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Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001)

al-asl huwa ‘l-hurriya
‘The basic principle is liberty’

Traditional Islamic jurisprudence assumes that everyone is free, based on the dictum: ‘The basic principle is liberty’ (al-‘asl huwa ‘l-hurriya). On this basis was slavery was an exceptional, and undesirable, condition.

Ronald Segal

Ronald Segal lived from 1932 to 2008. He was a white South African, born into a rich Jewish family. He became a committed socialist and anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. He was a political activist, writer and editor, founder of the anti-apartheid magazine Africa South and of the Penguin African Library. He wrote 17 books, including a biography of Leon Trotsky, though he is best known for The State of the World Atlas (first edition, 1981), co-founded with Michael Kidron. Islam’s Black Slaves was his last book. It was conceived as a companion to his previous book, 1995’s The Black Diaspora: Five centuries of the black experience outside Africa.

The link with McLynn and Jeal

I was moved to buy this rather expensive book because my reading of Frank McLynn and Tim Jeal‘s histories of European (mostly British) explorers in nineteenth century Africa sparked my interest in a number of issues, among them their repeated descriptions of the impact of the non-white Arab slave trade on East and Central Africa. (They also piqued my interest in a) the large number of white slaves captured by Islamic slave traders and b) the central role of the Royal Navy in quelling the sea-borne slave trade after 1833, both subjects I hope to explore soon.)

Islam’s Black Slaves

Both Jeal and Adam Hochschild‘s accounts show that the capturing of black slaves in East Africa was a bloody, brutal business, with entire villages laid waste and thousands murdered for every hundred or so slaves (mostly women and children) who were finally transported down the slave trails to the east coast of Africa (specifically to the slave trading island of Zanzibar, owned and run after 1840 by the Sultan of Oman on the Persian Gulf).

Eye witness descriptions of widespread devastation and the brutality of the slavers on pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161.

The Atlantic slave trade

Slavery was probably part of pre-Islamic Arab life and economy.

Whereas the Atlantic slave trade only got going after 1500 as European explorers (at first mainly the Portuguese) visited the west coast of Africa, the slave trade in the realm of Islam existed since the 7th century, 900 years earlier. Whereas the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, many Arab countries only formally banned slavery in living memory, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970.

According to the BBC, Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.

However 1) the Islamic trade in African slaves was always a lot smaller than the Atlantic slave trade, especially when the latter was at its height in the 18th century:

There was no extensive and long-sustained commitment of black slave labour to the scale of commercial plantation agriculture that absorbed so many millions of black slaves in the Americas. (p.42)

In part this was due to memories of the Zanj Rebellion (869 until 883) when black African slaves who were put to work draining the salt marshes around then present-day city of Basra in southern Iraq, rebelled, gathering more and more followers, slaves and free, and presenting a major threat to the Abbasid Caliphate (pages 43 to 44).

The rebellion had a lasting impact. The use of a large number of black slaves in plantation agriculture and irrigation schemes sharply declined; it was considered too dangerous. (p.44)

2) The Islamic attitude to black slaves was markedly different from that of white Europeans, in a number of ways.

The Atlantic slave trade, particularly as it escalated in the 18th century, was a key element in the development of industrial capitalism, generating the profits from sugar and tobacco plantations which was then invested in new technologies in Britain (p.106; cf Eric Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire). But what makes capitalism different from all other social and economic models is the relentless focus on profit. If you take this as the be-all and end-all of social effort, then human beings can quickly come to be seen as mere units of productivity or consumption, totted up on dry accounts books.

Thus, according to Segal, African slaves were treated as units of productions, like donkeys, horses or steam engines, stripped of any individuality, faceless drones whose lives and deaths meant nothing to their owners.

The treatment of slaves in Islam was overall more benign, in part because the values and attitudes promoted by religion inhibited the very development of a Western-style capitalism, with its effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit. (p.5)

He then discusses slavery’s place in Christianity, which is highly problematic. If Jesus meant what he said about the brotherhood of man and so on then slavery was an outrageous blasphemy against Christian teachings. This had two broad consequences.

1) Slave owners and their propagandists scoured the Bible to try and find justifications for slavery (blacks being the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who cast him out and curses him after Ham, saw his father drunk and naked, etc); or they simply denied that blacks were fully human, using any pretext which presented itself to argue that Africans were animals, savages, lower down the evolutionary scale etc.

2) The other consequence was those brave Christians who applied Jesus’s teachings consistently and so opposed the slave trade, generally evangelical ‘low’ Christians who formed the backbone of the Abolitionist movement and whose story is told in Adam Hochschild’s moving book Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.

Islam’s treatment of slaves

By contrast, slavery was accepted by the Prophet Mohammed and his successors but, being openly acknowledged, was provided for. Mohammed goes out of his way to insist that slaves be treated humanely. A slave’s master was enjoined:

not to show contempt for a slave
to share his food with a slave
to provide a slave as good clothes as his own
to set a slave moderate and achievable work
not to punish a slave excessively but forgive him ‘seventy times a day’

Of course slavery of any form is a wicked denial of the basic human rights of human beings as we now, in 2023, conceive of them. But Mohammed’s explicit insistence that slaves should be treated well established a venerable standard which all Muslim slave owners could be held to. Thus:

Slaves in the Ottoman empire were differently regarded and treated [than in the West]. In conformity with Islamic teaching and law, slaves were people who had stipulated rights. (p.106)

Two routes to slavery

According to the Prophet there were only two legitimate route to slavery: birth to a slave mother or capture in warfare (p.36). Warfare could only be against non-Muslims or infidels, as Muhammed assumed that Muslim would never fight Muslim, brother against brother. Enslavement of captives in war went some way towards repaying the losses of warfare but was also a means of assimilating and converting non-Muslims who could, ultimately, be freed.

Obviously these rules were flouted repeatedly through history, but at least there were rules, they were clear, and rulers could be held to account against them.

Islam’s anti-racism

There are other key distinctions between the two traditions. It follows from point 1) above, that the anxiety felt by European Christian slave traders and owners created and fuelled a vast ideology of racism. Christian slave owners could only square their consciences if they held to the view that black Africans were not fully human, less than human, or even a different species. Many, many commentators claim the legacy of these scandalous opinions lingers on today in numerous institutions and organisations and individuals.

The point is that the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade racism.

The Koran expressly condemns racism along with tribalism and nationalism. (p.6)

According to Arabist Bernard Lewis:

pagan and early Islamic Arabia seems to have shared the general attitude of the ancient world, which attached no stigma to blackness. (quoted p.46)

In his Farewell Sermon Muhammed said:

‘O people, your Lord is one and your father [Adam] is one. There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; no superiority of a white person over a black person, nor superiority of a black person over a white person – except in righteousness.’ (quoted p.46)

Indeed, the first official muezzin, personally appointed by Muhammed to proclaim adhan in Mecca, was Bilal ibn Ribah, an African slave who was emancipated when Abu Bakr (who was to be the first caliph or successor to the Prophet) paid his ransom on Muhammad’s instruction (p.46).

This, as I imperfectly understand it, is one of the great appeals of Islam through the ages. When a convert submits to Allah he or she joins the great international ulema, regardless of ethnicity or skin colour. This, as I understand it, explains the surge of interest in Islam among American black activists of the later 1960s such as Malcolm X, who thought the Christian tradition espoused by the Reverend Martin Luther King, was hopelessly compromised by its profound involvement in the slave trade for centuries.

Forty years later James Fergusson dwelled on the appeal of Islam to Somalis in his book ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’. He cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, who said:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens.

[Islam] continued to encompass slavery long after slaves had been freed throughout Christendom. But while slavery was practiced in Christendom and Islam alike, the freeing of individual slaves by their owners was much more frequent and widespread in Islam. This was of particular relevance to the social assimilation of blacks. As slaves, they were subject to no special racial discrimination in law; and, once freed, they enjoyed in law equal rights as citizens. (p.9)

Something very much not true of freed blacks in America and their descendants, arguably, to this day.

However, that was the theory, and Segal goes on to describe how Islamic social practice and attitudes often fell far short. He traces the emergence of anti-black attitudes which might be attributed to 1) the Zanj rebellion; 2) contempt for the mainly manual labour many black slaves were condemned to in a culture which prized intellectual achievement.

He then goes on to cite an impressive roster of medieval Islamic scholars who authoritatively declaimed a series of hair-raisingly racist generalisations against black Africans. A lot of this was repetition with elaboration of Galen’s founding racist generalisations from the third century of the Christian era.

By the Middle Ages the Arabic word ‘abd had come to denote black slave and mamluk to mean white slave (p.49).

A last point about the racism or absence arising from the Islamic slave trade. As mentioned, the Atlantic slave trade a) prioritised men, for hard manual labour and b) the European owners erected a severe race barrier, which involved legal and cultural denigration of Africans.

By contrast, the Islamic trade prioritised female slaves which led to greater miscegenation or inter-breeding. I wonder if anyone’s done research to discover how much ‘black DNA’ is present in the Arab population. I came across this website online: it claims the DNA of the typical Egyptian contains 3% of African genes, Kuwaitis are 7% African, Lebanese are 2% East African and so on. I’ve no idea if this is correct or scientifically meaningful.

But Segal definitely asserts that over 1,000 years of interbreeding between black Africans and Arabs produced a population many of whose members are racially indistinguishable – in stark contrast to the situation in North America where the visual distinction between black and white was fiercely enforced until well into the 20th century and so remains, to this day, much more prominent and problematic.

Islam’s slaves in the service sector

Slaves in the Atlantic system were, classically, regarded as units of production in a brutally capitalist system, worked to death on plantations. Thus it’s calculated that the slaves were transported in a ratio of 2 men to every woman, because sheer brute strength was required on the plantations.

Whereas slaves in the Islamic world tended to be employed in the name of consumption, often very conspicuous consumption, as Segal’s profiles of numerous immensely rich caliphs and Muslim rulers indicate. The very rich tended to have vast numbers of concubines, servants, attendants and whatnot, many of whom were slaves. Segal tells us that Ahmad b Tulun, the Tulunid ruler from 868 to 884, left at his death 24,000 white slaves and 45,000 black ones (p.54).

Essentially, the distinction between Western and Ottoman – indeed Islamic – slavery was that between the commercial and the domestic. (p.107)

Thus it is that the gender ratio was reversed, with an estimated two female slaves transported into the Islamic world for every male, as slaves were most commonly used for household work (most conspicuously, concubinage, which modern scholars might describe as sex slavery).

Lower down the social order, many slaves worked in the service sector as cooks, porters, secretaries and so on. There is much evidence that, although their capture in Africa was a violent and traumatic experience, once they ended up in Arab Muslim households, many slaves were treated well.

Slaves in Islamic armies

Some slaves were trained to serve as soldiers. This was the case with the Mamluks, an Arabic word which literally means ‘owned’ or ‘slave (p.31). These were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.

Mamluks became a powerful military knightly class in various Muslim societies that were controlled by dynastic Arab rulers. Particularly in Egypt and Syria, but also in the Ottoman Empire, Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, Mamluk factions seized the sultanate centred on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate from 1250 to 1517. The Mamluk Sultanate fought the Christian Crusaders in 1154 to 1169 and 1213 to 1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt and the Levant (p.31).

Segal’s discussion of slaves in Islamic armies pages 45 to 46.

Talking of one-time slaves rising to power, the longest reigning of the Fatimid Caliphs, al-Mustansir (1036 to 1094) was the son of a black Sudanese concubine, whose mother, because he only came to power when he was seven, was the real ruler of the Caliphate for the 15 years of his minority (p.51); and Segal gives other instances of Africans who rose to positions of high power, especially black eunuchs.

Islam’s releasing of slaves

The technical term in English is ‘manumission’, from the Latin, meaning simply ‘release from slavery’.

The Koran teaches that it is virtuous to free slaves. It says one of the uses of zakat, a pillar of Islam, which can be translated as ‘alms’, is to pay for the freeing of slaves:

‘Alms-tax is only for the poor and the needy, for those employed to administer it, for those whose hearts are attracted to the faith, for freeing slaves, for those in debt, for Allah’s cause, and for needy travellers. This is an obligation from Allah. And Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.
( Surah At-Tawbah 9:60)

Freeing your slaves can offset sins you have committed and hasten your entry to heaven.

‘The man who frees a Muslim slave, God will free him from hell, limb for limb.’ (quoted p.35)

The Koran describes a particular type of legal contract, the mukataba, which it encouraged slave owners to make with slaves, whereby they could work towards their freedom (p.36).

The Koran says slave owners can have sex with female slaves, but places on them an injunction to marry them off to male slaves, whereupon the husband has sole right. The Koran allots praise to a slave owner who educates his female slave, frees then marries her (p.36). Unlike America and other European colonies, it was expressly forbidden to separate slave mothers and their children.

Eunuchs

Islam expressly forbids mutilating the human body which is the image of God.

‘Whoever kills his slave, we will kill him; whoever mutilates (his slave), we will mutilate him; and whoever castrates his slave, we will castrate him.’ (Sunan an-Nasa’i 4736; Book 45, Hadith 31)

Nonetheless, eunuchs became an engrained part of wealthy Islamic culture and pious Muslims got around the ruling by having infidels do the castrating. Thus during the Middle Ages Prague and Verdun became castration centres supplying eunuchs to the Islamic market (p.40).

Possession of eunuchs was just one sign of the extraordinary conspicuous consumption which distinguished medieval Islam. Thus, Segal tells us, at the start of the 10th century, when Alfred the Great’s muddy successors were still fighting the invading Danes in East Anglia, the Caliph in Baghdad had seven thousand black eunuchs and 4,000 white ones, in his palace (p.41).

Vivid, stomach-turning description of castrating a boy (p.171).

Numbers and routes

There were three main routes of black African slaves into Islam:

across the Sahara
from Ethiopia across the Red Sea
from East Africa

Segal cites the calculations of scholars like Ralph Austen and Paul Lovejoy who estimate that the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century as 11 to 12 million. Raymond Mauvy calculates 14 million. This is directly comparable to the 11 or so million calculated to have been transported in the far shorter period of the Atlantic slave trade (pages 55 to 57). Scholar H.J. Fisher is quoted as saying the total number of black slaves transported in the Islamic slave trade was probably larger than the number involved in the Atlantic slave trade (p.61).

Segal points out that enormous though these numbers sound, the 14 million figure ‘only’ works out 10,370 slaves per year. All scholars agree that the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in volume in slave trading (in 1838 an estimated to 10 to 12 thousand slaves were arriving in just Egypt, each year), so the chances are that the figures for the previous 11 centuries are lower, a guesstimate of maybe 7,000 per annum (p.60).

Importantly, these numbers exclude the internal black-on-black slave trade, the intra-Africa slave trade. So, controversially, they don’t include the vast numbers of slaves captured in East Africa and transported to Zanzibar, owned by an Arab elite, to work on the clove plantations. Segal cites the figure of about a million black slaves set to work in Zanzibar during the nineteenth century. If you included the intra-African trade, the total would go up by at least 2 million.

If you add the Atlantic and the Islamic trades, you end up with a figure of around 25 million black Africans captured and taken off into slavery.

We will never know the precise numbers. All we can do, in this as so many other aspects of human history, is marvel, or reel, at the thought of so much human suffering.

Non-black slaves

Most of the above concerns black slaves. But Islamic rulers conquered and enslaved or bought slaves from many other ethnicities. Thus countless numbers of Turkish and Circassian people were enslaved, as were Slavs and others from the Balkans. Someone somewhere must have done research into this. Segal only mentions it in passing.

Chapters

The foregoing summarises the first 70 or so pages of the book, dealing in general principles, overall numbers and so on. Subsequent chapters deal with:

Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches

China

Segal brings together fleeting references to black people in medieval and early modern sources. Chinese porcelain has been found in ruined trading towns on the East African coast. There’s no records of an organised trade.

India

Islam expanded into north-west India through armed conquest. It brought black slaves, mainly for military service. They called themselves Sayyad, corrupted to Siddis who, when liberated, set up small kingdoms of their own, became employed as security on Muslim ships, some rose to become admirals. The story of the rise to power of Malik Ambar (1548 to 1626), a military leader who rose to the office of Peshwa of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in the Deccan region of India, his military and cultural achievements.

Spain

North African Muslims invaded Spain in 611, overrunning almost the entire peninsula (apart from Galicia) by 620. The resulting kingdom of al-Andalus grew to legendary wealth. Black slaves were imported from Africa, but the realm was also famous for exporting white slaves from Gaul and Galicia. It became a centre for castrating male slaves to provide eunuchs (p.80). The career of the black poet and arbiter of taste, Ziryab (789 to 857).

Chapter 6. Into Black Africa

A very detailed look at the different routes of slave traders and the slave trade into the Islamic world, from Ethiopia across the Red Sea, from the coast of East Africa. Segal gives a long complicated account of the rise and histories of various black African empires in west Africa – the empires of Ghana, Mali, the Kanem and Songhai empires – many of whose rulers converted to Islam, and the complex history of black slaving along the major trans-Sahara slaving routes. It’s a complex, unfamiliar history.

Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire

Of all the empires that rose and fell within the Islamic world, the Ottoman was the largest and longest lasting. Segal uses the Ottoman empire to really point the difference in attitudes to slavery between the Christian West and the Muslim East. Although many slaves may have held domestic positions in the Americas and some been released, the fundamental difference was the slaves in the West were used as units of production by fast-evolving capitalism. Whereas in the East, although some slaves were used in labour-intensive plantations and proto-factories, the majority were for domestic consumption. Plus the East had a more generous policy of freeing slaves. Many civil servants or soldiers who were, technically, slaves of the Sultan rose to become generals and governors (p.106).

He makes the simple crucial point that while the West pursued a model of nationalistic capitalism which encouraged aggressively competitive trade and enshrined in law the unbridled pursuit of profit, the Ottoman Empire cleaved to Islam’s disdain for trade, prioritising of military glory or scholarly achievement and its active discouragement, in law, of the kind of profit-seeking sought in the West. Merchants accumulated capital but their culture mandated them to use it charitably, to establish schools or hospitals. Lacking a central bank, or banks in general, which could be used to redistribute capital from its owners to speculative ventures, lacking the complex legal framework and definitions of property and company law which enabled Western capitalism, the Ottoman Empire condemned itself to slow decline.

While social, political and, above all, economic innovation swept the West, the Ottoman empire remained steeped in sterile ceremonial. (p.116)

Segal gives a lot of detail of Ottoman history, especially the role of black eunuchs at the highest level of the Ottoman court. As to general black slavery, there was a substantial and continuous trade but records are scanty.

He credits the British in particular for pressuring the Ottoman Turks to end slavery in their empire. In 1846 the slave market in Constantinople was closed. In 1855 moves to ban slavery throughout the empire led to a violent revolt in Arabia, led by an imam who declared the ban unIslamic. The revolt was put down but when the ban was promulgated, it made Arabia an exception, to the area continued to be a base for slavers. Slavery was banned in 1889 but kept its place in Sharia law. In 1923 the modern state of Turkey replaced the empire, with secular law banning slavery.

Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran

Segal gives a thumbnail sketch of Persia’s resistance to Arab rule which came to be embodied in its espousal of a distinct brand of Islam, Shia Islam or Shiaism. There is scant evidence of black slavery in Iran; what there is suggests black slaves enjoyed good treatment and high status in households, especially of the wealthy. An English lady traveller speculated that between two and three thousand African slaves were imported each year (p.123).

A scholar estimates the number of slaves in mid-19th century Iran as 80,000. As late as 1898 the Anti-Slavery Society estimated up to 50,000 slaves in Persia. As with the Ottoman Empire, from the 1820s onwards the British brought pressure to bear to end the slave trade, but the exemption of Arabia allowed it to continue as a conduit of African slaves into Iran. Only in 1882 did the Persian government renounce slavery in a treaty signed imposed by Britain (p.126). Only in 1907 did the new National Assembly enact a law ensuring universal freedom.

