Where Is the History of African Presidents and the Presidency?

The historiography of African presidents is profoundly interdisciplinary, lying at the crossroad of political science, history and the more popular genre of literary biography. The literature first emerged with the biographies of African presidents published in the 1960s, following the enthusiasm for the “fathers of the nation” who freed their nations from colonial oppression.Footnote ⁹ The enthusiasm raised by the so-called “fathers of the nation” upon independence forged the myth of the male liberating hero who dominated elite rivalries and conflicts inherited from decades of divisive colonial rule. The early publications dedicated to African presidents are therefore strongly marked by biographical narratives that legitimated new and still fragile native leadership, and which sowed the idea that African politics were dominated by a few influential individuals – not institutions.Footnote ¹⁰

The enthusiasm of independence was short lived and the late 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s saw the rise of authoritarian regimes. Biographies of internationally infamous dictators such as Idi Amin Dada in Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central Africa, or Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo not only met the demand of a general readership avid for tales of bloody dictators, but they also paved the way for interpretations of presidential powers centered on personal rule and neopatrimonialism. Though some historians expressed doubts about interpretations which conferred too great a role on African elites,Footnote ¹¹ the political instability favored interpretations emphasizing colonial legacy, neocolonialism, bureaucratic chaos, and, unsurprisingly, the overarching roles of a few individuals. In 1980, political scientists Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg introduced the concept of “personal rule” in their book, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant. They argued that African postcolonial politics “do not conform to an institutionalized system” but are dominated by individuals and that their passions are caught up in “clientelism and patronage, factionalism, coups, purges, pots, succession crises.”Footnote ¹²

In the 1990s, researchers showed that institutions do in fact matter in African politics, but that the fundamental ideas underpinning personal rule did not vanish. They were still encompassed in the widely used concept of “neopatrimonialism,” a political system defined by abuse of power, corruption, personal alliances, and private interests.Footnote ¹³ Yet, as the late Thandika Mkandawire brilliantly explained, neopatrimonialism is but an arbitrary concept based on stereotypical representations of African politics.Footnote ¹⁴ The concept fit a preconceived perception of African politics as irrational and unbureaucratic to the point that “the language of neopatrimonialism has permeated news coverage of African affairs.”Footnote ¹⁵ While African presidencies were becoming the almost exclusive territory of (European and North American) political scientists, the general public was familiarized with a caricatured vision of African presidential powers.

It is perhaps fair to say that the idea of governance which dominated political discourses throughout the 1980s and 1990s – epitomized by the World Bank’s Structural Adjustments Programs (SAP) – was meant to counterbalance this idea of volatile leadership. The failure of the SAP to foster political stability and development certainly encouraged scholars to refine the conceptual and theoretical analysis of political leadership and authority in African countries.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, the literature did not fundamentally refresh historical knowledge about the personalization of African leadership. For example, Jean-François Médard popularized the concept of the African “big man,” a new figure of authority whose political power was defined by the concentration and accumulation of economic resources.Footnote ¹⁷ The “politics of the belly,” as Jean-François Bayart put it, was the essence of African politics: consumption (or the “eating of political and economic resources”) became the symbol of authority and domination.Footnote ¹⁸ Narratives about presidential powers were, once again, reduced to the idea of a few individuals abusing state prerogatives and privileges.Footnote ¹⁹

Since the beginning of the 2000s, while political scientists have steadily continued to explore African presidential powers, historians have revisited the field of African politics, developing innovative approaches.Footnote ²⁰ Narratives on the processes of decolonization and state formation have been complicated by refined studies of nationalist discourses, biography writing, and elite politics. The makings of the “fathers of the nation” are increasingly deconstructed, with scholars highlighting the strategic, yet not less divided politics behind the myth.Footnote ²¹ The ideas and ideologies put forward by African presidents have been further scrutinized, while some have questioned the makings of state powers from a legal perspective.Footnote ²² Meanwhile, biography writing regained legitimacy within academic history.Footnote ²³ At the same time, arguments in favor of gendering the history of the decolonization struggle and early postcolonial politics have become more prominent and biographies of influential female leaders have gained visibility. Footnote ²⁴ Analyzing the hyper-masculinity of the Ugandan President Idi Amin Dada, Alicia Decker specifically argued for getting away from archetypes of blood-thirsty presidents and for understanding their performance of violence and abuse of power as political strategies.Footnote ²⁵

