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Journal of Contemporary African Studies
ISSN: 0258-9001 (Print) 1469-9397 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjca20
The ‘science’ of superiority: Africa and scholarly
colonial assumptions
Steven Friedman
To cite this article: Steven Friedman (2018): The ‘science’ of superiority: Africa and scholarly
colonial assumptions, Journal of Contemporary African Studies
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2018.1546046
Published online: 22 Nov 2018.
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The ‘science’of superiority: Africa and scholarly colonial
assumptions
Steven Friedman
Research Professor, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
ABSTRACT
The use of ‘neopatrimonialism’as a category in mainstream
scholarship on African polities and economies is ubiquitous. A
critique by Thandika Mkandawire has shown that the
‘neopatrimonial school’is devoid of conceptual coherence and
analytical power –it is an expression of a prejudice, not a useful
tool for research and analysis. The article endorses Mkandawire’s
view but points out that this is by no means the only example of
its kind. On the contrary, the use of categories which assume the
superiority of societies in the global North over those in Africa is
widespread. The article illustrates this by discussing and criticising
two others, the ‘democratic consolidation’paradigm and the
‘failed state’framework. It argues that all three shape assumptions
by scholars in Africa as well as outside it which obstruct concrete
analysis. A critique of these paradigms is thus essential to the
development of scholarship on and about Africa.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 31 August 2017
Accepted 9 June 2018
KEYWORDS
Neopatrimonialism;
democracy; consolidation;
state; colonial; bias
While Africa has freed herself from colonialism as a form of government, it is trite to point
out that many of the attitudes which justified colonial domination survive. What is less
obvious is the degree to which these attitudes live on in paradigms which are accepted
in mainstream scholarship not only in the global North but also in Africa itself.
These paradigms share important features. All of them claim to offer comprehensive
explanations which can be applied to all African polities and economies, regardless of
the differences between them. They have all achieved almost hegemonic influence
among scholars –and sometimes in popular discussion –despite the absence of firm intel-
lectual foundations. Some are influential despite lacking the elementary requirements for
a paradigm, such as a working definition of its assumptions. This raises an obvious ques-
tion –how did they come to be accepted by so wide a spectrum of scholars despite the
flimsiness of their conceptual underpinnings? The answer, in each case, is the same: they
become unquestioned frameworks for empirical research and analysis among students of
the continent in the global North not because they have anything to offer to the study of
Africa but because they express deeply held prejudices –so deeply held that they seem
entirely normal and natural to those who hold them. These assumptions are transferred
to scholars in Africa (Jana 2014; Mutongwizo 2014; Ngozwana 2014; Orievulu 2014)
both because the power of the Northern academy invests them with authority and
© 2018 The Institute of Social and Economic Research
CONTACT Steven Friedman SFriedman@uj.ac.za
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2018.1546046
because of the workings of another dynamic which will be discussed in this article. The
result is to ensure that Africa continues to be viewed in the academy, not only outside
the continent but often within it too, from the perspective not of those who inhabit it
but of those who remain deeply sceptical of its capacity to govern itself.
As long as these paradigms dominate, it is not realistic to expect mainstream scholar-
ship to develop coherent explanations of politics and economics on the continent. The
paradigms ensure that the questions which are asked of African polities and economies
cannot generate answers which credibly explain the past and present and which point
to a workable future. What a scholarly framework which may offer helpful answers
would look like is far from certain –developing one will require rigorous debate and,
no doubt, more than a little trial and error. But the work of generating this framework
cannot begin until the paradigms which currently dominate mainstream scholarship are
exposed as expressions of cultural prejudice rather than workable tools for understanding
and explanation.
This article is an attempt to begin this conversation by focusing on three of these frame-
works. All are chosen because they illustrate in exemplary form the critique proposed here
and because they are particularly influential in shaping scholarly work. The first example is
drawn not from the author’s own work –it relies, rather, on a 2015 article by the eminent
scholar Thandika Mkandawire. The article endorses his critique of the ‘neopatrimonial
school’of African scholarship on Africa (Mkandawire 2015) and then seeks to demonstrate
that it is not an isolated case. It does this by arguing that that the two other examples, the
democratic consolidation and failed state paradigms, show similar features to the para-
digm which Mkandawire dissects–that in all three cases, we are dealing not with
flawed scholarship but with a prejudice masquerading as a paradigm.
State of nature? Mkandawire’s critique of the neopatrimonial school
Much is at stake in Mkandawire’s critique for, as he soon points out, the use of ‘neopatri-
monialism’is far more than an attempt to coin a useful term which seeks to describe some
aspects of some African polities and economies –it is, rather, the ‘convenient, all purpose,
and ubiquitous moniker for African governance’. The neopatrimonial school’s view of the
world ‘informs policymakers and its language permeates media reportage on African
states’. It is said to explain much of what occurs in Africa, particularly the lack of economic
development: ‘So deeply ingrained is the view that underneath every policy lurks neopa-
trimonialism, that invocation of the concept has the air of irrefutable common sense’.
