State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin Pierre-Yves Le Meur ABSTRACT Kopytoff’s model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre-colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre-colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post-colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out- and in- migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non-state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post-colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state-led forms of ‘villagization’. Igor Kopytoff’s internal frontier thesis has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre- colonial Africa. In his seminal book The African Frontier (1987), he proposes a general interpretative model placing mobility at the centre stage as a structural feature in the production of the social and political order. ‘The African frontier we focus on consists of politically open areas nestling between organized societies but “internal” to the larger regions in which they are found — what might be called an “internal” or “interstitial frontier”’ (ibid.: 9). This genetic approach to the frontier is based on a continued sequence of fragmentation (production of frontiersmen ejected from their original soci- ety) and aggregation (production of adherents as kinsmen and later subjects) (ibid.: 16–17). One crucial point lies in the construction of an ‘institutional vacuum’: [T]he frontier also arises out of subjective definitions of reality: societies often define neigh- boring areas as lacking any legitimate political institutions and as being open to legitimate I would like to thank Jean-Pierre Jacob warmly for his comments, as astute and stimulating as usual, and Lara Colo for her careful proofreading. Development and Change 37(4): 871–900 (2006). C Institute of Social Studies 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA 872 Pierre-Yves Le Meur intrusion and settlement — this even if the areas are in fact occupied by organized polities. In brief, the frontier is above all a political fact, a matter of a political definition of geographical space. (ibid.: 11) Another important aspect of Kopytoff’smodel rests upon the idea of ‘institutional bricolage’ (in Mary Douglas’ssense: he does not use the expression). Frontiersmen and their followers resort to the existing stock of cultural and normative patterns in order to build a new polity. This would explain the elements of continuity and reproduction underlying the whole process. ‘Our analysis has tried to take a shorter step — from the political ecology of the frontier and its constraints to the structural setting in which African political culture was perpetuated and to the shaping in this setting of certain fundamental and very often contradictory features of that political culture’ (ibid.: 76). As we will briefly see below, Kopytoff’s explanatory framework applies quite well to the pre-colonial history of central Benin, as far as the struc- turing position of segmentation and mobility in the (re)production of social and political order are concerned. One could thus ask if the model validly expands beyond the rupture of the colonial conquest and if it has ‘something to say’ about the trajectory of colonial and post-colonial states in Africa. Drawing on the case of Central Benin,1 I will argue that one can interpret the colonial intrusion, at least partly, in terms of frontier dynamics. First, its conceptual (ideological) basis is about filling in — actually constructing — an institutional and moral vacuum, the latter (absent from Kopytoff’s framework) working as a justifying principle for the whole. Second, despite the objective of territorializing domination through coercive and administrative procedures, colonial governmentality (Pels, 1997) has allowed new patterns of mobility to emerge that have strongly influenced the local politics of be- longing and resource control in central Benin. In- and out-migration flows have transformed the conditions of access to land and control over labour, giving the frontier institution of tutorat (sponsorship) a central position organizing relations between autochthonous landholders and migrants along a 1. I first came to Gbanlin (an administrative village in the commune of Ouesse, Département des Collines) in 1993 for a short collective inquiry within the framework of a programme on democratization and local powers in rural Benin (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1998, 2003). I carried out individual fieldwork within the same programme in 1995, taking over from the rural sociologist Cyriaque Adjinacou who did fieldwork in 1993 before beginning to work with PGRN in Ouessè (Adjinacou, 1995; Le Meur, 1998; Le Meur and Adjinacou, 1998). I returned to Gbanlin in 2002 and 2004, this time for an INCO project funded by the European Union on ‘changes in land access, institutions and markets in West Africa’ (CLAIMS). The work is still in progress (see Le Meur, forthcoming, on delayed decentralization viewed from the local level). Julien Barbier, an MSc student from CNEARC (National Centre for Agronomy in the Tropics, Montpellier) did fieldwork under my supervision in 2003/04 (and together with me in January and February 2004; see Barbier, 2005). In this article, use is made of documents from the National Archives of Benin (ANB); unless otherwise stated, translations from the original are my own. State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Benin 873 patron–client pattern (Chauveau, 2006). This link has ruled access to land in close connection with service and labour exchanges. Beyond its dyadic form, it has up to now constituted the core unit of the government of people and resources in this frontier context, interacting with politico-legal bodies (chieftaincy, hometown associations, village councils), and state and development interventions. I will further argue that the political frontier metaphor provides us with a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making in post-colonial Benin. State making is here conceived as the unpredictable (and often rather unstable) outcome of organizing practices (Nuijten, 2003: 10–12) taking place inside and outside state and non-state organizations and arenas.2 In this respect, the development aid apparatus has been playing an increasing role since the late 1980s in Benin, as a structural feature of the national political economy (or as ‘development rent’; see Bierschenk, 1993; Le Meur, 2000) and as part and parcel of the state-making processes. Resorting to the interstitial frontier approach is productive here, especially as regards the discursive practices inherent in development as both an ex- ogenous intervention and a set of institutions. As we will see in the example of an externally funded natural resource management project, some of the main frontier features, such as the conquest of areas imagined to be ‘institutional vacuums’, are filled in by standardized committees and give room for entrepreneurs’ and brokers’ strategies. Segmentary tendencies and cultural conservatism (see Kopytoff, 1999) underlie the functioning of projects as the co-existence of diverging stories about their arrival and implementation, stories fuelled by the combination of different narratives and ideologies (of modernization, of democratic participation, of autochthony, of territory and village, of kinship, and so on).3 Denying the relevance or the very existence of alternative local stories (that is: of actions and knowledge too) constitutes a factor (among others) that contributes to the political creation of an institutional and cognitive vacuum (see for example Bierschenk, 1988; van der Ploeg, 1993). These effects are strengthened by the non-systematic nature of development, selecting intervention areas according to obfuscating crite- ria and favouring the weakly reflected notion of pilot-project.4 Generating and bearing complex flows of resources, techniques and ideas (Appadurai, 2. My argument is thus situated, as it were, ‘beyond’ Berman and Lonsdale’sdistinction (1992: 5) ‘between state-building, as a conscious effort of creating an apparatus of control, and state-formation, as an historical process of conflicts, negotiations and compromises between diverse groups whose self-serving actions and trade-offs constitute the “vulgarisation of power”’. 3. Here I follow Sivaramakrishnan (2000: 432) who writes that ‘development — as it is imagined, practised, and re-created — is best described as stories that can change in their telling, as they are pieced together into contingently coherent narratives. Development’s stories are rife with a micropolitics often obscured by the consistency or more orderly

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