Carolyn Brown:
I am Carolyn Brown.  I'm the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W. Kluge Center.  And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a lecture by Professor Crawford Young, on the African Colonial State and the Encounter with Decolonization.  This is a special occasion that brought Professor Young here, as a speaker in a seminar on decolonization.  And we are very grateful that you're willing to share your remarks with this broad a group and the general public through our Web cast.  So thank you very much.  The lecture, as I said, is part of a seminar, which is jointly sponsored by the National History Center and the John W. Kluge Center, as is the seminar itself.  

The National History Center promotes research, teaching and learning in all fields of history.  It was created by the American Historical Association in 2002 as a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching of history, as well as to the advancement of historical knowledge in government business and the public at large.  And you can get more information about that Center at their Web page, which is very simple to remember, www.NationalHistoryCenter.org.  

The Kluge Center, here at the Library of Congress, promotes advanced research in the collections of the Library, was created through a generous endowment of John W. Kluge, and established in 2000.  The Center provides financial support for the world's most senior scholars, at one end of the career spectrum, and the rising fellows, most promising scholars of the future, to come to the Library for periods of residence, and use the collections.  In addition to the fellows, we sponsor lectures like this one, seminars, and small conferences.  And you can find more about the Center on the Library's Web page, www.LOC, for Library of Congress, .gov.  

We're really pleased that the seminars with the AHA have continued.  I think we've done about five or six over the last several years.  And they've been wonderfully productive collaborations.  And we're delighted to have yet one more this summer.  

Here to introduce our speaker is Professor Roger Lewis, who wears multiple hats.  He is the Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas.  He was one of the key visionaries to establish the National History Center, and is its first Director.  He is also the inspirational mind behind the Decolonization Seminar -- arranged for the funding, we're very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding this project -- but not just the inspiring mind, he's the seminar leader.  So he's also the one who's rolled up his sleeves and done the inspiring but hard work of leading the project.  So, here to introduce this afternoon's speaker, Professor Roger Lewis.

[ applause ]

Professor Roger Lewis:
I would, myself, like to welcome everyone, members of the staff at the Library of Congress, representatives from the United States Department of State.  And I would like to say a word of introduction about Crawford Young, who is the Rupert Emerson Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin.  And this very simple statement of fact gives pause for thought.  Who was Rupert Emerson, and why should a political scientist be speaking to a seminar of historians?  The answer to the last part of the question is very easy.  The best political scientists are historians in disguise.

[ laughter ]

Rupert Emerson was the Harvard scholar who pioneered in studies of colonial administration and colonial independence from the late 1930s through the 1960s, a scholar, at once, learned and humane.  Crawford Young and I were both in the same Rupert Emerson seminar at Harvard in the fall semester, 1959, shortly before the Great Congo Crisis the following summer, on which Crawford Young is the foremost scholar in the world.  

Now I thought I might briefly say that by virtue of his study on the colonial state, that Crawford Young's name has become synonymous with the colonial state, and some people even thinks that he represents the personification of the colonial state.  But then I reread what another scholar has to say about the colonial state.  And I wasn't sure whether this was so much of a compliment, after all.  I quote from Ronald Hyam in the Oxford History of the British Empire.  "At its most basic level, the colonial state represented a network of bureaucracy, and intrusive policing, ever-widening and ever-tightening in its grip.  The colonial state was also an obsessive cartographer, new state boundaries were invented, some with disconcerting straight lines.  The colonial state, backed by technological superiority and weapons, by accumulating knowledge, self-confidence and reams of paperwork penetrated into the lives of their subjects.  The introduction of ideas of equality before the law, and Western systems of justice were crucial.  Those who did not conform were put into jails or lunatic asylums."  

Now, Ronald Hyam goes on at considerable length about the colonial state, its power, and its limitations.  And I'll stop with one striking generalization.  I quote, "The colonial state was also a tremendous prude."  Now somehow I couldn't quite reconcile this idea of the colonial state with Crawford Young as its personification.  And so, we turned to him for clarification and guidance in the adventure of understanding the nature of the colonial and the postcolonial state.  Crawford Young.

[ applause ]

Professor Crawford Young:
Thank you, Carolyn, and thank you, Roger, for your very kind words.  I had never thought of myself as the personification of the colonial state.  Those of you who have happened to read that volume, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, will recall that I drew upon the metaphorical expression widely used in the colonial Congo, and since, to characterize the colonial state as Bula Matari.  Bula Matari was a Kikongo term that meant crusher of rocks.  And it arose because when the local population in the lower Congo observed Henry's family and others cutting their way through the difficult rock mountains between the sea and the pool, what is now Leopold, Kinshasa, and Brazzaville, they were astounded at how he was able to make his way, and even carry steamships, dismantled, across this tortuous path.  

Now Bula Matari, then expanded in meaning, metaphorically, and came to refer to the colonial state.  When a colonial civil servant wanted to summon an African, he told his messenger, "Go tell 'X' that Bula Matari wants to see you."  And the Belgians rather liked that notion of Bula Matari, as a crusher of rocks.  And it comes up in all kinds of strange settings, that one of the Angolan guerrilla leaders, during the liberation war, took [ foreign language ] Bula Matari.  

Now, I've been invited to talk about decolonization in Africa, a subject concerning which there's so much to say, and so few minutes in which to say it.  Now that means that I'm going to have to ask your indulgence for a level of generality that may trespass seriously on a lot of particular facts, that many of you that are familiar with, in great detail, with one or another part of the continent, will react to a given statement, "Oh, my goodness, I say that doesn't apply to my part of the continent."  And you're probably right.  But this is a search for the general.  

