Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood: International Law and State Fragmentation in Africa

By Obiora Chinedu Okafor

Publisher: Kluwer Law International, PO Box 85889, 2508 CN The Hague, The Netherlands. 2000

Pages: 232; price: US$180

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada

As the new century opens up Africans are increasingly rethinking their existence in relation to how people created their nation-states who weren't Africans and who did not understand their way of doing things.

The African nation-states were created without recourse to African culture, tradition and history, and without consulting the African peoples. Like the bastardisation of the African culture, which was erroneously described by the colonialists as "backward", "pagan", and "primitive", African nation-states were created to suit the interest of the colonialists. The result, as we all know and experience today, is civil wars, unnecessary tension, tribalism, hatred, predatory elite, confused intellectuals, corruption, and general decline of the African life.

Nigeria's Dr. Obiora Chinedu Okafor, 40, currently teaching at Canada's York University Osgood Law School, gives explanations, analytically, of the need to reconstruct the African nation-states in order to minimise the internecine conflicts and give voice to minority ethnic groups in Africa. His work adds to the growing campaigns to shift developmental paradigm from Eurocentric to Afric-centric in order to eliminate most of the unnecessary tensions and free the developmental forces within the African peoples for their progress. This work won the Canadian 1999 governor-general's Gold Award because of its groundbreaking investigations and suggestions towards ending the African crisis.

Obi, as the author affectionately called, recounts the creation of multi-national empires in pre-colonial Africa via strong, centralised states and their resistant by weaker political formations. "The stronger states forcibly suppressed many self-governing peoples, incorporated them into their burgeoning empires, and often attempted, with varying degrees of success, to assimilate them into a particular socio-cultural way of life, or identity." To this day also the threat of the strong expansionist states created animosities that have continued

Obi gives a genealogy of African state-building in pre-colonial times, citing cases from such empires and kingdoms like Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Bunyaro-Kitara, Sokoto, Zimbabwe, Buganda, Kanem-Bornu, Rwanda, Burundi, AmaZulu, Oyo, Benin, Dahomey, and Ethiopia. His take here is that "the capacity of Africans to run large centralised states did not disappear with the decline and fall of Kemet, Kush, Meroe, and Axum...This historic ability continued to be demonstrated almost continuously for thousands of years before the advent of European colonialism in Africa."

The dawn of European colonialism was to change everything in the context of the types of "nation-states" that the Europeans imposed on Africa. The African states were not the European-type "nation-states". "... One crucial distinction to be made is between the genealogy of state-building and the genealogy of the "nation-state."

The pre-colonial African states were said to be segmentary while the European's were unitary. Obi cites examples throughout Africa to demonstrate that the pre-colonial state-building by Africans have had "lasting effect on the nature of the crisis of legitimate statehood in Africa. Rarely have these pre-colonial processes not impacted on the structural dynamics of state-building in the contemporary African era."

Such roll over of state-building saw the 19th century expansionism of both African and European states contributing to the present political configuration of the crisis situation of the African continent. Obi gives the cases of the Sokoto Caliphate, the Zulu Kingdom and the Asante Empire to show the expansion of the 19th century pre-colonial African states and the effects, beefed by European colonialism via the scramble for and partition of Africa, and later with alliances with some African kingdoms, on Africa's crisis today.

As the time came for the Europeans to go "no attention was paid to pre-colonial interstate/community relations in the creation of the new states." Obi says the colonial African state, and the struggles waged by the various ethnic groups within it, informs the nature of the structural crisis that later visited the post-colonial African state today. Still, the colonial African state lacked some three attributes of modern state. The author informs us that it was "merely a province of an European metropolis. It was not a nation because it had just forcibly assembled varying numbers of resistant nations into a single political container. It was not an international actor because its external relations were conducted on its behave by the relevant colonial power."

In such a climate, to the native African population the colonial African state was a Bula Matari (crusher of rocks) in that it enjoyed massive autonomy and hegemony, and as a Leviathan entity, it survived by notoriously asserting and maintaining "its authority against a resistant African population more or less by military force " over hostile population anxious to regain their independence, and as such "could not be anything but what it actually was: militaristic, authoritarian, over-centralised, and alienating." And because of these feelings the African population view the colonial African state as illegitimate.

It is in this understanding of the origin of the internecine conflicts in Africa that the author examines how international legal and institutional attitudes deal with the African state problem. The trouble with this is that it exhibits the same European structures and attitudes such as "the homogenisation of sub-state groups" and "the domestication of sub-state groups." The question is when these international laws will shed its traditional Western dominance and see the African state problem from African perspective. That international legal and institutional attitudes have contributed to the African state problems is discussed in chapter four.