"the black man's burden," basil davidson

take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.

a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).

thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).

he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)

again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.

if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.

there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.

nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."

a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."

(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.

(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."

(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."

(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."

(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."

(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."

(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."

(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."

(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."

(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."


(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"

(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."

(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged

(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession

(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.

(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)

(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.

(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."

(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."

(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.

(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."

(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.

(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.

(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]

(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."

(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations

(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.

(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs

(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)

(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."

(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."

(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"

(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."

(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."

(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"

(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."

(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."

(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."

(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service

(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern

(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."

(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]

(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."

(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost

(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."

(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."

(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade

(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.

(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."

(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."

(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)

(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.

(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."

(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model

(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'

(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"

(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"

(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.

(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."