At the same time, I'm compelled by the time constraint to not try to cover all aspects, but only to pick out particular themes.  What I'd like to do is to begin with, as baseline, the African colonial state as it stood on the eve of World War II, about 1937, then to look at some of the ways in which it changed during the terminal Colonial Era from 1945 to about 1960, talk about some of the visions of modernity that influenced both the agents of the colonial state and the African subject as they began to look towards a possible decolonization.  Next I want to say a few words about the territorialization aspect, the significance of the particular conjuncture of 1960, as the high water mark of decolonization in shaping perspectives and a number of the kinds of decisions that were made at that time. And, lastly, if your patience still bears with me, a few words on outcomes.  

Well let's start with the African colonial state at its zenith, on the eve of World War II.  There has in recent years been a debate within political science, and maybe this did also compel us to smuggle in a little history, as to whether the colonial state was really a Bula Matari or whether it was really closely inspected, or rather, weak and jerrybuilt structure.  Some of the more critical reviews of the African Colonial State book, particularly a long one by Bruce Berman, took me to task for overstating the Bula Matari metaphor and expanding it too far beyond its Belgian Congo point of origin.  And he has a point.  Now this debate on the weakness of the colonial state arises in part because it's transparent that in today's context, many, if not most, African states are in a seriously weakened condition.  And the issue is, is this relative weakness simply a reproduction of the colonial legacy, or is it something that is a postcolonial product, an artifact of the particular itineraries of African politics since the 1960s.  

Now, those who argue weakness have any number of statistics they can point to, considering the fact that in the vast Afrique ƒquatoriale Franaise Federation, what is now Gaban, Chad, simple African Republic and Congo-Grazaville, that there were only 5,000 French citizens, French people in that vast area, and only two or 300 of them were agents of the colonial state.  So how could you talk about AEF being a strong state when it had that thin a kind of human [ French ] at its summit?  Now, my rebuttal to that thesis is, yes, the interwar colonial state was a skeletal entity at its summit.  And its ambitions, in terms of what it purported to do, were circumscribed.  

It wanted to reproduce itself, provide basic security for the operation of colonial interests, and it outsourced many of what we regard as normal functions of the state, health, education and so forth, were, by and large, delegated to mission societies, sometimes with a little state funding.  So the state was quite circumscribed in what it actually tried to do.  At the same time, it had unusual autonomy.  Its inner core operated relatively unconstrained, either by the subject population or by the metropolitan center, that as long as a colonial administrator was able to avoid asking Paris, or London, or Brussels for money, and avoid creating some kind of rebellion that required the dispatch of a military force, they had a pretty free hand, within very general parameters of policy that were set from the metropolitan centers.  So the colonial state, at its peak, was a quite unusual bureaucratic construct, limited in its personnel, limited in its resources, it's true, but assuring a basically unchallenged hegemony over the territories that it claimed.  

There were not, by that time, any unoccupied territories, except for some desert fringes.  The state was informed by what had become, by the 1930s, a well-established field of colonial science.  It was a quite well elaborated set of ideologies of a colonial administration, and domination.  There were, by that time, well-institutionalized -- and this was the key to its thinness at the top -- set of intermediaries, so-called traditional rulers, chiefs, that did the actual day-to-day hands-on domination of the populations.  By this time they had been well screened for loyalty to the colonial ruler, for some minimal degree of administrative competence, as well as, ideally, some kind of a claim to customary legitimacy.  

Now, also compared to earlier colonial formations, the colonial state, at its zenith, benefited from new technologies of domination.  It had means of communication, that earlier colonial rulers did not have, the telegraph, radio, and so forth, so that there could be regular interaction with the cadres at the colonial center and the field agents.  This point acquires particular significance, as we look at patterns of disorder in Africa today, fueled, in part, by the proliferation of weapons in the countryside.  The colonial state had disarmed the subject.  There were no weapons in the countryside, to speak of, old hunting muskets, spears, and so forth.  But not any kind of weapon was within reach, which would permit anyone, however discontent they were with colonial oppression, to engage in some kind of really serious confrontation.  There were protest movements.  There were some uprisings, not many, some.  But the capacity for revolt was extremely circumscribed.  

Thus I do come back to Bula Matari, limited as the state was in a number of respects, it was able to, if I may employ a measure that will resonate, to extract in taxation a fraction of the peasant income -- which is far more than you or I pay today relative to their total income, often close to 50 percent -- so to have sufficient authority, dominance over the population, to extract that level of resources, not only in cash, but also in kind, through different kinds of forced labor, obligatory participation in public works, labor and so forth.  So with all appropriate respect to my critics, I do cling to the argument that the colonial state, in its own right, was a relatively strong entity.  

Now, at that time in 1937 there really wasn't any roadmap to the future.  The British were beginning to think of some kind of remote development of representative, and responsible, institutions, and certainly had the Indian example before it.  But these were seen to be many decades in the future.  And they were faced with two very different kinds of pathways, one represented by South Africa and the aspirations of the settler communities in British-ruled Central and East Africa, to have institutions in which they have a power devolved onto the settler populations, or perhaps the settlers, and immigrant commercial populations like South Asians, Levantines and so forth.  In the case of the French, the Brazzaville Conference in 1944, you'll recollect, solemnly declared -- attended only by French administrators, there were no Africans present -- that the future of the empire entailed no possible self-government, now, or in the future, for the overseas territories, quite categorical.  And in the Belgian case, aside from the occasional dystopia of some kind of undefined, difficult future, the only speculation one would ever hear was that, somehow or other, in an undefined way, the Congo, eventually, would become a kind of kempt province of Belgium.  

