The paradox of efforts over the past twenty years to reinvent democracy in Africa has been that rather than dampening the fires of ethnic conflict, they have often made them more intense and in the past decade have been accompanied by the explosion of violent conflicts of autochthony, confrontations of ‘sons of the soil’, that threaten the very bases of social order and cohesion in multi-ethnic societies. This essay explains the relationship through an argument in five parts. First, I examine the social construction of African ethnicities since the imposition of European colonial rule, with particular focus on both the role of the state and the market, as well as the internal response in African societies. Second, I discuss the particular relationship between the state, colonial and post-colonial, with effective institutionalization of ‘Big Man’ politics and patronage as the essential link between ethnic communities and the state and mode of access to the resources of modernity. Third, we will see that both nationalism and ethnicity in Africa share a common origin and focus on grasping control of the state apparatus that reinforces rather than undermines the salience of the nation-state. Fourth, I argue that neo-liberal ‘reforms’ of the state and market have led to significant political, social and economic decay that can reinforce ethnic cleavages and undermine democratization in multi-party regimes, even where there have been serious efforts at constitutional reforms to contain and limit its political expression. Finally, and fifth, I look at the conflicts of autochthony that have exploded in four very different national contexts that share a common relationship to economic crisis, growing social decay and increasing inequality in supposedly democratizing nations.

An informed discussion of Nigerian federalism against the backdrop of Nigeria’s political history characterized by the long years of British imperialism and thirty years of dictatorial ‘native’ military rule, and with emphasis not only on how military rule had emasculated, impoverished and suffocated the proper operation of Nigerian federalism, turning it to an excessively centralized system of governance, but also on what needs to be done to bring Nigeria back to the practice of true federalism. The study believes that “[Reviving the integrity of Nigeria requires a return of maximum federalism… [which recognizes] the authority of the states to have their own Constitutions, police formations…choices of their own capital headquarters…[in addition to the imperative of] redistributing national economic resources in a way that will enable states to develop their natural and human resources”

The foundations of modern Nigerian politics were laid in the 1950s. That decade began with the Ibadan constitutional conference of 1950, at which leaders of northern and southern Nigeria met for the first time in a common political forum since the amalgamation of these two separate British colonies in 1914. It ended with the attainment of independence in 1960. In the course of that fateful decade, Nigerians, previously estranged from one another by the circumstances of colonial rule, not only got to know themselves but worked together to produce a blueprint for the country’s political future. In essence, they rejected British as well as nationalist proclivities toward centralization. Instead, they forged a consensus that federalism was the appropriate vehicle for resolving political problems created by the nation’s deep-seated diversity.

A remarkable feature of African studies has been the sharp discontinuities in the characterization of transitions in African history and society from one era to another. Thus, for an important example, colonialism has rarely been related to the previous era of the slave trade in the analysis of any dominant socioeconomic themes in Africa. Such discontinuity is significant in one important strand of modern African studies: The transition from the lore and scholarship of colonial social anthropology to postcolonial forms of African studies has been stalled into a brittle break because its central focus on the “tribe” has been under attack. Social anthropology gained strength through its analysis of the tribe and its associated concepts of kin groups and kinship behaviors in colonial Africa. However, following criticisms of the mission and manners of social anthropology by postindependence African scholars and politicians, and a brave reexamination of the conceptual problems of their discipline, social anthropologists more or less agreed to abandon the use of thetribeand of its more obvious derivativetribalismwith respect to Africa.

Social exchange theory : the two traditions , Social exchange theory : the two traditions , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

This paper argues that the experiences of colonialism in Africa have led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West. Many of Africa's political problems are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics. I shall characterize these two publics and attempt to explain some of Africa's political features within the matrix of these publics. In order to give some empirical content to the distinction drawn here, I shall illustrate the issues raised with examples from Nigeria.