By Baba Galleh Jallow
Since the African state sees itself as a builder of nations but often turns out to be a breaker of nations, we need to revisit the idea of nation-building with a view to exposing its contradictions and replacing it with the idea of state-building. Exploring the concept of nation-building will allow us to put the relationship between us and our governments in proper perspective. Empirical historical evidence shows that the most successful nation-states in the world are those in which the nation (the people) builds the kind of state (government) they want. In countries where the state arrogates to itself the power and status of nation-builder, authoritarianism and a culture of repression is often the inevitable outcome because the people are rendered progressively passive and powerless in determining their own national destinies.
We may begin by asking why is it that while “nation-building” is part and parcel of independent Africa’s political and developmental vocabulary, we never hear it in France, Britain, Portugal, Germany and Belgium, which had the lion’s share of colonies in Africa and which introduced the concept itself into Africa? We need to recognize that nation-building is what colonialism claimed to be doing in Africa; it is not what European governments were doing in their own countries during the colonial period. And it is certainly not what independent African governments should be trying to do in their countries. If African governments claim to be nation-building, they should be people-building, that is: building the minds and intellectual capacities of their people to the extent that they would be enlightened and empowered enough to take charge of and control their governments.
Within European imperial culture, the concept and practice of nation-building betrayed Europe’s assumption that colonized peoples were utterly different and therefore inferior to the colonizers. This assumption was visible in the twin concepts of the “civilizing mission” and “the white man’s burden” through which the Europeans claimed they were colonizing others in order to deliver them from the darkness of their indigenous cultures into the light of western civilization. The French picked and chose those colonized peoples they considered worthy of being accepted into a superior French culture through their policy of assimilation. In Portuguese Africa, colonial subjects were considered assimilado only after many years of rigorous self-acculturation through education, dress, speech and table manners, among other things. Britain, on the other hand, decided that Africans were best civilized under the “subject leadership” of their own traditional and neo-traditional rulers through the so-called policy of indirect rule. Across the board, European cultures were considered superior spaces for which only a select non-European few may aspire and for which all colonized peoples needed to be grateful. Colonized cultures were debased and dismissed out of hand as the ways of a savage and backward people. Those who would not readily accept the dominant ideologies of imperial politics and religion were either written off as irredeemable children of the devil or forcefully pacified. This element of coercive pacification is inherent in the concept of nation-building, which suggests an all-seeing, all-capable state that knows what is best for the nation and arbitrarily prescribes development projects for the nation. It is a tragic feature of the politics of nation-building that the people are hardly ever allowed to contribute anything of substance to their own political evolution and welfare.
It is interesting to note that during the colonial period, when European colonizers were nation-building in Africa, the practice of nation-building had long gone extinct in their own societies. The practice of nation-building, of an all-capable, all-seeing government perched on top of the socio-political pyramid and building the nation below from those heights was unthinkable in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Europe. Western European governments had long recognized, accepted or been forced to recognize and accept that it is nations (people) that build states (governments), not the other way round. The concept of nation-building was passé in Europe, but it remained a ghost of long dead medieval cultures that could conveniently be imposed upon colonized peoples. It was a curious practice of European imperial powers to use laws and other instruments of coercion on colonized peoples that could not even be imagined in their own societies. Long dead censorship laws and emergency measures of a totalitarian kind were resurrected from the dusty cemeteries of European political culture and imposed upon colonized peoples. But since European imperial powers saw no contradiction in nation-building in colonized societies, they simply passed their ghost political culture on to our “independent” African leaders, for whom it soon became a favorite hobby horse because it offered them ample justification for authoritarianism.
Thus in independent Africa one party states are declared in the name of nation building, life presidencies are proclaimed in the name of nation building, military coups are staged in the name of nation building, and banal “dictatorships for development” are imposed in the name of nation building. The people are told and made to understand in no uncertain terms that if they don’t like it they can go to hell. Rather than move away from the colonial culture of political repression and political bondage, African leaders gladly embraced and practiced repression and political bondage through a variety of oppressive regimes often worse than the colonial sort. The culture of dissent that fueled African nationalism and led to independence is criminalized. Political opponents and critics of the government are pounced upon, roughed up, killed, exiled or imprisoned on bogus charges through a coterie of shadow state institutions – armed militia, political thugs, sinister “intelligence” agencies, and mercenary judges and magistrates for whom what matters is not truth, justice or the rule of law, but the word and personal interests of the president who pays their salary. It is a strange paradox that some independent African states practice a politics of hostility and insults that the oppressive colonial state would have been ashamed of. Most post-colonial African states thrive on a politics of divide and rule more sinister than the colonial state’s: they polarize societies and break them into distinct political clans – with those supporting the ruling party enjoying freedom from oppression, and those supporting other parties or opposed to the ruling party being constantly criminalized and persecuted. No matter what they do, supporters of the government are portrayed as faultless angels while those seen as “opposition sympathizers” are demonized and denied their rights and agency and often violently struck down.
In the New Gambia, we must aspire to a politics of state-building not a politics of nation-building. We must aspire to a politics in which the people are politically enlightened and empowered enough to hold their government accountable, not a politics in which an all-knowing state is perched on top of the social pyramid prescribing and forcing infallible prescriptions for development down the people’s throats, whether they like it or not. We must aspire to a politics in which the people are empowered enough to build the kind of state they want, not a politics in which the state assumes the status of all-powerful nation-builder, unless such nation-building means people-building in the sense we use the term above. By definition, the state is embedded within the nation and cannot therefore rise over and above the nation. For this reason, we require and must aspire to a political leadership that is sincere, a leadership that is disciplined, a leadership that will be eager to teach but also eager to learn and to drink of the public wisdom; a leadership that will not behave like the infallible and hostile lords and masters of the people, but like the humble servants and children of the nation. The kind of intellectual and moral energy that needs to be expended in order to actualize such a politics can only be generated in an environment of healthy civility and mutual respect between and among all members of society, regardless of age, gender, political, economic or religious status or affiliation.