Segal makes the interesting point that, as in the USA, colour prejudice might have intensified after the abolition of slavery.

Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection

The black slave trade into the semi-Ottoman state of Tripolitania. In 1818 a Royal Navy captain, G.F. Lyon, observed that the ruling Bey waged war on all his neighbours and carried away 5,000 slaves a year. Segal cites scholar Ralph Austen whose detailed calculations suggest that from 1550 to 1913 some 784,000 black slaves were transported through Libya. Given a 20% death rate on the journey from the South, this suggests 942,000 black Africans were kidnapped and enslaved by Arab and Muslim traders working the Tripoli route (there were numerous other routes).

In 1930 a Danish traveller to Libya reported that there was a slave market every Thursday in Kufra and a good adult slave cost £15.

Chapter 10. The Terrible Century

The nineteenth century saw an increase in volume and intensity of Islamic slaving across north and east Africa. In 1808 Britain withdrew from the slave trade and set about persuading other European nations to do the same. Britain also began to intervene in the Muslim world to abolish the trade, but tentatively, mindful of Muslim sensibilities.

East Africa

A European visitor stated that, around 1810, almost the entire income of the state of Oman derived from taxes on the slave trade. In 1840 the Sultan of Oman moved his court to the island of Zanzibar, main entrepot on the west of the Indian Ocean, principle outlets for black slaves captured in the interior.

By the 1840s up to 15,000 slaves a year were being trade. The Sultan himself needed huge numbers to work his clove plantations. In the 1850s it’s estimated that Zanzibar’s population included 60,000 slaves. A quarter of the Sultan’s income was said to derive from the trade.

The British protected the Sultan as their client but brought consistent pressure on him to abolish the trade. He signed a series of treaties to that effect but in the 1860s the British consul reported that 30,000 slaves were arriving annually at the coastal ports, some for Zanzibar, some shipped north to the Gulf. He also reported that for every slave who reached the coast alive, one had died en route. Other accounts claimed a far higher number.

Many of the slavers, the leaders of expeditions to attack and massacre African settlements, then take away prisoners in chains, were either Arab or, very commonly, of mixed Afro-Arab ethnicity. Segal, again, draws the distinction between the behaviour of the slavers, which was brutal and murderous, and slaves’ treatment in their destination households, which was often kind as per Islamic lore.

Sudan and Egypt

Khartoum was originally a small fishing village at the junction of the White and Blue Niles. After Sudan it was conquered by the Ottoman viceroy, Muhammed Ali, in 1840, it was turned into a major entrepot for African slaves. By 1838 12,000 black slaves were being imported into Egypt annually. Beyond the reach of the Egyptian authorities operated the Ja’aliyin, who raided west into Darfur and south into tropical Africa until well into the 1890s.

Huge enclosures for slaves were established in Cairo, where many died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. For every slave that made it to Cairo, it’s estimated that 5 died along the way (p.151). General Gordon calculated that in the area of Bahr el-Ghazal between 1875 and 1879, up to 100,000 slaves had been exported north. European explorers found entire areas which had been devastated and emptied of their populations by slavers (pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161). Only in 1883, when Britain occupied Egypt, were they able to start cracking down on the trade. By 1904 the Viceroy, Lord Cromer, could claim that the systematic slave trade had been eradicated.

Ethiopia and Arabia

Slavery in Ethiopia thrived for centuries. Up to 500 slaves were sold at the market at Gallabat every day. King Menelik was alleged to take a 10% cut in the trade i.e. gifted one slave in ten. Most were sent across the sea to Arabia. After the Ottoman Sultan banned it, the trade increased because it was no longer taxed. A British reporter estimated in 1878 that 25,000 slaves a year were sold in Mecca and Medina and the trade continued into the early 1900s.

The trade through Kenya was ended when the British created the East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Slavery was only legally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897.

West Africa

Segal describes a confusing profusion of kingdoms and rulers, Muslim jihads, insurgencies, overthrows and new rulers, all across west Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The point is all of them engaged in the slave trade, sending slaves north into Muslim Arab lands, or collecting them for their own grandeur. As the nineteenth century raiding became more intense and destructive, not least due to growing access to Western arms, which resulted in the devastation of entire regions. It’s instructive to learn that black on black slave trading continued energetically right to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A French agent on the Senegal river reported that in 1889 some 13,000 slaves were transported along the river.

Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions

Northern Nigeria

The British claimed the former Sokoto Caliphate in 1906, naming it north Nigeria. Segal describes the economic, legal and social reforms which led to the erosion of slavery, not only the banning of the institution but the economic development of the colony which gave peasants paid work.

French Soudan

In 1848 the French National Assembly abolished slavery in all her colonies. But it wasn’t until 1905 that the Governor-General of French West Africa decreed an end to the slave trade and any person losing their liberty (p.181). The data suggests that slaves made their way back to their former towns and villages.

Mauritania

As the cost of accepting French rule (1905 to 1910), the leaders of inland tribes in this part of north-west Africa demanded that traditional tribal laws about slavery remain. Colonial attitudes and Islamic law favoured masters in this largely nomadic population. Drought and famine in the 1930s then again after the war, forced many to offer themselves as slaves in order to secure food.

Somalia

Italy seized part of Somaliland in 1892. They made noises about banning slavery but in 1903 a third of the population of Mogadishu were slaves. In 1906 when Italy took full control of the colony, they estimated the slave population at 30,000. When they freed the slaves in the city, the Italians discovered it led to unemployment and beggary, so were slower to act in the countryside. A complicated mesh of laws followed until the Fascists took power in 1922 and passed laws designed to liberate slaves but force them into low-paid labour on plantations.

Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast

In 1890 the British declared the Sultanate a Protectorate but it wasn’t until 1897 that they passed legislation allowing slaves to claim their freedom and then take-up was patchy because for many ‘freedom’ meant loss of employment and home. Employers and ex-slaves had to negotiate new relations. Employers raised pay, many ex-slaves squatted on waste land or the edge of plantations. The authorities struggled with increased vagrancy, drunkenness and delinquency. The British supported the Arab minority, as small as 5% of the population, because they owned the land and the clove plantations. Resentment against this privileged minority would boil over at independence.

In Kenya Segal describes the long-running problem of ex-slaves who became squatters, had families, established squatter settlements, especially along the coast where there was likely to be more work, a problem which troubled the British authorities and carried on past independence in 1963.

In Zanzibar and along the coast anti-Arab feeling grew and in 1961 there were violent African-Arab riots which left 68 dead. In the election held after the British left, the Arab party won a majority through blatant vote-rigging. This led in January 1964 to an outbreak of politically-motivated African violence which massacred Arabs and seized property, overthrowing the Arab Sultan for good. As many as 4,000 Arabs were killed in the streets. President of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, offered the revolutionary leadership a union with their mainland neighbour and so the country of Tanzania was born.

Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery

Stories of the ongoing existence of black slavery in Arab states such as Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Muscat. As recently as 1982 accusations that black Africans travelling to Mecca are captured and sold. On the west coast, evidence that African girls are trafficked to Lebanon.

Mauritania

At the time of writing the secretive government of Mauritania kept up slavery, with as many as a third of the population of about 2.5 million enslaved. Segal moves into the present era with a description of the racist activities of the Arab Islamic Mauritanian government in deporting, arresting, executing and generally harassing Mauritanians of black ethnicity. Especially the 1989 Mauritania–Senegal Border War which led to the expulsion of some 70,000 sub-Saharan African Mauritanians from the country. Wikipedia:

Modern-day slavery still exists in different forms in Mauritania. According to some estimates, thousands of Mauritanians are still enslaved. A 2012 CNN report, ‘Slavery’s Last Stronghold’, documents the ongoing slave-owning cultures. This social discrimination is applied chiefly against the ‘black Moors’ (Haratin) in the northern part of the country, where tribal elites among ‘white Moors’ (Bidh’an, Hassaniya-speaking Arabs and Arabized Berbers) hold sway. Slavery practices exist also within the sub-Saharan African ethnic groups of the south.

Sudan

The civil war in Sudan between the Arab north and the African Christian or animist south lasted for 40 years after independence in 1956. In 1972 the south was granted regional autonomy. South Sudan finally became an independent country in July 2011. Segal masters evidence for the ongoing practice of slavery in Sudan, generally practiced by Arabs on black Africans (pages 216 to 222). He mentions Christian Solidarity International which undertakes missions to buy slaves their freedom. At the time of writing CSI had freed more than 20,000 slaves, at an average price of $50 each.

Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash

This was by far the easiest part of the book to read and for a reason I often remark on – because it’s about America and we in the UK are bombarded with American culture, history and values. So when he writes about racism in Detroit or Harlem, about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, these are people and places and issues I feel superfamiliar with, from books and TV shows, documentaries and radio programmes and movies, exhibitions, art and photography.

Whereas the information about the trans-Sahara slave routes or the rise and fall of the various empires of west Africa or even the history of Islamic Spain were just some topics I knew next to nothing about and found very informative indeed, and all the more rewarding for being so radically unfamiliar.

Reading the stuff here about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X reminded me of watching the movie starring Denzel Washington, plus documentaries, plus articles, all (over)familiar stuff. Whereas I know nothing about the Fulani or the Hausa kings, about the Oyo empire or the royal court of Bornu, about Usman dan Fodio or Muhammed al-Amin al-Kanami or Yusuf Pasha of Tripoli. Here is a huge subject (the history of north and west Africa) of which I am pitifully ignorant, and need to learn more.

Thoughts

The biggest, general thought prompted by the book is the ubiquity of slavery, among all nations and all ethnicities, throughout most of history. The chapter on the Ottoman Empire routinely describes the numbers of white slaves seized from the Balkans in the Sultan’s palace, or more broadly. The chapter on Iran mentions that Iranians were themselves taken as slaves by the Ottomans to the West or the Uzbeks to the north. Iranians in turn seized Christian Armenians or Circassians.

Next is the Big Idea that slavery in Islamic was qualitatively different than the Western and Atlantic form, as described above.

Third thing is the leading role played by Britain throughout the nineteenth century in trying to stamp out slavery, across North Africa, in the Turkish heartlands, in Iraq and Persia, and along the East African coast. In all these places British diplomats, backed up by the Royal Navy, tried to stamp out the Arab slave trade.

Lastly, and tangentially, Segal’s passage about West Africa and its empires (chapter 10) was illuminating in itself, but also made me wish I could find a good, affordable account of France’s empire in Africa, not just the well-covered Algeria, but countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger and Gabon, French Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad, which we in the Anglosphere never hear about.

Credit

Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal was first published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2001. All references are to the 2002 paperback edition from the same publisher.

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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 Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (2007)

Catching up is about radically raising growth in the countries now at the bottom…This book sets out an [aid] agenda for the G8 that would be effective.
(The Bottom Billion, pages 12 and 13)

Sir Paul Collier, Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) is a British development economist who is currently Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. He’s the author of nine books tackling big global issues like migration, refugees and the future of capitalism.

The Bottom Billion was his second book, written expressly to inform and advise politicians attending the 2007 G8 meeting in Germany, which is why the final chapter is titled ‘An agenda for action’ (pages 175 to 192).

Collier asserts that while a billion or so people live in developed countries, and 5 or so billion live in developing countries many of which have flourished in the 1980s and 90s, a hard core of impoverished people live in countries whose economies have stubbornly refused to grow, despite western aid, loans and advice. He reckons there are about 58 of these countries (p.7), home to 980 million people or, by the time we’re reading his book, over a billion (p.6). If everyone else is doing relatively OK then, if the G8’s ambition is to ‘abolish poverty’, it is to these 60 or so failing countries and ‘the bottom billion’ that attention needs to be focused.

To help do this Collier has developed the theory that these countries are being held back by a number of key development traps and these are what need to be addressed. Collier claims there are four of these:

1. The Conflict Trap

Contrary to received opinion, Collier thinks that civil wars do not correlate with rebel grievances, political repression, ethnic strife or colonial legacy. Instead he finds strong links to: low income, low growth and reliance on the export of primary commodities.

Civil wars last a long time: the average international war lasts six months, civil wars last at least ten times as long, and are likely to recur or break out again. This is because the longer a civil conflict drags on, the more deeply established the players become that profit from the conflict, making them harder and harder to end. Only about half the countries which resolve a civil war manage to go a decade without conflict breaking out again (p.27).

A typical civil war costs its country and its neighbours $64 billion. After civil wars conclude homicide rates generally increase as people inured to violence carry it out unilaterally.

It’s not just civil wars, coups are also correlated with low income and low growth (p.36).

2. The Natural Resources Trap

Countries that are rich in natural resources are paradoxically usually worse off than countries that are not, for a number of reasons:

governments that rely on extractive resources (oil, gas, gold, diamonds, iron, copper) tend to become anti-democratic rentier states
being home to abundant natural resources can lead to Dutch disease, where reliance on one resource leads to neglect of all other aspects of the economy, a failure to diversity and develop their economies which results, long term, in low or zero growth (p.39)
because rentier governments make most of their income from (often corrupt) deals with western multinational corporations, they have little need for taxes from the general population, and so the taxation-with-representation model which underpins most western nations simply doesn’t apply; rich governments can afford to ignore their populations
an accompaniment of responsible government is checks and balances; these tend to be absent in resource-rich, low growth countries
in other words, resource-rich poor countries tend to evolve terrible governments of kleptocrats, Angola, Congo, Nigeria

3. Landlocked with Bad Neighbours

Around 30% of Africa’s population lives in landlocked, resources-scarce countries (p.57).

Countries with coastlines can trade with the world, while landlocked countries can only trade with their neighbours, and that depends on having decent transport infrastructure. Landlocked countries with poor infrastructure connections to their neighbours therefore have a limited market for their goods. And they may have bad i.e. predatory or unco-operative governments. What can a poor landlocked country do?

Increase neighbourhood growth spillovers
Improve neighbours’ economic policies
Improve coastal access
Become a haven for the region
Don’t be air-locked or e-locked
Encourage remittances
Create a transparent and investor-friendly environment for resource prospecting
Rural development – the single biggest problem is here is the subsidies the West and Japan pay their farmers
Try to attract aid

4. Bad Governance in a Small Country

The kind of terrible governance which has characterised so many African nations since independence can destroy an economy with alarming speed. Think of the ruination of Congo by Mobutu. It’s doubtful if economic growth anywhere can exceed 10%. But someone like Robert Mugabe can run his country into the ground in under a decade. The smaller the population, the less inertia there is to prevent ruinous plans.

This chapter is highly technical with Collier explaining and defining criteria he uses to create technical reports on, among other things, what he calls ‘failing states’ (p.68) then defining what ‘turnaround’ would mean and what ‘sustained’ would mean (at least five years’ improvement; p.70). All these chapters read like summaries of pretty technical academic papers because that’s often exactly what they are.

Their study showed that a country was more likely to achieve a sustained turnaround: 1) the larger its population 2) the better educated its population 3) if it had recently emerged from a civil war.

Disappointingly whether it was or wasn’t a democracy seemed immaterial.

Solutions

Let me clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. (p.96)

Each of these countries contains honest, educated people working for reform and improvement. Collier calls them ‘heroes’. We need to help these heroes by clearing away the obstacles to their work. At our end this will require:

aid ministries in Western countries to be given much more importance and money
aid policies to be better co-ordinated across all government departments
Western governments to work more closely together to produce a co-ordinated Western approach to making poverty history

But then he moves on to four specific areas of improvement, many of which easy to state but will require entrenched institutions such as aid agencies and government departments, to change established practices and assumptions. Each of them gets a chapter explaining in detail:

Aid To The Rescue

He marshals pretty sceptical arguments and data about aid, lots of stories of aid’s ineffectiveness, corruption, theft, the uselessness of aid agencies and so on. He says things are improving, which is what they always say. Above 16% of GDP aid stops being effective. There are numerous different types of foreign aid. He considers in particular aid as incentive, aid as skills and aid as reinforcement.

Aid agencies should be concentrated in the most difficult environments and accept more risk p.116 the sequence

Military Intervention

Despite the terrible reputation Western military intervention has acquired because of Iraq, Collier still believes it has a role to play in improving the lot of the Bottom Billion, in fact three roles: restoration of order, maintaining postconflict peace and preventing coups (p.124).

On the whole appropriate military interventions, such as the quick, cheap, effective British one in Sierra Leone, should be encouraged, especially to guarantee democratic governments against coups (so we should back military intervention in Niger).

If only the European Union was prepared to use the Rapid Reaction Force it has set up with such a fanfare it might be possible to ‘make coups history’ by intervening quickly and decisively to reverse them, certainly easier than ‘making poverty history’ (p.131).

External forces are needed to keep the peace in postconflict situations because high government spending on the military is associated with greater risk of war breaking out again. External forces will have to come in and keep the peace for at least 10 years (p.133).

Laws and Charters

International charters are needed to encourage good governance and provide examples. Collier proposes five:

A charter for natural resource revenues: a very persuasive call for international charters to set standards of transparency, especially in the extractive industries
A charter for democracy: ‘Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used’ (p.147). Actual elections are the showbiz side of democracy but much more important is the introduction of democratic checks and balances into corrupt countries. This takes time, planning and support.
A charter for budget transparency: the story of Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile and alerting the local media (p.150)
A charter for postconflict situations
A charter for investment

Trade Policy: Western trade policy needs to encourage free trade and give preferential access to exports from Bottom Billion countries

Academic disputes

The uninitiated might think that academics are paid to find answers to problems and establish the truth. But the academic world, now more than ever, puts academics under tremendous pressure to compete, to publish scads of papers and books, to continually come up with something new, in order to justify their tenure and their research grants. And the best way to do this is not to come up with solutions but to continually problematise issues, finding new things to disagree about.

Hence why in History each new historian has to establish their reputation by rubbishing everyone who came before them and claiming to have found the real reason why X happened, or for the first time the true story can be told, or, in one of the clichés of our time, to be giving voices to the previously unheard, overlooked, suppressed etc.

Hence why in Literary Studies, every single work of literature from the last two and a half thousand years has to be reread and reinterpreted in light of the newish frameworks of feminism and race, post-colonial studies and, the newest kid on the block, queer studies.

Which is why second-wave feminism of the 1960s (white, horribly middle-class) had to be refuted by the 1990s generation of third-wave feminists, who claimed to be reclaiming feminism for non-white and working class people. Who were themselves supplanted around 2009 by fourth-wave feminists, who make much more agile use of digital technology i.e. social media, while insisting all previous feminism didn’t take into account modern ideas of gender fluidity.

The four waves of feminism

And so it goes on, wave after wave of thinkers claiming that their new interpretation is the right one, the revelation, the radical new discovery – until the next wave comes along and proves it wasn’t inclusive or diverse enough. Same in the language arts, the performing arts, the visual arts: in all the humanities academia is a kind of machine for generating ever-new waves of ideology and discourse.

Academic disputes in the aid sector

Anyway, when we come to Development Economics, to the world of development aid and foreign aid and aid policy, exactly the same thing applies. This is that, instead of there being broad agreement about what needs to be done, there is, instead, a surprising amount of disagreement about what should be done.

Why? Because academics are paid to disagree; they make their names and careers by rebutting, disputing and overthrowing previously accepted nostrums, the old ideas which have so signally failed, proposing new solutions based on new evidence, new studies etc etc.

And this lack of disagreement is, of course, notoriously endemic in the field of economics which, unlike art criticism or literary theory, directly affects the fate of nations and the wellbeing or otherwise of hundreds of millions of people who suffer the consequences of economists’ bickering and misrule.

The American economist J.K. Galbraith was a fund of witty criticisms of his own field of study. ‘If you laid all the economists in the world in a straight line, head to toe, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion’ was one of his gags, although his best one might be: ‘The only purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.’

Which is why, arguably, the most interesting part of Collier’s book is not the ostensible Key Points, outlined above, which could be conveyed in five or six PowerPoint slides. It’s the sidelights and sideswipes, in which Collier defends his position against his opponents in a range of debates I didn’t even know existed.

