All posts tagged Shell

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl (1984)

Born in 1916, Roald Dahl had his first short text (an account of crashing his RAF plane in the desert) published in 1942 i.e. aged 26.

As we all know, this marked the start of a long and stunningly successful career during which he wrote over 60 (increasingly macabre and gruesome) short stories, brought together in a series of collections for adults, most successfully under the brand name ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ to tie in with the 1970s TV adaptations – but more famously, from 1961 onwards, a series of books for children which made him one of the best selling and best known authors in the world.

Forty-two years after that first published piece, at the age of 68, Dahl published this, the first part of his autobiography. Except it isn’t a continuous and comprehensive autobiography at all. Instead it is, as he carefully explains in the preface, a series of memorable incidents and events which have stuck with him since boyhood. It is more like a series of episodes, hence the subtitle ‘Tales of Childhood’.

Boy follows a chronological order and is divided into sections mostly named after the teaching institutions he progressed through:

  1. Family background
  2. Kindergarten
  3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)
  4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)
  5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

The first sentence sets the tone:

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

So this, also, is a book for children, pitched to, what age group would you say? 7? 11?

Taken in the way it is intended, it is a brilliant read. Why? For its wide-eyed, childlike candour. For his tremendous excitement about everything he describes. Everything is the best, everything is vivid with excitement and enthusiasm. Everything overflows with child-like glee.

Looking a bit more closely, every sentence says something interesting. There’s no padding or fat. People and places are summed up with skill and economy. This gives the narrative tremendous pace because things are always moving on, stuff is always being discovered and described, and all with the winning enthusiasm of boyhood.

1. Family background

When his father, Harald, was 14 he fell off the roof while fixing some tiles and broke his arm. A drunk doctor injured it further and it had to be amputated.

His father and brother, Oscar, decided they had to leave the small Norwegian town they’d grown up in so they left for France. Uncle Oscar ended up in La Rochelle, a fishing port, where he ended up owning the biggest fishing fleet and canning factory.

Harald moved to Paris and set up a shipbroking company. The main fuel for shipping was coal. Where was the biggest coal port in the world, Cardiff, so Harald moved there with his young wife, Marie. Here Harald’s business thrived and he bought a big house at Llandaff, just outside Cardiff. Marie bore him two children but died soon after giving birth to the second. Heartbroken, Harald went back to Norway and found a second wife, Sofie, who bore him 4 children, one of whom was Roald.

Business boomed and in 1918, when he was 2, the family moved to a grand house in the village of Radyr. It had a small farm attached and was full of servants. Harald led a vigorous life, mountaineering and was an expert wood carver.

In 1920, when Roald was 3, his sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged 7. She was his father’s favourite and when Harald went down with pneumonia he didn’t put up much of a fight and died.

This left Sofie without a husband and provider and father to the remaining five children, and pregnant again. She could have sold up and gone back to Norway, where her father, mother and unmarried sisters would have helped out.

2. Kindergarten

Instead she sold the big house, bought a smaller one and, a few years, later, sent Roald, aged 6, to his first school, a kindergarten run by two old ladies. He remembers vividly the excitement of travelling there in his brand new tricycle!

3. Llandaff Cathedral School, 1923 to 1925 (age 7 to 9)

Two memories: one is of seeing an older boy cycle past him, taking his hands off the handlebars and crossing them on his chest. Oh how he wanted to be that boy!

Second memory is the sweetshop where he and his friends bought sherbet suckers and liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers and tonsil ticklers. Unfortunately this sweetshop is kept by Mrs Pratchett who is ‘a skinny old hag’ with a moustache on her top lip and a terrible temper.

The Great Mouse Plot

He and his friends discover a dead mouse and conceive the wicked idea of slipping it into one of Mrs Pratchett’s big sweetjars. And that’s what they do, while his friend Thwaites distracts her, Roald lifts the lid of the gobstopper jar and drops the dead mouse into it, quietly replacing the lid. What an achievement!

Mr Coombes

Next day they walk past the sweetshop to discover it closed. At school the headmaster calls the boys to an identity parade where, to their horror, Mrs Pratchett identifies them.

Mrs Pratchett’s revenge

Mr Coombes then canes them while Mrs Pratchett looks on approvingly. Worth quoting in full:

As the first stroke landed and the pistol-crack sounded, I was thrown forward so violently that if my fingers hadn’t been touching the carpet, I think I would have fallen flat on my face. As it was, I was able to catch myself on the palms of my hands and keep my balance. At first I heard only the crack and felt absolutely nothing at all, but a fraction of a second later the burning sting that flooded across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I gave a great gushing gasp
that emptied my lungs of every breath of air that was in them.

It felt, I promise you, as though someone had laid a red-hot poker against my flesh and was pressing down on it hard.

The second stroke was worse than the first and this was probably because Mr Coombes was well practised and had a splendid aim. He was able, so it seemed, to land the second one almost exactly across the narrow line where the first one had struck. It is bad enough when the cane lands on fresh skin, but when it comes down on bruised and wounded flesh, the agony is unbelievable.

The third one seemed even worse than the second. Whether or not the wily Mr Coombes had chalked the cane beforehand and had thus made an aiming mark on my grey flannel shorts after the first stroke, I do not know. I am inclined to doubt it because he must have known that this was a practice much frowned upon by Headmasters in general in those days. It was not only regarded as unsporting, it was also an admission that you were not an expert at the job.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered, my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames. (p.50)

Roald’s mother discovered the welt marks at that evening’s bath time and went straight round to the school to complain. Roald stayed till the end of that term but then his mother took him out of the school.

