Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)

I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it – but it is not at all what I expected. With the title ‘Dictatorland’ and a photo of an African dictator on the cover, I expected it to be an entertaining romp through the careers of Africa’s most notable dictators and kleptocrats, and it certainly contains that element, with chapters describing the rise to power of the following notable crooks and dictators:

• Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo)
• Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
• Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)
• Sani Abacha (Nigeria)
• Francisco Macías and Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea)
• Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast)
• Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)

Kenyon gives potted biographies consisting of short, punchy sections, scenes depicting the origins, education and early years of each baddie, their early involvement with their country’s independence movements or army (training ground for most dictators) or with a nationalist guerrilla movement.

Then he moves on to gruesome snapshots from their years in power, their madcap schemes (Mobutu’s Versailles-sized palace and Houphouët-Boigny’s basilica in the deep jungle vie for winner of the most expensive African folly) – descriptions of their secret police and torture chambers (Equatorial Guinea’s Macías Nguema is estimated to have had up to a quarter of the entire population of his country executed, making him ‘one of the most brutal dictators in history’) – and then on to the inevitable economic collapse, and their final overthrow, leaving a country in ruins.

In telling these stories Kenyon gives excellent backgrounders on the colonisation of the relevant country; the behaviour of its colonial government; the rise of nationalist agitation during the 1950s; the fraught political manoeuvres around independence, and so on.

All these profiles and pocket histories are clear and authoritative. They make for an immensely enjoyable read which conveys a lot of historical information with a sure, light touch.

The geological context

BUT there is one more crucial aspect of the book which I hadn’t expected at all; this is that Kenyon places the careers of all his dictators within a broader, what you could call, geological context. The entire book starts not with the this or that imperial conquest of this or that part of Africa, as you might expect, but with a description of the earliest ancestor of the genus Homo which has so far been found in Africa, the so-called specimen LD 350-1.

The point is that this introduces a deep historical perspective, far deeper than the past century or so of political history, a deep perspective from which Kenyon describes the geological history of Africa, and in particular the origin of the high value minerals and resources which were to play such an important part in modern Africa’s history, namely copper, diamonds, gold and then oil.

So, for example, he tells us about the discovery of the enormous stands of diamonds in southern Africa which caused the white invaders to seize the land from its black African inhabitants, and then to start fighting among themselves. He tells us the origin of the de Beers company and why the Kimberly region got its name, none of which I knew before.

This ‘geological perspective’ provides a deeper historical context for the actions of all the imperial conquerors, the colonial administrators, and then the newly independent black African leaders. It shows how they all tended to be dazzled by, fall victim to, act on the basis of, lust for Africa’s mineral wealth.

This perspective explains why the first few years of Congo’s independence era were characterised by civil war when the mineral-rich province of Katanga tried to secede from the nation (with the help of the Belgian government which wanted to hang on to its copper and diamond industries). It helps you understand how the Great War of Africa (1998 to 2002) developed into a struggle between numerous factions and foreign armies to seize parts of the country rich in minerals (diamonds, copper, gold, cobalt).

In the same vein, chapter three isn’t about a dictator at all but consists of an extended, and very readable, history of the rise of oil as the central fuel of the twentieth century. Kenyon gives the history of oil discoveries, first of all in Persia, then in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, in the 1920s and 30s, the controlling role played by Britain – which still owned or ran many of those places – alongside the growing power of America and how, by contrast, for decades, no oil companies thought Africa would yield oil deposits.

The oil chapter introduces us to a number of white, European oil prospectors, from back in the glory days of prospecting, the 1950s. We meet more of them than we do Africans, especially the ones Kenyon has tracked down and interviewed, old white men in their 80s (men like Dave Kingston, Rex Brown, David Orser) who still remember the excitement of the primitive conditions they worked under in the deserts of Libya or the malarial swamps of the Niger Delta.

The point is that a lot of those early prospectors and the oil companies they worked for (BP, Shell, Esso) were dead wrong about Africa: certain parts of it turned out to be sitting on top of vast oceans of oil, starting with Nigeria, where oil was struck in 1956, and then in Libya in 1959, then offshore Angola.

But the deep political-historical point is that, just as the so-called winds of political change were sweeping through Africa, many if not most places on the continent were about to undergo a sweeping economic change which would see their entire economies becoming orientated around a handful of commodities, commodities which the West would not only discover and develop, but do everything in their power to keep their sweaty hands on.

The dictators didn’t plan it, but they came to power just as a handful of commodities emerged as the dominant factor in their countries’ economies and the key importance of this is that an industry like gold or copper or oil is a) highly centralised and b) generates fantastic wealth.

