12 - Ethnicity, Conflict & the State in Contemporary West Africa

Summary

Introduction

West Africa came of age politically in 1960. Of the seventeen countries that gained their independence and were admitted to the United Nations in that watershed year, sixteen were African, around half of them from the West African sub-region. The struggle for black African liberation had been spearheaded by Kwame Nkrumah roughly a decade earlier and had culminated in Ghana's attainment of independence in 1957. This was followed a year later by the repudiation of France's Fifth Republic Constitution by Sékou Touré's Guinea, with strong backing from Nkrumah, his ideological soul-mate. Thus, by 1960, the nationalist leaders of ten of the sixteen African countries had succeeded in wresting political control from their European rulers. For the most part, West African leaders achieved this successful recovery of Africa's lost independence by mobilizing masses of people into peaceful but formidable nationalist coalitions that cut cross ethnic, religious, regional and class cleavages. In short, the new political kingdom or state was an entity superimposed on a pluralistic society.

As we shall see, the articulation of the post-colonial state with social pluralism was later to become a vexing political issue. But in the heady euphoria of the 1960s, issues of ethnic pluralism and ways to achieve genuinely balanced ethnic representation and protection of minority rights were subordinated; the nationalist state project of nation-building, the attempt to forge national unity among disparate socio-cultural groupings at different levels of economic and political development, was considered imperative. At one level, the moment appeared auspicious. The nationalist leaders had already demonstrated their political prowess and efficacy by orchestrating the formal departure of the colonialists. Many of them were also regarded as very charismatic. This combination of charisma and efficacious leadership generated widespread popular support and legitimacy for the new leaders. However, legitimacy was highly contextualized in the sense that the mobilized masses developed an instrumentalist conception of political independence. They viewed it as a prelude to material progress and social welfare. In short, legitimacy was based on a fundamental African social compact in which the new political elites promised, at least implicitly, to produce less poverty and less inequality, in exchange for popular support.