But the dominant premise was of the perennity of colonial rule, marked by, as master premises, a pervasive paternalism, that is the premise of the African subject, as child, and of a thorough kind of racism, as well, linked to that, and, on the face of that premise, was of African backwardness, that whatever Africa's future was, it would not be a replication of its past.  Now after World War II, in a paradoxical way, the terminal colonial state at once grew substantially stronger, and yet, at the same time, became progressively weaker.  How did it become stronger?  Well, it rounded itself out, through what has been often referred to in the historical literature as the second colonial occupation, that is, for the first time, beyond the limited cadre of field administrators, district commissioners, territorial administrators, the colonial state added on a whole panoply of technical services, of roads, of agriculture, of health, of education.  They began to supplement, or even replace, the mission effort in the educational and health fields.  

The second colonial occupation, which partly was a remarkable increase in the sheer numbers of European personnel, but also, that new set of arrivals regarded themselves as a new generation, with a new spirit of uplift, with new perspectives on the colonial task.  And rather than the civilizing mission of their elders, they were thinking in terms of developmentalism, as the mission of the colonial state.  Many of them were very able people, in their own right, dedicated to the task they had taken on.  

Now this became possible by a remarkable revenue surge.  In the years from 1937 till late 1950s, the revenue of the former Belgian Congo multiplied by 30.  The expenditures in Ghana multiplied by 10, between 1947 and 1957.  Now that was a measure of the expanded revenues that were coming in through an extended period of very high prices for major African commodity exports.  It was also fueled by for the first time significant metropolitan public capital investment in the colonies.  There were very small outlays, 1930 Colonial Development Welfare Act, but the amounts of money that were involved in that were quite miniscule.  After World War II, the amounts of money that were coming in from metropolitan sources, Republican investment, and, also, private, were very substantial.  

The extraordinary windfall in agriculture commodity prices permitted very high taxation rates, often as high as 50 percent or more of the farm gate value, was creamed off in export taxes.  Now all of those things gave the terminal colonial state this capacity to rapidly expand itself and to acquire a much more elaborated institutional structure than had characterized its prewar predecessor.  Now as this was happening it was also weakening, weakening in the face of the first really credible challenge from African nationalism.  This was carried out through diverse organizational instruments, most prominently, political parties, also labor unions, other kinds of African organizations, who really for the first time were permitted a little political space in which to operate.  

Now, there was also, in one way or another -- and I'm speaking now of the three instances of constitutional Democratic colonizers, Belgium, France, and Britain, not Portugal, and Spain -- there were gradually expanding electoral opportunities.  Now elections are enormously important for several reasons.  They serve as a focus, here and elsewhere, for political organization.  It's hard to sustain an enthusiasm for political organization unless you have some particular event that catalyzes it, that organizes it.  And elections provided that moment, provided the basis for the first formation of political parties of some consequence to contest the new legislative council elections that began to be held in various territories, or in the French case, from the Constituent Assembly in 1945, 6, on to the Fourth Republic Parliaments.  Africans got some seats in the French national institutions.  And those, too, provided a focus for political organization.  

Now another quite important aspect was that, whereas anybody of a mind to protest in Africa in 1937 would have been alone in the world.  After World War II, there began to be important sources of external support.  With the transformation in Egypt, after Colonel Abdel Nasser seized power in 1954, with Africa as one of his famous three circles, Cairo became a refuge for African resistance movements.  Now the refugee was important from several points of view.  It gave a place from which political tracks, information, and so forth, could be dispensed.  Not the least important fact was that the Egyptians were willing to give passports, sometimes diplomatic passports, to African Nationalist leaders that permitted them to travel easily, which the colonial instances could easily prevent them from doing it, and had done so in the past.  

Very soon thereafter, a crown [ spelled phonetically ] Chari became other centers of external sanctuary and support.  And then as African states became independent, one after another, the idea of Pan-Africanism, which has a long history, tended to become centered on the one issue upon which everybody could agree, African liberation, the liberation of the remaining colonized countries.  And so the Pan-African movement became another focal point for external support.  Now all of this gave to the emergent Nationalist leadership, a deepening sense of historical self-confidence, that they could perceive themselves as part of a movement that was being inexorably propelled forward by historical forces that were beyond the capacity of the colonial states to over time resist.  

Now the colonial state also, again, for the first time, faced a hostile global environment.  I won't go into any of this in detail, but, for quite different reasons, the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to see one or another pathway to the end of the colonial regime in Africa.  The United Nations by the 1950s had become a very important forum, accessible to African Nationalists for the diffusion of their message.  Now feeding into the sense of historical inevitability, were the inability of colonial states in Asia to defeat insurgent movements in Vietnam, in Indochina, in Indonesia.  Although liberation movements could never totally defeat colonial armies, they could hold them at bay.  And if you could hold them at bay long enough, then the costs of continuing the struggle would eventually become too great.  

In the case of Africa, there's no doubt that Algeria was absolutely a key, that the inability of 500,000 troops, equipped with the most sophisticated counterinsurgency doctrine, to come to the end of the FLN, was decisive in the rapid independence of the rest of the French-speaking territories, and not only that, because although the British had defeated an insurgent movement in Kenya and the French had done likewise in Cameroon, nonetheless, the Algerian revolution had demonstrated that, based upon the capacity of insurgents to acquire sufficient armament to withstand large colonial armies, their capacity to secure sufficient financing, internally and importantly, from abroad, to sustain their action over extended time, that even though one might win some short-term victories, in the long term, the effort to repress nationalism was doomed.  And it was much more effective to try to come to terms with it on a basis that preserved some of the interests of the withdrawing colonizer.  