The coincidence of mineral discoveries with independence gave the dictators immense personal control about which foreign companies were awarded contracts and licences to mine and extract the resources, and taught the dictators how to cream off for themselves and their families, hangers-on and clients, truly vast fortunes, billions and billions of dollars.

To put it another way: although nobody understood it at the time, the mineralisation of the economies of so many African nations was to create and entrench the rule of dictators and elites who acquired obscene wealth, while their nations’ infrastructures fell to pieces and their populations starved in the streets.

Many resource-rich African nations were to turn into rentier states (p.225), a rentier state being ‘a state which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments…With virtually no taxes citizens are less demanding and politically engaged and the income from rents negates the need for economic development… Instead, the government essentially ‘bribes’ the citizenry with extensive social welfare programs, becoming an allocation or distributive state…In the words of Noah Feldman in his book After Jihad, “no fiscal connection between the government and the people. The government has only to keep its people in line so that they do not overthrow it and start collecting the oil rents themselves.”‘ (Wikipedia).

Dictators like Mobutu or the successive rulers of Nigeria dealt solely and exclusively with multinational corporations dealing in oil, copper, diamond or gold, raking in fortunes from licensing fees and a cut of the profits.

With this guaranteed income the rulers of rentier states do not need to consult the population (no need for pesky elections) because their administrations aren’t reliant on taxation the way ‘normal’ western states are; with a guaranteed income not reliant on elections or representative assemblies of any kind, billionaire dictators become ever-more detached from conditions in their countries which they let go to rack and ruin. They can spend a fortune on building up a state-of-the-art military and still earn enough in corrupt rake-offs to build a palace in the jungle and hire Concorde to fly in ice cream from Paris (as Mobutu did) or build the biggest most expensive folly in Africa (as Félix Houphouët-Boigny did), while their populations see their standard of living collapse, prices hit by hyper-inflation, food become rarer, drinking water unavailable, and ultimately starve.

Back to Kenyon’s book, so it’s only after this long disquisition on the early history of oil exploration in chapter 3, that Kenyon returns to his ostensible subject, the dictators, in chapter 4. This gives an excellent summary of the 1969 Libyan coup staged by the Free Officers Movement which overthrew King Idris (friend to the West), and which installed what was supposedly a free socialist society, but which quite quickly came to be dominated by Colonel Gaddafi and became more and more authoritarian – spies and eavesdroppers in all public places, midnight arrest, torture and imprisonment without trial, the usual stuff. The point being, he was able to do pretty much what he wanted, set up a security state, claim to have invented a whole new political philosophy, and provide training bases for terrorist groups from around the world, because of the vast oil revenues his government acquired year after year without lifting a finger.

I expected a book titled ‘Dictators’ to consist of maybe a chapter each about Africa’s top ten dictators, amounting to an ‘Observer I Spy Book of African Dictators’ – but although that is, obviously, the ostensible subject, it’s not really the core of the text. It’s this geological or mineralogical context which is, arguably, the book’s most distinctive feature.

Contents

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

Clearly the topic of chocolate doesn’t quite fit into my initial suggestion that the book has a ‘geological’ or ‘mineralogical’ perspective. Chocolate is very much about geography, as I learned from Kenyon’s typically clear and interesting description, which explains that cocoa bean trees only grow in very restricted latitudes, in the right kind of tropical forest. The plant originated in South America but was experimentally introduced into Africa by Europeans, and nowadays Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are by far the two largest cocoa growing countries, accounting for over 60 % of global cocoa production.

Which is why, after chapter 7 introducing and explaining the history and development of cocoa in Africa, chapter 8 of the book focuses in on Côte d’Ivoire and the notorious figure of Félix Houphouët-Boigny who started out as a mild-mannered doctor, union leader, and cocoa planter himself, before winning election to the French Assembly and then becoming Ivory Coast’s first president, a position he held from 1960 to his death in 1993, making him the longest-serving leader in Africa’s history (a record subsequently beaten by Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017). So a chapter about a dictator, alright; but placed in the broader context of a history of the relevant basic resource.

Anyway, chocolate is obviously not a mineral, which left me a little stumped at how to give an overall summary of the book’s perspective. ‘A resource-based history of some dictatorial African rulers’? ‘A commodities-based explanation of African tyrants’? Not exactly catchy, are they? I can see why Kenyon’s publishers will have struggled to come up with a title capturing what it’s taken me three or four paragraphs to explain and how ‘Dictatorland’, although very catchy, doesn’t begin to convey this historical and resource-led backgrounding which I’ve been banging on about.

So: the book is not at all what I was expecting because its focus on precious resources makes it much more interesting, and much more penetrating, than just another purely political history would have done.

