State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings

By Tejumola Olaniyan

How has the state impacted culture and cultural production in Africa? How has culture challenged and transformed the state and our understandings of its nature, functions, and legitimacy? Compelled by complex realities on the ground as well as interdisciplinary scholarly debates on the state-culture dynamic, senior scholars and emerging voices examine the intersections of the state, culture, and politics in postcolonial Africa in this lively and wide-ranging volume. The coverage here is continental and topics include literature, politics, philosophy, music, religion, theatre, film, television, sports, child trafficking, journalism, city planning, and architecture. Together, the essays provide an energetic and nuanced portrait of the cultural forms of politics and the political forms of culture in contemporary Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253030177

Book preview

Introduction

State and Culture in Africa: The Possibilities of Strangeness

Tejumola Olaniyan

THIS BOOK EXAMINES the broad and multisided interactions of contemporary African cultural forms and practices, and the postcolonial African state that is their generative canvas. Given the distinctive worldliness and immersive political references embodied in these cultural forms and practices, scholars have long felt the need to study them in the light of state structures and processes.¹ This is a classic instance in which thinking across conventional disciplinary divides is more obviously and meaningfully demanded by the reality on the ground than by fanciful academic debates on campus. There is no comparable demand, however, on the study of politics in Africa to understand the cultural forms and practices that constitute the foundation of political meanings and negotiations—in short, of legitimacy.² Overall, the bonds and rewards of disciplinary work are still overly tight and alluring, even if this has meant less than robust attention to our objects of study. According to the logic of our structures of training, accomplished political scientists and philosophers are not expected to be so skilled in cultural criticism, while expert cultural critics can get by with the obvious basic gestures to the political domain. This is not a condemnation of disciplinary training and work—they are and should still be foundational, given the increasing volume of information and complexity of forms, structures, and processes that we study. Very clearly, disciplinary mastery is a solid basis for meaningful interdisciplinary work.

For now, the more pragmatic and achievable plea is for a reasonable effort beyond the normative disciplinary call of duty toward the admittedly harder work of broadminded listening and unassuming but focused analytical curiosity.³ Charged with this ethics of attention, the contributors to this book, from across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, critically examine large and small consequential conjunctures of the postcolonial state and culture in Africa and their compound effects.

The rhetoric of crisis of the state in Africa that dominated the last four decades has lowered a few notches in decibel.⁴ That, however, does not seem to be because the crisis has abated but because it has become normative and complex, and has overwhelmed the rhetoric beyond its explanatory capacity. Crisis seems to have been replaced of recent by a less declaratively pessimistic but only more ominously hopeful term, fragility, as seen in the enormous influence in social science circles of The Fragile States Index published by the research organization Fund for Peace (FFP).⁵ The Index annually ranks countries based on how stable they are and the key political, social, and economic pressures they face. Each country is then gorgeously color-coded on a world map on a scale from sustainable green to moderate yellow, warning orange to alert red. In a color scale refinement for the 2015 edition, the Index adds blue to the most desirable sustainable end of the spectrum, while demoting green to a middling stable; the warning spectrum is now yellow to orange, and red, in all its shades, is still for alert. Not a single state in Africa is blue or green; the majority is red, and only South Africa is demonstrably yellow. In the ten years of the Index, from 2006 to 2015, not a single African state has been colored green; virtually all range from orange to red. Like crisis, fragility is obviously rapidly becoming the norm and normative too.

From crisis to fragility, it is clear that the problematic of the postcolonial state in Africa is not just sociopolitical and economic, measurable in statistical figures of free and fair elections and growth in gross domestic product, but also epistemological, reckonable in the quality of knowledge about the structure of rule by state actors, scholars, professionals, and the general public, and the degree to which that knowledge engenders flexible and responsive state-citizen relations, policy recommendations and actions, and reasonable management oversight of competing interests. This epistemological realm is not one of data alone but foundationally of the vaster context of what constitutes data, what is its purpose, its many meanings, and its many possible paths from gathering, interpretation, and analysis to application and by whom and under which structure. This is the realm of culture writ large. This book is conceived in part as a contribution to the advancement of the much-needed epistemological task.⁶

