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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.

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by Simon on December 13, 2023 • Permalink

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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:

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.
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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by Simon on December 4, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History, Politics

Tagged 21st century, 21st century Africa, Africa, African elites, African history, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, al-Shabab, America, Angola, Asian Tigers, autocratic paternalism, autocratic rule, bayaye, BBC 100 women of 2015, Boko Haram, Canada, China, Chinua Achebe, Clement Nwankwo, Cold War, colonial Europe, Congo, contemporary history, Contractocracy, copper, Cost distribution, crony capitalism, Cryptocracy, cycle of looting, democratic development, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dutch disease, EIR, Emil Salim, Equatorial Guinea, extractive industries, Extractive Industries Review, favoritism, Feminism, Financial Times, foreign aid, Francisco Macías Nguema, Futungo da Belas, gas, Giacomo Luciani, gold, Hazem Beblawi, history, Hong Kong, Ignatius Kaigama, IMF, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, International Monetary Fund, Isabel dos Santos, Islamic State, Islamist violence, José Eduardo dos Santos, kleptocracy, Lamido Sanusi, Law of the roadblock, Luanda, Michela Wrong, Mobutu, multinational corporations, new Africa, Niger Delta, Nigeria, Nigerian textile industry, Nneka, NNPC, Norway, offshore accounting, oil, oil producers, oil state, oil-rich countries, Patronage politics, People's Democratic Party, petro-dictatorship, petro-nightmare, petropolitics, Petrostate, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, rentier state, rentier states, Resource curse, Resource state, Russia, Sahel region, Shadow economy, Shadow state, sharia law, Shell, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, Striking a Better Balance, Taiwan, tax dodges, tax havens, Teodorin Obiang, the Futungo, The looting machine, The Washington Consensus, the West, Tim Butcher, Tom Burgis, transnational corporations, Transparency International, Vagabond In Power, Wagner group, Western extractors, western governments, World bank, Zaire

Posted by Simon on December 4, 2023

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

A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern

This is an outstanding, wonderful exhibition bringing together some 150 photographs (and a few installations and videos) by no fewer than 36 photographers and artists from across Africa. It is full of breath-taking and beautiful works, suggesting a continent alive with wonderfully creative, innovative artists.

It’s divided into three ‘chapters’, each of which are sub-divided into themes. To quote the curators:

The first chapter is rooted in ancient African cultures and traditions which have survived periods of struggle and resistance. Inspired by Pan-African liberation movements, the second chapter looks at photography’s ability to produce counter histories – archival practices and the agency of photographer and subject are brought into focus. The third chapter explores the impact of globalisation and the climate emergency.

Chapter 1: Identity and tradition

Queens, Kings and Gods

For centuries Africa was conquered and colonised by European countries. The artists in room one pay tribute to the monarchs and matriarchs who resisted colonial conquest and occupation. The photographers here invoke the heritage of kingdoms such as the Asante of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria, who are descended from the goddesses and gods of the ancient spiritual capital, Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Thus a series of big, beautifully clear portraits of traditional monarchs of the present day by George Osodi (born Nigeria 1974).

Installation view of ‘Nigerian Monarchs’ series by George Osodi (2012 to 2022) in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern (photo by the author)

There is a set from the ‘We Live in Silence; sequence by Kudzanai Chiurai (born 1981, Zimbabwe) which elaborately recreates biblical narratives, history painting and Christian iconography which themselves turn out to be scenes from the 1967 film, ‘Soleil Ô’, by Mauritanian-born French filmmaker Med Hondo. So, worlds within worlds…

We Live in Silence IV by Kudzanai Chiurai (2017) courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery © Kudzanai Chiurai

Spiritual worlds

The next room gestures towards the complex and diverse history of religion across this vast continent. There’s a set of photographic self portraits by Khadija Saye (1992 to 2017, born and worked in the UK, of Gambian heritage). You might recall that it was one of these photos that British artist Chris Ofili used as the centrepiece for his huge new site-specific Requiem for Grenfell Tower at Tate Britain. In this sequence Saye photographed herself performs a series of rituals using sacred objects that combine her African, Christian and Islamic heritage.

Installation view of the ‘Dwelling: in the space we breathe’ series by Khadija Saye (2017) (photo by the author)

At the end of the room is a stunning work, a set of five huge digital photos arranged to create a striking tableau by Maïmouna Guerresi (born 1951, born in Italy, works in Senegal). Titled ‘M-eating – Students and Teacher’ it shows four girls and an older man sitting around a long table draped in a yellow cloth. The wall behind the table is inscribed with the Basmala, a Muslim prayer recited to elicit God’s blessings. It’s a huge and really powerful image of absorption and contemplation but, more than that, it’s just a beautifully clear and vividly coloured composition.

‘M-eating – students and teacher’ by Maïmouna Guerresi (2012) Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Masks

The next room is devoted to the role of masks in African religion, ritual, folklore and culture. There’s a stunning series by Edson Chagas (born 1977 in Angola), the Tipo Passe series of sitters wearing contemporary clothes but traditional Bantu masks. ‘Tipo passe’ is Portuguese for passport and the frontal composition references passport photography.

Installation view of the ‘Tipo Passe’ series by Edson Chagas (2014) (Photo by the author)

Opposite these is a series of really wonderful photos by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (born 1965, works in Benin), instances from the Egungun series.

Installation view of ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (photo by the author)

As the curators explain:

Egungun is a Yoruba masquerade practice which calls upon the spirits of departed ancestors. Through ceremonial drumming and dance, ancestral spirits inhabit the bodies of Egungun practitioners to pass on blessings and guide the passage of the dead to the spirit world. Clothing plays an important role in Egungun masquerade – elaborate masks and fabrics must completely seal the performer’s body. Agbodjélou’s performers wear costumes which layer expensive foreign materials and traditional Yoruba cloth. This combination of the traditional and the contemporary parallels the Egungun’s complex role as mediators between the world of the living and the dead.

They’re absolutely stunning, vivid photos.

Untitled from the ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou

There’s a massive video piece by Wura-Natasha Ogunji titled ‘Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?’ and showing women dressed in colourful (traditional?) clothes, dragging kegs of water roped to their ankles through the backstreets of Lagos. Here’s a clip:

You may not be altogether surprised to learn that it’s a feminist piece. Their costumes evoke images of Egungun masquerade, a Yoruba practice that manifests ancestors’ spirits and is traditionally reserved for men, and Ogunji explains the piece is designed to question the heavy labour still done by many women in traditional societies.

Chapter 2: Counter Histories

The next room is big with a lot going on. Along one wall is a series of relatively small ‘family portraits’. These loving portraits of family members gesture towards the long history of studio portraiture that gave agency to African photographers and their sitters, letting them create domestic alternatives to the imperial rhetoric of colonial postcards, posters and magazines. These included pioneering photographers such as James Barnor in Ghana and Lazhar Mansouri in Algeria, photographing families and individuals who would gather proudly to have their portraits taken, often for the first time. All fair enough, but they’re relatively small and struggle to compete with the other, enormous offerings in the same space.

Most striking is the large assembly of old box files arranged on a pebbly red base. This is ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike (born UK, works in Nigeria). These old file boxes are filled with archival documents, including colonial-era postcards and photographs, and then carefully choreographed on sand and soil. It is a general metaphor for the way information was power for the old colonial authorities and was hidden away in files and folders but then, during the period of independence, colonial archives were abandoned, hidden and destroyed. And yet…that information decayed, became irrelevant, barely concealing the true earth of the country, its geological bedrock, symbolising the country’s real roots.

Installation view of ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike in room 4 of ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Tate (Lucy Green)

In the centre, at the back of n this photo, you can see a set of four figures, blown-up and pasted onto cardboard bases, these are the work of Samson Kambalu (born 1975 in Malawi, works in the UK). They’re actually cardboard cut-outs of African soldiers use photographs sourced from the Weston Library in Oxford, UK. They represent the unnamed infantry who fought for the British Empire during the First and Second World Wars and were known as the King’s African Rifles. The cardboard indicates the soldiers’ expendable status to colonial powers. Behind them is a patchwork of quilts inspired by Kambalu’s childhood memories of collecting bubblegum cards of world flags.

Next to them, on the right, you can see a sequence of three big pieces. These are from the sequence ‘Figures’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (born 1971 in Madagascar, works in France). These are collages of maps, fragments of bank notes, record sleeves and other archival documents which build up into complex, evocative collages. The maps are, as you might expect, old-style colonial-era maps, the idea being that maps were used by the imperial countries to define and control; while the images are of strong African figures, including striking portraits of ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. These are strong, highly impactful images.

‘Figures 1861’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (2016) at ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Malala Andrialavidrazana

Away on the opposite side of the room is a large alcove with a distinctive black-and-white tiled floor, containing three big vivid sets of photographs by three different photographers.

They are, from left to right, four photos by Ruth Ginika Ossai (Nigeria), three by Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco) and four by Atong Atem (born 1994 in South Sudan, works in Australia).

Ruth Ginika Ossai’s portraits are carefully staged on floormats made of Astroturf and parquet-style laminate flooring. The backdrops are inspired by the special effects featured in Igbo gospel music videos and Nollywood films and give them a super-real feel.

The central three are by Hassan Hajjaj in a series called ‘Kesh Angels’ (named after the Hells Angels and the city’s motorbike culture). These are brilliant. The women are not only wearing vivid djellabas and veils but are posed in deliberately in-yer-face, take-no-**** attitudes. To cap it all, the frames are inset with tins of popular products, one appears to be lamb meat, another of tomato juice. So they’re stylish, stroppy, modern and funny.

Installation view of ‘Kesh Angels’ by Hassan Hajjaj (photo by the author)

To the right of the Kesh Angels are four portraits by Atong Atem. Atem portrays friends who are fellow members of Australia’s African diaspora. She says: This body of work honours the South Sudanese Dinka tradition of record-keeping and archiving as an intimate cultural practice.’ Aren’t they beautiful, brightly colourful, densely patterned, vibrantly alive?

‘Adut and Bigoa’ by Atong Atem (2015) courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery © Atong Atem

Chapter 3: Imagined Futures

The final room contains yet more series of really strong photographs. The theme is the environmental challenges facing Africa, specifically its overpopulated cities and its degraded environment plus, of course, the heating up and drying out caused by global warming.

Kiripi Katembo (1979 to 2015, born and worked the Democratic Republic of the Congo) discovered that people in his home town of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, didn’t like being photographed. But he could get away with photographing their reflections in the city’s countless large puddles and pools of water. Often these contained rocks or building rubble, but Katembo discovered that the intrusion of these objects into the crystal clear reflections created an interesting disturbance. As the curators describe it: usually depicted as a chaotic and busy capital, ‘here Kinshasa appears as a dream-like landscape populated by shadows and unidentified objects.’

Installation view of ‘Un regard’ by Kiripi Katembo (photo by the author)

There’s a striking series of large black and white photos by Mário Macilau (born 1984, born and works in Mozambique). These, as the images instantly convey, document the workers of the Hulene landfill site in Maputo, Mozambique. Obviously it shows human beings reduced to picking through rubbish to glean a living, and, of course, affected by the toxic substances released into the air and soil by the widespread practice of burning.

‘Breaking News’ from ‘The Profit Corner’ series by Mário Macilau (2015) © Mário Macilau, Courtesy Ed Cross Fine Art

Related to the same topic of environmental destruction, but in a completely different register, is a series of 3 wonderful photos by Fabrice Monteiro (born 1972 in Belgium, works in Senegal). They’re from his ‘Prophecies’ series and they are absolutely brilliant.

Untitled #1 (2013) from ‘The Prophecy’ series 2013 to 2015 by Fabrice Monteiro in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern

‘The Prophecy’ series captures environmental issues facing communities in Dakar, Senegal, from forest fires to coastal erosion. Spookily tall spiritual figures, inspired by West African masquerade and animism, rise up out of the rubbish dumps, themselves made of rubbish and detritus. They’re stunning.

And next to them is arguably the best set in the show, the ones the curators have (wisely) chosen as the posters, a set of four quite stunning, beautifully, staged, semi-abstract photos by Aïda Muluneh (born and works in Ethiopia, 1974).

Installation view of ‘Water Life’ series by Aïda Muluneh, being (top row): The Shackles of Limitation, Steps (bottom row): Star Shine Moon Glow and The Sorrows We Bear

These were commissioned by the charity Water Aid and depict – in an obviously highly stylised way – ‘rural water access and its impact on women’s rights, well-being and education.’ The impact of global warming will obviously further degrade access to drinking water for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest countries. But clearly the thing here is Muluneh’s stunning use of a limited palette of bright blue and red, and her incorporation of traditional African body painting and dress.

Epilogue

The final (small-ish, corridor-like) room in the exhibition hosts videos by two artists. On the whole I don’t like videos. I don’t have the patience – the photos I’ve highlighted earlier in the show all make their impacts with dramatic immediacy whereas art videos are, by and large, extremely slow.

The most striking is ‘In Praise of Still Boys’ by Julianknxx (born 1988 in Sierra Leone, works in the UK).

The 3 or 4 minutes of this I sat and watched featured lots of footage of a very young Queen Elizabeth II visiting somewhere in Africa (Freetown?), white British sailors steering a motor launch through canoes rowed by local Africans, then British troops from the (I’m guessing) 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone (almost none of this is shown in the trailer, above). And this harking on about the British colonial legacy prompted the train of thought which follows in my political commentary on the exhibition.

Political commentary

I hugely enjoyed this impressive, wide-ranging exhibition about African photography as an aesthetic i.e. visual and psychological experience. But aesthetics and politics are far apart, at least in this exhibition and Tateworld more generally. As political analysis or commentary, this exhibition was rubbish. Dire. Seriously misleading. On and on and on and on and on the curators go about ‘colonialism’ which, for most of these countries, ended in the 1960s, 60 years ago, and on and on and on the curators and the artists go about the Atlantic Slave Trade, which Britain banned in 1807, 216 years ago.

In chapter 3 the curators optimistically claim that the featured artists ‘imagine multiple futures’ and cite Senegalese academic, musician and writer Felwine Sarr (born 1972) who calls for ‘Africans to think and formulate their own future’. In his 2016 book Afrotopia, Sarr writes:

‘Africa has always been the object of discourse by others. Now is the time to dream this utopia in Africa itself, to design Africa ourselves, to think, and to act for ourselves.’

