 effectively ended all hopes of Pan
Pan-Africanism suffered an even earlier defeat. Pan-Africanism's most vocal advocates included
Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister
of the Congo. While both advocated Pan-Africanism, Lumumba's radical vision for Africa was short
lived. He was assassinated in 1961, less than one year after taking office. Nkrumah continued
to promote Pan-Africanism, but his efforts reach their zenith with the formation of the
Organization of African Unity in 1963. One of the primary goals of the OAU was to
promote the unity and solidarity of African states. But as with the Pan-Arab movement,
Pan-Africanism, even though the OAU, was never able to move beyond the colonial boundaries
of the nation-state. Rather, despite their artificial nature—ignoring geographical
features, ethnic and cultural distinctions, religious beliefs, local sensitivities, and
historical realities, the boundaries remain largely in place. Indeed, one of the other
primary purposes of establishing the OAU was to formalize those boundaries. Better the
enemy you know, it seems. The decision to retain the artificial colonial
borders was drive by two forces. First, postcolonial leaders came to power in the context of the
nation-state. Keeping the nation state intact was thus central to keeping power themselves.
Second, and more pragmatically, even if there was general agreement on the need to redraw
the boundaries, it is not clear on what basis the new boundaries should be drawn. How small
should the political unit be? Consider these two maps of Africa. On the left is the current
political map. On the right is a map illustrating the numerous ethnic groups across the continent.
Ethnic-based states would be too small to be stable.
And therein lies the problem of nation-building. Given the artificial nature of the postcolonial
state and the fact that little can be done either practically or ideally about them,
the fundamental challenge to the postcolonial state became constructing a common sense of
belonging around a new national identity. The lack of this common sense of identity
is thus at the root of the problem of legitimacy faced by many developing countries. In many
countries, the basis of the legitimacy of the state is the belief that, regardless of
political affiliation, ethnic identity, or other variable, the government is (at least
ideally) supposed to make decisions for the benefit of the country as whole and all its
people. But in may postcolonial states, that sense of legitimacy is underdeveloped, often
facilitating a great deal of political instability. For if the state only rules on your behalf
when your people control the state, then control of the state is absolutely critical.