What nature of `nation` existed beyond Benedict Anderson`s
Transcription
What nature of `nation` existed beyond Benedict Anderson`s
Platinum Global Journal of Social Science and Humanities (PGJSSH) Vol. X(X) pp. 010-018, April, 2015 Available online http://platinumglobaljournals.org/pgjssh/index.php Copyright © 2015 Platinum Global Journals Full Length Research Paper What nature of ‘nation’ existed beyond Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ of modernization in Africa?: rethinking pre-independence project of political entrepreneurs in social ‘writings’ and creative art Alfred Ndi University of Bamenda, Republic of Cameroon PO Box Bambili. E-mail: [email protected]: Tel: 237677674455 Accepted 28th March, 2015 This critical paper in political and entrepreneurship studies argued that Benedict Anderson’s theoretical insights about nations as ‘imagined communities’ are culturally reductionistic; their perspective is very restricted to western/ised experiences of religion, capitalism, the press, etc, and, thus, they do not throw sufficient light on the very complex situation of nationalistic identities and how they came out as processes in Africa. While these theoretical insights about nationalism are impressive, they do not illuminate the transcending nature of ‘nationalism’ in Africa as a shared identitarian history. Drawing insights from social ‘writings’ and creative art, it reported that this historical nature has to do with ambiguities in African nationalism, dichotomy between identity and nationhood, alienation of the script of nationalism, the overwhelming presence of perennialist’ realities, the connotative functions of the concept of ‘nation’ in different contexts and the determination of sociological conditions. The paper suggested that the potential for the concept of nationhood to take a very productive and unpredictable life of its own, the geographing of nationalism, the packaging of knowledge as power via maps and continued relevance of effects that go beyond religion itself are innovative issues of identity and nationhood in Africa that Anderson’s theoretical paradigm of ‘imagined communities’ obscures and political entrepreneurs must understand in order to implement effective policies of development. Keywords: Nationalism, creative destruction, economics and social development, political entrepreneurship INTRODUCTION One of the vital questions that Benedict Anderson fails to consider seriously in his modernization theory about ‘imagined communities’ is as follows: “whose imagined community” is he talking about? This question was very critical for pre-independence political entrepreneurs and policy managers in African nation states because during the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and the years beyond, nationalist elites such as Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Oginga Odinga, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Agostino Neto, Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela fought against colonial rule with a ‘dichotomous’ mindset, namely, that their struggles were emancipatory Ndi in objective and the imperial powers that controlled them were oppressive. In this way, as evidenced by their autobiographical narratives, the process of nation formation could not be collectively qualified as a nationalism ‘imagined’ endogenously and constructed ‘from within’ the dynamics of their indigenous histories. Their narratives were thus more accurately an ambiguated form of nationalism: imposed ‘from without’ the continental context and negotiated exogenously. This was a very serious strategic error that underpinned the development and modernization programmes of most African countries and partly explains the major causes of Africa’s underdevelopment or slow and painful evolutionary processes toward progress in the continent today. By pre-independence political entrepreneurs and policy managers, we are referring to the adapted sense of the term developed by Richard Cantillon, Frank Knight, and Ludwig von Mises (McCaffrey and Salerno. 2011.). Political entrepreneurs and policy managers are offshoots of market entrepreneurs. Africa’s nationalist elites were actually entrepreneurs groomed in market principles who attempted to apply them in the political domain of decolonization. Like entrepreneurs, they were very motivated people who saw opportunity in the creation of new nation states which they managed as their organizations. Consequently, they redirected production from the unregulated market to the sphere of politics. This production generated resources to the political entrepreneurs and managers, which resembled the profit that market entrepreneurs acquired. By exploiting Benedict Anderson’s theory, which is related to the modernization project, development policies and capitalist entrepreneurship and power, this paper attempts to open up innovative avenues, couched in the emancipation programme of decolonization, that could have been exploited by these leaderships in order to spare the continent of its subsequent turns of tension, conflict and underdevelopment. METHODOLOGY From the viewpoint of methodology, Benedict Anderson created his theory of nationalism by employing chiefly discursive narratives, that is, ‘fluid’ or ‘secondary’ sources of knowledge seen as a mirror to society. This suggests that creative literature is a mechanical reflection of a nation’s character that could also function to echo future directions it would take. His exploitation of cultural texts such as creative literature (novels) and mass media documents (newspapers) as a way to capture the reality of ‘national consciousness’ is informed more by his modernist understanding of the nation by which he ‘read’ nationhood as an ‘imagined’ phenomenon different from nationhood in a primitive past. From this modernist understanding, nations were ‘imagined’ as moulded by 011 the popular culture of a particular (‘primitive’) period during a long time before they were achieved in a practical (‘modernist’) context. This study therefore exploits literary sources in Africa but in juxtaposition with ‘primary’/sociological ‘writings’ or sources about nationbuilding processes because the latter are more ‘direct’ evidences that can be used in conjunction with secondary, discursive sources. In this light, it draws from public, historical and researched records detailing economic, cultural and ideological transformations in selected nations of Africa. In particular, both its primary and secondary records are employed to show how concrete experiences of nationalism as well as shifts emerging from them are effected from the communal ‘ownership’ of landed estates, and how labour and capital underwent moments of mutation prior to and a postiori periods of nationalistic change. In this way, the methodology employed, namely, the exegesis of nationalism from works of both art and social sciences is structuralist and post-structuralist and departs from the sometimes very subjective and unscientific opinions of Anderson such as that nationalism originated from the Americas. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS In autobiographies written by early African political entrepreneurs and policy intellectuals such as Kenneth Kaunda’s (1962) Zambia shall be free and Oginga Odinga’s (1967) Not yet Uhuru, nationalism comes across in Zambia and Kenya respectively as a ‘gift’ being ‘offered’ by progressive colonial (and less so in the case of apartheid) administrations to the subjugated peoples of Africa. These exogenously generated narratives were further evidenced by the fact that no sooner were foundations of the ‘modern nation-state’ set up as developmental projects by the entrepreneurs in different parts of Africa than the old, indigenous cultures, histories, traditional economies, political systems, and social habitus (i.e. ways of life) were rejected or undermined as ‘primitive’, unprogressive, childish, corrupt and were gradually abandoned by the same elites, who were hitherto claiming to be liberators of the African peoples. The indigenous cultures and histories became a site of otherness, a location qualified by the new political and entrepreneurial elites, the Fanonian white masks, black skins as ‘primitive’ (Fanon, 1967). In this way, the point on ambiguity being made here is that, although nationalism in Africa was not simplistically a transposable, modular experience, but a different form of elitist nationalism with its own anti-imperial dynamics, it was the colonial system that thought out the nationalist script inspired from European Enlightenment on behalf of indigenous Africans and through their new sntrepreneurial elite class in countries like Malawi (Kamusu Banda) Senegal (Leopold Sedar Senghor) and 012 Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Humanit Cameroon (Ahmadou Ahidjo). As elaborated in Albert Mukong’s (1990) autobiographical oeuvre against French neo/colonial rule in Cameroon titled as Prisoner Without a Crime. this ‘script’ induced these new ‘nation/s’ into a post-independence epoch characterized by narratives of dependency, moments of exploitation and a consequent history of under-development and misery. The nationhood ‘given’ and elaborated by these managerial elites was ‘not quite’ (to borrow the term from Homi Bhabha) ‘imagined’ by Africans but was brought into light by the former colonial power/s as a strategy to deal efficiently with growing resistance (such as Um Nyobe in Prisoner without a crime) and the threat of de-linking and at the same time continue with remote-controlled dependency. A specific problem with this ambivalent form of nationalism in Africa, which is very unAndersonian, is that it had no essentialistic character of its own; at one instant, especially prior to the 1960s, it appeared as if nationalism was combating the ill-effects of colonial domination. In this case, the political entrepreneurs adopted strategies that gave their early nationalism a veneer of autonomy, sovereignty and power. For example, at one instant, they initially constructed their nationalist movements from the background of an ‘essentially’ indigenous cultural identity, employed to undo the trappings of colonial rule even through the use of violent methods as evidenced in Ya Otto’s (1981) writing. At another moment, the post/nationalist framework formed by the managerial elites retained the same basic elements of segregation, exclusion (rural/urban, poor masses/elite bourgeois, male/female, etc) and exploitation that were hitherto embedded in colonial discourse as explained by Asong’s (2009) oeuvre No way to die. As a result, anti-colonial nationalist movements in Africa shared the same epistemological and discursive fields of politics as their colonial oppressors (Chatterjee, 1986). These historical, cultural, economic and political dynamics driving the ambivalent post-colonial national experience in the continent whether in Kenya (Ngugi, 1977), Ghana (Ayi Kwei,1968), Nigeria (Achebe, 1997), are absent from Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’. As Partha Chatterjee (1986) rightly notes in his Nationalist thought and the colonial