Which immediately prompts two objections. 1) Dreaming isn’t going to get you anywhere, buddy. Practical policies might. See Paul Collier’s list of practical steps in his hard-headed book ‘The Bottom Billion’.

But more relevantly to this exhibition, 2) there’s almost nothing about the future, instead there is a sustained, deep immersion in the legacy of colonialism. Loads of the 36 photographers’ work is directly about colonialism, the colonial legacy, colonial control, colonial archives, ‘the colonial gaze’, colonial images, colonial photography, colonial identity cards, colonial posters, colonial postcards. The word ‘colonial’ occurs 26 times on the wall labels. Even if the artist isn’t themselves addressing it, you can bet the curators will drag in a reference to slavery or colonialism or both in their wall labels.

In other words, the overall effect of the exhibition is immensely backward-looking. It’s like a traumatised adult condemned to act out the abuse of their childhood again and again, with no hope of escape. Maps of colonial Africa, footage of colonial Africa, old box files from colonial Africa, old derelict buildings from colonial Africa, trying to escape from the Christian religion imposed by colonial Africa. Backwards backwards, everything relates backwards to a lost era of 60 years ago.

Here’s a timeline of the year and date African nations gained independence, just to make clear how long ago this all was.

24 December 1951: Libya
1 January 1956: Sudan
2 March 1956: Morocco
20 March 1956: Tunisia
6 March 1957: Ghana
2 October 1958: Guinea

1 January 1960: Cameroon
27 April 1960: Togo
26 June 1960: Madagascar
30 June 1960: DR Congo
1 July 1960: Somalia
1 August 1960: Benin
3 August 1960: Niger
5 August 1960: Burkina Faso
7 August 1960: Côte d’Ivoire
11 August 1960: Chad
13 August 1960: Central African Republic
15 August 1960: Congo
17 August 1960: Gabon
20 August 1960: Senegal
22 September 1960: Mali
1 October 1960: Nigeria
28 November 1960: Mauritania

27 April 1961: Sierra Leone
31 May 1961: South Africa

1 July 1962: Rwanda
1 July 1962: Burundi
3 July 1962: Algeria
9 October 1962: Uganda

12 December 1963: Kenya

24 April 1964: Tanzani (Tanganyika 9 December 1961 – Zanzibar 10 December 1963)
6 July 1964: Malawi
24 October 1964: Zambia

18 February 1965: Gambia

30 September 1966: Botswana
4 October 1966: Lesotho

We’re talking about the era of Sputnik. The era when the Berlin Wall was going up. Before the Beatles’ first LP. That is the era, of the 1940s and 50s, which so many of these artists, at least in their Tate interpretation, are harking back to, again and again and again.

This obviously indicates a glaring great gap, two gaps if you like, which are: 1) what happened in Africa during the 60 years since independence and 2) what is happening in Africa today?

Sixty years of mismanagement, civil war, famine and genocide

One wall label sports a quote from Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, the first British African colony to become independent in 1957.

‘We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control.’

Nkrumah overflowed with utopian quotes about how socialism would bring peace and plenty to Africa, he was full of them (see the references to Nkrumah in my review of ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence‘ by Martin Meredith).

What the Tate wall label does not mention is that Nkrumah went on to become a steadily more repressive figure, passing emergency laws, outlawing the opposition, creating a cult of personality, having himself referred to as the ‘the Man of Destiny’, ‘the Star of Africa’, ‘His High Dedication of Redeemer’ and so on. He was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, receiving a Lenin Prize, tried to abolish tribalism and wasted money on vast white elephant building schemes. He made himself very unpopular with the rulers of neighbouring African countries when it was discovered that he was supporting various communist and guerrilla movements to overthrow their capitalist governments. In 1966 Nkrumah was himself overthrown in a coup by the army which set about de-Sovietising the economy and reversing most of his calamitous economic policies. At independence Ghana had a GDP on a par with South Korea, but decades of political instability, military coups and economic mismanagement brought the country to the brink of ruin. Ghana is now 83rd in the world rankings of GDP compared to South Korea at 13.

NONE of this is in the Tate exhibition, none of it, no politics, no economics, no contemporary history at all. Africa’s desperate history of secessions, civil wars, genocides, famines, economic mismanagement, rule by brutal Marxist murderers, by kleptocrats and homicidal dictators, NONE of that is here, none. It is all erased, made invisible, ignored, brushed under the carpet.

Instead what the wall labels repeat again and again and again are the only two tunes they know, the evils of colonialism (ended in the 1960s) and of the slave trade (ended 200 years ago). Simplistic binaries.

Why artists and curators simplify history and politics to make them more acceptable

In my review of Paul Danahar’s irritating book about the aftermath of the Arab Spring, I sketched out four reasons why even high-end (BBC, Channel 4) coverage of foreign affairs tends to be simplified and sanitised. These are:

1. Logistically easy It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely, so countries with good infrastructure, like Israel or America, tend to be over-represented.

2. Familiar narratives Editors prefer sticking to super-familiar, easy narratives, my examples being the Arab-Israeli conflict and the (now defunct) struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Absolutely everyone was familiar with the outline of those stories which had taken on the simplicity of fairy tales. Pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about, all your emotions pre-packaged and ready to take away.

To give an example, bad stuff is happening in various parts of China (Xinjiang, Tibet) but my points 1 and 2 apply in that: 1) it’s difficult to get access to those places, and 2) the issues are complicated. But, for the sake of argument, say that a protest march in Hong Kong is broken up by riot police and – because it’s easy to access and easy to cover – it’s all over the front pages for days. Easy access. Easy issues. Somewhere we know about. Easy to relate to.

3. Britain-related Some places matter more to Brits than others because they used to be colonies or places where Brits lived and feel a residual attachment to, thus India, Hong Kong, Egypt, Kenya – or which we feel some kind of special responsibility for (the Middle East, all those lines on the map, the Balfour Declaration yadda yadda yadda). The result is that these countries are over-represented in British foreign news at the expense of everywhere else.

4. Student causes Lastly, there’s what you could call student politics. Some of these places are associated with big, simple-minded political causes. All good progressive people marched against apartheid in the 1980s. All good progressive people are outraged by Israel’s bombing of Gaza today. All good progressive people agree that China is not keeping to its bargain of letting Hong Kong remain a democracy. Etc.

In the same kind of way all good progressive people are shocked and disgusted by anything to do with the European empires. And all good progressive people are shocked etc by the slave trade.

These are hot button topics, guaranteed to win over the audience, please the crowd, which can’t fail to unite artists, curators and visitors in a cosy feeling of moral righteousness, moral superiority, grievance from the artists and grovelling apology by white gallery goers.

Slavery and the evils of empire are the new consensus topics – everyone agrees that they were utterly evil and that they explain everything about modern Africa.

All the artists chosen for this exhibition stick to the narrow line adopted by the curators that African history ceased some time in the 1960s, at the moment of independence, that nothing whatsoever has happened since then, that all Africans are still trying to cope with the trauma of imperialism or the trauma of the slave trade – and that absolutely nothing significant has happened since.

No military coups, civil wars, mad rulers, stupid socialist economics, thieving stealing looting leaders like Mobutu, psychopaths like Idi Amin, mass murderers like the Hutu regime in Rwanda, cannibals like the Emperor Bokassa, ruinous rebel leaders in Angola or Mozambique, warlord chaos in the Congo.

No African history beyond the 1960s is present in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the simple-minded, pantomime-level narrative which many of the artists address and the curators almost obsessively promote – white slave traders / colonialists = evil, all black people = saintly victims.

I’m not saying the slave trade wasn’t bad or that colonialism wasn’t wretched, humiliating and shamelessly exploitative. Of course they were. And forms of neo-colonialism are obviously still alive and constraining African nations in all kinds of ways today. But that’s just the starting position: that’s the obvious stuff you need to process before moving on to a more sophisticated understanding of the situation.

You’re not going to begin to understand the plight of modern African countries unless you move on from the 1960s and engage with the 60 years of history since then. And then, once you’ve processed the 60 years since independence, it requires a further effort to engage with the host of military, economic and security issues which plague Africa today, in 2023.

Africa today

And what about the political and economic and social issues which face Africa today? Are these addressed in this exhibition? Is there any mention of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across North Africa, of the havoc being wrought by al Qaeda, or Boko Haram, or al Shabaab? No. Nothing.

Sub-Saharan Africa is ‘new epicenter’ of extremism, says UN

Is there any mention of China’s involvement in Africa over the last 20 years, buying up raw materials and rare metals and food in exchange for infrastructure projects? Mention of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives all across Africa? Nothing.

China in Africa (Economist special)

Any mention of Russia’s growing involvement in North Africa, specifically through the Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group? Nothing.

What Is Russia’s Wagner Group Doing in Africa? (Council for Foreign Relations)

Mention of the US’s surprisingly extensive investment in army, navy and air force bases across the region in efforts to combat Islamic terrorists? Nothing.

US bases in Africa

Lots of complicated geopolitical, military, strategic and economic manoeuvring is going on all across Africa, right now, as we speak, and none of it is discussed, described or even mentioned in this immensely backward-looking exhibition.

Conclusion

So I really liked lots of the art on display, a lot of these photos are stunning and breath-taking, world class, outstanding, and it is such a relief to get away from America and the usual suspects of the art world. Congratulations to Tate for staging this exhibition so beautifully and bringing so many great photographers to our attention.

But as politics this show is a washout, a whitewash, a travesty, a systematic erasure of African history for the last 60 years in favour of a fairy-tale story about colonialism. It not only takes absolutely no account of Africa’s 60 years of troubled tragic post-colonial history but presents a complete blank when it comes to the complex, difficult, multi-sided political issues faced by Africa today. An artistic triumph but when it comes to any serious discussion of the political, economic and social challenges of contemporary Africa, this exhibition is a travesty, seriously misleading in its omissions, elisions and simplifications of a long inconveniently complex history.

Tate Modern reviews

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by Simon on November 6, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Art, Photography

Tagged A History of a City in a Box, A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography, Aïda Muluneh, Africa, Africa traditions, African art, African body painting, African culture, African photography, Afrotopia, Al Qaeda, al Shabaab, Algeria, Angola, art exhibition, Asante, Atlantic slave trade, Atong Atem, Australia, Balfour Declaration, Bantu masks, Basmala, Beatles, Boko Haram, Breaking News, British Empire, China Belt and Road, China in Africa, Chris Ofili, colonial legacy, colonialism, Counter Histories, Dakar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dinka tradition, Edson Chagas, Egungun, Egypt, Emperor Bokassa, Ethiopia, exhibition, Fabrice Monteiro, Felwine Sarr, First World War, France, Gambia, George Osodi, Ghana, global warming, Hassan Hajjaj, Hells Angels, Hong Kong, Hulene landfill site, Hutu regime, Identity and tradition, Idi Amin, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Imagined Futures, In Praise of Still Boys, India, installation, Islamic fundamentalism, James Barnor, Julianknxx, Kenya, Kesh Angels, Khadija Saye, King’s African Rifles, Kinshasa, Kiripi Katembo, Kudzanai Chiurai, Kwame Nkrumah, Lagos, Lazhar Mansouri, Lenin Prize, Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou, M-eating – Students and Teacher, Maïmouna Guerresi, Madagascar, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Malawi, Mao's China, Maputo, Martin Meredith, masks, Mário Macilau, Med Hondo, Mobutu, Mobutu Sese Seko, Morocco, Mozambique, Ndidi Dike, Nigeria, Nigerian Monarchs, North Africa, Oxford, Pan-African liberation movements, Paul Collier, Paul Danahar, photographs, photography, prophecies, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Nefertiti, Queens Kings and Gods, Requiem for Grenfell Tower, Russia, Ruth Ginika Ossai, Rwanda, Rwanda genocide, Samson Kambalu, Second World War, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Soleil Ô, South Korea, South Sudan, Soviet Union, Star Shine Moon Glow, Steps, Sub-Saharan Africa, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Bottom Billion, the colonial gaze, The Congo, The Profit Corner, The Shackles of Limitation, The Sorrows We Bear, Tibet, Tipo Passe, Un regard, video, Wagner group, Water Aid, We Live in Silence, Weston Library, World in Common, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Xinjiang, Yoruba, Zaire, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on November 6, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/06/a-world-in-common-contemporary-african-photography-tate-modern/

Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics @ the House of Illustration

Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement and its allies defeated the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. The new revolutionary government enacted a wide array of new domestic laws and policies, but Castro always saw the revolution in Cuba as just the beginning of the liberation of the oppressed masses in not just Latin America but war-torn Africa and around the world, wherever the poor and downtrodden were oppressed by colonial or neo-colonial masters.

OSPAAAL

And so the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (in Spanish the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina – abbreviated to OSPAAAL) was set up to fight globalisation, imperialism, neoliberalism and defend human rights, in Havana, in January 1966, after the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of over 500 delegates and 200 observers from over 82 countries.

One of the first things the organisation did was establish a magazine to publicise its causes and titled Tricontinental. From 1966 into the 1990s more than fifty designers working in Havana produced hundreds of posters and editions of the magazine which expressed solidarity with the U.S.A.’s Black Panther Party, condemned apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, and celebrated Latin America’s revolutionary icons, as well as criticising the ongoing existence of U.S. military bases in Guantanamo Bay, calling for the reunification of North and South Korea and many other radical causes.

The exhibition includes some 33 of the total of 50 or so artists and designers who worked for OSPAAAL, including leading lights such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Helena Serrano, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila.

Unlike artists in the Soviet bloc the OSPAAAL designers weren’t shackled by the deeply conservative doctrine of Socialist Realism, but were free to pick and choose from all the best streams of current art, including Pop Art and psychedelia. They also co-opted images and ideas from capitalist adverts into what they called ‘anti-ads’.

The plan was for the posters to be stapled into copies of Tricontinental, and so distributed around the world. Because the posters were intended to be internationalist they had to use strong primal languages or find inventive ways of conveying their message. If any writing was used it was generally in the three major languages of Spanish, English, French, and sometimes Arabic.