Going to Norway

From 1920 to 1932, from the ages of 4 to 17, the family spent every summer holiday in Norway. The many islands and the freedom and innocence remind of Tove Jansson’s memoirs.

Roald gives an exciting account of the complexities of packing all the baggage and travelling first to London, then by train to Newcastle, then by boat to Oslo where his grandparents lived.

He loved his Bestepapa and Bestemama, they always hosted a celebration feast when he and his family arrived, which features ‘a mountain of ice cream’. See what I mean by the way everything sounds brilliant, the sweets, the food the family, the journey, everything!

The magic island

Day after the feast the Dahl family caught a steamer to the magic island. Like everything, it is the bestest of the best!

Late in the afternoon, we would come finally to the end of the journey, the island of Tjöme. This was where our mother always took us. Heaven knows how she found it, but to us it was the greatest place on earth. (p.61)

And:

Breakfast was the best meal of the day in our hotel, and it was all laid out on a huge table in the middle of the dining-room from which you helped yourself. There were maybe fifty different dishes to choose from on that table. There were large jugs of milk, which all Norwegian children drink at every meal. There were plates of cold beef, veal, ham and pork. There was cold boiled mackerel submerged in aspic. There were spiced and pickled herring fillets, sardines, smoked eels and cod’s roe. There was a large bowl piled high with hot boiled eggs. There were cold omelettes with chopped ham in them, and cold chicken and hot coffee for the grown-ups, and hot crisp rolls baked in the hotel kitchen, which we ate with butter and cranberry jam. There were stewed apricots and five or six different cheeses including of course the ever-present gjetost, that tall brown rather sweet Norwegian goat’s cheese which you find on just about every table in the land.

Yummy! Then they’d take the small boat and go exploring the islands, hundreds of them, looking for ones with a little sandy back when he and his sisters were small, later on rocky ones which they could jump off into the sea. In the evenings they went fishing for mackerel and cooked them fresh.

I tell you, my friends, those were the days. (67)

A visit to the doctor

When he was 8, a gruesome trip to a local doctor who takes out his adenoids with no anaesthetic, slashing inside his mouth and extracting great clumps of flesh covered in blood. The child-focused nature of the text is made explicit:

That was in 1924, and taking out a child’s adenoids, and often the tonsils as well, without any anaesthetic was common practice in those days. I wonder, though, what you would think if some doctor did that to you today. (p.71)

4. St Peter’s, 1925 to 1929 (age 9 to 13)

First day

This was in Weston-super-Mare, from which you can look across the Bristol Channel and see Wales. Every boy had a Tuck Box containing all his treasures. Boarding schools were money-making machines and fed the boys as little as possible while encouraging them to write to their parents for ‘treats’. The school is long and low sitting in front of its sports pitches and the headmaster is a giant with a grin like a shark.

Writing home

Every Sunday morning every boy had to write a letter home. With Dahl the habit stuck and he wrote his mother at least one letter a week for the next 20 years, from 1925 to 1945, and she kept them all. When she died, in 1957, she left him a huge bundle of his letters, some 600 in total.

The matron

The dormitories are ruled with a rod of steel by the matron who is an ogre. One boy has a bright idea of scattering castor sugar along the corridor so they can hear the crunch-crunch of her arrival. This drives her into a fury and she calls the headmaster who goes red in the face with anger and confiscates all their Tuck Boxes with the result that the boys go hungry for the last 6 weeks of term.

Young Roald is terrified. He sleeps facing the Bristol Channel and therefore his family. It is a great comfort.

A boy called Tweedie snores in his sleep. the matron hears, is disgusted and tips soap shavings into his mouth, so he wakes up blowing bubbles. You can see where all the vicious tyrants in Dahl’s children’s fiction come from.

Homesickness

He is so homesick he decides to fake appendicitis to escape. The matron and headmaster fall for it so he is put on the paddle steamer across the channel to Cardiff, collected by his mother and taken to the family doctor who immediately realises that he’s faking it. He is kind, though, and tells Dahl that it was his (the doctor’s) idea to send him to boarding school. It will toughen him up and get him ready for life.

A drive in the motor-car

Home for the holidays and a hilarious account of a drive in the family’s new car, a De Dion-Bouton, with his eldest step-sister driving, which ends in quite a bad crash, with the glass windscreen half slicing Dahl’s nose off, hanging by ‘a single small thread of skin’ (p.103)! His mother sticks it back in place and they hurry as fast as the unnerved sister can drive, to the doctor’s, Dr Dunbar.

Here he has another operation, this time with a primitive chloroform cotton wool mask to knock him out. The doctor sewed his nose back on and it took. His mother hives him a gold sovereign for being so brave.

Captain Hardcastle

The stock monster teacher, Captain Hardcastle is short and wiry with vermillion hair drenched in brilliantine and parted in the middle. He has a giant orange moustache, teaches Latin and football, and has it in for Roald from day one.

The disaster comes during evening Prep (all the boys sit at desks in the big hall for exactly one hour in complete silence doing whatever task is assigned them) when the nib on Roald’s pen breaks halfway through writing an essay and he incautiously asks his neighbour for a spare. Hardcastle spots this and goes mad.

(This all occurs in 1926, the same year Evelyn Waugh was struggling to be a teacher at a boys preparatory school in Wales, the unfortunate experience which became the basis of his first novel, Decline and Fall.)