These shed light on the tangled undergrowth of development economic thinking and begin to explain why leaders of Western countries do not give it the prominence Collier, naturally enough, wants his field to have. Why would they, when the so-called experts can barely agree among themselves?

Academic disputes about ‘growth’

Take the simple idea of growth. What could be more uncontroversial than the idea that the world’s poorest nations need to grow their way out of poverty by developing their economies. And yet in a couple of pages, before his book has really got started (pages 11 and 12), Collier sketches out the profound disagreements development economist have about this.

He tells us that many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are deeply unhappy with the entire concept of ‘growth’, presumably (although he isn’t explicit about this) because they associate it with unbridled capitalism, the Washington Consensus, the creation of a third world middle class and the ongoing abandonment of the poor.

This, he explains, is why nowadays organisations put adjectives before the word ‘growth’, things like ‘sustainable pro-poor growth’ to distinguish their kind of growth from naughty nasty capitalist growth (p.11).

Collier has no time for this. He enjoys telling us that while he was directing the World Bank’s Research Department (swank) the most controversial paper they published was titled ‘Growth Is Good For The Poor’. To you and me that might appear a pretty uncontroversial statement but NGOs’ hated it and the president of the World Bank rang up to express his concern.

What emerges is that Collier sees himself sitting in the middle of a spectrum of beliefs. To the left of him are often quite left-wing development charities which are ‘suspicious’ (p.11) of talk about growth because of its red-blooded, Thatcherite connotations. The ‘sustainable pro-poor’ guys. In the world of economic theory, the leading figure of this wing is American economist Jeffrey Sachs, a strong proponent of large-scale aid to the developing world.

To the right of Collier are the aid sceptics, right-wingers who think well-meaning foreign intervention often makes things worse. Countries have to sort themselves out and find their own way. The American economist William Easterly is, apparently, the leading figure on this wing, as the title of his book ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006), makes abundantly clear.

Easterly’s arguments are repeated and updated by someone like Dambisa Moyo and her 2010 book ‘Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa’. Moyo is black and a woman so scores double on the diversity-counter and has been showered with praise by the worried white establishment (in 2022 she was awarded a life peerage, becoming Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge). But, at the end of the day, she is yet one more American-educated development economist to enter the endless battlefield of development economics.

Anyway, amid all this argumentation, Collier is at pains to position himself in a nominal ‘centre’: definitely rejecting left-wing beliefs (he is scathing about anyone who offers Cuba as a model for other developing countries to follow) but at the same time rejecting the All Aid Is Bad school (p.191).

Early on he offers a common sense summary of what he’s aiming for, a goal he hopes everyone can rally round:

To my mind, development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. (p.12)

Reading this book made me realise that feel-good sentiments like that are so common in this area, and drop so glibly from the lips of politicians, precisely because they don’t really say anything. Because as soon as you start to be more specific, the squabbling starts.

Supporting girls and women

This atmosphere of continual argument and debate in development economics explains why the debate has moved away from ‘growth’ (wrongly, in Colliers view) towards more ‘safe’ subjects. This, for example, explains why all the squabbling parties can be brought back together around uncontroversial rallying cries such as ‘helping girls and women in the developing world’.

Who could possibly disagree? Who would dare to disagree? It’s a worthy cause, of course, as Collier emphasises (p.11) but also one which papers over the yawning cracks which divide development economists. Framing the debate in terms of helping ‘vulnerable women’ and ‘supporting girls’ etc is all very admirable:

But continues to evade the much harder discussion about the best way to provide foreign aid, or, as per Easterly and Moyo, whether the West should give aid at all.

Academic in tone

The Bottom Billion is very academic in tone, in the bad sense. Chapter 1 is about ‘conflict’, which you might have thought would be a big juicy topic. Instead Collier focuses in on the minutiae of a research paper he did with one of his graduate students, Anke Hoeffler.

He explains that they decided to take a very narrow approach and see if they could measure whether the outbreak of civil wars was related to income and GDP. They were quickly presented with the problem of how to define a civil war so, he explains, they adopted the definition of ‘civil war’ developed by scholars at the University of Michigan, which is an expert in this field.

Then, of course, there are problems with getting reliable data about GDP, average income and so on from the poorest countries which are, by definition, often in a state of chaos.

And then he complains that some fellow academics objected to this entire data-driven analysis. These critics come from the left, from ‘the politicised end of the academic world’ (p.19), who Collier has taken the time to criticise half a dozen times by just page 19.

Not all theorists of civil war have based their work on empirical data. Some social scientists, particularly the most politically engaged, know what they want to see in civil war and duly see it. (p.20)

See what I mean by ‘academic’?

1) Instead of treating the subject in a broad and insightful way, he is instead effectively summarising one very specific paper he co-authored.

2) He tells you as much about fellow academics who objected to his approach as he does about the results.

3) And his summary is littered with snarky jibes against Western Marxists, left-wing NGOs, the politically correct media and so on, sarcastic asides which I quickly came to dislike.

(For example, Collier attributes the over-emphasis on the urgency of the West giving aid entirely to ‘the left’ and its narrative of atoning for the sins of colonialism, in what he considers a blinkered, moralistic view which actively hampers the kind of aid and support we can and ought to give, p.123.)

Economic statistics

As an economist Collier prides himself on eschewing historical, political or sociological explanations for poverty or war. The trouble is that, as he explains how he and his post-grad assistants beavered away to define the data and stats they needed to generate their conclusions, the more artificial and contingent they appear. By the time he gets to the conclusions he’s so proud of, I found them unconvincing and also weirdly irrelevant.

For example, after a lot of number crunching, he tells us that poor countries are more likely to see civil wars which we could have worked out for ourselves. But then that a typical low-income country faces a 14% risk of civil war in any given five-year period. Each percentage of economic growth knocks a percentage off the risk, so a country with a growth rate of 3% has a risk of civil war of 14% – 3% = 11%.

This is just the first of many mentions of projects his graduate students are working on or that he collaborated on with his peers. An awful lot of the book consists of summaries of research undertaken by Collier or his research students or colleagues (Lisa Chauvet, Anke Hoeffler, Stefan Dercon, Steve O’Connell, Catherine Pattillo, Jan Gunning, David Dollar, Tony Venables) and there is an appendix at the end devoted to just these research papers, titled ‘Research on which this book is based’.

Underpinning the book are a mass of technical papers published in professional journals. (Preface, p.xii)

Collier’s unique selling point is that, once he has defined his problem, he works with students and colleagues to find ways to try to apply measurable data to them. He shares his working out with us because that’s how a good academic operates. It allows others to critique his methodology or results with precision.

In addition, Collier explicitly states in his Preface that he goes into such detail about who he worked with and how they developed the concepts and definitions for their research because the book has an aim over and above framing issues and recommendations for development aid: it is to give us lay readers a sense of what it’s like to do development economics, a sense of the buzz you get from framing questions then figuring out ways to answer them:

Although this is not a book about research, I hope that along the way you will get some of the flavour of how modern research is done, and a sense of the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions. (Preface, p.xiii)

But as well as often being pretty boring, it gives an unfortunate impression of being very, well, narrow. Instead of ranging across the whole field it reads more like the annual summary of research done by a particular department at a particular university. It feels oddly parochial.

Reasons not to be cheerful

For a guy who’s trying to come up with practical solutions, Collier shares a lot of very gloomy conclusions to his research.

– Assuming even an optimistic rate of economic growth, he estimates that ruined countries like the Congo will take something like fifty years to get back to the standard of living they enjoyed at independence in 1960.

– Resource-poor landlocked countries are going to be reliant on aid for a very, very long time. He is so pessimistic about their prospects that twice he says they should never really have been created as separate countries. Mali, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic – these countries are going to be dirt poor forever (p.107).

– Capital flight. He and his team researched long and hard to uncover the headline fact that in 1998, after decades of military rule, some $100 billion had been smuggled out of Africa by its elite and was held abroad, money which should, of course, have been used to invest in infrastructure, agriculture and so on, but had simply been stolen by its rulers. Instead of investing in their own countries, rich Africans invest their money abroad.

– Paralleling capital flight is human capital flight. Educated people leave poor countries because they have better life chances abroad. And the better your qualifications the more likely you can enter a Western country. And once one of you is in, you can bring other family members. Thus human flight disproportionately impacts the educated classes, which obviously keeps poor nations stuck in the poverty trap.

The countries of the bottom billion are already desperately short of qualified people and the situation is likely to get worse. (p.94)

– A really big reason for gloom is that his research shows that the main way to grow your economy is to attract inward commercial investment. The way to do that is to be a large country with political stability and a reasonably well educated workforce. These are the reasons why first China then India dragged themselves out of poverty in the 1990s and 2000s.

China in particular grew at an incredible rate partly because of what economists call ‘economies of agglomeration’ (p.82) meaning that you build up a well-enough educated workforce that can move easily between different firms or factories in the same sector. There are tens of thousands of foreign firms in China and tens of millions of workers educated and experienced enough to move between them.

Compare the economies of agglomeration in China with the bottom billion countries where a) there are few if any foreign firms and so b) an entire generation of workers with no experience of what is required to work in a foreign-owned factory or warehouse e.g. be clean, turn up on time day after day, literate enough to do the work, prepared to put in the hours.

So who wants to be the first Western investor to risk investing millions in a country with no educated workforce, no transport infrastructure, and corrupt rulers who are likely to overthrow each other in a chaos-creating coup at the drop of a hat? See the recent upset among the rulers of Sudan. Nobody.

Critiques

William Easterly’s criticism

William Easterly is another development economist but this time from the right-wing of the political spectrum and a deep-dyed aid sceptic. This explains why his most famous book is titled ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006) and explains why Easterly makes numerous criticisms of Collier. He starts by claiming that Collier’s strategy of attributing the poverty of the poorest countries to just four causes or ‘traps’ is completely inadequate. The world is much more complicated than that.

Easterly says Collier doesn’t take into account a number of other pretty obvious factors – such as the colonial legacy i.e. the template of the elite rule of land, resources and government which post-independence local rulers simply copied; or the disruptive impact of tribalism. He adds many others and develops his critique of Collier from there.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

All Collier’s conclusions derive from data and statistical analysis and the trouble with data and statistics is, notoriously, that you can make them mean anything you want to. Even an utterly honest, unbiased attempt to use data faces a host of problems which Collier, to give him his due, owns up to and describes in detail. These include:

sourcing the data in the first place: it rarely presents itself clean and complete as you wish, but has to be hunted down, sought in different organisations, or formats, or with different taxonomies, or purposes so that you have to manipulate it, ‘clean’ it, repurpose it
or it’s just not available and has to be guessed or ‘extrapolated’ from similar datasets elsewhere
Collier repeatedly explains how they had to choose how to define concepts such as ‘success’, ‘turnaround’, even ‘civil war’ and ‘growth’; the more he does so, the more contingent and – not quite arbitrary, but – flaky many of his central premises come to seem

Collier, to his great credit, shows all his working out, but the more he explains, the more rickety and bodged together his working appears. I’m sure he and all his collaborators did the best possible job but his candour about the challenges they faced getting hold of and then working with the data on which his entire approach relies, slowly undermines your trust in many of his findings. And since the entire edifice is based on these findings, well…

Fifteen years later

History doesn’t stop, Time marches on. Has poverty been abolished? Have we made poverty history? Have we lifted the bottom billion out of poverty? No, no and no.

Also, ‘Events, dear boy’. Since this book was published in 2008 we’ve had the financial crash of 2008 leading to a decade of austerity, the huge political disruption caused by Brexit, the COVID lockdowns, and now the war in Ukraine. All good excuses for focusing our energies elsewhere.

I don’t know whether Collier’s recommendations were adopted by the G8 or the British government or the UN, but I doubt it and I doubt they ever will be. Look at the umpteen reports about climate change, overflowing with recommendations. Some policies are being implemented in Western and developing nations, but is it enough? No. The sample of reviews of the book I’ve read all say it was ‘very influential’ and it may well have changed a lot of thinking and speeches and papers and research and so on in the vast papermill and huge bureaucracy of the aid industry.

But were any of his policies actually implemented? It would be lovely if Collier wrote another book (or article) assessing the book 15 years on: telling us which policies, if any, were adopted, and by whom, and what difference they made, if any. Come on, Paul.

TED talk

Sir Paul gave a TED talk summarising his book:

Credit

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2008.

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by Simon on December 11, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History, Politics

Tagged #democracy, 2008 financial crisis, Academic disputes, aid, aid agencies, aid as incentive, aid as reinforcement, aid as skills, aid ministries, aid policies, aid sector, Aid To The Rescue, Angola, Anke Hoeffler, Bad Governance in a Small Country, Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge, Brexit, Capital flight, Catherine Pattillo, Central African Republic, Chad, charter for budget transparency, charter for democracy, charter for investment, charter for postconflict situations, China, Civil Wars, climate change, conflict management, Congo, COVID pandemic, Cuba, Dambisa Moyo, David Dollar, developing world, development assistance, development economics, development traps, Dutch disease, Economic statistics, economies of agglomeration, Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, European Union, Feminism, foreign aid, Foreign Office, G8 meeting, Girls and women, governance, Growth Is Good For The Poor, heroes, human capital flight, J.K. Galbraith, Jan Gunning, Jeffrey Sachs, kleptocrats, landlocked country, Landlocked with Bad Neighbours, Laws and Charters, Lisa Chauvet, Mali, Military Intervention, Mobutu, Niger, Nigeria, Paul Collier, poverty, Rapid Reaction Force, rentier states, Robert Mugabe, Rural development, Sierra Leone, Sir Paul Collier, Stefan Dercon, Steve O'Connell, TED talk, The Bottom Billion, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, The Conflict Trap, The Natural Resource Trap, the West, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, Third World, Tony Venables, Trade Policy, Washington Consensus, Western aid, Western approach, William Easterly, World bank

Posted by Simon on December 11, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/11/the-bottom-billion-paul-collier/

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong (2021)

‘Paul Kagame is without doubt the most ruthless politician operating in Africa today.’
(US Ambassador to Uganda, Johnnie Carson, quoted on page 321)

‘The entire country is a spying machine.’
(exiled Rwandan economist David Himbara, quoted on page 422)

This is a major, comprehensive and blistering attack on a contemporary African regime.

In a nutshell, the West and the international community for many years regarded the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as heroes for invading Rwanda and bringing to a halt the 1994 genocide of Tutsis being carried out by the psychopathic Rwandan government dominated by advocates of the extremist Hutu Power ideology.

Not only that, but the RPF and its leading figure – tall, ascetic intellectual Paul Kagame – were also praised for going on to invade eastern Congo where they 1) sorted out the problem of the massive refugee camps holding over 2 million Rwandans refugees where the Hutu genocidalists were regrouping, and then 2) pressing this invasion on to the capital of Congo, Kinshasa, where they overthrew the rotten old dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

In the years that followed the West, the UN and the international community fell over themselves to lavish aid on Rwanda and fête its intense, driven president, Kagame, who presided over a peaceful multi-ethnic government and promoted his intention of turning Rwanda into a highly educated, high-tech economy, ‘the Singapore of Africa’.

For many years Financial Times and Reuters journalist Michela Wrong went along with this version of events and this highly favourable view of Kagame, ignoring the rumours and scattered reports which threw doubt on this image. Now she realises she was completely wrong. She has completely changed her tune.

This book is a comprehensive rubbishing of the historical record of Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing), the Rwandan Patriotic Army (the military wing) and President Kagame himself. It’s what Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie used to call a monstering, an exhaustive, scathing demolition of all the RPF’s claims; an indictment of its behaviour before, during and after the genocide; and a terrifying depiction of a paranoid, controlling, vindictive and murderous regime, which is still in power, still holding its population in a climate of fear, and extending the threat of assassination to exiles and dissidents around the world. Here are the key points.

Wrong’s indictment

The 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda was naive and destructive. Having contributed up to a quarter of the rebel army which brought Marxist leader Yoweri Museveni to power in neighbouring Uganda in 1985, long-term Tutsi emigrants from Rwanda and children of the refugees from anti-Tutsi pogroms conceived the idea of invading Rwanda and reclaiming their heritage.

This was a mistake. The Rwanda they wanted to return to, the ones their parents told them about, no longer existed. Instead, the invasion revived all the paranoid fears of the Hutu majority (Hutus make up 85%, Tutsis 14% of Rwanda’s population) that these violent invaders wanted to return Rwanda to the bad old days when a Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy lorded it over a subjugated Hutu peasantry. This paranoia was egged on by media outlets including Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines which was to play such a key role during the actual genocide (p.228).

The conventional view is that the Tutsi exiles just wanted to reclaim their heritage. The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion wasn’t about reclaiming anything, they wanted to seize absolute power, which is why the invasion marked the start of a four-year civil war, throwing the entire country into a state of crisis and edginess.

In other words, far from invading to stop the genocide in 1994, the RPF invasion in 1990 created the hysterical paranoid environment in which the genocide could take place.

The RPF made lots of mistakes from the start. First off was something which remains a mystery to this day, which is the unexplained death of their most charismatic leader, Fred Rwigyema. Wrong considers the two main versions of his death, plus the numerous minor variations, in great detail, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion (pages 207 to 213). A few weeks later two other RPF leaders, Peter Bayingana and Chris Bunyenyezi, were dead.

These unexplained deaths paved the way for the rise of Paul Kagame. Kagame was out of the country at the time, undertaking, of all things, a training course at Fort Leavenworth in the USA, so he is generally exonerated of these unexplained deaths, but they were very convenient, as was his swift elevation to strategic leader on his hurried return to the rebels base.

Anyway, these deaths were indicative of the failure of the RPF’s initial incursion into Rwanda. Not only did they meet stiff resistance from the Rwandan army but were dismayed to discover how much the ordinary Hutu peasants feared and disliked them.

The conventional story is that Kagame was a military genius who led the battered remnants of the RPF into the remote Virunga mountains where they regrouped and studied guerrilla tactics. Wrong’s debunking version is that most of these decisions were taken by people lower in command and that Kagame’s main contribution, then as right through to the present day, was to instil a regime of fear.

Ugandan journalist Sheila Kawamara, a frequent visitor to Mulindi (RPF headquarters), registered the staff changes taking place. ‘We heard about a policy of extermination of all the officers who had supported Fred. When you were with them you could sense this climate of fear. Those who were more ruthless rose through the ranks at that stage.’ (p.229)

Wrong goes out of her way to quote contemporaries, former members of the RPF, eye witnesses, who one and all testify that Kagame was a controlling, spiteful, sadistic man who used terror to control all around him.

In the revisionist version the holed-up-in-the-mountains phase is transformed from a glamorous Che Guevara idyll into a death camp where hundreds of new recruits would be taken off and killed in the middle of the night for the slightest reasons, sometimes simply because they spoke French which the Anglophone Ugandan Tutsis suspected. Wrong dwells on the way the kafuni or common farmer’s hoe was the weapon of choice used to kill suspects and undesirables.

When the RPF did come down out of the mountains in 1991 and fought their way through north Rwanda to within 50k of the capital, Kigali, it was not only the official Rwandan army they fought but many of the Hutu peasants whose land they passed through. Upset to discover the peasants didn’t welcome them with open arms, the Tutsi RPF got used to massacring entire Hutu villages if it was convenient. The accounts of massacres are disputed but no-one disputes that Hutu peasants retreated before the advancing PDF forces. Eventually as many as 950,000 people were uprooted by the RPF invasion and turned into internal refugees, 15% of the population (p.230).

The RPF’s advance, the civil war as a whole, was suspended by the Arusha Accords of August 1993 which gave the RPF representation in a new national government.

Then Wrong makes her biggest accusation, which is that it was the Kagame-led RPF, and not Hutu Power extremists in his own government, who shot down the plane carrying Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana. This was the trigger for the genocide which followed and which commended within minutes of news of the plane crash.