(Mkandawire 2015, 563/564) At stake, therefore, is nothing less than how Africa is
viewed by scholars and those they influence.
What is ‘neopatrimonialism’? Mkandawire notes that most scholars agree with the
British academic Christopher Clapham’sdefinition:
a form of organization in which relationships of a broadly patrimonial type pervade a political
and administrative system which is formally constructed on rational-legal lines. Officials hold
positions in bureaucratic organizations with powers which are formally defined, but exercise
those powers ... as a form of private property. (Cited by Mkandawire 2015, 565)
This suggests, of course, that arrangements held to exist before the establishment of the
modern state survive the founding of that state. Its institutions may appear to follow the
2S. FRIEDMAN
dictates of Weberian rationality, applying a set of rules which can be defended by reason
to all equally. In reality, they provide a convenient shell to continue very particularistic
exercises of power in which control of the state is used to serve the needs of the power
holders and their dependants, not the society.
Mkandawire suggest that this claim fits well with some deeply held prejudices. He notes
in passing that the ‘easy acceptance by researchers and policymakers of the school’s
claims in the absence of empirical evidence’may indicate more than a failure of academic
method: it suggests ‘that there are strong preconceptions and prejudices about African
politics that are unlikely to be dispelled by a more accurate measurement of the phenom-
enon in question’(601). It is important to fill in the gaps left by this understatement. The
explanation is entirely consonant with the prejudices about Africans which provided the
rationale for colonialism: it does not matter, this school suggests, that Africans seek to
adopt the camouflage of the modern and rational governance rules and institutions of
the global North. It is all a charade, for deep down the pre-modern political jungle, in
which big men use power to lord it over everyone else and ties to the powerful, not
merit and ability, are routes to wealth and success, still prevails. It is surely no exaggeration
to suggest that the story being told is that of the savage who masquerades as a convert to
civilisation in order to fool the gullible Western moderns: ‘Beneath the veneer of moder-
nity flaunted by local elites lurked a world of irrational belief, superstition, and a primordial
sense of selective interest’(566). This bias is deep-rooted enough to cross ideological
boundaries in the global North: Mkandawire notes that the neopatrimonialism school’s
contribution to the study of capitalism in Africa produces an ironic ‘sense of déjà vu’for
it harks back to ‘the early years of dependency theory’when neo-Marxists and radical
nationalists ‘considered African capitalism in terms of comprador, petty, or a lumpen bour-
geoisie –drone capitalists confined to buying and selling –as opposed to a national bour-
geoisie that produced captains of industry’(577).
It is no accident that one consequence of this school of analysis is to deny that ideas
play any role in the thought and action of African elites: ‘Whatever ideas the elite hold
are dismissed by neopatrimonialists as rationalization of interests and the crude excres-
cence of neopatrimonialism’(Mkandawire 2015, 598). After all, only moderns steeped in
the culture of the global North can be expected to take ideas seriously. Nor is it mere
coincidence that an influential member of the school, Jean-Franc̜
ois Bayart, proposes a
view of the ‘typical’African leader which relies on ‘the stereotypes of tropical lascivious-
ness, excessive conviviality, ostentatiousness, and sexual appetite’(572). Nor that the
school shows a deeply anti-democratic thrust, both because it denies that African citizens
possess the ability to vote intelligently and because its Weberian roots propose a view of
the state not as a vehicle for popular aspirations but as a rational-legal edifice whose inex-
orable rules are not to be disturbed by the (irrational) wants and needs of electorates (599/
600). Not only is the vote wasted on Africans –they are sure to exercise it in ways which do
great damage. However dense the academic language which is used, the effect is to repeat
some of the central cultural prejudices of the colonial period. This does not, of course,
mean that everyone who uses the ‘neopatrimonial’framework is an avid colonialist
bent on hiding their true intentions. But it does mean that it provides a plausible intellec-
tual framework for the expression of prejudices which made sense of colonialism to those
who practiced it and are deeply ingrained in the worldview of the intelligentsia in formerly
colonial powers.