Dahl is given a slip to take to the headmaster who, despite all his attempts to explain, gives him six of the best. For the second time he gives a really super-vivid description of the different stages and level of agonising pain which result from caning.

Little Ellis and the boil

Roald is in the sick room with flu when he observes the doctor ‘treating’ the only other boy, young Ellis who has a huge boil on his inner thigh. The doctor throws a towel over Elli’s face and stabs the boil, turning the blade, so that Ellis screams his lungs out. Hardly anybody used anaesthetic on those days, even for dental procedures.

Goat’s tobacco

His eldest half-sister, the one he calls the ancient sister, starts dating an Englishman who accompanies them on their big family holiday. The entire family is irritated by his manly behaviour and poses and way of talking, and particularly by the way that he never removes the manly pipe he smokes from his mouth. So Roald plays a prank. The manly man has just stuffed his perishing pipe when the ancient sister asks him to go for a swim. He does at which Roald, in full sight of the rest of the family, tips the tobacco out and replaces it with goat pellets which he breaks up with his fingers and stuffs in the pipe before putting a thin layer of tobacco back over the top, with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

5. Repton and Shell, 1929 to 1936 (age 13 to 20)

Getting dressed for the big school

By now the family has moved to Bexley in Kent. His mother asks whether he’d rather go to Repton or Marlborough, two grand public schools. He chooses Repton because it’s easier to pronounce. It was September 1929 when, aged 13, he went off to boarding school. The entire chapter is devoted to the ridiculous school uniform he had to wear.

Boazers

Repton slang for ‘prefects’. These big boys could cane the small ones for almost any infringement. Yet again Dahl describes the mechanics of caning and the different techniques of the different ‘boazers’.

The headmaster

Dahl takes malicious pleasure in explaining that the headmaster of Repton, a charmless ‘shoddy bandy-legged person’, was later selected to be Bishop of Chester, and then Bishop of London, and then Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was none other than he who crowned Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

For he was a notorious deliverer of phenomenally painful and sadistic canings. Roald’s best friend, Michael, describes how the victim had to take down his trousers, kneel on the sofa in the head’s study with their head over one end, and then the head delivered ten severe strokes, in between filling his pipe and delivering a rambling lecture about sin and punishment.

On chapel the head maundered on about forgiveness but showed no forgiveness whatsoever when it came to caning young boys’ buttocks so hard that they bled – at which he handed over a basin, sponge and towel and told them to clean up the blood before leaving.

That this man was a vicar, and then a bishop, and then the Archbishop of Canterbury goes a long way to explaining Dahl’s lifelong atheism.

Chocolates

Surprisingly, boys at Repton were used as guinea pigs for new ranges of chocolates by Cadbury. they were sent boxes containing one standard and nine new experiments, and then asked to fill out forms. In a characteristically enthusiastic chapter he recalls this as the basis of his second children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Corkers

There were about thirty or more masters at Repton and most of them were amazingly dull and totally colourless and completely uninterested in boys. But Corkers, an eccentric old bachelor, was neither dull nor colourless. Corkers was a charmer, a vast ungainly man with drooping bloodhound cheeks and filthy clothes. He wore creaseless flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with patches all over it and bits of dried food on the lapels. He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be. His lessons consisted of an endless series of distractions all invented by him so that the subject of mathematics would never have to be discussed. (p.151)

These distractions involved getting the whole class to help him with the Times crossword or bringing in some live snakes to hand round.

Fagging

The humiliations of fagging including being one of the three fags who, every Sunday morning, had to clean Carleton’s study until it was as clean as an operating theatre. And he actually performed the cliché task of sitting on a freezing toilet seat in an outhouse to warm it up ready for a senior boy, Wilberforce, to use. In fact he becomes Wilberforce’s favourite bog seat warmer.

Games…

Dahl turns out to be brilliant at fives, a public school ball game quicker than squash. He becomes captain of fives which entitles him to wear a special colour on his straw hat and braid round his blazer etc. He ought to have been made a prefect or ‘boazer’ on account of this eminence but:

But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. (p.162)

…and photography

Dahl turned out to be a very gifted photographer. He got permission to construct his own dark room and took it very seriously. The sensitive art teacher helped him organise a final year exhibition of his work. When still only 18 he won prizes from the Royal Photographic Society in London.

Goodbye school

He doesn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge but to get a job in as remote and magical a distant land as he can. To his own astonishment he gets a job with Shell. He leaves school in July 1933 and starts the new job in September, just as he’s turning 18.

In his last term he’d bought a motorbike, stashed it in a garage up the road from school, and used to go out for wild rides around Derbyshire disguised in helmet and goggles. On the last day he hurtles away from Repton with no regrets.

He goes on a public school outward bound adventure to Newfoundland, which he discovers to be inhospitable and cold, but returns fit and resilient.

Two years as a trainee with Shell in Britain and then several months in head office learning the business. He commuted in from the family home in Bexley. And here he makes some quotable remarks about the appeal of a regular job, salary, predictable commute etc as against the commitment needed to be a fiction writer, worth quoting in its entirety.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (p.171)

Then Dahl gets his first placement abroad. To the managing director’s amazement Roald turns it down because it is Egypt. Flat and desert and sand and old relics – Dahl wants lions and tigers and excitement! To his surprise the managing director gives into his wish, gives Egypt to another intern, and a week later gets in touch to say Dahl’s posting will be to East Africa. He jumps up and down with excitement.