The Productive State

The state, as a set of institutions comprising a supreme corporate entity and holding a monopoly in the exercise of coercion within a sovereign, geographically bounded territory, is no more than half a century old in Africa. It emerged in the 1950s with the wave of independence from colonial rule that swept the continent. The states vary in operational micro-details from one region or country to another and over stretches of time but they nonetheless all share a fundamental compound nature: an ancestry in the colonial state rather than in any autonomous evolution of indigenous histories; an inverted development in which the state structure and authority—coercively imposed by foreigners—preceded the nation conceived as an imagined community with more than less shared cultural traditions and worldview; official languages of governance and bureaucracy that are alien and alienating to a majority of the population; and formal institutions—political, juridical, economic, bureaucratic—with an unyielding extraverted mentality.⁷ These, then, are the distinguishing features of postcolonial African states. They are the sources of much of its public image in the world today: authoritarian, corrupt, and unstable; and master fabricator of epochal and especially gendered inequalities, imponderable bureaucracy, endless awakenings or transitions to democracy, civil wars and antistate rebellions, recurrent refugee crises, and an epidemic of reverse expectations.⁸ It is for the reason of this public image that, half a century after, the rhetorical bandwidth of the African state in discourse is no wider than the narrow orbit between crisis and fragility. In the reality of most people’s experience of the state, those are two words for the same thing: the unproductive character of the postcolonial state. Though rarely remembered as such, the earliest and most profound articulation of that unproductivity is by the Martinican psychiatrist and theorist of the anticolonial revolution, Frantz Fanon.

In The Wretched of the Earth, published in the heat of the anticolonial struggle in the late 1950s, Fanon warns of a yawning gap of reverse expectations in the emerging new nations, given the dubious practical and ideological character of the nationalist leaders, the managers of the new kind of state. He mercilessly excoriates them as fake bourgeoisie characterized by intellectual laziness, spiritual penury, an absence of … ambition, and a gross incapacity to fulfill [the] historic role of the bourgeoisie.⁹ In this class, Fanon argues, the dynamic, pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and of the discoverer of new worlds that are found in any bourgeoisie worthy of that name are lamentably absent. The African bourgeoisie is an unoriginal class that is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor; [but] is completely canalyzed into activities of the intermediary type.¹⁰ It is bankrupt, lacks initiative, and its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation but to be content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent.¹¹

The larger historical background of Fanon’s critique is, of course, Karl Marx’s lyrical articulation in The Communist Manifesto of that distinctive character of the European bourgeoisie: its productivity. To reread Marx alongside Fanon on this matter is to have a special appreciation of the fury and venom in Fanon’s language. Just compare Fanon’s plaintive lament with Marx’s loquacious panegyric to the manifold accomplishments of the historical European bourgeoisie in imagining a different world and boldly bridging the gap to its realization.

The historical European bourgeoisie, Marx writes, has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades…. [It] has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground. In a justified grandiose rhetorical flourish, Marx asks, What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumber in the lap of social labour?¹² And I think we can only answer, None, Mr. Marx, none.

Fanon fixates on the unproductivity of the African bourgeoisie, but there is a related side that he overlooks: the gaudy consumption of that class. The accomplished Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Sembène Ousmane would later dramatize this squarely in Xala, both the novel and the film, released in the early 1970s. The African bourgeoisie is not just unproductive (i.e., stricken with impotence—xala in Sembène’s Wolof language), but is an unproductive consumer. Sembène adroitly uses heterosexual impotence to symbolically figure the political, economic, social, and moral vapidity of the class, and in the process opens up a powerful feminist critique. After all, that African bourgeois class, though it is not unique in this, is male-dominated and masculinist, and the group of people who suffer the most from its unproductive consumerism is women. The apogee of this line of cogent extension of Fanon in African social and cultural criticism is, without question, the classic novel Devil on the Cross (1980) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Adversarial Contexts and Productive Creativity

The foregoing are truly prohibitive circumstances. But the state’s unproductivity is a tad overstated. Its tenor is primarily socioeconomic and socioscientific. It overlooks how the socioeconomic failings are experienced, made sense of, resourcefully articulated, and mass disseminated in a variety of small and big, fleeting and settled, and quotidian and extraordinary social and cultural forms and practices. This is productivity, too, and it is substantive. The repressive character of African states has produced thriving literary and performance forms such as antidictatorship literature, theater for development, and writers’ prison diaries. In the other arts, we find engaged cartooning, militant music, and guerilla journalism. There are also practices such as voluntary community and civic associations and microcredit unions, and urban garrison architecture, just to name a few. These all arose in response to the peculiarities of unresponsive postcolonial states and their failed promises of rapid modernization made on independence.

