Country Report

The African Colonial State Revisited

CRAWFORD YOUNG**

CRISIS OF THE AFRICAN STATE: PREAMBLE

We are not interested in the preservation of any of the structures of the colonial
state. It is our opinion that it is necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to
ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country to make everything possible
for our people.
The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps
the secret of the failure of African independence.
—Amilcar Cabral1
In January 1995, the Eritrean constitutional commission, given a two-year
mandate to draft a constitution for Africa’s newest independent state, con-
vened an international symposium in Asmara to debate the critical issues
surrounding this foundational enterprise.2 Cabral did not live to see the
independence of his own country of Guinea-Bissau, but the reflections
expressed in the preceding citation served as axiomatic premises of the
constitutional debates. Eritrea—which from an Eritrean perspective had
experienced three colonial regimes, Italian, British, and Ethiopian—faced
the challenge of constructing a polity rooted in the ethos of solidarity,
community and austerity drawn from its thirty-year liberation struggle,
rather than the institutional legacy of its multiple alien rulers. Further, the
painful lessons of post-colonial state construction elsewhere in Africa
required careful study; the inferences drawn were largely negative, based
upon a reading of African state performance which largely coincided with
the harsh indictment of Cabral.3

LIMITS TO STATE PERFORMANCE AS EXPLANATION

Of course such a judgment, without qualification, is excessive. Although a

widespread crisis of the African state has come into view since the late
1970s, its effects are uneven. Even if no African state has been presented as
a developmental model since 1980, “crisis” cannot remotely apply as
descriptor for the most effectively performing states, such as Botswana,
Mauritius, Namibia, or Tunisia.4 If the transition can be managed success-
fully, South Africa could enter these ranks. Some states have rebounded

**University of Wisconsin–Madison
Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1998
(pp. 101–120). © 1998 Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main St., Malden MA 02148, USA, and 108
Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 IJF, UK. ISSN 0952-1895
102 CRAWFORD YOUNG

from an earlier period of debilitation—Uganda and Ghana are examples.

A number of others, while in straitened circumstances, are not in acute
distress—Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, for
instance. But several states have disintegrated to a point where restoration
of effective central institutions of governance is problematic at best: Soma-
lia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, perhaps Rwanda. And four of the largest—Alge-
ria, Sudan, Zaire and Nigeria—face political impasses so intractable that
no early resolution seems likely.
Nor can all of Africa’s travail be laid at the door of flawed statecraft.
Punishing droughts in the 1970s and 1980s afflicted large areas of the con-
tinent. Some observers argue that the African physical environment poses
greater obstacles to development than any other (Kamarck 1982, 149–62).
International market conditions for the beverage crops, vegetable oils,
fibers, and base metals which are Africa’s major exports have been unfa-
vorable for much of the past two decades. International banks and West-
ern donor countries share responsibility with African governments for the
excessive indebtedness of many African states, and the debt collection
agency role played by international financial institutions has imposed
high social and political costs upon African polities. The zeal with which
client states were rewarded with armaments by the contending super-
powers of the cold war era now carries the ransom of leakage of these
weapons into the hands of diverse armed bands in many countries. The
decade of aggressive South African destabilization of regimes to its north
in the 1980s imposed a terrible cost. The 3% population increase rate, itself
a product of the major improvements in public health measures in the
postwar era, generates impossibly large youth cohorts to educate and
employ. The ravages of AIDS across the broad belt of eastern and central
Africa of maximum incidence, with infection rates of 10% likely by the
end of the century, exact a heavy human toll.

THE COLONIAL STATE TRADITION IN AFRICA

All these factors qualify but do not entirely invalidate the Cabral thesis.
Per capita income in many states declined during the 1980s, and in a
number the trend continues. “Crisis” continues in everyday discourse to
characterize the condition of the majority of African states. And many
influential studies situate the origins of the crisis in the inner nature of the
state itself (Bayart 1989; Mbembe 1989; Rothchild and Chazan 1988; Cha-
bal 1986; Reno 1995; Jackson 1990; Ergas 1987; Fatton 1992; Young 1994c).
The task of this article is to explore the legacy of the colonial state in
Africa, and to suggest some of the ways in which it has influenced the
post-colonial political order.
State traditions, though not entirely determinative, have a powerful
tendancy to persist. Even revolutions do not wholly efface the weight of
long-established institutional forms, practices, routines, mentalities, and
habits. The Napoleonic state and its diverse successors incorporated
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 103

important elements of the absolutist realm constructed by the Colberts

and the Richelieus. The outlines of the Czarist state and the Middle King-
dom were clearly visible in the political projects of Lenin and Mao, how-
ever important the transformations. In similar fashion, to a degree few
suspected in 1960, the potent legacy of the colonial state in Africa was
embedded in its post-colonial successor.
I revisit here the legacy of the African colonial state, in the light of tra-
jectories of post-colonial politics. In the first two decades of independence,
there was a swift restoration of the autocratic framework of rule, as the
fragile terminal colonial democratic institutions were swept aside on most
of the continent. The already large state realm experienced a rapid expan-
sion through a proliferating parastatal sector, agricultural marketing
monopolies, and a policed economy. Politically, the momentarily consti-
tuted citizen of the transition to independence reverted to subject in the
coils of a comprehensive superstructure of domination in the form of sin-
gle parties, military regimes, or both. A novel dimension of post-colonial
power management was the erection, alongside the formal hierarchies of
authority, of patrimonial networks for the subordination and control of
regional elites and their clientele, increasingly venal over time.
By 1980, the initial post-colonial dispensation had reached impasse:
bloated and bankrupt states, declining performance, eroding legitimacy.
Initially adjustment efforts were confined to the economic sphere, with
strong external pressures for liberalization. Beginning in 1989, when the
Huntingtonian “third wave” of democratization swept Africa, major
reforms occurred in the political realm as well (Huntington 1991). In revis-
iting the African colonial state, I explore the degree to which its legacy
begins to fade. Nearly two decades of a venture in remaking of states offer
an opening for initial reflection upon the possible emergence of more
viable institutions of rule in Africa. To what extent does the tenor of con-
stitutional debate on the invention of a state in Eritrea, which consciously
avoids the largely negative record of the initial post-colonial state, reflect
broader continental trends?
I turn first to an exegesis of the colonial state, to define core elements in
its legacy. There follows an examination of the central trends in state
expansion in the first two independence decades. In conclusion, we may
consider the implications of the era of state reconfiguration since 1980.
The circumstances of the creation of the African colonial state were in
important respects unique, and explain the particular physiognomy of its
institutions. For most of Africa, the partition was extremely rapid, and
much more competitive than in other former colonial regions. In only a
couple of decades, a modest number of mostly coastal enclaves suddenly
became a military occupation of nearly all the continent. At the 1884–85
Berlin Congress, the doctrine of “effective occupation” as essential to
international recognition and confirmation of proprietary claims was
exhumed and applied as a basic ground rule for the partition.5 In most
instances, the assortment of soldiers, adventurers, proconsuls and
104 CRAWFORD YOUNG