By the mid-1980s heavy trade embargos and sanctions imposed by American had created such shortages that it ultimately forced the organization out of production. By that time approximately 326 OSPAAAL posters had been produced.

Altogether it’s estimated that some nine million OPSAAAL posters were distributed around the developing world. At its peak the magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers, mostly students. At one time, it was common for posters from issues of Tricontinental to be put up on the walls of student community centres.

This exhibition brings together 170 works (100 posters and 70 magazines) produced by 33 OSPAAAL designers, created between 1965 and 1992, which are not only striking and dramatic art works in their own right but shed unexpected insights onto the long history of the Cold War.

The Mike Stanfield Collection

While originally distributed freely in editions of thousands, OSPAAAL posters and magazines are now rare and highly sought-after. The works in the exhibition are all drawn from a single UK private collection – The Mike Stanfield Collection, the largest collection of OSPAAAL material in the world, gathered by British collector Mike Stanfield over a 25-year period. Every work in the exhibition is drawn from his collection.

Posters

The poster designers used every trick in the toolbox of capitalist advertising plus a lot more they invented. The diversity and inventiveness of approaches is astonishing. Obviously the cause, the fundamental political aim of the posters, was deadly serious – but this didn’t stop them using scathing satire to make their points.

And above all they didn’t limit themselves to one aesthetic but seized an extraordinary freedom to experiment, with the result that you see everything from bold typography and photomontage to psychedelic colours and pop culture-inspired graphics, iconic modern imagery or ancient native objects pressed into service, silhouettes, psychedelic reverberating, cartoons and biting satire.

Cuba

The first edition of Tricontinental included an article by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a folded poster by Alfredo Rostgard, thus inaugurating its two-pronged approach to radical propaganda: text for those who could read, stirring images for those who couldn’t.

Che Guevara (1969) © Alfredo G. Rostgaard, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

It’s almost too obvious to point out but, in the Soviet bloc, the canon of revolutionary heroes from Marx through Lenin, Stalin on down, were all portrayed in real, or heroically socialist realist style. It takes a moment’s reflection to realise how utterly unlike that dull stifling tradition the OPSAAAL images are, freely taking from contemporary pop and op art and psychedelic art.

Africa

The designers were tasked with distilling complex anti-colonial conflicts down into simple but striking images, symbols which would require little or no explanation. This image of African women in traditional costume and carrying their babies in baby-carriers is made vivid and powerful by the addition of the semi-automatic rifles slung over their other shoulders.

The all-consuming nature of the struggle, the need to balance ordinary life with the struggle, the empowered role of women in the struggle, and the lack of facial features indicating that these are just two out of millions and millions anonymous fighters across the continent, are all brilliantly conveyed.

After Emory Douglas (1968) © Lízaro Abreu Padron, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Apartheid

Apartheid was a sore on the conscience of the world throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Many of the OPSAAAL posters were simple images of oppression. This is unusual in being a more narrative image, with its four pictures showing the progressive, and inevitable, collapse of the repressive regime. Note the use of the four cardinal languages, Spanish, English, French and Arabic.

Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the People of South Africa (1974) Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Asia

The Vietnam War came to symbolise neo-imperialist Western super-violence against nationalist independence struggles and crystallised America’s reputation as the great enemy of freedom for many Third World countries.

This clever poster shows the word Saigon slowly morphing from being dominated by the Stars and Stripes to bearing the flag of the communist North, suggesting that the rebels would win in the end. As they did.

Saigon, International Week of Solidarity with Vietnam (1970) © Rene Mederos Pazos, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Anti-America

Cuba is just 90 miles from the American mainland.

From the moment Castro’s revolution succeeded, the Americans tried to overthrow it. In 1961 they launched the embarrassing Bay of Pigs invasion which ended in humiliation, but continued making intermittent attempts to assassinate Castro, as well as imposing crippling sanctions on its tiny neighbour.

In response Cuba helped to focus the world’s attention on America as the heartland of neo-colonial oppression. Some of the most powerful images in the exhibition distort and subvert imagery and symbols central to American culture, such as the Great Seal, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty or, as here, Uncle Sam himself, zapped by the power of the World Revolution.

World Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution (1980) © Victor Manuel Navarrete, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Using native cultural heritage

As a way into contemporary liberation struggles in Latin America, Asia or the Far East, some OPSAAAL designers had the idea of taking traditional indigenous artefacts and giving them a modern spin, mostly putting a machine gun in their hands. Some of these aboriginal peoples also represented the very first resisters to the colonial oppression which their distant descendants were now fighting against.

This approach tapped into nationalist feelings in the respective countries, and also made contemporary protesters feel, or realise, that they were in fact part of a long, long lineage of resistance and protest. The ten or so images which used old imagery like this were among my favourites.

Guatemala (1968) © Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Magazine covers

To some extent the designers’ style was dictated by a shortage of materials, including good quality paper and printing ink, embargoed by the United States. This encouraged the designers to eschew subtlety in shade and contour and favour high-contrast photography and large areas of clearly defined colour. Tricontinental’s often starkly simple covers were printed in four colours by offset lithography.

Anti-America

Although little Cuba suffered badly from American sanctions, during the 60s and 70s there were many radical American supporters of the revolution. The San Francisco-based People’s Press published a North American edition if Tricontinental, and images created by Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper were adapted for use by OPSAAAL.

There are posters here supporting the imprisoned black activist Angela Carter, as well as memorials for various black radicals shot or imprisoned in America. But in a way, it was the imaginative symbols of American oppression which make the most impact.

Tricontinental magazine 33

Anti-apartheid

Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. It was only the most extreme version of institutionalised white racism, which also included the segregation laws in America, so vehemently protested by the Civil Rights Movement.

For me the OPSAAAL posters and Tricontinental cover art are at their best when they embody a really strong design idea, as in this simple but scathing image, a piece of Pop Art collage used to withering effect.

Tricontinental 76

Thoughts

1. Taken together they make up a fascinating review of visual styles and approaches available to political poster makers in the late 60s and 70s. In many ways the magazine covers are even more inventive and biting than the posters. Lots and lots of them have a really strong visual and intellectual impact, like the image – blown up, here, into a wall-sized hanging – of an American astronaut reaching out to the moon while standing on the backs of two prone African Americans.

2. It’s a reminder of just how much conflict there was around in the world in the 1970s when I grew up, with military dictatorships running most of South America, with colonialist regimes and apartheid South Africa still repressing millions of Africans, while millions of others were caught up in brutal civil wars, and then topping everything the nightmare of Vietnam which was promptly followed by the living hell of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

When you factor in that half of Europe was under Communist tyranny and there was an endless diet of scares about whether this or that incident might trigger World War Three, the world I grew up in seemed a much more violent and dangerous place than it does today.

3. This is embodied in the way there are so many guns in the posters. Almost all the native artefacts-updated ones simply put guns in the hands of tribal gods. In the last room in particular, almost every poster seemed to feature a man or woman or sometimes an inanimate object, holding a sub-machinegun. Stepping back from the rights and wrongs of the causes, the final room in particular gave me a claustrophobic sense of violence and fighting going on in every part of the world.

That’s maybe the main feeling the exhibition gave to me, but other visitors will find their own threads and meanings. Above all I defy you not to be thrilled by the sheer inventiveness and exuberance of so many of the works on display.

Installation view of Designed in Cuba at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

And it’s worth pointing out that the curators of the exhibition flew to Cuba specially to interview the surviving OPSAAAL designers and that the exhibition includes the resulting video, in which leading designers such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila explain at length their motivation and approach, the design ideas and technical constraints, which lay behind the Tricontinental phenomenon.

This is another brilliantly conceived and beautifully laid out exhibition from the House of Illustration.

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by Simon on January 1, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics

Tagged 1966, 26th of July Movement, Africa, Africa and Latin America, Alfredo Rostgaard, Angela Carter, anti-ads, apartheid, África y América Latina, Bay of Pigs, Black Panther Party, Cambodia, Che Guevara, colonialism, Communism, Cuba, developing world, Emory Douglas, Fidel Castro, Fulgencio Batista, Gladys Acosta Ávila, Havana, Helena Serrano, imperialism, Khmer Rouge, Latin America, liberation movements, Mike Stanfield, North Korea, Olivio Martinez Viera, Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, OSPAAAL, Pop Art, poster art, propaganda, psychedelia, Rafael Enríquez, satire, Socialist Realism, South Africa, South Korea, the Civil Rights Movement, the Mike Stanfield Collection, the People's Press, the Tricontinental Conference, the Vietnam War, Third World, Uncle Sam

Posted by Simon on January 1, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/designed-in-cuba-cold-war-graphics-house-of-illustration/

Nam June Paik at Tate Modern

Nam June Paik (1932 to 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term ‘electronic super highway’ in application to telecommunications. (Wikipedia)

This is a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, a collaboration between Tate Modern and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It’s the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work ever staged in the UK, bringing together over 200 works – from early compositions and performances, to sculptures, photos and paintings, magazines and drawings – through to rooms full of videos and large-scale television installations, and a final room which is a large scale, pulsating and very loud, multi-media rock installation.

Sistine Chapel (1993) Courtesy of the Estate of Nam June Paik

The Korean War ended in 1953 with South Korea saved from communist tyranny, and the country which saved it – at such cost in blood and money – the USA, proceeded to invest heavily in the South, fuelling a technology and consumer boom.

Paik developed as an artist during this boom and right from the start was interested in the incongruity of a still, in many ways undeveloped, traditional and Buddhist culture taking on the trappings of Middle American consumer capitalism. Hence his frequent images and assemblies playing with and highlighting the clash of these two cultures.

TV Buddha by Nam June Paik (1974) Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

When he, inevitably, traveled to America, he was put in touch with other opponents of the swamping consumer culture, the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, or the collection of artists musicians and performers at the Black Mountain College, North Carolina, which was home to all sorts of eminent artists and performers, notably the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Cage had an explosive impact on young Paik – he showed him that art can be made out of anything, incorporate any technology, and use chance and randomness. A man on stage twiddling through radio stations can, in the right circumstances be a work of art. A television showing an endless loop of imagery, or weird incandescent patterns you’ve generated to be played through it… or a TV with a magnet on top which distorts the images, or a large magnetic loops around the front with a fluctuating current going through it which makes the images bend and distort.

Why can’t all or any of this be art? After all, this was the age of the atom bomb and the Cold War, when the entire world might be reduced to a smouldering cinder in half an hour if someone pressed the wrong button. How could you possibly go on painting like Rembrandt or Constable in a world like that?

You needed something that responded to the urgency and the crisis of the times. And television seemed to be the new medium, the one through which entertainment and government lies poured in equal measure. A medium which could potentially be used for education and to bring the world together. Or to promote lies and ideology which would tear the world apart.

Why not address its ever-growing centrality, deconstruct it, take it to bits, satirise it, parody it, build sculptures out of it?

TV robots by Nam June Paik

Room by room

This exhibition feels really comprehensive. It’s massive and feels packed with stuff, but still manages to be imaginatively spaced and staged. Its twelve big rooms contain:

Introduction

Paik travelled to work in the US, Germany and Japan. He always questioned not just national borders but professional demarcations – and liked working with collaborators, not just artists, but dancers and musicians, and also fleets of technicians who helped him build robots and experiment with TV technology.

Buddhism. Many of his inventions use Buddhist motifs, from the image of a Buddha statue relayed via a CCTV at the start, to the penultimate room which contains a single lit candle with a camera pointing at it, and the image of the flickering flame reproduced on screens and projected onto the wall.

TV Garden

‘A future landscape where technology is an integral part of the natural world.’ The idea is supposedly related to Paik’s Buddhist feel for the way everything and everyone is connected in the spirit world and, increasingly, in a world dominated by new technology. But it is in fact a load of rubber plants with TV monitors arranged among them.

TV Garden 1974 to 1977 (2002) Tate Modern 2019. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Googling images of this, you can see that in some places the plants were set among stones in what looks like an actual low-growing garden. Tell you where would be a good place for these – the greenhouse at the Barbican.

Global Groove

According to the wall label: ‘This colourful fast-paced video mixes high and popular cultures, with imagery from traditional and contemporary, Western and non-Western sources.’

Far out, man! Look at the crazy picture distortion and mirroring effects! Top of the Pops 1973!!

From quite early on you get the feeling that all of this – the obsession with TV, the notion of the global village, lumbering robots, pop music and pop videos – it all seems incredibly dated. When I saw that the magnets placed around TV sets were being used to distort speeches by Richard Nixon I realised were in that kind of art, art gallery, curatorial time loops which is obsessed with the 1960s and their crappy hangover in the 1970s. The Vietnam War, the Beatles, Allen Ginsberg chanting blues to his harmonium, Woodstock, Watergate – yeah, man, it was all one heavy trip.

Even in the massive multi-media ‘experience’ which climaxes the exhibition in which a disorientiating stream of intercut images and clips and sounds and music are projected onto the walls and ceiling of the final room, I was astonished when prolonged clips came up of Janis Joplin singing her heart out. She died of a heroin overdose in died 1970.

In one darkened room is a huge wall of TV sets with other big TV monitors on the other walls and it seems to be playing a kind of multinational, global mashup of videos from various cultures, all treated to look over-coloured, cut-up and treated and all playing to… a soundtrack of Beatles songs! – titled Video Commune (Beatles beginning To End) and dating from 1970. Old. Old, old, old.

It is all just about near enough to be sort of familiar, but also old enough to smell musty like grandad.

Electronic music

Paik actually studied to be a classical musician and was an extremely able pianist. Some of the clips of Beethoven featuring in various vidoes are played by him. But when he moved to Germany in 1956 and met Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, it blew his mind daddy-oh.

In 1963 he hosted a one-man show at a villa converted into a gallery stuffed with immersive environments and sculptures which required audience involvement. There were musical instruments modified by the artist, three customised pianos in the Cage manner (Cage composed quite a lot of music for pianos which had had nuts and bolts and screws and elastic bands inserted between the keys or into the wires. They’re surprisingly listenable. Paik took this approach to the next level.

Zen for Wind took lots of random dangling objects which a breath of wind made brush against each other, jingle jangle. Visitors could record their own sounds and snippets on tape recorders and hear them reproduced at random through loudspeakers.

