Africa’s Political Skeletons: From External to Internal Colonialism
By Baba Galleh Jallow,
There is no doubt that the independent African nation state was born under inauspicious circumstances and faced formidable obstacles to proper development from the very beginning. Merely a shadow of the fully grown western nation state system that gave birth to it, the African nation state had to contend not only with the cruel legacy of the colonial state, but also with the unfeeling and alarmingly callous dictates of the global politics of ideological containment that was characterized the cold war. It had to contend with the impersonal forces of global capital and with economies that, while immensely endowed with potential, were extremely rudimentary and unable to survive without a degree of external intervention. At the same time, the African nation state was born with immense potential waiting to be exploited, especially in terms of human resources and the natural human capacity to think its way out of these obstacles and take its rightful place in the comity of nations.  
 It is a sad fact of African history that rather than honestly and courageously face the challenges of exploiting Africa’s creative potential and channeling the resultant fruits towards developing the continent into a community of fully grown, healthy nation states deserving of admiration and respect, the men who took over the reins of power from the colonial authorities engaged in a form of internal colonialism. The same oppressive relations of subjugation and exploitation that existed between colonizer and colonized now existed between themselves and their own people. The hegemon-subject relations of colonialism morphed into ruler-ruled relations in which the distribution of power was totally weighted in favor of the rulers, just like they were under colonialism. The new African rulers emerged not as dedicated servants to the ideals of freedom and human rights they fought for with and on behalf of their people, but as masters of their people who assumed the infallible right to define and decide what was best for their countries, what constituted human rights and freedom and who among their people deserved to enjoy or be denied such freedom and human rights. Just as the colonial state saw their colonial subjects as divided into collaborators and resisters, so too the new rulers regarded their people as divided into collaborators and resisters and into patriotic and unpatriotic citizens, or instruments of neocolonialism and imperialism. Those considered collaborators were rewarded with positions and other enticements, or at the least left at peace. Those considered resisters were branded enemies of the people and often subjected to forms of repression worse than those inflicted on the colonized by the colonizer. Draconian colonial laws were recycled and imposed on an independent people and former colleagues in the struggle against colonialism were transformed into enemies who did not deserve to live and who had no right to speak on behalf of the people they spoke for just a few years before. Even some of the most enlightened of Africa’s independence leaders – men like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure and Sir Dawda Jawara – somehow managed to replicate some the most repressive mechanisms of the colonial state in what had now become an independent nation-space. 
 Kwame Nkrumah, that great giant of pan-Africanism remains worthy of the respect of all Africans and will continue to hold an elevated place in African history. However, reason dictates that Africans revisit the political mistakes he made not only because Ghana trailed the blaze for African independence, but also because he set rather ugly precedents that continue to be followed by African leaders to this day. Nkrumah espoused a philosophy he termed Nkrumahism. According to Nkrumahism, the winning of political independence represented only a first victory over the forces of imperialism, a first stage in the struggle for total liberation from the forces of imperialism and neocolonialism. Having formally conceded defeat, colonial powers always tried to maintain their grip on decolonized peoples by building in “schisms” into the independence constitution which they would then later exploit through a regime of neocolonialism, a “strategy of divide and rule from afar” perpetuated through the use of local imperialist stooges (Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, p. 57). In order to preserve imperial interests in the former colony, the departing colonialists institutionalized a culture of “constitutional rigidity . . . political separatism . . . and a civil service apparatus insulated from the new political power in the young state and holding it ransom at will” (Some Essential Features on Nkrumahism, pp. 38-39). This constitutional rigidity made it hard to amend the constitution to meet the needs of the new nation; political separatism was perpetuated through a system of multi-party politics that hampered the nation’s progress; and a civil service apparatus insulated from direct state control limited the state’s effectiveness in administering the affairs of the nation the way it liked. Nkrumahism was the means by which all of these aspects of the neocolonial constitution had to be amended and brought in line with the aspirations of the new nation.  