State and Society in Africa: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The chapter explores the complicated interactions between state and society in African countries since the transformative moment of decolonization after the Second World War. Drawing on case studies from two distinctive African countries—Nigeria and Botswana—the chapter contends that the challenges and possibilities for development and governance in African communities are intricately connected to prevailing structures of state-society relations following their arbitrary construction from colonial states at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter concludes that while the holders of state power have consistently nurtured neo-patrimonial state systems predicated on patron-client relations, rationalized by entrenched communal identities to consolidate the narrow interest of the political class, the masses of local people drawing on age-old practices and structures, have paradoxically devised creative strategies for survival and sustenance within the context of fragile, uncertain, and insecure post-colonial state systems. However, the comparative perspective provided in the Nigerian and Botswana case studies questions the over-generalization of Africa in perpetual crises, providing a corrective to prevailing narratives of endemic crisis in contemporary African states and societies.