Now lastly, the terminal colonial state lost its autonomy at both ends.  It became subject to much more active supervision from the metropolitan centers.  And, as well, it was no longer able to entirely exclude the voice of the African subject, and decreasingly able to do so as the momentum of nationalist organization gathered force.  Now, what were the visions of modernity that were motivating the withdrawing colonizer and the African nationalist challenger?  Well, at a general level, they shared an idea of progress, which was in the world at large, I think, perhaps, at a peak at that very moment a confidence that history was a story of irreversible ameliorative change, that there were multiple versions of what this high modernity consisted of in its detail.  And it, inevitably, focused upon a certain number of advanced countries that were taken to be the embodiment of high modernity.  

The metropolitan powers, themselves, the United States, but also the Soviet Union, China, and the advanced welfare states of Scandinavia, were all exemplary models from which this composite notion of a future high modernity could be assembled.  Now, that shared vision of high modernity had one very important corollary, that the vision had to be achieved by the educated elites, that only the educated elites were equipped with the vision that was necessary to achieve that dream of high modernity.  

It posed a whole series of dilemmas, among them, the role of the former intermediaries, the customary rulers, or chiefs, who were definitely marginalized by this vision.  It also posed the dilemma of, "What is the place of the African heritage in this world of tomorrow?"  Well, in its 1950s and 1960s version, the rule of the African heritage was not very large because the idea of innate backwardness had been far from fully erased, and to some extent, it has to be said it was shared by many of the educated elite.  Now the education and the vision it purported to carry were one aspect. Another in the selection of those who became the successor elite, was the role of elected assemblies as an avenue to leadership, and the capacity to lead, or direct electoral organization, thus political parties, as the key passport.  In the French case, quite remarkable, to which I'll return a couple of times, this also included the quite remarkable opportunity for membership in the French National Assembly, in Paris, and thereby to become incorporated into the networks of influence and political interaction of metropolitan France, itself.  In 1956, no less than four of the ministers in the [ unintelligible ] government were Africans, including two, [ unintelligible ], who subsequently became presidents of their country.  Now that was a major factor in the very distinctive kind of postcolonial interaction that one sees between France and its formerly colonized territories.  

Now another premise imbedded in the vision of high modernity was, the state had to be the core agency of development.  Only the state had the capacity to enact, to carry out, to achieve this vision.  Now, the state, limited as I suggested as it was, in its range of activities, before World War II, began to acquire new functions which became associated with its economic and developmental role, subsequently, during World War II.  The wartime need for resource mobilization and a control led to a number of things that carried over importantly into the postwar world, and expansion of state action.  Price controls were widespread.  Exports were carefully managed.  And to perfect the control of the key agricultural commodity exports, one saw the beginnings of the practice of having state monopoly agricultural marketing boards to cover the main export crops.  As well we saw emerging, in the postwar world, a cultive planning, as a mechanism through which the state, as the holder of this vision, could bring it into reality.  

Now that vision, in particular, was very much shared by the African Nationalists, that high modernity absolutely required vigorous state action.  At the time, and here we get to the importance of the 1960 conjuncture, the seductive power of the Soviet model was very great.  Everybody believed those statistics showing the Soviet Union surging forward 10 to 15 percent, even more per year.  Even the CIA published those kinds of figures.  And in retrospect, we can see that there was a lot that was suspect in those figures.  But that was not apparent at the time at all.  It did look to one and all as though the Soviet Union had, through some kinds of means of terror, rule by terror and a massive coercion transformed a backward rural society into a modern industrial one, in a very short period of time, and, whereas one did not need to follow Stalin in all of his actions, there were many exemplary lessons to be learned from this dramatic transformation of the Soviet Union.  

Now China, as well, was an important model.  In 1960 we were in the midst of the Great Leap Forward.  Now at the time we all thought, I thought, that the Great Leap Forward was what it purported to be, a remarkable leap to industrialization through backyard furnaces and all kinds of innovative Maoist practices.  It wasn't until much later that we learned that, rather than a venture in transformation, the Great Leap Forward had been one of the great human disasters of the 20th century that took 30 million lives or more.  But the important point is that at the time this notion of a gigantic state effort had high credibility, and particularly in Francophone Africa the Marxism, in its various forms, had very high intellectual prestige.  And everywhere, the emergent African nationalist leaders found their friends and allies in the [ unintelligible ] amongst the parties of the left, and the far left.  They were the natural allies.  They were the friends of rapid decolonization.  They were the trusted friends, in whose advice one could have some confidence.  

Now let me say just a couple of brief words on the mechanisms for postcolonial continuation.  In the British case, of course, there was both the increasingly explicit pattern of move, from representative, to responsible government, to independence, and by the end of the 1950s, a full abandonment of any notion of special standing for settler populations.  But another part of it was the idea that the new African state would become a member of the Commonwealth, and that the former colonial territory would become part of a long term British family, Britain-centered family of nations.  I can remember studying in Britain in the '50s, that people would speak of the Commonwealth with great emotion, as something that was going to be a vital institution of the 21st century, something that is very far from its eventual fate.  It's not hard to understand why the idea of the Commonwealth was appealing in Britain.  

It's a little harder to see why African nationalists would find it, if not appealing, at least acceptable.  That Indian membership in the Commonwealth, and the fact that the Commonwealth no longer comported any obligation to be a partner in overall British imperial policy, as had been the case with the dominions in prewar years, made it an acceptable kind of a club.  And indeed, after Rhodesian UDI in 1965, the Commonwealth, in an ironic way, became a mechanism for its African members to beat Britain over the head on its reticence to take any kind of forceful action on the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence.  