Lots of context, not so much analysis

A reviewer on Amazon points out that, entertaining and well told though the dictators’ stories are, the book lacks any kind of political or intellectual analysis.

Well, yes and no. Kenyon has no ideological axe to grind and amid his many anecdotes, his stories about oil, independence struggles, his very readable accounts of the early days and triumphant rises of his dictators, it’s true that there’s little or no effort to question or dig deeper.

If you compare him with Michael Ignatieff’s books about international affairs, the latter uses examples and interviews to make searching points about the nature of nationalism and society which I found immensely illuminating and useful. There’s nothing or not much like that here. Kenyon tells his stories, describes key scenes from each country’s history, interviews survivors from those times, very well and very readably, and that tends to be your lot.

The Amazon reviewer wanted answers to more theoretical questions like: Why has post-independence Africa been such a disaster? What is it in African culture which makes Africans incapable of ruling themselves? Is democracy impossible in Africa and if so, why? Kenyon never asks those kinds of questions. He’s a descriptive not an analytical writer.

Except that, arguably, the mineralogical and resource-focused context is his theory, his analysis, his explanation. His mineral and resource-based perspective in fact goes a long way to presenting an explanation which underpins many of Africa’s troubles, and which, although it may be familiar to experts, I hadn’t come across in the dozen or so other books about Africa which I’ve read or not, I think, considered in such detail.

His short reference to ‘rentier states’, so brief it doesn’t merit inclusion in the book’s index, is a mighty key which unlocks not just the behaviour, but the tendency to total corruption, and the longevity which characterised so many of the dictators.

That first generation of dictators, coming to power in the early 1960s, is now routinely vilified, but their longevity did ensure stability of sorts. Since their overthrows, whether in the 90s (Houphouët-Boigny), in the Arab Spring (Gaddafi) or later (Mugabe in 2017), their countries have often got even worse and the resource perspective explains why: it’s because the dictators weren’t followed by ‘democracy’ in any sense we in the West understand. The demise of the dictators resulted in the eruption of multiple groups, parties and leaders, including the ever-intrusive armies, who themselves set about squabbling for control of the narrow range of commodities which generate such obscene wealth.

The West and the aid organisations have been fighting a battle for over 50 years to persuade the ruling classes of African countries to give a damn about their populations, to invest in infrastructure, industry and agriculture, to make long-term plans to develop the country as a whole and thus remove their populations from poverty. Meanwhile the elites themselves have been engaged in often cut-throat competition to fight their way to the seat of absolute power which the first generation of post-independence rulers showed is the pathway to unimaginable wealth, power and prestige.

This deep economic and political conflict is still at work in many African countries to this day, it’s arguably the key to understanding African affairs, and Kenyon’s excellent, hugely readable, enjoyable and illuminating book really helps to explain why.

Let the facts speak for themselves

There’s one other really strong aspect to Kenyon’s narrative which I want to emphasise. This is his admirable ability to let the facts speak for themselves.

The last two books about Africa I’ve read – ‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong and ‘Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ by Tim Butcher – are both excellent in their ways, but irritated me because the authors banged on and on about the evils of imperialism and the racism of the colonial administrations, throwing these terms of abuse around on every page, repeating the same old accusations in the same old clichéd phrases, all the while generally downplaying the role of modern African rulers in Africa’s woes.

In my Wrong review I pointed out that simply venting the opinion that the colonial regimes were racist and exploitative, and insistently blaming ‘the West’ for everything that ever went wrong in Eritrea, soon becomes boring, irritating and, eventually, counter-productive.

By complete contrast Kenyon’s text is studded with facts, gives the facts, just the facts. For example, the opening chapter about diamonds states the facts about how the imperialists in the 1880s and 1890s stole the land from its native owners, in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in stark, straight, factual terms which really bring home the inexcusable iniquity of their behaviour.

Kenyon gives the facts about how local chieftains and rulers were swindled out of their land by crooked legal documents they didn’t understand, or simply driven off it at gunpoint; how Africans were corralled into small, unhealthy, infertile areas, while the whites stole all the best agricultural land (notably in Kenya and Rhodesia), or any land which showed signs of gold, copper or diamonds (South Africa in particular).

In the chapter about Mugabe Kenyon describes the surreal maze of passes and identity cards and papers which the British colonial authorities in what was Southern Rhodesia demanded that every African needed just to get around, just to walk down the street, how they had to step off the pavement if white people were walking towards them, how the slightest infringement of this world of rules triggered shouted abuse, beatings or arbitrary arrest.