And that is where this book ends and its sequel, Going Solo begins.

Thoughts

A masterpiece of children’s storytelling, the book is notable for what it leaves out such as:

  • puberty and sex
  • friendships
  • intellectual development, discussion and debate
  • or even the basic central aspect of school, which is the subjects and the exams – none of these make an appearance

Old man blues

All this, you must realize, was in the good old days when the sight of a motor-car on the street was an event, and it was quite safe for tiny children to go tricycling and whopping their way to school in the centre of the highway. (p.23)

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous any more. (p.166)

But he’s right, of course. Cars have destroyed childhood and anyone can go anywhere now, often at Ryan Air prices, so that everywhere feels like the same huge shopping mall.

Credit

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1984. References are to the 1986 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Roald Dahl reviews

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Posted by Simon on May 27, 2024

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The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015)

The looting machine: the alliance between shadow governments and the resource industry that tramples over the people who live where oil and minerals are found.
(The Looting Machine, page 158)

Burgis is a reporter for the Financial Times. In his acknowledgements, he thanks numerous other writers and editors from the FT and, indeed, The Looting Machine, despite its lurid title, has the feel of an extended Financial Times special report, one about corruption all across Africa. There are attempts at ‘colour’ i.e. descriptions of places (luxury hotels in Luanda, open cast mining in Congo) but for the most part it’s facts and figures, names and details of contracts and, volumes of oil or iron and, everywhere, amounts of money money money. Which makes sense as it’s a book-length investigation of how so many African ‘leaders’ have stolen money, scores of billions of dollars, belonging to their countries and peoples.

Many of the ideas – about the nature of Africa’s resource-based, rentier states – are familiar but what distinguishes Burgis’s book is the detailed research he has done to unearth and record the names of (some of the) companies and individuals who are responsible for looting Africa’s wealth. Other books talk about the leader of an African nation ‘and his circle’ or ‘the elite’ in general terms, whereas Burgis names names, identifying the right-hand men of dictators in Congo, Nigeria, Angola, and delves into the shady companies and crooked deals they do. By ‘crooked’ I mean deals whereby corrupt governments sell their mineral resources in such a way as to cream off huge amounts for themselves, at the expense of official government coffers, let alone the needs of their populations, while also conniving in the anti-transparency, profiteering practices of the multinational corporations they’re in bed with.

21st century Africa

What really comes over is that my thinking about Africa is out of date. It’s all very well rehashing the standard old complaints about imperialism and the scramble for Africa and the wicked colonial regimes and the arbitrary borders they imposed which split up tribes and forced completely dissimilar peoples together. Or telling off ‘the West’ and ‘western governments’ for not holding African governments to account or not supporting democracy enough or giving enough aid to help women and girls etc etc, in the style of Michela Wrong or Tim Butcher: the West must do this, that and the other, do more to blah blah…

What comes over is that all those old issues, true as they are, have been superseded by the new world, the 21st century. In the new Africa:

  1. A lot of this is a lost cause; the power structures of crony capitalism, patronage politics and kleptocracy have been in place for over 60 years. It’s going to take more than a UN resolution or ‘the West’ stamping its feet to change the culture of places like Nigeria or Angola at this late stage. They are what they are. So-called elections just replace one faction of the elite with a different faction. The kleptocracy is firmly in place.
  2. China and Russia. The complaints of writers like Butcher and Wrong and hundreds like them, that the West needs to be doing ‘more’, tend to ignore the reality on the ground that Russia, via the notorious Wagner group, have an ever-increasing military presence, especially in the Sahel region of Africa; and much the bigger reality that China is emerging as a decisive economic player all across the continent.

Concepts and categories

Over the past 60 years social scientists, political theorists and economists have gone over the reasons for Africa’s failure again and again. The same basic ideas recur and reappear under different headings or from different perspectives. They build up like a collage of overlapping ideas or terms. Here are some key ones which overlap and mesh together to form the conceptual foundations of Burgis’s critique:

Resource state

A state most of whose revenue comes from one or a handful of raw resources which it sells abroad, generally via multinational corporations. The completely undemocratic closed nature of these kinds of deals makes them a perfect site for kickbacks, bribes, finders’ fees, various ‘taxes’ and numerous other ways for the small elite controlling the state to cream off huge amounts into their personal bank accounts.

Resource economy

An economy heavily slanted towards the production of raw resources (oil, gas, copper, gold) which fails to diversity or invest in other sectors, for example agriculture or manufacturing. Burgis’s chapter about Nigeria is, a little surprisingly, less about the obvious corruption and wealth generated by Nigeria’s huge oil industry/resources, than a sad review of the collapse of its once-thriving textiles industry.

By half way through the book Burgis lets his anger and disgust shine through. He doesn’t refer to the president of Nigeria as the president of Nigeria but as ‘captain of Nigeria’s looting machine’ (p.201).

Shadow economy

A shadow economy includes all economic activities which are hidden from official state or international authorities for monetary, regulatory and institutional reasons. Monetary reasons include avoiding paying taxes. Institutional reasons include hiding from the general population, opposition politicians, the media, regulators, and donor governments, the extent to which you’re running a huge illegal economy.

Shadow state

A state in which the over, official forms of government are not where the real power lies. In a shadow state real power inheres in small personal networks among the elite. Shadow states are characterised by the corrupt distribution of state contracts among this elite, who may also have alliances with powerbrokers in the army or security services.