world, Anderson's thesis on the national question, is 'highly unorthodox' because he conceptualized the ‘nation’ not by a set of objective Marxist determinist orthodoxies but as a universal scheme of the nation, that is, construed as a 'thought out' or 'imagined political community.' Chatterjee (1993) goes further to observe in The nation and its fragments that Anderson treats nationalism as though it were part of the universal history of the modern world. The ways in which the ‘nation’ was formed in postindependence Africa were not consistent with the 'modular forms' thesis of identity that Anderson formulated. The nationalist imagination in post-colonial nation states was not necessarily premised on identity but was based on difference (to borrow the term from postmodernist scholar Jacques Derrida) with modular forms of Western nationalism. For example, anti-colonial African nationalists generated their bid for sovereignty by exploiting the spiritual and material spheres of indigenous cultures in the continent in order to fashion out a nonEurocentric, differentiated national culture that was then employed in political struggles against the imperial powers. But the critical issue here is that in their attempt to bring their ‘nations’ into being, they were also presented with ready-made modular forms by nonconservative European and American ‘progressive’ forces, to the point where there was nothing left for political entrepreneurs and policy managers to imagine other than something that was not quite European nor American. For example, the nature of neo/colonial history in Africa imposed not only a neo-classical and neo/liberal form of economic consumption but also the ‘consumption’ of a national ideology of modernity. This Eurocentric ideology based on a ‘provincialism’ of either ‘Europe’ or ‘Africa’ was imposed in the process of nationalism and held that everything that was important in the modern world originated from Europe/the west rather than from Africa. In other words, Europe provided not only the Enlightenment script (together with its possible openings for exploitation), but also the processes of ‘re-writing’ anti-colonial imaginations and re-channeling the itineraries of the struggles (The nation and its fragments). This ‘script’ and the processes of the struggles were seen as necessary to stop brewing forces of communism, internationalism and nationalist revolution from eventually taking hold of the continent and posing as a serious threat to the expansion of capitalist development cherished by the entrepreneurs. The overly symmetrical link established between ‘identity’ and ‘nationalism’ in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities was not borne out in many examples of African nationalism. In Africa, there was no parallel drawn systematically between ‘nation’ and ‘community’ as existing in a ‘homogeneous, empty, time’. The idea of a ‘homogeneous, empty time’ was not a real experience in Africa until colonial rule was established to attempt enforcing it. As the literatures and social cases show in abundant detail, prior to colonial rule, indigenous relationships were created not through ‘horizontal’ feelings of friendship but through hierarchical ascription, class structures (high ethnicity/low ethnic groups, nobility/commoners, dominant male/submissive female, etc) and via the celebration of feats such as possession of wrestling skills and glorification of achievements like foes killed in intertribal wars (Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God; Samkange, On Trial for My Country, Jumbam, Lukong and the Leopard). Anderson’s version of nationhood as a product of ‘imagined communities’ was not itself a modernist project in Africa in the sense that it was about how nationhood Ndi was a discursivity to be subverted (Smith, 1998) rather than to be imagined. But this is where Anderson’s theory is very vulnerable to the alternative reality that existed in the continent. In Africa, ‘imagined communities’ were not ‘imagined’ at will as such, and identities were not chosen as one selects a particular house, location or lifestyle and decides to ignore others (Pittock, 1999). In Nigeria, for example, communities like the Igbo, Yoruba or Fulani/Hausa were rooted in much older ethnic identities rather than constructed only by signifiers of modernist ‘images’ and developmental ‘representations’. And even their ‘perennialist’ realities were derived from sociological facts like bonds of loyalty, ritual institutions (e.g. Ulu deity in Achebe’s Arrow of god) and political constitutions like exclusion of the osu/outcasts in Nigeria (see the Nollywood film ‘Royal Sacrifice’). Popular and musical cultures (social ‘writings’) like the ngondo festival among the littoral people of Cameroon, the bottle dance of the grassfielders of Cameroon and traditional resources like hunting skills among the Baka Pigmies of the Equatorial forests that endowed them with a sense of belonging and identity. Hence, our chief argument is that the notion of nationalism among Africans was not momentary, it was not a simplistic question of the ‘here and now’; it was certainly a matter of the spatial here but also one that stretched back to early times and was constantly revisited. Thus, contrary to contemporary and popular belief, the concept of ‘nation’ in Africa was much older than the notion of ‘nation’ in the modernist sense of the term, which began only recently from approximately the 1940s to the 1960s. The evidence to this critical submission is that in Africa the ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ as modernist and contemporary concepts were vigorously contested during the decolonization period and challenged by post-independence populations via a systematic recourse to a ‘certain ‘primordial ‘essentialism’ in virtually every nation-state such as Nigeria and this is represented in literature (e.g. Aluko, 1978, A state of our own). This is also consistent with what Tom Nairn had rightly attested, namely, that “nationalism is constitutive of man’s social nature” (Nairn, 1981). Another evidence may be culled from the situation of human geography in Africa, which instructs us in rich historical, economic (Geertz, 1963; Whitaker, 1970) and artistic detail (Achebe, 1958) that ‘national consciousness’ is determined by sociological conditions and not merely by collective imaginaries, consciences and signifiers. In this light, we may consider the relevant viewpoint of Karl Marx (1975: 425), who declared that: ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ The issue of ‘consciousness’ emerged in the pre-colonial continent with the embedded mode of production (to borrow the term from Karl Polanyi) that required communalistic/group rather than individualistic/ elitist responses to nationalistic imagination. The 013 materialist conditions of social, religious and political life richly described in sociology and in literature suggest that in Africa, the idea of establishing a capitalist/materialist order based on ‘timelessness’ was soon vulnerable to forces of transitivity. For example, in literature, the bourgeois gentry, Nwaka, insists that the Ulu deity has outlived its usefulness in Umuaroan anthropological history against the conservative opinion of the aristocratic priest, Ezeulu (Achebe, 1962). From this artistic insight, which reflects reality, the concept of ‘nation’ was historically relevant not only to capitalist entrepreneurial societies, but also to communalistic ones such as those in Africa. A concept such as nation is not simply a ‘word’ or an ‘idea’ in the Andersonian sense; it is also a context. Consequently, the value of a concept is contingent not simply on its denotation, but also on the connotative function of the concept in a given social life. This implies that different forms of social life make provision for varying roles to be played out by a given concept. Even in indigenous African societies, the notion of ‘nation’ was employed in the sense of ‘village’ in chieftaincies that had fairly settled populations such as Nso’ in Cameroon, and in the sense of ‘migratory groups with common family stems’ in nomadic communities such as the Woodabe tribe who do not have a fixed national geography. During the slave trade period of mercantilism and the Harlem Renaissance epoch, nation connotated with ‘Black nationalism’. In the colonial epoch of plantation economies, the concept of nation was akin to ‘several different villages brought together in a larger national geography speaking one foreign/colonial language’. In the decolonization period, its meaning shifted to ‘panAfricanism’ as advocated for by WEB Dubois, Kwame Nkrumah, etc, and in the post-independence era of internationalism marked by integration of the continent into the neo-classical or free market economy, the service economy, etc, the nationalistic concept was employed to mean the ‘neo-patrimonial nation of single parties’ and ‘fathers of the nation’ (Asongwed, 1993). Recently, in the era of globalization, nationalism designated the alienated/globalized diaspora of Africans. These shifting meanings suggest that the ways Africans understood the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ in the past were never the same as they meant them in the recent or contemporary epochs. This is so not because the respective groups of Africans did not have the capacity to ‘imagine’ as Anderson insists, but because their modes of production and their sociological, historical, geographical and political lives were different and more critical in determining the character of a nation than the Andersonian ‘minds’ of people living in it. This Marxist insight, which Anderson departs from, with his more or less modernist orientation, suggests that different African communities living at different epochs and geographies could not have shared the same conceptual meaning of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, not just 014 Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Humanit because of the commonality of the words, but because of the different forms of consciousness that the word/concept ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ expressed. In this way, different forms of social life allowed for different forms of consciousness, and for varied modes of expression of the concept of ‘nation’ to emerge into existence. In Nigeria, like in Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Kenya, Botswana, Ivory Coast, Algeria and Zanzibar, nationalism was an all-pervasive narrative that did not necessarily coincide with technological advances such as the printing press or religious encroachments like Christianity. Anderson’s idea of ‘nationalism’ as an imagined narrative idealizes the ‘nation’ as though it were a stable ‘textuality’. And this ‘text’ of ideas depends on a political economy or ‘materialist’ environment that Anderson theorizes as defining underlying social and material relations. Nevertheless, although this materialist base determines mechanisms of the capitalist entrepreneurial economy, and its modes of social production, an argument can be raised against this insight as oldfashioned Marxist influence. This