GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

STATE FORMATION IN PRE-COLONIAL SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA:

PATHS TO STATEHOOD IN ASANTE AND BUGANDA

DISSERTATION
Submitted in fulfillment of the requirement for the
Master in International Affairs (MIA)

by
Vsevolod Kritskiy
(Russia)

Geneva
2012

1
Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………....3
Maps………………………………………………………………………………….4

Chapter 1
Pre-Colonial sub-Saharan African State Formation Explained............................7
1.1 Aims and Motivations…………………………………………………………....7
1.2 European and African theories of the State…………………………………......11
1.3 An Epistemological Escape from Eurocentrism………………………………..19
1.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………....21
Chapter 2
Case Study: Buganda……………………………………………………………...23
2.1 The Spread of Informal Networks………………………………………………24
2.2 The Connection between the Material and the Mental: Banana and the
Mwoyo……………………………………………………………………………...25
2.3 A State Formed?………………………………………………………………..33
2.4 The Connection between Center and Periphery: Kabaka, Bataka and
Taxes………………………………………………………………………………..36
2.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...44
Chapter 3
Case Study: Asante……………………………………………………………......46
3.1 The Emergence of the Akan: Long-term State Formation Processes……..........47
3.2 Short-term State Formation: The Rise of Kumase……………………………...55
3.3 The Intricacies of the Center-Periphery relationship in Greater Asante………..57
3.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………...............66
Chapter 4
Comparisons, Alternative Explanations and Conclusions……………………...68
4.1 Buganda and Asante Compared…………………………………………….......68
4.2 Looking Back to the Past…………………………………………………….....76
4.3 Alternative Theories……………………………………………………..……...84
4.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………................94
Bibliography……………………………………………………………….............96

2
 Abstract

This paper represents an attempt to study African history on its own

terms. I argue that existence of states in the pre-colonial period should
not be dismissed based on Eurocentric ideas about state theory and state
formation. Additionally, I assert that the study of state formation in pre-
colonial sub-Saharan Africa can help the understanding of the root
causes of problems that abound in the continent today. In order to
substantiate these claims, I trace Asante and Buganda state formation in
the last thousand years and identify numerous examples of successful
ways of state maintenance, as well as recent trends that see African
states turn to the past for solutions for present problems. I find that both
case study states experienced surprisingly similar paths to statehood, and
I attempt to create a preliminary description of a typical sub-Saharan
African state for the benefit of future research.

3
 Maps

Buganda and Lake Victoria in the nineteenth century1

1
Richard Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society & Warfare in
the Nineteenth Century (Oxford 2002), p. xiii.

4
 Butaka Lands in Buganda2

2
Ibid., p. 34.

5
 Asante and Eighteenth Century Expansion3

3
Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens USA
1993)

6
 Chapter 1.

Pre-Colonial sub-Saharan African State Formation

Explained

1.1 Aims and Motivations

The overall aim of this paper is to contribute to the growing discussion about the

way we study the African past and present. I do not intend to provide concrete

solutions in a Master’s thesis, but instead provide possible avenues for research. This

paper will argue that detailed analysis of pre-colonial Africa on its own terms can

illuminate our understanding of the way the continent functions. In order to prove

this assertion I will explore state formation in two case studies, Asante and Buganda,

now parts of Ghana and Uganda, respectively. After analyzing the two in detail I will

attempt to infer a general description of state formation in sub-Saharan Africa for the

benefit of future exploration of the way states came to exist in the region. My main

aims of this undertaking are the following.

First, I argue, that pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa did experience state

formation and that this formation resulted in outright states that existed before the

Scramble at the end of the 19th century. This is in direct opposition to scholars such

as Robert H. Jackson who argue that these states were merely ‘loosely defined

political systems’ and ‘societies rather than states’.4 Jackson argues that ‘vague …

overlapping’ boundaries between states and ‘lack[ing] centralized authority

4
Robert H. Jackson, Quasi States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third
World (Cambridge 1990), p. 67.

7
structures’ meant that it is impossible to define these societies as states.5 My aim is

to prove exactly the opposite: defined territorial boundaries were not needed for

states to exist in pre-colonial Africa, and diffuse nature of authority structures

created the environment for states to emerge in the region.

Second, I intend to show that analysis of pre-colonial African states can

illuminate the current problems that African states face. By problems I do not mean

the widely discussed obstacles such as corrupt leaders, shortage of financial muscle

or political insurgency. Instead I intend to focus on the state itself as an institution

and as a means to ameliorating the general negatively perceived economic, political

and social situation in sub-Saharan Africa. A healthy state can become an instrument

that will strive to create better conditions for its citizens to live in. As Jeffrey Herbst

points out the study of ‘state consolidation in Africa is not merely an academic issue

but is, instead, critical to the future of tens of millions of people who are at risk from

the insecurity that is the inevitable by-product of state decline and failure’.6

Therefore it is important for academics to provide accurate representations of the

realities that cause Africa’s problems. In my opinion, a lot of them have their roots

in the pre-colonial period, because the state in Africa itself has its roots there.

Therefore, understanding the way states formed in the sub-Saharan region is key to

understanding the root causes of today’s problems.

Part of this aim, then, is to identify particular mechanisms, modes of

behaviour and strategies that pre-colonial African leaders used successfully to tackle

the obstacles they faced during state formation and state maintenance. By leaders, I

mean heads of states, but also African entrepreneurs, farmers and others whose

5
Ibid., p. 68.
6
Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
(Princeton 2000), pp. 3-4.

8
actions resulted in the advancement of their villages, societies and states in

economic, political or social areas. Additionally, I intend to compare Buganda and

Asante state formation and maintenance in order to identify similar techniques,

methods or agent-less processes that have occurred in the pre-colonial period. If

there are mechanisms that bear striking resemblance to each other then surely it is

important to understand their inner workings, especially if it can be concluded that

they successfully maintained the state. I will pay particular attention to informal

strategies that are often looked down upon such as the informal nature of

relationships within the state. For instance, tax collectors in Buganda would often

keep a portion of what they collected for themselves. At first glance this may be

branded as inefficiency, but as I will explore this in more detail in the case study, it

may have been an informal way of maintaining the state.

Another specific dimension that I intend to analyze is the relationship

between the center and the periphery and how it affected state building and

maintenance, both positively and negatively. In both case study countries the central

authority had complicated and nuanced relationships with their regional chiefs. The

fluidity of the connections between the center and periphery played a key role in

maintaining both states. I will also explore the way center and periphery have been

communicating in the post colonial era to show how identifying positive aspects of

king-chief relationships in Asante and Buganda can offer solutions to problems in

state maintenance today, thus forming part of my second aim to explore the past for

the benefit of the future.

The last two points that I intend to examine have to do with the relationship

between Africa and Europe. First, I will argue that using European concepts to

analyze African state building is a fundamentally flawed exercise. In order to

9
substantiate this I will move on to the second point that will showcase how the

European and African state building processes differed historically. African states

operate differently because they have a different set of environmental, historical,

economical and political circumstances. As a result, there is no merit in evaluating

the performance of African states based on a European definition of “a state” and

based on European ideas of how it should work and what it should represent.

After providing enough support to this argument, I will move on to explain

the epistemological basis for this paper. I have decided to postpone this until the end

of the first chapter because understanding the differences between European and

African state formation is critical to the way I approach the rest of the paper.

The last chapter will provide a synthesis of how Buganda and Asante’s states

formed in comparison to each other, and attempt to construct a general narrative of

pre-colonial sub-Saharan African state formation. In addition, I will present

alternative explanations that go against the arguments propagated in the paper and

describe the way that, in my opinion, they are unable to provide a sufficient account

of the formation of Asante and Buganda states. Moreover, with regards to my second

overall aim, I will provide evidence that African countries have recently started to

look for traditional ways to maintain the state.

This paper will not deal directly with the way states operate in terms of

administration and bureaucracies. My focus in most of the paper is on state

formation, therefore on the processes and conditions that led to the formation of

states in pre-colonial Africa. I will, however, now discuss the differences between

European and African states, as well as the way they are formed, in order to provide

enough proof that the latter should be analyzed on their own terms.

10
1.2 European and African theories of the State

There are many definitions of states, a plethora of explanations of how they work

and a lot of different viewpoints on what they represent. From Marxism to neo-

conservatism, from realism to constructivism, movements on all sides of the political

spectrum and individuals representing every intellectual movement in international

relations, politics, economics and more, have created their own visions of what the

state is and how it works. I will not align myself with any specific ideology and

instead I will attempt to create a definition of a state that will be based on the

evidence and circumstances that were present in pre-colonial Africa. Therefore, it

will be a region-specific definition, although not necessarily time-specific. The way I

view the state is heavily influenced by Herbst and the ideas that he expressed in his

book, States and Power in Africa. In my opinion, on the most fundamental level, it is

possible to divide the current debate about African states (be it pre-colonial, colonial

or post-colonial) into two categories: authors who identify the arrival of the

Europeans as a cataclysmic event that transformed the way states are formed and the

way they are maintained, and authors who see the arrival of the Europeans as

another development in African history, that should not be overemphasized.

1.2.1 Eurocentrism as fundamental to the perception of States

In Herbst, I identified an author whose ideas are similar to my own. He posits that

the arrival of the Europeans, while undoubtedly a significant chapter of African

history, does not define it. In my opinion, looking at African history through the

prism of European intervention is intellectually lethargic. It offers an easy

11
explanation of why modern Africa is unable to cope with its problems: the

Europeans came and disrupted the flow of African history, making it impossible for

African leaders to create a stable political, economic and social environment in

which the African people would be able to live without fear of starvation, rebellions

or ethnic violence. Treating the colonial period as one in a continuous flow of

African history, however, changes the perspective; it then becomes sensible to look

at the pre-colonial period as a legitimate source of suggestions for dealing with

present problems. If a pre-colonial leader was able to solve a problem that has

plagued the entire continent for centuries, surely we can learn something from his

achievement. This is not saying that brutally suppressing revolts in order to keep a

state together (such as how the Asante maintained their state, among other methods

of course) is something that I recommend to the current African governments. This

is, however, saying that specific methods or modes of behaviour could be fused with

current state maintenance techniques to improve not only the condition of the state,

but also the relationship between the state and the people.

Identifying colonialism as the defining chapter of African history is similar in

spirit to defining and evaluating African state using Western and Eurocentric

concepts and metrics. In my opinion, a regionally specific definition of a state is

more valuable than a general definition that could potentially apply to every state.

There is no doubt that there are certain benefits to defining a state in general terms

that would apply to every government and country, however the disadvantages of

such an approach outweigh the advantages. On the one hand a broad definition can

clearly identify specific requirements that an entity needs to have to be considered as

a state, and this is helpful in the modern world when one state collapses and another

tries to build itself up quickly. An example would be the current struggle in Libya,

12
where the death of Gaddafi means not only a change of regime, but most probably a

dismantling of the whole state with a view to rebuild it in a different fashion. On the

other hand, using Eurocentric concepts and metrics to define non-European states

and evaluate their performance will not lead to a meaningful result. A plethora of

processes and relationships that developed as a result of characteristics of a specific

region will be either lost or dismissed for being different to a Eurocentric ideal.

Therefore studying pre-colonial Africa on its own terms is important if one intends

to create a clearer picture of the African state. I will now go into more detail about

how these characteristics influenced state building in the pre-colonial era.

1.2.2 Differences in European and African environments

Describing the pre-colonial, sub-Saharan African states is a tricky procedure,

because there is no agreed definition. On one hand, I can list all the environmental

factors that made African states what they are and simply leave the issue there.

However, instead I would rather focus on why these states were dismissed as being

‘too exotic to be relevant’ and find the characteristics that were used as an excuse to

reject them. According to Herbst, what it comes down to is the issue of power, and

where power lies. In Europe, a state’s power was based on the amount of territory it

possessed and how far was the state able to control the population, in other words the

efficiency of tax collection.7 Here is where the disconnect between African and

European states lies. S. E. Finer, an expert in governing systems, stated in the

opening sentence of one of his articles about state building in Western Europe: ‘Tell

a man today to go and build a state; and he will try to establish a definite and

7
Ibid. p. 36.

13
defensible territorial boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him’.8 It

is difficult to understate the high influence of the fact that land in Europe was scarce

on the European perception of governing. In this context, territory was of utmost

importance, and once a ruler was able to acquire a certain amount, he would

subsequently turn his attention on the people inhabiting it.

In sub-Saharan Africa, in general, states did not need to establish political

hegemony in a specific territory, because that would be completely counter-intuitive.

Population density was much lower in Africa than in Europe and as a result plenty of

land was free and available to anyone to settle and cultivate. The level of European

population density of 1500 was reached by Africa only by 1975.9 Igor Kopytoff

provided the theoretical basis for this argument by describing the development of an

inner frontier in sub-Saharan Africa, during and after the migration of people from

the Saharan-Sahelian region that started around B.C. 2500. Due to the low

population density, the frontier became “a stage for the emergence of numerous new,

small-scale, and independent political formations, most which eventually faltered but

some of which grew into larger polities that provided the nucleus for the emergence

of new societies”.10 Therefore control of the population was the ultimate goal of

African rulers.

Herbst takes this argument a bit further: when a group of people were

dissatisfied with their ruler, be it due to excessive tributary requests, derogatory

treatment, political differences or simple personal dislike, they could easily move

8
Samuel E. Finer, ‘State-building, state boundaries and border control: An essay on certain
aspects of the first phase of state-building in Western Europe considered in the light of
Rokkan-Hirschman model’ in Social Science Information (August 1974 13:4-5), p. 79.
9
Herbst, States and Power, p. 15.
10
Igor Kopytoff (ed), The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African
Societies (Bloomington 1987), pp. 10-11 in the Review by Leonard Thompson in The
American Historical Review (95:3, June 1990), p. 879.

14
into another sphere of influence or a territory that was free of any political power.11

For instance, migration as a means of escape from social and political problems was

‘common among the Yoruba, the Edo, the Fon, and many others’. The mid-fifteenth

century reign of Oba Ewuare of Benin was so unpopular that it resulted in protest

migrations that created a plethora of new communities outside his dominion with ties

to each other.12 Interestingly, this phenomenon is not only confined to the annals of

history; in Ghana, one of the case study countries, the mismanagement of the state in

1970s and 1980s and the resulting political and economic crises caused a ‘massive

surge of emigration … as Ghanaians, always mobile and responsive to shifts in

opportunities, voted with their feet’.13

There exists also an agricultural dimension: African farmers ‘depended

almost completely on rain-fed agriculture’, which meant that there was little

investment into land. As a result, single farmers, families and even villages could

uproot at any point and move to a different location.14 In comparison, most Asian

societies, villages and states invested intensely into land due to irrigation works and

‘particular pieces of land had great value’, with one notable exception of mainland

11
Herbst, States and Power, p. 38.
12
Ibid., p. 39.
13
Eboe Hutchful, ‘The Fall and Rise of the State in Ghana’ in Abdi Ismail Samatar and
Ahmed I. Samatar, The African State: Reconsiderations (Portsmouth USA 2002), p. 102.
14
This assertion, although a longstanding accepted “truth” of African history, is now being
examined more carefully. Gareth Austin has provided several examples in Ethiopia, Lake
Victoria region and the western African coast that show that capital investment did exist in
pre-colonial Africa, and it was not always the case that entire villages could uproot at will.
However, he does point to the fact that the assertion that the lack of capital investment into
land in sub-Saharan Africa was in general based on labour inputs. The overall point that
Austin is making is that more attention to this phenomenon is needed, because a widely
accepted truth results in lack of critical research. Additionally, I would point out that
Herbst’s point is not only about the immediate pre-colonial period of 17-19 centuries, but
about a longer term condition of the African environment and its impact on the culture of
state building for two thousand years. Therefore, in my opinion, in general, the point that
Herbst makes stands, although Austin’s work does indeed show that it needs to be refreshed.
Source: Gareth Austin, ‘Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising
the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500-2000’ in
Economic History Review (61:3 2008), pp. 594-597.