The shooting down of the plane carrying the Hutu president was the trigger for the start of the genocide so it’s always been a deeply contested event. It’s the ‘Who Shot JFK?’ of Central Africa. Amid hundreds of theories, three main ones:

White men did it, either Belgians, French or Americans. But why?
Conventional explanation: Hutu Power hardliners within the government did it because they feared Habyarimana was giving too much away by signing the Arusha Accords, and had the extermination plans ready to go.
Revisionist explanation: the RPF did it because they knew the elections demanded by the Arusha Accords would consolidate Habyarimana’s government in power, whereas chaos and confusion would allow them to continue their military conquest and seize power.

As you’d expect, Wrong leans heavily towards theory 3, assembling a raft of evidence but, more to her style, numerous interviewees who all claimed the RPF and Kagame planned it. Western investigators charged the RPF with it throughout the 2000s, for example in 2006 a French judge accused Kagame and his allies of then shooting down. Then in 2011 a leading RPF exile, Theogene Rudasingwa, from 2000 to 2004 Chief of Staff to Kagame, posted a frank admission of the RPF’s guilt on Facebook (p.375). In 2012 another former RPF top gun, General Kayumba, went public with the accusation. In 2013 ex-RPF intelligence officer Jean-Marie Micombero joined the chorus (p.376). In 2014 the BBC broadcast a documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, which contained the accusation.

So, again, Wrong’s pressing of RPF guilt is not exactly new, and nowhere does Wrong find a smoking gun. Like the controversy around JFK it will rumble on forever.

There’s no doubt that Hutu Power ideologues had a fully worked-out plan for exterminating the country’s Tutsi population in its entirety, and were responsible for passing orders and instructions for mass murder down through the chain of command to the remotest parishes. But Wrong’s accusation is that:

the RPF invasion created the unstable, feverish atmosphere in which many, maybe most of the Hutu population felt threatened by a Tutsi takeover
and that the RPF was responsible for downing the plane and so triggering the genocide

The conventional view is that the plane shooting and the abrupt start of the genocide triggered the RPF to restart their paused invasion and that they swept through the country in order to stop the genocide. Wrong counters that the actual route of the RPF was calculated not on the basis of saving Tutsi lives but purely with a view to securing power (p.242). The notion that the RPF heroically intervened to stop the genocide is treated as a joke by one of the RPF’s own diplomats (p.350).

The conventional view is that the RPF established law and order wherever they went and protected what Hutus remained, like the conquering allied forces established law and order in 1945. The revisionist view is that on the contrary, wherever they went the RPF massacred Hutu communities but that these massacres went unrecorded or unreported in the context of the wider holocaust.

The conventional view is that the RPF begged for outside help. The revisionist view is that when the UN discussed reinforcing its small demoralised force in Kigali the RPF objected, repeatedly claiming that all the Tutsis were dead and the genocide over. This was because they knew a major UN intervention would end up preserving the existing Hutu regime, albeit with new leadership, whereas the RPF was set on securing complete military control. In other words, senior RPF figures were prepared to let the killing go on and tens of thousands more Tutsis to die, if it meant securing power (p.243).

The conventional view is that once the RPF had secured control of the entire country, Kagame then established an enlightened government of national unity in Kigali, ensuring key posts went to Hutus to ensure balance and trust. The revisionist view is this was the case for a very limited period, 12 months at most, into 1995, before these Hutu ministers started being sacked or forced to quit, in all instances replaced not just by Tutsis but by Tutsis loyal to Kagame personally (p.251).

The conventional view is that this enlightened RPF government then begged the international community and the UN to do something about the Hutu genocidalists who had taken refuge in the huge Hutu refugee camps just across the border in eastern Congo, repeatedly asked the West to intervene but, eventually, being goaded beyond endurance by Hutu militias crossing the border and carrying out little village massacres, reluctantly invaded into eastern Congo, killing the genocidalists and shepherding the 2 million or so Hutu refugees back into their own country.

The revisionist view is that the RPF planned to invade Congo all along.

The revisionist view is that, in the process, the RPF themselves carried out numerous massacres of Hutu civilians, men, women and children. In fact some scholars estimate the total number killed at 300,000, well on the way to matching the 800,000 killed in the genocide.

The conventional view is that the RPF wanted the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and to their abandoned properties, guaranteeing them safety if they did so. The revisionist view is that in the meantime tens of thousands of Tutsi exiles returned to the country and seized vacant Hutu properties, farms and houses, urban businesses, thus feeding into the Hutu narratives of conquest and grievance (pages 260, 270, 285).

The conventional view is that the genocide was a one-off event with a datable beginning and ending (7 April to 15 July 1994). The revisionist view is that the genocide was just a kind of wild upsurge in an environment where ethnic killing had been going on as far back as the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959, with the most recent surge starting not in April 1994 but with the initial invasion of the RPF in October 1990.

‘The troubles between Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start in 1994. The genocide was part of a process which began much much earlier.’ (Robert Higiro, quoted on p.269)

And continuing long after. The conventional view is that the RPF brought peace. The revisionist view is that massacres within Rwanda, and then in Congo, continued on after the genocide.

Wrong details important evidence suggesting an RPF policy of systematic violence and intimidation which carried on after the genocide, but which was hushed up or downplayed at the time:

the Gersony Report (pages 269 to 271)
the Kibeho massacre (p.273)

The conventional view is that the RPF pursuit of genocidalists who fled west slowly, reluctantly changed a temporary incursion into eastern Congo into a campaign to carry on west as far as the capital, Kinshasa, and overthrow rotten old Mobutu, installing a nice new democratic regime, much to the applause of the west.

The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion of Congo 1) continued to be marked by RPF massacres, now not only of defenceless Hutus but often of Congo civilians too, 2) overthrowing Mobutu had always been the core aim of Kagame (and his ally, Uganda’s Museveni). Gérard Prunier calls it the first imperialist invasion by one African country of another, a sentiment echoed here by Polish journalist, Hrvoje Hranski:

‘They were colonisers, pure and simple, but we were sympathetic.’ (quoted page 301)

On this reading it was not just an incursion to stabilise a border region but a deliberate attempt to establish colonial control over an entire country, to take over Congo via Kagame and Museveni’s puppet ruler, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Wrong quotes her hero Patrick Karegeya as saying:

‘We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.’ (p.297)

The RPF atrocities inside Rwanda were difficult to document in the chaos of the genocide, but there were many more witnesses to their behaviour in Congo. In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ (p.300).

By 1998 Mobutu was overthrown, Kabila was installed as puppet ruler of Congo, the Hutu refugee camps had been emptied, and the prolonged security crisis was over. In February Kagame was elected RPF chairman, to go alongside his posts of Minister for War and Vice President.

The RPF regime claimed that relations only deteriorated with Kabila when he began reaching out to remnants of the Hutu regime and the Interahamwe. The revisionist view is that relations deteriorated when Kabila began ruling for himself and kicked his Rwandan advisers out of Congo. It was then that Rwanda and Uganda began planning a second invasion and only then that Kabila reached out to the genocidalists as a desperate resort.

In April 2000 Kagame arrived at the acme of power, being elected president (p.319). The Rwanda-Uganda alliance completely collapsed and the two armies fought a vicious urban battle in Kisingani. Kabila made the mistake of abandoning his child warriors, even ordering them to shoot fallen comrades. Thus it was an aggrieved former child soldier, Rashidi Kasereka, who shot him at point blank range in the presidential palace. Later, Wrong claims that Patrick freely admitted that Rwandan intelligence were behind the assassination (p.323).

By the time the Ugandans and Rwandans fell out, many of the journalists who’d been sympathetic to the RFP had fallen out of love with them. What had started as an attempt to hunt down the genocidalists had turned into a naked grab of land and resources. Wrong gives a fascinating account of Rwanda and Uganda’s blatant looting of Congo’s resources and then moving to the ‘active extraction’ phase i.e. controlling the mines, the extraction and export of precious minerals (p.328).

It was a great revelation and shock to the regime’s western supporters when a UN report revealed that this systematic looting and theft was carried out by a Rwandan state body called the Congo Desk (p.329). And guess who was in charge of the Congo Desk? The Zelig of central Africa, Patrick Karegeya.

When it was set up the RPF devised a solemn oath of loyalty which all members had to sear. By the end of the Second Congo War, this had mutated into a mafia with its oath of Omertà i.e., you talk, you die (p.331).

After the war

Kagame has been able to string along and play the international community and western donors (chief amongst whom is the UK) for several reasons:

the conventional view is that Kagame is a visionary New African Leader, committed to democracy and developing Rwanda into a modern, high education, hi-tech nation, ‘the Singapore of Africa’
western guilt about not doing enough to prevent the genocide, particularly afflicted Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

Clinton later delivered fulsome apologies for America’s failure to act quickly enough or acknowledge the killings amounted to a genocide.

The revisionist view is that throughout the post-genocide period and right up to the present day, Kagame, far from being a western-style democrat and visionary, was establishing a terrifying surveillance dictatorship.

Precisely how he did that is revealed by the central thread of the book, the life, career and murder of Colonel Patrick Karegeya.

Patrick Karegeya as central theme

This summary gives the impression that the book is a logical or chronological account of the historical events but it isn’t, at least not to start with. The first hundred pages are something completely different.

Wrong opens her narrative, and thereafter uses as a repeated reference point, the murder of Patrick Karegeya, former head of external intelligence in the RPF regime and, at one time, a key member of Kagame’s close-knit RPF elite. The idea is that Karegeya was murdered because he had become a critic, and then an outspoken critic, of Kagame and, in 2010, helped set up an alternative Rwandan political party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC).

Karegeya was murdered on New Year’s Eve 2013 in a room at the Michelangelo Hotel in the Johannesberg suburb of Sandton. But Wrong doesn’t just give an extended description and forensic analysis of the days and weeks leading up to the murder, then of the crime scene and the probable cause of events. Three things:

1. Wrong interviews everyone who ever knew Patrick Karegeya – his wife, his mother, his children, his friends from school days, his colleagues in the RPF, and those who joined him in exile and set up the RNC. And not once, but repeatedly.* Their eye witness accounts of Karegeya’s life and personality and career are quoted very liberally on every page. In fact we learn that Wrong met and got friendly with and interviewed Karegeya on numerous occasions from 1994 till his death. There’s so much about him that the first hundred pages or so of this book amount to almost a biography of the man, but also, there’s so many memories of him at home with his family, at bars laughing and chatting, so many of which are Wrong’s own memories, that at many points it feels like a personal tribute.

This would probably be my main criticism of the book. What with the tearful testimony of his loving wife, his adoring daughters, his admiring colleagues and the often gushing testimony of lots of other journalists who met and liked Karageya, quite regularly the book is in danger of turning into a hagiography. I was struck when she described a 5-page personal statement he wrote out for his daughter’s application for US citizenship as ‘precious’ (p.304). What, like the Turin Shroud or the Rosetta Stone? The tone of voice often verges on the gushing:

Someone with a bigger ego might have staged a sustained sulk. Not Patrick. (p.352)
And so, mulish, steadfast, defiant, Patrick served out his sentence [in prison] (p.361)

When Patrick is reduced to shaking rage by a journalist accusing the RPF of shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, his anger is explained away because he is under pressure to nobble the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (p.369). When a journalist jokily asked why Kagame won the 2003 election with ‘only’ 95% of the vote and Patrick threatens to have a journalist killed next time he visits Rwanda, this is excused as a joke (p.348)

But the man was a killer. He was head of RPF intelligence all through the 1990 invasion and civil war, through the genocide. He was paid to deceive journalists and the international community about the RPF’s own massacres and their ulterior motives in invading Congo, paid to lie to the world’s press about the failed attempt to capture Congo with Rwandan troops flown into the Kitona airport near Kinshasa (p.312). He continued to justify the regime even as he knew it was committing mass murder, charming and schmoozing foreign journalists while more and more RPF comrades were assassinated, fled the country or were thrown in prison.

He was ‘implicated up to the hilt’ (p.342). He was a highly paid part of the killing machine, and was rewarded with a big house, lots of cars, a jetsetting lifestyle, plasma TV when they were an unheard-of luxury, his kids sent to private school in South Africa or America, his wife forgiving him his multiple sexual partners (‘all part of the job’), liked for his high-living and charm by even the most sceptical journalists. So while we read another tearful tribute from his loving wife, my criticism of the book would be that Wrong lets Karegeya off very lightly and regularly risks sentimentalising him.

2. Anyway, amid the great sea of blood which was 1990s Rwanda, why such extravagant focus on just one man, when well over a million men, women and children died in terror or misery as a direct result of the actions of the government of which he was a key member and which he assiduously defended for so long?

Because Wrong uses her super-detailed profile of Karegeya as a tool, as a way into exploring the world of fear and paranoia which political exiles from the Kagame regime work under. And once this is established, Karegeya’s entire career becomes a scaffold or structure on which to hang a historical account of the RPF, going right back to its roots in the Rwandan Tutsi emigre or refugee communities in Uganda in the 1980s.

Rhus, in Wrong’s hands, Patrick emerges as a kind of Zelig figure, popping up at all the right places. He was the lynchpin middle-man between Kagame’s government and all manner of outsiders, whether journalists or NGOs or UN leaders, or heads of intelligence from neighbouring countries. He played a key role in the First Congo War, accompanying the clumsy tactless Kabila everywhere, acting as his press and PR supervisor, the central liaison between Kabila and Kagame, as well as liaising with all the governments in the coalition which had invaded Congo (p.301).

3. It dawned on me that ‘Patrick’, as he is referred to pretty quickly and then throughout, has another key advantage for a journalist like Wrong. People were prepared to talk about him. Half way through the book it dawned on me that Patrick’s story gives Wrong far more access to events than if she had chosen the more conventional route of writing a biography of Kagame. Kagame doesn’t talk, his friends and family don’t talk, lots of people interviewed, even the ones who worked closely with him, said they never really knew what was going on in his head. By contrast, Patrick was famously outgoing, chatty, had hundreds of friends and acquaintances, all of whom were happy to go on the record for this book. Their collective memories and anecdotes are far more free and effective at building up a kind of collage history of the RPF then any attempt at a biography at the notoriously tight-lipped Kagame could ever have been.

In other words, the more the book progresses, the more you realise what a clever strategic move it was to make Patrick the star and use him to shed light on the entire regime and Rwandan history from the 1980s right up to the present day.

After the Second Congo War drew to an ignominious close in 2002, Wrong’s narrative reverts, for the book’s last 100 pages, to the approach of the first hundred i.e. using a detailed look at Patrick’s career, his growing misgivings, how he was sidelined by Kagame, with extensive quotes from friends, family, colleagues, journalists and commentators, to shed light on Kagame’s growing paranoia and vindictiveness, and the slow enmeshment of the regime in more and more assassinations, scandals and accusations.

* Interviewees

In fact the book is jam packed with interviewees, its main feature, as a text, is the number of quotes on every page. Wrong must have put in what feels like thousands of hours of interviewing and annotating, then careful selection and ordering of hundreds and hundreds of quotes. At one point Wrong lists the types of people she interviewed for this book, which extends far beyond the friends and family of Patrick Karegeya. She lists: ‘serving and dissident members of the RPF, Rwandan and western journalists, diplomats, intelligence officers and military attachés’ (p.341).

Mossad assassination technique

Karegeya not only defected from the RPF but, in exile, set up the RCN. The implication of the whole book is that this kind of thing is not permitted by the tightly-controlled and vengeful Kagame regime, so he was targeted and assassinated using methods perfected by the Israeli security service, Mossad.

What is this Mossad assassination technique? Have your target approached by someone they know and trust, in this case a friend of the family. Make appointment for drinks and a chat in their hotel room. Let in two strangers, one of whom holds everyone up at gunpoint, while the other injects the target with a quick-acting tranquiliser. Then one assassin holds a pillow or towel over the target’s face, while the other strangles him with rope. The point of all this is it is completely silent, causing no fuss or attention. Then quietly leave the room, careful to leave a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door, check out of your own hotel, drive to the nearest airport, and be far away by the time anyone realises anything is wrong (p.29).

Do not disturb. The book is named after the sign the killers hung on Karebeya’s hotel door. But is also a wider indictment of the wish of western donors, the international community and Rwanda’s supporters, even up to the present day, not to rock the boat, not to reveal uncomfortable truths, not to ask difficult questions, not to disturb.

One among many state-sponsored murders

General Kayumba Nyamwasa

Wrong gives a similarly detailed account of the attempted assassination of former General Kayumba Nyamwasa. Nyamwasa had been Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army as well as head of Rwandan intelligence from 1998 to 2002 i.e. during the Second Congo War. He became increasingly critical of Kagame’s authoritarianism until he fled into exile in South Africa. Wrong describes the bungled attempt to shoot him in his car on 19 June 2010. This attack crystallised the General’s decision to join with Karagey and others to found the opposition Rwanda National Congress in December 2010 (p.69).

Seth Sendashonga

Wrong devotes an entire chapter to the career of moderate Hutu Seth Sendashonga, recruited into the RPF government with lots of promises of reconciliation, then witnessing the Tutsis takeover of everything, the scales falling from his eyes with the notorious massacre of unarmed Hutus at the Kibeho refugee camp. Soon afterwards he quit the government, then left Rwanda, going into exile. Two years later he was shot dead by assassins (p.277).

No other nation in Central or East Africa has witnessed an exodus of former insiders to rival Rwanda’s and their flight speaks volumes for an entire political class’s understanding of the regime’s capacity for violence. (p.277)

Other examples

Rwandan diplomat Alphonse Mbayire was recalled to Kigali and a month later a soldier with a grudge shot him twenty times
David Kiwanuka’s body was found in a car trunk in Nairobi, shot in the head (p.280)
Assiel Kabera, President Bizimungu’s adviser, assassinated (p.318)

Wikipedia:

Wikipedia article about political assassinations associated with Paul Kagame

She gives more examples and details of Rwanda’s policy of overseas assassination (p.432). Many more opponents simply fled, becoming exiles like Patrick. The general name for the several escape routes from the country was ‘taking the subway‘ (p.318).

Wrong has two long sections devoted to detailed description of two separate assassination conspiracies where the middlemen hired to cosy up to the targets in preparation for hits admitted to the targets what was going on. This resulted in the targets taping the numerous phone calls from the minders back in Kigali to their agents in the field. Wrong explains the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tapes, which in both cases were handed over to the local police as well as key western embassies, the FBI and so on (pages 395 to 401).

These cases amount to powerful evidence that the Kagame regime operates extensive assassination projects and teams to eliminate dissident and ex-RPF officials.

Buyer’s remorse

This book, then, is a case of buyer’s remorse, or an example of a western liberal fan of a third world political party, government and its leader, slowly coming to realise she’s been had.

The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists on location with the mujahideen in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country collapsed into a ruinous civil war from whose ashes arose the Taliban did those western journalists reconsider their decade of enthusiastic support for Islamic extremists.

Wrong has form here because her book about Eritrea’s long war for independence describes how western journalists such as herself were entranced by the commitment of the rebel Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), young zealots who built an entire town in mountain caves, had daily education and self-criticism sessions in the best Maoist fashion.

Wrong says these western journalists wrote glowing accounts and counted themselves as ‘true believers’ in the cause. But, as so often happens, when the ELF zealots finally won independence and came to power, the intensity of their commitment and the harsh judgement of anyone in any way questioning the Party morphed into the paranoid dictatorship of ELF leader, Isaias Afwerki. Afwerki has been president of Eritrea for thirty years, during which he has turned it into one of the most repressive one-party states in the world, and all those ‘true believers’ and western supporters from back in the 80s…not so vocal now…

The moral of the story? It’s easy to be persuaded that one side in a foreign war, particularly if they’re the cool rebel underdogs, is standing up for justice and freedom, young and inspiring in their commitment and readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice etc. Wrong herself describes this psychological tendency as ‘the storyteller’s need to identify Good Guys and Bad Guys’ (p.299), the tendency I’ve ascribed to the influence of Hollywood movies on American foreign policy, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But wars are never simple. War is always brutal. All sides in a war are compromised. The Good Guys-Bad Guys dichotomy comes from the Second World War when the Nazis unambiguously were Very Bad Guys. But most wars since haven’t had the same moral clarity. In general there are no Good Guys, just less absolutely appalling guys. That kind of childish moral simplicity has to be left behind in order to engage with the horrible, cynical complexities of the real world. The moral of the story is – don’t take sides in foreign wars. Gaza-Israel.