occasionally missionaries who were agents and advocates of colonial con-

quest faced significant opposition in the home country, where segments of
the ruling elites and sectors of public opinion were skeptical concerning
the benefits alleged to flow from imperial expansion and apprehensive
about the costs and risks. To overcome such opposition in the British,
French and Belgian cases, a quite explicit fiscal pact was bargained. The
essence of the deal was that colonial territories had to be fiscally self-
sufficient, beyond perhaps the initial costs of conquest. Only Italy permit-
ted continuous deficits in colonial budgets (Anderson 1986; Longrigg
1945; Hess 1966).6
Naturally colonial powers everywhere engaged in imperial expansion
because it was expected to be profitable in one way or another. Western
hemisphere holdings in the 16th to 18th centuries often provided substan-
tial revenues to the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The slave plantation
sugar islands of the Caribbean in the 18th century not only created for-
tunes for plantation owners and merchants, but also significant revenues
for the British and French states. What made the fiscal pact special in
Africa was the simultaneous requirement to establish swiftly a skeletal
network of garrisons to meet the “effective occupation” requirement, and
to create mechanisms of extraction which could compel the African sub-
ject to cover the cost. Further, in much of the continent there was no organ-
ized system of taxation which the colonial state could intercept and divert
to its own needs. Tributary exactions in kind for rulers might be familiar,
but nothing like the capitation taxes which most colonial states were soon
to impose. Indeed, in its early days, much of the colonial state extraction
took the form of labor service, rather than monetary payment. The simul-
taneous imperatives of consolidating domination to achieve “effective
occupation” and thus avert territorial poaching by rival powers, and to
compel the subjects to pay for their own subordination, made urgent a
superstructure of extractive rule. This had little to do with “building capi-
talism,” which some have argued was the central design of the early colo-
nial state (Phillips 1989); its teleology pointed in a different direction:
survival and consolidation under the ground rules set by the effective
occupation doctrine and the fiscal pact.7 In this goal, the colonial state in
its own terms was remarkably successful; by 1914 the steel grid of alien
occupation was firmly fastened almost everywhere in Africa.
In the process, a basic framework of autocracy was created with wide-
ranging authority over the subjugated population. Intermediary struc-
tures were put in place, with African rulers of varying degrees of custom-
ary claims to authority invested with “chiefly” authority, and charged
with meeting the extractive requirements of the colonial state: large num-
bers of men for portage, road-building, other public construction, military
service and taxes, compelling a shift to cultivation of the cash crops for
export on which customs duty could be levied.8 The other major function
for intermediaries was repression of disorder or challenge to the authority
of the colonial state. Incentives were provided for intermediary service,
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 105

beyond whatever prestige attached to recognition of office; the chiefs

received a share in the proceeds, both in tax returns and extracted labor
services.
To a singular degree, the formative phase of the African colonial state
revolved around the control and allocation of African labor. The critical
resource which could permit the consolidation of the colonial state was
the African subject. There was no peltry trade, as in Canada; no estab-
lished land revenue, as in India; no silver and gold, as in the Americas; no
slave plantation sugar, as in the Caribbean. Capital was scarce, and in the
early years showed little interest in Africa. The key to colonial state sur-
vival was transformation of the able-bodied adult African male (“homme
adulte valide,” in the evocative Belgian census lexicon) into a state revenue
flow. Such a transaction required large amounts of force. The many bru-
talities associated with the early colonial years, the arsenal of arbitrary
legislation with which all colonial regimes equipped their field officers, of
which the French indigénat9 was prototype, and the command nature of
the colonial state all trace their origin to this basic fact.
Colonial hegemony became institutionalized, codified, and profession-
alized in the interwar period, at a time when the European hold on much
of Asia was already weakening. To a much greater degree than in earlier
time periods, a notion of “scientific colonialism” came into play. A series
of major international colonial congresses took place, bringing together
senior administrators, and an emergent cadre of academic specialists on
colonial affairs; in such settings, a veritable “epistemic community” of
colonial professionals emerged. Elaborate theories of “native administra-
tion” were debated; this was the heyday of competition between doctrines
of “direct” and “indirect” rule,10 and theories of “centralized” versus
“acephalous” systems amongst the subordinated (Fortes and Evans-
Pritchard 1940). The recruitment of colonial officers was systematized,
and training institutes were established to prepare them for their duties.
On the ground, a stable mode of economical hegemony took root. With the
domination of the colonial state only infrequently subject to overt chal-
lenge, its authority reposed less openly on brute force, and far more on
routinized subjugation. Its revenue flows now sufficed for its minimal
reproduction, but did not generate the resources for major public capital
investment, nor significant expansion of social infrastructure.