The personal state

State in which there is no distinction between the president or ruler, and state structures, especially when it comes to budget and bank accounts (p.27). Thus Mobutu of Zaire had revenue from all kinds of ‘state’ contracts, deals, taxes and so on, paid directly into his personal bank accounts and spent it as if it was his money, and so did his cronies. Money which should have been running the state, for example paying the police or maintaining the infrastructure, was instead spent building his palace in the jungle, buying swanky cars and top-end real estate in Paris and the South of France.

Kleptocracy

Where the ruler, his family and cronies, simply steal state money, usually on an epic scale.

In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources [identified] an ‘elite network’ of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war. ‘This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the last three years with no compensation or benefit for the state or treasury of the Democratic Republic of Congo.’ (p.37)

Result: the disappearing roads, the vanished railway network, hospitals without medicines, abandoned schools and general collapse of Congo, as reported by Tim Butcher in Blood River. Burgis gives the details of a particular series of deals between the Congo state and private companies which, he claims, lost the state $1.36 billion in the 2 years between 2010 and 2012, more money than it received from humanitarian aid over the same period (p.52).

As Burgis gets more angry, he becomes more entertainingly abusive. These countries are not run by a ruling class but by a ‘looting class’ (p.203). Thus Nigerian analyst Clement Nwankwo describes the country’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as ‘not a political party. It’s a platform to seize power and then share the resultant booty’ (p.203).

Cryptocracy

A form of government where the real leaders are hidden, or simply unknown. Overlaps with the universe of conspiracy theories where people believe there are hidden global or national conspiracies. In our context all it means is that sometimes the real movers and shakers, powerbrokers and big money men, work behind the scenes, anonymously.

Petrostate

A petrostate or oil state is a country whose economy is heavily dependent on the extraction and export of oil or natural gas. Merely producing oil and gas does not make a country a petrostate; Norway, Canada, and America are major oil producers but also have diversified economies. Petrostates do not have diversified economies, they rely on oil & gas exports for a large part of state revenue, which results in political and economic power becoming concentrated in the hands of an elite, and the spread of unaccountable corruption.

Take Angola where the elite are referred to as the Futungo, a few hundred closely connected families, named after Futungo da Belas, the old presidential palace (p.10). Oil accounts for 98% of Angola’s exports and about 75% of government income, and yet it provides just 1% of employment (p.13).

Or Nigeria where oil was discovered in the Niger delta in 1956 and the enormous wealth it generates for a small elite has ruined the country for 60 years. Oil accounts for 80% of Nigerian government revenue (p.63).

As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialisation – a functioning electricity system among them – were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The patter was the same [in Nigeria] as in Angola or Congo: the more the non-oil economy withered, the greater the impulse to embezzle, perpetuating the cycle of looting. (p.76)

A petrostate is run by petropolitics which simply equate high office with theft (p.77).

A country where the ruler entrenches power in himself and his clique, using authoritarian security forces against any form of protest, is called a petro-dictatorship. The extreme brutality of the Equatorial Guinea regime is a good example. At one point Burgis coins the phrase petro-nightmare to describe Nigeria’s descent into corruptions and coups.

(Venezuela is another example of a petrostate, along with Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – but I can only cope with one continent at a time.)

Rentier state

A term coined by political scientists Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, denoting countries which have undue reliance on one or several sources of rents such as mineral resources, notably oil and gas.

Rentier states derive most of their income from the extraction, processing and shipping of these resources. Government in a rentier state relies overwhelmingly on income from these industries and not on other sources of income such as general taxation. Therefore rentier states aren’t beholden to their populations but are characterised by autocratic paternalism. The media is commonly highly censored meaning that government and corporate corruption and institutional inefficiencies are easily concealed. From an economist’s point of view, this secrecy encourages inefficiencies and lack of competition, which tend to undermine the welfare, creativity, freedoms, and human development of their peoples. Reliance on one or a handful of commodities for national income means rentier states are vulnerable if commodity prices fall, if global demands falls, or when their resources are depleted.

Dutch disease

In the 1970s Holland discovered oil offshore and began drilling, extracting and refining it with great profits. Everyone was puzzled, then, when the Dutch economy as a whole fell into recession. Analysis showed that when a country comes to rely heavily on one or a handful of raw resources, it has a distorting and damaging effect on the rest of the economy, especially manufacturing and agriculture. Strong oil & gas exports drive up the value of the currency, making imports cheaper and exports more expensive (pages 69 to 70).

Thus Nigeria’s textile industry has been devastated because, when the currency rose on the back of the oil boom, it became cheaper to import cheap Chinese knock-offs of Nigerian fabrics than to make them themselves. In the mid-1980s it had 175 textile mills, now it has 25.

It is safe to say that the destruction of the Nigerian textile industry has blighted millions of lives. (p.65).

Over-investment in these industries at the expense of other sectors, such as manufacturing and agriculture, can hurt economic growth and competitiveness. Unless you make a conscious effort to support and encourage other aspects of the economy, a raw resource boom will tend to damage it. According to a 2003 World Bank report:

Between 1960 and 2000 poor countries that were rich in natural resources grew two to three times more slowly than those that were not. Over that period , of forty-five countries that failed to sustain economic growth, all but six were heavily dependent on oil or mining. (p.157)

Another bad effect is that undiversified reliance on oil and gas industries can cause political and economic crises when the price of oil drops. The entire system comes to a halt.

Resource curse

Research from the 70s, 80s and 90s all confirm the theory that countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes, than countries with fewer natural resources.

