Notes on 'Africa since 1940 – the past of the present' by Frederick Cooper
Cambridge University Press; 2002

Chapter 1: Introduction: from colonies to third world

"Africa's present did not emerge from an abrupt proclamation of independence, but from a long, convoluted and still ongoing process" (p.6)

· concept of gatekeeper states; raising taxes on import/exports, but not widely controlling

· continuity and change run parallel and interact, i.e. – institutions we think of as 'Western', like elected bodies, do not necessarily function in an African context in the same way as they do in Europe, and 'traditional' African practices, like kinship, do not necessarily function in the same way as they did 100 years ago

cultures' "distinctiveness did not mean isolation, and it did not extinguish interconnection, relatedness and mutual influence" (p.13)

"when the colonial empires fell apart, African leaders also faced the temptation to strengthen their control of narrow channels, rather than widen and deepen forms of connection across space" (p.14)

idea of 'colonial parenthesis' (J. Ade Ajayi) (cf. p.15) and "nationalist conception of political life… [with a] direct connection of 'modern' African states to an 'authentic' African past" (p.15)
-	some African historians use 3 stage divisions – pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial – the book attempts to bridge these divisions

Chapter 2: Workers, peasants and the crisis of colonialism

"in the late 1930s and 1940s, colonial rule choked on the narrowness of the pathways it had created. Trying to confine Africans to tribal cages…created the very sort of danger administrators feared" (p.20)

"In parts of Africa, colonization drove rural dwellers into deepening poverty, sometimes as a deliberate policy to create "labour reserves" where people had little alternative to selling their labour cheaply, sometimes…[making] difficult ecosystems worse" (p.21)
-	but not all trade followed this extreme capitalist/exploitative model; in some areas, wealth accrued and divisions were created, but also significant reinvestment in communities took place.

'native' "forms of spirituality and other concepts of the supernatural are still capable of making sense of the world and articulating moral beliefs, and many of these co-exist with the newer faiths" (p.27)

· 1935-1950 – strikes in African ports, mines and railways; response to "miserable wages… inadequate housing... [being] disciplined arbitrarily and… [having] little chance to advance" (p.31)

ZIM SPEC:- general strike in 1948 – restrictions on women: "not legally permitted to be in cities unless … they were legally married to a man who was entitled to be there" (or, some cases, were working themselves) (p.33)
-	but African urban life…proved to be impossible to control [despite] harsh policing"

this brought 3 reactions from colonial administrators:
1-	they started to wonder if "the migrant labour system was really in the best interest of colonial economies"
2-	pretended that the problem would go away; interpret it as a development question "and hope that a little capital investment and a little urban planning would solve it
3-	they realized "that how workers and their families lived would affect both how efficiently they produced and orderly and predictable they were likely to be

the third of these reactions led social engineers to coin a new term 'stabilization' – different from 'proletarianization' (where labour envelopes all society), meant separating a new generation of city workers from the 'backwardness' of the countryside

"Cities would be crucibles of social, cultural and political change throughout the post-war eras. It was not that they were intrinsically dynamic while rural villages were passively culture-bound…Density has its consequences – and for a colonial regime, its dangers" (p.34)

· After World War II, the West had to be more careful to legitimise colonialism, and if the claimed that they ruled their colonies with paternal intentions, they had to be careful of the timing of transferring power
-	"When would the time come to declare that the backward were sufficiently developed to strike out on their own? Who was to judge whether the "tutorial" power was acting in the interest of its charges rather than for its own benefit? Such questions were not new, but they became much more immediate during the war."

Chapter 3: Citizenship, self-government and development: the possibilities of the post-war movement

"Africans face the constraints and humiliations of a colonial state, but they were above all, human beings trying to survive, form relationships, find opportunities, and make sense of the world. They cannot be reduced to stick figures in a drama, with two actors, colonizer and colonized, or a story with one plot line – the struggle for the nation. What is striking about the years after the war was how much seemed possible"

"In the late 1940s, African political and labour movements saw that they had an opportunity, but what they saw as a goal in 1945 was not where they ended up 20 years later" (both quotes p.38)

[case studies p. 40-65 – re-read later]

Chapter 4: Ending empire and imagining the future

"French and British rule in Africa collapsed not because of an all-out assault from a clearly defined colonized people, but because the colonial system broke apart at its internal cracks, as Africans selectively incorporated into political structures based on citizenship or self-determination seized the initiative and escalated their demands for power."