is where Anderson’s position is reductionalistic; Marxist influence caused him to imagine the ‘text’ of national ideas as simply mirror images of the social and economic base, that is, as the reality underneath ideology. But the experience of nation formation in Africa was not merely anthropomorphic, that is, it was not merely a ‘social construction’. Nation formation in Africa most critically assumed as well a perspective of self-sustaining productivity and was implicit in a viewpoint of the power of new imperial ‘knowledges’ to take a life of its own in the Foucauldian (1980) sense of the concept. The process of nationalism was not only ‘social’; material relations were not the only means through which Africans became aware of themselves as historical agents. Modern African history did not only disclose its nationalistic trends by following certain deterministic logics of materialism/ capitalism, with its social relations of production. Rather there were also non-human actors and ‘materials’ (Walters, 2002) involved in the reconstitution and production of knowledge, space, and subjectivity. For example, during and after the colonial era, the nation state map was used as an instrument of knowledge/production by most imperial powers in Africa in order to sustain the legitimacy and relevance of the colonial administration. The map was historically inscribed in a geo-graphing process (O’Tuathail, 1996) of knowledge construction with the aim to politically conceive, locate and control land. As an immutable, flexibly movible, packaged-up ‘knowledge’ system transported from Europe by the colonial administration, it was manufactured from insights derived from travel writings, imperial theories, indigenous practices, and so forth. This charted ‘knowledge’ was not just objectively informational or technical, it was the product of a conspired territorial and Enlightenment appropriation. The conspired knowledge was produced to justify representation of the African as the Orient. Even though Africans were actively narrating their own history, the map that was often handed down to and was adopted by post-colonial nation-states was exploited to redefine the national terrain and ultimately modify the life, cultures, customs, practices and societies of the colonized African (Scott 1995). In British colonies, the imperial policy of indirect rule was instrumentalized to justify racial domination of the artificially constructed nations and to exploit the power of various ethnic groups. In this way, the map embodied a power/knowledge technique of normalization and discipline, a certain ‘material semiotics’ (Kendall 2004; Walters 2004) in which knowledge of a given territory was carefully packaged up to be employed easily as an unchangeable and itinerant technology of information. As a non-human and material object, the map was exploited to generate knowledge that could be deployed to reproduce the African as an Oriental Other (to borrow the term from postcolonial theorist Edward Said, 1979). Although the African subject was active even as a postcolonial victim, and attempted to rethink his national history, the imperial states tried to redefine and change the social structure of the life of Africans as they lived it (Scott 1995). For example, in British colonial territories, indirect rule was practised as a managerial policy to construct racial/ethnic hierarchies. The most notable example was in South Africa where this policy created a white/upper and black/lower racial, and by ideological logic, a political order determined by Boers. The outcome was a negative, segregated nationhood, a ‘geographication’ of division and exclusion, that was unacceptable to the marginalized indigenes and was unrecognized internationally and rejected by the black majority population. But inspired from this ideological logic, even the post-apartheid era was still marked by racial tensions and by a new form of compensatory ‘black racialism’ in which the ruling elites became intolerant of all forms of radicalism against the ANC party and its meager achievements vis-a-vis improvement of standard of living for the suffering black masses. This ‘division’ in the South African nation was echoed in many other African countries where the ruling elites, now the ‘neocolonial’ forces, treated the legitimate demands of different ethnic populations as a ‘threat’ to their power and sought to eliminate them. Consequently, many African countries faced devastating civil wars as was the case in Nigeria (Amadi, 1973), Rwanda, the Congo Kinshasa, Sudan, and prospects of secessionist conflicts as in Cameroon (the SCNC secessionist movement), etc. In addition, as portrayed in the internationally acclaimed film ‘Hotel Rwanda’, the colonial policy of supporting particular ethnic populations within an artificially constituted national territory such as the Tutsis (against the Hutus) in Rwanda fueled tensions in the continent. The physical construction of the map as a Ndi representation was a crucial example of the materiality of a Foucauldian power/knowledge binary, which itself resulted from a multiplicity of specific discursive practices and subjectivities. National projects of entrepreneurship, at the same time, were imbued with techniques of ‘normalization’ and discipline, or with what could be called “embodied” knowledges. Nationalism, in this sense, was understood not merely as ‘socially constructed,’ but as a phenomenon that was indeed, also lived. In addition, the production of knowledge was closely related to the geography of colonial conquest, for instance, mapping