Research shows that oil wealth lowers levels of democracy and strengthens autocratic rule because political leaders in oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because they will have more to give up from losing power. Similarly, political leaders of oil-rich countries refuse democratic development because the political elite collects the revenues from the oil export and use the money for cementing its political, economic, and social power by controlling government and its bureaucracy.

No taxation, no democracy

In Western democracies governments regularly have to consult electors because we’re the ones who fund them. In a resource state or petrostate, most of the government’s income comes from licensing deals and rake-offs from refiners. The regime doesn’t get its money from the people so doesn’t care what happens to them or what they think. The rallying cry of the American revolutionaries in 1776 was ‘No taxation without representation’, well the population of a resource state doesn’t pay much tax and it gets no representation. Not relying on the people for its revenue, the government doesn’t care what they think (p.73).

Elections are the last thing the elite wants because it will disrupt the deals and contracts done with Western extractors and multinationals. The Nigerian government gets just 4% of its income from general taxation but about 70% from oil and gas revenues (p.73).

In a resource economy politics degrades down to different factions of the elite fighting for the loot, behaviour which encourages everyone at all levels of society to think and behave the same. High office becomes universally accepted as the opportunity not to serve but to steal (p.74).

Patronage politics

Patronage politics is the use of state resources to reward individuals for their electoral support. It is a type of corruption or favouritism in which a party in power rewards groups, families or ethnicities for their electoral support using illegal gifts or fraudulently awarded appointments or government contracts. There is a further consequence: patronage politics attracts crooks.

Crony capitalism

an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favoured (as through tax breaks, grants, and other forms of government assistance) in ways seen as suppressing open competition in a free market. an economic system in which family members and friends of government officials and business leaders are given unfair advantages in the form of jobs, loans, etc.

A good example is the Futungo cabal of linked cronies who run Angola under the presidency of José Eduardo dos Santos, president from 1979 to 2017, whose daughter, Isabel dos Santos (born 1973), was Africa’s first woman billionaire and at one time the richest woman in Africa (p.10). The triumph of feminism? Not really. It’s deeply funny that this epitome of crony capitalism and kleptocracy was one of the BBC’s 100 women of 2015, so desperate are organisations like the BBC to fall over themselves to promote women, and especially black women (score double) even if it turns out that they’re world class crooks.

Or take Equatorial Guinea, continuing to enjoy relentless exploitation at the hands of its ruling family, relatives and cronies, led by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the longest serving leader in the world, in power ever since 1979 when he overthrew his evil uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema. In Equatorial Guinea, oil accounts for 75% of GDP, 98% of exports and 90% of government revenue. It is a classic petrostate. Burgis enjoys telling us that the dictator’s son, Teodorin Obiang, officially receives only a modest salary for the various ministerial posts he’s held, so it must be from some other source that he has been able to buy a $30 million mansion in Malibu, properties in Cape Town and the Avenue Foch in Paris (the avenue of kleptocrats), a fleet of Ferraris and Rolls Royces, a Gulf jetstream, paintings by Renoir and Matisse, and one of Michael Jackson’s jewel-encrusted gloves – while the majority of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of 51 (p.212).

Terrible leadership

Chinua Achebe  fingered the terrible quality of African leadership as the continent’s key problem, as long ago as 1983, 40 years ago:

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.’ (p.207)

Contractocracy

Government of contractors, by contractors, for contractors.

Law of the roadblock

Burgis appears to have invented this after being stopped and shaken down at countless roadblocks in numerous African countries. When the economy fails, and in particular when the police don’t get paid, they (or armed citizens) set up roadblocks and fleece drivers. Roadblocks demanding baksheesh are a telltale sign of a political system which has abandoned the wellbeing of the broader population (p.59).

China

The last 20 years have witnessed China’s ever-increasing involvement in Africa because African countries have a high concentration of vital raw resources, and China’s economy has grown at an extraordinary rate. Between the early 1990s and 2010 China’s share of world consumption of refined metals went from 5% to 45% and its oil consumption increased fivefold. In 2012 China’s economy was eight times bigger than it had been in 2002 (p.81).

In 2002 China’s trade with Africa was worth $13 billion a year; in 2012 it was worth $180 billion. Two-thirds of China’s imports from Africa were oil, the rest was other raw materials. As Burgis puts it: ‘The fates of the world’s most populous nation and the planet’s poorest continent have become wedded’ (p.86).

China spends two-thirds of its global outlay on foreign corporate acquisitions in the resources sector. Between 2009 and 2012 Chinese state-owned groups spent $23 billion buying Western companies with African resource assets that stretched from Sierra Leone to South Africa (p.143).

Many of China’s earliest deals were done with the petrostate Angola, where it developed the so-called ‘Angola model’. This is where China makes the country a big loan, generally billions of dollars, at low interest rates ostensibly for the country to develop its infrastructure (water, rods, dams, electricity, roads). These projects are then carried out by Chinese corporations employing Chinese engineers, managers and workers. And the country pays back the ‘loan’ in the form of raw materials, oil etc. Obviously, at every step of the process there is scope for the African country’s elite to cream off tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves. If Western countries, the UN, NGOs etc cry foul, then China and Angola (still nominally run by a Marxist-Leninist party) can dismiss their criticisms with the ad hominem catchcries of imperialism, and colonialism, and racism, and white supremacy etc while the elites of both countries get rich and the people of Angola starve in the streets. (As of 2022, about half of the population of Angola lives in ‘extreme poverty’, while the families who make up the Futungo are among the richest in the world vide Isabel dos Santos.)

