Stephen M. Magu 2021. Explaining Foreign Policy in Post-Colonial Africa. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, XVI + 349 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-62929-8 (hbk), €128,39; ISBN 978-3-030-62930-4 (ebk), €96.29.
Explaining Foreign Policy in Post-Colonial Africa, by Stephen M. Magu, is a welcome addition to the increasing number of books dealing with African agency within the international sphere.6 While books about the domestic politics of African states abound, a flurry of books and articles during the 1960s and 1970s that sought to disaggregate the components and dynamics of what informed post-colonial African foreign policies have faded out. Therefore, this is a welcome book and an interpretation of the considerations that have informed the choices made.
Comprising nine chapters, Magu undertakes a tour de force. Chapter 1 deals with issues around the early developmental stages of post-colonial foreign policy. Chapter 2 seeks to locate the discussions within several conceptual
In writing this book, Magu posits that any such endeavour that seeks to articulate an African foreign policy ‘evokes intellectual disquiet, even suspicion’ (p. 1). But this does not need to be so if and when the boundaries of what is being undertaken are clearly spelt out. And herein lies the books greatest weakness: in all the chapters, there are too many topics and subject matter areas that (a) are not linked to the title of the chapters, (b) include various digressions that lose the reader, (c) use way too many acronyms that are left unexplained, and (d) mention tectonic developments only in a cursory manner. Overall, there is a general disjointedness among the different chapters that makes it difficult to grasp the core arguments being presented in a succinct and clear manner, especially for those who are not conversant with Africanists.
A critical fallacy that Magu unintendedly perpetuates is the argument of the ‘largely ineffective’ inability of the OAU ‘to address the most critical issues’ (p. 6). Perpetuating this fallacy in a potentially useful and informative book is untenable. The OAU was established specifically to achieve three things: (a) decolonise the continent, (b) respect the colonially inherited boundaries, and (c) end apartheid. The OAU managed to achieve all these issues, albeit against momentous challenges. To denigrate this success in the light of the nature of the international system, which resisted African endeavours to demonstrate African agency, needs a revision. Other superfluous statements hardly help clarify the critical focus of the book. Magu postulates that ‘[m]ost issues affecting African countries can generally be classified as domestic policy, or
While seeking to present a critical take on discourses about how foreign policy is practised in Africa’s post-colonial societies, too many oversights and hasty and wrongful factual presentations suffuse the work in an unacceptably unfortunate manner. For example, considering this quote, ‘the actual practice of non-alignment was most unsuccessful’ (p. 10), one wonders what the criteria for this conclusion have been. The same applies to the characterisation of the successful actions by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in The Gambia in 2017 as a ‘near-intervention’ (p. 12). Moreover, applying a bureaucratic politics model to explain foreign policy-making processes, the author posits that ‘weak domestic audiences and lack of checks and balances mean that executives single-handedly make decisions’ (p. 40). Not only is this a fallacious and porous argument, but it also certainly overlooks and shows a gross misunderstanding of the policy formulation and implementation processes in most African countries. Historicising aspects of the analysis to ensure that particular epochs are well captured would have helped the author to limit the criticisms that might arise from such generalised statements. Certainly, since the early 1990s and even in the immediate post-independence period, there were processes that sought to curtail executive power and control over policy processes.
Although the above arguments have pointed out several difficulties and weakness of the book that detract its potential usefulness to students and teachers, there are several specific subsections in different chapters that can be useful to the general reader. Here, I want to highlight chapters 8 and 9, which sought to shed light on decisive, positive, and concerted African engagements in changing both the narrative and instituting policies, identifying new partners for engagement through the BRICS framework, and imagining an alternative future for the continent. In this way, Explaining Foreign Policy in Post-Colonial Africa is a useful and welcome addition to the panoply of literature on Africa’s post-colonial politics. However, its potential has not been fully demonstrated and will need fundamental and extensive revision to make its arguments more incisive and appreciated.
The author is an assistant professor of political science at Hampton University, USA, where he teaches courses on history, international relations, and political science. In addition to his academic writing, he has also published two volumes of poetry.