The state and its competitors in African(a) political thought

In this dissertation I argue that the core of the anticolonial project of the postcolonial state was to secure dignity for its people and that the normative yardstick for its success or failure should be whether it has secured such dignity. While maintaining the salient critiques of state failure literature, especially the critiques of its racist and colonial foundations, I argue that we should nonetheless have criteria for declaring a postcolonial polity failed, and it is these criteria I develop in the thesis. I also argue that state failure can and sometimes should be succeeded by the adoption of alternatives to the state, including anarchic alternatives. Given the record of the state in relation to the realisation of dignity, I argue that anticolonial utopia may in fact only be realisable at a distance from the state. To make this argument, I revisit the twentieth century debates that surrounded the coming-into-being of the postcolonial state forms, the record of the state especially in East Africa, and the alternative forms of polity that coexisted with and even challenged the state—what I call the state’s competitors.