Those who defend China’s involvement in Africa say China has built more infrastructure (roads, dams, airports) than the colonial powers did during the entire colonial period. Critics criticise China for doing business with dictators and opaque regimes but, you could argue, ‘the West’ a) did that for years, in fact b) put many of those dictators in place, and c) has been trying to make Africa’s nations more democratic for decades with pitiful success.

So maybe the best policy is just to crack on and build the infrastructure no matter who you deal with. Maybe building the infrastructure which will encourage African nations to develop and industrialise will also, in time, lead to the kind of empowerment and political openness which the western way has so signally failed to create.

The looting machine

As you read through the book you come to realise that Burgis’s account is very much focused on the damage mineral resources, notably gold and uranium, but above everything else, oil, have done to Africa – specifically, how scores of billions of raw materials have been extracted from Africa in a process which has somehow, almost magically, left most of its people worse off than when they gained independence in the 1960s. It’s this that he means when he refers to a looting machine. The machine consists of a number of interlocking past, including:

1. Corrupt rulers

Fairly obvious, and covered in the sections above.

2. How the World Bank and IMF screw Africa

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were set up at the end of the Second World War. The World Bank’s ostensible aim is to promote long-term economic development and poverty reduction – its official name was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – while the IMF was set up to ensure the stability of the global economic system.

In reality both institutions have a long and shameful history of forcing neo-liberal, ultra-capitalist solutions on developing countries, policies which have often plunged them into deeper crisis than they were already in, and actively impoverished their populations.

This is because they enforce what has long been called ‘The Washington Consensus’, the belief that, in order to thrive, all economies must follow the same strict, narrow economic and fiscal model, namely: cut taxes, cut government spending, privatise state-owned industries, scrap protectionism, open your markets to international investment and you’ll be rich. These are the strict and always unpopular terms which come attached to any World Bank loan.

Except all too often they don’t work. Put it another way: if they worked as well as the Bank and IMF claim, surely Africa would be rich by now, when it’s clearly not. In practice, Burgis claims that even if you followed Washington Consensus policies to the letter, all they do is balance the books and solve temporary budget crises: they don’t provide any guidance for the long-term development of whole economies. Compare and contrast the policies of the so-called Asian Tigers (the high-growth economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) which thrived in the 1950s and 60s. In complete contradiction to World Bank advice, these countries implemented protectionism to protect their fledgling industrial sectors, and had a high degree of state involvement, funding and planning in all aspects of their economies.

Instead, the two institutions tended to force African nations that needed their help to open their economies to the vulture forces of ‘the global market’ at exactly the time as 50 or so other struggling Third World countries were doing the same thing, all wrecking their welfare states, cutting spending to the bone and offering cut-price resource extraction deals to the world’s multinational corporations, circling like vultures.

Burgis devotes several pages to describing the Extractive Industries Review (EIR), an independent enquiry which the World Bank commissioned into its funding of the extractive industries (i.e. mining) in 2001:

The review was headed by [Indonesian economist Emil] Salim. Salim held consultations with a wide range of stakeholders in 2002 and 2003. The EIR recommendations were published in January 2004 in a final report entitled ‘Striking a Better Balance’. The report concluded that fossil fuel and mining projects do not alleviate poverty and recommended that World Bank involvement with these sectors be phased out by 2008 to be replaced by investment in renewable energy and clean energy. (Wikipedia)

In Burgis’s view, the World Bank carefully considered Salim’s recommendations, spent 9 months coming up with a lengthy reply, and then ignored them all.

It was not just the World Bank that found its influence in Africa’s resource states diminished. The IMF, its sister organisation charged with maintaining the stability of the world financial system, already had a bad reputation in Africa, with reformers and kleptocrats alike, for imposing the strictures of the Washington Consensus, under which African states had become test tubes for the unfettered free-market philosophy that would also beget the subprime crisis and subsequent near-collapse of the western banking system. Emil Salim’s review of the World Bank’s record in the oil and mining industries reported that, in the cases it had studied, ‘the IMF’s approach to the extractive sectors was mainly one that promoted aggressive privatisation of significant mining and hydrocarbon assets for short-term financing of the [government’s budget] deficit. This did nothing to ensure the creation of competition, efficiency gains, development of a domestic private sector, or environmentally and socially sound development strategies for the extractive sectors.’ (p.171)

3. How multinational corporations screw Africa

Arguably this is the core of the entire book, Burgis’s detailed investigations of the various ways multinational corporations screw African countries. I found the details sometimes hard to follow, and hard to see the difference between the legal world of business contacts and paying people finders’ fees or introductory fees (legal) and the illegal world of bribes and payoffs. But it’s much more than that:

a) Opaque deals which are never published, are inaccessible to researchers or citizens, deliberately designed to be inaccessible so as to allow bribery and kickbacks to the ruling elite.

b) The whole world of offshore accounting and tax havens whose sole reason for existing is to allow crooked governments, crooked organisations, crooked multinationals and crooked individuals to hide their financial dealings and loot from the scrutiny of tax officials and enforcement agencies.

c) Crooked governments finding themselves coerced by cartels of, for example, oil extraction companies into agreeing low rents, taxes and percentages i.e. the companies demand much lower rates of tax per barrel or tonne of precious metal, than are paid on other continents (South America or Asia). They can do this because so many African countries hover on the permanent brink of bankruptcy and so are desperate for deals and cash now, even if it means they get ripped off.

d) Cost distribution. This covers a range of tax dodges, and refers to the way transnational corporations are able to move their profits around to different countries so as to minimise their tax liabilities, or to offset profits in one country against losses or costs in another. Clever accounting means huge multinational corporations make it look like they made next to no profit and so pay little or no tax. Starbucks and Amazon have made this strategy common knowledge, but it’s one of the reasons African countries were handing over billions of dollars worth of resources to multinational corporations which made huge profits for their executives and shareholders, while the host nations remained poor and undeveloped.