Nevertheless, the origins of presidential powers still constitute a marginal theme in African political history. Historians seem reluctant to engage with concepts directly borrowed from political science, such a presidentialism, while political scientists tend to leave archival research to historians. The history of the presidency as a new institution, created upon independence, and the political negotiations surrounding the making of a new constitution and allocating executive, legislative, and judiciary powers are still under researched. Political biographies of influential leaders have come closest to studying African presidents; but the origins of presidential powers are systematically avoided. In turn, historical analyses are centered on the concepts of colonial legacy. Ali Mazrui’s seminal article on “The Monarchical Tendency in African Political Culture” is a good example of the limits of comparisons between colonial and postcolonial leadership when based on little historical evidence.Footnote ²⁶ The concept of colonial legacy is certainly useful to emphasize the artificial nature of the transition to independence, as well as the political, administrative, and economic continuities between colonial and postcolonial states.Footnote ²⁷ But the logic of continuity places the emphasis on colonial actors and says very little about the agency of African elites in designing, negotiating, and appropriating executive powers upon independence.Footnote ²⁸ Against the logic of inheritance, reproduction, or continuity, arguments of reinvention, re-appropriation, and fabrication so often put forward in African political history should be placed at the center of the historical analysis of presidential powers.

Writing the history of African presidential powers in Africa must be an interdisciplinary endeavor, inspired by various historiographies, conceptual approaches, and research methods across disciplines – political science and history in particular.Footnote ²⁹ What is at stake is to retrieve the agency and political intelligence of African elites in imagining, negotiating, appropriating, and strengthening political structures (executive powers in particular) and political ideas in a context of uncertain political futures. As such, the duty of historians is to explore the formation of the postcolonial state from a new angle, breaking with simplistic narratives of continuity and change and investigating both the political and institutional crises that national independence brought about.

Challenging Historical Sources

The main challenge is of course one of sources: what kind of archival material can historians use to break into the highest, and perhaps most secret, sphere of state power? The ambivalent status of archives in African postcolonial states has long been discussed. Achille Mbembe noted that, though archives might threaten state affairs, their material destruction provides them with additional content.Footnote ³⁰ Jean Allman called for chasing the “phantoms of the archives,” and Luise White advocated transnational archival research to fill the apparent blanks of postcolonial African history.Footnote ³¹ More recently, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart highlighted the hidden “human dimension” of archival texts, showing how bureaucratic power relations and aspects of daily life were entangled in the “paper works” of Ugandan prison officers during Idi Amin Dada’s regime.Footnote ³² Similarly, historians of African women’s history have provided many alternatives to bypass the apparent lack of written sources to document women’s contribution to decolonization, nationalism, and state building.Footnote ³³ Although the postcolonial state is made of “phantoms,” “paper cadavers,” and “spectres” whose lives are at once rendered legible yet remain elusive in archival spaces,” as Bruce-Lockhart aptly wrote, it does not resist archival traces.Footnote ³⁴ As Alexander Keese forcefully argued, post-independence archives held in African documentation centers have been (for various reasons) underestimated and too often disregarded, and they need to be more closely explored.Footnote ³⁵

These reflections have revived the writing of postcolonial African political history, refreshing in particular the conceptualization of politics and political agency and shedding light on many more actors, women in particular, and more complex forms of politic engagement. They also have come very close to presidents – Allman wrote on Kwame Nkrumah, White on Robert Mugabe, and Decker and Bruce-Lockhart on Idi Amin Dada.Footnote ³⁶ Yet, there has not been a comprehensive discussion on the state of African presidential archives – perhaps because the question tends to be seen more as a concern for political scientists.

