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Week Two Notes: Evolution of African States
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Reading Notes
Reading One: The Evolution of African States
SOURCE: Engelbert, Pierre and Dunn, Kevin Inside African Politics, (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2013) Chapter 2, pg 17-61.
SUMMARY: from 41 pages of text to ~18 pages (not everything is exam material, but is
helpful in understanding what the reading is covering) - dense and content heavy, worth the
long summary imo especially since its the only reading for the week and the lecture notes are
short.
Three main themes investigated:
1. How does the imported nature of the Western colonial conceptions of the state affect
contemporary politics?
2. To what extent have these originally colonial states become African?
3. What are the nature and the effects of the boundaries that Africans inherited from colonialism
and made theirs?
Precolonial Politics
● Before colonization, there was a mosaic of political systems across the continent, some of which
had endured and developed over centuries
● African politics were dynamic → confliccts, migrations, slavery, the rise and fall of kingdoms
and empires, substantial (trade) contacts with other parts of the world.
Two basic forms of political organization in precolonial Africa:
1. Stateless societies: societies which lacked centralized authority, administrative machinery and
constituted judicial institutions with no sharp divisions of rank, status or wealth.
2. Kingdoms, empires, and states: societies with all three features of government in which
cleavages of wealth, privilege, and status corresponded to the distribution of power and authority.
- Anthropologists note the existence of chiefdoms (e.g., among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo) that
were not acephalous but that did not form larger political units than a cluster of towns.
- Acephalous: not having a head; headless
Stateless societies:
● Relatively small - their organization did not rely on scale or centralization of authority.
○ Lineage provided the basis of social organization.
■ In these groups, family or clan elders exercised political authority, often in some
collective form.
■ Lineages established themselves as clans through a process of segmentation.
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● With elders in charge, young men often had to migrate in order to make a
living and attain some status on their own. As they did, they took wives
and children with them.
● These ejected people, “frontiersmen” formed new social orders,
attracting others along the way. These communities could vanish over
time or become the foundation of new polities and even new ethnic
identities.
■ The San of the Kalahari (often known as Bushmen), in today’s Botswana,
provide an example of this now essentially extinct mode of organization.
■ Before the creation of Somalia, the Somali were a clan society, with no
centralized authority among them and, actually, a fair degree of competition with
shifting alliances
■ Clans of a single nation might be united with cross-clan institutions like age
groups (e.g, the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania), or they might share a common
religious leader.
■ Principles of kinship were very fluid among lineage groups, and unrelated clients
or foreigners could progressively become included in clan structures.
States, Kingdoms, and Empires
● Some states were based on conquest, with one migrating group, often herders and warriors,
conquering and assimilating sedentary and farming groups, a common pattern in the Great
Lakes region of Central Africa.
● Other African states developed as a result of local elites controlling trade routes. For example,
the Ghana Empire reached from Senegal to the edge of Niger from the eighth to thirteenth
centuries, trading across the Sahara in gold and salt.
○ Succeeded by the Mali Empire, which peaked in the fourteenth cen.
● Some states developed, usually toward coastal areas. As a result of the slave trade. Such as the
Kongo Kingdom which had developed before the slave trade, Oyo in Nigeria, and Dahomey in
Benin.
Prior to colonization there were still some well established states accross the continent.
West Africa:
● Sokoto Caliphate of Northern Nigeria ruled over a vast territory and has exchange networkd with
N. Africa as far as Egypt & even the Middle East
● In today’s Ghana, the Ashanti/Asante Kingdom exercised authority over many and managed to
produce significal prosperity - developing a bona fide bourgeoisie.
East Africa:
● Explorer Henry Morrley encountered the Buganda kingdom in the 1870s, impressed with its
political organization and the peace and security it provided he wrote back home that all it needed
to equal Western civilization was Christianity (upon which the British sent missionaries, whom
the Baganda promptly decapitated).
● The dominant political system was the Ethiopian state, which, by the time of the European
colonial expansion, was under the authority of Emperor Menelik II.
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○ It was an ancient political system with traditions dating back some 2,000 years to the
Aksum kingdom, anchored around the Amharic and Tigray peoples, who dominated and
assimilated many other regional groups.
○ It was the only sub-Saharan African state to have developed a written language,
facilitating political centralization and administration. Its armies were strong enough to
defeat the Italians at the battle of Adowa in 1896, which spared Ethiopia the fate of
colonization.
Southern Africa: (the continent counted many more kingdoms)
● The Tswana (in today’s Botswana and South Africa)
● The Barotse (in Zambia)
● The Swazi (in Swaziland and South Africa)
● The Zulu of South Africa, who waged numerous military conquests under the leadership of their
king Shaka in the first decades of the nineteenth century before losing their war against the Boer
settlers- the “Voortrekkers”-in 1838 (which led to the creation of the colony of Natal).
As organized and centralized as they were, most African states differed from Western states in some
significant ways:
● First, apart from Ethiopia, they did not have any permanent impersonal administration, as
they lacked written languages.
○ Note: That Ashanti displayed significant bureaucratic development, they had diplomatic
services and relied on Arabic for some of their written correspondence.
○ Power was distributed along ritualized lines, and specific roles were recognized to
specific individuals.
● Second, patron-client relationship cemented the unity of these states and the loyalty of lesser
chiefs to the ruler.
○ Local chiefs and subjects typically paid tribute to the ruler in exchange for his
protection.
○ Power was projected from the center to the periphery
○ At the periphery, local chiefs were more loosely connected to the center, and were able
to exercise their authority with more autonomy.
● Third, political authority was exercised not so much over a territory than over people. With
perhaps a few exceptions like the Sokoto caliphate and Borno in today's Nigeria, there were no
fixed boundaries.
● Fourth, as with nonstate societies, kinship and lineage also mattered in states. Many kingdoms
were divided into clans and competing lines of succession.
● Fifth, temporal and spiritual authority were closely connected.