Take African literature, for instance. Its pervasive macropolitical content is world famous. Independence from colonial rule was barely achieved when powerful literary representations of systemic disjunctions between the people and the new states began to emerge: Tawfik al-Hakim’s Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor (1937), Peter Abrahams’s A Wreath for Udomo (1956), Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (1967), and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)—the list is too long. The disjunctions raised several questions, especially formal and epistemological, about the nature of the new postcolonial state: the strangeness of its structure, the systemic ease with which its rules are disregarded with impunity especially by those who rule, its alien and alienating language, its overtly vulgar class character, its enthronement of money as the solvent of all values (in newly and unevenly monetized societies), its imponderable bureaucracy, its radically different codes of access to personal fulfillment and participation in the public realm—not with hard work and integrity but simply money, some smattering of Western education and, later on, possession of weapons of coercion. The literature, in short, proclaims the illegitimacy of the new state and its authority. While the new states were fashioning grandiose five- and ten-year development plans, African writers were insisting that the mighty feet of the elephant of independence were mere clay. And many of the writers were handsomely rewarded for their clairvoyance—with exile, imprisonment with or without torture and solitary confinement, and even death. Ruth First, Soyinka, Assia Djebar, Ngũgĩ, Breyten Breytenbach, Alex La Guma, Ken Saro Wiwa, Abdilatif Abdalla, Abdellatif Laȃbi, Dennis Brutus, Nawal El Saadawi, Tahar Djaout—these writers cover all regions of the continent. This is the origin of that uniquely postcolonial African literary genre known as the writer’s prison diary—not literally a diary, but an account of imprisonment by writers jailed because of their writings or related activist work. A few lucky writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Agostinho Neto of Angola actually got to the palace of political power and took over presidential thrones.

I acknowledge here just one strand of the other side of the postcolonial state: its immense productivity as catalyst of the creative imagination.¹³ That productivity demands integrated consideration with the socioeconomic and political failures as a prerequisite both for a fuller understanding of the state as such, and for effective mobilization of reformative energies. This is not an instance of the common saying, necessity is the mother of invention. No one, after all, pleads for adverse necessities so as to enjoy the joy of inventions. The productivity of the African state is to be understood in the more chastening intertwined sense of (a) what low quality of inventions the state expects of its citizens by the fact of the primal, basic-level quality of challenges it imposed, and (b) what high quality of inventions could and would have been possible with much higher, more complex, and metalevel challenges that only a functioning state can engender. No one can give both descriptive and conceptual language to this complicated, very capacious picture of the productivity of the postcolonial state in Africa better than Soyinka:

In a statement I made last year I referred to my generation as the wasted generation and I was thinking in terms of all fields, not just the literary: the technological talents that we have which are not being used; but I also had in mind our writers of course, the fact that a lot of our energy has really been devoted to coping with the oppressive political situation in which we find ourselves. A lot of our energies go into fighting unacceptable situations as they arise while at the same time trying to pursue a long-term approach to politics such as, for instance, joining progressive-looking political parties, but of course each step is always one step forwards and about ten backwards. I find the political situation very, very frustrating, personally frustrating. I mean, forget even the amount of let us say personal work one could have done, writing and so on, and just think in terms of the amount of time one could have spent on training, in theatre for instance, would-be actors, or devoting more time to would-be writers, many of whom are constantly inundating one with cries for help; the qualitatively different kind of creative community atmosphere, structures that one would really love to give more time to … I know, very definitely, that I feel a great sense of deprivation in terms of what I could have contributed to the general productive atmosphere of the country in literary terms and I’m sure a lot of other writers feel the same. That is one of the penalties of the political situation we’ve been undergoing since independence and which has got progressively worse, progressively more lethal. The penalties for the wrong kind of political action in this situation have become far more depressing.¹⁴

Agency is always at the junction of constraints and possibilities—we make the world after all, but never under the conditions of our choosing. Soyinka here simultaneously affirms and laments the yield, but also the constraints that are constitutively degraded—unacceptable situations of one step forwards and about ten backwards—in their catalytic power to challenge the polity’s productive imagination at a higher level.