15
South-East Asia. It took generations to develop rice paddies for instance, and as a

result ‘states had a profound interest in controlling areas of intensive agriculture’

because of the high amount of taxes that could be collected off this land. This also

applies to Europe, not only due to agricultural investment but also the rise of urban

areas that signified not only financial but also emotional investment.15

A loss of an important city is always a huge blow to any state fighting a war

therefore it requires protection, which in turn requires money, which means taxation

systems had to be developed quickly and efficiently. Urban development was very

slow and even by the time of the Scramble there was not a lot of cities to behold that

were not initiated by the Europeans. Colson goes as far as to state that ‘permanent

towns existed only on the East African coast, though ancient towns had existed in

Ethiopia and probably in Rhodesia’, therefore the relationship between the state and

the hinterland was different to its European counterpart.16 While this is an over

exaggeration on her part in light of more recent research into African towns, the fact

remains that urbanization was a much more important factor in European state

formation than in its African counterpart.

In addition, European powers had secure areas, be they cities or heartlands

that had to be wrapped around with buffer zones, remote areas that were fortified in

order to protect the secure areas. This was both a cause and a consequence of the

intense competition for territory between close-lying European states. Frederick the

Great called these buffer zones the “mighty nails which hold a ruler’s province

15
Herbst, States and Power, pp. 38-39.
16
Elizabeth Colson, ‘African Society at the Time of the Scramble’ in L.H. Gann and Peter
Duignan (ed), Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960: Volume 1: The History and Politics of
Colonialism 1870-1914 (Cambridge 1977), p. 42.

16
together” because not only did they protect the state from foreign powers, but the

also ‘completed the job of internal consolidation’.17

These differences between European and African state formation illustrate

that using Western definitions to dismiss African states is a valueless exercise. The

two case studies that will follow this chapter will provide more evidence that pre-

colonial sub-Saharan African state formation should be examined on its own terms.

Before I turn to specific cases, however, I want to explain what I mean by state

formation and state maintenance.

1.2.3 State Formation and State Maintenance

State formation will be the actual process I will be exploring, because it illustrates

the obstacles that African states and leaders face, and because its study will show

that it is disrespectful to call these states “entities”, “polities” or Jackson’s ‘loosely

defined political systems’ and ‘societies’.18 The actual phrase means the long-term

processes, short-term events and decisions by leaders that combine together,

knowingly or not, to form a state over time. However, I intend also to analyze other

connections to the pre-colonial African state.

First, it is important not only to explore how the state was formed, but also

how it performed after the initial stages of its formation. In my opinion any state is

in a constant position of change, therefore its formation process should be only

considered over in the event of state collapse. However, that is not to say that no

states are formed. It is difficult to identify a point in the development of any state

where it becomes “formed” as opposed to “forming”; it may be possible given a

17
Herbst, States and Power, p. 14.
18
Jackson, Quasi States, p. 67.

17
suitable model that would apply to the “typical” state, but that is not the aim of this

paper. I will, however, attempt to identify a seminal event that heralded the

“creation” of the state in both Buganda and Asante, even though my focus will

remain on how the two entities became states, and how have they performed before

they were colonized. State formation is not a specific process in this essay, more of a

collection of various processes and this phrase will be used to identify either a

general trend of the building up of a state, or a specific process, depending on the

context.

Second, it is important to explore how the state was maintained. I do not

simply mean how was it financed or how was it protected from collapse, although

both these matters will be discussed, and form part of the definition of state

maintenance. By this phrase I also mean the overall maintenance of the state – how

did leaders of both Buganda and Asante kept hold of their citizenry, especially given

the freedom of movement that most Africans inhabiting the sub-Saharan region

enjoyed (with the major exception being slave labour, of course). It is also important

to consider more subtle narratives such as how the image of the state was

disseminated through the citizenry and, more significantly, how was it presented to

regional chiefs.

This dialogue between the center and periphery is the third part of the

definition of state maintenance, and it will form an integral part of my argument. I

will explore how the core-periphery relationship in Asante and Buganda functioned,

and, in keeping with the overall aims of the paper, I will investigate potential ways

to improve this relationship in Africa today. State maintenance therefore will be used

when describing processes initiated by leaders who look to improve or maintain the

economic, political, cultural or symbolic condition of the state.

18
1.3 An Epistemological Escape from Eurocentrism.

Eurocentrism in the study of inherently African conditions is still influential in

academic circles, and is, as a result, also used by international policy makers in their

attempts to solve various problems and crises in Africa. For example, as recently as

2007, Gareth Austin published an article aiming to illustrate the tools that academics

‘of various disciplines’ should be using in the study of Africa instead of relying on

Western concepts.19 He focuses on economic history and points to the fact that

‘conceptual Eurocentrism exists at different levels of abstraction [such as] elaborate

explanatory and/or interpretive theories [as well as] specific tools of analysis’,

thereby making it all the more difficult to refrain oneself from using these concepts

and tools, and move to a more Africanist perception.20

If Western concepts are useless, however, what tools should then be

employed? In my opinion, a historical narrative at this point is perhaps the best way

to examine the African state. Bayart proposed that ‘the modern state in Africa …

needs to be analyzed in light of what Fernand Braudel has called “longue durée”’. In

other words, we need to dispose of the restrictions imposed by modern political

analysis.21

Therefore, the case studies in this paper will examine the way states formed

over time, taking into account longue durée processes (as well as immediate

circumstances surrounding the formation of states). I will look at various levels of

analysis and attempt to intertwine them in order to achieve broad explanations; for

19
Gareth Austin, ‘Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual
Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past’ in African Studies Review (50:3,
December 2007), p. 1.
20
Ibid., p. 2.
21
Jean-François Bayart, ‘Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the
Political Trajectory’ in J. Manor (ed), Rethinking Third World Politics (London 1991), p. 53.

19
instance, I will pay close attention to regional differences in the core-periphery

relationships in Asante, but at the same time I will analyze the “Greater Asante” as a

whole.

This paper will be using inductive reasoning by examining case studies to

infer a generalization instead of deducing an outcome through analysis of empirical

data. There is not enough “data” that could be grouped together and used to deduce

how state formation in pre-colonial Africa occurred. Most of the evidence we

possess for pre-1800 Asante and Buganda consists of oral histories compiled by

ethnographers and anthropologists, scant few reports by European traders,

missionaries and dignitaries, archaeological evidence of changes in the environment

as a result of human action, and analyses of changes in languages, and religious and

burial practices. All of these types of data are often used for inference of general

trends and patterns. In terms of an epistemological tradition, this paper is, at its core,

operating in the realm of “understanding” by attempting to explore intersubjective

meanings as elaborated upon by Charles Taylor.22

With regards to the particulars of the paper, intersubjective meanings

represent, for instance, African attitudes to events, such as ascension to the throne, or

inherently African relationships between for example chiefs and kings or village-

heads and individuals or family units. The point of analyzing African states on their

own terms presupposes that I cannot use my own experience to draw conclusions;

therefore I will attempt to steer clear of using the operation of Verstehen as defined

22
Intersubjective meanings pose a problem for researchers, because accepting their existence
means that every individual has his or her own perception of reality. Common meanings then
are simply webs of meanings that a lot of individuals share, while using intersubjective
meanings will result in a description of reality by combining various meanings and
perceptions together. However, it is impossible to account for every meaning of an action,
event or trend to every individual aware of it, therefore scientific research in social science is
fundamentally flawed.
Source: Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’ in Review of Metaphysics
(25:1, September 1971), pp. 3-51.

20
by Theodore Abel.23 I confess that I will probably fail at completely removing my

own experiences in my analysis of case studies, but I am relying on secondary

literature, and therefore I will be interpreting the findings of more seasoned

researchers. Still, due to the nature of the evidence, a fair few assumptions will have

to be made but I will attempt to provide enough support for them to at least place

them in the realm of reasonable possibility.

The analysis of the case studies that follows in the next three chapters, then,

will be grounded in this epistemological basis, and I will attempt not to mix other

types of reasoning or use methods that are incompatible with the “understanding”

tradition of thought.

1.4 Conclusion

The arguments that I propagate in this paper do not assume that pre-colonial African

state formation can simply be mapped onto post-colonial experience. Nor do I

dispute the fact that European colonization did have a disruptive effect on the

progression of African state building, and that it undoubtedly prepared the

foundations for today’s African states.24 Instead, the point that I am making in this

paper is that perhaps a look back to pre-colonial experiences may prove fruitful in

the search for answers to problems that today’s states are unable to solve because of

their inherently European foundations. Thus the first general aim of the paper,

23
Abel identified Verstehen as interpretation of data and causal relationships based on
personal experience. As determined by the nature of intersubjective meanings, however, such
interpretation seems to be fundamentally inescapable.
Source: Theodore Abel, ‘The Operation Called Verstehen’ in The American Journal of
Sociology (Volume 54, 1948), pp. 211-218.
24
David J. Francis, Uniting Africa: Building Regional Peace and Security Systems
(Aldershot 2006), pp. 40-42.

21
because accepting the existence of states in the pre-colonial period puts both pre-

and post-colonial states on the same level of analysis. It follows then, that

understanding African experience before the Scramble is vital to understanding

today’s Africa. On this note, the focus of the paper will now turn to the examination

of the case study states in the next two chapters.

22
 Chapter 2.

Case Study: Buganda

My aim in this case study is to show that Buganda was a strong state that had been

forming for the last thousand years and that learning about its past and the Ganda

way of life is important. Not only will this help understand what the kingdom had

become by the 19th century, but it will also highlight various state formation methods

and techniques that the Buganda people used, as one of the main objectives of this

paper is to show possible avenues for improvement of African state building. One of

the most fascinating works on Buganda is one by Holly Hansen; her study of

Buganda reveals a complex web of informal relationships between the various

power-wielding individuals, as she aims to explore the ‘study of an African habit of

thought: the idea that people ought to be tied by bonds of affection, and that

relationships between people became visible in gifts in land, goods, and service’.25

The informal nature of African politics has been often sighted as one of the root

causes of the inefficiency of African governments, and while I do not suggest that

informal pre-colonial practices should be completely transposed to the modern

African state, it is one of the aims of this paper to identify unconventional state

formation and state maintenance methods that could be of use today.

25
Holly Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth USA
2003), p. 4.

23
2.1 The Spread of Informal Networks

Whether we like it or not, we have to admit that informal networks exist all around

the globe, not only in the so-called third world. Europe, North America and many

other regions use various notions, one of them, for example, being the notion of

“connections”. This also exists in Africa, to be sure, but this notion is part of a wider

set of informal tools that individuals use for their benefit, and in my opinion using

connections is similar to using, for instance, ones’ position in a clan to obtain

employment or benefits from another clan member who has more material wealth or

a higher social status, and would prefer to surround him or herself with members of

the same clan. It is general knowledge that in the Western societies gaining

employment, acquiring state contracts or receiving subsidies is, while not being

hinged upon, made considerably easier when there is a personal relationship between

decision makers, i.e. when they are connected to each other in some meaningful

way. To take one example, the top decision maker in the government contracts

sector may prefer to give a contract to a private company that has not submitted the

best project of all, but that has a CEO with whom the decision maker had previous

dealing with in another business sector, or that has a CEO with whom the decision

maker has a personal relationship with, for instance spending time together in the

same societies in the same university. Unless there is a lottery or the proposed

project is clearly inferior to others, this need not be an illegal scenario, since the

analysis of these plans is, at the end of the day, subjective, no matter how many

models the government might possess to evaluate them.

The reason why I want to show that these scenarios are widespread

throughout the Western world is to expand the thinking on Africa’s informal

24
networks. It is clear that in Africa these are, in general, more widespread than in

other regions of the world and that many aspects of these systems can be seen as

subversive of the power or reach of the state. However, that does not mean that

every aspect should be looked down upon, and instead a debate must start on how to

best utilize the positive characteristics of these economies.

2.2 The Connection between the Material and the Mental: Banana
and the Mwoyo

2.2.1 The Influence of the Banana

Hansen’s work at times echoes Richard Reid’s vision of the importance of the

material in Buganda.26 For instance, her insistence on the importance of the

development of the cultivation of the banana during some time between A.D. 1000–

1500 as central to Ganda identity could be re-interpreted and slotted straight into

Reid’s book, since his aim is to ‘examine the material basis of Ganda political

power’.27 Hansen’s argument, however, is different to an extent, because her aims

are different. She uses the cultivation of the banana to show how this crop had

transformed not only the political power, but also gender relations and the Ganda

society itself. According to her research, women were probably much more attentive

to banana cultivation in the period preceding the settling down of the tribes in the

lake Victoria region, and as a result, once it became one of the most important

agricultural activities among the Ganda population, women were to some extent

elevated to a higher social standing. While Hansen does explicitly say as much, it

26
Richard Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda.
27
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 2.

25
can be drawn out from the various examples that she provides. For instance,

‘woman’s work of banana cultivation eventually became so central to the ancestors

of the Baganda that it defined marriage’. Before 500 AD the linguistics of marriage

were represented by conventional phrasing: “to be married (by a man)” and “to

marry a woman”. However, after the cultivation of the banana became more

important the linguistics changed to, respectively “to become a cook (for someone)”

and “to cause (someone) to peel bananas”.28 Hansen used the work of Lucy Mair29

who was a widely respected anthropologist pursuing extensive fieldwork in Buganda

in the 1930’s.30 At the time, she was able to compare the ‘grandparent language’ that

some individuals were still seemingly in command of, and the Luganda language

that the people in the area speak now. Moreover, marriage rituals also heavily

featured the banana, whether it was part of a bridal dowry, the marriage feast or the

bride’s act of tending to the banana garden of her new parents-in-law before the

wedding.31

By nineteenth century, ‘access to banana land was an essential dimension of

marriage practice’.32 At this point, the elevation of women in society can be seen

clearer: before marriage, they were able to go on “a tour of exploration” to look for a

suitable husband who was not only suitable for her, but also could provide enough

land to grow bananas on of sufficient quality. In addition, ‘a woman could withdraw

from marriage if she felt she was being mistreated’ and, if she had been forced into

marriage with a man who did not provide a proper bridewealth, she could return to

her parents by employing a process called okweebuula obuko, or “treating one’s

28
Ibid., p. 29.
29
Lucy Mair, Native Marriage in Buganda (London, 1940), p. 13 in Ibid., pp. 29, 53.
30
Elizabeth Colson, ‘Obituary: Lucy Mair’ in Anthropology Today (2:4 August 1986), pp.
22-24.
31
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 29.
32
Ibid.

26
relatives-in-law with disrespect”. Here, Hansen is most assertive, and she writes that

women ‘exchanged hard work for social esteem’ when they married, and such a

statement does seem to be supported by the evidence she provides, and that I have

presented above.33

This connection between gender and the banana is important, because of the

impact that more intensive cultivation of the banana by women had on moving and

settlement patterns. Before the emergence of the banana as a central crop, ‘the

ancestors of the people who came to live around the East African lakes broke new

fields every three years and moved their homes about every decade’.34

Consequently, the tribes that ‘devoted more and more attention to banana groves

around A.D. 1000 must have gradually altered their deeply ingrained habit of

moving homes to stay close to worked fields’.35 Moreover, the Ganda tribes ‘might

have decided they could tolerate the lower yields that would come with reduced

fallows for their other crops, and the period between moves might have grown

[even] longer’.36 This was possible, in terms of the usage of the soil, because banana

plants ‘can be returned to productivity quickly once they are weeded’ and they

‘continue to grow’ if untended.37 As a result, people began to use the land in a

different way ‘as they gradually replaced mixed farming with intensive banana

cultivation’.38 In any case, ‘eventually, Baganda stopped moving their homes’

altogether.39

This process is another illustration of a difference between European and

African state building that I have described in the first chapter: the low population

33
Ibid., p. 30.
34
Ibid., p. 31.
35
Ibid., p. 30.
36
Ibid., p. 31.
37
Ibid., p. 29.
38
Ibid., p. 35.
39
Ibid., p. 31.

27
density and low levels of investment into land allowed the Africans in the sub-

Saharan region move without much cost, as opposed to Europeans who invested

relatively heavily into land that was in short supply. This is also consistent with the

Akan tribes who formed the center of the Asante kingdom, as I will explain in the

next chapter.

