Now, what of the exception, the one which said “No”? The late Sekou Toure, you may remember, was the outstanding abstainer at the inaugural banquet of the French Community. For this, he was lionized all over the African world as the radical flag-bearer of the francophone sector of African nationalism, a soul-mate of Kwame Nkrumah. Now, those who truly wish to understand how peoples attain nation-being should study the Guinean instance most carefully. De Gaulle was miffed – just as the Belgians were when Patrice Lumumba opted for immediate independence from Belgian Congo and, right from the handing-over ceremony, on that very open-air podium where one flag was lowered and the other raised – berated the Belgians for their inhuman colonial policies in unmistakable language, saying to them, literally, ‘Thanks for nothing.’ Lumumba shocked the Belgian dignitaries into silence, then into rage. Congo Kinshasa has continued to pay the price for that straight-talking, which was no grandstanding, but a bitterly truthful articulation of past colonial horrors and a resolve to build a real nation right from scratch. Lumumba was never given a chance to fulfill such dreams. Sekou Toure was in a similar position, but de Gaulle was a different mould from the Belgians – well, at least, quantitatively though not much qualitatively different in cast of mind. In any case, the world had moved on since Lumumba’s time, and Algeria was a reminder of how far the powers could go in ‘teaching’ their uppity colonies a lesson. In keeping with the pledge of Sekou Toure’s ‘No’ to Charles de Gaulle’s ultimatum, the latter provided him with a tabula rasa – a literally clean slate – of a nation space on which to construct his ideal nation. You want independence, de Gaulle, virtually said, well, you shall have it. In grand Belgian style, the departing French colonials were ordered to pull out everything – staff, desks, telephone wires, flush toilets….everything right down to the last paper clip, and leave Sekou Toure with nothing. Sekou Toure shrugged, signed up with the Eastern bloc for the restoration of infrastructrure and commercial relations.
The question is, did Sekou Toure thereby proceed to build a nation? Well, we know that, with the aid of the Soviets, he also did establish a state. That was his priority. Did the Guineans object? A few did. They discerned what was going on, discerned that an opportunity was being lost, that the pledge of ‘Non’ to France was implicit with a ‘Yes’ for the establishment of a genuine nation. Mostly however, the Guineans, as were most of the Third World, were head-over-heels with euphoria. The reinforcement of the state at the expense of the nation was accepted as a necessary price for the containment and defeat of the anti-nationalists – the colonial powers and their “stooges, revisionists, reactionaries, compradors, capitalist running dogs” and all other favourite epithets in the vocabulary of radicalism. And so, they acquiesced in the sacrifice of the nation and its intellectual and creative forces. They remained largely indifferent to the submission of the entire nation to a rival global force, the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, revolutionary flag-bearers. They were kept at a distance from the expropriation of the nation’s resources by the self-declared champions of the down-trodden. A nation-builder was at work, and dissent was unpatriotic. Thus, the putative nation was built on disappearances, tortures chambers, including the notorious electric box. Neither the Guineans nor the continent could however ignore the incarceration of the first Secretary-General of the African Union, Diallo Telli, and his eventual miserable death in one of Sekou Toure’s prison cells. The flight of creative and intellectual forces – the foremost resources of any nation – was predictable – some to neighbouring Senegal, a few to the Antilles, most of them to the bosom of the former colonial master, France. The nation project was aborted – visit the post-colonial history of Guinea-Conakry from them till now and decide for yourselves whether it was the nation-in-waiting, or metropolitan France that enjoyed the last laugh.
Now, we have already identified community as the forerunner of nationhood, a self-evident truth, since community is the most rudimentary unit of social self-cognition that we know of, and – from the experience of humanity till now – an eternal one. One of the ways by which embedded communities are judged in any society has always been in the degree and quality of their integration. The issue of integration is one which, today, confronts many European nations as an urgent reality that, rather belatedly, they find themselves compelled address in a structured fashion. African nations need not beat their breast over this, however, or attempt any holier-than-thou approach to what has become a global issue. Right in this nation, we cannot forget the shameful treatment of Ghanaians under the presidency of Shehu Shagari when that incontinent government chose to make them scapegoats for its bankrupt policies. The very expression ‘Ghana-Must-go’ bags came from that untidy exodus, when every form of container had to be commandeered to hold their belongings as they struggled to beat the inhuman deadline that had been declared for their departure. It was of course – let this be also admitted – a return play for a like treatment of Nigerians under the government of Professor Busia. Both events still rankle in the minds of the migrant entities on either side, hard working, law-abiding individuals on whom the bolt fell from a clear sky. They bore the brunt of the failed economic policies of our politicians.
