SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Department of Politics and International Studies

Government and politics in Africa

Course Code:

15PPOC205

Unit value:

1

Taught in:

Full Year

This course has had a long and distinguished history. Established originally by Professor Donal Cruise O’Brien, he co-taught it firstly with Dr Richard Jeffries, then Dr Michael Twaddle, finally with Professor Stephen Chan. Since 2006-7 it has been taught by Professor Chan, although it was taught by Dr Tom Young in 2007-8 while Professor Chan was on leave. The scope of the materials has broadened from its early West African emphasis to encompass all of sub-Saharan African – rather, as much of sub-Saharan Africa as can decently be fitted into such a course without doing injustice to a vast continent of 53 states, 48 of which lie partly or entirely below the Sahara.

The study of African states and their internal politics necessarily involves the study of governance, governing ideologies, forms of ethnic and political pluralism, monopolisation of political and economic power, chronic underdevelopment and maltreatment of citizens, the emergence of active polities nonetheless, and the use and abuse of cultural linkages amidst great dynamism and great violence. Many theoretical approaches have evolved to address the issues of African politics. Not all are helpful – and that includes those developed both in the West and Africa itself. The course will examine many of them, without being star-struck by any of them. The objectives of the course are:

1. To disaggregate the governments and politics of sub-Saharan African states.
2. To establish thematic groupings for the purposes of considering and debating the governments and politics of sub-Saharan Africa.
3. To assess political developments in sub-Saharan Africa, both in theoretical terms and by way of experiential accounts.
4. To evaluate accounts of the cultural origins and animations of sub-Saharan African politics.
5. To consider normative approaches to the politics of sub-Saharan Africa and to contemplate informed alternatives for the future.
6. To relate the governments and politics of individual sub-Saharan states to Africa-wide developments, to international pressures, and the global political economy.
7. To pay particular attention to urban political formations, and their expressions in literature, culture, religion, crime and technology.

Objectives and learning outcomes of the course

By the end of the course it is anticipated participants will be able:

1. To discourse fluently and knowledgeably about the governments and politics of sub-Saharan Africa.
2. To address theoretical and normative contexts in which African politics sit, with a view to further study and research.
3. To have acquired a body of knowledge suitable for preliminary policy-advisory roles.
4. To appreciate sub-Saharan Africa both in its component parts and in continental and international contexts.

Scope and syllabus

The course will revolve around 22 weekly meetings of two hours each. Depending on class size and demand, further seminar/discussion groups will be scheduled. The majority of the main weekly meetings will begin with a lecture by Professor Chan – sometimes by or with a guest lecturer – and will be followed by a rapporteur’s response/critique from a member/members of the class, prepared in advance on the basis of the readings for each week listed below. All students will take turns in providing, or participating in, such responses. A written summary/aide memoir of the response should be circulated either in print or electronic form. The class as a whole will then debate and/or question both the lecture and the response. This format is to encourage critical class participation; to enact the principle of an intellectual community in which both lecturer and students learn from one another; and to prepare members of the class for advisory/advocacy and other roles in the future that demand critical and informed public articulation.

Organisation of the Course Outline

What follows is not only a list of lecture titles and reading lists, but an effort to establish a key problematique: how to conceptualise the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa, an area of 48 recognised state and governmental distinctions, amidst so many contending academic voices, so much international concern and misunderstanding, and so much emotional content lying at the heart of that concern. Each lecture title is therefore followed by a synopsis of what Professor Chan will present, and each synopsis contains a preliminary or working hypothesis. The lectures themselves are informalised and interventions and objections are persistently welcomed.

Week One: Can Bono, Bob Geldof, American Presidents and British Prime Ministers save Africa?

The 2000s have seen unprecedented international commitment to Africa. The Millennium Development Goals have established a template for this commitment. Various learned commissions have probed the problems of Africa and amplified the aspirations of the MDGs. Concern for Africa has become a fashionable moral accessory and a necessary part of the political platform of every major world leader. However, the problems faced by Africa are not simply those of development, but the politicised nature of development, indeed of the politicised everyday lives of those who aspire or demand to be citizens.

• Commission for Africa, Our Common Interest, London: Commission for Africa, 2005.
• Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, London: Allen Lane, 2008.                 
• Martha C. Nussabum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.