Evidence

Pinpointing a time when banana cultivation became the prime agricultural endeavor

of Buganda’s ancestors is almost impossible. Hansen argues that it occurred

sometime between A.D. 1000-1500. Again, she cites the linguistic changes as central

to the time frame; the Luganda language appears to have developed gradually from

A.D. 500, and since then ‘almost one hundred terms for banana varieties and

processing’ have emerged. The grandparent language, spoken before A.D. 500, did

not use these terms. Another piece of evidence is produced by David L. Schoenbrun,

who argues that ‘severe rainfall fluctuations between 950 and 1100, combined with

deforestation, made productive agricultural land less available that it had been at any

time before or has been since’ in the region, acting as a trigger for the turn to the

banana as the main cultivation crop.40

Schoenbrun, however, analyzes the linguistic evidence in a more detailed

manner and comes to the conclusion that intensive banana cultivation had developed

no earlier than 1400 and no later than 1700, as a result of the changes in the Luganda

language, as well as changes in the language of the tribes who occupied the land
40
Quote is Hanson summarizing Schoenbrun’s argument on p. 28. For his part, he outlines
his arguments in A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social
Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century (Portsmouth USA 1998) and
‘Cattle Herds and Banana Gardens: The Historical Geography of the Western Great Lakes
Region, ca AD 800-1500’ in The African Archaeological Review (Vol. 11, 1993), pp. 39-72.

28
south of Buganda’s ancestors, the Rutarans. Around A.D. 1200 new terms for

banana and banana processing entered their language as well. In addition, he cites

the new word for a banana garden that translates approximately into ‘chief’s banana

garden’ as the most important development at that time, because it means that ‘a

highly developed banana economy’ had to have existed for the word to be used.

Using this data he manages to narrow down the start of intensive banana cultivation

to between A.D. 1300 and 1500.41

After the ancestors of Buganda had settled down, another long-term process

started that paved the way for Buganda state formation. This process came to be as a

result of the relationship between banana cultivation and Ganda beliefs about the

dead. It involved change on many levels of the Ganda society, and in my opinion it

is very important to properly explain and understand it. At first, however, I should

present a brief summary of the Bantu-speaking people beliefs about death and

afterlife, because the understanding of these beliefs is fundamental to the

understanding of how they affected state formation in Buganda.

2.2.3 The Influence of the Ancestors

Around Lake Victoria, the Bantu-speaking peoples believed that the life force of a

person, or the mwoyo, does not disappear after death. Instead, after the person’s

demise, the life force becomes a muzimu, or an ancestor spirit. These spirits can

interact with the living world and help those still alive. However, they are only

strong enough to do so if they are remembered. One thousand years ago, the people

that would become part of the Buganda kingdom, ‘needed the active assistance of

41
Schoenbrun, ‘Cattle Herds and Banana Gardens’, pp. 50-53, quotes on p. 51.

29
their ancestors’.42 For example, an ancestor soul of Mwanga-Kisole took on a

medium after the person’s death and “looked after the well-being of the clan,

multiplied their cattle, and made their women fruitful”.43 For Hansen, this was one of

the typical examples of what the living expected their ancestors to do for them if the

former remembered and praised them properly.

These beliefs did not stay static in that particular form for long, and as

Hansen admits herself, ‘religious practices changed radically around five hundred

years ago and again in the colonial period’.44 However, they became so engrained in

the behaviour of the Bantu-speaking peoples, that they helped form the power

structure of what was to become the Buganda kingdom. The relationship with the

ancestors evolved as tribes and clans began to settle in the same place for much

longer periods of time because of the growing importance of banana cultivation. The

common practice was to bury the dead in the banana groves, and for the individuals

who would take care of these groves the work became a way to mourn, remember

and maintain a relationship with those local muzimu. Moreover, as this relationship

developed further, it became the basis of power for heads of clans and chiefs. In

other words the combination of the growing importance of banana cultivation and

evolving burial procedures and beliefs presented the key to stable state building for a

new breed of decision makers.45

What it actually represented was the idea that the banana groves within

which there existed burial grounds of most influential individuals, or those that

contained the graves of many important ancestors, were the most desired pieces of

land. As tribes started to settle in, their oral histories would stretch longer than usual
42
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 31.
43
John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (1911;
reprint, New York 1966), p. 447 in Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid., p. 32.

30
and would contain the names of the buried in the nearby groves and whether they

were high-regarded individuals who committed great deeds. These lands became

butaka, ‘the lands associated with clans that people consider to be the origin of

Buganda.’46 Those clans who possessed banana groves with graves of the most

famous and greatest ancestors would as a result be blessed with more success than

other clans. This perception was probably a self-fulfilling prophecy as people would

be attracted to live and work next to the holiest banana groves, and as a result the

clans that controlled them would benefit. This is a reasonable assumption, since

Hansen mentions that ‘people chose to live in the vicinity of the grave of an

important or powerful person’47 and that ‘people of any clan could live on land

associated with the graves of a particular clan’48 as the clan head ‘had the

responsibility or ruling all the people on the land, of whatever clan, as well as

carrying out clan responsibilities for a dispersed clan group’.49

Once again the freedom of movement and freedom from being tied down to a

particular leader or settlement plays a role in Buganda’s state formation. It was

almost always a sizeable obstacle for African leaders, as it was generally easy for

their subjects to leave their sphere of influence. In the case of early Buganda,

however, butaka represented, to a certain extent, the product and the solution of the

same problem. The creation of a local political and social order is a facilitator for the

creation of a centralized state. Before the emergence of the butaka, and during the

early years of its formation until around 1600, there were many types of authority

figures who could claim the right to present land to their followers. ‘Some people

followed chiefs who controlled land as leaders of branches of clans, other people

46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., p. 33.
48
Ibid., p. 36.
49
Ibid., p. 37.

31
followed chiefs who controlled land as gatherers of people, and still others followed

leaders who controlled land because they connected people to spiritual forces’.50

The endurance of these forms of authority meant that the people saw them as

legitimate, and competition between alternative authorities did occur. However, the

nature of the competition was one of reciprocal obligation and ‘using the language of

chiefship [possible due to the existence of butaka] as a statement of reciprocal

obligation, authority figures built a complex and comprehensive network of

allegiances’.51 Around 1600 the butaka lands have become consolidated and at the

same time, it appears that one of the chiefs was able to win over others, not through

military means, and he became Kabaka, or king. ‘The establishment of Kabaka

kingship … drew these various forms of connection more toward one center, the

Kabaka’s capital’.52 Reid has even stated that the ‘gradual shift of political and

territorial power from the bataka [heads of butaka] to the Kabaka’ was ‘the single

most important theme of Ganda political history over the 300 years before the

nineteenth century’.53 Therefore, a chain of processes starting with intensified

banana cultivation and new settlement patterns due to changing religious beliefs

resulted in the development of chiefship lands; and the authority that these lands

provided to the chiefs who ruled them, facilitated the emergence of the kingship.

In terms of the aims of this paper, two points can be quickly identified. First,

the complexity of this process means that dismissing Buganda as a non-state is

impossible, even though so far I have only discussed the long-term processes that led

to state formation. Further examination of immediate circumstances of the formation

of the Buganda state and the way it operated in the nineteenth century should

50
Ibid., p. 39.
51
Ibid., p. 52.
52
Ibid., p. 53.
53
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 3.

32
strengthen his point of view even more. Second, though this process took place over

such a long period of time, lessons can be drawn from it for the modern African

leaders. It is a general rule that states are comprised of regions without the need for

these states to be federal. They need not be a result of a long-term evolution to be of

use to a leader in Africa today. The amelioration of the relationship between regional

governors and the central authority is ultimately the responsibility of the individuals

involved in the relationship. When this relationship works well, it is beneficial not

only to those involved but also the whole of the state and the people that it

represents. Later in the chapter I will show how this center-periphery relationship

works in modern Africa and why it is difficult to improve it. At first, however, the

immediate circumstances surrounding the formation of Buganda as a state should be

examined.

2.3 A State Formed?

As I have previously affirmed, pin-pointing the exact time when a state is formed is

a difficult, if not futile, exercise. However, it is important to identify a seminal event

in the history of Buganda that represents an immediate cause of state formation.

Buganda’s pre-1900 political history can only be gleamed from oral sources that

Apolo Kagwa had gathered during his lifetime (1864-1927). He was a historian and

an ethnographer, in that he compiled many legends, myths, stories and histories of

Buganda’s past, but he was primarily a politician who played a major role in the

country’s history as Katikiro (chief minister) during the second reign of Mwanga II

33
from 1889 to 1897 and subsequently as one of the three regents of Buganda during

the British rule.54

The picture that is revealed from the oral histories is that a specific event did

indeed take place that saw Buganda emerge as a strong state. At some point between

1500 and 1700 the state emerged as the leading power in the region, and Richard

Reid sees the sixteenth century as the most likely in which Buganda’s power

crystallized into the formation of its state. The single most important event at this

time was a war with Bunyoro, a rival power to the north. The period starting from

1500 that lasted around a hundred years was ‘crucial in the formation of [Buganda]

identity’, because Bunyoro was a stronger entity at the time, and in fact it dominated

Buganda for at least a century prior to the reversal of roles.55 A close presence of

such a powerful rival meant ‘if Buganda was to expand, even survive, military

confrontation was inevitable’ and ‘an army was required if the society was to

flourish’.56 The reign of Kabaka Nakibinge is especially important in this context: he

lost a war against the Bunyoro, and that loss set into motion ‘economic and military

processes … which would lead ultimately to Buganda usurping Bunyoro’s position

as the most powerful state in the northern lake region’.57

The actual existence of this particular Kabaka has been thrown into question

by Christopher Wrigley, who points out the many similarities between the story of

Nakibinge and the stories of other Kabakas, both before and after him. For instance,

Nakibinge and another Kabaka faced competition for the throne from a man by the

name of Juma. In both stories, Juma’s servant kills a prince by the name of Luyenje

and in both stories his servant is then killed in return. Juma and Luyenje do not
54
M. Louise Pirouet, Historical Dictionary of Uganda (Metuchen 1995), entry: Kagwa, Sir
Apolo, pp. 180-181.
55
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 3.
56
Ibid., p. 185.
57
Ibid., p. 186.

34
feature anywhere else in Buganda’s oral histories; therefore Wrigley assumed that a

single story was imported from one king to another. This is only one of a few

examples that he provides, making his argument fairly convincing.58

However, Wrigley’s argument ‘is rather depressing for anyone who might

have hoped that indigenous accounts offered something to support empirical

history’, as aptly noted by Reid. In any case it is more constructive to assume that

there is a certain amount of benefit to these oral histories, especially if we focus not

on individual episodes but on a general flow of history. Reid assumed exactly that

and provided an overview of Nakibinge’s reign. It is possible that he never existed,

or he represents a composite character derived from various individuals.59 However,

one thing is clear: in the period that his reign had supposedly occurred, significant

events took place that triggered the formation of the Buganda state.

Assuming that the overall story of his reign is fairly accurate, it is possible to

deduce a few points. First, he was unable to overthrow the dominance of Bunyoro,

but his struggle to do so led to an environment following his reign in which the

Buganda state ascended. Second, ‘a major factor’ in his Nakibinge’s defeat was the

limited supply of iron that the Ganda possessed at the time. As a result, ‘it seems

safe to assert, therefore, that Buganda’s subsequent gradual expansion was at least

partly inspired by the desire to secure raw materials’, especially iron ore. This gives

this period an economic dimension.60

Overall, then, it seems that at some point in the sixteenth century, Buganda

reacted to the threat of Bunyoro and the losses it suffered by reorganizing its army,

prioritizing the search for raw materials and, later in the century, defeating the
58
Christopher Wrigley, Kingship and state: The Buganda dynasty (Cambridge 1996), pp.
210-211.
59
Richard Reid, ‘The Reign of Kabaka Nakibinge: Myth or Watershed?’ in History of Africa
(Vol. 24, 1997), p. 288.
60
Ibid., p. 294.

35
enemy and ascending to the status of regional power. It is impossible to conceive

that this could have happened without some sort of a centralized Buganda state. This

scenario coupled with the long-term processes that I have discussed above, then,

illustrates the existence of state formation in pre-colonial Africa, something that I

planned to achieve as the first aim of this paper. I realize that the evidence available

to us is not pristine and there are other possible scenarios that could have happened.

However, in the next chapter I will look at Asante and its ascendancy bears striking

resemblance to Buganda’s story. In the last chapter I will compare the two, which

will, in my opinion, strengthen the case for this particular scenario of the state

formation of Buganda.

Before looking at Asante, however, I will look at Buganda in the nineteenth

century in order to find out whether my second aim is indeed a possibility; namely

whether or not analyzing pre-colonial states can provide any answers to modern state

building problems.

2.4 The Connection between Centre and Periphery: Kabaka, Bataka

and Taxes

2.4.1 Tax collection in nineteenth century Buganda

First, I will look at Buganda’s tax collecting procedures in the nineteenth century

and analyze its informal nature to see whether or not lessons can be drawn from it to

improve state maintenance of modern Africa. Several contemporary sources

describing tax collection are available to us, although most of them have to be

handled skeptically, as they were written by Englishmen with negative outlooks

36
towards the Buganda state systems. Richard Reid provides the typical example in Sir

Gerald Portal,61 the first commissioner of the Uganda Protectorate in 1893. At this

point, the English had already established themselves in the region, and he had

gathered information on tax collecting through observation but also by learning

about it in conversations with other Europeans such as missionaries or traders who

had visited Buganda before and during the rule of the British protectorate. He was

‘aiming to depict an impossibly top-heavy and corrupt bureaucracy which it was the

British duty to correct’.62 Predictably, his writings describe a “beaten and persecuted

[peasantry] until the very last drop is wrung out of them” and a deeply entrenched

system of what today will be called corruption, as every single middle man extracted

some of the wealth out of the taxes they collected.63 However this system may have

only been so dysfunctional in the 1890s due to the numerous environmental factors

such as epidemics and famines that intensified at the time, combined with the ill-

fated reign of Mwanga II.

A quick detour must be taken now to explain the situation at the end of the

nineteenth century in Buganda and why it was different to the hundred years that

preceded it in order to prove that the Buganda tax system could have worked well

before. By all accounts, the period surrounding the reigns of Mwanga II was

difficult, and even disastrous for Buganda. He ruled from 1884 to 1888 and again

from 1889 to 1897. The 1880s and 1890s were characterized by food shortages,

general worsening of economic conditions and political turmoil. Personally,

Mwanga ‘was entirely incapable of asserting kabaka’s authority over land that might

have resolved disputes’ that have become more frequent due to the arrival of

61
Gerald Portal, The British Mission to Uganda in 1893, (London 1894) in Reid, Pre-
Colonial Buganda, pp. 99-102.
62
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, pp. 99-100.
63
Portal, British Mission, in Ibid., p. 100.