CHANGES IN THE TERMINAL COLONIAL STATE

In the final phase of the African colonial era, spanning the period between
World War II and independence, paradoxically the state progressively lost
its hegemonic capture of society, and yet rapidly expanded its scope of
activity and scale of operation. A newly hostile international environment
and the rapid growth of African nationalism placed the colonial state on
the defensive for the first time. But initially all assumed that European
sovereignty in Africa would last for decades; thus colonial state strategies
106 CRAWFORD YOUNG

in the immediate postwar era assumed a capacity to retain control over

colonial events for an extended period.
Transformation of the minimal prewar colonial state began through the
management of the war effort itself. A wide range of economic controls
were established, many of which became permanent (creation of parasta-
tal marketing monopolies, price and wage controls). The war brought a
revenue surge, generally of 50–100%, which began to pave the way for an
expansion in the orbit of the state.
But the major transformations came after the war. A radically altered
discourse of legitimation took form, aimed both at the African subject and
the international realm. The colonial state, ran the argument, could now
deliver swift improvement in subject welfare, competent governance, and
effectively planned and managed economic development. The secret to its
claims lay in the remarkable expansion of its revenues, fuelled by the long
commodity boom, and the abandonment of the fiscal pact by the Euro-
pean rulers, in favor of substantial metropolitan public capital allocations
to colonial development funds.
The terminal colonial state undoubtedly had the institutional capacity
to implement its developmental designs without the brutalities of the ear-
lier period, now that resources were in hand. Coercion in labor mobiliza-
tion rapidly decreased (except for the Portuguese), and opportunities for
political participation as well as social ascension opened to much greater
numbers of Africans; a genuine civil society was taking form.11 The colo-
nial apparatus before the second war was primarily an infrastructure of
command; after 1945, swift enlargement of the technical and specialized
services occurred. In the phrase coined by Hargreaves (1979, 41), a “sec-
ond colonial occupation” took place, “in the form of a large-scale infusion
of technical experts, whose activities not only increased the ‘intensity’ of
colonial government, but seemed to imply its continuance in some form
until the new policies had an opportunity to mature.”
The scale of the revenue windfall was remarkable. In the Belgian Congo
expenditure levels increased elevenfold between 1939 and 1950 and tri-
pled in the final colonial decade. In the last decade of British rule in the
Gold Coast, state outlays multiplied by ten; in the preceding 35 years they
had only doubled. Nigerian revenues, a mere 7 million pounds in 1937,
rose to 17 million in 1947, then to 71 million in 1957 (Young 1994b, 213).
The final colonial years in much of Africa were a time of high hopes.
Real wages increased from 1945 to 1960 for perhaps the sole sustained
period during the colonial epoch. The newly expanded social infrastruc-
ture—schools, clinics, roads—extended tangible benefits for much of the
population. With independence coming within view for the young gen-
eration, now schooled in much larger numbers, enticing prospects opened
for spectacular social ascension. Humbler members of this generation,
now in middle age, not infrequently express today a disconcerting nostal-
gia for the colonial era. Their remembered colonial past refers to a very
narrow slice of time, in the 1950s, when “welfare colonialism” did indeed
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 107

deliver a better life to broad categories of the population; this gilded recol-
lection is set against the deprivations and disappointments of the present
in many countries.
Along with the construction of an embryonic welfare state, the withdraw-
ing colonial power belatedly sought to temper the inherent autocracy of
alien domination with a constitutionalization of transitional arrangements.
In some cases, few in number but critical in influence—Algeria, Guinea-
Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia—the presence of large
white settler communities already exercising decisive political influence
(Algeria, Zimbabwe, Namibia), or the ideologically-driven refusal of colo-
nial self-determination (Portugal) made negotiated independence impos-
sible. Armed insurrection proved able to outlast colonial determination to
protect existing arrangements, and forced independence largely on nation-
alist terms. Initially many assumed that a fundamentally different type of
post-colonial regime would result from this pathway; over time, however,
the successor states came to resemble closely those produced by negotiated
transfers of power, a silent and unintended tribute to the potency of the
colonial state legacy. Perhaps the crucial historical impact of the great anti-
colonial insurrections was to convince the colonizer that independence was
impossible to resist, and to tip the scales in favor of a bargained independ-
ence; certainly this calculus was crucial for the France of Charles de Gaulle,
and for Belgium.
In the end, in most of Africa the transition to independence was
remarkably and unexpectedly swift. For the negotiated power transfers,
there was a pact of apparent democratization in the cases where the colo-
nizing state was a liberal constitutional polity at home (Britain, France,
Belgium). Honorable withdrawal required grafting onto the robust trunk
of colonial autocracy fragile cuttings of democracy. For the nationalist
challengers, liberalization of the weakening colonial state provided the
indispensable openings for political mobilization to create a mandate for
their succession, and to accelerate the process of decolonization. As well,
“democracy” served as a badge of respectability at the moment of entry
onto the global scene as sovereign members of the international state sys-
tem. But an autocratic state tradition which had matured over three quar-
ters of a century was not so easily effaced.
As the colonial flags were lowered, and the new emblems of nation-
hood were raised, the African subject seemingly became the empowered
citizen. Many, particularly among the young, wanted to believe the
exorbitant promises nationalist leaders had broadcast of a life more
abundant. But there was also an undercurrent of uncertainty about what
the future might hold. The gap between appearance and reality is cap-
tured by Michael Crowder (1987, 21), in recollecting the dispatches com-
posed in Lagos before the actual handing-over ceremony, by journalists
reporting dancing in the streets; for those who then roamed the streets
of the Nigerian capital after the Union Jack was lowered, not a dancer
was to be seen.
108 CRAWFORD YOUNG

