CONCLUSION

This chapter is about the history of political thought in the African present. In what way, then, might situating the mid-twentieth-century history of state­making in an international context contain critical potential for the present and the future? What can the history of political thought offer to our contem­porary dilemmas?

For much of the last fifty years, a dominant popular and scholarly view of African independence has understood it as something conferred from outside, by legal transfer of power.

On the one hand, there is the tendency which we see in much political science writing about contemporary Africa, to focus on explaining and under­standing the ‘weakness' of states, within a discourse that sets up a normative ideal of what a state should be and finds African states wanting. This lends itself to a reading of the past fifty years in which the future course of Africa's new states was set at independence, taking little account of the change that has happened since independence, and in which future change is hard to envis­age. At the other extreme, this same reading of the past can lend itself to an analysis in which change, if it is to come, must come from a radical break from the state forms that were established at independence and the creation of something completely new, though quite what this might look like is seldom spelled out.

In contrast, I have argued here that the state was not simply imposed from outside in mid-twentieth-century Africa. It was reflected on and argued about by people (and not only political leaders) who were consciously making their own history in local and indeed regional contexts.

In this way, the history of the political thought of decolonization offers an important perspective on the foundation of the modern state in Africa in which the international is an intrinsic part of the story rather than separate from it. We have seen that in the early post-colonial period, the positive argument for creating new political communities not as an end in itself but as an essential precondition for human flourishing was the basis for ambitious projects undertaken by new states to improve the lives of their citizens. Nearly sixty years on from independence, there is now a long history of states seeking to negotiate an effective social contract with their citizens, characterized by moments of success as well as moments of failure.^[564]

But by taking seriously the way in which membership of a state coexisted with membership of an international society in the colonial and well as the post-colonial period, our attention is also drawn to an important intellectual resource for citizens trying to create change from below after independence. If we see the history of decolonization as in part a product of individuals reaching out beyond the boundaries within which colonial states sought to enclose them, to claim rights owing to them by virtue of their humanity, we can better see where change has come from in the past, and where it might come from again.

The rights that people were understood to have by virtue of their humanity, rights which states could not simply take away, continued to serve as a potential means of challenging the power of new post-colonial states, as they had served as a resource to challenge colonial states.

By putting the African state and international society into the same analyt­ical frame in the period around independence, we can therefore see the state as a contingent form, subject to change over time through human thought and action. And if we understand states to have been made in dialogue, we can better understand how they have changed in the past, and how they might change again.