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES 3
To demonstrate that a framework is rooted in prejudice is not automatically to show
that it fails to describe reality. After all, the prejudices may be rooted partially or wholly
in the truth. However, Mkandawire assembles a convincing array of empirical data and
conceptual evidence to show that: ‘the concept offers little analytical content and has
no predictive value with respect to economic policy and performance’(2015, 564). Data
presented in the article shows that African states do not behave in the way in which
the neopatrimonial school claims they do. To name one important example, the school
cannot explain why so many African states opt for market-oriented reforms which are
meant to undo the logic of neopatrimonialism. Michael Hodd has thus asked:
If vested political interest is opposed to market solutions and if the financial leverage of the
IMF and World Bank acting alone is not decisive in imposing policy change, why then have
so many African countries begun substantial restructuring of their economies on market
economy lines? (Cited in Mkandawire 2015, 593)
Nor, Mkandawire shows, does the data ‘support the view of decline and stagnation as the
norm in African economic history’. It shows an n-shaped curve which describes advance as
well as decline ‘rather than the downward sloping or inverted curve implicit in neopatri-
monial arguments’. Neopatrimonialists can explain only decline ‘and consequently have
problems explaining earlier periods of growth and the recovery of the last decade or so’
(Mkandawire 2015, 594).
Neither the data nor subsequent developments have forced any revisions of or retreats
from the neopatrimonial school. Changes which appear to refute its claims are explained
away by insisting that neopatrimonialism is tenacious enough to survive any change in the
environment –since this means that any development can be explained away by neopa-
trimonialism’s adaptability, the effect is to ensure that the school is incapable of meeting
the core positivist requirement of coherence –‘the research program of the neopatrimo-
nialism school (is) impervious to empirical falsification’(Mkandawire 2015, 565). This is not
surprising because Mkandawire’s close study of the literature shows that it is ‘plagued by
anomalies, non sequiturs, and false paradoxes’. All institutions and ideas in Africa ‘are said
to exist because they serve a particular function; the paradoxes arise when they do not
seem to serve their assigned role or do not produce the predicted outcomes …’ Their
function is to explain away evidence which undermine the school’s claims. And so the
school remains hegemonic even though many of its ‘claims about causality are spurious
and much of what is attributed to neopatrimonialism could, with equal justification,
apply to other factors’(601).
The price of prejudice
This critique becomes more remarkable when we recall that the neopatrimonial school is
not a peripheral influence on scholarship on Africa. Mkandawire is correct to point out that
it is ubiquitous: it has been, for decades, the dominant prism through which the continent
has been viewed, by many who were born in it as well as those who were not. There is,
therefore, a sharp dissonance between the concept’s lack of rigour and intellectual coher-
ence on the one hand, and its almost universal acceptance by both the academic and lay
mainstream on the other. Why is so weak an analytical concept regarded as self-evident by
so many who specialise in the use and study of ideas?
4S. FRIEDMAN
The answer was suggested earlier. The neopatrimonial school is not a wrong-headed
attempt to discern the truth –if it was, it would have been constantly revised and concei-
vably abandoned altogether in the face of contradictory evidence and the theoretical chal-
lenge of its critics. It survives and flourishes precisely because it is nourished not by
argument and evidence but by a deep cultural prejudice which assumes the superiority
of the polities and social arrangements of the global North over those of the South in
general and Africa in particular. The school does not only seek to explain Africa –it
does so in implicit comparison with societies which are assumed to possess the properties
which African polities and economies lack and to have either never experienced, or have
moved beyond, the ills which afflict them. And so it functions less as a tool of explanation
than as an affirmation of an instinctively assumed cultural hierarchy. And it survives
because that hierarchy is not a product of investigation or deduction –it is a manifestation
of deeply embedded notions of what makes ‘common sense’and what does not (Geertz
1983).
That these assumptions are common among the former colonisers seems understand-
able –assumptions of superiority and inferiority do not disappear when the systems of
domination which they justify are replaced. But in a world of very clear international hier-
archies, they are also often deeply embedded in the implicit world views of scholars, com-
mentators and public figures in the South. One plausible explanation is the inferiority
complex which is often the inherited consequence of a subordinated status: Steve Biko,
among others, wrote convincingly of racial domination’s capacity to demolish the feelings
of self-worth of its victims (Biko 1987). But there is another highly plausible explanation
(which does not necessarily exclude Biko’s). Writing about the influence of Northern
understandings of democracy among Latin American scholars, Guillermo O’Donnell
noted that it was assumed that ‘real’democracy would resemble that in countries of
the North who were ‘admired for their long-enduring regimes and for their wealth, and
because both things seemed to go together …the Northwest was seen as the endpoint
of a trajectory that would largely be traversed by getting rid of authoritarian rulers’
(1996, 46/47). In this view, the assumption of Northern superiority played a key role for
Southern intellectuals which went far deeper than intellectual processes. It served not
as an expression of a subordinated ego but as a critique of the manifest inadequacies
of political and economic reality in the South. By contrasting the world presided over
by Southern elites with an idealised view of the North, they acquired a ready-made con-
ceptual and moral toolkit with which to reproach the wielders of power in their societies.
