State and Society

Abstract

At independence leaders of the nationalist movements in Africa, or of the victorious political parties in the elections of the decolonisation period, came to power and became ministers, MPs and, in some cases, regional and district commissioners. However, they had mostly not been adequately trained by the colonial government and had limited experience of operating a governmental system on a national scale. Initially, the main problems that confronted them were not those ‘of economic development primarily, but much more urgently, those of legitimacy’.¹ They had to establish their right to rule culturally diverse societies which were rent by social cleavage and were characterised, as a result of the differential impact of colonialism and capitalism, by varying levels of political and economic development. Faced with a fragile national unity, many African leaders privately echoed the statement made by Jawaharlal Nehru in post-independence India: ‘We were simply horrified to see how thin was the ice upon which we were skating.’² The communal challenge took various forms, including disaffection on the part of ethnic minorities, regional pressure for a federal form of government or even for secession, and — as with the Somalis in the Horn of Africa — movements for self-determination by people divided by artificial and colonial-imposed boundaries.