Paik’s friend the German artist Joseph Beuys destroyed one of the pianos and Paik liked it so much he left it on display. Ah, those were the days. Such rebels, back in a time when rebellion had meaning.

Some of Paik’s Cage-like music, some of the dangling objects and one of the pianos are on display here in this exhibition. It was ironic to read on all the wall labels how Paik wanted his visitors to interact with the pieces and then turn to them to find them all protected by plastic covers or behind tripwires which set off alarms.

Installation view of Nam June Paik at Tate Modern

No, children, you could play with these dusty old toys once upon a time, even smash them up for fun, but now times are very different and every scrap of paper and piece of old cable which was ever handled by a Great Artist is now a precious Work of Art, which would fetch millions on the current art market, and so must be protected, curated, catalogued and carefully stored away.

That’s what happens to avant-gardes – they fall into the hands of galleries and curators where their entire disruptive, anarchic charge is neutralised, surgically removed, and replaced by polite wall labels and security barriers.

Merce Cunningham

There’s a room devoted to Paik’s collaborations with and riffing off the work of Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, including the film Zen for Film a, blank film ‘exploring themes of emptiness, boredom and random interference’ – and Merce by Merce by Paik.

Charlotte Moorman

As a thoroughly trained classical musician Paik was well placed to make his comment that sex was everywhere in art and literature and yet almost completely absent from the classical canon.

Why is sex, a predominant theme in art and literature, prohibited ONLY in music?

(For a start that shows the extreme limits of his knowledge of contemporary and pop culture: I think even a casual examination would have shown him that popular songs, jazz, blues, rock’n’roll, pop and rock music is OBSESSED with sex.)

So he set out to address this glaring error in a collaboration with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman which lasted for nearly thirty years. Basically, these involved getting Moorman to play the cello in various states of undress, topless, bottomless, totally nude, or with various objects taped onto her boobs, for example mirrors, or what looked like little display cases.

This was such a 60s idea it made me giggle. What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding, man? A big quote from Moorman is printed on the wall of her saying that, in the age of nuclear weapons and Vietnam, you couldn’t expect artists to make art like in the old days. She became known as the Topless Cellist.

Thus there are films of performances which involved Charlotte playing the cello nude, or with mirrors or even small TV monitors taped to her breasts, or playing a TV monitor as if it was a cello, or playing a man sitting in front of her as if he was a cello and, most impressively, climbing topless into a column of oil drums filled with water then climbing out again.

The idea that having women strip off, taking their clothes off or taping things to their boobs, would somehow revolutionise music or put the sex back into classical music is so laughable as to be sweet and quaint.

If there’s one thing that Charlotte Moorman is not, it’s sexy. She looks like a nice young lady who’s decided to take her clothes off to make a statement. But just taking your clothes off does not make you sexy, as anyone who’s been in a gym or swimming pool changing room and looked around knows: it just makes you someone who’s taken their clothes off, often enough a rather pitiable sight. Here she is, combining Paik’s two themes, playing a cello made of television sets.

Charlotte Moorman with TV Cello and TV Eyeglasses (1971) Peter Wenzel Collection

Joseph Beuys

Paik encountered the Zero Group in Dusseldorf in 1961, which included the eccentric German artist Joseph Beuys. They remained close friends and made various collaborations. One of the later ones is a long video of Beuys on stage somewhere, standing wearing his trademark hat and army flak jacket and howling howling howling like a coyote into a microphone.

This room contains a full-sized Mongolian yurt, because Paik felt very in touch with the Mongolian part of his heritage. It’s an impressive object, easily big enough to bend slightly and walk into. It was Paik’s contribution to the German pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Mongolian tent by Nam June Paik (1993)

The Sistine Chapel

As mentioned above, the penultimate room contains a flickering flame with a camera pointing at it, and projected on the walls. But this pales into comparison with the elaborate scaffolding which projects a mashup of footage onto the walls and ceiling of the final room all to a deafening rock and blues and classical splice track.

The sound is impressive and the images are sort of immersive, but what really impresses is how much bloody scaffolding and structure it took to project these images. I wonder if the same effect could be achieved nowadays with a fraction of the equipment… as in the nearby exhibition of contemporary immersive artist, Olafur Eliasson. And if so, the thing is impressive less for its effects, than for indicating how laborious and heavy and complicated it was back in 1993, to achieve something which can be done with a few hidden projectors nowadays…

Installation view of Nam June Paik at Tate Modern. Photo by the author

Nothing dates faster than old TV

Well, OK, some things do, bread for example. Or pop music. But not much dates faster and more completely than televison. Watching TV clips of Richard Nixon or John Cage or Janis Joplin or hearing tracks by the Beatles from the 1960s conveys a deep psychological sense that we have stepped back in time not just a few decades, but back into what, is now, a different century – a time which is fast becoming incomprehensible in its political and artistic naivety and optimism

I really enjoyed the exhibition because of its quaint sense of being dated and old. I liked the quaint old bakelite TV sets Paik made his television robots out of, or the extremely ancient tape recorders on which he made his cutting edge music compilations in the 1960s.

But nothing dates faster than old visions of the future. Paik’s wall of video monitors is wonderfully redolent of the 1980s, of MTV and the TV generation. But the future would turn out not to be about walls of TV screens, but screens which are so small you can put them in your pocket or possibly be projected onto your glasses (still waiting for that to be perfected).

This is a beautifully assembled and laid out and clearly explained exhibition, and it explains why Paik was clearly one of the early international art superstars but – Tate’s promotional video includes the slogan THE FUTURE IS NOW. But this exhibition is all about THEN, and quite an outdated THEN at that. To me it ranged from the dated, to the very dated, to the really antique.

Some ancient robots and gizmos by Nam June Paik at Tate Modern.

A fascinating look at the world of a pioneer of TV art, or art for the TV age – but really bringing home the fact that that era, the TV era, is long gone, and we are well into a completely new era, of boundless new communication technologies, bringing with them new social ideas and issues, and new geopolitical threats, which have as yet been very little explored by artists.

Paik appears to have been the grand-daddy to the modern world of video art, a granddad whose pioneering work more or less ended around the same time as the analogue era, sometime in the mid-1990s. He was the great pioneer of analogue visual technology, a revered ancestor. Let’s tap the temple bell, and make a bow to his cheeky, funny, loud and inventive achievements.

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by Simon on November 18, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on November 18, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/nam-june-paik-tate-modern/

Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion @ Hayward Gallery

Kader Attia is ‘one of today’s leading international artists’ and this exhibition is the first major survey of his work ever held in the UK.

Attia was born in 1970 France. His parents were of Algerian origin. He grew up in one of the banlieues or suburbs in north-east Paris, in a multicultural environment where Catholic, Jewish and Muslim religions mixed. Attia has dual nationality and has returned often to the family home in Algeria. In the mid-1990s he worked and travelled in the democratic republic of Congo where he held his first exhibition.

Since then he has gone on to forge a career as an exponent of deeply fashionable ‘post-colonial art’, working across a dazzling array of media to criticise western imperialism, western colonialism, western racism, western cultural appropriation of native lore and art, western control of its immigrant populations, and so on.

‘I try to trigger a political feeling in the viewer. My job is like all of us confronted with reality. What interests me is when a work poses a political question not only from a linguistic point of view, formal, but more from an ethical point of view.’

Political feelings. Political questions. Well, the show as a whole struck me as a sustained attack on western values, history, art and culture. The assault is sustained across six rooms on the ground floor of the Hayward gallery, plus the Heni Project space entered from the gallery lobby.

Transgender sex workers

When I learned that one of his earliest successes was a project to photograph and ‘document’ the lives of a community of Algerian transgender sex workers, and that a slideshow of 160 of these images won him international recognition when displayed at the 50th Venice Biennale, my heart sank.

What could be more crushingly obvious, inevitable and clichéd? Is there any other subject as fashionably outré and yet as well trodden? I immediately thought of:

Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde at the Barbican, which featured lesbian, gay and transgender artists and performers
diane arbus: in the beginning currently the sister exhibition to Attia, upstairs in the Hayward, which features a ton of male female impersonators and performers from the 1950s and 60s
Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers at the Photographers’ Gallery, with hundreds of photos of transgender and cross-dressing people from the past century, notable:
- the well documented life of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born a male in Algeria, who became a famous French transsexual entertainer with the stage name of ‘Bambi’
The photos taken by Olivia Arthur of the suppressed LGBT+ sexualities in India which featured in the Illuminating India exhibition at the Science Museum
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins at the Barbican, which featured photos by half a dozen photographers of sex workers and transgender people, namely:
- Daido Moriyama’s photos of prostitutes and transvestites in Tokyo
- Walter Pfeiffer’s portfolio of photos of his young transsexual friend Carlo Joh, from the Zurich gay scene
- Casa Susanna, a historic collection of around 400 prints taken during the mid-50s and 60s at a private retreat for transvestites in upstate New York
- Paz Errázuriz’s project depicting the community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile
- Teresa Margolles’s series of enormous colour photos depicting transgender sex workers in Mexico
Queer British Art 1861 to 1967 at Tate Britain which was packed full of transsexuals, transgenders and same-sex desires

Identity and ‘trangressive’ sexuality are the fashionable subject of our age and yet curators and artists conspire to imagine they are still hugely taboo subjects which you have to whisper about and which an artist is oh-so brave to address. Instead of a boringly predictable subject which has been comprehensively ‘explored’ by every art gallery in London.

This set the tone for my reception of Attia: he and his supporters think he is a grand rebel, an incisive critic of western historical narratives and norms – but all of his critiques seemed to me extremely old and over-familiar and passé.

When I went to the Sensation exhibition of young British Artists in 1997 I was genuinely bowled over by their dazzling new approaches to an amazing new range of subject matters. This guy is retreading ideas and approaches I got bored with decades ago.

Room 1. Modern architecture

Room one is dominated by an awesome projection which covers one entire wall of a camera very slowly moving up the facade of one of the shitty council housing blocks which make up the dreaded banlieues of Paris, the post-war sink estates where Paris sent all its working class and immigrant population to live and which, more or less every summer, erupt in rioting and car burning.

Post-war concrete high-rise council estates are crap. Not a new idea, is it?

Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by Linda Nylind

The wall label tells us Attia is drawing attention to the way these blocks were built around principles of surveillance and control similar to those used to subdue colonial populations.

As it happens a) I grew up on the edge of one of Britain’s all-concrete post-war new towns and b) I’ve been reading a lot recently about post-war town planning and architecture in the social histories of David Kynaston:

Austerity Britain, 1945 to 1951 (2007) comprising:
- A World to Build, 1945 to 1948
- Smoke in the Valley, 1948 to 1951
Family Britain, 1951 to 1957 (2009) comprising:
- The Certainties of Place, 1951 to 1955
- A Thicker Cut, 1955 to 1957
Modernity Britain, 1957 to 1962 (2014) comprising:
- Opening the Box, 1957 to 1959

Although the subject of post-war town planning was fraught with controversy and disagreement I’ve nowhere read anything suggesting that the new estates were designed in order to monitor and control their inhabitants.

Sounds like Attia has swallowed his Michel Foucault whole. (Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic whose theories address the relationship between power and knowledge and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. He died in 1984. Foucault was awesomely fashionable in the early 1980s when I went to university and read half a dozen of his books. It was when I found myself reading an interview from the mid-70s in which Foucault explained how ‘we’ [the radical student movement] could use Maoist concepts to battle against the fascist French police, that I began to realise that Foucault had little or nothing to offer me in the actual political and cultural situation of Thatcherite Britain that I found myself in.)

The mistakes the planners made had nothing whatever to do with surveillance and control. In knocking down the old slums and rehousing people, they decided that, instead of rehousing them on the same locations, they would move them out to clean new locations which had no historic restrictions on design. All the architects were fans of the fashionable Le Corbusier who promoted cities in the sky and also adopted high rise builds as solutions to shortages of space.

It was only as tenants moved into these gleaming and fashionable new blocks that the drawbacks became clear: very often the planners had forgotten to build in shops and facilities, pubs and churches and you centres and the miscellaneous kinds of places where people meet and hang out. Public transport into the city centres was poor and irregular, and they were too far way to walk to.

More importantly it turned out that various elements needed expensive maintenance, especially the lifts without which people couldn’t get to their flats. Getting rubbish out of people’s flats down to collective rubbish collection points didn’t always work and anyway resulted in overflowing bins which bred rats.

Most subtly, it was discovered that traditional communities are self-policing. Where you had an old-fashioned street you had windows on the street and, in any kind of good weather, people sitting out on stoops and steps watching, generally congeries of mums watching their kids playing, or owners of the various small shops in a neighbourhood similarly watching what was going on.

These acted as an informal and highly informed police. If fights broke out, if kids did something dodgy or rude or bullying and so on, there were scores of eyes watching and people could intervene, often mums who knew the mother of the wrong-doer. Thus communities were able to police themselves with little or no intervention from the authorities. This is something I’ve seen described in Somerset Maugham’s novel Lisa of Lambeth, have read about in 2,000 pages of David Kynaston’s histories, and was really emphasised by a recent BBC 4 documentary about Janet Jacobs who wrote the classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) describing how over-intellectual architects and planners, dazzled by the futuristic designs of le Corbusier and other fashionable European architects, were destroying the neighbourhoods of old Manhattan, replacing rundown but friendly and self-policing communities, with windswept high ‘projects’ – just like the French banlieues. Into the projects American planners decanted a lot of their cities’ poorest which tended to include lots of blacks, just as Paris decanted its poorest, which included lots of Algerian immigrants, into its banlieues.

The result? Vast expanses of concrete high rise buildings where ‘community’ has been destroyed, and the public spaces belong to the worst kind of tearaway teenagers who patrol in gangs, peddle drugs, stab rivals and erupt in violence if the police try to intervene.

In everything I’ve read and watched on this subject, no-one has mentioned the idea these wretched estates were built to to monitor and control their inhabitants. A far simpler explanation is that they were the disastrous result of planners and architects falling under the spell of fashionable French and German theorists with sweeping intellectual attitudes: demolish the old, build the shiny gleaming new cities of the future.

