This panel will examine the politics of a number of African states which have recently emerged from liberation wars. Papers will focus on how state-society relations are shaped by the liberation conflict. Societal groups of particular interest include: churches, NGOs, trade unions, and ex-fighters.
This panel brings together a number of scholars working in different African countries but with over-lapping interests in how states and nations are formed out of conflict; the particular configuration of societal groups (civil society?) vis-à-vis the state; the role of former combatants; and the role of ‘non-political’ organizations like churches. The paper-givers are particularly interested in how these states deal with opposition parties, especially from ‘losing’ groups, and formerly hegemonic interests. Military iconography and nationalist images are frequently very powerful contributors to the nation-building project, but they may also constrain or shape possibilities for transition to civilian rule.
Since independence, Zimbabwe has had an annual commemoration for the war dead heroes of its liberation struggle. It has also had legislation to provide hero status posthumously to those identified as heroes and material benefits to heroes' families. Every aspect of the commemoration and selection of official heroes has been fraught with intense conflict. The proposed paper will explore these conflicts and their relationship to state- and nation-building, with particular attention to ex-fighters, ex-political prisoners, and the war dead in Mozambique and Zambia.
Ten years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda is experiencing not democracy and reconciliation but dictatorship and exclusion. Although the government led by the Rwanda Patriotic Front has achieved rapid institutional reconstruction and relatively good bureaucratic governance, it has also concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a very small minority, practised ethnic discrimination, eliminated every form of dissent, destroyed civil society, conducted a fundamentally flawed 'democratization' process, and massively violated human rights at home and abroad. The Rwandan army twice invaded neighbouring Zaire-Congo, where its initial security concerns gave way to a logic of plunder. It has caused protracted regional instability and derailed the transition process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Rwandan government has succeeded in avoiding condemnation by astutely exploiting the 'genocide credit' and by skilful information management.
The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in May 1991, emerging from the civil wars which had convulsed Ethiopia and the wider Horn area for decades. Conflict had centred on control of the state, which exercised a monopoly over resources and decision-making. The resolution of conflict prompted the reconfiguration of the centralised Ethiopian state, as an ostensibly liberalised, democratised, and decentralised federation, drawn along the lines of Ethiopia’s major language groups. The paper explores how a range of opposition and liberation groups were simultaneously co-opted and marginalised in the process of state reform, resulting in the contemporary ‘one party dominant’ political arrangement. It considers key dynamics in relation to the legacies of war and the ‘liberation struggle’. They include political ideology, organisation, and culture; conflict, (ethno-)nationalism and de/remobilisation; pluralism and the colonising of extra-governmental space. Its concludes that traditional patterns of Ethiopian political culture were both reinforced and modified by practices honed during war, and outlines their further evolution under federalism.
The dominant political and economic logic in Angola has always been (since the independence in 1975) of a patrimonial/clientelist type, however, distribution of benefits by the State became extremely elitist throughout the years, gradually excluding the majority of the population. This phenomenon can be traced to late seventies (during the presidency of Agostinho Neto) being aggravated throughout the Socialist phase of Dos Santos’ presidency (1979-1989) and even more so with the transition to multipartism and market economy (from 1989 until today).
During the Socialist phase of the regime (1975-1989), popular discontentment and the loss of political legitimacy was defused by the war. The civil war ‘justified’ distributive contraction and reinforced micro-identity alignments (with stronger ethnic overtones). The war pushed identity and cultural differences to opposite extremes. For the different factions within the MPLA elite, as well as for the masses, UNITA represented a threat not only to their power, but also to the culture and identity of the Creole/Mbundu alliance itself. This allowed the ruling elites to neglect their various obligations towards the ruled without wholly losing their support. Moreover, the existence of valuable natural resources such as oil allowed the regime to ignore the usual practices of surplus extraction from the masses (‘mise au travail’).
In late eighties and early nineties (when the transiton to multipartism and market economy began), the war argument used by the government to justify resources mismanagement and miserable living conditions for the majority of the population, became increasingly criticised at an internal and external level. However, internal discontentment was once again circumvented, this time through the arrival en masse of international organizations -- NGOs, churches, solidarity assistance, etc. Working together with local communities and employing a very competent but marginalised section of the Angolan intelectual elite, these organizations and its developping projects acted unintentionally as an escape valve for political and economic discontentment.
On the one hand, they shouldered important governmental responsibilities such as education, health, basic sanitation, housing, support to those displaced by war and rural development. Acordingly, the government was able to relax in its care about the millions of people displaced by war, who for the past few years have been mainly fed by international aid (donations by WFP and the EU). However, contrary to what one might think, the Angolan government maintained a strict control over most of the foreign intervention, politically manipulating for its own profit, the activity of these organizations.
On the other hand, several of these international organisations started to implement what can be termed ‘counter-logic projects’ such as ‘Participatory Development’ and ‘Development from below or bottom-up’ (in a country where the whole political and administrative system relies in a pyramidal structure extremely centralised), partially filling the population need for inclusiveness at all levels.
This paper will be structured in three parts: the first and the second deal with the distributive structure and working logic of the Angolan regime constructed throughout its Socialist phase (Agostinho Neto’s presidency 1975-1979, Dos Santos’ Socialist administration 1979-1989); the third, deals with the so-called transition to multipartism and market economy (1989 until today). This last phase saw the continuing shrinkage of State distribution and government disregard for the political participation of the ruled masses. Such phenomenon was indirectly helped by the role of various transnational networks and projects joining expatriate activists, local communities and a marginalised Angolan intelectual elite.
This paper looks at questions of state formation and emerging forms of citizenship and belonging through the case of ‘reintegration’ of ex-combatants and former fighters in postcolonial Namibia. It focuses, first, on the construction of categories and ways of speaking about the ex-combatant issue, second, on the practices of classifying, including and excluding associated with ‘reintegration’, and third, on the interplay between the state and party actors and various ‘population groups’ involved. The paper concludes by discussing the competing tendencies of personalised versus bureaucratic forms of power, and associated forms of subjectivity and agency in Namibian political and social arrangements.
Mandela Mania’ is the term coined by director of the Southern African Council of Churches, Dr Tsele, in defining the immediate post-Apartheid nation-building period in South Africa. There was ‘an obsession of alignment with Mandela and his establishment’s position’, the position of the African National Congress at that time, an obsession that conditioned the actions and politics of the Churches (especially Mainline Churches) as a part of society. This process of alignment fundamentally weakened the response of Mainline Christianity post-Apartheid, in contrast to its important role within the anti-Apartheid movement. This paper will argue that it is precisely the historical close-knit relations with the broad anti-Apartheid movement that led to a weaker, poorly defined role for Mainline churches in civil society. More recently, however, it appears voices critical of the state are emanating from the churches, perhaps indicative of a new alignment more removed from the state. This paper will investigate the politics of Mainline churches in their shift from key actors in the resistance to peripheral figures in government and the implications this has for the nation-building process.