Introduction: Abdul Raufu Mustapha and the study of difference and power in African states

ABSTRACT

This special issue is dedicated to celebrating the intellectual life and legacy of Abdul Raufu Mustapha (1954-2017). In this introduction, we highlight three themes that permeate his work on social divisions within the African state: the everyday experiences of identity and difference; the dynamics of conflict and violence; and ‘whole-of-society’ governance and statecraft. Notable within Mustapha’s work on these themes, and within the papers that comprise this Special Issue, are interdisciplinary connections and deep, historically-informed empirical work. Using this empirical work, Mustapha frequently challenged theoretical framings of African states that pathologized them; instead, he forced us to understand African states on African terms, and argued that we could learn much from them. In this way, his legacy contains invaluable lessons about governance in complex and divided societies, on the African continent and elsewhere; and it demonstrates a practical method for the decolonisation of scholarship on Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Abdul Raufu Mustapha
• ethnicity
• ideology
• conflict
• diversity
• politics
• state

In his seminal article on the nature of the Nigerian state, Abdul Raufu Mustapha (1954–2017) outlined three core challenges that have shaped its politics: ‘deep ethnic and regional divisions, the militarisation of the state and the consequent distortions of its federalist foundations, and its rentier nature’ (Mustapha, 2002, p. 169). Of these three, he argued, we can learn most from Nigeria’s engagement with social divisions: how can the divisions of class, ethnicity, and religion become entrenched to the extent that they spoil politics and lead to conflict, even to the point of civil war? And how can they be governed to foster true pluralism in the face of these risks? Embedded within these questions is the notion of power, and how it is produced, contested, dismantled, and distributed. Engaging with social divisions and their intersections with power are salient beyond the Nigerian context, and this Special Issue uses them as an entry point to celebrate Mustapha’s scholarly work. It highlights some of his key analytical contributions and showcases some of the new and innovative Africanist scholarship that they have fostered.

All contributors to this special issue address the question of how to handle social divisions within the African state system (Mustapha, 2002, p. 172), albeit through different lenses and case studies. As such, they illustrate the impact of Mustapha’s thinking on current research, while also illustrating the analytical insights that his legacy is producing. Furthermore, each contribution follows Mustapha’s imperative to both constantly interrogate accepted canons and center African experiences in order to foster inclusive scholarship and theory. This underlines a key epistemological point that permeates Mustapha’s scholarship: that understanding African political and social life requires serious empirical analysis stemming from the African continent, and that such analysis provides helpful frameworks and lessons for elsewhere. In other words, the study of Africa should occur on African terms, as opposed to the use of theories built on what Mustapha termed pathologizing assumptions (see Mustapha, 2006). Mustapha’s scholarship thus presents a way to practically decolonise dominant scholarly understandings of Africa. His work effectively anticipated the widespread contemporary calls to this end, especially in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter movements (Bhambra et al., 2018).

This Introduction outlines three key themes in Mustapha’s work on understanding and governing social difference in African states: the everyday experiences of identity and difference; the dynamics of conflict and violence; and a bottom-up approach to, and understanding of, governing difference, which includes an emphasis on ‘whole-of-society’ governance and everyday statecraft. Within each theme, Mustapha’s work is notable for its interdisciplinary connections and its synthesis of historical and theoretical analysis. These themes allow us not only to identify some of Mustapha’s key theoretical contributions, but also to describe the elements of his methodological approach that, we argue, provides one of the most fruitful ways of actually carrying out the decolonisation of Africanist scholarship.

Everyday experiences of identity and difference

Mustapha’s scholarship shows a deep commitment to the African experience, and inductively explores and analyzes that experience through the words, actions, and livelihoods of Africans themselves. This approach runs counter to the way African society is generally understood through categories, frameworks, and assumptions created in the West (Mustapha, 2006). Mustapha argued that much of Africanist political science pathologized African states and people as dysfunctional and limiting development and progress. Instead, he called for empirical research that historicized and contextualized everyday experiences in the making and expression of identity and difference.