This is what went through my mind as I stood in this first room looking at the awesome film of a camera slowly moving up the side of just such a concrete high rise building, next to a model of such a building.

My conclusion was that Attia is deliberately and wilfully ignoring the real motivations and the complex social history of these places, in order to turn them into a cheap and obvious jibe at the police and authorities. The claim that these places were built solely so the authorites could control their inhabitants is 1. factually incorrect 2. a deliberate distortion which allows Attia to quote Foucault and so sound wondrously intellectual and clever and 3. 40 years out of date.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, who is surveilling and controlling the inhabitants of these horrible slums if it isn’t the owners of multinational American corporations, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and twitter to name but a few? But the internet is a bit too up to date for Attia. He is still lost in the 1970s when it was cool and path-breaking to take photos of transgender people (wow) and use new Left Bank ideas to deconstruct notions of power and control (“have you read Foucault, man, he’s just soooo cool”).

Away from the leather-jacketed student politics, I liked some of Attia’s more allusive pieces, such as this piece of minimalism, although I still found it weird that he made it some forty years after minimalism had become well established as a style in America.

Narcissus (2012) by Kader Attia. Concrete block, mirror and wire

Room 2. Joy, fear and humiliation

This is a massive room devoted to scores of big prints of his photos of 1990s Algerian transgender sex workers, capturing ‘moments of elation experienced in the course of an otherwise precarious and difficult existence’.

Attia is obviously yet another artist who subscribes to the view that prostitutes and sex workers are privy to a kind of special knowledge and insight concealed to the rest of us, that photographing hookers reveals a ‘secret world’, that the mere act of photographing them ‘breaks taboos’ and ‘transgresses’ conventional bourgeois values. Really?

La Piste d’Atterrissage (The Landing Strip) by Kader Attia (2000) © the artist

He says:

I wanted to present the whole picture of their lives, to show that even illegal immigrants working as transgender prostitutes have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope.

‘Even illegal immigrants have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope’. How patronising. How patronising to his subjects to treat them like some kind of remote tribe in New Guinea, instead of people like you or me. Aand how patronising to us, the viewers, that he feels he has to explain that prostitutes are people who have feelings too. Really? You think?

As to the transgender issue, some of us have been totally comfortable with, not to say bored by, the whole idea of cross-dressing and transgender for nearly fifty years. (‘But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head…’ as Lou Reed sang in 1972 i.e. 50 years ago.)

Like the room criticising soulless concrete housing estates, this took me right back to the 1970s.

The opposite wall displays a number of black-and-white press and publicity photos of world famous politicians and popular singers, entitled Field of Emotion. Apparently, this work

explores the ambivalent role that emotion plays in all areas of our lives… Attia asks us to consider how and whether powerful emotions might help heal rather than create conflict.

Emotions play a role in our lives. Hmm. Really. Do you see why I felt I was being patronised?

Anyway, what struck me about the display was how very dated all of the images were. Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Edith Piaf, Moshe Dayan, Lenin, Mussolini, Ella Fitzgerald. It looks like the wall of a radical student on the Left Bank circa 1974. “Right on, baby. Have you heard Lou Reed’s new album? And what about Foucault’s new book?” Dated dated dated.

Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery

Room 3. Chaos + Repair

I liked this big ball made out of fragments of fabric, broken mirrors and wire. Apparently it is an attempt to capture the ambivalence most people feel about aspects of their cultural, political or personal identity. Is that how it makes you feel? Do you feel ambivalent about aspects of your cultural, political or personal identity?

I just liked it as another example of the minimalist thread in his thinking and creating.

Chaos + Repair = Universe, 2014 by Kader Attia. Photo by the author

Room 4. Joy, fear and humiliation

Attia is, apparently, critical of

the museological impulse to classify and categorise [because it] is part of a much broader and more problematic system of control. In many of his sculptures and installations, he typically invokes the display methods and subject matter of a typical 19th-century natural history or ethnographic museum… in order to explore the ways in which colonialism continues to shape how western societies represent and engage with non-western cultures.

I profoundly disagree with this on all kinds of levels.

Abandoning all the achievements of science

All western science is based on the collection and sorting of data. Medicine is based on a vast array of anatomical, chemical, biochemical and medical information which has been painstakingly collected, sorted and categorised over the last 200 years. Does Attia really think the inhabitants of Algeria would be better off without antibiotics, anaesthetics, innoculations and vaccinations which European scientists devised after years of collecting samples, experimenting and cataloguing? If so, he is an idiot.

Valorising voodoo

His work, he says, is looking for a way we can escape from ‘the obsession of the Western modern mind to organise the universe’, which sounds very cool and Foucauldian. “Let’s smash the system, man.”

But just really, really think for a moment what it would be like to live in a world where there was no organising, classifying impulse, where knowledge was not recorded, and collated, in which each generation was born into the same old ignorance and fear. The world of the illiterate wode-painted heath-dwellers who the Romans found in ancient Britain, performing human sacrifices to placate the anger of the gods. Is that the kind of world you’d like to live in, ruled by shamans and witch doctors. Don’t think the transgender prostitutes would last long in that world. Or any woman who defies tribal customs.

Luckily Attia with his irresponsible views and the entire class of dilettantish modern artists to which he belongs, has absolutely no effect whatsoever on politics, economics, medicine, science or technology.

Classifying and categorising

A few years ago I went through every room in the British Museum and discovered that the five dark, dusty, wooden-cabinet-lined rooms on the east side of the central courtyard are devoted to showing how everything we know today had its origins in the impulse of all sorts of people, from the Holy Roman Emperor to English parish vicars, to collect all manner of weird and wonderful objects, and to sort and organise their collections.

These rooms look boring but turn out to be full of quirky and highly personal collections of everything from bones and fossils to Roman antiquities, types of rock to the shape of clouds.

All human knowledge is based on the impulse to collect and categorise. The impulse to collect is a fundamental human attribute. Everyone does it. I arrange my books into categories. My daughter puts her photos into different Instagram albums. My son organises his music into different spotify playlists. Who doesn’t ‘curate’ their own content on social media and the web?

Well then, it turns out you are in the grip of the Western world’s sick and dubious ‘museological impulse to classify and categorise’. It turns out you employ ‘problematic system of control’.

Of course some of this classifying and categorising can be used for evil purposes, as the Nazis categorised humans into different races, starting with the distinction between Jews and Aryans, and imperial authorities may well have categorised people into ‘white’ and ‘native’ for all kinds of bureaucratic reasons. And it is very much this tradition of classifying people and in particular the inhabitants of the colonised nations of Africa and Asia which Attia has in mind.

But to say that the impulse to collect and categorise is in itself evil and to devote your work to finding ways ‘to escape this’ impulse is like deciding to abolish language because Hitler used language in his speeches and imperialists used language in their racist laws.

Hypocrisy

And, it barely seems worth pointing out that all these works which are devoted to critiquing the wicked Western habit of wanting to organise and classify and categorise are being displayed in an art gallery where… they are being organised and classified and categorised :).

The walls of this exhibition abound in labels precisely dating each piece, carefully explaining the materials they’re made from, categorising them as photographs, sculptures, installations and soon.

The works are divided into rooms each of which has been organised around a central theme or concept.

And there is, of course, a big expensive catalogue of the works on sale in the gallery shop, ‘a fully-illustrated catalogue with an extensive interview between Kader Attia and Ralph Rugoff’, Director, Hayward Gallery, no less.

In other words, this exhibition itself demonstrates the very compulsion to categorise and organise which Attia claims to have devoted a career to trying to deconstruct.

When I was younger and experiencing the first heady rush of reading Foucault and Barthes and Adorno and Benjamin I might have interpreted this as sophisticated irony, or as ‘a playful deconstruction of the normative values which underlie the western historical narrative’, or some such.

Now I’m older and more impatient, I just see it as idiotic hypocrisy.

Technology

Is Attia at any point using traditional tribal native-people’s media to create his art with? No. He uses digital photography, digital video, film, light shows and minimalist sculpture. All the hallmarks and media of the most technically advanced, post-industrial, post-modern Western art.

Ethnography

But of course Attia isn’t really referring to the impulse to collect and categorise as a whole, whatever he might say. He is speaking much more personally about the West’s history of collecting and categorising the artefacts (and indeed peoples) of the non-Western, ‘developing’ world which he has taken it upon himself to be a post-colonial mouthpiece for.

No prizes then, for guessing that there might well be a room devoted to showing how Western culture has ripped off and appropriated non-western art and artefacts.

As long ago as the 1920s left-wing critics were criticising Picasso for ripping off African tribal masks. This accusation became a standard part of Marxist art criticism in the 1960s and 70s. Now it is entirely accepted, it is the utterly conventional wisdom of our time, that early 20th century artistic Modernism wouldn’t have existed if Picasso and Matisse hadn’t been able to see African and Oceanic tribal masks in the Paris Ethnography Museum. Which exhibition of Picasso and Matisse does not point it out?

Thus the Royal Academy’s exhibition on Matisse and his studio was at pains to prove how up to date and politically correct it was by ‘calling out’ Matisse for his ‘cultural appropriation’ of tribal artifacts, as well as his ‘orientalism’ for painting odalisques.

So – as with Attia’s pieces of minimalism, or his insight that concrete high-rise estates are horrible, or his oh-so-risqué photos of transgender prozzies – what really struck me about his western-modern-art-ripped-off-African-art pieces was how very, very, very old, clichéd and totally acceptable this fact is.

How he presents this is so glaringly obvious I thought it was funny, Here is one of his ‘artworks’ where he has placed a book with a cover illustration of Munch’s notorious painting The Scream next to a ‘Pende sickness mask’. Yes, Kader, I do get it. Munch would never have painted like this if it he hadn’t had sight of the African masks collected by wicked imperialists, and therefore his painting is a wicked wicked piece of cultural appropriation.

Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Naughty, naughty Western artists. Pablo and Henri and Edvard, you must all go and sit on the naughty step. Don’t you know that art must never copy ideas from other cultures. Only Europeans are this wicked. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians never copied art, writing or religions from of other people’s cultures. And even if they did, it’s alright, because they aren’t white.

What I found literally impossible to believe was the wall label for this work which explained that:

Several works in this room, including The Scream and Mirrors and Masks point to the still under-acknowledged influence of African art on the trajectory of Western art history.

Still under-acknowledged? By whom? This point of view has been knocking around for ages. I found it in full cry in an art history book from 25 years ago which I reviewed last year.

Primitivism and Modern Art by Colin Rhodes (1994)

Do you really think this is news to anyone who regularly attends art galleries or knows anything about modern art? It is one of the clichés, one of the absolute bedrock certainties, of modern art history. Anybody who studies modern art will hear about it.

Room 5. The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures

The biggest room in the gallery is given over to this massive installation.

Installation view of The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind

The fundamental concept is ‘repair’. Attia, as a self-declared expert on Western and non-Western societies, confidently proclaims:

While Western societies seek to erase marks left by injury or trauma, ‘in traditional societies it’s the opposite: they have ways to fix an injury that also keeps it visible.’

Hence this collection of twenty or so metal warehouse shelf units as well as three vitrines which display hundreds of objects including African masks, vintage photographs, books, newspapers and a series of decorative, functional or devotional objects constructed by soldiers during the First World War.

In among all these objects are mingled busts which Attia commissioned from craftsmen in Carrara, Italy and Senegal, which depict members of an African ethnic group known for body modification including facial scarring – juxtaposed with busts of First World War soldiers with severe facial injuries.

The whole thing, then, is an ‘investigation’ into contrasting Western and non-Western attitudes to scarring and healing, repairing and fixing.

Another part of the display is a slideshow juxtaposing photos of First World War soldiers undergoing early and rudimentary plastic surgery, with African masks showing obvious signs of repair:

an unsettling series of juxtapositions that challenges our conventional ideas about wholeness, injury, beauty and otherness.

Ah. ‘Otherness’. Surprised it’s taken this long to get round to this worn-out cliché of cultural studies and critical theory. The premise is that Western cultures try to cover, repair and occlude physical scars and injuries, whereas non-Western cultures don’t and often wear them with pride.

OK. I’ll buy that.

Room 6. Shifting Borders

The most recent work in the exhibition is a set of three videos being shown on three big monitors with benches in front of them, and headphones for you to put on so you can listen to the talking heads.

Each of the videos features Attia interviewing mental health professionals, academics and survivors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in which more than 600 people, most of them students, were killed.

Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind

In one of the videos a Vietnamese spiritualist describes holding a ceremony for the spirit of an American soldier who had possessed her brother-in-law. In another a professional doctor declares ‘I don’t think a psychiatrist is the only one who can heal.’ In other words:

Through the spoken testimonies that make up the video element of Shifting Borders, Attia addresses different forms of healing and in particular the therapeutic role played by shamanistic and spiritualist practices in non-Western societies.

West bad. Non-West good.

Thoughts

The first impact is the scale and variety of the work, sculptures, photos, installations, videos on display – Attia is covering the whole waterfront of contemporary media.

Next I was struck by how very out of date so much of it seemed – finding 70s housing estates crappy, oh-so-edgy photos of transgender prostitutes, the claim that European modern art ripped off African masks, the claim that traditional non-western ‘healers’ know things Western scientists don’t understand, a wall of political and jazz icons from the 1950s – all of these struck me as old, old, old ideas and images. Claiming that non-western medicine might have alternative ways of healing is a new idea? Really?

Attia wanted a political response and so I have responded politically to the ideas on show and I find them thin, deliberately misleading, superficial and, although dressed up in fashionable curator-speak, actually dated and old.

The one big theme which I did find thought-provoking or interesting was this idea of ‘repair’ which runs through many of the works. Thus in the room of African masks placed next to western books to prove how wicked wicked Europeans ripped off African culture, there was suddenly a big hole in the wall, apparently unconnected to the grim lecturing of the other pieces.

Untitled (2014) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author

I liked this. Like the ball made of fabric and broken mirror, I just found this an arresting artefact, object, thing. Not something you see every day.

I get so bored by hectoring, lecturing, dogmatic, ideological modern art. It’s a refreshing change to come across something which just… is. Which connects with you at some inexplicable level… Which gives you a funny feeling about space, and secrets, and interiors and wrecks and rubble.

