The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
appears, on the one hand, in the form of ‘huge world-wide machines’, like multinational organisations or religious formations, such as Christianity and Islam, and, on the other, ‘local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in relation to the organs of State power’. These are all forces exterior to the state in the sense of being vested with potentialities of a particular kind of power, denoted ‘war machines’. This has nothing to with armies or other institutionalized entities of violence; such forces are integral to the ‘state apparatus of capture’ (1991: 437). Rather, it is ‘a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a war machine…[I]t exists in a commercial circuit as in a religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State’ (1991: 360). In the present case we shall see, for example, how Christianity, on the one hand, in the form of institutionalized missionary churches was captured into the power structures of the merafe, while, on the other hand, gave birth to Christian ‘syncretistic’ movements beyond the merafe with properties typical of war machines: assemblages of power of a rhizome type that are antihierarchical, deterritorializing and operating in highly unpredictable ways from the point of view of the state. These properties posit these assemblages against the state apparatus of capture that is, conversely, characterized by hierarchizing, institutionalizing and territorializing features. Further, while states are stable, stationary and in transformation, war machines operate laterally in ‘nomadic’ ways – in flight – and change by metamorphoses, to appear in ever-new disguises. War machines are all forms that are exterior to the state with the potentiality of attacking the state. In the present case, as suggested, the merafe are always only incompletely appropriated by the colonial – and I now add postcolonial – state, with considerable potentialities of forces challenging the state.
As suggested above, in this conception the ‘sovereignty’ of the state is a relative matter, being determined by the capacity of the ‘apparatus of capture’ to appropriate what escapes states or stands against it. In such terms, we shall see that the state forms in focus here – from precolonial to postcolonial times – can be characterized as quite successful. It seems required to expand the conceptual scheme in order to recognize explicitly that the exterior also contains entities other than those that are antagonistic or evasive in relation to the state, yet with potentials of state empowerment. For example, the expansion of Western settlers into the nineteenth-century interior of South Africa had clearly rhizomic qualities from the point of view of the precolonial Tswana states, located on the edge of the Kalahari. Although there were some ambiguities surrounding the British establishment of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, on the whole the British overlordship warded off the war-machine potentialities of the surrounding settler states as well as strengthened the apparatus of capture vested in Tswana merafe. In this context the British Empire – with all its war-machine potentials across the globe – manifested itself to Tswana ruling groups as an empowering force. This was, though, entirely different from the point of view of communities involuntarily subjected to the dominant Tswana merafe.
This brings me back to the perspective suggested at the beginning of this chapter: considering state formations as conditioned by conjuncture between Eurocentric ideas and institutions, indigenous ideas, practices and institutions of power and global markets for cattle and diamonds. For example, as we shall see, such a ‘huge world-wide machine’ – in the language of Deleuze and Guattari – as the diamond company of de Beers in relation to the state in Botswana has been crucial for empowering the state by supplying its treasury with tremendous revenues. However, to explain why diamonds helped to strengthen the state and stabilized its government requires comprehension of other important conditions that coincided with the discovery of diamonds. Another exteriority – that of some Western states – was highly instrumental in establishing a modern state in Botswana by bringing the whole complex of modern statecraft into the country during the process of decolonisation. That they, in contrast to many other places, succeeded quite well is comprehensible only in view of the ways in which privileged and powerful people across the country merged in support of a strong, centralized state.
The major transformations with which I am concerned in this volume – from pre-to postcolonial times, also require a conception of exercise of leadership. A conjugation of conditions for major transformations does not help much if there is no leadership. This is, as we shall see, apparent in the development of the strength and scale of Tswana merafe in the beginning of the nineteenth century as it developed during the years following Botswana's independence. Intriguingly, the agency of transformations can, in important respects, be personalized by, probably, the two most celebrated icons of Tswana leadership, Kgosi Khama III – the Great – (r. 1872/1875-1923) and his grandson, Seretse Khama, the founding president of Botswana. Their transformative agency combined, in important respects, the two modes of domination that Gramsci (1991: 12) assigns to ‘civil society’ (hegemony) and ‘political society’ or ‘the State’ (‘direct domination through juridical or political apparatuses’). In such ‘tribal’ kingdoms as that of the Tswana, there is, as already suggested, no institutionalized divide between civil and political society. In fact, it is not clear either that Gramsci made any strict separation of the two as he asserted that ‘“State” should be understood as not only the apparatus of government, but also the “private” apparatus of “hegemony” or civil society’ (1991: 261).
In scholarly literature the notion of ‘hegemonic domination’ is not unambiguous.13 For the present analytical purpose I have found it useful to define it with reference to Eagleton's (1991: 115–16) rendering: ‘as a whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from those it subjugates. To win hegemony . is to establish moral, political and intellectual leadership in social life by diffusing one's own “world view” throughout the fabric of society as a whole’. Following this notion, hegemony is to be conceived as always in the making and a matter of degree, always competing with other orientations.
In all historical contexts of the present case, we shall see that the ‘practical strategy’ of the state apparatus of capture to ‘win hegemony’ is characterized by an often gradualist, nonconfrontational approach. This is an approach to reach consent about submission in the spirit of peace and harmony, which is a virtue of great symbolic significance amongst communities far beyond the dominant Tswana. The approach involves extensive exercise of ‘consultation’, which, especially in postcolonial times with radical changes, reflects the above-mentioned Hegelian concern about alienation in relation to issues of legitimacy. In this volume we shall see how this presents challenges of ‘winning hegemony’ in distinctly different historical contexts, ranging from Tswana dikgosi's acceptance of missionaries’ requests for transforming or abandoning major rituals and other important practices, to the radical institutional change of authority by the establishment of the highly Western-fashioned, modern state.
The cultural construction of hegemony differs, however, in some important respects between, on the one hand, that of the dominant Tswana merafe in precolonial and colonial times, and, on the other, that of the postcolonial, modern state. In the former cases, leadership was constructed on the basis of a notion of the Tswana rulers and their ruling communities as anchored in a cosmological order. They were thereby indisputably authorized to govern all the subjects within their domain; their custodianship of the social order was beyond question. The hegemony of the postcolonial state leadership is certainly Tswana-biased as it has been to a great extent composed by Tswana, as indicated by the name of the postcolonial state and the selection of Setswana as the national language. But it would, of course, have been counterproductive for a political leadership in an electoral democracy to establish hegemony on the basis of a strongly pronounced Tswana orientation when a substantial section of the population do not identify themselves with the dominant Tswana but, on the con-trary, often enough experience their discriminatory, repressive practices in a multitude of informal encounters. I shall argue that the establishment of the modern state reduced notably – but not eliminated – the problem of Tswana identification as the postcolonial state leadership was able to adopt extensively the virtues of ‘development’ in the Western sense and create what I shall call a hegemonic discourse of development which, in important respects, is ethnically