Now in the French case, there was a continuing elusive quest for some kind of formula in which there would be a France-centered sovereignty that was an umbrella for the states that had been under French rule, first in the form of the French Union, then in the French community.  Now by 1960, those who had been the strongest African advocates of participation in some such framework, had abandoned it, and France had to give it up in a formal institutional sense.  But yet, the whole pathway to decolonization -- the opportunity for African participation in French metropolitan institutions, the intimacy of the independence elites in most of former French-ruled Africa, with the French political universe, which has no counterpart in any other setting, meant that France could abandon any formal idea of some residual sovereignty over the formal empire, and replace it with an intimacy of interaction, and a capacity of continuing influence, that was quite exceptional in the postcolonial world, even to the extent as we hear, as I speak inquiries into forms of French political corruption show, that African unaudited presidential accounts were a mechanism by which money corruptly obtained could be laundered and recircuited into French metropolitan political parties as a source of political financing.  

Now, in the Belgian case, there was a vague notion that, after the 10th province idea had died a natural death, that some kind of Belgo-Congolese community, two partner states with Belgium as, obviously, the senior partner, could emerge as a postcolonial formula.  That, of course, all went by the wayside in the 1960 Congo crisis.  

Now let me move on to say a few words about outcomes.  Now, did decolonization matter?  Or did it really occur?  That's a question that's sometimes asked today.  Now it certainly mattered for the metropolitan states.  One of the striking things is that a case can be made that Britain was the only African colonizer that had strong and resilient enough metropolitan institutions to be able to carry out decolonization, and live through the traumas associated with that process.  

Now if we look at what happened in the case of Italy, the Mussolini Regime collapsed after the fiasco of its Ethiopian invasion and the easy British Ethiopian reconquest of it, and its inability to hold onto its fourth shore in Libya.  Certainly the Mussolini Regime, one cannot imagine ever accepting decolonization.  It would have fallen, in one way or another, first.  In the case of Spain, the small African empire that Spain assembled, after its earlier imperial grandeur had come to an end in the 1898 War, in Equatorial Guinea and the Sahara and Spanish Morocco.  The first response to Spain, to the growing decolonization pressures, was merely to claim that the colonial territories no longer existed, that they were all Spanish citizens, and the territories had been incorporated into metropolitan Spain.  

Now that only occurred in 1958.  At a time when the Franco regime was beginning to look for some kind of international respectability, first for admission into the United Nations, then for acceptance into NATO, and the agreement in 1968, to let Equatorial Guinea go, as well, was part of the conditionalities of NATO membership and of a respectable status at the U.N.  And the final abandonment of the Western Sahara occurred on Franco's deathbed, as Spain was just incapable of organizing any kind of other withdrawal from the territory.  

Now Portugal is a third case.  It's transparent that the [ Spanish ] could never resolve the colonial dilemma, and that it only could be managed through a military coup which destroyed the [ Spanish ], created a new political framework, and essentially, simply abandoned -- it was not a decolonization, it was simply an abandonment of the territories to the largest insurgent group.  

Now in the case of Belgium, this institutional incapacity to decolonize was visible in quite acute form, that the Belgian government was too weak, either to insist and find credible ways of requiring some more extended transition to independence, or in resisting the clamor of the Congolese nationalist movements for immediate independence.  So the final negotiations, which led to the independence decision in January of 1960, were not even carried out by the Belgian government.  They were carried out by the three largest political parties and their Congolese counterpart, a quite extraordinary way of making the kind of decision that was made.  

It has something to do with the huge gamble that it purported, of conceding the maximal demands of the Congolese nationalists for immediate independence on the assumption that they still complete control -- that is, not a single Congolese officer, amongst the 10,000 members of the force [ unintelligible ], only three Congolese in the 4,500 top three grades of the civil service -- that the total Belgian control of the administration in the army, the crucial instruments of state coercion, would mean that the Congolese politicians could have their political sandbox, as it were, while the real work of the colonial state carried along in postcolonial context, and only gradually adopted by rapid training of Congolese officers and administrators.  Now that gamble, as we all know, lasted five days.  In the case of France, the Fourth Republic absolutely could not resolve the Algerian dilemma.  And it collapsed.  De Gaulle came to power.  It required the entire reconstruction of the French political framework, to have a governing mechanism that was capable of making peace, eventually, in Algeria.  

So although Anthony Eden lost his political career over the Suez Crisis, which we can say was part of the larger decolonization dynamic, nonetheless, Britain was able to go through the trauma of decolonization without its own institutions coming into question.  

Now in terms of Africa, what did decolonization mean?  Well, an intriguing fact is that, for the first three decades of independence, the political itineraries of the 53 African states are remarkably parallel.  There were some that were exceptionally successful, like Botswana.  There were some that were unusually unsuccessful, but by and large, the overall pattern was one of deepening patrimonial autocracy and state decline.  Now that suggests that there was something about the legacy of the colonial state that propelled these polities along parallel lines.  

My shorthand explanation is that, in part, decolonization didn't happen in the sense that it was essentially the institutional structure of the colonial state that was simply taken over by the postcolonial African leadership.  The colonial state, itself, in its structures, in its doctrines, in its laws, in its functioning, in its habits of hegemony, and its routines of power exercise, remained.  To cite one banal example through that period, when you visited rural district headquarters, the district officers characteristically had to wear military type uniforms, that the state represented itself sartorially, and, thus, metaphorically, as a kind of military instrument.  That was one part of it.  

However, decolonization did happen in another sense, and that is that the African nationalists, in the moment of political organization, were able to deflect, as it were, upon the colonial state the multiple discontents and demands of the populace.  Once in power, they found themselves confronted with the expectations that had been created by their own campaign promises, of not only continuing this expansion of the state provision of the valued services of the terminal colonial state, but redoubling it, its momentum.  Now in order to regain the autonomy lost, we found, across the continent, the dismantling of the constitutional democratic institutions that had been part of the decolonization deal, and their replacement by single-party systems and subsequently in a number of areas by military regimes who, in turn, generally created a single party system for themselves.  

And at the same time, the momentum of state expansion into new spheres of activity and dominance continue.  So in that sense there both was and wasn't a decolonization.  In the debates over decolonization, one of the issues at point was whether there was some minimal viability size for an independent state.  And the British, in particular, were concerned with some of their very small polities.  Now, as one looks at the situation today, the three most troubled countries are not the three smallest ones, but the three largest ones in human geography: Sudan, Nigeria, and Congo-Kinshasa.  And some of the top performers in Africa are these mini states whose viability was widely feared, like Cape Verde or Mauritius.  

Now, in terms of colonial legacy, I've been spending time in the last months trying to assemble, from the now enormous array of indicators that different groups put together, Freedom House, Transparency International, the World Bank, and so forth, that great performance of African states on a whole different set of criteria to try and put those together, and see if any states emerge as particularly favored, or particularly weak in performance.  And from that list, without arguing as a particularly solid quantitative base for this, I can pick out 10 states that would seem to be amongst the list of top performers, at least in recent times.  They would include Ghana, Tanzania, Mali, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Senegal, and, if you totally close your eyes to political repression, Tunisia, and Rwanda.  

Now when you look at those states, it's striking that you have at least one from every colonial heritage.  They're not disproportionately drawn from one political, one colonial experience or the other.  That suggests that over the 50 postcolonial years, now there are perhaps a number of postcolonial factors that begin to enter heavily into the picture in determining the shape of political outcomes.  Now ironically, in another way, in my judgment, the two best at colonially administered British-ruled states were Ghana and Uganda.  Now both have at the present time performed reasonably well, but the best of them all is Botswana that was the least administered.  It was barely administered at all by Britain.  They put no money in it.  It had the most skeletal of colonial establishments, got minuscule aid during the '50s, and so forth.  

The most negative British colonial legacy is probably Sudan.  That the core of the Sudan problem in the South, from which Darfur spun off, is very much a product of the British haste to decolonize Sudan in a way that was driven primarily by British strategic interests concerning Egypt, and had little to do with an appropriate timetable for Sudan.  It involved, in effect, abandoning the South, with the consequences that are still playing out today.  

Now 50 years later, what is there, finally, to say about decolonization?  Well in the last couple of decades, there has emerged a whole discourse around the theme of postcoloniality that has many interesting points to raise and situates the decolonization debate in an entirely different intellectual setting and universe.  

Now the specific political frame for the constitutional decolonizations was, as I've suggested, rather swiftly abandoned in almost all cases.  Now it's interesting that, since 1990, it's being resurrected in the course of the democratization process, and that states that more resemble what one thought in 1960 the postcolonial states were supposed to be, may be coming back.  

Now the last point I want to leave you with is that, intriguingly, one of the most enduring legacies of the Colonial Era is the territorial frame.  Now, one, it was conventional wisdom, amongst African nationalists and academic observers, that the African territorial system was wholly arbitrary, artificial, might well be unsustainable in the long run.  Now, in practice, it has been remarkably enduring.  And the striking thing is that, even in a country like Somalia, which hasn't existed since 1991, there still is a belief that there is, or ought to be, a Somalia.  

The international community spends a lot of money supporting that idea.  Somalis, themselves, are in a constant search to try and resurrect this phantom entity, which is a Somali state.  Perhaps even more surprising is a case like Congo-Kinshasa.  Now, as in the last couple of decades of Mobutu's rule, as the state, itself, went into what appeared to be terminal decline, as it all but ceased to provide any services to its populace, as its agents became a source of insecurity rather than a guarantee of security.  Nonetheless, nonetheless, throughout that period from 1996 until 2003, when the future of the country was very much in question, when it was occupied by eight different foreign armies and later by a U.N. force, when it was split into four or five different fragments and factions, the one thing, the one thing that everybody agreed on, there must be a Congo, there must be a Congo, that there was no significant pressure -- there was a little Cotaga [ spelled phonetically ], there was a little Bacongo [ spelled phonetically ], but relatively minor, and easily overcome.  

Sierra Leone, Liberia are other examples of states that went through turmoil, agony, through much of the 1990s, but there was no voice that was raised to suggest that the answer to the turmoil was to reconfigure the states.  Now I think that has to be, and here's the final irony I want to leave you with, the fact that, whereas in 1960, conventional wisdom was that the great challenge to independent African states is to create nations, that their states, with the blessings of international recognition, this laying on of hands taking place, that breathed sovereignty into their territorial frame, but they were aspirant nations in the sense that they had created movements, often united movements, demanding independence within this territorial frame.  But a few believed that a sense of affective attachment to the territorial entity went very deep into the popular psyche.  

Now the postcolonial states have had nearly five decades of pedagogical opportunity to instill the notion of the territory as something that is a natural entity in some sense.  And if you've ever run across a wonderful book by one Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, who argues that in the 19th century, much of rural France did not have a strong sense of being French, it was the Republican schoolhouse that instilled that, that made peasants into Frenchmen.  It's a very recent kind of process.  Now one can say that the African schoolhouse, its generalization, and its explicit use as an agency of inculcation of this idea of attachment to this territorial entity, the emergence of new focal points for popular culture, national football teams, and the enthusiasms that they generate, not trivial, not trivial.  

The particular forms of urban popular culture, the urban painting, the urban popular music, that takes particular forms in different countries, have also been part of this sense of surprising attachment to the notion, "We are all Congolese," or, "We are all Senegalese," whatever.  Now the sense of some kind of nationhood has strengthened, while, in many instances, the state, itself, has seriously weakened.  And so, we find ourselves, paradoxically, reversing the 1960 equation, "The state must build a nation."  The challenge of the nation is now to build a state.

[ applause ]

Professor Roger Lewis:
Thank you, Crawford, for that wonderful and stimulating lecture.  We have about 20 minutes or so, for questions. To get us into the discussion, could I ask you, Crawford, just to elaborate briefly on the background of the United Nations, across the board and the process of decolonization.  This ran throughout your comment, but I think it would help to get our bearings.

Professor Crawford Young:
Well, the United Nations was important.  I mean, it's a huge subject now, unto itself, in any number of respects.  Among the first dimensions of the U.N. role, and recollect that, initially, in the 1940s, there were only a handful -- there was only Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, but that doesn't count, and Liberia, that were African members of the United Nations -- so it wasn't the African voice within the United Nations, but it was the path taken by the United Nations Trusteeship Council, and parenthetically, Ralph Bunche was a very crucial factor in that whole process.  It came to mind because we just passed the 100th anniversary of his birth.  

The Trusteeship Council operated within an entirely differently moral economy than did the League of Nations in the past, which was, the League of Nations Mandate System was operated, managed, supervised by the colonial powers, themselves, essentially.  They went after Liberia.  But they didn't go after colonial abuses in the trust territories.  But from the late 1940s, the quadrennial visiting missions, the first round in 1948 was quite timid in the kinds of suggestions that they made.  But the subsequent ones were much more forceful in insisting upon more rapid movement towards decolonization.  Now, that affected the French through Togo and Cameroon.  It affected the Belgians through Rwanda and Burundi.  It affected the British through the portions of Togo and Cameroon that they administered as trust territories.  

And things that had to be done in response to U.N. Trusteeship Council Mandates, and with the moral authority of the U.N. overall behind those recommendations, even if they were not totally effective enforcement mechanisms, nonetheless, they were hard to wiggle out of.  And they tend to drag along in their wake other parts of the colonial territories.  Once you'd created a certain policy for Togo or Cameroon, then it was hard to deny the same kind of political status to other territories that were not under U.N. supervision.  One of the first decisions they made was to, contrary to prewar league practice, permit petitioners to appear before the Trusteeship Council to present evidence of abuse.  And African nationalists, in various territories, made extensive and effective use of that opportunity.  

So the U.N. Trusteeship Council was one important element.  Now, there was a General Assembly Declaration on the Rights of Peoples whose self-determination, that was finally issued in 1961, but it was worked upon for the better part of the decade.  The whole dynamic of the elaboration of that, at that document, which was interesting document, going back to the territorial question, in that it, at once, had to create an indissoluble right of the self-determination of any people, at the same time insisting that a people was defined territorially, and that right of self-determination did not accrue to segments of a territory, or ethnic groups, or indigenous communities, for that matter.  So that was a part of the dynamic.  Major colonial issues were, as the '50s wore on, and it's more and more Asian, and then African members became part of the voting group in the body, current issues, like Algeria, were repeatedly brought to the fore.  The British, as well, were hauled before the General Assembly in different forms.  

Now those resolutions, if they actually did get passed, were only advisory.  There was no enforcement mechanism for them.  But they, nonetheless, had some weight.  They couldn't be simply brushed off and ignored.  So that was yet another way in which the U.N. was important.  As the African Liberation Movement gained momentum, in the later cases like Namibia, the U.N. played a very active role in helping to provide education for Namibian elites, Africans, in assuming a very forceful role, based on a Security Council mandate, to and pushing forward the decolonization of that territory.  So the U.N. was, in these many ways, quite active, and important, above all, as a moral voice, but as a moral voice that through repetition, gradually made its point, and could not, in and of itself affect change, but it created a climate in which things got pushed forward.  

Male Speaker:
[ inaudible ] government in both origin and evolution, than these trappings of democracy you're talking about in the postwar period, to me always have just been trappings, and, therefore, the real legacy of the Colonial Empire was autocratic government rather than democratic government.  Furthermore, the 1990s democratization you're talking about, I think that may have been caused by different winds of change blowing through the continent, than an actual legacy of the empire.

Professor Crawford Young:
If I left the impression that I want to interpret the Huntingtonian "third wave" of democratization that swept Africa in the '90s as simply a resurrection of the postcolonial formula, no, it was driven by a whole set of quite different kinds of factors.  I was only intending to remark upon the fact that it did, through this different avenue, restore some of the kinds of formulas that were characteristic of the decolonization, power transfer of constitutions.  

Now on your first point, I totally agree.  No.  And going back to my early comments, I think the African colonial state was a pure model of bureaucratic authoritarianism.  And the capacity to insulate itself, from both below and above, facilitated a command mentality and a Bula Matari style of operation.

Professor Roger Lewis:
Yes?

Female Speaker:
I'm asking my question out of ignorance on my part.  I don't think you said anything about large economic forces going on.  And it was my impression, before today, that the end of the Colonial Era had a lot to do with colonies no longer being economically viable for the home countries, the European countries.  They weren't getting as much out of it, economically, as they were putting into it.  Yet, if that were the case, they wouldn't have resisted so hard the Liberation Movement.  So I'm confused about that, if you could say something.

Professor Crawford Young:
Well the viability question, insofar as it was debated, this was mainly a British debate.  It had to do with, you know, the West Indies, and the reasons for a West Indian Federation.  The small territories lacked a kind of economic base, and other aspects of the capacity to sustain the superstructure of sovereignty, in terms of the kinds of governing apparatus that a state in the modern world is expected to have.  That if you're S‹o TomŽ, how can you have an army?  And how can you send people to Washington and have to pay their hotel bills?  So it was those kinds of things that preoccupied those who raised questions of viability.  

