Personality and political culture in modern Africa : studies presented to Professor Harold G. Marcus PDF
Preview Personality and political culture in modern Africa : studies presented to Professor Harold G. Marcus
African Studies Center BOSTON UNIVERSITY 1 PERSONALITY AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN MODERN AFRICA Studies Presented to Professor Harold G. Marcus editedby Melvin E. Page Stephanie F. Beswick Tim Carmichael Jay Spaulding African Studies Center Boston University MA Boston, 1998 AfricanStudiesCenter BostonUniversity 270 Bay State Road MA Boston, 02215 Copyright1998bytheBoardofTrusteesofBostonUniversity Cover design by Maddalena Goodwin CoverphotocourtesyofMichiganStateUniversity Photospages162and163courtesyofLaverleBerry ISBN 0-915118-16-5 CONTENTS Introduction The Editors 1 1 MedievalNubianDynasticSuccession Jay Spaulding 7 2 Orality, State Literacy and Political Culture in JamesC.McCann 15 Ethiopia: Translating the Ras Kassa Registers 3 ConstructingColonialPowerand Political Irma Taddia 23 Collaboration in Italian Eritrea 4 OntheOrigins ofMassNationalisminUrban LairdJones 37 Tanzania: MuslimTownspeopleandPetitionProtest duringtheInterwarYears 5 AReligiousand EthnicKaleidoscopeora Stephanie F. Beswick 49 North/South Frontier? Dinka/Baqqara Relations Across the Kir/Bahr al-Arab River 6 Pan-African Dialectics: Ethiopia, Africa and the Fikru Gebrekidan 65 African Diaspora, 1941-1974 7 Personality and Political Culture in Ethiopian DonaldCrummey 79 History: TheCaseofEmperorTewodros 8 "French Africa": Faidherbe, Archinard and DavidRobinson 91 Coppolani, the 'Creators' ofSenegal, Soudan and Mauretania 9 NineteenthCenturyDiplomacyonMount JamesCox 107 Kilimanjaro: RindiofMoshiReconsidered 10 Gambeila: An ImperialAnachronism RobertO. Collins 119 11 Settlers and the State: A Political Biography of TonyWoods 135 W.H. Timcke 12 Ras Welde Li'ul and the Establishment ofQwaran LaVerle Berry 149 Ascendance inMid-EighteenthCentury Ethiopia 13 A Reassessment of Lij lyasu's PoliticalCareer, with Tibebe Eshete 163 Particular Emphasis upon his Fall 14 TheTalesofYosephandWoransa:Gedeo Charles McClellan 181 Experiences in the Era of the Italo-Ethiopian War 15 Haile Sellassie's Hands-Off Direct Rule: Blata Tim Carmichael 195 AyeleGebreandtheHareriKulubMovementof1948 NotesonContributors Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries https://archive.org/details/personalitypolitOOmarc INTRODUCTION The annals of Africa’s long and varied contacts with alien cultures testify to the presence of pervasive change in the political life of the continent over the centuries. Some historians have chosen to attribute change primarily to externally impinging factors such as invasion, conversion, dependency and imperial incorporation, or have evaluated change more impersonally in terms of intrusive economic and social forces abstractly conceived. Other historians have preferred to visualize historical change in African political life as primarily the creation of ideas and individuals generated by African culture itself. An inherently fruitful tension binds these alternative historiographical approaches; surely both natives and aliens have contributed to the historical transformation of African political culture. Analytical generalization often exposes patterns of hidden meaning amidst the bewildering array of empirically observable events, yet the drama of an individual human life may well contain experiences that challenge the limits of any interpretive dogma. Harold G. Marcus is prominent among those scholars who have emphasized the role of African leaders in shaping the transformation of diplomatic and political destinies. His studies of the Ethiopian emperors Menilek II and Haile Selassie 1, in particular, situate powerful individuals within their national and international historical contexts, and argue persuasively that personality is a crucial elementin understanding political culture. In this volume students and colleagues of Professor Marcus offer tribute in the form of studies that draw inspiration fromhis example. The first six studies explore situations in which the contributor's quest for understandingofsocialstructureandbroadhistoricalprocesstakesprecedenceoverthe personalities of the individual African participants; in doing so, these studies introduce much ofthe stage setting against whosebackdrop the personalbiographical dramas that follow were to be played out. A major feature of this setting is the politically centralized state. Jay Spaulding introduces the very old northeast African tradition of statecraft in its medieval Nubian manifestation. He emphasizes the role ofmatrimonial arrangements and kinship ties in maintaining discipline and hierarchy within an hereditary landholding elite. James C. McCann analyzes the implications for African statecraft, in its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ethiopian manifestation, of the birth of new technologies for