Integrative View of Africa’s Chaos
Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State denies the assertion that Africa is doomed to endless political and economic turmoil as a consequence of an inherit defect. It proposes instead, that the indigenous political systems, with checks and balances on power, existed long before European came to Africa. Davidson argues that contemporary Africans can draw on their own experience to develop a successful political system appropriate to Africa. Davidson blames many of the political chaos on the rate of change and the separation of political structures from the lives and needs of the population. He identifies the nation-state as a European colonial-legacy that is the cause of many of Africa’s problems. He points out that, even in Europe, it has not always worked well. According to Davidson, for the future of Africa to be bright, there needs to be more participatory political systems that recognize differences through decentralization.
Davidson begins his discussion by explaining that historically, the educated African elite who sought self-governance were estranged from their own history. Many of them were "Recaptives" who had been enslaved, liberated by Europe and released in Sierra Leone or Liberia and in an effort to form a government, they adopted a European nation-state model. Alienated from Africa, they become the agents of "Christianity and Constitution." (Davidson, 27) Ironically, the colonizers were reluctant to handover power to these believers of modernization. Instead, the colonizers chose to rule through traditional African systems. The guardians of tradition became the agents of foreign dominion and others become the criminals. In Davidson’s words, "the British had frozen the indigenous institutions at the same time robbed colonized peoples of every scope and freedom for