All posts tagged contemporary Africa

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.

Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.

Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.

Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.

Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom.

Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.

A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

conflict
elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
landed wealth
weak social norms
the curse of natural resources
high inequality
corruption
ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
Experiment, based on the results of the search.
Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

Poverty in the UK

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services, sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

I walked inside [the former Belgian restaurant in the Congo town of Kalemie] to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a Congolese lady stood behind it.
‘Do you have anything I could drink?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything I could eat?’
‘No.’
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, page 103)

In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.134)

The Congo river system is potentially one of the most valuable assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.295)

As the lurid title suggests, Butcher is a journalist, not a historian or scholar. He was appointed Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and this book is a colourful description of his self-appointed task of repeating Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition across central Africa, from Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika, across country for 500 kilometres until he hit the River Congo, and then 3,000 or so kilometres down Africa’s second longest river, right down to the sea, beyond Boma – a journey he undertook in August 2004 (just as the Athens Olympics were about to start, p.322).

Limited use as a reference

Early on, Butcher inadvertently indicates the limits of his journalistic style or knowledge or interest or research, when he knocks off a description of the Rwanda genocide and how it unravelled into the two Congo Wars, which themselves degenerated into the Great War of Africa, in a mere two pages (13 to 14).

As it happens I’ve read about six book-length or chapter-length accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the wars which followed, all of which go into vastly more detail about this complicated and terrible sequence of events, and so I flinched a bit at the superficiality and, in my opinion, errors in Butcher’s brief summary. He has an interviewee say that Mobutu ‘invited’ ‘the Hutu gunmen’, the interahamwe, to flee into Zaire. He writes that ‘the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government’ then sent troops to support Laurent Kabila’s insurgency (p.13).

This is not only very simplified but, in my opinion, actively misleading. It wasn’t just the interahamwe that fled into Zaire but the entire Hutu government and administration which had planned and carried out the appalling genocide of the Tutsi minority. Justifiably terrified of being captured and punished for their crimes, the Hutu administration terrified millions of Hutus into thinking the invading Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front would take revenge on them for the genocide, and so it turned into a mass exodus of a large part (about a quarter) of Rwanda’s population across the border into Congo.

It’s true that Mobutu had a long-standing close relationship with the Hutu leadership of Rwanda, but he didn’t ‘invite’ the fleeing génocidaires nor their million peasant compatriots into his country, they just crossed the border and presented Mobutu with a crisis (and an opportunity).

Butcher skips any explanation of the pre-existing civil war in Rwanda which was the context for the genocide and helps to explain it. Nowhere in the book does he mention the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), or its leader and still the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, or the key role the RPF played in ending the genocide when the entire international community (the UN, Britain, America, France) was standing by and letting it happen (to our eternal shame).

He nowhere explains that the Hutu génocidaires established an iron control of the vast refugee camps just inside the Zaire border and used them as bases to launch attacks against Tutsi villages inside Rwanda, continuing the genocide on a small scale while marshalling their resources to launch a re-invasion with the aim of completing the job of exterminating all the Tutsis.

He nowhere explains that the new Rwandan government of national unity repeatedly complained about the Hutu exiles to the Congo government of Mobutu, and begged the UN and international partners to step in and stop the raids and to rein in the Hutu génocidaires but that, once again, the international community did nothing.

He doesn’t explain that this was why, after a year of putting up with this destabilising presence on its western border, the RPF-backed Rwanda government decided to do something about it: to send its army into the Congo, dismantle the refugee camps, force the Hutu population to return to their country with promise of safe passage and that they would be unpunished if they just returned to their villages, while at the same time chasing the genocidal Hutu leaders and their mass-murdering militia, the interahamwe, deeper into Congo with the aim of killing them and putting an end to their genocidal plans once and for all.

He doesn’t explain how Kigali found a willing partner in the government of Uganda, which contributed its own forces, and suggested they use as a fig leaf and front man for their invasion, the drunken, womanising guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been ‘fighting’ a small-scale insurgency against the Mobutu regime for 30 years and who they now put at the head of a new rebel force concocted for the purpose (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo). Nor that the initial operation was so successful that Rwanda and Uganda decided to send their forces on right across Congo to the capital, Kinshasa, forcing the ageing ailing dictator Mobutu to flee the country (May 1996) and installing their puppet, Kabila, as new president of Congo.