Soyinka’s reading of the productivity of the postcolonial African state here is pragmatist in emphasis. I identify two more or less dominant conceptual reading orientations out there across the social sciences and the humanities: the pragmatist and the foundationalist. The pragmatist critique affirms the legality and authenticity of where the African state is here and now and insists that it could do much better by learning from its mistakes as well as from successful examples worldwide, and by bringing uncorrupted reason and commitment to bear on the business of government. It foregrounds the necessity for managers of people and resources to be of unimpeachable character, and avows that the soul of any institution is people of integrity. For the pragmatist, there is no human institution, no matter its wayward origins, that is untamable in a direction deemed proper after reasonable and critical analysis. Behind this claim is a fierce belief in the endless capacity of individuals to make a difference in society; after all, the only truly dynamic factor in politics is the individual person. This mode of critique is the pervasive dominant among African writers and intellectuals, and also scholars of Africa. In addition to Soyinka, other leading writers whose works express the pragmatist view include Achebe, Nurrudin Farah, Abrahams, Athol Fugard, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, to cite only a few examples. This is also the reigning position in the social sciences, and has been so since the wave of independence in the 1960s.¹⁵

The foundationalist critique argues that the origin of the contemporary African state in the dictatorial colonial state compromises it so much that without a thorough-going decolonization of the instruments and procedures of rule, the African state would not be able to resolve its crisis of legitimacy. For the foundationalist, the problem is at the foundations; in other words, the problem is structural or systemic. While conscientious individuals are certainly needed to run institutions, the foundationalist holds that no amount of moral suasion would keep large numbers of people upright when placed within circumstances that sneer at or even punish uprightness. Bad management of human and material resources, says the foundationalist, is not the root of the problem, but a mere symptom. What can the best and most honest of men and women do running a bureaucracy that speaks a language that a majority of the population it is managing cannot understand? Some of the writers for whom only a foundationalist critique of the state would suffice include Sembène, Ngũgĩ, and Armah. Also, significant social science literature on the state in the last few decades has been focusing on foundations, after what Patrick Chabal laments as paradigms lost.¹⁶

There is a stimulating lesson to be learned in doing here what is rarely done: substantively engage the same thematic concern across disciplines. For that purpose, we can hardly do better than stage a comparison between Soyinka’s classic pragmatist critique in his important book The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, published in 1996, and Mahmood Mamdani’s foundationalist emphasis in his equally significant book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, published in the same year.¹⁷

There is a critical supplementary relationship between the two books. While Soyinka analytically dissects a contemporary instance of the crisis of an African state, Mamdani’s wide-ranging historicization shows how that crisis came about, how it could not have been otherwise. With perspicacious insight, Soyinka shows how the evil genie of tyranny, once unbottled, perpetuates itself and is perpetuated remorselessly even under different circumstances. Mamdani gives us a persuasive account of the historical—specifically colonial—origins of the evil specter; an account of where the rain began to beat us, as Achebe once evocatively put it.¹⁸ There is even a similar supplementarity in the respective prose styles of the two writers: Mamdani’s is the clinical, sedate prose of the scholarly social scientist; his sentences are rarely more than four lines long. What we get from the irrepressible dramatist and novelist Soyinka is a near-average of seven lines per sentence, with not a few sentences running to twelve lines: a cascading, torrential prose of the embattled humanist and activist right in the thick and thin of the struggle at the moment.

To say that a logic of supplementarity connects the two books is also to say that the books are different in substantive ways. Effectively two of the three chapters of Soyinka’s book are devoted to meticulous interrogations of the nation-state form. Nigeria provides the specific point of departure, interspersed with theoretical reflections on general issues such as nationhood and nation-making, the nation and its boundaries, the nation and its constituent human groups, the nation and the state and their relations, national belonging and its modes, and the national will—the modes of its determination and elaboration, and consequences of its conservation or subversion by which groups and to what purpose. In all the observations and analyses, Soyinka is the clear-eyed pragmatist, keenly aware of the weak foundational structures of the nation called Nigeria, whether of awkward boundaries, unseemly mixture of different ethnicities, or a score of other forms of colonial gerrymandering, but at the same time deeply affirmative that those weaknesses are not—and ought not to automatically be—enough unmanageable reasons for the edifice to collapse. With patriotic vision, the type that transparently promotes the mutual interests of all the constituent groups within the nation space, Soyinka suggests, it is actually possible to survive the affliction of rickety foundations. This is the polemical pragmatism that subtends the title Soyinka gives to chapter 1: A Flawed Origin—But No Worse Than Others, meaning that though the origin of the entity called Nigeria is defective, it is not thereby irredeemable.

