Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey Herbst is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of Politics of Reform in Ghana 1982-1991 and State Politics in Zimbabwe.

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"An original and intriguing book, which I read with the greatest interest. Herbst's argument is provocative and lucidly presented. This book will be read and debated not only by Africanists but also by others in the political science community. It is the most important and successful contribution to the literature on African politics since Jackson and Rosberg'sPersonal Rule in Black Africa."--Robert H. Bates, Harvard University, author ofOpen-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade

"Herbst's arguments will excite controversy among students of African history and politics, who have built up an extensive story about European transformations of African politics. His analysis raises doubts about how deeply those transformations went; rather, he maintains that durable conditions of topography and social structure have long constrained African state formation. Herbst offers an integrated account of state formation, transformation, and deformation in sub-Saharan Africa."--Charles Tilly, Columbia University, author of Durable Inquality

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STATES AND POWER IN AFRICA

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction..............................................................3PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE OF STATE-BUILDING IN AFRICA.......................9One The Challenge of State-Building in Africa.............................11PART TWO: THE CONSTRUCTION OF STATES IN AFRICA............................33Two Power and Space in Precolonial Africa.................................35Three The Europeans and the African Problem...............................58Four The Political Kingdom in Independent Africa..........................97PART THREE: NATIONAL DESIGN AND DOMESTIC POLITICS.........................137Five National Design and the Broadcasting of Power........................139Six Chiefs, States, and the Land..........................................173PART FOUR: BOUNDARIES AND POWER...........................................199Seven The Coin of the African Realm.......................................201Eight The Politics of Migration and Citizenship...........................227PART FIVE: CONCLUSION.....................................................249Nine The Past and the Future of State Power in Africa.....................251Index.....................................................................273

Chapter One

The history of every continent is written clearly in its geographical features, but of no continent is this more true than of Africa. Lord Hailey, An African Survey

The fundamental problem facing state-builders in Africa—be they precolonial kings, colonial governors, or presidents in the independent era—has been to project authority over inhospitable territories that contain relatively low densities of people. Sub-Saharan Africa, with roughly 18 percent of the world's surface area, has always been sparsely settled. Africa had only 6 to 11 percent of the world's population in 1750, 5 to 7 percent in 1900, and only 11 percent in 1997.1 Relatively low population densities in Africa have automatically meant that it always has been more expensive for states to exert control over a given number of people compared to Europe and other densely settled areas. As John Iliffe wrote, "In the West African savannah, underpopulation was the chief obstacle to state formation."

In only a few places in Africa, including the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian highlands, are there ecologies that have supported relatively high densities of people. Not surprisingly, these areas, with the longest traditions of relatively centralized state structures, have been periodically able to exercise direct control over their peripheries. However, ecological conditions throughout most of the continent do not allow high densities of people to be easily supported. More than 50 percent of Africa has inadequate rainfall; indeed, contrary to the popular imagination, only 8 percent of the continent has a tropical climate. Approximately one-third of the world's arid land is in Africa.

In Africa, two other factors have aggravated the cost of extending power in the face of low population densities. First, African countries have quite varied environmental conditions. Ecological differences across provinces of a country in West Africa, which can be coastal, forest, savannah, or near-desert, are greater than in any European country. Therefore, the models of control an African state must develop for these highly differentiated zones are more varied, and thus more costly, than what a government in Europe or Asia must implement in order to rule over their more homogenous rural areas. Second, it is expensive to project power over distance in Africa because of the combination of a peculiar set of geographical features. As Ralph Austen notes,

The geography of Africa also presents serious barriers to long-distance transport. Water travel is limited by the small amount of indented shoreline relative to the size of the interior surface of the continent, as well as the disrupted navigability of most rivers, due to rapids and seasonal shallows. The wheel was introduced into northern Africa for overland travel during ancient times but then abandoned because the terrain and distances to be covered could not feasibly be provided with the necessary roads.

The daunting nature of Africa's geography is one of the reasons the region was only colonized in the late 1800s despite its proximity to Europe. The Europeans found it easier to colonize Latin America hundreds of years before despite the much greater distances involved.

Why the particular pattern of population density occurred, given Africa's geography, is not within my competence to explain. Rather, this book examines how successive sets of leaders in Africa responded to a political geography they were forced to take as a given. This is not an argument for the kind of geographical determinism that has captivated scholars from Ibn Khaldûn to Montesquieu to Jeffrey Sachs. A variety of paths were open to African leaders as they confronted their environments. However, the challenges posed by political geography, especially low population densities, could not be ignored by any leader. Such an approach offers a tremendous methodological advantage: by holding the physical environment "constant," I can focus on the precise political calculations of different African leaders over time as they sought to design their states.

In this book, I argue that leaders confront three sets of issues when building their states: the cost of expanding the domestic power infrastructure; the nature of national boundaries; and the design of state systems. Understanding the decisions made regarding each is critical, and there are profound trade-offs inherent to different approaches. Africa's political geography helped structure the responses that leaders adopted to each set of issues just as European decisions were influenced by the structural features of that region. The following two sections provide a comparison of Europe and Africa's political geographies. I then develop the analytic tools that are central to this study.

The European Experience of State Consolidation

The African experience of politics amid large supplies of land and low population densities while confronting an inhospitable physical setting is in dramatic contrast to the European experience of state-building. In Europe, through the fourteenth century, population densities were not high enough to put immediate pressure on land and compel territorial competition. As Mattingly notes, "In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the continental space of Western Europe still impeded any degree of political organization efficient enough to create a system of continuous diplomatic pressures."

However, starting in the fifteenth century in Italy and later elsewhere, population densities increased. As a result, European nations began to compete for territory, a tendency that only makes sense if population densities are relatively high and vacant land is limited or nonexistent, so that the value of conquering land is higher than the price to be paid in wealth and men. In turn, there was significant pressure to strengthen states in order to fight wars. Charles Tilly notes that one of the central reasons for the creation of relatively centralized state apparatuses in Europe was the "continuous aggressive...