Butcher’s narrative gives the rough shape of these events but is, on my reading of the sources, wrong in most of its details, for example claiming that Rwanda and Uganda ‘backed’ a pre-existing military campaign by Kabila rather than Kabila being a convenient front man for an armed group invented for the purpose to cover an invasion entirely planned and led by Uganda-Rwanda.

It was when Kabila, safely established in power as the new president of Congo in 1997, began attacking his own Rwandan and Ugandan backers, ordering their troops to leave the capital, refusing to obey their orders any more, that Uganda and Rwanda, infuriated that their puppet had turned against them, mounted a second invasion, in 1998, to overthrow him.

This is why people refer to two Congo wars. The First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997 was the Rwanda-Uganda invasion to a) empty the Hutu refugee camps and b) overthrow Mobutu. The Second Congo War started in 1998 and was Rwanda-Uganda’s attempt to overthrow Kabila and impose a regime more friendly to them. It was this second invasion which got seriously bogged down because many of Congo’s neighbouring countries sent forces to support either the Kabila government or to ally with Uganda-Rwanda. Generally the alliances were influenced by deals to get their hands on Congo’s mineral resources. Thus Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe supported Kabila in exchange for access to minerals in Congo’s south-east, and so units of the Zimbabwean army found themselves fighting units from other nations in the tropical jungles of Congo, an expensive and bewildering waste of men and resources which distanced the Zimbabwe army from the regime (as described in Douglas Rogers’s account of the coup which eventually overthrew Mugabe).

This second conflict unravelled as not only forces from ten or so neighbouring countries got involved, but as regional warlords arose and seized control of different parts of the huge country. This is the complicated, multi-party conflict which is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa. Theoretically it ended with a peace treaty in 2003 but, on the ground, much violence continued in the form of roving bands of ‘soldiers’ or warlord-led militias, who emerged from the jungle, massacred villages, terrorised towns, looted all the food, raped all the women, murdered the men, then disappeared back into the jungle.

This, then, was the deeply insecure and scary environment in which Butcher planned to stage his recreation of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey down the Congo river. In the event, although he hears many rumours of roving warbands, although he hears from inhabitants of towns and villages of past attacks, and although he and his travelling companions race past small guard posts, he never in fact meets or has any encounters with any of the terrifying army, militia or tribal warriors.

I’ve summarised the events of the Congo wars in such detail because they are the vital backdrop to Butcher’s adventure, and because he refers to them again and again throughout the book, but mostly in what I regard as a misleadingly simplistic way. In particular I went from being puzzled to feeling a bit disturbed by his complete omission of the context of the genocide (i.e. the Rwandan civil war) and its cause (a deliberate policy of mass extermination in the name of Hutu Power), by his systematic downplaying of the genocide itself, by his complete omission of the name of the key organisation in both the civil war, the ending of the genocide, and the Congo wars i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and his preference for using the phrase ‘the Tutsi-dominated’ Rwandan government. The repeated use of this phrase cumulatively gives the impression that the source of all the disruption and violence in the region was the RPF-backed government in Kigali.

Now it is definitely true that the two Rwanda-Uganda invasions of Congo, first to overthrow Mobutu, and then to overthrow Kabila, massively destabilised the whole centre of Africa. But you have to understand that the RPF’s aim was to dismantle the Hutu regime which had just carried out the worst genocide of modern times, and then to overthrow the génocidaires’ main supporter, Mobutu, and install a government which would ensure that such a genocide never took place again. Unless you grasp that underlying motive for their actions you make it seem as if the Tutsi government was the unmotivated source of the disorder in the region. It certainly evolved into that situation, especially once all Congo’s neighbours piled in, but that wasn’t their initial motive.

The general thrust of Butcher’s account is correct and he repeats the outline of events several more times throughout the book, but almost all the fine details and the deeper background, which would help you make more sense of these tumultuous events, are either wrong or just missing.

In particular I found Butcher’s underplaying of the genocide (he mentions it but never dwells on what a truly horrific and regionally seismic event it was), his casting of the Hutus as helpless victims, and his continual nudging references to the violence across the region being caused by the ‘Tutsis-dominated’ government in Kigali, build up into a misleadingly incomplete and worryingly biased account of events. A casual reading of the book would lead you to believe that the Tutsis are the bad guys in the story and behind all the violence.