As noted below, conflict and violence are common tropes through which Africa is understood. Frequently, these tropes have focused on large group identities, such as religion, ethnicity, or tribe. Mustapha interrogated the usefulness of concepts such as ‘tribe’ (Mustapha, 1998a, 1998b), arguing that they were often deployed in ahistoric and essentialist ways. These types of interpretations fix identities into static, anachronistic monoliths, ignoring the dynamics of changing affiliations and other facets of identity which may be central to group consciousness. Instead of ‘are there ethnic groups?’ Mustapha encouraged his students to consider ‘in what circumstances do individuals and groups choose to express certain facets of their identities?’ Ethnicity, in his formulation, is to do with the process and relations through which particular portions of multifaceted identities are expressed. Identities are thus created and acted on. Mustapha utilized historical analysis to show identities changed over time, reminding us that the current ethno-regionally divided Nigerian state is a modern phenomenon. For example, he notes that ‘Hausaland’, which is now considered to be a specific area spanning northern Nigeria and southern Niger, was not a fixed place-name, but a place where the Hausa language prevailed, and that this pre-colonial state was multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan (Mustapha, 1998a, pp. 4–7). Further, identities within the pre-colonial state were fluid: non-indigenes could easily assimilate (Mustapha, 1998a, p. 9) and thereby ‘become Hausa’.

Mustapha also questioned the focus on elite instrumentality in the deployment of ethnicity in politics as it often denies agency to individual actors and ignores the quotidian significance of identities. Moving beyond metanarratives that construct identities as homogenous monoliths, Mustapha’s work demonstrates that the individual experiences of these identities vary, contingent on specific local, political, economic, and social contexts wherein groups formed, articulated themselves and potentially moved on to other groups or articulations. This everyday ethnicity (Brubaker et al., 2018) offers a rich matrix through which to understand the salience of identities and their relationships to each other. Mustapha, however, also showed us that everyday life is central to understanding the origins, dynamics, and impacts of extraordinary shocks, such as violent conflict or natural disasters, which are often the focus of Africanist research. For example, in this issue Luisa Enria demonstrates how understanding repeated contestations and renegotiations of power and local authority in Sierra Leone aid our understanding of the interaction between particular communities and the international response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Mustapha’s emphasis on the importance of the everyday connected directly to his approach and methods. With detailed, holistic case studies that tied together political economy, history, religion, culture, and more, he showed the value of African-centered empirical research and interdisciplinary analysis.

Conflict and violence

Mustapha brought his interdisciplinary approach to the study of conflict and violence, which have become prominent themes in both the public imaginary of Africa and research agendas within African Studies. The methods and focus of the literature ranges widely, from in-depth qualitative studies of the dynamics of sexual violence in specific cases (e.g. Marks, 2014 for Sierra Leone), to quantitative explorations of the causal impact of democratic reforms on civil wars throughout the continent (Elbadawi & Sambanis, 2000). Mustapha’s interdisciplinary approach, focusing largely but not exclusively on Nigeria, distinguishes itself by combining a deep, qualitative and quantitative engagement with case context and history with the systematic application of theoretical concepts and explanatory variables. His approach treats conflict not as a standalone outcome of a rational decision-making process, but of a conjuncture of historical forces and events that is part of a wider context of intergroup interaction. Such interaction involves cooperation and borrowing as well as competition and conflict (Mustapha & Ehrhardt, 2018a).

Analytically, Mustapha starts from a detailed description of a case: the local situation on the ground as well as its longer historical context. This helps him to avoid and challenge dominant frames for understanding conflicts and episodes of violence; to see them for what they are, rather than as what the dominant interpretations make them out to be (Mustapha, 2018). The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria provides a useful example. Often portrayed as a case of international Islamic terrorism, Mustapha views the movement as part of a history of layered contestation within the Nigerian Muslim community (Mustapha, 2014). The first layer started in the 1940s and revolved around doctrinal differences between Nigerian Islamic movements; the second, from the 1950s, around ethnic and regional divisions; the third, from the 1980s, pivoted around millenarian uprisings such as Maitatsine in Kano; while the fourth, from 2009, involved the institutionalisation of terrorist and insurgent violence. Ini Dele-Adedeji (this Special Issue) echoes and expands on this argument by showing how Boko Haram was able to exploit gaps and tensions in formal governance in northern Nigeria to garner support. Together, these layers are all important to understanding the rise and trajectory of the Boko Haram problem. They show how, as Last (2014) has also highlighted, Boko Haram is primarily an incarnation of longstanding dynamics of dissent within the Nigerian umma that interacted with international terrorism only at a very late stage in its development.