REPRODUCTION OF THE COLONIAL STATE LEGACY

The essence of the colonial state tradition was autocracy, as Crowder

(1987, 13) argues; “. . . if the colonial state provided a model for its inheri-
tors, it was that government rested not on consent but force.” In a perhaps
superficial sense, the inner essence of the state found sartorial expression
in the retention of the colonial practice of dressing the regional chief
administrative officers in a quasi-military uniform, invariably worn on
formal occasions or on tour, redolent of the military origins of territorial
command. The human instrument of state authority, thus clothed in a
mode exclusive to government agents, asserted an unspoken entitlement
to command. The implicit assertion of racial supremacy over the African
subject which permeated the colonial system was removed, but the voca-
tion of domination remained.
Also transferred were important remnants of arbitrary power. Deten-
tion laws, master and servant ordinances, emergency powers, police regu-
lations continued to provide state command agents with an ample
reservoir of authority over potential challengers of the post-colonial order.
Though magistrates had some autonomy, and the ethos of the law had
been internalized to a degree in the legal profession, the state tradition
provided only weak support to judicial independence and constitutional
protections for the citizen.
The very nature of constitutionalism was readily subverted, for reasons
cogently identified by Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf:
The African constitutions imported from London, Paris or Washington became
inverted versions of those after which they were modelled. The historical logic
which led to the appearance of constitutionalism in Europe is a logic of resis-
tance by civil society, the dominated vis-a-vis the dominators. The constitution
serves to limit the power of the state and to guarantee the liberty of the citizen. In
Africa it served to guarantee the authority of the state and the uncontrollable
and uncontrolled exercise of power by the occupants of the state apparatus. And
for this reason the constitution undergoes constant modifications. The legislative
armature, the structures which are supposed to be the expression of civil society,
is constantly subjected to the assaults of networks of kinship and clientele,
accentuating the tradition of the subordination to the state which the colonial
state inaugurated.12
The nationalist elite naturally assimilated the platonic notion of a
“guardian class” entitled not only by their leadership in anti-colonial
struggle but also by their schooled vision of statecraft denied to the unlet-
tered masses. “They staked their claims to leadership,” writes Ajayi (1982,
2), “on their superior knowledge” of external models of rule and develop-
ment, and “took for granted the masses’ and the traditional elite’s willing-
ness to accept their leadership.” An identical argument is advanced by
Doornbos and Markakis (1994, 16) in explaining the 1991 collapse of the
Somali state: The assumption by the Somali nationalist leaders that they
could adopt unchanged a colonial state imposed by force over a pastoral
society, because “they alone held a vision of modernity.” The “highly
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 109

centralized, authoritarian, militarized and violent post-colonial state run

by a tiny, westernized elite class . . . is the essence of the Somali problem.”
The library of statecraft, in reality, was the colonial state.
The principe autoritaire which Mbembe (1989, 148–9) identifies as the
defining element in state-society relationships thus encoded the essence of
the colonial state tradition. The science of development, accessible only to
those instructed in its secrets, necessitated authoritative transmission of
the instructions deriving from its mastery. The late Jean Colin, then Minis-
ter of Interior in Senegal, argued during a 1987 colloquium of senior
administrators that “development administration” after independence
had become an “administration of encadrement” rather than the com-
mand administration of colonial times.13 On close inspection, the distinc-
tion dissolves; “encadrement” also communicates a state mission, as
theologian of development, of organizing, directing and structuring soci-
ety to carry out its duties. States were presumed to have finite reservoirs of
policy energy; whatever was dissipated in debate and dialogue with the
subject was lost to the developmental process. Thus a reconcentration of
authority was indispensable.

VARIATIONS IN THE LEGACY

I make no argument that the colonial state legacies throughout the conti-
nent were identical. There were important differences in the metropoli-
tan state traditions, which shaped the subliminal premises of statecraft
by colonial state agents (Nettl 1968, 559–92; Dyson 1980; Badie and Birn-
baum 1981).14 Differing pre-colonial state traditions were encountered;
some were readily incorporated into the apparatus of colonial govern-
ance, in divergent patterns. In Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, existing
state machinery, rationalized according to the doctrines of the overruler,
could serve the purposes of the colonizer effectively. In the Tunisian
case, by the turn of the century the French monitoring and controlling
superstructure fastened atop the beylical state structures had become
regarded as a veritable model; potential intermediaries in Senegal were
sent on pilgrimmages to Tunis to observe its operation (Searing 1985,
127–51). In Egypt, the reorganization of revenues and state practices
under the tutelary eye of Lord Cromer permitted quick liquidation of
the debt which had served as major pretext for the 1882 occupation, and
generated resources sufficient to fund most of the British reoccupation
and initial administration of the Sudan. At the other extreme, in Bot-
swana Britain applied only the most minimal overrule, building upon
the Tswana political tradition, which when independence arrived trans-
mitted a much less dominating, commanding colonial state tradition;
this may partly explain the relative political and economic success of
post-colonial Botswana (Morrison 1987).
The colonial state as well defined itself in function of the structures of
the societies it sought to rule. The presence of a substantial European
110 CRAWFORD YOUNG

settler population is an obvious factor. Those from the ruling country car-
ried their citizenship in their steamer trunks. Although political exclusion
of the African subject was for the most part feasible, with such minor
exceptions as the four old communes of Senegal, European settlers were
another matter. At a minimum, their interests, noisily voiced, required
substantial accommodation. In the Cape Colony, Southern Rhodesia, and
Algeria, they had all but captured the colonial state.
Differently structured African societies also influenced the character of
the colonial state. Nomadic communities with a military tradition, inhab-
iting desert domains of little economic appeal to the colonizer, were left
under a much looser suzereinty than settled, cultivating (and taxable)
groups. The costs of imposing the degree of subordination imposed upon
settled populations was prohibitive in nomadic zones, and prospective
revenues limited, though of course herds might be taxed, and camels req-
uisitioned for military campaigns.15 Relatively greater latitude might be
accorded to well-organized kingdoms or emirates whose ruling class was
disposed to collaborate, as in Buganda, Northern Nigeria, or Barotseland.
The formidable mobilizing potential of Islam was well recognized by
Britain and France, with cultural space provided, and assiduous cultiva-
tion of tariq (religious order) leadership amenable to a cooperative rela-
tionship (most notoriously the Mourides and Tijaniyya in Senegal, also
eventually Khatmiyya and Mahdiyya in Sudan). Only the Belgians sought
to isolate systematically and uproot an embryonic Islamic community
produced by the 19th century expansion of Zanzibari polico-mercantile
networks. Boone (1994) offers compelling evidence of the impact upon
state structure and action, in colonial and post-colonial times, of the
contrasting patterns of rural political economy in the Senegalese peanut
basin, the Ghanaian cocoa zones, and the Ivory Coast export agriculture
regions.
The intensity of the colonial occupation varied substantially as well,
partly a function of its duration. In Egypt, British occupation, limited by
its operation through a continuing Egyptian state apparatus, lasted only
from 1882 to 1922 (despite the significant derogations of Egyptian sover-
eignty until the postwar period); the short-lived Italian conquest of Libya
was really operative as a colonial state only in the interwar years. The 130
years of French occupation of Algeria had a far more far-reaching impact
upon Algerian society than the four decades of rule in Morocco. The colo-
nial state legacy operated quite differently in zones of maximal and
intense impact, such as Zaire or Zimbabwe.
Finally, there were always limits to the reach of the colonial state, how-
ever potent its hegemony in its areas of most thorough-going domination.
Society was never without its weapons of resistance—what Mbembe
(1989, 148–9) terms its “historic capacity for indiscipline.” Although one
may doubt whether subjugated societies were entirely “uncaptured,”16
they might well, through a thousand strategies of dissimulation, evasion,
withdrawal, and passive resistance, limit the reach of the colonial
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 111