That the framework did not, as O’Donnell suggests, accurately explain reality was not
important for this was not its primary function, which was critique rather than analysis.
This applies as much to African intellectuals seeking weapons with which to fight their
own autocrats and merchants of poverty as it did to those in the Americas who O’Donnell
describes.
There is an obvious price to be paid for these assumptions –they obscure attempts to
develop a rigorous analysis of the post-colonial political economy. There is an important
implication to be drawn from O’Donnell’s insight: ‘neopatrimonialism’would surely
have held little appeal for African intellectuals if it was purely the expression of a Northern
prejudice. It continues to flourish as a form of critique masquerading as explanation
because there clearly is something to be criticised –the severe constraints to inclusive
growth and accountable government in many if not all post-independence African
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES 5
societies. If we set aside Biko’s explanation, the negative effect on African scholarship of
the ubiquity of the ‘neopatrimonial’school lies less in its role in expressing the degree
to which African intellectuals have imbibed Northern assumptions of superiority and
more as an obstacle to inquiry and understanding born of a perhaps understandable ten-
dency to privilege critique over understanding. One of its key products may well be a
widespread tendency to explain away all problems by a reference to the inadequacy of
leadership in Africa.
If the problems which African societies experience are placed at the door of ‘neopatri-
monial’leaders, both the problem and its potential solutions can be ascribed purely to the
failings of African leaders. It should be no surprise, then, that this ‘explanation’is ubiqui-
tous in African analysis of the weakness of African polities and economies (Ghanaweb
2005; Talk Africa 2010; Gyimah-Boadi 2015). Blaming the problem on ‘leadership’,
however, may be effective as moral critique but not as social or political analysis. It
begs the obvious question: why should Africa be particularly afflicted with unaccountable
leadership? For the ‘neopatrimonial’school the answer is self- evident: Africans are unable
to govern themselves in the way in which the ‘advanced’countries of the North do. For
Africans not hampered by deep-seated notions of inferiority, the answer must lie else-
where. But a framework which sees ‘bad leadership’as a cause rather than a consequence
is obviously unable to seek that answer. Since there is a clear consonance between the
neopatrimonial school’s explanation and the view that problems begin and end with lea-
dership, dismissing ‘neopatrimonialism’as an explanation should, therefore, clear the
intellectual decks for an inquiry which sees in African political and economic patterns
the workings of social and economic power, not imagined cultural proclivities. Mkanda-
wire’s critique therefore opens the door to a rigorous examination of the power relation-
ships which have obstructed African political and economic development, their causes
and the countervailing forces which might challenge them.
But neopatrimonialism is not the only concept, and its adherents are not the only scho-
larly school, to impose on Africa –and the global South in general –understandings and
concepts which express colonial biases rather than analytical insights. On the contrary, it is
only one among a set of ‘understandings’which show similar features –the ‘neopatrimo-
nial school’shares common features with other notions which have become deeply
embedded in scholarly study of Africa and the global South and in public discussion of
these issues. These frameworks also require challenge if the decks are to be cleared for
the analysis proposed here.
This paper seeks to elaborate on this point by identifying two other paradigms which
play much the same role with much the same effects as the neopatrimonial school: one is
an influential framework which purports to offer a means to understand new democracies,
the other claims to offer a means of analysing the function of the state. While the neopa-
trimonial school is directed at Africa in particular, these two demarcate a line between
‘developed’and ‘undeveloped’societies which apply across the globe. But they are regu-
larly applied to Africa too with much the same distorting effect.
Can ‘they’become ‘us’?: The consolidation paradigm
The emergence of formal democracy in many African societies, and in other parts of the
world in which non-democratic rule had been ubiquitous, prompted a new paradigm for
6S. FRIEDMAN
students of these democracies –‘democratic consolidation’. It has informed mainstream
writing on democracy in the global North and is common currency in the South. Like all
the concepts discussed here, its assumptions are often absorbed seamlessly into the writ-
ings and speeches of activists and commentators as well as scholars. It has arguably
become a hegemonic framework for viewing democratic progress.
Behind the copious work on ‘democratic consolidation’is a concern to establish
whether new democracies are ‘the real thing’. Initially this meant that they were built to
last –that they would always remain democratic and were not temporary aberrations.
Later, scholars came to equate democratic consolidation with determining whether new
democracies were really democratic or artificial imitations. This entailed in part seeking
to determine whether societies which had achieved democratic form were also
engaged in ‘completing democracy, with supplying its missing features’(Schedler 1998,
91,94). A lengthier critique of this approach has been attempted elsewhere (Friedman
2011, 29). But, as one critic of the paradigm pointed out, it has a profoundly teleological
flavour –it assumes that there is a democratic ‘end point’which all democracies are
expected to reach: if they do not, they are assumed to be ‘stunted’or frozen (O’Donnell
1996, 37). The finished democratic product is normal and natural and failure to achieve
this status is considered pathological. At the very least, it clearly does claim that some
democracies are ‘the finished article’and that it is possible to determine whether any
democracy has become ‘the real thing’.
We would therefore expect ‘consolidation’scholars to offer a clear and rigorous
definition of this end point. They do not –their criteria are very poor guides to anyone
trying to tell whether a democracy is ‘consolidated’. Thus one celebrated formula
claims, without justification, that this occurs when two governments have surrendered
office to opponents who defeated them in an election (Huntington 1991). At most, this
could be said to show that the society in question has become used to changing govern-
ments at the ballot box, although not even that is certain because elites may be willing to
tolerate a handover to some winning parties and not others. But it says nothing at all about
the health or longevity of democracy in the country in question. An equally oft-used cri-
terion is that democracy must become the ‘only game in town’a state of being in which
‘none of the major political actors consider that there is any alternative to democratic pro-
cesses to gain power …’(Linz 1990;Linz and Stepan 1996). This fails to specify who the
major political actors are, leaving open whether democracy is assumed to be sustained
by political elites or citizens. Perhaps more importantly, it does not say how we could
ever determine whether political actors really feel that there is no alternative to demo-
cratic process simply because they say so –they might change their calculations or
express their real preferences if circumstances change. It also, of course, sees democracy
as process rather than substance, as rules and procedures, not concrete practices. And
these two are among the more credible criteria –most of the others offer no guide at
all which would enable us to distinguish between the ‘finished product’and imitations.
The reason why the end point is never described is that there is no need to describe it
because it is simply assumed: liberal democracy as practised in the North –or, more accu-
rately, as it is assumed to be practiced by those who see it as a model –is, for the para-
digm, the optimal form of regulating and organising democratic politics and, therefore,
the goal towards which all democracies should evolve. Schedler notes a tendency to
compare Southern democracies with ‘a more or less rosy pictures of established
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES 7
Western democracies’(1998, 100). This assumption is so ‘obvious’to its adherents that
they see no need to define it. Democracies of the North are never subjected to the ‘con-
solidation’test because they are assumed, without any need for supporting evidence, to
be ‘consolidated’because ‘consolidation’is a synonym for ‘becoming (an idealised notion
of) a Northern democracy’and all others are to be judged by the degree to which they
have made the journey to this state. Like former US Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart who said he could not define pornography ‘but I know it when I see it’, consolida-
tion specialists do not need to define democracy since they (and, by implication, we) know
it when they see it (Lattman 2007). And they see it in North America and Western Europe.
Much of this scholarship boils down to a desire to establish (in the North) when and how
‘they’will become ‘us’or (in the South) how ‘we’will become ‘them’.
Even if we avoid important debates on whether liberal democracy is a democratic
exemplar, to assume that Northern democracies are models of this type of democracy
is untenable. The ‘two turnover test’would have excluded Sweden for four decades of
the twentieth century. If levels of popular participation in democratic politics are a
feature of ‘consolidated’democracies, the US and parts of Western Europe are unconsoli-
dated. Would an African democracy whose President’s election hinged on a dispute over
faulty voting machines in a state of which his brother was the governor qualify as ‘conso-
lidated’? If the state was Burundi or Nigeria, it would not. But that is how the 2000 US pre-
sidential election was decided. The United States has practiced detention without trial
since the events of 11 September 2001 (Sydney Morning Herald 2008). The vote is not
guaranteed to all adults in the US since some states impose voter registration criteria
which place unreasonable obstacles in the way of people seeking to vote, in particular
racial minorities and the poor (Waldman 2012). In 2016, the winning candidate in the
US presidential election received 3–4 m votes less than the loser but this minority
secured for the successful party control of the legislature, executive and judiciary, an
outcome which would surely deprive any African state of claims to consolidation. If an
unelected legislative chamber is a disqualification then Britain’s House of Lords disqualifies
it from the ranks of ‘consolidated’democracies. And Britain, too, has introduced detention
without trial for up to 28 days (Travis 2007).