Of what are a president’s archives made? What are the similarities and differences across archival repositories in African countries – and, of course, among various African presidents? There seem to be great disparities as to the primary sources tracing the lives and careers of African presidents. Reflecting on biography as historical sources, Richard Rathbone pointed out, for example, the lack of available visual material to trace the early life of Olusegun Obasanjo.Footnote ³⁷ John Lonsdale noted that Jomo Kenyatta’s private papers disappeared when he was arrested by British administrators in 1952;Footnote ³⁸ in contrast, Barthélémy Boganda’s private diaries constitute a very informative source on the latter’s turbulent career, as Klaas van Walraven showed.Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, Carolyn Hamilton noted the richness of Nelson Mandela’s prison archive, highlighting its unabated potential despite the already very large literature dedicated to Mandela.Footnote ⁴⁰ Daniel Branch has shown it is possible to zoom in on the Office of the President in Kenya using Kenyan, British, and American public political files and the detailed information they provide – not so much on the president himself, but on the many men of influence who surrounded him, including their regular correspondences.Footnote ⁴¹ Samuel Fury Childs Daly has valued the importance of global archival research to write Nigerian political history.Footnote ⁴² The recently released Foreign and Commonwealth Office “migrated archives” from the collections of the British National Archives have already provided historians with the means to document the political rise of president-to-be politicians.Footnote ⁴³ Last but not least, ongoing doctoral research dedicated to presidential history also shows the potential of archival research to situate African presidents’ politics within rapidly changing societies, retracing their educational trajectories and their social interactions during the decolonization period.Footnote ⁴⁴

Archives are not static; lost archives may be found again, and traces of destroyed documents may resurface in unexpected places. As Carolyn Hamilton powerfully put it: “Archival collections are reframed and refashioned over time, both affected by and resistant to the ebb and flow of reinterpretation, and in turn affecting interpretation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It appears therefore even more important to transfer the political scientists’ concern for institutional analysis to historians’ desks and archival rooms. This is the approach I took in my research on Jomo Kenyatta’s presidential trajectory, albeit unconsciously at first. When I started my research on Jomo Kenyatta’s political biography in 2012, I had freshly graduated in political science: I was new to the field of history and had no experience in archival research. My interest in the historical origins of presidential powers was shaped by my personal background as well as by the materiality of archival resources, and it is fair to say that the nature, richness, and sound preservation of British and Kenyan archival resources made it possible for me to embark on a project dealing with state power.Footnote ⁴⁶ I was not working in a space of physical chaos (as that shown in the pictures of the United National Independence Party Archives in Lusaka, provided by Luise White, or that of the archives of local governments in Uganda, as presented by Derek R. Peterson).Footnote ⁴⁷ I was able to retrieve files covering extensive formal bureaucratic processes directly hinting at the functioning of the presidential institution.

Trained as a political scientist and new to history, I was looking for traces of the president as an actor but had not thought of the presidency as an institution with its own political history. Rémi Dewière and Silvia Bruzzi emphasized that historians act as (creative) intermediaries between archival sources and historical narratives, and the archives themselves rapidly showed me that the two were inseparable: one could not research the history of the president without studying the history of the presidential institution.Footnote ⁴⁸ I unexpectedly stumbled on material documenting the negotiations on the strengthening of presidential powers in Kenya upon independence. My book, Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years, reconstructs the ways in which Jomo Kenyatta achieved and maintained power in postcolonial Kenya.Footnote ⁴⁹ My argument emphasizes that extensive presidential powers not only have a complex constitutional history, but also a long political history and require the reconstruction of how they were imagined, shaped, and negotiated at a time when nothing predicted that presidential regimes would take over the whole African continent.

Retracing Jomo Kenyatta’s Rise to the Presidency

The numerous intelligence and diplomatic reports written on Kenyatta portrayed him as an enigma.Footnote ⁵⁰ Authors who explored his political imagination drew a similar conclusion: Kenyatta was a solitary figure, and both his career and political ideas were marked by the search for opportunities to gain both attention and political support.Footnote ⁵¹ In his recent biography of Kenyatta, W. O. Maloba pointed out that Kenyatta’s rise to prominence shortly before Kenya became independent was nonetheless an uncertain process. This did not mean that Kenyatta had not constructed a complex political ideology, as John Lonsdale noted. Though most of the literature dedicated to Kenyatta’s political and intellectual biography does not explore his political career after independence in detail, it seems relevant to ask how this combination of political hazards and well-constructed political imagination affected the makings of Kenyatta’s presidential powers.Footnote ⁵²

