Table Of ContentTHE STATE IN
JEAN-FRANf OIS BAYART
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THE STATE IN AFRICA:
THE POLITICS OF THE BELLY
First published in French as L’Etat en Afrique
La politique du ventre
Translated from the French by Mary Harper
Christopher and Elizabeth Harrison
THE S TA TE
IN AFRICA:
THE POLITICS
OF THE BELL Y
Jean-Fran^ois Bayart
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522 PETERBOROUGH, ON fARIO
Longman
London and New York
30. ./US S3! 15 >*P6
Longman Group UK Limited,
Longman House, Burnt Mill,
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and associated Companies throughout the world.
Published in the United States of America
by Longman Publishing New York
This Translation © Longman Group UK Limited 1993
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without either the prior written permission of
the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued
by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd.,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.
French edition: L’Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre, Librairie Artheme Fayard,
1989.
First published 1993
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bayart, Jean-Franqois.
[Etat en Afrique. English]
The state in Africa : the politics of the belly/Jean-Franqois Bayart.
p. cm.
Inclusive bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-582-06422-8 (csd). - ISBN 0-582-06421-X (ppr)
1. Africa. Sub-Saharan-Politics and government-1960- I. Title.
JQ1879. A15B3713 1993
967.03’28-dc20 92-28666
CIP
Set by 13B in 10/12pt Bembo
Produced by Longman Singapore Publishers (Pte) Ltd.
Printed in Singapore
Contents
Foreword by Professor John Dunn vi
Preface to the English edition viii
Preface xvi
Introduction 1
PART ONE: The Genesis of the State
1. The shadow Theatre of Ethnicity 41
2. The Unequal State: ‘Little Men’ and ‘Big Men’ 60
3. The Bourgeois Illusion 87
4. The Opportunity State 104
PART TWO: Scenarios in the Pursuit of Hegemony
5. Conservative Modernisation or Social Revolution? The
Extreme Scenarios 119
6. The Reciprocal Assimilation of Elites: The Hypothesis of an
Intermediate Scenario 150
7. The Formation of a Postcolomal Historic Bloc 180
PART THREE: Political Action
8. Entrepreneurs, Factions and Political Networks 207
9. The Politics of the Belly 228
Conclusion: Of Terroirs and Men 260
Notes 273
Index 390
Foreword
To write a book about the politics of half a continent is in many ways an
extraordinarily ambitious undertaking. It is hard enough to understand
what happens politically in a single country - at times, indeed, hard
enough to understand what is happening in an individual town or a
particular occupational community (a factory, a school, a university
department). How can one sanely hope to comprehend such a treach¬
erous and opaque subject matter on such a huge scale?
There is nothing about a modern professional training in the social
sciences which gives even a modicum of trustworthy intellectual guid¬
ance on how to approach an undertaking of this extremity. Books that
seek to comprehend politics on a continental scale (on Latin America,
sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, perhaps on every genuinely continental
unit except Australia: a continent whichjust happens to be a single state)
certainly vary considerably in insight and intellectual force. But their
ceiling of aspiration is understandably low and their analytical achieve¬
ment and imaginative penetration for the most part correspondingly
modest. University teaching requires textbooks; and textbooks are
therefore produced. But, as for trying to capture the bemusing reality
of the politics of the exotic in these massive dimensions, we look today
not to the academy but to journalists, or novelists, or to the more
imaginatively reckless and seductive of travel writers to do that for us.
Jean-Franqois Bayart is a most unusual political scientist and L’Etat en
Afrique is a most unusual book. Intensely alive to the challenge and
exhilaration of any real attempt to understand somewhere so very
different, he is also a thinker of great analytical power and determina¬
tion. As much at home with the distanced Annales school vision of the
starkly physical setting of human habitats over the longue duree as with
the sundrenched immediacy and vividness of an African marketplace,
he combines, in a way that no previous academic interpreter of African
vi
Foreword
politics on a comparable scale has even tried to do, a feeling for the harsh
material constraints within which the politics of Africa has always taken
place with a wonderfully delicate ear for the rhetorical flamboyance and
the scintillating social insight of the language through which it is so
indefatigably expressed and carried onward. L’Etat en Afrique is an
unsentimental, even at times a grim, book. But it crackles with the life
of the continent it describes.
Like any serious scholar, Bayart began his work on African politics
on a less overwhelming scale, with a study on L’Etat au Cameroun (Paris
1979), and has worked on Cameroon ever since. (An obvious compari¬
son would be with the work of the distinguished English historian John
Iliffe, from his two major works on what is now Tanzania to the
development of capitalism in Africa or The African Poor on a far broader
canvas.) But Bayart himself always saw the politics of Cameroon in a
much wider perspective; and he has since set his mark, through the
journal Politique Africaine which he helped to found and edited for some
years, on a generation of younger French Africanists who have done
much to revivify the study of African politics not merely in former
francophone territories but across a much ampler terrain.
No one who reads L’Etat en Afrique with minimal attention could
hope truly to understand the politics of Africa by reading a single book
(or perhaps, for that matter, by living a single life). But they will be
given the clearest guidance on how to begin to do so, and the most
compelling sense of why doing so can be so intensely rewarding. To
seek to understand the politics of anywhere is less a longjourney than an
endless quest. For anyone who wishes to understand the politics of
Africa, there is no better book from which to start out.
John Dunn
Preface to the English edition
A brief presentation of the intellectual landscape from which The State
in Africa derives may well be useful to the anglophone reader. Not that
this book has tried to respond to particularly French preoccupations: on
the contrary, insofar as it is possible, I have tried to relate my work to
the totality of Africanist studies - or at least those to which my linguistic
abilities gave me access - and I profited enormously from the English
and American literature. Nevertheless, the problems encountered by
the translating team, working with Professor Donal Cruise O’Brien,
will have confirmed that my turn of mind is incurably French!
This characteristic will no doubt have been accentuated by my initial
objective in writing the book. It was never my intention to attempt the
impossible synthesis of everything to do with politics and the State in
Africa south of the Sahara, to write a sort of‘Everything you always
wanted to know about Africa but never dared to ask!’ I have rather
sought to construct a mode of analysis and interpretation in the hope of
injecting new life into a theoretical debate which has tended to lose its
way in recent years and perhaps above all to contribute to a revival of
the so important empirical work without which no comparative dis¬
cussion can have any sense.
I began my analysis on what is the central theme of the book, the
historicity of the postcolonial State, in an earlier work L’Etat au Cam-
eroun, Paris, 1979. There is now a wide consensus about this concept
amongst anglophone Africanists, except naturally for those last of the
radical Mohicans, neo-Marixists and neo-dependency theorists. The
way in which I have explored this theme is also well known across the
Channel and the Atlantic, since it is largely inspired by the historical
sociology of the State dear to E. P. Thompson, Barrington Moore and
Perry Anderson. In essence this means analysing the genesis of the
viii