hegemon. Particularly in the latter phases, when the hold of the colonial
state was weakening, the subject might more actively contest the policy
projects of the occupant; through transforming spheres of state action into
terrains of confrontation, the character of the state itself becomes altered,
as Greenberg (1987) argues in the South African case.
How much, then, does colonial state legacy explain? A precise answer
to this query is impossible. But close scrutiny of the post-colonial state
suggests that a number of its pathologies trace to its predecessor. This arti-
cle argues that many of the practices which over time undermined both
performance and credibility find their origin in the embedded legacy of
the colonial state: its autocratic habits, its command mentality, its extrac-
tive relationship with the peasant sector. The collapse nearly everywhere
of the democratic structures precariously erected in the last days of the
colonial state, in retrospect, is a natural resurrection of the more enduring
state tradition. Single parties or military regimes were new vessels, but the
authoritarian content was unchanged. Robert Bates (1981) cogently argues
the disposition to meet the revenue imperative at peasant expense
reflected the greater political weight of the urban voice; one may equally
perceive well-ingrained habits of the past.

TERRITORIAL LEGACY OF THE COLONIAL STATE

One may begin with the most obvious of bequests: the territorial organiza-
tion of post-colonial space. With only the most minor exceptions, the
political geography of Africa remains entirely determined by the cartogra-
phy of colonial partition, sanctified by the regional international norma-
tive order articulated through the Organization of African Unity (OAU).17
Only a handful of African states have an historical identity preceding the
colonial era: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Rwanda, Burundi, Botswana, Leso-
tho, Swaziland, perhaps Madagascar. But the territorial organization of
colonial rule created in its three-quarters of a century of duration astonish-
ingly persistent state identities, which have proved tenaciously resistant
to diverse schemes of regional integration, and surprisingly immune to
breakup.
The enduring force of colonial state identities is perhaps best demon-
strated by cases which might seem to contradict it. In the innumerable
instances where boundaries divide given ethnic communities, an abiding
consciousness of difference has been created. In northern Senegal, one
finds side by side Halpulaar (Fulani) communities who are Senegalese
citizens, and refugee communities, genealogically related, but classified as
Mauritanian refugees, lacking identity documents, entitlements to land
access, and all the myriad artifacts of “citizenship.” The former are fully
credentialed citizens; the latter are insecure displaced persons, of precari-
ous status. In the rural borderlands of Niger and Nigeria, Miles (1994) in
his masterful study of adjoining Hausa communities under different sov-
ereignties provides compelling evidence of the pervasive importance of
112 CRAWFORD YOUNG

the boundary, even though villagers flow across it daily without formality.
His description is vivid:
Incongruously, provocatively, it towers on high: a fifteen-foot metal pole, spring-
ing out of the dirty brown Sahelian sand. No other human artifact is to be seen in
this vast, barren, flat savanna; only an occasional bush, a tenacious shrub, a
spindly tree break up the monotonous, infinite landscape. One stares and won-
ders how, by beast and porter, such a huge totem could have been lugged there
and erected in this desolate bush. But there it stands: a marker of an international
boundary, a monument to the splitting of a people, a symbol of colonialism, an
idol of “national sovereignty” . . .
The poles would determine the identity, fate, and life possibilities of the peo-
ple along and behind them. First under European colonial rule and then under
independent African governments the tangaraho [border marker] has come to
identify the spot where one alien power ends and the next one begins (Miles
1994, 1).
His central conclusion, after exhaustive field inquiry, is “the continuity of
colonial institutional norms in the postcolonial state,” and “the power of
boundaries to endure long after their imperial demarcators have gone”
(Miles 1994, 15).
The three instances where colonially amalgamated territorial group-
ings broke apart paradoxically confirm the thesis of persistence of the
colonial legacy. The vast expanses of French sub-Saharan colonial
domains were grouped into two administrative federations, Afrique
Occidentale Française (1895), and Afrique Equatoriale Française (1908).
Colonial politics, however, remained located primarily at the territorial
level (even though there were frequent boundary changes and even, in
the case of Upper Volta, elimination between 1932 and 1947). Postwar
nationalist politics emerged mainly at the territorial level, where effec-
tive African access to political authority was first opened through the
1956 loi-cadre. France in the decolonization process made no political
investment in vesting potential sovereignty in the federations. But the
dynamic of the independence struggle as well revolved around the far
more internalized territorial identities. Thus, though at some points in
time key leaders such as Sekou Toure, Leopold Senghor and Bartholome
Boganda were partisans of preservation of the federations, these supra-
territorial amalgams swiftly crumbled in the surge to independence (de
Benoist 1979; Young 1997a).
In the case of Rwanda and Burundi, though these spoils carved from
German East Africa after World War I were ruled by Belgium as a single
mandate territory, the historical personality of the two kingdoms was pre-
served and codified. Thus, when the hour of decolonization struck, nei-
ther wished to preserve a shared sovereignty, despite the hostility of
African members of the United Nations Trusteeship Council to their sepa-
ration. Here the decisive factor was the colonial repartition of German ter-
ritories in the World War I peace settlement; had former German East
Africa remained a single territory, one may doubt whether either Rwanda
or Burundi would be independent today.
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 113

Perhaps the most astounding evidence of the persistence of the territo-

rial frame of the colonial partition comes with the novel 1990s phenome-
non of the “collapsed state” (Zartman 1995). Even where centralized rule
dissolves in favor of warring armed bands, as in Somalia, Liberia,18 or
most recently Zaire, an imagined polity persists. In Somalia, the forlorn
and unrecognized Somaliland merely restores former British Somaliland;
elsewhere sporadic bargaining punctuated by new episodes of militia vio-
lence presumes an eventual restoration of a Somali state. In Zaire, where
state institutions since 1975 have progressively eroded to the vanishing
point, the ensuing political vacuum fails to trigger separation by regions
such as Shaba or the two Kasais, for some years in practice largely autono-
mous (Young 1997b). Rather than splintering, the hollowed-out state was
captured from its periphery by an initially tiny insurgent force in 1997.

