POL301Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: African Political Systems, Sub-Saharan Africa, Meyer Fortes
Document Summary
Using weberian state model to analyze the african reality, focusing on pre-colonial and post-colonial politics and the critical juncture of colonialism. Conventional view on the african state? from arbitrary colonial administrative units designed as instruments of domination, oppression and exploitation. No doubt after some 40 (now 50) years of independence these states have been transformed, adopted, (cid:498)the contemporary state in sub-saharan africa is not african. Defining the modern state: definition now used for all modern states: three sources of legitimacy, 1. Perspectives on precolonial african political systems: fortes and evans-pritchard, in 1940, british anthropologists meyer fortes and e. e. Pritchard proposed a typology of african political systems: 1. Centralized state societies with centralized authority and judicial institutions (cid:523)the term they use is (cid:494)primitive state(cid:495)(cid:524) societies without any form of centralized gov(cid:495)t(cid:524: 2. Dispersed (cid:494)tribal(cid:495) societies (cid:523)i. e. the tiv of nigeria or the nuer: 4. Small autonomous local communities (also widespread in of the sudan)
