Party and State in Post-Colonial Africa

DATE: Friday, 28 August 2009
VENUE: Ashton Chubb Lecture Theatre, University of Fort Hare, East London Campus
TIME: 3pm

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr Somadoda Fikeni, Human Sciences Research Council

RESPONDENT: Professor Kofi Etsiah, University of Fort Hare

Post-coloniality has long seized the attention of both Africanists and African students of politics. Most post-colonial African societies display similar characteristics: disorderly succession to power, a near non-existent democratic culture, contested election outcomes, tendency for one-party rule, easy usurpation of state institutions for sectional purposes. Post-coloniality has come to mean more than just a time-period: it signifies generic structural and contextual strictures, which impose a specific form of agency on the post-colonial state. There is, thus, what some term a "regularized pattern of post-coloniality".

Understanding the problem of post-coloniality entails amongst other things problematising the relationship between the party and state, and record the role the state has played both in attenuating and exacerbating the problem(s) of post-coloniality. Should the state be kept distinct from the party in power? Can the state be insulated from opportunistic capture by sections of society - be it the power elite, ethnic or corporate oligarchy? Is the post-colonial African state in an irrecoverable malady of delegitimisation? These are questions with profound implications for policy and scholarship that we set out to explore in this public lecture.

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