What I’ve just written is based on the following sources:

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)
In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michaela Wrong (2000)
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)
The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2
Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010) – 3 The Great War of Africa
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns (2011)

And, of course, Wikipedia:

But the same goes for Butcher’s versions of earlier events. On pages 58 to 59 he gives a brisk summary of the murder of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, which is heavy on gruesome detail (the acid used to dissolve the corpse) but very light indeed on the complex international and domestic crises Lumumba found himself facing and made considerably worse by his own troubled character and his chaotic and rash decisions, alienating the Americans who found him impossible to work with, then inviting the Soviet Union to send armed forces to help him put down secessionist movements, which alarmed all the Western powers, the Americans and the UN.

Again, Butcher’s account isn’t wrong, as far as it goes, but by focusing narrowly on Lumumba’s murder and heavily blaming the colonial power, the Belgians (Belgian army officers helped kidnap Lumumba then fly him to a remote part of the country, were present when he was badly beaten, then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave) Butcher’s account omits the six months of hectic crises which preceded it, and Lumumba’s role in exacerbating it.

He gives no sense of how Lumumba’s difficult character worsened the crises and, eventually, led everyone concerned (including many of his own ministers and his army) to believe that Congo would be better off with him out of the way and replaced by someone more stable and predictable.

I’m not defending these events. I’m just pointing out that Butcher’s zippy two-page account, focusing (like a thriller) on the gruesome events of the murder itself, omits the complexity of the context and so militates against a proper understanding.

For all these reasons I would actively advise against reading this book as any kind of authoritative source for the geopolitics of the region and the period. For that, the best place to start would be the outstanding ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’ by David Van Reybrouck (2010).

Chaps in Africa

So, having established Butcher as a poor source of historical description or analysis, I was, in a sense, freed up to read the book for what it really is: a boy’s own adventure story, a ripping yarn, a white man’s tale of derring-do in the heart of Africa etc.

The ripping yarn tone of the story explains the praise on the cover from an impressive list of white, public school-educated, male Africa hands who recognise one of their own. These include: Alexander McCall Smith, Giles Foden, John le Carré and William Boyd. Boyd is quoted as saying: ‘The day of the intrepid traveller is not over’, which can be translated as: ‘White chaps can still have ripping adventures in the jungle’, a slice of cheery public school optimism which, once you’ve actually read the book with its bleak descriptions of super violence, social collapse and cannibalism, you might come to regard as pretty inappropriate.

Look at me, I’m woke

Butcher is at pains to stay on the right side of the reviewers and modern woke opinion by lambasting the wicked colonialists who exploited Africa during the wicked colonial period (the evils of wicked colonialism are described or referred to scores and scores of time) with a vehemence typical of a certain sort of middle-aged, middle-class, literary white man.

But I found the same is true of his dogged insistence on the evils of colonialism as of his references to the origins of the Congo wars, namely he’s not wrong, but, after a while, you start to realise he’s not describing the issue in its full complexity. He is, after all, a journalist, and so he’s writing in catchy headlines and peppy phrases.

For example, in several places he elides the truly evil, wicked, genocidal regime of the disgusting King Leopold in the 1880s and 1890s with the much more benign rule of the Belgian colonialists after the Second World War. OK, maybe they still had the same racist, white supremacist beliefs, but, as his actual narrative makes abundantly clear, they no longer massacred entire villages and cut people’s hands off; instead the post-war colonial regime built airports and railways and roads, and ports and docks, and ran mines and plantations and businesses and, above all, maintained the peace, creating the basis of a potentially prosperous country. Eliding the two eras and their policies into one thing struck me as morally dubious but also historically and politically misleading.

At one point, in a typically jeering throwaway remark, Butcher says it was one of Belgium’s most notable blunders that they didn’t train up a cohort of educated native politicians and administrators to take over the running of the country when they left. This sounds fine but it’s really a cheap shot because the Belgian colonial authorities, just like the French and British ones, thought they would be running Africa for decades to come and so had plenty of time to create an infrastructure and slowly train up the indigenes.

None of them anticipated the sudden rush for independence which was triggered by the independence of Ghana (in 1957). In particular none of them anticipated a key factor, which I’ve highlighted in my reviews of, for example, Martin Meredith’s bleakly hilarious book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence’, which was that, once negotiations started, the African nationalist parties tried to outdo each other in demanding independence, soon, sooner, NOW!

With the result that the fiery nationalists at the conference called to discuss the future of the Belgian Congo demanded they be given independence within three months of the conference ending. Many commentators at the time thought this was wildly rash but they were, of course, all denounced as racist imperialists.

Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist is set against the backdrop of the crisis of 1960 and gives a lot of factual detail about the lead-up to Lumumba’s murder. Some of the secondary characters who the impeccably liberal protagonist meets at cocktail parties etc point out that the Africans are nowhere near being able to run a country, that handing over rule to them will lead to massacres, white flight and the collapse of the country into civil war and…they are treated as racist bigots, disliked by the woke hero, ignored by the politicians. Trouble is, those racist bigots turned out to be 100% correct and then some. Rushed independence turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the people of the Congo.

White privilege

Butcher takes every possible opportunity to slag off the wicked Belgian colonialists, but he is considerably less attuned to the way that he, a middle-class, well-connected white westerner, with thousands of dollars stashed in his kit, along with zippy technology (laptop and satellite phone) and possessor of tiptop connections to government authorities, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the press (his employer, The Telegraph newspaper) is only able to undertake the journey because of his (relative) wealth, his white privilege and his western privilege.

Quite a few times he walks into the offices of bureaucrats or confronts African officials who are notably more respectful of him than of their fellow Africans who they’ve just been bullying, simply because he is a white man. The entire journey is only possible because he is, by Congo standards, rich, because he has thousands of dollars stashed in his clothes and so is able to pay Africans hard cash to drive him through the jungle, canoe him down the river, and generally bribe his way out of trouble.

That William Boyd quote could more accurately be rewritten as: ‘The day of the intrepid [western white male] traveller [with lots of cash and connections] is not over’.

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s entire expedition is an attempt to recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s great expedition across country to, and then down, the mighty Congo River, in which he was accompanied by three white companions and over 300 African porters, and which took three long gruelling years, from 1874 to 1877.

As you might expect, this inevitably entails several summaries of Stanley’s biography and character, of the great expedition (pages 44 to 49), and Stanley’s narrative (and illustrations) are referenced throughout the book, in particular whenever Butcher arrives at a place which Stanley first visited, or a town he in fact founded (for example, the settlement of Stanleyville which he founded at the end of the series of treacherous rapids which he modestly named, the Stanley Falls). Inevitably, Butcher also references Stanley’s central role in opening up central Africa for the murderous genocidal regime of the truly evil King Leopold of Belgium.

But again, I found Butcher’s account good as far as it went, but it never goes much beyond the stereotype of the wicked, brutal racist Victorian explorer. Butcher takes the standard journalistic view that Stanley was a wicked, violent, racist who treated his hundreds of native porters with appalling brutality and didn’t hesitate to open fire on tribespeople who got in his way. All the subtlety and complexity about the man and his achievements to be found in the (obviously much longer) biographies like that of Tim Jeal (2007) are simply absent. Jeal doesn’t gloss over Stanley’s brutality, but places him in the context of his time, compares him with other explorers, and explains the challenges he faced, from the treacherous Arab slave traders who dominated the region, to the often violent and sometimes cannibal tribes Stanley had to deal with.

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (2007)

I’m not in the slightest exonerating Stanley: the work he went on to do for King Leopold, systematically swindling scores of tribal leaders out of their ancestral lands by making them sign contract with Leopold which they obviously didn’t understand and had no legal validity, was obviously wicked and inexcusable. I’m just saying that, as with the Congo wars and Lumumba’s murder, Butcher’s journalistic summaries of Stanley gloss over the far more complex, more fascinating and therefore more useful facts.

Butcher’s mum

The blurb, the preface and much of the text all emphasise that Butcher is setting out to recreate Stanley’s epic voyage of explanation down the Congo – but on pages 8 to 11 we learn of a much more homely, domestic motive for his trip. His mother did it.

Butcher’s mum was a jolly hockey sticks daughter of the empire who, aged 21 in 1958, was packed off to southern Africa, with a friend, as a sort of finishing school. She travelled from Cape Town to Salisbury (modern Harare in Zimbabwe). It was the very end of the colonial era and so all the countries she travelled through – South Africa, Rhodesia – were still run by white colonial administrations, and so there was law and order and a good travel infrastructure: planes and trains and ferries ran on time and regularly.

This applied just as much to the 1958 Belgian Congo which the two young gells crossed as the final part of their journey. Leopoldville was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline and the Congo’s chief port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean liners. Everything – trains, planes, ferries – worked like clockwork , staffed by polite porters and obliging stewards – and so Butcher’s mother, when he used to question her, had little or no memory of it.