institutionalized control through the adoption of Amharic, the dominant vernacular, as a vehicle for the creation and preservation of written documents to establish an administrative record. Colonial governmentsimposedbyaliensbroughtwiththemakeenappreciationforthepowerof the written word. Irma Taddia draws upon hitherto-unexploited records from Italian Eritrea to demonstrate both that the authorities deliberately framed their policies 2 THEEDITORS and conducttoattractnumerousAfricanpoliticalcollaborators, and thatmanyEritrean leaders of the day responded positively to this appeal. Yet in other contexts colonial rule often inspired resistance. Laird Jones traces the formation of an organized opposition to British policy in the Mwanza region of Tanzania during the years between the World Wars on the part of initially-accommodating Muslim merchants. Their disa^ection was motivated both by colonial policies of economic "development" that marginalized them, and by the introduction of a favored caste of "Asian" competitors. Independent Africa, for good and for ill, has derived much from the political, intellectual, and socioeconomic fabric of the colonial age,but also wields apotential to redefine the given realities of received political culture. Stephanie F. Beswick studies how the increasingly negative effects of an originally colonial ethnic policy formulated in a remote urban capital have worked themselves out on the ground over recentgenerations in one rural situationas anunnecessarily painfulboundarybetween adjoining pastoralcommunities. Fikru Gebrekidan follows three decades in the growth ofanAfricanconsciousness,forgedinresponsetoEuropeanracism,thathasinspiredand challenged Ethiopia to assume leadership roles on behalf of the continent and the African diaspora. Within a periodization established by the passage of the African state throughprecolonial, colonial, and postcolonial ages, the studies introduced above name as important and perennial variables in historical process the factors of race, kinship, ethnicity and language, religion and ideology, institutions of economic production and exchange, and technologies for the exercise of political control that range from landholding institutions to diverse ingenious systems for establishing and maintaining clientage to the rise ofbureaucracies practicing written record-keeping or bearing arms. These are some important elements of the historical setting within which the protagonists of the biographically-focused studies to follow acted out their destinies. Of the biographical studies, the first five introduce individuals who significantly transformed their historical environment. Preeminent among these was the formidable reunifier of his country, the nineteenth-century Ethiopian emperor Tewodros. Donald Crummey draws upon the experience of the emperor’s career to analyze the role of personal leadership qualities, of violence, and of ideology across thewiderspan ofmodem Ethiopianhistory. No less influentialin anotherandbroadly contemporaryAfricancontextwere thenineteenth-centuryFrenchimperialfoundersof the colonies that were to become the modern nations of Senegal, Mali (formerly Soudan), and Mauritania. David Robinson finds that L. L. C. Faidherbe, Louis Archinard, and Xavier Coppolani left their respective personal imprints both upon these lands and upon the empire into which they incorporated them. James Cox reexamines the career ofthe nineteenth-century Chagga leader Rindi to expose a keen diplomatic acumen that understood how to create tangible forms of power through Introduction 3 diversealliancesbothAfricanandEuropean. In theaccountofRobertO. Collinsaseries of strong-minded British agents, largely through force of personality, maintained for half a century a profitable but precarious commercial entrepot at the river port of Gambeila, an Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese enclave deep inside western Ethiopia. Tony Woods unrolls the maverick political career of W. H. Timcke, a white settler whose failure as a small tobacco planter at the hands of an unsympathetic colonial establishment eased the redirection of his considerable organizational abilities toward incipient Malawian nationalism. Thefinalfourbiographicalstudies focusuponindividuals whoweremorenearly shaped by history than the masters of opportunity. Archtypically a product of his culture and time was the eighteenth-century faction-builder and strongman Welde Li'ul, close kinsman to the royal house and, as analyzed by LaVerle Berry, the master of Ethiopian imperial destiny for half a century. Tibebe Eshete offers a dramatic revisionary interpretation of the doomed Ethiopian emperor Lij lyasu as a martyr for multiculturalism and tragichero. Charles McClellanintroducesprotagonists ofhumble status from the Gedeo community of Ethiopian imperial subjects; for them, the era of Italian occupation afforded modest and sometimes unexpected opportunities for advancement. Tim