The biggest challenge of my research was to write the history of the president with virtually none of President Kenyatta’s written trace. His personal papers disappeared; he was known for disliking the nitty-gritty of bureaucratic procedures, and he left no memoir or autobiography to posterity. And yet, the apparent incompleteness of the archives has proven central to grasping Kenyatta’s political strategy upon independence. More importantly, it forced me to look at the question of presidential power in order to attempt to locate Kenyatta’s decision-making within complex institutional and personal power struggles in postcolonial Kenyan politics.Footnote ⁵³

The move away from too strong a focus on individuals first required a questioning of the narrative of the “father of the nation,” so entrenched in Kenyan political discourse over national history.Footnote ⁵⁴ While the notion of the “father of the nation” has been increasingly criticized, this shift of analysis was also inspired by the literature on the biographical turn, which questions why and when an individual dominates the tide of history to the point that he or she becomes the only possible alternative to lead political change.Footnote ⁵⁵ The British Migrated Archives proved essential to show the dissent and divisions that surrounded Jomo Kenyatta’s rise to power, as well as the deep uncertainty and distrust that dominated the decolonization process.Footnote ⁵⁶ The correspondence of British colonial administrators, telling of their personal discussions with prominent Kenyan leaders from all political sides, exposed the rumors, the corridor conversations, and the extent to which personal politics dominated the decolonization process. In capturing this uncertainty, I gained a more complex understanding of the political scene within which Kenyatta was acting. Far from being one of unity and solidarity, it was one of mutual distrust, and Kenyatta was clearly a relatively isolated player.

Furthermore, archival records show that nothing predicted that Kenyatta would become president in/of an independent Kenya. By the time of Kenya’s independence negotiations, Kenyatta was an old man (about seventy years old) and had spent eight years under restriction, as the British administration was convinced he was the leader of the violent Mau Mau movement. Though he had been informed of political developments throughout this time, he had little connection to the new and younger Kenyan elite which took center stage in political negotiations with the British. When he was released in 1961, virtually no one foresaw that Kenyatta would or could become a prominent political player. On the contrary, many Kenyan politicians attempted to prevent him from occupying influential political positions in Kenya. Kenyatta, in contrast, was patiently and cautiously biding his time. To British officials who tried to sound his political plans he said: “I have something cooking and I don’t wish to spoil it.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The historiography dedicated to Kenyatta’s political ideas gives us a sense of Kenyatta’s intelligence in a moment of unprecedented political transition; far from being cut off from Kenyan politics, Kenyatta had developed, over the years, a profound understanding of both colonial and indigenous politics. He knew, certainly like no one else at the time, that political (and economic) divisions were deep in the country, that he himself was surrounded by many enemies, and that even his friends were divided.Footnote ⁵⁸

The question, therefore, is not only how Kenyatta understood or conceptualized these divisions but how he was able to overcome them and hold them together in a presidential system. The focus on the history of institutions highlights that no one, Kenyatta included, predicted that Kenya would transition to a presidential political system. As archival records show, the negotiations on presidential power came late (in 1963) in the decolonization process. Two sets of very different British colonial files alerted me to that question. First, and perhaps more unexpectedly, were the land files. These were extremely large files, retracing in detail the economic matters related to the decolonization of land.Footnote ⁵⁹ The economic aspects of the history of the decolonization of land in Kenya have been well researched.Footnote ⁶⁰ So I concentrated my attention on the political aspects involved in the process, and, more particularly, on the fact that the British had designed a bureaucratic structure that centralized access to land resources before the question of a central or federal state was settled.Footnote ⁶¹ The question of the centralization of power took on a new dimension when I stumbled on an archival file in Kew entitled “Discussions on question of head of state at time of independence.”Footnote ⁶² The file documented Kenyatta’s personal talks with the British Commissioner and the tensions, within the Kenyan elite, over the issue: very few politicians wanted Kenyatta to become president; even fewer wanted him to be granted extensive executive powers.

Clearly, the making of presidential power has a complex history. It was, most importantly, an unexpected issue, which explains why little could be found in the records of the negotiations of independence in Lancaster between 1961 and 1963. This black hole not only showed that the negotiations on independence were highly personalized (cutting across political parties and institutions) but, perhaps more importantly, that the question of executive powers had not been foreseen by any of the politicians of the time. In Kenya, the issue emerged late in the year 1963: the independence negotiations were already coming to an end as parliamentarians discussed the draft constitution for an independent Kenya. Parliamentarians contested the provision that “the President has power to make any appointment or make any order or do any other thing.”Footnote ⁶³ Though the debate was extremely divisive, it came too late in the decolonization process for any significant renegotiated. Such very vague wording torpedoed all efforts to strengthen counter powers by giving extensive, almost unlimited, executive powers to the president.