While the consolidation paradigm is less in vogue now, its influence continues una-
bated for its assumptions continue to inform scholarship on Africa however infrequently
the terms of the paradigm may be explicitly invoked. Perhaps the most influential
product of its assumption that there are ‘completed’democracies in the global North
and democracies in search of completion in the South are the Freedom House Rankings
(Puddington and Roylance 2016) which grade societies’democratic progress by assigning
them a numerical score between 1 and 7. On the strength of reports complied by analysts,
each society is ranked as ‘Free’(a score of 1–2,5), ‘Partly Free’(3–5) or ‘Not Free’(5,5–7)
(Freedom in the World 2005). While Freedom House insists it is assessing ‘freedom’, not
democracy, in much academic work ‘freedom’is used as a synonym for democracy, for
scholars regularly use Freedom House scores to assess the state of democracy across
the globe as well as trends within democratic societies. Because it assigns a numerical
weight to its judgement, it appears to provide a handy guide to the state of democratic
progress which is of particular use to scholars who use quantitative methods to under-
stand comparative trends (Diamond 1999; Karatnycky 1999; Knack 2004)–Freedom
House scores can be easily fed into a regression analysis to generate international
8S. FRIEDMAN
trends and causal explanations. This gives them enormous influence, for they have
become an unquestioned tool in much of the mainstream scholarship on democracy.
They are treated much as official economic statistics are by economists, as an unimpeach-
able source of data from which analytical conclusions may be drawn.
Like the consolidation paradigm, however, the Freedom House scores are an expression
not of reliable scholarship but of prejudice. While the reliability of economic statistics is
sometimes challenged they are, at least in theory, data derived by researching social
phenomena. Freedom House scores, by contrast, are derived not from data but from
opinions submitted by analysts, to which a number is then assigned. It should be
obvious that an opinion which bears a numerical value remains an opinion –even
when the number hides its origins by cloaking it in the spurious ‘objectivity’of social
data. It should be equally obvious that, if the analysts who are hired to provide the
opinions share a common view of the world, the scores will be an expression of the pre-
vailing prejudice. While no data seems to be available on who supplies Freedom House
with its opinions, it seems reasonable to conclude that an exercise whose founding
assumption is that it is possible to distinguish between the ‘free’, the ‘partly free’and
the ‘not free’is likely to attract analysts who share that starting point and who therefore
agree that there is a hierarchy of democratic states. That these analysts share the view that
freedom is a condition attained by the democracies of the global North seems to be
confirmed by the fact that these democracies are always ranked as ‘free’–the United
States, the home of Freedom House, is always ranked in this way even when, as noted
here, it detains prisoners without trial, disenfranchises large numbers of its citizens and
is currently subject to minority rule. This means, of course, that democratic deficiencies
are simply overlooked if they occur in the North and that the rankings are not an
expression of ‘freedom in the world’but of the prejudices of a particular group of Northern
scholars and analysts. And yet it is these prejudices, reduced to numbers, which are rou-
tinely used to make research-based claims about the state of democracy throughout the
world. This raises the startling possibility that much of the current corpus of research-
based mainstream literature on democracy is based not on evidence but on a prejudice.
The effect may be much the same as that which might be achieved if all economic analysis
was based purely on data obtained by distilling the opinions of a few selected economists.
Freedom House is, conceptually, simply a distillation of the fallacies which underpin the
consolidation paradigm. The ideal state which it assumes –a democratic ‘finished product’
–is a chimera: ‘… democracy …is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended
as well as deepened. There is no threshold of democracy that once reached will guarantee
its continued existence’(Mouffe1993, 6). No democracy has ever been assured of survival
and none ever will be: the notion that Northern democracies will always be democratic is
hardly plausible. Nor is democratic perfection ever attained. Democracy is distinguished
from other forms of government not by a particular institutional form but by a principle
–the notion of popular sovereignty, which can be reduced to the principle that every
adult human being is entitled to an equal say in the decisions which affect them (Friedman
2012). If that measure is used, there clearly are no completed democracies, only societies in
various stages of democratic incompletion (Ibid). The notion that there is an end point is a
Northern cultural conceit, not a workable theory of politics.
Like the neopatrimonial school, the consolidation paradigm excludes important
avenues of inquiry –it also distorts understandings of African democracies and their
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES 9
potential trajectories. If we use the definition of democracy proposed here, it follows that
democratic progress or regression should be assessed by the degree to which more and
more citizens are acquiring more and more of a say in more and more decisions which
affect them, not by the adoption of a particular form or set of institutions. Besides the
obvious but important objection that ‘Western democracy’comes in many shapes and
forms, which means that it is impossible to simply mimic the institutional form of this alleg-
edly finished product, analysing African democracies by the degree to which they realise
the principle of popular sovereignty rather than the presumed features of Northern poli-
ties is likely to provide a much clearer understanding of African democratic possibilities
and constraints than the prism suggested by the consolidation paradigm. Moving
beyond the dominant mode of seeing is essential if new and far more productive lines
of vision are to be opened.