Mamdani would certainly agree with that, though from a different perspective, for he is more interested in the contours of that form of rule specifically programmed to, among other things, engender endless animosities among the constituent groups within the nation space. This difference is quite significant. For Mamdani, the major legacy of colonial rule that has continued to impede democratic initiatives in Africa is the entrenchment of what he calls the bifurcated state. By this he means colonial rule through ethnically organized Native Authorities (NAs) enforcing customary law in the rural areas; and through a racially based supervisory central state in the urban centers. The NAs speak the language of custom as defined and enforced by the colonizers, while the central state speaks the language of civil society. Africans under the NAs were subjects under oppressive local overseer states, while their entrance into civil society where they could be citizens was jealously guarded by colonial racialism and racism. At independence, the major reform carried out by the victorious nationalists was the Africanization or deracialization of the central state, while there was very little corresponding dismantling or detribalization of the NAs, much less the establishment of a noncoercive way of linking the rural and the urban. This, argues Mamdani, was ultimately the result, whether we are talking of mainstream nationalists who came to power through multiparty elections, or radical nationalists who adopted the single-party in order to detribalize the NAs.¹⁹ The result was decentralized despotism in one and centralized despotism in the other.

In his book, Soyinka rails against what he calls the spoils of office, which is transitory and position-based, and the spoils of power, which is permanent and group- or ethnic-based.²⁰ Mamdani’s submission is that the entrenchment of these spoils could hardly have been otherwise for two reasons: (1) because civil society politics where the rural is governed through customary authority is necessarily patrimonial: urban politicians harness rural constituencies through patron-client relations; and (2) because the tribalized and undemocratized NAs, through the economy of the patron-client relations, can only infect the deracialized civil society in the urban with its tribalism, which is why the nationalist deracialization of the central state on independence, in nearly all cases, wore an ethnic face.²¹

The lesson of all this is, of course, that a system of electoral politics alone does not guarantee democracy. In fact, it had in many cases been what the late distinguished Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake called it: the democratization of disempowerment.²² And specifically within the context of unreformed bifurcated power structure, electoral politics can only produce interethnic, interreligious, and other kinds of factional struggles and terrorisms that provide the ideal thriving ground for the politics of clientelism. Soyinka’s book is a passionate attack on the venal and ethnic and religious character of this clientelism, while Mamdani’s attention is on the embedded structures of the postcolonial state—and their historical origins—that by commission or omission were designed to produce none other than clientelism. This returns us, then, to Soyinka’s polemical title: a flawed origin—but no worse than others. Mamdani’s foundationalist answer would be that a flawed origin cannot be so easily dismissed; that the implied meaning that Nigeria could do better even with flawed origins may be somewhat far-fetched; that other African countries that share similarly flawed origins are not necessarily doing better in democratic governance; that the question may be not so much being worse off than others as the historic challenge today of being better; and finally, that there may be no real movement forward in democratization, no matter who wins elections, without our returning to revise that primal origin of colonially implanted impediments to democratization.

Friend, Enemy, Stranger

The differences and similarities between the pragmatist and foundationalist critiques of the African state are meaningful. They carry consequential policy implications, though they are more of contingent emphases than absolute directions. For my purposes here, their significance is not to be sought in what we might judge to be their comparative strengths or limitations, tempting as that might seem. Their significance is to be located elsewhere: their equally moving heroic effort aimed at no less than taming Africa’s one particular share of modernity, that historical aggressive Western imposition on Africa through the main organ of its rule, the modern state.²³ If the history of the state in Africa makes the state so unusually peculiar to those over which it rules, to tame it is to calm it, to master it, to make amenable the unusually peculiar. To tame successfully demands that what is to be tamed is readable within the hermeneutic horizon of the tamer. What is to be tamed must be known and digestible within that most elementary but fundamental form of understanding—friend or enemy, good or evil, and similar oppositions. The significance of these simple oppositions in ordering relationships, knowledge, and action is underscored by the distinguished sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, when he theorizes that we may say that friendship and enmity, and only they, are forms of sociation; indeed the archetypal forms of all sociation, and that between them, they make the frame within which sociation is possible, they make for the possibility of ‘being with others.’²⁴