It was the strategy through which Ghana would be transformed into a socialist nation and a union of West African and later, African socialist states on the continent created. It was in pursuit of these goals that Nkrumah gradually turned the Ghanaian state against the Ghanaian people, banning media houses that fought alongside him in the battle for independence, jailing former colleagues in the nationalist struggle like Dr. J. B. Danquah and Obetsebi Lamptey under the notorious Preventive Detention Act of 1958 and allowing them to die in jail, and eventually declaring that his party, the Convention People’s Party was Ghana and Ghana was the CPP. Nkrumah then took one of the most unfortunate steps of his leadership in 1964 when he turned Ghana into Africa’s first single-party state, an example that continues to be followed by African leaders with disastrous consequences for the continent. In a nutshell, Nkrumah continued fighting colonialism long after colonialism was dead. There is, of course, no denying the fact that neocolonialism was a real enough problem. But to assume that all who criticized or opposed him were agents of neocolonialism in cahoots with external forces to destroy Ghana was one assumption too much. No wonder that after his overthrow on February 24, 1966 by a combined police-military coup dubbed Operation Cold Chop, Ghana went through a succession of military coups and brutal dictatorships that ended only after a prolonged popular revolution in the 1980s that led to the inauguration of the Fourth Republic in January 1993. To this day, in spite of admirable political and democratic gains, Ghana continues to grapple with issues of political tolerance that could be traced right back to the Nkrumah era.
 In neighboring Guinea, Sekou Toure boldly declared that his dictatorship was a democratic dictatorship because it derived its power and legitimacy from the will of the Guinean people. Yet, those who disagreed with him were apparently not considered part of the Guinean people. Like Nkrumah, he tried to do the impossible: impose a uniformity of views, opinions and political orientations on a diverse society. And like Nkrumah, he turned with a vengeance on his former colleagues in the nationalist struggle against colonialism, killing and jailing opponents and silencing journalists and media houses that dared deviate from what he considered his infallible knowledge of what was best for Guinea. The results of his so-called democratic dictatorship were later to manifest themselves in the “undemocratic” dictatorship of General Lansana Conte, the atrocities of Captain Musa Dadis Camara and the momentous difficulties Guinea continues to face to this day in spite of her vast wealth in mineral and human resources.
 Even in The Gambia, where Sir Dawda Jawara allowed a form of multi-party politics and tolerated a reasonable measure of political tolerance, what obtained was in many respects a form of internal colonialism of the benign sort. There was clearly the ruler-ruled divide and society was perceived as consisting of the two classical, colonial factions of collaborators and resisters. Collaborators were generously rewarded; and while resisters were not necessarily physically brutalized to the extent that they were in some African countries, they were demonized and marginalized to the extent that they either faded into political oblivion or stood little or no chance of ever bringing about a regime change through the ballot box. The view that by 1994 parties like the NCP were on the verge of winning presidential elections under the Jawara regime are at best questionable. Gambia under Jawara held multi-party elections every five years, but it was clearly a de facto one-party state run by a clearly identifiable cohort of politicians and PPP loyalists who increasingly grew alienated from the realities of ordinary Gambian life.  Jawara’s best legacy might be the spirit of tolerance he instilled into the Gambian body politic. His worst legacy is certainly our current tyrannical pseudo-military dictatorship of the babbletariat headed by you know who. Of course, what we now have in The Gambia is a worst case scenario of internal colonialism.
 Clearly then, ordinary Africans have not enjoyed the fruits and freedoms of independence from colonialism. The oppressive colonial state was replaced by an equally oppressive postcolonial state. Rather than exploit the continent’s vast human resource potential by enhancing the free circulation and exchange of ideas and building a culture of political tolerance, African leaders imposed a notoriously malignant form of internal colonialism on their own people in the name of vague ideological formulations and fatuous claims that Western political forms were not suitable for Africa. The reality is that no one advocated the wholesale aping of western political forms or any other foreign political forms. The issue was not one of political forms per se. It was and remains one of respect for the fundamental God-given rights and freedoms of fellow human beings having the same rights as everyone over the nation-space and its resources. Furthermore, respect for the dignity and rights of the human being as human being is not a western political form. It is human political form adopted from natural wisdom by the West as one that works best in the conduct of human affairs.                                      

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