"By 1956 or 1958 French and British governments knew that the colonial endgame had begun….[as they] came to realize that hanging on to power would be too painful and costly, they made clear that the responsibility for the consequences of these decolonizations would fall on African shoulders" (p.66)

"In Central Africa, another version of developmentalist imperial policy came unstuck. In 1953, the British government had proclaimed the Central African Federation, uniting its three colonies of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, hoping that this larger unit would foster economic planning and stave off South African ambitions to bring the region's white settlers into its white-supremacist orbit." (p.73)
later:
"unable to defend racial privilege within British colonialism [the white leaders of Southern Rhodesia] defended it by declaring there own version of independence in 1965, dragging out the story of this ugly decolonization for another fifteen years at the cost of much human life" (p.75)

"Colonial leaders now defined those who followed the script as if they were a-cultural, a-social beings, embodiments of modernization, and they now saw Africans who refused to enter such roles as dangerously recalcitrant, as stubbornly primitive. As for the vast majority of people who did not live such a dichotomous life - their place in the colonial vision was unclear." (p.83)

Rhythms of change: economic change is "a process subject not only to the rhythms generated in the African continent itself, but to the shifting tendencies of the world economy" (p.85)

"Could the new independent state be simultaneously developmentalist-interventionist and populist-clientalist, insuring support by proving services with general appeal and rewarding followers with state resources? By the early 1970s, the answer appeared to be negative." (p.88)

- although Zimbabwe does not fit chronologically with other British states, parallel processes are at work

Chapter 5 - Development and disappointment: social and economic change in an unequal world, 1945-2000

"The development concept, some have argued, allowed for an internalization of colonialism, as the one-to-one relationship of metropole to colony was transformed into a generalized subordination of South and North, of Africa and Asia to Europe and North America." (p.91)

1960/70s - "the industrialization that never was" (p.99)

"it would be misleading to dismiss the development era as without accomplishment, even if not a single African state achieved the often-stated goal of autonomy and economic security for the mass of the population." (p.105)

p.116 - IMF/WB argument "let the market work its magic"; critics say this shifts the focus onto debt repayment, away from development - the IMF defence is that where their prescriptions have been followed (Ghana/Uganda) things have improved (empirical disagreement)
modernization or Westernization

"A Zimbabwe Supreme Court Decision in 1999 declared that the integrity of cultural norms outweighed constitutional provisions against discrimination and meant the women could not obtain equal rights of inheritance" (p.126)

who is to blame - the west or African leaders? the answer is clearly both, so there is a need for more precise questioning (see final paragraph p.131) 

Chapter 6 - The late decolonizers: southern Africa 1975, 1979, 1994

Two groups decolonising late – the Portuguese and the colonies with substantial groups of White settlers
-	“despite the sustained efforts of settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa to retain power, their ultimate fate was determined by the regional and worldwide processes which rendered empire indefensible” (p.133)

In Rhodesia, white “settlers gave up their place in an empire that was intent of devolving power to black majorities” “in order to maintain white rule. The unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 kept in place colonial institutions – a bureaucracy and police apparatus that enforced white land ownership and racial segregation….When African political movements, well aware of the rights Africans now had elsewhere, turned to guerrilla warfare, the state fought back, but it faced a regional problem – armed groups finding sanctuary in now-free neighbour territories – and a global one, economic boycotts and isolation. In the end, colonialism could not be maintained without imperialism…However divided and uncertain the guerrilla movement, it won the international battle to be identified with self-determination and progress.” (p.133)