37
Christian missionaries. The symbolic power of kabaka was at a low point; at one

dispute settlement a chief had openly criticized Mwanga and shouted at him in

public, to which the king replied by simply leaving the room. As Hanson points out,

‘less than a generation earlier, people had been executed for sneezing in the presence

of the kabaka’, while the chief who shouted at Mwanga was not even punished.64

In terms of tax collecting, Mwanga’s reign was regarded as ‘an abuse of the

system’ because he encouraged ‘plundering in the name of political justice [instead]

of the peaceful and legitimate collection of tribute’. This ‘royal arrogance’ was also

shown in his ‘ego-laden’ project to build a royal lake, for which he recruited a

massive amount of labour and financial resources from every chief.65 Ultimately, his

excessive behaviour was the reason for the revolt that was undertaken against him in

1888 by Christian and Muslim groups who unified to oust Mwanga because of his

perceived attack on the Christians.66 The only reason he was reinstated as Kabaka

was because the Christian and Muslim groupings fought against each other after his

deposition, and as the former were winning they needed ‘to legitimize their seizure

of power’.67

It is therefore more useful to focus on the period that preceded the reign of

Mwanga II in order to obtain a clearer picture of how the Buganda taxation system

worked. Reid contrasts Portal’s view with a report written by Apolo Kagwa, who

was the Katikiro (a kind of prime minister) of Buganda from 1889 to 1926, basing

his writings on oral history and his personal knowledge of the kingdom. He wrote

the report in tandem with John Roscoe, an Anglican missionary who spent 25 years

in the region. Their report provides a kinder view towards the taxation system as
64
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 115.
65
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 111.
66
Ibid., pp. 111-112.
67
Pirouet, Historical Dictionary of Uganda, entries: Mwanga, Danieri, pp. 276-278 and
quotation in Wars of Religion, p. 361.

38
they describe fairly independent chiefs, who would collect the taxes within their

Bataka by themselves, with the aid of their own men, after the Kabaka had chosen

which clan was next in line to produce taxes. These men would have gone to villages

and individual huts to collect tax in kind after the chief had designated the amount

needed from a particular village or region. They would then be able to “make

something for themselves” by “add[ing] to the number of … things composing the

taxes”. The general picture we get from this report is that the exploitation of this

system was regular but moderate, and probably predicted by the clan heads.68 The

truth most probably lies somewhere in-between the two sources, as it usually does,

in that exploitation existed but it varied by region and intensity.

In any case, in the context of this paper, this situation shows off the working

of two phenomena in strengthening state formation that are generally considered to

bear only negative impact: the nature of the middle man and the strength of the

periphery. I cannot promote a lax attitude towards corruption among tax collectors,

not only because there is no excuse for it, but also because of my personal

experience with corruption as a Russian citizen. However, there are a few points that

have to be made in favour of the way tax collecting was done in Buganda with

respect to how the middlemen behaved themselves.

68
Reid does not have a full name of the report in his bibliography, but he gives the year
1906 as the date of its publication. Given the fact that Roscoe and Kagwa co-authored this
report, its title is most probably Enquiry into Native Land Tenure in the Uganda
Protectorate as this is the only work co-authored by the two in 1906 that I could identify.
Given the limited amount of information I can only provide the following footnote:
Apolo Kagwa and John Roscoe, Enquiry into Native Land Tenure in the Uganda
Protectorate (1906), p. 5 in Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 102.

39
2.4.2 The Chiefs and the Kabaka: A fluid relationship

Portal himself showed that a chief was faced with real pressure from both directions

along the vertical hierarchy of power in Buganda – from the Kabaka to deliver

enough tax to satisfy his needs, but also from his subjects. The chief ‘would not last

long’ if he failed to accumulate enough tribute, but more importantly, he ‘had to be

fair on his clients and retain their loyalty and support, without which his position

would become just as untenable’.69 Not only is it possible for us to speculate that a

chief being too strict on his subjects would compromise his power base, but we can

also confidently agree with Reid, that subjects could move away from a chief’s

influence to another region under a different leader. Notwithstanding the fact that it

would have been harder and less realistic to do so for those with extensive economic

power that was rooted in the community, capital or land that was difficult or

impossible to move, even a ‘the steady loss of [less well off] human resources would

clearly be extremely damaging to a chief on several levels’ in itself.70 This is also

supported by Reid’s claims elsewhere in his book that ‘much of the success of the

[Buganda] political state was founded on its ability to marshal human and material

resources’71 and a significant drain on one or both of these would almost certainly

lead to the deposal of the current chief.

Buganda tax collection system was, for some time before the end of the

nineteenth century, balanced and highly attuned to changes. This system worked,

with all these layers of middlemen being able to write off some tribute for

themselves, without jeopardizing it, because if they did then not enough tax would

69
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 102.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid., p. 251.

40
be collected and the Kabaka would replace the chief, which would also have

consequences for the middlemen. Therefore, if the Ganda were able to strike that

balance, should not it be possible to find it again in the modern world?

To answer the question above, yes, in my opinion it is possible and it is

achievable, but with differing methods and tactics. It would be hard to get away with

what would now be deemed fraud and bribery in today’s world where the goal is to

be able to register and save every transaction and every bit of data. Perhaps one way

to regain this balance is to change the thinking about the relationship between the

centre and the periphery, which brings me to the second point that I want to make

about how understanding the Buganda tax collection system can be used to

strengthen state formation in Africa today.

According to Holly Hansen’s research, this relationship was one of the

elements that built the foundation of the Buganda political and material system.72

Accepting this assertion implies that the success of Buganda owes, at least in part, to

the core-periphery relationship, which in turn means that modern African leaders

would be wise to look at this connection more closely. This does not necessarily

mean that Buganda’s system should be replicated; I am instead suggesting that

certain of its’ features or norms may be useful for modern states. Taxation is only

one part of the center-periphery relationship of pre-colonial Buganda, and its relative

success should mean that other parts should also undergo careful analysis in order to

see whether any useful tools can be extracted to aid modern state maintenance.

This relationship evolved throughout time, and became more defined but also

more fluid. For instance, the chiefs knew that the Kabaka was the ultimate power

holder in the kingdom, but their power could not only stem from the office he held

72
Hanson, Landed Obligation, pp. 28-36.

41
but directly from the material and military wealth and reputation of their Bataka.

Therefore, there were cases when a chief was more powerful, at least in economic

terms, than the Kabaka to an extent when there was even open revolt and attempts to

secede. For instance, the case of Mwanga II comes to mind because he was actually

overthrown. Additionally, in the early eighteenth century ‘several princes refused to

obey Mawanda’s [the Kabaka at the time] command for public labour’.73

Kabaka Mawanda was an important figure in Buganda’s history, and he

personifies a conceptual link between earlier forms of authority and nineteenth

century Buganda. As it has been already established, the development of butaka

lands has resulted in the initial consolidation of political authority that created

conditions in Buganda for the kingship of Kabaka to arise. Consequently, kings have

been actively seeking to centralize their power even further, and Mawanda was able

to create specific regional offices that played a similar role of butaka lands i.e.

representing regional authority. He negotiated with ‘chiefs who held autonomous

power and linked that power to the Kabaka through a vocabulary of reciprocal

obligation’,74 to institute ‘a powerful innovation’, that consisted of creating the

“ssaza”, basically regions ruled by political governors in the guise of chiefs.75 By the

nineteenth century, Buganda was divided into ten ssazas.76

73
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 112.
74
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 81. By reciprocal obligation Hanson basically means the
nature of the relationship between, in this case, Kabaka and chiefs, was that of mutual gain.
Obligation meant that not only the chief but also the Kabaka had to work in order to keep the
relationship going, by recognizing the stature of the opposite office holder as well as by
participating in a complex conversation of gift giving.
75
Ibid.
76
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 4.

42
2.4.3 The Mistakes of the New Leaders

In order to show how the understanding of this traditional relationship between the

centre and the periphery can be of use for modern Africa, I should explain how the

current African system failed to employ these traditional lessons after independence

as the leaders decided to stick with a European system left over from the colonial

period. One of the most penetrating and interesting pieces of analysis that Herbst has

provided was to show the consequences of the African leaders choice of the nation-

state system as the template for independent Africa in the 1960s, at a time when

most of Africa was becoming independent. The Organization of African Unity’s key

first acts are extremely important in this context. The 1963 OAU Charter called for

“respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each State and for its

inalienable right to independent existence”,77 something that on the surface should

be commended for its peaceful message, but it laid the roots for the 1964 resolution

that confirmed the European borders by calling for “respect [of] the frontiers existing

on their achievement of national independence”.78 This represented the acceptance

of the borders that the Europeans had drawn during the Scramble for Africa in the

late nineteenth century, the boundaries that had since then been almost universally

derided as being illogical, unrepresentative and inattentive of Africa’s history.

Whether it was the choice of the African elite, as Herbst claims quite emphatically,

or whether they were forced into this choice by the circumstances that the Europeans

created is irrelevant at this point, more important is the fact that it happened.

77
Organization of African Unity, ‘Charter of the O.A.U.’ in Ian Brownlie (ed), Basic
Documents on African Affairs (Oxford 1971), p. 3, in Herbst, States and Power, p. 104.
78
Organization of African Unity, ‘O.A.U. Resolution on Border Disputes, 1964’ in
Brownlie, Basic Documents, p. 361 in Ibid., p. 104.

43
 Coinciding with this decision was the implementation of the idea that the

control of the capital amounted to the control of the entire territory, as made clear

after the first coup in West Africa and the assassination of Olympio, the then-

president of Togo, in 1963. After the rebels killed the president and took over the

capital Lomé, the OAU ‘established a decision-making rule that preserved African

borders and prevented any kind of external competition while requiring only

minimal levels of effective domestic sovereignty’, meaning requiring the control of

the capital. This was a popular decision within the OAU and in the international

community, basically because it made ruling easier for the heads of African states

and it made recognizing those rulers easier for the international community.79

2.5 Conclusion

Both the capital rule and the boundary decision shaped African history to come and,

in my opinion, have immensely complicated the progress in Africa’s political,

economic and social dimensions. Buganda’s taxation system shows a way forward

by looking backwards. To create a system along the lines of the Ganda way is almost

an impossible achievement now due to the two decisions made by the OAU,

because, by implication, they defined the relationship between the center and

periphery as unimportant. Therefore, little attention has been paid by African leaders

to improving the ties of the capitals to the outer regions of their respective countries.

The key to the Buganda system was the fluidity in the relationship between the

periphery and the center; the amount of independence chiefs were able to enjoy

while at the same time understanding the supreme power of the Kabaka. This power

79
Ibid., p. 110.

44
was not only created through the usual economic, military and religious means.

Hansen’s mission in her book was to show that ‘when people in Buganda thought

about power, they spoke about love’. In other words, ‘in the Ganda practice of

power, visible expression of love and affection created relationships of mutual

obligation between people with authority and those they ruled’.80 They were able to

achieve this in an informal medium, and, in my opinion, a similar feat should be

possible in modern Africa. However, this will require a rethinking of the current

attitude towards informal networks, but also towards the relationship between the

center and the periphery.

80
Hanson, Landed Obligation, p. 1.

45
 Chapter 3.

Case Study: Asante

The kingdom of Asante was a great regional power that was not only able to conquer

and hold a plethora of societies and states in the region but also hold back the British

colonialists, even winning some battles against the Europeans. In the end, however,

they were conquered and the Asante are now part of Ghana, although they do

represent the heartland of the country. The evolution of the Asante kingdom started

with the Akan people centered in the forest areas close to Kumase, the capital. After

an initial period of centralization of various villages and polities around Kumase,

Asante went on to annex states and entities in every direction through both military

and diplomatic means, with the accent on the former. The arrival of the Europeans

and the trade that they have brought with them certainly had an impact on the

evolution of the Asante state, but did in no means define it. However, before getting

into how the state operated, we need to examine the long-term processes and

environmental conditions that led to the forming of the Asante state.

46
3.1 The Emergence of the Akan: Long-Term State Formation

Processes

3.1.1 Gold and Slaves: The Creation of a New Agrarian Order

In the first part of the story of how the Asante state formed, I will explain the

economic preconditions of the rise of Kumase as the power centre. An interesting

dynamic was occurring around the time when the Akan started to expand their

settlements and create new ones, in and around the fifteenth century. Because the

amount of work that was required to clear a forest to build new estates was very

high, shortage of labour was the single most important obstacle that the Akan settlers

had to overcome. Ivor Wilks states that the availability of labour was a ‘necessary

precondition of [forest] clearances, and therefore of the creation of the agrarian

order.’ As I will explain later in the chapter, this new agrarian order was the

centerpiece of a new Akan society that rose to claim the power in the region. For

now, however, it is enough to say that closing the shortage of labour was essential

and that the availability of gold consequently made this closing possible.81

In this complex story with many interesting dynamics and relationships, the

bottom line is that the Akan people occupied an area rich with gold, and this sole

factor facilitated all the processes that lead to the formation of the Asante state. This

should not be interpreted as historical determinism, however, because gold was

available elsewhere in the region to other societies. For instance, Denkyira, a state to

the south of Kumase, that was considered to be the prime regional power before the

81
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 77.

47
rise of Asante, was rich in ‘gold resources that supported it’.82 What was more

important than the availability of gold was the way that the Akan used it. By the

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ‘many of the major reefs in the central

forests had been prospected and were being exploited to the lowest levels possible

without the use of mechanical pumps.’ According the Wilks’ interpretation of the

data available to us today, the development of mining as opposed to “washing” the

rivers for gold happened in the fifteenth century. 83 In my opinion, this should prove

to be true when further research into the phenomenon will be made, and if it is

indeed possible to correctly ascertain a time period when mining developed. I say

this because it fits with the other processes that were happening at the time, namely

the clearing of forests and the increased Akan demand for slaves.

This leads us to how the Akan solved their shortage of labour problems: the

intensification in gold procurement and the development of mining coincided with a

documented rise in slave purchases. While we do not possess any solid numerical

data, we still can make this statement based on evidence from late fifteenth century

Portuguese trading missions along the Gold Coast. The flow of slaves from Africa to

the Americas is the most studied and well-known early activity of Europeans in

Africa, but the coastwise trade in slaves actually preceded Columbus’ discovery. In

fact, the Portuguese built the first fortress of Sao Jorge da Mina in Elmina on the

shores of the Akan country after a little more than ten years of trading in 1482. The

exchange of gold for slaves was ‘among the commodities that the Portuguese found

most readily acceptable’ and as a result of the popularity of the trade a trading post

was established at Gwato in 1486. It is documented that in some instances the local

82
T.C. McCaskie, ‘Denkyira in the making of Asante c. 1660-1720’ in Journal of African
History (Vol. 48, 2007), p. 1.
83
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 77.

48
traders would buy the slaves for twice the price of what the Portuguese paid for them

in Benin, the main location where the Europeans bought slaves destined for Elmina

at the time.84 This trade expanded in the early sixteenth century and continued even

after the Portuguese were banned from trading slaves in the area by their king in mid

sixteenth century.85

While we can not be absolutely sure that this trade blossomed due to the

Akan forest clearances, for Wilks it is nevertheless ‘obvious that many were taken

northward by the various merchants from the interior who plied their trade at

Elmina’, or in other words that they were taken to the expanding Akan settlements in

desperate need of slave labour.86 This trade may give rise to a Western-centered

argument that the Europeans were an essential agent for Asante state formation.

Indeed, certain academics did argue that the Portuguese “captured” interior Akan

trade.87

However, while this trade was clearly important, ‘there can be little doubt

that there was a much higher flow southward into the forest from the savannah

hinterlands’.88 This trade was conducted by the Muslim Wangara, who set up a

string of trading posts along the northern borders of the Akan country. Even before

the Portuguese began to take part in the gold trade with the Akan, the latter ‘already

had strong consumer preferences formed in the context of their prior involvement

with the Wangara’.89 Again, there is no real data on how many slaves were traded

there, but an indication can be given by looking at the reaction of the Portuguese to

84
Ibid., pp. 74-75 and Ivor Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries II: The Struggle for Trade’ in The Journal of African History (23:4
1982), pp. 464-465.
85
Wilks, Forests of Gold, pp. 74-75.
86
Ibid., p. 75.
87
See for instance: Fernand Braudel, ‘Monnaies et civilization: de l’or du Soudan a l’argent
d’Amérique’ in Annales, Économies, Societés, Civilisations (January-March 1946).
88
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 76.
89
Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese’, p. 464.