The distance between friend and enemy is not as important as their mutual self-recognition, which is comforting, paradoxical as that might sound. They may be in hierarchical relationship but are also bonded by their mutual self-(re)production. Being a friend, and being an enemy, Bauman writes, are the two forms in which the other may be recognized as another subject, construed as a subject ‘like the self,’ admitted into the self’s life world, be counted, become and stay relevant.²⁵ So, friends and enemies are on the same terrain of the known and decidable, but how do modernity and the state form it generated in Africa fit into this framework of sociation? At a most oddly acute angle, I must say. The oddness holds certain immense possibilities but within a deep, circuitous thicket of incapacitating equivocations and ambiguities. I have elsewhere characterized this multifaced, simultaneously threatening and promising undecidable nature of modernity and the state in Africa as enchanting: an aporetic situation in which a modernity, forcefully imposed and inevitable, is railed at as an alien, oppressive, and bewitching illusion (a disenchantment), and simultaneously hailed as a desirable and a catalyst for further striving (a reenchantment). Bauman’s term for this enchanter is the stranger, a figure that short-circuits the (discord-ridden, tension-soaked, yes, yes, but also fundamentally psychically comforting) friend-enemy economy, and disperses the protocols of recognition that sustain their opposition and coherent meaning-generation capacity. I quote Bauman:

Against this cosy antagonism, this conflict-torn collusion of friends and enemies, the stranger rebels. The threat he carries is more awesome than that which one can fear from the enemy…. And all this because the stranger is neither friend nor enemy; and because he may be both. And because we do not know, and have no way of knowing, which is the case.²⁶

The stranger thus poses the greatest challenge to taming. Attempts to tame the stranger will have to be prepared to accommodate inadequacies, wobbly edges, and bursting seams that inevitably result. Taming a stranger, a stranger that may be friend or foe, is thus bound to leave a trail of paradoxes, contradictions, and, more precisely, antinomies. But it is nevertheless what we do and must do continuously, the endless horizon of humanity’s inescapable task in self-civilizing.

The postcolonial state in Africa is not a friend. It is not considered so by the majority of those it rules over, given its history and apparent unproductivity so far. Even the minority that has corruptly benefited from it is not saved the high anxiety of the state’s instability and inconstancy. So, what is the state in Africa if not a friend? I insist that the state is not an enemy and it is not to be conceived as such. In postcolonial Africa, the idea of the state as enemy is more self-defeating in the illusion it sells of a possible permanent nonengagement with the state. There is no going out of the state today; only academicists, themselves safely ensconced in functioning states, still argue against this reality in talking about states elsewhere. In many ways, the state in Africa is very familiar. It is familiar in tangled inchoate different ways to different groups, from those who benefit plenty from it, to the deprived many whose benefit is having mastered an arsenal of stratagems to fitfully dodge the state. This is a key problem; whether they know it or not, both groups are losers, just unequally.

Aligning disparate understandings of the state, achievable only by measurable coherent and impartial state performance across the board, is the urgent task today. Toward realizing that goal, I propose a neutral, unprejudiced starting ground. The postcolonial state is a stranger and it is more usefully conceived and related to as such. Just consider again a few of its constitutive features. It is not foundational in the sense of arising out of the autonomous evolution of indigenous histories, but it is inevitable and indispensable. It is dominant in the sense that (all the wobbliness and fragmentation considered) it is the largest source of coercive authority, but it is nonetheless also the most nonhegemonic authority structure on the continent in its commanding so little affect or moral authority. Even so, its potential to be a most skillful and intensive articulator of vast resources, differences, and interests over vast territories—beyond what any ancient polity ever achieved—is so clearly evident, so indubitable, and still so much sought after. No other authority structure comes even close in potential. If Africans today seemed to be concerned more about matters of state than of nation or nationality/ethnicity—many scholars are still very deaf to this shift, still clutching to their old rusty but comforting tool of ethnicity, or worse, tribalism—it is for the clear reason of the evident potential of the state form. In any case, the nationality question was, in emergence, evolution, and constitution, a bargaining chip for state resource distribution; its narrow and anthropological horizon has become passé even if not dead.²⁷