Disillusion with the RPF regime is not new

Disillusion may be new to Wrong but not to many other commentators.

In 2008 the Economist questioned received opinion about Kagame.
In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ by the RPF (p.300).
A 2011 article by Human Rights Watch lays out the case against Kagame.
A 2012 article in the Guardian observed that America was having second thoughts about supporting the Kagame regime and predicted that Britain would, too.

The HRW article gives the tone of the revisionist, critical point of view. The author is phoned by a journalist enquiring into the UK’s ongoing support of the RPF regime in Rwanda, ‘a fragile country ruled by fear’:

We began by talking about the 2010 elections, in which President Paul Kagame was re-elected with 93% of the vote after three opposition parties had been excluded from the race; one opposition leader had been imprisoned; another opposition party member and an independent journalist were murdered; and a prominent government opponent narrowly escaped assassination in exile.

(Wrong describes the sinister and farcical events surrounding the same election on pages 67 to 68).

In other words, Wrong’s book isn’t a drastically new and stunning revision. Specialist reports and general opinion (of the specialists who care about the subject) have been heading in this direction for 15 years or more. What Wrong’s book does is pull together all the evidence, rewrite the history in the most damning way possible and, above all, use hundreds and hundreds of quotes from eye witnesses, from interviewees who were in at the formation of the RPF, of its successes in Uganda, its 1990 invasion, its role during and after the genocide, candid interviews with people who’ve worked closely with Paul Kagame and the regime’s other leading figures – to build up into an extraordinarily powerful, thorough and blistering indictment.

In the last hundred pages the comparison Wrong keeps reaching for is Stalin, a megalomaniac who spent all his time scheming, playing subordinates off against each other, organising random arrests, holding show trials, issuing random periods of imprisonment to anyone he even suspected of holding independent opinions, then demanding complete obeisance, ritual humiliation (pages 343 (Beria) and 356).

By the end of the book the reader is left thinking that Paul Kagame is the devil in human form:

The ultimate class freak has created a state in his own image: introverted, suspicious, unaccountable and a prey to sudden violence. (p.418)

The last few chapters

The last few chapters address more recent events:

Chapter 18: Do not disturb

Explains in detail why ‘the West’, ‘the international community’ and foreign donors continue to support and donate generously to Rwanda, despite the mountain of evidence about its wicked ways. 1) Residual guilt, even after all these years, about letting the genocide happen. 2) Generalised guilt of Western governments that the terrible plight of Africa continues to stem from the European colonial era (p.383).

Above all 3) the Kagame regime has brought peace and stability to Rwanda, and its defenders, such as former DFID minister Andrew Mitchell, emphasise that this is the first requirement of any government and so how, in that part of the world, it is to be supported (compare and contrast South Sudan’s recent collapse into ruinous civil war).

On many of the metrics used by western governments and international institutions, the Kagame regime has been a remarkable success, notching up unprecedented economic growth lifting one million Rwandans out of poverty between 2008 and 2011, improvements in metrics in public health and education, support for gender issues (for example, in 2010 64% of Parliamentary MPs were women) and so on.

Diplomatically speaking, Kagame has successfully positioned himself as maybe Africa’s most high profile statesman. In 2014 Kigali hosted the African Development Bank’s annual general meeting. In 2016 the World Economic Forum chose it for an ‘African Davos’. The 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was held in Kigali.

So the continued support of western donors is explained by the way they focus on these positive achievements. And so the World Bank has invested more than $4 billion in Rwanda since the genocide (p.430) and the British government has given the Rwandans £200 million without, so far, sending a single refugee there.

Chapter 19: Song of the stool pigeon

The chapter explaining the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tape recordings made of senior figures in Rwandan intelligence recruiting then managing Rwandan emigres into assassinating outspoken critics in exile (pages 395 to 401). And the disappointing lack of response from western agencies and governments when presented with this evidence.

Chapter 20: The inquest

The long delay of the South African authorities in carrying out a proper investigation of or inquest on Patrick’s murder, the implication being they were leaned on by Rwanda. Progress only came when the case was taken up by campaigning lawyer Gerrie Nel of not-for-profit AfriForum leading to an inquest in 2019. Complex machinations amid which the South African state prosecutor justifies the decision not to prosecute those suspected of murdering Patrick because of the ties that exist between them and the Kigali regime (p.412). In August a verdict of death by strangulation i.e. murder, was returned.

The lost leader

The critics, obviously, say that all the achievements catalogued in chapter 18 (if they’re even true) could just as well have been achieved without the creation of a Stalin-level surveillance state and climate of fear based on arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and murder of political opponents.

You can see why so many of them still mourn the unexplained death of charismatic, caring Fred Rwigyema right back in 1990, the ‘lost leader’ that so many weave legends around. Wrong ends her book with a visit to her hero, Patrick’s, grave, but the very last paragraphs are a hymn to beautiful, innocent Fred, inexplicably dead before the civil war let alone the genocide took place, the lost leader so many dissident Rwandans mourn.

But that was 33 years ago, and we are where we are.

Thoughts

I know I should care about the minutiae of every one of the killings and assassinations, the tape recordings, precisely which RPF heavweight was implicated in which massacres or killings, but after a while it’s difficult to follow all the details. The overall impression is of a dazzling, long, immensely researched revelation of the RPF’s corruption and brutality.

But, when you put it like that, corruption and brutality, it sounds uncannily like most of the other African regimes I’ve been reading about for the last few years. Which African nation in the 60 years since independence has not had at least one murderous dictator, at least one civil war, elements of pogrom and massacre?

That’s a fairly trite thought but it leads onto a more interesting one which is how, stepping back, you can see how the uniqueness of the Rwandan genocide has dazzled many commentators and politicians into thinking Rwanda stands outside history, a special and unique case.

Wrong highlights (as does Prunier and other commentators) how lingering guilt about their inactivity during the genocide has led international bodies and western nations to give Kagame the benefit of the doubt despite the, by now, tsunami of evidence about the regime’s malfeasance.

Not unlike Israel, the Rwandan government has used the unspeakably horrific crime at the centre of its modern history to overawe commentators and silence critics (Wrong makes this point numerous times), to obscure the more everyday oppressions and dubious policies which are the stuff of most governments.

But considering the Rwandan genocide as a somehow one-off, unique, unparalleled and inexplicable mystery – as writers at the time like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch did – removes it from history, erases the troubled history which led up to it; which, of course, explains it; and the continuum of wars and further atrocities which has followed on from it. Focusing solely on the genocide in effect helps prop up a dictator and a terrifyingly repressive regime.

Overpopulation

A leitmotiv of the narrative is how packed, cramped and overpopulated Rwanda was and still is (pages 238, 293, 417). Wrong claims it was and is Africa’s most crowded country (p.239, 280). In an economy based on agriculture you either own enough land to make a living farming or you don’t. Every inch of fertile land is staked out and assigned so, in order to acquire more land you must dispossess someone else.

Decades of land shortage have reduced agriculture to a grim battle for survival. (p.417)

If you learn of an invasion by the enemy tribe that is driving people like you off the land, then your natural reaction will be to fear for yourself, your land, your family and, if ordered by the government and the local authorities, be prepared to kill in order to protect your own.

I wonder if, in a way, the overpopulation of Rwanda and the demented, pest-control killing of the genocide is an allegory of our species – or maybe a vision of its future, packed like rats into a limited space, driven by mounting crises into hysterical psychopathy, the mass murder of our neighbours, quickly, before they murder us.

Day after day I read in the liberal press hand-wringing articles about the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian regimes around the world (China, Russia, India, Brazil) and right-wing anti-immigrant parties across Europe (in Germany, Italy, France, Holland).

Liberal commentators are at a loss to explain these phenomena but I wonder if there’s a simple explanation. There are too many of us, us humans, and we are turning against ourselves like rats in dungeon.

Credit

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong was published in March 2021 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2022 4th Estate paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 8, 2023 • Permalink

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Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier (2009)

The most murderous conflict since World War Two.
(Africa’s World War, page 352)

‘The incompetence of most [Congolese] politicians is only rivalled by their determination to keep their privileges.’
(French ambassador Raymond Césaire, describing the chaos of Congo-Brazzaville in 1995, page 169)

This is said to be the definitive book on the subject and it feels like it, a large-format, massive, heavy Oxford University Press edition, printed on beautiful high quality paper. It’s surrounded by impressive scholarly apparatus consisting of:

a glossary of African terms (49 entries)
4 maps
an impressively long list of acronyms (11 pages, 161 entries)
extensive notes (99 pages)
a huge bibliography (45 pages including not only books and articles, but reports from numerous official bodies and charities, plus films and works of fiction)
a long index

The great war

I’ve summarised the war, with maps, in my review of the relevant section of David Van Reybrouck’s great book, Congo: the epic history of a people. This is the briefest I can get it:

Rwandan Tutsis driven by low-level pogroms had fled during the 1980s into neighbouring Uganda
some of these served in the insurgent army of Yoweri Museveni during the Ugandan Bush War and helped him overthrow the dictatorial rule of Milton Obote in 1985
emboldened by their experience, some of these Tutsi exiles set up the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
in 1990 the RPF began small-scale incursions into northern Rwanda, fighting the army of the Hutu-majority government of Juvénal Habyarimana
after 4 years of civil war the parties were brought to a peace accord which Habyarimana signed and was about to implement when a plane carrying him was shot down in mysterious circumstances; most people think it was shot down by elements in the Hutu army and government which a) rejected the peace deal with the RPF b) wanted to implement the genocidal policy of the so-called Hutu Power group, which said that Rwanda would never be at peace until the Tutsis (about 15% of the population) were exterminated
they organised the Rwanda genocide, 7 April to 15 July 1994
as soon as the genocide started, the RPF recommenced military action, and successfully defeated the Hutu government forces, driving them into the south and west of the country and then over the border into Zaire
but it wasn’t just the Hutu leaders who fled; as cover and part of their ideological program, they forced up to 2 million Hutu civilians to flee, too, terrifying them with rumours of Tutsi massacres
having completely failed to prevent the genocide or halt it as it was carried out, the international community now over-compensated by flooding the refugee camps with aid
however aid agencies, UN officials etc quickly realised these vast camps were completely in the control of the extremist Hutu leaders and génocidaires
the génocidaires used some of the western aid to rearm and regroup and, as soon as possible, began raids back across the border into Rwanda, killing Tutsis and Hutu they accused of being collaborators
they also attacked, and caused others to attack, the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis living in eastern Congo, particularly the province of South Kivu
the new Rwandan government of national unity which had been set up after the RPF victory protested loud and long about this anti-Tutsi violence and asked ‘the international community’ to stop it and properly police the camps but to no avail
eventually, the RPF, along with forces from neighbouring Uganda, invaded Zaire and seized the camps; they a) forced the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and b) pursued the génocidaires who, reasonably enough, fled deeper into Zaire, often taking large groups of refugees with them as cover
before the RPF embarked on their campaign they and their Ugandan allies realised ‘the international community’ would react badly to a straightforward invasion and so came up with the plan of covering their actions by using a native, Congolese rebel group and their leader, as a front man for the invasion, to make ‘a foreign invasion look like a national rebellion’ (p.115)
the figure they chose was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, not very effective leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), who in reality spent most of his time smuggling gold and running a brothel
so the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) was invented, with Kabila as its supposed leader; Prunier remarks that Kabila’s subservience to ‘the tall ones’ (as everyone called the Tutsis) earned him the Swahili nickname Ndiyo bwana, meaning ‘yes sir’ (p.124) (cf David van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, p.418)
as the RPF-led alliance forces experienced success which surprised even them, the idea developed to permanently cut off Zaire’s support for Hutu extremists by the simple expedient of overthrowing its long-standing President, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been friends with Habyarimana and had supported the Hutu génocidaires running the camp
and so the border incursion developed into a full-scale march on the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, which Mobutu and his cronies fled in panic (16 May 1997) and where Kabila, much to his own surprise, was installed as third president of independent Congo (which now changed its name back from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo)
Prunier says this incursion could be seen as the first postcolonial imperial conquest of one African country (Zaire) by another (Rwanda), ‘the first case of clear-cut African imperialism’ (p.333)
the period from the invasion to the new regime became known as the First Congo War (October 1996 to May 1997)
trouble was Kabila found himself in a tricky position: he had to please his Rwanda-Uganda masters who had put him in power, but he now had all the political factions and the general population of Congo to please as well
to please these new constituencies, in July 1998, Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo, they were widely perceived as an invading and occupying force (p.178)
but Kabila’s masters back in Kigali (capital of Rwanda) and Kampala (capital of Uganda) were understandably miffed at their puppet’s ingratitude and so they launched a second invasion, this time to overthrow Kabila
Prunier explains that it was support from Angola and Zimbabwe which saved Kabila’s ramshackle regime, along with some support from Sudan, Libya and Chad;
it was this second incursion which came to be known as the Second Congo War, which commenced in August 1998 but which then unravelled into a wider conflict, eventually drawing in forces from half a dozen other African countries, and degenerating into the armed chaos which came to be known as the Great War of Africa, which dragged on until (supposedly) ended by peace treaties in July 2003, a five-year war in which some 350,000 people died in fighting and as many as 5 million died from massacres, disease and famine
and it is this, the Great War of Africa, whose complex origins and tangled course that this book sets out to explain

Prunier’s critical attitude

I associate serious history with a serious, professional tone so I was surprised from the start by Prunier’s tone of blistering cynicism and withering criticism, above all of the ‘so-called’ international community, in particular of the West and the ‘so-called’ international community, which he sees as behaving with stunning ineptitude at every stage of the crisis:

‘Western incompetence and vacillation’ (p.23)
western ‘guilt, ineptitude’
‘the Western world reacted with stunned incompetence’
‘the West…was caught napping at every turn’ (p.24)
‘nobody in the international community had done anything to stop the genocide (p.33)
‘the utter spinelessness of the international community before, during and after the genocide’ (p.35)
‘the cowardice of the international community’ (p.35)
‘stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence’ (p.38)
‘of course the international community remained totally passive’ (p.57)
‘the international community did not understand the nature of the problem’ (p.225)
‘the United Nations, that supposed repository of the world’s conscience…frantically doing nothing and avoiding any responsibility in the third and last genocide of the twentieth century…’ (p.331)

Humanitarian aid instead of political solutions

Prunier blames the spiral down to war on the international community’s failure to address the political causes of the Rwanda civil war, then the genocide in Rwanda, then the refugee crisis in Zaire, then the armed invasion of Congo. In all instances the West preferred to offer humanitarian solutions i.e. to send in the aid agencies and NGOs, but consistently ignored the political roots of the crisis. Sending loads of tents and emergency food is easier than trying to address the political problems. And so the fundamental political issues were left unresolved, festered and spread.

The international community rushed into humanitarian aid with guilty relief, never-too-late-to-do-good, thus greatly helping the perpetrators of the very crimes it had done nothing to stop. (p.30)

And:

‘The West treated what was essentially a political problem as a humanitarian crisis.’ (p.58)

cf p.347.

Critical of the RPF

Prunier is far more critical of Paul Kagame’s RPF than other accounts I’ve read, accusing the regime of developing into a dictatorship, and of its military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of carrying out numerous massacres of Hutus in Congo.

Prunier explains this by going back to the RPF’s origins in Uganda in the 1980s to describe the atmosphere of violence in which it was born and flourished a) fleeing anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda and then b) getting caught up in Uganda’s Bush War. When the Rwandan exiles helped Museveni win this war and come to power, it clinched their experience that disciplined violence works.

Prunier goes on to describe the RPA’s violent ethos more unforgivingly than other accounts. In particular he is at pains to emphasise, right from the start, that as it fought its way across Rwanda during the genocide, the RPA a) carried out its own massacres of Hutus and b) didn’t plan its campaign in order to stop the violence i.e. target the worst areas, but was more focused on eliminated the Rwandan army and securing complete control of the country.

He discusses the report drawn up by Robert Gersony for the UN which conclusively proved the RPA was carrying out massacres of its own and claims this report was suppressed by the UN and western nations (pages 31 and 350) because of its accusations against a force the West was championing as a solution to the genocide. The report was suppressed and Gersony was instructed to never discuss the findings, and has kept silent to this day. We are in the world of conspiracy theory. Mind you, it fits Prunier’s withering view of the United Nations generally:

As to the UN human rights operation, it was a sad joke. (p.18)
[The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was] despised by everybody in Rwanda as the embodiment of arrogant powerlessness. (p.33)

A key event was the Kibeho massacre, April 1995, in which up to 4,000 refugees were killed by RPA soldiers. Prunier describes it in detail and how it led to the collapse of the government of national unity which had been running Rwanda since the RPF victory. He draws the same jaded conclusion which he applies to the genocide and then the invasion of Congo as a whole:

Non-treatment of the consequences of genocide, well-meaning but politically blind humanitarianism, RPF resolve to ‘solve the problem’ by force, stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence, and, finally, a hypocritical denial that anything much had happened.

It was one of what Prunier calls ‘massive human rights violations’ by the RPA (p.126). Much worse were the mass killings in and around the refugee camps in November 1996. Prunier cites the report of Father Laurent Balas (p.124) and of Roberto Garreton, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights whose work was blocked by Kigali (p.157). At the end of the chapter dealing with the Alliance’s swift advances through Congo, and accusations of widespread massacre, Prunier calculates that as many as 300,000 of the refugees disappeared, died of starvation, disease, lost in the jungle or were murdered by RPA forces (p.148).

(Cf David van Reybrouck’s account of the RPF carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘massive carnage’, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 423 to 425, where he estimates that between two to three hundred thousand Hutus were murdered.)

Very broadly speaking, the idea is that ‘the West’, specifically America but others too, tried to downplay the massacres out of a) guilt at letting the genocide take place and b) the wish to believe that a clean, democratic new regime existed in Kigali. The massacres were embarrassing. It left the UN and others on a hook, not knowing how to react: so they consistently downplayed them (p.159).

Prunier makes this point, that Western guilt over having stood by and done nothing to stop the genocide, explains why the West gave large amounts of aid to Rwanda even as it was fighting an extensive war, and obstinately overlooked all evidence that RPF forces were carrying out large-scale massacres of their own (e.g. pages 246, 273). Rwanda was able, for years, to ‘surf’ on western guilt (pages 266, 350, 351).

And Prunier details the internal developments in Rwanda, namely the persecution of critics and the inevitable rise to power of Paul Kagame at the head of ‘a dictatorial minority government’ (p.273), his:

ruthless determination, his capacity to fine-tune white guilt as a conductor directs an orchestra’ (p.332)

and his creation of ‘an airtight authoritarian state’ (p.294).

[The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists in Afghanistan with the mujahideen singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country plunged into civil war from which arose the Taliban were those western journalists forced to change their tune. Moral of the story: don’t take sides in foreign wars; neither side is ever as squeaky clean as we childishly wish them to be. All sides in a war are compromised.]

Encyclopedic complexity

As early as page 40 the text has got so complicated that it becomes difficult to follow. Everything Prunier describes he does so in immense, encyclopedic detail. The events in Rwanda I have a rough handle on, having read half a dozen accounts. I found it more challenging to read his long, detailed explanation of the civil war in neighbouring Burundi, his examination of the political and ethnic roots going back to the colonial period, starting with the fact that there were four different Hutu guerrilla groups, moving through dense complexity to the killing of Burundi president (Hutu) Cyprien Ntaryamira by Tutsis soldiers in an attempted coup in April 1994.

A contemporary journalist summed up the resulting situation in a quote I include not so much to clarify but as an example of the sheer number of entities the reader has to get clear in their heads, along with their changing motivations and policies.

