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' Similarly, Englebert (1997, 772) Explains That Colonially Administrators ...

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Similarly, Englebert (1997, 772) explains that colonially administrators secured alliances with local African chiefs in order to gain stability. They achieved this through providing the chiefs with access to diamond rmarkets and labour resources. In this way, a system of patronage begun as access to state power translated into benefit for the first time. This distorted existing relationships between the chiefs and their people and initiated a loss of legitimacy of the chiefs. ‘Ever since, attempts at reforming the formal state (from colonial attempts to contemporary stabilisation programmes) have resulted in a compensatory intensification of informal accommodations.' This view of the colonial structure is reinforced by Berman (1998, 305) who explains that ‘[c]olonial states were grounded in the alliances with local 'Big Men', incorporating ethnically-defined administrative units linked to the local population by incorporation of pre-colonial patron-client relations. This was reinforced by European assumptions of neatly bounded and culturally homogeneous 'tribes' and a bureaucratic preoccupation with demarcating, classifying and counting subject populations, as well as by the activities of missionaries and anthropologists.' As will be seen, these features of the colonial administration came to have a great impact on the development of Africa since independence. The key features here are the systems of patronage that developed and the ways in which dual societies developed in many countries.
Booth (2005:1) argues that reform of politics is key to African development. ‘Obviously, the discussion must not take the form of citizens of the North lecturing Africans about political realities. Africans who have lived in Africa know perfectly well what is being discussed here, and do not find it surprising. The problem of ignorance is mainly in the North. What the citizens of Africa need is not reminders on how things work now but ideas about how to move forward towards hard-headed yet culturally-appropriate ways of building effective national states. This is an intrinsically difficult challenge in what are urbanising but still largely precapitalist and non-industrial societies, with low literacy and poor communications.' The idea of culturally-appropriate ways of building effective national states introduces us to the idea that the current state system is not appropriate in much of Africa. It is a European state model initially imposed on Africa by the continent's colonisers and subsequently embraced by those seeking to secure power in post-independence African countries.
Englebert (1997, 767) argues that ‘[t]he contemporary state in sub-Saharan Africa is not African. It descends from arbitrary colonial administrative units designed as instruments of domination, oppression and exploitation. No doubt after some 40 years of independence these states have been transformed, adopted, adapted, endogenised.


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