Now, 45 or so years later (2004), the countries she travelled through have collapsed into dictatorship (Zimbabwe) or chaos (Congo), most of the infrastructure of the latter having collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle (railway lines and railway sleepers long ago dismantled and sold for scrap or burned as firewood; stations derelict; docks abandoned, as in a dystopian sci fi movie).

Butcher’s mum kept brochures and posters and timetables from her trip which Butcher describes poring over lovingly as a boy and young man. And so Butcher’s adventure has this second level, not only retracing the steps of the man who ‘discovered’, mapped, named and revealed central Africa to western readers in the 1870s and 80s – but at the same time moving through the surreal ruins of what had once been the thriving and efficient colonial infrastructure remembered by his mum and recorded in the various brochures and timetables she kept, circa 1958 (plus other 1950s documents and guides he acquired in preparation for his trip).

So: two sets of ghosts, and that’s just the white ghosts. Obviously Butcher discovers, once he enters the country, that he is also moving among spirits of all the African tribes who lived and died, fought and were enslaved, and, more recently, burned and looted, their way through the same terrain. (See Ryszard Kapuściński’s excellent book, The Shadow of The Sun, for extended descriptions of how belief in the spirits of the dead continue to saturate African culture.)

So Butcher’s trip is alive with resonances and echoes.

Kalemie

Butcher starts his journey in the port of Kalemie on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, which is where Stanley arrived with his huge expedition of over 300 porters, after having crossed country from Zanzibar and then crossed the lake from east to west. Instead Butcher kicks off his journey by flying there, direct from South Africa. I thought this was a slightly odd decision. To fully recreate the Stanley expedition he ought to have travelled overland from the Tanzanian coast to Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley did. It would have been interesting to have his description of modern-day Zanzibar and Tanzania, and would have maybe provided a useful contrast between one African country and another.

So anyway, Butcher flies direct to Kalemie on the western, Congo, side of Lake Tanganyika and it’s here that, after quite a few digressions about Stanley, his mum, the contacts he has drummed up in preparation for the trip, and the briefings he’s had, that he finally gets the journey started.

Kalemie straightaway provides a good example of the decline and decay all of Congo has fallen into, after 32 years of Mobutu’s systematic looting of his own country, zero investment and appalling corrupt local administration, followed by seven years (1997 to the time of his visit, 2004) of increasingly chaotic and widespread conflict. From a distance it looks like a modern town but once he’s landed and looks more closely:

What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls…Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station…An old railway carriage…stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of the compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots…Instead of a functioning high street what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals…Of the buildings themselves there was little beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs but eaten out huge holes through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons…Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working lightbulb…Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kelamie had been hollowed out by the years. Where there had once been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. (pages 85 to 85)

And this in ‘one of the biggest towns in the Congo’, a town with no state radio or TV, no newspaper, no landline phones and no internet, no petrol stations or cars, where the 1950s airport the Belgians built has become a bullet-riddled ruin (p.88).

This is what decades of neglect, lack of investment, lack of law and lack of local government produce, in a place ‘run by’ officials and administrators who do nothing but loot and steal and demand bribes for every transaction, a place where the state fails to provide either teachers or doctors or police (p.105). A key word or theme or image which threads through the text is ‘ruin’, along with its cousins, ‘derelict’, ‘wreck’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘abandoned’.

Going backwards

Butcher hires some guys to take him by motorbike (two bikes and their owners for security’s sake, and because they know the route) inland from Kalemie. The key fact to grasp is that there are no roads any more, let alone railways. In the 1950s guides and the memory of his mother (and other accounts from the 1950s, which he cites) the major cities and many of the towns were connected by good asphalt roads which the Belgians built. Every single one of these has disappeared and been swallowed back into the jungle. Several times he comes across vehicles buried under decades of tropical foliage and realises that the narrow track through the jungle where he’s standing was, 50 years previously, an open, asphalt highway busy with cars and lorries. Now all gone, disappeared.