The present situation in Burundi is largely a result of Zairean support for PALI-PEHUTU and CNDD. The final attack on Burundi would be a catastrophe for Rwanda because the plan is to allow Nyangoma to take power in Bujumbura and to bring the Interahamwe back in Rwanda. (quoted page 68)

Even more so his hyper-detailed explanation of the complex ethnic situations in the eastern Congo provinces of North and South Kivu, which also have long, very complicated ethnic histories. You’d have thought it would be difficult for anyone else to ever go into as much detail or display such scary erudition as Prunier. The situation in the Kivus is important because they form Congo’s border with Rwanda and therefore played a key role in the escalating crisis which eventually led to the Rwandan invasion, but the histories of ethnic rivalries, conflict, massacres, numerous parties and militias – for example the key role played by the Banyamulenge – are mind boggling.

And then he has a chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This is where Prunier slowly and painstakingly goes round all the countries which border Congo and explains why many of them were already infiltrating armed forces across its borders or through its territory in order to achieve a kaleidoscope of military and political goals. Featured countries include Congo and Rwanda (obvz), Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania and Angola, each of which themselves hosted complex civil wars, generally going back decades, as far as independence.

A feature of all these conflicts is the extraordinary number of military groups they give rise to, all of which have grand titles and imposing acronyms, hence the 161 acronyms listed at the start of the book. I found myself referring back to it on every page. Just the 5-page backgrounder on Congo includes:

Mobutu’s Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR)
Étienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS)
the Conférence nationale souveraine (CNS) set up in 1990
replaced by the Haut Conseil de la République-Parlement de Transition (HCR-PT)
the FAZ or Forces Armées Zaïroises

By about page 75 the book was feeling less a history than a degree course in the history, politics, ethnography and sociology of half a continent. I think you’d have to read it at least twice, probably three or four times, stopping to consult histories of all the other countries mentioned, to stand a chance of getting your degree.

I particularly enjoyed the background sections on countries we don’t hear so much about in post-imperial Britain, such as Angola and, even more so, the Francophonie countries which you rarely read about, Central African Republic, Chad and Congo-Brazzaville.

Initially, I was surprised at the jaded bitterness of Prunier’s tone but after a while I began to realise that only the blackest of black humour can do justice to a continent whose rules have spent 60 years doing their damnedest to utterly destroy.

Angola is a much richer country than either the Sudan or Uganda, which allowed its process of national destruction to be carried out with an impressive array of military means quite unknown in other parts of the continent, apart from Ethiopia. (p.88)

The guts of the war are described in a chapter graphically titled ‘Sinking into the quagmire’. It’s challenging keeping track of all the state-backed militias and armed forces, but when these start splintering and fighting amongst themselves, it becomes almost too complex to understand. On page 201 Prunier humorously asks whether his exasperated reader is ready to give up, and he’s got a point:

Does the reader at this point want to throw in the towel and give up on the ethnopolitical complexities of the region? I would not blame him, although I can assure him that I am honestly trying to simplify the picture. (p.201)

The importance of Angola

The single biggest cause of the Great War of Africa is that Eduardo dos Santos’s MPLA government in Angola went to the defence of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa.

I’ve explained how Kabila was installed as a puppet ruler by the alliance of Rwanda and Uganda to replace Mobutu, who both countries wanted removed from power, but how, after a year, he then turned on his own backers and ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country. And how this triggered those two countries to make a second invasion and remove Kabila.

For a start, Prunier adds much more detail to the story by explaining that Kabila was a terrible leader, stuck in a Marxist timewarp from the 1960s, but also just shambolic, chaotic and unpredictable, managing to insult or irritate all the neighbouring regimes and running his own one in a deeply unpredictable way, arresting his own ministers on a whim etc. So when Rwanda-Uganda began their second incursion to remove him many were keen.

Kabila had sacked his (Rwandan) chief of the army staff, James Kabarebe, who returned to the east of the country and, in Goma, hijacked three commercial freight planes, filled them with RPA troops, and flew them to the government base of Kitona on the Atlantic coast where they quickly turned Kabila troops to their side. Towns around Kitona fell, as did the diamond centre of Kisangani. The rebels seized the Inga hydroelectric station that provided power to Kinshasa as well as the port of Matadi through which most of Kinshasa’s food passed. In other words, Kabila’s regime looked doomed.

Then Angola intervened to save it. Why? The answer has to do with conditions inside Angola. The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government based the capital Luanda had been fighting a civil war against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) since independence in 1975. In 1994 the Lusaka protocol tried to broker a ceasefire and in 1995 UN peacekeepers arrived. But Prunier explains in detail why, by 1998, the truce had broken down and fighting began again.

The point is that the MPLA had, originally, in the 1970s, been a Marxist movement and Savimbi had presented himself as a business-friendly ally of the West, meaning America. In the simple binary of the Cold War, the MPLA were supported by the Soviet Union and the Cubans, UNITA by America and South Africa. And because Mobutu, ruler of Zaire/Congo, was also a creature of the CIA, supported by America, Mobutu had, for 15 years or more, offered UNITA bases and sanctuary in south Congo/Zaire.

Therefore, as Rwandan forces and Congolese forces backed by Rwanda closed in on Kabila’s regime, the MPLA, after some delay, finally gambled that supporting Kabila and having the gratitude of his weak regime, would guarantee that he would not support the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA. Angola threw itself behind Kabila as part of its ongoing civil war. And the key fact? Angola had one of the largest economies in Africa, based on its huge oil wealth. It had lots of planes, helicopters and a well-trained battle-hardened army, which it now sent to start supporting Kabila. The MPLA’s support for Kabila ensured he would stay in power and that the war would continue for three long, bloody, increasingly chaotic years.

Five layers of conflict

Prunier suggests the war had five layers (pages 201 to 203):

Layer 1: Core conflict: the RPF regime in Rwanda trying, with partner Uganda, to overthrow the puppet ruler, Kabila, who they’d installed.

Layer 2: Powerful players: Angola, Zimbabwe, with Namibia along for the ride, who had no interest in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict but wanted Kabila to remain in power (for Angola, to prevent UNITA taking refuge in Congo; for Zimbabwe, to continue mineral contracts made with Kabila; Namibia just went along with its big powerful neighbour, Angola).

Layer 3: Secondary actors: Libya, Chad, the Sudan, no interest in Congo but it was a zone to sort out relations between themselves and core players, mostly Uganda, which was more or less at war with Sudan.

Layer 4: bordering countries: Burundi which sent a small number of soldiers into the conflict; Central African Republic which tried to stay out.

Layer 5: South Africa: had no military or political interest and never sent troops to the war, but had a strong economic motive in infiltrating the economy of collapsing Zimbabwe and consolidating its hold on Congo’s huge mineral reserves so, on the whole, supported the rebels as being more desperate to turn the assets (mines etc) into cash i.e. let South Africa get bargains. This changed when Joseph Kabila came to power and, unlike his father, let it be known that he was open to business. South African banks and mining corporations suddenly packed his diary (p.262).

From all this you can see why Prunier calls it:

a war fought among foreigners on Congolese territory for reasons of their own. (p.274)

The shift to economic motivation

Why did so many of the countries neighbouring Congo get involved in the conflict? Prunier explains the motivation in the chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This has the added benefit of giving fascinating brief profiles of the countries involved, from Congo itself, through Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Congo-Brazzaville and so on.

Then there are the two increasingly mind-boggling chapters describing the chaotic conflict itself, ‘A continental war’ (181 to 226) and ‘Sinking into the quagmire’ (227 to 255).

He makes a vital point: the war might have started out from geopolitical considerations but as it went on it became increasingly economic i.e. about seizing Congo’s mineral resources:

What mattered more and more as the war went on were the economic interests. (p.234)

And this had a big military-strategic consequence. The first war had been fought to overthrow Mobutu and gain control of the country, so the key battlezone, the target, had been the capital, Kinshasa. But in the Great War the motivation increasingly became to seize Congo’s assets and so the target areas were provinces like Kasai and Katanga, in which the warring parties disintegrated into ever-smaller entities, sometimes fighting over just one mine. These had nominal ties with other groups in other areas, or with various outside parties, then again often went independent. Hence the unravelling complexity of the conflict which eventually nobody understood or could contain.

A useful recap

In the chapter describing the beginning of the end, ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper’, he gives a useful recap of why they got involved in 1998 and what had changed by 2001 to make many want to withdraw. In other words, why did the war ramify out so disastrously in 1998, and what allowed it to be dragged to an end in 2001/2? Here’s a list of key intervening countries, giving their initial motivation and what changed:

Kabila supporters

Angola supported Kabila to ensure Congo wouldn’t give safe havens for UNITA. In 1998 Savimbi was still a threat. But by 2001 he was a spent force, militarily and financially, struggling to survive. The MPLA had achieved its aims.

Zimbabwe had allied with Kabila in order to protect the investments and commercial deals it had made with him on his rise to power, and also to block South Africa’s slow rise to economic dominance of the whole of southern Africa. By 2001 Zimbabwe’s economic plight had significantly worsened while South Africa’s commercial ascent continued unhindered, and Mugabe was coming under increasing internal pressure. While peasants starved Mugabe was blowing tens of millions of dollars on an unpopular war. Time to pull out.

Namibia had supported Kabila at the bidding of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but the latter was pulling out and the former never committed men or resources.

Anti-Kabila

Burundi a minor player, had always been most concerned with securing its Congo border and never taken part in the wider invasions.

Uganda was under strong donor pressure to reduce its military budget if it wanted to continue receiving Western aid. Senior members of the army and the regime had done very well out of the war, not least from illegal smuggling of diamonds, gold etc. But Uganda never had the urgent internal political pressure to sort out the Hutu / génocidaire issue that Rwanda did.

In addition, one aspect of the general chaos was the slow falling-out of Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni came to really dislike Kagami’s ‘arrogance’ (p.241). Their forces ended up coming to blows, specifically in several different episodes of street fighting in Congo’s main north-eastern city, Kisangani (p.242). This queered the relationship between Uganda and Rwanda.

Rwanda By 2001 the international situation had changed. The Clinton administration, crippled with guilt, had passively supported Rwanda and been accused of fine rhetoric about a New Africa but no practical follow-through (p.338). However, George W. Bush’s new US administration commenced on 1 January 2001 and took a much tougher line on Rwanda, condemning its ‘grave human rights violations’ (p.266).

By the start of 2002 all the main parties had reached the same conclusion: withdrawal was a certainty, it was just a matter of agreeing schedules (p.267).

Laurent Kabila’s assassination

Arguably, the single most important event – certainly the easiest to grasp because one very specific event – was the assassination of the man at the centre of the conflict, Laurent Kabila, on 16 January 2001. He was shot at point blank range in his office by one of his bodyguards.

Now, since he was the man at the centre of a huge and ruinous war, conspiracy theories have abounded. It’s a kind of African version of Who Killed JFK? The (fairly) straightforward answer is that, while running his guerrilla group out east Kabila recruited lots of boys, young boys, thousands of them, called kodogo (‘little ones’). Kabila trained them to become fighters, and they in turn looked up to him as their Father or Mzee, Swahili for ‘elder’. But once in power he betrayed them. In lots of ways, which Prunier details. He let some be massacred, some ended up on opposing sides and fighting each other. The bodyguard was one of these former boy soldiers.

Then again, Prunier thoroughly describes all the other conspiracy theories, which wander off into huge conspiracies, involving enemy countries, the CIA, the Rwandans, or the dark and shadowy forces which lots of people like to think are behind any disaster or assassination. The likeliest is that Kabila had done a deal with the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA, to smuggle diamonds through northern Angola.

135 people were arrested, tried and convicted, some given the death penalty although no-one, in the end, was executed (pages 249 to 255).

(cf van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 465 to 466.)

The key point is that, after a few days of confusion, the senior figures in the administration decided a compromise candidate who everyone could agree on temporarily was Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy taciturn man who had, however, been moved by his father through the ranks until he was number two in the Congo army, and had helped with various diplomatic and administrative tasks.

In the event Joseph Kabila was to prove a very shrewd operator, the complete opposite of his chaotic unpredictable father. He outwitted all his superiors and peers, serving as president of Congo from January 2001 to January 2019.

From the point of view of the Great War, he was open to savvy negotiations and deals, and it was this new spirit of compromise and negotiation, combined with the war weariness of the key allies, namely Angola, which allowed the war to stumble to an end, sort of. Well, certainly for a peace treaty to be signed in 2002.

Peace, or conflict control

Prunier gives a fascinating summary of the year-long negotiations which eventually, reluctantly, ended with the signing of an inclusive peace treaty on 17 December 2002. Prunier humorously quotes a commentator who wrote that the deal offered the Congolese people the show of a government which was really made up of:

‘a coalition of people who looted their own country, predatory rebels and corrupt civil servants.’ (quoted page 277)

By the time of the treaty maybe 3.5 million people had died, 90% from the collateral effects of war. Agriculture had collapsed. 64% of the population was underfed. Maybe 33% were malnourished (p.278).

Massacre

Three days after Kabila’s murder Ngiti and Lenu warriors attacked Bunia, killing about one hundred Hema. The next day the Hema militia took revenge on Lendu civilians, killing about 25. (p.281)

Hardest to keep track of is the number of Africans killed by Africans. Every one of the 364 pages records Africans murdering other Africans, generally armed men killing defenceless civilians. A continent-wide abattoir. Thus in Prunier’s fascinating background to Angola‘s involvement in the war (pages 88 to 99), he describes the failed democratic elections of 1992 which led to panic on the streets of Luanda where MPLA soldiers killed about 1,500 UNITA soldiers and cadres (p.96). When UNITA took the strategic oil town of Soyo, the fall of the city was blamed on the Bakongo tribe and so about 1,000 unarmed Bakongo civilians were massacred in the streets of Luanda, Bloody Friday (p.97).

There’s killing on every page. The suffering of the population of Congo is beyond words. For the most part Prunier lets the facts of massacre after massacre convey the enormity of the horror to the reader.

In the period October 1992 and December 1993 the UN estimated civilian deaths at 450,000 to 500,000. In mid-1993, the UN counted about 1,000 war-related deaths per day. (Tufts University mass atrocities website)

Towards the end of the book he cites research by the US International Rescue Committee which suggested that between August 1998 and April 2000 there were some 1.7 million excess deaths in Congo (p.242). Of these only around 200,000 were directly due to fighting, the rest being due to:

frequent forced population displacement
overexposure to the elements
near collapse of the health system
disease
impossibility to carrying out agriculture, obviously leading to starvation
plain despair

(p.242, cf p.338).

Your life in their hands. 2015 photo of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) fighters. The FDLR is the latest iteration of Rwandan Hutu army and Iterahamwe militia génocidaires who fled Rwanda in 1994, plus other Hutus who’ve signed up since. Gang rape and mass murder a speciality.

The colonial borders

Prunier calls his final chapter ‘Groping for meaning’. You can draw all kinds of conclusions. The one that impressed itself on me was the old chestnut about Africa’s colonial borders. More than any other book about Africa this one shows how the borders the colonial powers drew had little or nothing to do with tribes on the ground and how most Africans’ sense of identity, especially in rural areas i.e. most of the continent, remained based on tribe, clan, religion and family, complex multi-levelled identities, with ‘nationality’ an evanescent Western invention (p.360).

This really reinforces Prunier’s criticism that western models don’t work on ‘nations’ which are nothing like the western concept of a ‘nation’. If the traditional definition of a ‘state’ is an entity which has a monopoly of legitimate violence over a defined territory, then Congo isn’t a state at all, as there were and still are areas where numerous other groups carry out systematic violence (p.305). As you read this:

‘There are more than 120 different armed groups active in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’ (Kivu conflict Wikipedia article)

Just because an African leader wears a suit and tie and has a ‘cabinet’ made of ‘ministers’, Western leaders and bankers shake his hand and think he’s like them, has the same mindset, comes from the same background, is managing the same kinds of problems. But they’re really not. African leaders are trying to run ‘states’ which often barely exist or only exist in patches, across territories which aren’t states in the way we in the West are used to them, lacking infrastructure, modern economies, integrated populations, a high level of education and so on.

Hence the repeated point Prunier makes about the ‘reality gap’ between the fine words of the international community – the lovingly worked-out details of various peace accords, with their withdrawal of forces and integration of troops and civil society and so on – and the generally chaotic, anarchic, often incomprehensible situations on the ground (p.225).

One aspect of this is the point I made at length in my reviews of books about the West’s attempts to impose ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that the attempts revealed the complete lack of understanding, in the West, of what democracy actually is, where it came from, and what sustains it, in the advanced, economically developed nations.

Democracy as a form of government presupposes a certain degree of social integration, the existence of a political class with some concept of the national interest, and a minimum of economic development (p.xxxii)

All of which are as absent in a country like Congo as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably most of the Middle East and Africa. Lacking the social and economic prerequisites for full democracy, undeveloped countries tend to adopt democratic window dressing, which conceals simple power grabs by ethnic or religious or tribal groups. Thus Prunier commenting that, ahead of the first free elections in Congo in 2006, dozens of new political parties sprang up across the country, but that:

These were parties in name only, since they were mostly tribal or regional gatherings around the name of one or two well-known local politicians. (p.309)

With the recurring result that as and when governments are formed, they are more often than not little more than:

a coagulation of groups operating out of completely mercenary interests (p.315)

(Prunier explains the arbitrary nature of the borders right at the start, pages xxix to xxx, and then gives a concentrated summary along with the characteristics of weak states and strong tribal identities which will plague Africa for the foreseeable future, on pages 360 to 362.)

The Kivus

Throughout the narrative it becomes ever clearer that the hotspot, the trouble spot, the recurring source of conflict, is the two small territories known as the Kivus, North and South Kivu, both of which have complex ethnic, political and military conflicts. This troubled little area turned out to be the hardest to fully pacify after the 2002 peace agreement, then trouble flared up all over again in the mid-2000s which had to be fought to a standstill by UN and government forces.

Kivu conflict Wikipedia article

At the time of writing the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world, deploying some 21,000 soldiers.

Will the war happen again?

No. The conditions were unique, being:

the flight of the génocidaires and the refugees into eastern Congo provided a one-off motivation for the RPF government to invade, repatriate the refugees and wipe out the remaining génocidaires
– that whole crisis situation has disappeared
instead it turned into a mission to overturn the decrepit dictator Mobutu and then, in the sequel, to overthrow the unpopular puppet ruler Kabila – but Congo has had much more stable and effective leaders for 20 years
guilt over their role in the Rwanda genocide meant the West and the UN turned a blind eye to the RPF’s abuses and massacres – that wouldn’t happen again, indeed already with the arrival of the George W. Bush administration in 2001 the RPF had to start moderating its behaviour
but the key thing that turned it into a continental war was the decision by Angola to intervene and support Laurent Kabila in order to prevent their enemy, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, from using southern Congo as a base: but Savimbi died 20 years ago and the civil war ended with him, all parties are concerned with maintaining their grip on power and corrupt money, and any kind of war would only jeopardise that

So Congo will, like most African nations, continue to be a weak state for the foreseeable future; and violence may flare up in some its territory, especially the ever-troublesome Kivus. But a war on the same scale is extremely unlikely to be repeated. it was the result of one-off geopolitical forces which won’t recur.

Further issues

France’s shame

France sees all foreign affairs as a conspiracy of the Anglophone countries (mostly America and Britain) to undermine French glory and the superiority of French culture. Therefore, the French government stood by the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda even as the genocide was underway because they spoke French and the incoming Tutu forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, having been raised in former British colony Uganda, spoke English. Simple as that. The French supported the third great genocide of the twentieth century because its perpetrators spoke French (pages 341 to 343).

Viewing the war through European paradigms i.e. the Holocaust

The West could understand the genocide because they viewed it through the prism of European history and the Holocaust. This led to the tendency to blindly support the RPF, to regard the Tutsi regime as black Israelis, as a people who had suffered an appalling crime and so could be forgiven any behaviour in retaliation. The West tended not to understand the Congo conflict in its own right, for what it was, an imperialist attack by one African country (Rwanda) on another (Congo) which drew in a range of neighbouring countries who used the Congo as a battleground to fight their own conflicts (predominantly Angola).