49
the expansion of this traffic in early 16th century: the Governor of Elmina in 1513

was complaining that the Wangara traders were outperforming their European

counterparts for Akan gold due to shortages of slaves and other goods on the

Portuguese side. In addition, later, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Muslim

traders and Malian cavalry groups seemed to have banded together to create the

Gonja state. Wilks argues that ‘it seems the kingdom was organized primarily for

trade, that trade consisted largely in the supply of labor to the forest in return for

gold’. In order to organize this trade, the two groups have joined forces and created a

framework within which the raiders would raid the densely populated Votaic region

further north from the Akan forests.90

While there were undoubtedly other causes of these events, it seems, at the

least, that Akan demand for labour drove the regional economy precisely around the

time that the forest clearings are said to have happened, in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries. The magnitude of the trade between the Akan, the Wangara and the

Europeans was certainly quite immense, to the point where ‘the Akan [became]

major producers of gold for the world market in the period’.91 This, in turn, shows

how the availability of gold created the availability of labour needed to create this

new agrarian order. Therefore, it is time to show how, through the creation of arable

land in the forests, Akan society became a layered structure that was an instrumental

part of their rise to dominance, and what lessons can their path provide for modern

African states.

90
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 76.
91
Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese’, p. 463.

50
3.1.2 The Aberemp‫כ‬n and the stratification of Akan society

Asante was primarily a forest-based entity, and its agricultural advances did not start

until around the fifteenth century. This is an extremely important period that needs to

be understood, because it was the impetus for Asante state formation. This link

between the search for material comfort and wealth, and politico-social development

echoes Buganda’s path. In the case of the Ganda people, their willingness to settle

down due to the advantages offered by increased focus on banana cultivation was a

key factor in the formation of the Buganda state. Both these evolutions in agrarian

behaviour have underpinned changes in the structure of societies of the two polities,

and ultimately led to the rise of their regional military, economic and political

power. These are clear examples of the long-term processes that I have identified as

being part of inherent pre-colonial African state building.

One of the interesting differences between the two processes, however, is the

question of agency. In the Buganda case, as I have discussed in the previous chapter,

it is difficult to identify a set of individuals or a social stratum of the local population

that was essential for the state formation process to formulate itself over the

centuries. However, the Asante path was different: there was a clear group of

individuals who facilitated the formation of the Akan state, the aberemp‫כ‬n. Ivor

Wilks calls them entrepreneurs, and I will now explain the role that they played.

These individuals were mostly hunters who had a unique entrepreneurial spirit: their

business was searching for new territory to develop. Once they would find a suitable

piece of land, the hard work of clearing the forest would begin. It is frustrating,

however, that while there are plenty of stories and village histories that talk about the

51
aberem‫כ‬n, nothing is known about how they cleared the forest and developed the

land itself.92 On this, we can only speculate.

What is known, however, is the transformation of society that followed after

many of these estates were created and began to grow into genuine villages and

towns. As a result of this, the Asante were able to conquer many other settlements

around them and become the great power that they were, therefore it is important to

properly understand these early processes.

When the forests were cleared and the estates were ready to attract settlers, as

a result of the Akan management of their gold resources to attract labour, the

successful ones began to grow. The prosperity of the estates were directly linked to

the abilities of the aberemp‫כ‬n, unlike in Buganda, where prosperity of early villages

would be firmly connected to the importance of the ancestors buried in the banana

groves. In the Asante forests, the developers had to be able to obtain enough slaves

to expand the territory and employ them to better the estate. In addition they had to

be able to attract free settlers to the territory. The developers had certain powers and

rights that saw them benefit from the settlers that came to their estates, and in time

these entrepreneurs became adehyeε, the equivalent of European nobility.93

This is where the interesting Akan perception of land ownership comes in.

The subtle understanding of who the land belonged to, and what ‘belonging’ meant

in itself is a crucial feature of not only Akan, but also of African state formation

processes in general. In this case, the local saying, “the farm is my property, the land

is the king’s” provides a window into this perception. Even though the developers

would give the land on their estate to free settlers, they were able to retain certain

rights. For instance, the individuals that would become noblemen could ask not only

92
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 97.
93
Ibid., p. 100.

52
for the fruits of agricultural labour but also for anything else found on the land where

the settlers lived, that being game, fish, kola etc. In addition, an early form of

taxation existed; various levies could be extracted from the settlers, such as peato for

military expenses, ayieto for funerals and ‫כ‬manto for infrastructural developments.

Furthermore, able bodies for military service and road building could also be

required by the aberemp‫כ‬n, which makes this arrangement look more and more like

feudal Europe.94

However, making this parallel would be a mistake. Wilks points out that free

settlers ‘acquired almost unassailable titles to the land they farmed’ and that ‘the

various taxes and services provided to the landholder were ad hoc and sporadic and

did not approximate in character to a rent, whether economic or otherwise’.95

Therefore, we can only compare the European and the Akan ways of state formation,

but we cannot equate them.

Going back to the point I made earlier about how the aberemp‫כ‬n became

adehyeε, it is imperative to state how important this gradual change was. It was not

only the developers who grew into a class inside the social stratum of the Asante, the

slave labour and the settlers were also part of this process. The latter became

‫כ‬manmufo or citizenry. Some of those settlers who came to the estates to farm, hunt,

trade, or partake in the economic life of the estate in some other capacity, settled

down in a particular estate and established a family and a home. Presumably

depending on the success of their economic activity their stature in the community

would differ, but they were the ones who became the citizenry as, in time, the estates

grew into villages and villages grew into towns, with some even becoming capitals

of powerful polities.

94
Ibid., p. 99.
95
Ibid.

53
 As this was happening, the slave labour that was recruited (always from

outside of Asante) for forest clearings and general work on the estates fused into the

servant class, the gyaasefo. These individuals became the servants of the adehyeε,

‘they farmed for them, assumed responsibility for their debts, and provided them

with a wide range of personal services as stool-carriers, drummers, hornblowers’ and

more. Additionally, ‘their masters (or mistresses) were heirs to their property’.96

Although it is difficult to definitively prove that the slave labour brought in the

fifteenth century formed the gyaasefo, it does make a certain amount of sense. When

the clearing of forests, road building and other hard work requiring a lot of

manpower was over, surely some of the slaves were transformed into servants for the

developers.

What is more important, however, is the fact that this explicit segregation of

society was conducive to the formation of the Asante state, because the distinction of

responsibilities in a society makes for easier rule. The nobility was able to

concentrate on political wrangling and annexation of more land and estates, because

the citizenry went about their daily lives and supported the economy while the

servants took care of any needs that the nobles had not only in terms of personal

assistance but also in terms of looking out for their property and economic well-

being.

The level of ability of the proprietors of the land was the key to the progress

of the estate. With time, these estates would grow into villages and towns. The larger

and wealthier they were, the more settlers would join the estate. While the estate

grew, it would annex surrounding territories, estates and villages through military or

diplomatic means. The most successful and famous of these estates blossomed into

96
Ibid.

54
Kumase, the capital of the Akan kingdom.97 The story of the eventual formation of

the state, the kingdom and, subsequently, what some call the empire, overshadows

the story of the creation of the Kumase estate. Therefore, in the next section I will

focus on the short-term and immediate causes of the formation of the Asante state.

3.2 Short-Term State Formation: The Rise of Kumase

3.2.1 The Conquest of Denkyera: A State-Forming Event

The issue of center and periphery again comes up when discussing state formation in

Asante. In the previous chapter, I showed that Buganda’s evolution into a regional

power was in part aided by the flexibility of this relationship, and I proposed that

incorporating this flexibility into modern African states may be an interesting way of

managing current problems in Africa as a whole. In Asante, it is clear that the king

and Kumase were the geographical, political, economic and military center of the

state, and because most of the expansion was carried through military means, the

outer regions of Asante were clearly subservient to the capital.

One of the most famous events in Ashanti military history was the conquest

of Denkyera in late 17th century, the first in a wave of expansion that continued into

the 18th century. This event is not only important because it preceded the other

campaigns, but because it was one of the short-term factors that caused a

consolidation within the early Asante state. The long-term processes that I have

outlined in the previous section are undoubtedly important, and in my opinion even

more so than the short-term factors, however it is clear that this event has a large

97
Ibid., p. 100.

55
significance in Asante history and therefore it warrants attention. To summarize, the

inner Akan polities, being Kumase, Dwaben, Bekwai, Kokofu and Nsuta ‘converted

into a centralized political authority, though one which was based on

decentralization of administration’ as a response to the threat of demands for tribute

from Denkyera.98 This was facilitated by the closeness of the Akan polities

geographically and socially; they were all part of the Oyoko clan that had migrated

north into the forests in the previous centuries. The migration was ‘probably …

connected with the activities of the Denkyera state … which … threatened the

Adansi, i.e. pre-Ashanti groups.’99 Additionally, these ‘clan brothers’100, as Arhin

calls them, experienced an early expansion into Offinso, north of Kumase, and

Sehwi in the western part of the Gold Coast. This pre-1700 expansion was conducted

by the clan brothers together under the leadership of Osei Tutu, the legendary

Kumase leader. Arhin claims that ‘it is not surprising’ that the clans decided to

further integrate their union and push on against Denkyera as one unit, because even

the ‘limited co-operation that had existed’ between these clan brothers ‘had proved a

source of strength’.101 From now on, the clan brother states will be called “Asante”

when referring to the centralized core of the kingdom, and “Greater Asante” will be

used to refer to the kingdom and all the regional polities under the king’s control.

While there was undoubtedly a degree of internal strife within the new

Asante state, the creation of a new ‘supra-divisional authority’ in the guise of

Kotoko Council which comprised of the chief of Kumase (as the new king of Greater

Asante) and the chiefs of the other polities, ‘had an undisputed voice in the conduct

98
Kwame Arhin, ‘The Structure of Greater Ashanti (1700-1824)’ in The Journal of African
History (8:1 1967), p. 69.
99
Ibid., pp. 67-68.
100
Ibid., p. 67.
101
Ibid., p. 68.

56
of external relations.’102 The internal strife was not a simple center-periphery

problem, however, because Kumase and the other polities were ‘on different

trajectories of change’ during the 18th century. For instance, around 1770 Dwaben

and Mampon, two Akan polities under Kumase’s rule, disputed territories in their

northern hinterlands between themselves, and even ‘came into armed conflict’ as a

result of these disputes.103 This illustrates not only the independence that these

polities were able to enjoy, but also the way they perceived their role within the

Greater Asante; not simple regions within a state, but actual autonomous polities that

even had the right to go to war with one another.

3.3 The intricacies of the Center-Periphery relationship in Greater

Asante

3.3.1 Provinces: Kinship and Domination

The Asante had control over many types of polities, and a classification of their

types is a useful exercise that will provide further understanding of how the Asante

state actually operated. The first type was also the one that gives us the most insight

into the centralized state. Arhin forms a scathing attack on writers who question the

intricacy of this relationship. For him, the foundations of the Asante state were laid

during the Denkyera conquest mentioned earlier in the chapter. These foundations

were based on kinship and their earliest development was spurred on by the external

threat of the Denkyera that had a uniting effect on the Akan peoples under Kumase’s

leadership. However, as Asante grew in power and territory, the Asante kings
102
Ibid., p. 69.
103
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 118.

57
realized that while the foundations could be based on kinship, the maintenance of the

state had to be performed in a more centralized and efficient manner. Therefore, the

second period of the relationship ‘saw a tightening of the controls over the various

states’. Apart from Bowdich and Dupuis, all other nineteenth century English writers

could not comprehend the intricacies of this second stage. For them, it was a simple

case of economic extraction out of the provinces that was supplemented by the threat

of force.104 However, looking deeper at such methods as tribute and fines for

breaches of oaths, king’s commands for financing of military victories and others, a

pattern becomes clear.

The Asante kings indirectly affirmed their authority over the provinces by

showcasing their achievements, making it expensive to break rules that came directly

from them and generally by using economic means for political purposes.

Admittedly, it may have been difficult to understand this at the time: there was no

need for cultural alignment because the Akan people were culturally similar and the

Asantes did not leave garrisons in outlying provinces at times of peace because they

did not have a standing army of professional soldiers. Therefore to the naked eye it

may have seemed that all the kings were doing was glorifying themselves and

profiting financially from their position at the center of the state. Since the kings did

not have a lot of available methods, however, they had to rely on more subtle ways

of affirming their political dominance.105

I will go through these ways promptly, but first I must point out one

important dimension that influenced the behaviour of the Asante kings. Following

‘every new accession to the Asante stool’ since the death of Osei Tutu in 1717,

104
Arhin, Greater Asante, p. 80.
105
Ibid., pp. 79-81.

58
rebellions and attempted cessations were rife in the provinces.106 During the

eighteenth century, Asante expanded greatly and wars and rebellions were a

common feature of the life of the state. Therefore, it is only logical that the Asante

kings sought to increase their power over the provinces through economic means in

order to minimize the amount of military campaigns, especially ones that did not

involve the conquest of new territory, but the re-conquest of territory that, in the

kings’ eyes, were already theirs. In my opinion it would also be reasonable to

assume that conquest of new territories would bring more booty, and the fallen polity

would tolerate more tribute since they were just defeated in battle, as opposed to re-

conquest of areas that have already been subjected to wealth extraction.

The ways through which the relationship between the center and the

provinces was being reaffirmed and strengthened involved both the proverbial carrot

and stick. The eighteenth century saw Kumase attempt to not only cement the

‘superordinate-subordinate relationship’, but also attempts to align the newly

conquered provincial chiefs on the same level with the central chiefs, in terms of

their personal relationship with the king. Arhin interprets this to be an action that

looked to ‘reduce the conquered chief‘[s status]’, with negative connotations.107

However, in my opinion, this could have been a strategy used to show all the chiefs

that they had the same status, especially to the chiefs of central provinces, the first

ones led by Kumase against the Denkyera. This would fit better with the idea of how

the relationship between center and periphery developed: away from kinship towards

something that could be tentatively described as a centralized authoritarian regime.

Therefore, for instance, strategies like calling all the chiefs to annual Odwira festival

to Kumase when the king would be able to “arrange difference, to encourage

106
Ibid., p. 72.
107
Ibid., p. 81.

59
obedience, to punish disaffection and sometimes to remove an obnoxious

opponent”.108 The festival is also a celebration of Asante history and is supposed to

remind the chiefs of the might of the state and their allegiance to the king who is at

‘the centre of the festivals’.109

In terms of more dominating measures, certain troublesome provinces have

experienced these regularly. The Akim, for example, were ‘pushed out … to remote

areas where Ashanti could deal with them when they felt ready to do so’.110 This was

most probably caused by the hostile relationship between the Akim and Asante, as

between 1700-1750 there were at least three wars involving the two on opposite

sides.111 Takyiman, another polity that experienced more than one war against

Asante, was divided and ‘some of her people … settled in central Ashanti’.112

Forced re-settlements are one of the more radical ways to make an opponent submit

to the king. On the other hand, central authorities did not only settle for the use of

the stick; the carrot was used widely too. For instance, a subordinate state that helps

to quash a rebellion will be rewarded with “privileges at the expense of the offending

power”.113 Arhin speculates that these privileges could have been land rights, but

transfers of other resources such as gold or manpower could also have been used.

Gyaman, Wassaw and Asikuma kings organized the tribute collection in the region

and were thus able to claim twenty percent of the total amount collected. Any

province sending manpower for military use would also be rewarded with a portion

of loot in case of victory. Lastly, according to Bowdich, the king was the highest

108
Quoting Brodie Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast (London 1853), p. 61 in
Ibid., p. 82.
109
Ibid.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., pp. 73-74.
112
Ibid., p. 82.
113
Quoting T.E. Bowdich, A Mission from Cape Coast to Ashantee (London 1819), p. 255 in
Ibid.