Similarly, Congo’s main cities were joined by railway lines and all of these have disappeared. In some cases the metal rails have been removed along with the sleepers and all that’s left is a track worn flat by the trudging of African feet. In town after town he comes across derelict, abandoned railway stations. In one particularly vivid moment he’s struggling through thick tropical forest, the sky blocked out by interlocking trees swaying high above him, dense foliage pressing right up against the narrow path he’s pushing his motorbike through when his boot clunks against something metallic. When he squats down and scrapes away at the thick soil and undergrowth at his feet he is stunned to reveal a metal rail. Beneath his feet and completely swallowed up by raw jungle is a railway which was part of thriving, developing country just 40 years previously. He is staggered by how quickly, and how totally all these infrastructures have been utterly lost, by how swiftly the country has unravelled and gone backwards.

Butcher’s journey

So Butcher rides pillion on the back of a motorbike from Kalemie heading directly west, roughly following the old abandoned overgrown railway line which once ran alongside the River Lukuga and linked Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika to join the River Lualaba between Kabalo and Kongolo. But after a 110k or so they take an abrupt right turn, heading north towards Mukumbo, then onto Kabambarre, and then to Kasongo, a now-ruined port on the River Congo.

This journey doesn’t look much on the (very good) map in the book, but it was in fact a mind-boggling 500 kilometres. (The book contains one master map of the entire route, done in a professional cartographic style, and then each chapter of the actual narrative starts with a charming hand-drawn map of that particular leg of the journey, complete with hand-drawn dotted lines, place names, and distances. Sweet. And handy.)

Anyway, Butcher covered this awesome 500k on the back of a motorbike! Along rutted, narrow, earth tracks bounded by tropical rainforest and continually littered with tree roots, bumps and ravines, streams, gulley and occasional rivers. No wonder he got a sore bum!

He takes a (very basic) ferry across the river and, on the other side, contracts more motorcyclists to drive him through 200km more narrow winding jungle paths, via the (ruined) town of Kibombo and on to another riverside port, Kindu. It’s on this leg that he comes across the wreckage of an armoured car which was shelled and destroyed during a firefight on a major road paralleling the river. Now the road has completely disappeared and all that’s left is a rusting metal hulk, almost completely overgrown by jungle.

In Kindu he contacts the local UN station (‘Hi, I’m a white jounralist’) which agrees to convey him in one of their river patrol boats 150k north, to the riverside settlement (not a town, just a few huts on the muddy bank) of Lowa. Here the friendly, civilised UN sailors set him ashore, with much shaking of heads over his folly, and Butcher, very scared, approaches some local Congolese lounging near huge wooden canoes. He is greatly relieved when one of them agrees to take him by canoe, or pirogue, the 200k by river further north to the town of Ubundu. This man, Malike Bade, quickly recruits three other oarsmen and off they set.

Ubundu, the ruined town which had once been the thriving Belgian port of Ponthierville, marks the start of the 150k or so of rapids and waterfalls collectively (still) named the Stanley Falls. Butcher has to transfer from the river to dry land and hitches a ride with some motorcyclists who work for a western charity (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’), who have just delivered supplies to Ubundu and are now returning to their base at Kisangani, the big settlement which marks the end of the Stanley Falls.

It’s on this leg that he has the haunting experience of stumbling across a rail from the railway the Belgians built running north-south parallel to the river, now not only abandoned but completely buried by the tropical jungle (pages 248 to 249).

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards. (p.249)

Kisangani is the first town in nearly 1,000 kilometres which has proper roads, car, electric power, hotels worth the name, and running water, and bed with clean sheets, so he has an orgy of showers and sleeping and eating proper food, and then more showers and more eating and sleeping.

He discovers Kisangani may look like a big functioning town but most of the infrastructure here, as everywhere else in Congo, is in ruins – the ruined railway station and the ruined harbour, the riverside cranes which look so impressive from a distance but haven’t worked for decades, broken beyond repair:

a shell, prone to spasms of political anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians…It owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers. (p.255)

And the local politicians do everything they can to undermine even these fragile elements of stability. A few months before he arrived in Congo there had been conflict in the profoundly unstable Bukavu region far to the east on the Rwandan border, with reports of Rwandan forces massacring Congolese. Instead of calming opinion, Kisangani’s officials inflamed it and blamed the deaths on the UN for failing to protect the Bukavese, with the result that angry mobs went on the rampage, looting then setting fire to UN buildings, ransacking aid organisations’ offices and warehouses, while the so-called police stood by or even joined in.

When you read of events like this you wonder, why are we bothering to give money to help people who are so absolutely determined to ruin themselves?