Who is failing who?: The perils of the ‘failed state’
An equally influential paradigm among scholars and others seeking to understand the pre-
sumed pathologies of African (and other Southern) polities is the ‘fragile’and ‘failed’state
paradigm which has been embraced by US luminaries across the mainstream spectrum
(Crocker 2003; Fukuyama 2004, 120; Rice and Patrick 2008) and has again seeped into
the writing of African scholars, including luminaries such as the late Mazrui (1995) It too
is commonly used in political debate as well as academic work (Hlongwane 2016). It is
also a focus of African multi-lateral institutions: the African Development Bank appointed
a High Level Panel on Fragile States in 2012, chaired by then Liberian President Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf (African Development Bank Group, n.d) and followed this up by appointing
three ‘high-level advisors on fragility’in 2015 (African Development Bank Group 2015).
Like the ‘consolidation’paradigm, it is based on the assumption that many states in the
South are lacking. Here their problem is not democratic inadequacy but that they are
unable to perform the functions which its advocates associate with statehood:
‘Governments are unable to do the things that their own citizens and the international com-
munity expect from them: protecting people from internal and external threats, delivering
basic health services and education, and providing institutions that respond to the legitimate
demands and needs of the population’. (Center for Global Development, n.d)
It is these states which are either ‘fragile’or ‘failed’. Just as Southern democracies are
assumed not to be ‘finished products’unless the contrary is proven, so in this framework
states cannot be considered real unless they meet specified criteria –‘…claims to “sover-
eignty”or “statehood”are no longer inherently given, but are increasingly based on
meeting certain (seldom explicit) standards of performance. Statehood has to be continu-
ously “earned”’ (Krause and Jutersonke 2007). That territories in the South were required to
prove that they had met a particular standard before deserving to become states was, of
course, one of the core assumptions underpinning colonialism.
As in the consolidation paradigm, the criteria for telling a failed state from the real thing
are largely incoherent and the paradigm rests more on assumption than explanation: ‘The
concept of state failure is used so frequently by politicians, journalists, and policy-oriented
researchers that it has become a reality …No one questions whether there is such a
thing’(Woodward 2006, 1). ‘Definitions are vague and distinctions blurred’(Boege et al.
10 S. FRIEDMAN
2009, 2). Similarly, ‘the term, state failure, is not defined in a way that makes it possible to
analyze empirically. One analysis, in fact, even admitted the terms “failing states”and
“failed states”were used “for convenience”’ (Woodward 2006, 5). In this paradigm, too,
the states which are lacking are never found in the North and here too the assumption
that the Northern state form is an exemplar is assumed but never demonstrated:
It is clear from this brief summary of the fragile states discourse that states are being measured
against the OECD type western state, which is regarded as the model stable state …State
fragility discourse and state-building policies are oriented towards the western-style Weber-
ian/Westphalian state. Yet this form of statehood hardly exists in reality beyond the OECD
world. (Boege et al. 2009, 3/4)
What this otherwise accurate critique misses is that this form of statehood hardly exists in
parts of the OECD world either. A look at current headlines would surely confirm that many
of these governments may be far less adept at protecting people from threats, providing
health and education and maintaining institutions ‘that respond to the legitimate
demands and needs of the population’than the paradigm assumes. In this paradigm
too, the standards by which Southern states are judged pathological do not actually
exist in the Northern societies which are assumed as a model: they exist, rather, in the
heads of comfortable scholars and commentators and reflect what they think the states
they live in are. Like ‘democratic consolidation’, state failure’s utility as a concept is
highly questionable since all states fail their citizens to a greater or lesser degree but con-
tinue to operate as states despite that.
The colonial utility of the failed state paradigm is far more explicit than that of ‘conso-
lidation’. In some formulations a key source of anxiety –that ‘failed’states may pose
threats to the North –is made explicit. The Center for Global Development, established
just after September 11 2001, declares that ‘failed’states ‘challenge US strategic interests’
and ‘threaten American values and moral leadership’. Weak states ‘may be deficient in only
one or two areas but still pose significant threats to US interests’(Weinstein, Porter, and
Eizenstat 2004). Here the concern is not only that Southern states may fail to approximate
to the values of the North but that they may not perform the functions it expects of them –
protecting it from threat. This makes it explicit just who ‘failed’states are failing –not their
own citizens but those of the North (or perhaps more accurately the elites who purport to
speak on their behalf). The assumptions of the consolidation paradigm blend with security
imperatives to provide an even more directly colonial framework than the ‘consolidation’
scholarship.
As in the other two examples, the price of embracing a colonial paradigm is the occlu-
sion of lines of vision which would open up new possibilities for understanding. Central to
the critique of the ‘failed state’scholarship is the proposition that there is no intrinsic,
idealised, model of the state and its functions –the state is a web of institutions and prac-
tices which are meant to serve a social purpose: it should be trite to point out that the
nature of states and the functions they perform will therefore vary, depending on the con-
crete realities in particular societies.