This description and historical contextualisation forms the basis on which Mustapha builds his own explanations. Theory is interwoven with historical contingency to build multi-faceted narratives that enlighten the origins of the cases, as well as the way that theory operates in practice. For example, to explain the recurrent violence in Jos in central Nigeria, Mustapha and others emphasise the zero-sum political competition between Muslim and Christian communities in the city (Mustapha et al., 2018a, 2018b). Given the lack of avenues for pursuing political grievances and the rise of electoral politics from 1999, this zero-sum competition created a security dilemma where small triggering events became sufficient to incite violence. Boko Haram provides another example of Mustapha’s ability to identify a range of different causal processes and weave them together into a coherent explanation. Here, the long tradition of Muslim dissent and doctrinal conflict merged with destructive electoral politics, poor governance, deep inequalities, and an inadequate security response to produce an insurgency that had the potential to threaten the integrity of the Nigerian federation (Mustapha & Meagher, 2020; Mustapha & Ehrhardt, 2018a).

The state looms large in Mustapha’s accounts of conflict, both as a source of grievance and competition and as an actor with key roles in escalating or resolving episodes of violence. Therefore, even if the state is not involved directly as a party to a violent conflict, it is often an essential part of the constellation of forces that produces the violence. This acknowledgement of the essentially political nature of conflict does not preclude other factors, such as horizontal inequalities or doctrinal differences. It does, however, underline the idea that violence rarely escalates without involvement of the state and politics. Resolving or preventing conflicts therefore must involve the state, for example, through the formal power-sharing of the Federal Character as described in the contribution by Leila Demarest et al. (this Special Issue). The state, however, has to engage with conflict in close connection and collaboration with civil society and private sector, for example, through peace-building NGOs (Roelofs, this Special Issue) or local (in)formal militia groups (Agbiboa, this Special Issue). In the next section, we look in more detail at this ‘whole-of-society’ approach to statecraft and governance.

‘Whole-of-society’ governance and statecraft

In the recent volume on Overcoming Boko Haram, Mustapha and Meagher (2020) argue for a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to countering the insurgency movement, which involves not only the military and civil society, but also addresses underlying socio-economic problems and the complex relationship between religion and the Nigerian state. It is this embracing of the complexity of conflict and its possible solutions, and the interdisciplinary scholarship that this requires, that is characteristic of Mustapha’s approach to governance and political science more generally. Fundamentally, the ‘whole-of-society’ approach is a response to the discrepancy between the developmental needs of African societies and the way we conceive of the state, the market, and civil society in designing responses to these needs (Mustapha, 2006). Where these three concepts are often clearly differentiated in social-scientific literature, the reality of African governance time and again underlines the deep and varied interlinkages between them. Markets are embedded in political and economic institutions (cf. Clough, this Special Issue); and civil society does not stand ‘in opposition’ to the state, but often interacts with it in all kinds of difficult and varied ways (Mustapha, 2006).

Effective states, therefore, manage to embrace these linkages in ways that are sensitive to local contexts and histories. For example, Mustapha and Ehrhardt (2018b, p. 345) highlight Senegal as a successful case of the ‘indigenisation and vernacularisation of democracy, religious tolerance, and pluralism within the state’. Key to this success, they argue, has been the implicit ‘social contract’ between the state, religious elites, and religious groups that allowed Islamic organisations and a nominally secular state could collaborate, and even co-produce, effective and peaceful governance (ibid., 346). The Nigerian experience has been more mixed in this regard, perhaps reflecting the depth and seriousness of the triple challenges of diversity, military rule, and oil patronage. One debate that illustrates this mixed record well is the one around ‘indigeneship’, which centers on the question of whether the Nigerian government should recognise, and institutionalise, ethnic or cultural forms of belonging and associated claims to political and other rights. The contribution of Mustapha and others (Nigeria Research Network, 2014; Mustapha, 2007, 2009) to this debate has been not only to demonstrate the dynamics of indigeneship allocation in comparative empirical detail across the country, but also to analyse its structural causes and to create video material on indigeneship for training purposes.