POST-COLONIAL STATE EXPANSION AND PATRIMONIALIZATION

The baneful aspects of the colonial state legacy were intensified by a pair
of new tendencies, the reinforcement of the state claim to hegemony
driven by ideologies and illusions of development, and the patrimoniali-
zation of political practice propelled by ruler desires to reproduce their
regimes. The first of these trends multiplied the ample heft of the terminal
colonial state far beyond the revenue potential of most states, producing a
deepening fiscal crisis by the late 1970s. The second over time corrupted
the exercise of power, gnawed away at its credibility, and profoundly
deprofessionalized and delegitimated the state.
A variety of ideological currents at the time of independence encour-
aged the enlargement of the state role. The model of state socialism, at the
time, was seductive; the Soviet Union and China were believed to have
unlocked the secrets of forced-draft development. Most development
economists of all persuasions believed in a central role for the state, and
the urgency of long-term planning. Nationalist doctrine prescribed a
broad-front state role as owner-manager of the productive sector; the only
alternatives were discredited colonial capital, widely resented pariah
entrepreneurs from the Levant, the Mediterranian, or south Asia, or the
feared multi-national capital. The state as well was the necessary provider
of infrastructure, and agency of social services. These forces converged to
foster a greatly expanded state apparatus, and a sprawling parastatal eco-
nomic sector. The forward momentum of terminal colonial revenue
expansion, the sudden availability of substantial amounts of foreign aid,
then the possibility of international borrowing, permitted state expansion
without hitting a resource barrier until the late 1970s.
The formidable enlargement of the would-be developmental state
accompanied the fashioning of political monopolies, whether under
single party or military auspices, or both. Party machinery to preemp-
tively fill political space and pursue legitimacy through rituals of citizen
applause was superimposed upon the bureaucratic apparatus of
114 CRAWFORD YOUNG

territorial administration. Although the colonial state was satisfied with

subject docility, the security of the post-colonial state required the appear-
ance of citizen plebiscitary support.
In short, the trajectory of state-building in the first two post-
independence decades created the illusion of an integral state (Young
1994c, 247–63). One imagined the possibility of a comprehensive hegem-
ony, political and economic, which could bring within reach a stable and
prosperous nation-state corresponding to the dominant models of moder-
nity. The integral state, exercising unfettered domination over society,
would be free to pursue unhindered its future designs.
Rulers quickly discovered that incumbency could not be perpetuated
on the basis of formal hierarchies and abstract organization tables. Autoc-
racy required personalized networks of articulation. Office-holders and
political lieutenants needed incentives for zealous performance of duty.
These rewards could only come from the state itself, in one form or
another. Thus the exercise of authority became patrimonialized; office was
a tributary prebend.
The management of the patrimonial state, in its most sophisticated ver-
sions, was skillfully contrived. The office-holder owed not just loyalty to
the ruler, but faithful execution of his writ, in the process assuring some
degree of achievement of goals, particularly those associated with control.
In turn, the client collected the rents of authority, but was kept insecure;
office was frequently rotated, there were always covetous potential rivals,
and the official was vulnerable to charges of nepotism or embezzlement.
The personalization of state operations operated at the civil society
level as well. The apparently hard outer shell of the would-be integral
state was relatively impermeable to collective action, but open to penetra-
tion by kinship and clientelistic networks. Repeal of a regulation was
hopelessly difficult; exemption to a rule was within reach by favor or pay-
ment. In the daily operation of the patrimonial state, public choice was
privatized.

BEYOND THE COLONIAL STATE LEGACY?

As the fiscal crisis deepened in the 1980s, the nature of the state itself came
under assault. The patrimonialized, integral state frayed with structural
adjustment programs imposed as the price of debt renegotiation or finan-
cial relief. An often reluctant commitment to economic liberalization
halted the dynamic of state expansion, and began to roll it back—though
parastatal sectors shrank at a glacial pace. The pressures for transparency
inhibited patrimonial operations, already increasingly constrained by the
acute revenue shortfalls.
There followed, at the end of the 1980s, the surge of democratization
demands, originating both within Africa and externally. The vast majority
of African states were compelled to make at least gestures toward political
opening, even though some of the more wily and durable autocrats
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 115

devised strategems to deflect or even turn to their advantage electoral

processes and multi-party regimes. The long-term prognosis for democra-
tization remains uncertain, but important changes have occurred, and are
probably irreversible. The form of integral, patrimonial state erected on
the foundations of the colonial state legacy, which dominated the African
landscape until the 1980s, cannot be restored.
To what extent do these changes suggest a renewed form of African
polity emerging, shorn of those elements of the colonial state legacy
argued here as baneful? No single verdict can be rendered, for the out-
comes vary widely, from significant transformation in polities such as
Benin, Mali, Ghana or Uganda, to the unresolved impasse in such shat-
tered states as Zaire, Somalia or Liberia. In the political economy dimen-
sion there are recent signs of positive impact from the prolonged agony of
structural adjustment. In 1995, the thirty-five sub-Saharan African states
graded by the international financial institutions as having implemented
economic reforms aimed at a more market-centered structure did achieve
an aggregate 5% growth rate in 1995, which contrasts sharply from the
continental decline in per capita income of the 1980s (Report of the Ninetieth
American Assembly 1997, 4).19 There has been in a significant number of
countries slow but cumulating headway in dismantling resource-draining
parastatal sectors. Rural economies have generally benefitted from
removal of exchange controls and state marketing monopolies. African
capitalism is slow to develop, but is not entirely blocked as it was in the
days of integral state control of the economy.
Democratization, however uneven its results, has had important
effects. The sheer fact that incumbents may be displaced has a significance
of its own; in the first three decades of African independence, there was
only one clear instance of eviction of a ruler by electoral process (Mauri-
tius in 1982), while since 1989, by my count, there have been sixteen. The
day of the life president as successor to the colonial governor has gone,
thus ending the tradition of completely unaccountable power. Civil soci-
ety associations have occupied some of the space vacated by a shrinking
state: churches, women’s associations, community groups. Local social
services are frequently assured by such bodies, however incompletely. A
burgeoning non-governmental organization sector, indigenous and inter-
national, assumes increasing importance in everyday life. No longer can
regional state agents impose their will simply by command and coercion.
A civil society is reborn, capable of enforcing a degree of accountability
through its enhanced capacity of resistance; in the process the subject
reclaims citizenship. Whether by official decentralization or practical
deflation of centralized capacity, effective power percolates downward.
Thus the African state stands at a crossroads. African intellectuals call
for a democratic, developmental state, and reluctantly acknowledge the
inescapable need for a capitalist economy, although not what they take as
the antisocial version prescribed in structural adjustment programs
(Mkandawire 1997). The international financial institutions advocate a
116 CRAWFORD YOUNG

