Notes on 'The Black Man's Burden – Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State' by Basil Davidson
1992 – James Currey, Oxford; Baobab Books, Harare; E.A.E.P, Nairobi; Fountain Publishers, Uganda

Chapter Six – The Challenge of Nationalism

“acceptance of the post-colonial nation-state meant acceptance of the legacy of the colonial partition” (p.162) – building on existing structures, not tearing them down
-	“it seemed impossible to reject any significant part of the legacy” (p.163) limited amount of insightful, popularly consumed political analysis

nationalism motivated not by promises of sovereignty itself, but the freedom from foreign rule, social deprivation
-	“the language of European nationalism, as applied to Africa, had been consistently misleading” (p.165) – dangers of Euro-centric analysis

national struggled characterized by “pragmatism” and a “poverty of ideological thought” (like the party men in 'The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born?)

“If the…governments really wished to move beyond the colonial structures…they must pay rapid and large attention to the social advancements in schools, trade unions, and cooperative associations of rural producers” (p.167)

colonial administrators were in many cases oddly apolitical  not concerned with the practicalities of power-brokering

Davidson refutes the suggestion “that the end of political empire was a program arranged and designed to give colonized peoples “the best possible start to their independence” (p.180)

Using the example of Nigeria
-	“They accepted the colonial legacy – whether of frontiers or of bureaucratic dictatorship – on the rash assumption that they could master it. But as things turned out, it mastered them.” (p.181)

many new independent rulers did not fully understand “the obstructive nature of the colonial legacy they were going to accept” (p.182)

some held some foresight: Nyerere hoped that an East African federation would come into existence

“the 'transfer of power' in short, was above all a 'transfer of crisis'

“What looked like a crisis of 'overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food maldistribution of goods” (p.192)

Summary “not even the worst news has been able to cancel out the tremendous central gain of the anticolonial independence…which has sprung from the reaffirmation of Africa's humanity” (p.196) 

Chapter Seven - The Black Man's Burden

"the sense of liberation from a grossly limiting bondage was real and expansive" (p.197)

the optimism was, with hindsight, resting on significant uncertainties; there was still and 'insufficient' analysis of everyday reality
- "practitioners [of social/political science] were usually hampered...by the unwritten but often mandatory assumptions of the Cold War" (p.198)

cites Fieldhouse in understanding the optimism of 1960s Africa "almost every expected too much"

"'modernisation'...had to mean the wholesale import of non-African scenarios and solutions...Africa would prosper on condition of rejecting itself"

initial cause for optimism - developments in education, public services, few quarrels between African countries

a big gap existed between the theory of how post-independence was 'supposed' to be and the reality - social class divisions for example:
- "Africa over the previous 150 years, or much more, had not produced a society divided into easily recognisable and operable social classes" (p.206)

the "politics of clientelism" (p.206) rapidly developed

From the Western powers: "the new nation-states inherited the dictatorship and not the democracy" (p.208)

"the practical outcome...had to be authoritarian even when the nationalists misled it to be democratic (p.208-9 - misquote? check)

also  - "a deepening opposition between the interests of the cities and the interests of the rural areas" (p.209), as urban dwellers "looked to the state for patronage...the ideal became note so much to occupy a job as to occupy a wage" (p.209)
- conflict between city and countryside destructive in terms of trade/food production, but difficult to reverse

e.g. Ghana - the post-colonial government continued the British habit of extracting a large surplus from cocoa production - didn't use enough moderation and many farmers either participated in transnational smuggling or gave up cocoa farming altogether, and focus on subsistence production

"At the outset of independence there had been a narrow gap in trust and confidence between the bulk of the population and the beneficiaries or leaders of anticolonial nationalism...[later] the gap had widened to an abyss: on one side, a great mass of resentful and impoverished rural people, and on the other, a small minority with quantities of wealth"

causes of decline of state legitimacy:
- Artificial territories
- expectations of democracy vs. reality of leadership
- illegal trade