These analyses not only show the intricacies of the institution of indigeneship, but also provide practical policy advice for how to reduce its negative effects. In addition, however, the indigeneship debate also highlights another key, and often under-appreciated, argument in Mustapha’s approach to governance: that pursuing development and good governance requires not only effective formal structures and institutions, but also careful attention to everyday statecraft (Mustapha & Ehrhardt, 2018b). Statecraft here is defined as ‘the everyday politics of inclusion and accommodation’ (Mustapha et al., 2018b, p. 333), the kind of strategic, pragmatic leadership required to reach compromises, to ‘get things done’, and to keep the peace in complex situations of diversity and conflict. For example, State governors faced with minority grievances may choose to include ethnic minorities as State Cabinet members or high-level bureaucrats, as Governor Lalong of Plateau State has done (Mustapha et al., 2018b). Similarly, traditional rulers may choose to formally recognise the representatives of ethnic minority communities in order to improve their social standing and political access.

Whole-of-society governance and the dynamics of statecraft outline important avenues for further research in Nigeria and throughout the African continent. What do these concepts look like when applied in practice, in various contexts and fields, such as service provision, intergroup power sharing, or conflict resolution? Who engages in it? What problems can they be applied to effectively? And, what are the institutional conditions, personal characteristics, and contextual factors that promote their efficacy? One important element of both notions likely relates to social and political information, about which individuals and networks matter and who can ‘get things done’. Good information on these questions is essential in designing and engaging in whole-of-society governance as well as effective statecraft. They also require some discretion in decision-making, as well as the strong social capital of decision makers and those who have to implement them. In many contexts, this means leaders need to engage in patronage – but the productive type, which benefits both patrons and their clients, rather than exclusively syphon off rents for personal gain.

The contributions in this special issue

Mustapha’s work thus identifies crucial avenues for further research in African studies. Thematically, the contributions in this Special Issue draw on Mustapha’s insights on African everyday life, on conflict and violence, and on governance and the role of the state. Further, methodologically, they follow Mustapha’s approach of centering African voices and experiences within the holistic analysis that integrates history and theory. Together, the articles illustrate the enormous breadth of the scholarship that Mustapha’s work can inspire.

Beginning with issues of governance and the state, Leila Demarest and her co-authors address the issue of ethnic power-sharing and pluralist governance by looking at the working of Nigeria’s Federal Character Commission (FCC). Intended to balance access to the benefits of the state and political power evenly across all groups around the country, the FCC has been credited with strengthening the unity of Nigeria and helping to prevent secession and fragmentation. Demarest et al., however, show that in terms of its own mandate, the FCC’s successes have been meagre. It has been plagued by bureaucratic weakness, lack of resources, complaints of corruption, and other impediments. As a result, there continue to be severe imbalances in public service employment across groups and regions. This, the authors argue, does not bode well for the recent extension of the FCC’s powers into the realm of socio-economic inequality.

Nelson Oppong’s contribution takes us to Ghana, drawing on Mustapha’s concept of ‘multiple publics’ within Africa’s public sphere. Utilizing this concept, he argues that the politics of oil governance is too often narrowly analyzed through opaque elite calculations. Rather, Oppong shows the importance of Mustapha’s ‘whole-of-society’ approach to governance, exploring Ghana’s contentious politics of oil governance across society. As opposed to a site of elite consolidation and exclusionary politics, Oppong highlights the ways in which the politics and governance of oil may permit inclusivity and democratic deliberation. In the end, this has actually eroded the control of the ruling coalition.

Honing in on, arguably, Nigeria’s most serious recent security challenge, Boko Haram, Ini Dele-Adedeji highlights how the early incarnation of the movement attracted public support through public service provision. Drawing parallels to other religious movements, and highlighting the historical tensions between Islamic ideals and secular (or multi-religious) forms of state governance, Dele-Adedeji highlights that Boko Haram ably inserted itself into some of the gaps left by these tensions. Prior to the 2009 crisis which transformed the movement into the terrorist organisation it is today, Boko Haram not only propagated appealing – if radical – religious ideas, but also provided security, health care, employment, and other tangible public services for the communities of its members. This pattern of subverting the state, Dele-Adedeji argues, is historically well rooted in northern Nigeria and helps to explain the movement’s rapid rise to prominence.