slimmed, market-friendly, facilitative, accountable, transparent state,

summed up in the apparently antiseptic label of “governance.” President
Abdou Diouf of Senegal encapsulates similar sentiments in the slogan
“moins d’état, mieux d’état”. The African Development Bank identifies
“capacity-building” as the core challenge, borrowing the vision of the pro-
ficient Asian developmental state, and recollecting the indisputable com-
petence of the terminal colonial state. Such different life-long observers of
African change as Basil Davidson (1992) and Jan Vansina (1989, 21–3)
plead the brief for a radically reconceived state which reconnects itself
with the underlying cultural heritage, thus overcoming “the curse of the
nation-state” and the “baneful dichotomy” between Western influence
and the majority tradition.
The pervasive decay of state institutions which has occurred in the last
two decades in the majority of African states silently effaces a significant
part of the colonial state legacy. In the more extreme cases, corrosion of a
state apparatus has proceeded so far that the vision of a “democratic,
developmental state” seems beyond reach. In Somalia and Liberia, institu-
tionalized “disorder” (from the received, state-centered perspective), or
crystallizing patterns of societal interactions and economic interaction
organized by armed factions, customary local leaders, and versatile mer-
cantile agents (“shadow states,” for William Reno (1995, 109–20), structure
territorial space in new ways. Whereas in the past, “juridical sovereignty”
may have sufficed, Somalia and Liberia demonstrate in different ways
that the international system alone has neither the motivation, the
resources, the skill, nor the staying power to sustain a state operating on
“negative sovereignty” alone.20 Sierra Leone and Chad teeter on the brink
of similar dissolution. The long-awaited demise of Mobutu in 1997 in
Zaire creates a new dispensation, but a democratic developmental state
appears an unlikely short-term successor to the institutional ruin of three
decades of what was once trumpeted as the “Zairian revolution”. For the
majority of states, where state decline is only relative or even marginal,
skilled statecraft and the constructively empowered civil society might
transcend the colonial state legacy to synthesize in some form the overlap-
ping visions of the preceding paragraph.
One may doubt, however, whether the mirage of the East Asian devel-
opment state supplies a transferable model. Inevitably, there is seduction
in the cold figures showing South Korean per capita earnings twenty
times that of Ghana, which only three decades ago ranked higher in the
developmental tables. The illusions fostered by such comparisons are
redolent of those engendered by the apparent Soviet or Chinese growth
rate statistics at the moment of African independence. The list of even
remotely conceivable African candidates for state-led, market-managed
rapid development is remarkably brief: South Africa (with good fortune
and exceptional leadership), Tunisia, Botswana, Mauritius. For most, a
long, painful adaptation of the post-colonial state, combining elements of
political and economic liberalization, while soberly acknowledging the
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 117

difficulties of both, offers the best, if modest, hope. Afropessimism

emerged from a recognition of how lethal was the combination of the colo-
nial state legacy, the integral state ambition, and the prebendalized man-
agement of public resources. Transcending this debilitating mood requires
a reborn state—not modelled on the apocalyptic phrasing of the opening
Cabral citation—but prudently constructed and guided by a vision
recognizing limitations as well as possibilities.

Notes
1. Quoted in “The State in Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, 5 (Janu-
ary–April 1976), 1.
2. I had the opportunity to serve on the International Advisory Board for the
Eritrean Constitutional Commission, and to participate in this symposium.
3. The analysis in this paper draws upon Young (1994b).
4. The changing roster of developmental icons would make a worthy topic in
intellectual history. In the African case, the list of fallen idols is lengthy: Nas-
ser’s Egypt, Nkrumah’s Ghana, Toure’s Guinea, Tanzania at the peak of Tan-
zaphilia, Mozambique early in the FRELIMO years, Ivory Coast and Kenya
as sometime capitalist miracles. The unending search for exemplary devel-
opment models in recent years is confined to East and Southeast Asia, with
an occasional nod toward Chile.
5. “Effective occupation” had been earlier used, especially by Britain and
France, to challenge Spanish and Portuguese claims to the entirety of the
western hemisphere by papal donation and “discovery”.
6. The reasons for Italian exceptionalism are not entirely clear. There were
some particular motivating dimensions to Italian policy: the vision of the
“fourth shore” for Libya in the Mussolini period, providing a means for the
large Italian emigration to be diverted to nationally aggrandizing purposes;
the scheme of using Eritrea and Somalia as launching pads for the construc-
tion of an Italian East African empire. By the close of World War I, 75% of So-
malia’s colonial revenue came from Italy; the Eritrean budget was balanced
only once during the colonial era.
7. One may doubt whether at a conscious level colonial administrative cadres
ever imagined themselves to be “building capitalism”, which many re-
garded as a vulgar affair. A liberal economy, of course, was assumed, and the
merchant houses had ample avenues of influence to the field administration
and to some degree in the home government. But state survival interests
took precedence over merchant concerns.
8. Mahmoud Mamdani (1996) advances the interesting, if perhaps exagger-
ated, argument that the very essence of the colonial legacy was the “decen-
tralized despotism” incarnated by the “chiefly” intermediaries. The core of
the despotic legacy, I believe, lies in the center rather than the periphery.
9. This code originated in Algeria as a comprehensive inventory of acts by
Muslim subjects which the local administrator was authorized to summarily
punish with a prison sentence or fine. Beginning in 1893, similar decrees
were extended to sub-Saharan French territories, with lists of proscribed be-
havior of sometimes astonishing length—over fifty items, in one version.
The bottom line was administrative authority to instantly punish any act of
disrespect toward a European agent of the state.
10. For a classic statement of the debate, and elegant debunking of its premises,
see Deschamps (1963, 293–306).
118 CRAWFORD YOUNG