and other forms of land surveys etc., laid the cartographic basis for the entrepreneurial imposition of developmental policy, and further accumulation of capitalism in much of Africa (Harvey 1984). While traditionally ‘positivistic’ forms of scientific knowledge often naively claim objectivity and neutrality, it is indisputable that the colonial context of imperialism and expansionism provided the social basis for the production and use of that knowledge. In order to continue to exploit and dominate previously unclaimed territory through capitalist accumulation, there had to be necessary societal, material, and epistemological preconditions set in place. In contrast to Anderson’s positions, the contexts of nationalism in Africa evidenced an elaborate approach to nationalism in which thematic continuities were in sync with historical and cultural particularities or discontinuities. Post-colonial theorist Edward Said formulated an orientalist framework in which he explained that ‘civilizing missions’ were invented to promote the Christian religion and establish close and physical relationships to colonial territories. This process was aided by scientific surveys, maps and censuses that were created by colonial masters in the name of statistics, ‘human progress’ and population count but were actually exploited to reconstruct an Orient that they knew very well in terms of his habits, beliefs, culture, etc. As a result, ‘anti-colonial’ nationalist movements in Africa were attempts to deconstruct the power of knowledge as defined by these imperial states. This sometimes took the forms of violation of colonially defined borders between nation states. For example, the conflict over the borderline between South Africa and Namibia is over a river! Other boundary crises (Ethiopia/Eritrea, Cameroon/Nigeria over Bakassi peninsular, North Sudan/South Sudan, Congo/Rwanda, etc) resulted in tragic conflictual outcomes. In de/appropriating Orientalist texts for the purposes of re/legitimatization, African nation-state policy entrepreneurs asserted new forms of unity, with all of their exclusionary components. They unfortunately became ‘inside-out orientalists’ to add value to what was absent (Burke 1998: 494-495). Just as nationalism meant the excluded Other in colonial discourse, so too did radical Islamic movements such as the Boko Haram, Al Shabab, etc, come up with an ideology of excluding all forms of technological 015 modernization and cultural westernization such as education and Christianity in Nigerian nationalist discourse. According to Anderson, a sudden rupture from the ‘imagined communities’ constructed by Christianity gave way to nationalist movements after the Enlightenment epoch. However, in Africa, this experience of nationalism took a different form: there was a continuity from (the advent of) colonial Christianity to the exploitation of orthodox and protestant religious movements during the decolonization period. This religious effect in Africa was evident in multiple post-independence contexts of the psychology of faith: consequently, in addition to different revivalist religious movements, there was ‘faith’ in the overpowering capacity of the ‘Nation’ to develop itself. There was a strong belief in miracles of scientific progress through projects of modernization like the hydro-electric dam for energy production by Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, excessive trust in the socialist policies and capitalist strategies of charismatic figures like Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (the Ujamaa), Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. This faith in the almost supernatural abilities of the nationalist fighters to liberate and develop their nations transformed the policy entrepreneurs from mere physical subjects to transcendental personalities and new, recognized forces of world-history. The Andersonian perspective of religion drawn from Marxism claimed that free societies emerged as religious institutions lost their power. Marxism carries a negative view of religion which can, and, in this case, caused the theorist to misdiagnose the subject matter. Well, one may understand the rationale for this claim as originating in Marxist influence given that Marxism presents a negative picture of religion. But this claim was a reference to another type of experience, namely, secularization as opposed to nationalism which are distinct processes (Claudio Lumnitz Lomnitz 2000: 352). The Nigerian nation, for example, came into light with Christianity, Islam and indigenous religions still in place as evidenced by the partitioning of the country into three regions, namely, the Islamised Grand North, the Christianised East dominated by the Igbos and the western Yoruba region. Edward Said’s approach to orientalism demonstrates that the colonial-historical chain of events continues to have an impact today with American orientalism pursuing new forms of ‘civilizing missions’ under the guise of liberal democracy, privatization, deregulation, freedom of press, human rights, etc. Employing the rhetoric of war against terrorism, for example, US President George Bush launched a military command, AfriCom, in February 2007 to help African states fight against terror. AfriCom provided military formation and shared intelligence so as to carry out special operations in all the states of the continent. This new form of US imperialism only went 016 Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Humanit further to validate the Saidian position of orientalism as a new scramble for African