Genocide narrative easy; Congo war narrative hard, complicated, sometimes impenetrable. Hence a) prolonged support for Rwanda and Kagame, whatever they did, b) long, long delay getting to grips with the political issues underlying the war.

Good guys

As remarked in my reviews about Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is plagued by a Hollywood simple-mindedness or regarding all foreign situations in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, consistently failing to understand complexities and shades of grey (p.340). Prunier sees this tendency to simplify situations and players into good guys/bad guys as distinctively American (p.357).

Credit

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. All references are to the 2010 OUP paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 6, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History, War

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Posted by Simon on December 6, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/06/africas-world-war-gerard-prunier/

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The geological context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

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

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

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

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

Lots of context, not so much analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the facts speak for themselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eritrea

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

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

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

Eritrea Country Profile by Freedom House

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

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

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

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

And so another African dictator is born.

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

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

Credit

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

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by Simon on December 1, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History

Tagged Africa, African dictator, African history, African leaders, Afwerki, Angola, Arab Spring, Belgian government, BP, Britain, British Empire, Côte d'Ivoire, Chocolate, cobalt, Cocoa, cocoa growing country, Colonel Gaddafi, colonialism, Concorde, Congo, copper, corruption, Cultural Revolution, Dave Kingston, David Orser, de Beers, diamonds, Dictatorland, Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, EPLF, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eritrean People's Liberation Front, Esso, Ethiopia, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Francisco Macías, Free Officers Movement, geography, geological perspective, geology, geopolitics, Ghana, gold, Great War of Africa, Gulf states, Homo, Houphouët-Boigny, hyper-inflation, imperialism, international affairs, Isaias Afwerki, Ivory Coast, Katanga, Kimberly mines, King Idris, kleptocracy, Libya, Lumumba, Macías Nguema, Maoist China, Michael Ignatieff, Michela Wrong, Mobutu, Mobutu Sese Seko, modern history, modern slavery, Muammar Gaddafi, Mugabe, Mussolini, Niger Delta, Nigeria, Noah Feldman, oil, oil industry, Paul Kagame, Paul Kenyon, Persia, racism, Red Guards, rentier state, rentier states, resource-rich, Rex Brown, Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe, RPF, Rwandan Political Front, Sani Abacha, Saudi Arabia, Shell, South Africa, South America, Southern Africa, specimen LD 350-1, Teodoro Obiang, the Derg, the West, Tigray, Tim Butcher, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

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

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Simplified map of the Horn of Africa showing the locations of Djibouti, Somaliland, Puntland and Somalia

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

Hawiye, 25%
Isaaq, 22%
Darod, 20%
Rahanweyn, 17%
Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

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by Simon on November 27, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History, Islamic terrorism

Tagged 7/7 bombings, Abdi-Osman, Aden Adde International Airport, Afghanistan, Africa, African Union, African Union Mission in Somalia, Airey Neave Trust, al Qaeda Central, al Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, Algeria, Allah, AMISOM, AQIM, Ash-Shabaab, AU, autonomous region of Galmudug, Ayman al-Zawahari, Badbaado refugee camp, bayaye. The bayaye, Besançon, Black Hawk Down, Bosnia, Burburki, Clanism, Colonel James Kiyungo, Dahir Kadiye, Daniel LeDouceur, Darod, Dharkenly district, Dir, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Faarax M.J. Cawl, Federal Government of Somalia, female genital mutilation, foreign aid, French Somaliland, gaalo, Galkacyo: Pirateville, Galmudug, gang culture, gang psychology, Garowe, Gerald Hanley, Hargeisa, Hargeisa Nights, Hawiye, Hawl Wadaag district, Hizb al-Shabaab, Hodan District, Horn of Africa, ignorance, Ignorance is the Enemy of Love, Isaaq, Islam, Islamic courts, Islamic Courts Union, Islamic terrorism, Italian Somaliland, James Fergusson, jihad, Khalid Masood, Khuram Shazad Butt, King Farole, Leytonstone, London, Manchester Arena bombing, marfish, Mark Bowden, Middlesex, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mogadishu, Mohamed Alin, Mohammed Farah Aidid, Nairobi, Nato, northern Kenya, Northolt, Nurrudin Farah, Operation Linda Nchi, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, paternal absenteeism, pirates, Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations, poverty, President Clinton, PRM, Puntland, qat, qat-chewing den, Rachid Redouane, Rahanweyn, Red Sea, Ridley Scott, Rwandan genocide, Ryszard Kapuściński, Salman Abedi, Saudi Arabia, Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, Siad Barre, Siad Barre regime, skinnies, Somali, Somali civil war, Somali Dervish, Somali diaspora, Somali Islamic extremism, Somali piracy, Somali rose, Somalia, Somaliland, Somalilands, Somalis in Britain, Sool, Southall, Soviet Union, Sufi saints, Taleh, Taliban, technical, the Anti-Tribalism Movement, The Battle of Mogadishu, the Ogaden, the Sayyid, the West, The World's Most Dangerous Place, The World's Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia, the Youth, Third World, Toolah, Twin Cities, Ugandan People's Defence Force, UPDF, xeer, Yemen, Youssef Zaghba

Posted by Simon on November 27, 2023

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Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith (2007)

‘Africa for Africans’
‘In Africa, the African is supreme’ (p.230)
(Mugabe slogans)

‘This is not about correcting a colonial imbalance. This is about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. This is about staying in power no matter what the damage is to your country or its economy.’
(Philemon Matibe, MDC i.e. Zimbabwe opposition candidate, whose farm and assets were confiscated by war veterans, quoted page 221)

I must stop reading out-of-date books about current affairs. When I picked this book up second-hand I didn’t realise that it was first published in 2007, and breaks off as Mugabe is gearing up for the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections; in other words that it doesn’t cover the last 10 years of Mugabe’s long, horrible career (he was only, finally, ousted by the army in 2017).

Meredith is a wonderfully fluent writer. I often struggle to read factual books but I found his 700-page history of post-independence Africa flew by, like eating ice cream. He has a real knack for relaying lots of factual information in an extremely accessible, readable way.

Then again, like any good journalist, he recycles his copy and so I recognised lots of the content here from the chapters about Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in his 2005 book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence’. Clearly he sub-edited the content from that book down to create the relevant chapters here; but I recognised hundreds of the same sentences. Given how out of date this book is, I’d recommend buying the ‘State of Africa’, for the wider context.

Learnings

The long shadow of colonialism

Colonialism was the fundamental crime from which no African country is ever likely to recover.

In this respect, the most interesting passage of the book is the one which describes the white conquest of the territories which were to be amalgamated into what became Rhodesia and the blatant, flagrant theft of land from the indigenous populations. Everything follows from that primal crime. It’s like Original Sin in Christian theology; nobody can escape from its consequences.

The land issue

This is why the land issue, treated at length in chapter 7, was so central. Whites stole the land from its African owner. But restoring it to its African owners proved to be very tricky indeed, and ended up being a rhetorical catchcry to cover Mugabe’s growing nepotism and corruption.

Independence war

The Rhodesian Bush War, also called the Second Chimurenga as well as the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, was a civil conflict from July 1964 to December 1979. It:

habituated all sides to violence as a way of getting their way
habituated the state to behaving illegally, to deploying illegal detention, detention without trial, ignoring the courts and due process

These were all traits Mugabe saw being deployed by the white government of Ian Smith and was himself to copy.

Rivals

There were rival political and guerrilla forces combatting white supremacism, namely:

the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), militantly socialist, which was formed as a split from
the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)

As in so many African countries (Angola and Mozambique spring to mind), the division between African parties fighting the coloniser for independence continued on after independence, not as a constitutionally contained political divide, but as an armed struggle between seasoned guerrillas used to deploying brutal tactics. Rival independence / nationalist forces sowed the seeds of civil war.

In fact Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Patriotic Front) has been in power continuously in Zimbabwe since the first free elections of 1980.

Negotiated peace

The long story by which Ian Smith’s UDI Rhodesia was forced to the conference table. All sides were surprised at the mildness of Mugabe’s political demands in the peace conference held in London. In ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent’ Meredith says it only later became clear that Mugabe came over as moderate and forgiving to the whites because he had a very clear idea that his first task was to eliminate opposition among the Black population i.e. the rival political party ZAPU.

Which is why he made honey-tongued promises to Britain and everyone else about his commitment to democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and a 2 or 3 year honeymoon after full Black independence was achieved in 1980.

Repression

Then:

establish one-party rule
eliminate rivals
siphon off aid
loot the state budget
land redistribution becomes a political weapon

Land redistribution in particular was a long, drawn-out business with Mugabe ranting against white farmers. So he illegally seized their land and redistributed it to…his political cronies, many of whom proceeded to asset strip them and run them into the ground. Notoriously, Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, began to rely more and more heavily on imports and then on foreign aid.

Systematic mismanagement of the economy by Marxist ideologues or corrupt cronies led to famously high inflation.

In 2008, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe peaked at an estimated 500 billion percent. It currently stands at around 176%, while all forecasts for the country paint a picture of doom and gloom with no real prospects of a turnaround on the horizon.
(In Zimbabwe, hyperinflation meets its match on the streets)

Leading to:

economic crisis
strikes, riots

Overthrow

The complex manoeuvring which led to Mugabe’s overthrow are described in my next blog post, a summary of ‘Two Weeks in November’ by Douglas Rogers (2019). Wikipedia:

On 6 November 2017, Mugabe sacked his first vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. This fueled speculation that he intended to name his wife, Grace Mugabe, his successor. Grace was very unpopular with the ZANU–PF old guard. On 15 November 2017, the Zimbabwe National Army placed Mugabe under house arrest at his Blue Roof mansion as part of what it described as an action against ‘criminals’ in Mugabe’s circle.

Repeat

The new regime found all the institutions of law and order and security, of a free society, civic society, had been hollowed out. It inherited the universal corruption and complex matrix of networks of patronage from the previous 30, 40, 50 years. It saw that this was what worked –this is what Zimbabwe had become – and copied it. Meredith ends his account by quoting the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who, in their Easter 2007 pastoral letter, warned of the effect the Mugabe regime would have on the next generation:

‘If our young people see their leaders habitually engaging in acts and words which are hateful, disrespectful, racist, corrupt, lawless, unjust, greedy, dishonest and violent in order to cling to the privileges of power and wealth, it is highly likely that any of them will behave in exactly the same manner.’ (quoted page 244)

Biography

I think the weakness of both ‘The State of Africa’ and this book is that, although Meredith gives an outstandingly readable, brisk authoritative account of what happened, he rarely delves below the surface to consider why.

Only in the final, four-page chapter does he attempt a fairly simple psychological explanation of Mugabe’s psychopathology. It reminded me of the lines in W.H. Auden’s poem:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Mugabe grew up, a sensitive, intelligent young man in a country where he and everyone with black skin was treated like second class citizens, mocked and slighted and belittled and deprived of life chances by the profoundly racist white colonial regime. ‘We feared the white man. He was power. He had guns.’ And so young Robert determined that he would never rest till he had the guns, he had the power, and he was feared.

Mugabe had planned a career as a teacher but when he went as a teacher to Ghana in 1958 he was intoxicated by the atmosphere of freedom and liberation and joy and the inspiring rhetoric of the country’s first Black Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, about building a socialist paradise. Returning to Rhodesia in 1960 Mugabe threw himself into the liberation struggle, soaking himself in the rhetoric of revolution and liberation and, above all, committing himself to the Leninist idea of a radical one-party state.

He was arrested for making inflammatory statements, tried and imprisoned from 1963 to 1975.

Although he acquiesced in the Lancaster House agreement of 1980 and let democratic elections take place, he always regarded these as a stepping stone to his ultimate goal of a one-party state run with an iron fist.

But, like all dictators, the rhetoric of revolution and liberty concealed the unrelenting accumulation of power for its own sake. He never showed any evidence of caring for the weak and powerless, in fact he victimised:

the tribal backers of the rival Zapu party
backers of the MDC party
the urban poor who he set about removing from shanty towns in the Operation murambatsvina (‘Move the Rubbish’) campaign

Instead, Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric concealed the extraordinary rise of a corrupt elite prepared to use any means, go any lengths of violence, torture and intimidation, to stay in power. Meredith cites hundreds of examples. Appalled, you end up thinking, why does the West give any aid money to regimes which rob their own nations, steal money from their own treasuries, impoverish their own countries, lock up and kill anyone who disagrees with them?

Notable names

Blessing Chebundo
Justice Maphosa
Saviour Kasukuwere
Strive Masiyiwa
Welshman Ncube

Credit

An early version of this book, ‘Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe’ by Martin Meredith, was published by Public Affairs in 2003. The paperback of this revised version, Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, was published in 2007.

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by Simon on November 17, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History

Tagged Africa, African history, aid, Angola, Blue Roof mansion, British imperialism, colonialism, corruption, dictators, Douglas Rogers, economic crisis, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Ghana, Grace Mugabe, history, Ian Smith, imperialism, Independence war, Kwame Nkrumah, Lancaster House, land redistribution, London, Martin Meredith, MDC, Move the Rubbish, Mozambique, Mugabe, Mugabe: Power Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, nepotism, one-party rule, Operation Murambatsvina, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe, Our Votes, Patriotic Front, Philemon Matibe, post-independence Africa, racist white colonial regime, revolution, Rhodesia, Rhodesian Bush War, Robert Mugabe, Second Chimurenga, The land issue, The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence, the West, Two Weeks in November, UDI, W.H. Auden, ZANU, ZANU-PF, ZAPU, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe African National Union, Zimbabwe African People's Union, Zimbabwe National Army, Zimbabwean War of Liberation

Posted by Simon on November 17, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/17/mugabe-power-plunder-and-the-struggle-for-zimbabwe-martin-meredith/

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger (2015)

Asymmetrical warfare is defined by asymmetry. Any terrorist ideology that can attract five recruits and the contents of their bank accounts can make headlines for months. A terrorist group with twenty recruits and half a million dollars can make headlines for years.
(ISIS: State of Terror, page 191)

ISIS is the crack cocaine of violent extremism, all of the elements that make it so alluring and addictive purified into crystal form. (p.235)

This book comes highly recommended as ‘a timely account’ and ‘the most important account’ of ISIS, but suffers from the same shortcoming as half the other books I’ve been reading about the Iraq-Afghanistan-al Qaeda turmoil, which is that it’s way out of date. My fault, obviously, not theirs.

It contains an admirably detailed chronology but it only goes up to November 2014. At many points, the authors say things like, ‘At the time of writing it looks like ISIS will…’, ‘It looks like ISIS might…’ expand and hold more territory, or maybe buckle after sustained attack by the US and its allies…they don’t know.

This is irritating because, in a sense, the most interesting thing about ISIS was the international campaign to extirpate it which only got underway in 2014/15 as this book was being finalised and published. Well, more fool me for buying a book which is nearly ten years old, although I can’t find anything more recent on Amazon.

ISIS

As usual, it’s easiest to go to Wikipedia for the basic facts:

The Islamic State (IS; as of 2014), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; in 2013) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a transnational militant Islamist terrorist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar massacre. The organization significantly influenced the course of the Syrian civil war when it announced its expansion into Syria in mid-2013 and began conducting ground attacks against both Syrian government forces and Syrian opposition militias. By the end of 2015, it held an area that contained an estimated eight to twelve million people and stretched from western Iraq to eastern Syria, where it enforced its interpretation of Islamic law. ISIL was estimated at the time to have an annual budget of more than US$1 billion (much derived from control of oil revenue from captured refineries) and more than 30,000 fighters.

The authors start by giving a straightforward chronological account of the rise of Islamic State out of its predecessor organisation, al Qaeda in Iraq (up to the time of writing, in late 2014). Then they go back and retread the same path or narrative but focusing on particular themes, such as the role of foreign fighters and of women; chapters on ISIS’s use of promotional videos and social media; on the complicated struggle to win over followers of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, not only in the Arab heartland but further afield in the Maghreb and North Africa. They have a chapter on the long-term psychological aims of ISIS, which they consider is to produce a society of dehumanised psychopaths, which partly explains their conscious policy of training child soldiers, forcing them to witness beheadings and whip or shoot prisoners. There is a very interesting chapter about how ISIS’s belief that it is operating in the end time before an apocalyptic Final Battle underpins all aspects of its worldview. And the book concludes with some suggestions about how we in ‘the West’ should manage and contain ISIS.

Names

The group grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). When it formally asserted its independence in 2013 it was under an Arabic name which can be translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS was the version picked up by most western media outlets, maybe because it has a certain zip and cachet as a word.

In June 2014 the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate, a restoration of transnational Islamic rule, and began referring to itself as the Islamic State (IS) and this is the position and the name it retains to the present day. However, the authors, after some discussion, decided to use the earlier name, ISIS for two reasons: a) it is familiar from lots of press coverage b) it is challenging, and silly, in English, to continually write sentences which include ‘IS is…’ ISIS is an easier acronym to manage: ‘ISIS is, ISIS was’ etc.

ISIS leaders

1. ISIS was ‘founded’ by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and led by him until his death in an American air strike in 2006. In fact this history is deeply contested, as the group Zarqawi founds was called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and, in 2004, after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, he was appointed chief of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In other words, he was killed before an organisation specifically named ISIS came into being. It is analysts and commentators who claim that the doctrines he practiced in AQI and its extremist policies of a) attacking other Muslims b) in particular attacking Shia Muslims and shrines c) attacking Western operations previously all considered off-limits e.g the United Nations and aid charities – these policies were disapproved of by bin Laden and others in al Qaeda Central but proved attractive and mobilising for the cadres of extremist Sunni jihadists who went on to form ISIS.

2. Zarqawi’s role was taken by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the militant groups Mujahideen Shura Council and its successor, the Islamic State of Iraq, until he, too, was killed in an American missile strike in 2010.

3. He was succeeded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is recorded as the second Emir or prince of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2010 to 2013. In 2014 ISIS declared the existence of an actual state, the Caliphate, which governed a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and Baghdadi was declared first caliph of this Islamic State, which he ruled until he blew himself up during an American raid in October 2019.

4. A week later IS’s media outlets announced that the new caliph was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. For a while there was debate about whether this person actually existed or was a fictional front man hurriedly invented by IS leadership. Having lost almost all the territory they held at their maximum reach, in 2016, ISIS were reduced to traditional insurgent attacks, but made significant advances through partner groups in Africa; new branches were opened in Congo and Mozambique. On 3 February 2022, al-Qurashi killed himself and members of his family by triggering a large bomb during a raid by the US Joint Special Operations Command.

In May 2022 ISIL’s West Africa Province said that it had killed 20 Nigerian Christian men in Borno State in a mass execution as a retaliation for al-Qurashi’s assassination. And so it goes on forever, the ideology of massacre, murder and vengeance.

5. Replaced by the third caliph of Islamic State, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, as confirmed by Al-Furqan Media foundation, Islamic State’s primary media outlet, 10 March 2022. As usual there was a lot of mystery about his true name and identity. In November 2022 it was confirmed that he killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during an operation carried out by former Free Syrian Army rebels.