FROM RHODESIA TO ZIMBABWE

Rhodesia was “challenged by a combination of urban workers and western-educated elites in the late 1940s and 1950s” (p.133) – “repression forced nationalists into neighbouring Mozambique from which the attacked…rural areas of Zimbabwe” (p.135)

large strikes – Railway in 1945, General in 1948
-	a“populist trade union, the RICU (Reformed Industrial and Commercial Workers Union), led by Charles Mziugeli, put issues of gender at the centre of urban politics” (p.135)

the state wanted a “trainable and tameable” (p.135) working class and racial segregation – this caused charismatic and dynamic resistance
-	initial reliance on normal forms of political resistance that had worked elsewhere appeared not to be working in Zimbabwe

The ZAPU was more militant than previous groups but still ineffective, prompting the breakaway of ZANU – Sithole and Mugabe among leaders  - both groups were considering an armed struggle

Ian Smith’s “radical” and “macho” (p.136) white party created, in 1965, The Unilateral Declaration of Independence – “Rhodesia would defend racial privilege in national rather than imperial terms” (p.136)

“The Rhodesian state, for about fifteen years, demonstrated that a highly motivated and unscrupulous minority controlling an army and a bureaucracy could maintain security in the urban areas, repression in the rural ones, and even a measure of industrialization and self-sufficiency in an economy that used cheap African labour to produce minerals and agricultural commodities for external markets” (p.137)

The relationship between ZANU/ZAPU rebels and peasants in the rural areas where they lived was complex – rebels offered hope but also “exposed people to revenge by the Rhodesian army” (p.137) and stole food/used coercion themselves
-	“ The indecisive armed struggle proved costly to the increasingly isolated white government…Smith now began to cooperate with the British government to find a settlement that would bring Black Rhodesians into the government but protect the white minority” (p.137) – the British response was a “paternalistic commission that found that “most Africans [would reject such a] denigrating compromise”

NOTE – Zimbabwe had several ‘INDEPENDENCES’
- Smith tried to work with moderate “nationalists like Muzorewa to forstall the radicals like Mugabe”
↓
result – “ a weak state with numerous guarantees for whites” (p.138)– accepted by neither side, armed conflict continued, with no demobilisation of armies, rebuilding of economy
↓
led to more negotiations and REAL ELECTIONS – Mugabe came to power in 1980 (Nkomo and ZAPU “uneasily and briefly cooperating”[p.138])

“Some observers thought Zimbabwe would be different from those nations which had come into being fifteen to twenty years before. It had fought for its independence; its peasantry had been mobilized; its leaders were courageous, socialist and self-confident. Zimbabwe inherited from wartime Rhodesia an economic infrastructure that emphasised self-sufficiency; it had a balance of agricultural, mineral, and industrialised possibilities. Zimbabwe may well have had more economic and political options than other African states, but Mugabe chose not to use them”

Mugabe was a socialist, but he also needed money, both for development and ZANU patronage (note tendency to enthicize patronage” – freedom fighters who he had alongside had to be carefully appeased

- Mugabe accused Nkomo of mobilizing Ndebele against Shona , which led to a repressive campaign and an uneasy true in 1987

In the 1980s “press censorship, detention of opponents and banning of political parties” (p.138) was particularly bad, with a slight improvement in the 1990s. However, things got worse again as opposition used the press and the electoral system well to “undermine the governments authority” (p.138)

Now white landowners are used as scapegoats, severe repression of domestic opponents and foreign journalists, white the economy collapses

Despite achieving “initial credibility for tearing down race-specific obstacles to education and development, [ZANU/Mugabe] has largely squandered the opportunity” to improve/develop Zimbabwe

Chapters 7 + 8

Is Zimbabwe, in some sense a ‘durable state’, unchanged borders etc – is this because post-colonial states rely on externally defined legitimacy for survival?

Independent African states have the same difficulty as colonial ones in extending power inwardly

Is corruption the same as ‘big-man patronage’?

Is the idea of a gate-keeper state relevant to Zimbabwe?

State are results of historical processes, but constrained and enabling

COLONIALISM BOTH PROVIDED AND DENIED OPPORTUNITIES