Personhood and State Building in Africa

Ifeanyi Menkiti presents us with a refreshing alternative to the static Western view of personhood that uses criteria such as rationality, will, or memory. This alternative is the African conception of personhood as a status conferred in the fulfillment of moral maturity. It is the community that confers this status, since it is to the community’s well-being that members contribute, and it is according to members’ contributions that members are evaluated as persons. In this essay I have drawn out the implications of this understanding of personhood in the context of the modern state in Africa, which is malfunctioning as a platform for evaluating personhood because the emergence of the state was not accompanied by an attempt to synchronize the state with the community to become another level of evaluating personhood. I explain the mechanics of this failure using Peter Ekeh’s observation of the two publics that colonialism hoisted on African societies. I then make recommendations for transforming the state platform in Africa to that of a catalyst in the realization of people’s personhood. So in the first (and next) section, I briefly outline Menkiti’s conception of personhood and relate it with similar conceptions of personhood across the African continent. In the second section, I explore the fate of the African conception of personhood in the context of the typical multiethnic African state. Here, I outline the failure of traditional communities to evaluate their members according to the moral contributions of these members to wider societies including the modern state. I argue that the phenomenon is not unconnected to ethnic diversity, and in the third section I cite research showing the effects of diversity on general dedication to public duties. Research generally shows that more diversity translates to lower public altruism and less investment in public goods, and suggests that it is not a peculiarly African problem. In the fourth section, then, I make some recommendations for establishing the project of moral personhood at the state level in Africa. The first major recommendation is that the traditional community needs to reevaluate its criteria for evaluating the personhood of its members, in a manner that makes members accountable to the community for deeds done toward wider societies such as the modern state. And the second recommendation is that we need to make it easier for traditional communities to do this by restructuring democracy in Africa in ways that make traditional communities feel they are genuinely part and parcel of the state project in Africa. I make a few suggestions about such a restructuring....