Pre-colonial leadership structures in Afrika wanting

Colonial injustices already discussed previously suggest a weak, incompetent and somewhat slothful leadership in Colonial Afrika. How can an outsider just come, take over and turn the landowner into a slave?

To begin with, the indigenous leadership and governance structures in Afrika were mostly founded on lineage and/or kinship. The main resource was land. Land ownership predicated livelihood, leadership and governance patterns. Therefore, land was not just a heritage. It was a major factor in bringing the immediate and extended community members together.

Land was the main outlet for labour in such communities. Labour in the Afrikan context was also used as a currency for getting seeds, food, and medication. In some communities, labour on land was used in the place of dowry. This remotely echoes the Biblical story of Jacob!

Thus land carried significant social, political and economic inclusion and exclusion dynamics. In their work on the leadership structures in the AmaLala clan of the Zulu tribe in South Afrika, Hamilton and Wright (1990) found out that: “...before the late eighteenth century, kinship functioned […] as an ideology of political incorporation [as well] as an ideology of political exclusion”.

Land and kinship, therefore, brought a sense of authenticity of social identity in the Afrikan societies. There is, however, one point worth stressing: in the ‘primordial’ Afrika community, members looked after each other. One community member’s problem was shouldered by all. This is a point to remember as we advance in our discussion.

Since land was owned communally, the harvest was also shared communally and equally, except for those in leadership who, by virtue of receiving a lot of requests from other community members, may have been given a slightly larger portion of the harvest but “no one starved while others stuffed themselves and threw away the excess”. Rodney (1981)

Afrika developed its own modes of production. Especially for the production of food, clothing, minerals and other products that were needed for use in the larger community. Or for trade and exchange purposes for such material artefacts that were not readily available within the immediate community.

The latter, it is assumed, were mainly a concern for the ruling classes in such communities. It is such classes that “mobilised labour to produce a greater surplus […] and encouraged specialisation and the division of labour, Rodney (1981) and strategised on the proper utilisation of the surplus for the economic stability of the ruling class, Stein (1985).

Until the 19th century, leadership and governance structures in Afrika were partly communal and feudal in the same vein as the earlier economies in Afrika. The Arab merchants do not seem to have involved in forceful land expropriation.

However, it appears that most of the economic activities were carried out of loyalty to the new landowner for livelihood purposes, Brown (1974), Bhaduri (1973). Just to make this clearer, in the case of Tanzania, and during the Ujamaa period, the Tanzanian government assumed the role of the feudal lord over its citizenry. The government appropriated land from its citizens and made allocation for communal agricultural land and those which could be utilised at household levels.

By the time the colonial system reached Afrika, a new system was introduced with not only a new mode of production and new tools. It also imposed a need for the local community to acquire a new form of education in order to not only use, but understand the new era of production. Local understanding of the society, politics, and modes of knowledge production, economics, leadership, and governance structures were disregarded, and branded “primitive”.

The new European way of learning and knowing only developed capacities among the local community members that would assist in the expansion of European-domination. In the process, indigenous social structures and social were soon forgotten.

In their famous work: Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels (1848) puts it this way, “the bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour”.

A new associational structure was born. Members of the same family felt more important than others. Members of a once united community were now in the service of the colonial master as a tool for the extension of the colonial rule all over Afrika.