Introduction

Abstract

This book contains essays scattered over a hundred years of state formation and decline in sub-Saharan Africa. It cannot, of course, claim to present a comprehensive account of that long period, the essays clustering as they do at three particular significant points in the process. But the long period imposes an overall irony. At its beginning African states were indicted before the bar of ‘world opinion’, first by humanitarians and missionaries and then by conquerors and colonisers. Half-way through the process, colonial states were indicted before the bar of an enlarged world opinion by nationalists and humanitarians and, increasingly, by missionaries. Today it is African states once again who find themselves on trial for rapacity and authoritarianism. The indictments are brought by humanitarians, church leaders, and the sort of young Africans who would once have been nationalists and are now democrats. They are also brought by the old colonial powers in a return of Europe to Africa which Daniel Bach documents in his contribution to this book. Whatever else this irony tells us, it abundantly reveals that the problem of legitimacy has been central to the state in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa.