International African Institute

Histoire de la France coloniale I, Des Origines à 1914 by Jean Mayer; Jean Tarrade; Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer; Jacques Thobie; Histoire de la France coloniale II, 1914-90 by Jacques Thobie;Gilbert Meynier; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch; Charles-Robert Ageron; La France etl'Afrique: vade-mecum pour un nouveau voyage by Serge MichailofReview by: David StyanAfrica: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 64, No. 4 (1994), pp. 574-576Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1161378 .

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BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS

What the essays in this volume show compellingly in their varied perspectives is that the question of legitimacy has been so salient in Africa for the last hundred years pre- cisely because political accountability has been problematic. Indeed, the issue of political legitimacy is never so critical as when there is widespread questioning in society at large of the reality of political accountability. It is in times of rapid change, of crisis or revolution that questions of legitimacy are felt most acutely. Africa since the nineteenth century has been in a state of almost continuous crisis, enduring first colonial conquest, then the 'blessings' of empire, eventually the traumas of decolonisation and, finally, the gradual but violent deliquescence of the post-colonial political order.

As I show in by book Power in Africa (1992), the issue of political accountability is at the heart of the question of the legitimacy of power. The problem for Africa is that, ever since the European powers set about colonising the continent, there has been a consistent failure in political accountability. Colonial conquest undermined but did not destroy pre-colonial forms of political accountability. Never able to transcend its coercive origins, the colonial state could never lay the political foundations which might have ensured the legitimacy of its political order.

In turn, the nationalist revolution challenged the legitimacy of the colonial state but failed to devise means of political accountability which could have ensured the legiti- macy of the post-colonial order. As the nationalist political 'capital' dissipated, the post-colonial state sought in vain to assert 'absolute' hegemony, and in the process further undermined the legitimacy of the political order. The currently dire political predicament of Africa is nothing but the outcome of the almost complete failure of political accountability, the almost total absence of legitimacy, not just of the state but of politics itself.

The editors of Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-century Africa must be com- mended not simply for having gathered together an impressive collection of authors but also for having focused the theme of the volume so firmly on the key question of legitimacy. One of the many merits of this book is to show clearly that what has hap- pened in Africa in the last hundred years is neither mysterious nor sui generis. In Africa, as elsewhere, where political accountability is weak or fails, legitimacy is questioned. The lesson of the twentieth century for Africa is that Africans have been poorly served by those who chanced to rule over them. Much harm has been done. The question is whether the worst is now over or whether Africans will have to endure further the evils of the failures of political accountability. How many more Rwandas?

PATRICK CHABAL

King's College, London

JEAN MAYER, JEAN TARRADE, ANNIE REY-GOLDZEIGUER and JACQUES THOBIE, Histoire de la France coloniale I, Des Origines a 1914. Paris: Armand Colin, 1991, 824 pp., ?36-95, ISBN 2 200 37218 3 paperback.

JACQUES THOBIE, GILBERT MEYNIER, CATHERINE COQUERY-VIDROVITCH and CHARLES- ROBERT AGERON, Histoire de la France coloniale II, 1914-90. Paris: Armand Colin, 1990, 640 pp., ?32-95, ISBN 2 200 37217 5 paperback.

SERGE MICHAILOF (ed.), La France et l'Afrique. vade-mecum pour un nouveau voyage. Paris: Karthala, 1993, 000 pp., 00-00 francs, ISBN 2 86537 403 3.

Why, for over half a millennium, has France been incessantly attracted to overseas adventures? How did the obsession of a tiny French elite with a colonial vocation become so inextricably woven into the fabric of successive French republics? Such

What the essays in this volume show compellingly in their varied perspectives is that the question of legitimacy has been so salient in Africa for the last hundred years pre- cisely because political accountability has been problematic. Indeed, the issue of political legitimacy is never so critical as when there is widespread questioning in society at large of the reality of political accountability. It is in times of rapid change, of crisis or revolution that questions of legitimacy are felt most acutely. Africa since the nineteenth century has been in a state of almost continuous crisis, enduring first colonial conquest, then the 'blessings' of empire, eventually the traumas of decolonisation and, finally, the gradual but violent deliquescence of the post-colonial political order.

As I show in by book Power in Africa (1992), the issue of political accountability is at the heart of the question of the legitimacy of power. The problem for Africa is that, ever since the European powers set about colonising the continent, there has been a consistent failure in political accountability. Colonial conquest undermined but did not destroy pre-colonial forms of political accountability. Never able to transcend its coercive origins, the colonial state could never lay the political foundations which might have ensured the legitimacy of its political order.

In turn, the nationalist revolution challenged the legitimacy of the colonial state but failed to devise means of political accountability which could have ensured the legiti- macy of the post-colonial order. As the nationalist political 'capital' dissipated, the post-colonial state sought in vain to assert 'absolute' hegemony, and in the process further undermined the legitimacy of the political order. The currently dire political predicament of Africa is nothing but the outcome of the almost complete failure of political accountability, the almost total absence of legitimacy, not just of the state but of politics itself.

The editors of Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-century Africa must be com- mended not simply for having gathered together an impressive collection of authors but also for having focused the theme of the volume so firmly on the key question of legitimacy. One of the many merits of this book is to show clearly that what has hap- pened in Africa in the last hundred years is neither mysterious nor sui generis. In Africa, as elsewhere, where political accountability is weak or fails, legitimacy is questioned. The lesson of the twentieth century for Africa is that Africans have been poorly served by those who chanced to rule over them. Much harm has been done. The question is whether the worst is now over or whether Africans will have to endure further the evils of the failures of political accountability. How many more Rwandas?

PATRICK CHABAL

King's College, London

JEAN MAYER, JEAN TARRADE, ANNIE REY-GOLDZEIGUER and JACQUES THOBIE, Histoire de la France coloniale I, Des Origines a 1914. Paris: Armand Colin, 1991, 824 pp., ?36-95, ISBN 2 200 37218 3 paperback.

JACQUES THOBIE, GILBERT MEYNIER, CATHERINE COQUERY-VIDROVITCH and CHARLES- ROBERT AGERON, Histoire de la France coloniale II, 1914-90. Paris: Armand Colin, 1990, 640 pp., ?32-95, ISBN 2 200 37217 5 paperback.

SERGE MICHAILOF (ed.), La France et l'Afrique. vade-mecum pour un nouveau voyage. Paris: Karthala, 1993, 000 pp., 00-00 francs, ISBN 2 86537 403 3.

Why, for over half a millennium, has France been incessantly attracted to overseas adventures? How did the obsession of a tiny French elite with a colonial vocation become so inextricably woven into the fabric of successive French republics? Such

574 574

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BOOK REVIEWS

are the daunting questions that Charles-Robert Ageron and his co-authors attempt to tackle in this mammoth 1,500 page two-volume study. The authors attempt not sim- ply to study French overseas exploits but to chronicle the impact that overseas expan- sion and possessions had upon domestic French politics, with the aim of filling a gap in French historiography. Yet frequently the dividing line between the history of French attitudes to the colonies and the history of the colonies themselves is blurred. Volume 1 in particular mostly reads as a straightforward history of colonial conquest spanning the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.

Given its size, it is inevitable that the work will be read essentially as a reference book. The layout suggests a curious hybrid of textbook and encyclopaedia, enhanced by extensive sub-headings, with over fifty pages indexing both individual and geographical names, in addition to a small bibliography in the second volume. This unusual format permits the reader to locate the required slices of information quickly. For example, it is easy to trace attitudes to slavery, Franco-Algerian relations, specific countries or commercial lobbies across the centuries in both volumes.

As a pedagogic tool the volumes thus have much to be recommended, particularly for those teaching colonial or French history. Yet the format of discrete, sixteen-page morsels on such a wide range of subjects is liable to leave the academic reader hungry for more substantial and sustained arguments. The need to provide a chronological narrative negates more discursive and illuminating analysis of the evolution of French attitudes to colonialism and the formation of metropolitan lobbies, opinion and policy.

Given that in 1914 91 per cent of the French empire's land mass was in Africa and 26 million Africans were French subjects, 60 per cent of the total, it is unsurprising that over half the vast text is taken up with Africa. The authors' aim of charting the history of evolving attitudes to overseas conquests and possessions is most successfully achieved in the chapters on the first half of the twentieth century, precisely when those attitudes were most acutely contested. Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch's detailed analysis of the rise of nationalism in the wake of the triumphalist 1931 Paris colonial exhibition and Ageron's chapters on shifting public and political opinion immediately after 1945 are among the book's strongest. Economic analysis is curiously low-key, trade and production occupying barely fifty pages spread across four chapters, much of it drawn from Jacques Marseille's Empire colonial et capitalisme franfais (1984) and synthesising rather than extending existing debates.

Despite its subtitle, 1914-90, the second volume takes the historical narrative only as far as the demise of the Fourth Republic. Ageron's chapters on the political cross- currents of decolonisation are valuable reading for anyone concerned with evolution of French post-war foreign policy and complement his more recent L'Afrique noire francaise: I'heure des independences (1992). However, there is little new beyond De Gaulle's ill-fated notion of communaute. The last forty years are dealt with cursorily in fifty pages and the reader is not provided with sufficient elements to understand the degree to which French public and political attitudes in the Fifth Republic have been shaped by the erosion and dismantling of the empire.

This is a pity, as it prevents an understanding of the essential continuity of French African relations under the Fourth and Fifth Republics, which are at the heart of Michailof's volume on current French-African relations, La France et l'Afrique: vade-mecum pour un nouveau voyage. Michailof's contributors address the contradic- tions and complications of the unwieldy historical baggage carried by France with its former African colonies as they limp towards the end of the twentieth century. Many of the problems highlighted-most particularly the rivalry between French presiden- tial and multiple ministerial prerogatives over Africa-are rooted in the debates of the 1940s and '50s, narrated by Ageron. The constant tussles over policy between

575

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BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS

rival Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Co-operation, Finance, Defence-and, more recently, Humanitarian Affairs-remain essential to understanding the political sur- vival of Messrs Bongo, Eyadema, Aptidon et al. as they manipulated their way around rival patrons.

Michailofs book is significant on two counts. Firstly as part of a long overdue effort by a loose network of academics and politicians to provoke new reflections on French African policy. Hitherto the most notable milestone in the campaign was La France face au Sud, by Jacques Adda and Marie-Claude Smouts (1989) the debate around this coinciding with Mitterand's La Baule declaration, ostensibly tying French patronage to political reform. Secondly the timing of the book was hardly coincidental, as the workshops which gave rise to the volume were held in the shadow of the impending rout of the Socialist Party, heralding a re-evaluation of policy in Africa. The book's pleas for a fundamental restructuring of Franco- African relations are thus the visible dimension of an on-going policy debate which largely eclipses the left-right divide. The book's origins lie in a thirty-strong com- mittee which met under the patronage of Edwige Avice and Marcel Debarge, the last two Socialist Party Ministers to hold the Co-operation and Development port- folio. It relates the content of workshops between civil servants, academics and politicians who met in the winter of 1991-92 to debate the errors of French policy in Africa and try and sketch out a new aid policy.

Like any collective work its contents are inevitably uneven, the best pieces being the polemical essays and arguments. Predictably, most trenchant among these is Jean- Francois Bayart, the current doyen of les africainistes parisiens, a tribe whose identity is every bit as problematic as that of any in Africa. Bayart challenges French politicians to redefine their African policy: ditch long-standing clients, resolve the contradictions of the franc zone and forge a policy based on the selective promotion of regional integration. (For a more trenchant statement of Bayart's position see Jeune Afrique, 14-21 April 1993. Africa Confidential, 5 March 1993, provides a snap- shot of the contradictions of French African policy on the eve of the 1993 legislative elections.) Buttressed by diverse analyses of structural adjustment in the franc zone, notably by Elliot Berg and Patrick and Sylviane Guillamont, these ideas are largely echoed in Michailofs conclusion pleading for a radical rethink of French African relations.

A year on from publication, with Houphouet buried and the shibboleth of the CFA franc's parity finally shattered, Paris's nouveau voyage in Africa appears to be belatedly under way. For disoriented foreigners familiar with their old neo-colonial map, Michailofs volume provides a useful blueprint for understanding both the future shape of Franco-African relations and the production of academic and economic ideas underpinning French policy.

DAVID STYAN

South Bank University

JEAN MARIE ALLMAN, The Quills of the Porcupine. Asante nationalism in Ghana. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 263 pp., ?24-95, ISBN 0 2991 3764 3 paperback, ?59-50, 0 2991 3760 0 hard covers.

Jean Allman's book is welcome as the first full account of the National Liberation Movement 1954-1956. The movement was organised three years before Ghana's independence on 6 March, 1957 in order to secure what its organisers conceived as Asante's vital interests before the colonial government left the Gold Coast. These vital interests were 'just' cocoa producer prices, and the prevention of the alleged

rival Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Co-operation, Finance, Defence-and, more recently, Humanitarian Affairs-remain essential to understanding the political sur- vival of Messrs Bongo, Eyadema, Aptidon et al. as they manipulated their way around rival patrons.

Michailofs book is significant on two counts. Firstly as part of a long overdue effort by a loose network of academics and politicians to provoke new reflections on French African policy. Hitherto the most notable milestone in the campaign was La France face au Sud, by Jacques Adda and Marie-Claude Smouts (1989) the debate around this coinciding with Mitterand's La Baule declaration, ostensibly tying French patronage to political reform. Secondly the timing of the book was hardly coincidental, as the workshops which gave rise to the volume were held in the shadow of the impending rout of the Socialist Party, heralding a re-evaluation of policy in Africa. The book's pleas for a fundamental restructuring of Franco- African relations are thus the visible dimension of an on-going policy debate which largely eclipses the left-right divide. The book's origins lie in a thirty-strong com- mittee which met under the patronage of Edwige Avice and Marcel Debarge, the last two Socialist Party Ministers to hold the Co-operation and Development port- folio. It relates the content of workshops between civil servants, academics and politicians who met in the winter of 1991-92 to debate the errors of French policy in Africa and try and sketch out a new aid policy.

Like any collective work its contents are inevitably uneven, the best pieces being the polemical essays and arguments. Predictably, most trenchant among these is Jean- Francois Bayart, the current doyen of les africainistes parisiens, a tribe whose identity is every bit as problematic as that of any in Africa. Bayart challenges French politicians to redefine their African policy: ditch long-standing clients, resolve the contradictions of the franc zone and forge a policy based on the selective promotion of regional integration. (For a more trenchant statement of Bayart's position see Jeune Afrique, 14-21 April 1993. Africa Confidential, 5 March 1993, provides a snap- shot of the contradictions of French African policy on the eve of the 1993 legislative elections.) Buttressed by diverse analyses of structural adjustment in the franc zone, notably by Elliot Berg and Patrick and Sylviane Guillamont, these ideas are largely echoed in Michailofs conclusion pleading for a radical rethink of French African relations.

A year on from publication, with Houphouet buried and the shibboleth of the CFA franc's parity finally shattered, Paris's nouveau voyage in Africa appears to be belatedly under way. For disoriented foreigners familiar with their old neo-colonial map, Michailofs volume provides a useful blueprint for understanding both the future shape of Franco-African relations and the production of academic and economic ideas underpinning French policy.

DAVID STYAN

South Bank University

JEAN MARIE ALLMAN, The Quills of the Porcupine. Asante nationalism in Ghana. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 263 pp., ?24-95, ISBN 0 2991 3764 3 paperback, ?59-50, 0 2991 3760 0 hard covers.

Jean Allman's book is welcome as the first full account of the National Liberation Movement 1954-1956. The movement was organised three years before Ghana's independence on 6 March, 1957 in order to secure what its organisers conceived as Asante's vital interests before the colonial government left the Gold Coast. These vital interests were 'just' cocoa producer prices, and the prevention of the alleged

576 576

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.152 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:06:03 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions