The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
to human rights principles, adhere to a Christian moral code, adopt Western technology and managerial practices, practise free trade and undergo a radical political modernisation. It has often been claimed that a well-functioning modern state would naturally follow the introduction of a Western-style democratic government, operating in terms of Weberian bureaucratic virtues of universalism and separation of public and private interests. Thus, Africa must get rid of what is conceived as its heritage of clientelism and all the ‘irrational’ ideas and practices arising from exercise of occult power. As other scholars have pointed out, such an outsider's view of African political life reflects a broader ‘tendency in Western social scientific and popular writings on Africa to deal in stereotypes, to reduce its politics to typifying adjectives – communalist, patriarchal, paternalist’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997b: 129). Consequently, those imbued with a Western outlook often draw the conclusion that the ideal of a sustainable, autonomous nation-state is only possible following emancipation from the ostensibly destructive influence of premodern political formations.
The case of Botswana challenges such views and demonstrates that indigenous political and social conditions do not necessarily generate unstable strongman structures with fluctuating clientelistic networks that operate violently and destructively in relation to efforts of developing a stable modern state. On the contrary, I shall argue that however ‘modern’ the postcolonial state in Botswana appears in its manifestation of vast modern Western-style practices and institutions of government, the development of its force is very attributable to extensive incorporation of symbolism and institutions of authority anchored in indigenous cosmology. These are cosmologically anchored structures highly integral to people's lives and have, as we shall see, been reproduced through their own transformations and adaptation to post-colonial circumstances. One important dimension to be examined is the strong popular perception of hierarchies of authority as essential to peace and order (kagiso) – existentially critical to good health, prosperity and welfare.
Concentrating especially upon the formative and consolidating period of the post-colonial state (1966–1990) in this volume, I want to explain how the agents of the state have, quite successfully, exploited this symbolic wealth in the effort to develop an imaginary of the state in accordance with people's idealising perception of authority as ‘the one from whom good things come.’ The considerable degree of legitimacy the ruling group seems to have enjoyed during this critical period of time – combined with the coherence of the dominant elites – has been imperative for capturing indigenous institutions of social control into the structures of the modern state. The indigenous symbolism, practices and institutions of authority have, moreover, been conducive to bringing people into the process of state formation by working on their subjectivities by virtue of state agents' interventions in the population, gently and with very limited use of overt coercive force. In order to come to terms with the distinctive ways in which indigenous symbolic and socio-political conditions have been important for the rise of a strong postcolonial state in Botswana, I shall trace their genealogies in precolonial and colonial state formations by an examination of their historical development.
All that said about processes and structures significant for the formation and consolidation of the modern state in Botswana, let me stress that I do not view ‘the social’ as solely a passive, contextual matter in which the state has grounded itself: I am centrally concerned with people's experience of the state through the discursive and material realities which the state has given raise to (cf. Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005: 15) and how people have increasingly reacted to repercussions of post-colonial state formation that have affected their lives adversely. In order to come to terms with such repercussions I am moving beyond the formative and consolidating decades of the postcolonial state because these repercussions are most evident after 1990.
In this pursuit I shall address two major trends. On the one hand, vast communities of ethnic minorities that have been under the domination of the major Tswana merafe since precolonial times, have voiced their pro-test in public against discrimination and demanded recognition – along with dominant Tswana – within the context of the nation-state. In view of the magnitude of these communities I shall discuss their attack on the state leadership and question the conditions for ‘minority’ mobilization against the perceived dominant Tswana. On the other hand, escalating discrepancies of income and wealth have progressively given rise to social tensions and adversely affected the legitimacy of political leaders. Occasionally this development has manifested itself in popular protests entailing violent confrontations with state armed forces. I am addressing these trends in view of their apparently growing potentialities of challenging seriously the post-colonial state.
Let me then proceed to develop the points suggested so far in the pursuit of spelling out the major issues of the following chapters and how I want to address them.
Issues of Patrimonialism, Globalisation
and Modern Nation-State Building in Africa
My concern with the relationship between modern state formation in Africa and indigenous ideas, practices and structures of power, links up with issues that have attracted considerable scholarly interest for a long time. In important respects this trend of research has been much inspired by Bayart's (1993) seminal study The State in Africa. The book's subtitle, The Politics of the Belly, refers to a celebrated virtue of political leadership found in many societies in Africa. Bayart (1993: 242–43) speaks of this virtue as an ‘African way of politics’ by which a ‘man of power who is able to amass and redistribute wealth becomes a “man of honour”…material prosperity is one of the chief political virtues rather than being an object of disapproval…[W]ealth is a potential sign of being at one with the forces of cosmos’. This is rendered as patently a ‘patrimonial’ kind of political system where the accumulation of wealth is conceived by subjects as essential for their protection, support and welfare. Bayart (1993: 261) asserts its pervasive significance within the postcolonial context where the state hence ‘functions as a rhizome of personal networks and assures the centralisation of power through agencies of family, alliance and friendship’, militating strongly against a development from a ‘weak’ to an ‘integral state’. The logic of ‘the politics of the belly’ under the conditions of the postcolonial state implies ‘the unbridled predatoriness and violence of political entrepreneurs’ (1993: 243). The heated competition for power generates notoriously political fragmentation that involves a dangerous battle – of life and death (1993: 238) – making ‘the State in Africa’ fragile, weak and failing.
Similarly, Chabal and Daloz (1999: 162) claim that in African postcolonial states there is ‘an inbuilt bias in favour of greater disorder and against the formation of Western-style legal, administrative and institutional foundations required for development’. In such unstable states, ‘political acts are played out on the market place of the various patrimonial networks concerned’ (1999: 157, emphasis added) generating a notoriously destabilising force. They argue that ‘in the absence of any other viable means needed to sustain neo-patrimonialism, there is inevitably a tendency to link politics to realms of increased disorder, be it war or crime’ (1998: 162, emphasis added). Berman (1998: 305), equally concerned with the destructive impacts of ‘patrimonialism’, argues that ‘[p]atron-client networks remain the fundamental state-society linkage in circumstances of social crisis and uncertainty and have extended to the very center of the state’. The ill fate of African postcolonial states has in other words often been conceived in a Weberian, central-government-focused conception of ‘patrimonialism’, and, by extension, ‘neo-patrimonialism’6 or even ‘pathological patrimonialism.’7 (I shall question the utility of the notion of ‘patrimonialism’ at the end of the following section.)
Many of Africa's political disasters have thus been attributed to a contradiction between, on the one hand, ideals of the autonomous state premised on Western, bureaucratic rationality and, on the other, all the African realities of particularism and clientelism. It is often assumed that such realities give rise to monstrous leaderships and terrorist movements and stir up tribalism. The perception of such threats amongst postcolonial political leaders committed to projects of nation-state building are clearly reflected in how they in many instances tried to get rid of or reduce substantially the significance of indigenous authorities during the first era of independence. President Samora