Now the reverse of my point is not entirely true.  It's not the case that every single microstate does well.  A number of those in the South Pacific are very difficult little colonies.  In the African case, the Comoros has been a running sore, and it continues to be.  That's three separate islands that find enormous difficulty in sustaining any kind of consensus amongst each other.  But I think that what finally drove the viability debate off the agenda was that there wasn't any alternative to a Gambia, let's say.  What else are you going to do with Gambia?  You can't connect it with Sierra Leone.  Really, neither the Sierra Leoneans nor the Gambians would have that.  

There was a sustained effort beginning, I think, in 1981 and running until the late 1980s, to confederate Gambia with Senegal.  And that came to a sad end.  It broke apart.  There were too many differences of administrative culture, of political orientation, of disparity between a very small partner and a much larger one, all of which operated against the sustainability of what, in many ways, seemed the most logical African amalgamation, that the other half of the argument about state reproduction is, with the exception of the attachment of Zanzibar to Tanganyika in 1964 -- and then the amalgamations of the Togo and Cameroon Trust Territories -- there haven't been any instances of states joining together to form larger entities.  There is a renewed effort on the East African scene.  Maybe we'll get someplace.  We'll see.

Professor Roger Lewis:
Yes, down in front?

Male Speaker:	
When we compare the Asian and the African colony [ unintelligible ], we see the stability of the state in Asia, compared with the fragility of the state in Africa, and pointing to what you mentioned earlier about how the different fragments of ethnicity had been a basis which is belied by the case of India where a state was forged from hundreds of ethnic and subnational groups, so given this, do you see any hope in realizing the goal of the state, bringing about the nation in Africa, to stable and viable?

Professor Crawford Young:
No.  The Asian-African comparison is a striking one.  Twenty years ago, a colleague of mine, Donald Emerson, who is a specialist on Indonesian politics, and I, gave a pair of courses together, comparing then-Zaire and Indonesia.  At the time, they looked very similar.  They both had recently installed reunification regimes, Suharto and Mobutu.  They both had substantial resources.  They both had gone through a searing experience, the massacre of communists in Indonesia in '65, and the rebellions in Congo in '64, '65.  And so, what appeared to be reforming military regimes in both countries, that had restored a surprising degree of peace, and, at that time, had generated a surprising degree of optimism about the future of those two countries.  Now, they've obviously gone very different pathways since that time.  

And although Indonesia, in terms of corruption, is certainly a worthy competitor for Mobutu, the Suharto family, I think, secreted in different bank accounts nearly as much money as Mobutu did.  But yet, the difference seems to be that at the core of the Indonesian state, there was a highly competent technocratic elite that was able to use the substantial oil revenues that accrued to Indonesia in an effective way to produce, in spite of the high level of corruption and crony capitalism and so forth, a very extended period, until the 1997 crisis, of a quite impressive economic performance.  Mobutu made a series of catastrophic decisions about the economy, about that same time, that sent the country in a downward spiral, to a point where, as late as the mid-'80s, they produced 450,000 tons of copper, their primary export commodity, and by a decade later, that was down to about 20,000 tons.  

The whole productive infrastructure of the country, as well as everything else, had really been devastated by the misrule of the Mobutu regime in its last two decades, and then to recuperate from that.  For Indonesia to recover from the '97 crisis, and to democratize, in a significant way, to face down some very serious secessionist challenges, one of which has more or less been resolved -- another still simmers -- is a quite impressive achievement.  

In the case of the Congo, consider the fate of poor Joseph Kabila.  He has a country that, whereas in 1960 there were 13 million people, now there are 52 million.  He has less revenue for his government than the independence government in 1960 had, about a billion dollars of revenue.  That's less than the revenue of my university, to govern a country that's the size of the United States, east of the Mississippi, where everything has to be rebuilt, where the roads are completely derelict, where the public services have long ceased to function.  Now, so, not only have the directions been different, but the challenge of recovery, now, is just immense, in the Congo.  They have resources.  They have had elections, $500 million, but they were elections.  And they were relatively uncontested. There is a more or less legitimate government in power for the first time in a long time.  And there is a large amount of external commitment, and support, available.  So maybe they can do it.  

Now, your question on the management of ethnic diversity, I think that, on one hand, Africa does face unusual problems of ethnic fragmentation.  The other hand, if you look closely at the civil wars that have ravaged the continent in the 1990s, although ethnicity always gets tangled up in it, with the exception of Rwanda and Burundi, it's not necessarily ethnicity that is the prime cause.  It's just that once you get such an armed conflict in process, it's likely to draw ethnicity into it.  

Now one of the special achievements, I think, of Africa is in the face of this enormous diversity, of being able to pursue a language policy that wins general consent and removes the language issue from the ethnic agenda, through what seems to be an emergent but stable pattern of multilingualism of different language domains, that it's accepted for a variety of reasons, that the European language would be the language of high politics, of central government administration, of higher education, a certain domain, would be widely used by the elites of the country, that almost every country has a major one, or, at most, two, major lingua franca, that is, vehicular languages that are widely spoken, understood, that become the everyday language of the market of the city, and then, as well, maternal languages.  

Now, since these languages have distinct social domains, and the preservation of one does not threaten the other, it's possible for this kind of language regime to, I think, persist over an extended period of time.  Now by taking language off the table as a source of ethnic tension, you remove one of the biggest, one of the biggest sources of tension, and difference, and so forth, that arise out of ethnic diversity.  I don't want to be Pollyannaish.  But I do think that Africa has gone a long ways towards learning how to live with its ethnic diversity, in ways that don't threaten the existence of the state or nation. 

Professor Roger Lewis:
Crawford, this makes such an excellent summing up, that I suggest that we carry on this question and answer session and discussion over drinks.  And in the meantime, we want to thank you for this wonderful presentation.
[ applause ] 

[  end of transcript  ]