11. By “civil society,” I refer to the domain of public-regarding action by the citi-
zen, perhaps captured by the notion of a space between the state institutions
and the household. Often the term is indexed through the array of autono-
mous associations through which public action is vehicled (Young 1994a,
51–82).
12. Mamadou Diouf, personal communication.
13. In an opening address to a colloquium which I attended on development ad-
ministration in Dakar, Senegal, December 1987.
14. The contrast between the Anglo-American and continental European
(Franco-Prussian) state traditions runs through much of the state literature,
and was forcefully argued in the seminal Nettl article (1968, 559–92), which
helped trigger a renewed theoretical focus on “state”.
15. For detail relating to the Niger Tuareg, see Fuglestad (1983).
16. Recollecting the argument of Goran Hyden (1980).
17. The exceptions are the attachment of Southern Cameroon to Cameroun in
1960, pursuant to a resurrection of an older colonial state personality of Ger-
man Kamerun, the amalgamation of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in 1964,
which remains incomplete and still problematic, and the unification of Ital-
ian and British occupied portions of Somalia, now undone by the reappear-
ance of a separate “Somaliland”, unrecognized but real.
18. Liberia is perhaps not strictly speaking a post-colonial state, although it was
created by the private American Colonization Society in 1822, and nomi-
nally sovereign since 1847. However, until the postwar period, citizenship
was restricted to Americo-Liberians, and the hinterland populace was ruled
as indigenous subjects.
19. “Africa & US National Interests,” Report of the Ninetieth American Assembly
(New York: Columbia University, 1997), 4.
20. Jackson (1990) argues that many African states enjoy only a formal, or
“negative,” sovereignty conferred by international recognition, and not an
effective monopoly of authority within their territorial realm.

References
Ajayi, J.F. Ade. 1982. Expectations of Independence. Daedalus 111:1–9.
Anderson, Lisa. 1986. The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–
1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Badie, Bertrand and Pierre Birnbaum. 1981. Sociologie de l’état. Paris: Editions du
Seuil.
Bates, Robert H. 1981. Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of
Agrarian Policies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bayart, Jean-Francois. 1989. L’Etat en Afrique: La politique du ventre. Paris: Fayard.
Boone, Catherine. 1994. Rural Interests and the Making of African States. Annual
meetings, African Studies Association, Toronto.
Chabal, Patrick, ed. 1986. Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of
Power. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Crowder, Michael. 1987. Whose Dream Was It Anyway? Twenty-Five Years of Af-
rican Independence. African Affairs 56:7–24.
Davidson, Basil. 1992. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-
State. New York: Times Books.
de Benoist, Joseph-Roger. 1979. La balkanisation de l’Afrique Occidentale Française.
Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines.
Deschamps, Hubert. 1963. Et maintenant, Lord Lugard? Africa 33:293–306.
 THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE REVISITED 119
Doornbos, Martin and John Markakis. 1994. In Crisis Management and the Politics of
Reconciliation in Somalia, eds. M.A. Mohamed Salih and L. Wohlgemut. Upp-
sala: Nordiska Africainstitutet.
Dyson, Kenneth H.F. 1980. The State Tradition in Western Europe. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Ergas, Zaki, ed. 1987. The African State in Transition. London: Macmillan.
Fatton, Robert. 1992. Predatory Rule: State and Civil Soviety in Africa. Boulder: Lynne
Rienner.
Fortes, M. and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. 1940. African Political Systems. London:
Oxford University Press.
Fuglestad, Finn. 1983. A History of Niger 1850–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1983.
Greenberg, Stanley B. 1987. Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resis-
tance in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hargreaves, John D. 1979. The End of Colonial Rule in West Africa. London: Macmil-
lan, 1979.
Hess, Robert L. 1966. Italian Colonialism in Somalia. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hyden, Goran. 1980. Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncap-
tured Peasantry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jackson, Robert. 1990. Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kamarck, Andrew. 1982. The Resources of Tropical Africa. Daedalus 111:149–162.
Longrigg, Stephen H. 1945. A Short History of Eritrea. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mamdani, Mahmoud. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy
of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 1989. Afriques indociles: Christianisme, pouvoir et état en société
postcoloniale. Paris: Karthala.
Miles, William F.S. 1994. Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria
and Niger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Mkandawire, Thandika. 1995. Beyond Crisis: Towards Democratic Developmental
States in Africa. Annual meetings, Council for the Development of Social Sci-
ence Research in Africa, Dakar.
Morrison, John Stephen. 1987. Developmental Optimism and State Failure in Af-
rica: How to Understand Botswana’s Relative Success. Ph.D. diss., University
of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nettl, J.P. 1968. The State as Conceptual Variable. World Politics 20:559–592.
Phillips, Anne. 1989. The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Reno, William. 1995a. Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
_____. 1995b. Reinvention of an African Patrimonial State: Charles Taylor’s Libe-
ria. Third World Quarterly 16, 1:109–120.
Report of the Ninetieth American Assembly. 1997. New York: Columbia University.
Rothchild, Donald and Naomi Chazan, eds. 1988. The Precarious Balance: State and
Society in Africa. Boulder: Westview Press.
Searing, James F. 1985. Acommodation and Resistance: Chiefs, Muslim Leaders,
and Politicians in Colonial Senegal, 1890–1934. Ph.D. diss., Princeton
University.
Vansina, Jan. 1989. A Past for the Future? Dalhouse Review 68:21–23.
Young, Crawford. 1994a. In Search of Civil Society. In Civil Society and the State in
Africa, eds. John W. Harbeson, Donald Rothchild, and Naomi Chazan. Boulder:
Lynne Rienner.
120 CRAWFORD YOUNG
_____. 1994b. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
_____. 1994c. Zaire: The Shattered Illusion of the Integral State. Journal of Modern
African Studies 32:247–263.
_____. 1997a. The Balkanization of AOF in Comparative Perspective. Le centenaire
de la création de l’AOF eds. Saliou Mbaye and Charles Becker. Dakar: ORSTOM.
_____. 1997b. Zaire: Anatomy of a Failed State. In History of Central Africa
1960–1995, eds. David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin. London: Longman.
Zartman, I. William, ed. 1995. Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of
Legitimate Authority. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.