Ethnic Diversity, Liberty and the State: The African Dilemma.

• Author: AHIAKPOR, JAMES C. W.
• Position: Review

Ethnic Diversity, Liberty and the State: The African Dilemma By Mwangi S. Kimenyi Cheltenham, Eng., and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1997. Pp. viii, 126, paper.

Few Africans today would not regard the state of African societies and their economies as regrettable and a serious embarrassment. After decades of costly struggle to rid themselves of the indignity of colonial domination, people in many African countries find themselves caught up in civil wars, brutal military or civilian dictatorships, economic degradation, and hopelessness. Even where there are semblances of parliamentary democracy, the requisite rule of law, freedom of the judiciary, the press, and association by individuals are often missing. Professor Mwangi Kimenyi writes about this state of affairs in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kimenyi traces the African problem, or dilemma as he terms it, to the diversity of ethnic groups, many of which were forcibly and incongruously placed under common central governments by the Berlin Act of 1885. He concludes that the solution is to redraw the boundaries of African countries so that they become consistent with ethnic identities, because it is apparently impossible for different ethnic groups to live together.

In places, however, Kimenyi does not stick with the logic of his argument, attempting instead to prescribe constitutional designs by which different ethnic groups may yet live together to take advantage of the economies of scale in the production of certain social services. His difficulty in following a consistent logic appears to flow from his attempt to equate the African condition with the "Hobbesian jungle" (p. 4) in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." That situation, he argues, results from the exercise of unlimited powers by governments; hence he accepts the Lockean prescription of governments whose powers are constitutionally limited. Readers inclined to appreciate the logic of John Locke's argument for constitutionally restrained governments as a means of preserving individual liberty might look forward to the development of Kimenyi's argument in the book, but they will be disappointed.

Kimenyi does not explain why countries in other regions of the world such as Asia, Latin America, eastern and central Europe, and the former Soviet Union did not experience the chaos he calls the "Hobbesian jungle," although their governments acted very much without restraint in violating the rights of their citizens...