There is no need to go after other instances – Nigerians being notoriously adventurous, it is no surprise that they tend to be first line of fire in these calculated bouts of xenophobia that overtake governments, often gleefully aided, alas, by the local citizenry, but I imagine that nothing in the histories of these nation spaces of the African continent quite beats the horror of the yet ongoing orgy of migrant cleansing unleashed on Mozambiquan and Zimbabwean refugees within South Africa. Several have been murdered in broad daylight, some of them by the notorious method of ‘necklacing’ – placing a tyre around the neck of the victims and setting them on fire. I watched a television coverage, filmed during and directly after a spate of such killings. One of the assailants, interviewed, had no regrets whatsoever and indeed promised the same treatment for any of ‘them’ who still remained within South African borders after some indeterminate deadline that he and his colleagues had obviously set. ‘What do they want here?’ he querried. “Let them all go back and face their problems in their own countries’.
This, in my view, represents the tragedy of nation on the continent – one of its most depressing facets. Community forgets its antecedents, as the cell from which nation is cultured. Nowhere is the banal dimension of such a self-betrayal felt more keenly than in nation spaces that have been referred to, most accurately, as mere ‘geographical expressions’, spaces whose nationhoods were imposed by external forces, acting with unabashed arrogance in their own interest. Leaving aside the internal contradictions that have surfaced in the organizing and maintenance of nation status everywhere, given the disintegration of communities based on the continuing perception of communities as a primitive level of social organization, given the high maintenance cost of these ‘nations’, given the fact that the nations that bequeathed the nation ideal to their colonial possessions have themselves begun to embark on new formations that progressively jettison some of the nation claims that once brought them repeatedly into violent conflicts with one another…..and so on and on, could it be perhaps that the world is overdue for a review of the nation concept and its substitution of a more humanized unit, one, that is, that actually pursues the line of the withering of the state in favour of Community of a capital ‘C’, made up of units of those other communities that have, in the meantime, turned nation? What we are witnessing today, in short, is a return to first principles, but at a higher level of evolution. The contrast with Colonel Ghadaffi’s project is that the latter believes that the first principle is perfectly in order, and that the sooner the usurpating intruder called state is eliminated, the earlier humanity will find itself, be true to itself, and in the only way that brooks no argument – a return to the rule of the organic beginnings of Community. Despite his admittedly confused, troubled, but intuitive methodology, I find myself in more than mere sympathy. A return to first principles may prove more beneficial to the primary unit – the human entity and its community – than our present efforts to shore up a construct that only ends up being gobbled up by, and subservient to that most rapacious and unproductive outsider – the state. Of course we know that others have tried before him. In a way, what Thomas Sankara attempted in his short span of life was different only in methodology – underlying his policies was also the same vision of closing the gap between state and nation until the parts became as close to indistinguishable as possible – not destroying the nation in favour of the state but the other way round.
Yes, I know, we shall not want for cries of ‘populism’, plain, primitive ‘populism’. Even ‘anarchism’, since the ultimate aim is to eliminate the monstrosity of government. My answer would be not to waste a moment contesting the pejorative but to ask instead just where the practice of state supremacy has landed us. What has it cost the world – not just the African continent? To ask what are the factors that have led to the dysfunction of a number of so-called nations – most notably Somalia, where even the state vanished as a recognizable entity. And even as Somalia is attempting to pull out of those decades of her unenvied distinction as the primus inter pares of all mere geographical expressions, the Congo appears poised to keep it company or perhaps, to throw in a bit of wry optimism, simply take its place. Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone – all have taken their turns in collapsing the nation around the state, only to have the state itself disintegrate, leaving the nation prostrate for the pickings by outsiders, vigilante squads and marauding killer units, until rescued, in the end, principally by outsiders. The notion of the nation as it exists today, from both external and internal examples, appear to have been a stage that should have been bypassed – at least theoretically. Is nationhood then completely obsolete? Are we looking for a higher order of social organization? Is this perhaps the vision that lies behind motions that result in a European Union?
While we ponder that possibility, let us at least recognize that for now, a nation claim can only be sustained by protocols of association fashioned by its constituent elements which are its identified nation groupings. Yes, no matter by what method a nation space comes to regard itself or be regarded as a nation, its nation-being becomes viable only by its constitutive protocols even if such protocols are articulated after the event. This seems self-evident, judging by the constant effort to write and re-write a constitution for the nation, sometimes in all sincerity, other times merely as a time-gaining device for the consolidation of the state. Keep the fools busy, the state says, while we consolidate. Those who doubt that this was the post-Abacha strategy, secretly fashioned out during the transitional state of General Abdulsalami, must surely have seen the light the moment that elections for the sole participatory arm of state – the legislatures – were called even before the nation had had a chance to look at the so-called constitution. A people were corralled into standing elections, voting and being voted for without having so much glimpsed the protocols of association that validated that arm of the state. It was clear from the beginning that this was a charade that could not hold.
Before the end of Apartheid, was South Africa a nation? A State, undoubtedly, indeed a police state, but a nation? A nation is not built on the exclusion of the majority of its inhabitants, but neither on the exclusion of any unit of its constitutive entities. There cannot be two or more rules to the definition of ‘constitutents’ in the making of a nation. Those who have lived in that space, worked it, exploited its resources, died in that space and spawned generations after them are those who make up that nation. To exclude any portion of it from any motion to re-define that space in any form is to store up restless actions that will demonstrate that designation a farce and a time-bomb.