Weeks Two, Three and  Four: Democracy and its discontents: a standard typology and some Southern African case examples

The Western preoccupation with democracy, in particular the publicly performative holding of elections, is grounded in a body of Western practice and democratic theory. The African theoretical reply has been sparse and has centred, either on a neo-Marxist questioning of democracy as an aspect of unequal globalisation, designed to reinforce comprador relationships, or on a suggestive note that seeks to marry primordial and modern systems of communal decision-making, positing forms of associational democracy not unlike an African variant of the Greek agora. This reply has had no impact on the Western sense of electoral democracy, and aid to help reach the MDGs is frequently predicated on African compliance with this kind of democracy.

There are several typologies that seek to encapsulate the African project of statehood and government. A typical typology, which we can treat as preliminary, might look something like this:

• Democracies
• Dictatorships
• States of primordial ethnic division, tension and violence
• The postcolonial state characterised by the mistakes of external actors
• The state of romanticised or ideologised culture, and
• The state as class vehicle.

When looking at certain Southern African case examples, and we start with these because of their topicality, we can see elements of all these categories manifest in governmental structures and systems of political possibility. However, no single category satisfies complex examination of any one state, government or system of political behaviour. These lectures look at Zimbabwe and South Africa, with side-glances at Botswana and Zambia.

• David Held, Models of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990.
• John Daniel, Roger Southall and Morris Szeftel (eds.), Voting for Democracy: Watershed Elections in Contemporary Anglophone Africa, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
• Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (eds.), African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy, Dakar: CODESRIA, 1995.
• Issa G. Shivji, State and Constitutionalism: An African Debate on Democracy, Harare: SAPES, 1991.
• Issa G. Shivji, Fight My Beloved Continent: New Democracy in Africa, Harare: SAPES, 1988.
• David Blair, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe, London: Continuum, 2002.
• Stephen Chan, Robert Mugabe: a life of power and violence, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
• Stephen Chan, Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai, Cape Town: Fingerprint, 2005.
• Ranka Primorac and Stephen Chan (eds.), Zimbabwe in Crisis: The International Response and the Space of Silence, London: Routledge, 2007.
• Stephen Chan, ‘The Tragedy of Tsvangirai’, Prospect, Issue 149, August 2008.
• Stephen Chan, Kaunda and Southern Africa: Image and Reality in Foreign Policy, London: I.B. Tauris, 1992.
• Kenneth Good, Diamonds, Dispossession and Democracy: Power and Weakness in Botswana, Oxford: James Currey, 2008.
  Also see Chan, Grasping Africa, op.cit., pp 55-62.
• R.W. Johnson and Lawrence Schlemmer (eds.), Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
• William Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC, London: Zed, 2007.
  Stephen Chan, ‘Throwdown in Polokwane, Prospect (online edition), Issue 142, January 2008, http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9977

Weeks Five and Six: Foundational discursive and intervening characteristics of ethnicity, religion and violence

Much somewhat generalised and lazy material has been written about ethnicity and religion in Africa, particularly their purported role in the destabilisation of governments and polities, and their instigation of violence. A key antidote to this has been scholarly writing that proposes the colonial construction of the ethnic identities apparent today, i.e. these identities are not, or are not necessarily, primordial. They are, in this thesis, imposed and discursively maintained. In the postcolonial state they are discursively propagated for political purposes. Resistance to governmental manipulations of ethnicity may be ethnically-based in turn, or religiously-based. The problem with religion as a factor in politics is the pluralism of confessional beliefs and, above all, their syncretic qualities. The components in the mix, and the levels of mix determine the discursive quality and purpose of a religious project. When these mixtures are added to armed resistance, whether by way of uprisings in ethically-demarcated areas of the countryside, or to crime syndicates and parallel systems of economy and self-regulation in poor urban concentrations, there are often explosive impacts on government and politics. At this stage, analysis of the discursive composition of belief that helped animate violence may help diagnose certain animations but do not necessarily diagnose, by themselves, the rationales that arise from the sheer dynamism of acts of rebellion or resistance; nor of the atrocities to which violence may lead. The East African examples of Kenya and Uganda, again to capitalise on their topicality, are used here.

• Leroy Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, London: James Currey, 1989.
• Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 
• Harvey Glickman (ed.), Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa, Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1995 
• Awinda Alieno, ‘Mungiki: “Neo-Mau Mau” and the Prospects for Democracy in Kenya’, Review of African Political Economy, 34 113
• There are several websites and blogs on Mungiki, e.g. news.bbc.co.uk/zhi/Africa/6685393.stm 
• Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1986-97, Oxford: James Currey, 1999.
  See the short story in Chan, Grasping Africa, pp144-171.
• Amnesty International, Uganda: “Breaking God’s Commands”: the destruction of childhood by the Lord’s Resistance Army, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR59001197en.html
• Frank Van acker, ‘Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: The new order no one ordered’, African Affairs, 103:412, 2004.
• Gerard Prunier, ‘Rebel Movements and Proxy Warfare: Uganda, Sudan and the Congo (1986-99)’, African Affairs, 103:412, 2004.

Week Seven: Pogroms and genocides of the state

Violent uprising or resistance to the state is, however, at least quantitatively different from situations where the state uses its organisational capacity and might to commit atrocity with real or seeming ethnic biases and targets. Here, there is the contradiction between modernity in its form of technologised state capacity and the use of seemingly primordial cultural mobilising motifs. This cannot be simply explained, let alone understood. The difficulty is amplified when the state concerned is functional and has sufficiently high capacity to contemplate, plan and commit genocide or vast violence. Ethnicity as an aspect of coherent nationalism, of pluralism, as a check and balance, is swept aside for the sake of an exclusionary and ‘purified’ paradigm of statehood, or of statehood as subjugator of difference and its uprisings. The extent to which such paradigms are discursive in terms of ‘traditional’ contestations, or in terms of competition for contemporary scarce resources, or in terms of simple political opportunisms requires to be examined. In all these terms, the ‘purified’ state becomes a ‘safe’ state. The East African example of Rwanda and the more northern example of Sudan, with emphasis on Darfur, are used here.

• Gerard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, London: Hurst, 2005.
• Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’, London Review of Books, 8 March 2007, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html 
• Alexander de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. 
• Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide, London: Zed, 2000.
• Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, London: Hurst, 1998.
• Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Weeks Eight and  Nine: The regressed, abdicated or collapsed state

Much generalised writing has been published on the ‘collapsed’ state. In fact, only formal governments may be said to have reached or neared collapse. Forms of governmental function continue, and alternative forms of authority and administration take the place of government. The ethos of ‘citizen’ within a state may be replaced by that of ‘combatant’ on behalf of a form of authority which aspires to governmental status within the state. The contingent nature of the ‘combatant’ ethos – in the midst of contestation for governmental status all is fluid – may lead to the forced anchoring of belief and morale, not to mention moral purpose and justification, on condensed and compressed codes and symbolic practices. Far from anarchy breaking loose, such situations become – more atrocious certainly – but also highly regulated within codified forms of command and administration. These are manifest differently from example to example. We shall look at the West African cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the northern example of Somalia.

• Robert Jackson, Quasi States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Robert Rotberg (ed.), When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Jennifer Milliken (ed.), State Failure, State Collapse and Reconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
• Chris Allen, ‘Warfare, Endemic Violence and State Collapse in Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, No.81, 1999.
• Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War, London: Hurst, 2001.
• William Reno, ‘The Reinvention of an African Patrimonial State: Charles Taylor’s Liberia’, Third World Quarterly, 16:1, 1995.
• Daniel Berger, In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of Black and White in West Africa, New York: Farrar, Straus & Girou 2003.
• John L. Hirsch, Sierra Leone: Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
• David Keen, Conflict in Collusion in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 2005

Week Ten: The state as chimera

What about the state that is neither apparently functional nor regressed, but ‘imitates’ simultaneously both? What about ‘states’ that seek emergence from chaos and ‘collapse’, such as Somaliland from Somalia, but are not recognised as legitimate authorities? Or those claiming emergence from last colonialisms, such as Western Sahara? In what ways may a ‘state’ impersonate itself by deploying the panoplies of statehood without having, in the normal sense citizens? There is here a parallel phenomenon in Africa: the ‘citizens’ without a state; and the ‘state’ without citizens. What dynamic of contractural exchange binds one to the other or the mythology of one to the other? Coercion as both force and spectacle, as command and carnival, provide a twin dynamic.

• Paolo Tripodi, The Absent Metropolis: The Colonial Legacy in Somalia, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
• Godfrey Mwakikagile, The Modern African State: Quest for Transformation, Huntington NY: Nova, 2001, espec. Chapter 4.
• Ken Menkhaus, ‘The Crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in five acts’, African Affairs, 106:424, 2007.
• Michael van Notten, From Nation-State to Stateless Nation: The Somali Experience, http://www.liberalia.com/htm/mvn_stateless_somalis.html 
• Sini Paukkunen, Towards a Critique of the Concept of the Right to Self-Determination in Africa: A Conceptual Examination and the Cases of Western Sahara, Southern Sudan and Eritrea, Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2007.

Week Eleven: Revision and Summary

Weeks Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen: The corrupt state: forms of patrimony and patrimonial politics

The concentration of macro-development efforts in centralised state hands has meant increasingly massive state corruption – whereas the case may be made that, in the West, corruption has simply become diversified within complex pluralist economies (Enron, other forms of insider-trading, parallel economies even in G8 nations such as Italy). Even so, it has meant a strong correlation between power and the means of wealth in much of Africa. Insofar as there are networks of beneficiaries – extended families and client groups of the corrupt person – and reinvestment in local businesses and facilities, corruption may have benefit. Insofar as corruptly-gained funds are husbanded abroad, laundered by highly-skilled Western lawyers and accountants, and benefit only a narrow elite, they represent a different form of patrimony. And, insofar as corrupt funds buy continued political power or influence, establishing a cycle of politics and wealth, they are antithetical to orthodox forms of democracy. The case examples to be discussed include Zaire (and Democratic Republic of Congo), Kenya, and Nigeria as representatives of three different forms of institutionalised corruption and styles and benefits of patrimony. Even so, they beget different forms of polity – both dependent and involved in reciprocities, needing to receive and able to structure and impose conditionalities upon the rich. This form of complex informal exchange may be idealised as a description of what is a ruthless despoliation of the common wealth all the same. Nevertheless it establishes an antidote to uni-dimensional descriptions of corruption as evil.

• Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Oxford: James Currey, 1999.  
• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, London: Pan Macmillan, 1998.
• Dave Renton, David Seddon, Leo Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance, London: Zed, 2007.
• Zoe Marriage, Not Breaking the Rules, Not Playing the Game: International Assistance to Countries at War, London: Hurst, 2006.
• The literature on Kenyan corruption is vast. However, the best volume on the early period of Kenyan independence is in French: Daniel Bourmaud, Histoire Politique du Kenya: Etat et pouvoir local, Paris: Karthala, 1988. Bourmaud’s later writings proliferate in extracted form on the web. For the purposes of this lecture, however, there will be an emphasis on a fictional depiction of corruption, and on the various electronic resources devoted to the revelations of the former Kenyan corruption investigator, John Githongo. Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wizard of the Crow, New York: Pantheon 2006.
• Karl Maier, This House has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis, London: Penguin, 2001.
• Jeffrey Herbst and Charles C. Soludo, Aid and Reform in Africa: Lessons from Ten Case Studies, Washington DC: World Bank, 2001, espec. Chapter 11.
• Mashood Erubami and Ian R. Young, Nigeria’s Corruption and Related Economic Behaviour in their Global Context, Ibadan: Centre for Human Rights Research and Development, 2003. http://www.chrrd.kabissa.org/nigeria-corruption-review.htm
• David Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Brennan Kraxberger, ‘The geography of regime survival: Abacha’s Nigeria’, African Affairs, 103:412, 2004.

Weeks Fifteen, Sixteen and Seventeen: The supervening state and its generational leaps in sophistication

I have previously identified 13 types of African government, 10 of which might in popular journalese be called ‘dictatorial’. I would wish to avoid such a generalisation but, in these three lectures wish to condense the various types into three forms of supervening state, where the forms, functions, and powers of state are condensed into an exclusionary group. I want to look firstly at civil-military relations, examining civil-military theory, and then looking at the case examples of successive military governments in Nigeria and at the transitions made by the Rawlings government in Ghana. Then I want to look at the post-independence phenomenon of one-party states, with strong efforts at philosophical underpinning, emphasising the case examples of Tanzania and Zambia. Finally, I want to look at the Ugandan experiment with the non-party state and how its variant, influenced also by the experiences of non-African states like Singapore, the dominant-party state, may now be taking root in South Africa – indeed, in Southern Africa as a whole, with the exception of Zambia and, very possibly if contingently, a future Zimbabwe.

• Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, London: Pall Mall, 1962
• William F. Gutteridge, Military Regimes in Africa, London: Methuen, 1975
• Keith Panter-Brick (ed.), Soldiers and Oil: The Political Transformation of Nigeria, London: Frank Cass, 1978.
• Robin Luckham, The Nigerian Military: A Sociological Analysis of Authority and Revolt 1960-1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
• Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War 1967-70, London: Heinemann, 1980.
• Larry Diamond, Antony Kirk-Green and Oyeley Oyediran, Transitions Without End: Nigerian Politics and Civil Society under Babangida, London: Lynne Rienner, 1997.
• Brennan Kraxberger, op-cit.
• Jeffrey Haynes, ‘The Ghanaian Elections of 1979’, African Affairs, 79:316, 1980.
• Jeffrey Haynes, ‘Railway Workers and the PNDC Government in Ghana 1982-90’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 29:1, 1991.
• Jeffrey Haynes, ‘The PNDC and Political Decentralisation in Ghana 1981-1991’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 29:3, 1991.
• Jeffrey Herbst, The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
• Richard Jeffries and Clare Thomas, ‘The Ghana Elections of 1992’, African Affairs, 92, 1993.
• Richard Jeffries, ‘The Ghanaian Elections of 1996: Towards the Consolidation of Democracy?’, African Affairs, 97:387, 1998.
• Richard Jeffries, ‘Rawlings and the Political Economy of Underdevelopment in Ghana’, African Affairs, 81:324, 1982.
• Jeffrey Haynes, ‘Human Rights and Democracy in Ghana: The Record of the Rawlings Regime’, African Affairs, 90:360, 1991.
• Stephen Chan, Kaunda and Southern Africa: Image and Reality in Foreign Policy, London: I.B. Tauris, 1992.
• Susan C. Crouch, Western Responses to Tanzanian Socialism 1967-83, Aldershot: Avebury, 1987.
• Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda, Kampala: Fountain, 1995.
• Hansen and Twaddle (eds.), Developing Uganda, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.
• Hansen and Twaddle (eds.), Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period since Independence, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.
• Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda, London: Macmillan, 1997.
• Roger Tangri and Andrew W. Mwenda, ‘Military Corruption and Ugandan Politics since the late 1990s’, Review of African Political Economy, 30:98, 2003.
• Gerard Prunier, ‘Revel movements and proxy warfare: Uganda, Sudan and the Congo (1986-99)’, African Affairs, 103:412, 2004.
• Stefan Andreasson, ‘The African National Congress and its Critics: “Predatory Liberalism”, Black Empowerment and Intra-Alliance Tensions in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Democratization, 13:2, 2006.

Weeks Eighteen, Nineteen and Twenty: The manipulations and rebellions of culture: cities as critical crucibles

A very great deal of non-governmental developmental emphasis has been directed towards rural uplift, but it is in the cities that the vibrancy of future development patterns is established. It is in cities that political ‘rhythms’ begin to chime with the necessary patterns, demands and negotiated spaces of urban life and exchange. I will look at Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm-analysis of cities and explore the ‘ghettos’ of Kinshasa, at Yvonne Vera’s plangent description of early Bulawayo, and give an account of youth and religious projects in various other cities. Music becomes a critical expression of dissidence and difference in places like Kinshasa, and it is no accident that Vera lingers on the jazz clubs of Bulawayo. I will look at music as popular commentary and protest, and how their more complex articulation in novels establish a critique of state, government and politics in Africa. The marrying of traditional and contemporary musical forms in Mali, culture and the Mouride Sufi brotherhoods of Senegal, direct protest as in Fela’s work in Nigeria and Mapfumo and Mutukudzi’s work in Zimbabwe, and the advent of Nigerian and South African TV ‘soaps’ will all be discussed. The cultural phenomenom of African cities sits against the intellectual formations attempted by people such as Senghor in Senegal, and also against the alternative (and violent) lifestyles and refusals of totsi gangsters in South Africa. Cities are reflective of a national historical moment, and aspirational towards important elements of an otherwise inchoate future. Is there something Gramscian in all of this, reminiscent also of Raymond Williams’ ‘long revolution’? Was Poulantzas right in his preliminary work towards, not classes, class fractions, within Africa. Finally, it is the dreadlocked (male or female) hipster, HIV-positive, outlawed and hunted, dressed like a New York rapper, and ripping off the system while being indispensable to the political ‘warlords’ or overlords of modern Africa, who may hold a true key to a future, if not of hope, of antidote to despair in Africa.

• Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
• Abdou Maliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
• Bill Freund, The African City: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Ranka Primorac (ed.), African City Textualities, special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44:1, 2008.
• Stephen Chan, Composing Africa: Civil Society and its Discontents, Tampere: Tampere Peace Research Institute, 2002.
• Filip de Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, Tervuren: Ludion, 2004.
• Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Cheri Samba:The Hybridity of Art, Westmount: Gallerie Amrad, 1995.Mamadou Diouff, ‘Urban Youth and Senegalese Politics: Dakar 1988-1994’, Public Culture, 8:2, 1996.
• Donal Cruise O’Brien, Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims Imagining the State in Africa, London: Hurst, 2003.
• William Oxley, Leopold Sedar Senghor: An African Whitman, http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx109.html originally 1989.
• Landeg White and Leroy Vail, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History, Oxford: James Currey, 1992.
• Donald Crummey (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa, London: James Currey, 1986.
• Thandika Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development, Dakar: CODESRIA, 2005.
• Three novels:
  • Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001 (South Africa).
  • Yvonne Vera, The Stone Virgins, Harare: Weaver, 2002 (Zimbabwe).
  • Wole Soyinka, The Interpreters, London: Heinemann, 1970 (Nigeria).
• Music: Collections by:
  • Rokia Traore (Mali)
  • Ali Farka Toure (Mali)
  • Youssef Ndour (Senegal)
  • Oliver Mutukudzi (Zimbabwe)
  • Thomas Mapfumo (Zimbabwe)
  • Fela Kuti (Nigeria)

Week Twenty One: Continental ways forward

Nevertheless, Africa as a whole needs a sense of its own self by way of comparison among its component parts. Caution and aspiration combine in bodies such as the continental African Union, and regional bodies such as the Southern African Development Community. These might never become true equivalents to the European Union, or not for a long time, but there is more to them than first meets the eye – including the gradual legislation of norms for government.

• Paul D. Williams, ‘From Non-Intervention to Non-Indifference: The Origins and Development of the African Union’s Security Culture’, African Affairs, 106:423, 2007.
• Gabriel H. Oosthuizen, The Southern African Development Community: The Organisation, its Policies and Prospects, Midrand: Institute for Global Dialogue, 2006.

Week Twenty Two: Revision and ‘what now for a project of typologies?’

What, possibly, might the course have accomplished by way of problematising, nuancing and restructuring its preliminary typology of states and government in sub-Saharan Africa? What about, for discussion purposes, the following?

• The democratic state
  Multi-party, low-intensity, dominant party, and impersonation
• The ethnic state
  Primordial, discursive, and manipulated
• The collapsed state
  Quasi states and the regressed state
• The patrimonial state
  Kleptomaniac, ineffectual, progenitor of the informal or articulator of the informal
• The supervening state
  Military, one-party or restricted-parties and ideological

Method of assessment

Assessment is 30% Coursework and 70% unseen examination - all coursework is resubmissible

Suggested reading

Convenors

• David Harris
• Phil Clark

• BA Politics and...
• BA Politics
• MSc African Politics
• MSc Asian Politics
• MSc Comparative Political Thought
• MSc Politics of Conflict, Rights & Justice
• MSc International Politics
• MSc Middle East Politics
• MSc Politics Of China
• MSc State, Society and Development
• MRes Politics with (Language)
• Certificate in Political Studies
• Postgraduate Courses
• Undergraduate Course Units
• Research Degrees
• Student Destinations