I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world. (p.285)

A Catholic missionary, Father Leon, tells him about the notorious massacre of monks and gang rape of nuns which took place here in 1964 (24 November 1964, to be precise), was widely reported, and helped crystallise world opinion that Congo was slipping back into Stone Age barbarism (pages 270 to 274).

After five days Butcher moves out of his hotel and into the last large mission being run in the city, by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After two weeks of sounding out local ship crews and NGOs, trying to find a boat which will take him down the river, after numerous disappointments, Butcher eventually secures a ride on a UN patrol boat (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’) which will take him the 1,000 kilometres down the river to the port of Mbandaka.

On the way he becomes ill and weak with fever so that by the time he arrives at Mbandaka, he just can’t face another week or two or three hustling for his next ride down the river. Mbandaka is much smaller and more ruinous than Kisanagani was, so there isn’t even a hotel. God knows where he’d stay. Whereas the UN riverboat captain had told him that a UN helicopter service left the following morning for Kinshasa.

Reluctantly, but with great relief, Butcher travels the 600k from Mbandaka to the country’s capital, Kinshasa by helicopter. Here he is put up in the amazingly luxurious gated compound owned by a major international mining company, which won lucrative contracts by helping with the smooth transition of power after wily old Laurent Kabila was unexpectedly assassinated (16 January 2001) and succeeded by his completely inexperienced son, Joseph Kabila, aged just 30 at the time.

Only after days of showers, lots of sleep, taking a variety of medicines, eating proper food and drinking clean water in this rich, privileged western enclave, does Butcher feel human again, and in a position to decide what to do next. He consults with the senior guy minding the mining company compound who explains that there are no buses or taxis in Kinshasa. The only possible option is to pay to have one of the mining company’s cars and driver drive him along the only remaining road in the entire country (recently refurbished with foreign aid money) the 350k to the Atlantic port at Boma. So that is what he does.

In total the journey took him ‘six harrowing weeks’, 44 days, and was a dazzling, deeply depressing insight into the state of contemporary Africa.

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

As the Telegraph‘s Africa correspondent, Butcher is amusingly blunt: Africa is fucked, that’s his basic position. African nations were screwed by the colonial powers from the Congress of Berlin to independence (the 1880s to the 1960s); then suffered epic civil wars and/or the extended rule of vicious kleptocrats; and have now mostly fallen into states of disrepair, degradation, police states, autocracies, characterised by epic corruption, horrible everyday violence, and the regular occurrence of coups or civil wars.

The one constant through all these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don’t apply.

It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked my way through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety – from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano – and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro forma analysis…as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.

By the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability… (p.4)

Certainly, when it comes to Congo, Butcher regards it as a country which has comprehensively gone to ruin, a place which has not only ceased developing but is actively undeveloping, moving at speed back into pre-20th century, pre-industrial times.

The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you. (p.289)

Butcher has a map from 1961 which shows all the railways, roads, airports, mines and towns built by the Belgians. Now almost all of them are abandoned and have faded back into the jungle. The Great War has left the huge territory divided between regional powers, armies and militias or just local bandits, any of whom might stop and shoot you for no reason.

Butcher is continually, vehemently rude about the white man, about colonialists, about outsiders who came into Congo, and is much consumed by the white supremacist, racist, arrogance which thought it knew what was best for the Congolese. Again and again he makes the same point.

And yet very often, in the very next paragraph, he goes on to describe at great length, and very upsettingly, just how completely Congo was devastated by its kleptocratic rulers, by Mobutu and his clique in faraway Kinshasa, who developed the cult of the leader of the nation while all the while stealing every last dollar from their people, building grotesquely luxurious palaces and villas, buying scores of properties around the world, while the infrastructure of entire provinces such as Katanga collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle.

And then he goes on to describe the work of the United Nations which strives hard to bring the warring sides in Congo’s endless conflicts to the negotiating table, which expends a small fortune trying to police the ceasefire at locations all across this country as large as a continent. For example, the story of Kisangani which saw horrific levels of violence in various civil conflicts, whose infrastructure and economy collapsed, and is nowadays only just about propped up by the UN and western NGOs, when the local population aren’t ransacking them.

The point being that, no matter how woke, anti-colonial and politically correct Butcher tries to be in his editorialising, the blindingly clear conclusion from his long, gripping narrative is that the Congolese simply cannot rule themselves. (p.319).