The empires of colonial Europe and the Cold War superpowers have given way to a new form of domination over the continent that serves as the mine of the world – new empires controlled not by nations but by alliances of unaccountable African rulers governing through shadow states, middle-men who connect them to the global resource economy, and multinational companies from the West and the East that cloak their corruption in corporate secrecy. (p.244)

Given the comprehensive screwing so many African countries have received at the hands of Western companies and institutions, you can see why China’s ask-no-questions, get-on-and-build-it approach presents an attractive alternative.

Some numbers

In 2011 the IMF determined that the discrepancy between the amount Angola ought to have made from its huge oil sales and the amount which actually went into government accounts was $32 billion (p.173).

In 2012 Shell’s revenue was $242 billion. Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, was paid $16.5 million (p.194).

In 2014 reforming banker Lamido Sanusi estimated that corruption at Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPC, was robbing the national treasury of $1 billion per month (p.205) – and yet western countries give Nigeria aid, despite the fact that the amounts Nigerian politicians steal from the state purse could match western aid hundreds of times over.

Islamist violence

All this corruption keeps African states backward. It prevents the development of industry and infrastructure and trade. It creates the prevention of jobs and thus ensures that the new generations of young men have few if any prospects. It promotes grotesque inequalities between the rich elite, and the rich in towns and cities, and the poor everywhere but especially in the country. So lots of unemployed men with no future and a burning sense of grievance.

What I’ve learned to call the bayaye. (The word and concept bayaye are explored in ‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński and ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’ by James Fergusson).

Fifty years ago they were ripe to join Marxist revolutionary organisations which fought brutal insurgencies to overthrow dictators, western capitalism and install utopian communist societies. Now they join violent Islamist insurgencies which promise to overthrow dictators, western values and install utopian Islamic societies run by Sharia law. Al-Shabab. Boko Haram. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. Islamic State. According to Sanusi:

‘There’s a clear, direct link between the uneven distribution of resources and the rise in violence.’ (p.206)

‘The region’s idle young men…were ready recruits.’ The young men problem, again, as described in Somalia.

Thought

These kinds of problems are so widespread – Transparency International report that “155 countries have made no significant progress against corruption or have declined since 2012” – that you can’t help wondering whether it is the natural state of affairs. Maybe this is what human beings, and the societies they construct, are just like.

So often the descriptions of modern African shadow states, run by a small cabal who control vast sums of money and run the country by paying off interest groups, tribes, regional leaders and so on – they sound like Dark Age warlords who emerge from wars to control territories, have first dibs on treasure, loot and women, then parcel out the loot to their lieutenants. It sound so primeval, it sounds like the kind of organisation of human groups which has occurred in one form or another throughout history, across all continents.

So maybe it’s the natural state of human societies? And maybe it’s we in the ‘Western’ democracies – we with our obsession with ‘fair’ and ‘democratic’ politics, our reliable civil services, our independent judiciaries, our complex civil societies diffusing centres of power across thousands of scattered nodes, with our ideas of being rewarded for hard work, our concepts of meritocracy – maybe it’s we who are the oddities, the exceptions, the unusual societies which need explaining?

Why give aid?

I don’t really see why we should give aid to any African country given the facts that many of them have enough natural resources to pay for their own development if only their rulers hadn’t a) stolen it or b) signed it over to rapacious extraction companies; and b) those countries which have few resources have already received tens of billions of dollars of aid which corrupt rulers have either i) stolen, ii) spent on huge amounts of arms (vide Ethiopia’s Marxist leaders building up the largest army in Africa while its population died of starvation) iii) wasted on badly conceived megaprojects which turned out to be white elephants / enormous wastes of money.

As the t-shirt slogan says, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

 The argument against violence

Burgis reports from the town of Jos in Nigeria where a terrible massacre of villagers was carried out, men, women and children hacked to pieces or burned alive. The antagonists portrayed it as part of the ongoing ‘war’ between Muslims from the north and Christians from the south. But Burgis talks to a local priest, Ignatius Kaigama, who makes a simple point I don’t remember reading before, which is: God is not such a weakling that he needs you to kill in his name (p.188). You do not need to kill anyone in the name of God or Allah or Brahma. If God wanted people killed, don’t you think he’s able to do that for himself? In other words, anyone who kills ‘in the name of God’ is admitting that their idea of God is  of a weakling who needs human help. Anyone who kills in the name of God, thinks God is weak. In other words, they are the ones who blaspheme and insult God, by implying that he needs human help.

Vagabond In Power by Nneka

Credit

The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis was first published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2015 paperback edition.

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https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/04/the-looting-machine-tom-burgis/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The geological context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

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

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

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

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

Lots of context, not so much analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the facts speak for themselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eritrea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so another African dictator is born.

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

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

Credit

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

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by Simon on December 1, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/dictatorland-the-men-who-stole-africa-paul-kenyon/