It reminded me of some of the works of Anish Kapoor which play with the integrity of the surface of the gallery i.e. disappear into the walls and ceilings.

Something similar could be said of this hypnotic jumble of sheep horns, that it creates an eerie and uncanny sensation in the viewer, a kind of discomforting sensation in your mind as you imagine running your hands over its sharp surfaces.

Schizphrenic Melancholia (2018) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author

Schizophrenic Melancholia (2018) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author

Unfortunately the wall label then goes on to give a lengthy explanation which does its best to eliminate all of the mystery and surprise from the piece, and convert it into another part of the heavy-handed anti-western lecture.

In this sculptural work, Attia elaborates on the relationship between contemporary Western medicine and traditional healing practices, in particular those that deal with mental illness. Attia’s research in this area – a key subject for the artist – took him to Dakar, Senegal, where he witnessed an ancient healing ceremony called ‘Ndeup’, in which the horns of sacrificial goats and sheep form the centrepiece of a ritual that involves the whole community. According to the Lebu people, by the ceremony’s end these horns would hold all the ‘bad energy’ that had been forced out of the afflicted individual during the ritual.

“Yeah, man, western society has lost its way, it’s like traditional peoples, man, they’re like so much more in touch with nature and their true selves, man. I’ve seen stuff on my trips, man, things you people can’t understand, stuff which defies western medicine, man.” Neil the hippy.

It was only on leaving the gallery that I realised that the enormous poster / hanging / digital print opposite the main entrance is also by Attia.

Rochers Carrés (2008) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author

It’s a striking composition although, like everything else in the exhibition, it cannot be allowed to simply be: it must immediately be stuffed full of progressive moralising and curatorial meaning-making.

It has to be categorised and defined and described, to be titled and dated and explained and interpreted, in just the kind of way which Attia has made a career out of saying he is trying to run away from. So:

Kader Attia is interested in boundaries – ‘geographical, cultural, sexual, religious’ – and the way they function as in-between spaces. the son of Algerian immigrants, Attia grew up in Paris but spent his summer holidays in Algiers where he spent hours smoking, fishing and – like the teenagers in this photograph – watching the ships going back and forth between Algeria and Europe.

Rochers Carrés – in English ‘square rocks’ – is one of a series of images that Attia made of this breakwater ‘beach’ in the Algiers neighbourhood of Bab El Oued. In Attia’s words, this beach is ‘the ultimate boundary’ that separates these young people from their dreams of a better life.

Really? Is it really that much of a boundary to youths like Attia who could take a cab to the airport, get on a plane and fly back to their homes in Paris, secure in the heart of the scientific, economic, technological and artistic bosom of the West?

Summary

The world is much more perforated and mixed up and heterogenous and immigrated than Attia’s simplistic binary definitions (West bad, non-West good) allow.

And this big poster is a classic example of the constricting, strangulating way in which every single piece in the show has to be dated and defined, contextualised and interpreted, labelled and explained to death.

If Attia is sincerely trying to ‘escape’ from the European obsession with collecting and categorising, then this exhibition shows his efforts to have been a self-defeating failure. It’s one of the most intensively collected and categorised exhibitions I’ve ever been to.

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

More Hayward Gallery reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

3 Comments

by Simon on March 16, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition

Tagged 50th Venice Biennale, A Thicker Cut, A World to Build, Anish Kapoor, Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins, art, Austerity Britain, Bab El Oued, banlieues, Barbican, Chaos + Repair = universe, cultural appropriation, David Kynaston, diane arbus: in the beginning, exhibition, Family Britain, Field of Emotion, France, Gwangju Uprising, Hayward Gallery, Heni Project, Illuminating India exhibition, installation, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde, Janet Jacobs, Jazz, Kader Attia, Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion, Le Corbusier, LGBT, Linda Nylind, Matisse, Matisse and his studio, Michel Foucault, minimalism, Modern Couples: Art, Modernity Britain, Munch, Olivia Arthur, Opening the Box, Orientalism, otherness, Paris, Photographers' Gallery, photography, Picasso, Primitivism and Modern Art by Colin Rhodes, Ralph Rugoff, Rochers Carrés, Royal Academy, Schizophrenic Melancholia, sculpture, Smoke in the Valley, South Korea, The Certainties of Place, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, Transgender sex workers, Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/kader-attia-the-museum-of-emotion-hayward-gallery/

Lee Bul: Crashing @ Hayward Gallery

This is a major retrospective of the art of the (female) Korean artist Lee Bul, born in 1964 and still going strong, so something of a mid-career snapshot. It brings together over 100 works in the five enormous exhibition rooms of Hayward Gallery, plus some work located outside.

Installation view of Lee Bul: Crashing at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

Installation view of Lee Bul: Crashing showing Monster Pink (left) and Civitas Solis II (in the background) © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

Oh for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

As you walk into room one, you immediately realise that much of Lee’s art is big, involving costumes, installations, mannequins and dummies.

You also realise that it is done to a high degree of finish. Everything looks very professional and seamless. It comes as no surprise to learn that much of her recent work is conceived by her but created by a studio of craftspeople and technicians.

I’m always a little envious of my teenage kids. When they come to art exhibitions like this, they roam at will, attracted by whatever is big and brash, rarely bothering with the boring wall labels or grown-up ‘issues’, enjoying things purely for what they look like and how much fun they are. They would certainly find lots to admire here, from the point of view of the spectacular and dramatic.

Monster Pink, pictured above, is accompanied by Monster White both of which look like assemblages of wriggling worms, like some mutant aliens from Dr Who. The same sci-fi vibe attaches to what look like fragments of space suits dangling from the ceiling. On closer examination you can see that these are life-size depictions of the human body in the style of Japanese manga comics, in which both men and women have sleek, perfect bodies, often encased in futuristic body armour.

Lee has produced dismembered versions of these, half a sleek, armoured torso, or combinations of limbs and extremities, moulded into striking but disconcerting fragments of mannequins. Soft pink sacks hang next to sleek machine-tooled silhouettes.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Cyborg WI on the left (photo by the author)

Up the concrete ramp, in room three, there’s what seems to be a model of a futuristic city, held up by thin scaffolding, some kind of hyper-freeway emerging from a tall plastic mountain, complete with a massive neon sign clicking on and off.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… (2005) Photo by the author

Nearby is a big ‘cave’ made of shiny plastic, with a ‘door’ to go in through, a ‘window’ to look out of, and walls decorated with a mosaic of mirror fragments.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (photo by the author)

Best of all, from an excitable teenager’s point of view, are two big transport machines.

Downstairs in long, low room two, is what appears to be a space-age hovercar not unlike the one Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi use to go to the city of Mos Eisley to look for Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Live Forever III (photo by the author)

To my amazement, visitors are actually encouraged to get into this device (once they’ve slipped on some protective plastic bags to go over their shoes). As I was saying to myself the immortal line ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for’, the gallery assistant lowered the roof and sealed me in.

You’re forced to lie quite low in the beautifully upholstered leather chair and watch a TV monitor placed right in front of you. If only I could have flicked the ignition, heard the engine roar, made a secret tunnel door open up and slid down a chute into the nearby River Thames to begin a high-speed boat chase against the baddies who’d just blown up the MI6 building.

Alas, all that actually happens is that the screen hanging in front of your face plays tacky Korean karaoke videos. You’re invited to put on headphones, pick up the handy microphone and join in which I was far too intimidated to do.

Finally, up the Hayward’s heavy concrete stairwell to gallery four where a) the entire floor has been covered in futuristic reflective silver plastic, giving it a Dr Who-TV set appearance, and b) and in which floats one of Lee Bul’s most iconic works, a huge model of a zeppelin made from shiny reflective silver foil.

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon (2015-2016) at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo: Linda Nylind

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Willing To Be Vulnerable: Metalized Balloon (2015 to 2016) at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind

And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…

My son, a big fan of manga, animé, graphic novels and sci-fi, would have loved all this, consumed purely as spectacle, as weird and wonderful objects of fantasy and imagination.

However, art is rarely this simple or free. The artists themselves, and certainly their curators and critics, are all too ready to catch the butterfly of fantasy in a net of explanations, drag it back down to earth, and pin it to a board next to all the other specimens in their collection. For example, when you look up the Wikipedia article about Lee, it begins:

Lee’s work questions patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women by revealing ideologies that permeate our cultural and political spheres

firmly dragging Lee’s art into contemporary art discourse with its all-too-familiar obsessions of gender, race, ideology and politics.

The free exhibition handout and the wall labels are where you go for more information about Lee, and they certainly are extremely informative and illuminating. In addition, there are two timelines printed on walls – one telling the history of South Korea since the 1950-53 war to the present, and one describing the development of modern art in Korea from the time of Lee’s birth (1964) to the present day, with a special emphasis on women’s art and issues.

All very interesting, but the more you read, the more you become weighed down by interpretations of art which see it all in terms of ponderous ‘issues’ – of ‘challenges’ and ‘subversions’ and ‘questionings’ – the more it feels like you are sitting through a dreary two-hour-long sociology lecture.

Korea

The South Korea Lee was born into was ruled by a right-wing dictator who had come to power in a military coup, General Park Chung-hee, who ruled with an iron fist from 1963 to 1979. Park inaugurated a series of five year plans designed to modernise Korean society and the economy at breakneck speed.

But Lee’s parents were left-wing dissidents and, although they weren’t arrested, were subjected to harassment, periodic house searches, banned from government employment and hassled into keeping on the move, never settling long in one place.

Thus Lee’s childhood memories are of often cold and bleak makeshift homes and the oppressiveness of the authorities set against a vista of brave new towns, cities, motorways and buildings built quickly of shoddy cement, destined soon to crumble and become seedy and derelict.

The failure of utopias

Amidst all the other ‘issues’ addressed in the art, it was this latter notion – the failure of utopianism – which interested me most. It seems to me that we are currently living through just such an epoch of failure, the slow-motion failure of the dream of a digital future.

Having worked in four British government departments or agencies on their websites and IT projects for the past eight years I have seen all manner of cock-ups and mismanagement – the collapse of the unified NHS project, the likely failure of the system for Universal Credit which was launched in 2010 and still doesn’t work properly, let alone the regular bank failures like the recent TSB collapse. All this before you consider the sinister implications of the recent Facebook-Cambridge Analytica-U.S. Presidential elections debacle.

I have also observed the negative impact of phones and laptops on my own children i.e. they have both become phone addicts. As a result of all this I have very strong, and generally negative, opinions about ‘the Digital Future’.

That’s why I warmed to this aspect of the work of Chinese art superstar, Ai Weiwei, as displayed at the 2015 Royal Academy retrospective of his work. Twitter, Facebook and all the rest of them sell themselves as agents of ‘liberation’ whereas they are, quite obviously in my opinion, implements of a new kind of surveillance society, instruments of turbo-charged consumerism, and the tools of Russian hackers and any number of other unknown forces.

Yet people love them, ignore the scandals, can’t give up their phones or Facebook accounts, and big corporation, banks and governments carry on piling all their services online as if nothing could possibly go wrong with this technology.

With all this in mind I was surprised that there was no mention anywhere of the digital utopia, of digital technology, of phones and screens and big data anywhere in this big exhibition. Instead the utopias Lee Bul is concerned with seemed to me very dated. People wearing futuristic (manga) outfits or living in futuristic cities – this all seemed very Flash Gordon to me, very old tech, a very 1950s and 60s definition of what the future is going to look like.

This feeling that her art is very retro in its vision was crystallised by one of her most iconic works, which was a star feature of the 20th Sydney Biennale in 2016 – the enormous foil zeppelin – Willing To Be Vulnerable: Metalized Balloon.

I’m perfectly aware that the Hindenburg Zeppelin is an enduring symbol of technological hubris and disaster – that it burst into flames and crashed to the ground in 1937. I’ve seen the black and white film footage many times, I’ve even watched the terrible 1975 disaster movie they made about it.

Willing To Be Vulnerable is one of Lee’s most recent works and yet… isn’t it a very old reference to a long-ago event. It would be like discussing the rise of right-wing populism by reference to Adolf Hitler (German Chancellor when the Hindenburg crashed). It’s a plausible reference, sort of, but it’s not very up to date, is it? It’s not where we are now.

And then again, it isn’t even a detailed or accurate model of the Hindenburg. It’s just a big shiny balloon. An awesomely big shiny balloon. My kids would love it. I couldn’t really see it interrogating or questioning anything.

Architecture

The grandiose rhetoric of Korean President Park Chung-hee’s regime, and its relative failure to build the utopia it promised, also explain the strong theme of architecture throughout the exhibition.

When you look closer, you realise that the big model of the kind-of super highway emerging from a phallic mountain – Mon grand récit – Weep into stones… – pictured above, is accompanied by a series of paintings and sketches on the walls showing aspects of architecture, visions and fantasies of architecture which come to ruin.

They are subtler, quieter work which would be easy to overlook in the first impact of all the big models and installations. I particularly liked one collage painting which gives an impression of some kind of disaster involving a glass and chrome skyscraper. The idea – urban apocalypse, skyscrapers in ruins – has been done thousands of times – but I admired the layout and design of it, the shape of the main image with its ‘feeler’-like hairs at the left, and the way the small fragment floats freely above it.

Untitled (Willing to be vulnerable: Velvet #6 DDRG240C) 2017 by Lee Bul

Political criticism

Again, it’s only if you read the wall labels and exhibition guide quite carefully that you realise there is a thread of political satire running through the show. In room one, in between the more striking cyborgs hanging from the ceiling, are a couple of small mannequin models of President Park, naked, in full anatomical detail (reminiscent in the way they’re less than life size and so somehow feeble and vulnerable, of Ron Mueck’s mannequins of his naked dead dad, back in the 1997 Sensation exhibition).

Next to the ‘bat cave’ installation (Bunker), which I described above, is what at first seems like an enormous ‘rock’, made out of some kind of plastic. It’s titled Thaw and if you look closer you just about see another model of President Park, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses, as if he’s been frozen in ice in some alternative science fiction history, and is only waiting to thaw out and rise again…

Thaw (2007) by Lee Bul

Next to this is a very big installation of a bath. Unusually, you are allowed to walk across the tiled floor which makes up a good part of the installation, towards the bath itself – a big rectangular affair as if in a sauna or maybe in the bath rooms of some kind of collective housing – to discover that it is ringed with what looks like white meringue tips, and that the bath itself is full of black ink.