6. He was replaced in November 2022 by the fourth caliph, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi. There are now some 40 IS provinces i.e. regional operations, throughout the Middle East and far into Africa. On 30 April 2023 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization had tracked down and killed Abu al-Hussein the previous day, on 29 April, but this has not been confirmed by the US, who we tend to trust more, nor confirmed by ISIS itself. Schrödinger’s caliph…

The differences between al Qaeda and ISIS

According to the authors the fundamental difference with al Qaeda was that the latter was an elite intellectual movement (pages 55, 192), whereas ISIS set out to be a popular mass movement. Al Qaeda was a sect or cult; they made joining it very difficult, starting with being difficult to track it down or contact it, then you had to go through tests or proofs of fitness. ISIS’s approach was diametrically opposite: it set out to create a utopian new society and advertised for as many members and volunteers as possible (p.73). ISIS made promotional videos and posted messages on twitter and Instagram. Muslim equivalents of the old Lord Kitchener poster, ‘Your country needs you’. The ISIS message was:

You have a place here, if you want it, and we’ll put you to work on this exciting project just as soon as you show up (p.73)

ISIS’s brand, its offering, was a unique combination of extreme violence – horror violence – with promises of a new life and a new world. al Qaeda had a lofty spiritual goal of eventually reaching a new Islamic world at some point far over the horizon. In this respect, its entire worldview was fundamentally defeatist (p.195). ISIS, in its blunt and practical way, declared the brave new world was here and now (pages 118, 195).

Al Qaeda worked on the premise, familiar to us from the revolutionary Marxist terrorists of the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades in Italy) that the masses are slumbering in a sleep of ignorance (p.55). If only you can wake them from their conformist slumber with acts of sufficient outrage and transgression, they would suddenly wake from their slumber, realise that the terrorists were right and that they need to throw off the shallow western consumer capitalist culture which exploits them, overcome their oppressors and institute a new communist/Islamic utopia.

Same here. al Qaeda thought the right kind of terrorist outrage would trigger a mass awakening of the Muslim masses who would suddenly realise that Osama bin Laden was right, the infidel needed to be kicked out of Muslim lands and a new, purified Islamic rule established. But ISIS thought they had achieved that, in the huge swathe of territory they captured 2014 to 2016.

Stern and Berger have a fascinating chapter describing the development of ISIS’s management of traditional and social media. Again, they contrast the very different subject matter and tone between al Qaeda and ISIS productions. al Qaeda’s rhetoric was all about Muslim powerlessness and victimhood. bin Laden lamented how Muslim lands were crushed and downtrodden, in the grip of corrupt leaders in hock to Western powers, the infidel. It was a discourse stemming from the apparently complete grip Western-backed leaders held over the Muslim world, and al Qaeda’s embattled, isolated resistance to that grip (p.108).

By complete contrast, ISIS came to prominence on the waves of chaos and social collapse triggered by the Arab Spring. Suddenly all these immoveable old regimes were collapsing like dominoes. Anything seemed possible. So ISIS’s rhetoric, messaging, videos and social media all reflect exuberant confidence that the world is changing and this is their moment (p.114). The overarching theme of ISIS propaganda was: ‘We are strong and we are winning’ (p.112).

The multiple appeals of ISIS

There are multiple appeals to this way of thinking. One of the most practical is the reality that the transformative event the organisation promises is never actually going to happen and so membership of then organisation is, in a sense, a job for life. The naive utopian dream of transforming the world is the gift that keeps on giving; since the transformed world will never arrive, you’ll just have to keep organising, fund raising and carrying out atrocities. Forever.

This leads to the second appeal, which is that such crusades obviously provide its members with a number of psychological rewards and comforts. Your life acquires a messianic meaning. You acquire a family, the brothers you never had and a wise and all-seeing father figure. You are among like-minded people whose clarity and conviction answers all your anxieties about life (p.82).

And you are working towards a Better World. If, in order to get to this Just, Fair and Peaceful World, you have to kidnap, rape, torture, murder and behead some people, well a) the boss told you to b) the extremity of the acts reinforces the high stakes you’re playing for: the future of the world is in your hands. Also c) such extreme acts bond you with the people you carried them out with; once you’ve beheaded someone with your own hands there’s no going back. And d) such acts show the world that you’re serious, this is the real thing, you’re not backing down until you have built The New World.

All this goes to explain why a disproportionate number of ISIS fighters are foreign i.e. don’t come from its heartlands in Iraq and then Syria. It’s been known for thousands of years that a convert to a religion or cause is usually more zealous and committed than someone born and bred into it. Same here. According to researcher Thomas Hegghammer a) the atrocities recorded on videos which are then distributed i.e. ritual beheadings, are disproportionately carried out by foreign fighters. The text mentions ‘Jihadi John’, real name Mohammed Emwazi, born in Kuwait but raised in London. He became such a notorious figure that he has his own, surprisingly long Wikipedia entry, and was hunted by both the US and UK governments until assassinated in a drone strike.

Plus another, simpler explanation – toxic masculinity:

The ultraviolence served multiple purposes. In addition to intimidating its enemies on the ground… ultraviolence sold well with the target demographic of foreign fighters – angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates. (p.72)

Some young men just like fighting. Some yearn for the thrill of killing and risking being killed. Others want the trappings of being a ‘warrior’, not least the sex slaves ISIS took wherever it captured, particularly among Iraq’s Yazidi minority (p.194). Some are criminals looking for opportunities for loot. Some are just psychopaths.

So Stern and Berger’s account fits ISIS neatly not only into the matrix of Islamic terror groups, but also among the wider context of terrorist groups around the world over the last 50 years or so. They define terrorism as having two aspects:

1. Terrorism is deliberately aimed at civilians or non-combatants; this puts it outside all definitions of ‘just war’ in most religious traditions, starting with the Islamic tradition itself.

2. Terrorism is designed to be dramatic in order to achieve propaganda ends; in the case of Islamic terrorism in order to:

a) create fear and dread in the wider target population (‘the hostages should be liquidated in the most terrifying manner which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy’, p.122)

b) wake passive Muslim communities in their host nations from their slumber; to ignite ‘the deadly tinderbox fizzing just beneath the surface of every western country’ (p.97)

Internecine Muslim killing

Mainstream Islam seeks to live in peace with non-believers. Radical or jihadist sects take a more binary approach, believing all infidels or unbelievers can be freely tortured and murdered, for exemplary and propaganda purposes.

But the authors also tell us that recent Islamic theorists have developed the handy notion of takfir which is the pronouncement that a Muslim is no longer a Muslim but an unbeliever i.e. any Muslims who don’t agree with your beliefs aren’t, in fact, real Muslims, and so can also be killed.

This conceptualisation feels like a rationalisation, or extension of, something which already existed in the sweaty world of Islamic jihadi / insurgency / radical politics, which is the notable tendency of Islamic radicals to kill each other. ISIS’s beheadings of Western hostages received a lot of publicity because they were intended to; they were well-produced videos of the killings, very effectively distributed them across social media and the internet, and Western media picked them up and rebroadcast them, exactly as ISIS intended.

Less well known was the time, effort and expense Islamic radicals have devoted to murdering each other. It’s one of the main revelations of this book. In the field, different Islamic fighters attack each other and fight battles. Individual Islamic leaders are targeted and assassinated and sometimes entire meetings of senior leaders. In this respect, many Islamic radical groups do the West’s work for them, which is nice.

Seen from another angle, the internecine bloodshed of these squabbling jihadist groups is just another version of the sectarian violence which erupted all across Iraq after the American invasion, above all of the profound and poisonous enmity between Shia and Sunni Muslims which emerged from the shadow of Saddam to wreck Iraq. And these are both examples of the tendency of Muslim, certainly Arab Muslim countries, to contain seething sectarian animosities just waiting to boil over into civil war: before our modern tribulations came the prolonged civil war in Lebanon and the murderous civil war in Algeria. Now we have social collapse and civil war in Libya, the terrible conflict in Syria, and the under-reported war in Yemen. How these Muslims hate each other.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni movements. ISIS follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. This appears to mean that, in order to create their Islamic paradise, they have to intimidate, terrorise and kill as many Shi’a Muslims as possible, as well as carrying out attacks on their mosques and holy places, witness the 2006 ISIS attacks on the Al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi’a Islam, in Samarra, 80 miles from Baghdad (p.25). This succeeded in triggering reprisal attacks by Sunnis and helping to precipitate the Iraqi civil war (p.25). ISIS propaganda films included accounts of Shi’a death squads killing Sunni Muslims, turncoats from ISIS tell stories of being brainwashed with endless stories of Shi’a evil-doing…which, of course, then justified massacring as many Shi’as as possible. (p.107)

In its publications and in countless videos ISIS extolled the virtues of killing the rafidah (a derogatory term for Shi’a Muslims) and nusayri (a derogatory term for Alawites, members of a sect of Shi’a Islam practiced by members of the Syrian regime). (p.116)

Paradise can, it appears, only be attained by wiping out most of humanity – the whole of ‘the West’, obviously; all other countries or cultures which practice any religion apart from Islam, natch; all Shi’a Muslims, of course, (p.230), all other minority Muslim groups (Alawites, Sufis), plus any Sunni Muslims who disagree with anything ISIS say and can now be rendered unmuslim by the simple process of takfir.

ISIS aims to cleanse the world of all that disagree with its ideology. (p.233)

It is, then, standard genocidal millenarianism. Set out to kill almost the entire world population in order to make the world ‘pure’. And when, as a result of your indiscriminate use of barbaric violence, you’ve alienated the entire world against you – not to worry, the very fact that everyone rallies against you fact is one more proof that you and your brothers alone possess The Truth and are part of a small elite of Truth-knowers and Holy Warriors which the entire world wants to smother.

And so it is that these people become trapped in the paranoid, self-confirming death spiral of the millenarian cult.

The end of the world

Most educated people know that our word Armageddon derives from its use in the Bible’s Book of Revelations and is supposed to be the site of the Last Battle before the End of the World. The word is a Latinisation of the Hebrew‎ Har Məgīddō where Har means mountain and Megiddo means place of crowds.

But I hadn’t heard about Dabiq. Dabiq is a small town in northern Syria near the border with Turkey. It features heavily in traditional Islamic end-times prophecy which predicts that it is here that Muslim forces will defeat ‘Rome’, which modern interpreters take to be ‘the West’, before going on to conquer Constantinople (p.220). Like the Book of Revelation, conceived and written millennia ago, when the configuration of forces and powers was drastically different, but twisted by modern interpreters to suit their current policies.

Anyway, so central was the place and concept and resonance of Dabiq to ISIS that when they established a multi-language magazine to promote their cause, they called it Dabiq (p.119). The authors not only mention this but quote from various editions of Dabiq. And the magazine was first published just a month or so after ISIS captured the actual town of Dabiq (p.224).

This leads into an entire chapter explaining the various Islamic prophecies about the end of the world. Some of these include the institution of slavery, especially sexual slavery, as well as intensified war between the Muslim sects. Seen in this light ISIS’s deliberate inflammation of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq has an eschatological purpose i.e. it is consciously designed to bring about the End Times.

All of which is set against the over-heated and hysterical atmosphere created by 9/11 and then the American invasion of Iraq. Both the al Qaeda and ISIS leadership have paid close attention to end time prophecies and, of course, their propagandists proudly claim to be striking the first blows in the Final Battle which will lead up to the arrival of the Mahdi and the End of Days.

Except that none of this will happen. The jihadists will just carry on beheading Western hostages, carrying out random atrocities in Africa and, above all, killing lots of Muslims in the name of their common God.

The authors make one important point. Because these warriors are living in the End Times and fighting the Final Battle between cosmic forces of Good and Evil normal moral rules do not apply. Millenarian groups are the most likely to carry out acts of barbarity because they have passed beyond the realms of normal human morality (p.225).

This chapter, Chapter 10: The Coming Final Battle, is arguably the most enjoyable of the book. It presents a useful summary of modern thinking about apocalyptic and millenarian movements, listing their attributes, quoting experts on the subject on the appeal of their psychology, and then assessing how many of these attributes apply to either al Qaeda or ISIS.

For example, it offers fascinating interpretations of the beheading videos which brought ISIS notoriety in the West. There are at least three motives or meanings:

The beheadings are designed to create fear and terror in western countries out of all proportion to ISIS’s actual capacities.
The beheadings are meant to goad western powers i.e. America, into another invasion, this time of Syria, which will a) spread even more chaos across the region, thus allowing ISIS to flourish b) comply with millenarian prophecies that the ‘crusaders’ will return to Muslim lands once again and be finally, definitively defeated.
Then there’s just the simple explanation that the people carrying out the beheadings really are psychopaths and sadists.

But towards the end of the book, they offer a fourth interpretation: this is that the beheadings enact the great psychological simplification that the beheaders have undergone: they now live in an End Time world of extreme black and white, us and them, good and evil. So the videos are designed to trigger an equally simplistic response in their viewers, making viewers so angry that they themselves resort to the same psychologically basic binary of good and evil.

In other words, they were designed to erase the sophistication and complexity of modern western thought, to trigger the same simple-minded binary good guys-bad guys dichotomy that characterised Bush and Blair’s response to 9/11.

But, the authors warn, we shouldn’t let ourselves be brought down to their level, not just of barbarism, but of simple-mindedness. The world is a complex place, societies are complex thing, people are complex animals and multi-levelled complex problems like Iraq or Syria require immensely subtle, complex and thought-through solutions.

Using good guy-bad guy rhetoric like Bush and Blair did is a failure of the sophistication and intellect we pride ourselves on, but this isn’t just a rhetorical analysis. It led us into simplistic thinking (invade – overthrow dictator – install democracy – leave grateful nation) which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the immense complexity of the situation on the ground. ISIS want us to do that again. We mustn’t.

ISIS and social media

Immensely knowledgeable though the book is, it has, in my opinion, a central weakness. The longest chapter in the book (Chapter 7: The Electronic Brigades) is a detailed analysis of al Qaeda and ISIS’s use of social media, particularly Facebook but especially Twitter. I found this very tedious – ISIS use social media much like everyone else, to publish videos and share propaganda material, no real surprise – but the chapter is clearly so long because one of the authors, J.M. Berger is, apparently, a real expert in this area and, they tell us, was commissioned by Google Ideas to carry out research into ISIS supporters and Twitter (p.171).

So this explains why this chapter is so long and contains so many detailed stats about ISIS social media users and followers. But the thirty pages of this account boil down to a repetitive and boring iteration of the basic problem facing the owners of Twitter which is how far the principle of free speech should let Twitter users publish highly inflammatory and homicidal content. The chapter includes lots of really boring facts about al Qaeda and ISIS’s twitter accounts and social media stars and how many accounts were suspended or cancelled and the various strategies jihadis resorted to to try and hang onto accounts etc etc. It feels exactly like an academic report prepared for a big corporation which has been tweaked and re-versioned to become the chapter of a book.

Then, at the very end of the main body of the book, is a chapter which offers the authors’ thoughts about the way forward for the West in tackling ISIS and this also is mainly concerned with a detailed look at how to counter ISIS’s messaging on social media, repeating many of the ideas already laid out at boring length in chapter 7. They list five goals ISIS have in their social media strategy and how we in the West can counter all five.

Anyway, my point is that, all this focus on the minutiae of ISIS’s twitter accounts comes at the expense of a military analysis of ISIS. There is nothing anywhere in the book about how ISIS came to be such a successful military operation. ISIS didn’t manage to overrun a large part of Syria and Iraq, eventually controlling a third of Iraq’s territory and seizing the hugely important city of Mosul, just by being good at social media.

This book is very interesting on what you could call the cultural aspects of ISIS, about jihadi psychology, the psychology of terrorism and millenarian cults, good at giving extended comparisons of its radical worldview with that of its progenitor al Qaeda, and much more.

But it is a complete blank when it comes to explaining how this ragtag outfit of extremists and sadists was transformed into such a very effective fighting machine. There is nothing about its military campaigns, no analysis of its military strategy or tactics, no account of any battle or fighting at all.

And, having been published in 2015, no account at all of the military campaign undertaken by the US and other Western allies to extirpate it. For the entire military side of the story you’ll have to look elsewhere.

American comedy

The United States had invested $25 billion in training and equipping the Iraqi army over the course of eight years. That investment evaporated in the blink of an eye as Iraqi soldiers turned tail and fled in the face of ISIS’s assault on Mosul. (p.45)

Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, fell soon after Mosul. At many stops along its march, ISIS captured US-supplied military equipment from fleeing Iraqi soldiers, which they trumpeted with photos on social media. (p.46)

Money well spent, then.

American chaos

The American invasion of Iraq created chaos, insurgency, ethnic division and civil war throughout Iraq, which then spilled into neighbouring Syria when it experienced its failed Arab Spring rebellion in 2011.

This catastrophic environment, the collapse of these two societies into chaotic violence, also explains the difference between al Qaeda and ISIS because it made the apocalyptic, millenarian, end-time beliefs espoused by the latter seem much more plausible.

Wikipedia quotes from William McCants’ book, ‘The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State’:

‘References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today [Iraq and Syria] lend credibility to the prophecies. The Islamic State has stoked the apocalyptic fire…For Bin Laden’s generation, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense than before.’

So… America is directly responsible for creating the super-chaos which raged across Iraq and amid which new types of extreme jihadi terrorism were able to develop and flourish. Also from Wikipedia:

According to Iraqis, Syrians, and analysts who study the group, almost all of ISIL’s leaders – including the members of its military and security committees and the majority of its emirs and princes – are former Iraqi military and intelligence officers, specifically former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government who lost their jobs and pensions in the de-Ba’athification process after that regime was overthrown.

The former Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the US State Department, David Kilcullen, has said that: ‘There undeniably would be no Isis if we had not invaded Iraq.’ (Wikipedia)

Or as Stern and Berger put it:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (p.238)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, with fine moral ideals and high-sounding rhetoric about freedom and justice and democracy (see the speeches of George Bush and Tony Blair). Stern and Berger sum up the message of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan in one pithy sentence:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all (p.237)

Or Islamic State.

Credit

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger was published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition, with an additional afterword.

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by Simon on November 1, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in History, Islamic terrorism, Middle East

Tagged 9/11, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, aid charities, al Qaeda Central, Al-Furqan Media foundation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qurashi, Alawites, Algeria, Anbar campaign, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State, AQI, Arab Spring, Armageddon, asymmetrical warfare, attacks on the Al-Askari Mosque, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Baghdad, beheadings, Bible, Book of Revelation, Book of Revelations, capitalism, Constantinople, contemporary history, Crucifixion, Dabiq, David Kilcullen, end of the world, eschatology, Free Syrian Army, Google Ideas, Har Məgīddō, history, invasion of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, IS, ISIL, ISIS, ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern, Islamic law, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Islamic terrorism, J.M. Berger, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, Jihadi John, Kuwait, Lebanon civil war, London, meaning, military history, millenarian cult, millenarian cults, millenarianism, Mohammed Emwazi, Mosul, Mujahideen Shura Council, new world disorder, North Africa, northern Syria, nusayri, one of the holiest sites in Shi'a Islam, Osama bin Laden, rafidah, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Red Brigades, Rome, Samarra, sexual slavery, Shia death squads, Sinjar massacre, Slavery, social media, strategy, Sunni Islam, Syria, Syrian Civil War, takfir, terrorism, the caliphate, The Electronic Brigades, the End of Days, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, The Islamic State, the Islamic State of Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Maghreb, the Mahdi, the Middle East, the West, Thomas Hegghammer, toxic masculinity, twitter, United Nations, war, western Iraq, William McCants, Yazidi minority

Posted by Simon on November 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/01/isis-the-state-of-terror-jessica-stern-jm-berger/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged the West

Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001)

Ronald Segal

The link with McLynn and Jeal

Islam’s Black Slaves

The Atlantic slave trade

Islam’s treatment of slaves

Two routes to slavery

Islam’s anti-racism

Islam’s slaves in the service sector

Slaves in Islamic armies

Islam’s releasing of slaves

Eunuchs

Numbers and routes

Non-black slaves

Chapters

Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches

China

India

Spain

Chapter 6. Into Black Africa

Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire

Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran

Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection

Chapter 10. The Terrible Century

East Africa

Sudan and Egypt

Ethiopia and Arabia

West Africa

Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions

Northern Nigeria

French Soudan

Mauritania

Somalia

Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast

Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery

Mauritania

Sudan

Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash

Thoughts

Credit

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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)

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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The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (2007)

1. The Conflict Trap

2. The Natural Resources Trap

3. Landlocked with Bad Neighbours

4. Bad Governance in a Small Country

Solutions