60
court in Greater Asante and if subjects of a chief were not satisfied with the ruling

they could, in theory, take their case to the king. 114

Later, in the nineteenth century, when the Asante state could be considered

formed, there was a realization that ‘more intense personal contact was needed’ for

success of provincial integration. As a result, more difficult provinces such as Akim,

Akwapim, Abura, Elmina and Wassaw saw direct appointments of resident-chiefs so

that Asante ‘political presence was … given a physical emphasis’. Moreover, a new

type of role was created that Arhin describes as a roving commissioner: these

individuals would move around from province to province and mostly dealt with

judiciary issues, specifically related to breaking the king’s oath and Asante rules

because these breaches were not under jurisdiction of local courts. They also called

periodic meetings of chiefs in a region where they would be asked to renew their

allegiance to the king.115

3.3.2 Protectorates

Protectorates were, in the most fundamental sense, provinces that were not required

to supply manpower for war. However, the relationship between protectorates and

the center must have been more intricate, because less military cooperation

presupposed more distant ties with these polities. While it is difficult to categorize

them with certainty, protectorates are considered to be polities that were not

involved directly into Asante military campaigns, but that were not left to their own

devices like the tributary states. Accra, Ada, Aowin, Elmina, Nzima and Banda can

be thought of as protectorates (Accra were involved in one military campaign but its

114
Ibid.
115
Ibid., p. 83.

61
causes were of mutual interests to Accra and Asante). These polities were not

directly conquered, but were won after conquests of other entities or, as in the case

with Banda for instance, were considered allies from early times. Once again, the

relationship with these polities was one of mutual benefit. Kumase would profit

economically from tribute, politically from possessing more protectorates, and

militarily from possessing more strategic territory, among other benefits. The

polities, on the other hand, would benefit from the ‘fear of Ashanti [that] cleared

paths [which was] conducive to the economic interests of the coastal middlemen’ in

the case of Elmina for instance, which was in direct competition with the long-term

Asante foe, the Fantis, on the Gold coast. The fact that Asante was the state that

protected these polities gave them more security and it undoubtedly increased their

confidence in situations involving political and economic battles with their enemies

and competitors.116

The main difference between tributaries and protectorates was the degree of

Asante political intervention that was allowed based on mutual understanding. Accra

and Elmina, for instance, had to house Asante resident-chiefs who had judicial and

political functions, as well as roving ambassadors who acted as dispute settlers. In

the case of Banda, the Asante appeared to have tried to fuse their culture with that of

the local population, for instance introducing material symbols of kingship, in order

to, according to Arhin, assimilate the province into Greater Asante to an even further

degree.117 In this particular case these efforts might have been initiated due to the

fact that Banda is located on the frontier, and it was ‘capable of shifting allegiance’

as a result, like they did in the 1880’s.118 Therefore, it seems that the Asante state

116
Ibid., p. 77.
117
Ibid., p. 78.
118
Ibid., p. 77.

62
was intentionally using cultural and political tools to establish its political influence

over Banda, and not simply threatening them with the use of force. This is one of the

interesting points that can be made in relation to Asante state formation: not only

was it not simple warfare-driven conquests, it also featured intelligent and effective

techniques of indirect subversion of local political structures in favour of the general

power of the Asante state. In terms of modern African state building, similar

techniques can be used to tie the state and the nation together on the subconscious

level in order to not only increase the power of the state, but also to increase the

amount of trust the people put into the state. This can lead to a better functioning

relationship between the populace and the government; a relationship that’s

organization and well-being is essential for a healthy state.

3.3.3 Tributaries

Not only was the inner-Asante system a complex interrelated web of allegiances and

responsibilities, but the outer polities that Asante have conquered were also not

straightforward vassal entities. As Greater Asante grew in strength, it expanded its

territory further in every direction, most notably, north and south. Most of this

expansion was of a military nature, however it did not mean that the state system that

formed as a result of these campaigns was fundamentally a despotic regime. On the

contrary, many of the relationships that Kumase have developed were economic in

nature. While it is correct to assume that ‘the ties were created by force and

maintained by a threat of force’, it is nonetheless important to understand that these

ties were mutually beneficial economic and commercial relationships.119 The polities

119
Ibid., p. 76.

63
that had such a relationship with Asante can be classified as tributary states. For

instance, Asante’s involvement in Dagomba was limited to agents who collected

tribute. Dagomba and Gonja were also part of an agreement that guaranteed

commercial relations with Asante. Moreover, political intervention was not part of

these agreements, with Asante interference only tolerated when the rulers actually

invited it in the first place, such as during a Daboya succession dispute. In addition,

tributary states were not expected to supply manpower for military campaigns;

Asante only expected financial tribute intended to bolster the military effort.120

3.3.4 The Nineteenth Century: the evolution of core-periphery relations

Lastly, it is useful to look at how regional administration evolved before the Asante

kingdom was taken over during the Scramble. In the first chapter I have made clear

that I will not focus on administration as part of state formation, but I do believe that

a brief explanation of Wilks’ ideas about the bureaucratization of Asante

government is helpful to both general aims of the paper.

Wilks formed a view that during the nineteenth century Asante developed a

‘centralized and largely appointive bureaucracy, capable of exercising a high degree

of social control and of organizing the man-power and other resources of the areas

under the king’s authority’.121 One of the ways he came across this important

development is by identifying a revolutionary change that was happening from late

eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries: the kings at the time, Osei Kwadwo (1764-

1777), Osei Kwame (1777-circa 1801) and Osei Bonsu (circa 1801-1824) “have

120
Ibid., pp. 76-77.
121
Ivor Wilks, ‘Ashanti Government’ in Daryll Forde and P.M. Kaberry (ed), West African
Kingdoms in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford 1967), p. 207.

64
artfully enlarged the royal prerogatives, at the expense of original constitution [by

raising their] favourite captains to vacant stools [i.e. important positions]”. This was

the observation of Bowdich at the time in 1821.122 The implications of this

development meant that skill and favour were beginning to displace right of birth as

paths to high positions of authority, which is symptomatic of the formation of a

bureaucratic system.

As I have alluded to previously, the center-periphery relationship has

undergone changes during the nineteenth century as well, and now that the

emergence of a bureaucratic culture has been identified, it is possible to

contextualize these changes. The new system encouraged the kings to use

administrative means in order to minimize attempts at rebellion and maximize the

central authority’s efficiency at dealing with those that could not be prevented.

Therefore, the appointment of resident-chiefs in the nineteenth century that I had

discussed above when dealing with provinces was part of a ‘superimposition of a

new structure of provincial administration’.123 This new structure saw the kings

appoint men that they could trust, therefore not necessarily high aristocrats, but men

who proved their worth to the king, to deal with problems in the provincial areas and

“exercise a general superintendence over them”.124

The overall significance of these developments is that they reaffirm the

statehood of Asante and that they again make clear that an intricate core-periphery

relationship was important for Asante’s kings to uphold. As it was established in the

Buganda chapter, modern African leaders are not encouraged to pay enough

122
T.E. Bowdich, An Essay on the Superstitions, Customs, and Arts common to the Ancient
Egyptians, Abyssiniansm and Ashantees (1821), pp. 21, 54 in Ibid., p. 212.
123
Ibid., p. 221.
124
Cruickshank, Gold Coast, p. 341 in Ibid., p. 222.

65
attention to this relationship, and a rethinking of this attitude is important in order to

ameliorate the condition of the African state.

3.4 Conclusion

Overall, Greater Asante can be described as an empire that had a turbulent political

life and a state that required “unremitting attention” in order for it to survive. In light

of the history of empires, it is possible to say that its collapse was inevitable.

However, since its life was cut short by British colonial rule in the late nineteenth

century we can not be sure of how the Asante state would have developed. The one

thing that is certain, in my opinion, is the complex story of the formation of this state

and its intricate design. Like Herbst posited, ‘precolonial African states developed as

logical responses to their physical environments’.125 This thread can be seen

throughout Asante history, as the availability of gold and opportunities for buying

slaves dictated the way the Akan polities developed the new agrarian order in the

15th and 16th centuries. Furthermore, the way clan brother polities’ reaction to

Denkyera pressure resulted in a new consolidated Asante state is another example of

the environment, not physical but political, driving history. However, it is important

not to take away from the ‘genius of the people of the forest’, as Ivor Wilks puts it.

He praises the abermp‫כ‬n vision of their present situation, and their ability to act and

‘bring that vision into reality’. Effectively, their actions created all the necessary

conditions for the future Asante state as they ‘lay the foundations [that] so utterly

transformed an Akan future.’126 This serves as another reminder of the complex

nature of state formation processes in pre-colonial Africa. Once again we are forced

125
Herbst, States and Power, p. 51.
126
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 120.

66
to do away with any simplistic notions of how the reasons behind the barbaric

Asante warfare in the post-Denkyera conquest period was because of their hunger

for gold and slaves, as some claim127, or how the European arrival forced African

societies into early submission through the slave trade, or even Marxist

interpretations of these societies through rigid class relationships. I will deal with

these specific counter arguments in the next chapter, but the subtle nature of the

beginnings of the Asante state has to already cast a shadow of a doubt on these

arguments.

127
This claim made by authors such as Cruickshank, Gold Coast, Sir A.B. Ellis, A History of
the Gold Coast of West Africa (London 1893) and J.D. Fage, Introduction to the History of
West Africa (Cambridge 1962) all in Arhin, Greater Asante, p. 65.

67
 Chapter 4.

Comparisons, Alternative Explanations and Conclusions

4.1 Buganda and Asante compared

At this point in the paper, I will compare various features of the analysis of both case

studies and attempt to infer a general description of a pre-colonial sub-Saharan

African state, informed by the similarities uncovered in the historical narratives of

Buganda and Asante. There will be three focal points that will feature in this

description, namely long-term processes, short-term conditions and the nature of the

core-periphery relationship.

4.1.1 Long-term state formation processes

After analyzing both Asante and Buganda, it emerges that both of these states owe

their existence to long-term processes that took place between A.D. 1000-1700. In

the case of Buganda, consumption patterns slowly changed and became focused on

the banana plant. At the same time burial practices and the evolution of the beliefs

surrounding their ancestors led the Bantu-speaking tribes to settle among the banana

gardens that housed the graves of their influential forebears. As a few of these cites

grew, the diffusion of power between religions, social or political leaders faded away

as a vertical power structure developed with the establishment of butaka lands.

In Asante, the long-term process was different because of the presence of

agency. While the lake Victoria tribes in question formed butaka over time without

68
any known catalysts, the Akan aberemp‫כ‬n began to actively search for forest land

that was destined to be developed into arable land around 1500. They started the

long-term clearances of forests and invigorated the trade with Europeans and the

Wangara who provided slaves in exchange for the gold that was in ample supply in

the forest lands. Similar to Buganda, the developers created estates to which settlers

would flock. In time, some of these grew to become capitals of polities or simple

villages, much like in Buganda where settlements around the most valuable banana

gardens grew into centers of butaka while others evolved into villages. The

difference in agency is evident here again as the fate of Akan estates was closely

linked to the abilities of the aberemp‫כ‬n to attract settlers and buy slaves.

These processes are not directly related to specific methods of state

formation that could be of use today. However, appreciating the time it took for them

to come to fruition, and the intricacy and complexity that characterized them, helps

us to historicize the two states. This, in turn, expands our understanding of Buganda

and Asante and can provide clues as to how other pre-colonial states developed.

Ultimately, these processes show the complex nature of sub-Saharan states in Africa

before the colonial period and provide more ammunition to dismiss Eurocentric

ideas that limit our perception of these states.

4.1.2 Short-Term State Formation: Triggers

As I have established in both case studies, a surprising similarity can be seen in the

immediate events surrounding the formation of Asante and Buganda as states. The

Denkyera in case of the former and the Bunyoro in case of the latter presented

similar threats to the case study states. First, both rivals were located close them and

69
represented a military threat. Second, both rivals held the position of prime regional

power before the rise of Buganda and Asante. Third, both states had been forced into

war. Analysis of Buganda showed that the state had to fight in order to survive while

the Denkyera, similarly, ‘threatened, and carried the fight home to Ashanti, and not

vice versa’.128 Fourth, Bunyoro’s primacy meant a lack of opportunities to find iron

ore for Buganda, and the latter therefore had to expand elsewhere to increase its iron

supply. Similarly, although not identically, there was an economic dimension to

Asante’s rivalry with Denkyera because the latter was the ‘most important inland

supplier of gold and slaves to the Dutch at Elmina and the English at Cape Coast,

and the wealthiest importer of European guns and ammunitions’.129 Osei Tutu surely

recognized that overtaking this trade would benefit the Asante state both financially

in terms of gold and militarily in terms of greater access to European weapons. This

last point is where a parallel can be drawn with Buganda’s search for iron ore that

was needed to improve its military capacity. Fifth, the struggle against these rivals

ensured that Buganda and Asante had to centralize politically and expand

territorially in order to challenge the former’s primacy.

An interesting argument can be made, taking into account both Asante and

Buganda’s stories. From available evidence, it seems that both these states had to

become aggressive in order to defend themselves against their rivals. Reid argues

that the birth of Buganda’s army was due to ‘aggressive defensiveness’. He showed

that Buganda had to react to the threat of Bunyoro by creating an army to defend

itself, and ‘at some point [after the defeat of Bunyoro] this defensiveness became

aggression’ as Buganda waged more wars to conquer other polities around it.130

128
Arhin, Greater Asante, p. 72.
129
McCaskie, ‘Denkyira in the Making of Asante’, p. 1.
130
Reid, Pre-Colonial Buganda, p. 185.

70
Similarly for Asante, its military campaigns of expansion after 1700 were triggered

by the war and defeat of Denkyera. Since, as we have already established, Osei Tutu

was forced into this confrontation, Reid’s idea of aggressive defensiveness could

also be applied to Asante.

It is also important to find clues of symbolic importance of the conquests of

Denkyera and Bunyoro. In Buganda, the ‘profound importance’ of the conquest of

the latter ‘is underlined by the accession ceremonies undertaken by Mwanga in

1884’. He was given a bow and arrow, representing the weapons that Kabaka

Nakibinge used in his ultimately fatal struggle with the regional rivals, and ‘was then

required to stab a young [Bu]Nyoro male’ to symbolize revenge against the death of

Nakibinge in battle. Overall, ‘the great struggle to which Nakibinge gave his life had

lodged itself in Buganda’s collective memory’.131 In Asante, the victory against

Denkyera has had arguably an even bigger impact: the Golden Stool that was the

symbol of a king’s power and authority, as well as the fact that Osei Tutu, the

conqueror of Denkyera, was the first one to take possession of this object in 1701,

‘are the best-known symbolic expressions of the new order’, by which McCaskie

meant the new Asante state.132 Arhin also points to the Golden Stool as one of the

‘manifest symbols of this unity’.133 Therefore, this conquest was so important to

Asante, that Osei Tutu used it to symbolically assert his power after the fall of

Denkyera.

There is also a similarity between what we can take away from the analysis

of long-term and short-term factors that led to state formation in Buganda and

Asante. The understanding of these short-term events that triggered the formation of

131
Ibid., p. 186.
132
McCaskie, ‘Denkyira in the Making of Asante’, p. 20.
133
Arhin, Greater Asante, p. 69.

71
Buganda and Asante states does not provide us with any concrete methods of state

building of use for today. However, just as with long-term processes, this

understanding illuminates the way these pre-colonial African states were formed,

which means that we can assume that other states in the region could have been

formed in similar circumstances, giving us more tools for research.

4.1.3 Center and Periphery relationship

The core-periphery dynamic is a central issue in both case studies. As I have

explained in the Buganda chapter, Herbst’s analysis showed that modern African

leaders have not been encouraged to utilize this relationship fully for the benefit of

both the state and the regions, because of the way power and rule has been defined at

the start of the post-colonial era. Consequently, in my opinion, an amelioration of

this relationship will facilitate state formation and maintenance in sub-Saharan

Africa.

The most important element of this connection that should be considered is

its fluidity, because it was present in both states in different ways. In Asante, the

central authority had different relationships with every entity that it had absorbed.