This is Heaven and Hell and without the exhibition guide there’s no way you’d be able to guess that it commemorates Park Jong-chul, a student protester who was tortured and killed by the South Korean security services in a bathtub in 1987.

Installation view of Lee Bul at Hayward Gallery showing Heaven and Hell (1987) Photo by the author

Thinking about political art, Peter Kennard’s blistering photomontages flaying political leaders such as Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair come to mind, for example the enormous photomontage of Tony Blair plastered with images of atrocities from the Iraq War which was on display at the recent Age of Terror exhibition at the Imperial war Museum.

Installation view of Age of Terror at Imperial War Museum London showing Head of State by Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard, with a marble sculpture of a CCTV camera by Ai Weiwei

Installation view of Age of Terror at Imperial War Museum London showing Head of State, a photomontage by Cat Phillipps and Peter Kennard, and a marble sculpture of a CCTV camera by Ai Weiwei

There is nothing that overt or emotional here. Everything is much more controlled, inflected, allusive. Given that Lee Bul is sometimes referred to as a ‘political’ artist, there’s nothing at all that – for me anyway – packed any kind of real political punch.

Women’s bodies / desire

With a certain inevitability, what the exhibition probably showcases most consistently is Lee Bul’s identity as a woman artist coming from a society which was extremely repressive, not only of political dissent, but of any form of feminism or gender politics.

The historical timeline tells us that a women’s movement only got going in Korea in the later 1980s and that Lee Bul was an enthusiastic part of it. It tells us that her earliest work went beyond sculpture to explore the possibilities of performance art.

Thus room two contains six screens on which we see some of Lee’s performances – ‘provocative performance works involving her own body’, as the commentary describes them – which she carried out between 1989 and 1996.

In Abortion (1989) she suspended herself from the ceiling of an auditorium for two hours and entertained the audience with lines from poems and pop songs as well as a description of her own abortion, a medical procedure which is still, to this day, apparently, illegal in South Korea.

The Monsters at the start of the show, the wriggly worm creations, turn out to be costumes which Lee wore either writhing around on the ground or walking the streets in order to question received ideas about X and subvert assumptions about Y.

Throughout the exhibition the ‘issue’ of gender and the ‘problematics’ of the female body are reiterated. For example, the timeline of women in Korean society describes ‘the rise of a generation of artists concerned with the representation of the female body‘ who also began ‘subverting the way that women are depicted in the media’.

The guide explains that

at the core of Lee’s recent work is an investigation into landscape, which for the artist includes the intimate landscape of the body…

It turns out the her interest in the manga-style cyborgs comes less from a feeling for science fiction tropes or ideas around artificial intelligence and the possibility of improving human bodies by combining them with machine parts (from pacemakers to prosthetic limbs), no, she

is interested in what the figure of the cyborg – a transhuman hybrid of flesh and machine – can tell us about desire, our relationship to technology, and cultural attitudes towards the female body.

Or, as the press release puts it:

Shaped by her experience of growing up in South Korea during a period of political upheaval, much of Lee Bul’s work is concerned with trauma, and the way that idealism or the pursuit of perfection – bodily, political or aesthetic – might lead to failure, or disaster. Questioning women’s place in society, particularly Korean society, she also addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of ‘feminine’ beauty.

Actually, rather like the so-called ‘political’ works (Thaw and Heaven and Hell) I only discovered that Lee was addressing the ways popular culture shapes our idea of femininity or questions cultural attitudes towards the female body by reading the guidebook. It really wasn’t that obvious from just seeing the works themselves. The three or four cyborg fragments hanging from the ceiling are probably, but not very obviously, female. They could belong to any gender, and be about anything.

Later on there are a couple of ‘busts’ made of lurid plastic of human thoraxes encased in cyber-armour but they aren’t very obviously female. The fact that they’re made of garish pink plastic and the design of the manga-style armour is the striking thing about them.

In one or two of the videos, the artist is seen naked or semi-naked, which even I picked up on as probably a reference to the female body, although I’ve never understood how young, nubile women artists stripping off is meant to subvert anything. To me it plays directly to society’s expectation that the most important or interesting thing about nubile young women is their nubile young bodies.

But if you hadn’t been told by the exhibition website, press release, guide and wall labels that her work ‘questions ideas of femininity’ I’m not sure you’d particularly notice.

I was, for example, surprised to learn that the silver zeppelin ‘addresses the ways in which popular culture – in both the East and West – informs and shapes our idea of feminine beauty’. Really?

Willing To Be Vulnerable by Lee Bul (photo by the author)

Via Negativa II

I haven’t yet mentioned another of the really impressive installations, Via Negativa II (2014) which is a maze made out of metal sheets suspended on stands, a bit like the stands you get at conferences but arranged to create an entrance into a convoluted labyrinth of shiny metal plates.

It’s not a very big maze – only three people are allowed in at a time. The ‘justification’ or ‘idea’ behind it? Well, the walls are covered with a text by an American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, in which he argued that early humans experienced a split consciousness when messages from one hemisphere of the brain to the other were experienced as auditory hallucinations. To make it art, the text is printed in a mirror image of itself i.e you can’t actually read it. You’d need to hold up a mirror to the text to see it printed properly.

I suppose this small metal maze is designed to recreate that sense of mild hallucination that Jaynes describes. At its heart there is certainly a great experience when you find yourself in a cubicle dominated by grids of yellow lights reflected to infinity in parallel mirrors. The other two visitors and I all jostled for the best position to take photos from. Maybe it’s meant to make you think about something, but it’s also just a great tourist photo opportunity.

Installation view of Lee Bul showing Via Negativa II (2014) (interior detail) © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Mark Blower

This is all great fun, but is it ‘questioning the limits of the human’ or ‘interrogating cultural ideas of the female’? Not really.

The international language of art

In fact, you don’t learn very much about the art or culture or history of Korea from this exhibition nor even – surprisingly – about feminism.

What comes over loud and clear is that this is now the international language of art – the same kind of brash, confident, well-manufactured, high concept work which you also see being produced by (the workshops of) Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, and numerous other superstars.

(Hirst sprang to mind as soon as I saw Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendour, a work consisting of rows of decomposing fish with sequins on, from 1997 which, of course, echoes Hirst’s A Thousand Years, a vitrine containing a cow’s decomposing head which he displayed in 1990. Great minds think alike.)

Not long ago I visited the fascinating exhibition of everyday products from North Korea held at the House of Illustration behind King’s Cross station. There I learned about the unique political system, the Cult of the Leader and the special economic policy (Juche) of North Korea. I learned about the importance of opera, theatre and enormous public performance in their culture, about the way the Korean language lends itself to blocky futuristic design, and about their fondness for a much brighter, more acid colour palette than we in the West are used to.

In Lee Bul’s exhibition I don’t think I learned anything at all about South Korea apart from being reminded of the name of its military dictator, and that its repressive military dictatorship was, well, repressive.

For me this exhibition shows that whatever her origins, whatever her personal biography may have been (the difficult childhood, the early anti-establishment and feminist performances), Lee Bul is now – in 2018 – on a par with Ai and Hirst in creating aroma-less, origin-free, international objets d’art for the delectation of equally rootless, cosmopolitan art critics, and for transnational buyers and billionaire investors.

I went to the press launch where the show was introduced by the director of Hayward Gallery – the American Ralph Rugoff – and the show’s curator – the German Stephanie Rosenthal. As they spoke I was struck by how all three of the people behind the microphones were members of an international art élite, a cosmopolitan, transnational art world which seems impossibly glamorous to those of us forced to earn our livings in the country of our birth and unable to jet off to international biennales in Venice and Sydney, to visit art shows at the Met in New York or the Foundation Cartier in Paris or the Mori Gallery in Tokyo or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (all places where Lee has exhibited). Wow. What a glamorous jet-setting life!

Summary

This is a very well-put together overview of the career to date of one of the world’s most successful and distinctive artists. It’s packed with big, bold, funky, cool objects and installations.

If you think art needs to be ‘about’ something, then you will enjoy the way the commentary invokes issues around the female body, around social utopias, about architecture and landscape, about the interface of technology and humans, to explain Lee’s work.

Or, like me, you may come to the conclusion that these issues, ideas and texts may well be important to motivate and inspire the artist, to get her juices flowing – but that most of the works can just be enjoyed in and of themselves, as highly inventive three-dimensional objects – fun, strange, colourful, jokey – without requiring any sort of ‘meaning’ or ‘interpretation’.

Related reviews

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

More Hayward Gallery reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

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by Simon on May 30, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Feminism

Posted by Simon on May 30, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/05/30/lee-bul-crashing-hayward-gallery/

The Korean War by Max Hastings (1987)

This book

This account of the Korean War (1950-53) is thirty years old this year, and so dates from before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, although there are several shorter accounts on the market, this seems to be the only lengthy, in-depth, narrative history of the Korean War in print – an indication of the general lack of interest in the war, both at the time and since (compare and contrast the number of books which come out every year about WW2 or Vietnam).

Why the neglect? The Korean War lacked the scale of the Second World War, so only a relatively small number of soldiers’ families were involved. Around 100,000 British troops were posted to Korea in total, but the British population was more concerned with its own problems – ongoing food rationing, a general election – or the Soviet threat on the continent of Europe. Who cared whether Korea was partitioned along this line or that line?

a) The war was on the other side of the world and
b) After the dramatic reverses of the first year of the conflict, the latter two years dwindled down to a grinding stalemate, demoralising and inglorious. In the end there was no Allied victory (as in WW2), merely a ceasefire which created a border not very much different from the pre-war line. So it turned out to have been a boring, faraway war which achieved nothing.

Background to the partition of Korea

A newcomer to the subject might ask, Why was Korea partitioned between north and south at the 38th parallel in the first place?

To go back a bit, Japan had interfered in Korea’s affairs since the late 19th century. In 1905 Japan made Korea a protectorate; in 1907 the Japanese took control of Korean domestic affairs and disbanded their army; and in 1910 Japan formally annexed Korea.

In the following decades Japan forced some 100,000 Koreans to join the Imperial Japanese Army, and up to 200,000 Korean women were forced into sexual slavery to service Japanese soldiers in Korea and Japanese-occupied China.

Then in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, the huge block of territory between northern China and Russia, and in 1937 attacked the rest of the coastal regions of China (as well as into Indochina, Malaya, Burma and so on). Korea was the earliest conquest of Japan’s Far Eastern empire.

Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonment were commonplace, and all dissent forbidden. (p.16)

When the Second World War broke out in Europe, Stalin was careful to remain at peace with Japan. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Japanese did not declare war on Russia or attack in Siberia, which they could easily have done from their base in Manchuria. Stalin, for his part, maintained Russian neutrality even after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941 thus provoking war with America, and Japan and Russia remained at peace right up to the closing days of the war.

In February 1945, at the Yalta conference, Stalin promised Roosevelt and Churchill that he would enter the war against Japan but he delayed till the last minute. (This, among other things, meant that the Japanese government held out the vain hope right into August 1945 that ‘neutral’ Russia would somehow stand up for them and negotiate good surrender terms with the Allies – a delusion.) So Stalin’s Soviet Union only abandoned its policy of neutrality and declared war on Japan on 9 August 1945. A huge Soviet army crossed the border from Siberia into Japanese-occupied Manchuria and swept south.

A glance at the map shows that the southern border of Manchuria is mostly sea, the Sea of Japan to the east and the Yellow Sea to the west of the Korean peninsula, which dangles down from the Chinese mainland like an Asian Scandinavia. So, with the goal of attacking the Japanese wherever they found them, it was natural that the invading Soviet army crossed the Chinese-Korea border (formed by the Yalu river) and headed south into the peninsula, defeating Japanese forces as they went.

‘Suddenly’ the Americans who, according to Hastings hadn’t really considered the strategic significance of Korea, realised they didn’t want Stalin to occupy the entire peninsula create a communist stronghold so close to soon-to-be-defeated Japan. So the Americans requested Stalin to halt his forces and informed him that American forces would invade Korea from the south.

Two American officers were put in charge of figuring out where the dividing line should be between the uneasy allies. Poring over a map, they reached the ‘hasty’ decision that the 38th parallel was a handy dividing line: it more or less divided the country in two, with the capital Seoul, the best agriculture and industry, and most of the population, to the south i.e. in the American sector.

President Roosevelt duly contacted Stalin with the request that he stop his forces at the 38th parallel and, to the Americans’ surprise, Stalin readily agreed. Stalin didn’t want to risk confrontation with the ally he was working so closely with in Europe, and was also very aware of the atom bombs the Americans had just dropped on Japan. Yeah, sure, you can keep half of Korea.

(There is a nice irony here, that the Americans from Roosevelt down were vehement opponents of the European empires, and actively tried to sabotage the return to European imperial rule of Burma, Malaya or Indochina. But quite quickly they found themselves dragged into drawing precisely the kind of arbitrary lines and borders which they had criticised the Europeans for making in Africa and the Middle East. The existence of separate states of North and South Korea and the fates, the life chances and premature deaths of tens of millions of Koreans, were determined by this hurried decision made in the last gasp of the Second World War.)

North and South Korea

So Stalin stopped his troops at the 38th parallel, when he could easily have pressed on and seized the entire peninsula. American forces landed at Incheon on September 8 and liberated southern Korea from their Japanese occupiers. In time both countries put their own regimes in place in their sector, the Soviets basing their government in the northern city of Pyongyang, the Americans in the traditional capital, Seoul, permanently crystallising the distinction between communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea.

While the Russians proceeded with their standard process of step-by-step managing the local communists into government and then picking off the opposition one by one to create a mini Stalinist state, Hastings describes the Americans as making a number of important mistakes in the South.

For a start, the Americans found the native Koreans completely unused to governing their own country. Thus, against their intentions, in the early days they ended up being forced to work closely with the now-defeated Japanese authorities, for the simple reason that the Japs had the experienced men in place to carry on carrying out the function of the state. Only slowly were these replaced by native Koreans, and then the Americans had the devil of a time selecting which of the many groups of clamouring Korean politicians to choose to run things.

