SOVEREIGNTY AND THE POST-COLONIAL STATE

If the leaders of new African states understood independence as the basis from which to undertake new collective projects, their challenge after independ­ence was to carry their citizens with them.

In this letter, Mbee describes the discussions which had followed independ­ence in Mbugwe. The older men, he recounts, imagined independence to mean an end to what they saw as the constraints on their lives which colonial rule imposed. At public meetings, they questioned why those who had held power in pre-colonial times had not been restored to their positions, why licences were still needed to hunt game, and why the end of colonial rule had not meant an end to taxation. The problem, Mbee wrote, was that ‘everyone understands Freedom to mean that we shall rule ourselves - this has been thoroughly explained - but the elders and the youths interpret self-rule in different ways, and this has caused misunderstanding and quarrelling'.^[548] The response of the younger men was ‘to explain the meaning of Freedom under modern conditions', that is, freedom within the political society.^[549]

In Ghana, where the nationalist leader and first President Kwame Nkrumah had long argued that self-government would only ever be a first step in a more far-reaching project of transformation, Jeffrey Ahlman has recently argued that independence in 1957 provided an opportunity for an argument ‘over the social contract of self-rule'.

In many cases, it was in arguments over taxation and the raising of revenue that social contracts were renegotiated. The expectation of an end to taxes after independence was heard across much of the continent. In response, governing parties and local governments had to make a positive case for taxation and frame the payment of taxes as a duty of citizenship, rather than an illegitimate demand made by the state.^[551]

The rhetoric by which post-colonial state-builders sought to meet these challenges seemed to embrace a vision of the state on the Westphalian model, in which sovereignty entailed the right to reject external interference. They were now able to close the door on their own house and were assertive of their right to do so. New parliaments quickly turned to debating who could and could not be a citizen of the newly independent states, often setting require­ments that went beyond simple place of birth to encompass more far-reaching commitments to newly independent states.^[552] While the leaders of the 1950s had criticized the artificiality and unworkability of the states which had emerged from the colonial partition of Africa and called for new kinds of federations, post-colonial states were in practice often reluctant to relinquish aspects of their newly won sovereignty to supranational bodies. When the international human rights organizations that had been allies before independence moved to criticize new laws which endangered the human rights of the citizens of post-colonial states, they were swiftly told that demo­cratically elected governments had the right to introduce preventive detention and similar measures if they judged it essential for the security of their states.^[553]

Yet if we look more closely, we can see that the reason that post-colonial African states were so anxious to advocate this conception of sovereignty was precisely because they knew that the picture was more complicated than a map of sovereign states would suggest.

If we are to understand where critical potential lay in the post-colonial state, one way of doing so is considering the ways in which appealing to a moral and political order beyond the state could provide a resource to the citizens of post­colonial states, just as it had to the subjects of colonial states. To explore this theme in more detail, I look first at the ways in which international languages of rights which had been so powerful for anti-colonial activists, particularly in those parts of Africa which had been Trusteeship Territories of the United Nations, could be redeployed by those who sought to challenge repressive rule in the post-colony. Second, I consider the ways in which correspondents to the Swahili-language newspaper Baraza, published in Nairobi but read across

East Africa, appealed both to older regional forms of governance and to individual connections across the region against independent governments whose concern with building nation-states challenged older flows of people and goods.

8.4