Africa's rocky road to state formation

By Daniel Nelson Africa has entered a new stage – of state-making, French academic Gerard Prunier told a meeting in London last week. In a talk about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the involvement of 14 African armies, Prunier dismissed the suggestion that the conflict was “Africa’s First World War”. Instead he compared Congo to a bowl with half-a-dozen unconnected wars underway on its rim: when the centre collapsed, all the conflicts on the rim fell inside. To understand the situation, he said, it was necessary to take a step back. When decolonisation occurred in the 1960s, Africa was a mess. By the middle of the 1990s, however, some states were beginning to consolidate and become “hard-edged” –they could control their territory. They were able to cut through the Congo like a knife through butter and the Congolese state started to disappear. It became a fighting ground on which other states fought each other, recruiting Congolese to do the fighting. The appropriate comparison was not the First World War but Europe’s Thirty Years War (1618-48). Prunier said the process of state-making was dangerous “because the little guys who are not part of the process could get crushed”. He attributed the silence of the Western media over the Congo conflict to Africa’s lack of economic clout, buttressed by racist attitudes: “Corpses go by weight,” he commented. “Heaviest is an American Jew, lightest is a black African peasant woman – you can do anything you want to her.” Prunier’s latest book, From Genocide to Continental War: The ‘Congolese’ Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa, concludes that “the death (and rebirth) of Zaire is a unique case. No other country in Africa today, probably not even Nigeria or South Africa, has the potential of creating such a continentwide upheaval… “It is in this way that 'Africa’s First World War' will probably remain a unique phenomenon, but one that was, here again like the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, a transforming moment, in the history of the continent. Albeit in ways that are quite far from the international community approved ways, Africa has now entered the modern age. Following its own rocky road.” * The meeting was organised by Demos, a London-based think-tank

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