The distinction into tributaries, protectorates and provinces is made in order to

facilitate the analysis of these relationships. While they do seem to generally fall into

one of these three groups, there were still differences inside them. For instance, as I

explained in the case study, the relationship with Akim was generally hostile to the

point where they were physically relocated to more remote areas. At the same time,

Gyaman organized tribute collection and claimed twenty percent of the collected

amount. Both these polities were part of the province grouping. Furthermore, the

72
center attempted to “Akanize” the protectorate Banda, using Jack Goody’s term,134

by fusing its culture onto the polity, while Accra and Elmina only had to house an

Asante resident-chief.

These examples illuminate the fluid nature of the relationship between the

center and periphery in Asante. It could change over time, as with the move from

kinship to dominance in the provinces, and it could vary from polity to polity in the

same subgroup. Additionally, this relationship was not one-way: polities under

Asante influence acted unilaterally and their actions changed their relationship with

the center. For instance, the multiple uprisings and attempted revolts surely affected

the dynamics of the core-periphery relations. Moreover, direct participation in a

military campaign through the supply of manpower resulted in a portion of booty in

case of victory and a strengthening of the ties between Asante and the provincial

entity through mutual sacrifices and the emotional component associated with

battles.

The Buganda kingdom did not rely on the use of force to the same extent as

Asante, but the center-periphery relationship in the lake Victoria state was also

marked by its fluid nature. In the case study, I have use the example of the taxation

system to illustrate its workings. The tax collecting middlemen, regional chiefs and

the king were all connected through the tribute accumulation system. Every actor

struck a precise balance in the system: the middlemen appropriate funds for their

benefit but knew that too much misappropriation would have effects on the overall

system, i.e. if the chief was unable to provide enough tribute the king could depose

him and such a scenario ran risks to the middlemen themselves.

134
As stated in Ibid., p. 77.

73
 The king chose a chief that would collect tribute in his region, which in this

respect is similar to Asante, where we know that Gyaman, Wassaw and Asikuma

organized tribute collections in their regions. The overall point here is that

delegating responsibility to the periphery, whether it be in the field tax collection or

others seemed to have worked for both Asante and Buganda, and this may provide a

lesson to modern African leaders. The incentive for them is not to empower the

periphery because of the fact that control of the capital equates to the control of the

country. As a result, the weaker the regions are, the easier it is for the current head of

state to maintain his or hers grip on power. This does not necessarily apply only to

despotic regimes; even in democracies an elected president with a limited period of

reign will still be motivated to attain more control and power, whether it be for

personal gain or because of a belief that only the leader knows how to best run the

country and the state.

4.1.4 On the road to a definition?

After comparing both states it becomes clear that they did have much in common. It

is therefore possible to construct a preliminary definition that could be tested against

other pre-colonial African states. To sum up, such a state must have gone through

long-term processes of changes in material culture (intensive banana cultivation in

Buganda and clearances of forests for arable land in Asante) that would allow for a

state to be quickly created as a response to external threat. The long term processes

were epitomized by the diffusion of clan members throughout the territory, allowing

for political leaders (aberemp‫כ‬n in Asante and bataka in Buganda) to become the

highest authorities. As a result of an external threat, the leaders band together under

74
the most wealthy, politically skillful and influential ruler that would centralize his

authority and lead the state in a war against the threat (Osei Tutu in Asante and

Nakibinge in Buganda). The resulting victory would prompt further successful

military campaigns of expansion, as well as a legendary status for the ruler

(Nakibinge was unsuccessful, but his rule nevertheless triggered similar eventualities

to Osei Tutu’s reign in Asante) that would be symbolically rendered in the collective

memory of the population. A state that emerges from such a sequence of events

would be characterized by the fluidity of the core-periphery relationship that is

shaped by both the central and regional authorities in that the actions of one will

inevitably result in a reaction from the other, modifying the relationship according to

the nature of these actions.

This is rather a description of events than a definition, however the

framework that it provides should nevertheless be useful for further research into

other states. Previously dismissed oral histories of some pre-colonial African states,

for instance, may contain similar stories of responses to external threats or legendary

rulers. Linguistic analysis may reveal more about changes in behaviour or in

material culture in other regions, that could be compared to Buganda’s turn to

banana cultivation. Archaeological digs could reveal regions where the environment

was changed for the material benefit of local people, similarly to Asante’s creation

of arable land out of dense forests that basically created a whole new economical

dimension of agriculture for Akan people who lived in the forest land. Careful

analysis of changes in religious practices, burial rites or mental behaviour may show

results similar to Bantu-speaking peoples’ beliefs about their ancestors, which in

conjunction with other trends may point to changes in settlement patterns or other, as

of yet unforeseeable, results.

75
 Additionally, I am not stating that this sequence of events is the only way a

state in pre-colonial Africa could develop. This description merely illustrates a

combination of various elements that, when considered together, formed a state in

Buganda and Asante. It is reasonable to assume that events did not unfold on the

same path in every pre-colonial state, but it is also reasonable to assume that many of

the same processes were at work in other cases.

4.2 Looking Back to the Past

After establishing the similarities between both case studies, it is important to

provide proof of the second aim of my paper, i.e. the usefulness of looking back at

the past. While the idea that there is value in pre-colonial past for tackling present

problems is intriguing, it may seem far-fetched, especially given the reluctance of

modern African elites to go back to the past since instead they focus on

incorporating modern techniques to maintain and build up the state. In order to

illustrate that such a turn to tradition is possible, I will now show how this is already

happening in African state maintenance, as well as point to other trends in modern

Africa that are conceptually similar to this idea.

4.2.1 Retraditionalization.

An interesting trend that has been noted in recent years shows the renewed

importance of the past in African state maintenance. Since the mid-nineties ‘a large

76
number’ of sub-Saharan African states have experienced what many scholars135 have

called “retraditionalization”. Interestingly, the focal point of this process is the

renewed cooperation between the modern political center and the traditional political

periphery. By that I mean a change of the status quo between the central government

and traditional authorities such as regional chiefs or clan-heads. The situation was

such that the political leaders saw these traditional authorities as ‘negative forces’,

and this view was held for decades since the wave of independence in the 1960s.

Now, however, this view is changing and a plethora of countries are adapting their

state in order to include the traditional authorities.136

This wave represents a complex rearrangement of power structures in

African countries, and there are three specific trends that, when considered together,

form the redtraditionalization movement. Firstly, there is a growing trend of

‘bottom-up, self-assertive organizations, unions or associations of traditional leaders’

successfully attempting to regain some of the political power that they lost during

the last century. In the most part, these organizations are able to accomplish this task

as a result of their involvement in ‘wider economic networks’, and Congo, Uganda,

Ghana, Zambia, Rwanda, Chad, Benin and Côte D’Ivoire have all experienced this

trend. The authors of the book on retraditionalization have singled out Ghana and

Uganda, the two case study countries, as some of the leading examples of the

phenomenon. In Ghana, ‘the Asante chieftaincy … played a powerful role in

national power structures by linking social, economic, and cultural capital vested in

135
‘The concept of retraditionalization is used by scholars working on contemporary Africa
to describe the increased articulation of “tradition,” “roots,” and “belonging” as part of
wider processes of modernization and reactions to these processes within the wider context
of globalization’ in Lars Buur and Helene Maria Kyed, ‘Introduction: Traditional Authority
and Democratization in Africa’ in Lars Buur and Helene Maria Kyed (ed) State Recognition
and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dawn for Traditional Authorities?
(New York 2007), p. 24.
136
Buur and Kyed, ‘Traditional Authority and Democratization in Africa’, p. 2.

77
local power bases’ and in Uganda they specify the Buganda kingdom itself, along

with Lozi of Barotseland in Zambia, as one of two ‘similar examples’.137

Secondly, in time of insurgency, traditional local authorities have been able

to carry out tasks that are usually performed by the state, such as ‘dispensing justice,

collecting rent, and policing’. In Congo, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Somalia and

Mozambique, this resulted in a replacement of or a fusion with state authorities,

showing that the relationship between the central authority and traditional periphery

can, in fact, become one of mutual gain. The traditional authorities regain

responsibilities and prestige that had been taken away from them and the central

authorities, providing they put their faith and trust in the former, can refocus their

attention on rebuilding the state and dealing with the overall consequences of the

rebellion that is either still taking place or that had been crushed.

Thirdly, and even more importantly in terms of my argument, there is a top-

down trend of ‘formal types of legislation, decrees, and reforms that have

(re)incorporated traditional authority officially into state governance’. In Ghana,

South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Somaliland, Uganda, Zambia,

Namibia, Cameroon and Niger the state is recognizing the efforts and influence of

traditional authorities and aims to expand the relationship between the two. For

instance, in Ghana and Uganda, as well as South Africa, Namibia and Zambia,

national authorities provided traditional ones with political agency as they

recognized them in the new revised constitutions of the 1990s and creations of

national houses of chiefs. While this trend does not mean the restoration of all the

tradition authorities’ powers, it nonetheless shows that the state is willing to

137
Ibid., p. 2.

78
officially back them to a certain point, as part of a decentralization campaign aiming

at political liberalization and liberal democratization.138

The third component of the retraditionalization trend is also supported by

Jude Fokwang’s book that focuses specifically on the renewed role that chiefs play

in democratic processes. He singles out two chiefs in South Africa and Cameroon in

his research and contextualizes his arguments in terms of “legitimacy”. Fokwang

discusses a trend in which these two individuals gain political capital among the

people by promoting their image as chiefs, although their main activity is being

politicians. He shows the willingness of the people to trust a chief even among

general mistrust of other politicians. In terms of the aims of this paper, this illustrates

the possibility that if a chief who happens to be a skillful politician decides to

become part of the ruling government and therefore the state, he can promote and

advance the relationship between the state and the people. Therefore, that individual

maintains the state by increasing its’ importance in society and building trust

between the two (as a direct result of his traditional claim to legitimacy), which will

in turn lead to a more robust and healthy state. There are limitations to such a

scenario, as Fokwang finds that not all chiefs are able to claim legitimacy, and not

all of those who do have the best interests of the state and the country in mind.

Nevertheless, there are also those who can positively contribute to the maintenance

of the state.139

138
Ibid., p. 3.
139
Jude Fokwang, Mediating Legitimacy: Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African
Chiefdoms (Bamenda 2009), pp. vii-viii, 101-103.

79
4.2.2 Core and Periphery: Theoretical basis for looking back

It is safe to say that modern attitude towards African regional politics is often

steeped in prejudice and tales of corruption, unable leadership and overall

inefficiency. As I have previously established, there is much to take away from the

relatively more efficient and fluid core-periphery relationship in the pre-colonial era.

Currently, however, the discussion about improving this relationship is dominated by

‘unwarranted emphasis on the exogenous determinant of variation in how modern

state structures have been imposed and implanted in the African countryside’.140

Catherine Boone argues that components of the core-periphery relationship

should not be viewed ‘as technical or administrative problems to be solved, but

rather as highly political processes’. As a result, ‘the outcome of current efforts at

institutional and economic reform in the countryside is highly dependent on local-

level political factors’. In other words, amelioration of the conditions in the

periphery requires the amelioration of the political relationship between the central

and regional authorities.141 She argues that specifically local conditions determine

success or failure of development programs. There are two main reasons for this;

first, the broad nature of most of these programs, as they had been developed to

apply to “the Third World” without particular attention to local differences,

significantly reduces the chances of success. Second, the over-reliance on ‘formal

rules’ produces ‘acute disjuncture’ between how a program is supposed to work and

140
Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and
Institutional Choice (Cambridge 2003), p. 2.
141
Ibid., p. 3.

80
‘the real politics’ of how African institutions function, reducing the chances of

success even more.142

Boone is adamant that ‘tensions and conflicts within the rural areas’ is often

ignored in the studies of state-society relations in Africa.143 The fact that ‘rural

political topography in sub-Saharan Africa is highly uneven’ and its consequence of

‘rural localities and provinces [being] incorporated into the modern state in highly

variable ways and to varying extents’ form ‘the main point’ of the research in her

book.144

The problems that she discusses are related to the idea of looking back at the

core-periphery relationship. My overall argument is that the study of sub-Saharan

African states on their own terms will yield benefits. Therefore, exploring the

particular processes at work in the countryside of a particular state and analyzing

them since before the colonial period, can illuminate the dynamics of not only the

core-periphery relationship, but also of the differences in, what Boone calls, ‘rural

political topography’ within the periphery of the state in question.145 Conceptualizing

modern problems and peculiarities in the African countryside as beginning during

the colonial era as a result of European intervention will not lead to any significant

solutions or avenues for improvement, because the roots of political and social

dynamics in rural Africa lie in the pre-colonial period.

142
Ibid., p. 4.
143
Ibid., p. 6.
144
Ibid., p. 320.
145
Ibid.

81
4.2.3 Looking Back in other fields.

Using traditional relationships and methods practiced in pre-colonial Africa to aid in

current African state building and state maintenance may also mean that other fields

can benefit from a similar approach. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that

identifying fields where these methods had already been used successfully

strengthens the case for using them in state building and state maintenance.

One such field is medicine, and here the study of pre-colonial Africa yielded

definite positive results. First, a new comprehension of traditional healing practices

‘has brought to light new chemical compounds and psychological effects, enriching

the scientific repertory’.146 Second, Africans have discovered various substances and

healing methods by themselves and ‘used them effectively for medical purposes’.

Contemporary medicine then absorbs these practices and they ‘provide new insights

into different ways of dealing with illness’.147 Third, medical researchers found that

in the pre-colonial period, Africans ‘independently discovered and developed’

substances and methods that are in being used in modern medicine.148 Therefore this

field benefited from considering the African past, ‘whether by adding African

discoveries to the world repertory or by bringing African inventions under the

universal names of things already known’.149

Another field that uses traditional African knowledge is conflict management

and reconciliation. It is important to first point out that ‘activities of seasoned

146
I. William Zartman, ‘Introduction: African Traditionalist Conflict “Medicine”’ in I.
William Zartman (ed), Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts: African Conflict
“Medicine” (Boulder 2000), p. 1. See for instance: Simone de Souza, ‘Fruits, Seeds and
Miscellaneous Ingredients Used in the Pharmaceutical Practice of Benin’ in Pauline
Hountondji (ed), Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails (Dakar 1997).
147
Ibid., see for instance: T.S. Githens, Drug Plants of Africa (Philadelphia 1949) or J.
Kerharo and G. Adam, La pharmacopée Sénégalaise traditionelle (Paris 1974).
148
Ibid.
149
Ibid., p. 2.

82
peacemakers using the best of personal skills and recently developed knowledge

about ways of managing and resolving conflicts [as well as multiple] international

efforts at conflict management have not been particularly effective or efficient’ at

tackling conflicts in Africa. Apart from the relative successes of ‘lengthy and

multiple efforts’ in Mozambique and Liberia, other conflicts seem to be impervious

to external diplomatic intervention, meaning that ‘improvements are needed in

conflict management’.150 However, this is not to say that the use of traditional

African methods have been recorded as successful in relation to their modern

equivalent. In reality, it seems that conflicts in Africa are ‘modern and therefore

impervious to traditional methods, yet African and thus resistant to international

methods’.151

William Zartman, however, shows that a better understanding of traditional

methods may point to an adaptation of modern methods in such a way that, fused

together, they will yield better results. This statement rings even more true when one

considers that ‘many of the practices associated with traditional African conflict

management are classical mediation, or negotiation with a third-party catalyst’,

meaning it is quite possible to adapt modern methods directly to African conflicts.152

For instance, African practice is to join sentence and reintegration of a guilty

element with atonement. Conflicts are managed by communities, and the conflicting

parties recognize the crux of the problem and seek to harmonize the situation. Once

both parties are willing to negotiate, ‘they need to recognize their disruption and

seek forgiveness for it’. A successful outcome of these negotiations can then be

interpreted as ‘a settling of accounts’ instead of ‘punishment’. This summary

150
Ibid., p. 3.
151
Ibid., p. 4.
152
Ibid., p. 220.

83
represents the spirit of traditional African conflict management, as both crimes and

accidents ‘are settled by compensation of a symbolically equivalent amount, which

is then recognized to have restored order to the community’. Moreover this outcome

hinges upon the atonement by the aggressor and the acceptance by the victim.153 The

difference between a Western approach is fairly clear: ‘conflict is resolved by

reincluding the offending member within the community, rather than excluding the

guilty party’ as in the West, where spending time in a penal institution is a direct

measure aimed at ejecting the guilty out of society for re-education.154 In addition,

the difficulty of reintegration back into society shows the difference in the

underlying spirit of Western and African conflict resolution practices.