In other words, Kenyon’s simple statements of the facts of imperial conquest, imperial land grabbing, imperial hypocrisy, imperial greed, the imposition of deliberately discriminatory, deliberately demeaning and humiliating regulations, at every level and every minute of an Africans’ life, is infinitely more powerful than Wrong or Butcher’s more generalised sloganeering about ‘racism’ or ‘the West’.

I don’t think Kenyon anywhere in the book uses the word ‘racist’ because he doesn’t have to. Kenyon’s plain, lucid stating of the facts of each of these issues does the same job but infinitely better; makes you quiver with anger, shrivel with embarrassment, and totally understand the rage and the impatience for freedom which drove agitators like Lumumba and Mugabe.

And this is another reason why I think this is an excellent book.

Eritrea

The very last chapter demonstrates Kenyon’s strengths and weaknesses. It gives a good account of the rise to tyranny of Isaias Afwerki, the man who rose steadily through the ranks of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to lead them to victory in the bitter 30-year-long war against Ethiopia, which finally came to an end in May 1991, with Ethiopia’s granting of Eritrea’s independence.

Kenyon tells the same story as Michela Wrong does in her long, digressive book ‘I Didn’t Do It For You’ in literally one-tenth of the space (one 44-page chapter versus Wrong’s 432 pages). Moreover, Kenyon’s account is more up to date, Wrong, published in 2005, hoping Afwerki’s regime might be overthrown or soften, Kenyon, published in 2018, giving the bad news that Afwerki’s regime not only didn’t soften but has become steadily more harsh and repressive.

Since independence Eritrea has had no elections, no constitution, no free press or media. It is almost impossible to gain entry to report on it. Eritrea commonly competes with North Korea as least free country in the world.

• Eritrea Country Profile by Freedom House

Also, Kenyon is balanced. Michela Wrong, as I’ve mentioned, comes over as very biased, repeating whenever she can the strongest criticisms of western nations like Italy, Britain and the West, very slow to blame anyone else (such as the brutal Derg regime in Ethiopia or its Soviet suppliers or the vile Afwerki), very slow to concede that the colonial period brought any benefits.

Kenyon, by contrast, feels fair and balanced. He clearly states that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imperialism at its most brutal, involving poison gassing of entire villages; but that the Fascist regime did then set about building roads and harbour facilities and wide boulevards and a modern infrastructure. Similarly, he mentions that the Brits asset stripped the country after they’d won it from Italy in 1940 but also introduced democracy, a free press and trade unions. In other words, he shows that the imperial legacy was mixed.

Something also emerges from Kenyon’s account which doesn’t so much from Wrong’s, which is the importance of the visit by Afwerki and a few other EFPL leaders to Maoist China in the mid-1960s. They arrived in the middle of the so-called Cultural Revolution and were very impressed by the zeal and sense of embattled virtue of the young Red Guards who rounded up the entire bourgeoisie and shunted intellectuals off to the country to work alongside peasants.

This more than anything explains how Afwerki went from being a hero of the independence struggle to one of the most repressive dictators in the world – because he knows no better. All he knows is The Struggle, and so he imagines himself surrounded by conspirators, a paranoia which is occasionally proven true because people have, understandably enough, conspired to overthrow him, and then was confirmed when was broke out anew with Ethiopia in 1998, and then 9/11 confirmed the rising threat from Islamists in the country, and then the civil war between Tigrayans from the north fighting against the Ethiopian government and so, you can see it from his point of view: there is constant struggle; the revolution is in continual jeopardy; only one man can save the revolution and save his country, and that’s why he can’t afford to hold elections. What if Islamists, if regional separatists, if rebels or traitors were elected? No, of course not. Only one man can save the nation, and he has to carry on his embattled lonely duty for as long as it takes.

And so another African dictator is born.

Wrong spends 400 pages trying to persuade us that it was Italy, Britain and the wicked West who are responsible for Eritrea’s current plight. In Kenyon’s account, both imperial nations were guilty of bad or atrocious acts, and the UN of foolish ones, but the real responsibility falls on Afwerki’s Maoist indoctrination, the man’s personal paranoia and delusions of destiny.

(The same goes, in spades, for the career of Paul Kagame who’s been at the heart of Rwandan Political Front (RPF) activity since the late 1980s and, like Afwerki, brought the paranoid style developed when the RPF was a small outfit hiding out in the mountains into office into general government when the RPF seized power in 1994, where this anxious guerrilla mindset has blossomed into intolerance of any dissent, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution worthy of Stalin or North Korea. See ‘Do Not Disturb’, the breath-taking indictment of the Rwanda regime, by Michela Wrong.)

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Credit

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon was published in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd. References are to the 2018 Apollo paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

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