This point is made not to imply that societies can choose from a menu the form of state
which fits their needs. Besides the key question of who decides, for the state is always the
site of contest between rival interests with very different notions of what they want the
state to do (Jessop 1990), the notion that forms of state can be freely chosen is a
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN STUDIES 11
conceit of social engineers who assume that any reality may be imposed on societies pro-
vided that a sufficiently technically adept elite is available to impose it. Forms of state are
products of inherited realities and contemporary power equations which cannot be
wished away by ‘cutting edge’technique. The point, rather, is that whether a state is
able to meet the needs of society, what it might need to do to achieve this and which
social forces are opening up or blocking offroutes to a more appropriate state cannot
even begin to be answered by adopting the ‘failed state’scholarship’s assumption that
states are to be judged by whether they conform to the specifications of Northern security
specialists with a strong penchant for ignoring the limitations of their own states. The
problem of understanding African state forms is complex enough without the distortions
imposed by the ‘failed state’template –toppling its intellectual edifice is thus essential to
an adequate understanding of African states.
Conclusion: three of a kind
Like the neopatrimonial school, then, these two paradigms are marked by their intellectual
incoherence. They add to this a tendency to demand of Southern countries a standard
which none of their Northern counterparts have ever achieved, and their deep ethnic
and regional bias. In all three cases, prejudice with strong roots in the colonial past
have become accepted as almost unquestioned scholarly frameworks.
But, while they express colonial assumptions in perhaps their clearest form, they are by
no means the only example of influential academic paradigms which frame public debate
but which are based on the assumption that some are superior to others. An international
example which is primarily expressed in policy documents but does receive some aca-
demic validation is the ‘good governance’literature which judges polities by whether
they behave in particular ways (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights, n.d) or whether they pursue specified economic policies (International
Monetary Fund 1997): to elevate to an academic category or policy prescription a frame-
work which is so sure of its biases that it has elevated the word ‘good’to an analytical
concept is perhaps the ultimate expression of the assumption that some can tell others
what they should value.
Other frameworks are more concerned to present the presumed mores and social prac-
tices of dominant groups in societies as the norm against which the rest of that society
should be measured. Perhaps because they express assumptions of superiority within
societies rather than between them, they are even more enthusiastically embraced by
Southern elites than the frameworks discussed here. They include the notion of ‘social
cohesion’, currently sacrosanct among South African elites, (Ministry of Arts and Culture,
n.d; Abrahams 2016) which assumes that the good society is one in which everyone
embraces the assumed mores of the suburban middle class; ‘social capital’, which posits
the social networks of dominant groups as an essential ingredient of economic success
(Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti 1994); and ‘civil society’which often, as Partha Chatterjee,
Mahmood Mamdani and others have pointed out (Mamdani 1995; Chatterjee 2004), can
be used to seek to make presumed middle class political practices normative.
Because these frameworks are not applied specifically to Africa –or even to the global
South –they will not be discussed in any detail in this attempt to challenge colonial con-
structs which present themselves as scholarly paradigms. They are mentioned to reinforce
12 S. FRIEDMAN
the key argument of this analysis: that ‘neopatrimonialism’is only one of a range of terms
which are hegemonic in mainstream academic and public debate but which contain no
explanatory power beyond an important glimpse into the prejudices of those who
develop them. Given their power to obstruct scholarly inquiry, a critique of all these
terms is an essential foundation to a scholarship which seeks to understand power and
its effect in Africa, not simply to replicate its assumptions.
The starting point of this discussion, Mkandawire’s critique of ‘neopatrimonialism’,is
thus an essential contribution to the development of new forms of analysis of African
societies which can replace colonial prejudice with concrete analysis. The process
begins with a realisation that the ‘neopatrimonial school’is not an isolated example –
that, on the contrary, it is one of several frameworks which serve to demonstrate that colo-
nial assumptions live on in the academy and in policy debates long after the system which
they justified has been discredited. This invites a deeper and wider inquiry into the degree
to which assumptions of superiority have become unquestioned elements in the way in
which Africa is seen not only in the North but by the scholarly and public debates in
which Africans engage throughout the continent –and, of course, debate on the frame-
works which best provide tools to analyse African reality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Steven Friedman is Research Professor in the Humanities Faculty, at the University of Johannesburg.
He is a political scientist who specialises in the study of democracy. He researched and wrote on the
transition to democracy and on the relationship between democracy, inequality and economic
growth. He has stressed the role of citizen voice in strengthening democracy and promoting equal-
ity. He is the author of Building Tomorrow Today, a study of the trade union movement and its impli-
cations for democracy, and the editor of The Long Journey and The Small Miracle (with Doreen
Atkinson), which presented research on the South African transition. His current work focuses on
the theory and practice of democracy and his study of South African radical thought Race, Class
and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid was published in 2015. He writes a
weekly column in Business Day.
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