resources. Africans were now ‘homogenized’ as potential victims under the ‘Islamic threat’ and the protection of American hegemony. African nations are now wedged into the ‘clash of civilizations’ logic (to borrow the concept from Samuel Huntington); they are now hemmed in between an essentialism of difference, an East/West, us versus them, mentality, which articulates a ‘dark side’ of the nationalistic process and stands in stark contrast to the rather optimistic Andersonian perspective that represents nationalism as modernization and therefore is just a question of what people desire, imagine or hope for. In this sense, the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis occupies the same discourse as religious fundamentalists who posit a similar us/them duality. As Hindess (2002) rightly argues, narratives of ‘civilization’ were the organizing principle for imperial rule and incorporation of the world into the modern system of nation-states in the 19th century. Today, we are witnessing what Rojas (2004: 108) terms as ‘the return of civilization’ in which the Anglo-American hegemonic structures advocate pre-emptive military interventions in countries seen as security failures in nation building. This type of justification is used to explain the need for neo-liberal market reforms, which so far have not had the expected results as poverty continues to increase in most African countries now referred to as ‘Third World.’ CONCLUSION In concluding this paper, we maintain that the theoretical premises of Benedict Anderson, this modernist historian, are inspirational as he attempted to bring together contending positions in order to emerge with a unified picture of nationalistic reality. This analysis against the grain of ‘imagined communities’ gives one a deeper understanding of nationalism as a modernist project that could have been properly managed if the early political entrepreneurs of Africa were more alert to the opportunities emerging out of the changing times and were innovative with a more productive and alternative exegesis of nationalism from its African context. However, these early political entrepreneurs and policy managers failed to see the complexity of the situations that nationalist politics had created. Consequently, they failed to take African countries forward. This explains why Africa, which was at the same level of development with the tiger economies like South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan before the 1960s, could not take off the ground at the same speed as these entrepreneurial states of Asia. Economic resources alone, which Africa had in abundance, cannot explain the whole picture. 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Battlefront Namibia, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.: Lawrence Hill & co. 018 Plat. Glo. J. Soc. Sci. Brief Bio *I am an assistant professor and holder of a Doctorat d’État degree in business entrepreneurship and development studies with research focus on political economy, psychoanalysis and critical studies. I investigate into strategic policies, management and pedagogy of risk, innovation, opportunity, ventures, social change and multi-facetted development. I lecture presently at University of Bamenda, P.O. Box Bambili, Bamenda, North West Region, Republic of Cameroon. My publications in different academic journals and books as detailed below as follows: - 2014, Beyond Marxist economism and entrepreneurial essentialism: post-colonial politics of empire in Chinua Achebe's and Linus Asong's writings. (Journal of Social Economic Research), - 2012, Setting the stage of ‘ab/normality’ in rehabilitative narratives: rethinking medicalization of the disabled African body (Disability Studies Quarterly), - 2011, What happened to post-imperial development in Africa during the last fifty years? Re-thinking the post-colonial turn in creative art, social 'writings' and films. (Journal of African Studies and Development), - 2011, US policy of capitalization and its discontents in Africa: A post-Marxist reading of postcolonial responses in art, film and social 'writings' (African Journal of Political Science and International Relations), - 2011, Why liberal capitalism has failed to stimulate a democratic culture in Africa: Rethinking Amartya Sen’s theory about development as freedom (Journal of Developing Societies), - 2011, Can capitalist 'core' survive the history driving development in the African periphery: re-evaluating Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems analysis (Journal of African Studies and Development),- 2010, Why economic growth theoriesbecame a fiction of development in postcolonial Africa: Critiquing foreign aid policy as discourse (Journal of African Studies and Development), - 2009, Disciplinary regime, neo-liberal bio-power and alienation of national sovereignty in Cameroon: political economy of the imprisoned body (African Journal of Political Science and International Relations), - 2007, Metropolitanism, capital and patrimony: theorizing the postcolonial West African city (African Identities), - 1999, Critical perspectives in oral literature: the case of Nso’ elegy (VOICES, A Journal of University of Wisconsin Madison), - 2005, A chapter on Relationship between literature and developmental legacy of history in Achebe\s writings (Ernest Emenyonu, ed., Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe,Trenton, N.J.: African World Press), - An entry on power, discourse and politics of marginalization in Anglophone Cameroon literature (GD Killam, eds.,Anthology on African Literature).