Do Archives Reflect Presidential Styles?

It is certainly not enough to point out that presidential powers in postcolonial Africa have a history. One should further caution that the establishment of presidential powers should not be seen as an event (that of independence) but rather as a process. As the Kenyan case shows, the legal wording of executive powers in the independence constitution was so vague that it was still unclear what shape a presidential regime would take. This question necessarily calls for further reflection on the president’s style of ruling. Exploring the issue was all the more challenging as, as I already mentioned, Kenyatta appeared to be untraceable.

Where could the president’s comings and goings be located? Browsing through the inventories of the Kenyan National Archives, one is struck by the unevenness of the records. The papers of the Office of the President offered no more than a collection of speeches (though very useful).Footnote ⁶⁴ The archives of the Eastern Province were the richest to work with – the post-independence files of other provinces had been oddly decimated. Besides working extensively on files from the Eastern Province (in particular the personal papers of the provincial commissioner for Eastern Province, Eliud Mahihu, as well as the security files related to the Meru district, which enabled me to write on the post-independence history of the Mau Mau movement), the records of the Ministry of Lands and Settlements proved to be an incredibly rich source.Footnote ⁶⁵ These archives provided firsthand information not so much on Kenyatta’s personal commitment to political affairs, but on his timely interferences or withdrawals in strategic affairs. In other words, they were about the particular matters on which Kenyatta did not want to be traced.

Whereas the general understanding of presidential powers in postcolonial Africa entails the idea of unlimited prerogatives, my research led me to reflect on where presidential powers end, so that the president remains politically unexposed. This was clearly the case when it came to repressing resurgent Mau Mau fighters after 1965, a part of postcolonial Mau Mau history which has, surprisingly perhaps, been little studied.Footnote ⁶⁶ Kenyatta was, apparently at least, completely missing from the archival records. Yet his name was mentioned at two strategic moments: before independence, colonial archives showed Kenyatta was aware of the issue of Mau Mau resurgence in Kenya; after independence, Kenyatta had ordered his ministers to bring back order in the district where Mau Mau resilience was the most problematic – a correspondence between top officials of Kenyatta’s government shows how the president instructed them both to ensure loyalty within his government, but also freed their hands when it came to taking action.Footnote ⁶⁷ The absence of firsthand material on Kenyatta was not necessarily a missing link. This was a clear case of retrieving the phantoms of the archives: Kenyatta’s invisibility in the archives reflected his desire to remain unexposed in politics.

The question of how archival material may inform our understanding of presidential styles needs to be more thoroughly examined. While many scholars have highlighted the ways presidents’ style affect the functioning of postcolonial states and their bureaucracies, more research should be done to reflect on the variety of presidential styles across African countries and their unique histories.Footnote ⁶⁸ Erik Kennes’s depiction of Laurent Désiré Kabila as “secretive” and someone who “rarely gave interviews” is reminiscent of Jomo Kenyatta. Writing about the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kennes not only noted that “much of the politically incorrect documentation and writing of the period” was destroyed but that access to potential sources was also difficult (sometimes because of security reasons, an issue which is far from being a detail!).Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite these difficulties, his argument is still one that engages with historical gaps and loopholes and takes unpredictability seriously. By mixing secondary and primary sources, Kennes shows us the possibility to locate a leader’s agency, to identify his “political persona” as well as his “conception of rule.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, Klaas van Walraven emphasizes the potential of bringing biography writing and political history closer to one another, to show “the unexpected twists and turns of a life and, indeed, of the political history of his country and its failed turning-points.”Footnote ⁷¹ Klaas’ defense of biography writing further shows that when it comes to the history of African political elites, the incompleteness of sources and historical speculation may also enhance historical analysis.Footnote ⁷² This observation directly resonates with Kenyatta’s apparent absence from the postcolonial archives, which remains no less useful and essential to retracing the makings of presidential powers in Kenya.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful comments, as well as Christian Hadorn for his careful reading and insightful suggestions.