It is time to come to terms with the stranger, the postcolonial state in Africa. The stranger is seen and known, but is neither friend nor enemy. Such an attitude takes state estrangement as neutral normative, and procedurally demands a valiant suspension of our admittedly justified—because experienced—prior assumptions of state enmity or friendliness in the fulfillment of its obligations and in the staking of claims by citizens. Over the last half-century, such a priori assumptions have burdened our understanding of the postcolonial state and therefore also our efforts to effectively engage and productively reshape it. They have beclouded our efforts to think what freedom, the all-pervasive rallying cry of anticolonial nationalism, might really mean in the postcolonial dispensation. Freedom was once freedom from colonial rule; then it was freedom from neocolonial rule, imperialism, and global capitalism. All the goals are outer-directed, and the postcolonial state automatically assumed guardianship of the goals, more concerned about protecting itself in the name of territorial sovereignty than instituting and expanding citizenship rights.²⁸ Whether as citizen, scholar, politician, or state agent, to approach the state as a stranger is to foreground and make possible open and equal possibilities for everyone in dealing with the state, on the basis of citizenship as level ground. It is also to expect and make possible equal and appropriate sanction under the law, on the basis of citizenship as level ground. The state ought not to be anybody’s enemy or friend, but a stranger—a stranger is structurally and substantively composed, in a chastening way, of the possibilities of both. The state is supposed to be and remain an undomesticatable stranger to all—never mind that the goal of practical politics will always be contentious struggles of diverse groups to exercise state domestication in their own interests—and therefore not easily capturable or monopolizable in an unchallengeable way for any stretch of time by any constituent group. This is the only kind of state that can manage Africa’s constitutive diversity and complexity of needs today. And to begin to imagine that new kind of state is to begin to rethink how we study the state.

The state in Africa needs a new wave of scholarly attention, and from all disciplinary perspectives. Surely a key aspect of that project is a far more disciplinarily composite and integrated approach than currently exists. Rather than an either/or, this is a call for interdisciplinary work as well as much closer collaborations among disciplinary specialists. There is an immediate low-hanging fruit and it should be much easier to pick: a reconception of culture that discards its impulsive or tutored separation from politics. Culture is not the realm of literature, art, language, music, religion, and the expressive symbolic generally. It is that and also, simultaneously, the realm of politics—that process by which competing interest groups mobilize, organize, and share resources. The common understanding of culture as a people’s more or less distinctive way of life, of the values and practices that organize them and help them make sense of that life, is actually more meaningful than its simplicity has been given credit for. Culture is the entirety of the vast context in which a society produces and reproduces itself. The processes of that are sutured differently and each domain may be identified for heuristic purposes and studied, but the way each is more or less an intimate part of the whole is more significant than its difference. This is more so when the issue under consideration is the very structure of authority or rule whose primary task is to oversee the orderliness of social production and reproduction itself. Culture is the art of making settled, normative, and credible the entire social process as composite, even while contingency and constitutive relentless adaptive change, chosen or coerced, are its key principles of operation.²⁹ The crisis or fragility of the postcolonial state in Africa has no precedent in the entire precolonial history of Africa. This means that the path to look to for direction is not just the past but also the changed and changing present and conjectured futures. If the state has been so unusually problematic for the past half-century, we can say as interpretive shorthand that it is in large part because it has not become cultural, or cultural enough. Culture is both tool and agent in the management of the strange compromise called society.

The essays gathered here speak to this larger vision of culture and of the postcolonial state itself as a genre of culture. This allows a perspective on the state that is fully aware of its uniquely contingent history but also affirms its invested African agency. This is neither pessimistic nor optimistic—labels are cheap.³⁰ On the contrary, it enables a conceptually rich accounting of the true dimensions of the living structure of constraints and possibilities here and now in the postcolonial state. The resulting book is simultaneously a fine-tuned cultural criticism that is alert to the social and political underpinnings of contemporary African cultural forms and practices, and a revelatory outline of a cultural biography of the modern state in Africa—that is, the emergence, evolution, and analytical accounts of constitutive strands of the state from its birth in the colonial state through its tumultuous postcolonial life so far, as seen or represented by the cultural forms and practices it engendered. The multidirectional exploration affirms the capability of sociocultural forms and practices to yield useful explanatory and analytical categories for understanding sociopolitical processes. It also demonstrates that studying the forms and practices this way contributes substantially to our understanding of the state—after all, to productively understand the state is to understand how the people over whom it rules, across all divides, conceive it. And how the people conceive it is deeply inscribed in their affective productions: the symbolic cultural forms and social practices they produce, exchange, and consume within and outside the immediate bounds of the state.