The point that Zartman makes, however, is not about superiority of one

practice over the other. Instead, his argument is that both have to be used in tandem,

but in order to be able to apply such a strategy, a better understanding of traditional

methods is needed. Therefore his ideas are similar to the ones expressed in this

paper, albeit in a different field. The general point should nonetheless have to be

made again: considering African past is beneficial to current problems, and there is

no need to replace current practices but only to use them alongside modern methods.

4.3 Alternative Theories

This paper focused on the idea that sub-Saharan African states should be treated on

their own terms and that it is worthwhile to look through the history of a state in

order to understand its roots. This can in turn help with tackling current problems

that a state may have. Firstly, treating states, especially those of the Third World on

153
Ibid., p. 222.
154
Ibid., p. 224.

84
their own terms is not a mainstream argument, and it has a few alternatives. Writing

in 1991, Jean François Bayart posited that ‘academic analysis of the “south” has long

been divided between the conflicting theories of “modernization” and

“dependency”’, both of which clash with arguments and ideas put forward in this

paper. As Bayart points out, both these theories have a similar fundamental belief

about the Third World: ‘that of external factors being the major influence behind

political change in Africa, Latin America and Asia since the global expansion of

Western imperialism’.155 Therefore, I will focus on the arguments constructed within

these two schools of thought.

4.3.1 Modernization

First, the longevity of the modernization theory should be addressed. In its current

form, i.e. addressing the need for backward countries to modernize, it has been

around since the Second World War. There are two reasons behind its success: for

the developed and the rich states ‘it justified the continuation of existing policies …

as ways of countering communist designs’ through foreign aid and domestic growth.

For the relatively underdeveloped and poor states ‘it entrusted the promise of a better

future to the new ruling classes that were accumulating tokens of Westernization as

they lined their own pockets’. Therefore, there was pressure from both sides to fund

research that promoted the modernization ideas.156

I should briefly explain what these ideas actually consisted of. There were

two main parts of the modernization theory: evolutionary and functionalist, with

both parts providing an epistemological basis for the theory. The evolutionary part

155
Bayart, ‘Finishing with the Idea of the Third World’, p. 51.
156
Gilbert Rist, The History of Development (London 2006), p. 109.

85
assumed that ‘social change is unidirectional’ and that ‘human society invariably

moves along one direction from a primitive to an advanced state, thus the fate of

human evolution is predetermined’. Moreover, the movement is adjudged to be

“good”, therefore progress and modernization is “good” and should be promoted.

Lastly, the movement is slow and evolutionary, rather than a series of sudden

changes and shocks.157

The second part of the epistemological basis is based on functionalist

premises. The basic idea on which modernization theory is built on is the belief that

the society, and therefore the state, works like a human body. The institutions

represent the organs and they are in constant state of equilibrium and harmony: that

is the people strive for harmony, the institutions are never in conflict, society will

not destroy its institutions and everything in general is interconnected and

interrelated. Additionally every institution has a specific function that it has to

perform in order for the society to live on.158

Limitations

On a purely theoretical level, there are a few problems with these

assumptions when one transfers them to the real world. For instance, the idea of

“homeostatic equilibrium”, being the uniform condition of the institutions within the

state whereupon one change will lead to changes everywhere, is central to the

functionalist narrative.159 In the real world it is unlikely that a change in one

institution will lead to an adaptation of others. By their very nature institutions

157
Alvin Y. So, Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency and World-
System Theories (London 1990), p. 19
158
Ibid., pp. 20-21.
159
Ibid., p. 19.

86
within the state are competitive, especially in cases where the budget allocation is

done centrally and institutions are evaluated by merit, percentage of planned tasks

accomplished or personal connections within the system.

The evolutionary part of the modernization theory is in direct contrast to the

arguments I put forth in the paper. For instance, the assumption of pre-determination

means that physical environment defines how a society will advance. Wilks himself

stated that ‘there was, perhaps, nothing exceptional’ in the long-term processes of

the creation of a new agrarian order, and a new society, that laid the groundwork for

the Asante state. For instance, he points to Denkyira having ‘earlier established their

hegemony’ over the region using ‘similar processes of conquest and alliances’.

However, it was the Asante who created the ‘intricate configuration of authority’

that went on to dominate the region and the Denkyira themselves. The environment

for both these two states, as well as numerous other clans, societies and political

systems was similar, to the point of being almost identical, and yet it was the Asante

who prevailed among all others. The courage of their leaders and the

entrepreneurship of aberemp‫כ‬n were key to the longevity of their primacy in the

region, only to be stopped by the overwhelmingly superior military capability of the

British forces at the end of the 19th century.160

On a more general level, modernization theory views progress as something

that societies and states should aspire to. However, modernization is a thoroughly

Western idea, where United States and Western Europe are considered to be the

templates for success if a state wants to become modernized quickly and efficiently.

Not only is this fairly arrogant and even ‘ethnocentric’, but it is also misleading. As

Alvin So wrote, ‘there is an attitude of complacency’ towards these states in the

160
Wilks, Forests of Gold, p. 118.

87
literature, because they are seen to have ‘unmatched economic prosperity and

democratic stability’, and modernization ‘is simply a process of Europeanization and

Americanization’.161 Therefore, because of their perceived superiority they are

unquestioned as the ideals of the modernization. Similarly, the attitude towards the

less developed countries as well as the labels that are used, such as “primitive” or

“traditional” are ‘used to justify Western superiority’.162

Additionally, the word “progress”, as well as the theory of modernization

itself, presupposes singular and linear progression of the development of states and

societies. In my opinion, there are multiple avenues for advancing a society, and it is

not necessary that all of them involve linear economical, political or social

“progress”. This is why a trend of retraditionalization is starting in Africa, and why I

decided that a look back at the past could provide some answers for dealing with

modern problems. Consequently, if I am correct, then the study of modernization is

actively blocking the research for alternative paths. For example, among the

modernization school, it is generally assumed that democracy is one of the

preconditions for progress. However, South Korea and Taiwan, for instance,

modernized during an authoritarian period. Other preconditions should then be

questioned as well, and more research should consequently be allowed to delve into

other paths for development.163

161
So, Social Change and Development, p. 34.
162
Ibid., p. 54.
163
Ibid.

88
4.3.2 The Dependency School.

The dependency argument is based on the work of South and North American

scholars, with the former contributing the bulk of dependency literature.164 After

their theories gained a certain amount of ground and they began to be grouped into a

movement, scholars from other continents joined it.165 These researchers did not

consider themselves part of a “school”, and there was no clear leader or

spokesperson; instead they focused on their individual work. However, since many

of their ideas ‘shared a common sensibility’, we can group them together into a

school of thought for the sake of simplicity.166 In many ways the ideas of these

researchers comprised the opposition to the modernization theory. While the latter

was an encouragement for the search of a Western-centric progressive path, the work

of the dependency school has been described as “Third Worldist” because of its

‘sympathy for the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and for Third

World liberation struggles in general’. The movement arose as an answer to the

meddling nature of the US foreign policy and the Vietnam War in particular, as well

as the activities of transnational corporations that imposed themselves on the

sovereignty of states, and their general activities that were perceived detrimental to

the health of the populations of the Third World.167

The basis for their ideas was a reaction to modernization. They saw

individuals as capable of influencing the flow of history and states as part of a

164
Brazilians Fernando Cardoso, Enzo Faletto and Celso Furtado, Colombian Orlando Fals
Borda, Mexican Rodolfo Stavenhagen as well as Paul Baran and Pail Sweezy from the
United States and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America headed by
the Chilean Raúl Prebisch represented the ‘roots’ of the dependency school. Rist, History of
Development, p. 109.
165
For instance, Samir Amin in Africa and André Gunder Frank, Pierre Jalée, Dieter
Senghass and Johan Galtung in Europe. Ibid. p. 109.
166
Ibid.
167
Ibid., p. 110.

89
structured international network where every single state had its place. Their

unfavourable view of colonialism is in direct opposition to Rostow, one of the

earliest and most important scholars who shaped the modernization school after the

Second World War, as they see colonialism being ‘synonymous with things falling

apart’.168

The Latin American dependistas had a clear vision about the relationship

between the wealthy Western states and the Third World, or in their terms the center

and the periphery. For them, the concept of free trade only benefited the rich states

while the poor ones suffered from unequal exchange169 due to the structural

superiority of the developed economies. In theory, comparative advantage should

have allowed the poorer states to specialize in something that they had a comparative

advantage in, mostly agriculture and exploitation of mineral deposits. The

dependistas, however, saw that this system did not benefit these states, and as a

result the developed world dominated its developing counterpart. Therefore, these

scholars called on states to develop their own industries through import-substitution

models and construct regional economic alliances in order to break out of the cycle

of exploitation.

Limitations

There are many differences between the viewpoints of scholars in the dependency

school, therefore I will discuss the general limitations of some of the underlying

ideas that are shared by its various members. Overall, the picture that emerges from

168
Ibid.
169
The concept of unequal exchange is explained thusly: the states in the periphery ‘must
pay more and more for what [they] get in the centre, where there are regular wage increases’
because the periphery states are unable to match them. Ibid., p.117

90
these ideas is one of continual domination of the periphery by the center. However,

like with modernization theory, there are numerous problems with accepting the

dependency line of thought. In actuality, it is even possible to equate the two in a

certain way. Both these theories presuppose dominance and primacy of the

developed Western world. In modernization it is shown clearly as the ideal to which

other states should aspire to, and it is therefore praised. In dependency theory,

however, it is also assumed that the Western world dominates the underdeveloped

one, even though this primacy is derided. Some scholars in the field do allow for the

underdeveloped states to modernize and become part of the center. However,

‘Western ethnocentrism is … present … in versions of dependency theory that make

the center totally responsible for the process of “development”/”underdevelopment”,

and convert the peripheral countries into passive victims of the expanding capitalist

system’.170

Applying the dependency theory to Asante, for instance, would mean that the

Europeans had to dominate the Asante state through trade before the Scramble,

because they are judged to being “more developed” at the time. However as I have

previously mentioned, at the beginning Europeans were not even the main trading

partners, it was the Wangara who assumed that role. Additionally, it was the

Portuguese governor who complained that trade with Asante was slipping away from

them and derided the lack of goods the Portuguese had to offer, not the other way

around.

The trajectory of thought of both modernization and dependency theories is

similar. Both of them assume that the “natural” way, whether it is the natural

progress towards the Western ideal for modernization scholars or natural course of

170
Ibid., p. 119.

91
development of the periphery states that is interrupted by the centre states for their

dependency counterparts, is the single and ultimate path to a better future. They both

assume an inherently “good” natural progression that can only be restored if

individuals or states stop “interfering” with it. Moreover the latter theory ‘did not

challenge the basic presuppositions of that system, which come down to the idea that

growth is necessary to gain access to the Western mode of consumption’.171 This is

where dependency theory clashes with the arguments put forward in this paper.

Using traditional methods for state building in Africa presupposes the ultimate goal

is the emergence of a different kind of state (as opposed to the Western model). The

relationships between its fundamental institutions and the relationship between the

state and the people would be ultimately different even though it may have similar

characteristics when compared to its Western equivalent. A parallel can be drawn

here with African conflict management: it appears to be similar to the modern

negotiating techniques on the surface, but at its core it is a system that promotes

absolution rather than exclusion.

Following on the logic of dependence, it is possible to assert that if the

central states draw most of their resources from the periphery, then they themselves

are dependent on the periphery. ‘In the end, we can probably say that all today’s

“developed” countries … were themselves once dependent’ which then means that

all the states in the periphery should be able, in the future, to ascend to the central

status.172 On the other hand, the theoretical “independence” of a state is almost

impossible to identify, because most countries, perhaps with the exception of large

and relatively self-sufficient ones such as United States or Russia, would be unable

171
Ibid., pp. 120-121.
172
Ibid., p. 120.

92
to survive without any foreign trade or technology exchanges.173 These two points

should be considered as indisputable fact; instead they point to a logical

inconsistency within the dependency school of thought.

Some dependency theorists point to the domineering relationship between the

center and periphery as the key to the growth of the industrial state in the post-World

War II period. This is also a questionable assertion since it is difficult to imagine that

all of this growth can be directly linked with exploitation of the relatively

underdeveloped states. Furthermore, imperialism ‘turned out not to be a necessity

after all’ as, for instance, from 1945 to the mid-1960s ‘the economic growth of

industrial countries owed very little to international trade (which anyway took place

mainly between industrial countries)’.174 Additionally, writing in 1985, Alain Lipietz

asserted that France “draws” only four percent of its annual growth from the Third

World.175

One of the arguments in this paper is that Europeans did not define post-

colonial Africa; instead they represented one of the forces that made Africa what it is

today. As a result, it is more important to understand African pre-colonial

experiences rather than the colonial era in order to understand the continent properly

(although both should be adequately studied). On the other hand, the dependency

line of thinking points to the primacy of the center, therefore limiting the inherent

power of the periphery. They define the states in the periphery along Western lines

and using Western economic ideas such as free market, the nature of international

trade and comparative advantage. While these systems do have their benefits in

terms of analysis of the performance of states or of the international system, they

173
Ibid., p. 119.
174
Ibid.
175
Alian Lipietz, Mirages et miracles: Problèmes de l’industrialisation dans le tiers monde
(Paris 1985) in Ibid., p. 119.

93
homogenize individual states up to the point where it may seem they are stripped off

of all agency.176 In this paper, however, two African states are considered in and of

themselves and the results show that this type of analysis is worth pursuing in order

to further understand African state building and maintenance and deal with any

problems that they face.

4.4 Conclusion

My two aims in this paper were to strengthen the case for the existence of states in

pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa and to look at state formation in the past in order to

illuminate the causes of, and find possible solutions to, modern problems. I believe

that after examining the two case studies, it is clear that both Buganda and Asante

were not loosely defined political entities but states in their own right. The complex

nature of the path that both states have followed in order to form only reaffirms this

point.

In addition, the last chapter provided ample evidence that a trend of using

tradition and the past as ways to improve state maintenance in Africa has been

observed recently. Moreover, other fields have also been using similar conceptual

strategy to improve their understanding of Africa and their respective disciplines.

The narrative in both case studies has also shown that understanding how exactly

African states formed in the pre-colonial period can provide important information

176
I am aware that my argument in itself may appear to homogenize all African states,
however this is only a result of the limited scope of the paper and is intended to show that
African states all have certain similarities as opposed to the Western model of the state. The
point is that sub-Saharan African states are different, and whether there are significant
differences between these states themselves is not in the scope of the paper.

94
about the roots of modern problems as well as unconventional (by Western

standards) techniques of dealing with them.

It may not have escaped the reader that I barely mentioned the colonial

period in this paper. This is a conscious attempt at moving away from the

presupposed importance of Europeans in African history. As I have stated in the first

chapter, my view is that the colonial period was simply another chapter in the

continuous history of the continent. While it is evident that this particular chapter

was one of great turbulence and is in general derided by both Africanists and the

majority of Western academics, I believe that the attention that is usually given to

this period restricts enquiry into the pre-colonial era.

Overall, the motivation for this paper represented an attempt to study African

state formation on its own terms. Although I am guilty of not completely

disengaging from my own experience as an undergraduate and postgraduate student

in the West, in my opinion this way of examining African history is the only one that

yields valuable results. Africanist academics have long prescribed to this view, but it

still has not completely penetrated the wider scholarly community, hence the

continuous assertions about the benefits of this perception throughout the paper.

95
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