Daniel Agbiboa brings our attention to one of the key opponents of Boko Haram, the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF). He describes how they went from informal ‘stick-carriers’ to ‘gun-wielding, pro-government militia’ and outlines the crucial roles they have played in intelligence gathering, knowledge brokerage, and connecting to local populations. As such, the CJTF has been essential to the success of the counterinsurgency strategy. At the same time, however, the organisation has not been innocent of wanton violence and human rights abuses. Moreover, there continue to be fears about the future of this organisation of violent youths, and the risks of them becoming a security threat in their own right. As such, Agbiboa not only gives us a rich insight in the dynamics of the specific case of the CJTF but also highlights the more general theme of the way in which state and society efforts interact in complex ways in conflict resolution and security provision in Africa. In addition, this article demonstrates the complicated ways through which power interacts with the everyday experiences of people. It shows that despite tropes of ethnoreligious and regional division, there is also unity and cooperation across communities. Agbigoa thus underscores the value of deep empirical research, as he allows the voices of CJTF members to drive his analysis.

Turning to localised peace building in northern Nigeria, Portia Roelofs focuses on a prominent ‘local’ peace-building NGO with extensive international recognition and support: the Interfaith Mediation Centre (IMC) in Kaduna. Addressing the well-trodden cliché that successful peace-building needs to involve ‘locally’ legitimate and knowledgeable actors, Roelofs shows the difficulties of maintaining the local-international distinction when international organisations get involved in peace building. In the case of the IMC, she argues that international support from USAID reflected American geopolitical interests as well as a genuine interest in local outcomes; yet over time, the IMC’s ‘local’ character also became a problem as it appeared to clash with ‘international’ standards of professionalism and (financial) accountability. Moreover, as IMC became more integrated with the international development industry, it raised questions about its ‘local’ nature.

The interplay between international interventions and local institutions is further discussed in Luisa Enria’s exposition of the dynamic realities of the interactions between humanitarian initiatives and community stakeholders during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in western Africa. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, near the border with Guinea, Enria demonstrates that community leadership and authority is unsettled and in constant flux. The production, unmaking, and reproduction of local authority complicates humanitarian work that seeks ‘partnerships’ or the use of ‘community stakeholders’ and local authorities. Rather than static, culturalist assumptions about community leadership, authority needs to be understood in its historical and structural context. Deep empirical work allows us to understand Africa as it is rather than as it is assumed to be. Enria’s historical and empirical approach connects the effects of colonialism, ideas about authority in the wake of the civil war, the realities that emerge from geographic location, local contestations over power, and everyday experiences of culture and belonging. In this process, she demonstrates how the Ebola response did not neatly interact with local authority but became part of the many modalities through which authority is made and unmade.

Finally, and returning to Mustapha’s early work on rural Nigeria, anthropologist Paul Clough revisits his fieldwork sites in rural Hausaland to explore the fundamental functionings of the local economy and processes of capital accumulation. He shows that even though economic growth in the region’s main metropolitan areas is transforming accumulation, rural Hausa accumulators (‘farmer-traders’) continue to follow a more non-capitalist trajectory: a process of wealth creation that combines economic gains through farming and trading with the accumulation of social obligations through wives, clients, and other dependants. Over time, Clough argues, the increasing social obligations reduce the speed at which economic capital is accumulated. There is, as such, an organic system of redistribution that sets limits on the economic inequality that capitalist accumulation can produce. A long-time colleague and friend of Mustapha’s, Clough unexpectedly passed away in 2019. We are proud to publish his piece posthumously and grateful to his family for permission to do so.

Mustapha’s legacy as a research agenda for African studies

This Introduction has highlighted Abdul Raufu Mustapha’s scholarship on difference and power in Africa, and particularly Nigeria. From the livelihoods of rural peasants to the structure and practices of the Nigerian state, his research is notable for its interdisciplinarity, fostering of bottom-up analytical frames, as well as holistic and historically informed empirical interpretations. Moreover, Mustapha’s imperative to understand the African experience through its own articulations serves as an example of a powerful decolonial approach to African studies. While he never (to our knowledge) categorized his approach as decolonial, his work served to disrupt Western paradigms and assumptions about African states, politics, and peoples. He demanded that we listened to and made African voices and experiences central. He also continuously supported scholarship and activism on the African continent (Shah et al., 2018). As the articles in this Special Issue will show, Mustapha’s theoretical, methodological, and ethical contributions provide fertile ground for truly Africa-centered research and engagement in African Studies and beyond (e.g. Pailey, 2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.