Carmichael critiques the Harar governor Blata Ayele's handling of insurgent Somali nationalism on Ethiopian imperial soil. The extremely diverse experiences of the subjects from both sets of biographical studies afford many opportunities to test generalizations aboutpoliticalculture. TherecentflowofacademicchicfromMarxismtoPostmodernism,asTonyWoods correctly observes, has carried the mainstream of Africanist scholarship from the sociological syntheses of the 1970s to the psychologizing abstractions of the 1990s without pausing, however briefly, at any sort of intervening concrete reality. The studies of the present volume contribute to a critique of fashionably excessive generalization, as the very human individuals introduced herein work out their respective personal destinies. Wherever people are seen to behave in ways the prevailing theoretical discourse would not have anticipated, it would be well to summon the insight of Charles McClellan that principled "idealism tends to be the luxury of those who have a broader range of options." The embrace of a personal perspectiveprovides asound vantagepointfromwhich toexploreboth theconstraints upon and the opportunities available to a historical protagonist. If conventional truisms are therebychallenged,sobeit. The concept of "race," for example, epitomized by some as the touchstone of modemAfricanhistoryoreventhecentralissueofthetwentiethcentury,didnotspring organically from the soil of Ethiopian experience. Rather, according to Fikru Gebrekidan, only when the emperor Haile Selassie was restored to the throne during World War II did he begin to find it expedient to receive instmction in the practical utility ofracialist politics from a variety ofAmerican or American-trained ideologues. 4 THEEDITORS For reasons concerning which his Gedeo or Eritrean subjects could undoubtedly have elaborated, it was easier to kindle unqualified metaphysical passion for the Lion of Judah at the safe distance of Kingston, Jamaica or New York City. Nor was the line between black and white necessarily a hostile frontier across the wider terrain of colonized Africa. Rather, close scrutiny of individual experience reveals a much more complex and variegated range of relationships, along which continuum the brutal confrontations of fashionable academic discourse provide only one extreme. Collaboration, Irma Taddia insists, is quite as important a theme in the history of colonial Eritrea as is resistance, an assertion that evokes particularly deep resonances from the studies ofJames Cox, Charles McClellan and Tony Woods. "In many cases," Taddia writes, colonial power "resulted from compromises that were made between colonial subjects and European authorities." From this perspective one may best appreciate the contribution of David Robinson; the generals who created French West Africa in a very real sense performed their most difficult and important conquests in France, through the annexation for themselves as "africains" ofan ever-widerprovince of the official mind of the imperial establishment. (Conquering West Africans was considerably less difficult, and the routine could usually be delegated to other West Africans.) Conventional Africanist discourse holds a set of rather fixed moralizing expectations concerning the historical role of the state. The precolonial state is usually construed in positive terms and sometimes, notably at the hands of Afrocentrists, is greatly romanticized. The colonial state, in contrast, receives a negative assessment, while the governments of independent Africa are understood to share a Manichaean heritage within which ancient authentic virtue strives against recently-inflicted alien evil. Building upon the historical experiences of uncolonized Ethiopia as a point of critical reference, the contributors.challenge the received assumptions of the conventionalparadigminmanyways. Jay Spaulding suggests that the often fragmentary evidence from early times shouldbe read in terms oftheperhaps less sanguinebutbetterimderstood realities of themorerecentpast. SeveraloftheselatterfigureconspicuouslyinthestudyofDonald Crummey, who stresses the violence, the immense human cost, and the deliberate ideological self-deceptions implicit in state-formation. Some of this is apparent in LaVerle Berry’s analysis of the rise to power of Ras Welde Li’ul in a context where controloverlandandsubjectscomprisedtheprincipalfocusofacquisitiveattention,and more may be found inJames Cox’s account ofRindi ofMoshi, where dominance over commercial routes and connections was also an important objective ofpower-seekers. When viewed against a realistic backdrop of precolonial political culture, the alien regimesimposedbyconquestduringthenineteenthcenturyandtheirmodemheirsoften seem to differ in degree rather than in kind. (In thecase ofGambeila, an aliencolonial enclavewithinanindependentAfricanstatediscussedbyRobertO.Collins,itwouldbe
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