I have divided the essays into three broad categories, but that is just one suggestive handle to begin engaging the state-culture problematics they explore. Though the arrangement proceeds from large explorations to specific forms and practices, neither the categories nor the chapters are in any inviolable order. They will reward entrance from any point; forward or backward or from the middle, there are mutually insightful overlaps between and among them. The area coverage is broadly continental, and the disciplinary and topical range are vast, from literature, politics, and philosophy to music, religion, theater, film, television, sports, journalism, city planning, and architecture. The contributors are all accomplished senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners.

The first group of chapters explores foundational intersections of culture and governance and their study. The essays also provide, from the vantage points of different disciplines, usefully overlapping archaeologies of the state. Patrick Chabal, in chapter 1, addresses the contentious issue of culture and politics, assessing dominant conventional approaches and laying out their limitations. Culture is not merely an additional dimension of politics that requires attention, he argues, but quite simply one of the fundaments of social life, the matrix within which what we understand as political agency takes place. The field of politics itself, he insists, has to be examined within its appropriate cultural milieu, as it were. The consummate literary-cultural history of African politics that Niyi Osundare provides in chapter 2 buttresses Chabal’s point. Writers are not political scientists or politicians but somehow, knowing African literature alone has been enough to warn anyone of the unwise separation of culture and politics on the continent. Joined at the hip is how Osundare describes the intimacy of African literature and the state. Thinking of a systemically healthier affair, though, he wishes they had been joined at the head, for that would have made their medical problem more critical and more intimidating, [which] would have ensured the possibility of a common think tank, so to speak, a unified intelligence, a mutual insemination and, possibly, a common purpose. The problematic of common purpose is of particularly great importance to philosophy, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, in chapter 3, wonders why the discipline has not figured much in the Africanist discourse on the state, for the philosophical idea of the state is crucial to the constitution and operation of the state in postindependence Africa. He masterfully redresses that absence, cogently exploring the philosophical assumptions of the idea of the state in modernity, and underscoring the agency of African thinkers in engagement with state discourse as well as the institution of the state.

Needless to say, governance is not all about formally articulated visions and institutional structures of politics. It is also about the governed large masses and the popular realm in which their expressive labors, in work or play, are most immediately manifested. Sport is one such labor, and there is no nitpicking the popular suggestion that soccer is the number one cultivator of national feelings in much of Africa. Surely this is not just a pastime, outside of the state and its many serious businesses. Michael G. Schatzberg sees a moral structure in soccer that is largely unstated but relates to the cultural and political logics of daily life in many parts of the continent. People value and are invested in the sport and its moral structure, he argues in chapter 4, because of the regularity of rules and fair predictability. There is a meaningful lesson here applicable to the official world outside the soccer pitch, especially on understanding what is or is not legitimate or thinkable—whether in sport or political life. But content apart, what of the means by which soccer and its moral structure is most widely broadcast to the largest number of people? This is the television, and it plays a most fascinating role in the development of the modern state in Africa. It was the means through which the rituals and protocols of the new state, its symbols, and authority—indeed, its authoritativeness—were and continue to be visualized, shown, to millions as fact, lesson, and vision. The enchantment that moving pictures brought to the colonies is matched only by the showy appurtenances of the new state form itself. Matthew H. Brown studies the Nigerian state television network, the oldest and largest in Africa, mapping its origins from the colonial era to the present, and—just like the state—the many continuities and disjunctions in its structure and function. In chapter 5 he meticulously accounts for the trajectories of an institution and a medium that complicatedly did what it was supposed to do—[supersede] the colonial broadcasting machine—but also never strayed much from the function of that machine.

The second group of chapters focuses on the expressive arts. It offers a wide spectrum of the catalytic impact of the state as experienced and creatively transmuted, as well as of the impact of the arts on the state—what the state has become in public consciousness, courtesy of the ways it is named and imaged in the circulated imaginative expressions. The chapters foreground the especially polemical arts such as literature, drama, and theater—they, as related composites, constitute the single most consistent and most sophisticated opposition to the postcolonial state beginning right from its conception in the womb of the colonial state. No other cultural form better exposes postcolonial Africa’s social vulnerability, to use Luís Madureira’s haunting phrase as he examines the intricate connections between and among theater, nationalism, state, and citizenship in Mozambique in chapter 6. The explosive September 2010 uprising of the poor in Maputo he evocatively describes left many dead and injured. That was no theater, but it was also not metaphorically far from what theatrical expressions in the country had long imagined, all the contradictoriness of