As the threat from Soviet communism became more palpable into 1946, the Americans found themselves setting up a government run by the smooth-talking, right-wing émigré Syngman Rhee. Hastings recounts how left-of-centre Korean groups were too quickly marginalised because of the taint of communism and how the Americans, despite their best intentions, found themselves installing Rhee, and then coming to regret the choice of such a corrupt, brutal figure. Rhee ended up being president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960 and was an early example of the kind of brutal, repressive and corrupt right-wing regime which the Americans would find themselves supporting again and again throughout the Cold War.

This had the result of fuelling left-wing and communist agitation against his government, which led to a spiral of repression, and left many Americans feeling ambivalent and uneasy in their support for Rhee. This was epitomised by a reluctance to arm his air force, artillery and infantry with more than a token minimum of equipment, since there was good evidence that arms were mainly used against his own civilian population.

Meanwhile, throughout the late 1940s North Korea kept up a steady stream of propaganda broadcasts to the south, designed to appeal to all Korean patriots, calling for the reunification of the country, as well as predictable calls for the overthrow of Rhee and his unlikeable clique. In the spring of 1950 this rhetoric became steadily more heated and experts in the U.S. State Department warned of the growing threat of some kind of attack by the North on the South. The American government, under President Harry Truman, had its hands full coping with crises in the more obvious cockpit of the Cold War, Europe, beset by a sequence of crises including the Berlin Airlift from June 1948 to May 1949, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and so on.

The Korean War

1. The North invades Thus it came as a complete surprise to the world when Kim Il-Sung’s North Korean army invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. The United Nations immediately voted it an illegal act and sent forces to stop the advance. These were at first mostly American, but in time came to consist of a coalition including other Western countries and eventually 20 nations from round the world. But before this could be organised, the North Koreans succeeded in storming through the south, pushing the under-equipped demoralised Republic of Korea’s army back until it and its American support were, by September 1950, pinned into a pocket in the south-east of the peninsula, the Pusan area.

Map of the Korean War

2. Landing at Inchon Not only did the Americans reinforce their troops who fought bravely to hold the line at Pusan but General MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific War, who had been ruling post-war Japan as American Vice-Consul, now conceived his last great strategic coup, which was to organise a massive American amphibious landing at Inchon in mid-September 1950, on the coast near Seoul, thus attacking the North Koreans in their rear, and threatening their supply lines.

The Americans broke out of the Pusan pocket and drove north, pushing back the demoralised and exhausted North Koreans, back across the 38th parallel and further north. At this point Hastings’ account dwells on the massive disagreements within the American administration on whether or not the Allies should halt at the parallel or press on to take the entire peninsula. This latter view prevailed and the American, ROK and other UN national forces (British and Commonwealth as well as a large contingent from Turkey) pressed north.

3. China enters the war Allied forces had come within sight of the Yalu river which forms the border between Korea and China when they were horrified to learn that a vast contingent of the People’s Republic of China had crossed the border and was attacking along the line. Briefly, sheer weight of numbers overran Allied positions, creating confusion and panic, and it is chastening to read accounts of Allied troops dropping their guns and equipment and running in panic fear. The Chinese routed the Allies, pushing them relentlessly southwards back towards the 38th parallel.

Hastings excels, in this book as in his later one about the War in the Pacific, at combining at least three levels of analysis:

Carefully chosen eye witness accounts (from letters, diaries and reports made at the time along with highlights of the scores of interviews with veterans which he conducts for each book).
Detailed descriptions, with maps, of specific battles and the broader military situation.
But what I enjoyed most is Hasting’s ability to pull out of this narrow focus to explain in detail the strategic and geopolitical issues behind the war. Thus there is a lot of analysis throughout the book of the conflicting aims and strategies of the Allies, and particularly within the US administration and armed forces. It is riveting to read how war aims a) can be so contradictory and fiercely debated within a set of allies b) change over time according to all sorts of pressures, like domestic opposition, political attacks from opponents, looming elections, threats elsewhere.

4. Shall we bomb China? The largest issue raised by the Chinese victories and our troops’ humiliating defeats was whether to broaden the war to attack China itself i.e. why only fight the Chinese forces inside Korea, why not bomb mainland China, as we did Germany and Japan? 1. The scattered terrain of hilly Korea, lacking main roads and railways, and the methodology of the communists, moving across country, made it difficult to attack enemy formations in Korea. 2. All their supplies were coming from factories in China, and Chinese MiG jets were flying from airfields in China – why not attack those?

The highpoint of this point of view, strongly espoused by senior figures in the US army and air force, was MacArthur’s request that the Allies use the atom bomb against Chinese forces not only in Korea, but against Chinese cities. The army drew up a list of twenty possible targets. Imagine!

Within Truman’s own cabinet there were – as always – hawks and doves, with some supporting broadening the war, others strongly against. In the event, Truman took the cautious line, and posterity has to agree. If both sides, by tacit consent, limited their confrontation to within the peninsula, it was containable and manageable. In February 1950 Russia and China had signed a defensive alliance committing each to go to war if the other party was attacked, so if the UN forces had bombed Chinese cities, would Russia have been forced to come to China’s defense? Would it have triggered World War III? Was it worth taking the risk?

Hastings brings out how US hawks saw the conflict in terms of the global Cold War against communism. The gruesome way Soviet-backed regimes were established across Europe and the victory of Mao Zedong’s communists in China in 1949, gave a very real sense that communism was advancing on all fronts. The North Korean attack fitted right in with that view of the democratic West being under sustained attack, and revelations of the extent of Soviet spies inside the atom bomb programme and throughout the US establishment, go a long way to explaining the mounting hysteria epitomised by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities Committee. Truman had to stand up against a great deal of pressure, within the military establishment, from the McCarthyites, from some sections of the media and public opinion, in refusing to widen the war. 60 years later we pay him credit.

Only very slowly, did some parts of the US administration come to realise that China’s motives stemmed at least from simple nationalism as from world communist conspiracies. A captured Chinese soldier is quoted as saying, ‘How would you like your enemies armies, complete with atom bombs, parked just across your 450-mile-long border?’ If the Americans hadn’t pushed on north beyond the parallel, maybe the Chinese wouldn’t have been prompted to invade. Maybe a lot of lives could have been saved.

5. Stalemate Of course, the decision not to widen the war i.e. attack the Chinese mainland – condemned a lot of American, British Commonwealth and UN troops to ongoing slog, battle, injury and death. In December 1950 Lieutenant-General Matthew B. Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army and began to turn it around. Retrained, re-equipped and remotivated, his forces held the Chinese and then began to press northwards, retaking Seoul in March 1951, and pressing forward to the parallel.

Throughout this period General MacArthur, in overall command of US forces in the Far East, had given interviews and communicated to representatives of other governments his wish to expand the war, often in direct conflict to the stated aims of the US administration. Eventually, President Truman felt compelled to relieve him of his command on 10 April 1951. This caused a storm of protest within the military, in Congress and among the general public, for whom MacArthur was a great American hero. Truman’s popularity fell to the lowest ever recorded for a US President. And without it being the immediate intention, MacArthur’s sacking sent out a strong message to America’s allies, to China and Russia, that the United States did not intend to attack China, did not even intend to seize the whole Korean peninsula, but would settle for the much more limited aim of returning to the status quo ante.

As spring 1951 turned to summer, the front line advanced and receded around the parallel, slowly settling into a stalemate. A year after the initial invasion, the armies were back more or less where they had started. The North Koreans reluctantly agreed to open ceasefire talks and protracted armistice negotiations began on 10 July 1951 at Kaesong, before moving to the neighbouring village of Panmunjom. Due to the intransigence of the North and the Chinese, these talks dragged on for two long years, while on the ground there was a steady stream of offensives and counter-offensives, none of which really changed the strategic picture, but in which a lot of soldiers died pointlessly on both sides.

The narrative pauses at this point for a series of chapters looking at specific aspects of the war:

The war in the air, where the West learned for the first time the limits of air power – something which was to be repeated in Vietnam – and for the first time jet fighter fought jet fighter, Soviet MiGs against US Sabres.
The creation more or less from scratch of a U.S. intelligence operation, which featured a number of gung-ho operations behind the lines but precious little usable intelligence. I was tickled to read that the CIA’s Seoul station had 200 officers, but not a single speaker of Korean, an attitude of uninterest in local cultures and languages which the Americans repeated later in Vietnam and the Middle East.
The issue of communist prisoners of war, whose numbers had risen to some 130,000 by the end of the war and whose repatriation back to the North became one of the big stumbling blocks of the peace negotiations.

The mounting frustration at having to fight and die in bloody, futile engagements while the diplomats at Panmunjom, just a few miles away, drew the peace negotiations out with unbearable delays, is well depicted in this 1959 movie, Pork Chop Hill. It illustrates the brutality and heavy losses incurred for insignificant hilltops, the effectiveness of Chinese propaganda broadcast to Allied troops by loudspeaker across the front line, and the widespread demoralisation of the American soldiers with many, perhaps most, of them expressing intense doubt about what they were fighting for and whether it was worth it.

Hard not to see foreshadowings of the irresolution and crushing sense of futility which were to bedevil the Vietnam War.

6. Ceasefire Josef Stalin died in March 1953 and Soviet policy went into a shadowy period of uncertainty. Meanwhile, Republican President Eisenhower replaced Democrat President Truman. Part of his campaign had included the pledge to bring the war to an end. These final stages include the unnerving plans made by the new administration to: massively boost South Korean armed forces; bomb China north of the Yalu; deploy the new artillery-fired nuclear weapons the US had developed; and to transport Chinese Nationalist fighters from Formosa to the Chinese mainland to carry out guerrilla operations (p.473). These aims were communicated to the Soviets and Chinese and at last broke the logjam. In April the communist delegates at Panmunjom began to respond to suggestions.

Ironically, the final stumbling block turned out to be the obstinate dictator of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, who was refused by America’s decision to ‘abandon’ his nation and refused to agree to a ceasefire or sign the agreement. The Americans, not for the last time, found themselves struggling to contain a right-wing leader of their own creation, but by immense pressure managed to prevent Rhee actively sabotaging the negotiations. It is rather staggering to learn that they developed a plan for kidnapping Rhee and overthrowing his government if he refused to play ball (plan EVER-READY p.479).

On 27 July 1953 a ceasefire was finally declared and a demilitarised zone (DMZ) created either side of the ceasefire line. Legally, the war has never ended and this, along with the belligerent rhetoric which has continued to pour out of Pyongyang, along with the occasional terrorist atrocity and a trickle of shooting incidents across the DMZ, explains why South Koreans have lived in a state of tension and high alert for the past 64 years.

And now that Kim Il-sung’s son and successor as Great Leader, Kim Jong-il, has developed nuclear weapons and is testing long-range missiles to deliver them, who knows what further trouble this barren peninsula might cause.

Stats

1,319,000 Americans served in Korea, of whom 33,629 were killed and 105,785 wounded
The South Korean army lost 415,000 killed and 429,000 wounded
The Commonwealth lost 1,263 killed and 4,817 wounded
The Americans estimate that 1.5 million Chinese and North Koreans died, but this is an educated guess
Wikipedia reports that some 2.5 million Koreans, north and south, were killed or wounded

This huge loss of civilian and military lives is captured in Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War from 2004, a phenomenally violent Korean film directed by Kang Je-gyu, and saturated with blood-spattering special effects.

The lessons of history

The Korean War is interesting for a number of reasons:

as a dramatic and very hard-fought war in and of itself
as the first armed confrontation between two superpowers in the Cold War
as a template for the Vietnam War

It’s the latter which is, at this distance of time, maybe the most resonant. Their convincing win against Japan gave the Americans the sense that overwhelming might on land and sea and in the air guaranteed victory. Korea disabused them of this confidence. In Korea the Americans stumbled upon issues which were to plague them 15 years later in Vietnam:

the difficulty of supporting an unpopular native regime
the problems of creating a native army to support an unpopular regime, in a corrupt and inefficient society
the cost of underestimating an Asian army
the difficulty of using air power, no matter how overwhelming, against a peasant army with no identifiable infrastructure – this wasn’t like bombing German or Japanese factories
the difficulty of deploying a highly mechanised army in broken country against a lightly armed, highly mobile enemy (p.xvi)

This is an excellent, thorough, well-written and gratifyingly intelligent account of an important war which, paradoxically, makes it clear why it has been so often overlooked by historians in the Allied countries which fought in it, namely America and Britain. It powerfully explains why fighting a pointless war in a faraway country for an ugly regime was so unpopular at the time and has been neglected ever since.

P.S. Japan

Big strategic history like this is full of ironies. I was delighted to learn that the Korean War helped to set Japan on its feet again and kick-started its astonishing post-war economic recovery, helped along by the vast amounts of money poured into the country which served as ‘aircraft carrier, repair base, store depot, commissariat, hospital, headquarters and recreation centre’ for the UN forces in the Far East (p.444). Every cloud has a silver lining.

Credit

The Korean War by Max Hastings was published in 1987 by Michael Joseph. All quotes and references are to the 2010 Pan Macmillan paperback.

All posts tagged South Korea

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

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21st century Africa

Concepts and categories

Resource state

Resource economy

Shadow economy

Shadow state

The personal state

Kleptocracy

Cryptocracy

Petrostate

Rentier state

Dutch disease

Resource curse

No taxation, no democracy

Patronage politics

Crony capitalism

Terrible leadership

Contractocracy

Law of the roadblock

China

The looting machine

1. Corrupt rulers

2. How the World Bank and IMF screw Africa

3. How multinational corporations screw Africa

Some numbers

Islamist violence

Thought

Why give aid?

The argument against violence

Vagabond In Power by Nneka

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Chapter 1: Identity and tradition

Queens, Kings and Gods

Spiritual worlds

Masks

Chapter 2: Counter Histories

Chapter 3: Imagined Futures

Epilogue

Political commentary

Sixty years of mismanagement, civil war, famine and genocide

Why artists and curators simplify history and politics to make them more acceptable

Africa today

Conclusion

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Tate Modern reviews

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OSPAAAL

The Mike Stanfield Collection

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