As soon as they tried to (June 1960) the place collapsed into a series of civil wars along with tribal massacres on a hair-raising scale, and now, as he writes (2004), 43 years after independence, Butcher’s journey amounts to an odyssey through a country which has not only failed to develop but is, to use his powerful neologism, undeveloping, with communities all across the country deprived of the clean water, electricity, communications, industry, travel infrastructure, even minimal education, even the most basic medical facilities, all things they took for granted under the Belgians.

Now it’s all gone, decayed, corroded, overgrown, crumbled to dust, and the country has reverted to its African origins: impenetrably difficult to travel across, riddled with disease (cholera from the water, malaria from the ubiquitous mosquitos) and infested with blood-thirsty, savage warrior bands, who arrive out of nowhere, kill all the men, rape all the women, burn the village to the ground, then disappear back into the jungle.

It’s a tropical hell. It’s Hieronymus Bosch in the jungle.

Summary

As I’ve probably stated at too great a length, I was unhappy with Butcher’s journalistic and rather superficial descriptions of many key aspects of Congo’s modern history. And I am gently mocking of the contradiction that, despite his insistent criticism of colonialism and white racism and imperial exploitation etc, it is only because he is a white westerner and (relatively) rich that he can pay the locals to ferry him wherever he wants, waltz into UN offices anywhere in the country and not only get their attention but persuade them to help him out (by boat, by bike, by helicopter). He’s a white man. Of course they’ll help.

But what I haven’t emphasised enough is that Butcher is also a cracking writer, with a great eye for detail. His descriptions of the jungle, the ruined settlements, primitive villages or scary cities (like Kisangani) are vivid and compelling. It’s a gripping, exciting read.

And also, Butcher has a knack for interviewing people or getting them to tell him about themselves and stories about their trade, village, town, or local history. Obviously these stories are tidied up and made fit for western consumption, he’s a journalist, that’s what he does. But he talks to a wide range of people who begin to build up a sense of opinions and experiences from right across this vast country.

(There are obvious omissions: he never speaks to anyone from any of the armed militias which, according to his interviewees, roam so much of the jungle, emerging to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but then journalists rarely do. They’re not the kind of people who make for compliant and articulate interviewees and so their voices are consistently absent from most western accounts.)

So although there are better books to go to in order to to understand the recent political and military history of the Congo, Butcher’s sweaty, fearful, sleepless, buttock-bruising account gives you a really vivid feel for what the country and its actual population – thousands of miles from the slick government spokesmen and official narratives of downtown Kinshasa – are really like. And a vivid and almost overwhelming sense of the dreadful fate, almost complete social collapse back into the Stone Age, which so much of it has undergone.

On the long slow journey down the river aboard a UN patrol boat (more accurately, a primitive tug or ‘pusher’) Butcher finds himself audience to an impassioned diatribe by the Malaysian captain, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who explains that Malaysia, like Congo, was colonised for centuries; Malaysia like Congo was subject to a cruel racist colonial masters (the British); Malaysia gained independence about the same time as Congo (1957 and 1960); Malaysia like Congo was dragged into Cold War conflicts. And yet, 50 years later, Malaysia is part of the world, has achieved great things in education and health, has a booming economy, they even host a Grand Prix every year. While Congo is collapsing year by year into pre-industrial, Stone Age poverty. Why? Why has Malaysia stormed ahead and Congo fallen so far behind? The skipper:

had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? (p.310)

Credit

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher was first published by Chatto and Windus in 2007. References are to the 2008 Vintage paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Books & Boots

All posts tagged contemporary Africa

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

Limited use as a reference

Chaps in Africa

Look at me, I’m woke

White privilege

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s mum

Kalemie

Going backwards

Butcher’s journey

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

Summary

Credit

More Africa reviews

Follow

Topics

Categories

Books & Boots

All posts tagged contemporary Africa

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

Background

Planners and Searchers

The War on Terror

Politico-philosophical traditions

Capitalism versus communism

The conditions for markets

No cheating

Trust networks

Mafias

Property rights

Britain versus France

The failure to westernise Russia

Bad government

Security from violence

Reasons why good government may not take hold

Part 2. Aid in practice

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Conclusion about the book

Thoughts about the West

Credit

Related links

More Africa reviews

Share this:

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

Limited use as a reference

Chaps in Africa

Look at me, I’m woke

White privilege

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s mum

Kalemie

Going backwards

Butcher’s journey

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

Summary

Credit

More Africa reviews

Share this:

Follow

Topics

Categories